[ilds] Selected Fictions

[Bruce Redwine]

Marc,

Dunno what's an "Enneargram."  But I see your main point about roles  
and the way we play them.  What you say is undoubtedly true.  We all  
have various social roles:  in my case, son, husband, father, friend,  
former soldier, perennial student, etc.  That's a little like Justine  
in the dressmaker's shop admiring herself in different mirrors and  
seeing different views of the same person.  However, when Durrell  
starts talking about the self and its "many negatives" or when  
Pursewarden makes pronouncements about lives and "selected fictions,"  
then I think they're referring to something far more basic.  Durrell  
is talking about one's core identity, the "old stable ego," what you  
call the "true self" -- all that having no real or true identity.   
Hence, the stress on "fiction."  Being a father or a husband is no  
fiction, those are social facts, but calling the "I" or the "self" a  
fiction is something else again, something radically different.  All  
this is not new, but a restatement or development of ideas central to  
Buddhism or touched upon by some of the English Romantics.  Keats  
begins to explore this idea when he talks about the "camelion poet"  
and "negative capability," i.e., great artists being able to assume  
other identities because they live in some state of suspended  
identity.  All admittedly not very clear, but that's part of the  
appeal of the notion.  So, when someone says his core self doesn't  
exist or is just multiple fictions, if he says that and truly believes  
and demonstrates it, then I think that he's either a Zen Buddhist  
who's reached some level of enlightenment or that he's showing early  
signs of schizophrenia.

Best,

Bruce


On Oct 3, 2009, at 9:52 AM, Marc Piel wrote:

> Thanks Bruce for your remarks.
>
> From the very first reading of the AQ I understood that most of the  
> characters were either taken from or were hybrids of people that LD  
> knew... for me it was all to true and possible to heva been totally  
> invented. Also nearly all the personalities had their true self and  
> their selected self.
>
> All these years later I think that is true of most people, and some  
> even hjave selves posed onto them by their family, their way of  
> making a living, or the context of their lives which often they can  
> do nothing about. I don't think at all that that makes us all  
> schizophrenic. "Selected" can be by us, for us and in spite of us.  
> The whole structure of the AQ; the same story seen from the  
> different points of view of the actors is temoignage of this. It is  
> also LD's genious. Have you ever played the game where everyone is  
> situated around in a circle and one person whispers a phrase to the  
> next, who in turn repeats it to the next and so on... the phrase  
> ends up completely transformed....
>
> Have you ever taken a look at the "Enneargram" ?
>
> Salutations,
> Marc
>
> Bruce Redwine a écrit :
>> Marc,
>> Yes.  "Lives" or personalities as "selected fictions" would seem to  
>> be one of Durrell's pet ideas.  In the poem "Alexandria," we have  
>> the line, "As for me I now move / Through many negatives to what I  
>> am."  "Negatives" is ambiguous, it could refer to negation or to  
>> photography, but I usually take it to mean the latter, a  
>> photographic image.  (Durrell liked photographs, how they  
>> momentarily captured a bit of reality.  Cf. the scene in / 
>> Balthazar/ developed around a photograph taken in Mnemjian's barber  
>> shop or the scene in /Justine/ where Nessim appears behind a  
>> frosted glass door:  "He developed like a print in a photographer's  
>> developing bowl.")  I'm sure more examples of this idea, other  
>> variants, can be dug up throughout Durrell's oeuvre.  The idea of  
>> the "unstable ego" gets developed in chapter three of Durrell's /A  
>> Key to Modern Poetry/ (1952), which begins by quoting D. H.  
>> Lawrence on the passing of the "old stable ego."  Once Durrell  
>> establishes the basic human personality as "unstable," i.e., fluid  
>> or unknowable, it's not a big leap to believing in "selected  
>> fictions" or "multiple selves."  For me, being a rather down-to- 
>> earth guy, this has never made much sense, and I doubt if many  
>> psychiatrists would go along with Durrell's analysis.  Isn't having  
>> "multiple personalities" part of the definition of schizophrenia?   
>> On the other hand, maybe Durrell was a little crazy, that being  
>> part of his genius.  Look at the end of /Monsieur/ and all those  
>> multiple levels of narration, all those "begats," all that  
>> fragmentation -- the novel seems to be having a mental breakdown.   
>> Old Durrell, bless his heart, seems to be going off the deep end.   
>> And I think he sometimes did.
>> Best,
>> Bruce
>> On Oct 2, 2009, at 3:54 PM, Marc Piel wrote:
>>> Thank you Bruce for situating the citation. The
>>> accompagning paragraphe explicites the meaning:
>>>
>>> "Our view of reality is conditioned by our
>>> position in space and time--- not by our
>>> personalities as we like to think. Thus every
>>> interpretation of reality is based upon a unique
>>> position. Two paces east or west and the whole
>>> picture is changed.' Something of this order.....
>>> And as for human characters, whether real or
>>> invented, there are no such animals. Each psyche
>>> is really an anthill of opposing pre-dispositions.
>>> Personality as something with fixed attributes is
>>> an illusion ----but a necesary illusion if we are
>>> in love! (last five words in italics).
>>>
>>> Bruce, you must surely have a numeric version of
>>> all this..... I am sure this idea was also said
>>> elsewhere!
>>> Best regards,
>>> Marc
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Bruce Redwine a écrit :
>>>> Marc,
>>>>
>>>> Good point.  "'We live' writes Pursewarden somewhere, 'lives  
>>>> based upon
>>>> selected fictions'" /(Balthazar,/ New York 1986, p. 14).  And  
>>>> Durrell
>>>> and his alter ego weren't lying.
>>>>
>>>> Bruce
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Oct 1, 2009, at 3:03 PM, Marc Piel wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Surrely he summed it all up himself with the words
>>>>> "we each live our selected fictions".
>>>>> Marc (or was it "we all live our selected fictions"
>>>>>

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