The Age of Sincere Inauthenticity

Oddmakers took bets on the 2020 State of the Union Address that President Donald J. Trump couldn’t go 45 seconds without making a false statement. The president made his first untrue statement in his opening sentence, followed by 30 more in his speech. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker had previously documented 16,241 false or misleading claims by the president during his first three years in office.

To help us understand how Trump gets away with constant falsehoods — and even maintains considerable public support — his former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci explained on Bloomberg TV, “He’s an intentional liar. It’s very different from just being a liar-liar.” Trump isn’t inauthentic when he “uses a methodology of mistruth,” Scaramucci clarified on Fox News; “he’s trying to galvanize his base, and it’s a media device.” In other words, Trump is being sincerely inauthentic.

It’s a mistake to see Trump’s inauthenticity as a singular phenomenon. He couldn’t survive, even thrive as he has, without the pervasiveness and broad acceptance of inauthenticity throughout American life, something years in the making. Alternative facts, slanted histories, fabricated videos, fake memoirs, fantasy games, virtual reality, and celebrity unreality have been bubbling in a cultural cauldron — a veritable olla podrida — for some 50 years since Nixon’s inauguration in 1969. Trump isn’t an anomaly. He’s an iconic example of an enormous shift in much American literature, art, film, comedy, architecture, music, television, social media, sports, as well as politics which might be aptly described as “sincerely inauthentic” in both positive and negative ways.

“Now and then it is possible to observe the moral life in the process of revising itself,” the literary and cultural critic Lionel Trilling announced in 1970 in a series of Harvard lectures, titled Sincerity and Authenticity. The cultural anxiety of those transitional Vietnam War years, similar to our own, led Trilling to investigate the primary values in Western culture. An emphasis on sincerity as a virtue, he said, dominated moral life for some 400 years with its injunction for people to present themselves to others as they honestly think and feel. The chief cultural villains of the time from Shakespeare’s Iago to Dickens’s Uriah Heep were liars and dissemblers whose public impersonations and false behavior deceived others. Dissimulation or feigning or pretense was the height — or nadir — of insincerity.

By the 20th century, sincerity as a public virtue came to seem antiquated, according to Trilling, undeserving of respect in modern culture. Displays of moral earnestness and honesty were increasingly exposed as ways of conforming to the opinion of others. “There is no deeper dissembler than the sincerest man,” Emerson wrote in the early 1840s, early recognizing the need of individuals to engage in public role-playing to gain esteem. “The public be damned!” modern writers and thinkers proclaimed. What’s important in life and art is authenticity, not to respond to conventional social demands but to be autonomous individuals, unfeigning and indifferent to approval from the establishment herd.

At the time of his lectures in 1970, Trilling sensed cultural values again shifting. Authenticity seemed to be falling into disrepute just as sincerity had slipped downward in the previous century. Trilling observed without approval the increasing celebration of individuals devoid of authentic accomplishment and the fantasy of melodrama overtaking authentic literature. Fakery and lies about an inauthentic war led to the questioning of authenticity everywhere.

Looking back on Trilling’s lectures, it’s not unreasonable to imagine his voice from the grave saying that even beyond Trump we now live in an age of sincere inauthenticity. An odd cultural mutation has occurred. Inauthenticity is sincerely embraced or understood as an expression of sincerity as in the recycled songs on TV’s American Idol, now in its 18th season. Singers’ exaggerated displays of karaoke demonstrate one extreme of how inauthenticity can be sincere, as when untalented singers on the show sincerely maintain belief in their authentic talent despite the judges’ mockery of them; after all, family and friends have told them they’re good. Opposing this heartfelt form of misapprehending inauthenticity is a self-conscious acceptance of it to a degree that can be transformative, as when the professional singer Courtney Love says, “I fake it so real that I’m beyond fake.” In a keynote address at a music-business convention in Austin, the American troubadour Bruce Springsteen announced, “We live in a post-authentic world.”

The single nod Trilling makes to popular culture is when he asks, “What is a hero?” He finds the answer not in the traditional notion of a person performing an approved act of unusual courage but in the famous line from the critic Robert Warshow on Western films, a statement that like a Zen koan you either get or you don’t: “A hero is one who looks like a hero,” referring to the iconic figure of the movie cowboy. From Greek theater to contemporary films, the male hero is one who looks like a hero, Trilling says, because “the hero is an actor — he acts out of his own high sense of himself.”

Trilling didn’t live long enough to see actual actors and game show hosts become presidents of the United States to illustrate his point about the shakiness of sincerity and authenticity as criteria for admired public behavior. Skillful role-playing became increasingly apparent with the election of the “Cowboy Presidents,” Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Reagan was a professional actor and Bush was potentially one. Norman Mailer, who at the time of Trilling’s lectures was the most public of famous writers in the United States, said about Bush, “The presidency is a role, and George, left on his own, might have become a successful movie actor.” Bush defeated an authentic war hero and accomplished athlete in John Kerry because, Mailer said, “Bush is the better actor. He has been impersonating more manly men than himself for many years.”

Now comes Trump. “This guy’s a performance artist,” journalist Mark Singer, author of Trump and Me, told a colleague after his first encounter with the future president two decades ago. We all to one degree or another inhabit a persona that masks our most intimate thoughts and feelings, Singer wrote in The New Yorker, but Trump “has deliberately chosen to exist only as a persona, never as a person.” He remains in character at all times. None of his biographers has figured out what truly goes on in his head. After the election, Singer asked several actors and acting teachers about such a calculated persona.

“With a really great actor, it always comes down to a feeling of spontaneity,” Austin Pendleton of HB Studio said. “Trump has that — the freshness of a really fine actor-artist. The reason his positions are all over the map is because he lives in the moment. That’s electric to people.”

Richard Feldman of Juilliard said, “What makes Trump so powerful is that he believes his own story. When he says those women made up those stories of sexual assault, what makes him feel authentic is that some part of him believes it.”

Everyone remembers Trump saying, “Grab ’em by the pussy,” when he bragged about his exploits with women in a taped conversation with Billy Bush, host of the TV show Access Hollywood. What isn’t so often cited is that Trump was then NBC’s biggest star, the network’s “cash cow,” as Bush wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece. Bush and seven other guys on the bus laughed at what they took to be Trump’s “crass standup act. He was performing. Surely, we thought, none of this was real.” But much was real, according to firsthand accounts of Trump by some 20 women. Then the president claimed the voice on the tape wasn’t his. In another off-camera conversation, after Bush reportedly challenged him for inflating his TV ratings, Trump replied, “People will believe you. You just tell them and they believe you.”

During his initial year as president, Trump asked people to believe an astonishing 2,140 documented false or misleading claims, something that would’ve been his undoing in an earlier time. During and since his impeachment, the untrue statements have kept mounting to include fantastical assertions about the coronavirus. In London last year, I saw All’s Well That Ends Well, a play that exposes the character Parolles as an inveterate liar. Parolles, whose name means “Words,” is both a braggart and “the lie incarnate,” as described by the Shakespeare scholar Muriel Clara Bradbrook. “To give the lie was the deadliest of insults,” a violation of the Elizabethan code of honor. “Crimes of violence were less dishonorable; the convicted liar was finished socially.”

