The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

220 Skaz
Nature (1884) of the character Des
Esseintes, whose neurasthenic extravagances
fascinated Oscar Wilde and
his contemporaries. It was Wilde who
enunciated the pithiest of anti-sincerity
paradoxes when he wrote that ‘the first
duty in life is to be as artificial as
possible’. Around the same time the
discrepancy between what people may
say or do in public and what they really
think (betrayed through dreams or
by involuntary slips of the tongue)
attracted Sigmund Freud’s scientific
curiosity, and led to the publication of
such studies as The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life in 1914 (see PSYCHOLOGY).
After Freud it was no longer possible to
take an innocent attitude towards the issue
of sincerity, and this deepened awareness
of complexity in matters hitherto thought
relatively simple was reflected in the
work of modernist novelists. The nocturnal
persona of Molly Bloom, the speaker
of the closing monologue in James
Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), is clearly more
sincere, or at least more authentic, than
her everyday self. Similarly, in bringing
the titanic clashes of ancient tragedy into
the demure and sedate drawing rooms of
her characters, Ivy Compton-Burnett
(1892–1969) called into question the
‘sincerity’ of much that passes for
polite conversation. Her French disciple
Nathalie Sarraute (b. 1902) concentrated
on the phenomenon of ‘sub-conversation’,
or the level of social intercourse which is
never heard aloud but conveys unavowed
animosities, conflicts and resentments, in
fact all the unseemly deceptions hidden
beneath urbane surfaces.
The evolution of attitudes towards
insincerity in art and life is thus a complex
one, and examination of it is not
assisted by imprecision in the term
‘sincerity’ itself. All the intellectual historian
can say with any assurance is that ‘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’ (Lionel Trilling); and that
this point occurred somewhere around the
middle of the eighteenth century. Trilling
defines the meaning of the term as ‘congruence
between avowal and actual feeling’.
In this sense it tends, in discussions
about literature, to become the amateur’s
panacea, used as a means of explaining or
isolating literary excellence; in such naïve
exercises in evaluation it serves as a loose
form of approbation (cf. ‘genuineness’ or
‘authenticity’). On examination the most
apparently ‘sincere’ works usually turn
out to have reached their final form long
after the original emotions which gave
rise to them, and should ultimately be
seen to have more in common with a literary
tradition than with the feelings of a particular
individual. Leo Tolstoy, himself an
almost archetypally sincere writer, put it
succinctly when he saw ‘poetry in the fact
of not lying’, by which he meant that the
work of art has its own truthfulness, which
has little or nothing to do with the honest
transcription of feeling. Sincerity as usually
understood is therefore not a very helpful
word in the literary critic’s vocabulary and
should be sparingly employed. As Oscar
Wilde discerned with his usual acuteness,
‘Man is least himself when he talks in his
own person. Give him a mask and he will
tell you the truth.’ See also PERSONA.
See I. A. Richards, Principles of
Literary Criticism (1924), chs 23 and 34;
Henri Peyre, Literature and Sincerity
(1963); Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and
Authenticity (1972).
JWJF
Skaz See FORMALISM.
Society In critical usage, a term with
two main senses: (1) the ‘society’ of
a novel, play or poem, a social world