Paradoxes of Authenticity: Studies on a Critical Concept [1. Aufl.] 9783839418192

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Julia Straub (ed.) Paradoxes of Authenticity

Cultural and Media Studies

Julia Straub (ed.)

Paradoxes of Authenticity Studies on a Critical Concept

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2012 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Lukas Etter, »Doll« (2008) Typeset by Julia Straub, Katharina Lang Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar ISBN 978-3-8376-1819-8 Global distribution outside Germany, Austria and Switzerland:

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements | 7 Introduction: The Paradoxes of Authenticity

Julia Straub | 9

MAPPING AUTHENTICITY Authenticity – The Signature of Western Exceptionalism?

Aleida Assmann | 33 The Ambiguousness of the Authentic: Authenticity between Reference, Fictionality and Fake in Modern and Contemporary Art

Susanne Knaller | 51 Time, Alterity, Hybridity and ‘Exemplary Universality’: Some Remarks on Alessandro Ferrara’s Concept of ‘Reflective Authenticity’

Thomas Claviez | 77

REPRESENTING THE AUTHENTIC The Rhetorics of Authenticity: Photographic Representations of War

Thomas Susanka | 95 A Quest for Authenticity: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated

Irmtraud Huber | 115 “I Want My Past Back”: The Quest for Memory and Authenticity in Helen Dunmore’s Talking to the Dead

Christa Schönfelder | 135

AUTHENTIC L IVES Posthumanist Panic Cinema: Defining a Genre

Scott Loren | 159 Violent Criminals and Noble Savages: The Filmic Representation of Football Hooliganism as a Quest for Authenticity

Uwe Mayer | 185 Performative Authenticity: Identity Constructions among Asian Second-Generation Youths in Great Britain

Sabine Nunius | 201

AUTHENTICITY AND AUTHORSHIP “That is Real”: Oprah Winfrey and the ‘James Frey Controversy’

Anna Iatsenko | 225 Reclaiming “The Grandeur of Inspiration”: Authenticity, Repetition and Parody in William Blake’s Milton

Diane Piccitto | 243 Coming Home: Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park, Authorship and Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity

Julia Straub | 263 Contributors | 281

Acknowledgements

The publication of this essay collection follows a conference entitled Authenticity which took place in Berne in October 2008 and in which many of the contributors to this volume took part. The fact that this conference was followed up by a book is owed to the help and support of a number of individuals and institutions. I would like to thank the Mittelbauvereinigung of the University of Berne for their financial support of the conference in 2008. The UniBe Forschungsstiftung (“Berne University Research Foundation”) and the Hochschulstiftung of the Burgergemeinde Bern generously contributed towards the production costs of this book. To them in particular I would like to express my gratitude. The readers involved in the peer review process that most articles underwent deserve special thanks and so does Kareen Klein, who provided important help with translations. In order to make the manuscript fit for publication, I relied on the valuable and efficient help of Naomi Shepherd, Charif Shanahan and Simon Reber. Lukas Etter helped make authenticity look good by providing the cover image of this book. Thank you all for your conscientious work. Thank you also to the co-organizers of the 2008 conference, Annie Cottier and Juliane Langenbach, and to Barbara Straumann for her commitment to the establishment of a network of young researchers in Switzerland, from which this collection profits. Finally, I would like to thank Gabriele Rippl for her helpful advice and constant support of this and many other projects.

Introduction The Paradoxes of Authenticity J ULIA S TRAUB The paradox, the dilemma of authenticity, is that to be experienced as authentic it must be marked as authentic, but when it is marked as authentic it is mediated, a sign of itself, and hence lacks the authenticity of what is truly unspoiled, untouched by mediating cultural codes. (JONATHAN CULLER, FRAMING THE SIGN)

In Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl (1904), Prince Amerigo goes shopping for a wedding present for his future bride with a former lover, Charlotte Stant. The pair comes across a “[s]imple but singularly elegant” (120) crystal bowl in a little curiosity shop, which the owner is keen to sell to them. But the two customers are not easily fooled into paying a price they suspect is inappropriately high. “‘Gold, really gold?’” the incredulous Charlotte asks, wondering if the gold can be scratched off (120-21). Her inkling that something must be innately wrong with the bowl persists, disregarding the shop owner’s reassurances: “‘What is the matter with it?’” she asks him, “‘Of course I know something must be’” (122, emphasis in the original). Her companion, Prince Amerigo, discerns its potential flaw more sharply: “‘Its beauty is its being crystal. But its hardness is certainly its safety. It

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doesn’t break,’” he states (123, emphasis in the original). “‘[L]ike vile glass,’” he continues, “‘It splits – if there is a split’” (123). Holding up the bowl and marvelling at its beauty, he ponders “‘Where is the weak place?’” (124), before he and Charlotte decide not to buy the bowl and leave the shop (to embark on a life of marital unhappiness and extramarital consolations). If authenticity had to be conceived of as a material object, it would be a Jamesian golden bowl. It would attract passers-by, luring them back for second or third looks, perhaps even tempting them to enter the shop. Eventually, they would refrain from buying the bowl since a closer inspection would reveal that it is split. A fragile object, though pleasing to the beholder, this bowl is a risky purchase. Similarly, authenticity is a concept that lost its innocence a long time ago; by mentioning it, one automatically feels compelled to issue a caveat or two. Just like the split bowl, authenticity comes with a warning that one should not buy into it without some good insurance. Jonathan Culler formulated its crux back in the 1980s, and his dictum is so central that it is best placed as a motto for this volume. Once marked as authentic, the mediated character of the allegedly authentic comes to the fore, spoiling the illusion of the “unspoiled,” as it were. Thirty odd years later, this contradiction is as present and valid as ever. It is the double bind of the authentic – that it sends off signals both of immediacy and mediation, genuineness and performance, spontaneity and staging – that this collection of essays seeks to explore. Given the number of recent publications on authenticity (to some of which I will return below), one can argue that authenticity has gained momentum in literary and cultural studies as well as in related disciplines during the last decade or so. However, critics seem to handle it with a certain amount of unease. Theodor W. Adorno, who theorized its ‘split’ more than any other thinker in the twentieth century, declared authenticity – implying truthfulness, originality and singularity – to be estranged from our reality, a concept no longer to be harnessed for discussions of the artwork and the status of art. Once entering mass production, he wrote in Minima Moralia, the work of art will dissimulate the traces of its own making, thereby evoking the impression of perfection and, paradoxically, authenticity. The artist’s fingerprint will disappear from the canvas he held, or more generally speak-

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ing, the creator’s touch will vanish, which will “injure works of art and condemn them to be fragmentary” (226). The artwork will look flawless, but its authenticity is nothing but an illusion. There are, of course, different kinds of authenticity. Adorno’s authenticity belongs to the realm of aesthetic thought, and his writings have deeply influenced ensuing debates about the status of the artwork in a world where the conditions for the production of art have changed so much. Existentialist philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger had a completely different take on it, making authenticity a matter of life and death. Yet, however much of a truism this may be, the object world and the world of human interaction are not separate. Miles Orvell, in his book The Real Thing, argued that the need for authenticity is an unavoidable byproduct of civilisation and came into force in the late nineteenth century with the onset of materialist culture and consumerism. Authenticity begins to matter when the possibility of fraud arises, “when the society becomes so large that one usually deals with strangers, not neighbors” (xvii). This facet of authenticity could be understood as a modern fight and flight mechanism, in response to an evolutionary drive to build up trust and protect oneself from falsehood. Is authenticity still a productive, substantiated concept, or has it become obsolete and redundant – a mere husk of a word?1 The paradoxes of authenticity are exciting and inviting at best. At worst, they can be daunting and paralyzing. Hence, it is important that new ways of reconceptualizing authenticity as a productive concept are explored. Aleida Assmann, for example, speaks of authenticity as the signature of Western culture. Her contribution to this volume shows that authenticity has played into earliest discourses on language, representation and the self, going back as far as to Socrates and Plato, and Hamlet’s soul-searching. Other contributors discuss authenticity as something that is performed or ‘done,’ or even as a bond be-

1

This paradox is reflected in the title that Virginia Richter chose for her discussion of “Authenticity: Why We Still Need It Although It Doesn’t Exist,” from which she concludes that our “collective investment in it is so high that even after decades of deconstructivism and anti-essentialism it is impossible to get rid of it” (73).

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tween people, thus as something with a communal dimension. These are perspectives that steer away from concepts that see authenticity as a state or a merely individualistic experience. To investigate its manifold paradoxes and twists productively is a first important impetus to this volume. But these essays set out to do more: they aim to provide affirmative responses and approaches and thus ensure that the paradoxes they detect do not ultimately lead us into a cul-de-sac. In different ways, these essays help to keep authenticity and its discourses dynamic and supple. Understood as a tool that can be used for critical inquiry and the interpretation of literary texts, films and images, authenticity should be regarded as an epistemic device that can help us gain knowledge about things as different as rhetoric, representation, identity formation and the agents and rules of the literary marketplace today.

M APPING THE P ARADOXES

OF

AUTHENTICITY

Another beauty, and certainly complication, of the term ‘authenticity’ is that it suggests universality and timelessness due to its ubiquity. It is hard to imagine that this word has a past, a genealogy. And still, as Susanne Knaller has argued, it is important to historicize it (Ein Wort aus der Fremde 9). Authenticity has come a long way. In fact, no matter how topical some of the essays in this collection are, the discourses they draw upon are inherited. No concept of the authentic is new, but their changing configurations and evaluations are; the old philosophical ideal of being true to oneself, the medieval connection made between authenticity and authority and more Romantic notions of artistic originality and creativity – all these have provided grounds for discussion for a long time. One simple look into the OED alerts us to the semantic wealth that the term has accumulated over centuries. The word’s history brings together interrelated aspects of meaning: “authentic” can mean “authoritative,” “legally valid,” “genuine,” “trustworthy” and “authorized.” While these words have partly overlapping meanings, they have been employed in very different contexts and disciplines: in literary and cultural studies, as well as, for example, in

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philosophy, art history, sociology, ethnology or musicology. As a consequence, they create debates that are very often intricately dovetailed. Over the last ten years, a remarkable lot of work has been done to trace the development of concepts of authenticity and to show their impact on discourses in different disciplines. Charles Guignon, in On Being Authentic (2004), has provided the neatest recent overview of the concept’s historical development. In a German-speaking context, the more detailed and extended work by Susanne Knaller (Ein Wort aus der Fremde: Geschichte und Theorie des Begriffs Authentizität, 2007), and also in editorial cooperation with Harro Müller (Authentizität: Diskussion eines ästhetischen Begriffs, 2006) needs mentioning. A sociological perspective has been offered by Philip Vannini and Patrick Williams in Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society (2009). Charles Lindholm puts an anthropological focus on authenticity in Culture and Authenticity (2008). Authenticity in the context of trauma studies has been analyzed by Geoffrey Hartman in his seminal book Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity (2004). Authenticity in connection with forgery and the fake has been examined by Mary McAleer Balkun (The American Counterfeit: Authenticity and Identity in American Literature and Culture, 2006), William Ian Miller (Faking It, 2003) and the contributors to Authentic Artifice: Cultures of the Real (2007, edited by Shelley Deasy et al). A collection of essays entitled The Pathos of Authenticity: American Passions for the Real, was edited by Ulla Haselstein, Andrew S. Gross and MaryAnn Snyder-Körber in 2010 and explores, as the title suggests, the pathos of the concept poised, they argue, as it is between feeling and rhetoric. Many more titles could be added to this list.2

2

For a discussion of authenticity in the context of philosophical debates, especially with regard to existentialism, see Malpas/Wrathall’s Heidegger, Authenticity and Modernity (2000) and Jacob Golomb’s In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus (1995). Timothy Milnes and Kerry Sinanan published their study on the Romantics and their ideas of authenticity (Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity) in 2010. On authenticity and Native American writings see the essay collection edited by Deborah Madsen entitled Native Authenticity: Transnational Perspectives on Native American Literary Studies (2010). See also Kemal/Gaskell’s

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It is not the aim of this book to systematize the interdisciplinary dimension of authenticity debates or to ultimately synthesize the many approaches and discussions surrounding the topic. The contributions to this volume speak for themselves in that, no matter whether we look at British films about hooliganism, the treatment of artificial intelligence, forms of autobiographical art or trauma literature, the paradoxes of the subject matters point towards similar, reiterated conflicts and dichotomies. My suggestion would be to consider the dichotomy between inside and outside as the irreducible one that has remained powerful for centuries and that the different concepts and uses of the term always seem to fall back onto. To speak of the externalization of the internal or the making visible and graspable of what is private and on the inside are ways of conceptualizing the eternal conflict of authenticity. From the seventeenth century onwards this wedge was driven between the inner, ‘real’ self and the external, ‘fake’ self. This was a time when people had to find and know their place in an increasingly secularized and stratified society, which required the development of a social persona. With the onset of Romanticism, authentic selfhood became aligned with emotional honesty and artistic genuineness. Authenticity referred to some deep, internal ‘core’ of the self, controlled by and ultimately in conflict with expectations from the outside. This inside/outside dichotomy causes conflict-prone transactions that affect modes of representation, the formation of identities and notions of authorship – to name the three categories according to which the essays in this volume have been grouped. But it also affects the way we think about works of literature or art, closely entwined as they are with questions of production and reception, origin and ownership. Another paradox results from this inside/outside dichotomy: while we tend to side with the authentic, equating what is genuine with goodness, its moral implications suggest ambivalence rather than unambiguous virtuousness. The excesses of the authentic were highlighted by Lionel Trilling’s famous distinction between authenticity

Performance and Authenticity in the Arts (1999) and Elizabeth Outka’s Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic (2009) for further, relatively recent perspectives on the subject.

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and sincerity, which he established in the early 1970s in his seminal study Sincerity and Authenticity. For him authenticity means a more strenuous moral experience than ‘sincerity’ does, a more exigent conception of the self and of what being true to it consists in, and a less acceptant and genial view of the social circumstances of life. [...] Conversely, much that culture traditionally condemned and sought to exclude is accorded a considerable moral authority by reason of the authenticity claimed for it, for example, disorder, violence, unreason. (11)

Trilling’s statement refers us back to a modern philosophical tradition which has placed the human longing for a state of ‘authentic’ existence in opposition to the false charades acted out in everyday, ‘civilized’ life, a notion which also informed existentialist views on the concept such as Martin Heidegger’s Eigentlichkeit. The really interesting aspect this quotation broaches, however, is its emphasis on the unruliness and the strenuousness Trilling ascribes to the human experience of authenticity. Authenticity is not a key to happiness, a state of mind powerful enough to iron out the ruptures in identity and life experience that afflict modern individuals. It can also denote conflict and needs to be seen as a term of crisis. So far, the sketched paradoxes paint a rather bleak picture and their battles seem to be fought somewhere between academia and the literary review sections. However, authenticity is, as mentioned above, ubiquitous. It is a visible force in mass entertainment and popular culture and it resonates with broad audiences and readerships. To give one example: two American novels written in the first decade of the twenty-first century which already count as classics today, having enjoyed both commercial success and critical acclaim, deeply engage with aspects of authenticity. Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections was published in 2001, and was regarded as a prime example of neo-realist writing at the turn of the millennium. Neo-realism is a literary mode, which engages with the realist legacy of the later nineteenth century and its epistemological assumptions in complex ways.3

3

See Bärbel Tischleder’s discussion of the novel and its engagement with the real, where the author defines authenticity as “a particular spatiotem-

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It is centred on a paradox: “The metaphysical scepticism of postmodernism infuses, is combined, or even (intentionally or unintentionally) collides with the formal language of realism. The latter is thus disconnected from its own metaphysics, epistemology, and claims of representations” (Claviez 10-11). In neo-realist writing, the formal properties of realism are disjoint from the epistemological tenets that realism could draw on but that have been invalidated in (post-)modernist times. Interestingly, just a few years later, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated was published, the critical response to which, again, saw its main achievement in its flexibilization of representational means in a narrative where universal claims to the ‘real’ version of history and memory are shown to be brittle, and the available literary means of expression limited (as is discussed in more detail by Irmtraud Huber in this volume). Foer’s novel could thus be seen as the more daring response to concerns it shares with The Corrections, namely how to depict the individual experience of the ‘real’ when verbal expression reaches it limit. Both novels became bestsellers. Another striking example is the publication of fake memoirs and the responses they elicit, which is the subject of both Aleida Assmann’s and Anna Iatsenko’s essays. Fake memoirs are autobiographical texts, whose author differs from the narrating and narrated subject (which is a breach of the autobiographical contract the way Philippe Lejeune defined it) and/or texts based on more or less wilfully falsified information declared as authentic. The revelation of James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces – a book that dealt with the rough coming to life again of a drug rehab candidate – as a piece of literary forgery placed the spotlight on the delicate bonds that, postmodernism notwithstanding, exist between certain genres and truthfulness. Frey was beaten at his own game: having dissected his private life in front of cameras, right before the avid eyes of Oprah Winfrey’s audience, his fraud caused considerable public dismay. Set within a media landscape that exploits human privacy and shows zero tolerance for dissimulation, the Frey case received hitherto unknown public attention.

poral nexus in which objects become meaningful points of crystallization in human biographies and histories” (77).

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AND

As the Frey case suggests, authenticity in literary and cultural studies is hottest as a concept when people living on the margins of society or belonging to minorities are concerned: trauma literature, post-colonial and minority writing in general receive strong interest in connection with authenticity and its crises. Used in positivist, evaluative contexts, i.e. when referring to the object world, its meaning can be sober, even hard-edged. Detecting a piece of forgery places authenticity among hard facts. A manuscript receives the seal of approval, or it does not.4 Seen from this normative perspective, authenticity can indeed permit very concrete judgements within an empirically secured framework, challenged as it may obviously be by forgery and fraud. This is its promise of crystalline solidity that we seek and cherish. However, things are different when authenticity touches upon the human realm. Authenticity, then, becomes an emotional minefield and very messy. The reason for this is that narratives of experiences that could be most loosely described as liminal are measured with a different set of scales. Suffering – and there tends to be suffering in narratives told from the margins of society – unmasks the individual: we expect people in pain to be at their most vulnerable, naked and therefore authentic (Lethen 221). Looking at survivors’ tales, we do not expect postmodernist fireworks to go off. This explains why the interest Western readers take in writings from the edge is sometimes both motivated and sweetened by a nostalgic impulse. These texts compensate for the readers’ perceived lack in their own lives, lives which appear to be deprived of first-hand experiences. Deprivation, stigmatization and marginalization come to be seen as means of empowerment. To share the supposed authenticity of other people’s lives means aiming for the consolation prize, a compensation for a lost signifier, origin or essence: “One of the characteristics of modernity is the belief that authenticity has been lost and exists only in the past – whose signs we

4

Minimizing its relevance, Theo van Leeuwen has argued that authenticity is no longer thought of as an objective feature of socio-cultural production, instead “[a]uthenticity is about validity” (396).

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preserve (antiques, restored buildings, imitations of old interiors) – or else in other regions or countries” (Culler 160). As a consequence, in post-colonial and increasingly globalized literary and cultural contexts, “the ‘authentic’ voice is seen to guarantee the authenticity and truth of the narrated experience” (Erichsen 195). In the absence of stable national or social affiliations, authenticity has become an authoritative marker which fills in the gaps usually covered by categories such as the author, the canon, national literature, creed or class affiliation, many of which can no longer be ascertained, or have simply lost their relevance. Hybrid biographies, in Homi Bhabha’s sense, positioned somewhere between fixed categories of ethnic, religious or gender identity, contain a residue of authenticity that humans living in Western societies yearn for (Lethen 226). Is authenticity thus a versatile alibi for taboo concepts such as ‘truth,’ ‘origin(al)’ or ‘real,’ all of which threaten to re-evoke the spectre of essentialism? Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s hesitant advance is noteworthy: “As we are getting increasingly tired of [...] the seemingly infinite intellectual freedom granted by constructivism, we may become, once again, more tolerant vis-à-vis ontological world-views and their inherent authenticity-concepts (for what such tolerance may be worth)” (330). His statement is speculative, but the tolerance towards apparently redundant concepts such as authenticity he detects points towards an interesting project: how to make allegedly ‘hostile’ concepts amenable. The question that scholars need to ask is how they can account for the persistence of such apparently essentialist needs and demands in a postmodern world, where they are commonly depicted as staged or performed. Authenticity concerns our view of the artist, the artwork and the artistic act of creation. In other words: it concerns the human subject, the object world it inhabits – and the ties that link the two, i.e. literature, film and the visual arts. In which ways can the authentic then be reconsidered, at a time when the necessary philosophical and epistemological grounds are no longer available? How can the use of authenticity as a critically valid term be accounted for, if it is so conspicuously contaminated by its own paradoxes, and thus a term of crisis? It has been suggested to think of a “new” authenticity that “remains profoundly shaped by postmodern skepticism regarding the grand narratives of origin, telos, reference, and essence,” but is

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“more than a nostalgic return” to its older meanings and proponents by virtue of offering a “revision of postmodernism” (Haselstein/Gross/ Körber, “Introduction” 19). This seems to be quite a big burden placed on a fraught and fragile concept. However, any such approach sets us on a right track by exploring its positive value for analyses of literary texts, films or images. In fact, none of the above questions can be answered by nodding towards its postmodernist playfulness, by only dwelling on its paradoxes or by hastily dismissing it as a fast track into the essentialist trap. It is against the backdrop of conflicting demands – sceptical awareness of the term’s polyvalence versus an acutely perceived need for an affirmative revaluation – that it needs to be employed. Each of the essays included in this collection, opens up in its own ways a can of worms. It is only in alliance with existing and future studies on the subject matter that this collection can position itself as part of a joint effort. To show how authenticity, a concept not entirely hollowed out by postmodernist critique, can be reconciled with the shifting epistemological frames, changing production and reproduction possibilities, new paradigms of representation and notions of subjectivity arising in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is one of the ambitions of this essay collection.

T HIS C OLLECTION

OF

E SSAYS

Mapping Authenticity To begin with, the contributions by Aleida Assmann, Susanne Knaller and Thomas Claviez are meant to map and pull together some of the central debates, questions and fields of investigation that have developed around authenticity. Aleida Assmann describes the history of authenticity as a concept that has been inherent to central Western discourses about the self. Elaborating on Plato’s Socratic dialogues in Phaedrus and Parmenides and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Aleida Assmann shows that the historical dimension of the term is crucial for an understanding and interpretation of Western culture. The distinction between seeming and being, which she conceptualizes as the “Platonic distinction”

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at the heart of Western debates on subjectivity, affects the search of the modern self “in a kaleidoscope of attributed and self-chosen roles” (40). In the second part of her essay, setting off from her two case studies, Binjamin Wilkomirski’s fake memoir Fragments and the case of an Englishman-gone-native, the Indian Grey Owl, Assmann unfolds the central paradoxes that affect contemporary debates on authenticity and identity, and the implications of literature in processes of selfauthentication. In her essay on “The Ambiguousness of the Authentic,” Susanne Knaller discusses the status of authenticity in art theory and twentiethcentury art as a concept situated between referentiality and autology. Referring to discussions of falsification, she suggests that copies of works of art and other forms of forgery must make us not only rethink the ontological distinction between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic,’ but also that of ‘art’ versus ‘non-art.’ The copy needs to be seen as a complementary category to the more established concepts of ‘the original’ or ‘the authentic.’ It has a productivity of its own which needs to be acknowledged. Looking at photography and documentary art forms emerging towards the end of the twentieth century, Susanne Knaller shows that processes of authentication in these two medial forms can produce their own objectivity and assume a performative quality, which makes authenticity a “reflexive self-dramatization” (70), an antithesis as well as a term of legitimation. Thomas Claviez’s essay directs the discussion towards philosophy by critically examining the work of the Italian philosopher Alessandro Ferrara. Ferrara’s book Reflective Authenticity, which was published in 1998, remains, so Thomas Claviez argues, largely blind to the full implications of the linguistic turn, and the string of cultural, linguistic and literary theories that followed in its wake, such as e.g. structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction and post-colonialism. The vulnerability of Ferrara’s concept of ‘exemplary universality’ lies, according to Thomas Claviez, in its failure to take into account time and alterity as its greatest challenges and as two aspects that complicate any concept of authenticity. In order to gain a better understanding of the “symbolic capital” (90) that authenticity possesses, it needs to be rethought in the light of notions of intersubjectivity, community and identity so strongly influenced by the linguistic turn.

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Representing the Authentic With Jonathan Culler’s quotation as a motto, the representability of authentic experience as a profoundly ambivalent phenomenon has been emphasized: representing authenticity means mediating what ought to be original since un-mediated. This affects certain media in particularly strong ways, especially those which claim a high degree of referentiality for themselves, such as photography. At the latest with its digitization, photography has lost its indexical quality. Our awareness of its manipulability has increased. Drawing upon the field of rhetoric, Thomas Susanka approaches authenticity as something that is produced by semiotic means, focusing on contemporary war photography from Iraq and Afghanistan. He argues that the veracity and authenticity of photographs, especially in a highly politicized context as that of war journalism, can only be ascertained on a semiotic level, i.e. in awareness of the techniques employed by the photographer. According to Susanka, authenticity and photography enter into a relationship which is nowadays defined by the communicative strategies used by the photographer and the result of his subjective perspective. This also opens up debates on ethical journalism, i.e. the question of what is ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ press photography. While the great majority of people living in the Western world lack first-hand experience of war, they have a very clear idea of what it should look like. This ‘look of war’ is created by photographers who transgress traditional aesthetic norms of photography by minimizing the effects of intentionality and premeditation. The essays by Irmtraud Huber and Christa Schönfelder are concerned with the truthfulness of narratives and the representation of traumatic experience. Ethical demands placed on literature and narrative explorations of the past and the question of how authentic the self and narratives can and or even must be – these aspects come together in these two essays. The novels which Huber and Schönfelder each discuss deal with traumatic experiences and their effects on human beings and their identities. The works of Saul Friedländer and Theodor W. Adorno have attuned readers to the ethical charge inherent in writing about atrocities endured by oneself or others and the difficulty of finding the right words and the right form to convey such experience.

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Both Huber and Schönfelder look at texts whose concern with authenticity as a narrative mode reaches beyond its referential function. The texts they have chosen for analysis focus on events that cannot be represented with the help of conventional language or narration. Instead, authenticity is treated indirectly on a meta-level. Here authenticity manifests itself as a quest for real selfhood and identity, triggered or accompanied by traumatic experiences. Irmtraud Huber’s essay examines Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything is Illuminated (2002), which wraps up its trauma narrative in an unreliable narrative mode. Huber uses Foer’s well-received and hugely popular novel to propose a shift away from a romantic view of authenticity as something internal and essential towards the testimonial authentic as the more adequate form of framing authenticity in the twenty-first century. Similarly, Christa Schönfelder’s essay shows that the authenticity of the narrative act is tied to the truthfulness of the narrating voice: if the integrity of the latter is threatened by the unreliability of memory, caused, for example, by childhood trauma, the narrative itself loses its trustworthiness. The self cannot be true to itself when it has been fragmented by a loss of memory. Hence Schönfelder’s discussion of several novels, among which are Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and Helen Dunmore’s Talking to the Dead, hinges upon crises of authenticity, which are crises of memory and identity. Authentic Lives Scott Loren begins his contribution to this volume by referring to the phenomenon of self-help literature. The popularity of the example he mentions, Phillip C. McGraw’s self-help guide Self Matters: Creating Your Life from the Inside Out (2001), reflects the unbroken human desire for self-realization and ‘authenticity.’ As Loren argues, McGraw’s book, certainly only one among many of the same kind, proposes an idealized view of the liberal humanist self, a self that is characterized by its autonomy, its ability for self-reflection and its capacity to maintain a culture of interiority. It is this kind of liberal self that had come under attack by theorists and philosophers of the twentieth century, and their notions of ‘discourse’ or ‘performativity,’ which have dismantled essentialist notions of subjectivity ever since. In his essay,

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Loren discusses a number of films that reflect the anxiety with which we face perceived threats to our humanist understanding of subjectivity. Narratives of artificial intelligence, virtual realities, alien abduction or cyborgian life forms destabilize notions of human identity by bringing to life the decentrement of the subject that we know only in theory. What we understand to be authentic in a person has much to do with our belief in liberal-humanist and essentialist notions of the self, which is why these films provoke what Scott calls a “millennial disease” (161). The making of ‘true’ individual identities within the boundaries of a collective identity is what concerns Uwe Mayer in his essay on the representation of football hooliganism in films. Mayer revisits moral philosophy, whose questions are: is there something like an authentic self, a primordial core, which is more original and truer to human nature than existences cast into roles of ‘civilized’ behaviour? The individuals for whom this becomes an issue are English football hooligans, whose working class existences as dutiful employees, boyfriends and citizens collide with the liberalizing energies they experience when engaging in acts of violence. Violent fanship is a model of social affiliation which stands in stark contrast to their domesticated existences as white working class men, subject to the consumerist imperatives of Blairite Britain, dull job perspectives and romantic commitments perceived as oppressive. As these films (Philip Davis’s I.D., Nick Love’s The Football Factory and Lexi Alexander’s Green Street) demonstrate, being a hooligan means both unleashing and ritualizing physical violence. This regression to a pre-civilized state unbridled by laws and internalized norms of behaviour enables the young male protagonists of these films to explore aspects of their personalities which are perceived as truer than their everyday personae. The ritualistic and formulaic dimension of these identities – the making of which follows certain prescribed codes, be it the right kind of music or clothing – can be theorized in terms of performativity. This is Sabine Nunius’s approach in her essay on ‘BrAsian’ identities. She regards authenticity as the result of strategic and highly selfconscious performative efforts, represented in novels and music. In the case of Gautam Malkani’s novel Londonstani (2006) and the bhangra music pieces Sabine Nunius discusses, these are British-born Asian

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youths whose parents had immigrated to Britain in the mid-twentieth century. In order to pass as authentic, in this concrete case this means falling into the more recent category of being authentically ‘BrAsian,’ these individuals recur to codes and gestures embodying the ‘other’ and serving as identity markers. They act according to stereotypes they believe make them appear ‘real’: by living up to them they authenticate their own hybrid cultural identity. BrAsian identity is upheld against white Britishness, but is ultimately defined by the latter, the touchstone against which the authentic other is generated. Sabine Nunius’s contribution gives an interesting case study of the performative dimension of authenticity, which also serves as a good example of authenticity’s reactionary potential. Thus, authenticity is not only a feature, state or condition, it is also reached by means of being full of effects which are geared at an audience. Authenticity and Authorship Authenticity and authorship are in a vexed relationship. As shown by their respective etymological roots, both terms single out authorization as an important strand of meaning. Both terms have had a varied life in the twentieth century. Once declared dead, their vital signs remain hard to ignore (see Burke and Donovan/Fjellestad/Lundn). However, authorship is usually understood as referring to the external or social persona of the author, and not so much to the ‘real’ person behind the name on the book cover. Authors often struggle to control their public image: impersonality and conspicuousness are the two main facets of embodied authorship, as seen in J.M. Coetzee and Philip Roth, for example. The ways in which actors, musicians and, to a lesser degree, artists are revered in today’s culture, and the ways in which their conformity to pre-fabricated ideas of their public persona comes to count as authentic are well-known. To say similar things about authors – who often shun the public gaze and step back behind their work as nameless entities – seems unusual still, but the notion of star authors has reached discourses on contemporary authorship (see Moran). Literary stardom, coupled with the notion of the author as a brand or label who inhabits a globalized marketplace – these are all phenomena that have caught our attention over the last ten years. A good example

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would be the ethnic branding of writers such as Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth. The author becomes part of the product that is sold, but something else is going on here which is of interest to the literary scholar: the ties between the literary text and its author, weak and questioned for a long time, are re-established. Anna Iatsenko’s essay on the scandal surrounding the publication of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces sheds light on the mess caused when the alleged ‘real’ is revealed to be a lie. Thus, what in the realm of fiction appears to have become the legitimized shape of authenticity – as a strategy, a staging of truth, a mere performance of the essential – remains a no-go, a breach of trust and even a legal crime in the world of non-fiction, where different laws apply. Anna Iatsenko’s essay thus not only offers an insight into the complex interactions between genre and authenticity, i.e. the permissibility of fiction in some contexts and its inappropriateness in others. It shows that authenticity can create togetherness. Being authentic means creating bonds between human beings and reaching out to each other after having endured hardship together. Iatsenko’s essay not only dissects the interesting chronology of events leading up to Frey’s debacle, thereby unravelling the implications of literary stardom in today’s media world. It also throws a glance at the cultural phenomenon called Oprah Winfrey, which owes a lot to her uses of an ostentatiously ‘authentic’ rhetoric. Diane Piccitto’s contribution offers a historical perspective by tracing William Blake’s engagement with John Milton. Her essay suggests that Blake’s reading of Milton subverts traditional notions of artistic creativity and concomitant notions of authenticity that tie it closely to notions of origin and singularity. Blake envisions a new concept of the author by suggesting that the status of the copy, i.e. of a work being part of a series, needs to be positively redefined in terms of authenticity. Piccitto’s reading of Blake’s Milton focuses on Blake’s theory of intertextuality avant la lettre. This is a theory of creativity, which embraces the other as a necessary element of authorship. Drawing upon Judith Butler’s theory of gender performance, Piccitto argues that Blake’s theory of writing and authoring texts displaces traditional biblical concepts of causality and origin. She suggests an emphasis on the performativity of inspiration, which simulta-

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neously subverts the image of the prophet-poet whose acts are authorized by God. Being an author thus requires a communal, shared act of reiterated inspiration; authorship is partly poetic, partly social. Because creation in Blake’s Milton is torn apart into a sequence of moments, the unique status of the primordial moment is threatened. As part of a series, the individual moment, but also the individual work of art, can only possess restricted singularity. It is the social dimension of authorship that stands at the centre of my own contribution to this volume, in which I look at Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Lunar Park. I argue that the novel comments on authenticity as something that is do-able. Authorship, by virtue of being a thisworldly practice with social relevance, helps the author to become at home in this world. Heidegger’s concept of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) is used to unlock some of the inconsistencies in Ellis’s novel, which apart from its autobiographical dimension is notable for its unexpectedly serious engagement with the theme of authorial responsibility. This rather serious note to the novel is constantly being challenged by Ellis’s self-conscious reflection on the staging of authorial, public identities, which makes it hard to settle on a conclusion. Still, the fact that this novel places its focus on authorship as something that is not static, but needs to be lived and done opens up interesting fields of investigation.

W ORKS C ITED Balkun, Mary M. The American Counterfeit: Authenticity and Identity in American Literature and Culture. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2006. Claviez, Thomas. “Introduction: Neo-Realism and How to ‘Make It New.’” Amerikastudien/American Studies 49 (2004): 5-18. Culler, Jonathan. Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Deasey, Shelley, et al., eds. Authentic Artifice: Cultures of the Real. Salford: European Studies Research Institute, 2007.

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Donovan, Stephen, Danuta Fjellestad, and Rolf Lundn, eds. Authority Matters: Rethinking the Theory and Practice of Authorship. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Erichsen, Ulrike. “A ‘True-True Voice: The Problem of Authenticity.” Being/s in Transit: Travelling, Migration, Dislocation. Ed. Liselotte Glage. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. 193-202. Ferrara, Alessandro. Modernity and Authenticity: A Study of the Social and Ethical Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 1993. —. Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity. London: Routledge, 1998. Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything Is Illuminated. 2002. London: Penguin, 2003. Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections. London: Forth Estate, 2001. Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. London: Murray, 2007. Golomb, Jacob. In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus. London: Routledge, 1995. Guignon, Charles. On Being Authentic. London: Routledge, 2004. —, ed. The Existentialists: Critical Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. Lanham, MD: Rowman, 2003. Gumbrecht, Hans U. “Is the Production of Authenticity FakeRecycling?” Werk und Diskurs: Karlheinz Stierle zum 60. Geburtstag. Ed. Dieter Ingenschay and Helmut Pfeiffer. München: Fink, 1999. 321-30. Habermas, Jürgen. Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. London: Blackwell, 1992. Haselstein, Ulla, Andrew S. Gross, and MaryAnn Snyder-Körber, eds. The Pathos of Authenticity: American Passions of the Real. Heidelberg: Winter, 2010. —. “Introduction: Returns of the Real.” Haselstein/Gross/SnyderKörber 9-31. James, Henry. The Golden Bowl. 1904. Ed. Leon Edel. The Bodley Head Henry James IX. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. Kemal, Salim, and Ivan Gaskell, eds. Performance and Authenticity in the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.

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Knaller, Susanne. Ein Wort aus der Fremde: Geschichte und Theorie des Begriffs Authentizität. Heidelberg: Winter, 2007. Knaller, Susanne, and Harro Müller. “Authentisch/Authentizität.” Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. Ed. Karlheinz Baarck et al. Vol. 7. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005. 40-65. —, eds. Authentizität: Diskussion eines ästhetischen Begriffs. München: Fink, 2006. Lethen, Helmut. “Versionen des Authentischen: Sechs Gemeinplätze.” Literatur und Kulturwissenschaften: Positionen, Theorien, Modelle. Reibek: Rowohlt, 1996. 205-31. Lindholm, Charles. Culture and Authenticity. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. Madsen, Deborah L., ed. Native Authenticity: Transnational Perspectives on Native American Literary Studies. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 2010. Malpas, Jeff, and Mark Wrathall. Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2000. Miller, William I. Faking It. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Milnes, Timothy, and Kerry Sinanan. Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Moran, Joe. Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America. London: Pluto, 2000. Müller, Harro. “Theodor W. Adornos Theorie des authentischen Kunstwerks: Rekonstruktion und Diskussion des Authentizitätsbegriffs.” Authentizität: Diskussion eines ästhetischen Begriffs. Ed. Susanne Knaller and Harro Müller. München: Fink, 2006. 55-67. Orvell, Miles. The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1989. Outka, Elizabeth. Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic. Oxford: OUP, 2009. Richter, Virginia. “Authenticity: Why We Still Need It Although It Doesn’t Exist.” Transcultural English Studies. Ed. Frank SchulzeEngler. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 59-74. Tischleder, Bärbel. “A Soap Bubble is as Real as a Fossil Tooth: Physical Objects and the Presence of the Past.” Haselstein/Gross/Snyder-Körber 75-92.

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Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1972. Van Leeuwen, Theo. “What is Authenticity?” Discourse Studies 3 (2001): 392-97. Vannini, Phillip, and Patrick Williams. Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009.

Mapping Authenticity

Authenticity – The Signature of Western Exceptionalism? A LEIDA A SSMANN

This paper argues that the concept of authenticity has a long history that leads back to the roots of Western culture. When considered in this long-term perspective, it proves to be a singularly persistent concept that provides a seminal value and normative source for cultural interpretations, decisions and practices. Given its central function in shaping the orientation of values, attitudes and action, I want to argue that it belongs to the core concepts of Western culture, setting it off from other cultures that have no equivalent for it. I will develop this argument in three steps. After a brief introduction of the related terms ‘sincerity’ and ‘authenticity,’ I will recall two stages in the history of this concept, one relating to central axioms of Greek philosophy, the other marking the beginning of early modernity around 1600. In a third part, I will introduce two case studies to illustrate the philosophical, psychological and legal ramifications of the concept and the problems of their implementation.

D EFINING THE T ERMS S INCERITY AND AUTHENTICITY Our semantic reflections on the relevant terms can start with an instructive study by the American critic Lionel Trilling on Sincerity and

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Authenticity.1 He shows that both concepts related originally to the status and quality of material objects and were only later transferred onto persons and evaluation of human behaviour. Sincerus comes from the Latin word combination sine cera, which literally translates as ‘without wax.’ This formula is likely to have originated in the domain of beekeeping and designates pure honey as one that has been completely purged from the honeycomb’s wax. The formula ‘without wax’ was later metaphorically extended to other substances such as wine, indicating the absence of any additional substances, designating material purity. In early modern times, the term was incorporated into English and French, where it underwent a decisive semantic change in being applied exclusively to human behaviour and actions. While today the word ‘sincere’ (or aufrichtig in German) is exclusively applied to humans, the word ‘authentic’ has a much broader semantic spectrum. It comes from the Greek (authentikos, late Latin: authenticus) and designates the genuineness of an object or a circumstance, usually in the form of an attribution to a specific origin or provenance. The term ‘authentic’ expresses a positive, rare and singular quality, which is perceived and sought for in different contexts. The adjective can refer to: •

•

•

1

the quality of written sources, documents and signatures (in response to the test question: are they real or forged, manipulated or imitated?) the quality of events (in response to the test question: did they really occur? Are they historically true, verifiable; are they based on testable facts or are they imagined, fabricated, invented?) the quality of works of art (in response to the test question: is it an original or a forgery, a copy, a reproduction or a fake?2 Are we dealing with a precious, unique object or only with a cheap copy?)

In the introduction to these Harvard lectures, he writes: “At a certain point in its history the moral life of Europe added to itself a new element, the state or quality of the self which we call sincerity” (2). Trilling defines sincerity as the exact correspondence between expressed and real feelings.

2

The ‘fake’ is a new art genre, which simultaneously creates and unmasks its derivative character and thereby foregrounds tacit social norms and cul-

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the quality of establishments, institutions, traditions (in response to the test question: was something persistently in use, or was it only recently invented? Is it celebrated and performed by the people or imposed and staged by the state?) the nature of human intentions (in response to the test question: are we dealing with reliable, true, genuine behaviour or faced with deceit, a hoax, or an impostor?) the quality of a person: (in response to the test question: is s/he original or conventional, natural or artificial, genuine and autonomous or adapting to the rules, standards and masks of society (Trilling 66)? This quality can be further defined through three pairs of opposites: wild v. civilized/naïve v. reflected/original v. conformist.)

In the semantic field of ‘authentic’ and ‘authenticity’ we also have to consider a verb form. ‘To authenticate’ means to endow something with credibility and to mark it as genuine. A stamp or seal authenticates documents as true and valid in administrative bureaucracy. This cultural practice begs the question: who is endowed with the authority to authenticate? The certification must be carried out by official or professional authorities such as lawyers, notaries, historians, archivists, art experts, chemists and other forensic specialists (who, for instance, are able to identify a substance in the pigment of the colour blue called phthalocyanine, which was invented in 1908 and should therefore not be identifiable in paintings created before that date). Is it possible to apply the verb form also to human life and experience? Is there anything that ‘authenticates’ a human being and makes it more authentic (in the sense of unique and distinctive) than another? Witnesses, heroes and victims are endowed with a specific authenticity; they are authenticated by their individual embodied experiences, acts and sufferings to which others have neither access nor claim. As such distinctive experiences cannot be deliberately acquired, they are in no way interchangeable. In the era of postmodernism, where (near-

tural practices in the domain of art evaluation. An example is Ernst Volland’s creation of the fake artist Blaise Vincent (the name is a compound of Blaise Pascal and Vincent van Gogh).

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ly) everything is regarded as optional, constructed, performed, discursive and manipulated, the authentic as the token of an outstanding and unique experience that cannot be replicated or transferred has been called into question (see Bach). It is, however, in it the pathological form of trauma that the value of the authentic has re-entered, as it were, through the back door. Sincerity and authenticity are dialectical values that are largely defined by their opposites, namely insincerity and inauthenticity. They are derived from the explicit negation of their opposites, which overshadow them as a constant threat. These values are therefore locked in an antithetical relationship that generates continuous doubt and frames every approach to it with an attitude of skepticism and mistrust. Sincerity and authenticity are discovered in the literal sense by withdrawing a virtual veil that hides the false from the true. The central agent in this case is a suspicious gaze that perceives a disturbing gap between the outer representation and the inner condition of a phenomenon. I would like to argue that this decisive split, separating between the manifest appearance of an object or person and its or his/her real interior value or essence is a foundational act of Western metaphysics, running through large domains of its theology, philosophy, literature and science. Unrelated and diverse as these domains may be, they are continuous and consistent in the application of a critical gaze, which penetrates the surface and probes the real and deeper quality of an object, person or phenomenon. The assumption of a possible discrepancy between seeming and being inaugurates philosophical, religious, social and psychological problems of inexhaustible depth and range. We are speaking about a revolutionary strategy and mental habitus that has kicked off amazing mental developments in various cultural domains. Where are the origins of this mental framework that has truly changed the world and provided Western thinking and feeling with such a powerful distinctive feature? In the following part, we will look into the origin and history of the discrepancy between seeming and being and its consequences for Western culture. Since the topic is immodestly large, I will confine myself to examples from two historical strata, namely Plato in the fourth century BC and Shakespeare around 1600.

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T HE P LATONIC D ISTINCTION : T HE R IFT BETWEEN S EEMING

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B EING

In his book The Price of Monotheism Jan Assmann has analyzed the genesis of a categorical distinction which, he claims, has fundamentally and irreversibly changed the world of religions. The ‘Mosaic distinction’ introduced the difference between true and false religion. This distinction has profoundly transformed the landscape of religions, which had been hitherto not necessarily homogenous but generally compatible and translatable across cultures. The Mosaic distinction is described by Assmann as a polemic impulse that became manifest in a new type of intolerance and concomitant acts of violence. Assmann argues that wherever the Mosaic distinction was brought into play, the history of religions turned bloody. I would like to introduce here another distinction, which was equally influential for the modelling of Western thought and feeling. While the Mosaic distinction forged a new type of boundary between religions and thereby shaped the political dimension of monotheism, the ‘Platonic distinction’ that I want to place next to it created a new mental habitus that proved equally fundamental for the development of Western culture. By ‘Platonic distinction’ I mean the opening up of a rift between seeming and being, i.e. between the surface of a representation or the impression of a sensuous experience on the one hand and a deeper layer, quality or essence that is not directly accessible on the other. Plato did not invent this distinction himself but he gave it its pithy form in which it shaped important traditions and had lasting effects. He was influenced by Parmenides, who in turn may have been influenced by the ‘veil of the Maya,’ an Indian concept denouncing the ‘unreality’ of the material world of the senses on behalf of a higher transcendent reality. In a didactic philosophical poem of which only fragments survived, Parmenides created the dualism between “truth” (aletheia) and “opinion” (doxa) (Riezler 42-47). While human opinions are blind and fallible, truth is the orientation of a few true philosophical seekers who claim access to specific forms of revelation. The writings of Parmenides, which claim that truth lies beyond the reach of common sense, are acknowledged as the source and foundation of critical and methodological thinking in Western philosophy.

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Plato transformed Parmenides’s fundamental distinction between opinion and truth into the dualism between appearance and reality, the form in which it entered the core cluster of Western cultural concepts. The distinction between appearance and reality has found its emblematic expression in Plato’s parable of the cave in which humans have succumbed to mere apparitions and are chained to unrealities unless they liberate themselves from such debasing conditions and seek for the true origin of light and truth. Plato also introduces this seminal distinction continuously into his dialogues. It is clearly inscribed into the very constellation and intellectual strategy of his dialogues, in which the teacher, Socrates, continually destabilizes his interlocutor’s naive assumptions by showing him that something, which he believed to have understood, was only a superficial facet of a problem and by no means its real core. Into the dialogue called Phaedrus, a story is introduced in which the roles of Socrates and his pupil are taken by two mythical figures: Theuth, the Egyptian God and inventor of letters, and Thamus, an Egyptian king. In a conversation, Theuth takes on the role of the pupil, who represents the commonsensical view, which is then deconstructed by Thamus, who takes Socrates’s role. The topic of their conversation is the invention of writing and the question whether this new cultural technique is a blessing or rather a curse for civilization. Thamus’s arguments make emphatic use of the Platonic distinction. Writing, he warns, will not strengthen memory but rather create forgetfulness, because the users of the new technology will “remember things by relying on marks made by others, from outside themselves, not on their inner resources” (Phaedrus 69). What can be conveyed in written characters, Thamus argues, is not real wisdom: “You provide your students with the appearance of intelligence, not real intelligence” (69). In the framing dialogue, Socrates further explains Thamus’s position by comparing letters to paintings. Both produce unsubstantial make-believe: “The off-spring of painting stand there as if alive, but if you ask them a question they maintain an aloof silence” (70). The same holds true for the words of a written text: “You might think they were speaking as if they had some intelligence, but if you want an explanation of any of the things they’re saying and you ask them about it, they just go on and on for ever giving the same single piece of information” (70). At the end of the dialogue, Phaedrus has

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learned his lesson; he now knows to distinguish between the living word and the written word which is only its deficient reproduction. The dialogue ends with Socrates’s prayer to Pan: “Grant that I may become beautiful within and that my external possessions may be congruent with my inner state” (75). Throughout the text, the dialogue is structured by the polemical opposition of seeming and being, which is paralleled by that of exterior and interior. This opposition is underpinned by the normative distinction between a real truth and a false simulation of truth. While the Mosaic distinction cuts a deep chasm between a true and a false religion, backing up the claim to the superior truth of monotheism, the Platonic distinction creates an equally important divide between an assumed truth and a real truth, backing up the claim to an exclusive and superior philosophical truth. In both cases, the border draws a categorical line separating in the first case the infidels from the believers and in the second case the many ignorant from the few enlightened.

APPEARANCE AND R EALITY H AMLET ’ S P ERSPECTIVE

FROM

Lionel Trilling argues that the values of sincerity and authenticity are not valid in all cultures and all ages but are an important element of Western modernity. The concept took on a new quality in the early modern era where it was part of a radical change in the structure of moral culture (Trilling 2). Trilling associates this change with the emergence of the individual as a new cultural value: “[A]t a certain point in history men became individuals” (Trilling 24). This emergence of the individual is linked by Trilling to a new, dynamic form of civic society, which goes hand in hand with the opening up of private spaces for retreat as well as “internal spaces” (Georges Gusdorf; see Trilling 24). Internal space is developed through new forms of ‘privacy,’ both in the structure in housing architecture and in the new genre of autobiography. It required secluded, protected parts of the house which “contributed to the introspection and soul-searching of radical Puritanism, to the keeping of diaries and spiritual journals” (Hill 253). The genre of autobiography is constituted by a writing ‘I’ that is in

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constant search for itself and thereby constructs itself. The searching ‘I’ that examines itself no longer only addresses God, but also increasingly and reflexively itself. This new cultural practice of writing diaries in the Protestant communities is immediately linked to the new middle class virtues of sincerity and authenticity. The genesis of the value of authenticity in the context of a new self-reflexive discourse of individuality can be witnessed as it were in statu nascendi in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Hamlet is an elusive hero who sets himself apart from the various roles attributed to him – he is addressed as “courtier,” “soldier,” “scholar” (III.i.150). In addition to these, he invents further eccentric roles for himself, such as the lovesick melancholic, the fool and the madman. On top of that, he is also a stage-manager and an actor playing his part in an obscure script. Hamlet is the paradigmatic modern hero in search of his own self in a kaleidoscope of attributed and self-chosen roles. Hovering between grand histrionic gestures and total disillusion, he poses the question of the true self in various monologues, which is never conclusively answered. In the course of his search for his own self, however, Hamlet hits upon a negative revelation that deconstructs the concept of identity. Hamlet’s pitiless gaze penetrates all social masks and roles right to the naked core of a person, a gaze that he also applies to himself. I am thinking of the famous scene in which he introduces himself to the audience. In this scene, his mother asks him to take off his black mourning clothes, thereby urging him to break off his melancholy fixation on the past and to participate in the courtly life of the present. She reminds him that death is part of human nature and therefore common. Why, then, she wants to know, “Why seems it so particular with thee?” (I.ii.75)

As happens so often in the play, Hamlet does not answer the question but instead focuses on a particular word of the phrasing: “‘Seems’, madam – nay it is, I know not ‘seems’” (I.ii.76)

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His grief, he assures her, is a feeling over which he has no power. He then proceeds to defend the force of this feeling by negating all the voluntary marks of its expression: ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good3 Mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected haviour of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly. These indeed ‘seem’, For they are actions that a man might play, But I have that within which passes show, These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (I.ii.77-86)

We are here dealing with the ‘Hamlet-paradox,’ which states that his sincere grief must be expressed but cannot be performed. André Gide once formulated it as follows: one cannot be sincere and present oneself as being sincere at the same time (“On ne peut à la fois être sincère et le paraître,” 142). Showing off sincerity constitutes a performative contradiction. Deep grief has its symptoms, which are involuntary actions of the body, but, he adds, all these symptoms could also be feigned. Once the abyss is opened by the suspicious gaze that distinguishes between the inner and the outer, Hamlet must denounce conventional signs of grief as strategic dissimulations or theatrical representations. Clothes can be changed; gestures can be rehearsed, but how about bodily reflexes such as tears and blushing? In the eighteenth century such involuntary somatic reactions were rated highly as markers of authenticity. For Hamlet, however, even tears – “the fruitful river in the eye” – are not markers of authenticity but the test of a great actor.4 Hamlet’s critique of signs is thus much more radical than

3 4

I am following here the Folio edition (1623). In order to represent the Hecuba monologue with adequate pathos, an actor has to be able to produce real tears. Hamlet puts the actors that have arrived at the castle to the test and breaks off the audition as soon as the first tears are visible. The casting is over, this actor can be hired: he is versed in

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that of the eighteenth century. He accepts no positive expressions of authenticity as valid: everything is a spectacle. There is no necessary connection between the authenticity of a feeling and its expression. Exterior and interior do not mirror each other. There is thus no single definitive proof for the authenticity of a feeling, because all its exterior manifestations are actable and can hence be manipulated. In his famous speech about seeming and being Hamlet, however, gives the argument another twist: it is true that all his signs of grief can be gestures and performances, but there is something beyond the world of show and sham to which he lays claim. Sincerity merges here with authenticity, and both are mingled in a new rare value that is extolled as the other of the theatre stage (Trilling 70). The speech is indeed paradoxical in structure, because through a series of obsessively repeated negations in five continuous lines it builds up a positive affirmation. Hamlet argues for the authenticity of his feelings while deploring the fact that he has no adequate signs for it at his disposal. He denunciates in the Platonic tradition all exterior forms of expression as counterfeit in order to affirm ex negativo the ultimate potency of an inner core. The modern value of the authentic is thus for the individual what negative theology was for the Christian God: the inaccessible core becomes the transcendent and holy centre of individuality. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the identity of social roles is deconstructed as the new concept of individuality emerges, which is grounded in new forms of interiority and in the transcendent value authenticity. The radical split between the interior and the exterior person inspired the revolutionary move of the reformation, blasting traditions and institutions. It was not a new invention but one that had already been inscribed into Western culture by Parmenides and Plato. In the Jewish and the Christian-Protestant traditions, the only authentic space of the inner human being was considered to be the contact zone between man and God. This transcendent religious core was transformed into the authentic core of individuality in the early modern age. Hamlet’s new discourse of authenticity frames this core of individuality as a void, which eludes all signs or definitions and identifica-

the art of stirring deep emotions, since he is able to affect himself first, as the Roman rhetoric had recommended it.

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tions. As a transcendent space it is within the person but not of the person; it is a space of the ‘non I’ contained in the depth of the ‘I.’ Where in the religious tradition the inner voice of God had a place within the person, this place is transformed into an abyss of selfreflexivity in secular modernity. In vain Hamlet searches for the authentic inner core of the person; what he finds instead is a void created through repeated negations, constituted by the absence of signs and definitions. Yet it is in no way a black hole of negation, but rather an all-surpassing power, an ultimate form of being, an essence, which is discursively constructed through a series of negations.

