In an interview, Walter Kirn – whose latest book, Blood Will Out, chronicles his relationship with the con man masquerading as “Clark Rockefeller” – discusses the peculiar appeal of swindlers:
Rumpus: Why are stories about impostors—The Talented Mr. Ripley, Six Degrees of Separation, Blood Will Out—so compelling? And beyond that, why are they of particular interest to you?
Kirn: We’re all impostors to ourselves. By that I mean that we know instinctively, intimately, the difference between whom we are inside and who we appear to be to others. Most of the time—when we aren’t flat lying about something or playing a particularly stylized role in some heightened dramatic situation—this difference between the internal and the external is modest and manageable. But there are moments when it frightens us, threatening to expose us as inauthentic. Well, the big-time impostors we read about in literature run this risk constantly, flirting with destruction, not just humiliation or embarrassment. It’s a spectacle that we can’t help but find compelling, and it involves a certain level of courage that we sneakily admire, perhaps.
I’ve always defined a truly alluring story as a journey we’re not equipped to take ourselves with a person we’re tempted but afraid to emulate. Impostor narratives are exactly that. When they end in disaster, as Clark’s did, or as Gatsby’s did, we can congratulate ourselves for our own wisdom. We can also experience, safely, at no cost, the terrible thrill of radical self-invention, of trading who we are for who we might be.
Rumpus: To what extent do you think Clark believed his own lies, and to what degree was he aware of all that he was doing?
Kirn: People who know Clark’s story superficially tend to find a strange comfort in the notion that he fell for his own lies. They imagine that he was delusional, confused—not unremittingly shrewd and calculating. They’re wrong, though. They’re projecting their own humanity onto a sociopathic, alien mind, a mind that couldn’t afford for even an instant to lose track of its own schemes. You or I would have trouble targeting different people with an array of specialized deceptions tailored to their respective personalities; we’d crack under the stress, the mental strain. But for someone like Clark, such pressure is a pleasure. I imagine that he woke up each morning wondering whom he could deceive that day. It made him happy, misleading people. It was his craft, not merely his compulsion.
Previous Dish on Kirn and Blood Will Out here.
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