Charles Eliot Norton Lecture Series At Harvard University; Lionel Trilling: Sincerity And Authenticity: The Heroic, The Beautiful, The Authentic

The university is a community but it is increasingly a community of specialists joined in divergence. Our connection is strained and we depend therefore on those among us who make substantial the relation of our work our interests our specialties to some larger. More vital whole. In the past 30 years or so no one in this country has done more to relate the study of literature to human enterprise than Lionel Trilling. Though this is not I hasten to add BN has a valid subject. The evidence is too obvious to require a citation. But I should like none the less of it. To cite an early story by Mr trolling that has not sustain the currency it deserves. The story of this time of that place was published in 1943 and it concerns a young teacher of English who has particularly tried and. Tried in its metaphysical not in its legal stance tried by a student named

Ferdinand R. Turton. A young man Dacia vary in the sense in which Mr. trilling used that French word last week psychically torn. Apparently mad. But terribly cogent near the beginning of the story. At the first meeting of his class the teacher assigns a stock team who I am. And why I came to do-I college. For most of the students the solicits stock grammatical banality perhaps sincerity from Turton it unless it's something radically different. The title of the story comes from the following paragraph intern's theme. Existence without ally is the question presented. Environment and hereditary relegated aside the rags no clothes or practical life discarded the name and the instrumentality of livelihood do not as the profits of the dismal science insist on in this

connection give solution to the interrogation which not from the professor merely But veritably from the cosmos is given. I think therefore I am. CAVUTO etc. but who am I certain I am. But what is certain of this time of that place of some parentage. What does it matter. The teacher's agony is to deal in imaginative justice with the student to deal simultaneously with the grotesqueries of his prose style with his painful deviations from social norm and with what I should like to take the liberty of calling his stunning authenticity. This evening the fourth of Mr. drawings Norton lectures is entitled The heroic. The beautiful the authentic that it is part also of an even larger continuing undertaking. Should I think be manifest. Professor. Thank you.

It's like you are. Thank you. I. Was doing. I think I was responding to this piece of my fiction because. Many years ago when I published my first so far my own novel angle was. Getting all the. Press public. Last weekend my lecture speaking of Jane Austen's. Heroines.

I said that they were depicted. Through their activity and development. Through process. And history. I'm free to praise this observation because it is not my own. I took it from an English critic whose essay on Jane Austin published anonymously. In the North British review in 1870 just a hundred years ago is one of the best I know. But is this. Admirable critic proceeds with his explanation of how the novelist delineates her characters. He makes a statement in which hears usual like you and me is not at work he says that to Jane Austin I'm quoting him. The individual mind can only be represented as a battlefield where contending hosts Marshall and where victory and lines now do one side. To the other.

Now obviously this military figure is inaccurate. It attributes to the novels. And the characters a pattern of psychological development which is not at all the way by which they move but subsequently the writing retrieves his era by remarking of Jane Austen that she was saturated with a Platonic ideal. She was committed he says. To the ideal of intelligent love according to which the deepest and truest relationship that can exist between human beings is kind of God consisting in the giving and receiving of knowledge about right conduct. In the formation of one person's character by another and the acceptance of the loved one's guidance in one's own growth now surely no one will fault the correctness of this critical observation.

The idea of a love based on pedagogy may be repellent to some and to others seem merely quaint but unquestionably a pedagogy of this sort plays a decisive part. In the power of Jane Austen's work. But it is perhaps exactly because having once made this observation he wishes to lessen its emphasis that our Anonymous critic made this strange statement. I have just one thing about Jane Austin's having seen the mind as a battlefield. With this war like image no doubt hope to suggest the novels have an energy and momentousness which we ordinarily associate not with the pedagogic life but with a heroic life and thus with tragedy. The genre originally defined by its reliance upon the heroic mode yet of course the very thing that constitutes the peculiar achievement

