Sincerity and Authenticity

Lionel Trilling

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1973
• ISBN:
  9780674504196
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"Now and then, " writes Lionel Trilling, "it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself." In this new book he is concerned with such a mutation: the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one's self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life—and the further shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity. Instances range over the whole of Western literature and thought, from Shakespeare to Hegel to Sartre, from Robespierre to R. D. Laing, suggesting the contradictions and ironies to which the ideals of sincerity and authenticity give rise, most especially in contemporary life.Lucid, and brilliantly framed, its view of cultural history will give Sincerity and Authenticity an important place among the works of this distinguished critic.

REFERENCE NOTES

I. SINCERITY: ITS ORIGIN AND RISE

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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

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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...