As opposed to today’s political moment of repeated lying and fakery, sports used to offer a rare arena in American public life for displays of authenticity. An athlete presumably couldn’t fake catching a sphere of laced cowhide in the end zone or pretend to run a sub-three-hour marathon. When I was a boy, interest in athletics, at least on the professional level, was mostly limited to the three major sports — baseball, football, and boxing. Boxing was the essential sport, the authentic sport, now replaced in TV popularity by mixed martial arts, a combination of kicking, wrestling, and slugging that emphasizes violent street-fight action over technique. The biggest payday in professional boxing history occurred in 2017 when former boxing champion Floyd Mayweather came out of retirement and without serious training easily knocked out a mixed martial arts champion in what The Ring magazine derided as a “spectacle.” An authentic boxing match alone couldn’t garner such fans or money. “There’s no way I can watch boxing,” a 25-year-old fan of mixed martial arts recently told The New York Times. “It’s just too boring.”

The same response to wrestling as “boring” occurred early in the last century when fans wanted the spectacle of nonstop action rather than skilled matches requiring discriminating appreciation. You might now click your remote for months, or perhaps four years between the Olympics, before catching a glimpse of authentic wrestling, formerly the glory of sport in Greek civilization. The fakery of bulked-up wrestlers in comic spectacles exploded in popularity in the 1980s and reached their apogee on TV in the late 1990s. Trump hosted two WrestleMania spectacles in Atlantic City before getting into the action himself. Impersonating a tough guy, he flung a wrestling promoter to the floor and pummeled him with fake punches. Three years before winning the presidency, Trump was inducted into the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame.

In contrast, nothing is more authentic than serious literature, Trilling said. It fosters personal autonomy. Those of us who were students in his audience may have been the last generation in America to accept without a flinch his claims of serious art as the model of authenticity and the artist as its personal example. Indifferent to commercial demands or audience approval, modern literature followed its own dictums. It challenged us. It tore away social masks of hypocrisy. It generated resistance. It offered nothing less than the meaning of life, the reason for existence. Modernism, with a big M, was subversive and adversarial. It was transformative. It threw rocks at the Establishment.

During the spring of Trilling’s lectures, Norman Mailer, the then-antiwar activist who defined his position as a writer in opposition to the corporate, technological establishment, came to Harvard to give a reading and referred to Trilling, who sat among us in the audience of 500 in Sanders Theatre. Extending his adversarial position beyond mainstream culture to those in the audience who protested the Vietnam War, Mailer said, “Revolutionaries have two options: one is to be militant, and the other is to think.” He went on, “Throwing bricks is good for some guys and bad for others. The main thing is to do it authentically.” A glimmer of approval brightened Trilling’s face.

The advent of modernism didn’t produce smiles everywhere. Even as the primary principle of authenticity waned during the Vietnam War, much modern writing was loathed for its propensity to shock and divert literature into the gutter. Every shift in cultural values is iconoclastic in its professed reaction to what came before it, while it silently continues some part of what it seemingly rejects. Early 20th-century writers who attacked romanticism in art and poetry now seem in retrospect incredibly romantic in sentiment and language. While traditionalists condemned modern writing and art negatively as degraded and even, in cases, obscene, deserving to be banned, writers and artists themselves celebrated individual creativity with religious intensity. “[T]he devotion now given to art,” Trilling said, meaning primarily literature, “is probably more fervent than ever before in the history of culture. This devotion takes the form of an extreme demand: now that art is no longer required to please, it is expected to provide the spiritual substance of life.”

The status of art’s salvific power quickly became outmoded, even to Trilling. On the cultural horizon he saw troubling signs of an easy acceptance of mass-produced art, rife with cultural commonplaces. Art no longer made demands on its audience or outraged its habitual sensibility. He noted an increasing conjunction of advanced art with popular and commercial art. The result was disturbing. To be authentic is to be singular not a copy. “Inferior art, commercial-popular art, has always been thought corrupting,” he said.

In 2008, the mass-produced commercial object merged with the anointed important work of art when the New York Guggenheim Museum devoted its spiral space to a comprehensive, 30-year retrospective celebrating Richard Prince as one of “contemporary art’s foremost innovators,” particularly for his series of “appropriation art” called Cowboys, which initiated his enormous art-world success when he began making blown-up photographic reproductions of cowboy scenes from Marlboro cigarette ads. “This was a famous campaign,” Prince has said. “If you’re going to steal something, you know, you go to the bank.” Prince set the auction record for photography when one of his photos of a Marlboro advertisement sold for $1.2 million. No original vintage photograph by an American master had previously sold for a million dollars. He later surpassed the record for the most expensive photograph sold at auction when another reproduction from his Marlboro cowboy series went for $3.4 million. The original photographers of the ads and the cowboy models received no credit or payment. “There’s not a pixel, there’s not a grain that’s different,” Jim Krantz, a commercial photographer, said about a photograph he had taken for a Marlboro ad and Prince’s enlarged duplication of it.

“Making art has never been a mystery to me,” Prince said. “It’s never been something that’s very difficult.” In reproducing stock images of mass media as his own autonomous work, Prince says he found a “reality that has the chances of looking real but a reality that doesn’t have any chances of being real.” Art always made him feel good, he told a Vanity Fair reporter. “Anything I do,” he added, “I hope it would make you feel good. It’s as simple as that.” In the process, authenticity is no longer to be considered an authentic value.

The term “postmodern” doesn’t appear in Trilling’s original lectures, but in their published version in 1972 he added a footnote — with hyphenated spelling that indicates the new usage of the coinage — describing “Post-Modern” as the current period when “the faculty of ‘taste’ has re-established itself at the centre of the experience of art.” The older adversarial position of modern art to its audience has become anachronistic. “At the present moment,” Trilling says, “art cannot be said to make exigent demands upon the audience. […] The audience likes or does not like, is pleased or not pleased.” This decade was momentous, according to the Native American writer Paul Chaat Smith in Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong, when truth ceased to matter “because television and popular culture rule the world.”

Now some 50 years later, Trilling’s intimation is full blown. “When watching a show such as American Idol (or, in the UK, Pop Idol), we can feel as though authenticity doesn’t matter any more,” Hugh Baker and Yuval Taylor propose in Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. What matters is an appeal to the likes and the dislikes of television viewers through a homogenization of music from the past to reach the widest possible audience. In Trilling’s beloved realm of literature, many memoirs with audience-appealing stories of degradation, recovery, and redemption have in recent years been exposed as inauthentic. None of these frauds, however, matched the uproar over the fabricated events in James Frey’s autobiographical account of his triumphant recovery from crime and drug addiction.

Frey’s best-selling book, A Million Little Pieces, was supposedly a true story. The problem was that America’s Queen of Sincerity, Oprah Winfrey, endorsed James Frey on TV (twice), and he’d lied to her. Modern autobiography, as Trilling tells us, is a carry-over from the age of sincerity when a new sense of the individual self came into being; the person depicted in Rousseau’s Confessions may repel us, but the writer in his impulse to reveal himself honestly demonstrates his likable sincerity. Writers may sincerely misremember or embellish some things, as memoirists habitually do, but they can’t outright lie, as Oprah accused Frey of doing when she publicly shamed him and his publisher. But nobody wanted this story, Frey claimed, when he presented it as a novel. Eighteen publishers turned it down. He blamed his agent, editor, and publisher for labeling his book a “memoir” that with Oprah’s blessing then rapidly sold two million copies. They, in turn, all claimed they were duped. Nevertheless, all managed to work together — author, agent, editor, publisher, and Oprah — to create a salable commodity that even as fiction is a sincerely inauthentic story. Frey’s role in this escapade merited him a $1.5 million contract for his next book, Bright Shiny Morning, published with jacket photographs by Richard Prince.