of Jane Austen's novels. Is there success in giving life a large significance without recourse to the heroic idiom. Their ability to achieve momentousness and universality within the pedagogic. Now Jane Austen wrote at a time when the pedagogic mode of literature was in especially common use. But life seems seen under the aspect of instruction as scarcely a new vision in literature despite. Plato's commitment to it pedagogy is far more salient in the judeo christian literary tradition than in the Greek. It is definitive of works as diverse as the Book of Job and Piers Plowman. And The Divine Comedy. Sometimes the pedagogic code borrows the costume and weapons. Of heroism

as in the Fairy Queen and Pilgrim's Progress. But we understand that this is a device intended to lend glamour to the learning process by its nature because pedagogy is at odds with the heroic You genre of tragedy to which it tacitly imputes a perverse self-indulgence a lack of ultimate seriousness seriousness about life as it actually is tragedy because for its part invites us to find in it some pedagogic purpose. But the invocation is really not made in good faith. Our best critical efforts cannot convince us that say they to Oedipus tragedy to Oedipus tragedies of Sophocles teach us anything or show the hero as learning anything. The

tragedies are often about knowing and not knowing. And they see the whole range the Messiah sells on the side of knowing but I think that this partisanship must be approached very warily lest we find ourselves in the unhappy situation of those critics. Who tell us that Lear and wast suffered to good purpose because their pain educated them before they die. And when as in other posts around us a great tragedy is made to yield the conclusion that it is a wise child who knows his own father. Mother. Or as in King Lear that the universe is uncomfortable and its govern as a governance inscrutable. We decide the tragedy has nothing to do with practical conduct practical conduct of life except in the way of transcendence and negation that it celebrates the mystery.

The bard to reason prudence and morality. Which is of course why pedagogy sets itself against tragedy. It accuses tragedy of being essentially deficient in serious point in history that developed indeed an open antagonism between pedagogy and the heroic tragic literary mode. Speaking of the genre of the novel it was once said that from its beginnings and Dawn Kwikset and Tom Jones the novel has persistently made war on to think how culture. And the heroic. Now obviously the novel did not fight alone. Who can recall the juxtaposition of Falstaff and Hotspur or the treatment of the heroic and Troilus and Cressida and we realize that the heroic mode found its antagonists in its very citadel of the theatre.

But Mr. Bosler is correct in fixing upon the novel. The pedagogical genre par excellence as the chief opponent of the heroic view of life. The German critic of all that Benyamin speaks of the impulse to impart instruction instruction. As a defining characteristic of storytelling and as a condition of its vitality. Storytelling he says is oriented toward practical interests. It seeks to be useful. It has counselled again and the end it has in view is wisdom. I mean so far as this is true the novel which at least in its beginnings was committed to storytelling is of its nature opposed to the heroic. Now what is. Or was the heroic. What is a hero. A good answer was given by. The late Robert Warshow when an

essay on Western movies. He said a hero. Is a man who looks like a hero. What you always are saying essentially what Professor Margaret Biba had said in her book on the Greek Theatre the hero is an actor on the juice that juice statements especially professor. Make it plain that the idea of a hero is only secondarily a moral idea to begin with. That is no more a moral idea than the grace of a dancer is a moral idea. Nowadays the habit of our language makes the idea of a hero less coextensive with one of the moral qualities which is felt to be essential to it. A name for an unusual and approved exercise of courage because as Harold. But in the original literary conception of the hero. Courage is only a single element of their own ascension.

It is virtually taken for granted and a man who is favored by the gods as the hero is presumed to be or even endowed with a certain certain inherited traits of divinity. In fact it is this preeminent and that really marks the hero of the ancient literary tradition and the dignity that accompanies such superior and is supposed to be readily recognized it is manifest in word and deed. It announces and insists upon itself. It takes no great discernment on the part of the audience to discover it. The hero is a man who looks like a hero. The hero is an actor. He act out his own high sense of himself. Now not all cultures develop the idea of the hero. Some years ago I had occasion to

