The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830-1910 by Marcus Waithe & Claire White

Author:Marcus Waithe & Claire White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Siskin, Clifford. (1999) The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Part III

Work Ethics and Aesthetics

Preface

If in the later decades of the nineteenth century, the relationship between literature and moral utility came under particular strain, this was often framed in Britain as a problem of French extraction. The potentially corrosive discourse of aestheticism, and of its Continental successor, Decadence, signalled a conscious departure from middle-class, and high Victorian, assumptions about the uses to which literary labour ought to be put. The following chapters examine these aesthetic discourses in relation to the ‘work ethics’ of different writers, whose self-conscious relationship to the nature and industry of literary work marks a shift away from moral concerns towards an ethics of writerly conduct. Our contributors question the familiar view of France as a source of a ‘leisure ethic’ and of British writers as either rejecting or self-consciously mimicking French models. In his discussion of Baudelaire, Richard Hibbitt explores the apparent contradictions, and idiosyncrasies, that characterized aestheticism in the French tradition. Those who subscribed to a model of ‘art for art’s sake’ sought to liberate their own creative projects from the straitjacket of bourgeois pragmatism. And yet, this did not necessarily lead to the categorical rejection of a type of ‘work ethic’ that had come to be appropriated, however spuriously, by the middle classes. If Baudelaire can be understood to privilege—to reprise Barthes’s terms—‘work-value’ over ‘use-value’, his scattered reflections on the writer’s vocation point towards an ambiguous, and often ambivalent, attitude that Hibbitt captures via the paradoxical phrase, ‘dilettante work ethic’. This he defines as a form of work that is dissociated from ‘the capitalist work ethic but not from profit per se’; indeed, it carries ‘the aspiration to work for the symbolic profit of pleasure alone and, in Baudelaire’s case, to arrive at a state of pure work’—or even, as Robert Browning had it, ‘work for work’s sake’.

The sensuous enjoyment, or ‘pleasurable stimulus’, that can be derived from strenuous effort is fundamental to the embodied vision of style elaborated by Walter Pater, the chief advocate in Britain of French aestheticism. But across Pater’s reflections on art, there emerges, as Marcus Waithe argues, a vision of literary labour that is also rooted in a valorization of suffering; his model of writing describes ‘a complex interrelation of pleasure and pain, linked ultimately to the slumbering energies stirred by work’. It is, Waithe shows, Flaubert who provides a vital impetus for this account of the writer’s masochistic tendencies. In one sense, Pater’s recourse to the French writer’s account of his famously painstaking mode of composition, or ‘agonies of style’, allowed him to reabsorb the working imperatives of early Victorian moralists, even as he appeared to reject their premises. More directly still, Flaubert insisted on the materiality of literary labour in ways that informed Pater’s own metaphors of style. While Flaubert would ‘[beat] away at his anvil’, or—as Patrick Bray discussed previously—toil like a stonebreaker, Pater aligned writing with

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