Authenticity and Representation in Literature
1
People become. We do not know who we will come to be; we do not know how we will
come to be. Our unfolding is mysterious—to ourselves and to our loved ones. Part of the
joy of parenthood is the promise of the new. The pregnant mother wonders how the child
will look. The new parents take pictures to capture the face they know will disappear.
And it is not simply the face and the voice that disappear; the toys, the obsessions, the
character itself evaporate, replaced with what remains to be discovered.
But we assume continuity. We are placed into our world with a name, and we in turn
learn to name other people as well as things. And these names efface the mystery; that is
part of their function. My name is my own, but it was given to me by others. I learn to
interpret myself through the concepts these others provide. They not only tell me who I
am, but what I am, and what I have done to make myself that way.
I make these concepts my own and discover that keeping them consistent requires
struggle. This seems to me the situation of most high school and college students. One
of their most important tasks is the discovery/construction of identity. They can no
longer take who they are for granted. They are aware of pressures to become people of
whom they do not approve. They discover that the concepts they have inherited are much
flimsier than they originally seemed.
This is perhaps the moment when literature becomes most crucial in a person’s life
because in many ways our identity is literary. It is not a fact; it is a representation. Our
person is imagined, first by others and then by ourselves. And what is more, the quality
of the imagination is here crucial. A weak, conventional imagination hides ourselves
from ourselves; it flattens us and blinds us from our subtleties and possibilities. It binds
us to clichéd roles in trite scripts. It denies us the fullness of life.
The nature of social life is towards conventionality. The function of scripts is to make
interaction predictable, to allow us to act automatically. Reducing persons to roles saves
social wear and tear at the expense of originality and spontaneity. More than any other
group teenagers experience the conflict between the desire for fullness and the need for
regulation, which is allegorized as the individual vs. society: the individual usually being
designated as the protagonist, society the antagonist. The story is often interpreted
through the concept of integrity: the individual striving to maintain integrity, society
undermining it.
To most of us, educated in postmodernism, this kind of distinction seems unsophisticated.
After all, we have been taught that the self is fractured, and the fractions are unstable and
in incessant conflict with one another. The integral self seems so modernist, so J. D.
Rockefeller and John Calvin, so inner-directed. It is worse than unsophisticated; it is
impossible.
Why? The postmodern education is literary—even when it ignores what is
conventionally designated as literature, even when it takes place outside the morally
irrelevant classroom. It is literary in the sense that it plays with its embodiments.
My central premise here is based on distinction made by James Kinneavy in A Theory of
Discourse between the expressive and the aesthetic. Kinneavy anatomizes forms of
discourse through the rhetorical triangle. Expressive discourse centers on the speaker,
and seeks to define and assert the self. Aesthetic discourse centers on the material the
speaker uses and seeks to explore the possibilities inherent in that material. Expressive
discourse can be judged on the basis of its truthfulness; false discourse misleads the
audience. Aesthetic discourse can be judged on the basis of rightness; this effect (word,
note, stroke) is too easy, too sentimental, too dissonant with the whole.
Postmodernism denigrates the expressive in favor of the aesthetic. It denies the
referentiality of the I and therefore, the concept of authenticity. It replaces authenticity
with play, so that the criteria for judging the sufficiency of the I are aesthetic rather than
ethical.
This is not an easy concept to teach because the word “I” seems to refer to something,
although what this something is is not clear. We might say it is our body, until we hear
such phrases as “I hate my body?” or “You don’t love me; you only love my body,” or
we unexpectedly come across ourselves in a mirror and ask “Do I really look like that?”
If we are Christians, we can identify our I with our souls, but most postmodernists don’t
believe in a soul, and find it easiest to conclude that the I is a fiction, although it is a
fiction that continuously experiences itself experiencing things.
David Riesman had traced the understanding (or decay) of the self in a similar way. His
first self he called tradition-directed because it guided itself through laws derived from a
comparatively unitary tradition. As that tradition became more complex and
contradictory, it became replaced by the inner-directed self, which legislated its own laws
for and upon itself. Both of these self can be thought of as ethical; conduct is judged by
moral laws than can be codified. But Riesman’s final stage, the other-directed self, is not
ethical, and Riesman found it distasteful. The other-directed self does not judge itself by
codified laws, but by cues it derives from its environment. Riesman imagines this self
superficial and anxious, unrooted in a tradition or in the riches of a cultivated soul.
