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AnalysisTime and Identity in Anne Provoost's Falling "Brilliant work, Lucas, I'm proud of you. I think I've already said this to you: you're a man of solid character." I was dumbfounded by what he said. To me, my character seemed hollow. Anne Provoost, Falling (p.238) "A false self can manifest in various modalities and in degrees of its falseness… The individual in bad faith makes inauthentic choices that are situational, repetitious or characterological in the service of avoiding her/his responsibility to accept personal freedom. In other words, s/he characteristically chooses not to choose authentically and resides in the everyday mode of 'the they', as the fallen Das Man." Jon Mills, The False Dasein: From Heidegger to Sartre and Psychoanalysis (p.10) How is identity related to time? Heidegger believed that understanding the temporality of 'Dasein' (literally, 'being-there', but more broadly meaning human existence in all its fullness) was key to understanding its nature - to grasping the essence of what it is to be human. I wish to explore Heidegger's conception of the temporality of Dasein and its propensity to inauthenticity and see how this relates to the adolescent Lucas in Falling. In this respect I shall also look at Sartre's own version of inauthenticity, which he termed mauvaise foi or 'bad faith' (1). Finally I want to look at the way in which Anne Provoost suggests that inauthenticity can affect not only the individual but the community. Heidegger rejected the idea, accepted by his neo-Kantian contemporaries, that philosophy should be concerned solely with our experience of the world insofar as it is given to us through our conceptual faculty - reason. He saw this as too narrow an approach to human experience. Yes, we do encounter objects in this way - what he called 'present at hand' - but this is only a part of human experience. He gives the example of a hammer. Generally, we do not encounter a hammer in a scientific way - as a thing possessing particular properties - but as a tool which we can manipulate. Our understanding of the hammer is informed by a background understanding of associated items and practices; wood, nails, carpentry, etc. While the neo-Kantians were concerned with a hierarchy of concepts, Heidegger focused on interpretations. The hammer is meaningful to us because of our interpretation of it in the context of carpentry or building - without the background understanding the hammer would be meaningless. Heidegger believed his hierarchy of meanings, like the neo-Kantians hierarchy of concepts, to be unified through 'principle monism'. In other words he thought that all modes of experience could ultimately be brought back to a single interpretation that gives rise to them all. He claimed that the fundamental interpretation of Dasein was its temporality: 'Temporality is the condition of the possibility of every possible experience; in other words, every experience is in some sense 'temporal''. (ST p.11) Heidegger's notion of 'temporality' is to be contrasted with our ordinary idea of time as sequential - the one borrowed from physics, which sees it as a linear series of 'nows'. Again, he did not deny the existence of time in this sense, but he claimed it was just a 'present at hand' interpretation which was a condition of a more fundamental interpretation, and he believed 'the path toward revealing this originary sense goes through an analysis of the temporality of human agency'. (ST p.l3) His argument is that we understand the world through our purposive involvements with it (Bewandtnisse). The world would not exist for us in the way it does if it was not meaningful. For a carpenter, the hammer is meaningful because it represents a necessary tool in the making of cabinets and so forth. In an act of self-interpretation he sees his 'sake' as a carpenter, therefore the activity of carpentry is purposive, or towards an end. So we make sense of the world through projecting ahead. Yet we also understand the world through the web of background knowledge. 'In an important sense, we 'come back' to the present from the future via the past. This feature of our understanding makes our experience of the world fundamentally temporal.' (ST p.15). Dasein's temporal being is tripartite in structure, consisting of Existence, Thrownness, and Fallenness. Existence is the way in which Dasein projects itself into the future to see how its possibilities may be actualised, thus it is a phenomenon of the future. Thrownness is the way in which Dasein finds itself in a world it did not choose - its possibilities are constricted by an historically conditioned environment, so Thrownness is of the past. Fallenness is the way Dasein finds itself in the midst of the world and alongside other beings, thus it is a phenomenon of the present. A vital aspect of Dasein's being is 'care' (Sorge) - the way in which the world matters to us (it does not matter to a chair or a stone), and therefore our projects matter to us. Dasein projects itself into future possibilities but, with the knowledge that its own existence will one day inevitably be terminated, comes the understanding that such possibilities too will cease to exist. A complete interpretation of Dasein must take this into account, so Heidegger makes the distinction between authentic and inauthentic Dasein. The actions of inauthentic Dasein are directed at the purposive goal which they have set themselves