The cultural chasm since Trilling’s time is no better evident than in the replacement of the terms “serious novel” and “quality fiction” with the epithet “literary fiction,” a label congenial to a marketplace where novels of literary merit form just another genre based on audience taste, along with thrillers, romances, chick lit, and fantasy. Books are now only commodities, novelist Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in Harper’s, “and a ‘good book’ means a high gross.” Few today talk about quality fiction or serious novels as did old-timers like Le Guin and Mailer. In a National Book Award speech, Mailer echoed Trilling when he said the purpose of a great novel is not to kill time on an airplane trip but to enter and even alter a person’s life. “The good serious novel and most certainly, the rare great novel, is now inimical to the needs of this market place.”

Trilling claimed the organic principle of architecture is the chief criterion for what is authentic in art and life. Hemingway professed the same view in his theoretical statement about modern writing: “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.” The lack of organic design is also what the novelist Chitra Divakaruni detected in many of the 300 contemporary novels she read in a five-month period while judging the National Book Award. Many flagged after 50 pages to leave her wondering if “the novel was sold on the strength of its first few chapters, after which the writer slackened off and the editor didn’t care.” The successful novel in her view effects a shape, a design. Unlike the architectonic aesthetic of modernist writing, self-conscious prose and voice-driven fiction rely more on what B. R. Myers in The Atlantic called a “barrage of hit-and-miss verbiage than on careful use of just the right word.”

The Italian writer Italo Calvino would agree. “It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty — that is, the use of words,” he wrote in the lectures he was to deliver at Harvard 15 years after Trilling. “It seems to me that language is always used in a random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearably. […] That’s why I try to talk as little as possible.” At least in writing, Calvino says, he can revise each sentence to the point of reduced dissatisfaction with his words. Lots of words, though, are what we’ve been getting since Calvino died in 1985 before he could deliver his lectures, more words than ever on radio call-in and TV talk shows, as well as on our computers and mobiles during the Big Bang of misinformation in posts, tweets, blogs, podcasts, and videos.

“Blog writing,” the cultural critic Sarah Boxer wrote in The New York Review of Books, “is Id writing — grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty,” all intending to say, “Hey, I’m here.” But who’s “I”? The self can hide behind aliases or anonymity or simply dissolve into another self and a virtual reality. Authenticity doesn’t matter; what matters is to be noticed with links on other blogs pointing toward your blog to achieve fame as a blog celebrity or, more precisely, a blogebrity. The blog Eschaton notes that the audio-and-visual media of YouTube began “the age when it is impossible to tell parody/irony/performance art from completely sincere product.”

What’s normal about inauthenticity today is its widespread acceptance. Thirty years ago the popular R&B singers Milli Vanilli had a Grammy revoked for lip-synching to the voices of others. Eight years ago, at the time of her death, the pop star Whitney Houston’s Super Bowl XXV performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was repeatedly shown on TV as one of the greatest national anthems in history and the highlight of Houston’s career. Before this year’s 2020 championship game Rolling Stone called it “the gold standard for all Super Bowl performances […] one of the most stunning moments in American sports history.” A TV commentator said, “Whitney sang her heart out into the mic.” He neglected to add how the microphone was turned off and Houston lip-synched to a prerecorded tape, albeit her own. Viewers of President Obama’s inauguration watched Yo-Yo Ma earnestly playing his cello while they actually heard a recording made two days earlier. Ma said he wanted the performance to be emotionally genuine.

“The secret of people who had class was that they remained accurate to the facts,” Mailer wrote some 40 years ago in The Executioner’s Song, a claim striking many today as anachronistic. Facts are prosaic, as Mailer shows, open to multiple interpretations, but they need to be confronted not dismissed as fantasy. With one foot fixed in the age of modernism Mailer stretches the other back to earlier writers like the novelist George Eliot, who best expresses this aesthetic when she said, “Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: — in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.” In almost a postmodern satirical performance of this aesthetic quest, Mailer tried to create the authentic sound of a fist hitting someone’s face for his movie Tough Guys Don’t Dance by punching himself. “The sounds of punches in movies are all phony,” he said. While a sound designer used a portable digital recorder, Mailer hit himself in the face and the chest again and again, at least 20 times, until he got the authentic sound he wanted. In contrast, the sound designer of the film No Country for Old Men used a pneumatic nail gun to reproduce the explosive bangs of an air-tank cattle gun when a psychotic killer shoots people. The soundman was looking for impact. “I wasn’t looking for authenticity,” he said, “so I didn’t even research cattle guns.”

“Fantasy from del Toro Wins Top Oscar” was online news after the 2018 Academy Award for Best Picture went to a love story between a mute woman and a mysterious, scaled creature ripped from Amazon waters. Fantasy and spectacle are what Hollywood knows best. This year’s 2020 Academy Award for Best Picture went to a technically skillful South Korean film passed off as a PC social message artistically dominated by fantasy and violence. Trump disparaged the film without seeing it or recognizing its Americanized allegiance to the fantasy and spectacle he called for: “Can we get, like, Gone with the Wind back, please?” Last year, the 2019 Best Picture Oscar went to a movie derided by The New York Times movie critic Wesley Morris as a “particularly perverse” example of a “racial reconciliation fantasy.” Films about environmental degradation of the Amazon or any other place received no attention. In the past two years, Oscars also went to three triumphant blockbusters about World Wars I and II, but none to films about the United States’s longest-running wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At a Pennsylvania rally after the Oscars show a year ago, Trump fostered his own spectacle, racking up another half-dozen false and misleading statements to add to his growing record. He boasted of his appeal to women voters and taunted the TV celebrity, who, according to the Times that day is “a fantasy candidate for Democrats: Oprah Winfrey.” The previous day Winfrey herself opened a $250 million Walt Disney fantasy, starring as a celestial guide magically traversing space and time. As if invoking her supernatural powers, she told People magazine that she’d asked God to tell her if she should run for president, but she hadn’t heard back.

The posturing figure with the sweeping hair whose intellectual significance makes him an important precursor to our time is the playwright, novelist, and personality Oscar Wilde, who, in Trilling’s words, was “one of the great figures of Victoria’s reign.” In his attack on Philistine respectability and earnest sincerity, Wilde quipped, “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered.”

Fantasy, role-playing, and impersonation led to what Trilling feared is a loss of personal integrity and authenticity. “In our time,” he said, “the conception of the self has been undergoing a drastic revision, of which a notable element is the lessening of the value formerly assigned to individuation.” The result is a fake person following the herd to the point of scarcely being a self at all but rather a “reiterated impersonation.” To be authentic is to be original, individualistic, unlike anybody else. “Born Originals,” the 18th-century aesthetician Edward Young asked, “how comes it to pass that we die Copies?” Today even Trump’s propensities aren’t one of a kind. Populist demagogues thrive throughout the world.

