Autonomy Versus Commitment: Eliot, Adorno, Bakhtin and Foreign Words
p. 15-29
Résumé
The paper reconsiders Adorno’s famous pronouncement that it is impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz, in the light of the contrast between autonomy and commitment. That the contrast is in fact a dialectical spiral is demonstrated using the example of foreign words. Their role is analysed in modernist poetry, through an analysis of a passage in The Waste Land and of a famous parody of the poem. Another point of view on autonomy and commitment is taken, using Bakhtin’s concepts of speech-tact and social evaluation.
Texte intégral
1 Literature after Auschwitz
1In the call for papers for this conference, Adorno’s celebrated statement that after Auschwitz poetry is impossible was mentioned as introducing a ‘limit to commitment’. The word ‘limit’ is of course to be taken in both its senses: in its weak sense, as limitation (there are parts of literature that commitment cannot or must not touch: hence the claim for the ‘autonomy’ of literature, for which Adorno is now famous), but also in its strong sense, as frontier (after the Shoah, a frontier having been crossed or breached, literature is no longer possible). Adorno’s pronouncement has become a cliché in its strong sense. But is it really the sense in which Adorno meant it? And since, in the strong sense of ‘limit’, the phrase is obviously untrue, is not the other meaning more useful? A return to Adorno’s text is in order.
2The provocative statement that poetry was impossible after Auschwitz and that post-war German culture was a mass of rubbish was made in the early fifties (Müller-Doohm 412). But the rest of Adorno’s writings on literature is an attempt to qualify the provocation, till the final verdict, in Negative Dialectics: ‘Everlasting pain has as much right to expression as the victim of torture has to scream. It might well have been a mistake to state that after Auschwitz it is no longer possible to write poems’ (Müller-Doohm 414). One of the reasons for this change of heart is the polemics that the statement provoked, together with Adorno’s dialogue with Enzensberger; another is Adorno’s admiration for the work of Paul Celan, the importance of which he fully apprehended: he corresponded with Celan, who in turn was notably influenced by Adorno’s aesthetic theories.
3One of the most interesting formulations of the famous statement is to be found in the Notes on literature, where a radio talk on the subject of ‘commitment,’ dating from 1961 and largely devoted to Sartre is reprinted: ‘I have no wish to tone down the statement that only barbarians could still wish to write poetry after Auschwitz; it negatively expresses the impulse behind the literature of commitment’ (Adorno 1984, 298). The term he uses is of considerable interest: ‘barbarians’ were those who could not speak Greek, and therefore could hardly be said to speak at all. In the field of art, the term is an intensifier for the milder ‘philistines’. But surely, if barbarians, in the widest sense of the term, there were, and history has taught us that there were, the barbarians must have been the perpetrators of the Shoah, not the poets that came after. And yet the paradox is that the butchers of Auschwitz were not all primitive and sadistic brutes, but often highly cultivated alumni of one of the best university systems in the world: after their daily dose of massacre, they went home to listen to the music of Schubert and read the poetry of Goethe. The paradox for us is that the greatest crimes against humanity were not committed by a nation of barbarians, uncivilised and inarticulate, but by a nation of high culture, who conceived and massively condoned crimes the scale of which introduced a break in the continuum of history—a nation who, through the voice of Heidegger, claimed to be the spiritual descendents of classical Greece. So we fully understand Adorno’s apparent misnomer: for who would dare, especially in Germany (of which Adorno was speaking) to write poetry after Auschwitz, thus acting as if the break in history had not occurred, as if the usual occupations of before the Shoah, for instance the writing of poetry, could go on as if nothing had happened. They would in so doing share the same kind of responsibility as the average German who failed to realize or pretended not to know what he should have known and more often than not did know.
4But Adorno, a notoriously subtle dialectician, goes one step further— this is the part of the argument the cliché usually ignores: poetry, which is impossible after Auschwitz, can, must and does go on. Ceasing to write after Auschwitz would be an elementary form of commitment to the situation, the worst possible form, letting the historical conjuncture directly influence the work of art, to the point of its disappearance, thereby turning art into committed heteronomy. But art, for Adorno, is autonomous, and the opposition between autonomy and commitment informs all his work on aesthetics. This is why he immediately adds, on the same page: ‘Enzensberger’s answer is nevertheless right: literature must be able to face this verdict, and behave as if the very fact of coming after Auschwitz did not condemn it to a form of cynicism’ (Adorno 1984, 298). Here we can see the dialectics at work, with its usual moment of reversal: the verdict has been stated (‘it impossible to write poetry in the present conjuncture’), yet the accused must not feel guilty or accept the sentence. This purely negative moment is soon relieved into a positive one: ‘Such suffering, or, as Hegel says, such consciousness of utter misery, while it precludes the continuing existence of art, at the same time demands the continuation of its existence; this is the condition for art to find its own voice, to provide a consolation that will not immediately turn into betrayal’ (Adorno 1984, 298).