T WO C ASE S TUDIES In a third step, I would like to put the problems of sincerity and authenticity to the test with two case studies, one from the first half and one from the second half of the twentieth century. We have seen that Western culture produces specialists who can formulate clear criteria for the authenticity of documents, works of art and other objects; the authenticity of individual people, however, poses quite different problems. I am not talking here about strategic forms of dissimulation like those of undercover agents, who have to conceal their true identity and interests or about so-called ‘submarine existences,’ referring to people in post World War II Germany who took on a new name in order to evade criminal prosecution and start a new career.5 These are cases of intentional masking for professional or personal reasons involving no real changes of identity, which would raise questions of authenticity. My first example is Archibald (Archie) Stansfeld Belaney, a trapper and author of English origin, who was born in Hastings (England) in 1888 and died in Canada in 1938.6 He came from a broken home; at

5

A well-known case was that of the rector of the technical university in Aa-

6

See Caroline Rosenthal. “Vom Wunsch, Indianer zu werden: Der

chen Hans Ernst Schneider (1909-1945) alias Hans Schwerte (1945-1995). kanadische Traum von Grey Owl” (Inaugural lecture at the University of Constance, 7 July 2008). A slightly different version of the lecture will appear in print in 2011, see Works Cited.

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the age of two, two stern aunts took him under their wings (see Smith). Already as a child he developed a great love for the American Indians as well as for nature. He devoured the works of Fenimore Cooper and went on long hikes in the countryside around Hastings, imagining himself to be one of the Natives in the woods of North America. He began to keep and observe various wild animals in the attic of his house. In 1906 Belaney turned his dream into reality and travelled to Canada. From an experienced trapper he learned important lessons about the art of survival in the North Canadian wilderness. Belaney also learned the language of the Ojibway-Indians, with whom he spent decades and where he adopted, along with the Indian way of life, the name of Grey Owl. When asked who he was, he declared that he was the son of a Scottish father and of an Apache mother. In Canada, he observed the inroads of white civilization into the natural environment with great concern. It not only destroyed the Indian way of life but also the rich beaver population of Northern Ontario. Originally a trapper, Grey Owl ‘converted’ into a protector of this endangered species. He set up a beaver colony and financed it with popular stories and novels, including the autobiographical text Pilgrims of the Wild, which found a wide circulation in England and brought him world-wide fame. He continued his writing as a conservationist who worked in various national parks. He travelled twice to England for lecture series, where his ecological message found great acclaim. Before he died at the age of 50, he became the target of a public scandal. His English background was discovered, which unmasked the supposed half-caste. In the wake of this revelation, public interest abruptly abandoned him: his fame vanished over night, his life’s work was invalidated. The Native Americans, however, reacted in an entirely different manner. They acknowledged his long Indian life and his abundant knowledge of their language, their customs and of the wilderness, claiming Grey Owl as one of them. They could not understand why the white people had so suddenly abandoned him and rejected his life’s achievement. Today we are inclined to sympathize with the Native Americans and to view Western assumptions of what constitutes ‘authenticity’ from a more critical and detached vantage point. In postmodernity, where all identities are thought of as ‘constructed,’ we do no longer

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find ourselves in the predicament of having to distinguish between a ‘sincere message’ and a ‘false life.’ Unfortunately, things are not quite that easy, as my second case study, that of Binjamin Wilkomirski, shows. His autobiography Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood 1939-1948 was published by the Jüdischer Verlag of the Suhrkamp Verlag in 1995 and was immediately translated into twelve languages. It became one of Switzerland’s bestselling books. Using images of utmost violence and paying unprecedented attention to detail, the author depicted his survival in the deathcamps of Majdanek and Auschwitz as a toddler and his arrival at a children’s home in Cracow after the end of the war, from where a charity organization brought him to Switzerland, a country where he would always feel like a stranger. The response to this harrowing Holocaust autobiography was effusive: “Since the publication of Anne Frank’s diary no account of the Holocaust from a child’s point of view has touched so many readers” (Lappin 10). Wilkomirski joined the association ‘Children of the Holocaust,’ whose spokesman he became. In this function he attended major events all over the world and presided over workshops where he helped other people revive their buried traumatic memories and Jewish roots. Three years after the publication of Fragments it was proven, with the help of a birth certificate and school reports, that its author had not spent his childhood in Eastern European death camps, but continuously in safe Switzerland. Bruno Grosjean, as was his real name, was born as an illegitimate child who spent some time in an orphanage before his mother offered him up for adoption. His adoptive parents, Mr. and Mrs. Dössecker, raised him in their well-to-do bourgeois home.7 When Bruno Dössecker, who became a clarinet teacher, had to undergo psychotherapy he met a therapist with whose help he ‘unearthed’ the memories of his supposedly repressed Jewish childhood. In the course of this search for his true identity, he created an extensive Holocaust archive and got in touch with two self-help groups, which, under the guidance of experienced therapists and survivors, regularly or-

7

The Wilkomirski affair has been researched and discussed in depth by Ganzfried (... alias Wilkomirski), Lappin (Der Mann mit zwei Köpfen) and Mächler (The Wilkomirski Affair).

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ganized trips to the death camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz. With this personal and material support he was finally able to articulate what he believed were, or what he passed off as, his long repressed traumatic childhood memories. He presented these memories, and this is important here, in the adjuratory rhetoric of authenticity. “My early childhood memories,” he insists on the first pages of his book, “are planted, first and foremost, in exact snapshots of my photographic memory and in the feelings imprinted in them, and the physical sensations” (4). He claims that the fragments of his memories were literally burnt into his childhood memory and that they therefore defy the logic of the grown up. When describing the images of his childhood, he therefore has to abstain from “the orderly grain of grown-up life and escap[e] the laws of logic” (4). His task as a writer was to forget his present identity and perspective in order to make room for his authentic memories, which he claims to register in full and direct transparency. His memories, as he asserts, had remained untouched and encapsulated inside him for decades. After having suffered from the environment of a repressive silence, his Holocaust trauma finally resurfaced in the much more supportive context of the 1990s.8 The logic of his argument is not difficult to trace. On the one hand, it follows the model of victims of child abuse, a topic that hit the American media with full force in the early 1990s. Before they started to break the silence with the help of their psychotherapists, these victims had to repress their trauma for a long time in the repressive atmosphere of families and an un-empathetic society. On the other hand, it follows a theory of trauma – equally currant in the 1990s – that compares it to photographic images, which after having been exposed in the flashlight of terror were supposed to be faithfully retained and stored in the embodied memory from where, because of their affective

8

In the afterword to Fragments, he described his familial environment as a milieu of repressive silence, and thus picked up a topos of survivors who were confronted after the war with an indifferent society: “‘Children have no memories, children forget quickly, you must forget it all, it was just a bad dream.’ These were the words, endlessly repeated, that were used on me from my schooldays to erase my past and make me keep quiet. So for decades I was silent, but my memory could not be wiped clean” (153).

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charge, they resisted the processing into narratives and other modes of representation or communication. This theory, however, does not explain why he could suddenly translate his devastating emotional burden into a bestseller. How can we explain the stunning success of this forgery? One explanation lies in the specific timing, which created a perfect correspondence between the form of the reconstruction of the childhood trauma and a global public who welcomed this excruciating Holocaust testimony from the point of view of a small child. Another explanation lies in survivors’ responses which authenticated Wilkomirski’s ‘testimony.’ They confirmed that he had found the words for the horror they had experienced. Wilkomirski, who now lives a secluded life in the Swiss canton of Thurgau, may have experienced his change of identity with subjective sincerity. He certainly framed it in the rhetoric of authenticity. What he could not guard against, however, was the external verification of his text with the evidence of bureaucratic records. In his case, the inner evidence clashed with the outer evidence, unmasking Wilkomirski/Dössecker as a hoax. Since he did not write fiction but an autobiography and a Holocaust testimony on top of that, the question of whether his text was based on a true or invented story was far from trivial. When Suhrkamp, his publishing house, asked him to comment on the veracity of his memories, his flowery statement was: “Legally accredited truth is one thing – the truth of a life another” (Fragments 154). What this statement really showed was his defiant attitude as a victim that kept complaining about an identity forced upon him in Switzerland, which was not really his own. He even threatened to take legal steps to make up for this injustice. In the meantime, a lawsuit had been filed – but not by Wilkomirski. One of his readers sued the writer for having acquired his pity by false pretences.9 That was the official end of his career as a writer. When he could no longer pass himself off as a Holocaust witness, some critics praised him as a sig-

9

In 2000, Manfred Kuhn, a lawyer from Uster in Switzerland, pressed criminal charges against Wilkomirski, accusing him of organized fraud. His highly original explanation was that as a reader he saw himself conned out his money spent on the book as well as the time spent on reading it, given that his empathy had been elicited by fraudulent activity.

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nificant literary writer, while others diagnosed him as a pathological fraud. Pathological fraudulence is motivated by an aberrant “striving for prestige and recognition.” This “insatiable desire for selfaggrandisement” is often connected to an “uncommonly lively activity of the imagination, at times highly original, full of vivid ideas and visualized thoughts, at times derived, following external stimulation from novels or the cinema” (Stoffels 167; my translation). There are interesting parallels between the two case studies. Dösseker/Wilkomirski shared his confabulations not only with his therapist, but also with the public. The images which he conjured up in his book were received so positively because they were taken from the arsenal of the film industry and hit the relevant cultural stereotypes. Ruth Klüger once defined “kitsch” as the perfect fit between a representation of something and the audience’s expectations (52-67). Similar things can be said about Belaney/Grey Owl: he also made himself available as a projection screen for the wishes and stereotypes of the public. His persuasive impact was correlated to the extent to which his own role-playing was in line with the imaginations of the others: What is decisive here is that the fake often appears to be more authentic than the real, because right from the outset it has been calibrated and styled to match the important stereotypes, thereby creating an unmistakable effect of recognisability. Similarly to Wilkomirski’s representation of the atrocities of the Holocaust, Grey Owl simply seems more ‘real’ than any other Native American, because he evokes conventional concepts of authenticity, authentic behaviour and writing.10

The same logic applies to the representation of folklore by the tourism industry, which is only deemed authentic when it is perfectly in tune with our pre-conceived expectations. Grey Owl’s case, however, differs significantly from that of the Swiss clarinetist. While Wilkomirski disappeared from the public eye, Grey Owl has had a continuous come back ever since the 1970s, most notably since the 1990s. His life achievement has been rediscovered over the last two decades, after our concepts of identity and authentici-

10 Caroline Rosenthal. Letter to the author. 26 October 2008.

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ty have changed. This reflects a certain liberalization of the cultural value of authenticity and at the same time a partial revision of Western exceptionalism. Although he was also unmasked by a birth certificate, it seems much more problematic to retrospectively discredit his real life, covering the years 1906-1938, as a forgery. While Wilkomirski invented in his memoir a life that he had never lived, Belaney actually ‘converted’ from a European to a North American Indian. He did not only reconstruct his identity but also lived the life for which he then became famous. The external evidence that eventually laid bare his real identity adds complexity to his story but can hardly undo what he has practiced and performed under a false pretext. The Indians, who lack the tradition and value of authenticity, therefore had a hard time understanding the way in which the language of fraud and deceit was applied in this instance. While Wilkomirski only imagined the trauma of the holocaust, Archie Belaney transformed his life’s dream into reality.

W ORKS C ITED Assmann, Jan. The Price of Monotheism. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2010. Bach, Susanne. Theatralität und Authentizität zwischen Viktorianismus und Moderne: Romane von Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde und Wilkie Collins. Tübingen: Narr, 2006. Ganzfried, Daniel. … alias Wilkomirski. Die Holocaust Travestie: Enthüllung und Dokumentation eines literarischen Skandals. Berlin: Jüdische Verlagsanstalt, 2002. Gide, André. L’immoraliste. Paris: Mercure de France, 1930. Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714. London: Routledge Classics, 2002. Klüger, Ruth. Gelesene Wirklichkeit: Fakten und Fiktionen in der Literatur. Göttingen: Wallstein. Lappin, Elena. Der Mann mit zwei Köpfen. Zürich: Chronos, 2000. Mächler, Stefan. The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth. Trans. John E. Woods. London: Picador, 2001. Owl, Grey. Pilgrims of the Wild. London: L. Dickson, 1934.

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Plato. Parmenides. Trans. Mary L. Gill and Paul Ryan. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1996. —. Phaedrus. Trans. Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002 (repr. 2009). Riezler, Kurt. Parmenides. Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1934. Rosenthal, Caroline. “Impostors and Wannabes in the Work of Thomas King.” Thomas King: Works and Impact. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011 (in print). Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006. Smith, Donald B. From the Land of Shadows: The Making of Grey Owl. Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1990. Stoffels, Hans. “Das Trauma als Faszinosum: Zur Psycho(patho-)logie von Pseudoerinnerungen und Pseudo-identität.” Das WilkomirskiSyndrom: Eingebildete Erinnerungen oder Von der Sehnsucht, Opfer zu sein. Ed. Irene Dieckmann and Julius H. Schoeps. Zürich: Pendo, 2002. 157-79. Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authority. London: Oxford UP, 1974. Wilkomirski, Binjamin. Fragments: Memories of a Childhood. Trans. Carol B. Janeway. London: Picador, 1996.

The Ambiguousness of the Authentic Authenticity between Reference, Fictionality and Fake in Modern and Contemporary Art S USANNE K NALLER

In 1588 the theologian William Whitaker defines, in his postReformation text Disputation on Holy Scripture, against the Papists, especially Bellarmine and Stapleton, “authentic” as that “which is sufficient to itself, which commends, sustains, proves itself, and hath credit and authority from itself” (332). In this exposition, which considers the Church’s authority to certify the authenticity of the Holy Scriptures, one already finds an essential feature of the treatment of the concept of authenticity, its autological structure, which, four hundred years later, Jonathan Culler still describes as a basic feature. The theologian can transcend questions of authentication and authority – that is, the questions of who defines authenticity and how – by relying on a metaphysical conception of self-defining truth: the Holy Writ is God’s Word. For Culler, who cannot build on such authority, modern authenticity is marked by a dilemma, by the paradoxical situation “that to be experienced as authentic it must be marked as authentic, but when it is marked as authentic it is mediated, a sign of itself, and hence not authentic in the sense of unspoiled” (130). One could also add to “unspoiled” the senses of being genuine, truthful [eigentlich], undisguised, unadulterated. This process between hetero-certification and auto-validity, which always determines the conception of authen-

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ticity, is also expressed in the definition of authenticity put forth by Jan Berg: Authenticity can be understood as an extrapolation of the old, metaphysical truth, relic of incontrovertible omnipotence, majesty and holiness. But authenticity can also be seen as a specifically modern figure of truth, a compensatory one which, in modernity, has moved in to fill the vacuum created by the Enlightenment and its emptying of the world of gods. Authenticity, finally, can be understood as an effect, a result of authenticating mode/techniques of representation [...]. (70)

Inherent to the concept is a representative and referential as well as a performative and reflexive moment. Authenticity is universal, individual and rhetoric at the same time. This is shown in the success story that authenticity has enjoyed since the second half of the twentieth century, a success grounded in its combining of empirical, evaluative and normative elements. Theodor W. Adorno is the first to describe consistently how the notion of authenticity, as a concept of validity and of value, mediates between the empirical, form, and transcendence: “It [authenticity] is supposed to be the nature of works, which gives them an objective obligation that transcends the randomness of merely subjective expression and simultaneously also authenticates socially” (127; my translation).1 In the field of modern artistic authenticity, the referential and empirical components of meaning that have determined the concept from the beginning (certification via origin, author or belongingness) are perpetuated in terms of aesthetic value. An artistic object can be authenticated when it is not adulterated, when it can be ascribed to a specific style of a period, a specific technique, or when it properly adheres to certain qualitative criteria. Beyond that, artistic authenticity can be connected to an unadulterated will to art and a truthful creation based on integrity. Subsequently, the recursive certificatory relation-

1

“Es [Authentizität] soll der Charakter von Werken sein, der ihnen ein objektiv Verpflichtendes, über die Zufälligkeit des bloß subjektiven Ausdrucks Hinausreichendes, zugleich auch gesellschaftlich Verbürgtes verleiht.”

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ship between artist/author (creator) and work leads beyond the demonstrability of a determinate origin to become a normative criterion, which presupposes an artistic subject upon whom the task of (artistic) self-realization and originality is incumbent. To take an example from music: “The most important legacy of the historical performance movement may be those performances that attain authenticity in the deepest sense: that of conviction, self-knowledge, spontaneity, and emotional honesty” (Sherman 169). Authenticity is moreover employed as an ontological concept to determine the difference between art and non-art. Concepts such as ‘original’ and ‘truthful’ are then connected with the meanings of authenticity that remain valid into the twentieth century (authorship, adherence to tradition, genuineness) in order to procure a ‘universal’ validity for the artwork and the artist against the background of elusive generalities, reproductive media, and shifting or eradicated medial boundaries between art and non-art. This remains the case up to today: Thereby the notion of authenticity is in a very broad and basic sense understood to be the defining criterion of an art that is authentic and unadulterated in the fact that it differs from non-art. […] The formula ‘authenticity of the aesthetic’ here rather refers to the aesthetic validity claim itself. (Ostermann 11; my translation)2

At the bottom of this normativity thus lies the differential relationship, constitutive of a modern concept of art, between authenticity and inauthenticity. The constructedness of the same is recognized by Umberto Eco, who notes that every conception of authentic art as something irreproducible and singular is legitimized through “authorial authenticity” (“autenticità autoriale”) and presupposes an abstract and conceptual notion of truth. The actual problem thus rests not in determining the falsity of the falsified object but rather the authenticity of the authentic

2

“Der Begriff der Authentizität wird dabei in einem sehr weiten und grundlegenden Sinne als das entscheidende Kriterium einer Kunst verstanden, die darin echt und unverfälscht ist, dass sie sich von Nichtkunst unterscheidet. [...] Die Formel ‘Authentizität des Ästhetischen’ meint hier vielmehr den ästhetischen Geltungsanspruch selbst.”

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object – “But if we thought that authenticity means truth, then it is good to remember that this truth, like all those which comfort us, is still largely conjectural” (Eco 191; my translation, emphasis added).3 The development of the conception of authenticity in art is closely connected to the conceptual series original/falsification/genuine/false/ fake with which empirical demonstrabilities as well as normative determinations (like originality) are designated and which themselves refer back to instances of authorization such as author/artist and work. At the same time, it must not be overlooked that these categories of authentication gain validity in reciprocal processes of self- and heteroreferentialization. Authenticity always presupposes a recursive dynamic between subject and object and is persistently renewed performatively. The following discussion draws on art-theoretical premises and artistic poetics to show that the art of the twentieth century in various aesthetic programmes bears out the tension between representation and performativity, referentiality and autology inscribed in the concept of authenticity. By making use of the conceptual series original/falsification/genuine/false/fake, it can be shown how conceptions of authenticity function to support normative and non-normative concepts of art as well as contribute to the specification of the criteria whereby art and non-art are distinguished from one another. I will start by way of example with the programmes of realism and photography that have given rise to the modern concept of authenticity since the nineteenth century as well as more recent artistic approaches.

E MPIRICISM

AND

R EFERENTIALITY

A first step towards the establishment of a far-reaching modern concept of authenticity is made possible by the new definition of the hetero-referential components within the artistic process as far as the work and its producer are concerned (Knaller, Ein Wort aus der Fremde 70). With realism and the invention of photography, authen-

3

“Ma se ritenevamo che autenticità volesse dire verità, è bene ricordare che anche questa verità, come tutte quelle che ci confortano, è sempre ampiamente congetturale.”

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ticity becomes an essential artistic category. The photographic image plays a crucial role therein, insofar as it points to the authenticity of the object and, more consequentially than in realism, to subjectobjectivity as well.4 The idea of a gaze that is rendered objective through the camera, as well as the idea of the object as the reproduction of a given, imply the conception of a procedure of authentication. In photography, the producer of the image may disappear more radically behind the camera than the author of naturalistic literature within the text. The exactitude of photographic representation opens up a previously invisible world and displays that which is otherwise not perceived. In doing so, the photographic image reformulates the idea of the imitation of nature and gives romantic fantasies of immediacy a positivistic turn. It thereby confirms a reality independent of representation and perception: the photograph is the perfect copy of the object, even more, the object can depict itself as the picture generates itself. Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (1844-1846) is based on the concept of photographic self-depiction of nature. However, photography simultaneously leads to a medial reflexivity and fosters an awareness of worldand subject-relations as perceptions of self and other in an imageconstituting process. As Wolfgang Kemp notes, there has been a displacement since the mid-nineteenth century from imitation of nature to an imitation of seeing: Since the Age of Renaissance painting has itself established as a more or less systematic pairing of objectivity and subjectivity. With all the care for perspective, it was not intended to reproduce seeing. In the nineteenth century, under the sway of scientific thinking, in consequence of new demands on the Arts and as a result of radical tendencies toward subjectivization, in short, for the most varied reasons, this basic attitude changed: Now one no longer wants to give something to be seen, but instead wants to give the seeing itself (Kemp 20; my translation).5

4

The relationship between realism and photography has already been extensively examined, see the studies by Gerhard Plumpe and Irene Albers. On photographic objectivity, see Daston/Gallison.

5

“Seit der Renaissance hatte sich die Malerei als eine mehr oder minder systematische Paarung aus Objektivität und Subjektivität etabliert; bei al-

56 | SUSANNE KNALLER

The photographer faces reality and its pictures and potential pictures respectively as he faces his own perception. Oliver Wendell Holmes for instance recognizes a consequential change of the term of reference: “Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it” (Holmes qtd. in Busch 505; my translation).6 This development becomes evident in David Brewster and Hermann von Helmholtz, who also describe the stereoscope and photography respectively as subjective constructions, which are based on physiological (sense) and rational-constructive fundamentals. This is where, at the beginning of the twentieth century, one of the basics for the determination of art photography lies. Thus, the empirical approaches of physiological and psychological theories of perception introduce a medial construct dimension with the terms of experience (and sensation respectively) and perception. This construct dimension is consistently adopted by the twentieth-century avant-gardes. They understand photography to be an abstraction of visual and spatial experiences (Bauhaus, Surrealism). The new devices and their images connect questions of mimesis with the consciousness of materiality and perception of the objects. As a representation of seeing, photography sets into motion a modern development of the image, whereby self- and hetero-determinations are newly reconfigured with repercussions for other media as well. This constructive dynamic of modern image-forms is related to the concept of authenticity insofar as the moments of performativity and formation are constitutive as are those of individual perspective and objectifying certification. With the concept of authenticity it becomes clear that conceptions of self- and hetero-perception stand in a recip-

ler Pflege der Perspektive wollte man kaum das Sehen reproduzieren. Im 19. Jahrhundert, unter der Herrschaft naturwissenschaftlichen Denkens, in Folge neuer Anforderungen an die Kunst, als Ergebnis radikaler Subjektivierungstendenzen, aus den verschiedensten Gründen also ändert sich diese Grundeinstellung: Jetzt will man nicht mehr zu sehen geben, sondern das Sehen geben.” 6

Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Stereoscope and the Stereograph (1859).

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rocal relationship between experience, performativity and certification. Art, from the 1960s on, makes this clear with its medial play between situations in real spaces, documentation of these situations and experiences with the same. At the present time and its primacy of visuality and the media-awareness of human beings in technologically developed cultural worlds in the most quotidian activities, this relation becomes more and more a playful performance of medial arrangements and aesthetic-communicative processes. This occurs in art and in mass media, as seen, for example, in the formats of reality television. More recent photography can also serve as an example of the performative aspects of authenticity and referentiality for it refuses to relinquish a poetics of self-reflection about its status as image even when it resumes a radical dependence on referentiality. Since the second half of the 1980s, photography, in its advanced forms, is both realistic and media-reflexive. It situates itself between referentiality and self-reflexivity, perception and iconicity. Characteristic thereof is, for example, the exhibition project Un’altra oggettività/Another Objectivity, in which, at first, descriptive, objective images are advocated. Artists such as Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer insist therefore on a descriptive and verifiable reference to a motif (or subject) whose nature is heterogeneous to the image – that is to say, precisely, objective. And the photographic treatment of this subject does not exhaust itself in a process of auto-reflexivity according to the standard logic of analytic and conceptual art. (Chevrier/Lingwood 34)

Nevertheless, the reflexive form of photography remains valid for the proponents of objectivity: “[P]hotographic experience predicated on recording and objectivity but which is attained in the specificity of the image as object and picture rather than in the specificity of the medium itself. […] [A]ll representation, even photographic, is fiction and artifice [...]” (ibid. 33). The image is not simply the trace of an experience or situation but rather constitutes a new objectivity as image – “the reality of the image as picture” (ibid. 43). A similar tendency in dealing with the poetics of authenticity may be found in artistic documentary films since the 1980s. Here, an au-

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thentication of the material, which is the basis of the documentary, likewise takes place performatively: what is held onto is both the real as well as the event of perception, or rather the gesture of the effort itself (Nichols 45).7 The performative documentary challenges a disembodied, measuring and ‘ethnographically’ observing gaze as much as it challenges realistic referentiality, or rather the pretences of ‘how it really is’ and ‘how it really happened.’ Gaze, narration, description and chronicle are not only exhibited self-reflexively in order, as in the reflexive ‘film within the film,’ to pay lip service to a representative realism but rather enter into a multi- and hetero-perspectival context in which referentiality is newly conceived: referentiality is now understood as a discursive and ideologically always shifting spatial and temporal arrangement out of which neither those filming nor that which is filmed can retreat to the calm standstill of the one explanatory or referential ground.8

F ALSIFICATION

AND

F ORGERY

Due to the demonstrated spectrum of authenticity between the categories of attribution [Zuschreibungsskategorie] and validity [Geltungskategorie] and its recursive reflexivity any contribution of authentic and inauthentic remains ambiguous. Indicative of this ambiguousness

7

The concept of the ‘performing documentary’ was coined in 1994 by the film theorist Bill Nichols. The new term was Nichols’s reaction to documentary films such as A Song of Ceylon (1985, Laleen Jayamanne) and Tongues Untied (1989, Marlon Riggs). These films mix narration and chronicle as much as facts and fiction.

8

See Knaller, “Autobiographie und Realismus” 70f. and also Susanne Neubauer: “[T]here is a tendency in current documentary art practice to juxtapose different media evincing different degrees of authenticity in ‘documentary-essayistic’ image-text-hybrids. This in no way negatively connotated hybridization is a sophisticated system of reading instructions and viewer integration, in which new sites for personal experience emerge. The documentary image is central, but in comparison to the practice of the sixties and seventies its importance has diminished” (21).

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is the fact that a strict opposition between falsification, or forgery, copy and authenticity does not hold up to a more exacting conceptualhistorical and application-oriented analysis. Umberto Eco’s claims about the relativity of the concepts of falsification and authenticity further support this: Thus a semiotic approach to forgeries reveals the weak theoretical basis of our criteria for making judgements on authenticity. [...] Any reflection on objects which have, more generally speaking, been forged should, in any case, give us an indication of how hazardous our general criteria of identity are and that concepts such as truth and falsity, authentic and fake, identity and difference define each other mutually and in circular ways. (Eco, I limiti dell’interpretazione 19-20; my translation)9

Nevertheless, Eco accepts as a valid characteristic of modern culture the assumption that authenticity is formed through historical originality (reference) and authorial originality (self-authentication), whereby the object is the autological sign of its own origin (Eco, “Del falso e dell’autentico” 16). For this reason, forms of authentication serve to mark the priority of an original, self-authenticated object over and against the imitated/copied object. This combination of authenticity as a self-referential (artistic) truth and authentication as an authoritarian determination can also be observed in the modern conception of the art expert or connoisseur (Knaller, Ein Wort aus der Fremde 102). In contrast to pre-modern models of authority, this individual is distinguished by a subjectively acquired and represented expertise, which makes it possible to locate artistic works and objects historically and determine their creator. A precondition for this is the assumption that, on the side of the artist, there is an “authoritorial authenticity” (“autenticità autoriale”), an ir-

9

“Così, un approccio semiotico ai falsi mostra quanto sono deboli teoricamente i nostri criteri per decidere dell’autenticità. […] La riflessione su questi oggetti più comunemente contraffatti dovrebbe, comunque, dirci quanto sono azzardati i nostri criteri generali per l’identità e quanto concetti come Verità e Falsità, Autentico e Falso, Identità e Differenza si definiscano circolarmente a vicenda.”

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reproducible, singular signature that makes the work one of art and a unique thing that can be recognized by the expert (Eco, I limiti dell’interpretazione 168). Even today, individual expertise is claimed where technology and documents are not sufficient to recognize a work as a forgery (Sutton 30). The extent to which the idea of authentication of an original as a result of expertise and the expert’s discerning eye perpetuates the aesthetics of the eighteenth century along with its premises about the particularity of aesthetic perception is shown by the most often discussed theoretical problematic case in the discourse of falsification, the question of the perfect forgery (Knaller, Ein Wort aus der Fremde 103). Several disputes on this case show how empirically and rationally scientific arguments of demonstrability are voided in favour of ontological determinations and individually argued attributions. I would like to discuss how the question of the perfect forgery also implies the distinction between art and non-art by turning to Nelson Goodman and Arthur C. Danto. Goodman exemplifies the problem as a question of art’s ontological determination. Danto asks the question in the context of contemporary art since Andy Warhol. Nelson Goodman devotes himself to the question of the perfect forgery in a much-discussed chapter of Languages of Art. His interest rests in defending a difference between the original and the copy by thematizing the basic problem of art’s particularity inherent to the discussions about falsification. For Goodman, the aesthetic difference between a perfect forgery and the original is a fundamental problem of art and its institutions, the clarification of which is expected of philosophers of art. Here, it could be replied that the difference is first regulated institutionally: by the market, by established discourses about art, by scholarship and by law. But for Goodman the basis for every determination is the aesthetic experience of perception, which, for the discursive and institutional regulations, is to be presupposed. Goodman’s initial question, whether there can be any aesthetic difference between two pictures by merely looking at them (101), is answered by maintaining that seeing has no strictly fixed form, but is rather dependent on the history and context of art and individual reception. In other words, despite the knowledge that the two indistinguishable images represent an original and a copy respectively and even if no dif-

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ference between the two can be discerned by the naked eye, this does not mean that the indistinguishability between original and copy has to last forever. It fades for instance with cognitive gain. Goodman’s definition of forgery as “a work of art [that] is an object falsely purporting to have the history of production requisite for the (or an) original of the work” (122) – to which Radnóti adds the important clause, “[B]oth the history of production, as well as the entire subsequent general historical fate” (116, emphasis in the original) – also expresses at once the historicity of the problem of forgery and exposes the narrativization of discourses of value and attribution. The question of authenticity can turn into a detective story, in the wake of which a great potential for fictionalization is opened up. If just one of the narrative components is changed, a new story can emerge, which may signal the end of a formerly great painting. With that, the problem of originality and authorship shifts to a more broadly construed concept of authenticity. For if, on the one hand, a painting that has been exposed as a forgery falls ‘into pieces’ before a knowledgeable curator and if, on the other, a renowned art expert refuses to recognize a probably forged Mondrian as fake, because the painting contains everything that he expects of great art generally as well as of a Mondrian specifically, then there can be no more talk of strictly historical, empirical, or phenomenological criteria for originality (Gibson 122). With reference to authenticity, the dissolvability of the dividing line between original and forgery is hidden in numerous ways in twentieth-century discussions about forgery. One of them is the de-historicization of the notion of originality. As a consequence, original and copy are often discussed without considering artistic developments. Nelson Goodman’s efforts are characteristic of this de-historicization of the categories of forgery, namely original and copy. As late as 1968 and despite his demand for contextualization (and narrativization), Goodman discusses the question of forgery without taking into consideration those contemporary developments in media and art that radically challenge traditional conceptions of originality.10

10 The extent to which also the art expert can hold on to a long-standing dividing line between original and copy is demonstrated by Francis V.

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In contrast to Goodman, Arthur C. Danto takes the most important innovations in art since Duchamps’s ready-mades, Pop Art, Conceptual Art and Minimal Art as the starting point of his inquiry. He therefore neither presumes a creative genius nor a closed character of the work of art [geschlossenen Werkcharakter] that demands originality. At a time when the copy/reproduction of everyday items and the use of industrially produced material admit of art, for Danto the artistic character of works can no longer lie in the perceptual but rather only in the conceptual (Danto 44). Danto tells the following story: shortly before his death, Picasso painted a tie blue in the style typical of New York artists during the 1950s, the paint-and-brushstroke, which yields a soft, unified colouration. At an exhibition, a father claims that his child is equally capable of painting Le cravat in this way. The child proceeds to paint a tie in the same paint-and-brushstroke style. At the same time, a coup à la Van Meegeren takes place. A forger invents a blue tie. An art dealer confuses all this with the result that the child’s tie hangs in the Palais des Beaux Arts, Picasso refuses to acknowledge his tie as authentic, and signs the forgery; the original lies with Van Meegeren’s Christus in Emmaeus in a cigar box full of supposed wooden pieces of Christ’s cross (ibid. 40). In spite of the indissoluble indistinguishability between the visual and the perceptual, for Danto only Picasso’s tie is the work of art. This is due to its aesthetic conceptuality and its offer of meaning, which are the result of the artist’s historical and aesthetic reflection (ibid. 51). Although Danto does not relinquish the conceptual distinction, he does challenge the strict separation between original and copy and introduces the (much worn) example of Borges’s Pierre Menard, who

O’Connor: “It used to be that an ‘original’ work of art was understood to have been created by the artist, its originality proved with documents, signatures, and the informed opinion of experts. […] More recently, there has been a disturbing tendency to denigrate the authority of both artist and expert, to confuse truth with dogma, and to treat all created objects as ‘texts’ which can be used as pretexts for new texts based on the free associations of their relativistic authors. […] Taken to extremes, such a point of view denies the objectivity of historical truth, and would deem a fake to be as culturally significant as an authentic object” (4).

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copies Don Quixote word for word and yet creates a work that stands on its own and can no longer be confused with Cervantes’s because space and time, that is, reception and context, grant the text in each case its own identity. Moreover, Cervantes’s tale is inferior to Menard’s (Borges 57). As in the example of the tie, the specifically artistic character of Menard’s Quixote is not found in the material but rather in the conceptual aspect. Material, form, style, motifs may remain the same, but their function is dependent on the possibilities offered up by the relevant epistemes and discourses about art (Danto 51). For this reason, the copy cannot simply be explained in terms of the opposition between authenticity and reproduction. The creative and productive aspect of the copy or repetition is not excluded in more recent discussions about falsification, and several exhibition projects in recent decades have likewise taken up the productive effects of copy and forgery. The objects in the Museo dei Musei (1988) are, according to Luccio Passetto, works that are neither genuine (vero) nor fake (falso). They are rather authentic copies that produce a theatrical effect (11-12). In the exhibit’s catalogue, Daniel Arasse describes how the copy leads beyond the apparently perceptive enjoyment of the object to reflection about its fetishistic relationship to the original, which here too is defined as a “theatre of painting” (“teatro di pittura”) (19-22). The exhibition Originale, echt, falsch (Originals, real, fake) responds to Duchamps’s claim that everything which is declared to be art becomes art with a concept of “authenticity derived from the intellectual and conceptual, which no longer needs to be bound to manual production” (Deecke 12-37; my translation).11 The exhibition Fake (1987), curated by William Olander, and the accompanying catalogue Fake: A Meditation on Authenticity is based on the repercussions of Appropriation Art of the 1970s and 80s. This was presented to the public for the first time with Pictures, an exhibition curated by Douglas Crimp in Artists Space, which, along with Troy Brauntuch, displayed the rephotographs of Sherrie Levine. The group exhibition for the opening of the New York gallery Metro Pictures in 1980, with Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, also played an

11 “sich aus dem Gedanklichen und Konzeptuellen herleitenden Authentizität, die nicht mehr an die handwerkliche Herstellung gebunden sein muss”

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influential role.12 In the work of artists such as Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, the concept of the image, the institutions of art and the alliance between the concepts of author and originality are dissolved through the privileging of reproductive media such as photography. This is decisively anti-modernistic action that works artistically with referentiality (through rephotographs of Walker Evans’s realistic depictions of poverty from the 1930s), media and institutions (through rephotographs of advertising images) and discourses of identity (through the performance of role-images in fictitious cinematographic stills). Sigmar Polke and Achim Duchow’s painting-cycle Original + Fälschung (1974), a reproduction of famous paintings in which nine of the 24 pictures stem from images stolen from Interpol files, is also worth mentioning in this context (Römer 44). It is not only art (especially that of Marcel Duchamp, the Pop Art of the 1960s, the Appropriation Art in the 1970s and 1980s) that has an influence on the (re)formulations of original and copy. Rosalind Krauss, for example, participates in the debate about originality in 1986 with the Symposium Multiples without Originals: The Challenge to Art History of the “Copy”. But with an eye towards more recent theories, she changes the title to Originality as Repetition. Krauss wants to rethink the theory of falsification, which has been compelled by the “challenge of the copy” to differentiate more and more exactingly between the original (also in terms of creation) and copy (without authorial origin), with regard to the fact that at no time was this difference a solid one and further that authorial theories of origin were rejected by artists themselves (“Originality as Repetition” 36). Radnóti, whose perspective is more related to tradition, recognizes in the copy a statement about the canon, which can be deconstructed or affirmed through repetition – such as through Marcel Duchamp’s and Andy Warhol’s Mona Lisas for example (83-84). He thus understands the productive processuality of the copy as reception. Finally, with the concept of the fake, a term has been established with which it is possible to broaden the juristically demarcated semantics of falsification, or

12 The two exhibits are continuously confused with one another, or Pictures is attributed to artists who did not exhibit anything. Appropriation is being perpetuated in the historical construction here.

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forgery, by means of an aesthetic-theoretical concept, which emerges within the semantic field of the copy (Römer 85). As becomes clear in this overview of the discourse of falsification, Eco’s “autenticità autoriale,” the concept of the singular, selfdetermined, autonomous work of art, is highly unstable. Original and copy are fused in the various periods of art history very differently (see Knaller, Wort aus der Fremde 116-25). The separation between original and copy, authentic and inauthentic, proves to be a categorical distinction that is characteristic of strictly modern approaches; but it cannot always be clearly drawn. The application of the concepts also underlies a polysemy. Because of this, falsification itself also has a duly changing meaning. The concept of falsification, like that of reproduction, thus presents a “challenge” to art – in the double sense of a threat to the status quo (a threat that is supposed to be hindered by more and more efficient methods) and of chance (of the productive possibilities of copy and falsification), as Rosalind Krauss maintains (35). Because of this, one can only ascertain the reciprocal relationship of falsification, copy, repetition and original from a perspective that attends to both – discourses on art and artistic productions (Margolis 165, 171). Indeed, an approach is necessary that – as Hans Ulrich Reck demands – pays heed to changes in media: Only the problematization of the concept of originals and the indistinguishability of unique-authentic and reproductively-copied, which was caused by digital media, forces the future of art history to go through pragmatic changes in regards to authenticity. Digital media, to the extent that they remain symbolic like all non-iconic systems of symbols, have a traditional reference that is nontechnically defined. Nevertheless, it is the technological definition – on an electronic basis – that is primarily decisive for the problem of authenticity. It entails a new form of cooperation that transcends the prevailing frame of action of the artist-individual (491; my translation).13

13 “Erst die durch die digitalen Medien bedingte Problematisierung des Begriffs des Originalen und die Ununterscheidbarkeit von einmalig-echt und reproduktiv-kopiert erzwingt für die Zukunft der Kunstgeschichte paradigmatische Änderungen im Hinblick auf das Authentische. Digitale Medien haben, insofern sie wie alle nicht-ikonischen Zeichensysteme immer

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Walter Benjamin’s analysis of new productive and receptive relations in modernity already drew attention to such changes in media in a lasting way. In Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Benjamin bases his considerations on an activity in process of reproduction that was always there and that reaches its climax of technical development with the invention of photography and film. After the demise of manual execution in the process of producing images and since the industrial reproduction of works of art in the nineteenth century, Benjamin observes how reproduction developed into an artistic procedure in the twentieth century (475). This development renders impossible a temporal classification in the sense of a history that belongs to the work itself, one that it inheres only by the power of its own singularity and genuineness: “Even in the case of the most supremely accomplished reproduction, one factor is absent: The hereand-now of the artwork – its unique existence in the location where it is found. […] The here-and-now of the original constitutes the notion of its authenticity” (ibid.; my translation).14 What is lost is also the aura, which promises proximity and distance, singularity and duration (i.e. tradition and a place in the canon), whereas reproduction points to the transitory and repeatable characteristics of the work of art (ibid. 479). For Benjamin, singularity and genuineness adhere to the concept of the authentic, which replaces the cultic value of art ever since its emancipation from the ritual and its secularization during the Renaissance: [T]he concept of genuineness never ceases to go beyond the attribution of the authentic. (This is particularly evident with the collector, who always retains

symbolisch sind, einen nicht-technisch definierten traditionellen Bezug. Jedoch ist erst die technologische Definition – auf elektronischer Basis – für das Problem der Authentizität entscheidend. Sie bedingt eine neuartige Kooperation, die den bisherigen Handlungsrahmen des Künstlerindividuums überschreitet.” 14 “Noch bei der höchstvollendeten Reproduktion fällt eines aus: das Hier und Jetzt des Kunstwerks – sein einmaliges Dasein an dem Orte, an dem es sich befindet. [...] Das Hier und Jetzt des Originals macht den Begriff seiner Echtheit aus.”

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something of the fetish servant and who, through his possession of the work of art, shares its cultic power.) Notwithstanding the above, the function of the concept of authenticity remains unambiguous in art contemplation: with the secularization of art authenticity takes the position of the cult value. (ibid. 481; my translation)15

With this conceptual shift, Benjamin also recognizes the change in the application and function of art within the social and economic context: authenticity replaces not only the religiously based cultic value but also constitutes its value for exhibition. The here and now, or rather the surplus value of the original, can also, contra Benjamin’s estimation, be attributed to originals without an original or reproductions without an original such as ready-mades, multiplicities, rephotographs etc.16 This is also shown by Benjamin Buchloh in a reply to Peter Bürger’s thesis that the neo-avant-gardes are lacking the originality of the historical avant-gardes because they only copy the models of the former. The question is rather “whether it might not be precisely the process of repetition which constitutes the specific historical ‘meaning’ and ‘authenticity’ of the art production of the neo-avant-garde” (Buchloh 45). By means of the empirical ties of the authentic, the art of the avant-garde acquires time and tradition. Author, style and connoisseurship thereby constitute a stable constellation in the twentieth century: “A period style is a special form of coherence that cannot be fraudulently breached. The authenticity folded

15 “[D]er Begriff der Echtheit hört niemals auf, über den der authentischen Zuschreibung hinauszutendieren. (Das zeigt sich besonders deutlich am Sammler, der immer etwas vom Fetischdiener behält und durch seinen Besitz des Kunstwerks an dessen kultischer Kraft Anteil hat.) Unbeschadet dessen bleibt die Funktion des Begriffs des Authentischen in der Kunstbetrachtung eindeutig: mit der Säkularisierung der Kunst tritt die Authentizität an die Stelle des Kultwerts.” 16 Benjamin Buchloh expands the authenticity of origin by means of the metaphorics of the authenticity of art, when he claims that repetition can constitute the authenticity of a specific artistic direction (in this case, that of the neo-avant-gardes), independently of the “authentic moment of originality” (43, emphasis in the original).

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into the concept of style is a product of the way style is conceived as having been generated: that is, collectively and unconsciously” (Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde” 17, emphasis in the original). Reck points to the same relationship: “The guarantee for the guaranteed object as the authentic object must be reliable and credible. It must also provide an insight into the relationship to the original and secure the attributions. The final criteria will probably always be negotiated within the circle of experts” (Reck 492; my translation).17 As does Krauss from her poststructuralist perspective, Reck examines, in a semiotic and media-theoretical approach that takes into consideration more recent art, the traditional conceptions of artistic discourse as concepts of authenticity, without thereby relinquishing the concept of authenticity as a concept of attribution and value (ibid. 501). Categories of value, which ensure that artistic attributions can be made, congeal in the concept of authenticity, with which all of the essential aesthetic categories of specification, such as author, work, reception, context, are dealt and circumscribed discursively. For the theorist of American modernism Clement Greenberg, the authenticity of art is its historical authenticity: “Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is – among other things – continuity, and unthinkable without it. Lacking the past of art, and the need and compulsion to maintain its standards of excellence, Modernist art would lack both substance and justification” (Greenberg 93, emphasis in the original). The concept of authenticity retains its validity even when craftsmanship and creativity no longer constitute any basis for art. In spite of the delegation of manufacturing work from the artist to professionals and industry (Jeff Koons, for example, has an enormous workshop hall with numerous assistants in New York), the demand for the work and the author to be original is upheld. Minimalist artists, who have work done with industrial materials, reject the replications of their work which were put together for

17 “Die Bürgschaft für das Verbürgte als das Authentische muß zuverlässig sein, glaubwürdig, Einsicht in den Bezug zum Originären gewährleisten, Zuschreibungen sichern. Die endgültigen Kriterien werden wohl immer im Kreis der Experten ausgehandelt.”

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an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum at the beginning of the 1990s with the following argument: That neither the objects themselves nor the plans were sufficient to create replicas equal in value to the originals, because chance can unexpectedly change the appearance during production. Therefore the materiality of the individual work has significance and the necessary authenticity is only attributed by the artist (Tietjen 43; my translation).18

This ideational authority of the artist can be supplemented by the contextual authenticity of the convention, the attribution whereby a work is made into a work of art. Arthur C. Danto confronted the dilemma of art criticism in the face of an art that is no longer determined by external characteristics such as technical accomplishment, material and objects, and internal characteristics such as genre and style, in response to Andy Warhol’s exhibition of the Brillo Box in 1964. Given the perceptually indistinguishable difference between art and everyday objects, the philosopher is confronted with the previously neglected philosophical question about art, namely, what is it that constitutes art and how are completely identical objects to be distinguished in terms of art and non-art? This question stands in the same problematic context as the question about the falsification and the original: to devise a Brillo Box means nothing for the art market (although the designer was an artist who accepted the contract due to financial exigency), but to exhibit one may impart lasting renown. As Warhol’s artistic coup demonstrates, the story of the copy complements the original, the inauthentic that of the authentic. This dissolution of classifications is further radicalized in multi-media performances of situations and actions, as in Spoerri’s eating-actions, in which galleries are turned into restaurants. The work is a series of spe-

18 “dass weder die Objekte selbst noch die Pläne ausreichten, um den Originalen gleichwertige Repliken herzustellen, da bei der Produktion der Zufall das Erscheinungsbild unvorhergesehen verändern könne, damit die Materialität des einzelnen Werkes Bedeutung habe und sich die notwendige Authentizität deshalb allein vom Künstler zuschreiben lasse.”

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cific events, an “excerpt from a situation of direct day-to-day living”19 – and with that is neither original nor copy, nor is it falsifiable (Metzger 11; my translation). Art is actionism in all kinds of ways, a search for traces in everyday living, playing out patterns of actions and performing and documenting everyday situations (Schmidt-Wulffen 33). With that, I would like to return to the beginning of this essay, to the paradoxical structure of referentiality and autology. In the context of contemporary authenticity another look at the documentary as a form of referentiality can provide some concluding ideas. In the case of Chris Marker’s Japan film and documentation essay Sans Soleil, Michael Wetzel (2006) is likewise able to refer to the productive double-bind of authenticity. This is not about “authentisches Jenseits oder Irgendwo” – an authentic other world or somewhere but rather about “the strength residing in pictures as pictures, if indeed [...] images care about images” (54). Chris Marker (1986) describes the procedure thus: My friend Hayao Yamaneko has found a solution: if the images of the present do not change, to change the images of the past [...]. He showed me the fights of the sixties processed by his synthesizer. Images less dishonest, he says, with the conviction of a fanatic, than the ones you see on television. At least they pass for what they are, images, not the portable and compact form of a reality already become inaccessible. (262; my translation)20

Authenticity is thus a concept that does not abandon its paradoxical position between subjective legitimation and objective certification. In its reflexive self-dramatization, it becomes comprehensible as a polemic antithesis as well as a term of legitimation. Assuming that concepts of reality are important interactive acts originating in the physical and cognitive capacities and their organisation, authenticity may

19 “Ausschnitt aus einer Situation unmittelbaren Lebensvollzugs” 20 “Mon copain Hayao Yamaneko a trouvé une solution: si les images du présent ne changent pas, changer les images du passé […]. Il m’a montré les bagarres des Sixties traitées par son synthétiseur. Des images moins menteuses, dit-il avec la conviction des fanatiques, que celles que tu vois à la télévision. Au moins elles se donnent pour ce qu’elles sont, des images, pas la forme transportable et compacte d’une réalité déjà inaccessible.”

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be understood as positing and self-description, the observation of which can give insights into the rules of development, preservation and transformation of cultural systems. Authenticity is the result of a process of certification being held in a given place at a given time that has to be implemented over and over again without guarantee (Knaller, “Genealogie des ästhetischen Authentizitätsbegriffs” 32). The new artistic documentary film displays this programme of authenticity in its multi-layered splendour: an incident or a situation becomes an event to be availed of. It is a matter of setting it into an image or form that receives its factual and at the same time aesthetic credibility in the simultaneity of the reference to the situation giving rise to it and the reflection of this production. A documentation or documentary art thus presupposes authenticity to the extent that it “simultaneously constitutes the real and situates it in relation to other realities, makes it clear, and leaves it open to renewed statement” (Jongmanns 251; my translation). 21 Jean-François Chevrier has captured succinctly the potential of the documentary: “[T]he document provides facts and is a fact in itself” (48). Authenticity reveals itself here as a combination of representation and performativity, the poetological possibilities of which I would like to show in conclusion by means of an example of a real-life documentary. At the Documenta 11 in Kassel in 2002 the film Nunavut, Our Land (1994/95; released in 1999) by Zacharias Kanuk was shown, in which the life of an Igloolik family was displayed in such a ‘real’ way that many wondered what this documentation was doing at an art exhibition. But the project consisted of 13 half-hour episodes, which, conceived in the form of a Reality TV show, transported contemporaries back to the forms and standards of living of 1945. This film is more than a play with authenticity and fiction. On the one hand, it is a statement about the precarious situation of Inuit culture and language, which can only be preserved in the sense of an – I cite Culler once again – “unspoiled culture” by means of such archival undertakings, for younger people too. On the other hand, this interpretation is challenged by the film’s presentation, which displays single ep-

21 “simultan Reales konstituiert und es zu anderen Realien in Beziehung setzt, dies darlegt und zur erneuten Darlegung offen lässt.”

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isodes on different monitors simultaneously: what is thereby negated is the demand to access authentic life. Only the documentation can be displayed, not life. In the difference, recognized by Kitty Zijlman, between documenting and displaying life, a concept of authenticity is being articulated within the performative field, which takes referentiality as well as recursivity into consideration (104). For this reason, the expectation of an authentic reality is not a specifically anti-modern affect, as Norbert Bolz maintains, which, as it were, distinguishes itself against fake reality as a zone of genuineness (which itself would only be a false promise of the media) (101). Authenticity rather develops a field of presence, in which reality qua media reality, does not remain enclosed in a loop of incessant cross-referencing of images and signs.

W ORKS C ITED Adorno, Theodor W. “Wörter aus der Fremde.” Noten zur Literatur 2. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1961. 110-30. Albers, Irene. “Der Photograph der Erscheinungen: Emile Zolas Experimentalroman.” Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit: Fotografie in Kunst, Wissenschaft und Technologie. Ed. Peter Geimer. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2002. 211-51. —. Photographische Momente bei Claude Simon. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002. Arasse, Daniel. “Una perversa onestà.” Museo dei Musei. Ed. Paolo Piazzesi. Firenze: Condirene, 1988. “Authenticus.” Johann H. Zedler. Grosses vollständiges Universallexikon. 2 vols. 1732. Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1961. 2266. Benjamin, Walter. “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner Reproduzierbarkeit.” Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhäuser. Vol. 1.2. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 21974. 471-508. Berg, Jan. “Techniques of Media Authentication Centuries before the Invention of the ‘Documentary’.” Documentary Creations. Ed. Susanne Neubauer. Frankfurt a.M.: Revolver, 2005. 67-78. Bolz, Norbert. Blindflug mit Zuschauer. München: Fink, 2005.

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Borges, Jorge L. Ficciones. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1996. Buchloh, Benjamin. “The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde.” October 37 (1986): 41-52. Busch, Bernd. “Fotografie/Fotografisch.” Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden. Ed. Karlheinz Barck, Martin Fontius et al. Vol. 2. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001. 494-550. Chevrier, Jean-François. “Documentary, Document, Testimony ...” Documentary Now: Contemporary Strategies in Photography, Film and the Visual Arts. Rotterdam: Nai, 2005. 47-56. Chevrier, Jean-François, and James Lingwood, eds. Un’altra oggettività/Another Objectivity. Milano: Idea Books, 1989. Culler, Jonathan. “Semiotics of Tourism.” American Journal of Semiotics 1 (1981): 127-40. Danto, Arthur C. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981. Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. “Das Bild der Objektivität.” Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit: Fotografie in Kunst, Wissenschaft und Technologie. Ed. Peter Geimer. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2002. 29-99. Deecke, Thomas. “Originale, Echt, Falsch.” Originale, echt, falsch: Nachahmung, Kopie, Zitat, Aneignung, Fälschung der Gegenwartskunst. Ed. Thomas Deecke and Christian Köhler. Heidelberg: Umschau, 1999. Eco, Umberto. “Del falso e dell’autentico.” Museo dei Musei. Ed. Paolo Piazzesi. Firenze: Condirene, 1988. 13-18. —. I limiti dell’interpretazione. Milano: Bombiani, 1990. Gibson, Michael. “For the Love of Mondrian.” Art News 84.8 (1985): 121-22. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1968. Greenberg, Clement. “Modernist Painting.” The Collected Essays and Criticism. Ed. John O’Brian. Vol. 4. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. 85-93. Jongmanns, Georg. “Gute Zeiten, schlechte Zeiten: Das EchtzeitReal.” Authentizität als Darstellung. Ed. Jan Berg et al. Hildesheim: Universität Hildesheim, 1997. 250-71.

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Kemp, Wolfgang. Theorie der Fotografie, 1839-1912. Vol. 1. München: Schirmer, 1999. Knaller, Susanne. “Genealogie des ästhetischen Authentizitätsbegriffs.” Authentizität: Diskussion eines ästhetischen Begriffs. Ed. Susanne Knaller and Harro Müller. München: Fink, 2006. 17-35. —. Ein Wort aus der Fremde: Geschichte und Theorie des Begriffs Authentizität. Heidelberg: Winter, 2007. —. “Autobiografie und Realismus in der zeitgenössischen Kunst: Mit Beobachtungen zu Sophie Calle und zum künstlerischen Dokumentarfilm.” Realitätskonstruktionen in der zeitgenössischen Kultur: Beiträge zu Literatur, Kunst, Fotografie, Film und zum Alltagsleben. Ed. Susanne Knaller. Wien: Böhlau, 2008. 57-75. Krauss, Rosalind. “Originality as Repetition: Introduction.” October 37 (1986): 35-40. —. “The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition.” Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Ed. Brian Wallis. Boston: David R. Godine, 1991. 13-29. Margolis, Joseph. “Art, Forgery, and Authenticity.” The Forger’s Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Denis Dutton. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1983. 153-71. Marker, Chris. “Sans Soleil.” Traverses 28/29 (“Japon Fiction”). Paris: Edition du Centre George Pompidou, 1986. 256-66. Metzger, Reinhard. “Werk, Original und der Tod des Autors.” Original: Symposium Salzburger Kunstverein. Ed. Salzburger Kunstverein. Ostfildern: Cantz, 1995. 8-17. Neubauer, Susanne. “Terrain vague: Ambivalent Sites of Reflections in Current Documentary Art.” Documentary Creations. Ed. Susanne Neubauer. Frankfurt a.M.: Revolver, 2005. 9-23. Nichols, Bill. Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1994. Nunavut, Our Land. Dir. Zacharias Kanuk. Iglooik Isuma Productions. 1999. O’Connor, Francis V. “Authenticating the Attribution of Art: Connoisseurship and the Law in the Judging of Forgeries, Copies, and False Attributions.” The Expert versus the Object: Judging Fakes and False Attributions in the Visual Arts. Ed. Ronald D. Spencer. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. 4-27.

