Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to De Man by Andrew Goldstone (review)

Andrew Goldstone’s Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to De Man will no doubt be greeted with a certain enthusiasm by a generation of modernist scholars long trained to consider the concept of autonomy as something forbidden and taboo. Goldstone’s savvy introduction—with its allusions to “relative autonomy,” “partial autonomy,” and “many versions of autonomy” (2)—frames the book as a Modern-Studies-Association-cure-all, promising to sail the field gracefully through the Scylla of historicism and the Charybdis of formalism. The modernist pursuit of autonomy, Goldstone argues, should not be rejected as merely ideological or implicitly tyrannical because it inevitably exposes and addresses its own social embeddedness. As a “position to be made,” and thus a “[mode] of relation,” modernist autonomy allows us to view the social relations of its own production and thereby returns us to history in a more complex and subtle way (9, 10). To stage this argument, Goldstone turns away from “autonomy” to “fictions of autonomy,” modernist textual representations of the struggle for autonomy—think Dorian Gray, Stephen Dedalus, T. S. Eliot’s Tiresias—that carry within them the social institutions and contexts they so desperately seek to leave behind. At his punchiest, Goldstone sets his sights on new-modernist approaches (he singles out the work of Jed Esty, Rebecca L. Walkowitz, and Douglas Mao in his introduction¹) that append an “extraliterary social program behind modernist aesthetics” (5); instead, drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu, he offers a “sociologically informed” account that, by taking form seriously, dialectically reconstructs—“lights up”—the “real relations between the institutions of art and other fields of social life” (7, 8).² Hence, Goldstone promises autonomy as history—an “institutional, contextualizing approach” that boomerangs back and forth between text and context, exploring the pursuit of artistic closure in its dialectical relation to (as mapped out in his four chapters) labor, personality, political community, and linguistic reference itself (13).

Goldstone’s appealing introduction, however, does not quite match the rest of his book. Simply put, his analysis of modernist literature—while often insightful and compelling—rarely proves to be formal or historical enough; in fact, in emphasizing “fictions of autonomy,” he most often winds up splitting the difference between form and history altogether and offers little more than theme. This is especially true in the first two chapters, in which Goldstone addresses autonomy in relation to servant culture and authorial aging, respectively. The first of these, “Autonomy from Labor: In Service to Art for Art’s Sake from Wilde to Proust,” demonstrates the deep ambivalence that aestheticist and decadent fictions display toward the servant labor that supports formal artistic endeavor. Goldstone here aptly characterizes the complex social dependencies of artists and servants in The Picture of Dorian Gray and À la recherche du temps perdu, demonstrating along the way how the “privileging of form” is always originally built on the “privileging of the master” (27).³ But, apart from a few references to how chapter breaks and other formal devices are framed by and thus act as forms of servant labor in the novel, there is little more here than self-conscious plot details that already make these thematic points obvious to the average reader; in turn, there is little theoretical weight behind Goldstone’s claim that servants themselves represent something of a reality principle contradicting each text’s blatant aesthetic commitments (26). Chapter 2, “Autonomy from the Person: Impersonality and Lateness in Eliot and Adorno,” proves to have a greater investment in form, since it links Eliot and Theodor Adorno through an emphasis on lateness and aging that marks their respective theories of impersonality. Here Goldstone evacuates all politics from their work and restores both figures to the kind of stodgy, withered roles from which recent and more interesting studies have tried to release them. While Goldstone provides insightful readings of “Gerontion” and Four Quartets that buck New-Critical commonplaces,⁴ especially in...