5No wonder the subsequent mentions of Auschwitz in Adorno’s work were all retreats from what had become a journalistic cliché, up to the point when he finally stated in Negative Dialectics that the initial statement may have been a mistake. The following is typical: ‘While the situation no longer admits the existence of art—this is what the statement on the impossibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz aimed at—yet it needs a form of art that would be its own.’ (Adorno 2002, 1974). It appears that art (poetry being here generalised into art) is impossible and for that very reason necessary; it is committed to the conjuncture, which makes it impossible, and yet autonomous, hence its necessity in spite of the impossibility imposed by the situation, and as such it is committed in its autonomy, as its very autonomy is a response to the needs of the situation. Such autonomous commitment or committed autonomy can be said to be characteristic of Adorno. The remainder of this paper will explore this paradox, or rather, since we are dealing with the greatest dialectician since Hegel, with this dialectical spiral.
2 Autonomy versus commitment
6At first glance, the contrast is not between equal terms: there is a distinct lack of balance. Although commitment is strongly disapproved of, it is of greater concern in Adorno’s work than autonomy, the definition of which is either traditional and etymological, purely negative, or canonical. The traditional definition states that autonomous art creates its own norms, even as the moral subject in Kant is autonomous in so far as she imposes upon herself her own norms, which are also universal ones. The negative definition simply states that autonomous art is non-committed, and therefore defined by its antonym. The canonical definition defines autonomous art by giving a list of great works, which happen to be the canon of high modernism: Schönberg but not jazz, Beckett rather than Charlie Chaplin, Thomas Mann à la rigueur (he was a personal friend of Adorno during their American exile).
7Let us explore the opposition. Autonomous art has two opposites: the commodified art of the culture industry, which hardly deserves the name of art; and politically committed art, from Sartre (who is plainly damned) to Brecht (who is damned through sometimes enthusiastic praise)—in both those cases, I am referring to the already mentioned essay on commitment. But of course the most noxious type of committed art is realism, with special mention to the socialist realism of the Soviet Union, not only its now forgotten novels but their critical champion, the Lukacs of the essays on realism and the historical novel.
8In the case of the first enemy, commodified ‘art’, the dialectic finds it starting point in the analysis of stereotypes:
Since stereotypes are an indispensable element of the organization and anticipation of experience, preventing us from falling into mental disorganization and chaos, no art can entirely dispense with them. Again, the functional change is what concerns us. The more stereotypes become reified and rigid in the present set-up of cultural industry, the more people are tempted to cling desperately to clichés which seem to bring some order into the otherwise ununderstandable. Thus, people may not only lose true insight into reality, but ultimately their very capacity for life experience may be dulled by the constant wearing of blue and pink spectacles. (Adorno 1991, 171)
9The quotation comes from an essay on psychoanalysis and fascist propaganda, a constant preoccupation with Adorno, never more so than during his exile in the United States. And all the relevant words are present, thus providing an a contrario definition of autonomous art: ‘reified’ (autonomous art de-reifies), ‘order’ (autonomous art tends to subvert it), the flight from the ununderstandable, which autonomous art does not shun, the loss of true insight into reality (autonomous art aims at the truth), the dulling of life experience through the blue and pink spectacles of divertissement (whereas autonomous art is fully aware of the cruelty of the Real).
