Specificity and independence of the literary game

Abstract

In developing his theory of the “literary field,” Pierre Bourdieu essentially had in mind the case of France from the second half of the nineteenth century, the use of which as a case undoubtedly contributed to his marginalizing numerous aspects of the national microcosm. Among its unstated and unrecognized particular qualities, France is mono-national (rather than multinational) and monolingual (rather than multilingual), and occupies the dominant position in the international Francophone world (much as Germany is at the heart of the German-speaking world). A state, a nation, a language, a territory, a literature – all of these make one unit and prevent one from considering situations more complex or tangled, such as those of many minority literatures. These allow the tackling of issues – among others, problems of their “autonomy” in relation to realities outside of literature such as the political, religious, linguistic, and economic. Rather than imposing constraints on a research agenda, the study of minority literatures allows one to shed light on the complex and contradictory relations between the political (the national, the communal, and sometimes the state), the market, and the literary game.

Keywords:

• minority literatures
• literary game
• specificity and independence of the literary sphere

Notes

By 1938, Gustave Charlier was already speaking of “second literature” to classify Francophone Belgian literature “developing in a language which it shares with the national literature of another country, in this case, France” (8–9).

With the notable exception of Creole literature.

This has led him, moreover, to overestimate literary position-takings such as “art for art's sake” as an indicator of the autonomy (a certain type of autonomy) of the “literary field,” whereas these “theories” or these attitudes are but a very unusual, and historically determined, way of existing within the literary game. One of the effects of this overestimation is to consider that the weakening of formalist or experimental literatures, or avant-garde positions, would necessarily be the sign of a loss of autonomy (of a setback in the process of autonomization). Here, one can only subscribe to Alain Viala's argument when he writes: “For the past century, we have too often given in to the temptation to build a theory of literature out of a few images hatched in the imaginations of some art for “art's sake” poets, toiling to assume their self-contradictions. All while acting as if this was a general theory. Whereas it is at best – but as such, meaningful – a theory of a literature. However theorisation holds only on the condition that we take into account the totality of objects that one is theorizing about.” (“Ah, qu'elle était jolie” 141).

The case of an attempt to create a “Jewish-French literature” is slightly different, even though the failure of this communitarian strategy nicely demonstrates, on one hand, the fairly weak impact of institutions and religious communities in public, political, and cultural life in twentieth-century France, and on the other hand, the difficulty of those wishing to impose religious categories of classification on works and authors from the moment that the literary universe is strongly constituted and proposes its own categories of perception and appreciation. This however does not prevent the issue of Jewishness from playing a role in the literary works of certain authors in more or less cryptic ways (Lévy, Écritures de l'identité).

One could consider especially the cases of Yiddish and Czech literatures in Prague at the beginning of the twentieth century (Lahire, Franz Kafka 111–134).

In order to avoid Francocentrism, one should speak precisely of the Belgian literatures – French and Flemish – of which each has its own peculiar relations with French and Dutch literatures.

In his conversation with Jacques Dubois, Bourdieu admits that the desire for “assimilation” is not the only attitude within the Belgian literary universe and that one can observe a number of subversion strategies within it.

Even though the situation of Flaubert is of course not directly comparable, since he was solidly ensconced in a very central literary game, his life being principally based at Croisset – which was, in the midst of the nineteenth century, a good distance from the capital – no doubt greatly affected the way Flaubert conceived of his relation to the Parisian world of letters. Many examples of this kind can be found in Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters.

No doubt the researcher would place prestigious publishing houses such as Gallimard or Le Seuil at the more “literary” end of the spectrum, even though they regularly publish classically commercial works.

The articles in this issue also invite us to take into account the relations of political power between nation-states and minority groups to understand the circumstances of minority literatures.

“The idea that Americans, long after they declared their political independence, retained a colonial mentality in matters of culture and intellect is a shrewd perception that deserves serious consideration” (Levine 2).

For over a decade I have engaged in critical reflection on the concept of “field” to elaborate a theory of the social differentiation of activities integrating the insights of field theory (L'homme pluriel, “Champ, hors-champ,” La condition littéraire). This reflection has recently come out in a publication (Monde pluriel. Penser l'unité des sciences sociales, 2012).