Like most of us in his audience, Trilling missed what he discerned elsewhere when examining details that distinguish the morality of one age from another: change doesn’t consist simply in the loss of old status and privileges; “something is gained as well as lost — something is gained through the loss” — a new relation to art and a new awareness. A century after Wilde advised the young to be as artificial as possible, he might now say that their second duty is to be, as he was, aware of it.

Overt inauthenticity has appropriately made a comeback in recent years with a revival of the great performing arts of sincere inauthenticity like magic, ventriloquism, and impersonation. The ventriloquist Terry Fator with dummies that impersonate celebrity singers won a million-dollar prize on a primetime TV talent show and caused a delighted Oprah to fall out of her chair. He performs as a multimillion-dollar Las Vegas headliner at the Mirage, an inconceivable achievement in the era of Trilling when ventriloquism would have been considered unhip or old-fashioned, meaning inauthentic for the present time. Magic was then a moribund public art as well, but it’s now booming with several magicians appearing on Oprah and in primetime series. Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself set an off-Broadway New York theater record for a magic show with repeated extensions and sold-out audiences. In January 2020, magician Derren Brown culminated a string of sold-out performances on Broadway. In literature, magic and fantasy increasingly sell and win awards. In acknowledgment, the 2020 L.A. Times Book Prizes in October will offer for the first time a special prize to include fantasy and speculative fiction.

Impersonators on TV have moved from the wings to center stage. The comedians Whoopi Goldberg and Dave Chappelle, as paragons of outraged authenticity, once whipped a phony, hypocritical society with lacerating tough talk. They then gave way to comics who reveal social deceptions they work on themselves, like Sarah Silverman, who describes her funny self-impersonation as an earnest “asshole,” which in politer phrasing is to say she’s an inauthentic jerk but sincere in thinking otherwise. Impersonating a news anchor, the comedian Jon Stewart invested “fake news” with cultural authenticity before Trump as president appropriated and sullied the term. Trump himself engaged in impersonation to disguise the staging, shooting, reshooting, and editing that go into the accepted fakery of so-called TV reality shows. The importance of inauthenticity became increasingly apparent when in 2007 the impersonator of a conservative political pundit on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report was voted the Associated Press Celebrity of the Year for having the biggest impact on pop culture.

Self-aware manifestations of inauthenticity also dominate much popular writing and art. David Sedaris, described on Wikipedia as “the rock star of writers,” cheerfully writes, “Like most seasoned phonies, I roundly suspect that everyone is as disingenuous as I am.” The death of a friend left him unable to shake the mixed sincerity and inauthenticity of his mourning: “My grief was genuine, yet still, no matter how hard I fought, there was an element of showmanship to it. […] It was as if I’d learned to grieve by watching television.” In a review of the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective of the artist Cindy Sherman, titled “The Art of the Impersonator,” critic Sanford Schwartz sees as both limited and enthralling Sherman’s large self-photographs presented as fake paintings in cheesy frames; “the sheer human spectacle of someone continually transforming herself into one person after another has proved riveting.” The convicted art forger John Myatt, perpetrator of what has been called “the biggest art fraud of the 20th century,” is now out of prison and successfully selling his forgeries as “Genuine Fakes.”

In his final lecture, Trilling acknowledged that the modernist age was over and inauthenticity was on the rise. As if to punctuate his anxiety that April evening in 1970, the sound of sirens and the smell of tear gas entered the hall as he spoke. Many of us in the audience had attended a massive afternoon peace rally in Boston Common to protest the Vietnam War. A splinter group protesting the New Haven trials of Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers marched into Harvard Square with 1,500 demonstrators chanting, “Free Bobby Seale,” and, “One, two, three, four, we don’t want this fucking war.” Street fighting raged in the square for four hours as a growing number of demonstrators threw bricks, looted stores, torched police cars, and set fire to buildings. Twelve hundred cops swung nightsticks and shot tear-gas canisters. Two thousand National Guardsmen stood by. Charging police drove protestors onto Mount Auburn Street, where bystanders swelled the final crowd to nearly 3,000, including many from the Trilling lecture.

Today other wars flare on the horizon, joining domestic unrest and a global pestilence to mark what may be equally a turning point in an unnamed but so-called post-authentic, post-fact, post-truth, post-racial, post-gender, post-literary, post-historical, post-text, post-postmodern era. While Trilling felt uneasy about the shift away from the ideal of an integral authentic self, he recognized that the truth of the self can at times consist in its being not true to itself, in there being no self to be true to, or at best only a fragmented self composed of many selves. Poor Emma Bovary, the fictional heroine of Flaubert’s novel, has been castigated by readers and critics for the inauthenticity of her fantasies and self-corrupting impersonations. One of the most touching moments in Trilling’s lectures is his defense of Emma Bovary against the condescension of her harsher critics who see her inauthenticity in the “roles that she was continually playing for others and for herself and which were based on the most platitudinous of conventions.”

Trilling cautions us to understand that Madame Bovary is each one of us. We are all insincere. We are all inauthentic. Trilling revealed the fear underlying our reading of the original Madame Bovary. Uneasy laughter at today’s characters of sincere inauthenticity underscores a revelation no less distressing: we are all self-deluded to one degree or another. We are all self-deceived. But there are degrees. There’s no going back to modernism’s naïve view of authenticity. If awareness grants freedom, then recognition of our inauthenticity and self-deception may perhaps free us to become less so. Will 2020 reveal Trump as the apex and culmination of a 50-year shift in cultural values and the initiation of a new one? Will more heroes then emerge who don’t look like heroes? Today several young novelists, playwrights, filmmakers, painters, comedians, and magicians express in their art a poignant longing to bridge the gap between the magical and the prosaic. They may point to a future as we spiral deeper into the age of fantasy or finally out of it with greater awareness of the tragedy and necessity of human self-deception.

Four hundred years ago, the disgraced and vilified Parolles in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well admits he’s a liar. Trump doesn’t. Parolles gains some authenticity in his awareness. The question of Trump’s awareness remains. Whether or not he escapes electoral defeat or later indictment, he’s still an iconic figure of our time, a conjurer of magical cloud pictures as opposed to prosaic facts. Trump and his shifting self-creations manifest what Trilling called a “cultural mutation” that has evolved into a 50-year merger of sincerity and inauthenticity. Social media from Facebook to TikTok buzz in response to a global pandemic with news about washing hands, elbow bumps, the Wuhan Shake, government plots, secret labs, and magical cures. Statistics show that false news stories travel faster on Twitter than factual ones. Inauthenticity is “liked.”

Our Age of Sincere Inauthenticity. By Frank Bergon. Los Angeles Review of Books,  April 12, 2020

A Possible Keats

In 1803, the guillotine was a common children’s toy. Children also had toy cannons that fired real gunpowder, and puzzles depicting the great battles of England. They went around chanting, “Victory or death!” Do childhood games influence character? We have to assume that they do, but let’s set aside such heartbreaking speculations for a moment. War—it’s not even a proper game—leaves influenza in its wake, and cadavers. Do childhood games typically leave cadavers behind in the nursery? Massacres in those little fairy-dust minds? Hoist the banners of victory across the table from the marzipan mountain to the pudding! It’s perhaps a dreadful thought, but we’ve seen clear evidence that both children and adults have a taste for imitation. Certainly, such questions should be explored, and yet let us allow that there is a purely metaphysical difference between a toy guillotine and war. Children are metaphysical creatures, a gift they lose too early, sometimes at the very moment they learn to talk.

