In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

AUTHENTICITY VS. ARTIFICIALITY
An instinct to slaughter
Families and providers,
To fulfill the task
Of the conqueror.
(Brecht, 376)
Both Authenticity and Artificiality bear clear, frequently recurring
marks of particular times and spaces. Opting for Authenticity means
opting for tradition and the past (often with nostalgic enthusiasm),
whereas opting for Artificiality means opting for the future (often with
the impression of yielding to an inevitable fate). Artificiality's future and
Authenticity's past are generally perceived as moving in opposite directions.
The future seems always to be increasingly ahead of the present,
whereas the past appears more and more remote. Past and future no
longer meet in a chronotope of continuity, but offer themselves as diametrically
opposed polarities. North America-and sometimes the big
cities of Europe-symbolize the world of Artificiality and, for better or
worse, anticipation of the future. Authenticity is seen as surviving in
Latin America and in the geographic periphery of Europe, mainly in
Spain and here and there on the African continent. This mapping explains
why Europe constitutes a horizon of desire for so many American
intellectuals of the Lost Generation and why, having arrived in Europe,
many of them discover that the big European cities do not (or no longer?)
offer the longed-for Authenticity. [see Americans in Paris] Therefore,
many of them move on from Paris or Berlin to Spain, which they experience
as a nation, as a country determined by its history, as a country
that ultimately acts and reacts emotionally-like a person. In the same
way Ernest Hemingway tries to escape the Artificiality of the United
States, Jorge Luis Borges rejects the complex connotation of Authenticity
attributed to Argentina. But unlike Hemingway, Borges avoids the binary
logic that would lead an Argentinian intellectual to embrace Artificiality:
"I do not want either progressivism or creolism, in the current understanding
of these words. The first is a way of subjecting us to being
almost North American or almost European, a persistent almost-beingothers;
the second, once a term of action (the cavalryman's taunt to the
South American-he who went mainly on horseback mocking him who
went mainly on foot), is today a term of nostalgia (timid craving for the
countryside)" (Borges, 14).
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