Preface

The literary history of sincerity is, among other things, a history of writers uncovering and exploiting the exchanges between inwardness and its expressions. With each movement of inwardness and its corresponding expression, the one makes demands on the other. Sincerity is concerned with the representational efforts of the self, with making the inner self available to and operative in the outer world. Sincerity in literature, specifically, finds its performances of the self tested by their exposure to audiences through various forms of representation, poetics, and theatricality. Thus, literary histories of sincerity target especially the investments of its dialectical relation to the self, as the idea of sincerity cannot evolve or dissipate on its own but must work through culturally and textually embedded representations of interiority and exteriority, honesty and dishonesty, purity and impurity, morality and immorality, and nature and nurture.

Typically, historians and critics address sincerity in the context of discussions about modernity. Modernity, as many have suggested, has had the effect of augmenting the distance between forms of sincerity and the outward correlatives by which it authenticates itself. Hence, the modern term "authenticity" is commonly understood to mean self-authenticating, to describe something that is pure and good on its own without reference to external correlatives. Part of sincerity becoming more individualistic in modern eras is its decreased reliance on inherited forms, institutions, and authorities outside a notion of the autonomous inward self. Lionel Trilling states the case in terms of the "organic":

The belief that the organic is the chief criterion of what is authentic in art and life continues … to have great force with us, the more as we become alarmed by the deterioration of the organic environment. The sense of something intervening between man and his own organic endowment is a powerful element in the modern consciousness, an overt and exigent issue in our nature. In an increasingly urban and technological society, the natural processes of human existence have acquired a moral status in the degree that they are thwarted. It is the common feeling that some inhuman force has possessed our ground and our air, our men and women and our thought.¹

But the dialectic of sincerity works the other direction as well. The shapes that outward expressions take change and reinforce beliefs about the self that support them. Note Trilling's recognition that "the natural processes" of life become moral "in the degree that they are thwarted" by commercial society; that is, attending to one's organic environment puts one in mind of inorganic, social constructions of the self and thus creates an alliance between the organic and the moral, which we call the authentic. Trilling might have gone further to add that the natural and the moral appear to us "in the degree that they are thwarted" or at the rate that moral problems give rise to new perspectives on what is and is not natural and therefore sincere about the self.

In other words, a critical awareness of the history of sincerity reveals its own dialectical influence on the history of ideas about nature and the organic. Charles Taylor notes that even the motivations that drive social change contain a view of the inward self and thus of sincerity: "Of course, the social changes that are supposed to spawn the new outlook [of individualism and instrumental reason] must themselves be explained, and this will involve some recourse to human motivations, unless we suppose that industrialization or the growth of cities occurred entirely in a fit of absence of mind."² The truth about the self is duplicated in expressions of the self's access to and representations of the truth, and vice versa. Hamlet pretending madness, Milton's Satan exercising his version of free will, Wordsworth's leech gatherer, Eliot's self-conscious Prufrock—when the grounds for establishing self-accuracy are called into question by new social patterns, they do not become irrelevant or obsolete. Rather, they shift, or plunge, rooting themselves at a lower depth. Out go the old correlatives, and in come the new, disguised as the truly sincere.

Theologically informed literary criticism is suited to reveal...