1 A Note on Autonomy and Commitment

1‘Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence,’ William Blake writes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.1 The following text is intended to clarify the relation between the terms ‘autonomy’ and ‘commitment,’ suggesting that they refer, though on different levels, to ‘contraries’, in the Blakean sense that their combination is ‘necessary to human existence.’ Pure autonomy is a mere Idea in the Kantian sense of being out of the field of all possible human experience, and pure heteronomy is sheer animality.2 In Kantian terms, imagination is basically the faculty to carry the objects of empirical perception (or aisthêsis) to the mind in the form of images (representations). These representations are then organized under the transcendental categories of the understanding, substance and causality. Man thus makes a step towards autonomy, but stops short, confronting the impossibility of reconciling the reality of his experience with the ideas of pure Reason. He reaches there the limit of what can properly be called ‘knowledge.’ What remains possible is moral praxis oriented by the imperatives of Practical Reason. He can also have the experience of beauty and the sublime in Nature, but it is a purely subjective feeling, in one case of a supersensible harmony in natural forms, and in the other of a power beyond natural forces ‘inciting the mind to abandon the realm of sense and to occupy itself with Ideas that involve a higher purposiveness.’ The mind, however, can also deal freely with the images of perception. The range of autonomy is thus extended when we turn to Art, including literature with narrative Fiction, which is not committed to the reality-principle. Fingere does not signify creation ex nihilo, but it implies the power to mould and transform the material derived from experience. Art may thus be called an ‘aesthetic’ mode of representation in the sense of ‘sensuous,’ but that representation is related ‘not to the cognitive faculty, but to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure.’ It is autonomous in so far as it is purely reflective.

2The pivotal importance of Kant is that he sets the terms for the later Modern debate about Art. The distinction made by Coleridge between the primary imagination, passively empirical, and the secondary imagination as a power of transcendent intuition justifying the term of ‘re-creation,’ derives from Kant, but in the wake of Schelling, and summarizes the Romantic idea, ideal or dream of the reality of the poetic vision of harmony between truth and beauty. The division between the ideal and the real is overcome in the synthesis of the Hegelian dialectic. The most influential part of that synthesis is the accession of the slave, through the praxis imposed upon him and his confrontation with the object, to the recognition of himself as subject, and so to the self-consciousness which is the condition of his autonomy. The objection from Marx that abstract dialectic must be grounded in the historical reality of modes of production and corresponding social systems has contributed to move the debate about art from the philosophical to the historical field.

3So, the second chart proposed here is concerned with ‘the human historical situation.’3 Since it relates to the specific status of man as a political animal within the context of Nature, it is to be seen as necessarily comprehended within the first. We shall see later that the question of the social commitment of art is not to be dissociated from the larger issues of Life (for Lawrence) and Transcendence (for Huxley). On the other hand, the relation of Art to the polis, the city, is an age-old question. The debate about diegesis and mimesis has as much to do with politics as with poetics. Plato prefers the narrative discourse because it can be directive, and thus ensure that the ‘bad’ actions represented cause no prejudice to the values and norms of his Republic. Aristotle sees imitation as freely disengaging a ‘general truth’ from factual history, and allows tragedy to give us an unmediated presentation of ‘the errors of human frailty,’ affecting us with pity and terror. But the final purgation is a return to the norm, the expurgation of all temptation to rebellious hubris.

4For Adorno, Art is a social product. But its manifestations (rituals, festivities) are detached from any direct utilitarian or functional purpose. It is in itself, in its essence, a marginal activity, in the sense of enjoying a certain freedom, though controlled and ‘administered’ by society. It is not autonomous (it has no independent nomos). But it contains an immanent potential for self-assertion and rebellion, which can only be actualized when it becomes for itself what it is in its essence, that is freedom. That can only happen, in Adorno’s basically Marxian scheme, when the social order is ‘fissured,’ in Modern times as the result of the establishment of capitalism and later of the development of its inner contradictions. Art then comes into its own as a self-conscious manifestation of Antinomy. But its field is the interplay of attraction and repulsion between the contraries that constitute human existence, and it must, in its relation to society, keep clear of the two self-defeating extremes: complete heteronomy, but also absolute autonomy, activity with no empirical commitment or even content, purely formal art which is easily récupéré, retrieved and recycled, as a fetishistic commodity within the social order it professes to despise. On the other hand, commitment, as the autonomous decision to involve oneself in and (polemically) engage with heteronomy, is primarily antagonistic towards the dominant social order, but must not betray the function of art by surrendering its freedom to the emergent society (as in the so-called ‘socialist realism’).4