Instead it relates to the world aesthetically. It plays.
Literature is the study of the play of language. But in that case why study? One can see
why the young should become literate, and literature might be introduced as a
comparatively pleasant way of tempting the young to read. But why should serious
people seriously study the stuff? One answer might be that literature provides a transition
between the tradition-directed self and the inner-directed self. Literature codifies
tradition so that it enters me not through the anonymous words of the village, but through
the words of an author, authoritative but also localized and responsible. Communal
insight is expressed and exteriorized. I can explore contradictions between authorities,
make choices and reject what I choose not to make my own.
But if I am an other-directed person, I do not make such choices. I can not only endure, I
can relish contradictions. I read not to codify my experience, but to play with it.
Codifications seem platitudes, and the study of literary themes threatens to become
literature lite. I no longer read a story for its moral but for its style, and literature is no
longer judged bad because it is immoral but because it is clumsy. The other-directed
person becomes a version of Oscar Wilde.
Very often crude versions. What I am describing can as easily be the world of Pauline
Kael endorses when she praises trashy movies. The New Wave directors and critics like
Kael thought of themselves as opposing bourgeois finesse and chose vitality over polish.
This contempt for polish is aesthetic, and that contempt can be found punk rock and
abstract expressionism. It is the contempt other-directed for the inner-directed, a
dismissal of the old humanism that Foucault imagined founded on literature but
disintegrating.
2
Oddly enough, the American literary tradition that begins with Emerson had the same
complaints about the European humanistic tradition. Emerson complains about the
tendency of books to imprison us within their circumference rather than to lead us beyond
their boundaries. His notion of self-reliance assumes that the self ought to expand
beyond what it can now imagine. The self can only be placed when it is spent and the
purpose of art is replenishment. He too prefers the raw to the finished, and the virtue of
the authentic is its access to power. The inauthentic has becomes devitalized; the social
has repressed its vitality.
At present Americans find themselves encumbered by representations of the social, by
signs. These signs are not really expressive; they have been sampled, torn from their
original contexts. They are mediated, and adult Americans experience the various media
to which they subject themselves very much the way teenagers experience society.
Indeed the media are the force by which we synchronize our tastes and our desires.
At their deepest base, these signs are not persuasive. In their most sophisticated form
they mock the products that they advertise as well as the consumers of those products.
The information they present is frequently trivial. They are aesthetic. What is important
is their tone, their irony, their denial of inwardness. Or in their Norman Vincent Peale/
Oprah Winfrey incarnation, the supremacy of inwardness and the denial of the
importance of impediments of desire.
The answer to the denial of inwardness is not the assertion of inwardness since the
history of religious and humanist culture demonstrate that inwardness can be as
deadening as anything else. Emerson can be thought of a one of the great prophets of
inwardness, and yet I suspect he would have recoiled in horror at being canonized and
listed in the Great Books. The occupational hazard of the teacher of Great Books is
betrayal and fraud.
The answer to the inauthentic is not the assertion of the authentic since nothing is made
more authentic by being asserted as such. The experience of the last one hundred years
has demonstrated with what ease the authentic can be torn from itself and made
inauthentic.
What help can literature teachers give the young, who are unlikely develop a taste for
inwardness and whose need for authenticity is constantly being turned against itself? My
suggestion is postmodern: that we teach literature as games that we play for delight and
that we study as maps to who we are. It is not the teachings of literature that tell us who
we are; it is through meditating on the sources of our delight that we can make these
discoveries.
Moreover, the study of literature can refine a taste for the fine. In this case the fine is not
synonymous with the polite. Oscar Wilde was able to recognize the finesse of Walt
Whitman. It does not lead students to make the right ethical choices. Writers of taste and
distinction have endorsed all kinds of horrible tyrannies. But the study of literature can
help us see beyond the limitations of the conventional. It can help us see that our
representations are simply representation, not facts, that representations are limited, that
those limitations can be expanded, mocked, and reinscribed in other genres.