Fake It If You Can’t Make It: Nella Larsen and the Ideal of Autonomy

Abstract

Abstract This article argues for Nella Larsen’s theory of art by reading her two major novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), in the light cast back by her last publication, the plagiarized story “Sanctuary” (1930). In this reading, “Sanctuary” is a perverse tribute to the commitment to aesthetic autonomy that Larsen demonstrates in those novels. As Stanley Cavell put it in 1969, Larsen wants “the creation of art” to be the kind of “conduct” that is “free to choose only those commitments it wishes to incur.” This commitment to an ideal of the freely made artwork aligns Larsen’s writing practice with the aspirations of an incipient American New Criticism. But the point is not to elevate Larsen’s work by claiming its modernist bona fides. The point is that Larsen’s practice offers a necessary revision of aesthetic autonomy by risking fraudulent labor. Larsen reckons with the pressure to perform for the market in ways that make for a more complex and durable understanding of the work of art than the New Critics ever found it necessary to develop. This reading offers a new understanding of Larsen’s work, showing the contradictions embedded in aesthetic autonomy and its implications for the work of criticism in the university today.