ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the artist-figures' deceitfulness can be traced to their reluctance to acknowledge the gap between reality and representation. In Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, and Henry James's "The Aspern Papers" and The Sacred Fount, the characters' embarrassment appears less acute–but the dishonesty becomes a more fundamental component of the artist's make-up. Like other critics of Mann, among them Manfred Dierks and Rolf Gunter Renner, Wysling focuses his research on Thomas Mann the writer, and one of the stated aims of his study is to discover "the psychological and artistic strategies that Thomas Mann employs in his attempt to master personal and general conflicts." Krull's enhancement of a strong self is incongruous with the "doubling" of the self inherent in his constant role-play, which causes the loss of his own identity. Like Felix Krull, James's first person narrator can be read as an artist who is also a constantly disguised double-dealer.
