The person I was in my early twenties is becoming increasingly inaccessible to me. I no longer remember terribly clearly what it was like to be that person; I find it difficult to empathise with my former self. What rather felt like other people’s failure, at the time, to empathise with me seems more understandable in retrospect.
The temptation, which I imagine must come to quite a few people once they get clear of their early twenties, is to suppose that one must have been somewhat out of one’s mind. On the other hand, one of the things I do remember about being in my early twenties, is having had a similar impression at the time of having been out my mind in my late teens. It’s altogether possible that in ten years’ time I will look back at my 30-year-old self and think: my God, what a basket-case.
Some people get to spin entire heroic narratives of life-long recovery out of that sort of material, but because another of the things I did in my early twenties was read Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight - and he spent his early twenties writing literary articles in collaborationist newspapers in Nazi-occupied Belgium - I am equipped, or so I tell myself, with a critical awareness that protects me from such lapses into mystification.
(I pity the fool who is not armed with a comparable critical awareness: surely he will proceed haphazardly from one mystificatory lapse to another! Then again, according to de Man, the development of a critical awareness can be seen as nothing other than a series of such lapses, or tropological substitutions. After reading de Man for a while, it is difficult to know just whom one is to pity).
De Man wrote an essay titled “Autobiography as De-Facement”, which was concerned with the way that literary memorials become a substitute for the life they memorialize. In particular, it asserted that:
The specular moment that is part of all understanding reveals the tropological structure that underlies all cognitions, including knowledge of self. The interest of autobiography, then, is not that it reveals reliable self-knowledge - it does not - but that it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of totalization (that is the impossibility of coming into being) of all textual systems made up of tropological substitutions.
The “specular moment” referred to is the moment when an autobiography recognises and declares itself as autobiography, as a text signed by an author who is also its ostensible subject. De Man writes that the autobiographical “program” imposes a kind of figurativity on the “life” it essays, such that autobiographies are “true fictions”, or fictions with an effect of truth, rather than more-or-less fictional accounts of a true life that precedes them.
The distinction may not be clear, or seem to matter. If one says that the truth of autobiography does not immediately derive from its correspondance to the facts of the subject’s life, then one is in immediate danger of being taken to condone the production of outright fabrications. But “effects of truth” cannot be had for free, and a textual system that seeks to produce such effects cannot do so without support from the factual record. De Man’s argument is that the factual record plays a supporting role - it is co-opted by the rhetorical performance of autobiography, and must be successfully and plausibly co-opted in order for that performance to come off - rather than an originating role. The life does not produce the text, and even though in one sense the living author is responsible for the “life” he writes, what he writes is always already caught up in a “tropological structure”, a figurative context, that it cannot escape (or from which it continually tries to escape, only to be recaptured).
The person that I was in my early twenties was prone to worrying about these sorts of questions - in general, I was apt to fret about any highly abstract situation in which one found oneself ineluctibly caught up in a paradoxical structure from which no escape was possible. There are undoubtedly worse things to have to worry about. Nowadays I concern myself more often with abstract situations of a relatively tractable nature: programming problems, which have the merit of frequently turning out to be solvable (and, as an added bonus, rewarding you with working programs when you solve them!). The impossible I save for poetry, and try as far as possible to keep out of my personal relationships.
At the same time, it seems to me now that the problems with which I was preoccupied a decade ago were real problems with pragmatic and emotional consequences, for me at least. They had to do with whether one could trust one’s perceptions (and figurative renditions) of oneself and other people, whether one would be able to tell if those perceptions were systematically disordered, whether kindness and goodness were what one thought they were when one was trying to be kind and good. If you take those questions for granted, you may end up making terrible mistakes. If you do not take those questions for granted, you may also end up making terrible mistakes. But they are at least evidently ethical questions, even if they bear on problems of knowledge and motivation rather than directly on conduct.
Iris Murdoch’s novels are full of people thinking lofty thoughts about ethics whilst behaving atrociously badly; the question they pose, which is really a meta-ethical question, is whether there is any connection between the lofty thoughts and the atrocious behaviour. Actually, they don’t so much pose the question as pre-empt it: in Murdoch’s literary universe, what you’re going to do just is what you can’t help doing, and if you’re blessed with intelligence you’ll use whatever brainpower is necessary to bend your moral compass round to your body’s way of thinking. If one is a rationalist, one may justly fear the power of perverse rationalisation. Murdoch I think ultimately celebrates that power, as an indicator of the vital energy of human desire, even though she dutifully lines up defeats and disasters for all who succumb to it. But it is not unreasonable to wonder, as Murdoch also did, about the possibility of a goodness that would illuminate that closed world of self-deluding casuistry, and put its inhabitants to shame.