One should note incidentally that since art and culture play a symbolic role (as markers of prestige) independently of the specific content of the works, we can observe among the public behaviors consisting of the material acquisition of works (buying) without the ability to appropriate them symbolically (understanding).

Certain minority literatures benefit on occasion from financial support from political parties or community associations, which is not always well received by authors concerned about their literary independence. The intervention of the State in a minority literary game that was previously neglected or denigrated (such as the case of Berber with IRCAM [Institut royal de la culture amazighe], radio, and public education [Pouessel, this volume], or in the Kurdish case with public television [Scalbert-Yücel, this volume]) introduces a profound transformation of the literary game and its stakes. However, in either case (the support of minority political groups or the State) it is impossible to deduce very clear and unequivocal effects as to the nature of literary productions.

I rely on the contrasts between the word “game” and the word “work”: work (for profit)/game (leisure activity), primary activity/secondary activity, serious activity/frivolous activity, and the like.

The situation is very similar to some minority literatures that are progressively institutionalized before being able to benefit from a true market.

Some historians do not hesitate to date back to the Middle Ages the moment when a series of fields of cultural production become autonomous. This is the case for the medievalist Jean-Philippe Genet, who dates to the thirteenth century the beginning of a strong differentiation: “If then we refer to the historical domain, it is obvious that as early as the thirteenth century, the ecclesiastic monopoly is taking a pounding, and little by little a number of fields, whose status is however difficult to establish, are becoming autonomous. First and foremost, there is the field of law, the most observable, the most separated from the Church, but which is not solely – one suspects – a market of symbolic goods. Secondly, there is the academic field: it is easily spotted through its bodies of authorities but it remains generally dominated, though not without violent struggles, by the ecclesiastic authority, and it itself tends to split, law functioning virtually and straight away autonomously, and medicine tending towards it. Then there is what one could call indeed the literary field or rather the literary fields, that do not have visible bodies of authorities, but that are not subject to the Church monopoly and really function as systems” (Genet 139).

Dominated by the “well-read,” then by “littérateurs” who give “the first rank to the invention and the originality of forms” (Viala, Naissance de l'écrivain 273) against the erudition of the former and contribute to making literature something other than a practice for the dilettante (Viala, Naissance de l'écrivain 33).

“In that, as it is today, the institutions of literary life supplied consecration within the restricted space of specialists” (Viala, Naissance de l'écrivain 43). Or again: “The academies were a decisive factor in the autonomization of the intellectual field and its division into distinct specific branches. Within it, they favored the supremacy of the literary domain. They thus played a capital role in the initial legitimation of literature and the author” (50).

“The income that an author brings in from the sale of his works, in revealing what exchange value is attributed to them, shows what place he can take in the economic circuit, whether being a writer can be a profession or not, and the amount of autonomy available to this profession” (Viala, Naissance de l'écrivainala 103). The copyright, fixed at around 8% since the seventeenth century, lead to complicating the hierarchies of genre, since the greatest in literary dignity (poetry) does not provide as much income as the theatre or the novel.

Clientelism places a good number of writers in the position of personal dependence vis-à-vis those who pay them – to the point where the same author can write successively for an influential patron and then for his adversaries (Viala, Naissance de l'écrivain 60). It is thus common to see “men of letters put into service, satire, memoirs, or adaptations' writers, increasing commissioned attacks or defenses” (Goulemot and Oster 23). In addition, censorship, “one of the most brutal forms of heteronomy” (Viala, Naissance de l'écrivain 115) – developed in the seventeenth century in reaction to the autonomous organization of the literary life.

In the second half of the seventeenth century, writers often multiplied the dependencies and recognitions (the rule of “multiple participation,” in the words of Alain Viala): academies, salons, copyright, clientelism, and patronage. The rule of multiple participation is not however specific to the classical age. A number of writers today carry out various types of literary activities (personal works, texts commissioned by publishers, screenplays, scripts for radio, etc.) and para-literary activities (interventions in schools or libraries, public readings, writing workshops) because of economic need.

“The ‘second job’ holds back the career by seizing some of the possibilities, when it is distant from literary activities – like Mainard and his legal position. And, when it is a job connected to the preoccupations of a man of letters, it affects the direction of the trajectory: like the jobs of professor, historiographer, or librarian” (Viala, Naissance de l'écrivain 191).

