Literary Careers in the Modern Era

Guy Davidson, Nicola Evans, Guy Davidson, Nicola Evans

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137478504
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is the first study of the shape and diversity of the literary career in the 20th and 21st centuries. Bringing together essays on a wide range of authors from Australia, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, the book investigates how literary careers are made and unmade, and how norms of authorship are shifting in the digital era.

1

Introduction: Brilliant Careers?

Guy Davidson and Nicola Evans

My Brilliant Career (1901) is the story of a young woman growing up in the outback who yearns to be an author. The novel has an iconic status in Australian literature and the success of Brilliant Career enabled its author to finance Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, the annual Miles Franklin award. Yet as any reader knows, the title is deeply ironic; it is used in the novel to describe the exhausting farm labor that Sybylla endures for much of her childhood in rural New South Wales and that makes her dream of a literary career seem remote.

This was life—my life—my career, my brilliant career! I was fifteen—fifteen! A few fleeting hours and I would be as old as those around me. I looked at them as they stood there, weary, and turning down the other side of the hill of life. When young, no doubt they had hoped for, and dreamed of, better things—had even known them. But here they were. This had been their life; this was their career. It was, and in all probability would be, mine too. My life—my career—my brilliant career!¹

For Sybylla, her impoverished rural beginnings are an obstacle to the life of artistic expression for which she hungers. In the ‘Special Notice’ that prefaces the novel, she warns her readers not to expect ‘descriptions of beautiful sunsets and whisperings of wind. We … can see nought in sunsets save as signs and tokens whether we may expect rain on the morrow … we will leave such vain and foolish imagining to those poets and painters—poor fools!’² While Sybylla chafes at the narrowness of her life of toil, her image of a poet’s life is not a happy one either: ‘For a poet must be companionless—alone! Fearfully alone in the midst of his fellows whom he loves. Alone because his soul is as far above common mortals as common mortals are above monkeys.’³ The hackneyed image of artistic solitude attests to another kind of deprivation: the absence in the narrator’s life of any models of how to build a literary career. Although she is ‘given to writing stories’, and tells us that ‘literary people predict I will yet be an authoress’,⁴ Sybylla is no closer by the end of the novel to achieving her literary ambitions and escaping the ‘sodden round of grinding tasks’.⁵ It is not just Sybylla’s class and gender that complicate her desire to be an author. Sybylla’s questions: ‘Why do I write? For what does any one write? Shall I get a hearing? If so—what then?’ express the existential uncertainty that as Edward Said will argue is an integral part of the modern literary career.⁶ Indeed, in an abrupt turn-around in the novel’s final pages, Sybylla appears to renounce the idea of a literary career altogether, professing herself proud to be ‘a peasant, a part of the bone and muscle of my nation, and earn my bread by the sweat of my brow, as man was meant to do’,⁷ and piously decrying ‘vain ambition’.⁸ Yet the final lines of the novel with their detailed description of ‘sunset pageantry’ slyly suggest that inside Sybylla, a writer is still struggling to emerge.⁹ Despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that Sybylla does not become a published writer, My Brilliant Career compellingly elaborates the way in which the writing life is unpredictably determined by a host of ‘external’ social forces and ‘internal’ psychic ones. It is the interplay of these external and internal forces on the modern literary career that the essays collected in this volume explores.¹⁰

While ‘career’ is an indispensable term in contemporary literary criticism, as a theoretical focus it has received only scattered attention. In Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), Edward Said included 50 pages of richly suggestive discussion of the topic as part of a chapter on the genesis of a literary work.¹¹ Said pointed out that between the writer’s life and the writer’s text lay a rich territory almost untouched by critics: the making and unmaking of a literary career. How does one begin to write? What is the relationship between an author’s life and his writing life? Is life a rehearsal for writing, or a potential threat? Or is it the other way round? A distinctive feature of modern writing, for Said, is the way in which difficulty of beginning to write becomes a compulsive topic of the literary text. Drawing largely on a European canon of modernists, Said offers as his prime example the work of Proust, whose À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu ‘is a preparation for the writing career which, it has not escaped some critics, Marcel by the end of the novel is unlikely ever really to begin.’¹² Protagonists like Marcel in À La Recherche, Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, or indeed Sybylla in My Brilliant Career, ‘exist exclusively as writers-to-be’ and the text becomes a ‘sort of pretext’,¹³ one that includes the life before the literary career as part of the effort to understand how the production of a text begins.

