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

The wonderfully wide-ranging and incisive Fictions of Autonomy is a major study of “an idea whose time has passed” (1), aesthetic autonomy. Literary modernists were, as Andrew Goldstone points out, “the twentieth century’s most strident advocates of aesthetic autonomy for literature” (1). If most critics dismiss autonomy as philosophically incoherent and politically reactionary, Goldstone utilizes institutional studies of modernism (most notably Peter Bürger, Lawrence Rainey, and Pierre Bourdieu) to work out the complex ways in which autonomy becomes formally embedded within literary works and modernist criticism. In a certain sense, Goldstone’s work is far removed from the expansive contextualizing favored by New Modernist Studies (NMS), the institutionally dominant approach in modernist criticism today. He focuses on the high modernist canon as opposed to undiscovered or unknown writers; his close readings emphasize literary form rather than social or political contexts; and he is least comfortable in discussing politics, the driving point for much NMS criticism. Yet Fictions of Autonomy ultimately shores up NMS orthodoxy when Goldstone claims that literary autonomy pushes literary studies “not in the regressive direction of a ‘return to the aesthetic’ . . . but rather toward the wide realms, and the empirical methods, of cultural history and the social sciences” (190).

The most outstanding feature of Fictions of Autonomy is the volume’s comprehensive focus, with a variety of authors and subjects covered: Wilde, Huysmans, Henry James, and Proust on domestic service; Eliot and Adorno on late style; Djuna Barnes and James Joyce on exile; and Wallace Stevens and Paul de Man on linguistic reference. When so much is covered, and so well, one can only long for more, and the most noticeable omission from the study is Walter Benjamin, whose critical writings on Baudelaire, the avant-garde, and technology would have been welcome additions. [End Page E-17] The other outstanding feature of the book is its transnational focus, as Goldstone deftly positions both French and German authors and critics in a larger modernist agenda. (One may also add the Belgian Paul de Man, although Goldstone notes that de Man’s “personal history encapsulates the migration of modernist aesthetics into American academic literary criticism” [174], and very little is done to contextualize de Man’s wartime Belgian writings except to refer to certain papers, such as Le Soir, as “collaborationist” [173] without further comment.)

For Goldstone, autonomy is a “complex, ramified family of practices, evolving across a transnational literary field” (4). This idea is worked out in four substantive chapters treating autonomy in relation to various aspects of social reality, namely “labor, personality, political community, and linguistic reference” (15). Yet, since he considers “the aesthetic practices of modernism as its social program” (5), Goldstone in a sense moves the goalposts, excluding a strong version of autonomy from the start (it is autonomy as a social phenomenon that interests him rather than autonomy as a Kantian ideal). The same problem attends “social reality” or context. When Goldstone claims, for instance, that “Barnes’s style does have real-world effects” (130), those real-world effects turn out to be Barnes’s literary standing and later academic studies of modernism. These are real-world effects, but surely this is a weak version of social impact.

Perhaps the finest chapter and the most concrete in terms of considering autonomy within the framework of a social context is on domestic service. Goldstone argues that Wilde, Huysmans, James, and Proust considered their claims to aesthetic autonomy through the literary tropes that servants offered. Wilde’s characterization of Phipps, the butler in An Ideal Husband, is crucial: “He represents the dominance of form” (qtd. on 24). That kind of “form” is, of course, the superficial world of appearance, but Goldstone argues that domestic service provides a mode of thinking about literary form as well. James’s The Ambassadors, he argues, reveals how “aesthetic form . . . is most intensely itself when it includes the kindred work of servants” (52). This claim follows upon a longer analysis of a...