10The other enemy, realism, will present the same a contrario characteristics. First, in spite of appearances, it is not so different from the divertissement of the culture industry:
Literary realism, whatever its origin, whether it is called critical or socialist, is much more hostile to anything strange and disquieting than works of art that, without conforming to political slogans, subvert the system of rigid coordinates of subjects addicted to authority, who cling to such a system all the more strongly as they are incapable of having life experiences that have not been approved of in advance. (Adorno 1984, 288)
11So realism is authoritarian in essence, it conforms to the existing order, it re-familiarises reality. In other words, if not downright fascist, realist art is reactionary: ‘The reactionary nature of any realist aesthetic today is inseparable from this commodity character. Tending to reinforce, affirmatively, the phenomenal surface of society, realism dismisses any attempt to penetrate that surface as a romantic endeavour’ (Adorno 1991, 182). The unfairness of such judgement is blatant, as is blatant the unfairness of Adorno’s pronouncements on jazz and the cinema. More interestingly, perhaps, what Adorno reproaches realist art and the culture industry with is their moralising tendency: ‘Literature that claims to be of service to mankind, as both supporters of committed literature and moralistic philistines want it to be, betrays mankind: the only way literature can help mankind is by affecting not to help’ (Adorno 1984, 304). Hence the necessity of defending autonomous art against committed art, which has appropriated the noblest values but makes rotten use of them.
12An a contrario picture of autonomous art has emerged from Adorno’s polemics. Autonomous art refuses to appeal to Man with capital M, it is free of moralising tendencies and divertissement, it is subversive, distancing and de-reifying. As such, it reaches further into reality than superficial realism, and therefore has a right to aim at truth. However, the main characteristic of autonomous art, its auto-nomy, has not been explained yet. This Adorno does by comparing the work of art to the Leibnizian monad, a classic instance of autonomy in that it has neither doors nor windows (as we know, it has been engineered by God, through pre-established harmony, to reflect the whole of the universe in its folds). We must of course be aware of the limits of the comparison: Adorno is attempting to solve the classic paradox of the work of art that is particular, to the point of individuality, and yet has universal value. So that autonomous art is so called because its structure is homologous to the structure of the universe—this is why literature thinks, not in concepts but in percepts and affects, as Deleuze would say: they reach the same universal truth as the concepts, and they have no need of them, especially if the concepts are debased in the shape of ideology (for instance commitment to mankind or to a political creed: Sartre as much as Lukacs).
13But this a contrario definition of autonomous art makes the contrast too sharp. It doesn’t take the work of the dialectic sufficiently into account. It produces an illusory sense of self-satisfaction in the supporter of high-brow art who feels entitled to despise the culture industry. So the dialectic is back with a vengeance:
This does not mean that we naively take for granted the dichotomy between autonomous art and mass media. [...] In fact, the present division of art into autonomous and commercial aspects is itself largely a function of commercialisation. It was hardly accidental that the slogan l’art pour l’art was coined polemically in the Paris of the first half of the nineteenth century, when literature really became a large-scale business for the first time. (Adorno 1991, 159)
14It appears that autonomous art itself, in its paroxystic version of l’art pour l’art, is a product of the development of capitalism, that is of a process of generalised commodification. Even the truth reached by autonomous art is a reflection of bourgeois society: ‘Aesthetic truth was bound to the expression of the untruth of bourgeois society. Art really only exists as long as it is impossible by virtue of the order which it transcends. That is why the existence of all great forms of art is paradoxical, and more than all others that of the novel, the bourgeois art form par excellence’ (Adorno 1991, 77). We are back with the paradox of the impossibility and necessity of art, which is in fact the dialectics of autonomy and commitment. No wonder the essay on commitment ends on a Benjaminian note (already perceptible in the use of the concept of the monad), by evoking Klee’s Angelus Novus, the sketch that is the source of Benjamin’s Angel of History, caught in a storm and flying backwards towards the uncertain future that the ideology of progress claims to know. The sketch is inspired, says Adorno, by the caricatures of the German emperor that Klee drew during the war, but it is no longer ‘committed’, no longer a reflection, even indirect, of the historical conjuncture: the angel hovers over both caricature and commitment, and its enigmatic eyes compel the spectator to wonder whether it announces the final catastrophe or seeks to avoid it. And Adorno concludes: ‘according to Walter Benjamin, who owned the sketch, the angel does not give, it captures’ (Adorno 1984, 306).
3 Foreign words
15Let us take stock of our position. Art is both impossible and necessary, before or after Auschwitz. Autonomous art is both the inverse of committed art (in both its versions of commodified art and politically committed art) and irredeemably entwined with it. There is no autonomy without a form of insertion in the historical conjuncture (which is the degré zéro of commitment), and there is no committed art, if, as with Brecht, it still has a right to call itself art, which is not to some degree autonomous. Our task is to give a clearer idea of the degree of overlapping that the dialectic involves.
