7 October 2024 Authenticity: The Idea of the Festival

Be Yourself! Or Maybe Not

Some try to prefabricate authenticity, though most often this fails. It is a rare commodity, but also the most highly prized. Perhaps we are incapable of precisely defining it, but sometimes we can capture it on the fly.

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While working on the program of this year’s festival, and thus, on the present article, I have sometimes had Nirvana’s “Come as you are” in my head. In the 1990s this song was seen as an anthem for authenticity. Come as you are: it sounds like a Buddhist koan. We encounter a similar conundrum when we grapple with the term “authenticity.” We are accustomed to instinctively deciding what strikes us as authentic or not, as if we had a faultless gauge inside of us. At the same time, trying to explain what we mean by authenticity we may come across some trouble: though it seems we might delve into its core, it contains many paths and destinations.

The difficulty in this concept means we can pull out various threads from its tangle. It is not an axiologically neutral term; it is adjacent to truthfulness, sincerity, reliability (though is not quite identical to any of them). Its opposite is not falsehood or fiction, but rather something that might be seen as low and reprehensible: an imitation, a fake, a forgery. At the same time, this term is overused, threadbare and stripped of all its value, having become a hollow slogan—it has become “safely meaningless,” serving as filler in a sentence.

Pop culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the history of counterculture in particular, reminds us that it only takes a moment to turn authenticity into a commodity. This is another reason to reexamine this concept. What do we want to achieve in demanding authenticity, and how far might these demands be reasonable? Let’s take a closer look at ways of grasping authenticity—as a category related to reliability, sincerity, and experience, the “real me”—and finally, to try to trace its potential in imaginary worlds and tales.

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Just about every day we answer a question from a biometric system or other security feature: Are we really us? This means every day we are confronted by the existential basics. We no doubt respond intuitively, without thinking, because we feel an inner cohesion. At the same time, however, this means we regularly confront a miniature Delphic prophecy that demands we know ourselves and confirm our “selfhood” (to borrow a phrase from Barbara Skarga). How should we know that this impulse takes us to the correct answer? Are we guided by an “instinct for truth” or do we need to develop and sharpen it through introspection or deeds?

The concept of authenticity is one of the keys to modernity; we might see these categories as peers. Though self-exploration was not, as such, a modern invention (we also know it in the guise of gnothi seauton or tat tvam asi—“that thou art”), its foregrounding, or its focus on the individual and “moral burden,” undeniably were. Authenticity as a postulate first appears prominently in Rousseau, who outlined a vision of a “sense of existence” obscured by no external influences. This is a dream of fleeing the theater of semblances, because this was how he saw the world of social relations, and an indication as to how to calibrate one’s moral compass: according to one’s own nature. We might doubt this task is possible, yet the promise it contains remains legible: even if we make a mistake or are disappointed, at least we’ll be certain that we have not betrayed the only person who will be with us for all our lives—ourselves.

As the creator of a new kind of autobiography, Jean Jacques Rousseau decided he had to confess everything, including his shameful deeds. “I want to show my fellow-men a man in all the truth of nature; and this man is to be me myself. Myself alone. I feel my heart and I know men,” he declares at the opening of his Confessions (trans. Angela Scholar). “I am not made like any that I have seen; I venture to believe that I was not made like any that exist.” This manifesto is astonishing for its self-assuredness and conviction of being wholly unique—especially when we juxtapose it with the autobiographical turn in literature today, a turn toward oneself, but also the desire to verify one’s own experiences in the stories of others. Today’s autofictional literature or autobiographical essay speaks of something quite different than Rousseau, and makes different sorts of promises. Weaving personal confessions in with a backdrop taken from the social sciences, it tends to say: How similar you are! You are one of many permutations of shared human experiences, dependent on your place, time, and position on the social ladder. You are a well-narrated (lucky you!) example of a broader process.

