10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 e lizabeth K oVach Collapsing the Economic and Creative Values of Contemporary Literature in Sheila Heti’s Motherhood and Ben Lerner’s 10: 04 1 Introduction: A Literary Sub-Genre about Two Types of Value In the Oxford English Dictionary, various definitions of ‘value, n.’ are relegated to two main categories: “I Worth or quality as measured by a standard of equivalence,” under which the first definition listed is “The material or monetary worth of something; the amount at which something may be estimated in terms of a medium of exchange, as money or goods, or some other similar standard” 1 and “II Worth based on esteem; quality viewed in terms of importance, usefulness, desirability, etc.,” under which the first definition listed is “The relative worth, usefulness, or importance of a thing or (occasionally) a person; the estimation in which a thing is held according to its real or supposed desirability or utility ” 2 ‘Value’ thus most generally pertains either to worth in a monetary, economic, market-determined sense or to worth in a non-monetary - cultural, ideational, ideological, political, societal, or personal - sense This volume is clearly focused on the latter category, as its impetus is to explore why literature and literary studies are worth bothering with and valuing, particularly in light of urgent 21st-century concerns such as climate change, surges in right-wing nationalism, on-going forced migration, and others raised by the volume’s editors and contributors This article, however, addresses both categories of value in its discussion of contemporary ‘novels of commission,’ which reflect upon the institutional and economic structures underlying literature’s production along with the creative value of literature Such novels force a consideration of the value of literature as something that is at once economic and creative, because they explicitly draw attention to situations in which these two kinds of value vitally inform one another The term ‘novels of commission’ was coined by literary scholars Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan to denote novels that “consider the institution’s presence in the writing process […] to reimagine rather than evade their institutional bonds Novels of commission do not at- 1 “value, n ” Oxford English Dictionary, 17 December 2019 2 Ibid 186 e lizabeth K oVach 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 tempt to transgress institutionalized novelistic conventions or win freedom from the institutions of which they are a part ” 3 Buurma and Heffernan draw upon two examples of contemporary literature, the semi-autobiographical novels How Should a Person Be? (2010) by Sheila Heti and Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) by Ben Lerner Heti’s novel chronicles the struggle of the writer Sheila Heti to complete a commissioned play for a feminist theatre It is about the various ways in which she evades writing (spending time with friends, in relationships, going to parties, etc ) due to an agonising case of writer’s block Lerner’s novel follows a similar premise: it details everything the protagonist, Adam Gordon, thinks and does during his stay in Madrid besides pursue the Fulbright-funded poetry project that brought him there As Buurma and Heffernan state, these novels are about “[m]oving from the fantasy of writing a canonical work to a realization that the preparation for writing the work in fact slowly and over time constitutes the work ” 4 In other words, these novels are deviations, or side projects, that describe the conditions, emotions, thoughts, and creative processes under which other commissioned works are evaded 5 Instead of being the projects their authors initially intended to complete, these works describe deviations from these projects’ completion Such novels thus collapse the separation between literature’s economic and institutional frameworks, on the one hand, and artistic creation purported to transcend and subvert such frameworks, on the other hand They describe the activities of the commissioned writers themselves instead of presenting works thematically and formally sealed off from the economic and institutional conditions that made them possible In what follows, I will draw connections between Buurma and Heffernan’s observations on contemporary novels of commission, Marxist conceptions of literature’s market and creative value, and sociologist Bernard Lahire’s notion of ‘the double life of writers’ to suggest that, while discourses surrounding the contingency between literature’s economic and creative value is not something new or unique to novels of commission, these novels offer distinctive perspectives and stances from which to 3 Rachel Buurma/ Laura Heffernan, “Notation After the ‘Reality Effect’: Remaking Reference with Roland Barthes and Sheila Heti,” Representations 125 1 (2014), 88 4 Ibid 5 In a New Yorker review of Heti’s newest book Motherhood, Alexandra Schwartz notes that the play Heti struggles to write in How Should a Person Be? did reach completion in real life: “Heti did complete the play that gave her so much trouble Called ‘All Our Happy Days Are Stupid,’ it was produced in Toronto in 2014 and the following year in New York, where I happened to see it It was close to pantomime, heavily stylized and difficult to decipher, a strange antithesis of the almost anarchically naturalistic novel that describes its agonized creation ” See Alexandra Schwartz, “Sheila Heti Wrestles With a Big Decision in ‘Motherhood’,” The New Yorker, 15 November 2019, n p 187 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 Collapsing the Economic and Creative Values of Contemporary Literature consider literature’s value in these dual senses This discussion will reference passages from David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King (2011), which I read as a forerunner to novels of commission in its overt discussion of literature’s economic and creative potentials and motivations I proceed with an analysis of two later novels by Heti and Lerner - namely, Motherhood (2018) and 10: 04 (2014), which can be read as thematic and narrative continuations of How Should a Person Be? and Leaving the Atocha Station, upon which Buurma and Heffernan base their discussion of novels of commission These works complicate Buurma and Heffernan’s definition of novels of commission by adding new facets to and pushing the boundaries of this novelistic sub-genre Nevertheless, these novels continue the theme of being deviations from other projects, and it is precisely through this deviation that the value of literature continues to be this novelistic sub-genre’s most prevalent concern I conclude by situating contemporary novels of commission as products of and critical responses to the so-called ‘rise of the creative class,’ to borrow the title phrase of Richard Florida’s 2002 book, and the 21st-century’s creative economy that has arguably blurred the activities and social positions of workers and artists to a historically unprecedented degree - and made the question of literature’s value so pressing for the contemporary novelists at hand 2 Comparing and Collapsing Literature’s Economic and Creative Values To define more clearly my notions of literature’s economic and creative values, the Marxist concepts of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ offer a productive starting point A basic tenet of Marxist thought is that the economic ‘base’ is a foundation in relation to which a political, juridical, ideological, and