The Negativity of Modernist Authenticity / The Authenticity of Modernist Negativity: "No Direction Home" in Yeats, Dylan, and Wilde

. . . Man can embody truth, but he cannot know it. . . . You can refute Hegel but not The Song of Sixpence.

–Yeats, letter of 4 January 1939

To keep these notes natural and useful to me I must keep one note from leading on to another, that I may not surrender myself to literature.

–Yeats , "Estrangement," Sec. 1, The Autobiography

He not busy being born / Is busy dying.

–Bob Dylan, "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)"

My goal is to bring out the negativity in a characteristic stance toward authenticity among writers of the long twentieth century. That stance typically involves three moments: first, an evocation of wrongheaded attitudes and behavior that present themselves as authentic (true, pure, natural, and the like); often the attitudes are refused (or refuted); if they are accepted, it turns out that they would better have been refused; second, an evocation of an alternative that appears to be itself authentic, or at least preferable; finally, a self-correcting stance that recognizes the alternative as itself not authentic in any absolute, static sense but in need of being part of a process that does not replicate the refused ostensible antitype. The self-correcting stance can include the antiessentializing recognition that Roland Barthes presents as knowing our own mortality, our situation in a historical process that will displace us.¹ Or we can think of the three moments as representing what Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler might agree is a shift from the pedagogical to the performative, a shift that recognizes the possibility of the performative lapsing into the pedagogical and of the pedagogical persisting even in attempts to reject its specific forms. Modernist negativity displaces the pedagogical, at times through a self-correcting, self-transforming merger of the aesthetic and the political. In that merger, the embodied, historical, fallible dimension of human experience becomes a basis for making defensible choices about values and actions.

I had planned to focus in my paper on Oscar Wilde's notion of lying as one crucial origin for the process by which modernist authenticity rejects (and corrects) conventional, institutionalized, essentializing attitudes without itself becoming totalizing. For reasons of space, efficiency, and (primarily) compulsion, my paper wrote itself mostly about Yeats and briefly about Bob Dylan, specifically "Fergus and the Druid" (1892) and "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" (1968). There is no intention, or possibility, of overlaying these texts absolutely, but each gives us a version of a process involving literarily a dialogical, actually polylogical, situation in which apparently opposing perspectives are taken up into a potentially self-correcting dynamic that is represented or otherwise evoked. In sum: in this model, the modernist critique of authenticity involves a negative moment of corrective rejection followed by a further different kind of negativity that recognizes the corrective rejection's inevitable eventual lapse into bad faith (or ideological delusion, or inauthenticity). Among the many omissions below: no sustained exploration of androgyny as a relevant gendered dialogical form or of the complicated refusal in literary modernity of the cultural denial of death and the related technological imperative to master nature. Androgyny's relevance to the scheme is evident in Virginia Woolf's comments on gender and identity in chapter six of A Room of One's Own (1929). There her swerve from the constrictive masculine "I" of some male writers (and of Italian Fascism) is not a turn toward a singularly gendered female identity; instead of the latter, which Woolf warns against, she turns to androgyny, a mixed state presumably involving unpredictable interactions within a process of emergence, as in Fanon's third stage of postcolonial nation building mentioned below.

The inherent fluctuations, or oscillating perspectives, of modernist negativity that I argue for in Yeats, Dylan, and Wilde occur as well in modern painting. Primed by Roger Rothman's paper on Salvador Dalí, our discussion began bringing out the connections. A move away from positive knowledge occurs in avant-garde painting, as well as in the writing I discussed. Magritte and Duchamp deserve consideration, along with Dal...