a pervasive dishonesty

Credulity, confession, Vladimir Nabokov, and vintage British daytime game shows

We are all obsessed with lying. We are drunk on the power it bestows, the secret satisfaction that we can bend someone else’s reality to our will if but for a second. So much literature and entertainment is driven by the fact that at any time we can decide not to tell the truth, despite the near universal disapproval from major religions and secular ethical mores alike. Plenty spring to mind, though they are random and unrelated: Golden Balls with Jasper Carrott, a former daytime TV staple at my nan’s house, where the premise is sort of like the Prisoner’s Dilemma but for winning sums of money and lying to the face of the other contestant that you definitely chose to split the money instead of steal; Traitors, where the clue is in the name; The Great Gatsby; Pale Fire by Nabokov, the master of deluded and dishonest narrators; Nativity! with Martin Freeman. There’s that Ricky Gervais film about a world where people cannot lie that I still haven’t watched (and won’t), and the first Knives Out film that I have, where Ana de Armas has a psychological affliction that makes her throw up whenever she tells even the whitest of lies. There is a certain discomfort that forced honesty evokes in an audience, a horror at the prospect of being stripped bare with nowhere to hide. Operating in pure unadulterated truth is so anomalous, so unthinkable, that it becomes the pivotal difference in the parallel universe of The Invention of Lying.

I think, in a more accurate rewriting of my first sentence, I am obsessed with lying. Not doing it myself, mind — I am obsessed with other people’s propensity for it. I am obsessed with the idea that people are lying to me. Some would call this ‘trust issues’ or ‘anxious-avoidant attachment’ from being ‘cheated on,’ but I think I possess more of an anthropological curiosity than a pathology,¹ and besides, my suspicion that people take advantage of my credulity vastly predates any events from the last year. I am quite open that, in many ways, I am like Ana de Armas in Knives Out. The only time I can be dishonest is if it will have absolutely no consequence later down the line and will have zero negative effect on anyone else, or if it is to save me from getting into trouble that I ultimately don’t think I deserve: I routinely used to turn up late to school thanks to my myriad ailments and spin little tales about what had happened to me that morning so I wouldn’t receive a break time detention for turning up at 8:53am instead of 8:50. No harm done. It is the big lies, the ones I know shoot so far off on a tangent away from the reality, that I cannot swallow. I cannot go out of my way to say things I don’t mean, and when I am backed into a corner, I betray myself so easily. My heart is sewn right there on my sleeve, all raw and pink and pumping desperately.

It may come as no surprise, then, that of the many iterations of OCD that I have experienced in my lifetime, confession OCD is one of them. I have this conviction that in a previous life I was a devout Catholic (and a subsequent aversion to the religion), because both guilt and an impulse to confess have been built-in features of my personality for as long as I can remember. I don’t think I would have built up such an online footprint through posting my every thought if they weren’t. People often look at me, slack-jawed, when I casually mention the things I tell my mother, or the sort of things I go viral for on a semi-regular basis. They ask me how I’m able to be so open with them, how I talk to my mum about everything, how I tell the internet stupid shit about my personal life. It is true that I live an exhibitionist’s existence. What they do not understand, in the first instance, is that I have forced this on her: she is the one person I know will not condemn me, who I can place in my own personal priest’s booth and make her listen to my every fault and foible, and know that I will be forgiven and reassured. In the case of the latter, it is a way of saying please listen to me I am telling you the truth I promise after a childhood and adolescence of feeling broadly unlistened to and mistrusted when I said things hurt. All of this is a compulsion. I probably shouldn’t do it.

