Questioning the Cultural Industry of the Self: Fiction, Selfhood and Individualism in Patrick White's 'The Vivisector'

Abstract

Montaigne concludes his long essay, "An Apology for Raymond Sebond," by stating that there is "no communication with Being" possible: "[And] if you should determine to try and grasp what Man's being is, it would be exactly like trying to hold a fistful of water: the more tightly you squeeze anything the nature of which is to flow, the more you will lose what you try to retain in your grasp." More recently, Janet Malcolm, paraphrasing Montaigne (himself quoting Plutarch), refutes the central premise of modern psychoanalytic theory: "To fully accept the idea of unconscious motivation is to cease to be human. The greatest analyst in the world can live his [sic] own life only like an ordinary blind and driven human being ... The crowning paradox of psychoanalysis is the near-uselessness of its insights. To make the unconscious conscious - the programme of psychoanalytic therapy - is to pour water into a sieve. The moisture that remains on the surface of the mesh is the benefit of analysis." The two statements, while differing in scope and objective, can be seen as punctuating the historical period in which the modern human subject is said to have emerged; the long historical phase marked by the "turn to the self as a self" - the reign of the "highest sovereign, the individual human self" (as the character Lord Hauksbank proclaims in Salman Rushdie's recent novel, and with it, Western culture's dominant "first-person perspective," as the philosopher Charles Taylor puts it. Contentiously, Malcolm and Montaigne cancel the humanist ideal: the "enigma of being" is annulled and the Socratic imperative made redundant because the self as a knowable entity and object of enquiry is deemed irrecoverably elusive. In the language of contemporary popular culture, the "journey" to authentic selfhood - the "truth" of one's life - is both illusory and futile.