2 A. Huxley

5Eyeless in Gaza appeared in 1936,5 but Huxley had struggled for four years to complete it, and the novel marked the end of a long period of increasing uncertainty. The essays in Proper Studies (1927) return to the difficulty of constructing a coherent personality, adding a presentation of Jung’s recent study of psychological types (introvert / extravert) and functions (intellectual / emotional and social / sensuous). These essays are also concerned with the modern crisis of democracy, showing signs of the influence of the sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, posthumously enlisted as a supporter of fascism for his attack on plutocratic demagogies prohibiting the circulation of the elites. The political concern is present in Point Counter Point (1928), with Webley the fascist, Illidge the communist and Spandrell the anarchist. It is mostly absorbed in the ‘Comedy of Humours’ revised along Jungian lines of stunted functions and unsuitable pairing of types, in the spirit of the epigraph from Fulke Greville: ‘Oh, wearisome condition of humanity, / Born under one law, to another bound, [...] / What meaneth nature by these diverse laws, / Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?’ But the total effect on Lawrence, as recorded in a letter, was one of impending apocalypse:

I have read Point Counter Point with my heart sinking through my boot-soles and a rising admiration; I do think you’ve shown the truth, perhaps the last truth, about you and your generation, with really fine courage. [...] I do think that art has to reveal the palpitating moment or the state of man as it is. [...] But [that moment] produces ultimately inertia, inertia, inertia and final atrophy of the feelings. Till, I suppose, comes a final super-war, and murder, suicide, rape sweeps away the vast bulk of mankind.6

6Do What You Will (1929) is placed under the auspices of Blake, with the liminal quotation that provides the ambiguous title: ‘Do what you will, this Life’s a Fiction / And is made up of Contradiction.’7 Whatever you may do, contradiction (in the singular) is the very stuff of life, and man is an amphibian animal. You can make the best of it by accepting discontinuity and living your life without fixed rule (fais ce que voudras) in the alternation between the two extremes of ‘passion and reason’ that define the human condition. But that constant to and fro movement is far from the creative dialectic of tension between contraries, and that pseudo-Lawrentian interlude will be brief.

7The next novel, Brave New World (1932) is essentially ambivalent. It reflects Huxley’s impressions of American life (recorded earlier in Jesting Pilate), between his appreciation of the rational efficiency of Fordism and the nightmarish oppression of Los Angeles, ‘the City of dreadful joy.’ It presents what he calls in a letter ‘the horror of the Wellsian Utopia’ in the form of a world totally rationalized, urbanized, under a totalitarian state. But that state uses conditioning rather than force, it has saved mankind from the self-destructive war which democracy was incapable of preventing, and Nature does not offer with the Savage a credible alternative to the City.

8Eyeless in Gaza occupies a central position in the work of Huxley. It appeared in 1936, but he had been at work on it, off and on, over a period of 4 years, going through a crisis which is transposed in the novel. It is fiction, not autobiography, and Anthony Beavis is a sociologist, not a writer. But he shares and carries to an extreme what Huxley saw as his own type, that of the intellectual extravert for whom the functions of emotion, private or collective, and of sensuality are marginal. In the scene that opens the novel, Anthony, on his forty-second birthday, goes through a collection of snapshots, old and recent, all jumbled together, evoking his past life. The narrative follows the process of his recall, shuffling like cards the scenes belonging to different periods. The effect is that Anthony’s life appears to him as a random succession of moments, not only disconnected but unrelated. For him and the reader, however, a pattern slowly emerges out of the apparent disorder. The fragmentation is the result of his determination to find freedom in detachment from all ties. He has come out as an intellectual entomologist of human beings in society and a sensualist refusing to get involved emotionally. But what the two sides of his split personality have in common is deliberate non-commitment. The crisis is his realization that what emerges through the years is cowardly evasion from responsibility, in personal relations, but also in public life. His freedom is not a gift of nature, it has been made possible by human historical praxis. Now, at a time when in Europe the possibility and the very concept of freedom are threatened by the rise of totalitarianism, it can survive only in fighting the forces of oppression. So, Anthony, like Huxley, joins the pacifist anti-fascist movement of the Peace Pledge Union.