John Keats (1795-1821) was seven years old and in school at Enfield. He was seized by the spirit of the time, by a peculiar compulsion, an impetuous fury—before writing poetry. Any pretext seemed to him a good one for picking a fight with a friend, any pretext to fight.

Fighting was to John Keats like eating or drinking. He sought out aggressive boys, cruel boys, but their company, as he was already inclined to poetry, must have provided some comic and burlesque treats. For mere brutality—without humor, make-believe, or whimsy—didn’t interest him. Which might lead a person to extrapolate that boys aren’t truly brutal. Yes, they are, but they have rules and an aesthetic. Keats was a child of action. He’d punched a yard monitor more than twice his size, and he was considered a strong boy, lively and argumentative. When he was brawling, his friend Clarke reports, Keats resembled Edmund Kean at theatrical heights of exasperation. His friends predicted a brilliant future for him in the military. Yet when his temper defused, he’d grow extremely calm, and his sweetness shone—with the same intensity as his rage had. The scent of angels. His earliest brushes with melancholy were suddenly disrupted by outbursts of nervous laughter. Moods, vague and tentative, didn’t settle over him so much as hurry past like old breezes.

A year before leaving Enfield—the Georgian-style school building would later be converted into a train station and then ultimately be demolished—John Keats discovered Books. Books were the spoils left by the Incas, by Captain Cook’s voyages, Robinson Crusoe. He went to battle in Lemprière’s dictionary of classical myth, among the reproductions of ancient sculptures and marbles, the annals of Greek fable, in the arms of goddesses. He walked through the gardens, a book in hand. During recreation breaks, he read Elizabethan translations of Ovid. Scholars have made a habit of pointing out that the poet didn’t know Greek. So what? Even Lord Byron insinuated that Keats hadn’t done anything more than set Lemprière to verse. In the same way that the translation errors from Greek don’t at all invalidate Hölderlin’s Der Archipelagus, Keats’s own transposed Greek perhaps allowed him to tear up the fields of Albion with the shards of classical ruins. He revealed to no one that he was an orphan. The tutors were glued to his side. He forgot his birthday and decided to study medicine. He learned how to leech, pull teeth, and suture. He observed cadavers on the dissection table that had been purchased off the resurrection men for three or four guinea each. The naked bodies were delivered in sacks.

Keats took notes and in the margins sketched skulls, fruit, and flowers. He felt alone. The “blue devils” settled along with him into the damp room. He frequented the Mathew family, his cousins, Ann and Caroline, who had a righteous horror of the frivolities of youth. They picked out piano arias from Don Giovanni and the young men danced the quadrille. It’s said that John Keats’s very first passion was for a stranger he’d seen for half an hour. He was waiting for her to smile at him but she never did. John Spurgin wanted to make a Swedenborgian of him. Keats’s friend Charles Cowden Clarke procured his books. Clarke was a massively tall man with bushy hair; eight years older than Keats, he had a great interest in cricket, about which he wrote a handbook. He would also write about Chaucer and Shakespeare. Keats played cricket too.

His appearance was transformed in a single afternoon in 1813 at a lecture about Spenser. Seeming suddenly both large and potent, he emerged from his diminutive stature while reciting the verses that had struck him. He devoured books, he copied, translated sections, he became the scribe and secretary to his mind. He informed his friends at Guy’s Hospital that poetry was “the only thing worth the attention of superior minds.” And it would become his sole ambition. He dressed like a poet, collar turned up and tied with a black ribbon. For a short time he grew a mustache. When exam day arrived, everyone was sure that he wouldn’t pass, what with those poetic airs. He did earn his diploma and would be able to work as an apothecary. But he chose to leave medicine. He was only twenty years old when he saw his own poem, “To Solitude,” published in the Examiner.

It was impossible for his talent not to draw the attention of many people. Leigh Hunt, imprisoned for having libeled the king, protected Keats as long as Keats let him. John Hamilton Reynolds thought of him as a brother. Joseph Severn perceived ecstasy in his face and about his features—but then, Severn was a painter. He observed that his head was too small for his broad shoulders, observed the intensity of his gaze that blazed like a flame when crossed but when calm glittered like a lake at dusk, and noted a cold lethargy. They visited museums together. He saw Brown, Dilke, Bailey, Hazlitt. Things were lukewarm with Shelley. Benjamin Haydon showed him the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon. Keats didn’t have the money to travel the world but made a long walking tour of Scotland. He wore a sack on his back filled with old clothes and new socks, pens, paper, ink, Cary’s translation of the Divine Comedy, and a draft of Isabella. His traveling companion was the clerk and writer Charles Armitage Brown, a practical and energetic man. Keats returned home ragged and feverish, his jacket torn and his shoes missing, but he had scaled a mountain, the Ben Nevis. He was poor, according to W. B. Yeats, and couldn’t build a Gothic castle as Beckford had, which inclined him instead toward the pleasures of the imagination. Yeats also said that Keats was malnourished, of weak health, and had no family. But aren’t all poets the heralds of Heaven?

According to the testimony of friends, Keats was of small stature, though rather muscular, with a broad chest and broad shoulders (almost too broad); his legs were underdeveloped in proportion to his torso. He gave off the impression of strength. His chestnut hair was abundant and fine. He parted it with a ruler and it fell across his face in heavy silken curls. He had a high, rather sloped, forehead. His nose was beautiful but his mouth— they were specific on this point—was big and not intellectual. His lower lip was pronounced, giving him a combative aspect, which diminished his elegance a bit, yet served, they were quick to add, to animate his physiognomy. His face was oval and there was something feminine about his wide forehead and pointy chin. Despite his disproportionate mouth, Keats, they’d concede, was handsome. Sometimes he had the look in his eyes of a Delphic priestess on the hunt for visions.

According to Haydon, he was the only one who knew him—with the sole exception of Wordsworth, who’d predicted great acclaim for him based on his looks.

He was brilliant socially, loved wordplay, and his eruptions of laughter were noisy and extended. People found him irresistibly funny when he did impressions. If he didn’t like the conversation, he’d retreat to a window corner and look out into the void. His friends respected that corner as if it were his by law.

If a face, as Johann Gottfried Herder says, is nothing more than a Spiegelkammer of the spirit, then we should be a little frightened of Keats’s variety of expressions. Even doubt insinuates itself. When Keats wrote, “I thought a lot about Poetry,” we can’t see in that a mirror reflection of Keats. The mirror is empty, uninhabited. The idea has no facial features and could look like anything, but theologically it’s more beautiful empty. Keats is unable to contemplate himself. His gift is not knowing how to reconcile himself. The identity of a person who is in the room with him presses in and cancels his own out in a flash. When Keats speaks, he’s not sure that he’s the one talking. When he dreamed of bobbing in the turbine in Canto V of Dante’s Inferno, it was one of the great joys of his life.

