I’ve just finished reading Siri Hustvedt’s novel ‘The Blindlfold’. Not surprisingly it’s all about identity and identity shifts, dislocation etc etc. But there’s one part that really stands out for me. The main character has just assumed an identity which involves adopting another name - a fictionalised identity. One of this character’s confidantes claims that ‘Fiction is not like life.’ - fair enough - but the response is brilliant, I’m sure I’ll use it as a quote sometime:

You know as well as I do that the line can’t be drawn, that we’re infected at every moment by fictions of all kinds, that it’s inescapable.

So I’m now pre-occupied by that phrase ‘ infected at every moment by fictions’. Of course the suggestion of disease or infection seems to carry a value judgement, but the nonetheless it also makes us see how the fictions we consume and the fictions we live by influence our self-narrative. Perhaps also the most severe forms of political oppression are achieved by innoculating the populace with dangerous fictions.