Dismembering the American Dream: The Life and Fiction of Richard Yates

3. Theories of Selfhood

3 Theories of Selfhood It is axiomatic that we all perform all of the time, whether onstage, in a social situation, or even in the home; we invent a version of ourselves not just once but to suit every situation we encounter. Performance is routinely understood to be part of human existence. We shield ourselves behind masks, knowingly or unknowingly, we project “fictional” images of ourselves, sometimes innocently, as part of our aspirational inclinations or as a devious means of shirking our responsibilities, and we are routinely amused, horrified, or beguiled by the performances of others. The pervasive use of social networking sites in contemporary life has only added to the sense that people can choose how to project themselves as they routinely change their “profile picture” and carefully edit what information about their lives is released. However, it should be said at the outset that this idea that humans wear masks or choose different performances to suit their moods and the context in which they find themselves is a relatively recent view of the way humans interact. For the modernists and postmodernists it became a preoccupa4 . Richard Yates in Fahnestock State Park, New York, 1962 or 1963. Courtesy of Grace Schulman. 50 Chapter 3 tion and a paradigm; their investigation of the notion of selfhood continually drew attention to its instability. Yates absorbs some of their preoccupations but suggests, as is demonstrated by the narrative view of his characters’­performances—generally such performances are undercut or highlighted by the use of an ironic voice—that there was an authentic self to be uncovered. His literary craft, grounded in the implicit notion that reality can be transcribed onto the page, nevertheless challenges the privilege of the author and suggests, with its narrative layering and constantly shifting perspective, a more complex view of the reality of human interaction. In his book Social Selves: Theories of the Social Formation of Personality (1991), Ian Burkitt traces the shift from Renaissance thought (based on the work of, among others, René Descartes and Immanuel Kant), whereby man was seen as a solitary individual, a monad, “separate, distinct and unique,”1 to thought informed by the work of sociologists in the twentieth century that suggested the social bonds that inform personality. Burkitt argues that by and large modern thought is still informed by the Renaissance view of man as monad and has been slow to absorb the work of social scientists such as George Herbert Mead, whose theory of “social behaviorism” provides a more reliable, if more complex, model by which to investigate and understand human performance: “The basic thesis that Mead propounded was that the ‘mind’ and ‘self’ are formed within the social, communicative activity of the group. He was therefore one of the first theorists to explore the notion that personality develops within discourse.”2 Burkitt stresses the two most important aspects of Mead’s theory that are necessarily interconnected: the primary role of language in the formation of self and the ability of the self to look at itself objectively. Burkitt argues: “the responses of the self can only enter awareness when the in­ di­ vidual gains an objective view of their own self. This can only be attained through language, by taking the attitude of others towards the self. Even when we are alone, our introspective thinking takes place in the form of an internal conversation with our own self, mediated by social language and meanings.”3 Only very particular Yatesian fig­ures demonstrate any ability to look at themselves and their actions objectively. In Yates’s work, it is the inability of the characters to examine their inclinations and behavior objectively that is at the root of their social breakdowns. Crudely put, the performances his characters adopt consistently show that they maintain a view of selfhood that is essentially one of the monad. Burkitt outlines the dangers of this way of thinking for the self: “To think of the personality as a monad, a pre-­ sealed primary reality out of which emerges social relations, is to cling to a supernatural notion of the self.”4 I would suggest , however, that Yates has a more complex view of selfhood that is perhaps Theories of Selfhood 51 subconsciously informed by the likes of Mead and Erving Goffman (I say subconsciously because it seems unlikely that Yates will have delved into the work of such theorists; he expresses an aversion to all...