Looking for the real thing

We live in an age that hungers for authenticity. “Real” is one of our favorite terms of approbation, and to call someone a “phony” is never a compliment. Surrounded by ads, propaganda, double talk and stimulation, we search for things, experiences and people that are “authentic.”

But the quest for authenticity, Yale professor Geoffrey Hartman warns, can be dangerous as well as desirable. Indeed, the very title of his new book, “Scars of the Spirit,” is a direct rebuttal to a statement of Hegel’s, quoted by Hartman in his epigraph: “The wounds made by the spirit leave no scars.”

What is “authenticity” anyway? In his influential 1972 work, “Sincerity and Authenticity,” Lionel Trilling saw our modern idea of the authentic as stemming from a Rousseauvian belief that the strictures of civilization had alienated us from our true natures. Out of this, eventually, came bizarre notions like R.D. Laing’s belief that sanity itself was a kind of straitjacket. Trilling found in Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontents” a better, more complex model of authenticity: one that involved recognizing our primal instincts and the need for sublimating them.

Hartman approaches the question from a different angle. He begins by pointing out two meanings of “authentic,” a word etymologically linked to the notion of authority. Authenticity was once “the power, legal or moral, vested in those who founded an institution or claimed they were transmitting vital truths from an ancient source.” Now, in “nontheocratic societies,” he notes, “authenticity ... signifies a moral strength not based on formal or institutional authority.” Real by definition, yet ineffable by its very nature, authenticity, as Hartman understands it, is often related to spirituality: the wisdom of the Holy Scriptures, the prophecy of the oracle or the sense of one’s own “inner light.” Hartman venerates authenticity but shares Trilling’s distrust of the wrong sort. For many, he feels, authenticity seems to be a matter of being true to one’s self -- whoever or whatever that may be: not always necessarily one’s best or deepest self. For others, authenticity is vested in group identity: ethnic, religious or sexual. One form easily degenerates into self-indulgence or self-idolatry; the other may lead to fanaticism and violence.

Not only can the quest for authenticity be dangerous to questers of the wild-eyed sort who, like poet Arthur Rimbaud, derange their senses to get in touch with their inner essences, there can be danger to innocent bystanders as well. The murderous passion for racial “purity” often begins in the revulsion from the shallowness of modern life and a desire for something more “authentic.” So, too, the quest of the “true believer” -- religious or ideological.

“Except for ‘spiritual’ itself, ‘authentic’ may be the most inauthentic word around,” notes Hartman. “There is a temptation to use these charged phrases for trivial or masked purposes.” A pastoral Rousseauvian vision of authenticity as rural simplicity can become the fodder for labor camps and killing fields. Or, as Hartman reflects in his epilogue, written in the wake of the events of Sept. 11: “A spectacular act can give the illusion of agency or self-identity, even at the cost of unleashing disaster.” The critic ponders the terrorists’ motives: “The call may ask believers to change their life and ‘put away childish things.’ But what does that mean? What mode of maturity or authentic existence is implied? I find it impossible to respect a culture that in fact denies childhood, and trains children to grow into warriors or even suicide bombers. Or movements that wound secular time by seeking to end it.... The Ground Zero left by the collapse of the Twin Towers is literally a scar of the spirit. It testifies to more than an attempt to shatter icons of capitalism and U.S. power. The smoldering devastation of those ruins creates a new icon, a permanent mental image of how violence can cloak itself as spirituality.”

Hartman, a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany, has spent the bulk of his professional life at Yale, where he has taught in the departments of English and comparative literature and is the co-founding director of a video archive for the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Romanticism, Judaic studies and critical theory are but a few of his many areas of expertise. Like a vast, finely spun web, this book touches on a dazzling array of subjects, from religious fundamentalism and reality television to the confusions of the contemporary art scene, the sorry state of literary studies and the failure of humanities departments to transmit culture.

Perhaps the kindest spin that Hartman can put on the proliferation of tasteless talk shows, sensationalistic “news” and lurid exposes is that they too bespeak a hunger for authenticity. But how “authentic” are they really? Shallow, strident, predigested, often slanted, the sensationalistic versions of “reality” proffered by the media may, in the long run, only increase our sense of unreality. The hunger of some individuals for publicity at any price, the prurient curiosity of audiences for ugly and embarrassing self-exposure strikes Hartman as a grotesque parody of authenticity.

For Hartman, the true struggle for a deeper form of authenticity is exemplified in someone like Emily Dickinson and her lifelong “resistance to the limelight.” Citing her poem “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?,” he dryly notes: “She wished to attain immortality, not publicity.” He also finds sustaining -- and sustainable -- forms of authenticity in the immediacy of aesthetic experience, the unshaped testimony of Holocaust survivors and the process of interpreting texts, both sacred and secular. (Curiously, the once-popular notion of true love as the ultimate “authentic” emotion does not enter into his discussion.) The authentic, he would remind us, is not to be found in crude or oversimplified versions of reality but in the recognition of its -- and our own -- intricacy.

A champion of the tentative who writes in praise of complexity, Hartman’s watchwords as a critic are “patience” and “attention.” He is adept at seeing several things at once, whether it be two sides of a question or multiple layers of meaning in a novel, a poem, a line of verse or a single word. His style -- limber, erudite, often playful -- ranges from engagingly informal to pithily epigrammatic and sometimes, alas, to dauntingly convoluted.

If Hartman has a besetting flaw (which, seen from another standpoint, might be accounted a virtue), it is that he tends to be too reticent in advancing his own theses and too ready, not just to understand, but sometimes also to rationalize the faults of others: Heidegger, for instance, whose philosophy of sorge (care) did not prevent him from actively supporting the Nazis.

Many of the ideas and apercus contained in these essays speak to the concerns of the general reader, although Hartman’s argument seems aimed at an academic audience, and a discerning one at that. His refinement and cautiousness can be maddening at times yet bespeak a profound recognition of the weight and value that words can have. Hartman’s intensely scrupulous manner of scrutinizing things is in itself a form of authenticity.