AbstractsLanguage, Literature & Linguistics

Literary authors have authority. This is certainly true of the early twenty-first century, as writers are asked in interviews, talk programs and on the Internet to give their views on social issues, but the same holds for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For hundreds of years writers have functioned as figures with an oddly paradoxical authority, for they base their claim on their outsider status and apparent lack of influence. Captivated by Prometheus makes use of a detailed posture model to investigate the self-representations of five Dutch authors active between 1820 and approximately 1970: Jean Baptiste Didier Wibmer, Multatuli, Lodewijk van Deyssel, Carry van Bruggen and Willem Frederik Hermans. It shows how Dutch literary authors in this period underpin their authority with the claim that they are autonomous. More specifically, the analysis reveals that the elements of authority and autonomy occupy a different place in the posturing of each of these five authors, but that broadly speaking these authors nevertheless have something in common. They refuse to be associated with the power of politicians or ‘intellectuals’. They make this clear by representing themselves not only as autonomous and individual but also as lacking all authority and power. This serves the paradoxical goal of gaining more authority: precisely a person who makes no attempt to uphold an actual position of power, who is essentially ‘nothing’ because he functions autonomously of any identifiable moral or political institution, can—the reasoning goes—assume an authoritative position as an author. Such authority is definitely vulnerable because it is in fact founded on an ‘empty’ category (autonomy, non-belonging). The writers show, however, that this vulnerability is characteristic of all forms of authority. In the last analysis political authority also rests on nothing. Authors assume an authoritative position of political commentator precisely because they claim to be the only ones who are honest about the artificiality of their authority. The point of departure of this book is that neither autonomy nor authority is a historical ‘given’. Although literary culture undergoes unmistakable changes in the period 1820-1970—authors have greater political and juridical freedom at the end of this period than at the beginning—there is no linear progression toward greater autonomy which guarantees the freedom of a writer in a certain period. On the contrary, autonomy always has to be claimed by an author, and on the basis of that claim an author can again assume an authoritative position.