Abstract
In a story entitled ‘The Hitchhiking Game’ the Czech writer Milan Kundera describes a young couple setting out for their two-week vacation in the Tatras Mountains.2 During a stop at a service station the girl, who is very shy but impulsive, leaves the car, walks down the road and, pretending to be a stranger, thumbs a ride from her boyfriend. They develop the game as they drive, improvising roles opposite to their personalities. She becomes ‘an artful seductress’, ‘a role out of trashy literature’, and he plays ‘the tough guy who treats women to the coarser aspects of his masculinity’ (10). The fiction arouses and fascinates them to the point that it takes over their behaviour. Instead of continuing to drive on to the Tatras the young man turns off in another direction, and they end up for the night in the only hotel of an unfamiliar town. Over dinner they intensify the role-playing, which by now is aggressively erotic. The young man takes the girl to their room, pays her money and demands that she strip for him. But when she stands there naked, expecting that now they will drop the roles and make love as their real selves, the young man forces the game to its end, taking her as if she were a whore — while she discovers to her horror ‘that she had never known & so much pleasure as at this moment’ (25).
Fiction is nothing less than the sublest instrument for self-examination and self-display that mankind has invented yet.
How simply the fictive hero becomes the real.
But this is the way life goes: A man imagines he is playing his role in a particular play, and does not suspect that in the meantime they have changed the scenery without his noticing, and he unknowingly finds himself in the middle of a rather different performance.1
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Notes
The first quotation is from John Updike, ‘The Importance of Fiction’, Esquire, vol. 104/2 (August, 1985) p. 62.
The second quotation is from Wallace Stevens, ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, in Holly Stevens (ed.), The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play by Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1972), p. 234.
The third quotation is from Milan Kundera, ‘Edward and God’, in Laughable Loves, tr. Suzanne Rappaport (New York: Penguin Books, 1975) p. 229. Page numbers of sources from which quotations are taken are given in parentheses following the citation.
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage Books, 1985) p. 37.
Max Frisch, Mein Name sei Gantenbein (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1964) p. 30. To my knowledge, this novel has not been translated into English. The sentence in German reads, ‘Ich probiere Geschichten an wie Kleider!’
Annis Pratt, Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981) p. 178.
Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) p. 45.
Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind; The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 1985) pp. 252–3.
Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, tr. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971) p. 227. Quoted by Silverman, p. 45. The quotation immediately following from Silverman herself (p. 52) refers to the contribution of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory to Benveniste’s work.
Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: PUF, 1969), and Logique du sens (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969).
Other texts helpful to me in understanding the concept of the aggregate self are these: James Ogilvy, Many Dimensional Man: Decentralizing Self, Society, and the Sacred (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), in which Ogilvy attempts a theory of how a ‘plurality of selves’ or what he calls ‘intrapersonal selves’ function;
Jeremy Hawthorne, Multiple Personality and the Disintegration of Literary Character (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983);
Bradd Shore, Sala’ilua: A Samoan Mystery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), especially Chapter 8 on ‘persons’, in which Shore gives a stimulating account of the many facets of selfhood and the importance of relationships in Samoan society, as well as a provocative description of naming in that culture;
William James’ The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), especially Chapter X on ‘The Consciousness of Self’, in which James distinguishes among the material self, social self, spiritual self, and pure ego;
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1959);
and Geoffrey M. White and John Kirkpatrick (eds), Person, Self, and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Methuen, 1982) p. 24.
The quotation is from Fredric Jameson in his Foreword to Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, tr. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) p. xviii. Deleuze (cf. Note 9) offers a similar perspective.
In Suzanne Gearhart, ‘Philosophy before Literature: Deconstruction, Historicity, and the Work of Paul de Man’, Diacritics, vol. 13/4 (Winter 1983) p. 70.
Owen Miller, Preface to Identity of the Literary Text, Mario J. Valdes and Owen Miller (eds) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985) p. xiii.
Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).
John Updike, Hugging the Shore (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983) p. xv.
Jacques Derrida, ‘La Pharmacie de Platon’, in La Dissemination (Paris: Seuil, 1972) p. 71.
I have used the translation by Steven Randall that appears in Mihai Spariosu, ‘Mimesis and Contemporary French Theory’, in Mihai Spariosu (ed.), Mimesis and Contemporary Theory: The Literary and Philosophical Debate (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1984) p. 71.
John Barth, ‘Life-Story’, in Lost in the Funhouse (New York: Bantam Books, 1969) p. 123.
Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Archaischer Torso Apollos’, in Gedichte: Dritter Teil (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1927) p. 117. The final line and a half read in German: ‘denn da ist keine Stelle,/die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben ändern.’
Robert J. Stoller, Observing the Erotic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) p. vii.
Leo Bersani, ‘The Subject of Power’, Diacritics, vol. 7/3 (Fall, 1977) p. 21.
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© 1989 Robert Detweiler
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Detweiler, R. (1989). Playing for Real. In: Breaking the Fall. Studies in Literature and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09991-7_1
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