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Ostermann, Eberhard. Die Authentizität des Ästhetischen: Studien zur ästhetischen Transformation der Rhetorik. München: Fink, 1999. Passetto, Lucio. “Se vi pare, così è.” Museo dei Musei. Ed. Paolo Piazzesi. Firenze: Condirene, 1988. Plumpe, Gerhard. Der tote Blick: Zum Diskurs der Photographie in der Zeit des Realismus. München: Fink, 1990. Radnóti, Sándor. The Fake: Forgery and Its Place in Art. Trans. Ervin Dunaie. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. Reck, Hans-Ulrich. Kunst als Medientheorie: Vom Zeichen zur Handlung. München: Fink, 2003. Römer, Stefan. Künstlerische Strategien des Fake: Kritik von Original und Fälschung. Köln: Dumont, 2001. Schmidt-Wulffen, Stephan. “‘Ursprung: Über das Verschwinden einer Idee.” Original: Symposium Salzburger Kunstverein. Ed. Salzburger Kunstverein. Ostfildern: Cantz, 1995. 29-36. Sherman, Bernard D. “Authenticity in Music.” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Ed. Michael Kelly. Vol. 1. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 166-69. A Song from Ceylon. Dir. Laleen Jayamanne. WMM. 1985. Sutton, Peter C. “Rembrandt and a Brief History of Connoisseurship.” The Expert versus the Object: Judging Fakes and False Attributions in the Visual Arts. Ed. Ronald D. Spencer. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. 29-38. Tietjen, Friedrich. “Das Multiple als Original.” kunst ohne unikat. Ed. Peter Weibel. Köln: W. König, 1998. 31-43. Tongues Untied. Dir. Marlon Riggs. FrameLine, 1989. Wetzel, Michael. “Artefaktualitäten: Zum Verhältnis von Authentizität und Autorschaft.” Authentizität: Diskussion eines ästhetischen Begriffs. Ed. Susanne Knaller and Harro Müller. München: Fink, 2006. 36-54. Whitaker, William. A Disputation on Holy Scripture, against the Papists, especially Bellarmine and Stapleton. Ed. William Fitzgerald. Cambridge: UP, 1849. Zijlmans, Kitty. “Documentary Evidence and/in Artistic Practices.” Right About Now: Art and Theory since the 1990s. Ed. Margriet Schavemaker and Mischa Rakier. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2007. 10107.

Time, Alterity, Hybridity and ‘Exemplary Universality’ Some Remarks on Alessandro Ferrara’s Concept of ‘Reflective Authenticity’ T HOMAS C LAVIEZ

Alessandro Ferrara’s 1998 publication Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity, a follow-up on his previous Modernity and Authenticity: A Study in the Social and Ethical Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1992), has reintroduced a venerable concept back into the philosophical discussion that seemed to have disappeared under the onslaught of postmodern and post-structuralist scepticism. One of the notable exceptions is, of course, Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity, which appeared in the same year as Modernity and Authenticity, and relies as heavily on the thought of Jacques Rousseau. Ferrara’s proposal to rethink the concept of authenticity as an alternative to the previously prevalent paradigm of autonomy has stirred a lively discussion among contemporary thinkers.1 What is quite striking about his approach is not only Ferrara’s claim that his authenticity thesis “represents the most radical form” that the, according to Habermas ‘as-yet-uncompleted project’ of modernity can take (Reflective Authenticity 149), but that he repeatedly insists that his thesis indeed considers, takes into account and incorporates the insights of the linguistic turn (14; 38; 69; 153). The relationship of this 1

Cf. Duvenage, Honneth, Larmore, Knaller.

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linguistic turn – and the traces it has left in deconstructive, feminist and post-colonial thinking – to the project of modernism, or of modernity at large, have admittedly been notoriously hard to pin down. Here is how Ferrara himself defines this turn: I understand what goes under the name of the ‘Linguistic Turn’ as a cultural Gestalt switch consisting essentially in the awareness of the formative, as opposed to instrumental, function of language and of the inescapable dimension of contextuality that surrounds all our theoretical and practical claims. Such awareness of contextuality amounts to the awareness that the truth of propositions and the justness of norms and actions can be claimed, assessed, or contested only against the background of shared conceptual schemes, and that there exists an irreducible plurality of such conceptual schemes (Reflective Authenticity 38, emphasis in the original).

He later amends this rather breathtakingly concise definition with the insight that all access to whatever reality is symbolically mediated. But even if we make do with this rather rudimentary concept of the linguistic turn and the consequences it has yielded via structuralism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, feminism and gender studies (just to mention a few that Ferrara’s book never seriously takes into account), suffice it here to address two phenomena that he mentions in this quote: on the one hand, the contextuality argument, which has been with us since Hegel and Heidegger and which urges us to take into account history and its factors of contingency (or simply: time); on the other hand, the ‘irreducible plurality’ of culturally diverse conceptual schemes, that is, the phenomenon of otherness or alterity. As I will argue in what follows, both time (as instigating change) and alterity (as causing and delineating such change) constitute categories that throw a highly problematic light on any concept of authenticity. Both, that is, are highly relevant for and in “(post)modern,” feminist, Lacanian and post-colonial concepts such as mimicry and hybridity (Homi Bhabha, Gloria Anzaldua), differance and the impossibility of self-presence (Jacques Derrida), the other/Other (Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Lacan) or performance (Judith Butler); let alone the implications these concepts have for any notion of universality that Ferrara wants to retain, if in a modified form – as “exemplary universality”

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(72). As I will argue, it is only by deliberately ignoring these longterm effects and consequences of the linguistic turn that he is able to still resort to terms like authenticity or universality. These consequences, however, come back to haunt him.

T HE O/ OTHER The other or Other – that is, the ‘not-me’ – plays a decisive role in many ways for Ferrara’s argument. A significant one is that of ‘recognition,’ a term that has played an important role in two replies to Ferrara’s book: Charles Larmore’s “Alessandro Ferrara’s Theory of Authenticity,” and Axel Honneth’s “Considerations on Alessandro Ferrara’s Reflective Authenticity.” In his reply to both, “The Relation of Authenticity to Normativity,” Ferrara insists that “the notion of authenticity underlying my argument fully takes into account what Larmore calls ‘the reference to others,’ namely the intersubjective moment of mutual recognition. […] The recognition moment is essential for authenticity. […] Thus in our pursuit of an authentic identity, recognition on the part of others is always presupposed” (20). Let us leave aside for the moment the fact that the “reference to others” entails much more than just the sphere of recognition. In Reflective Authenticity, Ferrara defines authenticity as follows: “Authentic conduct has the quality of being somehow connected with, and expressive of, the core of the actor’s personality. It brings into play the actor’s uniquely personal, as opposed to culturally shared, identity” (5). If, however, we accept this definition, a host of problems opens up: how does the linguistic turn effect any assumptions of the very ‘expression’ (or representability) of that core of the actor’s personality? And if this core is what stands opposed to a “culturally shared” identity, how does that, in turn, affect the entire process of expression and recognition – which, by default, is also ‘culturally shared’ – that forms the backbone of Ferrara’s authenticity thesis? But even more problematic, as far as the central role of recognition is concerned: how will any other/s be able to verify my own authenticity? To have the opportunity to do so, they would have to know my core personality first, in order to then compare it with my ‘expressions’ of them, and to what degree they

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converge with, or diverge from, the assumed core. However, these expressions of my presumed core are all that is available to them, the only medium through which it becomes accessible – if they are not my psychiatrist. But even in this case, as Lacan has shown, access to this “core” (both for myself and for others) is made highly problematic through the strategies of metonymic displacement and metaphorical condensation.2 Thus, they stand a good chance that they might completely misinterpret my expressions; moreover, how could any change in that presumed but inaccessible “core” be registered in the face of such vagaries of interpretation, and why would such change have to be ‘bad,’ inasmuch as it would not allow me – even if I were to try – to make a coherent life story out of my past? Let us assume – although this happens rather rarely – that someone reconsiders his life because he has been sent to prison and actually changes through this experience: would that count as a minus for his personal consistency, or as a plus for finding back to the right track? This brings me to another aspect of Ferrara’s work: his tendency to transfer concepts from psychology and psychoanalysis to both the realm of community and that of aesthetic, which he attempts in the chapters 6 and 7 of his Reflective Authenticity. The problem is that the entire stratum of ‘pathologies’ embedded in the individual realm of psychoanalytic discourse is being projected upon the levels of society and art, respectively. Otherness here acquires a very problematic status, in that it constitutes part of the psychoanalytic discourse as inherently normative itself. Otherness – as allegedly ‘pathologic’ in the symptoms of an individual person – is what then enters the vocabulary of the discipline by way of diagnostics: the otherness of the person is brought into relationship with a problem that s/he has with what is other – not fully integrated, not worked-through – in her/himself, and in his/her interaction with others. I am afraid that, the work of Fou-

2

Cf. Lacan 175ff. This is what Paul Ricoeur hints at when he writes: “What poses a problem to us is understanding how the self can be at one and the same time a person of whom we speak and a subject who designates herself in the first person, while addressing a second person. […] The difficulty will be instead understanding how the first person is designated in discourse as someone who designates himself as a first person (34-35).

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cault and others notwithstanding, we still have not yet started to analyze psychology and psychoanalysis as historically contingent and thoroughly normative and disciplinary discourses themselves, which is partly due to the fact that their own claim of ‘scientificness’ allegedly transcends their historically contingent status. And as ‘contingent’ (in the negative sense) on the rest of the society is how psychologically ‘others’ are usually experienced. This also pertains to how we see other cultures, as becomes clear in Freud’s diagnosis of the primitive mind that Ferrara (approvingly) quotes: “The ‘primitive mind’ is naturally inclined toward megalomania, maintains Freud. It is characterized by an ‘overestimation of the power of wishes and mental acts,’ by its belief in the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’ and by its faith in ‘the thaumaturgic virtue of words’” (Freud, “Narcissism”, qtd. in Reflective Authenticity 103). This is a typical instance that should remind us that Freud – all his contributions to the field of ethnology, as in Totem and Taboo notwithstanding – was not an ethnologist, but a psychoanalyst, and as such a product of his time. At least, we should be prepared to read such quotes in relation to Ernst Cassirer’s work, who, in the second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, speaks of “man’s self-limitation in his immediate relation to reality” (85, emphasis added) implied in mythic thought, as compared to the concept of instrumental reason that still forms the cornerstone of Enlightened normativity inherent in psychoanalysis. In this regard, it is quite telling that Ferrara admits that Winnicott’s emphasis on the creative aspect of illusion “consist[s] in reconciling, or at least somehow connecting, two things that the culture of the Enlightenment, to which Freud’s work is heir, sought to separate by an unbridgeable cleavage: human maturity and the capacity to create and enjoy an illusion” (Reflective Authenticity 102). I will come back to both the concept of maturity and the metaphor of “cleavage” later. The discourse of pathologization is most prominent in chapter 5 of Ferrara’s book, with the title “Postmodern Eudaimonia.” As the title suggests, he wants to revitalize the Aristotelian concepts of eudaimonia and phronesis. The former is characterized by the teleological assumption that what constitutes a good life is the degree to which wo/man has lived up to the potential inherent in his/her core. The

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problem that enters here is one that haunts all attempts to resuscitate Aristotelian thought for our modern times, as I have argued elsewhere (cf. Claviez 53ff.). The problem consists of the fact that it is only within the rather clearly circumscribed limits of a homogeneous Hellenic polis that the assumption that achieving one’s personal telos is and can be coincident (that is, not in conflict) with the goals of the polis makes any sense whatsoever. If anything, however, modernity, which Ferrara’s authenticity thesis is designed to address, is characterized by the absence of just such a homogeneity and convergence. Thus, Honneth’s justified remark that “the various subcultures” that inhabit our multicultural societies “suggest entirely different, often incompatible, modes of self-actualization” (13) has to be read against the background of an ethics of eudaimonia based upon the assumed or partly realized homogeneity of a polis that was achieved by excluding most of its inhabitants from the process of consensus formation. It is in this light that the following quote of Ferrara should be read: [I]f we understand the good as fulfillment [of the Aristotelian telos, T.C.], then the relation between society’s claims and the individual’s drive-related needs appear in a different light. The notion of the good as fulfillment, in fact, bears more than an elective affinity with an intersubjective conception of the individual, according to which only in the medium of social relations – i.e., in the medium of reciprocal recognition – can the human individual become who he or she is and approximate that elusive fulfillment which can never be fully specified in an affirmative way but can best be reconstructed a contrario, from the sense of what it means to fail to attain it (Reflective Authenticity 74, emphasis in the original).

This reconstruction a contrario, however, raises the question ‘against what’ this ideal has to be distinguished. It is against all the others that, on the one hand, I need to provide me with recognition – which they, as far as my authenticity is concerned, cannot recognize, as we have seen, but which they, as regards my contribution to the general good (in itself notoriously hard to define and possibly clashing with my own goals) might give me. On the other hand, these others always also are potential ‘obstacles’ as to the wished-for coherence of my lifestory. And, all well-intended liberal attempts to neatly separate be-

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tween otherness as colourful and enriching on the one hand and as threatening and obstructive on the other, both are always and inextricably intertwined. Any interference by ‘another’ – be that the symbolic order according to Lacan, an actual other who crosses my way and either serves to change my ways inadvertently or actually forces me to rethink what my ‘core’ is, or simply a person who I might happen to fall in love with (and who, consequently, definitely stands an even greater chance to achieve the latter) – will serve to ‘interrupt’ my life story; consequently, this other will force me to spend even more of an effort to rewrite my life story (which is always rewritten a posteriori, and here, the concept of time comes in again) as a coherent one. Even Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the strongest defenders of the concept of the continuity of identity,3 is forced to admit that “what the agent is able to do and say intelligibly as an actor is deeply affected by the fact that we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives” (213). The other, consequently, is both somebody who I need as a mirror, but who on the other hand might prove to be an obstacle as to what I want to see in this mirror. The consequence of which is that I might – change: change, that is, as to what constitutes that ‘core personality’ which authenticity, according to Ferrara, supposes. But what does that mean as regards our alleged ‘authenticity’? Are we – and do we have to be – “forever whatever I have been at any time to others” (217), as MacIntyre insists; and, for that matter, to ourselves? And are all instances of inbetweenness, of hybridity and the ‘interstitial’ (in the sense of Bhabha) by default potentially pathological? While earlier work in post-colonialism – such as Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth – seems to indicate as much (based, however, as is Ferrara’s

3

[W]hat is crucial to human beings as characters in enacted narratives is that, possessing only the resources of psychological continuity, we have to be able to respond to the imputation of strict identity. I am forever whatever I have been at any time to others – and I may at any time be called upon to answer for it – no matter how changed I may be now. There is no way of founding my identity – or the lack of it – on the psychological continuity or discontinuity of the self” (217).

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work, on the discursive conflation of individual and communal psychology and the vocabulary of pathology that it entails), the feminist and queer work of Gloria Anzaldua, and especially her 1987 Borderlines – La Frontéra, reflects the tension between the creative and the destructive potential of such inbetweenness. Bhabha’s approach, on the other hand, generally seems deliberately to ignore or downplay the potentially negative aspects of ‘tornness’ and lack of unity that hybridity and the interstitial harbour (cf. Bhabha, “DissemiNation”, Location).

T IME One of the philosophers that Ferrara also resorts to, and who has addressed the possibility of change, or othering within time, is Paul Ricoeur. What Ricoeur specifically addresses is a problem that has been with us since Kant: that of telling a lie, or not sticking to a promise, which amounts to the same. Those two occasions, however, still entail the domain of the the O/other since, when I make a promise, I give it to another, and this other assumes me to “stay the same” in that I keep my promise, even when circumstances have changed, and I might not be the “same” person that I was when I gave the promise. This also applies to the example that Ferrara resorts to: when I declare my love to a significant other that I love her/him. This, as we all know, can change. The main point in Ricoeur’s argument is not only that, all presumed permanence in time of a promise notwithstanding, we indeed can change; moreover, it takes into account the fact that, in modern times, the pole between idem and ipse reaches a point at which we have to distinguish between the two; and to distinguish between them along historical lines: [W]e easily recognize a permanence which belongs to us. My hypothesis is that the polarity of these two models of permanence in time with respect to persons results from the fact that the permanence of character expresses the almost complete mutual overlapping of the problematic of idem and ipse, while faithfulness to oneself in keeping one’s word marks the extreme gap between the permanence of the self and that of the same and so attests fully to

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the irreducibility of the two problematics one to the other. I hasten to complete my hypothesis: the polarity I am going to examine suggests an intervention of narrative identity in the conceptual constitution of personal identity in the manner of a specific mediator between the pole of character, where idem and ipse tend to coincide, and the pole of self-maintenance, where selfhood frees itself from sameness. (Ricoeur 119, emphasis in the original)

In the literary history that Ricoeur deduces from this distinction, selfhood freed from sameness is what characterizes modernity, while the assumed coincidence of both characterizes the literary productions of earlier, ‘heroic societies’; societies, that is, in which the concept of exemplariness (or exemplary universality that constitutes the core of Ferrara’s argument) still applies, due to the assumed convergence of individual and social telos embodied in the relative homogeneity of the Aristotelian polis. Once this homogeneity, and its according convergence, are put into question – as they are in modern diasporic, globalized, multicultural communities or societies – then the concept of ‘exemplariness’ is undermined as well. Thus, while in the case of MacIntyre, literary history and its didactic (i.e. exemplary) task end with Jane Austen, Ricoeur at least takes into account not only that others expect us to keep our promise, but, more important, allows for a category or an idea that catapults us out of the didactic character of art in heroic societies: that ipse, which indicates a potential change in time, and idem, which indicates permanence of character, might be divorced, and that this divorce actually constitutes a quality of modernism, indeed of modernity at large. Which is as much as to say that the promise – and its taking into consideration of time and thus change – can be defined as taking into account change, but denying it at the same time, as it “does indeed appear to stand as a challenge to time, a denial of change: even if my desire were to change, even if I were to change my opinion or my inclination, ‘I will hold firm’” (Ricoeur 124). If, that is, we agree with Kant that lying, or not keeping one’s promise, undermines any social reliability, then this social reliability – also known as ethics – needs to be rethought in the light of the modern divergence between idem and ipse. Reliability assumes that a person stays the same. What Ricoeur, however, describes is a literary history

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where the sheer assumption of sameness – the coincidence of idem, or sameness of character, and ipse, continuity in time – becomes problematic. While Ferrara’s notion of authenticity is relieved from the problem of time, change and otherness, Ricoeur is at least prepared to admit that something like an ipse exists, and that it might not converge with the idem. It is quite striking that Ferrara, in this regard, so often refers to Luther’s saying “Here I am; I can’t do other.” This statement also appears, in a similar way, in Ricoeur: Self-constancy is for each person that manner of conducting himself or herself so that others can count on that person. Because someone is counting on me, I am accountable for my actions before another. The term ‘responsibility’ unites both meanings: ‘counting on’ and ‘being accountable for.’ It unites them, adding to them the idea of a response to the question ‘Where are you?’ asked by another who needs me. This response is the following: ‘Here I am!’ a response that is a statement of self-constancy. (165, emphasis in the original)

If the “‘Here I am’” is a statement of self-constancy, it still indicates that I indeed ‘could do other’: If the exclamation ‘Here I am; I can’t do other’ came out of the mouth of a paedophiliac or of a massmurderer, he might still be considered as ‘authentic’ and ‘exemplary universal’ along Ferrara’s line. And we do not have to resort to such extreme ‘examples’ to subscribe to Larmore’s laconic quip that “[o]ften things go better if we do not aim to ‘be ourselves.’ Certain strands of our identity, however deep they might run, can be perfectly dreadful” (8). Which brings me to the last aspect of Ferrara’s approach.

‘E XEMPLARY U NIVERSALITY ’ I would argue that the concept of exemplary universality as Ferrara deploys it is highly problematic on two accounts: the first one pertains to the concept of exemplarity, the second one to universality – both of which turn out to be untenable, if we take into account both otherness and time. Ferrara argues that by replacing the external criterion of ra-

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tionality with Kant’s model of “reflective judgment,” we are left with the question “whether and to what extent a given choice satisfies the inner normativity of an identity.” And he continues: Then the impossibility of exhaustively translating one vocabulary into another ceases to be an obstacle to the universality of judgment. For we no longer have to translate one vocabulary into another, but simply to assess the degree of self-congruency of an identity in its own terms. Of course the kind of universalism that we can thus hope to obtain is of a peculiar kind, exemplary rather than methodologically cogent, singular rather than generalizing, and not susceptible to demonstration. (Reflective Authenticity 71-72, emphasis in the original)

This, however, is a rather paradoxical project, and I am afraid it is not that easy to leave the problem of translation behind. First of all, as I have argued above, this ‘self-congruency of an identity’ is practically impossible to assess, both for myself and for others. But what is even more problematic is the concept of a ‘singular,’ in contrast to a ‘generalizing universalism.’ Any characteristic of singularity (its particularity, its uniqueness, its ‘otherness’) vanishes the moment it is assumed to be a purely synecdochal (a pars pro toto) instantiation of a universal; as such, it simply is the universal (and thus loses all qualities of singularity), as any kind of ‘representation’ would open it up to the vagaries of differance. Moreover, even if we were to ignore this problem, we would still have to ‘translate’ the universality that the example is designed to totally and absolutely express or represent. If we abstain from resorting to define universality as in itself ‘universal’ – which, as Judith Butler and others have shown, is impossible, as all such definitions are inescapably historically and locally rooted, and thus contingent – we are left with the concept of the universal as processual, as forever ‘to come.’ In such a light, the attempt to “conceive of freedom, or justice, or any other fundamental normative notion, in terms that are neutral with respect to the diversity of cultural understandings from them” (“The Relation” 22) is in itself an impossible, Eurocentric fiction. If, moreover, exemplary universality, as Ferrara admits, cannot be demonstrated, then this is due to the fact that, were this to happen, not only would any singularity vanish in this instance

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of demonstration, but we would also have to presume that this demonstration referred to a given, static and defined universality. The latter, however, has to be thought of as a perpetual opening up of itself toward otherness and within time, as Butler convincingly argues: To claim that the universal has not yet been articulated is to insist that the ‘not yet’ is proper to an understanding of the universal self: that which remains ‘unrealized’ by the universal constitutes it essentially. The universal begins to become articulated precisely through challenges to its existing formulation, and this challenge emerges from those who are not covered by it, who have no entitlement to occupy the place of the ‘who,’ but who nevertheless demand that the universal as such ought to be inclusive of them. The excluded, in this sense, constitutes the contingent limit to universalization. (“Universality in Culture” 48)

On the one hand, the processual character of universality makes it an elusive signifier that always ‘slips’ beyond any singular signified that allegedly exemplifies it. On the other hand, Butler’s argument also points out certain limits as to the translatability of the concept derived from the realm of the singular (the ‘core’ identity) to that of culture at large: while the attempt to integrate – or at least to acknowledge, or take into account – as many ‘othernesses’ as possible within the realm of culture might be a desirable goal or ethical horizon for some societies, such an attempt would probably prove disastrous for a single human being. Even if integration, according to Melanie Klein, constitutes “the over-arching goal of human development and as the key aspect of mental health” (Qtd. in Reflective Authenticity 83), the amount and degree of coherence, and the degree of health this signals, vary significantly between an individual and a community. Indeed, the awareness that some vocabularies are not translatable into each other, and that one has to live with incompatibilities is what characterizes ‘maturity’; a maturity that may also allow for the retrospective realization that one is at best the co-author of one’s life-story. Maturity, according to Freud, means the capacity to tolerate “the direction, toward the same person of contrary – affectionate and hostile feeling” (Reflective Authenticity 104); or, in other words, “to accept the similarities and differences between self and others without regres-

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sive reactions” (Freud, “Mourning”, qtd. in Reflective Authenticity 105). Such an ability to acknowledge the simultaneous coexistence of incompatible schemes – also known as irony – is probably what adolescents, in search for their ‘identity,’ often experience as the ‘unprincipledness’ or ‘opportunism’ of elder people. Such an ironic maturity is closely connected to the sphere of art, as irony in itself is the aesthetic manifestation of the “unbridgeable cleavage between human maturity and the capacity to create and enjoy illusion” that I referred to at the beginning. As such, maturity, according to Ferrara, offers us an insight into the psychodynamic basis for our cultural appreciation of the ability to bring diversity to (non-coercive) unity – the appreciation of the artist’s ability to bring a multiplicity of motifs, materials, styles and motivations into the unity of a work of art, as well as the ability of those who can fuse a multiplicity of interests, dispositions, projects and affects into the unity of a single life course. (Reflective Authenticity 106)

To compare, indeed, to conflate these different realms is, as we have seen, highly problematic. First of all, the aspect of illusion in art – also known as fictitiousness – remains completely unconsidered; an aspect that Ricoeur already criticized in MacIntyre’s attempt to make the coherence of a life story the aesthetic yardstick of an existence based upon an Aristotelian ethics.4 Can we indeed go as far as to claim, as

4

“MacIntyre is mainly considering stories told in the thick of everyday activity and does not attach any decisive importance, at least with respect to the ethical investigation he is conducting, to the split between literary fictions and the stories he says are enacted. In my own treatment of the mimetic function of narrative, the break made by the entry of narrative into the sphere of fiction is taken so seriously that it becomes a very thorny problem to reconnect literature to life by means of reading. For MacIntyre, the difficulties tied to the idea of a refiguration of life by fiction do not arise. However, he does not draw any benefit, as I try to do, from the double fact that it is in literary fiction that the connection between action and its agent is easiest to perceive and that literature proves to be an immense laboratory for thought experiments in which this connection is submitted to an endless number of imaginative variations. This advantage of a detour

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Ferrara does, that “it would be self-contradictory to think of wellformedness in terms of adequacy to anything other than a principle of authenticity as exemplary self-congruency” (Reflective Authenticity 144)? As with another who tries to measure the expressions of my core personality in comparison to a core that s/he never really has access to, and as the exemplary universality of the singular instance presumes a highly problematic universality against which to measure its ‘exemplariness,’ the ‘self’ that the work of art is congruent with is but another fictive projection. Assuming that we take seriously the lesson about ‘intentional fallacy’ that Wimsatt and Beardsley (Verbal Icon) have taught us – and, again, taking into account all the work done in the aftermath of the linguistic turn, from Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault to the Reader Response Theory and Reception Aesthetics of Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Robert Jauss and Stanley Fish – this ‘self’ of the work of art is in itself just the product of another ‘projection’ or conjecture without a real base. This, I would argue, holds true for the concept of authenticity as such, which might indeed be nothing else than a ‘decay product’ of modernity, as Andreas Huyssen (“Zur Authentizität von Ruinen”) has so poignantly put it. Why it nevertheless still retains so much of its significance – very much so in terms of ‘symbolic capital’ – cannot be the subject of this essay. What is necessary is a large investigation project into the concrete and historically contingent instances where this symbolic capital is generated and invested, and an inquiry into the motivations for, and ideological purposes of, such investments. And in order to do so, we should indeed have to take the consequences of the linguistic turn into account – but seriously.

by way of fiction does, it is true, have another side to it. And here a difficulty unknown to MacIntyre arises, namely: how do the thought experiments occasioned by fiction, with all the ethical implications that will be discussed below, contribute to self-examination in real-life?” (Ricoeur 159).

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W ORKS C ITED Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands – La Frontéra. New York: Aunt Lute Books, 2007. Bhabha, Homi. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 291-322. —. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Butler, Judith. “Universality in Culture.” For Love of Country. Ed. Martha Nussbaum. Boston: Beacon P, 1996. 45-52. Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume 2: Mythical Thought. New Haven: Yale UP, 1955. Claviez, Thomas. Aesthetics & Ethics: Otherness and Moral Imagination from Aristotle to Levinas and from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to “House Made of Dawn.” Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. Duvenage, Pieter. “Review Essay: Alessandro Ferrara’s Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 30.1 (2004): 127-34. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove P, 2004. Ferrara, Alessandro. Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity. London: Routledge, 1998. —. Modernity and Authenticity: A Study of the Social and Ethical Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Albany: State U of New York P, 1993. —. “The Relation of Authenticity to Normativity: A Response to Larmore and Honneth.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 30.1 (2004): 17-24. Freud, Sigmund. “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth P, 1953-74. 67102. —. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth P, 1953-74. 237-58. Honneth, Axel. “Considerations on Alessandro Ferrara’s Reflective Authenticity.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 30.1 (2004): 1115.

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Huyssen, Andreas. “Zur Authentizität von Ruinen: Zerfallsprodukte der Moderne.” Authentizität: Diskussion eines ästhetischen Begriffs. Ed. Susanne Knaller and Harro Müller. München: Fink, 2006. 232-48. Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude: A Study of Unconscious Sources. New York: Free P, 1975. Knaller, Susanne. “Genealogie des ästhetischen Authentizitätsbegriffs.” Authentizität: Diskussion eines ästhetischen Begriffs. Ed. Susanne Knaller and Harro Müller. München: Fink, 2006. 17-35. Lacan, Jacques. “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud.” Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977. 138-68. Larmore, Charles. “Alessandro Ferrara’s Theory of Authenticity.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 30.1 (2004): 5-9. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1984. Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Identity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Wimsatt, William K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1954. Winnicott, D.W. Playing and Reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.

Representing the Authentic

The Rhetorics of Authenticity Photographic Representations of War T HOMAS S USANKA

Since its invention, photography has been discussed in terms of authenticity, of truthfulness to reality. Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography, entitled the book series that features his first successful attempts in photography The Pencil of Nature – an expression of his conviction that in photography, the subject of an image would depict itself and hence guarantee its own truthful representation. The influence of the image’s creator, according to Talbot, would cease to be decisive of whether a depiction is faithful to the original or not. Indeed, great fascination was aroused by the fact that the photographer does not even seem to have final and absolute control over the image – rather, the things seem to imprint themselves on the photographs. Fox Talbot writes enthusiastically: It frequently happens, moreover – and this is one of the charms of photography – that the operator himself discovers on examination, perhaps long afterwards, that he had depicted many things he had no notion of at the time. Sometimes inscriptions and dates are found upon the buildings, or printed placards most irrelevant, are discovered upon their walls… (Qtd. in Newhall 246)

With similar ardour, the Gazette de France writes on 6 January 1839: Imagine the faithfulness of nature’s image reproduced in the camera and add to it the work of the sun’s rays which fix the image, with all its range of high

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lights, shadows and half tones, and you will have an idea of the beautiful drawings which M. Daguerre displayed.... [...] You will see how far from the truth of the Daguerotype [sic] are your pencils and brushes. (Qtd. in Newhall 19)

In a way, the authenticity of depiction supersedes the intentionality of the creator, the image being regarded as a truthful reflection of reality that is not entirely subject to the will of the photographer. Roughly a decade after Talbot’s publication, in 1855, the English photographer Roger Fenton travelled to the site of the Crimean war to become the world’s first war photographer. But in fact, he was also to produce history’s first photographic propaganda, which aimed at sustaining support for a war that was becoming more and more unpopular in England. Fenton was allegedly ordered by Prince Albert to show “No dead bodies” (Paul 63). The pictures Fenton brought home showed an idyll of war: an officer enjoying a glass of wine after His Day’s Work Over, or a soldier dozing away during A Quiet Day in the Mortar Battery.1 Fenton’s photographs are all cautiously staged and are very well elaborated with regard to how they depict war. Indeed, the pictures Fenton took do not give us the slightest hint that they could actually be from a war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, not only during combat action but also due to epidemics or hunger. In light of these two vignettes, the authenticity of photographic representation, especially in the case of war, must be seen as a site of ambivalence. In this paper I want to take a look at some aspects of the discourse on photographic authenticity and examine a few recent developments in the construction of authenticity in war photography from Afghanistan and Iraq. There seem to be essentially two ways by which authenticity in photography can be approached. The first is the discourse about the medium of photography and its potential to depict reality truthfully. The second is concerned with how photographers try to create the impression of authenticity within their photographs – i.e. within the semiotic fabric of the photograph, so to speak.2 While the

1

These are real titles of photographs taken by Fenton (Paul 63, 64).

2

We might actually think of a third route, namely by paratextual ascription of authenticity. For example by adding a caption that more or less explicit-

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first aspect conceives of authenticity as an inherent property of the medium, the second sees it as a communicative strategy of the photographer. I will take a brief look at the medial implications of photography since the medium of photography is often seen as the central criterion in discussions of photographic authenticity, especially in contemporary publications where photography’s authenticity is cast into doubt on the basis of photography’s digital turn. However, it seems to me that looking at the medium alone will take us only half the way. That is why the main part of the essay tackles authenticity from a semiotic perspective and considers it a communicative strategy which serves a rhetorical agency, i.e. persuasion. The main question is: how do photographers construct images that have the appeal of being authentic representations? Photographers seem to pursue certain strategies in terms of style and choice of subject matter in the construction of images that aim at creating the impression of authenticity. The two major strategies of creating authenticity can accordingly be referred to as spatial proximity and temporal immediacy. In a final step, I will take a look at how these two are realized in contemporary war photography and hence examine more recent developments in the construction of photographic authenticity. The central strategies here seem to imply a conscious transgression of conventional formal norms of ‘good press photography’ and a shift of perspective away from that of a neutral and distanced observer, towards a more subjective, immersed portrayal of war. Recent war photography seems to put more emphasis on the subjectivity of experiencing war, and moves away from common journalistic principles of photography that emphasize objective neutrality.

ly states ‘This is authentic.’ Indeed, the interaction of image and language is a stock device in establishing authenticity, e.g. Keith Jarecke’s picture showing the charred corpse of an Iraqi soldier was published on the front page of the The Observer under the title “The Real Face of War” (Campbell 73). Often these ways of authentication are linked to the persona of the photographer. Even though highly interesting, I will not be concerned with this form of authentication in this paper, where my central interest in photographic authenticity is limited to the actual image (cf. Andree 43261).

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AUTHENTICITY

AND

R HETORIC

There is a lot of research of various interests grouped around the term authenticity, and diverging conceptions of the term can be found.3 The major interest of this paper lies in the rhetoric of war photography, and for this purpose essentially two aspects of the concept of authenticity seem to be important.4 The first is the idea of truthfulness or realness, which also often goes along with the notion of ‘not being made by man’ and the second is the idea of authority. From a rhetorical perspective, authenticity plays a critical role with regard to the central category of rhetoric, namely credibility, which is (ever since Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric) the fundamental basis for any act of persuasion. However, authenticity is not identical with rhetoric’s conception of credibility; it forms merely one important aspect of it. Contemporary neo-Aristotelian rhetorical theory assigns a more clearly delimitated place to authenticity. According to Joachim Knape, persuasion is achieved by effecting a change in the addressee’s judgment, evaluations or attitudes (Persuasion 875). He sees this change oriented along the lines of seven criteria from which the idea of verification points to authenticity (Rhetorik der Künste 919-20). From this perspective, persuasion can be achieved by acting upon the addressee’s ideas of what is real, for example in consolidating his ideas about a given thing. In this sense, authenticity can be seen as one strategy to achieve verification and hence persuasion, namely by demonstrating or suggesting realness or truthfulness. It is in this sense that I would like to understand the term in this paper.

T WO ASPECTS O F P HOTOGRAPHIC AUTHENTICITY : M EDIUM AND S EMIOTIC ‘T EXT ’ Two major foci can be identified in the discussion of authenticity in photography. The first is media-theoretical since it circulates around the idea that photography is authentic because of the implications of

3

Cf. Andree, Knaller/Müller, Knieper/Müller, Wortmann.

4

I will only point to some paramount links between rhetoric and authenticity. A circumspect account will be found in Ulrich (forthcoming).

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its medium, i.e. essentially the light-sensitive surface of the plate, film or chip. The other focuses on the semiotic fabric, i.e. how authenticity is generated on the surface-structure of the image by means of signs. In a simplified way, we could say that the first perspective asks, for example, if and why a portrait photograph might strike the beholder as superior in terms of authenticity as compared to a portrait painting of the same person. The second, semiotic perspective inquires what elements in terms of style or choice of subject matter add to the authenticity of an image. I think it is fundamental to the discussion to distinguish authenticity as a discursive ascription to the medium from that generated by the actual image, i.e. the semiotic text. In contemporary theory, however, the levels of medium and semiotic text are often intermingled. There is a tendency to call those communicative phenomena that use a different semiotic system rather than a natural language (be it written or orally performed) a ‘medium.’5 Even though these are metaphoric applications of the term, they stand in stark contradiction to the status quo of present-day semiotic (and hence also rhetorical) theory, where a medium is seen as having the function of carrying and disseminating signs that in turn carry meaning. In the same vein, Knape argues that “[a] medium is defined as device to store and send (artistic) texts, which, for example, also includes pictures understood as texts. A text is a delimitated, structured complex of signs that is uttered with a specific communicative intention” (Rhetorik der Künste 895). To conceptualize the medium as the carrier of a semiotic fabric proves productive in distinguishing different phenomena. This usage of the terminology helps to describe what happens, for example, when a verbal text is published in a book and, on another occasion, read out aloud at a public reading. While the text certainly remains the same, it is the medium that changes. By the same token, we can describe the difference between a painting that we find hanging in a museum as well as in an art history book. In both cases it is the same image, the same semiotic artefact, but the medium has changed. With regard to photographic authenticity, keeping the realm of the medium distinct

5

For example Rajewsky in her book on intermediality; Werner Wolf also refers to this problem of terminology.

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from the realm of the meaning created by signs helps us to differentiate between the idea that authenticity is seen as something connected to the medium and the notion that it is actually a result of the photographer’s semiotic work. Medial Authenticity Since photography’s invention, it has been a stock argument in photographic theory that because of the specific conditions of production necessitated by the involved medium, photography has a high level of authenticity. In this sense, photography is ascribed to be an authentic means of representation because of the medium. Hence, a photograph is conceived of as a mechanically produced image, the object of depiction imprints itself on the photographic surface and the operator of the camera has only very limited means of influencing the result (as compared to the painter). Especially the relation of causality between the depicted and the depiction and the high amount of similarity between the two gave rise to conceptions of photography as trustworthy and credible. The founding father of modern semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce, called these the indexical and iconic qualities of photography (65).6 In the same vein, Roland Barthes talked in several of his essays of these properties, addressing them as the “[t]hat-has-been” (Camera Lucida 77) and the “perfect analogon” (The Photographic Message 17). Especially the indexical relationship is often seen as what essentially distinguishes photography from painting. With the advent of digital photography, it is exactly this relation of causality that is seen as disrupted. Because the digital medium facilitates image manipulation to such an extent that the relation of causality is no longer the prerequisite for a photograph-like looking image, critics went so far as to even claim that photography is essentially dead (cf. Mitchell 20, Mirzoeff 65), meaning that its trustworthiness has been forfeited. However, a few years later, it was pointed out that the conception of digital photography as the end of photographic authenticity silently created a myth about the alleged authenticity of ana-

6

I use Helmut Pape’s translation of Peirce’s Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic.

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logue photography (Wortmann 221). Especially with regard to war photography, we are soon reminded of the fact that staging in particular has been a common practice from the start, as the initially presented case of Roger Fenton’s account of the Crimean War illustrates. But photographs were also manipulated even before the digital era, and sometimes even staging and manipulation were applied at the same time, in order to create a persuasive image, as in the example of Jewgeni Chaldej’s famous picture of the fall of Berlin. The medium always functioned as a point of reference in attributing authenticity to photography. And hence, it is not so much the fact that the digital turn implies a fundamental change in photography, but it is our conception of photographic authenticity that is altered by the change. Photography did not suddenly become susceptible to manipulation, but with the advent of digital technology the knowledge about photography’s malleability became paramount. And that is why the heated debates about digital photography of the past few years have also shown that it is not sufficient to conceptualize photographic authenticity merely on grounds of the involved medium. Mediatheoretician Peter Lunenfeld seems to be right when he claims that photography is no longer a privileged realm of communication since its authenticity now ranges on the same level as that of the written word (60). Talking about the medium means talking about photography in general. However, when it comes to war photographs, grasping authenticity becomes even more difficult. Not only does the medium not function as evidence per se anymore, but war photographs are also put under immense discursive pressure. First of all, war photography always implies taking sides. Each side in a conflict always strives to present pictures that back up its interpretation of the conflict. Consequently, photographs attesting to contradicting claims abound. The case of the Crimean war, which I alluded to above, demonstrates this as well. Ever since its invention, photography has been a popular medium for propaganda purposes. Staging and manipulating photographs to propagandistic ends has been common practice since the nineteenth century, and especially in the case of war photography. In particular since the Vietnam War, militaries have become even more sensitive to the power of photographs to sustain or shatter the support for a war in

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the home country (Paul 342-44). The pictures of atrocities committed by Americans in Vietnam, especially Robert Haeberle’s pictures of My Lai, fuelled the resistance to the war in the US. Hence, beginning with the British Falkland War, militaries have made extreme efforts to control which images reach the public at home (Brothers 201-17). This restrictive policy can be observed prominently in the recent practice of embedded journalism, where photographers who become akin to enlisted members of the army are unable to take their pictures independently and are subject to censorship (cf. Carlson and Katovsky xixix). Public awareness of theses restrictive actions on the part of the military is another dent in the authority of war photography. Paradoxically, the restricted access to the actual battlefield is accompanied by unrestricted access to distributive means in the form of the internet. The internet offers free flow of information and also of photography, but there are no regulative institutions (such as an editorial) that could filter unbalanced reporting. Hence, even unwarranted and clearly biased or manipulated images may gain access to a worldwide public. Given the strict control on the part of militaries and the overall suspicion of deception, the authenticity of war photography seems to be in bad shape. Yet despite all doubts and objections, we use war photography on a daily basis. We consume it as regularly as our daily newspapers. Despite its patent unreliability, we cherish it as a helpful device for spreading and gaining information about the conflicts of our time. But how can this be? Clearly, the question of authenticity in photography cannot be answered merely by reflections on the medium. When we talk about the authenticity of photography, and especially of war photography, it is apparently not the epistemological reliability of photography that is our primary concern. But what is our primary concern? A good starting point in making sense of this is to notice that we have already progressed far into the field of rhetoric, whose central concern, according to Aristotle, is to find out what is credible about a subject matter and what seems to be convincing. The reference to the properties of the medium may elucidate an important aspect of photography, but it answers only half the question. It may explain some general attitudes and expectations ascribed to photography, but it completely ignores what is actually shown in the photographs. Fur-

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thermore, just like in written texts, there are ways of suggesting the truthfulness of the depiction by means of subject matter and style. From the perspective of rhetoric, we could conceive of this as a communicative strategy that aims at verifying the subject matter, i.e. by claiming its truthfulness. How do communicators establish truthclaims? In the following, I would like to turn to those procedures that aim to authenticate a photograph and re-establish the claim that what we see in the picture is ‘the real thing.’ Constructing Authentic Images Intuitively, we might speculate that those images that strike the beholder as authentic must bear a strong link to reality. We might assume that examining the subject of depiction and then scrutinizing the adequacy of its representation could be a potent means of checking the authenticity of a photograph. Obviously, this procedure usually cannot be applied, and not only because photographs are temporally removed from their point of reference. Even if a photograph is perfectly analogous to reality, there is nevertheless a “reduction” (Barthes, The Photographic Message 17) that takes place in the process of image production, namely due to the specific characteristics of the camera and the film. For example, we find an alteration of perspective according to the focal length the photographer uses, furthermore light acts quite differently on the photograph than we usually experience it. Moreover, photographs are not merely pieces of reality fixated on paper but are images that are intentionally made. “It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude” (Sontag 46). Photographers incorporate decisions about light and perspective in their photographs and construct them according to formal rules and compositional conventions (such as the golden ratio) in order to suit their intentions best. Hence, the idea of double-checking with reality neglects the fact that there is actually somebody who takes the photograph and makes decisions about what is to be in the picture and how it is to be shown. It is not reality we find in photographs but a form of communication about reality. Last but not least, the real-life phenomenal appearance of war may not be that important for a photograph’s appeal of authenticity in the

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first place. The photographer cannot pursue a strategy of appealing to the addressee’s real-life experiences of war, since normal Western consumers of news do not even have any of that kind. However, what they have and what they draw their ideas about war from are other representations of war that shape and determine their ideas, conceptions and expectations; they use these in order to decide whether to trust a photograph or not. The larger discursive framework within which we can locate war photography, then, seems to include all kinds of representations of war – it is not restricted to documentary, nonfictional accounts of war but at the same time includes fictional renditions of war. Reports in newspapers, magazines or on television, stories written about war, movies, television series and even computer games – they all add to the cognitive framework with which consumers of news approach war photography. All these ways of depicting war seem to partake in an intertextual and intermedial realm that defines their conceptions about war. And hence these accounts certainly provide a ready resource for producers of representations of war, which they use as blueprints in order to verify their own depictions of war. And they do so not only with regard to the construction of fictive renditions based upon non-fictive portrayals, e.g. when Steven Spielberg and his director of photography, Janusz Kaminski, use Robert Capa’s picture of D-Day as a model for the movie Saving Private Ryan. But the phenomenon can also be traced the other way round, in cases where actual war photographers use stylistic devices that first appeared in popular culture, such as in computer games (as will be discussed later). The content and form of preceding representations of war provide the beholder of war photographs with expectations regarding the subject matter as well as the overall appearance of these photographs, and these expectations are brought to bear in assessing the authenticity of the photographs. At the same time, photographers use them as resources in order to accommodate their addressees’ conception of authentic depiction of war and thereby to verify their photographs. Consequently, authenticity in war photography is not merely linked to reality and a truthful depiction of it, but it also seems to be fundamentally connected to a strong tradition of authentic depiction: the beholder of a photograph may know nothing about war – but he surely knows what it is supposed to look like on a photograph.

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Proximity and Immediacy With regard to war photography, we can isolate several major criteria of authenticity that have prevailed over the course of the last 60 years. Most prominent is the impression of spatial proximity and temporal immediacy with respect to the events depicted. Photographs satisfying these criteria create the impression that they were taken right at a particular spot at a significant moment in time and thereby support notions of truthfulness and accordance with real-life events. Robert Capa’s proverbial dictum, “[i]f your photographs are not good enough, you’re not close enough” (Miller xii), can be seen as a leitmotiv for images that aim to create the impression of spatial proximity and seem to take their beholders right down to the battleground. Here, the essence of conflict – men fighting – can be captured emblematically in a photograph that corresponds to the addressees’ conceptions of war. To be sure, the device of proximity does not merely employ close-up pictures. For close-ups can also be taken by using tele-objective lenses from large distances, which would, however, be reflected in the organization of perspective in the image and would suggest a distanced glance at the events. To create pictures that insinuate closeness to the frontline, photographers use short focal lengths that create a field of view similar to that of the human eye and allow a very large depth of field that complies best with human vision. Cameras are usually held at eye level. Hence, it can be said that these images strive to create the illusion of an unmediated glance at reality; they seem to capture the vision of an observing bystander – or as media theoretician Siegfried J. Schmidt puts it, they aim to hide their own mediality (14). The sense of temporal immediacy is created by freeze-framing an instantaneous moment, a certain constellation of people and objects, an unforeseen moment in the combat. The photographer Henri CartierBresson referred to this moment famously as the ‘decisive moment’ in photography. The notion of immediacy counters the suspicion of staging with the help of a seemingly spontaneous organization of the image. An important aspect of photographic authenticity, according to Elke Grittman, is that the photograph has to establish the impression that its subject was caught in a moment otherwise unobserved; that the

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subject is unaware of the camera, and his actions, therefore, do not appear to be merely performed for the camera (146). Perhaps the most famous image of war that creates this impression is Robert Capa’s Falling Soldier – despite the heavy debate about the photograph’s authenticity. Apart from subject matter, purely formal devices are often also instrumental in creating a sense of temporal immediacy. First and foremost, this can be achieved by an organic, snap-shot-like composition that reveals its formal logic only upon second glance, as opposed to images that feature a manifest system of organization that overtly reveals their compositionality. Both spatial proximity and temporal immediacy reflect the notion that the construction of authenticity in war photography is defined by the interaction of form and content. Even though the subject matter intuitively seems to be central to a picture’s potential to appear authentic, it is not merely the subject matter and the fact that it was recorded with a camera that makes an image authentic. Authenticity is always connected to a certain style of depiction, and this style most often aims to create the impression that the picture was taken rather than made. In the same vein, Susan Sontag argues that [p]ictures of hellish events seem more authentic when they don’t have the look that comes from being ‘properly’ lighted and composed, because the photographer is an amateur or – just as serviceable – has adopted one of several familiar anti-art styles. By flying low, artistically speaking, such pictures are thought to be less manipulative – all widely distributed images of suffering now stand under that suspicion – and less likely to arouse facile compassion or identification. (26-27)

Pictures seem to make a stronger claim to authenticity when they hide the fact that they are constructed images and suggest that they are either unmediated pieces of reality (a window to the world,7 the captured gaze of the bystander) or the result of a spontaneous, unplanned and seemingly unintentional act of photographing without thinking about how to make the picture look good. In this sense, Volker Wort-

7

Gisèle Freund uses this metaphor in “Photographie und Gesellschaft” (117).

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mann points to the paradox of creating the impression of authenticity by consciously pursuing an aesthetic strategy that tries to suggest that there is no conscious aestheticizing going on in the first place (13). Recent Developments: Deficient Images and Change of Perspective If authenticity in war photography is not only about the medium or the subject matter but also about a stylistic strategy implemented to achieve a certain effect, it is important to note that the specificities of this ‘authentic style’ are subject to historic change. My question now is how contemporary photographers try to create the impression of authenticity in their images. While we will find that the dominant notions of immediacy and proximity prevail, there are new stylistic devices used to create these impressions. In the following, I will take a look at some of these developments that can be observed in war photographs taken by photographers of the photo agency VII in Afghanistan and in Iraq. The pictures were all published in a book entitled War: USA. Afghanistan. Iraq (edited by Christoph Anderson et al), which offers a chronological overview of the events referred to. Looking at these photographs, we can observe two prominent strategies for establishing authenticity. The first is a playful engagement with the mediality of photography. Essentially, these photographs seem to highlight the medium and strike the beholder as unconventional insofar as they work by means of stylistic irritations (mainly with excessive blurring and tilting of the camera). The second strategy is the shift of perspective from that of a bystander to that of an actual agent in war. Both strategies seem to highlight the experience of war and aim at a more emotional appeal, since they try to present a more subjective and impressionist account of wartime events. And in this sense, these are clearly strategies that aim to create the idea of authentic images of war, giving the beholder the impression of being immersed in the conflict, seemingly annulling the distancing effect of medial communication and thereby getting closer to an authentic depiction of war. One reason for the fascination with the pictures of the Spanish Civil War was certainly that it was the first time that combat photography was possible. Even fast movements could be captured by the

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camera precisely and sharply. Extremely low exposure times made lucid and high-detail photographs possible in which each element was discernable, and scenes of war which had eluded the mass media before. This kind of photography set the standard for ‘good’ war photography in the following decades. A sharp image is desirable because it allows for more information. Blurriness, on the other hand, makes for obscurity and unclearness. Blurring may occur under extremely bad light conditions or if the object or the photographer move when the photo is taken. It can be used productively to illustrate the movement of a single object (Barthes, The Photographic Message 23), but in general an overall blurred image is regarded as defective. What can be observed in the photographs from Afghanistan and Iraq, though, is a maceration of this rule of photography. It is remarkable how many pictures are completely blurred, some even to the extent of indiscernibility (e.g. Christopher Morris’s picture of break contact live fire training in Afghanistan, 204-05). And there is no doubt that, in most cases, the photographers could have chosen to shoot a sharp image – at any rate, SLR cameras with exposure times of up to eight milliseconds offer the means of doing so, and flashes can be used to compensate for low-light shooting conditions (again, Christopher Morris’s picture of a US patrol searching Iraqis at dawn, 276-79). In any case, these images would not have been published only a few years ago, as they, from a technical perspective, are defective and do not conform to the standards of press photography. But in recent war photography, the blur is used more freely as a stylistic effect in order to insinuate movement and action and hence goes along with the notion of immediacy. This device is used excessively by several photographers, among them Antonin Kratochvil, John Stanmeyer and Ron Haviv. Another newly observable stylistic irritation is a heightened use of tilting the image. For a long time, the standard for war photography that aimed to hide its mediality was normal human vision. That also meant that the pictures were to be straight, the upper and lower borders of the images being parallel to the ground or the horizon. Such images appear to the beholder as ‘normal.’ Even though human vision is not always horizontally even (for example when we tilt our head), our sense of balance compensates for the disequilibrium. A tilted photograph on the other hand, strikes us as irritating. Now, however, pho-

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tographers present pictures that suspend this rule of balance. Antonin Kratochvil is an especially salient example but we find this device also with Christopher Anderson, John Stanmeyer or Christopher Morris. Kratochvil makes a point of tilting his images always at roughly the same angle, somewhere around 14°. The result is vexing images that suggest movement and spontaneity during the process of imagemaking. These images seemingly imply that they were taken rather intuitively, without the photographer stylistically engaging in the act of representation (even though we may note how well-composed these images are, nevertheless). Similar to the blur, the appeal of authenticity of these images lies in the fact that they seemingly eliminate the intentionality of the photographer by transgressing an aesthetic norm. Both devices, the blur and the tilt, overtly defy the common standards of journalistic photography. But by overtly violating conventional conceptions of ‘objective photography,’ they also counter the suspicion of deception. After all, it is obvious in the era of Photoshop manipulation that flawless images can easily be created. An openly flawed image might strike us as more convincing, as it seemingly (and deceptively) lays its emphasis not on form but on content. But there is also another level on which devices like blurring and tilting seem to authenticate photographs – namely because tilts and blurs usually occur under extreme conditions, such as in combat action, where there may not always be enough time and it may be too dangerous to handle the camera properly. Thus, these photographs place emphasis on the moment at which they were taken and highlight the heat of the battle, underscoring their claim to authentic representation. Furthermore, these images necessarily attract attention to the photographer, marking his presence at the battleground by highlighting the medium, and hence support the notions of testimony and eye-witness. Yet the regularity with which some photographers use these devices sustain the idea that they do not result from the heat of the moment but from calculated stylistic reflections on the part of the photographer. The use of blurs and tilts amounts to a productive exploitation of potential deficiencies, underscoring the fact that it is a photograph that we are looking at. Through overt play with the medium, photographers employing this strategy aim to achieve authenticity by suggesting spontaneity and unintentionality. Paradoxically, they seek to mitigate their own appar-

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ent involvement in the photos by drawing attention to it. In a sense, this is the opposite of the other strategy that I would also like to discuss, which is characterized by the aim of providing an unmediated gaze upon war. The impression of authenticity in war photography is largely created by closeness to the action. Yet what we are conventionally used to is the gaze of the observer, the uninvolved bystander. When he took his famous pictures of D-Day, Robert Capa, for example, was in a landing craft of the first attack wave – almost as close to the action as possible. Yet his photograph of soldiers storming out of the boat maintains a certain distance from them, which is great enough to highlight a distinction between photographer and soldier – i.e. that he is there as an observer. What we find in the Iraq and Afghanistan pictures of today is a suspension of this distance. The photographs assume the position, or field of view, of the agent, thereby suggesting an even more original perspective upon the scene of action. The photographer achieves this by positioning himself among the soldiers and by photographing from their perspective. As we see, for example, in James Nachtwey’s picture of American soldiers storming a house in Baghdad (374-75) or the pictures by Gary Knight of Marines approaching Diyala Bridge (346-51), such photographs simulate the field of view of the soldiers, i.e. their gaze upon the scene of action and the enemy. One striking device in achieving this effect is the use of a protruding gun in the lower border of the image, which suggests that the picture actually reflects the view of an agent in the war rather than that of an observing bystander (e.g. pictures from the Iraq War by Ron Haviv, 262-63, or Christopher Anderson, 256-57). It is remarkable that these pictures feature a similarity to so-called ego-shooter computer games, the primary characteristic of which is the afore-mentioned protruding gun – held by the player. Hence, these pictures aim to create the feeling of authentic representation by immersing the beholder in the picture and identifying him with the agent of war, i.e. by picking up the field of view of the soldiers but also by accommodating ideas about war that stem from popular visual culture. It is the authenticity of the experience of an agent of war that these images aim to achieve. Needless to say, we should be alarmed by the political implications of such a willing abandonment of journalistic distance and neutrality and its

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substitution with a radically subjective, unilateral gaze at the battlefield. In this paper, I have isolated and scrutinized two main aspects of photographic authenticity. I first took a brief look at conceptions of photographic authenticity which are grounded in the medium of photography. The upshot was that at first glance, the medium of photography can be seen as a point of reference in the attribution of authenticity to photography. Especially in the case of war photography, however, it is rewarding to ask how photographers construct authentic images by means of choosing a certain subject matter and by pursuing a specific style of depiction. Here, the impression of immediacy and proximity both in terms of subject matter and style can be seen as functioning as overarching principles in the construction of authenticity in war photography. In contemporary pictures from Afghanistan and Iraq, we can observe some remarkable changes in the way photographers verify their images. On the one hand, photographers emphasize the heat of the moment by insinuating spontaneity, essentially by giving their images a feel of technical deficiency. On the other hand, many photographers seem to have shifted their perspective on war from that of a distanced observer to that of an agent of war. In doing so, they appeal to the sense of authenticity of their addressees by suggesting an original gaze at the battlefield. What unites these newer devices of authentication is their impressionist nature. Hence, contemporary war photographers stress the subjectivity of experiencing war and seem to abandon the concept of neutral and objective photographic depiction. Indeed, it seems as if the stylistic devices used by war photographers reflect contemporary conceptions of photographic truth – namely that despite its fervent appeal to our sense of authenticity, photography is a highly subjective and personal way of approaching the events of history. This points to a decisive change in the conceptions of photography after the digital turn: namely that photographic authenticity is no longer connected to the objectivity of representation but to the subjectivity of the represented experience.

