#artistic autonomy

[literary-structures]

Art may generate profit or propaganda, but its point, as Marx understood, lies in its self-realising power. Only those with too crude an understanding of the concept fail to see this as a function. The aesthete who scandalously proclaims that art has no function is in this sense the terrible twin of the philistine. Both share the same anaemic view of functionality. It is just that the philistine believes that anything without some instant utility is worthless, while the aesthete falsely assumes that being functional and being an end in oneself are necessarily at loggerheads.

Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (p. 204)

[literary-structures]

In this sense, all fiction is fundamentally about itself. Yet because it draws the materials for this self-fashioning from the world around it, the paradox of fiction is that it refers to reality in the act of referring to itself. Like Wittgenstein’s forms of life, fictions are self-founding; but this is not to deny that they incorporate aspects of the world around them into their self-making, just as forms of life do. They could not be self-fashioning otherwise. Fredric Jameson remarks in The Prison-House of Language that for the Formalists and structuralists the literary work ‘speaks only of its own coming into being, of its own construction’, but Terence Hawkes rightly adds that ‘a work of fiction can only speak of its own coming into being against a background of speaking of something else’.

Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (p. 138)

[literary-structures]

Macherey does not mean to suggest that literary works of art stand magically aloof from the histories that give birth to them. On the contrary, they are the product of a great many historical factors: genre, language, history, ideology, semiotic codes, unconscious desires, institutional norms, everyday experience, literary modes of production, other literary works and the like. It is rather that these factors are combined in a way that allows the work to evolve according to its own internal logic. To call a piece of art self-determining is not to claim, absurdly, that it is free of determinations, but that it makes use of these determinations to fashion its own logic and give birth to itself. They provide the material for its self-making. The work of art does not simply reflect or reproduce the materials which go into its manufacture; instead, it actively reworks them, in the process of doing which it produces itself. Fiction is about the world by virtue of adhering to its own internal logic. Or – to change the terms round – it is about itself in a way that projects a world. Its inside and outside are reversible.

Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (p. 139–40)

[literary-structures]

Yet the cooperative form of a poem or painting is entirely compatible with freedom, once freedom is understood positively as self-determination rather than negatively as freedom from constraint. Since each feature of the artefact works to enhance all the others, bringing them to their richest potential, the self-realisation of each (to adopt a phrase of Marx) is the condition for the self-realisation of all. For this aesthetic, then, works of art correspond to reality less in their content than in their form. They incarnate the essence of human freedom not by pleading for national independence or promoting the struggle against slavery, but by virtue of the curious kind of entities they are. One should perhaps add that as images of self-determination, they reflect less the actual than the possible. They are exemplary of what men and women could be like under transformed political circumstances. If they point beyond themselves, what they point to is a redeemed future. In this view, all art is utopian.

Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (p. 141–2)

[literary-structures]

Fiction, then, like performatives as a whole, is an event inseparable from its act of utterance. It has no support from outside itself, in the sense that what it asserts cannot be checked off in any important way against some independent testimony. In this sense, it is more like swearing than reporting an armed robbery. Fiction manufactures the very objects to which it appears to refer. It covertly fashions what it purports to describe. It looks like a report, but is actually a piece of rhetoric. In Austinian jargon, it is a performative masquerading as a constative. As the German critic Karlheinz Stierle illuminatingly puts it, it is the auto-referential in referential form. Its referent – a murder mystery, a political crisis, an adulterous affair – is purely internal, existing only in its own account of it. As Lamarque and Olsen put it, ‘Fictive states of affairs owe their identity to their mode of presentation’. Fictional narratives project an apparent outside to themselves out of their own internal activities. Yet it is exactly this autonomous or self-referential quality that lends fiction its peculiar force. If it is ‘creative’, it is because it is by nature less constrained by the pressures of the real than a paper on the thyroid gland, and this applies just as much to spectacularly bad fiction as it does to the superbly good. ‘Creative’ here is thus more a descriptive than a normative term.

Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (p. 137–8)

[literary-structures]

To say that a work of fiction is self-fashioning, then, is not to suggest that it is unshackled. As we have argued already, it is restricted by the nature of its materials (not least if it is a realist work), just as it is by formal, generic and ideological factors. Yet art is a matter of internalising such constraints, incorporating them into its body, turning them into the stuff of its self-production and so restricting itself. There is a logic to its self-production, so that it is not free of a certain necessity. But it is a necessity which it creates itself as it goes along. If a realist novel decides to call its heroine Bridget on page 1, it cannot start calling her Gertrude on page 13 for no discernible reason, as a non-realist work might. This is a (supremely trivial) example of a text determining itself – creating its own necessity, conforming to its own self-constituting logic, being faithful to a law that it bestows on itself. That the heroine cannot be abruptly renamed is, of course, more than the author’s decision. It is determined by generic conventions, and perhaps by ideological ones as well. A Victorian writer might feel it unchivalrous to take such liberties with his leading lady. But these conventions are not simply external limits on what texts can do. They are also raw material for its self-making.

Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (p. 142–3)