Introduction
p. 9-14
Texte intégral
1This collection of essays means to explore the interaction between autonomy and commitment in an attempt at revisiting and possibly, revising conventional literary history. Until recently, literary history has indeed tended to present twentieth-century British literature as either autonomous or committed. Such a position certainly needs qualification since in matters of autonomy and commitment one should beware of strong dichotomies. In trying to map out the literary output in the field of twentieth-century British literature, one is bound to see dominants emerging. If modernism is most often associated with autonomy, we should bear in mind that it also accommodated such categories as the “modernist novel of ideas”, of which Huxley might be the most notorious representative. Conversely, even though it is a commonplace of literary studies that the modernist aesthetics of autonomy was replaced by an anti-modernist swing of the pendulum towards commitment, in the works of Orwell, obviously, but also of the Angry Young Men, in the fields of fiction and drama, and of the poetry of the Movement, how should one account for the concomitant tendency towards experimentation that seized hold of a spate of British dramatists, poets and novelists in the sixties? For the anti-modernist predilection for realism has to be observed in relation to the contemporaneous espousal of a metafictional aesthetics which favoured some centripetal, narcissistic observation, as is well known and documented. But what about contemporary fiction?
2The essays published in this volume have been selected after two conferences which were held in 2007 and 2008 at the University of Montpellier III and addressed the topic of autonomy and commitment in a diachronic approach, first, in modernist, then, in contemporary British literature. The point of these conferences was to look closely at the fiction of twentieth-century British writers and see what it really tells us about autonomy and commitment. Can a work of art that foregrounds its metafictional qualities be necessarily regarded as autonomous? And conversely, does a novel that flaunts its political commitment inevitably relinquish all form of autonomy? In other words, are the terms autonomy and commitment mutually exclusive?
3And what does autonomy really mean? Does the etymological meaning of “respecting its own law” suggest it is synonymous with independence, aestheticism, formalism, experimentation, and devoid of all moral and political purpose? And can commitment be understood simply as a form of political involvement as “littérature engagée”, as defended by Jean-Paul Sartre, was? Is an autonomous novel a closed linguistic system or simply a self-contained entity possessing “internal harmony,” as E.M. Forster suggests?1 Is autonomy a refusal to be involved in world affairs or is it a critical position, a political one as Jacques Rancière, in the wake of Adorno and Bourdieu, suggests when he writes that la “pureté [de l’art] a à voir avec la politique”?2 Consequently the very possibility of autonomy has been discussed since the work of art is necessarily connected with its predecessors, as T. S. Eliot argued in his seminal essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”.3 Indeed, if such critics as the New Critics or the structuralists have defended the thesis of a self-sufficient work of art, the concomitant stress on intertextuality that came in the wake of T.S. Eliot and Bakhtin and characterized the works of some of them (Barthes’s demise of the author and correlative encomium on intertextuality, for instance) seem to point at the impossibility of autonomy through ceaseless reference to tradition. Other schools of criticism—cultural, feminist, Marxist, post-colonial studies, etc.—have later insisted on the unavoidable connection between literature and the socio-political context in which it is produced. Should we come to the conclusion that the so-called autonomy of the work of art is fundamentally deceptive and finally impossible? Is commitment intrinsically linked with literature and autonomy nothing but a form of respect for a certain class-determined ideology? Or should the two concepts be re-thought and re-defined individually and in relation to each other? If autonomy, both from the socio-historical context and the literary context or intertext, is unthinkable, does it mean that literature is necessarily synonymous with commitment, responsibility, accountability? Must literature be an instrument of warfare, expounding a message, defending a political point of view? Are such politically committed writings literary or “didactic”,4 as Woolf would have it, servile and simply cultivating a clear conscience?
4And wouldn’t there be other forms of commitment—aesthetic, religious, amorous or ethical—indirect ones that would be in keeping with the essential indirection of modernist writings? Even if the work of art is “separated from actual life by the absence of responsive action” and “moral responsibility”,5 as Roger Fry would have it, it can certainly communicate emotion, through its content, its style, its rhythm or musicality. And this may well be a form of commitment to the other, and first of all, the reader. Such forms of indirect, almost unconscious, commitment could well be exercises in the understanding of the world as well as tokens of the literary. Rather than being at odds with autonomy, they would be grounded in some sort of autonomy of the work of art and would open onto some form of universality, or alterity, which, rather than provocation and action, would privilege emotion, humour and pleasure, but also solidarity, all implying the readers’ involvement.