Joseph Severn’s portrait is described by some as a lie drawn from truth: friends found it too effeminate, the trembling mouth, and yet the eyes were right, even radiant. The painting’s three-quarter view makes the eyes seem even bigger, more remarkable. His focus rests above the earth yet not in the sky—fixed on a murky horizon. His pupils are slightly enlarged, trained perpendicularly on the suspended thought. Even his gaze is indolent, sensual, consciously engrossed, and like a veil shifting across his brow, there is a flash of charming zealotry. He looks like a girl, and if we think of him as a girl, the femininity of his features evaporates and he seems stubborn and volatile, the constant surveyor of his own visions.

One day in Haydon’s study, Keats recited “Hymn to Pan.” Wordsworth was there; he kept his left hand tucked into his waistcoat. “With reverence” was the way he’d inscribed a book of his poems for Keats and he was truly reverent about poetry. Wordsworth’s wife was once heard to say, “Mr. Wordsworth is never interrupted.” Keats dared open his mouth anyway. He recited his verse in that singsong way of his while pacing up and down the room. In the space between his voice and the paintings on the wall there was a plastic silence. “A very pretty piece of paganism,” said Wordsworth, his left hand still tucked into his waistcoat. Haydon was distressed by Wordsworth’s utter tactlessness and angered by his use of the word “paganism.” And yet we read in Meister Eckhart that through their virtue, the pagan masters had ascended higher even than Saint Paul, and that experience was what had brought them as high as the apostles had come through grace.

There were women Keats didn’t dislike. Miss Cox, an Anglo-Indian heiress, had a theatrical Asian beauty and was therefore despised by the Reynolds sisters. She kept him awake one night the way a Mozart piece might. “I speak of the thing as a passtime and an amuzement than which I can feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman the very ‘yes’ and ‘no’ of whose Lips is to me a Banquet.”

Isabella Jones was a few years older than Keats and had read “Endymion.” They met when she was staying with an elderly Irish relative in the village of Bo Peep near Hastings. Biographers have questions about her—the two took walks, took tea together in the garden, and played whist late into the night—was this a summer fling or an initiation? The prevailing view is that it was an initiation.

What took the form of a young woman who’d moved in nearby was almost a matter of sorcery. For some time, Keats didn’t want anyone to utter her name. Her mere existence was secret. Fanny Brawne was descended from knights, monks, and lawyers. Her mother had married for love against her parents’ wishes— like Keats’s own mother who’d married the stable boy at the Swan and Hoop Inn. Fanny acquired Beau Brummell as a cousin when her mother’s sister married. From her paternal ancestors who’d performed at the Garrick, Fanny inherited a proclivity for the theater. Grandfather Brawne had supported the liberation of women. It was said about Fanny that she wasn’t very beautiful, but undoubtedly elegant. Her nostrils were too thin, her face too long, the nose aquiline, and her pallor chronic. Her cheeks were never rosy, not even after a six-mile walk. The history of female beauty is almost always told in the negative. Even the Brontë sisters were talked about as plain, as was Emily Dickinson. Spiritual sex appeal does not seem to generate chivalry. Fanny was the same height as Keats, just over five feet tall. His nickname for her was “Millimant.” From the moment she met him, Fanny was taken with his conversation. Generally, she found men to be fools. Was compelled to describe herself as “not timid or modest in the least.” She conversed in French with the émigrés at the Hampstead “colony.” She danced with officers at the St. John’s Wood barracks. She had an eighteenth-century way about her, her hair curled in the style of the court of Charles II. Fanny had a “fire in her heart.” Her mother made inquiries about Keats with the neighbors. They were engaged. Keats signed his letters to her with the emblem of a Greek lyre with four broken strings and the motto: Qui me néglige me désole. Walking on the heath, Keats came across a being with a strange light in its eyes, a rumpled archangel—he recognized Coleridge. They walked together and spoke of nightingales and dreams.

“That drop of blood is my death-warrant. I must die,” pronounced Keats calmly on the third of February 1820. He seemed intoxicated. His future was not predicted by a Sibyl, but by the medical student himself, the poet whose verses describe beauty flooded by a mortal estuary. With the intensity he’d once applied to his anatomy studies, he scrutinized the blood on his handkerchief. He felt like he was suffocating and only managed to fall asleep after hours of despotic insomnia. On the third day he was well enough to receive visitors and read news of George III’s death. Doctor Rodd came to see him. His lungs were not compromised but the doctor recommended mental rest. They determined that the hemorrhage was simply the body trying to fight off the recent bout of cholera that his brother George had suffered. They soothed him with currant jellies and compotes, some of which dripped onto a Ben Jonson first edition. This extreme diet provoked strong palpitations. Doctor Bree, a specialist, was summoned. They could find no ailments in his lungs or other organic causes. Keats’s illness “is in his head,” they concluded. For a day, he was tormented by Fanny’s specter, which appeared to him dressed as a shepherdess and then in a ball gown. She was a joyful simulacrum dancing and giggling in the void.

The morning of June 22, he had light bleeding. In the afternoon he went to the Hunts for tea. They talked about an Italian tenor. There was a lady there who was particularly interested in bel canto and was amazed that the young gentleman was the author of “Endymion.” The bleeding got worse over the course of the evening. He spends the twenty-third laid out in a room, far from Fanny, staring at flowers on a table. Speech is difficult. He indicates the verses he favors in a volume of Spenser he wants to give to Fanny. The doctor Darling prescribes a trip to Italy. Keats’s hands are like those of an old man, veins swollen; his features, Severn reports, have taken on the same cast his brother Tom’s did when he was dying of consumption. The evanescent hand furiously traced an oblique line over the first copy of his book. In a preface, the publisher apologized for the unfinished “Hyperion.” It is the first of July. There is a metal taste in his mouth. “If I die,” he tells Brown, “you must ruin Lockhart.” For he was the one who’d written an insulting article about Keats that touted gossip and personal details. Unsigned—yet Keats applied his sleuthing talents and located an inside source to identify that enemy of literature.

Keats considered going just anywhere in order to die alone. Then he wanted Brown to go with him. But he was to leave for Rome with Severn. On the twentieth of August he started coughing blood again. His friends began to say their farewells. Fare wells to dying people are often awkward. Haydon started off the ceremony. By way of comfort, he began to speak about life after death—the last thing that Keats wanted to hear. Angered, Keats answered that if he didn’t get better right away he’d rather kill himself. John Hamilton Reynolds was unable to take his hand. He wrote to John Taylor that he was happy about Keats’s departure, that he should be running from Leigh Hunt’s vain and cruel company. As for Fanny, Keats only benefited from the absence of the poor thing—to whom he was so incomprehensibly bound. Fanny wrote in her diary: “Mr. Keats leaves Hampstead.” Keats gave her the Severn miniature, a copy of Dante, a copy of Spenser, and his Shakespeare folio. They exchanged locks of hair and rings. Fanny sewed a silk lining into his traveling hat and also gave him a journal and a knife. Woodhouse also took a lock of his hair. He wanted to be Keats’s Boswell. The Maria Crowther set sail. It was a small two-rigger and when the sea got rough it disappeared beneath the waves.

