Narcissus the Romantic

When you write about yourself, is it a bit like peeling off a layer of yourself and looking at it? How much does it remain part of yourself? When you look at yourself in a mirror how much is it yourself that you're looking at, and how much some other person you are seeing from outside, who other people also see as you? In other words when we see other people we know that what we see is a simulacrum made in a collaborative process by them, us, society, and everything; and when we see ourselves it is the same thing.

The White Castle, which I just read in Wales, takes as its epigraph this line of 'Marcel Proust, from the mistranslation of Y. K. Karaosmanoğlu':

To imagine that a person who intrigues us has access to a way of life unknown and all the more attractive for its mystery, to believe that we will begin to live only through the love of that person - what else is this but the birth of a great passion?

I don't remember whether this is making the same point in Proust (I can imagine that it does), but by the end of Orhan Pamuk's book it seems to refer to self-love. What writer isn't fascinated by (and in love with) his own mysterious self? Maybe I'm slow (and particularly self-absorbed) but I did not appreciate this reflexive theme until quite near the end of the 150 pages. Which makes it all the more interesting to go back and find a sentence like this,

A man would be as spellbound by someone knowing the smallest details of his soul as he would by a nightmare.

Of course! Of course it's ourselves who we are spellbound by, and who are our own nightmares.

He did not even want to think how terrible the world would be if men spoke always of themselves, of their own peculiarities, if their books and their stories were always about this.

Well by this point I had got the point, or something of it. But what follows the last-quoted line of course as a refutation. 'He' thought that, 'But I did not!' Otherwise the book would hardly have been written. But here is perhaps the thing: it's obviously not that we should celebrate self-absorption, but maybe that we should understand from this - from our efforts at self-understanding - that we are actually less different and less separate than we thought, that the same mystery inheres in other people, that we can conceive for them the same fascination and the same passion as we do for ourselves.

It is unclear if there are two people or just one person in The White Castle. The diagnosis must be simultaneously schizophrenia, and love.