In his essay entitled Against sincerity (Against sincerity, 1994), the North American poet Louise Glück—who won the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years ago and later died—delves into the difference between reality and truth in a poem, or in a work of art. Throughout the essay, the author addresses the issue from different perspectives: for example, the comparison between a sonnet by Keats and one by Milton is particularly interesting. Both authors deal with the same issue: the fear of dying, but while Keats, from a Romantic perspective, presents this fear as a personal matter, Milton, from his solitary and puritanical grandeur as a 17th-century man, sees the proximity of death as a matter that confronts his soul with God. For Keats, who is from the 19th century, the fear of death becomes true when he considers it in relation to his own being and to the love he feels for his beloved; for Milton, that same fear takes on truth in the transcendent realm, that is, outside of himself and outside of existence in this world.
Behind it all lies the same operation, which Glück describes as "the transformation of reality into truth." Reality is what we experience, but truth is what the poem, or the work of art, says. Therefore, the pretense of "sincerity" in the poem (or "honesty," or "integrity"), understood as a public confession of the author's intimate life, is an idea without much sense. It may seem morbid, but it has no relation to the value of the poem or the work of art, which, if anything, consists in bridging what Glück describes as "the abyss between truth and reality." It is to build a bridge, or a door. It is through formal elaboration, through artifice, that the poem transforms into truth what was previously only real. The Portuguese poet Pessoa expressed it more recently in those famous lines: "The poet is a pretender, / and he pretends so completely / that he also pretends that the pain he truly feels is pain."
For the poet, for the artist (the musician, the playwright, the actor), sincerity can be the enemy of truth, and reality is a set of facts waiting for their chance to become true by being formalized by the poem, the painting, the stage performance, etc. It goes without saying how close these interesting and sophisticated (and long-standing) disquisitions are to the simplest and most vulgar cynicism. The separation of reality from truth, and the idea of truth as a construction that must be made through discourse, apart from the reality on which it is based, is found in the politics of post-truth and alternative facts that in just a few years has devastated liberal democracies and turned political language into a mere artifice, as one might say of words. Perhaps contempt for sincerity (or honesty, or integrity) comes at a higher price than imagined or anticipated.
