The Real Thing Does Not Exist
Various things across the flist about realness and authenticity of identities, etc, intersected with various thoughts I had been having about as a result of reading High Table (mentioned in my recent book post).
When someone starts talking about Real [anything], I reach for my trusty codfish. Because once you start going down this road, what, if anything, is really really Real?
E.g. woman in a writing group I was in who asserted that I (and other group members) had not really had working class upbringings because we had had books in the house. Also the woman in another writing group who claimed that Real Working Class Women (or she may have said girls) wanted to read nice glamorous Mills and Boony stories and did not get irony or satire.
Literary example (doubtless based in her family experience) from the novel Children of No Man's Land (aka Debatable Ground) by my beloved G B Stern. One of the main characters is the son of that branch of a cosmopolitan and secularised Jewish family long settled in England. He does not feel like a 'rootless cosmopolitan', he feels deeply English. Unfortunately, this being 1914, his father (I think deceased before the novel begins) failed to get naturalised as a British citizen and the son is as yet underage for purposes of doing this himself. So he counts as 'really' German, an identity with which he completely does not identify. Problems ensue.
And what niggled me in High Table was the pervasive theme that being an academic was an escape from Real Life. And this reminded me of a brief passage in Pamela Hansford Johnson's Night and Silence, Who is Here (1963)(which was brought back to my mind some months ago by my sojourn in Urbana-Champaign, as it deals with a group of visiting scholars at a mid-western US university...). The main protag at one point considers the elderly female scholar of Old Slavonic Languages, and thinks that in spite of the stereotypes, she has had a good life doing what she wanted to do and if she's missed passionate love, maybe she didn't really want it anyway (this is just a little curious given that at one point she mentions the devoted female friend from whom she is currently separated, but hello, early 60s).
Which - and this may be a bit tangential - made me think of Sayers' Shrewsbury College in Gaudy Night, which is a defence of the life of the mind as well as of the female right to use their minds. Though a women's college was pretty much bound to have women who were serious dedicated scholars who had made a very deliberate choice against a lot of pressures, and doubtless contemporary men's colleges had their complement of Fellows who had once been promising and had never achieved anything except, maybe, ensuring that the college wine was of an excellent standard. Which may be unedifying, but is still not unreal. It's a life.
(I also - still more tangential - thought of Miss Lydgate, a name which for me evokes not just early English poetry but Middlemarch; and how her great work does get finished - because she is working within a community of supportive women who help her with her footnotes rather than as a solitary scholar.)
Anyway, realness - it's not real, and its invocation is nearly always smoke and mirrors.
(Though admittedly, I do reserve the right, occasionally, to deem someone Not A Real Historian, because what is life and opinion without contradiction?)