W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz. Related to myths surrounding reason are myths surrounding the will. Nothing is more illusory than the notion of cognitive self-determination; not only is reason generally a pretext for decisions made and preferences harbored beneath our consciousness awareness, but when applied willfully reason just barely affects us: hence failed diets, lapsed promises, submission to temptations, unresisted compulsions, and the years of therapy one needs to accomplish the smallest change.
False fiction in all media often relies on epiphanic character development: in a moment of awareness, someone changes deeply. Yet it is only the harshest traumas and the most transformative immersions that change us. In real life, the moment of change is often followed by something less examined: the gradual attenuation of the epiphany, the diminution of the decision, the regression to what came before. One thinks, “I am changed! Never again!” Or: “From now on!” But one remains the same.
(In instances where a dramatic break seems to have happened –a shooting, perhaps- one often discovers on investigation something more like the slow removal of a bandage, tearing at a wound’s edges as it comes off: at some recent point in the shooter’s life, the failed effort at healing was abandoned and the damage was now exposed to the world. But the sore was always there. It is perhaps our guilt or embarrassment at not seeing it –or worse, at seeing it and looking away in the hope that it would scar over- that drive us to say: “He just snapped.”).
A probably controversial illustration of the difference between true and false character development in this respect: Dostoevsky’s manifestly false idea-based caricatures deciding to murder one another based on ideas they develop in libraries and Tolstoy’s unforgettably real characters, whose actions are often comically dressed in ornate rationalizations but whose true motives we see in the structure of their personalities.
One might say that reason is just a pretext used by the darker, deeper parts of the psyche, like a toy steering wheel attached to a missile following its own trajectory, or -if one wants to concede that it has some effect- one could describe it as a tiny rudder on an enormous ocean liner, steaming ahead towards whatever its likes as its captain self-assuredly turns his massive, useless wooden wheel.