5In any case, asserting that literature must be defending a political point of view, as was the case in the political drama of the 1960s and 1970s, would be tantamount to evicting most of the production of the second half of the twentieth century from the province of the literary. In the post-WW2, post-Shoah, post-19/11 world, we may wonder whether autonomy from the means and context of production is still possible and whether commitment is not always already unavoidable. Going one step further, we may wonder whether asserting that the literature which grapples with the world of history and politics is the only committed form of literature, is not tantamount to assuming that the world can be read directly and that literature is necessarily mimetic, even if its aim is to denounce the world it copies, thus compromising any possibility of autonomy. More particularly still, in the wake of Benjamin and Adorno, it seems difficult to disentangle the two notions, since under their influence autonomy has come to be synonymous with independence of the means of production on which the culture industry thrives, and commitment with a way to denounce the manufacture of culture. Under the circumstances, any contemporary cultural and literary discourse would be the repository of a “political unconscious,” to take up one of Fredric Jameson’s most famous phrases, that would point at a necessary collaboration between autonomisation and commitment. In this respect, and in addition to the ethical turn that has swept over literary criticism and theory over the last two decades, perhaps the contemporary could be envisaged as the site of the return of some sort of old-fashioned, deontic type of ethics relying on the buttressing of moral norms and the revival of such apparently hackneyed forms as satire. If the production of Jeanette Winterson, of Peter Ackroyd favours an ethics of alterity based on a constant opening to the other, the works of Martin Amis, Will Self, of the later Salman Rushdie and the later Ian McEwan would seem to address problems in a more prescriptive way, commitment entertaining an ambivalent, blurred relationship with the two forms of autonomy evoked above.
6Initial definitions that pit the autonomous work of art as “den [ying] by its absolute claims [all] connection with reality”6 against the work of art that is committed as “strip [ping] the magic from a work of art” (Adorno 177) have therefore been relentlessly taken to task. The two terms autonomy and commitment have constantly been confronted with each other and combined in the different articles published here so as to measure the gap that divides them and delineate possible meeting-points between them. This work has been backed mainly by the writings of Adorno who argued in favour of a way out of this spurious alternative between autonomy and commitment, and by theories developed by such thinkers as Bakhtin, Benjamin, Jameson, Rancière or Attridge, whose names come back regularly in most papers and whose theories are presented and discussed by Jean-Jacques Lecercle.
7Far from being gratuitous, these reflections on autonomy and commitment, on experimentation and ideology, narcissism and metafiction, aestheticism and militancy, abstraction and ethical involvement have enabled the contributors to this volume to question and qualify the canonical definitions of modernism as experimental literature, the literature of the 1940s and 1950s as committed and post-modern fiction as self-reflexive and autonomous. Common to most presentations on modernist writings is the consideration that though belonging to a period that had established autonomy as the golden rule of artistic practice (or more exactly, an earlier school of critics who chose to extend the Symbolists’, the Parnassians’ or the Decadents’ affinities with autonomy into the early twentieth century, had established this rule), commitment was rarely to be dispensed with, always insinuating itself back into the texts with a vengeance. Addressing the dialectics of autonomy and commitment in modernist fiction has also been a way of highlighting the complexity of individual works of art, of questioning categorisation and clichés, while bringing to life the historical context in which fiction was written and the way it relates to that context, how it is shaped by it and how it tries to influence it. It has further revealed how critical movements have been instrumental in obscuring some aspects of literary works and reducing them to either pure autonomy or commitment. The interaction between autonomy and commitment broached here helps to right the balance and although in a modest way, since necessarily, only a sample of writers can be presented here, give a more dynamic vision of twentieth-century British literature. Questioning literary preconceptions also ends up in questioning the literary canon, its hierarchical distinctions and the way it has been constituted. That is why famous modernist writers like Joyce, Pound, Lawrence or Woolf appear side by side with far lesser known ones like Vernon Lee, Rosamond Lehmann, Mina Loy or Stevie Smith.