through self-interpretation, but the fact that they will cease to exist one day makes no difference to their actions. They know they will die, but they do not allow it to influence their actions, and may choose to sweep it under the carpet and in doing so they becomes just one of the 'they'. Such inauthentic Dasein 'which never dies and which misunderstands Being-towards-the-end, gives a characteristic interpretation to the fleeing in the face of death. To the very end 'it always has more time'' (BT 425). The inauthentic moral agent 'awaits' death, where the authentic agent 'anticipates' it. It is only through anticipating death that an agent can fully understand her range of possibilities, and act accordingly. Inauthenticity is tied in with Dasein's 'fallenness'. Human beings are inescapably communal, so have a universal tendency to lose themselves in present concerns and social interactions. If this happens to the extent that they become alienated from their own unique potential then Dasein's being becomes merely one of many - again, just a part of the 'they', and the fallen 'Das Man' is nothing but a 'presence-at-hand': "This 'absorption in…' has mostly the character of Being-lost in the publicness of the 'they'. Dasein has, in the first instance, fallen away from itself as an authentic potentiality for Being its Self, and has fallen into the 'world'. "(BT, 175). It is immediately striking that Anne Provoost chose the word 'Falling' as the title of her novel (Vallen, in the original Dutch). Fallenness is an inevitable part of Dasein's social being, thus inauthenticity is one of Dasein's natural modes. But if we forget that Dasein is 'mine' and allow ourselves to act as the 'they' expect us to, we forego our autonomy and become the 'anonymous one'. Provoost's book raises many questions; for instance, at what point do we change from being an irresponsible child to an autonomous adult with all the moral responsibility which goes with it? How (though Provoost does not use Heidegger's term) does a developing personality begin to break free of its 'Thrownness' - that particular history given to an individual by his family and circumstances? In Lucas's case, the stories and memories are out there in the community, beyond his control, and the grandfather's identity continues to haunt his own after his death. By writing in the first person Provoost plays a game with her readers in that she foils certain expectations. Because we are given access to the narrator's thoughts, we assume we are in a privileged position. We should be able to empathise with Lucas - or at least gain an understanding of him. But we soon learn that there is something strange about his account - that we cannot trust his words, and so his putative intentions become suspect. That he is unreliable in his dealings with others becomes apparent in the first few pages. When he hears his mother climbing the stairs he immediately jumps off the table and moves it back into place. She gives him presents to take to Caitlin in the hospital which he never delivers. Yet does Lucas's mother participate in this deception?: 'My mother knows it as well as I do: I can't visit Caitlin.' (p.15). They appear to conspire not to confront each other - Lucas will not, until near the end, ask her about her father, and his mother seems strangely lacking in curiosity about what her son is up to - in the same way that she has turned a blind eye to her father's actions. Neither of them project themselves into the future in order to realise their individual potential, nor do they draw on the truth about the past to inform such a projection. Instead they either lose themselves in 'everydayness'; day-to-day preoccupations such as taking the dead heads off flowers, phoning friends, fiddling with TV sets. Or they try to eliminate uncomfortable reminders of the past by selling the grandfather's pictures, or (in the case of Lucas's mother) burning the newspaper articles. Lucas's particular preoccupation - that of sawing down and cutting up trees - signifies complex motives. A fascination with the violence and power of the chainsaw that once belonged to his grandfather, a need to be doing something - anything - that will prevent him discovering things about himself and his inherited past, and a need to in some way compensate for that past by supplying (as did his grandfather) the convent with wood for the winter. This - a provider of fuel - is, for the moment, Lucas's own particular 'sake'. But it signifies that Lucas is one who awaits rather than anticipates an end to his possibilities, for though the activity occupies him and enables him to feel temporarily better about himself, it also allows him to avoid projecting into the future and exploring the scope of his own potential; life for him is just a series of 'nows'. Yet to what extent is Lucas's behaviour typical of that of any unsure adolescent? In a novel where we are exposed to the internal workings of a character we expect to know where they stand - of having clear-cut indications of their emotions and motives. But how much does this reflect what actually goes on in someone's head - particularly that of a teenager? Surely Provoost is right to suggest that confusion and avoidance of responsibility is characteristic of such a person. When confronted with a situation that demands action Lucas, instead of thinking 'how shall I handle this?' appears to think 'how do others expect me to react' (and it is invariably reacting rather