9But the moral force to overcome his reluctance, temperamental and confirmed by the years of escapism, to participate in public action is given to him through a transcendental experience recorded in the final chapter of the novel, at the end of the fragmented Diary completed at the time when Huxley himself was following the same path. It does not finally arise from his personal ego. It is what he analyzed later as the result of ‘autology rather than psychology’: the awareness ‘in the depths of particular individualized selves’ of that ‘eternal Self’ which is the presence of ‘the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being.’8 That Perennial Philosophy originates in what is, formulated in non religious post-Kantian terms, the transcendent intuition of the harmony between finality and causality from which Huxley will draw the conclusions for human praxis in Ends and Means (1937).

3 J. Joyce

10A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, with its first draft Stephen Hero, is a Künstlerroman proceeding through stages of apprenticeship. It moves to two successive climaxes: Stephen’s analysis of the aesthetic experience and his final appeal to his mythic father Dedalus. The phases in the apprehension of Beauty are defined as wholeness (integritas), harmony (consonantia), and radiance (claritas).9 The term ‘epiphany’ appears only in Stephen Hero, and it is dropped in the Portrait, the reason being that the word implies ‘symbolism or idealism’ in the Platonist sense of the manifestation (or translucence, to use the word of Coleridge) of a supersensible reality (Joyce 1966, 208, 213). The text of Stephen Hero says of the object that ‘its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance’ (Joyce 1966, 217). Now in the Portrait, the whatness or quiddity is the quality of the sensible object as such, and any common object (or incident) can be thus transfigured: any thing can become a thing of beauty. But the apprehension of beauty is not given and passively received. ‘The esthetic image is first conceived in the imagination’ (Joyce 1966, 213). We have looked at the clock many times for the utilitarian purpose of knowing the time of day. When attention is paid to the object as such, it is seen as detached, singled out, and having its singular internal form (what Hopkins calls inscape). The imaginative vision is the instantaneous result of the other two qualities apprehended together, when the image of the object clicks into a radiant entity. The image here is borrowed from the reference in Ulysses to a similar effect in Berkeley’s theory of stereoscopic vision: ‘Veil of space with coloured emblems hatched on its field. Hold hard. Coloured on a flat: yes, that’s right. Flat I see, then think distance, near, far, flat I see, east, back. Ah, see now! Falls back suddenly, frozen in stereoscope. Click does the trick.’10

11That seems to be an experience of contemplation rather than involvement. But it must be set in the context discussed a few pages earlier in the Portrait: ‘The esthetic emotion is therefore static’11 and opposed to the ‘improper’ arts that ‘excite the kinetic emotions,’ pornographic or didactic. Pornographic art makes a direct appeal to our sensuous nature. Didactic art impels us to move in response to social rules or norms. It is, to use Adorno’s term, ‘administered.’ Conversely, proper art is detachment from both kinds of heteronomy, and as such it is a necessary stage before autonomous commitment. That is the essential, constitutive ambivalence of Art. Stephen says at one point in the Portrait: ‘When the soul of a man is born in this country, there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets’ (Joyce 1968, 203). He wants to be freed from ‘the plague of Catholicism’ (non serviam), from the parochial inbred movement of Irish revival, which are part of the general ‘paralysis’ of the country (Joyce 1968, 203), and make of history ‘a nightmare from which [he] is trying to awake’ (Joyce 1986, 28).

12But the final invocation to Dedalus is a challenge, the battle cry of freedom: ‘O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Old father, old artificer, stand me now in good stead’ (Joyce 1968, 252-253; italics added). The key words italicised here appeal to the permanent tradition of art as confronting reality, forging its own weapons to arouse the conscience of men and their desire for liberty.

13One of those weapons is Myth to break down the barriers confining the imagination of men within the limits of the here and now, time and space. The mythic hypotext in Ulysses is the Odyssey. The myth, universal, multi-layered and forever ‘re-circulating,’ will become text in Finnegans Wake, with at its centre, or rather as one of its nodes, the antagonistic and indissoluble brotherhood between Shem the penman and Shaun the postman, the sign and the message, free creation and administrative (administered) transmission.

4 D.H. Lawrence

14There are two similar scenes in the early chapters of Women in Love. In ‘Breadalby,’ Birkin is copying Chinese drawings of geese. In answer to Hermione’s insistent questioning about what he gets from it, he says: ‘I know what centres they live from [...] the hot, tingling centrality of a goose in the flux of cold water and mud [...] entering their own blood like an innoculation of corruptive fire.’12 In ‘Sketch-Book,’ Gudrun is sketching ‘the water-plants that rose succulent from the low shores: She could feel their turgid fleshy structure as in a sensuous vision, she knew how they rose out of the mud, she knew how they thrust out from themselves, how they stood stiff and succulent against the air’ (Lawrence 1995, 119).