observe. It was in connection with Wordsworth. That in the rabbinical literature or there is no touch of the heroic idea the rabbis in speaking of virtue never mention the virtue of courage which Aristotle of course regarded as basic in the Reich character. Virtues character and the indifference of the rabbis to the idea of courage is perhaps worth more worth remarking because they were of course aware that many of their number would die for their faith and cause what is essentially to our point. Is that as ethical beings the rabbis never see them selves. It is as if the religious commandment against the making of graven images extended to their way of conceiving a personal moral existence as well. They imagine no struggle no dilemma no hard choices no ironies no

destinies nothing interesting none of the stuff of morality as drama. They would have been quite ready to understand Professor Bieber's definition of the hero as an actor and to say that as such. He was undeserving of the serious attention of grown men now. Aristotle's virtuous man in his highest development. Quite precisely sees himself. He whose virtue is such that it wears the crowning perfection of the gala superhero. Which is translated as great sold in this aristocratic pride sometime. Such a man is to be recognised by his star hotels are by his slow gauge his low pitched voice his

measured diction his conscious irony in dealing with his inferiors. Sure the virtuous man is an actor and hunts you on us in his study of the Gnostic religion comments on the theatrical element in the ethical system of the Stoics. To play one's part. He quotes. The play once part that figure of speech on which stoic ethics dwells so much unwittingly reveals the fictitious element in the construction of a role played as submitted is substituted for a real function. Before long the actors on the stage and this means of course the stage on which we act out our lives not the actual stage of a theater. The actors on the stage behave as if. They acted their choice and as if their actions mattered what

actually matters is only to play well rather than badly with no genuine relevance to the out. The actors bravely play their own already. Now this comic Marvel history and some of the Stoics who cause it the furthest removed from the rabbis and even the Jewish tradition we go back. Back of the rabbis to the Bible. I think we don't find the heroic there either. David as a person is is of consumption interest to us but the interest is not of the sort that attaches to heroes. Milton in the Greek manna does its best for Samson. But even in Milton much less in the Bible is Sampson really a hero. Oedipus confronting the mystery of human suffering is a hero but job in the same confrontation is not now. Now the Greeks were under no illusion about the actuality of the hero. House title makes this

plain. It is comparison of tragedy and comedy. It is only in the genre of calm of tragedy that the hero exists of course but tragedy shows man as better. That is to say he has no more impressive more dignified and they really are. The whole import of tragedy depends upon the elevation of the hero to which every stylistic element of the drama language jest cost must contribute. There can be no comic hero comic hero. For comedy shows man as ours dawdle says as worse. That is to say more ignoble less impressive less dignified and short lower. Than they really are. And of course we're puzzled to know when we meet the famous definitions for the first time. Why this philosopher who thought of so much never thought of a literary genre but shows man as they really are neither better nor worse the the

higher the lower but he does not. Now it's sometimes a pose that the comic is a response to the tragic and in its essence it is an adverse comment on the heroic but is just as possible to say that the germ of the heroic idea is to be found in the comic itself. That at the moment at which men think of themselves as funny they have conceived the idea of their dignity as soon as they joke about their natural functions about the absurdity of death occasion and copulation about the oddness of the shapes their bodies grow into. They are on the way toward contriving to appear nobler than they really are. How else do men recognize their ignore billeted then by I imagine that my imagining their potential nobility a state of being which in time will come to burden and bore them and then rouse them

up. Now in literature as in the personal lives of many of us the issue between the heroic and the anti principle would seem to represent the natural rhythm of the human psyche. The alternate rendering of deference to the super ego which is the repository of our governing ideal and the ID which is the locus of our instinctual drive. In the Renaissance However the antagonism acquired I think we can see new form new significance. At this moment in history the attack on the autistic style of the super ego was made not merely by the aid but by the ego by the self. All its energy of self preservation and assess the heroic was represented not only as being

absurd in its moral pretension but standing in the way. I wole the practical advantages that accrue to man to man when he takes account of the world as it actually is. Although during the Renaissance the literary mind of Europe was haunted by the charm of the heroic idea. It was at the same time. It at the same time felt the need to exercise it and it is this ambivalence that is memorialized in Othello. It is easy for us to dad. Unlike the Romantics and Victorians to see one so fascinating to commentators has no existence really apart from that he is a function avi's generated by. Othello's in the sense a commitment to the heroic is overriding the solicitation of the heroic style. And it is because art fellow sees himself as a hero and as nothing

