Brodsky: ‘Less Than One’

 Joseph Brodsky said: “The real history of consciousness starts with one’s first lie.”

The line is from his essay “Less Than One,” a strange and wonderful meditation on how consciousness and identity are formed or how memory shapes and is shaped by identity.

Brodsky said he remembered his first lie. He told a librarian he couldn’t remember his “nationality,” meaning that he was Jewish. He was applying for membership at a school library and knew that his “nationality” would have disqualified him. He was 7.

Brodsky told the story not to make a point about anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. He was trying to make the more fundamental point his first lie involved identity.

If you change the word “lie” to “fiction,” you have a look at the writer’s work.

Some characters — Brodsky was one of them — are so astonishing you just have to tell stories about them. You try to tell stories that show that these marvelous characters are human beings, just like the rest of us, but you also try to show their individuality, to contrast the one against the many.

Brodsky’s pointed out that some societies are so poisonous that the individual isn’t really one against the many. The individual is less than one. 

• Source: Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays; New York: Farrar Straus Girous, 1986. The title essay is on pp. 3-33. It’s online here:

https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/media/0305/Brodsky%252520Less%252520Than%252520One.pdf