The Self-Deceiving Muse: Fiction and the Rationalistic Dictates of the Present

One

The present-ness of character in fictional narrative figures an inherently conflicted temporality. No one would dispute that plot conflict epitomizes tensions between moments in time as much as conflicts between persons. But our way of construing the thematic sense of narrative fictions, by putting an emphasis on the conflict of personalities, privileges the already formed dispositions of character. It transcends the disruptiveness of temporal immediacy, of being present in the present. A focus upon plot conflict inclines us to ignore the relative inchoateness of character in time. It inveigles us to lose sight of the possibility that character is too easily taken for granted as a repository of experience rather than a threshold of experience. Particularly from the vantage point of the novel of the present—since 1945—character is an increasingly vexed proposition. The present moment prompts us to consider how the novel has long harbored a notion of character that resists characterization insofar as it is responsive to the circumstance of present-ness.

My purpose in reconsidering how the present bears on fictional narrative is to revise our notion of character in fiction and indicate its usefulness for modeling and remodeling human selves. By focusing on present-ness as the salient quality of character I wish to countenance a version of character that will appear to be paradoxical: a self that is inherently self-deceiving. Contrary to popular assumptions about self-deception, I will suggest that the condition of self-deception is both normative and imperative in fiction’s aptitude for illuminating the meaningfulness of selves. I will propose that only from such a self-deceiving self can the ethical stakes of fiction be honestly derived.

The link between the present-ness of character and its self-deceiving ethos is the ongoing-ness of temporality. Temporal change is the most immediate threat to ego-identity. We are never more conscious of the frailty or instability of our ego ideals than in the midst of circumstances whose outcome we cannot predict. There is little disputing that a self-deceiver is motivated to hold a belief that promises to realize an idealized self: one that can sustain a self’s beliefs through the vicissitudes of action. This bid for coherence between beliefs and lived experience, however, founders upon the simultaneous knowledge that the beliefs one is motivated to hold are often at odds with the facts. What’s more, facts are quite often intractable to human will. The mind of a self-deceiver is thus torn between evidence that the world is one way and a desire that it be another way. The line that divides these visions of reality shifts, as a variable of time, that constantly threatens to divide character against itself.

An important threshold for recognizing a self-deceiving character is this assumption: a self-deceiver can know that what he/she believes is false, contrary to the facts. Self-deception thus presents us with an insuperable irrationality that makes the interpretation of character a seemingly impossible proposition. And yet the circumstance of a character seeming to believe what is false and acting accordingly, seeming to hold two contradictory beliefs, remains a fervent source of dramatic interest for us both in life and in fiction. Literary characters who exhibit symptoms of self-deception also give a defining contour to the history of the novel. Self-deceivers are so pervasive in the canonical texts of narrative fiction that the genre looks to be formally inextricable from the terms of their predicament: Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Emma Bovary, Stephen Dedalus, Conrad’s Marlow, Ford’s Dowell, Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, etc. In one way or another all of these protagonists act at odds with what they know. They are self-deceivers in the sense that they seem to hold beliefs about their own motivations and acts that contradict their own accounts of motive and act. Thus, we are bound to conclude that self-deception—the epitome of irrationality—rationalizes the longevity of the genre as a métier of human self-understanding. In this susceptibility to paradox, the genre...