else but a hero that we come to feel that the brutality and history of this tragedy is no individual person really but the heroic itself. Now I have said that in the Renaissance the antagonism to the Iraq idea was undertaken in the interest of practicality and of the banns of the actual quotidian world. Classic instance of this submission to actuality is the development of Prince how. Into kingship. The effect to a ruler has not only to reject the man who embodies the anti-right principle we must also kill the man. Who embodies the heroism he must be read both a full staff. And a hotspot. Now again the transactions of Savan case with a heroic idea of cost to complex and paradoxical to be specified here but for our purpose.

I'm sure it's enough to recall it done quick so that it grew out of the author's desire to assert the claims of practicality against those other heroic mode of life and feeling the valor and loving disciple of Salon case was virtually obsessed by the discrepancy between the heroic tradition and the actual world he could think of no more delicious joke than to bring the two together. Heroism in actuality and describe a brawl of village slots in terms of a battle before the walls of Troy. Order forced upon his readers on the status of a hero a foundling whose name is not Oedipus but Tom which of all names fielding thought the most absurd. He has an essay say now to feel that he was always an astonishing idea that literature as he knew it from his adoration of the Greek classics was not consonant with life.

As he had to deal with it in his magistrate's courtroom or in a sociological and criminal logical pamphlet literary mind of Europe increasingly inclined to give its assent to a swift definition of the virtuous man as he who makes two blades of grass grow where one had grown before. Did Rose great encyclopedia was to celebrate the marriage of virtue and industrious practicality. Nevertheless the concern with the act with a daily ordinary. Was not directed to practicality allowed. It also made the promise. Of a new notion of spiritual experience to admit the wonder listeners of daily life. Is to make all the more wonderful such disclosures of spirit as may occasionally occur. This I think it will be

recognized as the basis of James Joyce's conception of what he calls the epiphany. It is literally a showing for the assumption behind the Epiphany is that human existence is in largest part compounded of the dullness and triviality of its routine. It's revitalized the paralyzed by habit and by the weight of necessity. What is shown for. To our surprise may not be divinity in the ordinary theological meaning of the word. But is something that is never Nevertheless in accord with divinity something that we can I perhaps call spirit and often what is disclosed is of small importance of Jerricho intention. But there are times when the disclosure transfigures the dull and ordinary suffusing it with a transcendent significance. So far as Joyce thought of the Epiphany as a genre in itself and he

seems to have done so he stays close to one of the established implications of the word. That the revelation should take place suddenly. In a flash and yet we can't perhaps think of the whole of his Ulysses as an epiphany a showing forth of the spirit of Leopold Bloom out of the intractable commonplaceness of his existence and this of course is what makes the frequently remarked affinity of bloom were done quickly in the existence of both man the ordinary and actual apre pope. And both are in bondage to daily necessity and to the manifest absurdity of their bodies. And this puts them in a quite opposite situation to that of the aras to the Chilean hero with his aristocratic freedom and dignity. And yet both men both bloom and Don Kwikset transcend the imposed actuality to become what we buy some new definition of the word.

Are willing to call here all the way down as her client has said is the same thing as the way up now. Between Joyce and WORDSWORTH The difference in personal temperament and public image are so very wide that when some years ago I suggested that there were certain similarities in the work of the two men I felt it necessary to give rather elaborate assurance that I was not joking. But we now know from Joyce's letters that at a crucial moment in his creative life at the time of Dublin's Joyce held Wordsworth in unique esteem it is Wordsworth Joyce writes to his brother who of all English men of letters best deserves the word genius. We can scarcely be wrong if we take it the chief ground for this the Pearl of the judgment was Wordsworth's own devotion to the epiphany.