Favorable economic conditions do not of course systematically lead to such an autonomy, which also and overall depends on the writers' work, sometimes considerable, of appropriating a literary patrimony. “I would like to write you a very long letter about your resolution to fully be a man of letters. If you feel an irresistible urge to write, and you have a Herculean temperament, then you have done the right thing. If not, then no! … Read extensively and take a long and complex subject. Reread all the classics, not as when you were at school, but for yourself, and judge them with your conscience as you judge the moderns, broadly and scrupulously” (Flaubert, Letter to M. X., 5–9 April 1858).

For a classic example of a differentiated work on a pre-existing corpus or tradition, one could mention the case of oral myths, which, once put down in writing, constituted as much the basis for a theological knowledge of the roles of the different gods and the relation between the gods as the basis of a more philosophical knowledge or a more literary writing.

“The threats to autonomy result from the increasingly greater interpenetration between the world of art and the world of money” (Bourdieu, The Rules of Art 344).

In a text on editorial strategies, Anna Boschetti (1991) straight away postulates, referring to a series of articles by Pierre Bourdieu, the autonomization of the literary field conquered through the market economy, but does not demonstrate this link. She even concludes by pointing out the “threats” of the transformations of the market to this autonomy.

In an essay on modern novels in Le Bohème of 29 April 1855, Paul Saulnier described the difficulty of making a living from one's art and the necessity of adjusting oneself to the public's tastes as did a number of novelists: “The modern taste for sensationalist stories and cheap thrills made literature an impossible career for the person devoted to art itself. Only those willing to exploit the debased tastes of the public could succeed” (Seigel 132).

This too-supportive intervention of the State seems suspect in the eyes of the creators, who may fear being turned into literary functionaries or party writers.

Bourdieu himself underscores, regarding the nineteenth century, that only the most “well off” could not be “obliged to dedicate themselves to secondary tasks to procure their subsistence” and that the others were “constrained to sooner or later abandon poetry for better-paid literary activities” such as the novel, the theatre, or “‘industrial literature,’ which makes writing an activity like any other” (“Le champ littéraire” 40).

And yet the theme was already present in Edmond and Jules de Goncourt: “Writing for the audience? But have not all the honorable, enviable, and enduringly glorious success desecrated the public, have not made it, have not imposed themselves on it? Take all the great works, they raise the public to their level, and do not descend to the level of the public” (de Goncourt and de Goncourt 527).

Eugène Delacroix, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Schœnberg, Berg and Webern, Sainte-Beuve, Picasso, Raymond Picard and Roland Barthes, Aristotle and Plato, Descartes and Leibniz, Hegel and Marx (Bourdieu, “The Market”).

These examples rely on the commonsensical assumption of a great number of readers: “everyone knows” (or think they know) who are Delacroix, Robbe-Grillet, Sainte-Beuve, Barthes, Picasso, etc.

As Eliot Freidson very correctly reminds us, artistic activities have not been through a professionalization process to the same degree as other activities (“Les professions artistiques”).

It is moreover that which Bourdieu himself recognized – contradictorily – when he said to Jacques Dubois: “The productions that one could readily call avant-garde are works without a market, which can survive to a great extent only artificially, thanks to subsidies, etc. Does that necessarily imply a dependency? Not at all. Take the example of sociology. It could deal with the objects that the State assigns to it today: the poor, the marginalized, drugs, etc. But it can also be the means provided by the State for the study of the State. It can use the freedom that the State gives it for critiquing the State. Receiving subsidies from the State does not at all mean that one is subject to the stipulations and verdicts of the State” (“Un entretien” 16).

It is clear that, in the case of minority literatures, it is strictly impossible to understand the works produced without considering the political commitments of many of their authors.

In this study on the work of Franz Kafka, I proposed a sociological manner of precisely analyzing the work of literary creation which makes apparent, by contrast, the limits of the concept of “field.”

And this is particularly relevant for an author like Kafka who writes legal texts parallel to his literary texts while working at an insurance company dealing with work-related accidents.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bernard Lahire

This article has been translated from French by Matthew Goldman, and the translation carefully revised by Marianne Woollven. I particularly wish to thank Clémence Scalbert-Yücel for her help throughout the elaboration of this article.