It had one cabin intended for six people. There was the Captain, a good man; Lady Pidgeon, plump and pleasant; and Mistress Cotterell who was gracious though in an advanced state of consumption. But then there was a typhoid epidemic in London, the ship was quarantined, and it was October 31 by the time that ended and Keats was twenty-five years old. When Mistress Cotterell disembarked in Naples she asked, a little too loudly, after the moribund youth. They arrived in Rome on the fifteenth of November. Doctor Clark was waiting for them. His bedside manner had been acclaimed by the King of Belgium and Queen Victoria. He was a Scot. While attending Keats, he had only minor concerns about what was afflicting the heart and lungs and said that the more serious trouble was in his stomach. Mental exertions were the source of the trouble. The doctor recommended fresh air and moderate exercise. He had Keats throw all his medicines to the dogs. He suggested horseback riding and rented a horse for him at six pounds sterling a month. The landlady, Anna Angeletti, asked five pounds sterling in rent. Keats desired a piano and so that was rented as well. Doctor Clark lent him several pieces of music, throwing in a Haydn sonata as well. The food was fetid. On one occasion, Keats threw it out the window after tasting it. Shortly thereafter he was brought an excellent meal.

He started reading Alfieri’s Tragedie but had to stop after the first few pages—not being able to contain his emotions. He wrote a last letter to Brown, attempting an awkward bow and a grand farewell. On the tenth of December after vomiting blood, he asked Severn for laudanum. The attacks over the next week were violent. He suffered from hunger. Clark rationed his food severely because of the ruined state of Keats’s digestive apparatus; one anchovy on toast a day. Keats begged for more food. He couldn’t sleep. He suspected that someone back in London had poisoned him. The servants didn’t dare come into his room because they feared he was contagious. On Christmas Day, Severn perceived in his friend’s desperation that Keats was “dying in horror.” As a good Christian, Severn tried to convince Keats that there was redemption in pain. Keats dictated a list of books that he wanted to read: Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying, and Madame Dacier’s translation of Plato. Three letters arrived that day. The letter from Fanny remained unopened.

                                        Bright Star , 2009, directed by Jane Campion

At the end of December the landlady reported Keats’s illness to the police. Severn didn’t go out to sketch ruins but stayed at Keats’s side instead. Keats was overcome by sleep and Severn drew a portrait of Keats’s head on his pillow, eyes closed, face hollowed, a few curls glued to his forehead with cold sweat. Then transcribed Keats’s words, his last testimony. Severn was in the presence of a great poet. He may have been already thinking that one day he would be buried beside him. He’d been to visit the Protestant cemetery near the Pyramid of Cestius, its grounds were glazed over with violets and it seemed that Keats liked the spot. He said he would feel the flowers grow over him. Severn knew that violets were Keats’s favorite flower. He plucked for him a just budded rose, a winter rose. Keats received it darkly and said “I hope to no longer be alive in spring.” He wanted what he called in his last letter a “posthumous existence” to come to an end. Inscribed on his gravestone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” His words are set into the stone as if on a mirror, touching everything and not touched by anything—strange asymmetry.

Stretched out on his bed, he gazed up at the rose pattern in the blue ceiling tiles. His eyes grew glassy. He spoke for hours in a lucid delirium. He never lost his faculties. He prepared Severn for his death. He wondered whether he’d ever seen anyone die before. He worried about the complications that might come up. He consoled Severn and told him that it wouldn’t last long and that he wouldn’t have convulsions. He longed for death with frightening urgency. On the twenty-third of February he worried about his friend Severn’s breathing, how it pressed on him like ice. He tried again to reassure him: “It will be easy.” Dusk entered the room. From when Keats said that he was about to die, seven hours passed. His breath stopped. Death animated him in the last moment. After the autopsy, Clark said that he couldn’t understand how Keats had survived so long. Fanny’s last letters, never read by anyone, were sealed in his coffin. After the funeral service, the police took possession of the apartment on Piazza Spagna. They stripped the walls and floor and burned all of the furniture.

From These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Minna Zallman Proctor, published by New Directions in 2017. Originally published in 2009 under the title Vite congetturali, by Adelphi.  The New YorkReview of Books , July 24, 2017. 

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In These Possible Lives  Fleur Jaeggy offers three very short biographical sketches of Keats, De Quincey, and the fin-de-siècle symbolist orientalist Jewish Parisian Schwob. Schwob is known  as a kind friend to Arnold Bennett in his lonely Paris days; more pertinently, he was a friend of Stéphane Mallarmé and Alfred Jarry, and is said to have influenced Borges. Her three subjects are loosely linked by opium, by malady, by a delectatio morosa or morbid delight, and her essays are prose poems rather than factual narrations. She does not give facts or dates, but tells us of Wordsworth’s habit of cutting the pages of books with a butter knife, of De Quincey’s nightmares, of Schwob’s love for a tubercular working-class girl and her dolls, of Keats begging “in a lucid delirium” for more laudanum.

The Sharp Force and Disgraceful State of the Modern Aphorism

The origins of the aphorism are both elevated and abject, as fits a literary form of sublime ambition that is at present in a kind of disgrace. The English word, which seems first to have been used in the sixteenth century, to describe certain medical writings, derives from the French aphorisme and the Latin aphorismus, whose Greek original denotes a definition or distinction, a setting apart. The term appears at the head of writings on medicine and the good life attributed to Hippocrates. There are over seventy of these texts, and the first is among the most well-rehearsed gobbets of wisdom in literary history: “Life is short, and Art long.” The second fragment or thesis treats of “disorders of the bowels,” which suggests already that the aphorist is a costive sort, disgorging small verities with considerable effort. The aphorism is defined by its monadic quality, its obtuse resistance to being teased or elaborated. It is related to the essay, though the essay may also contain aphorisms. These go by other names too: maxim, apothegm, dictum, epigram, gnome, and sentence. I am not quite sure they are the same as saws, adages, and proverbs—the aphorism is an oblique sort of statement.

The modern aphorism may be modelled on the classical, but it adds to the form a degree of self-consciousness about its own power, motion, drive. Above all, the aphorism is a sharp or pointed thing, violently deployed—though this action can never be definitive, but must be repeated time and again. Like the fragment of which it is a version, the aphorism is mostly to be found among others of its type; it manifests in multiple, even though its internal workings are all geared toward the unique verbal thrust or parry. (The contradiction is neatly expressed in a remark by James Boswell about Horace Walpole: “I am told that Horace, Earl of Orford, has a collection of bon-mots by persons who never said but one.”) In the seventeenth century, this combination of economy and violence was given various names. In Spain, the Jesuit writer Baltasar Gracián, in “The Art of Worldly Wisdom,” perfected what he called agudeza: a kind of wit in which the maximum of meaning is compacted into the minimum of form or style. In the same century, in Poland, the poet and aesthetician Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, also a Jesuit, elaborated a theory of the acutum: a Mannerist knife-thrust, a stylistic stiletto. It has never gone away, this pert or pointed metaphor for the action of the aphorism. Here is Maurice Blanchot in “The Writing of the Disaster”: “Writing is per se already (it is still) violence: the rupture there is in each fragment, the break, the splitting, the tearing of the shred—acute singularity, steely point.” And E. M. Cioran, on the virtues of economy and obliquity: “Is there a better sign of ‘civilization’ than laconism? To stress, to explain, to prove—so many forms of vulgarity.” Finally, Barthes on the pointedness of the aphorism, and the performance that goes with it: “Point is a form of rupture: it always tends to close thought on a flourish, on that fragile moment when the word is stilled, touching on both silence and applause.”