Now it was worth the Epiphany has two distinct though related forms in one form. The poet receives a communication through the agency of nature in this category as Wordsworth experience of the mountain Dawn in which he dedicated himself to the priesthood of the imagination. The other. Less grandiose and more closely connected with Joyce is kind of a carefully. Has as its agent some unlikely person. Only each gatherer or a bereft and deserted woman or an old man travelling or some such person who without intention by something he says or does or does not do suddenly manifest the particular quality of his own being and thus implies the wonder of being in general lowness of social station

loneliness even in a biological stand as a necessary condition. These persons who provide Wordsworth's a preference for men are so sometimes that they can scarcely move. Women are stupefied by this. Or an idiot boy. No more than Brr brr brr. And we wonder indeed whether people as marginal to develop life as these are actually partake of full humanity. And yet this is of cause why Wordsworth has chosen them for what their pickaninnies disclose is that these persons forcibly exist as human beings in this context however the stress probably falls not on the word human but on the word being. It is impossible it is impossible really to exaggerate the word wait that the would be be

had for words but he uses it as if with the consciousness of every moment that it made the name of God. When he takes for example of you a sister in law into a correct appreciation of his poem resolution and independence he says what is brought for a lonely place he quotes a lonely place upon by which an old man was far from all house or home not stored. These have nots not sacked but want the figure represented in the most naked simplicity possible. How nowadays in critical consideration the words get the name of who so appears less frequently than they did earlier in the century.

Although I think that although the revision in our estimate of what influence on Wordsworth is justified. There is one point of connection between the two men. It requires to be kept in mind and that is their shared passion for the individual's ontological experience of himself his animal faith in his I can't resell it as we have seen the sentiment of being and Wordsworth also by the same name using exactly the same phrase. For both man the sentiment was an unassailable intuition. It figured in their minds as it did really in the mind of Ward Whitman who called it the hardest basic fact. And only entrance to all things. And the facts to which this basic fact is entrance those of the social.

And political life. It is in our conscious certitude of our personal self or that we rest on knowledge society. Now in what I have said so far this evening I have not spoken of sincerity. The idea of sincerity can never be far from our thoughts. When we speak of either or words words it does not however at least not in the first instance upon their ontological concern their preoccupation with the sentiment of B. In my first act I remarked at the word sincerity could not be used of persons in certain states of culture that for example it could it could only be absurd to say of the patriarch Abraham that he was or was not a sincere man. It would be similarly absurd to undertake an assessment of the sincerity of the protagonist of words words.

Poet Michael who like Abraham was a shepherd of father very old. The poem comes. To its climax in a single line which no one who has read it ever forgets. When Michael having lost his son Lupe to the corruption of the city continues to build the sheep followed which he and the boy had ceremonially begun to gather his neighbors report him that sometimes he had sat the whole day and never lifted a single stone. Now it would go beyond absurdity. It would be a kind of indecency to raise the question of the sincerity of such grief even in order to affirm it indeed the impossibility of our

raising such a question is of the essence of our experience of the poet. Michael says nothing. He expresses nothing. It is not the case with him as it is with Hamlet that he has that within which passive. There is no there and without he and his grief are one we may not then speak of sincerity but our sense of Michael's being of so to speak his being in grief comes to us as a surprise as if it were exceptional in its actuality and value. We are impelled to use some word which denotes the nature of this being and which accounts for the high value we give it. I think that the word we employ in our day and not words will Day be

sure word that we are employing nowadays for this purpose is authenticity. It is it seems to me a word of ominous import as we use it in reference to human existence. It is a metaphor whose provenance is the museum where a persons expert in such matters have it as their function to test whether the object of what they appear to be or are claimed to be and therefore worth the price that is asked for them. Or if this has already been paid with the admiration that they are being given at the word the word has become part of our moral slant. To the point to the peculiar nature of our fallen condition our anxiety over the uncertain

credibility of existence and individual existence says. An 18th century aesthetician States the dilemma of born originals. Edward said. Born originals. How comes it to pass that we die. Copy. No one I think has much difficulty with the answer. To this question. From. What the straw is our authenticity is the sign. Of a sentiment of being depends upon the opinion of other people. The ideal of authentic personal being of cost is at the very center of thought. Yet its presence there however forcible it may have seemed to Russo's contemporary is too abstract or too moderate to command.

