does “literary” denote in this framework? For the “literary field” does not simply demarcate a space in which one could practice “literature,” but one in which the concept of “literature” itself, as a specific kind of intellectual activity, became knowable and as a result debatable. The term is very much a dependent variable in this study. It is not a given and will not be presumed self-evidently to account for the success of a work or a writer. Instead, the assumption will be that a critical part of any writer’s success lies in his or her ability to impose a specific conceptualization of his or her activity as “literary,” to have the activity seen and appreciated as such.14
My focus on literary or intellectual value as a site of mediation leads me to depart in salient ways from Bourdieu’s first view of the field as starkly bifurcated into autonomous and nonautonomous zones. For Bourdieu, the two zones are, as it were, ontologically equivalent in that both are assumed to be actual spaces in which individuals actually behave according to the logic imputed to their respective fields. A purely venal culture industry takes shape and sparks the opposition of a group of writers and artists who really do retreat into rarefied circles where they experience a radical disconnect—in the form of failure, obscurity, and poverty—from the industry and its commercial public. One consequence of such a bipolar schema is that the values and practices characteristic of the autonomous subfield tend to come across as defensive responses to the overbearing influence and philistinism of the bourgeois culture industry. Indeed, for Bourdieu, literary and artistic autonomy ultimately seems to rest on accepting the power and crassness of the nonautonomous zone, even emphasizing its corruption in order then to do everything in the opposite way and to have the contrarian gestures valorized, in turn, as heroic and necessary. In this respect, Bourdieu’s famous description of the field as an “economic world turned upside down” should be understood in light of the immense efforts and suffering that go into such a reversal. Likewise, as an articulation of the field’s basic rationality, “disinterested interest” explains not the facile indifference of an aristocrat to an economic gain that he hardly needs, but an urgent and sublime effort of self-denial.
Bourdieu draws in large measure on literary sources for this view, most famously on Flaubert’s 1869 novel L’éducation sentimentale. I am not suggesting that we reject such sources as fantasies—this study will itself be primarily concerned with them—but it seems obvious to point out that their agenda is not an “objective” or totalizing depiction of the cultural sphere. Literary sources have “literary” interests at heart; they highlight particular issues— related to, say, the integrity or the livelihood of writers—at the expense of a whole host of other concerns that are of equal possible relevance for the broad functioning of the cultural sphere. Furthermore, if they do address such issues as the profitability of publishers or the preferences of readers, it is to address them not as such but only insofar as they affect authorial concerns15 The upshot is that the “autonomous field” as conceived by Bourdieu is not “out there” in the world. It is instead the effect of a specialized, partial vantage point, which sees the field as autonomous to the extent that the cultural sphere is viewed, against its inherent complexity and heterogeneity, through the narrow lens of literary priorities, and assumed to exist solely for the purpose of consecrating writers and their works. The same logic dictates that anything not serving literary interests first and foremost be relegated to “nonautonomy” and caricatured as pointedly anti-literary. It is in this effort that the language of economics is polemically wielded, in order to devalorize such influences as venal and profiteering. In any case, the “nonautonomous” field is no more “real” or “objective,” but takes shape as a by-product of the conceptual fantasy of the “autonomous field” and the “autonomous writer.” The “exploitative publisher” and the “bourgeois reader” are indeed part and parcel with those whom they are presumed to torment.
My contention is that the relation between autonomous and nonautonomous, as well as between symbolic and economic, is far more permeable than Bourdieu allows. Not because one is merely the denial of the other, but because neither has a real existence. The dichotomies belong to a single vision of purity that, in rescuing “literature” from the forces of co-optation, had to play up the danger of those forces, and indeed had perhaps to invent them. Nor is the literary market an actual place. Like Bourdieu’s subfields, it offers a postulation or an argument about how the cultural world should operate, how it should function in the interest of bolstering the formation and valorization of certain intellectual identities. With roots in early modern debates over the definitions of literary legitimacy, the “market” developed in a prolonged effort to transform the field of play for specific writers—namely, for those seeking to define themselves as outsiders with respect to an established cultural order whose authority was increasingly open to contestation—by changing how the intellectual field was perceived. The market imposed new meanings on familiar outcomes—for instance, the noble leisure that was traditionally considered to be the most proper condition for lettres became, in this view, indecent and demeaning—and it offered new outcomes as meaningful: those, above all, which ensued from the print publication process.
For in the framework of the literary market print publication was symbolically invested in ways that it had never been.16 “As an exhibition makes a painter,” remarks Bernard Lahire in his recent study of La condition littéraire, “so publication, in a large measure, makes a writer.”17 The fact is, though, that there was no such clear-cut connection between literary identity and publication in early modern literary culture, in which writers endeavored to be recognized for their respectability and elegance as honnêtes gens rather than for the brilliance of their books. We shall see that publication was an intensely fraught issue, and writers were far more prone to obfuscate or downplay their contacts with the world of print rather than to appropriate them as decisive factors of their credibility. The connection was not given but forged in the same debates that advanced the market as a conceptualization of the cultural sphere. Accordingly, publication processes were integrated in new ways into the self-presentations of writers, who no longer underscored their distance from the book trade—say, by expressing indifference to or ignorance of its outcomes—but highlighted their involvement.
Most often, they did so by playing up the bad treatment to which they were subjected, along with their inabilities, as “disinterested” writers prepared to suffer for their art, to negotiate with publishers concerned only to make a profit. But decent pay could figure, too. In any case, both experiences at bottom proved exactly the same thing: that through contacts with the commercial publishing world the writer was independent from the corrupt elites who for so long had ruled the cultural sphere. This was without a doubt the fundamental logic of the “market,” which in all of its positive and negative permutations envisioned a field in which the links tying a specific vision of intellectual legitimacy—based on social autonomy from traditional elites—to a vision of authorial economic participation in publishing (whether this was successful or not) were self-evident, such that an evocation of the latter easily and persuasively conjured up a belief in the former, that is, in the writer’s credibility. Whether depicted being robbed by a libraire or as the recipient of a handsome payment, the writer at the center of such a representation was in either case independent from a patron, and extricated from the rationale of the corrupt world that patronage evoked: pleasing, leisure, entertainment.18 With its roots in Old Regime polemics rather than in the “natural” desires of writers, the association of legitimacy, social autonomy, and economic self-sufficiency is at the core of our contemporary understanding of the author and the intellectual. A lack of a sense of its historical contingency and development has clouded many analyses of the modern cultural sphere and the condition of the modern writer within it.
From a broad historical viewpoint, the problem of the field has often imposed itself as a problem of identifying the first one. This is, of course, what inspired Alain Viala to describe in such influential terms the literary field of the seventeenth century, which he so famously called “le premier champ littéraire” in a refinement of Bourdieu’s effort to situate the first field in the late nineteenth century.19 He would back off from this assertion to some degree, despite the compelling nature of the argument.20
