George Orwell, via the excellent Sarah Belfort (not posted in relation to this, but not -for me- occurring quite apart from it). One might object to Orwell: if all accounts we give must be disgraceful, there is something amiss about our notions of defeat and disgrace; we cannot expect so much more of humanity than it is capable of, ourselves included, or we are like embittered utopians ready to execute everyone for being less than angels. To say you think of life as a series of defeats is to admit that you’ve been fighting imaginary battles and playing impossible games. Maybe that is the way of the world.
But what of the good in others? What of the good in oneself? Is there none? Is there really only defeat from the inside? Isn’t the morbid preoccupation with all that we are not a form of negative vanity: an inversion of pride that retains its form but negates its content?
I am often criticized by those to whom I am closest for writing too often in a depressive spirit, or being too self-critical, or in some other way –in their view- falsifying or exaggerating a negative view of myself. It means little to say that I write as honestly as I can (if it strikes a phony chord, its intent is irrelevant). Are they accusing me, perhaps, of making a show of my disgrace? And isn’t that an odd wrinkle of the modern era: the pride we feel in our abjection?
One hopes to be lucid and unsentimental about oneself, but it is difficult. In any event, I am partial to Orwell’s point but consider it likely that such an injunction as the one above will distort one’s writing: if, after all, biography or fiction ought never be solely concerned with “revealing the disgraceful” -and David Foster Wallace is right to say it shouldn’t- neither should autobiography, unless we say that honesty about oneself is fully impossible.
(That may be the case).
