Outrageous Fortune by William Ian Miller

Author:William Ian Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

(I would give ten years of my life, especially if they are the ones from eighty to ninety, to write a passage like that, even granting the high likelihood that it is my own down-in-the-dumpsism that Orwell is sneering at.)

Measure the phoniness at the core of the romantic notions of the artist, or of Blut und Boden, or of Brook Farm or any hippy commune, all meant to strip away pretense as their first order of business. The inauthenticities of movements dedicated to seeking authenticity generated new hypocrisies and phoniness that made the old hypocrisies of false piety look respectable.

I must confess this: when it comes to pathetic pretentiousness, no Parisian avant-gardiste, no poète maudit could outdo me in June 1969 reading the Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (1868), in French no less, while on a bus loaded with young boys/men heading down from Green Bay to the Milwaukee induction center for our draft physical as a preliminary to being shipped off to Vietnam. I had just graduated from college (the draft notice beat my diploma home by a week); the other eighty or so had mostly finished high school if that. The army discovered I had a slipped disc, two it turned out; thus, I avoided death in the jungle along with one overweight Oneida Indian, but how I managed to avoid being rightly murdered on that bus still mystifies me.

Industrialization and romanticism raised new anxieties about the real, the true. Mass production, political democracy, and fears of tawdry cheap knockoffs sent some to the faux authenticity of Walden Pond, others later to celebrating the machine, on the right as Futurists, on the left as five-year plans with fake factory output numbers (and mass dislocations of soon to be “dead souls”). Unique selves? What of your very self being mass-produced, let alone mass-murdered? Not only artworks can be reproduced and printed to hang in the dorms of university students but you also find you yourself duplicated, when you go to a football game or attend a demonstration or an academic conference, to say nothing of what the internet and social media platforms have done for mass replication of images of our unique and very authentic Photoshopped selves.

The previous paragraph, graced with nary an original thought, could pass for a screed written by a true believer in authenticity demoralized by the triumph of the inauthentic. Yet it works equally for a nonbeliever in the authentic self to mock the idea of lamenting its imagined disappearance. As I have said, it is very hard to separate claims of authenticity from pretense, from fakery and self-indulgence.

Those who sing the praises of authenticity, of being true to oneself, leave me cold. Return to that authentic ‘self,’ the very self Polonius, whom the exceedingly intelligent Hamlet thought an idiot, tells his son Laertes, who is an idiot, to be true to, neither father nor son to be trusted with giving sound advice or with taking it when given.9 I have always thought that what Polonius really meant in his famous speech is to remind Laertes to stay within his budget.

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