In the fall of 2017, a year into the current U.S. administration, a month into the #MeToo movement, I reread Adorno's 1962 essay “Commitment,” on the creation and consumption of art in an authoritarian world. I reread it at the same time that I became brave enough, and angry enough, to teach Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) for the first time in my fifteen-year career. Adorno says that Sartre's question, “‘Is there any meaning in life when men exist who beat people until the bones break in their bodies?’ is also the question whether any art now has the right to exist” in the wake of atrocities like the Holocaust. Adorno ultimately resolves the question in the affirmative, but only at the end of an essay otherwise dedicated to the difficulties of producing literature that resists a consumerist regime. For Adorno, committed literature (that is, progressive, instrumentalized, messaged) all too often assimilates itself to the brutalities against which it protests, while autonomous literature (that is, art that exists for itself) runs the risk of degenerating into a “fetish . . . an apoliticism that is in fact deeply political” (177). In returning to both Tess and Adorno after a longish absence, I wondered whether, in spite of Adorno's overtly modernist leanings, we might nevertheless consider that certain Victorian novels manifest his concept of tensed oscillation between commitment and autonomy. Adorno suggests that certain nonrealist art forms (one of his examples is Picasso's Guernica) neither “do” nor attempt to compel others to “do” anything instrumental, and yet such works simultaneously both illuminate and (precisely in their turning away from action) condemn systemic brutalities. We need not entirely agree with Adorno's reading of Guernica specifically, nor his fetish-treatment of modernist art broadly, to entertain the idea that—even in their realist projects—certain Victorian novels also “negate empirical reality, [and] by merely existing endlessly reiterat[e systemic] guilt” (190). I'll return to this question more directly later in the essay; for now, let it lurk in the corners of my discussion of Tess.

中文翻译：

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“可怕的迭代”：未经同意阅读苔丝

2017 年秋天，也就是美国现任政府上任一年，#MeToo 运动开始一个月，我重读了阿多诺 1962 年关于威权世界中艺术创作和消费的文章《承诺》。我在重读它的同时，我变得足够勇敢，足够愤怒，去教导德伯家的苔丝（1891 年）这是我 15 年职业生涯中的第一次。阿多诺说萨特的问题是：“‘当有人打人直到骨头折断的时候，生活还有什么意义吗？’ 还有一个问题，在大屠杀等暴行之后，任何艺术现在是否有权存在”。阿多诺最终以肯定的方式解决了这个问题，但只是在一篇文章的结尾处，否则他将致力于创作抵制消费主义政权的文学作品的困难。对阿多诺来说，忠诚的文学（即进步的、工具化的、信息化的）常常将自己同化为它所抗议的暴行，而自主文学（即为自身而存在的艺术）则有堕落为“恋物癖”的风险. . . 一种实际上具有深刻政治色彩的非政治主义”（177）。在返回两者苔丝和阿多诺在长期缺席之后，我想知道，尽管阿多诺有明显的现代主义倾向，我们是否仍会认为某些维多利亚时代的小说体现了他在承诺和自主之间的紧张振荡的概念。阿多诺建议某些非现实主义艺术形式（他的一个例子是毕加索的格尔尼卡) 既不“做”也不试图强迫他人“做”任何有帮助的事情，但这些作品同时阐明并（正是在他们转离行动时）谴责系统性的暴行。我们不必完全同意阿多诺对格尔尼卡具体来说，也不是他对现代主义艺术的广泛崇拜，以接受这样一种观点，即即使在他们的现实主义项目中，某些维多利亚时代的小说也“否定经验现实，[并且]仅仅存在无休止地重申[e系统]内疚”（190） . 我将在本文后面更直接地回到这个问题；现在，让它潜伏在我讨论的角落里苔丝.