The Authentic Experience

For class this week, we read the strange, wonderful mindfuck of a book: The Remainer by Tom McCarthy. It centers on a man who survived a near-fatal accident and has just received a multimillion dollar settlement from the company at fault. The guy uses the money to orchestrate massive recreations of events (real and imagined) in order to give himself a sense of being the master of the universe instead of just a mere puppet like most of us are. It was a first person narrative and having someone so unhinged as the guide in the world made it that much more surreal. There were many twists and turns before a shocking last act that you are left wondering if they even happened.

An assignment for class that we had parallel to this was thinking of three examples of objects/people/places/experiences whose authenticity is questionable or impossible to evaluate. I ended up choosing three that I wrangle with (in myself and with others a lot): New Yorker, American, and Black. All three are pretty verifiable in my case, paperwork/documents for the first two definitely and experiments can prove the third. The authenticity of all three are mostly defined socially though. Spending a summer abroad challenged my own perception of what they meant. In Europe, they think of black as African origin first where my identity is totally wrapped up in the American experience. Being an American from New York was a way I used to differentiate myself from other Americans who I thought were acting badly and to signal to Europeans that I was cosmopolitan. I ended up defining myself with those three categories by what I was not. I think most situations of declaring authenticity are that way too. It’s the “I know it when I see it” factor of finding it easier to define something by absence instead of tackling the harder task of saying why it is.