I think our modern imagination the authenticity of the first discourse ascribed to pre-social man that famous noble savage seems to us to consist in his being inauthentic. And the authenticity which Roussel ascribed to the Bush Republican Geneve is defined by his not being a Persian or at its most the Mayans having a weekend cottage in the country. A gun and some friends to drink and shoot with. I think I sense today at what authenticity means involves a degree of rough concreteness or degree of extremity of situation which Rousseau with his essential commitment to an ideal of patrician civility does not give us but which Wordsworth preeminently does. Michael. Is as actual. As hard. Dense weighty durable as any stone.

He dials or does not lift up. Now the want of words words appear fully as of authentic being. Coleridge took strong exception. The idiot boy he said is inevitably offensive to the sensibilities of the reader. This is an opinion with which we are at present less in agreement of course than we might once have been. And yet the poem still provokes resistance enough. But when we do it Myra. We cannot fail to see that its offensiveness is part of its intention. That this is suggest that authenticity is implicitly a polemical concept fulfilling its nature by dealing aggressively with received and have been if you will opinion aesthetic opinion in the first instance.

Social and political opinion in the next and one topic of its polemic which has reference to both aesthetic and social opinion is the error of the view that beauty is the highest quality to which all can aspire. I think that something can be learned about the program of the authentic by reference reference to the artistic quality that is or was called the sublime. The sublime in the eye of the authentic certainly not equivalent. Or even closely related. But they do have one trait in common and that is an antagonism to beauty. When Edmund Goode makes his enquiry into the sublime and the Beautiful. He is perfectly forthright about the social import of the opposition that he sets up between the two qualities

that high or mayhap sublimity and beauty that is this brilliant young man with a career to make leaves us in no doubt that he has a static preference his choice of the sublime as against the beautiful is controlled by his sense of society by his social intentions and his commitment to the energies of his genius and he explicitly connects the sublime with ambition. The defining characteristic of the sublime he tells us is its capacity for arousing the emotion of terror. And terror produces in us the power to meet and mastery beauty on the other hand he says. Is to be associated with femininity. It seduces

men to glorious joy in glorious indolence and do ignoble hedonism and all the true joy of aesthetics. There is perhaps only one comic moment. That is the moment in which I describe the effect of beauty upon a man. As he looks at a work of art and his head and his mouth open and his eyes goggle. And he's completely overcome and made an operative by this great power. Now Brooks emphasis on energy of course but it's much of a static variable following a shallow example under the influence of Burke. Proposes that beauty has. One which you calls melting beauty which relaxes off as a goal a model of nature and the other mode is that of energizing beauty which

by confronting us with difficult harsh. And even disagreeable experiences increases what he calls our last just a day and power of prompt action. Both modes of beauty he tells us aid in the development of man. The usefulness of each of them depending upon the condition of culture at a given time. Schiller writing is a static letters between 1793 and 18. One would seem to have believed that energy was the order of the day at play says the man who lives under the indulgence way of taste is in need of energizing beauty. He is only too ready once he has reached the stage of research sophisticated refinement to trifle away the strength he brought with him from the state of savagery. We are of course. At once reminded of that last phrase of the part played

by Russo and all the theories which make up the aesthetic revolution of the later 18th century. Burke of course was an antagonist of Rousseau politically and Schiller was used disciple as that but both men are responding to his denunciation of the arts for the intention of pleasing. It was this we saw last week that made the arts for research for the paradigm of society and all its characteristic negation of the sentiment of being. When Burke says. I call beauty a social quality he means exactly what Rousseau meant when he said that the arts have the effect of socializing men which is to say making them passive and acquiescence. But where book both book. And Schiller part company with Rousseau is in perceiving that the

arts can have an intention and effect. Other than that of pleasing that they can serve some other purpose than that of indulging their audience. Now I think that we should perhaps here take note of a slight some magic complication. One connotation of the word please tends to limit limit its use to objects which are relatively small either in size or unimportant. That is those to which the faculty of taste can be applied and another connotation suggest the ideal. The idea of social deference. But the word pleasure unlike please can repel these meanings. Doubtless because of its habitual association with the word pain and because two of its actual involvement with pain which is a matter which gives considerable attention for this for this reason.