Whether this course is for the best—I will leave unanswered, turning to reflect upon what the Existentialists had to say about authenticity. In Martin Heidegger it is a predisposition of a human individual, a virtue, but also active work. It is not given once and for all, as the “Self,” conceived as a safe and impersonal anonymity, forever attracts us, and the temptation to submit to it, thus resigning from individuality, is not easy to combat. Existentialism merged individuality with a kind of responsibility: seeing one’s own raw existence “thrown” into the world, in all its transparency, could serve as an impulse to consciously undertake some sort of effort. From this philosophical school’s perspective, this consciousness and self-recognition provide the greatest chance to live one’s life in fulfillment, though this goes hand-in-hand with effort, or perhaps even courage—for the Existentialist, the coherence of convictions and actions, remaining true to oneself, is key to authenticity.

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We find the modern concept of authenticity in one more category—the outsider. Being true to oneself implies, after all, taking the “road less travelled-by,” not always by one’s own free will. This stance, in literature and in life, increases the risk of conflict, disagreement, and certainly requires one to stand one’s ground. Sticking to this sort of path, an author must “learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence,” as William S. Burroughs phrased it, outlining a challenge for writers of the space age. Does this mean authenticity requires a writer to be unshakably independent, does it increase the risk of confrontation? Need it be defended?

With a touch of the provocative, we might ask if the search for authenticity does not lead us to delusions, does not slip too easily into simple associations. Then something that seems convincing is too quickly judged to be true. The same goes for stories that exhibit what is brutal and ruthless, recalling a vivisection: Doesn’t identifying this content with authenticity mean surrendering to a kind of forced blackmail (“But I’m showing you EVERYTHING!”)?

We might also succumb to the illusion of the outsider: then we assume that the very act of sticking to the margins and being alienated produces art that is more authentic, because it is freer—in a sense, as Rousseau wanted it, free of the influences and expectations of the outside world. The Surrealists sought this quality in the twentieth century, turning to the art of those who were excluded or outside of the prevailing norms. Their category of “Others” included groups so diverse we might doubt they have a common denominator—children, psychiatric patients, native peoples. We now know they had succumbed to a fiction of sorts, to their own dream, because individual art did not remain in isolation, and its creators were not immune to influences. At times what seems raw and honest turns out to be just another delusion.

This leads us to more questions: If adaptation occurs so smoothly, can we trust our own words, pictures, and expressions? How far are our convictions or even recollections really our own? Since our culture is founded on stories, does the rough or incohesive truth give way to the smoother flow of the narrative—which ultimately becomes a more assimilated truth?

Nominal sincerity can also have its conventions, its “Self” into which one inadvertently slips with ease. This is well illustrated by an anecdote about the legendary blues musician Leadbelly, who was famed for his rough, raw prison songs. When he was discovered by ethnomusicologist John Lomax, he was serving time. Upon his release, Leadbelly decided to wear a suit and play popular jazz, as a free man should. Lomax urged him to continue performing in his prisoner’s outfit, as he thought this was a more authentic look. In the meantime, however, the musician had left his old life and experience of the present well behind. Who was right when it came to authenticity? Which image was more “real”?

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We can also look at this issue from another angle. Philosopher Charles Taylor was curious about the notion of authenticity; he saw that no consciousness exists without a horizon of meanings, that each individual defines their existence in dialogue with something or someone. This does not mean we are slaves to convention, it is the causative flip side of a sense of being lost and atomized. According to Taylor, it is the “creative imagination of the individual” that endows the world with meaning. The way we exist in it comes from ongoing individual revelations. This thought takes us to the presence of authenticity in the midst of threadbare conventions.

Literary theorist Jacek Kolbuszewski once analyzed letters written at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by adults who had only recently gained the ability to write. These were often composed of similar stock phrases, yet Kolbuszewski stressed that their similarity did not make them bereft of personal truth or intention. The conventional form of the letters did not mean empty verbosity; for people with no other means of expression it was the only way of speaking for themselves. Maybe striving for authenticity sometimes requires a scaffolding for support?

The historian Eric Hobsbawm used the term “invented tradition” to mean shows of culture (holidays, rituals, integrating tales, symbols), often created to unite a community; they are not only swiftly adopted as their own, they also take on a nearly eternal aura. Even if introduced only a few years before, they become things that have been “celebrated forever.” They incontrovertibly acquire an authentic, solemn quality in the eyes of their practitioners, much like the aura that testifies to the uniqueness of a work of art or a product of nature in Walter Benjamin: it is the “unique apparition of a distance, however near a thing might be” (trans. Edmund Jephcott).