Pale Fire, as I mentioned in the beginning, is an infinite Russian doll set of a novel. It is a product of various layers of fictional and metafictional narration recounted by the deranged protagonist Charles Kinbote, who drip-feeds us tales of his fictional homeland Zembla before all but explicitly announcing he is the disgraced king of the nation. Zoran Kuzmanovich refers to confession, especially in relation to the text, as ‘an objectification of the self, a peeling off of one's drab past, as [John Shade, the fictional object of the narrator’s obsession] puts it, to present it, over and over, not only as a knowable but as an invaluable object uniting the confessing and the confessor.’² But Nabokov possessed a particular genius when it came to constructing the untrustworthy narrator, as also seen in Lolita: structured as an introduction, commentary and index that are anchored around a 999-line poem written by Shade, it is Pale Fire’s commentary section where the narrator’s ‘confessional’ mode unfolds, and which Sonja Pyykkö describes as not multilayered at all, but instead, in Deleuzian terms, rhizomatic. ‘Confession,’ she says, ‘is commonly understood as a mechanism of disclosure, of truth-telling: a discourse in which truths are established and defended. Yet […] Pale Fire uses confession for the opposite purpose, as a destabilizing mechanism […]’³ It is more of a parody of confession, much of it so ridiculous and unbelievable and yet so intentionally done through multiple agents of narration that for a second, we question whether Nabokov would add another branch, another little sprout on the vine, shifting the foundations of the last premise we supposed to be true or false. Like Cervantes’ Don Quixote, another parodic text that satirises the hero’s journey, and its many voices mediating the narrative, it is a mode of reading that instils inherent distrust from the outset. Maybe, as Kuzmanovich posits, the narration ‘[unites] the confessing and the confessor,’ but only so far as we realise we are both forced to operate under a certain delusion and suspension of disbelief to progress any further, to acknowledge that objective reality does not exist, in this literary universe or our own. Only so far as I realise I am desperately trying to unite myself with something, to lay myself bare in an attempt to find a truth that Nabokov himself admits is ‘unquenchable, unattainable,’ and to allow someone to witness it. I want to be a knowable and invaluable object. To me it feels like love. It took me two months to read what is a fairly slim volume.

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Speaking of parody, my housemate has this extended bit where she tells the most mundane gratuitous lies for no reason, and then immediately owns up to it. It makes me howl precisely because of how ludicrous it is to lie about some of these things. The other day she told me we needed to go to the bagel shop because she’d eaten some of mine and there was only one left. I balked: ‘ONE bagel? I bought six and I’ve only eaten two.’ She looked me dead in the eye and said: ‘I actually made that up. I don’t know how many bagels you have.’ On the way, we discussed whether next year, we could cheat in the London Marathon. ‘We could literally just lie and say we did it,’ she said, not realising they track the runners now, because of woke. ‘We could cut across and then just run the last few miles.’ It works as an inoculation of sorts, an exposure therapy, intentionally parodic and ridiculous in the way Nabokov’s Kinbote leans into, knowingly or unknowingly. It shows me the fun, unserious side of it. Mostly, I feel safe around her, because I have been conditioned like Pavlov’s Dog to expect an explicit signal when she isn’t telling the truth.

The only person I am seemingly able to substantially lie to is myself. I lie to myself that I am happy. I lie to myself that I mean nothing to people who would give me the shirt off their backs, and a lot to others who wouldn’t piss on me if I were on fire. I also have fairly poor theory of mind, so my natural first impulse is to lie to myself that others maintain the same standards of truth that I do, despite theoretically knowing otherwise. I never go out of my way to say something I don’t mean, so why would anyone else? It turns out there are many advantages to this. Lying to get what you want, as a means to an end, appears to be far more socially acceptable than I previously believed. I am not insinuating that I am a beacon of moral fortitude in this regard; quite the opposite, in fact, as I am more of a liar-by-omission, which is often just as bad, and I wish I could muster the ability to give someone a compliment I don’t necessarily think is true just so I can make their day or to feign concern or interest more effectively when it really isn’t there. But I tend to prefer people who are so reticent and brutally honest that you never have to second-guess them. If they praise you, you know it’s real. This is why I gravitate to other autistic people. And the French.