8As for contemporary fiction, it is hardly possible at present to discriminate between clear tendencies and categories since autonomous and committed narratives seem not only to co-exist, but most often to be indistinguishable. True enough, some novels by Jonathan Coe may appear to be fairly angry and might be classified into the category of satire, which implies a great deal of commitment, as Gulshan Taneja would claim, but the writings of many leading contemporary novelists, like Martin Amis or Will Self, or Jeanette Winterson, or Julian Barnes, or Ian McEwan— in other words, all those authors who have come to be associated with the canon of contemporary quality British fiction that we academics have been concerned with constituting and peddling—do seem to be of a composite nature as they do accommodate a centrifugal concern with the society in which they are produced while at the very same time retaining some muted metafictional, narcissistic inspiration that their predecessors of the 1960s had to fight for, and which seems to be taken for granted, without any fuss, in contemporary aesthetics.
9It is then fairly clear that autonomy and commitment have come to collaborate, and that they might be seen as two poles separated by a spectrum of possibilities, of collaborations and associations. Granted, there remains an original, essentially Adornian definition of autonomy that associates it on the one hand with such an aesthetic practice as that of art for art’s sake, and which makes it the opposite of that paradigm of fetishisation which kitsch is supposed to represent. And along similar lines, we may remember that commitment is defined (by Adorno again) in opposition to the absolute autonomy of art for art’s sake, and as compatible with the extreme forms of realism and propaganda. Yet, a committed work that wants to remain art has to beware of the extremes of propaganda, and an autonomous work that wants to be valued in the contemporary context has of course to be aware of the dangers of the culture industry while it is at the very same time dependent on the culture industry.
10Those are perhaps elements that should help us reconsider what is conceived as opposition and to formulate the relation between autonomy and commitment in terms of collaboration. In such a context, autonomy and commitment might well be said to occupy a central place on a spectrum of possibilities, far away from extremes, in the grey area of contemporary aesthetics.
Notes de bas de page
1 E. M. Forster, “Art for Art’s Sake”, Two Cheers for Democracy (1938; New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1979) 92.
2 Jacques Rancière, Politique de la littérature (Paris: Galilée, 2007) 11.
3 T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1999).
4 In “The Leaning Tower” (1940), Virginia Woolf laments “the pedagogic, the didactic, the loud-speaker strain that dominates [the 1930s] poetry” which “feel [s] compelled to preach... the creation of a society in which everyone is equal and everyone is free.” Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays II, ed. Leonard Woolf (1966; London: Hogarth P., 1972) 175.
5 Roger Fry, “An Essay in Aesthetics”, Vision and Design, ed. J. B. Bullen (1920; Oxford: O.U.P., 1990) 15.
6 Theodor Adorno, “Commitment”, Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Fredric Jameson (London: Verso, 1980) 178.
Auteurs
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Christine Reynier
Christine Reynier is Professor of English Literature at the University of Montpellier III. She founded the Société d’études woolfiennes in 1996 and chaired it until 2004. She has published extensively on Woolf as well as on other major modernist writers, edited books and journals on Woolf (Virginia Woolf. Le pur et l’impur, eds. C. Bernard & C. Reynier, P. U. Rennes, 2002; Insights into the Legacy of Bloomsbury. With Unpublished Essays and Memoirs by Roger Fry, V. Bell and V. Woolf, Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 62, octobre 2005; Journal of the Short Story in English, Special Issue on Woolf 50, July 2008), taken part in The British Companion to the Short Story project and published in the V. Woolf Miscellany. She is the editor, with J-M.Ganteau, of Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Literature (Publications Montpellier 3, 2005) and Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Arts (Publications Montpellier 3, 2007). She has also written a monograph on Jeanette Winterson, Le Miracle ordinaire (P.U. Bordeaux 2004). She has just completed a full-length study of Woolf’s short stories, Virginia Woolf’s Ethics of the Short Story (Palgrave Macmillan 2009).
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Jean-Michel Ganteau
Jean-Michel Ganteau is Professor of English Literature at the University Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3, France. He is the editor of the journal Études britanniques contemporaines. He is the author of two monographs: David Lodge: le choix de l’éloquence (Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2001) and Peter Ackroyd: la mélodie du passé (Michel Houdiard Editeur, 2008). He is also the editor, with Christine Reynier, of two volumes Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Literature (Publications Montpellier 3, 2005) and Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Arts (Publications Montpellier 3, 2007) and of a volume in collaboration with Susana Onega, The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960s (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007). He has edited special issues of various journals. He has published many articles on contemporary British fiction, with a special interest in the ethics of affects (as manifest in such aesthetic resurgences and concretions as the baroque, kitsch, camp, melodrama, romance).
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