The Life We Invented – Pseudologia Fantastica and the Construction of Identity

Between who we are, what we know about ourselves, and what we can bear to be, there is no perfect overlap. In that small yet psychologically fertile space, our self-interpretations take shape. We forget some things and embellish others; in retrospect, we make greater sense of the past than we ever could while living through it. We attribute nobler motives to our own actions and explain our failures in ways that make them easier to live with. Without a certain degree of fiction, we might not be able to sustain the sense that we are the same person across time.

In 1836, Gogol published The Government Inspector and introduced into literature a thoroughly unremarkable young civil servant, Ivan Alexandrovich Khlestakov. He is neither particularly intelligent nor successful. He has no social standing to justify his vanity, nor a biography interesting enough for anyone to wish to claim as their own. A provincial town, paralysed by fear of the arrival of a government inspector, mistakenly takes Khlestakov for a man of importance. In doing so, it gives him something far more seductive than money: other people’s belief that he matters.

His lies do not follow the logic of ordinary deception, where a falsehood is chosen for the benefit it is expected to bring. On the contrary, they become more extravagant precisely when they are no longer necessary. In his stories, his position becomes increasingly prestigious, his acquaintances increasingly important, his connections to the centres of power increasingly intimate, and his life increasingly grand. As he speaks, there is a curious sense that he is almost as captivated by his own story as the people listening to it. It is as though every sign of belief from others narrows the gap between the person he has invented and the person he experiences himself to be. More than a century later, Patricia Highsmith would explore the same instability at the heart of identity from an entirely different perspective.

Tom Ripley has none of Khlestakov’s verbal flamboyance. His fantasy is colder, more disciplined, and far more dangerous. He does not simply want reality to validate an inflated version of himself; he studies it carefully, looking for ways to falsify it. A gesture. A signature. A voice. Clothes. Habits. Taste. The way a person moves through the world when he assumes that he has a rightful place in it. Tom Ripley meticulously weaves each of these details into a web that will eventually lead to a tragic conclusion. An intelligent manipulator, he charms everyone around him and effortlessly assumes an identity that makes it easier for him to live with himself. Separated by time, genre, and the moral universes of their respective authors, these two literary characters nevertheless have something fundamental in common. Both bring us to the point at which lying ceases to be interesting merely as a moral transgression and becomes far more compelling as a psychological phenomenon.

Most of the lies people tell in everyday life serve perfectly understandable purposes. We lie to avoid punishment, discomfort, loss, or conflict; to preserve a certain image of ourselves in the eyes of others, or to obtain something to which we would otherwise have no claim. Such lies may be ethically questionable, but psychologically they are not particularly mysterious. There is reality, there is self-interest, and between the two we place a falsehood.