16In order to do this, and to render the dialectic slightly less abstract, I shall envisage a concrete example of such overlapping: the presence of foreign words in the literary work of art. The question of foreign words, to which Adorno devoted two essays in the second volume of his notes on literature (Adorno 2004), is a fact, or a problem, of daily life. We remember the franglais polemics, and the pitiful attempt of a now forgotten minister of culture to banish English words from administrative language through a piece of legislation. Adorno would have remembered similar attempts by Mussolini and Hitler—the foreign words to be eradicated through a legislative and ideological campaign being English and French—the words of the old empires but also the words of the old democracies. No wonder that in one of the aphorisms that conclude the first part of Minima Moralia, Adorno should bluntly state that ‘foreign words are the Jews of language’ (Adorno 1980, 106): the eradication of foreign words is a symbolic prefiguration of the destruction of the European Jews.
17What can the aphorism mean, and in what way does it illustrate the dialectic of autonomy and commitment? Being alien, foreign words threaten a natural language (which is also a national language) with a hybridity that can be conceived as a metaphor of the feared racial hybridity: they insidiously introduce the values of an alien culture and mode of thought (which means they subject it to a form of brainwashing), they impair the moral fibre of the nation even as mixed marriages taint the purity of the race. That is the rationale for their exclusion from common language. But what about their presence in literature, where hybridity is not such a threat (call it influence, tradition, intertext, the task of the Benjaminian translator, or what you will)? It is the object of one of Adorno’s essays, entitled ‘Foreign Words’ (Adorno 2004, 58-76), to explain this. By forcing the meandering text of the arch-dialectician (who is never where the reader expects him to be), I have extracted a number of theses.
18Thesis 1: foreign words are traces of the process of thought. So that the foreign ‘tone’ of the text is due as much to its syntax as to its words: the function of foreign words is to ‘swim against the current of stereotypical language’ (59), thereby enabling thought processes to emerge. Foreign words, therefore, de-familiarise language and let thought work.
19Thesis 2: foreign words are sites of resistance to nationalism, for instance the wave of nationalism during the First World War. Conversely, they are the vectors of erotic affect. They represent the ‘exogamy’ of language: they enable us to leave the doxa and express ourselves outside les bons sentiments that ordinary language carries with it. If you pardon me the coinage, foreign words operate a ‘de-doxisation’ of language.
20Thesis 3: foreign words make us realize that language is not an organic whole, not a natural being but a historical and cultural product, the site of ideological struggles. Here again, foreign words de-familiarise language by de-naturalising it.
21Thesis 4: because they are excluded from the language in which they appear, foreign words work for truth. They counter the tendency to reification, to the separation between words and things inherent in language. They combat the illusion that what is said is also, without mediation, what is thought. In other words, foreign words, de-reify language.
22Thesis 5: in each foreign word ‘the explosive contents of the Enlightenment’ are hidden (64-5). This means that foreign words force us to understand that a text is the product of a tradition, an intertext, a dialogic chain, and that such intertext is anchored in the historical period of the Enlightenment, which was both rationalist and irrationalist. Hence the function of foreign words is one of disenchantment and of protection against irrationality.
23Thesis 6: the positive converse of thesis 5 is that foreign words are points of utopia in the language that welcomes them. By pointing out the mediations of past history (there is no immediate relationship between word and thought, but a mediated path through tradition and intertext) they open up the future of the language, they let it have a future because they force it to have a past.
24I think we can draw three conclusions from these theses. The first is that the function of the foreign word is subversive in an entirely positive sense: it de-familiarises, de-nationalises, de-reifies and dis-enchants the language in which it appears. The second is that such critical and subversive function has its positive aspect: it opens up language to the construction of thought, it opens up language to its future by forcing it to go back to its past (we remember Benjamin’s Angel of History, who flies backwards towards the future). The third conclusion is that, in so doing, the foreign word embodies the dialectics of autonomy (the series of ‘de-’ words cuts off the literary text, which welcomes foreign words, from the current situation as reflected in the doxa, it forces it to look both forward and backward in time) and commitment (the foreign word commits the text to a form of historical consciousness, and to a form of political consciousness, as clearly appears in thesis 2, where ordinary language is de-nationalised). In other words, foreign words show that there is no ostranenie (the famous de-familiarisation of Russian formalists, given as the principle of construction of the work of art in its autonomy) without a cosmopolitan intertext (which shows that the very process of ostranenie inserts the work of art in a historical and political tradition). We understand the philosophical and political weight Benjamin places on the process of translation in his famous essay on the task of the translator.
