Impostures

 A friend of mine was telling me the other day about his stint in high school as the editor of the student newspaper. I asked him how he got that gig. "Did you apply for it?" He giggled at the naïve question. "No," he said. "People just weirdly appointed me to it." He went on to describe this as a frequent occurrence of his high school experience. He didn't really try to succeed or be put in charge of things. People just mysteriously worked to clear a path for him without his asking. 

Most people reading this far might conclude that this is merely a product of privilege. And while that no doubt explains some part of the phenomenon, it should be noted here that my friend is neither white nor straight—so he couldn't be described as privileged across all aspects of his identity, at least not in the present state of our society. There were plenty of straight white men around when we were in high school who could have been appointed in his place, if privilege were the only factor. But instead it was him. 

I think what's happening here may have more to do, therefore, with people's longing to cast someone in a social role. Whether good or bad, high or low, people are much more comfortable with you when they have found the appropriate pigeon-hole in which to cram your personality. 

Something similar happened to me when I moved to Florida when I was ten. For the first time ever, I discovered that I couldn't get by on simply being one more of an undifferentiated mass. I was the new kid trying to find his way into a previously-formed alternative mass. It was around the time of this move, therefore, that I first felt the need to have a "thing." I needed some readily identifiable trait, like a Dickensian verbal tick or a stage-limp, that would mark me out and give me a social role. 

Incredibly, I found, the position of "nerd" and "smart one" was not already taken at my new school. So I started playing up to it, memorizing vocabulary words in the evenings and dropping pretentious hints of a supposedly deep and mysterious erudition. 

What amazed me—as it amazed my friend—is that no one opposed me in this. To the contrary, they welcomed it and helped me along. "Josh is so smart" they started to cry. Behavior that I expected them to loathe and shun—because I would hate it and resent it if I saw it in another—they instead applauded; even my obnoxious vocabulary imposture!

Writing years later in a "novel" that was actually a thinly-veiled autobiography of my high school days, I had my alter ego describe the phenomenon in the following overwrought terms: "The point is that the other kids didn’t hate me for it, as they had every right to do. Instead, they actually egged me on. They enjoyed it! It was like the world had graciously created – for no reason I could see – a whole group of people who existed to admire and applaud me, with no thought of themselves."

My and my friend's experience was rather like that of Stefan Zannovich, a legendary character who appears in an anecdote from Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. When Döblin's petty criminal protagonist Franz Biberkopf is released from prison and swears to go straight at the start of the novel, he is intercepted by two men who fill his head with the tale of Zannovich's successful attempt to impersonate a Hungarian aristocrat. 

The remarkable thing about Zannovich's imposture, the storytellers proclaim, is that he didn't even set out to con anyone. He resisted the role at the beginning, telling people the truth: he was no aristocrat, but rather the humble son of a peddler. But the people preferred to see him as a lost member of the nobility. It was a more interesting social role in which to cast him. So eventually, after they had called him a baron for long enough, he just stopped protesting and went along with it. 

Zannovich "knew a bit about people, and [...] how little there was to fear from them," the storytellers continue. "See how they smooth your path, almost as they show a blind man the way. They wanted him to be Baron Varta. All right, he said, I'm Baron Varta." (Hofmann trans.) Just as my friend's high school success scarcely required effort so much as submission to the collective will. Just as my desire to be "the nerd" found such ready acceptance and a school full of people glad to facilitate it.

I can't help but think there is a lesson in this about the wave of impostures that has recently obsessed our culture—Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos fame, to take only one example. I, as part of my general principle of "pity the monsters," have always felt like Holmes was treated a bit unfairly, and I think the Zannovich story partially explains why. We tend to assume, when thinking about a con artist, that they always set out to hoodwink the world. But what if they didn't? What if the world insisted on being hoodwinked?

After all, a con is a two-way process. Holmes is surely culpable for her deceptions; I don't wish to give her a pass. But what about the many very powerful, rich, and influential people who were supposed to know better—who were supposed to be the "smart" and responsible ones in the room—who cleared a path for her rise? They wanted to cast her in the role of visionary and savior. Maybe she did little more than merely acquiesce to them, Zannovich-style? 

The imposter may be someone who sets out to create a false image in the minds of others. But they may just as often be people who present simply a blank image, and thereby allow the world to project onto them whatever social role meets its own needs. Society wanted a visionary Elizabeth Holmes, and she allowed them to paint it on the canvas of her personality. She became the victim thereby of what D.H. Lawrence called "image-making love"—the tendency of people to see in another whatever they want to see, and then proceed to worship it. Did she do anything other than let them? 

In Ingmar Bergman's famous experimental film Persona, a famous actress stops speaking because she refuses any longer to play any fictitious social roles. Is this what Holmes should have done instead? Is this the only alternative? If we allow ourselves to speak at all, will we inevitably be cast in someone else's false conception of us?

This is both the attraction and the peril of simply acquiescing to people's desire to cast us in certain social roles. On the one hand, it feels like the world at large is mysteriously rolling out the red carpet for us. They "smooth your path, almost as they show a blind man the way," as Döblin's storyteller puts it. But the danger is that, when we are wholly the product of other people's conceptions of us, and have retained no core of selfhood beneath it—then we are utterly at their mercy for the maintenance of any identity. 

And indeed, it has happened before that society has decided to take away what it had once so freely bestowed. Elizabeth Holmes' imposture set her up for a downfall. Society may denounce as an imposture the same false social image it had itself worked to cultivate, and conveniently forget the role it had played in establishing the falsehood to begin with. 

Behold the fate of even the great Zannovich, for example. After the first storyteller in Döblin's tale is finished, the other man scoffs and urges him to tell the rest of the story: say how this miraculous imposter Zannovich actually finished his days, he says. "They chase his Zannovich from Florence like a thief!" he adds, and Zannovich ended his days in prison.