We ought to take a similar approach to people’s relationships with the traditions they practice: there is no reason not to believe they truly see them as unchanging and eternal. This is why we ought to ponder the presence of authenticity in fiction, in the free flight of the imagination, in genre prose, and even in pure invention. The convention provides a point of departure, but the contents bear the stamp of the author: “I created it myself.”

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By some twist of fate, or perhaps just the wheels of the Zeitgeist turning behind the scenes, the term “authenticity” has recently caught on in the world of marketing. Companies that analyze trends in advertising and Internet communications have pointed toward a growing need for authenticity, and even picked it as the catchphrase for 2024. Working on the festival concept, none of us were especially aware of this fact, but I will try to take this unexpected coincidence as a real challenge.

On the one hand, the circulation of goods and services (including the industry that gives quick advice and facile solutions to complex psychological dilemmas) has long used the idea of “be yourself.” Ages ago, Shakespeare pointed out the trap in this call. “To thine own self be true,” Polonius tells Laertes in “Hamlet.” “And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not be false to any man.” Taken out of context, these words sound like “words to live by.” And yet, because in the drama they are spoken by the character most fond of artifice and intrigue, they turn into empty blather.

Yet although the industrial production of meaning, in pointing to our desires, often inflates them in a manipulative fashion, suggesting how we might make them come true, to turn a profit—it undoubtedly does have a fine-tuned system for picking up our needs. And so, it has identified a pressing desire for authenticity in response to messaging that is increasingly flat and identical. We might try to fabricate authenticity, usually in vain; once more in the vernacular of the world of advertising and marketing (I see no reason to avoid the signs that surround us), it is a rare commodity that is in high demand. When noted by customers, it is appreciated and rewarded with fidelity. Perhaps we cannot define it precisely, but every so often it can be captured on the fly.

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Every question here leads us to others. But instead of rushing to provide the answers, I suggest we stop a moment and think. We are not alone; we have the written word, after all, and conversations. Literature offers us something difficult, perhaps, but still there—the luxury of slow reflection. This goes for the issue of authenticity. It provides a complete set of tools: ruthless introspection, immersion in experiences, speculation, flights of the imagination. The word allows us to record the tension between doubt and trust, individuality and a sense of unity, intuition and conscious cognitive effort. Perhaps we have yet to find a tool that is more versatile. And above all, one that can interrogate and transcend rigid expectations and facile conclusions so nimbly.

This is the theme we had in mind in planning the festival program. This time we challenged ourselves by choosing authenticity, but avoiding automatic, knee-jerk associations. Argentine writer Claudia Piñeiro uses the forms of genre literature but saturates them with local details and a journalist’s or a historian’s eye for precision, which gives her compelling novels a unique documentary backdrop. Irish author Sebastian Barry speaks in an array of voices: creating characters in far-flung geographical and historical locations, with ambiguous identities, his stories have a rare emotional weight. Anna Brzezińska operates in two worlds: delving into historical fact and genre prose, she boldly enters the realm of both speculative and experimental literature. In Phantom, Łukasz Kozak scrutinizes how literary motifs filter into the mass imagination, and then science, prompting us to keep probing and remain vigilant toward the knowledge that reaches us. Both compellingly recount the intermingling of fiction and non-fiction, and their mutual relations. But literature is also ways of reading—and these are sometimes quite novel. A new sphere of reading autonomy is bookstagram, where new canons and modes of reading have emerged. We ought to take this space seriously.

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Take a look at the main visual motif of this year’s Conrad Festival. We see an intense, vibrating patch of color that blurs and goes translucent, spreading outward. Yet if we shift our attention and look at this shape a bit differently, we might say that the color is thickening, condensing, tending toward a single center. In October we will try to grasp something that is both fuzzy and cohesive. Without fear of paradoxes.

 

Olga Drenda 

Creative Director of the Conrad Festival