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I’m loath to reference a tweet as a springboard for discussion, but in a since-deleted post from the other day, one user described Gen Z dating as being characterised not by a lack of willingness to connect or an aversion to sex and relationships, but by ‘a pervasive dishonesty’ about what one party actually wants from another. I have previously been sceptical of sweeping statements about generational demographics that are not real to begin with, and I do not think it is unique to this broad age cohort by any means, but I do think it is bang on the money about one of the most devastating and dehumanising aspects of trying and failing to engage in relationships with others. Couples will see each other regularly, sometimes for months, tell each other things they may not have told anyone else or show pieces of themselves the rest of the world rarely if ever gets to see, only for one to tell the other with their fingers crossed behind their back that they ‘thought it was only casual’ or ‘weren’t looking for anything serious.’ Or crueller still — they gradually excuse themselves from the conversation by tapering down to the bare minimum before making an exit, or offer no explanation and go completely silent. Banalising aspects of intimacy that are in fact incredibly fragile and precious and should be handled with care is one thing. Lulling someone into a false sense of security so that they hand it over to you for instant gratification feels, to me, so inhumane it might be unforgivable. There is something so uniquely soul-destroying and lonely about believing someone might be showing genuine interest in you as a person, only to come to the realisation that they merely coveted you as an experience, and that it was over the minute they were reminded that you are in fact a sentient human and not a flesh-covered goal to tick off their bucket list. With enough consideration and respect, you can still invest in people as people instead of as objects in a casual sex scenario, and it is okay not to know what you want long term. It is loathsome, however, to be calculatedly deceptive about it to leverage power over another person so you can ensure you get what you want in the meantime.

If people wanted to be scathing, they would probably call me stupid and naive; if they were to be nice about it, they would likely tell me it is a virtue to see the good in others and take them at their word. I don’t think either of these are fully true. I know that people lie and deceive as a means to an end. I know that some do it because they erroneously think it will save another person from hurt, and some do it out of selfishness, and some out of malice. My problem is that I cannot effectively detect it when it happens, so by way of attempted self-preservation, I tend to assume everything coming out of their mouth is, on average, at least seventy percent bullshit, rising to ninety-five percent if it is a man who is attracted to me. This does not always translate into action. Sometimes, despite my cynicism, they breach the spam filter. It always feels like a crushing personal failure on my part when they do.

I don’t like where things are headed for me, the credulous idiot who continues to believe. The prospect of having the rug pulled out from under me again in future makes me ill. It feels like one big hellish personal Golden Balls. We’ve racked up quite a total, the stakes are high, and we’ve got the last four balls in front of us, one that contains a big bold ‘SPLIT’ and one that contains a ‘STEAL’ each. Jasper Carrott is there. He tells us it’s time to make our final decision. Are we going to split the money and go home with half, satisfied with our bank balances and our own integrity? Will both of us steal and go home with nothing, having both cut off our own nose to spite our face? Or, in possibly the worst outcome, will one of us be stupid enough to operate on blind faith in the goodness of humanity while the other robs them blind? The hot yellow studio lights reflect off Jasper’s bald head like a beacon on a lighthouse warning me that one wrong turn will cost me my life, or at the very least, my dignity. There is no real strategy to this. Despite the Prisoner’s Dilemma being one of the most famous examples studied in Game Theory, there is no mathematical model that will spit out the correct protocol when you are missing one set of data, which is the mindset of the virtual stranger you met in the studio mere hours ago. It feels like I can do nothing but assume I am going to be stabbed in the back. But I would be unable to sleep at night if I stole, and will go home with nothing if we both do. So I carry on in the knowledge of my inevitable hurt being the best option of a bad bunch, and when Jasper tells us it’s time to reveal our choices, I’ll try to pretend not to be shocked that people can look me in the eye and give me assurance with one hand, while reaching into my pocket and stealing a piece of me with the other. I probably would have given it to them anyway, had they asked truthfully.

‘A man who doesn’t keep his word is worth nothing. He’s not worth a dollar.’

(i think the guy on the right may have hacked golden balls? someone call the game theory professors)

1. This is a lie, probably

2. Kuzmanovich, Zoran, ‘Strong Opinions and Nerve Points’, in The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov, ed. by Julian W. Connolly, Cambridge Companions to Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 11–30

3. Sonja Pyykkö, ‘Disclosing Structures: Scenes of Confession in Pale Fire’, Nabokov Studies, 19.1 (2023), pp. 23–46.