25The time has come to see whether the use of foreign words in modernist texts corresponds to this double process of autonomy and commitment.
4 Foreign words in modernism: the case of Eliot
26There is no need to justify the importance of the use of foreign words in modernist texts: the first page of Finnegans Wake, the poetry of Ezra Pound and The Waste Land immediately come to mind when the subject is broached. A typical account of their presence in modernist texts is to be found in Eugene Lunn’s analysis of modernism in his Marxism and Modernism: among the four characteristics of modernism he distinguishes, we find one entitled ‘Simultaneity, Juxtaposition and Montage’ (the other three are aesthetic self-consciousness and self-reflexiveness; paradox, ambiguity and uncertainty; and the demise of the integrated individual subject). This is what he has to say about montage: ‘ [Modern art] is intended to exist within an open-ended and continuous present in which various experiences, past and present, inner and outer, of different persons are juxtaposed, their distances eclipsed as though on a flat surface’ (Lunn 35). The flat surface of the text does not concern only consciousness, memory, dream or point of view, but also language, in that various languages, words of different origins are juxtaposed in a form of Babelism—not the chaotic sort, however, the construction of the work of art being the telos of such juxtaposition.
27So here is the famous last section of ‘The Burial of the Dead’:
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many,
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ’Stetson!
’You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
’That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
’Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year,
’Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed,
’O keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
’Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
‘You! Hypocrite lecteur! —mon semblable, —mon frère!’ (Eliot 65)
28As we know, the first section of The Waste Land is full of foreign voices, in foreign words (‘Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch’ (Eliot 63): such claim to German purity is meant to sound ironically in that quintessentially English modernist poem). The passage I have quoted is full of allusions, local or foreign, to Dante, Baudelaire and Webster, to Orion and Osiris, as the notes make it clear. And it ends on that famous quotation, en français dans le texte.
29On the face of it, we have a fine instance of the autonomy of the work of art, in the form of a play, a kind of parodie sérieuse, on the European literary tradition, which is convoked, taken lightly and celebrated at the same time. This might be a definition of autonomous literature: not only does the work of art give itself its own norms (the originality of The Waste Land, its epochal emergence, is witness to that), but when it must refer to something other than itself, it does it without doors or windows, like a monad, in that it contains in its folds the whole of the tradition it inherits and develops. The foreign words are traces of that alterity—always already present in the monad as its internal other.
30Yet, there is another way of reading this passage, with its foreign words. In his superb history of the writing of the Great War in letters, diaries, poems and novels, Paul Fussell (Fussell) notes the revolution in language that the trauma of the war provoked. He contrasts the euphemistic stereotypes of the first inscriptions of the experience of the war, when the enemy had to be a ‘dastardly foe’ and a horse could not be anything but a ‘steed’, with the stark realism imposed by the sheer horror of trench warfare, when the veil of cliché and euphemism was torn by the brute oppression of history, when rotting corpses and eyeless sockets were at last called what they actually were, rotting corpses, gangrenous wounds and eyeless sockets. In the field of poetry this revolution takes the form of the passage from the patriotic songs of the early days of the war (the highest literary expression of which is to be found in Rupert Brooke) to the angry poems of Owen and Sassoon, with a culmination perhaps in poems like Isaac Rosenberg’s Dead Man’s Dump, where the artillery tender, like a juggernaut, crushes the bones of the rotting corpses that make up the road up to the front line, and no horror is spared the reader, no pain remains untold. My reading of the passage from The Waste Land, which obviously, if indirectly, refers to the war and its massacres is that it inscribes, indirectly also, this revolution in language, whether ordinary or poetic, and that the foreign words, together with the deliberate anachronisms (‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae’ refers to the Punic wars) and the innumerable literary and mythical allusions are the vectors of such inscription. The war experience was a European and world experience, expressed in a Babel of tongues (in Barbusse’s Le Feu and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front as much as in Death of a Hero or Parade’s End). A national poetic language, with its stilted diction, is no longer possible. And this impossible autochtony of the poem is also a limitation to its autonomy: it marks an inevitable commitment to the experience of history and to the experience, produced in determinate historical circumstances, of a revolution in language. Let us examine this indirect form of commitment.