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W ORKS C ITED Anderson, Christopher et al. War: USA. Afghanistan. Iraq. New York: de.MO, 2003. Andree, Martin. Archäologie der Medienwirkung Faszinationstypen von der Antike bis heute. München: Fink, 2006. Barthes, Roland. “The Photographic Message.” Image, Music, Text: Essays. Ed. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977. 15-31. —. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Brothers, Caroline. War and Photography: A Cultural History. London: Routledge, 1997. Campbell, David. “Cultural Governance and Pictorial Resistance: Reflections on the Imaging of War.” Review of International Studies 29 (2003): 57-73. Carlson, Timothy, and Bill Katovsky. Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. New York: Lyons, 2003. Cartier-Bresson, Henri. The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers. Ed. Michael L. Sand. New York: Aperture, 1999. Freund, Gisèle. Photographie und Gesellschaft. Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1979. Grittmann, Elke. “Die Konstruktion Von Authentizität. Was ist echt an den Pressefotos im Informationsjournalismus?” Authentizität und Inszenierung von Bilderwelten. Ed. Thomas Knieper and Marion Müller. Köln: von Halem, 2003. 123-49. Knaller, Susanne, and Haro Müller, eds. Authentizität: Diskussion eines ästhetischen Begriffs. München: Fink, 2006. Knape, Joachim. “Rhetorik der Künste.” Rhetorik und Stilistik. Ed. Ulla Fix et al. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008. 894-927. —. “Persuasion.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. Ed. Gert Ueding. Vol. 6. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003. Knieper, Thomas, and Marion G. Müller, eds. Authentizität und Inszenierung von Bilderwelten. Köln: von Halem, 2003. Lunenfeld, Peter. “Digital Photography: The Dubitative Image.” Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2000. 55-69.

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Miller, Russel. Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History. New York: Grove P, 1997. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge, 2000. Mitchell, Wiliam J. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the PostPhotographic Era. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1994. Newhall, Beaumont. The History of Photography. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1982. Paul, Gerhard. Bilder des Krieges – Krieg der Bilder: Die Visualisierung des modernen Krieges. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004. Peirce, Charles S. Phänomen und Logik der Zeichen. Trans. Helmut Pape. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1993. Rajewsky, Irina. Intermedialität. Tübingen: Francke, 2002. Saving Private Ryan. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Amblin, 1998. Schmidt, Siegfried J. “Die Wirklichkeit des Beobachters.” Die Wirklichkeit der Medien: Eine Einführung in die Kommunikationswissenschaft. Ed. Klaus Merten et al. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994. 3-19. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003. Ulrich, Anne. “Authentizität.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. Ed. Gert Ueding. Supplemental Volume. Forthcoming. Wolf, Werner. “Intermedialität.” Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie. Ed. Ansgar Nünning. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001. Wortmann, Volker. Authentisches Bild und authentisierende Form. Köln: von Halem, 2003.

A Quest for Authenticity Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated I RMTRAUD H UBER

Today’s idea of the authentic in literature is intrinsically bound up with what can be called our present “age of testimony.” As Elie Wiesel puts it in “The Holocaust in Literary Imagination”: “If the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle, and the Renaissance the sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony” (9). The horrors of the two World Wars, unprecedented in their global impact, and especially the inconceivable inhumanity of the Nazi racial politics seemed to call for a literature that faithfully reported and documented what had happened, a literature of authentic reports. In the representation of these events and most explicitly in connection with the Holocaust, literature was faced with moral and political restraints which Saul Friedlander called a “moral imperative” (Memory 53). At the same time, however, postmodernism increasingly gained influence in literature, questioning master-narratives and relishing in intricate plays with fictionality and language. Postmodernist playfulness seems to be incompatible with Holocaust literature’s aspirations to the testimonial, since the latter tended to preclude the ludic because the topic demands absolute seriousness. “The overall representation of the Nazi era, and of the annihilation of the Jews in particular,” Friedlander notes, tends [...] to flow back into the monumental-didactic mode. This means, in itself, a fundamental dissonance in relation to contemporary sensibility, as the

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ironic mode is an essential dimension of this sensibility and as the disconnection between moral judgment, aesthetic norms, and intellectual analysis represents a strong component of present-day Western culture. […] The ‘moral imperative’ seems to impose limits on aestheticization. These limits cannot be defined a priori, but their transgression is perceived by the reader or the viewer, and this very limitation seems particularly at odds with what may sometimes appear as the playful experiments of post-modernity. (Memory 53-54)

A lot seems to have changed between 1993, when Friedlander wrote these words, and 2002, the year of publication of Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, a book that does address the extermination of the Jews during the Second World War but is nevertheless described by the chorus of critical voices cited in its blurb as “hysterically funny,” “exhilarating,” “fantastic and boldly imaginative.” Does Foer’s novel infringe on the moral imperative that Friedlander postulated? How does it negotiate the tension between its postmodernist strategies and the demands of its subject matter? And what role do aspirations for authenticity play in this negotiation? Before I will address these questions in more detail in my reading of the novel, a general consideration of authenticity as a quality of literature seems to be in order. The turn towards testimony in post-war literature considerably influenced the meaning and evaluation of authenticity and the authentic in literature. In its shift towards the testimonial, literary authenticity is increasingly associated with the demand for objectivity and truth to external facts. It is, therefore, no more merely a question of the sincerity of truth claims, which are based on the subjectivity of the speaker. Testimonial authenticity invokes a juridical dimension that does not allow for inaccuracies and anchors its concept of truth in the material world. These two ideas of authenticity, one based on subjectivity and one on objectivity and thus potentially contradictory, nevertheless coexist and intermingle in contemporary uses of the term. Where authenticity is understood as being true to oneself, as not succumbing to tradition and conventions but finding genuine expression in artistic innovation, an aesthetic is implied which derives its authenticity from constant change. Authentic in this sense is only what is original and new; everything else is condemned as inauthentic copying of preconceived

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forms. The testimonial authentic, by contrast, resists innovation and can be traced back to authenticity’s roots in ideas of authority and authentication. Consequently, it is consistency with authoritative discourses, such as history, science or ethnology that serves as a measuring rod here. This double-sidedness of authenticity is nothing new but reflects fundamental debates about art and artistic truthfulness that can be traced throughout Western history even as far back as to Plato’s and Aristotle’s diverging conceptions of mimesis.1 What makes the coexistence of these concepts highly problematic in the current situation, however, is that they are used differently in different contexts. Authenticity in the sense of a creative realization of subjectivity tends to be applied to works that are valued for their universality and their exemplification of the conditio humana. Authenticity in the sense of testimonial accuracy and faithful representation of reality is, in contrast, especially evoked in representations of the other, of things that lie beyond the experience of the average, still so obviously Western reader. The authority of the authentic is especially required if adherence to truth cannot be confirmed by the reader’s own life knowledge. As Virginia Richter puts it: [I]n certain contexts authenticity still remains an important category of reference. This is particularly the case with books written by women, writers from ethnic minorities, or Holocaust survivors. Works written by authors whose identity is ‘unmarked’ – by and large, white heterosexual men – tend to be evaluated according to their aesthetic merit. (60)

Notwithstanding their fictionality, representations of the other are to serve as truthful testimonies. Hence the frequent objections from critics to books touching topics that are not based in the immediate cultural and social environment of the author’s life experience. Hence also publishers’ insistence on marketing strategies which emphasize an author’s cultural and social background whenever appropriate. Authenticity has become of strategic value in the positioning of an author

1

For a discussion of different concepts of aesthetic authenticity see Knaller. A brief survey of meanings of authenticity in non-aesthetic contexts and the term’s relevancy for mass media can be found in van Leeuwen.

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in the globalized field of literary production.2 The author, therefore, is by no means dead. On the contrary, when criteria of testimonial authenticity are applied, it is the authors who, with their life and experience, must be able to vouch for the authenticity of their work.3 A testimony is never a completely disinterested utterance; it implies retribution, healing, scientific value, stating a precedent, correcting official history. The term testimony invokes a juridical situation, a court, a jury and judgment and thus the demand for the testimonial authentic is closely connected to what seems to be a currently widespread conception of literature as functional, political and responsible. Literature’s task to give the silenced victims a voice pervades critical discourses with a political orientation and has been especially emphasized in gender studies and postcolonial theory. 4 These attempts to empower the margins and to make them heard often led to a demand for accuracy in description since they were to serve as truthful testimony to heretofore suppressed and ignored realities. In spite of the revolutionary and empowering potential that such an approach to literature originally might have possessed, its pitfalls and limitations for

2

The role of authenticity as a market factor has been investigated in several recent studies on postcolonial literature, e.g. in those by Huggan, Root, Brouillette. The idea of literature as an economic field of production of course draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas as formulated in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature.

3

Several recent cases in which the author’s life spectacularly failed to be consistent with readers’ expectations can attest to the impact of this demand. The scandals and controversies caused by Benjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (which Aleida Assmann discusses in this volume) or by the exposure of Mundrooroo Narogin’s true identity are two prominent and frequently discussed cases in point.

4

Notably so in the seminal postcolonial study The Empire Writes Back by Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin and in much of the work of Gayatri C. Spivak to name just some of the most obvious examples. In gender theory the attempt to develop a feminine literary voice has been one of the main concerns ever since such early feminist texts as Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own or exponents of écriture feminine such as Hélène Cixous or Luce Irigaray. Cf. also the influential work of Showalter and Moi.

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postcolonial discourses have recently been stressed by several critics. Gareth Griffith voices concerns shared by several postcolonial critics when he warns that authentic speech, where it is conceived not as a political strategy within a specific political and discursive formation but as a fetishised cultural commodity, may be employed […] to enact a discourse of ‘liberal violence’, re-enacting its own oppressions on the subjects it purports to represent and defend. (241)

As a commodity, authenticity addresses itself to consumers’ expectations. Representations are considered authentic when they conform to an already preconceived idea of what the truth is and how to adequately represent it, and this is not only the case where postcolonial issues are at stake. Which representations we allow to be true and valid testimony is at least in part always already prescribed by our ‘horizon of expectation’ (Jauss’s term). It is certainly partly because of the vogue of ‘otherness’ that authenticity is such an issue in current discourse. “Authenticism,” as Ana María Sánchez-Arce terms it, “permits and precedes the ‘celebration’ of difference whilst enforcing a repressive discourse that restricts the articulation of those differences” (143). A considerable part of Western readership is apparently keen to catch a glimpse of difference such as that of e.g. a postcolonial exotic or the psychologically liminal, but an idea of what constitutes this ‘other’ is already predetermined by the selfsame. The other that readers expect to find in these texts is therefore rarely an absolute other in Levinas’s sense of a capitalized Other. It is rather an ‘other’ that has been completely assimilated into the same by the totalizing mechanism that Levinas aptly calls “imperialism of the same” (39). Such an alterity serves to bolster the self’s sense of sameness by delineating and confirming the borders of sameness because it represents what the same is not. It is a reassuring other, one that never questions the status of the same because it is constituted by it while, according to Levinas, the relation with an absolute Other would imply the unsettling experience of “the putting into question of my freedom, the appeal coming from the other to call me to my responsibility” (213). In such a fetishization of difference and the other, the discourse of testimonial authenticity serves as a use-

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ful mechanism to contain and to control alterity’s disturbing potentialities. Everything that exceeds readers’ expectations and questions their preconceptions about the other can be rejected as inauthentic or might be suppressed and made invisible by reading strategies structured along expectations of authenticity. It is thus in representations which engage with alterity that testimonial accuracy, with its appeal for authenticity, is particularly called for. All things considered it is not very surprising that the rise of testimony as a literary form coincides with postmodernism’s growing awareness of the inaccuracies, restraints and inadequacies of linguistic representations and the fundamental questioning of any objective assertions of truth and universal values. The Holocaust served strikingly both as a point of reference for prominent postulations of the need for authentic literary testimony and as the central metaphor in Lyotard’s seminal work The Postmodern Condition. The very event that seems to explode all representational possibilities, and to rule out generically all possibility of containing it in a meaningful structure, calls most prominently for truth and authenticity in any attempts to do it justice. What appears to be a paradox on closer inspection turns out to be causality. It is precisely because the belief in the ability to represent truth has been deeply shaken and called radically into question that the demand for authenticity and sincerity has become so very urgent. It is because the Holocaust questions fundamentally the possibility of adequate representation that guidelines seem necessary and limits to representation are felt to be required. If no representation can ever be completely truthful, the expectation and hope is that the demand for authenticity sets up some kind of applicable standard. In the words of Virginia Richter: “[W]e need authenticity because it doesn’t exist” (68, emphasis in the original). In the case of the Holocaust it is, of course, the sheer horror of the event that seems to allow for no other criterion of literary representation than that of authenticity. The other that has to be represented here is not distanced from the Western reader in spatial or cultural terms but rather seems to be situated beyond what is generally considered human. The immensity of cruelty and suffering of this “event at the limits” (Friedlander, Limits 2), which exceeds cognitive and imaginative faculties, is especially disturbing because in all its inconceivabil-

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ity it is both absolutely foreign and frighteningly close to home for European readers, since it is impossible to isolate from their own identity and history. As Saul Friedlander points out in his introduction to Probing the Limits of Representation: [O]n the one hand, our traditional categories of conceptualization and representation may well be insufficient, our language itself problematic. On the other hand, in the face of these events we feel the need of some stable narration; a boundless field of possible discourses raises the issue of limits with particular stringency. (5)

In response to this perceived necessity for representational limits it has been argued that every appropriation of this historical event for other than strictly testimonial reasons implies neglecting the victim’s reality and banalizing the event and verges on the immoral. Since there is an “unbreachable discrepancy” (Lanzmann 206) between the horrible events and every conceivable representation, writing about the Holocaust seems to be a “blasphemy” (Wiesel 8). Because literature “faces problems of aestheticization or the need for an indirect approach that may be symbolically meaningful yet produces a soothing effect” (Friedlander, Memory 6), it has been rigorously rejected by prominent voices. Claude Lanzmann even contends that “it is not only obscenity, it is real cowardice, because this idea of our being able to engender harmoniously, if I may say so again, this violence, is just an absurd dream of nonviolence. It is a way of escaping; it is a way not to face the horror” (207). In face of the mass-murder of millions of people the limits to representation are not only ontological and structural but ethical as well. This demand for authentic representation of the Holocaust is, however, faced with two dilemmas: since fewer and fewer people are left who can, as survivors, adopt an authentic voice, should the effort to represent the Holocaust simply stop? Would this not risk the event to be forgotten, to be closed off and put behind us? Are the continually re-imagined and revisited representations of the past not the very means by which it is kept alive and meaningful or, one might even say, present for us? The second dilemma touches even deeper. Considering postmodernist sensitization to the inevitability of subjective

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construction of reality and limitedness of discourse, how can a demand for absolute truth to reality ever be adequately met? This second point acquires even more urgency whenever the narrated events must have been traumatic to a high degree, because one of the defining properties of trauma is that the triggering event tends to elude narrative structures. Traumatic memories “are not encoded like the ordinary memories of adults in a verbal, linear narrative that is assimilated into an ongoing life story” (Herman 37), because the severity of the event destroys the victim’s connection to the symbolic systems that are the basis of narration. Trauma implies an excess that cannot be integrated into a coherent story, and traumatic memory is, therefore, intrusive and non-verbal; it manifests itself not in words but rather in images and sensations. Cathy Caruth maintains that in its immediacy of experience a traumatic flashback is literal or, if you will, authentic, precisely because it is not verbal. Every verbalization, every assimilation of the event into a narrative would therefore imply a loss of authenticity. In terms of therapy this is a paradoxical situation, because, as Caruth argues, [T]rauma […] requires integration, both for the sake of testimony and for the sake of cure. But on the other hand, the transformation of the trauma into a narrative memory that allows the story to be verbalized and communicated, to be integrated into one’s own, and others’ knowledge of the past, may lose both the precision and the force that characterizes traumatic recall. (153)

Though one might be inclined to doubt the assertion of an inherent absolute literality of traumatic flashbacks, the point that every testimony, how truthful to subjective or objective criteria it ever strives to be, is always already transformed and distorted to a degree and necessarily limited still seems to be valid.5 Incongruence and fragmentariness is

5

How reliable traumatic memory really is has been an issue of considerable controversy, especially in the so-called False Memory Debate of the 1990s. For further references on this topic see Christa Schönfelder’s article “‘I want my past back’: The Quest for Memory and Authenticity in Helen Dunmore’s Talking to the Dead” in the present volume.

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an inherent feature of traumatic experience and to assimilate it into a coherent narrative is in a way a twofold betrayal. Caruth asserts that beyond the loss of precision there is another, more profound, disappearance: the loss, precisely, of the event’s essential incomprehensibility, the force of its affront to understanding. […] The danger of speech, of integration into the narration of memory, may lie not in what it cannot understand, but in that it understands too much. (154)

It is especially this even more fundamental and apparently even less avoidable loss that has repeatedly been keenly felt by critics of Holocaust representations and has contributed considerably to their reservations about representation in general. Language and representation inevitably fall short of the immensity and the horror of the suffering and pain. Every representation is necessarily a betrayal. In face of this inevitability the responsibility for adequacy of representation shifts partly to the reader or listener. Since representations can never be entirely adequate it becomes the task of the reader or listener to answer responsibly to the text’s demands by being aware of the gaps and absences, the impossibilities of narration. The inherent fictionality of the witness’s account has to be acknowledged without passing judgment or neglecting its truth value.6 The boundary between testimony and literature, we see now, is difficult to establish. This is, of course, the very reason why it is so heavily contested and so jealously guarded. It is in facing these representational problems and challenges, I will argue, that a postmodernist and ironic approach to the Holocaust can go beyond realistic and testimonial representation without infringing upon the moral sensibilities mentioned by Friedlander. To sharpen my point I will claim, following Derek Attridge, that literature’s singular import is to be found beyond mechanical readings which primarily value accuracy, beyond the mere level of content on which testimonial claims would have to be negotiated. Its singularity lies in its ability to open up to the other and it is precisely at this point that an

6

The importance of the listener has been stressed countless times both by psychological practitioners and literary theorists (cf. Felman/Laub 70; Kopf 65; Caruth vii).

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ethical demand is raised which compels us as readers to develop responsible readings. “The text that functions powerfully as literature (rather than as exhortation, description, mystification, and so on),” Attridge asserts, “uses the materials of the same − the culture which it and the reader inhabit and within which they are constituted − in such a way as to open onto that which cannot be accounted for by those materials (though they have in fact made possible its emergence)” (124). Literature’s ability to represent an other is only activated inasmuch as this other is not already completely prescribed and predefined by the reader’s or the market’s expectations and dictations. It is to the extent that representations of the other exceed expectations and force them to be reconsidered and changed that literature is able to be ethically relevant. By staging its own linguistic processes, literature can, furthermore, point to the absences and gaps in its own narration, thus being able to elicit responsible reactions to the immensity of traumatic events. In what follows I will attempt to trace such a reconsidered ethical perspective on literature dealing with massively violent events by investigating the novel Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, published in 2002 by a twenty-five-year-old American, a grandson of survivors. In familiar postmodernist manner its story is fragmented, pieced together out of several different narrative strands. On one level it tells the story of the author’s alter ego’s trip to the Ukraine in search of clues to his grandfather’s past as a Ukrainian Jew. On another, it is the story of young Alex, the Ukrainian translator, and his grandfather, who accompany Jonathan on his quest and are in consequence confronted with questions of guilt and responsibility that lie hidden in their own history. It is, furthermore, the story of Jonathan’s attempt to write a book about his ancestors’ life in the Jewish shtetl Trachimbrod and, lastly – again typically postmodernist – the novel tells the tale of its own process of creation. Though the author’s alter ego appears as a character in the book, it is not he but rather Alex who serves as a homodiegetic narrator for large parts of the novel, in which he gives an account of the trip. He successively sends his completed chapters to Jonathan, accompanying them with letters that are also reproduced as part of the novel. Finally, several chapters from the story

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Jonathan is in the process of writing about Trachimbrod are inserted between Alex’s contributions and are commented on by Alex in his letters. Neither storyline strictly adheres to the conventions of literary realism, but even though Alex’s story is astonishing and often hilarious – mainly due to the idiosyncrasies of its characters as well as of its language – it is still very much grounded in what one might call consensual reality. The Trachimbrod chapters, however, are far from realistic or ‘authentic’ in any historical sense but seem to be stylistically rather closer to myth and folk-tale. Though it purports to portray shtetl life before its utter destruction during the Second World War, it abounds from its very beginning with fantastical and magical elements. For instance, we are told that the shtetl is divided into a Jewish Quarter, in which all sacred activities are performed, and a Human Three-Quarters, with the so-called Upright Synagogue straddling the two, resting on the Jewish/Human fault line. Since the ratio of secular to religious tends to shift from time to time, however, the synagogue has to be moved regularly and we are informed that “in 1783 […] wheels were attached, making the shtetl’s ever-changing negotiation of Jewishness and Humanness less of a schlep” (10). In this strange place a man can live happily with a disk-saw blade embedded into his forehead, making love emanates light and its inhabitants are obsessed to absurdity with memory and the recording of their past and present. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to think that this is simply a highly idealized nostalgic version of the shtetl, using artistic licence to make the lost past look like paradise. It is not, and cannot be, the attempt of a survivor “to bring back to life people and places destroyed by the executioner and to prove that Jews can, with words, build upon ruins” (Wiesel 8). The shtetl, Elie Wiesel points out, “became the illustration of our kingdom, […] Jerusalem away from Jerusalem. […] The shtetl can be found only in song, only in memory, only in words, in words alone. That is why the teller of its tale does whatever he can to present it in its most glorious aspect” (8-9). Though this tendency of survivor literature is certainly evoked here, it is critically refracted

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both by fantastical hyperbole and corrosion.7 Despite its prevailingly light-hearted tone and humorous elements, the main characters of the Trachimbrod chapters are mostly tragic and absurd rather than idealized in their vain search for love and happiness. Their actions are frequently morally questionable and sometimes downright outrageous. They are not celebrated as heroes of the past but lead often pathetic lives and eventually they all run blindly and tragically into their doom. Far from creating a glorious myth about the past, Trachimbrod’s inhabitants are radically human in their imperfections. Can such an account that introduces obviously fantastical elements and therefore drastically diverges from reality be adequate, considering the historical fact of the total eradication of shtetl-culture during the Holocaust? Is it not our and the author’s duty to remember, as has frequently been stressed, and to remember as faithfully as possible? Or, to put it more drastically, if, as Wiesel maintained, “the shtetl can be found only in song, only in memory, only in words, in words alone” (8), if its continuing existence is thus entirely dependent on its manifestations in language, must such an inaccurate description not be considered perfidious because it results in an ultimate destruction, a falsification that fundamentally threatens the only residue of shtetl life? Everything Is Illuminated presents us, of course, with a blatantly fictional representation on several discursive levels. We are repeatedly made aware of the fact that the Trachimbrod chapters are a novel within a novel, that this is a construct and a product of the imagination of the fictional author Jonathan Safran Foer. And not only is its fic-

7

Another literary genre that Everything Is Illuminated certainly draws on considerably is magical realism. The book shows strong intertextual links e.g. to One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, a text which is generally considered to be a founding text of magical realism. The implications of this conscious move to relate to a genre that has frequently been associated with marginalized discourses because it is perceived to “offer […] to the writer wishing to write against totalitarian regimes a means to attack the definitions and assumptions which support such systems (e.g. colonialism) by attacking the stability of the definitions upon which these systems rely” (Bowers 4) are certainly intriguing but cannot be considered more closely here.

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tionality emphasized, but also the fact that it widely differs and does not in the least try to represent life in a Jewish shtetl as it ‘really’ was. This is highlighted especially in Alex’s increasingly critical comments on the Trachimbrod chapters, voiced in his typical, highly idiosyncratic English: “We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes? The both of us? Do you think that this is acceptable when we are writing about things that occurred?” (179). Since Jonathan’s letters to Alex are not part of the novel this question remains for the reader to answer. Increasingly, however, it becomes apparent that every seemingly realistic representation of life in Trachimbrod would necessarily be just as fictional as Jonathan’s fantastical version, due to the fact of the total eradication of the shtetl. When the search leads finally to the place where Trachimbrod once stood, what they find is a shockingly absolute absence, a void so complete that Alex’s words fail him: I implore myself to paint Trachimbrod, so you will know why we were so overawed. There was nothing. When I utter ‘nothing’ I do not mean there was nothing except for two houses, and some wood on the ground, and pieces of glass, and children’s toys, and photographs. When I utter that there was nothing, what I intend is that there was not any of these things, or any other things. ‘How?’ the hero [Jonathan] asked. ‘How?’ I asked Augustine. ‘How could anything have ever existed here?’ (184)

In face of this complete blank, there are scarcely any reference points left that would allow for a graspable connection of past to present. Even when the protagonists actually encounter a mass of surviving items from Trachimbrod, which have been collected by an old woman, one of the very few survivors of the catastrophe, they serve rather to deepen the estrangement from the past: There were many boxes, which were overflowing with items. These had writings on their sides. A white cloth was overwhelming from the box marked weddings and other celebrations. The box marked Privates: Journals/Diaries/Sketchbooks/Underwear was so overfilled that it appeared prepared to rupture. There was another box marked silver/perfume/pinwheels, and

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one marked watches/winter, and one marked hygiene/spools/candles, and one marked figurines/spectacles. (147)

The inscriptions on the boxes, while ostensibly trying to impose order, only manage to aggravate the impression of chaos and disconnectedness. What are we to make of pairings such as watches with winter, or journals with underwear? Without a story to connect them and to make sense of them, these remnants of the past are for all their materiality and reality but a randomly assorted mass of objects without any true referential value or inherent meaning. The only item that Jonathan does possess that seems to promise access to past life in Trachimbrod is his grandfather’s journal. It falls short of this promise, however, as becomes clear by the few entries cited in the text such as: “Went to the theater today. Too bored to stay through the first act. Drank eight cups of coffee. I thought I was going to burst. Didn’t burst” (170, emphasis in the original). Since entries as blunt as these cannot possibly satisfy Jonathan’s (or the reader’s) need for a full picture of what life in the shtetl must have been like, Jonathan has to fall back on his imagination. And rather than doing this covertly he invents an outrageous and clearly exaggerated story of sexual promiscuity, brandishing his inventions blatantly before the reader’s eyes. It is the absolute rupture with the past, the blank of the traumatic event of complete destruction that makes a more direct approach impossible. The traumatic event of the erasure of shtetl culture lies always just beneath or behind the novel’s two main plotlines. From the very beginning, the reader knows it to be the unavoidable catastrophe awaiting at the end both of Jonathan and Alex’s search and of the shtetl life Jonathan describes in his novel. This traumatic core is approached diametrically from opposite directions. On the one hand from a fantastical, explicitly fictional account which, starting in the year 1879, progresses in time, on the other hand from the retrospective direction of the search for Trachimbrod, a delving into the past that is, in contrast to the Trachimbrod chapters, designated as real or authentic. The illusion of facticity and objectivity is created in these chapters by the unedited faulty English of Alex’s letters, by its featuring of the author himself as a character and generally by the pretence of the novel to be a faithful compilation of a real correspondence between Alex

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and Jonathan.8 In their incongruence and diametrical opposition the two plotlines thus emphasize the rupture that separates them. The traumatic event cannot be grasped and spoken by either of the plotlines but manifests itself in their incompatibility. When both plotlines finally reach the unavoidable traumatic moment, syntax breaks down, words merge into each other, and language dissolves in face of pain and suffering (cf. 247-52, 272-73). Being conscious of its own problematical status the text questions the adequacy of truthful representation in the sense of a simple adherence to facts, and yet it acknowledges the necessity of constituting meaningful connections to the past. Whatever the novel does manage to say serves only to point to the unsayable that lies beneath. By openly admitting that it necessarily fails in its attempt to represent and understand, it acknowledges the event’s “essential incomprehensibility” rather than trying to “understand too much” while proposing at the same time that stories are essential for memory (Caruth 145). The importance that memory has for making sense of one’s self and one’s environment is repeatedly stressed in the text and is ascribed even additional importance in the Jewish tradition. Memory is the Jew’s sixth sense, the text informs us: The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks – when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell asleep from stroking his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain – that the Jew is able to know why it hurts. When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks: What does it remember like? (198-99, emphasis in the original)

In accord with that, Trachimbrod’s inhabitants are obsessed with memory. In their chronicle called “The Book of Antecedents” they note down everything that occurs in the shtetl, down to the last detail

8

Even though it has to be noted that the authenticity of Alex’s quest-story and especially his letters, once established, is again questioned by further metafictional twists of the text, it is still set in stark contrast to the Trachimbrod chapters.

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and up to the absurd report of the very fact of their reporting. The last entry from this book cited in the text consists of nearly two hundred repetitions of the words “we are writing” (213, emphasis in the original). This meticulous account remains, however, just a random collection of events and statements without a connecting narrative that makes meaningful memory possible at all. Memory does not work as a mere archive of the past. On the contrary, it is a collection of stories like the biblical one of the sacrifice of Isaac mentioned in the quotation. Memory is not based on facts, but on narration. If it is misconceived as a mere accumulation of facts and vain causalities memory is barren and can be paralyzing. Though the villagers are repeatedly warned of the approach of the German army and of the atrocities committed by them, they ignore them because they are strangely overcome by a collective addiction to memory, “using memory to remember memory, bound in an order of remembrance, struggling in vain to remember a beginning or end” (258). Men in the village “set up flow charts […] in an attempt to make sense of their memories,” which pointlessly try to draw connections between apparently arbitrary words, leading e.g. from “Pocket” to “Radiance” to “Death by drowning” (259). The past presents itself in meaningless fragments that can only be made sense of if they are integrated into a story that is necessarily arbitrary to a certain extent. Stories are, therefore, absolutely necessary. They are a human exigency and, the text implies, the only way we can integrate the past and make it meaningful for our present. But the Holocaust cannot simply be told. It cannot be integrated into a story, it resists any attempt to make it meaningful, it always exceeds all frameworks. Its facts, of course, can be archived, preserved in museums, monuments and history books. Its incomprehensibility, however, can only be preserved in stories that admit to and expose their own inadequacy, their gaps and silences. In its excess and inaccessibility the past can thus be encountered anew as an other that surprises and calls to responsibility and it is precisely literature’s fictionality, its ability to be “nomadic with the truth” (179) that makes such reconsiderations and re-presentations possible. Demands for testimonial authenticity strip literature of this fundamental quality, its ability to confront us with an alterity that is surprising and that exacts a reaction and reconsideration from the reader. By approaching the

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Holocaust in the formerly banned mode of postmodernist playfulness and irony Everything Is Illuminated manages to deal with its traumatic subject matter and to re-present the irreducible absence of the past to the reader. Friedlander’s moral imperative therefore has to be reconsidered. Keeping it up in all its strictness would eventually imply a ban on further fictional representations of the Holocaust. The authentic has, nevertheless, by no means left the literary stage. Though Everything Is Illuminated leaves aside historical accuracy and realist conventions, it seems, in fact, that acknowledging the absolute loss of the past and the impossibility of testimonial accuracy by opting for a postmodernist and magical realist approach is probably the only way an author with no personal memories of the Holocaust can be authentic in any sense at all. Thus, in a way, the moral imperative has only shifted. Everything Is Illuminated would probably have earned less general praise and quite a lot of indignation if Foer was not himself a Jew and a descendent of Holocaust survivors. The novel fulfils demands for authenticity by staging itself as the quest of a thirdgeneration Jew for his origins and it abounds in authenticating gestures. It is still, one could say, an authentic testimony of the situation and experience of a third-generation American Jew. In face of the increasing temporal and generational distance to the Holocaust on the one hand, and the challenges of postmodernist philosophy to conceptions of truth and representation on the other, to assume the stance of a first-hand witness would, in effect, be inauthentic. Problematical as it is in its normative tendencies, the demand for the authentic has, one can see, in no way lessened, though it is perhaps less burdened with demands for historical accuracy and shifts more in the direction of subjective sincerity. At this point one comes back to Alex’s central questions: “We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes? The both of us? Do you think that this is acceptable when we are writing about things that occurred?” (179). Yes, the answer seems to be. But only if you are authentic.

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W ORKS C ITED Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature. London: Routledge, 1989. Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge, 2004. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Bowers, Maggie A. Magic(al) Realism. London: Routledge, 2005. Brouillette, Sarah. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Foer, Jonathan S. Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel. 2001. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Friedlander, Saul. Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. —. “Introduction.” Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution. Ed. Saul Friedlander. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996. 1-21. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Cien Años de Soledad. 1984. Madrid: Cátedra, 152004. Griffith, Gareth. “The Myth of Authenticity.” The Postcolonial Studies Reader. Eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 237-41. Herman, Judith L. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge, 2001. Knaller, Susanne. “Genealogie des Ästhetischen Authentizitätsbegriffs.” Authentizität: Diskussion eines Ästhetischen Begriffs. Ed. Susanne Knaller and Harro Müller. München: Fink, 2006. 17-35.

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Kopf, Martina. Trauma und Literatur: Das Nicht-Erzählbare Erzählen: Assia Djebar und Yvonne Vera. Frankfurt a.M: Brandes & Apsel, 2005. Lanzmann, Claude. “The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude Lanzmann.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 200-20. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP, 1969. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. 1985. London: Routledge, 22002. Richter, Virginia. “Authenticity: Why We Still Need It Although It Doesn’t Exist.” Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities. Ed. Frank Schulze-Engler and Sissy Helff. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 59-74. Root, Deborah. Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of Difference. Boulder: Westview P, 1996. Sánchez-Arce, Ana M. “Authenticism or the Authority of Authenticity.” Mosaic 40.3 (September 2007): 139-55. Schönfelder, Christa. “‘I want my past back’: The Quest for Memory and Authenticity in Helen Dunmore’s Talking to the Dead.” Paradoxes of Authenticity: Studies on a Critical Concept. Ed. Julia Straub. Bielefeld: transcript, 2011. 135-155. Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977. Van Leeuwen, Theo. “What is Authenticity?” Discourse Studies 3 (2001): 392-97. Wiesel, Elie. “The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration.” Dimensions of the Holocaust. Ed. Elie Wiesel et al. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2 1990. 5-19. Wilkomirski, Binjamin. Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood. Trans. Carol B. Janeway. New York: Schocken Books, 1997. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. San Diego: Harcourt, 1989.

“I Want My Past Back” The Quest for Memory and Authenticity in Helen Dunmore’s Talking to the Dead C HRISTA S CHÖNFELDER “[T]he subject of trauma attracts passionate advocacy and passionate skepticism in a quite disproportionate measure.” (CHRIS R. BREWIN, POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER) “I’ve forgotten things. I’ve forgotten that I’ve forgotten them. […] I’ve forgotten all of the bad things that happened. […] Time is missing.” (MARGARET ATWOOD, CAT’S EYE)

One of the many controversies surrounding the phenomenon of trauma has been centred on the complexities of remembering and forgetting trauma. In the 1990s, the “most contentious and heated debate in the field,” in the words of Chris R. Brewin, breaks out in America in the False Memory Debate (127): a number of therapists claim that memories of childhood trauma may be repressed for decades and then accurately recovered through memory work or therapy. In contrast, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation strongly attacks such assumptions about the preservation and full recovery of trauma memories,

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postulating that memories are subject to change and liable to distortion to the extent that therapy may induce false memories of a childhood trauma that the patient never actually experienced.1 In other words, the late twentieth century witnessed an extremely heated, polarized and heavily politicized debate about the reliability, authenticity or “literality” (Cathy Caruth), versus the unreliability, distortedness or constructedness of trauma memories, particularly of recovered trauma memories.2 Many novels about trauma written roughly at the time of these “Memory Wars” (Brewin 128) also confront and problematize issues of memory and trauma memory. The main focus of my article is Talking to the Dead (1996) by English novelist Helen Dunmore, which shows a particularly complex and nuanced approach to questions of trauma memory, evoking different theories of memory, while, as Roger Luckhurst rightly points out, “refus[ing] to stay in the debate” (“Memory Recovered” 89, emphasis in the original). Against the background of psychological and psychiatric perspectives on trauma memory, I investigate how Dunmore’s novel dramatizes the auto-

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As Nicola King emphasizes, both memory theories can be traced back to Freud: the theory of preservation corresponds to Freud’s model of archaeological excavation, while the rejection of the idea that memories can later be recovered intact is part of Freud’s notion of Nachträglichkeit (4). The two positions also resonate with Freud’s ideas on trauma insofar as Freud in The Aetiology of Hysteria maintained that the origins of hysteria can be ascribed to a childhood trauma, only to abandon this theory soon afterwards and claim that sexual fantasies rather than an actual trauma were the source of hysteria.

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Describing the False Memory Debate in terms of a “collective failure of rationality,” Brewin emphasizes the striking degree of polarization involved in this debate (129-38). Cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus accused trauma researchers and therapists of operating in a realm of myths and being non-scientific “true Believers,” and was in turn denounced as suffering from a “false expert syndrome.” The highly polemical nature of this debate can also be seen in book titles such as Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria, and Victims of Memory: Sex Abuse Accusations and Shattered Lives.

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diegetic narrator’s posttraumatic crisis as dominated by a profound crisis of authenticity of memory and the self, and how the novel represents the narrator’s struggle to overcome her posttraumatic authenticity crisis. Talking to the Dead will also be brought into dialogue with Nicci French’s The Memory Game (1997) and Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991) to further contextualize the novel’s approach to trauma, memory and authenticity, as well as its exploration of the ethics of narrating, sharing and reading life-stories.3 These three novels all explore some of the crucial issues disputed in the False Memory Debate and can be read as points of intersection between literary, clinical and public discourses. Psychological approaches, with their specific and differentiated concepts and models of traumatic stress and its impact, help illuminate the complex and fractured topographies of identity and memory mapped out in these novels. Moreover, a dialogue between literary and psychological discourses also reveals tensions and divergences and, hence, allows us to see more clearly the specificities of literary approaches to trauma and memory. With Laurie Vickroy, I contend that “literary and imaginative approaches [to trauma] provide a necessary supplement to historical and psychological studies” (221). Literary imagination and forms of symbolization and fictionalization help approach extremes of the human experience that seem to resist being confronted and verbalized. The fictional worlds of trauma novels open up spaces in which the phenomenon of trauma can be explored from multiple perspectives, often being personalized and contextualized at the same time. More generally, trauma novels are interrelated with the emergence of both trauma and memory as cultural key categories and concerns. Luckhurst identifies trauma as an “exemplary conceptual knot” in contem-

3

I want to acknowledge that in my selection of novels, I draw on Luckhurst’s “Memory Recovered/Recovered Memory,” which briefly discusses, among others, the novels by Dunmore, Smiley and French. Bringing the novels into an extensive dialogue with memory and trauma theories from the 1990s to the present and exploring interconnections with issues of authenticity, I want to bring into focus further crucial issues of trauma fiction and life-writing, which complement Luckhurst’s perspective of over a decade ago in several important ways.

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porary networks of knowledge (The Trauma Question 14), while Anne Whitehead speaks of a “memory boom,” diagnosing widespread “cultural obsessions” with both individual and collective memory (1-2). The obsessions with memory and with trauma also mutually reinforce each other; a mania for memory is particularly likely to arise at moments of crisis, at times when memory comes to be perceived as fragile and threatened – a frequent after-effect of trauma. This is the scenario in Helen Dunmore’s Talking to the Dead, a novel centred on the topos of childhood trauma, its long-term effects and its powerful impact on the relationship of two sisters. The novel is told by autodiegetic narrator Nina, the younger of the two sisters, and explores the repercussions of her main traumatic childhood experience, her witnessing the death of her baby brother, in adult life. The focus of the narration is Nina’s stay at her sister Isabel’s house, where the confrontation with her sister’s baby boy triggers the sudden reemergence of long buried, deeply distressing memories about her baby brother. The novel, however, refrains from giving a clear picture of Nina’s childhood trauma, inviting contradictory interpretations of its specific nature: as readers, we oscillate between the interpretation that Nina witnessed her beloved older sister suffocate their baby brother with a pillow and the reading that it was four-year-old Nina herself who committed the deed of horror. The memories of the fatal night when Colin died were lost to Nina for decades, as the novel makes clear, constituting the hidden black hole of her childhood. In clinical terms, Dunmore has her narrator suffer from posttraumatic amnesia, a memory disturbance often observed in trauma victims. Psychiatrist Ronald J. Comer defines amnesia as a “loss of memory” which cannot be explained in terms of ordinary processes of forgetting; it is “not caused by organic factors” but by the effects of traumatic stress (177). Intrusive memories, also called “intrusions,” are an even more common manifestation of trauma victims’ memory crises. Intrusions can be described as images and other sensory impressions that appear suddenly and involuntarily, with striking intensity and immediacy, making trauma survivors feel as if they were re-experiencing the traumatic past (Ehlers/Clark 324). Trauma specialists ascribe amnesia and intrusions essentially to the same cause: unlike ordinary memories, memories of trauma tend to resist being inte-

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grated into cognitive schemes and consciousness, that is, into the existing structures of autobiographical memory, and are encoded in different ways (van der Kolk 282). As a result, traumatic experiences often cannot be recalled intentionally but continue to haunt the trauma survivor through sudden, uncontrolled intrusions. The complexities and paradoxes of trauma memory play a crucial role throughout Talking to the Dead. Dunmore has her protagonistnarrator, Nina, be assailed by intrusive memories even decades after her traumatic childhood experience. The sight of her sister bending over her baby’s cot triggers a vivid picture of Isabel as a seven-yearold the night their baby brother died: I see her, tall Isabel, her dark silky hair falling like bunches of grapes, her kimono brushing the floor. But I see another Isabel as well, half her height, in a cotton nightdress that comes down to her knees. […] I can see her thin, intent face. She is pressing down on the baby’s back, pressing and pressing, pushing him into the mattress. I can see his weak purple legs thrashing, but there’s no sound. (142, emphasis added)

It is the resemblance between a scene in the present and one in the distant past which here causes vivid intrusions. Emphasizing that Nina “remember[s] things in pictures” (144), Talking to the Dead highlights the strong visual, nonverbal quality characteristic of trauma memories. As van der Kolk asserts, trauma memories “may have no verbal […] component whatsoever” but are mainly organized on “somatosensory or iconic levels” (287). While trauma memories are experienced as exceedingly powerful, trauma victims often find it difficult to believe in them as genuine, authentic memories of a past event. As Caruth puts it, “[T]he fact that this scene or thought is not a possessed knowledge, but possesses, at will, the one it inhabits, often produces a deep uncertainty as to its very truth” (Unclaimed Experience 6). In other words, defying verbalization and being largely unavailable to conscious recall, trauma memories are not experienced as graspable and reliable but as elusive and perplexing and as possessing a haunting quality, leaving the trauma survivor in a state of “speechless terror” (van der Kolk 286).

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Talking to the Dead conveys how precisely this special nature of trauma memories threatens Nina’s sense of her memories’ authenticity. Despite the striking vividness and the strong here-and-now quality of her intrusions of Colin in his cot, Nina struggles to believe in these as authentic memories. On top of that, the sudden eruption of images revolving around her baby brother threatens to completely overturn her autobiographical narrative. Exploring how the combination of long-term amnesia and sudden intrusions results in a profound memory crisis, the novel stages the “breakdown of a coherent life story,” the powerful sense of “distraction and disconnection” and the “threat of chaos, of meaninglessness” often produced by posttraumatic memory disturbances (Crossley 57). Nina suddenly finds herself confronted with pressing questions about which of her autobiographical memories are reliable. She laments that “uncertainty runs round [her] like ice” (145) and feels her story of the past begin to collapse: “Fear, horror, admiration, disbelief, fight in me. The iceberg slices the side of my ship, and I go down” (147). Nina’s sudden loss of certainty about what is true and what is false makes her perceive her self and her life as determined by forces beyond her control, metaphorically represented by the iceberg. Switching back and forth between past and present, Nina’s narrative circles around the traumatic event, which figures alternately as the “black hole” of her past, in van der Kolk’s terms, and as the unbearable burden or inassimilable Fremdkörper, in the words of Ruth Klüger. The text hence essentially dramatizes the “oscillation between the terrors of too little memory, or too much” (Luckhurst, “Memory Recovered” 91). By highlighting the narrator’s memory disturbances through repeated direct or indirect references to her intrusions and amnesia, Talking to the Dead inevitably raises issues of unreliable memory and unreliable narration. It reveals that the False Memory Debate hinges on a number of issues which are at the core of narrative fiction: processes of narration and narrating the past, construction, imagination and (un-)reliability. Revolving around these concerns and featuring an autodiegetic narrator who explicitly and self-reflexively problematizes her memory gaps and shows a high emotional involvement in the story she tells, the novel stages the struggle of narrating a life-story through a narrator who clearly displays “factual” or “epistemological”

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unreliability, in Ansgar Nünning’s terms (12-13). What do we, as readers, believe, if the narrator herself does not know what to believe? Could I have made it up? […] Could I have been so terrified of what I’d done that I not only hid it from myself forever, but made up another scene, one where Isabel stood over the baby and the baby was alive, half-hidden by her body, struggling? […] Have I made those pictures in my mind, frame by frame? (182-83)

Confronted with a narrator who is overwhelmed by her own uncertainty – “I know nothing, and I can’t trust my own memory” (183) – readers are, in the words of Vickroy, “guided through the narrative via the disorientations and conflicts of traumatic memory” (3). The repeated emphasis on the narrator’s unreliable memory produces a particularly high degree of “indeterminacy,” in Wolfgang Iser’s terminology, causing us to repeatedly re-examine the text and our interpretation, inviting us to question the status of the narrator’s story and continuously to wonder what we are supposed to believe. Throughout the novel, Nina seems suspended in a state between knowing and not knowing, which is – in a drastically weaker form, of course – re-experienced by the reader. Through its high degree of indeterminacy, a trauma narrative like Talking to the Dead, then, encourages readers to reflect critically on the nature and the impact of trauma. At the same time, it invites us to identify emotionally with trauma victims, to share their experiences and struggles. An important characteristic, and also strength of, literary approaches to trauma hence seems to be that they elicit both an emotional and an intellectual response to trauma, that they “engage readers’ empathy and critical faculties” (Vickroy 225). Dunmore’s novel encourages us to empathize with Nina and yet to analyze her memory crisis critically. Talking to the Dead shows, furthermore, how Nina’s overpowering uncertainty about her past leads to a profound sense of selfalienation and a disrupted sense of self. As Nina laments, “I don’t feel like me anymore” (149). The crisis of her memory’s authenticity goes hand in hand with a crisis of her self’s authenticity, for the resurfacing of the traumatic past triggers threatening doubts about some of her long-held, core beliefs. Having always blindly trusted Isabel and her

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“story of the past” (130), Nina is now forced to ascribe the murder, this deed of inconceivable horror, to her sister or to herself. She is confronted with the “prospect that another self, attached to a wholly occluded memory-chain, might lurk in the interstices of a life-story,” as Luckhurst emphasizes, and as a consequence, “identity threatens to collapse” (“Memory Recovered” 86, 90). The ghosts of the past haunt her in the form of disturbing questions about the very foundations of selfhood: Nina finds herself forced to question who she is and who she was in the past, what elements of her self she can still believe in and trust to be authentic. As she is faced with the nightmare vision of being a murderer, compelled to ask herself if she would indeed have been capable of murdering her own brother, self-knowledge and her former autobiographical self-representation come to be felt as exceedingly fragile and unstable. The novel also emphasizes the close interrelations between Nina’s identity crisis and her highly ambivalent feelings towards her sister, oscillating between deep affection and intense jealousy. This unstable, conflicted relationship seems to function as a continuous source of destabilization for Nina’s sense of self, producing a sense of inferiority: “I’m not at all like Isabel. I’m bad and she’s good” (141). Most strikingly, Nina, who seems in constant worry about her sister’s health and her postnatal depressions and appears to embrace her sisterly duty of nursing her, repeatedly has sexual intercourse with Isabel’s husband. Moreover, this proscribed act takes place on particularly forbidden ground, her sister’s garden, which symbolically underlines the severity of the trespass, the ruthless invasion and appropriation of her sister’s territory. Nina’s affair with her sister’s husband casts doubts on her values and ethical standards; the novel thereby signals the narrator’s moral, in addition to her factual unreliability, in Nünning’s terminology. Thus, the text exemplifies Vickroy’s assertion that trauma novels tend to create fictional spaces of ethical uncertainty (33-34). Dunmore’s novel invites readers to reflect on the ways in which trauma affects ethics. It encourages us to reflect on whether normal ethical standards can be upheld in the face of trauma, signalling that trauma may overthrow individual and collective moral codes and ask for ethical rethinking. The text, thus, resonates with a key claim put forward by Michael Rothberg, who alerts us to the ways in which trauma chal-

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lenges traditional notions of guilt: “The categories of victim and perpetrator derive from either a legal or a moral discourse, but the concept of trauma emerges from a diagnostic realm that lies beyond guilt and innocence or good and evil” (90). Highlighting the ethical incertitude produced by trauma, Talking to the Dead precisely calls attention to the ways in which trauma tends to push conceptions of guilt to its limits and to render clear-cut moral judgements exceedingly difficult. As readers, we oscillate between sympathizing with Nina as a trauma victim and assessing her actions critically as a possible perpetrator, but the text also alternately undercuts both processes. The ethical complexities of writing trauma are, then, reflected and reproduced in the complexities of reading trauma. Raising important questions of trauma and ethics, Nina’s intricate relationship with her sister also calls attention to the interpersonal dimensions of remembering the past. According to social psychologist Harald Welzer, trauma survivors’ suffering can be severely aggravated if they feel that their memories lack concordance with the memories of others. Conceptualizing autobiographical memory as fundamentally social and communicational, Welzer maintains that not only the collective but also the individual past is created and constantly recreated in a continuous process of interpersonal communicational practice (“Gedächtnis und Erinnerung” 164-65). The autobiographical subject is engaged in a ubiquitous process of synthesizing and synchronizing, the aim of which is to make his or her narratives, beliefs and feelings about the past self compatible both with the present self and with the memories of others.4 As Welzer asserts, trauma victims, especially if they suffer from posttraumatic disruptions of memory, are particularly dependent on the sense that their memories are trusted and accepted by others. “Traumatic experience” is characterized by “radical disruption,” as Caruth puts it (Trauma 4), and if the seeming stability of a life-story falls to pieces, existence threatens to collapse even more. Talking to the Dead depicts the experience of realizing that one’s memories and life-stories are incompatible with those of one’s closest fellow human beings as deeply disturbing. The sudden discovery that her memories are irreconcilable with those of her sister is a vital com-

4

On this subject see also Welzer/Markowitsch.

