Sincerity and Authenticity

Lionel Trilling, Lionel TRILLING

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 1973
• Print ISBN: 9780674808614, 9780674808607
• eBook ISBN: 9780674504196
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: Literature

"A powerful diagram of the moral life from Shakespeare to the present...a book crowded with insights."—Geoffrey Hartman, New York Times

One of the twentieth century's foremost literary critics traces the idea of the self across five hundred years of Western cultural history.

"One cannot both be sincere and seem so," André Gide once wrote. Attempting to inhabit sincerity to satisfy social expectations makes it into a posture or a persona—a self-defeating enterprise. What, then, does the oft-repeated injunction to "be yourself" really mean?

In his 1969–1970 Norton Lectures, Lionel Trilling argues that this simple piece of advice has been the source of centuries of moral perplexity. In Elizabethan England, being true to oneself was seen as a means to an end. "To thine own self be true," Polonius famously advised Laertes in Hamlet, "And it must follow, as the night the day / Thou canst not then be false to any man." But this vision of the "honest soul," whose pursuit of self-knowledge brings harmony with external society, gradually collapsed under the weight of modern literature and philosophy. Drawing a line from Rousseau, Robespierre, and Jane Austen through Hegel, Freud, and Joseph Conrad, Trilling brilliantly shows how sincerity was displaced by the more strenuous ideal of authenticity, in which genuine selfhood became a product of alienation and negation, a ceaseless purge of both social artifice and self-deception. In his final lectures, he presciently notes the rising embrace of deliberate inauthenticity, a development that rapidly accelerated after his death.

Moving fluidly between philosophy, literature, cultural history, and psychoanalysis, Sincerity and Authenticity is a bravura performance, unraveling our labors of self-definition with the wit and effortless sophistication that made Trilling a foremost literary critic of the twentieth century.

REFERENCE NOTES

I. SINCERITY: ITS ORIGIN AND RISE

page
4	‘Why is it . . . never made?’/The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. W. Dexter (Nonesuch Press, London, 1938), vol. ii, pp. 620–1.
5	‘Below the surface-stream . . . feel indeed’/The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry (O.U.P., London and New York, 1950), p. 483.
	‘Every individual human being . . . this ideal’/F. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed. and trans. E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1967), p. 17.
	‘Be true! . . . be inferred’/Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, ch. XXIV, ‘Conclusion’.
7	‘The aesthetic point of view . . . discussing my work’/This statement, presumably quoted from a letter of Gide’s to the author, is the epigraph on the title-page of André Gide by Jean Hytier, trans. R. Howard (Doubteday Anchor, Garden City, N.Y., 1962; Constable, London, 1963). Eliot’s statement is made in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ and Joyce’s in ch. v of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
	‘No literature . . . concerned with salvation’/L. Trilling, ‘On the Teaching of Modern Literature’, Beyond Culture (Viking, New York; Secker, London, 1965), p. 8.
8	‘A poem in which . . . a persona of the author’s’/D. Davie, ‘On Sincerity: From Wordsworth to Ginsberg’, Encounter, Oct. 1968, pp. 61–6.
10	The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life/ By Erving Goffman (New York, 1959; London, 1969).
11	‘Those masterful images . . . the heart’/W. B. Yeats, ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, Collected Poems (Macmillan, London and New York, 1956), p. 336. Copyright 1940 by Georgie Yeats, renewed 1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, Michael Yeats, and Anne Yeats. Quoted by permission of Mr. M. B. Yeats, Macmillan & Co. Ltd., The Macmillan Company, New York, and the Macmillan Company of Canada Ltd.
17–18	Of this Rousseau . . . ‘vice and virtue’/J.-J. Rousseau’s Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur les spectacles (1758) has been translated by Allan Bloom as Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d’ Alembert on the Theatre (Free Press, Glencoe, Ill., 1960), and is quoted here by permission of The Macmillan Company. For Rousseau’s discussion of Molière, see pp. 34–47.
19	Culture and Society/ By Raymond Williams (London and New York, 1958).
19–20	Frances Yates . . . Zevedei Barbu . . . Paul Delany . . . the new genre/F. Yates, ‘Bacon and the Menace of English Lit.’, New York Review of Books, 27 March 1969, p. 37; Z. Barbu, Problems of Historical Psychology (Routledge, London; Grove Press, New York, 1960), p. 146; P. Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (Routledge, London; Columbia Univ. Press, New York, 1969), p. 19.
20	‘the idiocy of village life’/K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in A Handbook of Marxism, ed. E. Burns (Random House, New York; Martin Lawrence, London, 1935), p. 27.
21	Michael Walzer . . . ‘“advanced” intellectuals . . .’/M. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1965; Weidenfeld, London, 1966), p. 121.
22	Castiglione’s Courtier . . . not what it should be/B. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. C. S. Singleton (Doubleday Anchor, New York, 1959), pp. 287–95.
23	the writer cannot . . . as he was and is/See, passim, Delany’s admirable work previously cited.
24	Georges Gusdorf . . . internal space/G. Gusdorf, ‘Conditions et limites de l’autobiographie’, in Formen der Selbstdarstellung, ed. Reichenkron and Haase (Berlin, 1956), p. 108.
	He did not . . . as an individual he was of consequence/Delany, p. 11.
25	Jacques Lacan . . . the manufacture of mirrors/J. Lacan, ‘Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je, telle qu’elle nous est révélée dans l’expérience psychanalytique’, Revue française de psychanalyse, vol. xiii (1949), pp. 449–55. The influence of mirrors in the development of the sense of individuality is touched on by Gusdorf, pp. 108–9, and by C. Hill, The Century of Revolution, p. 253.
	If he is an artist . . . threescore of them/The correlation of mirrors, self-portraiture, and autobiography is made by Delany, pp. 12–14.

II. THE HONEST SOUL AND THE DISINTEGRATED CONSCIOUSNESS

28

Karl Marx . . . ‘unique masterpiece’ will give him/Selected Correspondence [of] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, trans. D. Torr (International Publishers, New York, 1942), pp. 259–61. For the original letter, with its amusing ‘Ich finde heute by accident, dass zwei “Neveu de Rameau”. . .’ and ‘. . . sagt old Hegel darüber . . .’. See Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels Werke (Dietz, Berlin, 1965), vol. xxxii, pp. 303–4.

‘If your little savage . . . sleep with his mother’/I quote from the translation by Jacques...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• I Sincerity: Its Origin and Rise
• II The Honest Soul and the Disintegrated Consciousness
• III The Sentiment of Being and the Sentiments of Art
• IV The Heroic, the Beautiful, the Authentic
• V Society and Authenticity
• VI The Authentic Unconscious
• Reference Notes
• Index of Names