15In both scenes, art gives form to what Lawrence elsewhere defines, in terms of a different medium, as ‘poetry of this immediate present, instant poetry,’ revealing to us the ‘most superb mystery: The quick of all time is the instant. The quick of all the universe, of all creation, is the incarnate, carnal self.’13 The image, in outline or words, is a significant form, the instantaneous result of a ‘sensuous vision,’ associating perception with empathy and imagination, which reveals that our self, in common with the most alien productions of life, comes out of the original mud.

16But the image can also provoke a reaction, a retraction of the self into the ego. The sudden apparition of Gerald in the picture instantly recalls Gudrun to her own life:

Gerald was her escape from the heavy slough of the pale, underworld, automatic colliers—he started out of the mud. He was master. She saw his back, the movement of his white loins. But not that—it was the whiteness he seemed to enclose as he bent forward, rowing (Lawrence 1995, 119-120; italics added).

17What emerges here in the imagery is the network of binary oppositions which underlies and commands the dramatic development of the novel. It is an expansion of the old Creation myth of fecund Darkness quickened by Light into the opposition of senses and mind, of female and male principles (not individuals), of nature and civilization. Life is neither the merging of the two streams, which would be a return to the chaos before creation, nor progress from heteronomy to autonomy of the Reason and Will, but the constant creative clash of contraries, in the truly Blakean sense.

18That is why Birkin in the chapter entitled ‘Fetish’ maintains against Gerald that an African statuette (of a woman in labour) ‘is art, because it conveys the complete truth of a certain state, pure culture in sensation’ (Lawrence 1995, 79). But the term ‘pure’ is used critically. And modern civilization is also ‘pure’ in the sense of dissociating men from nature to turn them into automata, and associating master and worker as instruments in the service of the machine (class struggle being about relative positions within the system).

19The novel includes two scenes of argument about art, centred on the character of Loerke. The prelude to them is the complex impression Gudrun receives of him, in two passages separated by just a few lines, as ‘pure unconnected will, stoical and momentaneous,’ and as ‘a mud-child, the very stuff of the underworld of life’ (Lawrence 1995, 427).

20The second of the two scenes is about a statuette of a small naked girl on ‘a massive magnificent stallion.’ Ursula reacts to it as an image of frailty cowed by brutal strength. She is scornfully rebuked by Loerke, who tells her that the statuette belongs to the ‘absolute world of art’ which ‘must not be confused with the relative world of action.’ Ursula, as usual, is emotional and unsophisticated in her reactions, but the rest of the scene suggests that she is fundamentally right, and that the work of art is a projection of the artist’s will for power.

21In the first scene, Gudrun makes Loerke describe a frieze he is doing for a factory in Cologne. ‘It was the representation of a fair, with peasants and artisans in an orgy of enjoyment, drunk and absurd in their modern dress, whirling ridiculously in roundabouts.’ Loerke’s comment is that ‘art should interpret industry, as art once interpreted religion,’ and his interpretation is that now ‘the machine works [man] instead of he the machine.’ Lawrence was inspired by a picture of Mark Gertler, The Merry-Go-Round, of stiff wooden figures with fixed smiles on the roundabout, about which he writes to the painter: ‘It is horrible and terrifying,’ but in that ‘violent mechanised rotation and complete involution, and ghastly, utterly mindless intensity of sensational extremity, you have made a real and ultimate revelation (about the modern times). [...] But you are all absorbed in the violent and lurid process of inner decomposition.’14 What Lawrence projects on frieze and picture is his reaction to the Futurists expressed in a well-known letter to his editor about the first draft of his novel. They interest him as being, like himself, no longer concerned with ‘the old stable ego of the character,’ but they are ‘stupid’ in looking to physics, not physiology, for the non-human in man, and celebrating in their art the age of the machine.15

22Gudrun will finally join Loerke, at least for a time, in his hatred of life, finding refuge with him in the opposite extremes of pure sensation and pure art. They know ‘the subtle thrills of extreme sensation in reduction,’ ‘disintegrating the vital organic body of life.’ They fashion their private esoteric world of art, playing with the past as in ‘a sort of little game of chess or marionettes’ and looking at the life outside with irony or in fancies of its apocalyptic destruction. But what they find at both ends is the satisfaction of the death-wish, ‘the subtle experiencing of the process of death’ (Lawrence 1995, 452-453).