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ponent of Nina’s memory crisis. The harmony of one of the most important memory communities, the family, is shattered at its very foundations, and what is authentic about the familial past becomes a matter of an intricate and never-resolved negotiation between the two sisters. Talking to the Dead shows, then, that the narrator’s posttraumatic crisis of memory and identity in several ways involves a crisis of authenticity. The novel also conveys that it is precisely the crisis of authenticity that leads to the need and the search for authenticity. It suggests that when one is forced to doubt one’s memories, a pressing need naturally arises to investigate which memories are real and which false, to re-gain a sense of control and a sense of authenticity about the past and the self. The quest for memory already pervades the novel’s “prologue.” Lying on Isabel’s grave, Nina talks to her dead sister and waits for answers to “[a]ll the questions [she is] desperate to ask” (6). The subsequent narrative, therefore, could be interpreted as Nina’s attempt to find answers to all these questions about the past to which her sister cannot reply any more. Dunmore has her narrator re-examine and re-construct her uncertain and threatening past through writing. The novel emphasizes throughout to what extent issues of trauma memory involve key questions about processes of narrating the past and narrating the self – and precisely these interrelations can be seen as one important reason why the topos of trauma has become such a prominent theme in literature and attracted such widespread attention by literary critics and theorists. The novel indeed stages the need for narration but also clarification as a predominant desire of the trauma survivor. Once her story of their childhood starts to disintegrate, Nina seems possessed by the powerful images burning in her mind, trying time and again to break the silence on the past. As Nina states, “I want my past back. I need it now, to ask it the questions I never realized I needed to ask” (130). After Isabel’s death, Nina’s urge to uncover and resolve the mysteries of their childhood becomes even more compelling. Hardly conscious of what she is doing, she looks through Isabel’s drawers, her diary, her notes, her address book: “The drawers are still open. I’ve looked at everything, and there’s nothing left to find. But my hand slides in again, grazing on the wood, crackling against the thick layers of newspaper with which she’s lined them, searching. My hand moves of

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itself” (291). This passage exemplifies the central topos that determines the protagonist’s actions and structures the narrative: the compulsion to search for clues that might shed light on the obscurity of the past. A key question to ask, then, is if and to what extent Talking to the Dead depicts this quest for an authentic past as successful. It is crucial to note that the novel “refuses to let the traumatic scene become fixed,” as Luckhurst puts it, “Memory, which means talking to the dead, will be without final resolution, Dunmore implies” (“Memory Recovered” 90). Even the novel’s ending makes it hard for readers to determine whether Nina herself or rather her sister is responsible for her brother’s death. Through Isabel’s suicide at the end of the novel, the latter may seem more probable, but this crux ultimately remains unknowable. This essential openness is expressed by the last sentences of the novel, containing a question announcing another question, which in turn remains unspoken and without an answer: “‘Isabel,’ I say, ‘when we get to the top, can I ask you something?’” (300). It seems that the ending thereby refuses to produce a sense of closure, and the final image evoked by the very last sentence of the novel, the two sisters walking up an “endless staircase, hand in hand” (300), symbolizes reconciliation, but not necessarily clarification. The novel’s openness regarding the authenticity of the recovered trauma memory is a crucial aspect in which Dunmore’s approach to the issues of memory recovery differs from Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres and Nicci French’s The Memory Game, both of which also extensively explore the theme of recovering memories of a traumatic childhood. A Thousand Acres by American novelist Jane Smiley is an ingenious reworking of Shakespeare’s King Lear, set in a contemporary mid-West farm, where the patriarchal, tyrannical Larry Cook divides his farmland among his three daughters. Through autodiegetic narrator Ginny, one of the three daughters, the novel dramatizes crucial ideas put forward by one of the opposing parties in the earlier mentioned False Memory Debate, namely by the trauma therapists who came to be dubbed Recovered Memory Therapists. Some of their core assertions are that memories of sexual abuse may be entirely erased from conscious memory and that the sense of a conspicuous gap in memory as an adult may point to repressed memories of an

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abuse – memories that can then slowly be recovered. It is exactly this process that A Thousand Acres sketches in detail: at the beginning, Ginny suffers from the typical, inexplicable and disturbing sense of memory gaps emphasized by trauma therapists. When her sister Rose suddenly confronts her with the shattering idea that they were both abused by their father as teenagers, Ginny harshly denies everything, intuitively showing strong resistance to leaving her “life of the unsaid,” her state of “voicelessness,” as Neil Nakadate puts it (177). Soon afterwards, however, she is assailed by a vivid flashback of a scene of parental abuse: Lying here, I know that he had been in there to me, that my father had lain with me on that bed, that I had looked at the top of his head, at his balding spot in the brown grizzled hair, while feeling him suck my breasts. That was the only memory I could endure before I jumped out of the bed with a cry. (228)

In contrast to Talking to the Dead, the autodiegetic narrator (and the novel as a whole) does not seem to question that at this moment Ginny “found the past” (228), that this central flashback memory of incest is genuine. It should also be acknowledged, however, that, as Sinead McDermott emphasizes, “reading the novel as merely a symptom of this debate [the False Memory Debate] fails to do justice to the scope of Smiley’s project” (394). A Thousand Acres is a subtle exploration of the trauma of incest in relation not only to memory but also to issues of gender and power: “Ginny’s story […] foregrounds the sexual politics of memory and forgetting, suggesting that remembering can be a form of resistance to the erasure of women’s lives and of domestic histories of abuse within patriarchal discourse” (394). As in Nina’s case, the resurfacing of the traumatic event leads to an intricate quest for the past; the unearthing of Ginny’s incest trauma, long buried in oblivion, results in a radical re-investigation and re-assessment of her familial past, as well as in an abrupt reorientation of her present. Smiley has Ginny suddenly realize that her domineering father not only dictates her present life, but that his overarching presence also governs her memory to such an extent that it entirely eclipses any memories of her mother. As a result, she finally decides to break with the stifling

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status quo, to free herself of her suffocating roles of dutiful daughter and devoted wife and to live a new life as a self-determined, independent woman. Pointing to the potentially empowering and liberating force of suddenly discovering a traumatic childhood, the novel recalls an important point Judith Lewis Herman makes about trauma and recovery: “When survivors recognize the origins of their psychological difficulties in an abusive childhood environment, they no longer need attribute them to an inherent defect in the self. Thus the way is opened to the creation of a new meaning in experience and a new, unstigmatized identity” (127). Despite suggesting a positive potential of memory recovery, the novel’s ending is far from idealistic; although the recovered memory of Ginny’s trauma of incest is portrayed as authentic, the text conveys clearly that the complexity of the past defies being recuperated fully and easily. Moreover, the revelation of her traumatic childhood arouses hatred and a powerful desire for revenge in Ginny, which is, however, paradoxically re-directed from her abusive father towards her sister Rose, another trauma victim and Ginny’s fellow sufferer. While A Thousand Acres seems to express a feminist stance by highlighting how closely trauma and memory recovery can be interlinked with sexual and power politics, the novel refrains from ending on a reconciliation scenario of female bonding in the face of male violence and instead likens the victimized daughter Ginny, who meticulously plans to poison Rose with a sausage, to the heartless, malicious “pelican daughters” in King Lear. Stylizing Ginny, the victim of sexual abuse and trauma, as a would-be murderer of her own sister, A Thousand Acres, like Talking to the Dead, confronts readers with questions of trauma and ethics, challenging moral distinctions between innocence and guilt, between victims and perpetrators. Both novels emphasize both the painfulness of coming to terms with a long forgotten, deeply disturbing past and the difficulties of becoming reconciled to others who are crucially involved in that past. The Memory Game by Nicci French (pseudonym for the writing partnership of two English journalists, Nicci Gerrard and Sean French) offers again a rather different perspective on memory recovery. The Memory Game recalls Talking to the Dead insofar as it is also structured around the protagonist’s powerful urge to penetrate finally to the

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truth of the past. After the finding of the corpse of her best friend Nathalie, who mysteriously disappeared at a summer party twenty-five years ago, Jane Martello, the autodiegetic narrator, embarks on a fervent quest for the past and decides to undergo psychotherapy. Jane’s constant interrogations about the past enervate her family and friends and make them perceive her memory work as disturbing detective work. A driving force in her quest for the past is her psychotherapist, who is convinced that Jane’s feelings of emptiness and her sense of a “golden, golden childhood and a black hole in the middle of it” point to a “submerged trauma,” that is, to repressed memories of a traumatic childhood experience (57). The therapeutic methods depicted in the novel are in line with the misdirections in therapy denounced by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, notably the idea, as Brewin critically asserts, “that the very existence of certain symptoms and difficulties indicated that abuse had probably occurred, even if the patient had not recalled it” and the practice of “repeatedly encouraging a patient to imagine or fantasize about what might have happened coupled with an absence of warnings about the unreliability of memory” (131, 138). The Memory Game portrays Jane’s therapist, the psychoanalyst Alan Dermot Brown, as precisely the kind of malpractitioner attacked by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation: he has Jane reconstruct under hypnosis the crucial scene around Nathalie’s death so many times until she finally has a very vivid image of what happened. After several sessions of hypnosis, Jane is finally convinced that she witnessed how Nathalie’s father Alan, her father-in-law, raped and murdered his daughter. Nicci French has Jane’s “search for the truth of [her] past” take a surprising turn, however (271). After the detailed portrayal of a psychiatrist who “believes passionately in the phenomenon of recovered memory” (312), the novel introduces a committed representative of the opposite camp, Dr Scott. These two characters and the specific arguments and jargon they use show the extent to which The Memory Game is constructed around the False Memory Debate. It is Jane’s encounter with Dr Scott that forces her to start questioning the reliability of her recovered memories – even after she has publicly revealed them and her father-in-law has confessed to the crime. In contrast to A

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Thousand Acres, in The Memory Game, the narrator’s recovered memories ultimately turn out to be a severely distorted version of the past; detective, rather than memory work reveals that Nathalie’s brother, not her father, was the real perpetrator. The novel hence seems to express the idea that, in Dr Scott’s terms, the memory metaphor of a “sandcastle on a beach,” washed away by the sea and hence irretrievably gone, is more fitting to describe memory processes than the metaphor of a “file on [a] computer that had accidentally been lost” but can still be retrieved in its entirety (306-07). The novel recalls the propaganda of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation not only through its metaphors and models of memory but also through its emphasis on the far-reaching and destructive consequences false memories and their ensuing accusations may have on individuals and whole families. Smiley’s novel also implicitly seems to support one of the two opposing camps of the 1990s “Memory Wars,” but Nicci French’s propaganda novel puts politics centre stage to such an extent that it essentially seems to constitute a fictional illustration of a politicized psychological discourse. Talking to the Dead, in contrast, refrains from expressing such a clear political message. It evokes the idea that repressed memories may be accurately recovered in adulthood but simultaneously also draws on the notion that trauma memory may be fundamentally liable to suggestion and distortion. Moreover, the novel problematizes the idea of remembering as a direct access to an authentic past in more general ways. The sudden eruption of the black moment in her childhood, her brother’s mysterious death, makes Nina doubt her whole life-story and family history. She is forced to question both Isabel’s and her memories and stories about the past and becomes painfully aware of how constructed they are. Nina starts to realize that remembering an autobiographical past inevitably involves processes of reconstruction, interpretation and narrativization. In line with a number of contemporary memory theorists, Dunmore’s novel hence reveals any autobiographical memories to function in more complex ways than to provide a one-to-one representation of the past. Michael Lambek and Paul Antze in Tense Past express this as follows:

150 | CHRISTA SCHÖNFELDER [Memory] may be seen as a problematic and perhaps exemplary site for dealing with the complex interlinkage of reality and fantasy in representation and interpretation; the balance between reproduction and representation, or fact and interpretation, or recollection and understanding. (xxvii)5

Again, a significant overlap of core concerns in memory discourses and narrative fiction becomes apparent. Dunmore’s novel metaphorizes memory in terms of an archive of stories, suggesting that memories may be constructed and liable to change but at the same time also sedimented in time. The metaphor of memory as an archive of stories implies not only a more subtle and less polarized conceptualization of memory than The Memory Game, with its metaphors of a brittle sandcastle versus a fully preserved or retrievable computer file, but also adds a self-reflexive dimension to the novel. Talking to the Dead, then, can be read as a particularly complex and subtle exploration of issues of memory, trauma memory and memory recovery. It challenges the assumption inherent especially in the theories of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation that it is possible to make a clear-cut distinction between false and true memories. In the context of the False Memory Debate, the question of whether we can assess memories on a truth index of accuracy versus falsity was particularly polarized and politicized. How could Talking to the Dead, then, written around the time when the debate reached its peak, escape this polarization of positions? First, we might speculate that as a British writer, Dunmore experienced this debate, whose epicentre was America, less directly. More importantly, the novel demonstrates that scientific and literary discourses do not necessarily constitute parallel histories; overlaps of key concerns may go hand in hand with significant divergences. Talking to the Dead makes use of literature’s potential to trouble or escape scientific positions, to remain in between, above or beyond these. Free from psychology’s objective, very generally speaking, to establish and justify fact-oriented knowledge

5

Welzer in Das kommunikative Gedächtnis discusses how strongly autobiographical memory follows the structures of stories, and how, therefore, the boundaries between reliable and unreliable memories often become strikingly fluid. Cf. also Terdiman.

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about empirical reality, the novel engages important concerns of the debate, but in such a way that its significance clearly extends beyond the merely topical. As a literary, fictional play around memory politics, it addresses a number of issues that are crucial to both fictional and non-fictional forms of life-writing and still highly relevant more than ten years after the debate.6 Similarly to Janice Haaken and Paula Reavey, who assert that “even as the embers have cooled in most quarters of academia and popular culture,” many “knotty questions” raised by the False Memory Debate still persist (2, 6),7 I argue that a number of psychological and social, cultural and ethical issues with regard to memory, memory theory and memory politics remain crucial issues up to the present day – and that literary texts are a key area for exploring these. Challenging the distinction between real and false memories, Talking to the Dead plays with different theories of memory and different notions of an authentic past. While the narrator seems desperate to find out what really happened, the novel also implies that this quest for the perfectly accurate truth about the past is ultimately an illusionary project. The novel suggests that the trauma victim’s need for the sense of authenticity of memory does not necessarily have to be conceptualized in terms of an absolute truthfulness and factuality; the need for an authentic past could also be seen as the need for a past the subject can believe in as true and accept as part of his or her life-story. If we return to psychological discourses for a moment but move forward in time, it is also interesting to note that in the meantime the two extreme positions challenged by Dunmore’s novel have in fact been relativized to some extent by later psychologists. As Brewin points out, “The initial polarization between memory researchers and clinicians has now dissolved” (150).8 It has increasingly come to be

6

For a discussion of authenticity with regard to non-fictional forms of lifewriting, especially with regard to the trauma memoir, cf. Luckhurst.

7

The recent cross-disciplinary essay collection by Haaken and Reavey, with its telling title Memory Matters, explores key issues of the debate and their ongoing relevance from a multiplicity of perspectives.

8

There seems to be a general consensus that “some recovered memories are almost certainly false and others almost certainly true” (Brewin 150-51):

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recognized that memories are reconstructed differently depending on the context, setting and ethical framework (Assmann 269). The question of true versus false memories involves rather different issues in a therapeutic setting as opposed to a courtroom setting,9 and the factual truth of the past need not necessarily correspond with the emotional truth of the past. In a similar vein, Dunmore’s novel implies that what Nina finds are not definite, reliable answers to her questions about the past, but – possibly – a sense of reconciliation with her past, as hinted at by the novel’s final image of the two sisters “go[ing] on up the endless staircase, hand in hand” (300). In other words, if the narrator in the end regains a sense of authenticity, it is one that works not according to the rigid standards of detective work and court procedure, but according to the more fluid, flexible frame of autobiographical memory work. Yet ultimately, the novel refuses to give clear answers regarding the success or failure of the narrator’s quest for the past and for authenticity, and it is precisely by exploring and challenging different notions of memory and authenticity that Dunmore’s Talking to the Dead calls for further literary, psychological and theoretical investigations into the politics, poetics and ethics of trauma fiction.

some cases of therapeutic malpractice leading to false memories have been well documented, while in other cases, external evidence has corroborated the accuracy of recovered trauma memories. For a good discussion of the debate cf. also Rüdiger Pohl, Das autobiographische Gedächtnis. 9

Therapists perceived as outrageous the False Memory Syndrome Foundation’s postulation that patients’ memories should be corroborated by external evidence, since this would mean a severe violation of the relationship of trust between patient and therapist. Most trauma specialists see the essence of memory recovery not as the gaining of perfect truth about the past but as the integration of trauma into a life-story.

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W ORKS C ITED Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. München: Beck, 1999. Atwood, Margaret. Cat’s Eye. Toronto: Seal Books, 1988. Brewin, Chris. Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Malady or Myth? New Haven: Yale UP, 2003. Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. —. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Comer, Roland. Fundamentals of Abnormal Psychology. New York: Worth Publishers, 42005. Crossley, Michele L. Introducing Narrative Psychology: Self, Trauma and the Construction of Meaning. Buckingham: Open UP, 2000. Dunmore, Helen. Talking to the Dead. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996. Ehlers, Anke, and David M. Clark. “A Cognitive Model of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.” Behaviour Research and Therapy 38 (2000): 319-45. French, Nicci. The Memory Game. London: Heinemann, 1997. Haaken, Janice, and Paula Reavey, eds. Memory Matters: Contexts for Understanding Sexual Abuse Recollections. New York: Routledge, 2010. Herman, Judith L. Trauma and Recovery. New York: BasicBooks, 1992. Iser, Wolfgang. “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.” Modern Criticism and Theory. Ed. David Lodge. London: Longman, 1988. 211-28. King, Nicola. Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000. Klüger, Ruth. Weiter leben: Eine Jugend. Wallstein: Göttingen, 1992. Lambek, Michael, and Paul Antze. “Introduction: Forecasting Memory.” Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. Ed. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek. New York: Routledge, 1996. xi-xxxviii.

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Luckhurst, Roger. “Memory Recovered/Recovered Memory.” Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present. Ed. Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks. Longman Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature. Harlow: Longman, 1999. 80-93. —. The Trauma Question. New York: Routledge, 2008. McDermott, Sinead. “Memory, Nostalgia, and Gender in A Thousand Acres.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.1 (2002): 389-407. Nakadate, Neil. Understanding Jane Smiley. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 1999. Nünning, Ansgar. “Unreliable Narration zur Einführung: Grundzüge einer kognitiv-narratologischen Theorie und Analyse unglaubwürdigen Erzählens.” Unreliable Narration: Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1998. 3-39. Ofshe, Richard, and Ethan Watters. Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria. New York: Scribner, 1994. Pendergrast, Mark. Victims of Memory: Sex Abuse, Accusations and Shattered Lives. Hinesburg, VT: Upper Access, 1995. Pohl, Rüdiger. Das autobiographische Gedächtnis: Die Psychologie unserer Lebensgeschichte. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 2007. Rothberg, Michael. Multi-Directional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009. Smiley, Jane. A Thousand Acres. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. Terdiman, Richard. Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. Van der Kolk, Bessel A. “Trauma and Memory.” Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body and Society. Ed. Bessel A. van der Kolk, Alexander C. McFarlane and Lars Weisaeth. New York: Guilford P, 1996. 279-302. Vickroy, Laurie. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2002. Welzer, Harald. “Gedächtnis und Erinnerung.” Handbuch der Kulturwissenschaften. Vol. 3. Themen und Tendenzen. Ed. Friedrich Jaeger, and Jörn Rüsen. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004. 155-74.

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—. Das kommunikative Gedächtnis: Eine Theorie der Erinnerung. München: Beck, 2002. Welzer, Harald, and Hans J. Markowitsch. “Towards a Bio-psychosocial Model of Autobiographical Memory.” Memory 13.1 (2005): 63-78. Whitehead, Anne. Memory. The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2009.

Authentic Lives

Posthumanist Panic Cinema Defining a Genre S COTT L OREN Collective representations are the result of an immense co-operation, which stretches out not only into space but into time as well; to make them, a multitude of minds have associated, united and combined their ideas and sentiments. (EMILE DURKHEIM, THE ELEMENTARY FORMS OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE)

Mainstream American cinema around the turn of the twenty-first century was prolific in producing a specific representation of the individual in crisis: a human subject beset by an onslaught of forces alien to itself. The regularity with which this type of figure appeared in popular cinema was both a result of and contributed to practices of collective representation. Implicit in the assumption that popular narratives provide insight into the cultures that produce and circulate them is the concomitant assumption that identities and subjectivities are inseparable from stories cultures tell about themselves, and that upon closer examination, these stories will always tell something more about historical selves. Following this logic, popular cinematic representations can be treated as cultural artefacts that both form collective representations and reflect “collective preoccupations,” as Renée Hoogland has

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put it (213). Who, then, was this set-upon figure in popular cinema of recent decades, and what can his collective representation tell us about the ideas and sentiments Durkheim proposes as indicators of cultural concerns?1

T HE L IBERAL H UMANIST S UBJECT Charles Guignon begins his book On Being Authentic with reference to an event that was nothing short of a cultural happening in the United States: the reception of Phillip C. McGraw’s Self Matters: Creating Your Life from the Inside Out. McGraw’s 2001 self-help book struck a nerve with its American readership. On the New York Times bestseller list for 43 weeks, Guignon points out that Self Matters epitomized the style of “books, television talk show and magazine articles” in which the “idea of achieving an authentic existence” remained the topic of concern day in and day out in American media culture (1). It is no coincidence that McGraw came to prominence through his appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show, which itself “has made authenticity a central theme for her six or seven million daily viewers” for nearly twenty-five years (ibid). McGraw’s focus on authenticity may not be a new addition to the self-help/therapy-culture discourse of the time, but he is particularly interesting for two reasons: his level of prominence in popular media and the accuracy with which his “authentic self” mirrors the characteristics of the liberal humanist subject. Guignon quotes McGraw as follows: The authentic self is the you that can be found at your absolute core. It is the part of you that is not defined by your job, or your function, or your role. It is the composite of all your unique gifts, skills, abilities, interests, talents, insights, and wisdom. It is all your strengths and values that are uniquely yours and need expression, versus what you have been programmed to believe that you are “supposed to be and do.” (2, emphasis in the original)

1

I exclusively use the masculine pronoun here as the crisis of the liberal humanist subject appears to have been a predominantly masculine crisis in the period and medium indicated.

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According to this account, each individual has an innate “core” that, we can infer, is the source of his or her personality, characteristics, abilities, etc. independent of social and cultural influence. The debate on freedom embedded in this description is one in which the core self is opposed to forms of social control. A confluence of the pressures of various institutions and personal experiences, it should further be inferred, results in conditions that force one to think and act in ways antithetical to the inclinations of the authentic self’s core. To realize one’s self fully, one needs to free oneself from such psycho-social restraints and thereby enable unrestrained access to one’s core, one’s authentic self, to one’s true potential in its uncorrupted natural form. The self McGraw sketches out is thus a markedly essentialist self that might be positioned on the nature side of the somewhat dusty nature vs. culture debate. Even in McGraw’s very brief description above, one can identify traces of an extended history of essentialist-humanist thinking that has situated itself against external influence, from Rousseau’s noble savage, to the Cartesian cogito isolated from external input and impulses, to the individual freedom and autonomy of the Enlightenment subject (from Hobbes and Locke to Kant) that C.B. Macpherson reformulates in terms of “possessive individualism” in his influential work The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. If book sales and viewer ratings are taken as indications of the popularity such a model might hold, then this particular account of the authentic self was undoubtedly resonant with a large segment of mediaconsuming Americans at the time. My wager is that we can find further support for such a claim in mainstream cinema of the same era. The figure of the essentialist, liberal humanist subject (‘LHS’ from here on), whose ‘core,’ identity, individuality or authenticity is under threat of compromise by external agents, is the most prominent figure in posthumanist panic cinema at the turn of the century, giving expression to a particular form of millennial dis-ease. Posthumanist panic cinema might be conceived of as cinema that stages some form of threat to the liberal humanist subject’s authenticity. To reduce what is at stake here to a single phrase, one might claim that the authenticity of the LHS is grounded in its forms of essentialism. What makes the LHS authentic is the innate status ascribed to its characteristics and its potential as a free agent. Guignon categorizes

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characteristics of liberal humanism and Enlightenment subjectivity more generally as indicators for authentic subjectivity in the modern era: “[T]he modern worldview understands humans as nuclear selves. To be human, on this view, is to be a self-contained, bounded individual, a center of experience and will, with no essential or defining relations to anything or anyone outside oneself” (108). According to this definition, what Guignon refers to as the authentic subject in modern philosophy and what, following N. Katherine Hayles, I am calling the liberal humanist subject might be positioned in contrast to what Bernd Stiegler recently referred to as a ‘best of’ subject theory in the humanities: psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan), discourse and power (Foucault, Derrida), capital and empire (Marx; Hardt and Negri), ideology (Althusser), performativity and gender (Butler, Halberstam), postcolonialism (Fanon, Bhabha, Said, Spivak), not to mention the contemporary currents in posthumanism seeking to push the subject off the map.2 This synoptic list of approaches to subject theory in the humanities makes immediately clear that what have turned out to be the most prominent approaches of the last century are all opposed to essentialist notions of the self.3 The five characteristics Guignon enumerates as constitutive of the authentic subject are more or less interchangeable with the definitive elements of liberal humanism and are thus useful for clarifying precisely what comes under threat in posthumanist panic cinema:

2

Stiegler’s comment was in reference to a talk given by Jörg Metelmann and myself titled “Visualizing Subjectivity: A Dual Ontology,” at the University of St. Gallen, 2 May 2011.

3

N. Katherine Hayles theorizes the decline of liberal subjectivity in relation to the onset of “cybernetic anxiety” in the 1950s in her chapter “Liberal Subjectivity Imperiled: Norbert Wiener and Cybernetic Anxiety” of How We Became Posthuman (84). Thinking of the LHS primarily defined through its essentialism, the threat against it has a far broader historical base in the humanities. In this context, it perhaps makes more sense to subsume cybernetics in a broader intellectual history over the last century that repeatedly took turns at dismantling the LHS.

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the authentic subject is defined as an “inner space;” it is the “source from which action springs;” it has the capacity for self-reflection and self-consciousness; it is “self-subsistent, distinct from everything outside itself, including its own body;” self-realization is the ultimate goal (Guignon 108-9)

To briefly recapitulate these points through established (primarily Enlightenment) notions of the self, the first reiterates the notion of an essential core, and is thus concerned with the question of borders; the second reiterates Rousseau’s notion of the noble savage, and is thus concerned with a natural sense of character and agency; the third reiterates Descartes’s cogito; the forth, Descartes’s mind/body split and radical autonomy; and the fifth returns to the notion of an essentialist core, hidden under the constraints of society and the psyche and in need of freeing. One might thus also link the final point to Kant’s Enlightenment injunction Sapere Aude!, where the courage to embrace self-knowledge will ultimately liberate the individual from selfimposed immaturity and deliver him into self-realization.4 It is precisely the threat to borders of the self, to agency, to the authenticity of self-consciousness, to autonomy and to self-realization that is at stake in posthumanist panic cinema.

P OSTHUMANIST P ANIC C INEMA What is posthumanist panic cinema? The term should indicate both cinema that depicts representations of the posthuman and threat to humanist philosophies and ideologies. Though the terms posthuman and posthumanism are rather close and have at times been conflated by some theorists, one would be hard pressed to legitimate the claim that posthuman cinema is more representative of posthumanist philosophies than it is of humanist ones, wherein lies the point: posthuman cinema generally depicts various forms of panic expressive of anxiety

4

Immanuel Kant’s famous response to the question “What is Enlightenment?” in the Berlinische Monatschrift, November, 1784.

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regarding the status of the LHS. Posthuman cinema has often taken a reactionary stance in opposition to philosophies of posthumanism. If, following popular usage, posthuman cinema consists primarily in stories of artificial intelligence, virtual realities, alien abduction or visitation and cyborgian science fiction, then the filmic narratives of posthuman cinema tend to position themselves anxiously in relation to logics of posthumanism and nostalgically, even desperately, in relation to tenets of humanism. Posthuman popular cinema, one might say, is in a state of crisis. That is not to say it is in immediate danger of becoming financially unviable. To the contrary: though its concerns might be shifting, posthuman cinema continues to reverberate through multiplexes, across the screens of portable devices and along the corridors of collective imaginaries. With its capacity for metamorphosis and for mirroring desire and anxiety on the border between the known and the yet-to-be known, posthuman cinema is alive, but not well – at least not from a posthumanist perspective. If posthumanist theory attempts to map the philosophical territory that succeeds humanist thought, posthuman cinema has been astute to the turbulence accompanying such a shift. Inquiring into “what remains of humanism in the posthumanist landscape” (15), Neil Badmington has suggested that, from a Derridian or Lyotardian position on the uses of the prefix post-, “posthumanism does not (and, moreover, cannot) mark or make an absolute break from the legacy of humanism […]. Humanism has happened and continues to happen to ‘us’ (it is the very ‘Thing’ that makes ‘us’ ‘us,’ in fact)” (21-22). Though recent shifts in posthumanist theory appear to be making headway on this front – challenging notions of ‘us,’ for example, by focusing elsewhere (not on human beings as individuals or subjects, or not on topics like consciousness and agency), through processes of re-contextualization and re-categorization (as in second order systems theory), or by expanding the category of ‘us’ to be more broadly inclusive (as in animal studies) – much of posthuman cinema has been concerned with the remains of the human in posthuman biotic and non-biotic communities, and what can be salvaged of humanism in an age where prosthetic coupling and recursive interactivity, what Cary Wolfe calls “the prosthetic coevolution of the human animal with the technicity of tools and external archival mechanisms

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(such as language and culture),” becomes “increasingly impossible to ignore” (Wolfe xv). Of course, with fictional narratives to be read, heard and viewed, there is also the function of identification to consider. If one is to gain access to a story, then it is through some form of focalization. From the various possible perspectives we take when we read or watch films, as humans we access narratives and identify within them primarily – though with exception – via characters that either are or highly resemble humans.5 Be that as it may, it would also be amiss to claim that posthuman cinema does not move into the territory of proper posthumanist, non-anthropocentric representation and philosophical discourse because, from a narratological perspective, it cannot. Considering the ways in which popular cinema reflects and reflexively contributes to collective preoccupations, one might postulate that posthuman cinema is for the most part not interested in decentring the human, nor in doing away with humanism. The dominant story has rather been one of anxiety regarding forms of decentrement. Rather than presenting a viable posthumanist philosophy, posthuman cinema predominantly stages posthumanist anxiety about the loss of or threat to defining characteristics of the LHS even when the viewer is prompted to identify with the figure of the biological posthuman, as in the filmic adaptations of Phillip K. Dick’s postutopian, paranoid science fiction. N. Katherine Hayles has proposed that the decline of the LHS is inaugurated by Norbert Wiener’s theory of cybernetics presented at the Macy conferences in the mid-1940s: “By the mid-twentieth century, liberal humanism, self-regulating machinery, and positive individualism had come together in an uneasy alliance that at once helped to create the cyborg and also undermine the foundations of liberal subjectivity” (86). She also notes that the work of Phillip K. Dick in the 1960s was particularly attuned to the potential threat self-regulating machines posed to liberal humanism. Dick’s depictions of the cyborg begged the question, “should a cybernetic machine, sufficiently powerful in its self-regulating processes to become fully conscious and rational, be allowed to own itself?” (ibid). Dick’s fiction thus foregrounded a sudden instability the cyborg en-

5

For an analysis of posthumanist focalization, see Clarke.

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gendered for assumptions about authenticity, autonomy and agency, and by extension what it meant to be human. With the unprecedented influence Dick has had on an era of film-making, Hayles’s remark could not be more pertinent to the anxieties reflected in posthumanist panic cinema. The notion of the posthuman in posthumanist panic cinema employed here – portraying what comes after or is beyond the biological human at a specific historical moment – is aligned with the popular notion outlined above: artificial intelligence, virtual realities, alien abduction or visitation and cyborgian science fiction. Added to the scope of this rather conventional category of the posthuman is a consideration of conspiracy films. Where posthuman cinema reflects types of posthumanist anxiety about body and identity borders and differentiation through representations of the posthuman form, conspiracy films tend to articulate similar types of panic in relation to autonomy, agency and control. Although conspiracy films need not present the figure of the biological posthuman, they are likewise always concerned with borders, differentiation and alterity. It is thus not surprising that conspiracy narratives are inevitably tied into the stories and plots of more conventional posthuman, that is cyborgian and extra-terrestrial, cinema. The elements of threat in posthumanist panic cinema can be categorized according to three interrelated but distinct crises represented in the three interrelated but distinct sub-genres: cyborgia and the crisis of authenticity, conspiracy and the crisis of agency/autonomy, extraterrestrials and the crisis of metaphysical determinism. Each of these panic cinema sub-genres are characterized by a central threat that, with great consistency, organizes character actions and drives the plot. In cyborg or artificial intelligence films, the threat is one of no longer being able to distinguish between the authentic and the inauthentic in terms of physical and biological processes, but also in terms of identity formation, cognition and emotional capacities. Conspiracy films are characterized by a compromise of free will and the ability to effect meaningful action. Finally, extra-terrestrial films are characterized by a more general threat to human autonomy, where non-human agencies can potentially determine the fate of human subjects, though as I will show, the threat in extra-terrestrial cinema can simultaneously repre-

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sent both anxiety about and desire for metaphysically deterministic agencies. With the proliferation of ‘real life’ alien abduction testimonials around the turn of the century, and with continuing mutual paranoia from both the politically conservative and liberal communities about the other controlling the media in order to manipulate popular opinion, extra-terrestrials and conspiracy have become commonplace topics in America that receive earnest attention even in non-fictional popular media: think, for example, of conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks that placed blame on the conservative ‘powers that be,’ or Glenn Beck’s more recent prime-time explanations of the vicissitudes of power on the left. Equally, real cyborgia has become a second nature, so to speak: there is uninterrupted connectivity to apparatuses for communication and information retrieval, as well as inextricable binds to machines, gadgets, medicines and other prostheses that accompany humans through their daily lives, and a broad recognition throughout the humanities of language as a kind of proto-prosthesis to the human. Moreover, digital social network technologies have quite literally transported communicable identity formation and potential subjectivity into the realm of the virtual. Taking all of this into consideration, I would wager that the enormous commercial success posthumanist panic cinema has enjoyed can hardly be reduced to the appeal of escape into sci-fi fantasy worlds. It has much more to do with the ability for popular cinema to both reflect and shape the concerns of viewing audiences beyond the world of cinematic fiction. The popularity of extra-terrestrial, conspiracy and cyborg narratives in and beyond fiction is perhaps not cause enough to consider them together as constitutive of a shared phenomenon in popular culture. The level of genre-hybridity between posthuman and conspiracy narratives, though, points toward the shared humanist sensibilities that have constituted the particular form of millennial dis-ease in relation to the LHS addressed above. Uniting these sub-genres beyond their sensibilities about subjectivity and the liberal humanist characteristics of authenticity, agency, autonomy and the desire for stable metaphysical truths, are their shared thematic content depicting fear of new technologies and of the foreign, concern about political ideologies and social cohesion, and modes of expressing and experiencing the spir-

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itual or quasi-religious within a secular context. Whatever various elements these sub-genres share or intermingle, their respective narratives almost always revolve around a central allegorical commentary on authentic subjectivity and are expressive of some form of posthumanist anxiety, thus indicating an overarching theme of authentic subjectivity in crisis structuring or giving impetus to the allegories. The following will be a brief, though I hope nevertheless enlightening consideration of LHS crises divided among the posthumanist panic cinema sub-genres.

C YBORGIA

AND

ARTIFICIAL I NTELLIGENCE

Cyborg and artificial intelligence films interrogate the implications of the artificial being for the authentic human. But what kind of authenticity are we talking about? With the decoding of DNA and with the ability to clone complex biological organisms, authenticity can hardly still have anything to do with the natural processes of conception and generation or with biological and non-biological difference. Descartes already theorized this shift with the mechanical monkey of his Mediations on First Philosophy. Authenticity will have to be sought elsewhere. As I have illustrated in an earlier article drawing on the theoretical framework of Louis Althusser’s notion of “interpellation,” films such as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Steven Spielberg’s A.I. and filmic versions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein all stage processes of identity and subject formation as a central component in obfuscating the boundaries between human authenticity and cyborgian artificiality.6 In his ‘notes’ on ideology, socio-ideological structures and subjectivity, moving from a necessary though complicated distinction between concrete individuals and concrete subjects, Louis Althusser defines interpellation as a hailing of the individual into subjectivity. Ideological (state) apparatus such as schools, family, religion, political affiliation and profession repeatedly hail the individual, at once forming the individual’s social status as a subject along with their private iden-

6

See Loren.

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tity. They position the individual within the ideological and symbolic matrix of relations to other subjects and institutions. The hailed individual acknowledges that he or she – or it in the age of posthumanism – is the proper subject of the call by recognizing the call and responding to it accordingly. Thus, a perpetual reestablishing and reaffirmation of positions within the social-symbolic takes place, through which not only is the hailed subject located, but, by being located in relation to all the subtle and not so subtle conditions of the life surrounding, interpellation functions in an omni-directional manner, situating and re-situating all subjects and subjectivities. If the cyborg or automaton of cyborgian cinema does not pose an outright physical threat to humans, as in the case of the first Terminator film (James Cameron, 1984), then the threat it consistently poses is one in which its identity formation processes mirror that of the human. In each of the films noted above, effective processes of interpellation make the distinction between human identity-subjectivity and nonhuman identity-subjectivity increasingly meaningless. Think, for example, of the mental images (memories and dreams) and physical pictures the Replicants of Blade Runner carry around with them as evidence of their humanity and authenticity, or of the literal staging of the interpellative process in A.I. (the “Imprinting Protocol” scene), where the naming of characters in relation to one another literally hardwires the cyber-boy with love for his orga-mother (and much to the mother’s surprise this also functions vice versa). There are of course other means of obfuscating the distinction between authenticity and artificiality in these films. From the supercomputer Hal’s survival instincts in 2001, to the possession of a soul and eye as the window to the soul in Blade Runner, to the Oedipal love of one’s mother in A.I., to the desire for paternal and conjugal companionship in Frankenstein, the cyborg becomes an increasingly emotional, creative, moral, critical and humane figure. An additionally consistent pattern in cyborg cinema, though, is that despite the authenticity of its human characteristics, whether these are of appearance or quality of character, the artificial being must inevitably perish at the hands of its creator. The problem it poses, of course, is one of authenticity. With the image and the character of the artificial being raised to the level of authenticity – that is, in addition to its physical human form, the artificial

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being is in possession of all of the defining characteristics of the LHS – the authentic human itself becomes, to borrow Benjamin’s phrase, “the blue flower in the land of technology,” an imaginary projection of a lost ideal that technology has penetrated to the heart of (Benjamin 458; my translation).7 To extend the reference to Benjamin a bit further, one might claim that if the cyborg makes the authenticity of the LHS problematic, then at stake is the aura of authenticity, a distinctive individuality that has been raised to a deific status in liberal humanism, and now threatens to crumble, or already has. In cyborgia, the human is positioned vis-à-vis the posthuman artificial being, exhibiting difficulties in determining alterity and, moreover, in determining what these very difficulties represent. These films begin their commentary on alterity by making the physical appearance of the artificial being either radically different from or radically similar to the human. Their collective aim, however, is to frame the subject-forming processes as identical for both the artificial being and the human. By depicting subject- and identity-forming processes for the artificial being as indistinguishable from the human being, these narratives provide a kind of meta-commentary on authenticity with regard to subjectivity and identity. They iterate the notion that subjectivity, and through it identity, is a construct negotiated beyond the individual’s own reflexive notions of the self; or, beyond the jurisdiction of liberal humanist essentialism. What viewers thus witness in cyborg cinema is an extension of the nature versus culture debate, in which if we assume that culture has prevailed, the borders to the authentic human disintegrate. The threat to the borders of human authenticity presented in cyborg cinema in turn also raise symptomatic questions in response to the fear of subjectivity as a social construct: if my identity is not something that springs forth naturally from myself, then who is responsible for its coming into being? And to what extent do these ‘external agents’ have control over me? This questioning logic provides the best link to the paranoid structures of perception that provide the fundamental energies and logics driving the plots of conspiracy narratives.

7

Original: “[…] der Anblick der unmittelbaren Wirklichkeit zu der blauen Blume im Lande der Technik.”

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C ONSPIRACY Where narratives on automatons and artificial beings give expression to crises in relation to the authenticity of identity, conspiracy narratives have a reactionary quality in which anxiety about a loss of agency and autonomy manifests itself in the notion that an external agent has taken over command of the authentic self. Conspiracy situates subjects in relation to an Other agent that imposes its will on the individual, and whose will the individual feels compelled to reject. Considering this structure in the manner I have done with cyborgia – as potentially reflective of a widespread cultural discomfort with the shift from Enlightenment and humanist notions of the authentic, essentialist self (nature) to constructivist notions of the authentic self (culture) in popular culture – it is a logical turn to associate anxiety about a loss of agency and autonomy with constructivist notions of the self. One also finds that although the focus is slightly different, being on autonomy and agency as definitive of authenticity as opposed to biology and identity/subjectivity forming processes as indicators for authenticity, the problem is still rooted in anxiety about the LHS essentialist core. As with the crisis of authenticity structuring cyborg cinema, we can see how an essentialist crisis might be symptomatic of dominant notions of selfhood circulating in late modernity: the subject as a production of economic and political forces; the psyche, the ‘real core’ of the individual, is in a state of perpetual antagonism and beyond the individual’s control; the subject as occupying a position at the intersection of various ideologies and social forces. Some kind of false synthesis of these notions reached an apex in popular culture through discourses on and of postmodernism between the 1970s and 1990s. Despite the various problematic receptions of subject theories, particularly where subject formation is completely free-floating and able to be formed and transformed at will, postmodernism convincingly popularized notions of the subject as something fluid and always already decentred. Such perspectives destabilized traditional notions of borders to the self, and newfound fluidity led to completely new “technologies of the self,” to borrow Foucault’s phrase. As a symptom-figure of these social and cultural developments, one might argue, the conspired against individual fears the loss of its ability

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to protect its own borders and control its own actions. Perhaps even more than in cyborg cinema, conspiracy necessarily presupposes an essentialist self. It comes as no surprise that we find some form of invasive surgery or penetration to the head as a repeated motif in conspiracy cinema. Such images reiterate the notion that the core of the authentic self is to be found in the mind, in the cogito (see Guignon’s fourth point above). In Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1998), for example, the classical conspiracy trope of brainwashing is replaced by an injection directly into the brain, manipulating one’s memory and one’s sense of self, enabling the individual to be completely manipulated in every detail of life without being aware of any change whatsoever. The individual becomes an unsuspecting puppet. Jonathan Demme’s remake of The Manchurian Candidate (2004) also marks this more radical invasiveness to the cogito as the authentic core of the self by visually intensifying the compromise of its borders. Where John Frankenheimer’s original (1962) famously stages manipulation through brainwash, Demme stages an elaborate surgical procedure in which penetration to the ‘core’ is doubled on screen. We see Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) in an operation room having a hole drilled through his skull and into his brain. On a screen behind the operation table, we see a blown-up computer tomography image of what is happening in Sgt. Shaw’s head: a drill penetrates his skull and a minute device for controlling him is inserted deep into his brain. The shift in imagery between the 1962 version and the 2004 version is representative of the shift from cold-war anxiety about an unseen enemy who might compromise national borders and attempt to take control from without or through infiltration, to postmodern anxiety about the compromise of borders and loss of control at a far more intimate level, penetrating deep into the core of the authentic self. If conspiracy is viewed as symptomatic of a nostalgic longing for a return to the autonomy of the liberal humanist subject with a protected inner core, one might interpret the anxiety reflected in conspiracy as a response to the poststructuralist and psychoanalytical deconstruction and rescinding of an internal/external dialectic. As the images of cogito/brain penetration suggest, conspiracy narratives cling to an internal/external opposition. According to these terms, conspiratorial anxiety is directed at a lack of unified centring (a non-object that divides the subject). Victoria Nelson has suggested that

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From Plato to Descartes, the image of the puppetmaster pulling the strings to make his creation move had emblematized first a presumed division between soul and body, then one between mind and body. Recognizing the close connection of the puppet and the robot with notions of intrapersonal invasion, manipulation, and loss of autonomy, the new twentieth-century discipline of psychology identified the sensation that an alien entity is manipulating the afflicted person, ‘pulling the strings,’ as a symptom of various types of pathology, particularly schizophrenia. (252)

If we view conspiracy through the lens of a lack of centring that antagonistically amplifies psychic tensions regarding identity, agency and autonomy, coupled with the lens of schizophrenia, we inevitably land in the proximity of Deleuzian ontological heterogeneity. Not surprisingly, various cultural theorists working on conspiracy, from Mark Fenster and Patrick O’Donnell, to Jodi Dean and Peter Knight, partially ascribe the widespread prominence of conspiracy theories in American popular culture to the social and psychological effects of the logics of late capitalism. In Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America, Timothy Melley describes conspiracy theories as reactionary narratives that hinge on a condition in which the individual experiences “intense anxiety about an apparent loss of autonomy or self-control – the conviction that one’s actions are being controlled by someone else, that one has been ‘constructed’ by powerful external agents” (12). Thus characterized, the individual is at a loss to effect meaningful, authentic action. Alessandro Ferrara has suggested that “[a]uthentic conduct has the quality of being somehow connected with, and expressive of, the core of the actor’s personality” (5). Calling for a reconsideration of authenticity beyond the “internalist” and “externalist” accounts, Monika Betzler similarly states that it is a common though problematic intuition that “a person is self-governed only if she acts for reasons grounded in her authentic self” (51). In addition to these explanations, which take the position of potential compromise and loss of control, it is also necessary to position the subject of conspiracy as an individual who can no longer be held accountable for his or her own actions. Melley suggests that the popularity of conspiracy narratives stems from a “sense of diminished human agency, a feeling that individuals cannot effect meaningful social

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action and, in extreme cases, may not be able to control their own behavior” (11). We might think of such conditions in conjunction with what Slovoj Žižek terms the logic of victimization: “[I]s the basic characteristic of today’s ‘postmodern’ subject not the exact opposite of the free subject who experienced himself as ultimately responsible for his fate, namely the subject who grounds the authority of his speech on his status of a victim of circumstances beyond his control?” (124). Where the concept of autonomy loses currency within a cultural economy of ideologies, it becomes increasingly possible to place the blame for one’s actions elsewhere. We find tropes for this condition throughout conspiracy and other posthumanist panic cinemas. Take, for a rather explicit example, the narrator of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, adapted to the screen in 1999 by David Fincher. He ascribes his own transgressive desire and behaviour to another person entirely, only to find out in the end that he is this other person, that through a trick of the mind he was able to both live out and keep himself at a distance from his transgressive desire and behaviour. Although the practical trope for usurped control differs between Demme’s Manchurian Candidate and Fincher’s Fight Club, we again witness manipulation taking place at the most intimate location of the authentic self, the cogito. Fight Club is the best example of staging schizophrenia as a conspiracy against oneself. It also poignantly stages this condition as a direct result of late capitalist consumer lifestyle, and on these terms constructs a very similar philosophy to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985). Conspiracy cinema at the turn of the century displayed a wide range of modes of control. At the far end of the scale of manipulation, there are characters that have been programmed, such as everyone connected to the Matrix from the Wachowski brothers’ film of the same title. Again, here we find the trope of cogito penetration represented by the ‘cranial jack.’ We also find wholly manufactured individuals, as in Michael Bay’s The Island, where cloned individuals are manufactured as capital, waiting to be used as a biological resource. In such cases, the individual has been programmed or manipulated to such a degree that it might be considered a pure ‘product.’ Indeed, the abundance of product placement in Bay’s film takes on new significance when viewed from this perspective.

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To provide an additional turn in conspiracy cinema and its anxieties about authenticity, conspiracy can also be understood in terms of anxiety about a lack of deterministic metaphysical meaning. Paranoia about an omnipotent and omniscient Other can inversely reflect a desire for such an Other, an entity constitutive of one’s subjectivity and selfhood, providing being with a deeper meaning. That is, conspiracy can be understood not only in terms of fear of an overbearing Other that might compromise the borders to my authentic self, but also as symptomatic of the fear that there is no higher source that might substantiate one’s existence by lending it a greater purpose, through a deeper metaphysical authenticity. Fear of an omnipotent oppressive Other also inversely representative of the desire for an Other is very much how posthumanist panic cinema around the millennial turn was interpreting Descartes’s Meditations. This double-edged sword – a desire for an omniscient, omnipotent Other mixed with fear of an omniscient, omnipotent Other – is well represented in the ghost of Descartes’s evil genius that prominently appears with Blade Runner and continues to haunt posthumanist panic cinema. It seems that it is no longer possible to read the Meditations on First Philosophy without raising the question that, if it is possible that nothing exists outside my mind, that through a deception of the senses I have simply dreamt everything up, then why is it not possible that I am simply a projection, a fantasy, in someone else’s dream – Descartes’s malevolent demon? This is the philosophical query structuring the plots and narratives of films such as Blade Runner, The Thirteenth Floor, eXistenZ, A.I., Minority Report, Vanilla Sky and The Matrix Trilogy, all notably staging a mix of cyborgia and conspiracy. The conflation of fear and desire of and for an omniscient and omnipotent Other, though, finds its literal apotheosis in the third incarnation of posthumanist panic projected onto the screen: extra-terrestrial cinema.

E XTRA - TERRESTRIALS Jodi Dean suggests that, like the conspiratorial Other, “the alien takes away our agency, and the sense of security and certainty upon which our agency was predicated” (174). The alien is in possession of

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knowledge and power beyond human capacities and can attack, abduct, infiltrate or exterminate at will. Abstracting the defining characteristics of the extra-terrestrial into familiar terms, the alien, like the conspiratorial Other, is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. As such, the alien and the conspiratorial Other both present a threat to the human that engenders metaphysical fear. Think, for example, of the various extra-terrestrial narratives that are apocalyptic in nature, from H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) to M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs (2002). Of course, the alien in cinema not only represents a wrathful sky-god. It is also the embodiment of a strong desire for nonsecular identity anchors; the alien can alternately represent a wrathful god and a benevolent one. Extra-terrestrial cinema emphasizes the desire for metaphysical determinism in posthumanist panic cinema by giving the stories and imagery a more mystical, quasi-religious character. Caron Schwarz Ellis suggests that the appearance of aliens in popular cinema addresses both “our deepest fears about technology and […] spiritual questions about our destiny” (83). Although this point is brought to the fore in extra-terrestrial cinema, the mystical and quasi-religious are also evident to varying degrees in cyborgia and conspiracy: think of the god-creator theme in Frankenstein and Blade Runner, or Neo as saviour in The Matrix and Dan Brown’s enormously successful Christian mystery conspiracy fictions and their filmic adaptations. Desire for metaphysically deterministic, quasi-mystical meaning is an additional element uniting cyborgia, conspiracy and extra-terrestrial cinema, constituting an additional posthumanist crisis. With the addition of this particular form of crisis, posthumanist panic cinema is capable of staging anxiety about the compromised LHS’s authenticity, autonomy and agency, but also anxiety about the loss of what was transformed in the secularization of the authentic self: spiritual subjectivity. Although the LHS is generally thought of in relation to secular humanism, it has often been argued that the humanist displacement of deities or God offers no significant departure from the Judeo-Christian structures of theism; that the human itself is simply raised to the status of divinity, thus constituting a mere shift from theism to deism. As Foucault pointed out in “What is Enlightenment,” “[S]ince the seventeenth century, what has been called humanism has always been obliged to lean

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on certain conceptions of man borrowed from religion, science or politics” (44). The nostalgia, or something more urgent, for non-secular subjectivity anchors is not in conflict with the LHS tenets of agency and autonomy, but rather accompanies them in a hidden form. Posthumanist panic cinema is thus characterized by a confluence of technological fear and fetish coupled with a loss of agency, problems of autonomy and desire for metaphysically deterministic meaning. Not surprisingly, philosophizing on this unseemly knot of desire and anxiety regarding the physical and the metaphysical is not limited to popular American cinema. In The Ethics of Authenticity, Charles Taylor proposes three “malaises of modernity”: 1.

2.

3.

Regarding individualism: “[W]orry has been repeatedly expressed that the individual lost something important along with the larger social and cosmic horizons of action” (3). “Instead of a higher purpose that opens the space for heroic action, there is only “abnormal and regrettable self-absorption” (4). Regarding “instrumental reason”: “[T]he primacy of instrumental reason is also evident in the prestige and aura that surrounds technology, and makes us believe that we should seek technological solutions even when something very different is called for” (6). Regarding the loss of political vigour: a combined result of points 1 and 2, in which “the institutions and structures of industrialtechnological society severely restrict our choices,” forcing “societies as well as individuals to give a weight to instrumental reason that in serious moral deliberation we would never do” (8).

Taylor’s third malaise recalls Nietzsche’s last man in that “few will want to participate actively in self-government” but would “prefer to stay at home and enjoy the satisfactions of private life” (Taylor 9). As long as the government provides for the conditions that allow for nonpolitical personal pleasures, the individual is satisfied to increasingly withdraw from a politicized social sphere. Taylor suggests that such a condition leads to what Tocqueville called “soft despotism,” where the “vast bureaucratic state” contributes to a feeling of helplessness and powerlessness (think again of Brazil and Fight Club) (Taylor 10).

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Drawing a parallel between these notions and posthumanist panic cinema, it seems to me that one might unproblematically link Taylor’s third malaise, along with Nietzsche’s last man and Tocqueville’s soft despotism, to Timothy Melley’s concept of “agency panic,” which characterizes conspiracy culture in America: the fear of powerful external forces of economy and the state coupled with the feeling of an inability to effect meaningful action (Melley 12). In Taylor’s model, feelings of helplessness and powerlessness circularly relate back to the relinquishing of agency and inability to ground authentic action in deeper social or metaphysical formations of meaning. In these terms, it appears that posthumanist panic cinema philosophizes about the compromises to the LHS in much the same way Taylor and the tradition he draws on does, with a focus on authenticity, autonomy and metaphysical meaning; or as Taylor puts it, “the loss of meaning” and “fading moral horizons,” “the eclipse of the ends,” and the “loss of freedom” (10). Though where Taylor’s analysis is descriptive and prescriptive, posthumanist panic cinema as a cultural artifact is symptomatic. An extract from Sigmund Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego is helpful in addressing the mystico-religious turn extra-terrestrial cinema puts on the paranoid structure of suspicion about an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent Other in posthumanist panic cinema. He proposes that religion and religious narratives in pre-secular societies protected the individual from various neuroses and helped to prevent an indulgence in a pathological adherence to imaginary (in the Lacanian sense) structures. He also addresses the types of neuroses that can develop once religious institutions and narratives lose their potency: Even those who do not regret the disappearance of religious illusions from the civilized world of today will admit that so long as they were in force they offered those who were bound by them the most powerful protection against the danger of neurosis. Nor is it hard to discern that all the ties that bind people to mystico-religious or philosophico-religious sects and communities are expression of crooked cures of all kinds of neuroses [...]. If he is left to himself, a neurotic is obliged to replace by his own symptom formations the great group formations from which he is excluded. He creates his own world of imagina-

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tion for himself, his own religion, his own system of delusions, and thus recapitulates the institutions of humanity in a distorted way [...]. (Freud 74)

Freud’s hypothesis is a useful supplement to the obviousness with which extra-terrestrial narratives employ spiritual or religious motifs to stage anxieties concerning both the individual’s potential metaphysical determination and its being-in-the-world. By extension, Freud’s claim can also shed light on the posthumanist anxiety reflected in posthumanist panic cinema more generally, with cyborg, conspiracy and extra-terrestrial cinema staging and reflecting on psychic tensions and pathological perceptions of the self in relation to anxieties about authentic modes of subjectivity. However implicit or explicit, at stake in such narratives is always the individual’s perception of itself in relation to society and anxieties about the social forces that determine selfhood and subjectivity. In this regard, cyborg, conspiracy and extraterrestrial cinema can be thought of in terms of a popularized reactionary response to social constructivism, which does not offer anchors for authentic selfhood in non-secular metaphysical forms, nor in the Enlightenment mode of autonomy, nor in the humanist mode of authenticity and agency; and it is in this sense that the respective anxieties they stage should be understood as symptomatic of posthumanist anxieties.

H UMANISM

AND

P OSTHUMANISM

As Neil Badmington has suggested, discourse on posthumanism automatically assumes two approximate poles of historical and philosophical perceptions of the human subject: the humanist and the posthumanist. The advent of the secular humanist position is usually contextualized in relation to the triad of the Cartesian subject, Renaissance Humanism and post-Enlightenment secular Humanism. To whatever extent these three categorizations for positioning a notion of the human differ, they all share a principle of essentialism, where metaphysical truth claims about human authenticity and potential agency are the focus of discourse and serve to affirm notions of an authentic self. Although the Cartesian and Enlightenment self may conceivably

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be influenced from the outside, the humanist subject does not find any source for its being in anything external to itself. It is rather a natural self that springs forth independent of the individual’s experience in the world and whose borders of the self constitute a distinction between the individual’s autonomy and agency, and the world that the individual moves within. It is precisely this tradition of essentialism that posthumanist theory is opposed to, and that posthumanist panic cinema stages a fearful loss of. In its counter-position to the humanist principle of essentialism, the human subject as autonomous agent, and against the human subject as the organizing principle and focus of knowledge and discourse, posthumanism functions on a principle of decentrement. On the one hand, this is a result of technology. On the other hand, current posthumanist theory of decentrement is anchored in anti-humanist and post-structuralist philosophies, such as the theoretical anti-humanism Althusser proposes in his defense of Marx against theoretical anthropology, and Foucault’s archaeological deconstruction of “man,” as “an invention of recent date” (Foucault, Order 387). Both Althusser and Foucault decentre the human by putting universal humanist truthclaims fundamentally into doubt and contextualizing the human as historically constructed through ideological discourses. In the same years (from 1964 to 1966), Derrida achieves this destabilization of universal truth claims or the “transcendental signified” by arguing that the centre (of historical thought, knowledge, language) “was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play” (Derrida 353-54). For posthumanist theory, the anti-humanist tradition provides a crucial turn by destabilizing universal truth claims about the human, and destabilizing the so-called centre of subject-centred discourse: Althusser moves agency from the human to a structural formula of social relations, Foucault to the episteme of a particular historic era, and Derrida to language – each constituting a theory of radical contingency that, as Lacanian subject theory did, divides the subject, turning the individual into what one might term a ‘dividual.’ Where philosophies of posthumanism are, with some exceptions, logical extensions of theory in the humanities that divide, decentre, deconstruct and displace the LHS, posthumanist panic cinema can be

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seen as presenting a kind of reactionary skepticism regarding subject formation as it is articulated from various logics of social constructivist theories. What troubles the subject of posthumanist panic cinema can to a large extent be attributed to the idea that identity and, much less so, subjectivity are not something that simply spring forth from the individual, but are perpetually negotiated and renegotiated from the start, and that this negotiation does not consist of a struggle to discover one’s authentic self and realize one’s natural potential, but rather of the struggle for proper positioning in social systems (including language). Though for quite some time it has been neither radical nor particularly original for theory to claim that the subject is unthinkable beyond the context of the social, perhaps this is not what is at stake in popular cinema’s portrayals of destabilizing essentialism in the last thirty or forty years. Posthumanist panic cinema might rather be thought of as addressing itself to the viewer-subject’s latent knowledge of its own decentrement. As such, we might think of posthumanist panic cinema in terms of symptom-formation – “the result of a specific process, of a psychical working out” – of collective preoccupations about authenticity, agency, individualism, technology, subjectivity, social formations, locations of power, etc (Laplanche/Pontalis 446). As W.J.T. Mitchell has put it, “[S]till another task [of art] is the re-articulation of what we mean by the human, by humanism, and the humanities” (498).