than spontaneous action). He is also highly self-conscious, constantly seeing himself through the eyes of others: "You've gone too far, Benoit!" I said. My voice shook and I wished it wouldn't because it made me sound so feeble. "You've used me and I won't put up with it any longer." His look showed only pity for me, and I realised I must look pathetic. I felt ashamed." (pp.263-4) Having failed to catch and free the dove in the basement, Lucas reflects: "While I stood there letting my eyes adjust to the light, I began to suspect what had happened. She [Caitlin] had put me through a test and I had failed… I regretted not having acted more decisively. I could have easily grabbed the bird." (p.83) What comes through here is disappointment. But not because he failed to rescue the suffering bird; rather because he failed to impress Caitlin - to behave in a way that she would respect. In the same way, he eventually kills the bird because it is what she expects him to do. He misunderstands at first, thinking that he is again supposed to catch it. But when she tells him to kill it, he does: "But I have never killed a warm-blooded animal. It was only because Caitlin stood behind me that I stretched out my hand…" (p.134) This kind of painful self-consciousness - the feeling that you are only real when seen through the eyes of others, and the desperate desire for your actions to be approved by your more glamorous and confident peers, is surely one that many adolescents will recognize. Lucas is torn between two strong characters who, on the face of it, are (despite their youth) authentic in that they appear to know where they are going. Benoit with his thinly-veiled fascist attitudes and his firm purpose of ridding his hometown of foreign immigrants; Caitlin with her ambition to dance. It is significant that Lucas, with his total lack of an idea of a purposeful future, is responsible for - literally - cutting hers short. Sartre saw inauthenticity or mauvaise foi as 'the renunciation of human freedom in the service of self-deception… As long as we consciously choose in freedom and accept full responsibility for our actions, we are in good faith' (FD pp.5 & 6). In Being and Nothingness he gives the example of a woman who goes out with a man. In her bad faith she turns a blind eye to his intention to seduce her; she 'refuses to apprehend the desire for what it is' (BN pp. 96-97). In her self-deception she prolongs the moment of decision for as long as possible. "She has disarmed the actions of her companion by reducing them to being only what they are; that is, to existing in the mode of the in-itself. But she permits herself to enjoy his desire, to the extent that she will apprehend it as not being what it is, will recognize its transcendence." (BN pp97-98) By choosing not to project ahead and recognize the true motives of the man, she has reduced herself to a passive object to whom events happen over which she has no control. In the same way, Lucas refuses to recognize the true nature of Benoit and his intentions, allowing himself to be drawn into actions for which he continually fails to take responsibility. Benoit asks him to cut down a tree in the Cercle, saying: "If there is anything I dislike, it is half-heartedness. I like people who are committed. Integrity and directness are great qualities. People who prevaricate make compromises. In the end, they achieve nothing. I prize action. Doing what has to be done quickly and efficiently.' He waited for me to say something. I couldn't think of anything. I wanted to get out of that cellar. But I knew that the longer the silence lasted, the harder it would be to get out of the task. If I didn't go on resisting, I was lost. I took a deep breath. "It would have to be done fast,'" I said in a voice which was pitched higher than I wanted. "Alex is stronger than me." [Benoit continues to attempt to persuade Lucas using various arguments, then leaves the cellar] I stayed behind with Alex who, for a while, kept on reading as if nothing had happened. I sighed to draw his attention. "Just do it," he said suddenly, chewing on his gum and without looking up from his book. "You don't really have much choice. It's either that, or leave your saw behind for good." [The next thing we learn, Lucas is carrying out Benoit's instructions]. (F, pp167-169). Alex is wrong. Lucas does have a choice. He could choose to refuse to perform the action and so risk losing his chainsaw. But essentially he chooses not to choose by allowing himself, in an act of self-deception, to be persuaded to take the path that Benoit has chosen for him. Like Sartre's flirtatious woman, Lucas has failed to project into the future and become a passive object whose individual autonomy has been lost to the 'they' who will use him as they think fit (2). Later, when Lucas hesitates before throwing the Molotov cocktail into the presbytery, Benoit says: '"You're not responsible. I am responsible. You're carrying out an order."' (F p.219). Even when Benoit has pointed out the truth - that Lucas has forfeited his own agency and become his puppet - Lucas is still able to carry on the self-deception. But again, how universal is Lucas's experience? After all, only a few years ago he would be regarded as a child requiring guidance in all actions of any significance. In an important sense, society expects children to be puppets - to follow the lead of a stronger, more mature role model. Within a relatively short space of time a dependent