Topical Guide 330
Mark Dorset
Personality Traits: Persistence of
Self-Presentation: Façade and Substance
Garth Castle … lived at the beach, avoiding the company of anyone who made him feel that he ought to shake off this setback, pick himself up, dust himself off, get a grip on himself, pull himself together, get back to work — especially May. Whenever Garth looked at her, he saw in her face, in her eyes, the admiration she still had for him, and that look of trust and confidence made him feel like a fake and a failure. In fact, he had been something of a fake, but May had never objected to that quality in him; she’d considered it part of his charm.
The truth was that Garth was afraid to go back to work. He was afraid of failing again. The world, the nation, and Studebaker had pulled a dirty trick on him, letting him get his hopes up and then letting him fall, like some wiseacre who pulls a chair out from under a guy. Garth wasn’t going to fall for the same nasty gag twice; he wasn’t even going to risk falling for it … and in Nosy’s he advanced a twisted Emersonianism: the notion that a bum was born to be a bum and would be a bum forever, “just like those shacks — those old shacks that we tried to fancy up! Shacks again! They were always shacks under the skin.”Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 12
I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. No matter how many times we reopen “King Lear,” never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs . . . . Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us.
Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
Self-presentation is distinguished from self-display by the active and conscious choice of the image shown; self-display has no choice but to show whatever properties a living being possesses. Self-presentation would not be possible without a degree of self-awareness—a capability inherent in the reflexive character of mental activities and clearly transcending mere consciousness, which we probably share with the higher animals. Only self-presentation is open to hypocrisy and pretense, properly speaking, and the only way to tell pretense and make-believe from reality and truth is the former’s failure to endure and remain consistent. It has been said that hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue, but this is not quite true. All virtue begins with a compliment paid to it, by which I express my being pleased with it. The compliment implies a promise to the world, to those to whom I appear, to act in accordance with my pleasure, and it is the breaking of the implied promise that characterizes the hypocrite. In other words, the hypocrite is not a villain who is pleased with vice and hides his pleasure from his surroundings. The test applying to the hypocrite is indeed the old Socratic “Be as you wish to appear,” which means appear always as you wish to appear to others even if it happens that you are alone and appear to no one but yourself. When I make such a decision, I am not merely reacting to whatever qualities may be given me; I am making an act of deliberate choice among the various potentialities of conduct with which the world has presented me. Out of such acts arises finally what we call character or personality, the conglomeration of a number of identifiable qualities gathered together into a comprehensible and reliably identifiable whole, and imprinted, as it were, on an unchangeable substratum of gifts and defects peculiar to our soul and body structure. Because of the undeniable relevance of these self-chosen properties to our appearance and role in the world, modern philosophy, starting with Hegel, has succumbed to the strange illusion that man, in distinction from other things, has created himself.
See also: Personality Characteristics and Emotional Stability, Assessing TG 119; Personality Traits, Distinctive TG 103; Personas, Façades, Masks, “Others” TG 8
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