Pretentiousness: Why it Matters

¶ Start with the basics. (Presumably the least pretentious place to begin.) The Latin prae — ‘before’ — and tendere, meaning ‘to stretch’ or ‘extend’, give us the word ‘pretentious’. Think of it as holding something in front of you, like actors wearing masks in the ancient Greek theatre.

Or imagine yourself on a medieval battlefield, carrying a shield. In heraldry, the term ‘escutcheon of pretence’ describes the coat of arms of an heraldic heiress, incorporated into her husband’s own arms on the death of her father. In the absence of other male inheritors, the heiress’s husband would ‘pretend’ to represent the family. A shield was needed to protect your body in combat — held in front of you, prae tendere, like the actor’s mask hides the face — but it also carried a design that boasted of your power and political authority. Your pretence was your protection, and could also make you into a target. (Since the fourteenth century, the Russian army has used a strategy of deception they call maskirovka — ‘something masked’ — to hide, deny, or divert attention away from real military manoeuvres.)

In politics the claimant to a throne or similar rank was known as a ‘pretender’. Upheavals in England, Scotland and Ireland brought about by the ‘Glorious Revolution’ in 1688, for example, saw the overthrow of the last Stuart king, the Catholic James II, by the Protestants William and Mary. Two ‘pretenders’ aiming to restore the Jacobite monarchy subsequently made claims to the English crown. (The most famous of these was the ‘Young Pretender’, Charles Edward Stuart, also nicknamed Bonnie Prince Charlie.) To be called a ‘pretender’ was not necessarily an insult; the issue was the legitimacy of the claim you held before you, prae tendere. Authority was recognized on the basis of your political allegiance and religious belief, not questions of truth or falsity. This pretence was not an act. It was a matter of blood and God.

Go back to the actor and the mask. In classical Greek theatre the word hypokrités — from which we get ‘hypocrisy’ — was the standard term for actors, deriving from the words hypó (‘under’) and krisis (‘decide’, ‘distinguish’ or ‘judge’). It was a way of describing a dissembler, the faces of the mask and the actor beneath it. When St Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans, wrote ‘Let love be not hypocritical’, he used the word in this Greek sense, meaning ‘actor’. Paul meant that love should not hide itself behind a mask representing love, or use words signalling it insincerely.

‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person,’ said Oscar Wilde. ‘Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.’ Well, maybe. It depends on the time and place. Theatre, cinema and broadcasting provide the professional licence to wear one. We derive pleasure from the deceits of the stage illusionist, whose acts of fakery we pay money to watch. (Magician James ‘The Amazing’ Randi describes himself as ‘an honest liar’.) In carnival and ritual too, the mask is socially sanctioned. Outside these fields the actor’s mask is suspect. So we smear it with the brush of immaturity, dismissing it as ‘pretending’.

Pretending is what kids do to figure out the world. Children do not put on airs. A child might be precocious — from the Latin prae, meaning ‘before’, and coquere, ‘to cook’, that is, pre-cooked or ripened early — but it’s rare that a child is called pretentious. That insult is reserved for their pushy parents; pretending is what’s done at the kids’ table, pretension goes on over the wine and cheese course with the grown-ups. Pretending reminds adults of childish things long put away; of imaginary friends, of the companionship found in favourite teddy bears and dolls, in toys we imagined to have distinct personalities, and the stories we swaddled them in. To pretend is to live in denial of ‘real’, grown-up problems. It’s child’s play.

And a play is also what professional actors are employed to make onstage in theatres. ‘Acting is a reflex, a mechanism for development and survival,’ writes theatre director Declan Donnellan in The Actor and the Target. ‘It is not “second nature”, it is “first nature” and so cannot be taught like chemistry or scuba diving.’ Acting is a tool of every social interaction we have from birth. ‘Peek-a-boo,’ says Donnellan, is the first play a baby enjoys, when its mother acts out appearing and disappearing behind a pillow.

“Now you see me; now you don’t!” The baby gurgles away, learning that this most painful event, separation from the mother, might be prepared for and dealt with comically, theatrically. The baby learns to laugh at an appalling separation, because it isn’t real. Mummy reappears and laughs — this time, at least. After a while the child will learn to be the performer, with the parent as audience, playing peek-a-boo behind the sofa … Eating, walking, talking, all are developed by observation, performance and applause. We develop our sense of self by practising roles we see our parents play and expand our identities further by copying characters we see played by elder brothers, sisters, friends, rivals, teachers, enemies or heroes.

‘Born Originals, how comes it to pass that we die Copies?’ asked Edward Young in his Conjectures on Original Composition. Young would argue that mimicry blots out individuality. But mimicry is a mechanism by which we become socialized, by which we make ourselves human. It doesn’t take a sociology Ph.D. to recognize that we pretend every day. Pretend to be absorbed in a book to avoid catching the eye of a stranger on the bus. Pretend to be pleased to see your boss when you arrive at the office. Putting on a suit allows you to pretend you’re efficient or powerful when you would rather be in your pyjamas in front of the TV. Wear jeans and a T-shirt to the office to pretend to your co-workers you are laid-back when your personality tends towards the uptight. It’s hard to admit to pretending because in Western society no one likes a faker. Great store is placed on ‘keeping it real’. We tell those with unrealistic expectations to ‘get real’, ‘face reality’ or ‘wake up and smell the coffee’, as if the rest of their activities were a dream.

Yet we value dreams. ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on,’ wrote William Shakespeare. Four hundred years later his line from The Tempest would be printed on motivational posters, accompanying a soaring eagle or spectacular sunrise. ‘Keep hold of your dreams,’ we advise. ‘What’s your dream job?’ ‘Who is the man/woman of your dreams?’ The contradictory impulses to both dream and face the truth find uneasy reconciliation in the language of the workplace. ‘Act like you mean it.’ We refer to ‘acting on behalf of’ a person or organization, or ‘playing a part’ in a project. Your boss assesses you on your ‘performance’ in the job, a ‘role’ that might be rewarded with ‘performance-related pay’. ‘Dress for success,’ say the careers gurus. ‘Dress for the job you want, not the one you have.’ ‘Look smart.’ The cover headline of the January-February 2015 edition of the Harvard Business Review reads: ‘The Problem with Authenticity: When it’s OK to fake it till you make it’. The article explains ‘Why companies are pushing authenticity training’ and advises its readership that ‘by trying out different leadership styles and behaviours, we grow more than we would through introspection alone. Experimenting with our identities allows us to find the right approach for ourselves and our organization.’

Play, according to psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, allows a child to see, risk-free, what happens when their internal world engages with the external one. Yet by the time you reach an age at which you can legally drink, vote, drive, consent to sex, or get married, it’s presumed you know where to draw the line between fact and fantasy, where innocent play congeals into pretension. And nobody wants to be accused of that. In his 1996 diary, published as A Year with Swollen Appendices, musician Brian Eno describes how he

decided to turn the word “pretentious” into a compliment. The common assumption is that there are “real” people and there are others who are pretending to be something they’re not. There is also an assumption that there’s something morally wrong with pretending. My assumptions about culture as a place where you can take psychological risks without incurring physical penalties make me think that pretending is the most important thing we do. It’s the way we make our thought experiments, find out what it would be like to be otherwise.

If ‘pretending is the most important thing we do’ then what bred such discomfort with it?