child is supposed to make the transition to an independent adult, taking responsibility for all its actions as a mature moral agent. So is it surprising that Lucas - or anyone else in their mid-teens - is confused. Yet there is one occasion when he appears to be acting spontaneously. It is when he 'rescues' Caitlin from the burning car, when no-one is there to influence his actions. What are we to make of his motives? The problem is, we cannot know what his intentions are because he himself (or at least, the Lucas to whom the reader is exposed) is unclear. "How did I come up with the idea? I don't know; it was an act of desperation. I ran the fifty metres back to where I was standing when the accident happened. As I ran, I tried to remember Benoit's basic rules. The second one was: "If someone is hurt, eliminate the danger." But what was the first? Ring the ambulance? Stay with the victim? Mentally, I heard a clock ticking. I grabbed the chain-saw and ran back…' [Then, having sawn through the seat-belt, he finds her foot is trapped under a rod]. 'Having cut the safety belt, it seemed as if I had crossed a threshold. It was easy. It worked. I could save her life. There was nobody to ask for advice. The fire didn't allow me any time; it was roaring in my ears and coming at me, hissing furiously. I felt infinitely alone and knew that, no matter what I did, that feeling would be with me for ever." (F pp. 234-5) The frantic need to deny responsibility for his actions comes through again and again: How did I come up with the idea?…an act of desperation… I tried to remember Benoit's basic rules… I grabbed the chain-saw… it seemed as if I had crossed a threshold… there was nobody to ask for advice… the fire didn't allow me any time. Why, when he knows Benoit to be dangerous, does he draw on his 'basic rules' as a guide to action? Why did he not decide to grab the chain-saw? The implication is that this action springs from nowhere - it is Lucas's hands that do the grabbing, not Lucas himself. And it is not 'I knew I had crossed a threshold', it is 'it seemed as if…' Again, the implication is that Lucas is passive - that his actions are, like the burning car, simply events over which he has no control. So afterwards, when Benoit congratulates him, although Lucas appears to not know what he is talking about and later is angry, we are left with the question: what were Lucas's true motives? Or are notions of 'truth' and 'motive' simply not applicable to him? One reason that Lucas is incapable of projecting himself into the future to discover his unique possibilities as an individual, is that he will not confront the past. Lucas is curious about his grandfather's activities, but he does not truly face up to their implications. He argues with Caitlin about whether the Jews met their deaths as a result of his grandfather's action without acknowledging that such action could be intrinsically wrong. As if his grandfather would be in some way less culpable if the outcome was not so harsh. Yet why does Lucas feel the need to see his grandfather vindicated? It is after all his past, not Lucas's. Lucas is experiencing the full extent of 'Thrownness'. He did not choose his family and background, and his grandfather was not responsible for the circumstances that gave rise to the particular choice he made. But he was responsible for that choice. In order to move towards a future where we become the authors of our own destiny, the actions of those past figures to whom we have a connection must be confronted, just as a nation or community cannot shed responsibility for the negative elements of its past if it is to move forward. If it does so, the danger is that history will repeat itself. For all her own self-deception, Lucas's mother sees this. When Lucas returns home having been attacked in the Cercle and with a new shorter haircut his mother looks at him: "Lucas," she said, "don't do it!" "Don't do what?" I asked. My nerves tensed, as always when she forbade me do something. "Anything," she said hoarsely. "Don't become like your grandfather." (F p.128). This danger (of history repeating itself) threatens not just Lucas as an individual but the wider society in which he finds himself. In many quarters of the town the grandfather is remembered as a hero, and the fate of the Jews just fifty years before is forgotten. "I think… I don't think… That my grandfather was aware of the consequences. I mean. His daughter died. He reported them because… because it was illegal. Against the rights of the children of the town. He was law-abiding." "Spare me that bullshit," she said nastily. "He even painted for the Germans. He was a shining example for extremists. Right until his death, he denied the existence of concentration camps. And you saw nothing. You played with your grandpa." (F p.138) It is now the Arab immigrants with their poverty and petty crime that represent a threat to the 'law-abiding' inhabitants of the modern town. When Lucas attempts to report Benoit to the police the reaction is chilling: "He has dangerous ideas," I said, sounding more resolute than I felt. He gave me a long, penetrating stare. "What exactly do you mean?" he said emphatically. "Doesn't his way of thinking please you? It is actually no different from that of your late grandfather." He leaned forward across the metal desk and added: "If your grandfather had stayed in local politics, we mightn't be in such a mess now." (F p.266) Here, inauthenticity and self-deception extend from the individual to society. Instead of acknowledging and confronting it, the community has succeeded in sanitizing and justifying their collective past. This enables them to repeat the behaviour of that past with a clear conscience. Such a society does not project itself into the future, so concerned is it with what Heidegger called the 'everydayness' (the small concerns that we are confronted with as social beings from day-to-day). And it is this which obscures the bigger possibilities open to the individual and the community. It is only by taking responsibility for the past that the future becomes 'mine' and not 'theirs'. 