W ORKS C ITED 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. MGM, Stanley Kubrick Productions, 1968. A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Warner Bros., 2001. Alien. Dir. Ridley Scott. 20th Century Fox, 1979. Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (Notes towards an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: Monthly Review P, 1971. —. “Marxism and Humanism.” For Marx. London: Verso, 2005. Badmington, Neil. “Theorizing Posthumanism.” Cultural Critique 53 (2003): 10-27.

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Brazil. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Embassy International Pictures, 1985. Benjamin, Walter. “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit.” Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Vol. I 2. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974. 431-70. Betzler, Monika. “Authenticity and Self-governance.” Emotions, Ethics and Authenticity. Ed. Mikko Salmela and Verena Mayer. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009. 51-67. Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. Warner Bros., 1982. Clarke, Bruce. Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. Vanilla Sky. Dir. Cameron Crowe. Paramount Pictures, 2001. Dark City. Dir. Alex Proyas. New Line Cinema, 1998. Dean, Jodi. Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge, 2001. Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: Collier, 1912. Ellis, Caron S. “With Eyes Uplifted: Space Aliens as Sky Gods.” Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film. Ed. Joel W. Martin and Conrad E. Ostwald, Jr. Boulder, CO: Westview P, 1995. eXistenZ. Dir. David Cronenberg. Alliance Atlantis, 1999. Ferrara, Alessandro. Reflexive Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity. London: Routledge, 1998. Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. Fox, 1999. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon, 1971. —. “What Is Enlightenment?” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984. 32-50. Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1967. Guignon, Charles. On Being Authentic. London: Routledge, 2004. Hayles, N. K. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Hoogland, Renée. “Fact and Fantasy: The Body of Desire in the Age of Posthumanism.” Journal of Gender Studies 11.3 (2002): 213-31.

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Kant, Immanuel. “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” Berlinische Monatsschrift 4 (1784): 481-94. Laplanche, Jean, and Pontalis, J.-B. The Language of PsychoAnalysis. New York: Norton, 1973. Loren, Scott. “What are the Implications of the Virtual for the Human? An Analytical Ethics of Identity in Pop Culture Narratives.” The European Journal of American Culture 23.3 (2004): 173-85. McGraw, Phillip C. Self Matters: Creating Your Life from the Inside Out. New York: Simon and Schuster Source, 2001. Macpherson, C.B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1962. Melley, Timothy. Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. Minority Report. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Dream Works; 20th Century Fox, 2002. Mitchell, W.J.T. “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction.” Modernism/modernity 10.3 (2003): 481-500. Nelson, Victoria. The Secret Life of Puppets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, 1818. Signs. Dir. M. Night Shyamalan. Touchstone Pictures, 2002. Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991. The Island. Dir. Michael Bay. Dream Works; Warner Bros., 2005. The Manchurian Candidate. Dir. Jonathan Demme. Paramount, 2004. The Matrix. Dirs. Andy and Larry Wachowski. Warner Bros., 1999. The Thirteenth Floor. Dir. Josef Rusnak. Columbia Pictures, 1999. The Terminator. Dir. James Cameron. MGM, 1984. Wells, H.G. The War of the Worlds. London: William Heinemann, 1898. Wolfe, Carry. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Žižek, Slavoj. On Belief. London: Routledge, 2001.

Violent Criminals and Noble Savages The Filmic Representation of Football Hooliganism as a Quest for Authenticity U WE M AYER

A HOOLIGAN

INDUSTRY AND THE NOTION OF AUTHENTICITY Subcultures seem to inspire the popular imagination as they make it into books, onto the screen and lately into the World Wide Web. Interestingly, even football hooliganism – a subculture which is usually unanimously condemned – has inspired a whole series of films. As a matter of fact, one might identify hooligan films as a distinct genre with Alan Clarke’s The Firm from 1988, starring Gary Oldman, as an early achievement and Pat Holden’s Awaydays from 2009 as a recent example. Generally, the representation of hooliganism in film is not only the most prominent part of what Franklin Foer calls a “hooligan industry” – producing books, websites, documentaries, fashion etc. – but also clearly transcends the boundaries of subculture (101).1 Con-

1

Hooligan films are not only acknowledged by football magazines, socalled lad mags or tabloids. John S. Baird’s Cass, to choose an example from 2008, was reviewed in The Observer by Philip French, who called the film a “superior British crime movie” – while his colleague at The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw, was less favourable, discovering much “selfserving, self-sentimentalising macho nonsense.”

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sidering that the audience of hooligan films is not only made up of hooligans, police officers, sociologists or of genuinely concerned citizens, one might wonder how to explain a certain popular fascination with football hooliganism – which is where the notion of authenticity might prove to be quite helpful. Authenticity, one might object, has become a rather problematic notion in times of accelerated globalization, intensified commodification or simply post-modernism, which has done much to question systems of belonging, believing and shared values. However, one should not too hastily discard the notion of authenticity. An impressive number of publications bear witness to the presently renewed interest in the topic, as does the appropriation of the concept in business, where pretensions to authenticity seem to be regarded as a key to commercial success. Although the hard facts – ingredients, materials or production methods – might not always stand the test for authenticity, the production of “sign value” relies heavily on the notion (Baudrillard 76-77).2 Authenticity, after all, is still in great demand and it is actively promoted by the desire industries (advertising, popular culture etc.). The hooligan industry, which has flourished since the late 1990s, seems to be another instance of authenticity’s popularity. At least the three films to be discussed in this paper – I.D. (1995), The Football Factory (2004), Green Street (2005) – negotiate the concept by representing football hooliganism as a (sometimes successful, sometimes doomed) quest for a more authentic lifestyle. Accordingly, the films embark on fictional, though sometimes superficial explorations of the cultural and psychological dimensions of hooliganism against the background of consumer society, its uniformities and its lack of values, the commodification of experience or, more generally, a prevailing sense of inauthenticity. This paper will scrutinize and try to contextualize the different notions of authenticity which are brought up and negotiated in the films. It will be discussed how and why the films ambivalently portray hooligans as violent criminals, noble savages or

2

In Baudrillard’s account we do not only purchase or evaluate commodities on the basis of their specific use value or exchange value but also consume them as signifying elements. In many instances to promote a commodity’s authenticity will increase its sign value.

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just ‘ordinary’ men – and thereby an explanation for the popular fascination with hooliganism might emerge.3

I.D. (1995): T HE TOPOGRAPHY OF AUTHENTICITY AND THE MYTH OF THE EVIL Philip Davis’s I.D. from 1995 tells the story of John, an ambitious police officer, who is sent on an undercover mission to infiltrate an East London hooligan firm. The mission gets out of hand as John is gradually seduced and drawn in by the life of the football thugs he is supposed to monitor. The coarseness, the violence and the prevailing macho attitudes turn out to be irresistible temptations to the young police officer, who does not only lose sight of his task but even becomes one of the firm’s ‘top boys.’

3

It should be made explicit that this paper does not pretend to make any claims about hooliganism as a ‘real phenomenon.’ However, it will take on the films themselves as a reality – a reality of some significance as the films are linked to a number of culturally relevant discourses and desires, such as the discourse of and the desire for authenticity. Nevertheless, some preliminary remarks might facilitate understanding of the following argument. First of all, it has to be acknowledged that football hooliganism is a complex phenomenon with its own history and with different national ‘brands.’ In the films which are discussed in this paper, the focus is on a specific English version of hooliganism which flourished – although further historical differentiations were possible – from the late 1970s until the early 2000s. The hooligans are organized in so-called firms and do not show the colours of their team nor do they dress as skinheads, a style which dominated football-related violence in the 1970s. Instead, they cultivate a casual style including designer attire and expensive sportswear. Moreover, the kind of hooliganism portrayed is usually confined to consensual violence. Accordingly, there are hardly any innocent victims as the hooligan firms try to fight each other, not the ordinary supporter or spectator. Furthermore, the fights between the firms are predominantly taking place outside the football grounds and are often prearranged.

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The film’s title I.D., if understood as an abbreviation of identity disclosed or perhaps even as a reference to the Freudian id, might bring to attention what Helmuth Lethen has described as a popular topography, i.e. the conceptual location or space, of authenticity (22021, 229). Notions of authenticity often locate the authentic underneath an artificial surface, behind a veil of unnatural manners or, more generally, under the rubbish heap of civilization. Accordingly, authenticity is only to be achieved by getting beyond or underneath the civilized or the conscious, by overcoming the allegedly alienating effects of education and social determination – which, actually, appears to be an adequate description of John’s transformation from police officer to football thug. Drawn to a seemingly authentic lifestyle, John leaves his middle class environment behind to descend to lower social strata. In a plot which shows certain parallels to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the protagonist is especially drawn in by the arguably primitive aspects of hooliganism: the celebration of an archaic masculinity that could not care less about political correctness, the excessive consumption of alcohol and the rushes of adrenalin. Giving in to this lifestyle leaves clear marks on John – intellectually, socially and physically. The evident change in – or the release of – John’s character and desires is set against the backdrop of his petty bourgeois life as a police officer. It is a life which appears rather innocent and quite ordinary although one can detect signs of superficiality and dishonesty in its devotion to a successful career and in its idealization of family life. John’s journey to his ‘Heart of Darkness’ which he finds in football hooliganism can be understood as an escape, an escape which does not bring about improvement but ends in complete failure. At a crucial point in the film, John finally breaks up the relationship with his longterm girlfriend, who is a fellow police officer: “Your John? I ain’t your John. You don’t know me at all. Mend the fuses, fix the car, mow the lawn; it’s boring. You think that’s me. It’s all bollocks. Fucking house, fucking babies…Bollocks. I’m my John... me... I’m different.” As the new John does not seem to be too different from his new mates, one is certainly invited to question the last claim. However, one cannot deny that John has managed to become different from his former social peers and irreversibly so, as it will turn out.

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Later on in the film, John is confronted with the verdict that he tries hard to be “a really bad boy” – a verdict he does not wish to contradict. That his aspiration to badness, and hooliganism in general, flourishes in a context related to football is not necessarily a coincidence as some observations about the poetics of football might reveal. German philosopher Gunter Gebauer describes football as a combination of two contradictory principles: the principle of order and harmony, embodied by the set of rules and by the globe-like shape of the ball, and a more violent principle, manifest in the only seemingly innocent practice of kicking the ball (150-61). Moreover, football might be structured and civilized by a set of rules, but the possibility of transgression is already fully incorporated in the game. Accordingly, there are fouls which are commonly accepted as necessary or which are even admired as intelligent, so-called tactical fouls. In Gebauer’s account, hooliganism relies on the potential for transgression inherent in football and takes it to an extreme. Therefore, far from being completely in contradiction to everything the ‘beautiful game’ stands for, hooliganism only rejects the civilizing dimension of football, its aspiration to order and harmony. At the same time it affirms football’s darker dimensions and its violent origins, thereby – in the words of Gebauer – celebrating the myth of the evil. Even without closer scrutiny, it is easy to recognize that the myth of the evil which fuels football-related violence in Gebauer’s account is compatible with the popular topography of authenticity. In this perspective, hooliganism appears to be a seemingly authentic lifestyle that disrespects the values of society and unearths violent modes of behaviour that are usually covered by a set of civilizing and arguably alienating rules. So even if authenticity is not regularly mentioned in the context of hooliganism or in the films discussed in this paper, it seems to be a central notion. However, no one can seriously claim that the destructive principle underlying football is the purest essence of the game. Limitations and transgressions can hardly be separated from each other. This also seems to be true for the authentic ideal and the social or intellectual being which a popular notion of authenticity likes to contrast. Such a topography of authenticity might be rather misleading as is impressively illustrated by the failure of John’s quest for authenticity in I.D.

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The film ends on a very bleak note: after his superiors have put a halt on his undercover mission, John unwillingly has to face the ruins of his former life and suffers a complete mental breakdown. The last scene of the film shows him participating in a violent National Front rally and one can hardly be convinced that his new appearance as a racist skinhead, fanatically shouting ‘Sieg Heil,’ are simply part of another undercover mission. Eventually, I.D. offers a filmic illustration to Lionel Trilling’s warning that certain notions of authenticity – notions which are based on a simplifying topography – seem to justify excesses in the name of the authentic, not only revaluing but directly or indirectly promoting disorder, violence and madness as values in themselves (Sincerity and Authenticity). Accordingly, I.D. explores its protagonist’s involvement with hooliganism as a self-destructive quest for authenticity.

G REEN S TREET (2005): AUTHENTIC EXPERIENCE AMONG NOBLE SAVAGES A very different account of football hooliganism as a quest for authenticity is given in Green Street from 2005, starring American actor Elijah Wood. Director Lexi Alexander tells the story of American college student Matt Buckner, alias Wood, who is unjustly expelled from Harvard after drugs were found in his wardrobe. Although well aware that the drugs were planted there by his room-mate, Matt, whose lack of confidence is presented without much subtlety, does not even think of clearing his name – surrendering without a fight, so to speak. After his expulsion, Matt visits his sister Shannon in London, where he gets involved immediately with the Green Street Elite, a hooligan firm following West Ham United Football Club and run by Pete Dunham, the brother of Shannon’s English husband. The encounter with Pete leads Matt, ‘the Yank,’ into the alien world that is football hooliganism. However, in Green Street that world is far from being a ‘Heart of Darkness.’ Its inhabitants, and especially Pete, who works as a teacher, hardly live up to the stereotype of mindless, racist and violent thugs. Quite on the contrary: while travelling on the Tube and relating the basic tenets of hooliganism – standing your ground, sticking with

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your mates and working on your reputation – to Matt, Pete casually offers his seat to a young lady. The football hooligan, who does not suffer any pangs of conscience when battling rival hooligans, is simultaneously a reflective, polite and overall amiable person. In other words, he is the perfect image of an urban noble savage. The image of the noble savage is even more valid as the hooligans in Green Street, a film clearly produced for an international audience, are represented as just another kind of English eccentrics. The Englishness of the phenomenon is clearly worked out in Matt’s American perspective. Familiar with neither the rules of ‘soccer,’ nor with hooliganism, Matt encounters the violent subculture as an ethnologist might encounter cruel rites in exotic cultures. England as part of the Old World still seems to harbour the seductive other – at least in Matt’s perspective. And although this other might be disturbing in one way, it is primarily a nostalgic space that has not suffered from the levelling effects of late capitalism and globalization yet. Therefore, one may recognize a kind of heritage-industry-pattern at work in the film. Hooliganism, which is sometimes labelled the ‘English Disease,’ in an anachronistic portrayal that ignores the commercial signature of modern football and the effects of hightech policing becomes one expression of an idealized version of Englishness. It seems remarkable, indeed, that not only Jane Austen and the filmic adaptations of her novels but also – maybe to a lesser degree but still significantly – films dealing with English subcultures find a huge audience abroad, longing for England.4 That Green Street makes so much of the local foundations of hooliganism – which, by the way, could be said of all three films with actors trying to get the cockney accent right etc. – seems to be a concession to a fascination with authenticity in times of accelerated globalization. The hooligan firms with their very local sense of belonging seem to represent an anachronistic feature in a world where socio-

4

No one can seriously deny that since the 1960s British youth-, sub- and pop-cultures – the music of the Beatles, the look of mods and skinheads or the Britpop of the 1990s, to name just a few instances – have inspired much admiration abroad and have left their mark on the popular perception of Britishness/Englishness.

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economic and cultural pressures enforce individual mobility and undermine traditional ways of belonging. Tellingly, Matt Buckner, the outsider drawn into the subculture of hooliganism, suffers from a family that can hardly be described as intact. His mother is dead, his sister is living abroad and his father, who is a successful and globetrotting journalist, is first and foremost absent. Adding to Matt’s homelessness his humiliation at Harvard, Green Street tries to convince its audience that the protagonist finds – at least temporarily – a new sense of belonging in the hooligan firm, where friendship still exists and comradeship proves itself in the face of violence. As local institutions that cultivate a strong personal bonding between its male members, hooligan firms more specifically also seem to be at odds with developments in modern football. In particular, English club football has given up its reliance on local or even national ‘origins’ as Christian Huck points out in an essay on “Football and Postmaterial Britishness”: “Today, [English] football clubs are owned by foreigners and trained by foreigners, they field foreigners and are sponsored by foreigners […]” (28). Against this backdrop, one can understand why authenticity, at least in fictional representations, is projected onto hooligan firms with their local outlook.5 Of course, it is not just the Englishness and local nature of hooliganism that inevitably draw in the American college dropout and neglected son. The physical challenge, i.e. the violence, is an essential trigger for the character’s development. The violent experiences are stylized as moments of an awakening self-awareness which is supposedly essential for the re-creation of an authentic self: “Once you recognise you are not made of glass, you only feel alive when you are

5

Commenting on his conversation with a former Chelsea hooligan in How Soccer Explains the World, Franklin Foer discovers the following link between (the self-representation of) hooliganism and globalization: “Unwittingly, Alan boiled down the essential cultural argument against globalization made by No Logo author Naomi Klein [...]: multinational capitalism strips local institutions of their localness, it homogenizes, destroys traditions, and deprives indigenous proletariats and peasants of the things they love most. It is easy to understand how this argument would apply to English soccer in general […].” (96-97)

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pushing yourself to the limit” (Matt Buckner in Green Street). A widespread assumption linking authenticity to extreme and existential situations can be detected here. Arguably, authenticity can only be achieved by “acting in circumstances that are beyond the ‘good and honest’ ethic, the world of shallow appearances and pious ethical codes” (Golomb 24). In times when some cultural critics bemoan a virtualization of identities and selves, it seems a rather obvious thought that violence and extreme physical experience can be privileged sites of re-creating authenticity. It is probably superfluous to point out a gender bias that is virulent at least in the film’s take on this nexus. The implicit ideal comes very close to an archaic notion of masculinity that stresses physical strength, ruthlessness, competitive spirit etc. Following this logic, the film narrates Matt’s personal development – visualized in his clothing and his characteristic facial expressions – from a supposedly effeminate, passive victim to a selfconfident and active self/male. In On Being Authentic, Charles Guignon elaborates how a selfhelp industry has been built on a vague notion of authenticity, offering advice on how to become oneself, which is supposedly a requirement for self-fulfilment. Obviously, most people would be disturbed by the thought that the experience of hooliganism could be decisive for the individual development of an authentic and confident personality. However, Green Street seems to suggest just this. At the end of the film, after a last and fatal battle, Matt returns to the US, where he courageously and smartly confronts his former room-mate and thereby secures his readmission to Harvard. In the last shot, one sees a grown-up and self-confident Matt Buckner walking down the street, chanting the hymn of West Ham United Football Club. Ultimately, with its explicit celebration of hooliganism’s first commandment (‘Stand your ground!’), Green Street portrays the violent subculture as a school for life. And it does not make much of a difference that the film is cautiously pointing out at the end that it is sometimes better to turn around and leave because no one stays at school for good. But even if one interprets the film less celebratory of its subject, at least Matt Buckner seems to profit and to grow from his authentic experience among the noble savages of English hooliganism.

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T HE F OOTBALL F ACTORY (2004): H OOLIGANISM , CONSUMERISM AND THE POLITICS OF AUTHENTICITY Nick Love’s The Football Factory from 2004, the third and last film to be discussed in this paper, offers a more ironical but arguably also the most realistic portrayal of hooliganism, which is in part due to “the fact that the majority of the brawlers are the real thing” (Munday, “Hooligan Movies”). With over 300.000 copies of the DVD-version sold in the UK alone, the film, which is based on a novel by John King and portrays a group of Chelsea hooligans, definitely has to be described as a success with its audience (de Lisle, “Home Box Office”). What is remarkable about The Football Factory is that it explicitly links hooliganism to consumer society. At a first glance, the hooliganism as it is portrayed in the film appears to be a critical challenge to the ideology of consumerism. Consumerism can be defined according to Robert Bocock as “the active ideology that the meaning of life is to be found in buying things and pre-packaged experiences […]. This ideology of consumerism serves both to legitimate capitalism and to motivate people to become consumers in fantasy as well as in reality” (50). No one can seriously deny that consumerism has left its mark on modern football, which comes along as a commercial event that could also be described as a “pre-packaged experience.” Modern football stadiums, often named after the corporate sponsors, resemble shopping malls and supporting a team is no longer a sign of local pride but of brand loyalty. English professional football could be described, somewhat polemically, as a spearhead of consumerism where commodification processes seem to eliminate traditional attitudes and relationships. Only football hooliganism seems to be immune to commodification – if, for the time being, one ignores the films and the media coverage. Therefore, Tommy Johnson, the central character of The Football Factory, can justify his violent passion as follows: “What else you gonna do on a Saturday? Sitting in your fucking armchair, wanking off to Pop Idols, […] Spend your money […]? I know what I’d rather do. Tottenham Away. Love it.” From this perspective, hoo-

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liganism appears as a refuge for real experience in the plastic world of consumer society and mass media.6 However, the Chelsea hooligans are not, if compared to other groups of the population, the obvious victims of consumer society that late capitalism has left behind. Affluence, driving a Land Rover or running a respectable business can go together with a second life as a hooligan as some characters in Nick Love’s film illustrate. So it is not material poverty that generates football violence. Furthermore, it would be inadequate to reduce the hooligan subculture to a rebellion against the inauthentic lifestyle of consumer society. One must not gloss over the fact that hooligans are themselves avid consumers, probably spending more on their attire than the average football supporter. Accordingly, the protagonists of The Football Factory show – as do the characters in Lexi Alexander’s Green Street – a keen interest in “aspirational fashion (as in real life, the football hooligans are not Dr Martens-wearing skinheads, but smartly dressed ‘casuals’ clad in upmarket brand names: Burberry, Stone Island and Aquascutum)” (Munday, “Hooligan Movies”). Obviously, the notion of the football hooligan as a noble savage needs readjustment. Whereas John, the protagonist in I.D., wants to be fundamentally different, the members of The Football Factory do not show this ambition: “There is nothing different about me” are the first words with which Tommy Johnson introduces himself from the off. “I am just another bored male approaching thirty in a dead end job who lives for the weekend.” His involvement with hooliganism appears as an ambivalent quest for authenticity. On the one hand, it seems to offer an alternative to the boredom of ordinary life in a consumer society. In this respect the film is not much different from the other two films discussed in this paper. However, on the other hand, the representation of hooliganism in The Football Factory seems to suggest that the phenomenon depicted is authentic not because it differs from what ordinary life has to offer but because it is an adequate expression of today’s state of Britain.

6

Tellingly, German football hooligans are sometimes called euphemistically erlebnisorientierte Fans – i.e. fans that are keen on a real and physical experience (and not on football as a commercial event or product).

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It is Jean Baudrillard’s reaction to the Heysel-catastrophe in 1985 that might prove illuminating at this point. Baudrillard, in an essay written shortly after one of the worst events in the history of football-related violence, which left dozens of spectators dead and led to a ban on English football clubs in international competitions, does not explain the violence as the outbreak of social unrest or of archaic desires, but describes it as an utterly contemporary phenomenon (Baudrillard, “Das Heysel-Syndrom”). For Baudrillard, the English hooligans involved are – in what must appear a provocative association – taking Thatcherite politics into the grounds and onto the streets. The fact that Margaret Thatcher considered football hooligans “as the enemy within” (Foer 95) must not be misleading. Their brutality is, at least structurally, not dissimilar from the brutality of the Iron Lady, shown for example in her handling of the miners’ strike in 1984-85. ‘Standing your ground,’ which is identified as the first commandment of hooliganism in Green Street (and humiliating or facing down your opponents) is not only the hooligans’ imperative but also a mode of politics. Moreover, for Baudrillard, football violence seems to be the purest expression of an ethics of indifference and of the implosion of social values (in times of prosperity), arguably characteristics of British society since Margaret Thatcher came into power. The hooligan subculture, therefore, can neither be elevated to an instance of civil disobedience nor should it be dismissed unthinkingly as anti-social or criminal behaviour. Hooliganism, especially as portrayed in The Football Factory, might be closer to the heart and soul of today’s Western societies than one would wish to think.

P ROJECTIONS

OF AUTHENTICITY

The three films discussed in this paper obviously differ in their representations of hooliganism and in their negotiations of authenticity. I.D. presents a critical stance towards simplifying and yet seductive notions of authenticity which easily lead to naturalizing accounts of social, cultural or historical phenomena (‘men have to fight,’ ‘the British are a warrior race,’ ‘competition is the natural state of being’ etc.). Such notions of authenticity often appear as intellectual shortcuts and can obviously be exploited to elevate all kinds of anti-social behaviour. Green Street, in contrast, relies

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affirmatively on a notion of authenticity to turn a story of hooliganism into a story of personal growth. It offers an optimistic, not to say naïve account of the pedagogic effects of extreme (physical) and seemingly ‘real’ experience which is – needless to say – the experience of the other. Both films, Green Street and I.D., remarkably illustrate that every quest for authenticity, although directed at the creation of a more or less autonomous self, needs instances of the other to gain direction. Whereas I.D. and Green Street focus on the development of their main protagonists in the face of the seemingly authentic other, The Football Factory significantly does not portray such a development. Nick Love’s film challenges the assumption that hooliganism is the radical other to/within modern Western societies. It even seems to imply that hooliganism is an authentic expression of contemporary Britain. With binge drinking and yob culture as often lamented plagues to British society today, Nick Love could have a point there. Football hooliganism becomes just a showcase for the other as part of the self. However, notwithstanding their differences, the three films ultimately suggest that football hooliganism in a certain cultural context lends itself to projections of authenticity. Of course, one might argue that the hooligan films do not only thematize the idea that hooliganism is a kind of authentic other, but rather (re)produce it or make it available to a wider audience. Regardless of their critical potential, the films try to sell hooliganism, a phenomenon usually considered unpalatable – and linking the violent subculture up to the respectable value of authenticity surely makes it more consumable. Although none of the films can be accused of explicitly promoting hooliganism as an authentic lifestyle, a certain potential for glorification can hardly be denied. On the one hand, it might be inherent in the films’ ambition to understand and not to condemn the subculture. On the other hand, it is a result of choosing specific filmic strategies such as video-clip-style aesthetics and the use of animating music. Anyway, the films certainly participate in a commodification and domestication of hooliganism, which goes along with its rise to an object of a wider popular fascination:7

7

The rise of the hooligan industry since the late 1990s probably can be set against a backdrop of perceived loss or nostalgia. On the one hand, there are the radical changes which the old-fashioned world of football has un-

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[H]ooliganism has been domesticated, or domesticated enough to become an object of fascination and adoration. You can understand why the market might have an appetite for the hooligan. On the most basic level, he’s a romantic rebel, willing to risk bodily harm and battle police. He’s not just a nihilist. He fights for the colors of the club, the same colors that the average peace-abiding fan loves. Because the hooligan is so similar, he is also fascinating. (Foer 10102)

The image of the hooligan as a romantic rebel might be exaggerated, but Foer’s observation concerning the similarity between the hooligan and the average football supporter appears to be quite sensible. It refers to the tribal kind of belonging (under “the colors of the club”) which is not only characteristic of hooligan firms but is also what “the average peace-abiding fan” perhaps aspires to, at least when it comes to football. As it can be easily opposed to the alleged fragmentation or atomization of modern societies, such a strong and unrepentant sense of belonging can be easily charged with the promise of a more authentic identity and less alienated lifestyle – and so can the physical dimension of hooliganism etc. The popular fascination with football hooliganism, which is reflected and fuelled by the hooligan films, might be just one indication that the popular notion of an authentic identity and lifestyle is still vibrant. In spite – or maybe because – of the post-modernist attacks aimed at dismantling and de-constructing (traditional) forms of (collective and personal) identity, the concept of authenticity still seems to be crucial for an understanding of popular culture or contemporary societies in general. Taking the notion of authenticity seriously might at least help cultural critics to account for the fact that football hooligans can be regarded as both: violent criminals and noble savages, objects of despise and desire.

dergone (e.g. a commercialization including the upgrading of football for a new audience that is no longer predominantly male, working-class etc.). On the other hand, England is no longer ‘setting the standards’ for hooliganism internationally, as it is especially Eastern Europe that sees the worst – and hardly consumable – excesses of football violence today.

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W ORKS C ITED Awaydays. Dir. Pat Holden. Optimum Releasing, 2009. Baudrillard, Jean. “Das Heysel-Syndrom.” Le Monde diplomatique 12 June 1998. 10 March 2011; . —. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage, 1998. Bocock, Robert. Consumption. London: Routledge, 1993. Bradshaw, Peter. “Review: Cass.” Guardian.co.uk 1 August 2008. 10 March 2011; . Cass. Dir. Jon S. Baird, Optimum Releasing, 2008. De Lisle, Tim. “Home Box Office.” Guardian.co.uk 14 January 2005. 10 March 2011; . Foer, Franklin. How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005. French, Philip. “Review: Cass.” Guardian.co.uk – The Observer. 3 August 2008. 10 March 2011; . Gebauer, Gunter. Poetik des Fußballs. Frankfurt a.M: Campus Verlag, 2006. Golomb, Jacob. In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus. London: Routledge, 1995. Green Street. Dir. Lexi Alexander. OddLot Entertainment, 2005. Guignon, Charles. On Being Authentic. London: Routledge, 2004. Huck, Christian. “Postmaterial Britishness: Playing Football Like a Gentleman.” Journal for the Study of British Cultures 15.1 (2008): 25-42. I.D. Dir. Philip Davis. Polygram, 1995. Lethen, Helmut. “Versionen des Authentischen: Sechs Gemeinplätze.” Literatur und Kulturwissenschaften: Positionen, Theorien, Modelle. Ed. Hartmut Böhme and Klaus R. Scherpe. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1996. 205-31. Manzoor, Safraz. “Boot Boys.” Guardian.co.uk 24 July 2008. 10 March 2011; .

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Munday, Matt. “Hooligan Movies Are All the Rage.” Telegraph.co.uk 07 May 2004. 10 March 2011; . The Firm. Dir. Alan Clarke. BBC, 1988. The Football Factory. Dir. Nick Love. Momentum Pictures, 2004. Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. 1972. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980.

Performative Authenticity Identity Constructions among Asian Second-Generation Youths in Great Britain S ABINE N UNIUS

In the present paper, I would like to examine the specific notion of cultural authenticity which is currently promoted among members of the group of so-called second-generation immigrants in Great Britain. My study thus focuses on a community of people with an Asian background whose parents migrated to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. The specific predicament of this circle consists in the fact that, while having been born and raised in Britain – and therefore officially constituting British legal citizens – many of them apparently fail to identify with Britain as ‘their’ nation and, as a consequence, turn to other referents in their attempt to construct satisfying collective identities. After the 2005 London bombings, which, against previous assumptions, were perpetrated by English legal subjects rather than Islamist terrorists infiltrating the nation, this group entered the limelight of public attention. It was from this point on that debates about the state of integration of so-called hyphenated Britons gained momentum and began to draw attention to the existence of a vibrant subculture which had evolved more or less unrecognizedly in the previous years. On an academic plane, the topic rose to prominence in a similar fashion. Here, a vast number of studies on British-Asianness focuses on ways to conceptualize hyphenated identities and to assess their status within established ‘British’ culture. At present, one of the most hotly debated

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issues results from the choice of an appropriate label to replace the term British-Asian, which is perceived as inadequate on the grounds of its allegedly being delimiting. Accordingly, Sayyid explains the ratio behind the introduction of the term BrAsian as follows: Thus, the use of British as prefix or suffix establishes a superficial relationship between Asian and British. […] Such an arrangement maintains the distinction and distance of the West and Non-West. […] The category of BrAsian has four main features. First, it refuses the easy decomposition of the British and Asian dyad into its Western and Non-Western components. […] Second, BrAsian occupies an intermediate terrain on the cusp between West and NonWest. […] BrAsian signifies the impossibility of a hyphenated identity. […] Third, the signifier of BrAsian needs to be conceptualised in the Derridean sense of being ‘under erasure’ (Derrida, 1976). […] Fourth, BrAsianness is defined by what can be described as a sense of ironic citizenship. That is, BrAsians experience persistent and deep-seated skepticism about the dominant mythology of Britishness. They have recurring doubts about their inclusion within the conversation of the nation as interlocutors and peers. Their sense of irony arises from a recognition (often tacit rather than explicit) of the distance between the narratives available to them and the entrenched sense of Britishness. (7-8)

Apparently, there is a strong feeling that the hyphen used in references to British citizens with a mixed background implies the (tacit) assumption of a white British norm from which non-British elements – be they Black, Asian or Carribbean – are set off and thereby marked as foreign.1 To subvert this covert privileging of (white) Britishness,

1

On closer examination, it becomes clear that such a neat separation of British and, for instance, Asian elements within a specific cultural context is unfeasible. Nevertheless, the foregrounding of specifically non-British elements continues to play a significant role in fields such as identity politics. Sadly enough, it still continues to be exploited primarily in racist discourses where claims to retain ‘original’ British culture are still rife. In a similar vein, the British National Party (BNP) request on their homepage to stop immigration for the following reasons: “On current demographic trends, we, the native British people, will be an ethnic minority in our own

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concepts such as BrAsianness stress the Indian or Asian component instead. Since we are at times confronted with highly idiosyncratic conceptualizations of ‘Indianness’ in this context, I would like to trace which notions of Indianness or rather ‘desiness’2 to use the protagonists’ own words, are promoted in the respective constructions of cultural identity. In the process, I will illustrate the function ascribed to authenticity and highlight the great value placed on authentic forms of behaviour. As source material for my analysis, I have chosen samples from two different discursive systems, i.e. a literary and a musical rendition of the topic. Thus, after an analysis of Gautam Malkani’s 2006 novel Londonstani, I will move on to a discussion of bhangra music as exemplified by the songs of Britishborn artist Apache Indian. In both cases we detect a marked emphasis on authenticity, especially as far as characteristic forms of behaviour and visible features such as a recognizable dress style and selected accessories are concerned. This strong focus on markers of affiliation displayed in interaction with other people already hints at a second crucial component: the aspect of performance and performativity. For this reason, I would like to introduce the term ‘performative

country within sixty years. To ensure that this does not happen, and that the British people retain their homeland and identity, we call for an immediate halt to all further immigration, the immediate deportation of criminal and illegal immigrants, and the introduction of a system of voluntary resettlement whereby those immigrants who are legally here will be afforded the opportunity to return to their lands of ethnic origin assisted by a generous financial incentives both for individuals and for the countries in question. We will abolish the ‘positive discrimination’ schemes that have made white Britons second-class citizens. We will also clamp down on the flood of ‘asylum seekers’, all of whom are either bogus or can find refuge much nearer their home countries.” 2

As to the initial meaning of the term, MSN Encarta offers the following definitions: 1. South Asia local: produced or made locally; 2. South Asia rustic: characteristic of rural areas, especially those considered to be unsophisticated; 3. of S Asia: relating to or characteristic of South Asia. (emphasis in the original)

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authenticity’ as a description for the particular version of authenticity promoted by (self-proclaimed) desis. While I aim to demonstrate the validity of this idea in the following analysis, I am well aware of the fact that the postulation as such entails the combination of two hotly contested concepts. To begin with, ‘authenticity’ has been repeatedly discussed in a variety of discursive formations such as philosophy, art and literature; yet, despite some proximities, the single disciplines and subdisciplines stress different aspects and, as a result, come up with all but clashing definitions. What proves of prime importance with respect to the notion of authenticity advanced in this essay is a basic distinction pertaining to the ‘source’ of authenticity, i.e. the benchmark used to qualify something as authentic. In this case, judgements do not follow the logics of those definitions which focus on the idea of heritage or a genealogy endowing an object or a person with authenticity. In his study Culture and Authenticity, Lindholm draws attention to this basic differentiation between two opposing conceptualizations: [T]here are two overlapping modes for characterizing any entity as authentic: genealogical or historical (origin) and identity or correspondence (content). Authentic objects, persons, and collectives are original, real, and pure; they are what they purport to be, their roots are known and verified, their essence and appearance are one. As we shall see, these two forms of authenticity are not alwas compatible nor are both invoked equally in every context, but both stand in contrast to whatever is fake, unreal, or false, and both are in great demand. (2, emphasis in the original)

This feature proves crucial especially for members of the second generation since they find themselves in the precarious position of having to build up an identity without being able to resort to the element of origins as a guarantee for authenticity. Seeing that ‘their’ tradition, i.e. Indian culture, is only handed down to them via their parents and can in the majority of cases not be experienced at first hand, the youths are to some extent forced to create their own, often highly eclectic, version of ‘Indianness’ provided they do not wish to abandon their parents’ traditions entirely. Moreover, in comparison with the parental generation, the second generation occupies a more

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precarious space within British society since they can no longer refer to India as their home nor do they seem to feel at ease in defining themselves as British. As a result, the idea of heritage as a guarantee for authenticity is closed off to this part of English society. As far as the second component of my concept – performativity – is concerned, I likewise wish to precede my discussion with a reflexion on some terminological difficulties. These complexities arise primarily from two aspects: firstly, the notion of performativity – as in the case of authenticity – is used across a variety of disciplines, with media studies and linguistics probably being the most prominent among them. The respective applications of the term, however, are by no means compatible so that further specification is required for a fruitful usage of the term. Secondly, the precise distinction between performativity and performance often becomes blurred because the two concepts are sometimes used interchangeably and with insufficient precision. As a basic distinction, Phelan offers the following characterisation of the single categories: Performance and Performativity are braided together by virtue of iteration; the copy renders performance authentic and allows the spectator to find in the performer ‘presence’. Presence can be had only through the citation of authenticity, through reference to something (we have heard) called ‘live’. Perhaps

the

relationship

between

performance,

performativity,

and

performance studies might best be expressed as ‘a way of happening, a mouth.’ (10)

Seeing that this definition only offers an elementary differentiation, I would like to pursue the conceptualization a step further in order to clarify the differences between the two notions. For this purpose, the theories developed by Judith Butler in both Gender Trouble and her later publication Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex appear particularly well suited. Even though Butler concentrates on aspects of performativity with regard to gender roles and gendered behaviour, her findings prove applicable to constructions of cultural authenticity among second-generation immigrants as well, at least as far as basic patterns and structures are concerned. The most pertinent points of this theoretical framework may be summarized as follows:

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In “Critically Queer” and in Bodies That Matter, however, Butler resignifies both performativity and performance: performativity now refers to a discursive compulsion to repeat norms of gender, sexuality, and race, while performance refers to an embodied theatricality that conceals its citational aspect under a dissimulating presence. Thus, in addition to stressing performance as both normative and transgressive, Butler also stresses both the discursive and the embodied dimensions of performativity. She even warns that the “reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake”. (McKenzie 227, emphasis in the original)

Thus, with regard to my definition of ‘performative authenticity,’ two features prove of prime importance: first, it is significant to note that authenticity results from specific contents and forms of behaviour but is not derived from a (historical) genealogy. Secondly, authenticity is classified according to specific types of conduct. At this point, the element of an audience or a spectator comes into play because, as Carlson states, “[p]erformance is always performance for someone, some audience that recognizes and validates it as performance even when, as is occasionally the case, that audience is the self” (5). By way of illustration for British-Asian constructions of (cultural) authenticity, I consider the notion of desiness particularly well suited since the protagonists themselves explicitly thematize the aspect of authenticity and display a great concern in proving that their version of desiness is actually an, if not the, authentic one.

R UDEBOYS VS . C OCONUTS – AUTHENTIC D ESINESS IN L ONDONSTANI My first example of performative authenticity, Gautam Malkani’s novel Londonstani, may be considered an exponent of so-called ‘Black British fiction.’3 In his narrative, Malkani portrays a decisive

3

With regard to the term as such, a first controversy arises from the question of what, ultimately, constitutes the ‘black’ element. In the majority of cases, it is a combination of a black writer (usually him- or herself part of the second generation) and a ‘black’ subject, i.e. a plot which focuses on

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period in the life of teenage protagonist Jas, a youngster who spends most of his time hanging out with a gang of self-proclaimed ‘rudeboys.’ Formerly derided as a ‘ponce’ – i.e. an effeminate, supposedly homosexual person lacking any masculine prowess – Jas is intent on maintaining his new-found coolness by securing his membership in the circle around gangleader Hardjit. Thus, as far as the general plot outline is concerned, the narrative follows the patterns of the conventional coming-of-age story covering incidences such as the protagonist’s first love and his rebellion against his parents. What proves remarkable in structural terms, though, is the text’s engagement with the differential category ethnicity and the concomitant praise of an authentic version of desi identity by the protagonists. Unsurprisingly, the gang promote their version of desiness as the only ‘real’ or ‘true’ one and thereby distinguish strictly between authentic and allegedly inauthentic forms of behaviour. Obviously, the strategy as such, i.e. the attempt to decry the other as less authentic and therefore also less worthy, does not constitute a novel phenomenon. In fact, it can be traced in almost all processes involved in the creation of both auto- and heterostereotypes.4 The same holds true for the instrumentalization of positive (self-) ascriptions in the attempt to further the coherency, unity and

the problems that confront citizens with a migratory background. As far as marketing strategies are concerned, it is striking to note that promotion campaigns usually stress a writer’s humble origins and their having retained their roots. What is more, an appealing outer appearance is certainly an asset likewise exploited to increase the popularity of an author and to boost the sales figures of their books. From a perspective outside the realm of marketing, though, there is, in principle, no reason why a white author should not write on a ‘black subject’ – and thus, at least theoretically, produce ‘Black British fiction’ as well. On the concept of ‘Black British fiction’ as well as its exploitation for marketing purposes, see Nowak. 4

These logics have been analyzed extensively elsewhere, especially in the field of Postcolonial Studies where attention has been repeatedly drawn to the processes involved in the construction of otherness and exoticism as well as the implication of those outward-projections of negative qualities on national identities.

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(seeming) homogeneity among a specific group. While this general form of conduct is observable in any type of community – especially as far as minorities are concerned – the rudeboys are faced with an especially pressing predicament inasmuch as they have to cope with the need to define an ‘us’ first against which to set off a ‘them’ subsequently. By contrast to their parents, the return myth, i.e. the idea of returning to India one day in the distant future in order to indulge in the wealth acquired in England, is closed off to them. On the grounds of their having been born in Britain, the connection to India has been severed so that they do no longer qualify as Indian citizens. Nevertheless, most families are still firmly moored in Indian networks so that their offspring are raised in an environment situated between Indian and English society. As a result, the youths tend to identify themselves as desi rather than British, a phenomenon which puts them in a marginal position. In addition to that, they also have to distinguish themselves from other second-generation immigrants and, in doing so, define their own sphere. Consequently, they are faced with a twofold task: besides emphasizing the (more obvious) distance to English establishment, they have to erect firm boundaries against their own peers who, according to the group’s standards, do not display the required characteristic features and prescribed forms of behaviour and are therefore disqualified as proponents of authentic desiness. At this point, performance comes to the fore as a crucial component. As Carlson states, “Since the emphasis is upon the performance, and on how the body or self is articulated through performance, the individual body remains at the center of such presentations” (5-6).5 The impression that the rudeboys deliberately stage a show is increased by the marked change of behaviour to be detected once they enter the family home. Immediately shedding their rough, streetwise front, the tough young men miraculously turn into obedient sons who take off their shoes so as not to soil their mothers’ carpets and take care to not to upset the aunties invited round for tea by making too much noise.

5

In his study, Carlson primarily refers to theatrical performances. Nevertheless, I deem his observations applicable to the street-performance staged by the rudeboys as well since their conduct may be considered a form of role-playing or enactment.

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When it comes to the single elements combined in the notion of authentic desiness promoted by the rudeboys, the points of reference referred to prove highly intriguing. As pointed out above, many established referents traditionally resorted to for orientation and stability have lost their functionality for the second generation. This holds particularly true for the nation as a symbol of affiliation. Likewise, the status of religion is subject to substantial changes. While, in most of the boys’ homes, ceremonies continue to play a certain role, their initial meaning and function have frequently fallen into oblivion or are no longer actively perpetuated and practised. Likewise, boundaries between the respective denominations have begun to blur with the single creeds merging into one allencompassing ‘Indian’ type of religion. Narrator Jas comments ironically on this phenomenon: Up on the landing, the subjhi mixed with the incense sticks burning in bedroom number one along the long, L-shape corridor. There weren’t no bed in bedroom number one. It was where they kept their copy a the Guru Granth Sahib on a table. They’d hung their pictures a various Sikh Gurus on the landing walls outside. They’d even got a couple a pictures a Hindu Gods too. Usually you only get Hindus who’ll blend their religion with Sikhism but Hardjit’s mum an dad were one a the few Sikh families who blended back. (Malkani 51)

Dissatisfied with their parents’ approach towards practising an ‘Indian’ religion in a diasporic environment, the second generation begin to set up their own rules and regulations, thereby all but establishing a new system which does not necessarily follow the lines of religious affiliations and inter-relations as practised on the Indian subcontinent. Due to the extremely rigid demarcations cultivated by the youngsters themselves, tensions between the respective religious groups run high with all ‘transgressions’ of boundaries (usually resulting from dating a girl from another creed) being punished severely. In this context, the anxiety with which the youths themselves try to pigeonhole their own community reveals an underlying insecurity and a longing for clearly defined affiliations and stable bonds. Ultimately, the sole established criterion which appears to have retained its functionality in the designation of separate groups and the

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subsequent construction of comparatively homogeneous group identities is the category of ethnicity. Yet, even though ethnicity (seemingly) provides an essential component in the production of a collective desi identity, the end of the novel dispels this assumption, at least as far as a conventional understanding of ethnicity in terms of a specific cultural background is concerned. On the very last pages, the reader finally learns that the narrator himself does not share the same ethnic background as his friends but actually stems from a white middle-class family. His adopting a new ethnicity, so to speak, underlines the performative element included in the rudeboys’ construction of authentic desiness. In view of the fact that the gang has hardly any ‘objective,’ i.e. clearly definable and graspable markers of affiliations to rely upon, labels adopt an essential significance.6 On closer examination, the attribution of specific names to individual groups turns out to be a highly complex process, though.7 In this context, terminological problems mainly arise from two aspects. First, the group itself does not stick to one single label for self-definition but rather comes up with new coinages time and again. What is more, a tension emerges since some terms are imposed on the gang from outside so that they see themselves forced to ‘strike back’ linguistically by rejecting former designations in favour of self-established ones: People’re always tryin to stick a label on our scene. That’s the problem with havin a fuckin scene. First we was rudeboys, then we be Indian niggas, then rajamuffins, then raggastanis, Britasians, fuckin Indobrits. These days we try an use our own word for homeboy an so we just call ourselves desis but I still remember when we were happy with the word rudeboy. (Malkani 5)

6

It is at this point that we detect a possible intersection with Butler’s idea of “doing gender” and the significance she ascribes to the aspect of performance.

7

One might even venture so far as to claim that this name-giving process carries a certain performative element in the sense of Austin’s definition since a label lends a specific personality to an individual and apparently forms a decisive part of their self-image.

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Once again, performativity can be seen to constitute a crucial aspect. While the respective labels as such are comparatively empty of meaning, their usage in a specific context endows them with significance. Simultaneously, the element of iteration comes to play a central role since a label only retains its identity-generating function as long as it is actively and recurrently used by the group. Here, it is interesting to note that not only designations shift but that definitions of authenticity are subject to change as well: in a somewhat reductive fashion, one might therefore claim that authenticity consists of what the group judges or proclaims as authentic at a specific moment in time. This issue is complicated even further by the altered meaning of specific labels in changing contexts. Accordingly, an initially derogatory term can be appropriated by the group against which it was formerly used and become ‘re-coded’ so that it is transformed into an expression of proximity and familiarity.8 In tune with this attitude, Hardjit summarizes the range of application of the term ‘Paki’ as follows: “A Paki is someone who comes from Pakistan. Us bredrens who don’t come from Pakistan can still b call’d Paki by other bredrens if it means we can call dem Paki in return. But u people ain’t allow’d 2 join in, u get me?” (Malkani 7). The same may be stated with regard to desiness in general. Similarly, the idea of desiness is not based on a fixed, inalterable definition but rather offers an arbitrary concoction of elements proclaimed as authentic by the rudeboys. However, this arbitrariness in judgements on ‘real’ desiness can never be acknowledged; likewise, the insecurity as to certain rules of behaviour must not be spelled out openly since it would endanger the whole concept of a seemingly natural authentic desiness. The conversation between Ravi and one of his former teachers quoted below offers an ironic example of the youths desperate attempts to erect clear and binding boundaries, which

8

The process as such may be witnessed in a variety of different contexts with ‘queer’ and ‘nigger’ probably constituting the two best-known examples. While ‘queer’ has by now entered the academic discourse and even serves as a name for the sub-discipline of Queer Studies, controversies about the usage of terms such as ‘nigga’ and ‘ho’ in popular music (especially rap) are as yet unsolved and continue to provoke heated debate.

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allow them to neatly classify British-Asians into desis and ponces/ coconuts (brown on the outside but white on the inside): - […] Anyway, dat man is jus anotha BBC ponce. - Trevor McDonald? - Yeh, man. Only Trevor I got time for is Trevor Nelson. - I sincerely hope you’re just feigning your ignorance, Ravi. Trevor McDonald is on ITV, not the BBC. He’s a national institution, for crying out loud. - ITV, BBC. How does dat make him any less poncey? Put him on MTV Base an I’ll listen to him. - Correct me if I’m wrong, Ravi, but isn’t this Trevor Nelson fellow a BBC man? - A’ight, wiseguy, so you know yo shit. So wat? There’re loadsa Asians on da BBC but Trevor Nelson don’t act like a BBC ponce. He ain’t a sap. (Malkani 127)

This ambiguity and lack of clear-cut definitions likewise manifests itself in the ‘authentic’ version of desiness promoted by the rudeboys, which, on closer examination, turns out to contain a number of highly disparate elements from a variety of cultural contexts. Accordingly, we are presented with references to Western pop and consumer culture, elements from the American rap scene, as well as allusions to Hollywood, Bollywood and bhangra. In addition, the youngsters doggedly stick to the notion of bling, a concept which initially emerged in the context of US-American rap.9 Against this background, one may conclude that what ultimately counts is the correct combination of several hetereogeneous elements and their employment in the right fashion. As a result, the reader is presented with efforts aiming at the perfection of a specific cultural performance rather than attempts to unearth inherited traditions or to return to genealogical roots. Interestingly enough, the notion of performance is voiced by the protagonists themselves. Accordingly, the main

9

On the significance of bling in contemporary rap see Chapter 6 in Donalson, “Beyond the Reel: Rappers, Bling, and Floss.”

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character Jas comments on his lack of authentic rudeboy-ness when compared to the others as follows: So now it was Ravi’s turn to make me jealous with his perfectly timed an perfectly authentic rudeboy front. […] Anyway, whatever the fuck we are, Ravi an the others are better at being it than I am. I swear I’ve watched as much MTV Base an Juggy D videos as they have, but I still can’t attain the right level a rudeboy authenticity. (Malkani 5-6, emphases added)

In this estimation, two elements appear particularly significant. First of all, the narrator uses the expression “front,” which already indicates a façade or mask adopted for a specific purpose. Remarkably, though, the idea of a mask or disguise is coupled with the notion of authenticity, which hints at the fact that authenticity is a matter of conduct rather than the outcome of a number of inherited or inborn features. Secondly, Jas talks about the others “being” better at displaying desiness.10 As a result, the impression arises that authenticity is derived from the repetition and emulation of fixed patterns of behaviour which are promoted as the expression of an individual’s identity. As in the case of gender roles, it is only by way of a permanent reiteration that this façade can be maintained and thus serve as the basis for the construction of collective identities. To pursue this line of thought further, I would like to turn to bhangra music and the constructions of authentic desiness offered in this discursive formation.

K EEPING IT REAL – P ERFORMATIVE AUTHENTICITY IN B HANGRA M USIC Speaking about the field of pop music in general, I consider it an intriguing phenomenon that authenticity is promoted as a value in itself across a number of different styles. Thus, in genres as varied as rap, hard rock and bhangra, with each of them uniting their own

10 This idea of doing or acting desiness once again proves reminiscent of Butler’s theorizing on the topic of gender identity and performance.