Pleasure persists for a long time and aesthetic theory as the proper end of the sublime does not in the old sense of the word please. But it gives pleasure it gives or at least gratification it produces books as a sort of swelling and triumph that is extremely grateful to the human mind. And it isn't really until our own time anyone will be willing to say for example has said that pleasure has nothing whatever to do with the artistic with the aesthetic experience. That statement which takes a little but not wholly a back. Has been prepared for by two centuries that ascetic theory. And the static practice which have been less and less willing to take account of the unconscious had big jeweled preferences of the audience the artist as he About this time comes to be called ceases to

be the craftsman or the performer dependent upon the audience for its custom and applaud his reference now is to himself own or to some transcendent power of Wichita who has decreed his enterprise and alone is worthy to judge it. Now we rightly speak of this change. As a revolution and having done so it seems quite natural to connect it with a social revolution. Down goes the audience up comes the office. But actually the situation is considerably more complex than that. In the mirror in the land an admirable account of the aesthetic revolution. Professor NH Abrams speaks of the fate of the audience at this time late middle of the 18th

century. The fate of the audience is being a drastic one. And so it is but this faith does not consist simply in the loss of the old status and prerogatives of the audience. Something is gained as well as lost something is gained through the loss the faith of the audience is as paradoxical. As it is drastic. If down. Goes the audience. It is unfortunate for all that it is taken. The last of its even of gratified desire. Brings with it covenants of redemption and the author of a higher and more significant life and certainly the present day audience. Does not seem to regret. Having had to exchange flattery and indulgence while the exigencies of its new relation do are on the contrary.

Today we have a devotion to art that is probably more fervent than it has ever before been known in history of culture. And this devotion takes the form. Of an extreme demand. Now that is no longer required to please. It is expected to provide the spiritual substance of life. As for the artist. Even when while he asserts his perfect autonomy and differ and difference and even then hostility or contempt for his audience he is sustained by the certitude that he alone can provide what his audience most deeply need. No the situation between the two parties the art of audience is not promise a ready understanding. The less so because the audience is not always conscious of what it wants from the artist. How much reliance has come to place upon it. And yet in the end there is actually no failure of communication. What the audience

demands really demands and it's unconscious desire. And what the artist thinks it ought to be given turn out to be the same thing. We know of course what this is. It is the sentiment of being a synonym for the sentiment of being its strength the strength which tells us man brought with him from the stage of savagery that he finds so difficult to maintain in a highly developed culture. The sentiment of being is the sentiment of being strong in the 19th century we see a variety of interpretations of what is meant by being strong a variety of suggestions of how art should go about inducing the sensation or conviction of power so that man will be assured that he goes forward on the banners Millett. But as the century advances.

The sentiment of being increasingly has reference to the criterion of authenticity. The work of our is authentic. By reason of its entire self definition it exists that is only by the laws of its own being which include the right to choose painful ignoble or socially unexceptable subject matter. Similarly the artist. Seeks his authenticity in his or her autonomous. His goal is to be a self-defining as the art object which he created. And as for the audience its assumption is that through its communication with the work of which may be difficult or unpleasant even hostile it acquires the authenticity of which the art object is the model and the artist the personal example.

Thus when in Sartre's Llanos day the protagonist. At the end of his diary of queasy despair. Commits himself to hope. It is grounded. In the possibility of his writing a story that will be as he said as hard as steel and make people ashamed of their own existence. That is the authentic work of all. Instruct us and often in our inauthenticity and that draws us to overcome it. Now the soldiers at my younger colleague Natalie Sauer wrote in her essay on flowback says. Of Madame Bovary that she is characterized I'm quoting quoting that I'm sorry by what today we call in authenticity. And that answer out explains that this quality. With which everyone is