5 Another view of foreign words: Bakhtin as a critic of the formalists
31It is now clear that autonomy and commitment in the work of art are inseparable, even if, in the case of literature, this commitment is not to a political creed or to direct social action but to language, in so far as language cannot be conceived solely as grammatical system, but must be treated as a form of social praxis. Thus, two conceptions of language, one admittedly ‘scientific’, the other ‘mystical’ (in the case of the philosophy of language of Walter Benjamin) or political (in the case of Marxist views of language like my own) are strongly contrasted. I shall briefly evoke this political concept of language through Bakthin’s critique of the formalists—who are known to have supported the other concept of language.
32In 1928, P.N. Medvedev, a prominent member of the Bakhtin circle, published his critique of formalism, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (Bakhtin). It has been suggested that the real, or at least the main author, was Bakhtin, and the book has been reprinted under their joint names. Recent scholarship suggests Medvedev, like Voloshinov, was far more than a prête-nom, but I shall not go into that discussion here. Medvedev’s critique bears on the concepts for which the formalists became famous, concepts that formulate a view of art as autonomous: the sharp distinction between ordinary and poetic language, the defamiliarisation or ostranenie of the work of art and its ‘transrational’ language (the transrational word ‘coincides with itself’—it is an organised material body that is not directed towards a referent in the external world). However, what is more interesting than this critique is the attempt to construct a concept of literature through a form of pragmatics. The main critique, of course, concerns the fetishisation of certain aspects of language, called ‘poetic’, and the necessary adoption of the principle of totality (language is not cut off from the world and its ideological representations). I shall look at two aspects of this total view of language.
33The first is what Medvedev calls ‘speech-tact’. What the formalists describe as characteristics of poetic language (‘brakings, evasions, ambiguities, crooked speech paths’—[Bakhtin 95]) can be ascribed to the operation of speech-tact, which goes far beyond mere politeness, and by which the speaker constantly adapts herself to the speech situation, by choosing the genre of her discourse and reacting to the inflexions of her interlocutor’s speech. Speech-tact is, in the last instance, determined by the ‘aggregate of all the social relationships of the speaker, their ideological horizon, and, finally, the concrete situation of the conversation’ (Bakhtin 95). It is my contention, and I shall show it briefly through an illustration, that the use of foreign words is part of the operation of speech-tact, that, by introducing alterity in the text, such foreign words extend the scope of the literary exchange, evoke the totality of the ideological situation as a situation of struggle. But first, let us look at the second aspect.
34The second aspect is social evaluation, which for Medvedev ‘unites the material presence of the word with its meaning’ (Bakhtin 118). It starts with the contrast between signification, or utterance meaning, the meaning given in the dictionary and the system of langue and sense, which for Medvedev is not the utterer’s meaning but the meaning constructed in the concrete act of interlocution. For Medvedev, such ‘sense’ is the result of social evaluation: the utterance is a historical event, determined by the ideological intercourse in the concrete conjuncture. So that the utterance, be it an everyday speech-act or a literary text, can never be entirely autonomous. It is not committed in that it is a direct reflection of the extra-linguistic situation (of the class-struggle, of the political commitment of the speaker) but in that it derives its sense from the ongoing social evaluation, from the ongoing dialogue and ideological exchange, even in apparently monological texts like poems. This is what I mean by the dialectics of autonomy (the text does not reflect the external reality, it refracts it—a concept famously introduced by Bakhtin) and commitment (the text is the site of ideological struggle—call it dialogism if you like— and social evaluation).
6 Illustration of the commitment to language: Myra Buttle
35The Waste Land is eminently susceptible to parody, and has often been parodied. Here are the opening lines of one of the best parodies, Chard Whitlow, by Henry Reed: ‘As we get older we do not get any younger./ Seasons return, and today I am fifty five./ And this time last year I was fifty four./ And this time next year I shall be sixty two’ (Macdonald 218). Reed has beautifully captured Eliot’s characteristic diction, syntax and rhythm, their colloquialism and sense of exaggeration. But the parody I want to examine is Sweeney in articulo (Macdonald 219-22), by one ‘Myra Buttle’, a pseudonym for Victor Purcell, a don in Trinity College, Cambridge. And again (see appendix) we note the unmistakable tone: here colloquialism is combined with systematic enjambment.