The aphorism, then, is singular and separated—or at least separable, when discovered in the midst of other aphorisms, or embedded in some more discursive text. It is sharp, also hard: in an essay on the polished maxims of La Rochefoucauld, Barthes compares the form to the brittle casing of an insect’s thorax—the aphorism not as weapon but as suit of armor. The aphorism would like us to believe in its tightly furled autonomy, but we can still discern its secret anatomy. It has a well-defined structure, which at its simplest is composed of symmetries and parallels. The aphorist imagines a rhetorical algebra; everything is structured like an equation. The genre has a curious affinity with the verb to be; in the aphorism, x is y. Or better, according to the writer’s need to surprise the reader: x is actually y. Still more effectively: x is, after all, only y. Thus La Rochefoucauld, in his “Maxims,” as related by Barthes: “The clemency of princes is often only a policy to gain the affection of the people . . . . The sage’s constancy is only the art of keeping his agitation shut up within his heart.”

As Barthes remarks of La Rochefoucauld’s somewhat glib and static phrases, the subjects of the aphorism appear to be solid and stable, to exist eternally. Aphorisms contain such sturdy, ahistorical abstractions as love, passion, pride, deceit, and so on; with its brute insistence that x is (however complexly) really y, the genre sometimes looks like a field of immovable prose monuments. But there are more complex, oblique structures available. In a gymnastic mode, the author may attempt a daring backflip between the parallel bars of a slightly more baroque formulation: a is to b as x is to y. And, in an embrace of the structure and practice of thought called chiasmus, of which Pascal in his “Pensées” was master, the terms may be reversed. At times, Pascal’s structures are straightforward, as in his reflection on inconsistency of character and morals: “Contradictions. Man is naturally credulous, incredulous, timid, bold.” Here the parallel form and antithetical content raise no further problems: the aphorism still feels self-contained. In other cases, the terms are flagrantly reversed, so that when considering moral contradictions we are left to wonder at the seeming labyrinth, with no reputable way out, in which humanity exists:

 We are so presumptuous that we should like to be known all over the world, even by people who will only come when we are no more. Such is our vanity that the good opinion of half a dozen of the people around us gives us pleasure and satisfaction.

Wit is the art of bringing unlikely things or ideas together, in such a way that the scandal or shock of their proximity arrives alongside a conviction that they have always belonged together. In the aesthetic theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, wit is opposed to judgment, which is the skill of making fine distinctions, prising things apart. Perhaps the aphorism is made of equal parts wit and judgment, its success depending on its making a sufficiently daring detour in thought, while at the same time maintaining formal integrity, poise, and precision. In his “Waste Books”—a supposedly casual repository for passing reflections and notes—the German scientist and essayist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg remarks of an unnamed individual: “He was so witty that any thing served him as an intermediate term for comparing any pair of other things with one another.” There is a good case for saying that the essence of the aphorism is not merely the economical expression of contradiction, but the condensed presentation of pure paradox. (Which has been present at least since Pascal—hence Cioran’s quip: “Pascal, excessive in everything, was excessive in his common sense as well.”) At the furthest remove in this direction, the aphorism risks becoming only paradox, in an escalating contest to trump logic, realism, and ethics alike. Oscar Wilde’s is the epitome of the paradoxical style; each of his bon-mots, whether embedded in a play or story, or discretely proffered as part of a list, is designed to expose this or that cliché from the store of Victorian piety and hypocrisy. A single example should suffice to remind us: “In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.”

In this sort of aphorism, assertion is all: in place of argument or proof, the implacable “is.” But isn’t there something insufferable about this tyranny of the verb to be, and the rhetorical recourse, always, to reversal or paradox? It starts to sound like a species of intellectual and stylistic kitsch, a preciousness that is the preserve today mostly of pseudo-spiritual treatises and vacant self-help volumes. Maybe this is what Nietzsche meant when he complained that the aphorism was no longer taken seriously enough; it was about to be appropriated by purveyors of aching banalities of the following order: “By teaching others you will learn yourself ” (G. I. Gurdjieff). There is the tendency also to extract seemingly plain aphoristic nostrums from essays or works of fiction with manifestly ironical intent. Consider for example the fate of the opening sentence in Joan Didion’s “The White Album”—“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” What sump of literal-mindedness must subtend a sensibility so obtuse as to miss the fact, even on the first page of this essay about the curdling of nineteen-sixties counterculture, that the telling doesn’t work? But the impulse to read such statements literally, as if they were autonomous examples of timeless wisdom, is not entirely disreputable; sententiousness is one of the aspects of essayism, and we may find it all over the landscape of the genre, solid and informing, like a series of altitude markers on an upland trail.

The Sharp Force and Disgraceful State of the Modern Aphorism. By Brian Dillon. The New Yorker.  September 10, 2018

What is your favourite aphorism?

Brian Dillon : “I’m not sure I have anything as precious as a favourite, but I can’t help admiring how well put together this line is that I just discovered in a short story by Susan Sontag, who’s channelling Pascal, La Rochefoucauld and EM Cioran all at once – ‘We would be glad of the world, if we were flying to it for refuge.’ It’s simple but beautifully made: nicely balanced, the alliteration not overdone. And it says something profound, tragic and ridiculous: because where else can we fly to?”

Is there a future for essayism in a world where political debate is being conducted in 140 characters?

Brian Dillon: “If by ‘essayism’ we mean telling hard, complex truths with elegance and precision and some daring, then I’d say the art is as hale as it’s ever been, just harder to find in the old places. Yes, politics is mediated – or, as you say, actually carried out – in grim and childish registers. (Though I’d argue good thought and expression could survive 140 or 280 character counts: what else are aphorisms?)

“I’m modestly encouraged by how many readers nowadays pay attention to voices – Rebecca Solnit, Maggie Nelson, Olivia Laing – you would have to call essayistic. It turns out that readers are still well able to engage with works of nonfiction that address the world urgently and at the same time try to reimagine what this venerable form, the essay, may be capable of doing in artistic terms.”

A thought that struck me reading the book is that it’s really about the meaning of life, or rather the meanings we give to our lives. Of the essay-writing life, you ask: “What’s it all for, exactly?” Have you come closer to finding an answer?

Brian Dillon : “Not at all, but predictably an answer of a sort might be in the search. Essayists, including essayistic philosophers, such as Michel de Montaigne, Friedrich Nietzsche or EM Cioran, seem allergic to those large questions and answers. My ambitions are smaller than theirs in turn.

“As I say in the book, the very act of writing many essays over many years feels like a way of structuring your life: being interested in all manner of stories, places, individuals, works of art and literature, and then turning that attraction into something else – a way of making things and putting them modestly (or presumptuously?) into the world.

“Like most writers in any genre, I tend to call the things I publish ‘pieces’, and I like the idea of a life in pieces. If you write enough of them, and pay enough attention, the time seems to go slower.”

What future has the essay in a social media age?  Interview with Brian Dillon by Joe Humphreys. The Irish Times , October 31, 2017. 

Reviews on his book Essayism : On Form, Feeling, and Non-Fiction. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017. 

The Irish Times

The Guardian

The New Statesman