Autonomy, Difficulty, and the Work of Literature in Wyndham Lewis's Tarr and Andre Gide's the Counterfeiters

This chapter examines the relationship between modernist claims of autonomy and modernist arguments for the value of difficulty as a literary mode. It argues that modernist autonomy claims should be viewed not as monolithic dismissals of any purpose, for the work of art, but rather as the contextual disavowal of specific connections between the work of art and the world. Moreover, these highly contextual autonomy claims are often intentionally provocative rather than descriptive. Through an analysis of Andre Gide's Counterfeiters and Wyndham Lewis's Tarr, it examines how these modernists claims of autonomy are often placed in dialogic contexts that problematize and ironize them. This is no longer an austere and monolithic modernist work that seeks to stand apart from the social, but a provocative and self-reflexive work that places absurd and hyperbolic autonomy claims within a dialogic structure.