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followship and communities with a specific fan culture, the appeal to keep it real (a dictum that originated in the context of (black) rap in the US) constitutes the decisive factor which allows for a distinction between, say, ‘real’ rockers and pop musicians. In his discussion of the discourse of authenticity in rock music, Auslander raises several crucial aspects which are also applicable to bhangra music: Taken on its own terms, rock authenticity is an essentialist concept, in the sense that rock fans treat authenticity as an essence that is either present or absent in the music itself, and they may well debate particular musical works in those terms. […] In my own discourse, however, I treat rock authenticity as an ideological concept and as a discursive effect. […] I will argue that authenticity is not simply present in the music itself and will also emphasize its cultural, rather than ethical, dimension. In other words, I posit that the creation of the effect of authenticity in rock is a matter of culturally determined convention, not an expression of essence. It is also a result of industrial practice: the music industry specifically sets out to endow its products whith the necessary signs of authenticity. (70, emphasis in the original)

In my examination of Apache Indian’s bhangra music, I follow Auslander’s assumption that authenticity may be understood as a discursive effect. Moreover, I share his conviction that the authentic quality lauded by listeners does not exclusively result from the music itself, i.e. that it does not solely arise from specific tonal patterns. In contrast, I intend to demonstrate that, especially as far as Apache Indian is concerned, the entire ‘package,’ i.e. the combination of music, lyrics, register, styling and the aesthetics displayed in video clips, has to be taken into account since all of these factors contribute to the impression of authenticity. What, to my assessment, renders the case of Apache Indian particularly worthy of examination is the double function fulfilled by authenticity with regard to his music. On the one hand side, authenticity exerts an appeal on listeners who share Apache Indian’s mixed background and who might feel addressed by the themes he deals with in his songs. On the other hand, however, the impression of being presented with an authentic form of a seemingly foreign culture is exploited as a selling point and serves to broaden

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audiences so as to include, for instance, white youths as well. Seeing that Indian culture at present undoubtedly carries a certain chic11, bhangra has, over the last couple of years, become increasingly fashionable among white listeners who do not stem from a ‘mixed’ background; for this reason, boundaries have become blurred and the style can no longer be considered a niche phenomenon but is on the verge of being integrated into mainstream popular music. My choice of Birmingham-born singer and songwriter Apache Indian (a.k.a. Steven Kapur) as an exponent of British bhangra music was motivated by several considerations: first, Apache Indian is generally perceived as one of the founding fathers of British bhangra and has exerted a substantial influence on the development of the genre. Moreover, he represents an exceptional case inasmuch as he first rose to fame in Britain before being ‘exported’ to India, the alleged homeland of his tunes. Comparable to the patterns observable in my analysis of Londonstani, authenticity in Apache Indian’s case arises primarily from a particular way of staging a number of selected elements which, on closer examination, can be construed as an amalgam of different cultural influences and traditions. Content (and its presentation or performance) is therefore once again placed above origin. Among the features combined in Apache’s eclectic style we detect references to various cultural practices. While bhangra as a musical pattern originated in an Indian context,12 the version performed by Apache Indian – frequently referred to as bhangramuffin – fuses these traditional rhythms and instruments with elements from Western pop music, especially rap and dancehall.13 This hybrid quality continues on

11 Among the most widely known examples of this phenomenon is probably Madonna’s appearance wearing a bindi. By now, the trend has been followed by other celebrities such as Julia Roberts, Gwen Stefani and Britney Spears. 12 For a detailed account of bhangra as a harvest ritual, see Roy. 13 It is striking to note that the term bhangramuffin apparently carries additional connotations. Accordingly, the Urban Dictionary defines a bhangramuffin as follows:

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a linguistic level, given that Apache couples his tunes with song lyrics presented in an idiosyncratic slang which Taylor characterizes as “a heady mixture of English, Jamaican English, and Punjabi” (162). What is more, similar processes of fusion may be detected in the aethetics used in the video clips accompanying some of the songs. In the production for the 1993 hit single Boom-Shak-A-Lak, for example, a Western, MTV-inspired aesthetics merges with pointedly ‘Indian’ elements. These visual references to India include women clad in saris and scenes from concerts on the Indian subcontinent. Finally, the ambiguity in terms of cultural ‘origins’ is alluded to by Kapur’s choice of Apache Indian as a stagename. Apart from offering an obvious pun on the term Indian, the designation likewise inscribes the singer into the tradition of reggae via its reference to Supercat, the “Wild Apache.” While the notion of bhangramuffin as an authentic form of cultural expression could thus be easily dismissed as a heterogeneous mixture of a comparatively arbitrary choice of characteristic features, it is nevertheless perceived as authentic by its listeners.14 Moreover, bhangra is apparently received as the manifestation of a specifically (British)Asian identity. Accordingly, Leante characterizes the reactions to bhangra among second-generation immigrants as follows: Here [at Southall] at the beginning of the 1980s, a new form of hybridised bhangra developed and came to constitute a means for the younger generations to express their identity as “Punjabis in the West.” […] British

A bhangramuffin is a person of Indian or Pakistani origin who speaks in an Estuary accent, wears sportswear or clothing that went out of fashion in the 90s and often has a taste for Asian girls, known as the ‘rasmaloi’, but is rarely rewarded for his efforts. First found in Goodness Gracious Me in the Bhangramuffin sketch. ‘Why you going after them rasmaloi, man?’ ‘Because I'm absolute besty. I'm a bhangramuffin!’ ‘INNIT!’ (emphasis in the original) 14 Again, we may observe a parallel to other musical genres. Auslander, for instance, states the same phenomenon with regard to authenticity in rock music.

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bhangra soon went beyond the borders of the Punjabi Sikh communities and started to connote a wider diasporic group: while Punjabis still represent the dominant group – especially in the production of this music – other South Asians (mostly those from the Northern regions of India) have also adopted it to express a broader shared diasporic identity, cutting across religious as well as regional divisions. (112)

Interestingly enough, Apache Indian himself thematizes this aspect explicitly. In an interview with theinder.net, he even ventures so far as to define his (likewise English-born) peers as a group set apart from ‘indigenous’ society; in the process, he claims that their ‘double’ heritage (arising from their parents’ Indian background on the one hand and the context of their own socialization on the other hand) entails the formation of a new type of culture. Strikingly, the choice of words in the interview may be seen to imply essentialist notions such as the idea of a quintessential Indian culture (referred to as a monolithic entity) and a closed-off, homogeneous cultural sphere created by the second generation. Our parents are born in India (Punjab), but we are coming from England. Reggae, Rap, Pop, music and fashion and a lot of other stuff exert influence on the present generation. But you also notice direct influences from India, like the “arranged marriages”, which is typical for the Indian culture. My music is a mixture of my provenance, blended with styles of reggae. Moreover, I was stamped by artists like Bob Marley and UB 40 (from Birmingham). Speaking frankly, it’s quite easy to describe my style of music: I mix the street style reggae with with [sic] original Indian sounds that I experienced I experienced [sic] at home. New generation – new culture. (theinder.net)

By way of illustration of Apache Indian’s engagement with the plights of this new generation, I have chosen the song title “Arranged Marriage.” Simultaneously, this example serves to demonstrate how performative authenticity works via a combination of sight, sound and lyrics. Thereby, I also wish to underscore the tension arising from the tunes, which suggest a happy-go-merry atmosphere that clashes with the grave topic negotiated in the lyrics. This tension is increased by the fact that the statements made in the song may be understood to

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condone the practice of arranged marriages whereas Apache Indian stresses elsewhere that he does not sanction the procedure. Despite this seeming inconsistency, one may still interpret these tactics as an attempt to highlight the difficulties arising from the second generation’s position and their being caught between the contrasting demands of both two different cultural traditions and two systems of value not entirely compatible with each other. As the lyrics quoted below demonstrate, language and pronunciation play a crucial role. Thus, the creation of authenticity once again relies heavily on the aspect performance. The time has come mon fe apache Fe find one gal and to get marry But listen when me talk tell everybody Me wan me arranged marriage from me mum and daddy […] Now me done get marry say me start to worry Me have fe tell you something mon would you help me About me arrange marriage me have a problem When is the right time to tell me gal friend! Beca the time has come mon fe apache Fe find one gal and to get marry But listen ragamuffin tell everybody Me want me arrange marriage from me mum and daddy. (my emphases)

Due to the muffled pronunciation of these words, it is highly likely that the content of the song is largely lost on white parts of the audience, who might not be overly well versed in patwa expressions. In addition to that, the tunes accompanying these lines suggest an entirely different mood and do not reveal the serious topic dealt with in the song. One may therefore argue that, while performative authenticity in music always relies on a combination of different elements, their estimation ultimately depends on the listener and their subjective assessment of what is perceived as an indicator of authenticity, i.e. while listeners with an Indian background might focus on the lyrics, the musical patterns might prove more important for Western listeners.

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P ERFORMATIVE AUTHENTICITY AND D ESINESS – A P URELY AESTHETIC C ONVENTION ? So far, I have mainly concentrated on artistic examples illustrating the notion of performative authenticity with regard to the construction of both desiness as a category and desiness as a collective identity. Even though the perception of desiness in ‘real’ life is much harder to assess, I would nevertheless like to argue that some of my findings are applicable to existing social formations as well. In contrast to the instrumentalization of desiness for the production of reliable identities, though, the notion of ‘doing desi’ here rather seems to be exploited for comical purposes. Apparently, ridiculing ‘desis’ may likewise serve as a means to demonstrate one’s own superiority and to underscore one’s distance to the allegedly embarrassing and backward behaviour of some fellow countrymen. Accordingly, one blog entry offers the following definition: You are a Desi if you fulfill most of these – •

You unwrap gifts very carefully, so you can save and reuse the wrapping

•

You only buy Diwali cards after Diwali, when they are 50% off. […]

•

You keep most of your money in a savings account.

•

You address an older person you never met before as ‘uncle’.

•

No one you’re related to is a music major.

•

Your parents don’t realize phone connections to foreign countries have

next year.

improved in the last two decades, and still scream at the top of their lungs. [...] •

Experiencing 20 power blackouts in a single day doesn’t faze you. (Satyavrat)

While this account is obviously meant as a parody, it nevertheless provides interesting material for a discussion of desiness since it points out specific ways of behaviour, which are seen to characterize a desi, rather than drawing attention to aspects such as heritage or origins. This emphasis on the performative component can also be

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observed in the following entry in a blog called The Desi Connect, which even explicitly draws attention to the function of cultural/artistic performance: But I think what’s evolved more recently is this ‘cookie-cutter’ definition of what it means to be South Asian. Can you dance? sing? act? Speak your native tongue? Do you know your Bollywood trivia? Is your sari actually trendy enough to wear in cultural fashion shows? It seems like we second generation Desis feel compelled to prove our ‘Desiness’ through how well we can outwardly express our cultural identity. Now I’m not pointing fingers at those who participate in cultural events (note: bhangra competition tomorrow). All I’m trying to say is that Hilal makes an obvious but well-affirmed point: we do use the “arts” to explore and affirm our cultural identity. Especially through cultural performances. And often. (The Desi Connect)

Interestingly enough, this entry emphasizes precisely those aspects which had likewise been presented as crucial in the previous literary/musical examples. Apparently, great significance is ascribed to the following features: dress style, language and a basic knowledge of desi cultural practices. Hereby, the fact that desi culture is not necessarily derived from Indian culture as practised on the subcontinent and has come to include influences from other (pop)cultural formations does not impede the perception of these constructions as authentic. In the last instance, the decisive factor rather seems to consist in the ability to participate in the discourse of desiness and to perform in the prescribed way so as to qualify as a real desi, irrespective of the origins of single elements of this performance. As a result, authenticity in this case seems to consist in the repetition of specific forms of conduct which are assessed as the ‘correct’ or ‘authentic’ ones within a community. One may therefore argue that what we are ultimately confronted with is a question of ‘doing desi’ rather than actually ‘being desi.’

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W ORKS C ITED “Arranged Marriage.” Lyrics Freak. 20 Feb. 2009; . “bhangramuffin.” Urban Dictionary. 20 Feb. 2009; . “Definition of a ‘Desi’.” Satyavrat. 20 Feb. 2009; . “The Quarter-Life Identity Crisis – Desi style.” The Desi Connect Blog. 20 Feb. 2009; . Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999. BNP. “Immigration Isn’t Working.” 2009. British National Party. 6 July 2009; . Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge, 1993. —. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999. Carlson, Marvin. Performance: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge, ²2004. Donalson, Melvin. Hip Hop in American Cinema. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Leante, Laura. “Shaping Diasporic Sounds: Identity as Meaning in Bhangra.” The World of Music 46.1 (2004): 109-32. Lindholm, Charles. Culture and Authenticity. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. Malkani, Gautam. Londonstani. London: Harper Perennial, 2007. McKenzie, Jon. “Genre Trouble: (The) Butler Did It.” The Ends of Performance. Ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane. New York: New York UP, 1998. 217-35. MSN Encarta. 2008. Microsoft. 20 Feb. 2009; . Nowak, Helge. “Black British Literature – Unity or Diversity?” Unity in Diversity Revisited? British Literature and Culture in the 1990s. Ed. Barbara Korte and Klaus Peter Müller. Tübingen: Narr, 1998. 71-87.

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Phelan, Peggy. “Introduction: The Ends of Performance.” The Ends of Performance. Ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane. New York: New York UP, 1998. 1-19. Roy, Anjali Gera. “‘Different, Youthful Subjectivities’: Resisting Bhangra.” ARIEL 32.4 (Oct. 2001): 211-28. Sayyid, Salman. “Introduction. BrAsians: Postcolonial People, Ironic Citizens.” A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain. Ed. Nasreen Ali, Virinder S. Kalra and Salman Sayyid. London: Hurst, 2006. 1-10. Taylor, Timothy D. Global Pop: World Music, World Markets. New York: Routledge, 1997. Vazhayil Jerry, and Sherry Kizhukandayil. “The Don Raja in Amsterdam: Exclusive Interview with Apache Indian.” www.theinder.net. 23 July 2009 .

Authenticity and Authorship

“That is Real” Oprah Winfrey and the ‘James Frey Controversy’ A NNA I ATSENKO

Despite the fact that the academic and particularly the literary academic world has paid little attention to the involvement of the famous talk show hostess Oprah Winfrey in the domain of literature, every once in a while Oprah’s Book Club may inspire scholars of literature with reactions other than embarrassment and dismissive hand gestures. Indeed, Winfrey’s Book Club tremendously influenced not only the publishing world through her recommendations, which immediately increased the sales of the books in question but also the world of the readers as the show’s host presented to the viewers her monthly selection and, the following month, discussed the book in the presence of the author and some selected members from the audience. In short, Oprah Winfrey is not only responsible for the books’ presence in The New York Times top ten bestseller list, but also for the paperbacks which can be found in the homes of her audience. Moreover, Oprah directs her audience through their reading. Her point of view is never neutral since the hostess of the show chooses the books to be discussed according to her own, personal taste – she has to like the book in order to offer it to her audience. Thus, Oprah is regarded by the viewers of her Book Club as someone who speaks from a position of authority because the viewers must trust Oprah’s taste in literature in order to make the recommended purchase. And, indeed, they do. As an example of this trust, one can quote the sales figures for James Frey’s work A Million Little Pieces which sold 1.77 million copies in

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the United States in 2005 with the majority of sales occurring immediately after the Book Club’s selection (“The Man”). However, when in autumn 2005 Oprah Winfrey selected James Frey’s autobiography A Million Little Pieces to feature in her monthly Book Club, no one could foresee the scandal which brewed backstage. The show was aired under the ambiguous title of “The Man Who Kept Oprah Awake at Night,” which already suggests an exaggerated sense of proximity between the author and the show’s hostess. Furthermore, in the first few minutes of the show, Oprah referred to the book as “nothing you’ve ever read before” (“The Man”). Indeed, according to Oprah, Frey’s five-hundred-page autobiography, which mainly deals with Frey’s successful attempt at fighting alcohol and drug abuse in an AA rehabilitation clinic, had a tremendous impact on the employees of Harpo Productions to the extent that it was the privileged subject of morning conversations: “Everybody at Harpo is reading it. When we were staying up late at night reading it, we’d come in the next morning saying ‘What page are you on?’” (“The Man”). Moreover, Oprah adds, “The book I’m choosing kept me up for two nights straight, honest-to-goodness. I could not sleep. I could not sleep, people! I was like reading, reading, 2:00 in the morning, I’m going to do the show, I was up because I couldn’t put it down, it’s that good” (“Interview”). Finally, before Frey’s appearance on the show’s stage, the audience could follow a number of highly emotional employee accounts, praising the book as revelatory and a comment by the teary-eyed Oprah herself who commented on her tears by saying that “I’m crying ‘cause these are all my Harpo family so, and we all loved the book so much” (“The Man”). My emphasis on Oprah’s emotional reaction to Frey’ book is not coincidental. Indeed, what will come to be known as the ‘James Frey Controversy’ after this show, heavily relies on the emotional appeal and reaction which the book has caused. I propose that it is precisely the emotional involvement of Oprah in the James Frey scandal that is of particular interest and should be further researched by social sciences, media studies and literary critics. As I intend to argue in this paper, the issue of autobiographical authenticity which is raised by the ‘James Frey Controversy’ is mediated by the emotional reactions of the show’s audience and the show’s host herself and thus creates an amalgam between feelings and truths and, ul-

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timately, questions Oprah’s own authenticity – an amalgam which quickly becomes extremely confusing. On 8 January 2006, a few months after the airing of the show where Oprah and Frey initially discussed his autobiography, a website entitled “The Smoking Gun” fact-checked Frey’s autobiography and published, under the flaming title “The Man Who Conned Oprah,” an article revealing that the majority of Frey’s work was simply a product of the author’s imagination. What this article denounced is the fact that most of the serious criminal convictions which Frey describes in his autobiography are gross exaggerations of relatively minor events; these include spending three months in an Ohio jail for hitting a police officer with his car and starting a fight with a police officer while being under the influence of alcohol and crack cocaine. Although it is true that Frey was arrested for driving under the influence, he was nonetheless released on a $733 bail. Sergeant Gudgeon, the police officer of Granville even remembers Frey as a “polite and cooperative” young man (“The Man”). Needless to say, the publication of the article by “The Smoking Gun” had tremendous consequences for Frey, his publisher Nan Talese and Oprah herself. Three days after the release of the article, Frey made his first public appearance on the Larry King Live show, where he had to answer very uneasy questions about the truthfulness of the events described in his work. The author openly admitted that some of the facts had been changed but constantly emphasized in the interview with Larry King that “[t]he important aspect of a memoir is to get at the essential truth of it,” and that “the primary focus of the book is not crime. The primary focus of the book is drug addiction and alcoholism, and that’s why the book takes place in a treatment center. You know, it’s a book about getting better, you know. It’s a book about dealing with problems. It’s a book about redemption and pain and family” (“Interview”, emphasis added). Furthermore, Frey practically admitted to the fact that his work can be considered as a fiction. According to Frey, a number of the first attempts to publish the memoir failed and Frey seems to make a link between the failure and the genre under which he planned to propose the book to publishers. Frey commented on this by saying: “We initially shopped the book as a novel and it was turned down by a lot of

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publishers as a novel or as a non-fiction book. When Nan Talese purchased the book, I’m not sure if they knew what they were going to publish it as. We talked about what to publish it as. And they thought the best thing to do was to publish it as a memoir” (“Interview”). Despite having almost confessed that his memoir is a work of fiction, and thus openly admitting to having violated the ‘autobiographical pact’ (to use Philippe Lejeune’s term) according to which the author, the narrator and the protagonist of the work are one and the same person, Frey continued to receive extensive support from Oprah Winfrey, who called in towards the end of the Larry King Live show. In spite of the fact that the industry had been holding its breath in the expectation of Oprah’s reaction to the situation, Oprah’s comments seemed to be largely in support of Frey. In her statement Oprah said the following: So the truth is this. I read and recommend books based on my connection with the written word and its message. And, of course, I am disappointed by this controversy surrounding A Million Little Pieces, because I rely on the publishers to define the category that a book falls within and also the authenticity of the work. So, I’m just like everybody else. I go to the bookstore. I pick out the book I love. It says memoir, I know that – that maybe the names and dates and the times have been compressed, because that’s what a memoir is. And I feel about A Million Little Pieces that although some of the facts have been questioned – and people have a right to question, because we live in a country that lets you do that, that the underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me. And I know that it resonates with millions of other people who have read this book and will continue to read this book. And, you know, one of the things James says in the book, for all the people who are going through any kind of addiction, is to hold on. And I just wanted to – you know, I have been calling this number and it’s been busy, trying to get through to say to all those people out there who have received hope from reading this book, keep holding on, because the essence of that, I don’t doubt. [...] If you’re an addict whose life has been moved by this story and you feel that what James went through was able to – to help you hold on a little bit longer,

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and you connected to that, that is real. That is real. And it’s – it’s irrelevant discussing, you know, what – what happened or did not happen to the police. (“Interview”, emphasis added)

Oprah’s statement suggests a number of very interesting ideas. Oprah takes the opportunity to position herself as a simple and approachable person when she says “I’m just like everybody else.” Indeed, being “just like everybody else” has been a major influencing factor in Oprah’s success – she creates intimate links with her audience and gives her viewers the possibility of identifying with her by openly exposing her life to them. Indeed, the audience of The Oprah Winfrey Show is aware of Oprah’s ongoing issues with men, weight, her childhood poverty and abuse and other issues which Oprah freely discusses on her show with either guest celebrities or participants from the audience. However, can “everybody else” make a book sell 1.77 million copies within a few months? I strongly doubt that, but Oprah’s ability to be simultaneously “like everybody else” and a media mogul (which, quite frankly, is far from the situation of the majority of the American population) can spur readers to purchase and read a work which Oprah advertises as being “real.” Furthermore, how many members of Oprah’s audience are aware of the fact that by claiming herself to be “just like everyone else” at the same time de-racializes herself as an African-American? As Janice Peck points out in her article “The Mediated Talking Cure: Therapeutic Framing of Autobiography in TV Talk Shows,” the absence of discussion concerning class and race dimensions seem to be an overt strategy in Oprah’s show. In her essay Peck states that despite the fact that racial and class issues often surface in the talk show, they are deliberately discarded “because topicality, personalization, and therapeutic discourse are such effective framing devices” (148). It is interesting to observe in Oprah’s statements quoted above a development of a rather peculiar cluster of abstract concepts. Oprah very heavily stresses the idea of the “real” in her statements. This “real” seems to exist in the capacity of the reader to identify not with the truthfulness of Frey’s work but with the experience he represents in it: “If you’re an addict whose life has been moved by this story and you feel that what James went through was able to – to help you hold on a

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little bit longer, and you connected to that, that is real” (“Interview”, emphasis added). Furthermore, Oprah even proposes, but fails to name with any further precision, the “essence” of Frey’s work – there is an essence to the work, and this essence is worth supporting. Frey himself refers to the experience he depicts in his work as “essential truth” (“Interview”). Finally, by positioning herself as being “like everybody else,” another layer of authenticity is added to an already complex tangle of abstract terms related to the real, the truth and the idea of authenticity. We can understand perfectly well the fact that what Oprah is trying to do here is to touch her audience in a way that she has done before – she calls for an emotional identification with the book by those members of her audience who have faced the same traumatic experiences as Frey in relation to drug and alcohol abuse. Indeed, we can say that through his work, Frey presents to readers a model of courage and determination in a battle with addiction, and this very fact has great emotional appeal both for addicts and those who are close to them. Unfortunately, countering the emotional subjectivity, the crude objective fact remains – Frey’s work is fictional because the events he describes in this book have been fact-checked and disproven. Ultimately, it is this crude fact which prompted Oprah to change her mind and complicate things a little further. Two weeks after her supportive telephone call to the Larry King Live show, Oprah summoned Frey, his publisher Nan Telese and a panel of journalists who had written about the controversy, for a rather surprising discussion about the question: “Can you promise people the truth and then not deliver it?” (“Oprah’s Questions”, emphasis added). In the first few seconds of this new episode, Oprah, with a very sombre and disapproving facial expression shown in a close-up shot, confronted Frey by saying: James Frey is here and I have to say it is difficult for me to talk to you because I feel really duped. But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers. I think it’s such a gift to have millions of people to read your work and that bothers me greatly. So now, as I sit here today I don’t know what is true and I don’t know what isn’t. (“Oprah’s Questions”, emphasis added)

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What we can observe here is a complete reversal of the previous situation. Oprah abandons her idea of the “real” as the connection between the reader and the experience presented in the book and re-positions her focus in terms of the importance of “truth.” She confesses to her audience that she regrets her previous statements and, as the events which follow demonstrate, repositions herself as the defender of this “truth” which she had neglected during the Larry King episode. What follows this rather confessional statement is a lengthy period of almost police-like interrogation where Oprah attacks Frey in an attempt to make him publicly verbalize the fact that his book, in fact, is a lie – the very opposite of “truth.” Perhaps it is Frey’s facial expression of distress, or the fact that he does confess to having embellished the work that make Oprah soften towards the end of the show when she practically absolves Frey of this crime of lying: “I appreciate you being here,” says Oprah, “because I believe the truth can set you free. I realize that this has been a difficult time for you [...] maybe this is the beginning of another kind of truth for you” (“Oprah’s Questions”, emphasis added). Frey answers Oprah in a rather schoolboyish manner by saying: “[I]f I come out of this experience with anything, it’s being a better person and learning from my mistakes and making sure that I don’t repeat them.” “Good,” answers Oprah as she moves on to her next victim, Frey’s publisher Nan Talese (“Oprah’s Questions”). Before discussing Oprah’s conversation with Talese, I would like to pause in order to make a brief digression which will bring a more theoretical focus to Oprah’s sudden change of lexical field. As mentioned above, it is interesting to consider Oprah’s shift in vocabulary from the “real” to the “true.” The reader will be sensitive to the frequency with which the term “truth” occurs in the quotation in the previous paragraph, and it is this frequency of occurrence which points to a tension that resides in these verbal exchanges. Somehow, in the material quoted above, the idea of truth no longer solely concerns the authenticity of Frey’s work but also the author himself, as Oprah literally demands a confession and absolves him through his truth-telling performance and sends him back into the world a “better person.” Furthermore, through the tension brought by these terms one can also observe a movement from ontology (“real”) to discourse (“true”) and, as I will discuss below, a re-racialization occurs in Oprah’s discursive

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field which contributes to her status of absolver. Perhaps the question we could attempt to answer here is: what is it that confers upon Oprah such authority? One of the obvious answers to this question is Oprah’s notoriety as a public figure. Although this is certainly true as numerous fans of the show actually do look to Oprah for advice and reassurance, this does not help us to explore the mechanisms by which such notoriety is acquired. I would like to propose that it is Oprah’s language, reinforced by the extensive airings of the show, which places Oprah not only as a defender of truth but also as its source. My proposal rests on an argument put forth by Antonio Brown in his essay “Performing ‘Truth’: Black Speech Acts,” where he explains that the use of what he terms “Black Speak” – the multiple creolised forms or dialects of AfricanAmerican language – conveys a certain idea of “truth”: Living in the two worlds that constitute the America detailed by Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk has equipped me (and others) not only with dual consciousness (or, as Du Bois dubs the duality ‘twoness’) but also with multiple languages. Among the languages is a dialect that I title Black Speak. It is a language that resonates a ‘truth.’ I posit that the form of ‘truth’ asserted by the invocation of Black Speak is based in the sense of community evoked by and attributed to the cultural/ communicative form. Black Speak communicates a ‘truth’ by infusing its messages with the linguistic style that formulates and informs cultural identities and communities. (213, emphasis in the original)

Indeed, basing his argument on Du Bois’s concept of doubleconsciousness but also on Bakhtin’s idea of dialogical discourse and his own experience and observations as an African-American, Brown elaborates the idea of Black Speak as a representation (“(re)presentation”) of a “cultural connection” (216). In other words, what Black Speak does, independently of the transmission of content is: [C]ommunicate clearly and concisely a ‘truth’ to another or others who have shared the cultural history and who are conversant in the vernacular form. The purposeful invocation of the dialect and manipulation of standardized English suggest that the orator is in command of all the languages involved. For those

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individuals whose daily demands require a reliance on ‘mainstream,’ standardized speech acts, the purposeful invocation of Black Speak can be a powerful statement about identity, community, connectedness to the counter/alternative culture, and the oration as well as the perception of a ‘truth.’ (214, emphasis in the original)

Thus, Black Speak is always and already a subversion of the mainstream hegemonic language of the white majority and a replacement of it with something other which Brown terms “a truth.” The indefinite article in the expression is not to be taken for granted. Indeed, Brown does not suggest “the” definite truth, but “a” truth – one amongst many and at the same time “other” than the one imposed by the hegemonic language. Brown defines the “truth” associated with Black Speak in the following manner: The ‘truth’ that Black Speak exposes relates to the dialogical discourse noted by M. M. Bahktin [sic]. For Bahktin [sic], in contrast to the monological that is oriented towards success, the dialogical is oriented toward understanding. I submit that the familiar dialect associated with Black Speak is a recognizable dialogical form which inverts and averts the culturally hegemonic speech patterns valued as standardized American English in order to effectively communicate an unfiltered ‘truth.’ Such ‘truth’ is, according to Derrida, ‘an unveiling of that which is ... an adequation between a judicative statement and the thing itself’ (“Signature” 99). Therefore, I posit that a ‘truth’ lies somewhere between that which is observed and the perceptions, or judgements, of the observer. As those perceptions are communicated, language choices made by the orator become both the enunciator and delineator of a ‘truth.’ So, while I do not advocate the association of Black Speak with dissemination of the ‘Truth,’ I do assert that Black Speak attempts to unravel perceptions of something viewed from the precipice from which Blacks observe American culture and transmit a (subjective/alternative) ‘truth’ to the receiver. (216, emphasis in the original)

What this quotation shows is the fact that the power residing in Black Speak does not solely lie in transmission of a particular message or information, but that it is firstly, and most importantly, the message in itself. In fact, according to Brown, Black Speech is an “oral signature”

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which simultaneously identifies the speaker as being part of a group which shares a common understanding, a common knowledge of the language of hegemony, and at the same time subverts this hegemony by offering an alternative based, once again, on common cultural experience: I assert that a (contextualized) invocation of Black Speak authentically resonates as a kind of emotional ‘truth’ that emanates from exposures to and knowledge of the mainstream and its shortcomings and is legitimated by the ‘risk’ of invoking the counter-cultural communicative form in the face of normalized speech acts [...] Black Speak provides a distinguishable oral signature based on shared experiences and relationships to others and the dominant culture. This signature inscribes a cultural resonance that registers as an authenticated ‘truth.’ (218, emphasis in the original)

It would be easy to draw a simplistic conclusion here which would position Black Speak as a type of authentication strategy for AfricanAmerican culture. Brown anticipates this and warns his readers that this is not his goal. On the contrary, his primary interest lies in revealing Black Speak as an agency involved in “performative communication acts.” Thus, it is not what Black Speak is or is not that is of interest here, but what it does and the ways in which it does it. To illustrate this latter aspect, Brown uses an example which is very convenient for my discussion – the example of Oprah Winfrey and the way she practices Black Speak in her show. Brown points out that the popularity of The Oprah Winfrey Show mainly resides in Oprah’s ability to present herself to her audience as a familiar figure, and that this familiarity is partially due to the fact that Oprah is able to use Black Speak. Brown says that: Oprah Winfrey is an African American female (re)constructed as a populist arising from the American mainstream; she is an other who has garnered mainstream appeal […] Oprah has contributed to the reconstruction of the popular to include space for the marginalized, (seemingly) relevant discourses and (most important to the subject at hand) alternative speech acts. A portion of her familiarity, humor, charisma, and forthrightness is derived from her

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‘twoness’ and her related invocation of Black Speak. (220, emphasis in the original)

In his article Brown continues to demonstrate how Oprah is able to travel across the linguistic continuum between standard white English and Black Speak. In his examples, Brown identifies moments where Oprah employs characteristics associated with Black Speak, such as “inflection, intonation and the intention” as well as moments which point to clear assertions of her status as a teller of “truth” (221). In fact, a number of examples which Brown cites clearly show how Oprah uses Black Speak as a tool to challenge the veracity of her interlocutors’ comments. For example, when questioning Janet Jackson on her lack of communication with her brother, Michael, Oprah is not satisfied by the excuse that Ms. Jackson gives of her brother’s busy schedule. In a manner that one can only describe as code-switching, Oprah immediately changes her expression from standard English to Black Speak and asks: “Y’all ain’t ha’ no AT&T cards o’ nuthin’ like that, huh?” This question is directly followed by laughter and applause from the audience and a comment from Janet Jackson: “That’s very true. Very true” (222). The meaning of this verbal exchange does not concern whether the Jacksons do or do not have AT&T telephone cards, but the difficulty of communication between the two siblings, and this is precisely what Oprah underlines by using Black Speak. In fact, Black Speak performs a double role in this exchange. First, it directly undermines Janet Jackson’s feeble attempt to justify her distance from her brother. Brown describes this process as “[…] strip[ping away] the veneer of the ordinary oratory represented by standardized English […]” (222). Secondly, and at the same time, Oprah’s sentence suggests the fact that a ‘deeper truth’ can explain the behaviour of the siblings and Janet Jackson herself confirms Oprah’s suggestion. Furthermore, this example shows that Black Speak is not only a tool which serves to subvert hegemony, but also, in Oprah’s hands, it is a tool with which to manipulate her audience. Oprah’s Black Speak appeals to her audience because it creates a sense of the familiar on numerous levels, but most importantly, it conveys a sense of a shared experience or, as Brown explains:

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Black Speak is as soothing as familiar/familial foods that instantaneously bathe one in cultural comforts. Black Speak is not the ‘Truth’ but a ‘truth’ about American experience as lived by African-descent peoples. A ‘truth’ that is exposed by Black Speak is the acknowledgement of the unfulfilled promises of a society that dishonours its commitment to freedom and equality. Black Speak acknowledges the limits that bound educational, political, and social opportunities and that necessitate the cultivation of the alternative linguistic form. (223)

From the quotation above it seems that Black Speak is intrinsically linked to the experience of African-Americans in America and that this experience cannot be separated from the trauma of slavery and the ongoing post-Abolition discrimination which African-Americans continue to face. Indeed, trauma seems to play an important part in the common experience and the use of Black Speak is the very narration of this trauma as well. Here we arrive at yet another point of intersection with Oprah’s technique for creating intimate links with her audience – trauma narratives. Indeed, Oprah’s faithful viewers are left with the impression that they know the details of Oprah’s private life because she discusses it in her show. The audience knows that Oprah has been battling with her weight for a very long time and fans continue to support her even after Oprah’s promise to stop excessive dieting and her very recent endorsement of dieting supplements. The audience is also aware of Oprah’s ongoing private issues relating to her romantic life and the number of unsuccessful relationships she has had with men. These issues are discussed during her shows and aired throughout the world and enter the intimacy of the viewer’s homes where members of the audience create links with the hostess by identifying with Oprah’s trauma narratives. Frankly, who would not identify with these issues and how comforting is it to know that even Oprah – one of America’s richest and most powerful women – is experiencing the same problems as any other woman? In fact, trauma becomes a quasi prerequisite in order for Oprah to perform herself as “just like everybody else” and her traumatic accounts of poverty-ridden childhood, rape and the death of her infant son are familiar to her audience. From the perspective of commonly shared trauma narratives, Oprah’s audience

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is led to believe that Oprah could be a next door neighbour, a friend, even a confidant. This is the persona Oprah creates for her audience. How different, we may then ask, is Oprah’s position from that of James Frey himself? Although Frey is not an African-American, their tactics of reaching out to their audiences are stunningly similar: as it has been discussed above, often Oprah resorts to the practice of deracialization in order to reach her white audience. If we now return to Oprah’s questioning of Frey’s publisher Nan Talese, we can see that the main reason why Talese never questions the authenticity of Frey’s work is very similar to the process underlying Oprah’s relationship with her audience. When questioned about her responsibility in the controversy, Talese replies: I read the manuscript as a memoir. I thought it was this extraordinary story of a man with drug addiction going through the hell of both the addiction and the recovery and the process. I thought the book was absolutely riveting. And you talked about the Novocain and, you know, you were implying that it perhaps that was a red flag, that the publisher should have said, ‘Hey, this couldn’t possibly be true.’[…] But in fact, I have had a root canal without Novocain – not particularly because of the choice, but because of an extraordinary inept dentist. And I am here. And I, you know, it’s really awful. It’s very much as James described it. So I didn’t think that. It wasn’t a red flag to me. (“Oprah’s Questions”)

This quotation exemplifies what has been said earlier. The reason why Talese hails Frey’s work as authentic is through the process of identification with Frey’s trauma narrative: “[…] I have had a root canal without Novocain […] It’s very much as James described it” (“Oprah’s Questions”). What Frey actually describes in his work is not the pain associated with the treatment – he does not refer to it as pain, but as “a current [that] shoots through my body that is not pain, or even close to pain, but something infinitely greater […]” – but to the state his body is in under the influence of this “something infinitely greater”: Everything goes white and I cannot breathe. I clench my eyes and I bite down on my existing teeth and I think my jaw might be breaking and I squeeze my

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hands and I dig my fingers through the hard rubber surface of the tennis balls and my fingernails crack and my fingernails break and my fingernails start to bleed and I curl my toes and they fucking hurt and I flex the muscles in my legs and they fucking hurt and my torso tightens and my stomach muscles feel as if they are going to collapse and my ribs feel as if they’re caving in on themselves and it fucking hurts […]. (81)

This unpunctuated monologue continues for another five lines in which Frey enumerates other parts of his body that are affected by the pain. This style of writing is quite representative of Frey’s work as a whole where in the moments of distress he manipulates punctuation or, as we have in the quotation above, simply bypasses it altogether. The absence of punctuation in the quoted paragraph is replaced by a linking word – the conjunction “and” – which functions as a string on which all these different pains are gathered, making this experience indeed “something infinitely greater” than just pain. As readers we can speculate on a style of writing which expresses trauma. Frey’s style expresses the need to subvert standard written English and replace it with something else – something that would describe and inscribe a moment when pain surpasses a certain accepted threshold. In writing, punctuation is used to create order in a sentence, and it is precisely this order that is targeted by Frey in the above passage. “Something infinitely greater” than pain disturbs the order and transforms Frey’s language from an orderly, coherent structure into adjuncts of painful bodily experiences. This fact strongly echoes Black Speak which carries the idea of subverting the hegemonic language in order to describe African-American experience. What Talese identifies with is not only the pain but the overall extreme state of anxiety due to an extraordinarily painful experience which Frey describes in his passage – it is the experience of a dental treatment which creates the link between the publisher and the author. In fact, how many of us, to a greater or lesser extent, can identify with Frey’s and Talese’s experience? The commonality of experience which Talese shares with Frey impacts on Frey’s work as a whole. In fact, Talese so fully and completely identifies with Frey that she does not fact-check his work because, as Talese says: “In this instance, I absolutely believed what I read” (“Oprah’s Questions”, emphasis added). Thus, the truth of

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Frey’s memoir, according to Talese, lies in the fact that she shares Frey’s trauma narrative and here we may attempt to draw a parallel between Black Speak and Oprah’s use of it and Frey’s work. Frey’s narrative also carries a number of truths and the experience of having a root canal treatment without Novocaine is one of them. Other truths which one can identify in Frey’s narrative are addictions, criminal and social behaviours related to these addictions, and, most importantly, the difficulty of overcoming these addictions in a society which imposes healing methods in the form of twelve-step programs that may be suited to some individuals but not others. Indeed, Frey’s memoir is so full of traumas such as impossible, unattainable love, friendships and family relations, issues relating to belief in a higher power, violence, redemption, etc. that it becomes practically impossible for any reader not to identify with some part of the narrative or other. It is, simply put, a narrative of struggle which weaves together a series of identifiable trauma narratives and presents them in a language which is other than the mainstream Standard English we are used to reading in a novel. Thus, the language Frey uses in his work already carries within it the traumatic elements of Frey’s memoir. Perhaps the reader may now become aware of the emergent parallel between Frey’s work and Black Speak I discussed earlier. Indeed, I would like to suggest that the two are, in fact, very similar, if not identical, processes. Frey and Oprah rely on the same mechanism of identification with their readership and audience. This mechanism works through language, but also the audience’s capacity for appropriation of the trauma narratives of Frey and Oprah. Although at first Oprah believes Frey’s account, the facts published by “The Smoking Gun” spawn the controversy. One of the many things for which Oprah had to reproach Frey is the fact that the author modified events which took place with respect to the deaths of two of the characters. First of all, Frey alters the cause of the death of his girlfriend and says that she hung herself (as opposed to the fact that she committed suicide by cutting her wrists). Secondly, Frey positions himself as responsible for a classmate’s death. In this latter accident, Frey tells his readers that he was driving the car which collided with a train and, therefore, killed his classmate. Indeed, this accident was reported by the police, but Frey was not in any way implicated in it. Frey appropriates the trauma

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narrative of another person, transforms it and presents it as his own. Frey can be accused of lying in his memoir – he did alter the facts and when confronted with his reasons for doing so, Frey replies: I think one of the coping mechanisms I developed was sort of this image of myself that was greater, probably, than – not probably – that was greater than what I actually was. In order to get through the experience of the addiction, I thought of myself as being tougher than I was and badder than I was – and it helped me cope. When I was writing the book […] instead of being as introspective as I should have been, I clung to that image. (“Oprah’s Questions”, emphasis in the original)

It is obvious from Frey’s response that he invents a persona in order to cope with his trauma. To a certain extent he becomes his own character in the memoir and this character helps Frey to confront his trauma and deal with it in a constructive manner because the James Frey sitting on the set of The Oprah Winfrey Show is not the vomit-caked drug addict he depicts in his work but a sober individual. At the end of the interrogation to which Oprah subjected Frey, his publisher and the journalists, Oprah closes the session by citing the Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times critic, Michiko Kakutani: ‘I read this quote in The New York Times from Michiko Kakutani, who said it best, I think,’ says Oprah. ‘She says, ‘This is not about truth in labeling or the misrepresentation of one author. […] It is a case about how much value contemporary culture places on the very idea of truth.’ And I believe that the truth matters.’ (“Journalists Speak Out”)

I find it a pity that Oprah does not provide an answer to Kakutani’s statement because I would have been interested in knowing her opinion on the subject. However, I strongly doubt that it is in Oprah’s interest (and definitely not in the interest of Harpo Productions) to make her audience question the binary opposition of truth and lies, because the audience may begin to realize that not only fictions but also the people we hold up as icons can bear the label authentic as a stamp of approval. Indeed, Oprah’s quotation made me question to what extent it can be applied to Oprah herself. How much value has Oprah placed

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on the very idea of truth throughout her career? Do people believe in Oprah in the same way that Nan Talese believed Frey’s fiction to be a genuine memoir? Talese did not react to any of the potential markers of fabrication in Frey’s work because she shares with him some of the same experiences – she did have a root canal treatment without Novocain because of an incompetent dentist. Therefore, when this episode appeared in the text, Talese was more happy than shocked to find another person who shared the same experience. Oprah seems to be using the same tactic with her audience. As we have seen, the bond between Oprah and her audience is based on the fact that by presenting her own trauma narratives, she gives her audience the possibility to identify emotionally with her. Furthermore, her use of Black Speak authenticates Oprah as part of a community that questions hegemonic practices and offers an alternative to the currently failing cultural, economic and state systems in the United States. In fact, Oprah becomes an inspiration for her army of viewers but to what extent does she really display an authentic personality in her show and not simply a fictionalized persona, a constructed character? When I was researching this paper in spring 2008 a substantial amount of material was accessible via the internet and, in particular on the website www.youtube.com which displays video material. The entire affair known as ‘The James Frey Controversy’ was documented on YouTube, including the material from the Larry King Live show. This material is no longer available. Furthermore, the first episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show in which Oprah praises Frey’s work is also missing. In fact, numerous pictures, references and links to shows for which Oprah has been criticized, such as shows where she displays herself as having lost a tremendous amount of weight, are becoming progressively more and more difficult to find. The fact is that Oprah controls her public image and the public image which Oprah lets us see is, literally, a torso and a head – very few photographs taken of Oprah actually show her full-size. Most photographs depict her from waist or chest and upwards, almost always alone and in close-up shots. Perhaps, Oprah does not lie (I have not fact-checked her shows) but she does not give her audience the truth of her experience of being Oprah either. The audience is always manipulated into believing that she is “just like everybody else” and not the richest

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woman in America who can make books by authors like Frey become, overnight, the country’s bestsellers. What I believe to be at the crux of Oprah’s change of heart in the ‘James Frey Controversy’ is the fact that Oprah (or perhaps her producer) realized that this affair could potentially jeopardize her own ‘authenticity.’

W ORKS C ITED Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Brown, Antonio. “Performing “Truth”: Black Speech Acts.” African American Review 36.2 (2002): 213-25. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1984. Decker, Jeffrey L. Made In America: Self-Styled Success from Horatio Alger to Oprah Winfrey. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. London: John Murray, 2004. Larry King Live: Interview with James Frey. Cable News Network LP, LLLP, 2006. 19 Feb. 2009; . The Oprah Winfrey Show. “Journalists Speak Out.” Harpo Productions, Inc. 2006. 19 Feb. 2009; . The Oprah Winfrey Show. “Oprah’s Questions for James.” Harpo Productions, Inc. 2006. 19 Feb. 2009; . Peck, Janice. “The Mediated Talking Cure: Therapeutic Framing of Autobiography in TV Talk Shows.” Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 134-55. The Smoking Gun. “The Man Who Conned Oprah.” Turner Broadcasting System. 2006. 3 April 2008; .

Reclaiming “The Grandeur of Inspiration” Authenticity, Repetition and Parody in William Blake’s Milton D IANE P ICCITTO

Once seen as a hallmark of British Romanticism (c. 1785-1830), the myth of authenticity has been deconstructed in the past decade by critics such as Judith Pascoe and Saree Makdisi. For instance, with its emphasis on sincere expression and speaking a more human (rather than ornate and poetic) language, critics tend to view William Wordsworth’s “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads as “the manifesto of Romantic authenticity par excellence” (Russett 37). However, in Romantic Theatricality, Pascoe interrogates this conventional view of Wordsworth. She argues that he displays a performative persona in his poetry by self-consciously constructing a poetic voice on the pretence of authenticity and sincerity: “Wordsworth […] struck a pose, but his was that of the sincere rural dweller, the natural talent” (178).1 Makdisi, mean-

1

Scholars tend to discuss authenticity and sincerity in unison but by distinguishing the two rather than aligning them absolutely. For instance, Lionel Trilling asserts that the former “suggest[s] […] a more exigent conception of the self and of what being true to it consists in, a wider reference to the universe and man’s place in it, and a less acceptant and general view of the social circumstances of life” (11) than the latter, while more recently Tim

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while, has shown how William Blake “tried to subvert the reproductive machinery of commercial engraving in his illuminated books, using it to produce a number of dazzlingly heterogeneous ‘copies’ that have no ‘original’ to refer back to” (12). Thus, in the illuminated works, Blake undermines the relationship and assumed hierarchy between original and copy by producing multiple copies of an individual work with no authentic and unique original. Despite appearing unrelated, these two kinds of authenticity – personal and object-oriented – have a similar logic underpinning them: the idea of an unrepeatable original essence or identity. Tim Milnes and Kerry Sinanan explain that “the notion of an authorizing origin” corresponds both to personal identity and to the artistic object: “just as the authenticity of an individual’s everyday being is determined by his or her relation to an original, authorizing essence, the test of a poem’s authenticity lies in its relation to the hand of the writer from which it originated” (5, emphasis in the original). Blake conjoins the two and undermines their logic with his depiction of inspiration in his epic poem Milton: A Poem in 2 Books. Blake himself rarely uses the term authentic or authenticity. When he does, it is only in the context of painting and concerns the accuracy of a character’s costume in relation to the time period from which the character is taken (e.g., see Descriptive Catalogue E 533).2 However, his representation of inspiration in Milton (1804; printed between 1810-1818) explores issues of authenticity that go beyond this narrow context. In order to get at these issues, I view Blake’s poem through the lens of Judith Butler’s theorization of performativity – a theory that stands in opposition to authenticity – and argue that Blakean inspiration implicitly challenges the authentic, particularly as it relates to authority (a meaning that comes into use as early as the fourteenth

Milnes and Kerry Sinanan point out, “Authenticity is a state, sincerity a practice” (4). 2

All citations from Blake’s works refer to David V. Erdman’s standard edition The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, noted with the letter “E” followed by the page number; also, plate and line numbers are given where relevant. Designs are noted with a plate number, which correspond to copy C of Milton.

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century according to the OED), singularity, power and identity. Indeed, Butler’s theory of gender performativity attacks and disables notions of the authentic, the real and the original, showing them to have a “fundamentally phantasmatic status” (187), while confronting and challenging essentialist definitions of identity or the “fixity of the self” (171).3 In this context, I argue that Blake’s performative figuration of inspiration destabilizes the original biblical moment of inspiration and subverts any notion of the inspired prophet-poet as a unique and divinely authorized identity, thereby questioning the authentic source of a prophecy or poem. At the same time, his work also questions the singularity of such inspirational acts. Paradoxically, Blake ‘inauthenticates’ one moment in order to authenticate multiple moments that may otherwise appear as impotent copies or weaker imitations of an original, and he also depicts the performative nature of the prophetpoet’s identity in order to show that the search for authenticity ends in reclaiming inspiration for all. Blake, then, stands apart from the project of authenticity that Charles Taylor outlines. Taylor parallels “earlier moral views” with modern ones in his discussion of the search for and experience of authentic existence: “being in touch with some source – God, say, or the Idea of the Good – was considered essential to full being. Only now the source we have to connect with is deep in us” (26). Accordingly, supreme beings or abstract ideals and the more modern equivalent of “the source within” function to provide us with the locale for authentic experience. Taylor continues: Being true to myself means being true to my own originality, and that is something only I can articulate and discover. In articulating it, I am also defining myself. I am realizing a potentiality that is properly my own. This is the background understanding to the modern ideal of authenticity, and to the goals of self-fulfilment or self-realization in which it is usually couched. (29)

3

Butler’s theory is especially apt for my reading due to its focus on both the force of words (as in speech acts) and actions (as in performances). She acknowledges the blending of the linguistic and the theatrical in her performativity theory, stating that the “two are invariably related, chiasmically so” (xxv).

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In his epic, Blake rejects these avenues to reaching a fullness of being. Neither God nor “[one’s] own originality” provide a source for authentic experience, for self-definition, “self-fulfilment or selfrealization.” Instead, inspirational moments that arise from communal engagement and spiritual and physical exchanges between identities – founded on the idea of a human divinity not bestowed by the grace of God – result in Blake’s understanding of what it means to live authentically. Blake’s Milton functions in part as a response to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Blake alludes directly to it by quoting the famous phrase “justify the ways of God to men,” which he places at the bottom of the title page that depicts Milton about to enter a vortex to another realm (E 95). This intertextuality results in what Mary Lynn Johnson calls an “interrogating, not justifying, [of] God’s ways” (231). Highlighting the subversive and even parodic elements of this seemingly innocuous reiteration, Johnson rightly reads this allusion as a confrontation between Blake and Milton, between their epic poems and between their views of Christianity. David Riede asserts that Blake provides “a radical critique of Milton’s Puritan […] Christianity, and consequently of the idea of Christian inspiration that enabled Milton to write with dogmatic authority by transcribing the word of God” (258). Blake’s conflict with Milton, then, has as much to do with poetic vision as it does with religion. Riede continues, “[A]s Blake saw it, such a claim for inspiration made Milton akin to Moses, not as a prophet, but as the founder of an absolute and tyrannical moral law” (258). Some critics argue for a more nuanced view of Blake’s relationship to Milton. For instance, Lucy Newlyn asserts, “Riede joins in a general conspiracy […] to make Milton himself more Urizenic than he is” (259). In fact, she not only credits Milton for being less rigid than some have remarked but also credits Blake for seeing the radical potentialities of Milton’s epic writing despite the shortcomings he finds there. Undoubtedly, Blake was inspired by the visionary aspects of Milton’s works, as well as by the revolutionary spirit that pervaded Milton’s political life, but it is also evident that Blake set out to revise Milton and “to undo [his] mistaken notions of divinity, of politics, of sexuality, and of imagination” (Newlyn 257). Blake opposes the tyrannical and violent element in Christianity,

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which he finds in the Old Testament and sees personified in “Milton’s characterization of God,” a “justification for earthly tyranny” (261).4 Significantly, as Riede points out, Blake also rejects the restrictive idea of inspiration as Milton represents it in Paradise Lost. Outlining a basic narrative or even sketching a linear map of the events in Blake’s Milton is difficult. The poem repeats actions, obscures cause and effect, interweaves the identities of characters, and confounds a traditional sense of time as distinctly past, present and future. The central event seems to be John Milton’s decision to leave Eternity, Blake’s version of a heavenly space, to begin a redemptive quest. Along the way, Milton and several other characters (including Blake himself) participate in various inspirational encounters and acts that are described as simultaneous or even as one single event. As Ian Balfour states, “Milton can be said to have one and only one action, a single moment that is repeated, witnessed, contested, or avoided by every character in the text” (147). This “one action” or “single moment” is, I argue, the scene(s) of inspiration. Blake continually returns to this one action but does not prioritize or centralize one particular instance; he thereby imbues all of them with potency. To name only a few examples, the Muses enter Blake’s brain and hand; the Bard enters Milton’s chest; Milton – as a star – enters Blake’s foot; and Los – as a sun and then later as a whirlwind – enters and envelops Blake. This repetition distinguishes the moment of inspiration from all other actions and events in the poem, suggesting that these moments are the defining acts of the poem. However, because of its numerous reiterations, this deed does not belong solely to one character or actor, thus no one character or act dominates. With this kind of depiction, Blake

4

Defending this characterization, Michael Bryson contends that Paradise Lost does not function as a platform for the glory of God: “The Father is not Milton’s illustration of how God is, but Milton’s scathing critique of how, all too often, God is imagined,” particularly “in terms of military and monarchical power” (12, emphasis in the original). In fact, “The Father of Paradise Lost is off-putting to many readers because he is supposed to be off-putting” (24). However, Blake’s efforts in his poem Milton suggest that he saw Milton’s depiction of God not as a critique but as one needing revision.

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emphasizes the singularity of each moment but also situates each one in a wider, more interconnected framework. The critique of essential identity and origins in Gender Trouble makes Butler’s performativity theory particularly useful in analyzing the significance of Blake’s emphasis on individual articulations of inspiration within the larger scope of multiple reiterations. The heart of the connection rests in how Blake’s moments of inspiration relate to her views on authenticity and authentic identity. In the context of gender performance, Butler says, “[P]erformativity is not a singular act, but a repetition, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body” (xv). Her primary example of the way gender can be subverted is drag, “a stylized repetition of acts” (179, emphasis in the original). Undercutting any pretensions to nature, essence, or authenticity bound up in notions of an original versus “a failed copy,” drag demonstrates the theatrical and performative quality of gender identity (186). It embodies a subversive act that challenges stable notions of gender, showing that a male body can indeed enact femininity or that a female body can enact masculinity and that there is no “authentic feminine” or masculine identity (49). Drag functions as an example of a “parodic redeployment of power” (158): it mimics a gender, which is wrongly presumed not only to be expressive rather than performative but also to be necessarily a product of biology rather than social construction. Although Butlerian drag and Blakean inspiration seem a disjunctive comparison, both highlight the potentially disruptive effects of repetition and parody, which challenge authenticity: drag, as iterations of gender stereotypes, destabilizes gender categories and identity, while Blakean inspiration, as iterations of biblical inspiration, destabilizes the authority of such an activity and the identity of those who can access and participate in it. The scene in Genesis when God first breathes life into Adam signifies the original moment of inspiration in the Judeo-Christian tradition; indeed, ‘to inspire’ means ‘to breathe’ or ‘to blow into.’ However, the activity of inspiration in Milton does not function primarily as a tribute to God or as a validation of His unique power. I contend that Blake’s excessive iterations and implicit parody of inspiration work to undermine such an origin for inspiration and to undermine the implication that all other inspiration is but a copy of the authentic biblical

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moment. While inspiration happens in a number of ways, the most common and memorable depiction is that of a falling star entering into a character. For instance, three plates (14, 29, and 33) visually depict a nearly naked male figure bent back in ecstasy as a falling star enters his foot; two of these plates are full-page designs. In the text, Blake writes of Milton’s journey, he “fell / Precipitant loud thundring into the Sea of Time & Space” (15.45-46, E 110). Blake, who is also one of the characters of his epic (and one of the bodies included in the ecstatic poses above), says, “Then first I saw him [Milton] in the Zenith as a falling star, /Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift; /And on my left foot falling on the tarsus, enterd there” (15.4749, E 110). In these examples, inspiration is not unidirectional from the divine to the mundane, from a supreme being to an inferior human. Rather, one human inspires another. In addition, Milton is not the only character to actively inspire others, nor is he the only character to be inspired. Thus, inspirational power is neither unique to God nor rare; rather, inspiration is multidirectional, prevalent, and available to the many as both inspirer and inspired. Moreover, in the same vein as the mock epic, this scene has a parodic element: Milton’s descent “as a falling star” invokes another infamous fall, that of Milton’s Satan or Lucifer, the bearer of light, whom “the Almighty Power / Hurled headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky” (Milton 1.44-45).5 Blake inverts the meaning of Satan’s archetypal fall, produced by his disobedience to God, and resignifies it. Rather than damning, Milton’s act is redeeming. He redeems himself (and others) by choosing to descend from heaven (rather than being ejected from it), an event delineated as a star falling from the skies and entering into Blake’s foot – a bathetic locale for inspiration. This bathos has the effect of making inspiration mundane in the sense of being earthly or human. Not only does inspiration belong to the many in this epic, but it is also cast in an ironically demonic light as a wilful turn away from Milton’s (and the OT’s) God toward a valorization of the human and of human divinity. Indeed, by extensively restaging scenes of inspiration, Blake stylizes it, giving it a theatrical quality as

5

Critics such as Joseph Anthony Wittreich have drawn the comparison to “Lucifer” and “Milton’s Satan” (15), as well as other possibilities.

