Sincerity and Authenticity in the Poetry of Bernice Chauly

Abstract

The distinction between “sincerity” and “authenticity,” made famous by the American critic Lionel Trilling in The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1969-1970, leads to the notion that it takes more than sincerity for the expression of feelings and emotions to carry conviction in writing treated as art. The aesthetic representation of feeling, it is argued, needs something other than sincerity (which may be defined as a concurrence between intention and execution, that is, between what is felt and what is articulated). The aim here is to test the hypothesis by looking at a specific body of poetic writing in order to establish whether it is possible to distinguish between the “sincere” and the “authentic” Lements in a poem. The premise for the investigation is not that “sincerity” and “authenticity” are mutually exclusive, but that the aesthetic success of a poem needs something other or more than the “sincere” expression of feelings: it needs for that articulation to come across – not just to the individual reader but to potential a consensus among readers – as “authentic.” Thus, the essay becomes an inquiry into the viability of a hypothesis which is to be tested with reference to a body of poetry written without any necessary awareness of or agreement with such a hypothesis. The recent poems of the Malaysia-born Bernice Chauly (b. 1968) are used to test the hypothesis.