Abstract

The present study examines the idea of lucid self-delusion in late nineteenth and early twentieth century French literature. It traces its gradual incorporation at every level of the text--author, narrator and reader--and connects this tendency to trends in contemporary German philosophy . As a primary vehicle for lucid self-delusion, story-telling becomes a central theme in the confessional prose and symbolist poetry of the period. Here the narrative voice often performs a deliberate and conscious falsification upon the material of the tale, just as the author, at a higher level, spins experience into acknowledged fantasy. The result is that the reader, while willingly submitting to the illusion on which all reading depends, must also reconstruct the activity of speaker and author, and is thus placed in a similar double position. ;If the reader's relationship to the text is ultimately made to resemble that of the author, this is because the latter discerns a new form of heroism in such a rigorous lucidity, coupled with the determination to believe: a resolution to live life as if it made sense, even if this means forcing it to do so; to act as if one had a fixed essence, even if this means constructing one. Lucid self-delusion becomes a value to fill the vacuum; and self-reflexivity, the aesthetic analogue of this psychological state, comes to characterise the literary output of an age