1 Authenticity, Dante and True Love in Samuel Beckett’s How It Is Russell Smith On strawberries The word “authentic” is seemingly doomed to failure. At best it’s no more than a tautology, stating that a thing is what it is: a rose is a rose is a true, genuine, authentic rose. At worst, however, like the salesman’s “Trust me”, the word “authentic” can do nothing less than raise suspicion. The OED defines “authenticity” as “the quality of being authentic, or entitled to acceptance” and gives four senses in which it can be used: authoritative or duly authorized; as true, factual, in accordance with fact; as genuine, or as being what it professes to be in origin or authorship; not fake or counterfeit; and as actual, really existing, not imagined or fictional. 1 Authoritative, true, genuine and actual: I will return to this quartet of assurances later. But for me, the notion of authenticity has always had a somewhat dubious flavour, like the label I once saw on a tub of yoghurt: “NOW WITH REAL STRAWBERRIES”. The word “real” here goes a shade too far, drawing attention to the fact that previous versions of the product — marketed, distributed, sold and consumed, and, who knows, enjoyed under the name “strawberry yoghurt” — did not, in fact, contain strawberries. So authenticity is a word corrupted by the dirty work it has to do; and if suspicion, as in Othello, has a slight aroma of strawberries, 2 it is because the notion of authenticity must constantly get its hands dirty separating the genuine, high-yielding, disease-resistant, genetically-modified strawberry from the seductive claims of benzyl acetate, ethyl butyrate, ethyl hexanoate, ethyl formate, isobutyl acetate and methyl cinnamate, to name but a few of the many compounds that make up the genuine, licensed, patented and authenticated, chemically-engineered strawberry aroma and mouthfeel.