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multiple performers enact the same scene and as multiple signifiers (shooting star, flaming sun, whirlwind, vortex, etc.) stand for the same act. I read the overabundance of metaphorical identifications and performers as signalling the performativity of inspiration. The parodic delineations and performative iterability of inspiration destabilize the relationship between the original biblical scene and its copies, thus subverting the traditional model of authentic inspiration and challenging the need for a sacred, non-human origin. Likewise, Blake disturbs the authority of the authentic poetic scene, which is conventionalized as an invocation to God or the Muses. Mimicking some of Milton’s language, Blake begins his epic with an invocation. Riede reads this scene as a parodic, and therefore critical, revision of Milton’s invocation to the heavenly Muse (264). Not only does Blake parody Milton’s stance as a unique and divinely authorized voice in Paradise Lost, but he also complicates the agency involved in inspiration, raising questions about the relationship between poet and poem and the possibility of an authentic origin for the latter. In Milton, an inspired individual never completely loses a sense of self. For example, in the opening lines of the poem, Blake calls on higher powers to tell the story of Milton in Eternity, but, strangely, he does not request inspiration. Instead, he asks the Daughters of Beulah to write about Milton’s quest through his body, imploring them to enter and take over his “hand,” “the Nerves of [his] right arm” and his “Brain” so that this vision of Eternity may find its way to the page (1.5-8, E 96). In this case, Blake occupies a seemingly passive role in order to function as the conduit through which the Muses will “Record the journey of immortal Milton” (1.2, E 96). Indeed, for Balfour, the prophet-poet “giving up or over […] [his] voice” to a superior being(s) suggests that “Blake’s works – like Milton’s poems, like the prophet’s words – are his and not his, with the emphasis on their author being more possessed than possessing” (172). However, I argue that Blake does the opposite in Milton. He does not show himself given over to possession by supernatural beings; rather, he exaggerates this episode to the point of parody, making it “a subtle parody of Milton’s claim to have transcribed the whole of Paradise Lost by dictation from God” (Newlyn 269).

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Blake’s parody and disruption of the origin contradict readings of inspiration and prophecy such as Balfour’s. In The Theory of Inspiration, Timothy Clark describes conventional scenarios of inspiration: “[t]he muse speaks, and the poet is only her mouthpiece and servant; or in the medieval Christian tradition the human scriptor has authority only as a scribe of divine truth” (2). He maintains, “[B]oth notions actually negate individual creativity. Inspiration there concerns matters of authority, the right to speak and the claim to speak in the name of truth.” Through his exaggeration of passive reception, Blake subverts and parodies a relation between the poet and the Muses or God based on the latter exerting control over the former, and, in doing so, Blake opposes Milton’s vision of inspiration. W.J.T. Mitchell claims, “[W]ithout the Miltonic assumption of an untouched, perfect divinity in the heavens, the prophet cannot simply serve as the mouthpiece of God; if he is to be a seer, he must create what he sees” (Blake’s Composite Art 169).6 A passive receiver, then, cannot have a truly prophetic moment. Visionary perception necessitates creative acts. Although one must be open to inspiration in order to participate in such acts, it is equally vital that one actively take part in them. Blake’s depiction of inspiration in the opening invocation (as with subsequent examples) does not suggest a suspension of will – quite the opposite. Although characters in the epic usually commit acts only after being inspired by another character, such an inspired state does not indicate the absolute control of one character over another; rather, it is depicted as a fusion between or among characters so that an act gains multiple agents. This kind of inspiration entails activity on the part of both characters, displacing passivity altogether. A merging of characters occurs so that more than one being takes responsibility for an act. Furthermore, despite calling on the Daughters of Beulah to write this epic through his body, Blake does not relinquish his authority, as the title page of Milton makes clear. Here, he

6

Some scholars disagree with “the Miltonic assumption” that Mitchell proposes here and find Milton’s God more difficult to pin down. For instance, Neil Forsyth states that, in Paradise Lost, “God is not necessarily good, nor Satan evil” (119), as “[g]ood and evil are not so easily sorted or apportioned between God and Satan” (136) in the poem.

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does not list the Daughters of Beulah as the originators of the work. Instead, “W Blake” is listed as “The Author & Printer.” In fact, Milton is one of the few works in which Blake identifies himself as the author. He assigns to himself possession of the work, though Milton’s presence on the title page qualifies this unique singularity, as I will discuss later. This assignation does not discount the inspiration that he seeks at the beginning of the poem; rather, it complicates the notion of agency and origin in the epic, which in turn complicates the authenticity of the source of the poem. Butler’s discussion of “the original” offers some insight into Blake’s manipulation of origins. She contends that her “notion of gender parody […] does not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original […] so gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin” (175, emphasis in the original). Blake’s strategy of repetition can be read as imitation and parody of the “original” scene of inspiration in order to reveal that its power does not belong to some god who sits on high. Rather, humanity has the capacity to wield this powerful tool. Also, by emphasizing the body in this process, Blake returns to the site of initial inspiration in which Adam’s body was literally animated by God’s breath. The poem shows inspiration to be the actual and not just metaphorical interpenetration of bodies: Blake repeatedly refers to characters entering the bodies of other characters, whether into the brain, the chest, the hand, or the foot. Inspiration does not occur only as an effect of breath or words but also as an effect of bodily penetration and physical acts. Blake unsettles this primal scene by indicating that not only does God have the power to penetrate another so radically – humans have it as well. Human inspiration, then, is not “a failed copy” of some original moment (186). It has its own potency as, to borrow from Butler, “[an] imitation[...] which effectively displace[s] the meaning of the original” (176). The tyrannical God of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the God figured as a supreme being who demands obedience from his human subjects, is not necessary in Blake’s world where humans are the ones with the power to create change and to alter the world, where humanity is not a failed or lesser copy of God.

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Similarly, Blake’s depiction of prophecy undermines the idea of an origin. Traditional prophetic moments follow the pattern of inspiration in that a prophet, in the biblical sense, as God’s spokesperson, produces a prophecy under God’s direct guidance; the prophet is, in effect, filled with God’s breath and speaks for Him. Thus, the prophetic tradition traces the origin of its lineage back to the first biblical site of inspiration, the creation of Adam. As Balfour explains, “[T]he authority of prophetic rhetoric normally derives in large measure from its representation as coming from a divine source outside the human mind” (133). However, Blake sees prophecy differently. In fact, Blake undermines the authenticity of external sources for prophecy. For example, Milton’s revolutionary journey is foreseen in an ancient prophecy in Eternity. The Eternal Prophet, Los, recollected an old Prophecy in Eden recorded, ͒ And often sung to the loud harp at the immortal feasts ͒ That Milton of the Land of Albion should up ascend ͒ […] and set free ͒ Orc from his Chain of Jealousy[.] (20.58-61, E 115)

Milton’s extraordinary deed has long been foretold and is communal knowledge in Eternity, but Blake does not reveal its authority or source. No God stands behind this prophecy, and no one character stands out as the prophet or as God’s mouthpiece; the prophecy exists without an explicit source. By destabilizing the authority of the prophecy about Milton’s act and calling into question any kind of accountability, “is Blake not,” as Angela Esterhammer points out, “disrupting the very tradition on which he should be drawing for credibility as an inspired speaker? […] Blake replaces the conventions of inspired poetry with a belief in the sensory experience of the individual” (217). Indeed, Blake daringly relinquishes and threatens the security and authority of the divinely inspired prophet. He abandons such a tradition and fashions a new concept of inspiration, one that relies entirely on human interaction: Blake “avoid[s] the reductive clarity of a Miltonic overview, since there is no epic narrator to underline the significance of the events as they unfold, and no character within the poem who is truly omnisci-

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ent” (Newlyn 266),7 including Los, the figure of imagination and the so-called Eternal Prophet. Los’s recollection of the prophecy and the Bard’s many performances of it serve to complicate any notion of causality. We know the Bard’s song provokes Milton’s journey,8 but would he have made the decision if he had not heard it? Was he present at all the prior performances of the prophecy? If so, has Milton had an eternity of hearing it to convince him to act? When the Bard concludes his performance, which induces Milton to act, the eternal community demands to know the source of his song: The Bard replied. I am Inspired! I know it is Truth! for I Sing According to the inspiration of the Poetic Genius Who is the all-protecting Divine Humanity To whom be Glory & Power & Dominion Evermore Amen[.] (13.51-14.1-3, E 107-08)

The Bard does not claim God’s authority but declares nevertheless, “I am Inspired!” Instead of God, he credits the Poetic Genius as the source of his prophecy, defining it as “Divine Humanity.” Thus, for Blake, divinity is not exclusive to God, nor is the Poetic Genius exclusive to a few individuals; rather, it resides in all of us by virtue of our humanity. The Bard ends his response in a kind of prayer, praising the Poetic Genius and Divine Humanity in the same manner some praise God. Again, this re-articulation of something a preacher might say in the worship of God functions parodically to undermine the sacredness and authority of the traditional context of the words, much like Blake’s Butlerian parody of the biblical moment of inspiration. By identifying the Poetic Genius as the source of the Bard’s prophetic song, Blake constructs a subversive notion of authenticity in his depiction of authorship and poetic identity as shared and communal as well as in his delineation of prophecy (and inspiration) as human expression.

7

Initially, Blake seems to be the speaker of the poem, but he soon becomes part of the action as a character in the poem.

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Blake writes, “What cause at length mov’d Milton to his unexampled deed/ A Bards prophetic Song” (2.21-22, E 96).

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Furthermore, performative repetition expands the moment of inspiration past the narrative level to the level of the audience of Blake’s text, and it opens inspiration up as a more inclusive process, one not confined solely to unique individuals such as prophets and poets. The title page furthers these ideas, constructing a moment of inspiration that also disturbs notions of singular personal identity. Milton, with flaming feet, stands before a vortex, or a kind of whirlwind, which bears not only his name but Blake’s as well. As noted earlier, beneath Milton’s feet sits the Miltonic citation, “To Justify the Ways of God to Men.” Implying an affirmative answer, Johnson asks, “[I]s Milton, in flexing his left foot to take a second step into Blake’s poem, leaving the secure foundation of his theodicy behind him?” (231). As Milton steps forward into the vortex, his left hand hangs down adjacent to the name “W Blake.” The vortex and flames indicate that both Milton and Blake, connected through Milton’s body, are in a moment of inspiration. Blake inspires Milton, as is evident in the way Milton’s hand almost touches Blake’s name (an echo of the invocation scene); however, Milton also inspires Blake. Significantly, Milton’s right “hand is shown reaching through and ‘breaching’ [his own] name,” thereby breaking it in half (Vogler 142, emphasis in the original). In wilfully separating and severing his name, “MIL / TON,” he unsettles who he is and who he has been in order to enter such a moment, and, thereby, embraces his penetrability. Milton’s act recalls Butler’s view of authentic identity as performative rather than essentialist. And by ejecting God from the equation and depicting a two-fold and bi-directional scene of inspiration, Blake throws into question the authentic source of creative power, resignifying it with a human source – in this case Blake and Milton. In addition, the very status of the title page as the first page of the poem suggests a particular kind of relationship between the audience of the poem and Milton: Blake tropes the audience engaging with or entering his illuminated work as Milton entering another world to begin a visionary quest. Such an entrance inevitably resonates with the various entrances into other bodies that many of the characters enact. Blake points to the audience’s willing participation as yet another level of these scenes of inspiration. Clark perceptively argues, “The history of the concept of inspiration in much Romantic and post-

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Romantic writing can be summed up as the attempt to locate or employ some privileged ‘creative’ faculty with the property of a performative that (impossibly) ensures its own value or which, in other words, projects and incorporates its own audience” (11, emphasis in the original). Although he references Blake only occasionally, the particular performative coding that Clark assigns for inspiration accounts for the relationship of the audience to Blake’s work. As Clark says of other Romantic poets, Blake “present[s] [himself] in terms identical to those concerning the supposed power of the ‘inspired’ text upon others” (10) – as a character who participates in inspirational moments, a position that he hopes we too will occupy. Also, he prompts the audience to participate actively in these moments: we, like Milton, enter into the vortex of inspiration by reading/viewing the poem so that we “become what we behold” (to positively resignify the Blakean phrase “he became what he beheld” (e.g., 3.29, E 97) that usually connotes an activity with negative repercussions). Reaffirming this kind of relationship between audience and poem, the Preface to Milton concludes with the following quotation from the Bible: “Would to God that all the Lords people were Prophets” (E 96).9 The full quotation, as Moses speaks it in Numbers, is: “Would God that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them!” (11:29). The missing half of the verse suggests divine inspiration, while the placement of Blake’s biblical quotation just after the famous lyric “And did those feet in ancient time,” a poem that talks of “Mental Fight” (E 95) and “buil[ding] Jerusalem” (E 96), intimates a coming apocalypse. By withholding the second part of the verse, Blake implicitly prompts his audience to fill in what is missing. Far from relocating the authentic prophetic and inspirational power back in God, Blake does not illustrate God “put[ting] his spirit upon” humanity; instead, excluding Him here reinforces what the rest of the poem depicts repeatedly: authentic propheticinspirational power originates in and potentially manifests itself

9

Critics such as Northrop Frye (340), Joseph Wittreich (243) and Ian Balfour (131) have pointed out that Blake not only cites the Bible with this quotation, but he also echoes John Milton’s Areopagitica, which also includes this phrase.

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through every person. This omission and our subsequent completion of the verse allow us to take an active role in the creation of meaning and, by the same token, in the creation of the new Jerusalem. By doing so, we take a small step toward becoming the visionaries that Blake wishes us to be and creating a new world order. In a Preface that has already uttered a performative call to England’s people to “Rouze up” (E 95), the biblical citation is conspicuous for pointing out two things at once: one, that the poet wishes all people were inspired prophets and, two, by doing so, he indicates that we are not, in fact, prophets. Here, Blake forces the audience away from the private space of the mind and into the realm of public action. In his reading of Milton, Mitchell foregrounds the public space where the audience is forced to interact with the work. He uses the term “radical comedy” as a “theatrical metaphor” for the poem, where this metaphor functions as “a way of seeing Milton as a kind of living theatre, open-ended, inconclusive, and reaching out to involve its audience in the action” (“Blake’s Radical Comedy” 282). The two-pronged biblical quotation with which Blake ends his Preface exemplifies such a reaching out. Moreover, I read this example as a linguistic performative (in which words do things and have power to make things happen), specifically, as the kind that follows the form of a dare. Blake dares his audience to become what he says they are not, to access the visionary world that inspired individuals can access; he dares them to demonstrate the protean or transformative ability to alter themselves. In line with Butler’s subversion of essence, he challenges his audience to overthrow their sedimented and false view of a fixed, limited identity. Even more, he does so in order to make them recognize their inspirational potential and the authenticity of their own authority. Blake’s representation of inspiration affirms that the prophetic, the visionary, and the space for change are available to all of us. Blake makes Milton’s act hinge on all the moments of inspiration that occur throughout the poem, indicating that there is no such thing as the original, authoritative and authentic inspirational moment: the prophecy is just one of many articulations. By disturbing the traditional notion of prophecy and prophetic identity, Blake extends the possibility of who has access to the visionary and who has the potential to enact visionary (or revolutionary) change. Each of us has the potential to do so.

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Blake confounds attempts to locate the cause for any and all acts in the poem by reiterating various moments of inspiration, moments that involve any given characters at any given moment. Like prophecy, inspiration does not have a stable source. Both bodies involved in a Blakean moment of inspiration are altered or affected in such an exchange. Hence, inspiration is not unidirectional. In fact, in a discussion of agency and the act of touching between two individuals, Eve Sedgwick states, “Even more immediately than other perceptual systems, it seems, the sense of touch makes nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of agency and passivity; to touch is always already to reach out, to fondle, to heft, to tap, or to enfold, and always also to understand other people or natural forces as having effectually done so before oneself” (14). The penetrability of Blake’s bodies highlights Sedgwick’s claims about the destabilization of the binary view of agent and receiver: one cannot inspire another without becoming inspired by the other as well. In such an understanding of inspiration, the relation is not hierarchical, as it is in God’s relationship to Adam or His prophets; instead, it is necessarily reciprocal. Following these ideas, Blake creates a different kind of visionary poetics and poetic identity. He parodies and revises the idea of the visionary poet so that the act of inspiration acquires multiplicity, authorizing each of its incarnations and visionary change by any individual, rather than authorizing only the epic poet who has some hidden connection to higher powers. What is at stake in such a revision of inspiration? And what does Blake gain in using interpenetrating bodies as a signifier for inspiration rather than using the image of breath or language flowing from one being to another? For one, it gives visionary acts a concrete presence. He shows that these kinds of acts have very real impacts in the material world. But he also goes further, and Butler’s discussion of the body in Gender Trouble can help articulate his idea. In relation to the AIDS epidemic and fearful responses to diseased bodies, she points to “permeable bodily boundaries” (168). She claims that such a permeability of the body, marked by penetration and the exchange of fluids during sex, confounds any attempt to use the body – traditionally an external marker of a stable self – to ground the claim of “the internal fixity of the self” (171). The permeability of bodies “disrupts the very boundaries that determine what it is to be a body at all” (169). Blake’s

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bodies are more than permeable; they are penetrable and move in and out of one another. If one’s body does not signify a sealed enclosure, then one is necessarily open to change at a fundamental level. To embrace and acknowledge the permeability and penetrability of both the self and the body is to be open to being other than what one has been before or other than what governing institutions say one should be. In reference to Polonius’s advice to Laertes, Trilling says, “[W]e are still puzzled to know not only the locus of the self to which we are to be true, but even what it is that we look for” (5). Blake’s answer in Milton is that we have searched for this authentic self in the wrong place; we should not be looking within but without. Both permeability and penetration open the possibility for an altered identity, one that leads to an authentic existence not founded on an authorizing essence but on multiplicity and expansion. Blake makes it clear that rejecting this penetrability is akin to a failure or fall. Unlike Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which Satan sins through his disobedience and revolt against God, in Blake’s epic poem, Satan falls, I would argue, because of his refusal to be entered, and, thus, to be inspired by another. He resists moments of interpenetration and inspiration: at the end, in the face of Milton’s attempt to inspire him, Satan “trembl[es] round his Body, [and] he incircle[s] it” (39.16, E 140). Satan chooses to enclose and encircle himself and his body, thereby isolating himself from others and rejecting the potential to be radically altered by another individual. In contrast, the rest of the characters in the poem form a community of inspirers, and, as such, they transform themselves – who they are and who they can be – as well as the world through inspiration. Primarily through the performative depiction of inspirational acts, Blake moves away from conventional (Romantic) notions of a solitary and special prophet-poet being inspired by some external divinity toward a theory of inspiration for all, a theory that addresses social concerns as much as poetic ones. As a result, poetic inspiration no longer belongs to a small elite minority. Blake does not construct a Wordsworthian vision of the poet speaking for or to “men”; instead, Blake imagines the poet to be every man, every one. As Charles Guignon points out, a Romantic or explicitly Wordsworthian vision of an authentic mode of existence is one in which “[t]he ultimate metaphysical reality is the human Self, independent of and untouched by anything

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outside itself, in its own unbounded freedom creating realities for itself, and in no way answerable to anything outside itself” (64). Contrary to this inward solipsistic turn, Blake’s reconfiguration of inspiration necessitates and emphasizes the interpersonal exchange between human beings, suggesting not the isolated mind turned in upon itself but a vision of community where to be human, even authentically so, is to open oneself up to others and alter and expand identity rather than to search steadfastly for a buried fixed essence. In exploring Blake’s understanding of identity and community, Leonard W. Deen argues, “Identity is the community of men acting through the individual man to create a human world” (183). In light of my analysis of inspiration, I would add that inspiration unites individuals into a community and gives them a unified power to effect change. Butler’s performativity theory provides a way to make sense of Blake’s numerous reiterations of inspirational acts as they apply to identity. Her theory is one of identity subversion, as her subtitle to Gender Trouble states: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Although Blake’s Milton does not explicitly focus on gender identity, it does provide an example of the subversion of identity, namely human identity and poetic identity as it is passed on through texts such as Paradise Lost. Repetition and reiterability are crucial components for both Butler and Blake: drag and inspiration challenge the status quo and confound notions of originality and authenticity. Boldly revising the fundamental problems of Milton’s epic, Blake undermines God’s authority as the one and true Creator by destabilizing the primal scene of God’s inspiration of Adam. The deconstruction of the original authentic moment of inspiration, and also significantly of creation (poetic and otherwise), allows for a re-conceptualization of human identity and capacity. For Blake, displacing “the notion of an authorizing origin” (Milnes/Sinanan 5, emphasis in the original) of inspiration does not ‘inauthenticate’ all such moments; rather, doing so reaffirms and reclaims the authenticity of each iteration, giving them, and humans, authority and power. With the poem Milton, Blake argues, in effect, that participation in inspirational moments necessitates disturbing one’s perception of the impenetrable authentic self in order to shift one’s perception of reality from the way things are to the way things could be, or, as Butler says, to “rethink the possible” (xx).

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W ORKS C ITED Balfour, Ian. The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002. Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. Rev. ed. New York: Anchor, 1988. Bryson, Michael. The Tyranny of Heaven: Milton’s Rejection of God as King. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2004. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversions of Identity. 1989. New York: Routledge, 1999. Clark, Timothy. The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Writing. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997. Deen, Leonard W. Conversing in Paradise: Poetic Genius and Identity-as-Community in Blake’s Los. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1983. Esterhammer, Angela. Creating States: Studies in the Performative Language of John Milton and William Blake. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994. Forsyth, Neil. “‘Evil’ in the Bible and Milton.” Colloquium Helveticum 34 (2003): 117-41. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. 1947. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969. Guignon, Charles. On Being Authentic: Thinking in Action. New York: Routledge, 2004. Johnson, Mary Lynn. “Milton and its Contexts.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 231-50. Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Milnes, Tim, and Kerry Sinanan, eds. Introduction. Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 128. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. John Leonard. New York: Penguin, 2000. Mitchell, W.J.T. “Blake’s Radical Comedy: Dramatic Structure as Meaning in Milton.” Blake’s Sublime Allegory: Essays on “The

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Four Zoas”, “Milton” and “Jerusalem”. Ed. Stuart Curran and Joseph A. Wittreich, Jr. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1973. 281307. —. Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978. Newlyn, Lucy. “Paradise Lost” and the Romantic Reader. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1993. Pascoe, Judith. Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997. Riede, David. “Blake’s Milton: On Membership in the Church Paul.” Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions. Ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson. London: Methuen, 1988. 257-77. Russett, Margaret. Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760-1845. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Sedgwick, Eve K. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991. Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1972. Vogler, Thomas A. “Re: Naming MIL / TON.” Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality. Ed. Nelson Hilton and Thomas A. Vogler. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1986. 140-76. Wittreich, Joseph A. Jr. Angel of Apocalypse: Blake’s Idea of Milton. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1975.

Coming Home Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park, Authorship and Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity J ULIA S TRAUB

Authorship and authenticity are concepts that, at first sight and despite shared etymological roots, are defined by opposite qualities. Authorship says something about the historical or biographical identity of a writer. The author of a book equals his or her social identity, which is part and parcel of a production chain leading towards the availability of a book. This seems to be its major difference with regard to authenticity: authenticity is a concept which, though approached differently in different disciplines, is traditionally seen as referring to an essential, internal dimension of human identity. The commonsensical conclusion would be that it clashes with outward appearances, such as the playing of social roles and the wearing of masks, and that it remains unaffected by the exigencies of the marketplace. In this essay I look at Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Lunar Park, which exemplifies an extremely self-conscious and ironic form of writing about the self, resulting from a deliberate confusion of autobiographical facts and fictional elements. Declared as a ‘novel’ on its cover, Lunar Park capitalizes on the star potential of its author, who knows well that we know his public persona well – not only as a novelist but also as a figure who appears on TV shows and in glossy magazines. Authorship is represented ambivalently in this novel: Lunar Park problematizes the authorial persona(e) of Bret Easton Ellis, withhold-

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ing definitive statements on whether there is a real Bret Easton Ellis behind the masks he is wearing or whether these masks are all there is. Eventually, the real Bret Easton Ellis recoils even further. With the help of a complex author-narrator figure, Bret Easton Ellis stages what is commonly held to be unstageable – authenticity. But this novel has more to offer than to simply toy with the paradoxes of authenticity. Approaching the novel from a Heideggerian perspective, I will show that Ellis has written a novel in which authenticity is presented as something achievable and ‘do-able’ by virtue of being an author.

L UNAR P ARK :

AUTHENTICITY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY The issue of authenticity is more pressing in some literary genres than in others. In autobiography, aspects of authenticity come to bear on the writing subject and the written subject since the two coincide. It is common lore that autobiography requires authenticity on the author’s part for the ‘contract’ (Lejeune) between reader and author to work. Promising authentic experience, but delivering fiction equals a breach of trust. As Jacques Derrida, Séan Burke and Peggy Kamuf have shown in their respective studies, a text possesses, due to its author’s signature, an afterlife that cannot be disentangled from the author’s empirical biography: As with the legal signature, the textual mark is addressed to the future; to mortality and to the afterlife of the written sign. In particular, it offers itself to any tribunal which may be subsequently established upon the basis of the signatory’s text in relation to as yet unrealised historical circumstances. (Burke, “Ethics” 289)

The empirical author’s name embodies the inseparable link between the work and its author, whose relevance to the study of literary texts has often been challenged and contested. Burke’s notion of a tribunal that will judge a work of literature at an unpredictable moment in the future provides a poignant image of the social and ethical implications of reception processes, reminding us of the chains that link the literary

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text to its empirical producer. The tribunal makes him liable for any offence his or her text may cause. The faking of identities and concomitant fooling of readers is one such offence, the promotion of ideological thought (to be revisited and judged by later generations) another, as Jacques Derrida argued in The Ear of the Other. Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park is his sixth novel and the follow-up to Glamorama, which was published in 1998. The novel does not fit easily into categories: it combines features of the horror novel with semi-autobiographical elements. Lunar Park wraps up Bret Easton Ellis’s seemingly autobiographical account in a Gothic framework provided by a haunted house and ghosts coming back from the author’s past and the fictional universe he created. Haunted houses are often travesties of the American middle-class home, traditionally thought of as strongholds of familial values and stability. It soon becomes obvious that its monsters and ghosts are revenants in a Freudian sense, embodying whatever was repressed in the author-narrator’s (from now on called ‘Ellis’ as opposed to ‘Bret Easton Ellis,’ the empirical author) life. This re-emergence on the shiny surface of Ellis’s respectable family life means that façades crumble. The monstrous things that appear in the novel have their breeding ground in the psyche of the male protagonist. These ghosts haunt their victim whose existence is ‘unhomely’: he is not at home in the house he inhabits. The novel begins with an outline of Ellis’s past, which, as he openly confesses, was dominated by drug abuse, promiscuity and other excesses coming with the pre-mature fame that he enjoyed in the early and mid-1980s. He now lives the settled life of a family man, teaching creative writing courses at a local college. His marriage to Jayne Morris, a beautiful actor, followed a long, off and on relationship. Jayne is the mother of his eleven-year-old son, Robby, whom Ellis had not acknowledged as his offspring for years. These familial bonds are not particularly strong, nor had the cut with the bad habits of his past ever been very clear: Ellis needs to keep his persistent drug habits hidden from his wife, as well as his lusting after one of his female graduate students, Aimee. With his son and Jayne’s six-year-old daughter, Sarah, who also lives with them, he is unable to communicate reasonably. Besides, his authorial interests remain predictable: Ellis is currently working on a novel called Teenage Pussy, a “porno-

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graphic thriller” (101). The plot that follows contains a number of unexplainable phenomena that are regularly rationalized by Ellis as results of too much alcohol and too many drugs. Haunted by the memory of his dead father and the novel’s amorphous phantom, Clayton, the protagonist finds himself sifting through his old manuscripts. There he discovers an ur-version of American Psycho, which contains all the clues necessary to make sense of certain riddles. Writing stories means playing fate in Ellis’s case: he sets off to rewrite this ur-version of American Psycho, thereby having Bateman, his most monstrous creation, killed. The horror, which the author-narrator is subject to in this novel is related to his responsibilities as a father and author. Faced with his own aging, the death of his father and the potential death of his son, he is forced to acknowledge the errata of his life, his failure as an author, son, father and husband. Reading this as an apologetic invitation to demystify Bret Easton Ellis’s life, however, would mean to look for an unexpected gesture by an author little renowned for self-censorship. While moral reasoning and self-critical revision of one’s life are stock elements of autobiographical and confessional writing, they do not go well with the label ‘Bret Easton Ellis.’ Within the continuum of fake and real that Bret Easton Ellis has built around himself, it is hard to take such a statement at face value. Bret Easton Ellis, the empirical author, does not give clear demarcation lines indicating how far the autobiographical dimension of his book reaches – the author profile on his publishing house’s website plays with exactly this fuzziness. The book’s achievement lies in the conscious blurring of the boundaries between reality and imagination. It leaves unanswered the question of whether the story that is told is yet another drug-induced hallucinatory nightmare, a horror novel or a parable of the burdensome existence of an author reaching middle age. To the deliberate confusion of authorial identities that this novel generates, an overall impression of authorial helplessness is added: the author is not the master of his creation, nor is he the master of the house he is living in. The word “author” can mean several things; its etymology includes the Latin verbs “agere” (to act), “auieo” (to tie), “augere” (to grow) and the Greek noun “autentim” (authority). The latter meaning going back to medieval times when the “auctores” were

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sages whose interpretation of the written word had a formative influence on various disciplines (Pease 264). Lunar Park depicts an author who is far from controlling his writing. He finds it hard to cope with his productive agency. Looking back to the writing process of American Psycho, he admits that it was not him who wrote the scandalous novel, but that the book wrote itself: When I realized, to my horror, what this character wanted from me, I kept resisting, but the novel forced itself to be written. [...] My point – and I’m not quite sure how else to put this – is that the book wanted to be written by someone else. It wrote itself, and didn’t care how I felt about it. [...] I was repulsed by this creation and wanted to take no credit for it – Patrick Bateman wanted the credit. (18)

Ellis describes the composition process of his novel as an act of ventriloquism, an estrangement of his own self from his fictional creation. He is an author who has lost control over his writing.

AUTHORSHIP

AFTER

B ARTHES

AND

F OUCAULT

The links between writing and death have been welded ever since the 1960s, when Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault questioned traditional notions of authorship. Barthes’s essay “Death of the Author” (1967) emerged in the context of early post-structuralism. According to Barthes, artistic creativity disappears behind the dense web of textuality, in which the author is neutralized to the extent that he or she becomes a “scriptor,” who merely manages the textual material: Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears with him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred. (Barthes 128)

With the removal of the author’s ‘human’ presence, i.e. when his or her biography loses relevance, the text is freed from the constraints of

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a personalized reading. It then is also de-temporalized, since it no longer refers back to its author’s past. A few years later, in 1969, Michel Foucault replied to Barthes in a lecture, later published as “What is an Author?” in which he argued that the death-knell for the author had been sounded prematurely. In fact, Foucault argues, Barthes’s introduction of concepts such as ‘scriptor’ and ‘writing,’ which were supposed to replace ‘author’ and ‘work,’ fill exactly the voids the author left behind. What, according to Foucault, remains after his disappearance is the possibility of “fluid functions,” a reappraisal of authorship as a means of classifying and evaluating literary texts, thereby distinguishing them from others sorts of texts. Foucault’s concept of the author turns him into a technical factor in the production of literary texts: “[...] the function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society” (235). He is supposed to create unity, to neutralize contradictions, to explain and to be “a particular source of expression” (238). Foucault dismisses the idea that there is meaning instilled in a text by the author’s presence: “The author’s name is not a function of a man’s civil status, nor is it fictional; it is situated in the breach, among the discontinuities, which gives rise to new groups of discourse and their singular mode of existence” (235). He locates the author-function on the demarcation line between author and writer: “It would be just as wrong to equate the author with the real writer as to equate him with the fictitious speaker; the author-function is carried out and operates in the scission itself, in this division and this distance” (239). Yet his emphasis on the discursiveness of authorship as a concept that has been functionalized differently during the course of history ignores certain problems, as for example the afore-mentioned significance of the author’s ‘signature.’ After all, Foucault is not concerned with ‘personified’ or ‘embodied’ authorship, but with something like the ‘invisible hand’ of the author, which guides his text through reception processes. How authorship can become part of a person’s identity and how it relates to an individual’s self-definition is of no concern to Foucault. While it matters that somebody is speaking, it does not really matter who is speaking. “Who is the real author” is for Foucault one of the “tiresome” questions never to be repeated again (245).

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The author’s proclaimed death, even after Foucault’s re-definition of authorship, left a gap to be filled by alternative ways of thinking authorship. Séan Burke, who has provided the most seminal studies on poststructuralist theories of authorship with The Death and Return of the Author (1992) and the The Ethics of Writing (2008), argues that the deconstruction of the subject in post-structuralist discourse did not bring about the death of the subject as such, but that of a particular kind. Freud and Heidegger “deconstructed the idea of a reified, unitary subjectivity in the interests not of the death of man or of the author, but of re-perceiving human subjectivity outside the domain of a transcendental subjectivity” (Burke, Death and Return 114). The author is, these days, a less conspicuous presence because he has become skilful at finding unobtrusive ways of entering texts and criticism. Burke’s quotation neatly summarizes the unstable position of authorship after the poststructuralist onslaught on subject-centred philosophies, a point which Peggy Kamuf also emphasizes: “The institution of authorship has shown a remarkable capacity to return even after being pronounced dead [...]” (11). The author keeps haunting his or her text as an uncanny presence. As Burke continues later on, the death of the author is a “blind-spot” in the work of Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, “an absence which they seek to create and explore, but one which is always already filled with the idea of the author” (Burke, Death and Return 172). While the author has been eliminated, the problems of authorship persist. To draw a first conclusion, a critical assessment of contemporary writing seems to require a readmission of questions that the theorists of the 1970s and 1980s had dealt with. Today’s authors have found new and manifold ways of defining, presenting and marketing themselves and their work to the public. To be sure, the artifice of authorship is not a new phenomenon: the Romantic staging of authorial identities is a good example of the self-conscious creation of authorial selves. Now this staging can take place in more media than ever before: with the help of publishing events, marketing in the print media, the more traditional audio-visual media such as television and radio, the internet, and through various forms of remediation. Authors such as Bret Easton Ellis, and the same could be said for Mark Z. Danielewski and Jonathan Safran Foer, all born in the 1960s and 1970s,

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are connoisseurs of the (new) media and their possibilities. The way they construct their works and themselves (inter)medially varies and requires conscious use of the media. Hence Lunar Park’s vision of authentic authorship is contradictory. The novel suggests that Ellis’s acceptance of his authorial duties entails moral growth and authentic existence. It describes his efforts to pull authorship inwards, towards the centre of the self. And yet authorship appears also as something that is constructed or staged. The text flaunts its willed hybridity as a fictional autobiography (or autobiographical fiction), without resolving or clarifying the resulting confusion. It brings forth the issue of authorship as a weighty and ethical dimension of writing, it revitalizes the empirical author, and it complicates matters even further by introducing a third dimension of consideration: literary stardom. How the novel spins the issue of authorial and personal authenticity into this rich fabric, I hope to show next by drawing upon Heidegger’s notion of Eigentlichkeit.

C OMING HOME : H EIDEGGER ’ S

CONCEPT

OF AUTHENTICITY Ellis’s emotional homelessness and the morbid transformation of his house remind us of the role that houses have traditionally played in US-American literature. The making of a family and the building of domestic structures in a country that was often perceived as an uninhabited ghost land finds its metaphorical counterpart in the image of the self that settles in an empty shell and grows into something ‘real’ – a typical feature of the American novel (see Weinstein 3-9). The relationship between structures of the psyche and those that underlie the house rests on complex analogies between the building and its inhabitants, as Marilyn R. Chandler has pointed out (1-20). Building a house equals building a self, but more than this: the constructive act of designing and erecting a house is comparable to the task of an author, who is the architect of a textual building.1

1

The metaphor of the ‘house of fiction’ has been used by Henry James in his “Preface to the New York Edition” of The Portrait of a Lady (1880-

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Ellis is certainly neither the architect nor builder of his own home, but only its half-hearted purchaser and inhabitant. Yet his intimate, transferential relationship with the house elicits a gradual metamorphosis of its façade orchestrated by his memories of his childhood home. Ellis becomes the Poe-esque lord of the mansion, in what is a twenty-first-century version of Gothic sentience: the house reflects his internal landscapes and externalizes his memories. His house is neither a safe haven nor an external manifestation of his status as a member of a particular social class of which he has keenly sought to be a member. Hence the question of Robert Miller, the parapsychologist and demonologist, whether the house he was going to inspect was built on “ancient Indian burial ground” (380) is more than a reference to novels such as Stephen King’s The Pet Sematary. It nonetheless confirms Ellis’s haunting curse: that he has to live with the dead and that he has no real home. ‘Being at home’ can be understood in both a literal and metaphorical sense. Perfect examples of how someone can be at home literally, but a completely misplaced stranger at the same time are the moments when we see Ellis moving among his family, participating in meals and conversations, yet mentally and emotionally detached, almost like a ghost among the living: “There was no place for me in this world or in that house. I knew this. Why was I holding on to something that would never be mine?” (258). He considers turning his back to the dead end he has reached and to “continue [his] refusal to embrace the mechanics of East Coast lit conventionality. [...] Get the full body wax and the spray-on tan and the tattoo in serif scarring your biceps. [...] Force them to take the cover story seriously, even though you knew how awful and fake it all was [...]” (258-59). While his reasoning reflects signs of a midlife crisis coupled with a chronic fear of commitment, it also reflects a desire to return to the life associated with his

81) to refer to the relation between the author and “the novel as a literary form – its power not only, while preserving that form with closeness, to range through all the differences of the individual relation to its general subject-matter, all the varieties of outlook on life, of disposition to reflect and project, created by conditions that are never the same from man to man […]” (7).

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former authorial persona, no matter how ‘fake’ it was. He is thus torn between his need and want of a family home, yet frustrated by its unavailability or at least his inability to grasp it and tempted by the ease of the kind of life he had lived before. In neither life is he fully at home. Ellis is a misfit in the social environment he has chosen for himself: meant as a cure and not so much as a means in itself, he finds family life, his role as a father and monogamous husband stifling. It is only with the help of his medication and drugs that he manages to survive the parties, the conversations with his wife, simple everyday family life and his encounters with neighbours and friends. The loss of authenticity inherent in their lifestyles is reflected by their houses. Their neighbours’ house, Ellis notices, is a replica of their own with an almost identical architecture (196). Even the food is a quotation: it refers the party guests back to their own youth, growing up as children of wealthy parents in the 1970s. Ellis is quick to notice that he has little in common with “the career dads, the responsible and diligent moms” (196). Their conscientious performances in the roles that they are expected to play makes him feel “filled with dread and loneliness” (196). Heidegger’s concept of authenticity materializes in these moments when Ellis contrasts authentic being with being as part of the ‘they.’ In this social environment, Ellis realizes, he will be unable to ever be authentically himself. It makes him feel as if he had lost his future and, together with it, the possibility of developing his own self: “I concluded with an aching finality that the could-happen possibilities were gone, that doing whatever you wanted whenever you wanted was over” (196-97); “The future didn’t exist anymore. Everything was in the past and would stay there” (197). Lunar Park depicts the homelessness of a writer, father, husband and citizen (his deep concern for boys who have gone missing in the region can be read not only as a sign of fatherly care, but also as that of a ‘good citizen’) and his attempt to do well in each of these roles. In fact, he hopes to turn them into authentic parts of his existence: “‘I’ve decided against wearing masks’,” Ellis says early in the novel, while deciding on costumes to wear at the Halloween party, insisting that he wants to be “real” (46). Lunar Park depicts this conflict between outward appearance and the

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need for authenticity: what keeps Ellis busiest is the constant negotiating of his true self caught up in an intricate web of authorial personae, social masks and neuroses: “I was a mystery, an enigma, and that was what mattered – that’s what sold books, that’s what made me even more famous. Propaganda designated to enhance the already very chic image of author as handsome young playboy” (27). Ellis contrasts the opacity of his old existence and his external image as the author of provocative novels with the desirable transparency of being truly himself. However, he thwarts these processes of authentication by anchoring them within his deeply ambiguous staging and un-staging of authenticity. This yearning for realness affects Ellis’s status as an author and a father: the novel depicts Ellis’s unsuccessful attempts to act not out of duty but according to his genuinely felt fatherly impulses, which, however, he finds hard to cope with or to express. One example is the moment when he confesses to his son that he honestly cares for him: He removed his hands from his face once he stopped crying and looked at me with something approaching tenderness, and I believed he wasn’t keeping a secret. The world opened up to me in that moment. I was no longer the wrong person. Happiness was now a possibility because – finally – Robby had a father now and it was no longer his burden to make me one. (329)

After this moment of rare proximity between father and son, Ellis experiences a momentary feeling of coming and being at home: None of us really knew each other because we were not a family yet. We were simply a group of survivors in a nameless world. But the past was being erased, and a new beginning was replacing it. There was another world waiting for us to inhabit. The tension had broken and the light in the house felt clean. (331)

Ellis experiences a temporary solution of his father/son conflict, which echoes his own problems with his father. He experiences it in a way that changes his self-perception dramatically. This situation, which

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precedes the catastrophic disintegration of his family, provides him with a glimpse of what he could be at his best. In Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) (1926) the German philosopher Martin Heidegger describes the uncanny in simple words: it is a feeling of not being at home. The term he uses, “Unzuhause” (Pt. I.6 §40: “not-at-home,” 233), describes a state that does not allow an individual to remain ‘at home,’ i.e. immersed in the consolatory framework provided by everyday life. Instead, he or she is forced to face sheer terror in the face of death and the finitude of life and its possibilities: “In anxiety one feels ‘uncanny.’ Here the peculiar indefiniteness of that which Dasein finds itself alongside in anxiety, comes proximally to expression: the “nothing and nowhere”. But here “uncanniness” also means “not-being-at-home” [das Nicht-zuhause-sein]” (233, emphasis in the original). The scenes in which a hung-over Ellis, who spent the night in a living nightmare, faces the chirping conversations of his wife and children engaging in their breakfast rituals, are shining examples of the collision of the authentic and the inauthentic in a Heideggerian sense. Human existence, according to Heidegger, presupposes an inauthentic perception of death. Human beings, he argues, tend to acknowledge death as a fact that affects each of them, yet keep it at bay from their concrete, individual lives. Death is continually deferred: “[…] death is understood as an indefinite something which, above all, must duly arrive from somewhere or other, but which is proximally not yet present-at-hand for oneself, and is therefore no threat” (Pt. II.1 §51, 297, emphasis in the original). By being able to anticipate one’s death and to foresee its impact on the possibilities we have in life, we can grasp our existence authentically: “Anticipation turns out to be the possibility of understanding one’s ownmost and uttermost potentiality-for-Being – that is to say, the possibility of authentic existence” (Pt. II1 §53, 307, emphasis in the original). Living an authentic life means not to turn one’s back to the reality of death or to hide behind the protective shields provided by everyday existence. By becoming aware of one’s “thrownness” into Dasein (i.e. being), the individual loses his or her safe footing in the public and familiar context. Living in full awareness of one’s mortality results, according

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to Heidegger, in the moral imperative of standing up for one’s decisions with resolution and ultimately in an authentic life. In a Heideggerian sense, home is not a refuge to which we return, far removed from buzzing social life, its role-playing, conventions and stories. In this sense he demystifies a Romantic tradition which saw the self defined by some inmost kernel that remains hidden from the public eye and that is exposed only within the sanctuary of ‘home.’ Instead, from an existentialist point of view ‘home’ is exactly the normality and familiarity provided by the individual’s taking part in the ‘man,’ the ‘they.’ This is our comfort zone. As Charles Guignon put it in his discussion of Being and Time, “the public context provides the medium of intelligibility we draw on in making something of our lives” (“Authenticity” 279). It is because of these pre-given narrative structures which shape our perception of life as we live it every day that we can access the world – determined as these structures may be by the specific historical and cultural context into which one is placed. Yet these structures are pernicious since they offer themselves far too easily as given possibilities: one is led into believing that one’s own life should follow the patterns deemed normal. It is tempting to establish oneself within these structures and to take them for all there is to be had from life. Heideggerian homelessness can thus be compared to a loss of the comforts provided by everyday life, often induced by the (sudden) awareness of one’s essential solitude and mortality. The loss of home is rewarded by the option of gaining authenticity: once we have lost the solace of convention, we can truly live in the present. This is reflected by his concept of Eigentlichkeit, which is usually translated as ‘authenticity’ and which he constantly contrasts with Uneigentlichkeit or ‘inauthenticity’ in Being and Time. Nowhere does he define these two concepts positively, though he does paraphrase them with examples that point to its omnipresence in everyday life: “Rather it is the case that even in its fullest concretion Dasein can be characterized by inauthenticity – when busy, when excited, when interested, when ready for enjoyment” (Pt. I.1 §9, 68, emphasis in the original). Everyday life gives us plenty of possibilities for distraction; it allows us to immerse in forgetfulness. But this forgetfulness to the limits of our lives makes us live fake lives. Thus, being authentic does not mean returning to a ‘real self’ which was camouflaged by social

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masks. Instead, Heideggerian authenticity is an event, something that takes place as a person is living up to his or her potential within a social context. This potential can only be accessed once the individual has soberly assessed the options he or she can expect from life given the finitude of human existence. Just as Heidegger’s subject is earthbound, so authenticity is not a transcendental quality, but happens in everyday life. Authenticity lies entirely in one’s own hands – to extrapolate it and one’s struggle with it to a transcendental level is not possible. Becoming authentic means being more honest, losing one’s pretences and masks: Proximally Dasein is ‘they’, and for the most part it remains so. If Dasein discovers the world in its own way [eigens] and brings it close, if it discloses to itself its own authentic Being, then this discovery of the ‘world’ and this disclosure of Dasein are always accomplished as a clearing-away of concealments and obscurities, as a breaking up of the disguises with which Dasein bars its own way. (Pt. I.2 §27; 167)

The implications of becoming authentic in Heidegger’s understanding suggest that it is not a smooth process. It means living in ways that require constant critical reflection of one’s own actions and decisions and the rejection of much-cherished beliefs and convenient consolations. Being authentic in a Heideggerian sense contains a strong narrative quality: the process that leads towards an authentic life involves recognition of one’s mortality and subsequently leads to a different perception of everyday existence and its temporal conditions. Awareness of the limits of human existence determines the way we structure and perceive our existence. An authentic person affirms the temporal frame which covers past, present and future. As Charles Guignon put it: Where inauthentic existence is lost in the dispersal of making-present, an authentic life is lived as a unified flow characterized by cumulativeness and direction. It involves taking over the possibilities made accessible by the past and acting in the present in order to accomplish something for the future. (On Being Authentic 282)

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It is this processual and self-determined quality of being truly oneself that reflects best the task of being an author. ‘Authoring’ in a Heideggerian sense, I argue, means creating things, bearing responsibility and being part of a continuous, unfinished dynamics whose sole endpoint is death, the awareness of which is continually refreshed through the act of writing. There is a link between the temporal dimension of life, Heidegger’s concept of resolution and narrative structures. Authenticity’s non-static quality explains its potential for and affinity to stories. There is potential for drama and for conflict. The path to authenticity can make a good story. What makes texts, especially in the genre of life writing, appear authentic and intriguing is their depiction of the toilsome processes leading towards authenticity. Authenticity happens if the subject works towards it: authenticity is do-able, so to speak, for everyone. Fatalistic surrender is not possible; instead living authentically is a practice and skill. It is certainly one of the less convincing moments in the novel when Ellis remembers that an unpublished ur-version of American Psycho exists. The discovery of this private, unpublished text opens his eyes and makes him see the excessive power he as the author has over his creation. One of the conclusions the novel draws is that there is something like a textual origin that only the author knows and controls. “There was something beneath the surface of things” (256), Ellis meaningfully ruminates after he has realized that his father has come back to haunt him. Ellis is not only the conceptual author, he is also the material producer of a manuscript. He undoes the divide which literary criticism, ever since the New Criticism, has made between the intratextual construct of the narrator and the extratextual empirical author. By returning to the first version of his novel, the material source of the fictions he created, he reconnects the detached the author with his work. He returns to an unmediated, un-marketed story, an authentic origin of creativity. It would thus be tempting to read this episode as an emblem of the novel’s greatest concern: its author’s attempt to find his authentic authorial identity and leave behind his medially constructed masks. However, it is behind these masks that the authornarrator ultimately withdraws again. Bret Easton Ellis seems to be far too fond of them to drop them. This leaves us with a flash of the authentic as a nostalgic evocation of a form of existence impossible to

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hold on to today, maybe because it costs efforts to uphold it. But the novel also gives us an impression of the narrative potential inscribed into authenticity, if no longer seen as a static stamp of approval that is either awarded or denied. Instead, if seen as a process that we can either master or fail at, it is clear that it harbours many good stories.

W ORKS C ITED Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Burke, Authorship 12530. Burke, Séan. The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. 1992. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 21998. —, ed. Authorship from Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995. —. “The Ethics of Signature.” Burke, Authorship 285-91. —. The Ethics of Writing: Authorship and Legacy in Plato and Nietzsche. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008. Chandler, Marilyn R. Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1991. Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Ed. Christie McDonald. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1988. Ellis, Bret E. Lunar Park. Basingstoke: Picador, 2005. —. Less than Zero. 1985. London: Picador, 2006. —. American Psycho. 1991. London: Picador, 2006. —. Glamorama. 1998. London: Picador, 1999. Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” Burke, Authorship 233-46. Guignon, Charles B. On Being Authentic. London: Routledge, 2004. —. “Becoming a Self: The Role of Authenticity in Being and Time.” The Existentialists. Ed. Charles B. Guignon. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004. 119-32. —. “Authenticity, Moral Values, and Psychotherapy.” The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Ed. Charles B. Guignon. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 22006. 268-92.

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Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. 1926. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 19 2006. —. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008. James, Henry. Preface to the New York Edition. The Portrait of a Lady. Ed. Robert D. Bamberg. New York: Norton, 1975. 3-15. Kamuf, Peggy. Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. King, Stephen. The Pet Sematary. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1983. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974. Pease, Donald E. “Author.” Burke, Authorship 263-76. Weinstein, Arnold. Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

Contributors

Aleida Assmann is Professor of English Literature at the University of Constance. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Heidelberg. Aleida Assmann has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Princeton, Yale, Chicago and Vienna and received numerous prizes and awards. She has published widely on memory and literary anthropology as well as other aspects of literary and cultural studies. Among her manifold publications are Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (1999; English translation: Arts of Memory, Cambridge University Press 2011), Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (2006), Geschichte im Gedächtnis: von der individuellen Erfahrung zur öffentlichen Inszenierung (2007) and, co-edited with Sebastian Conrad, Memory in a Global Age (2010). Thomas Claviez has taught American Literature and Culture at the Free University Berlin, the University of Bielefeld and at the University of Stavanger, Norway. He is currently Professor for Literary Theory and Director of the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of Berne. He is the author of Grenzfälle: Mythos – Ideologie – American Studies (1998) and Aesthetics & Ethics: Moral Imagination from Aristotle to Levinas and from “Uncle Tom's Cabin” to “House Made of Dawn” (2008), and has co-edited several volumes. Currently he is editing a book on The Conditions of Hospitality and working on a monograph with the title A Metonymic Society: Toward a New Poetics of Community. He has published essays on Pragmatism, Ecology, American Studies, American literature, Ethics and Aesthetics, the relation-

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ship between Europe and America, Democracy theory and Native American literature. Irmtraud Huber has studied Comparative Literature, English Literature and Theatre Studies in Munich. She is currently employed as an assistant of English Literature at the University of Berne and working on her PhD on the use of fantastic elements in contemporary fiction. She is a member of the Graduate School of the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities of the University of Berne. Anna Iatsenko is currently pursuing a PhD research project in African-American Literature which focuses on the later works of Toni Morrison at the English department of the University of Geneva where she is also a teaching assistant in American Literature. She is particularly interested in developing a new critical approach to Morrison’s texts which, rather than being situated in the traditional historicopolitical versus formalist dichotomy, is centred on black aesthetic forms. Her other interests include West African literatures, literatures of the Caribbean, orality and theories of embodiment. Susanne Knaller is Professor of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at Karl-Franzens-University in Graz. Her research interests are aesthetic theory, the history and theory of authenticity, concepts of reality since the eighteenth century, and various aspects of Italian, French, Latin-American and Anglophone literature. Among her many publications are an edited essay collection entitled Realitätskonzepte in der Moderne: Beiträge zu Literatur, Kunst, Philosophie und Wissenschaft (2011, together with Harro Müller), Authentizität: Diskussion eines ästhetischen Begriffs (2006, co-edited with Harro Müller) and Ein Wort aus der Fremde: Geschichte und Theorie des Begriffs Authentizität (2007). Scott Loren studied literature and psychology at San Francisco State University. He received his MA in English Literary Studies from the City University of New York and his PhD in American Studies from the University of Zurich. He currently teaches Film and Visual Culture Studies at the University of St. Gallen, and English language and

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literature at the University of Teacher Education, St. Gallen. His research interests include posthumanism, narrative theory, psychoanalytic theory and contemporary cinema studies. Uwe Mayer studied English Language and Literature and Business Studies at the University of Göttingen (Germany) and at King’s College London. He received his MA in 2007 and has since then worked as a doctoral candidate at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) and at the Department of English at the University of Gießen (Germany). His research interests include the theoretical and literary uses of myth and, quite generally, the literature of the British Isles. Sabine Nunius, having read English Literature, British Cultural Studies and Modern German Literature at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and the University of Warwick, continued with a PhD on contemporary British literature at Erlangen. After her doctorate, she took her exam as State-Certified Translator for English (Economics). She is currently employed as Personal Assistant to the Vice-Presidents at FAU. Publications include Coping with Difference: New Approaches in the Contemporary British Novel (2000-2006) and several articles on contemporary British literature and culture. Diane Piccitto is an assistant in the English Seminar at the University of Zurich. She recently completed her PhD in English Literature at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Her dissertation, Dramatic Forms and Identity-Formation in the Works of William Blake, explores the performative elements of Blake’s illuminated works in relation to his representation of identity. Her areas of research include identity, adaptation, and performance with respect to Romanticism, Shakespeare, theatre and film. Christa Schönfelder is an assistant in the English Seminar at the University of Zurich and is currently working on her doctoral dissertation with the working title Wounds and Words: Romantic and Postmodern Narratives of Childhood and Family Trauma. She has articles forthcoming on contemporary trauma fiction, and she is on the edito-

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rial board of Variations, a comparative literary journal of the University of Zurich. Her main research interests include Romanticism, twentieth-century literature, trauma and memory theory, identity, and gender. Julia Straub is a post-doctoral assistant in “Literatures in English” at the University of Berne. She completed her studies in English, French and Philosophy at the University of Constance in 2003, followed by two years of doctoral research at the University of York, UK. She completed her PhD in 2007 at the University of Berne. Her first book entitled A Victorian Muse: The Afterlife of Dante’s Beatrice in Nineteenth-Century Literature was published in 2009. Julia Straub’s current research interests are early American literature, canon theory, autobiographical writing and melodrama. Thomas Susanka studied American Studies and Rhetoric at the University of Tübingen and, on a Fulbright stipend, at the Universtiy of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA. He wrote his MA thesis on the rhetorics of the American war photographer James Nachtwey and continued his work on the rhetorics of photography in his doctoral thesis as a fellow of the postgraduate programme “Dimensions of Ambiguity” at the University of Tübingen. Thomas Susanka teaches Cultural Studies and Rhetorics at the University of Tübingen. He also works as a professional photographer and was featured in several minor exhibitions.