36What interests me in this extract, however, is the exaggerated presence of foreign words, a mixture of the poetic and the colloquial (‘Das Herz ist gestorben, swell dame, echt Bronx’). The general trend of the parody is clear: what we have is the delirium of an alcoholic addict, who talks about nothing but drink, so that the prophetic voice of the poet turns out to be the voice of a ‘pious sot’, and it all ends in a public toilet, as the last line shows.
37Foreign words are massively present in the last stanza, and their foreignness is graphic in both senses of the term: Chinese and Egyptian characters, hand signs and Morse signals, the whole gamut of graphic foreignness follows a quotation from the Catholic mass and a piece of gibberish attributed to one St Mumbo Jumbo. The question is: what is it exactly that this exaggeration parodies. We can answer with the help of Medvedev’s pragmatics—here transformed into a pragmatics of the foreign word. First, this extraordinary abundance, this grotesque intrusion of alterity turn the speech-tact that allows alterity into the vector not of tact but of tactlessness: the external world entering the linguistic monad in the guise of foreign words does so through the violence of invasion. The second point is that it exaggerates and thereby focuses upon the social evaluation of which the foreign word is the site: the cultural and inter-cultural precision that justifies the presence of the foreign word, le mot juste, en français dans le texte, becomes mere affectation—the parody of the celebrated footnotes insists upon this. The interest of the parody is of course that it provides an a contrario account of the pragmatics of linguistic foreignness: the autonomy of the work of art (in so far as it reconstructs, monad-like, within itself a whole tradition of world literature) is intertwined with the commitment to other cultures and therefore to other historical conjunctures—in brief, un-monad-like, to the external world— that the work of art inevitably contains.
Conclusion
38The argumentative path I have followed shows that autonomy and commitment, far from being opposites locked in irreconcilable conflict, are intertwined elements of the same dialectical process. My point of departure is Adorno, where the two concepts are treated as strict opposites, has shown that, even if we adopt as our corpus the high modernist canon of Adorno, the meaning of both concepts must undergo a shift.
39We shall grant Adorno that, at least as far as modernist texts are concerned, simple political commitment (what used to be known as tendenz Literatur) is not a possibility. However, it has also become clear that the modernist text cannot do without a form of commitment: it is not only situated in a historical conjuncture, it is committed to it, in so far as language is not only its material, but its medium, and language is committed to the historical conjuncture and to the social evaluations it produces, because language is not merely an autonomous grammatical system but, in the terms of Gramsci, ‘a conception of the world’. This is the essence of Medvedev’s critique of the formalists and this is also the rationale for Bakhtin’s concept of refraction. The work of art may not reflect the social and historical conjuncture, as orthodox Marxism will have it, but it refracts it, that is it both reflects and distorts it, which is a form of commitment. Parody is the genre in which such refraction, which autonomous modernist art tends to forget, is made manifest.
40But such commitment, in the distorted form of refraction, presupposes a relative autonomy of the work of art. The relationship to the historical conjuncture is never direct, since it goes through the medium of language, which, as a representation of the world, has its own, only relatively dependent, history, the name of which is tradition. For language is both in and of the world, and separated from it in relative dependence, or independence: it has its own rhythm of change, it allows elements of past historical conjunctures to persist in modern consciousness, it anticipates on the changes in the historical conjuncture by capturing and thematising the emergent elements (in other words, in its literary form, language has strong utopian contents). This is where literature, this concentrated and reflexive form of language, enjoys the relative autonomy towards the historical conjuncture that enables it to do more than simply reflect it: to act upon it by distancing itself from the situation. Parody also makes this autonomy manifest: it does not merely debunk, it celebrates the greatness of the work it parodies, and this greatness lies in its autonomy.
41I shall leave the last word to Walter Benjamin. The danger of pure, uncommitted autonomy, the strong belief in l’art pour l’art, is that, when it inevitably encounters the historical conjuncture in the guise of politics, it will tend to aestheticize politics, which is, as he forcibly reminds us, the main characteristic of fascism. So the slogan we must adopt is the inverse one, a slogan in which the dialectics of autonomy and commitment is embodied: politicize aesthetics. Adorno, I believe, would not have disapproved.
Auteur
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Jean-Jacques Lecercle
Paris X Nanterre
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