WANTING TO BE A CHAMELEON.

WANTING TO BE A CHAMELEON. The story about “Clark Rockefeller” began as a post on Colin Mcginn’s proposition that personality is “not a given, but a choice, not determined but free.” In that post I said that: McGinn “suggests that Shakespeare means that ‘our personality (or many personalities) is analogous to the character an actor plays on the stage’” In this week’s New Yorker David Grann has an article about a French impostor who, at the age of thirty, has already chalked up “scores of identities, in more than fifteen countries and five languages.” Some quotes from him in his real voice: “I can become whatever I want,” and “I am a manipulator. . . . My job is to manipulate.” This impostor usually adopted the role of an abused teenager. “First, he said, he conceived of a child whom he wanted to play. Then he gradually mapped out the character’s biography, from his heritage to his family to his tics.” In other words, he invented the backstory for the character in the same way that an actor would. What is his real personality? Grann points out that he has a tattoo on his forearm: “caméléon nantais”—“Chameleon from Nantes.”