now in such familiar was once a new psychic subsumes which flow back on Earth or recreated in his No. We all remember Madame sorrow as that universe. Were seen through the eyes of Madame Bovary her design of her imagining the dreams I would she seeks to build her existence all of which are made up of a succession of cheap images drawn from the most base discredited forms of our mattresses. One has only to recall she continues her adolescent daydreams her marriage her love of money. I love of luxury the vision of the lives led by the upper crust of artistic and Bohemian circles of Parisian life. I had periods of fervent mysticism how mother love my sex life. Or roles that she was continually

playing for others and for self and which were based on the most platitudinous of convention. Now this is certainly a sufficiently accurate account of inauthenticity I quoted however not because it tells us anything we did not already know. Because it doesn't. But because. It's relentlessly sorriest tone suggests the intellectual and moral weight which we now bring to bear upon questions of authenticity. Here is a young woman oppressed by a provincial existence and a marriage who seeks to brighten her days by such means as are available to a person neither roofless nor very greatly developed. But having a certain imprudent courage and toward this unhappy

creature Madame Sorel does not find you know hot to show even a wry compassion. She is as strict with Emma Bovary as with a culture that furthers the inauthentic stuff of the poor woman's misguided dreams. And it's really a similar harshness informs all of Madame Soros writing beginning with our first book trapeze work which induces us to wonder why this gifted and imperious offer should have chosen as the object of her fears concerns such lowly incidental person whose inauthentic existence as we presume need not ever impinge upon in any significant way. The answer is to be found I think in the sentence with which Madame Star

wrote scholarly sought to close his vision of the modern damnation. And here's why. No actually it's a simple sentence and it reads hell is other people. All of the people the entire race up and down the scale of cultural sentience make a hell of recognised and experienced in authenticity. They made the inhabited nothingness of the modern world. They speak to us of our own condition. And just so one sought to himself undertakes to depict an example of an authentic being. He was a waiter in a cafe. Whom he chews away to who sees himself not as a human being but as a waiter

and finds satisfaction in acting out this role. To do that is to say send considerations of social class and cultural status. Freud said speaking of the neurosis we are all no less. We might say or inauthentic. It is not then the hardness of heart that makes the sorrow speak of with contempt it is fear. The terror as Sartre identifies it in an essay on my dance I wrote the fear the terror of dehumanization that you know in authenticity implies she has he says a protoplasmic vision of our interior universe.

Roll away the stone of a commonplace. And we find running discharging mucus has an amoeba like movement. It is just is not merely the victim of the disease but it's carrying a kind of Typhoid Mary just. Now. According to the inauthenticity of Emma Bovary you can see just you know using as the stuff of dreams the cheap images drawn from the base. Discredited for mattresses. Would she have lived a more authentic life. Would her sentiment of being. Have

been more nearly approached autonomy if at the behest of a more eggs taste she had chosen as the basis of a dream. The well-made expensive images of a more credible form of romanticism. Will not any are the most authentic the most shaming our Make the ground of the inauthenticity of those who consciously based their experience upon it. It was the end of authenticity which comes from basing a life on the very best cultural objects that nature had in mind when he coined that terrible phrase culture Philistinism. What he means by this is the inversion of the bourgeois resistance to which we usually call Philistinism.

He means the fast literalistic use of the art and thought of high culture of the highest culture. For purposes of moral accreditation. Though I was not mocked the arts it is true no longer seek to please. But after all pleasing was never the only technique of seduction an art can still lead us into making the sentiment of our being dependent upon the opinion of others. The concerted effort of a culture or of a segment of a culture to achieve authenticity generates its own conventions. It's generalities it's commonplaces it's Maxim's. What Sartre

taking the word from Heidegger calls the gavel. And to the gabble saga of course as himself by now made his contribution. As has sorrow as did Andre Sheed and D.H. Lawrence as most anyone. Who undertakes to satisfy our demand for reminders a law for one state and for reasons why we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. Well the irony is a familiar one myself well said loudly and in time. Marcel Schwab said that they reiterated sincerity becomes a lie and like a reiteration of authenticity makes a hollow sound. Well I'll start here then. And next week at that time I

will consider the criterion of authenticity as it is applied to a man's life in society.