Posted by Dave Kelly on March 30, 2000 at 11:22:55:
The thesis of Inventing Mark Twain by Andrew Hoffman is that Samuel Langhorne Clemens invented Mark Twain and played him his whole life. This idea is going to be a part of my construct of the Inventive personality type. I type Mark Twain as the Inventive R3w4 ENTP, and he is for me the epitome of this type. Here are two paragraphs from the Prologue of the book.
Because he appears to be alive, Twain grows and changes so frequently that writing a biography of him is like writing a biography of a liar. We will never know the complete truth about Mark Twain, because he changes shape as we study him. A fool, a tyrant, a philosopher, a humorist, an unschooled literary genius, a friend to revolution, a confidant of presidents and industrialists, an insatiable and sophisticated reader of history, a glad-hander, a sham, a self-destructive narcissist: Each of these epithets describes Mark Twain; their contradictions create a persona that is at once both larger and smaller than a real person.....
In writing this study of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, I encountered one fundamental, overreaching problem. Traditional interpretation of the man dictated that Clemens had such a large personality that he needed a separate persona in which to carry it. That premise seemed to me fundamentally false. Anyone who has ever performed, whether on the stage or at a dinner party, knows that maintaing a false persona places a huge strain on one's ego. The larger the ego, in fact, the more difficult it becomes to sustain the invention. To live as someone else, to fully inhabit an invented self, the root self must have no ego, or at least one so handicapped by insecurities that it might as well not exist. It became clear to me that Sam Clemens could play Mark Twain to such success for so long only because his fundamental self was so unstable and uncertain. This hollowness at Clemens' core resulted from the odd configuration of his childhood: his very early acceptance of responsibility for the deaths of loved ones; his flighty mother; his distant but demanding father, whose death as young Clemens entered adolescence determined much of his adult identity. Later experiences in his life reinforced his perception that it was the image of the person that truly mattered in life, and not the essential identity, which was likely to be callow, cruel, frightened, and selfish. His faith in the sharp separation between image and identity resulted in the nearly seamless presentation of an invented self named Mark Twain.
Any ideas?
Dave