Beginnings was widely acclaimed; it won the first Lionel Trilling Memorial award and an entire issue of the journal Diacritics was devoted to it.¹⁴ However, it was quickly overshadowed by Said’s field-defining work Orientalism, published three years later.¹⁵ For his epigraph to Orientalism, Said chose Disraeli’s infamous line ‘the East is a career’, a phrase that summed up the way Western fantasies of an exotic Orient served imperialist objectives—and it was that career that subsequently interested scholars.

The study of the literary career has been further impeded by several decades of critical orthodoxy in the Anglophone academy that worked to rule out of bounds serious consideration of authorial input into texts. First the New Critics held sway throughout the 1940s and 1950s, in the US at least, with their injunction against the ‘intentional fallacy’.¹⁶ Subsequently the even more influential attacks on conventional understandings of authorship mounted by Roland Barthes in ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968) and Michel Foucault in ‘The Author Function’ (1969) ensured that the suppression of speculation on authorial intention became for many years a virtually reflexive move in literary criticism.

However, despite the influence of these anti-intentionalist arguments, Said’s discussion of the career did have some impact; and a few scholars of nineteenth and twentieth century literature—some in dialog with Said, some not—have written book-length studies on the interrelation between the idea of the career and the published work of single authors. These include Nina Baym’s The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career (1976), Gary Lee Stonum’s Faulkner’s Career: An Internal Literary History (1979), David Carter’s A Career in Writing: Judah Waten and the Cultural Politics of a Literary Career (1997), and Edgar Dryden’s Monumental Melville: The Formation of a Literary Career (2004). Of these books (discounting Baym’s, which appeared only a year after Beginnings), those of Stonum and Dryden are explicitly indebted to Said, though Dryden’s book does not mention Stonum’s earlier one, which implicitly presented itself as laying the groundwork for future explorations of the authorial career. Carter’s book, on the canonically marginal Australian writer Judah Waten, does not mention the preceding work of either Said or Stonum, though Carter’s arguments are not incompatible with them. In sum, work on the modern literary career has thus far been sporadic and often carried out by scholars apparently unaware of the work done by others.

In pre-modern literary scholarship, the picture is somewhat different. Two recent collections, European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance (2002) and Classical Literary Careers and their Reception (2010),¹⁷ attest to growing interest in the pre-modern literary career. As Patrick Cheney notes in the introduction to the first collection, the 1980s and 1990s saw the consolidation of a body of ‘career criticism’ in English Renaissance studies, primarily in relation to the work of Edmund Spenser.¹⁸ Cheney notes that work on the career in Spenser studies is indebted to Lawrence Lipking’s The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (1981) and Richard Helgerson’s Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (1983), though Helgerson’s book has been more influential in English Renaissance studies than Lipking’s, which offers a broadly comparative account of the European poetic canon from Virgil and Dante, to Goethe and Keats, to Rilke and Mallarmé.¹⁹ Apparently unaware of Said’s work, Cheney claims that Helgerson and Lipking ‘[w]orking independently of one another … basically invented career criticism.’²⁰ The elision of Said from Cheney’s introduction indicates again the patchiness and stop-start nature of career studies.

Literary Careers in the Modern Era, which collects scholarship on American, Australian, British, and Canadian twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers of novels and poetry, does not aim to present a comprehensive account of even the modern Anglophone literary career. But it does attempt to amend the hitherto piecemeal nature of career studies by drawing upon and extending previous work in the field—though, given the collection’s historical focus, work on the modern era, and Said’s work in particular, usually has more resonance for contributors than scholarship on pre-modern careers. Investigating canonical and noncanonical authors from diverse national and diasporic backgrounds in relation to a range of ancillary concerns—including political commitment, popularity, sexuality, gender, and race—Literary Careers in the Modern Era offers the first sustained treatment of the diversity of modern and contemporary literary careers.

The study of the literary career obviously intersects with other, established areas of scholarship in literary history and theory, including literature as an institution, literary reputation, literary afterlives, and literary celebrity. Of these areas, it is perhaps the last, the study of literary celebrity, that is closest in its materials and methods to career studies. Authorial celebrity has recently become a growth industry in literary studies, and several of the essays in this book engage with this recent scholarship.²¹ But only a tiny minority of authors become celebrities, while all authors have careers of one sort or another. It is the contention of this book that the career may productively be thought of as a category of an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on the Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Brilliant Careers?
• Part I Career/Success
• Part II Queer Careers
• Part III New Contexts: Rethinking How Literary Careers are Made
• Bibliography
• Index