'Mine' does not imply selfishness. It means that, within the constraints of our 'Thrownness' we have free will and the ability to take responsibility for future actions. And this, as Anne Provoost suggests, applies just as much to the society as to the individual; the community of Montourin is incapable of moving on because it is in denial about its past (3). Heidegger's view of the temporality of human agency can, then, be seen to be relevant to the character of Lucas. But Anne Provoost suggests that the false or inauthentic self that Lucas reveals to the reader may be something universal - part and parcel of the painful transition from childhood to adulthood. This is significant in that implies that many of us at a certain stage of development are, like Lucas and his grandfather, capable of terrible actions if we were to be faced with a particular set of circumstances. Similarly, any member of society at any age can, if they allow themselves to fall in with the 'they', find themselves part of a community which is, at its core, self-deceiving and therefore capable of perpetrating atrocious crimes against its fellow beings with a clear conscience (4). The ending of Falling is, as it should be, ambiguous. It appears that Lucas has renounced Benoit for good, and that he has thrown himself into helping with the preparations for the new refuge at the convent. He has a new 'sake'. Yet we must wonder whether this activity is the result of Lucas' finding his authentic self, or a desperate bid to compensate in some way for the damage done to Caitlin - in the same way that the Grandfather supplied wood to the convent to make amends for past deeds. As Caitlin points out, Lucas is complicated; the very thing that makes him appealing is that which makes him dangerous: "What I liked so much about you," she said suddenly, "was your vulnerability. Other boys I know behave as if they're certain about everything. You didn't. You had doubts about just about everything, and didn't try to hide it. I liked that about you… Now I realise that your vulnerability has its downside." (F pp283-4) Lucas, it seems, has made an independent decision by choosing to reject Benoit and follow Caitlin, the morally sound character. But the question remains. Is he still simply a follower? And if so, what will become of him if a stronger and more appealing character than Caitlin enters his life whose motives are not so worthy? Footnotes (1) For an account of the contrast between Heidegger's inauthenticity and Sartre's mauvaise foi, see Jon Mill's 'The False Self' (2) Sartre, like Heidegger, sees man's ability to project himself into the future as a crucial part of what it is to be human: Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself… something which propels itself towards a future and is aware that it is doing so. Man is, indeed, a project which possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus or a cauliflower… man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be. (EH p.28) (3) For existentialism, the tension between responsibility to the self and responsibility to the wider community has always been problematic. Sartre, when accused of basing his philosophy to much on the ego, 'a position from which it is impossible to regain solidarity with other men outside of the self', defended his position thus: When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. To choose between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen… I am thus responsible for myself and for all men, and I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him to be. In fashioning myself I fashion man. (EH, pp29-30). (4) The real irony is that Heidegger himself was a card-carrying member of the Nazi party until 1945, and his Jewish mentor, Husserl, was all but abandoned by him. He later claimed to renounce Nazism but Michael J. Quirk points out: After the war, Heidegger included Nazism with American capitalism and Soviet communism as globe-threatening examples of 'technological domination', but throughout his 'retirement' in the Black Forest he never said anything about the specific evils of Nazism - the destruction of Europe, the extinction of democracy and civil society, and worst of all, the holocaust - and Germany's specific guilt in letting the Nazis rise to power, and to have turned a blind eye to the Shoah. Everything was 'levelled down' to the tyranny of technological domination, which was itself 'destined' by the trajectory of western metaphysical thought. More than one commentator has noted that this line of thought sounds quite evasive - as if Heidegger's mildly guilty conscience collided with his stubborn pride, with the latter winning out in a kind of grandiose philosophical rationalization. Michael J. Quirk The Heidegger Case, 2000 |
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