Sleepwalking into Modernity: Bourdieu and the Case of Ernest Dowson - Critical Essay

Criticism, Fall, 1999 by Stephen Thomson

Behaviourally, sleep is easily recognized(1)

HOW DOES ONE DISCUSS literary mediocrity? It is not, at first appearance, an especially frightening question. For the mediocre, neither terribly good nor even instructively bad, is often taken as precisely that which, vapid, pedestrian or merely superseded, does not demand discussion. It is immediately apprehended as flat, cliched, overused. The mere attribution of mediocrity, then, has a compelling self-sufficiency For, seen as the product of half-waking habit, the mediocre text commands a correspondingly low level of attention on the part of criticism. In sketching the role of also-ran generally assigned by literary history to an Ernest Dowson, however, my interest does not lie in the redressing of balances. Rather, I want to suggest that such a role--regardless of who fills it--has a certain structural necessity in the charting however implicit, operative, or provisional--of periods, movements, and generations. This is especially the case where Modernity is at stake. Bearing the stigma of the second order--cliche, habit, somnambulism--such a text assumes a lack or failure of consciousness in the denunciation of which mastery, consciousness, and the avant-garde are constituted.

This, at least, is a rough outline of a theme--of sleeping and waking, of consciousness defined by the ability to recognize the unconsciousness of another, and of the limits of such confidence--whose operation in critical discourse surrounding Modernist poetry I want to trace. First, however, I want to note the extent to which a certain problematic of consciousness is inherent in the structuralist and sociological element in criticism, and not just the symptom of some clearly demarcated historical error. To do so, I will consider the recent work of Pierre Bourdieu, which offers perhaps the most interesting, influential, and complex sociological approach of the moment. Moreover, dealing as it does with the genesis of the Modern field of cultural production as an ongoing process from about 1850 onwards, Bourdieu's theory will have particular resonance for the case of a writer like Dowson whose critical fate, as I will argue, hinges on a failure to be, somehow, sufficiently Modern.

According to one common conception, the Sociology of Literature would be like a sort of Christian Socialism of criticism; its mission, to take care of the disfavored of literary production, to give the orphans of literary history a place. Pierre Bourdieu is at pains to distance himself from the sentimentalism implicit in this.(2) The sociologist's vocational interest in the relatively disesteemed is still there in his theory of the field of cultural production, but it is by no means driven by a conviction of their just desert. For Bourdieu, the ethical responsibility to remember the forgotten would be a matter of methodological rigor--of not just accepting literary discourse's self-serving, doxic account.

Indeed any field theory would have to be suspicious of forgetting. Since everything in the field has its place in relation to everything else, according to what principle could one justify passing over any text whatsoever? The field, to be a field at all, ought to know what it contains. That is what it is there for; to reassure us that, though they may only have been partially aware of it, all these individuals were there, together, in history--that society registered their presence in some way, that a mark once made remains somewhere. This raises enormous theoretical problems. For one thing, it implies a sovereign consciousness whose identity and location are profoundly mysterious--now ideality of the field, now property of the individual critic. Given that the proposed methodology unabashedly claims mastery, and so full consciousness, as its ultimate goal, Bourdieu's rather easy and untheorized appropriation of Freudian terms--unconscious, negation, repression, anamnesis, and so forth--to the field arguably only serves to intensify the problem.

Supposing, however, that some consciousness must be attributed--to any history, field, movement, culture, society--I want to consider the methodological problems that remain. The general idea is that sociology must remember what literary history has forgotten, or at least inadequately remembered, so as to avoid lurking doxic assumptions, anachronism and so forth. What is not clear is how, once one is committed to taking nothing as read, there can be any limit to the need to remember. Bourdieu's analysis, centering on Flaubert, does gesture to works "written out of literary history" and seems to imply that this is a bad thing, and that it should be rectified.(3) So, fully to comprehend the greatness of Flaubert, we must be aware of the whole field from which he springs. We must not "chant the litanies of the unique," but instead, ask in relation to what Flaubert's greatness emerged. We must reinstate, in its entirety, the context of literary production: "It is by completely historicizing him that one can completely understand how he tears himself away from the strict historicity of less heroic destinies."(4) So, to paraphrase, "historicizing" would entail remembering, reinstating those "less heroic destinies" that embody "strict historicity" but have nonetheless been erased from literary history. Bourdieu's aim is to avoid reading Flaubert as if Flaubert had already happened, this we must do by "taking the viewpoint of a Flaubert who was not yet Flaubert."(5) In effect, we should each, in our reading, become as the first readers of the text, primed with the consciousness of the age to receive afresh the imprint of Flaubert.(6)