cultural ‘superstructure’ takes shape In the oft-cited passage that addresses this dynamic in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx writes that: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life 6 6 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marxists.org, 15 October 2019, n p 188 e lizabeth K oVach 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 According to this account, “definite forms of social consciousness” are not autonomous nor are they arbitrary in their formation and development Rather, they are conditioned by “[t]he mode of production of material life,” which is itself never a static phenomenon but rather an on-going emergence of social relations and economic forces The writing of literature is one type of expression of social consciousness that, in the words of Terry Eagleton in Marxism and Literary Criticism, is not “mysteriously inspired” but rather produced in “relation to the dominant ways of seeing the world which is the ‘social mentality’ or ideology of the age ” 7 Such “ways of seeing” are specific to each historical stage of economic development The material production of life and social consciousness (including literary expression) are thus fundamentally bound to one another in their on-going emergence This is not to say that literary texts can be directly explained by the economic relations of their times. This would be a crude simplification of the way in which Marx had framed the relationship between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure.’ As Eagleton points out, the vectors of influence are by no means unidirectional: “elements of the superstructure constantly react back upon and influence the economic base,” and the relationship between the two is one of “complexity and indirectness ” 8 In Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams dissuades from the very use of the categories of base and superstructure, finding that the tendency to oversimplify the relationship between them is indeed “a radical persistence of the modes of thought which [Marx] attacked ” 9 The assumption that the two fields can be thought about as distinct entities is, according to Williams, a vulgarisation of Marx’s intention Williams thus advocates the idea of ‘overdetermination,’ i e “determination by multiple factors,” to explain cultural and economic phenomena 10 The base and superstructure together form a historically contingent horizon of both limitation and possibility. Rather than functioning as a second-order reflection of an economic ‘foundation,’ artistic expression can generate new accents or shifts within social consciousness that impact economic relations, and vice versa It is also worth pointing to the simple fact that published literary texts are themselves commodities with specific market value. In Theories of Surplus Value (1863), Marx states that “[a] writer […] is a worker not in so far as he produces ideas, but in so far as he enriches the publisher, in so far as he is 7 Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976; New York: Routledge Classics, 2002), 6 8 Ibid , 9 9 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977; Oxford/ New York: OUP, 2009), 78 10 Ibid , 83 189 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 Collapsing the Economic and Creative Values of Contemporary Literature working for a wage ” 11 Literature does not simply reflect or arise out of an economic base, because it exists as a constitutive element of this very base The publishing industry is, to borrow the phrasing of Eagleton, “internal to art itself, shaping its forms from within ” 12 The monetary goals of a given author or publisher are considered to be “internal” to a commissioned work’s creation In light of this framework, the economic value of a given work of literature refers to its monetary worth on the literary market - to its material value from an economic standpoint and as a constituent of the economic base Creative value, on the other hand, pertains to a work of literature’s contribution to the horizon of possibility in imagination, thought, expression, and action From a Marxist standpoint, literary texts do not miraculously spring from a genius author’s mind Rather, emphasis is placed on the intellectual and literary-expressive - i e superstructural - horizon available to an author at a given time and place Daniel Hartley, in The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics (2017), offers the term “configurer” to describe the author, whose “labour is determined and determinate, since it is limited both by the type of social content available and by the sedimented paradigms which the configurer inherits from the tradition ” 13 The author may construct innovative configurations, but she works with a historically determined sphere of “content available” and “sedimented paradigms ” The work of writing is never performed in a void; its potential contribution to thought and expression arises out of a social consciousness that cannot be divorced from the economic forces through and against which it takes shape. Such a notion of the author as configurer implies that literature, in addition to enriching publishers when sold on the market, produces ideational, expressive, and political value This value of writing, which I will refer to as creative value, is artistic, social, and political for its potential to alter expressive possibility and social consciousness From this Marxist perspective, literature’s economic and creative values enfold into one another, just as the base and superstructure comprise a shared horizon of mutual influence. While such notions of value are often applied to the Marxist-critical analysis of literature, these notions need not be ‘applied’ in the case of novels of commission Rather, novels of commission generate and draw attention to these notions themselves by collapsing the fields of economic base and cultural superstructure Buurma and Heffernan argue that novels of commission belong to a lineage of thinking started by Roland Barthes in his lecture series Preparation for the Novel (2010 [1978-1980]) In the 11 Cited in ibid , 56 12 Eagleton, Marxism, 63 13 Daniel Hartley, The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 57 190 e lizabeth K oVach 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 lectures, Barthes claims to be setting out to write a novel, but, as Buurma and Heffernan find, “the ‘Grand Project’ of the seminar” is actually another one - namely, “to become a writer reimagining the university as a part of his writing life rather than a block to it ” 14 Barthes asks: what if, instead of setting institutional demands against a classically pure and apparently uninstitutional writing life, he could “invest the Course and Work in the same (literary) enterprise”? Such a solution, Barthes imagines, would “put a stop to the division of the subject ” He would “no longer have to keep up with all the work to be done (lectures, demands, commissions, constraints)”; instead “each moment of [his] life would henceforth be integrated into the Grand Project ” 15 Barthes explores the possibility of collapsing the divide between a potential “writing life” and his obligations as a university professor While Buurma and Heffernan rightly focus on the institutional nature of the latter role, it is also, of course, a salaried position that enables creative work by producing economic value The notion of erasing boundaries between the two, of relegating both activities - economically/ institutionally and creatively motivated - to a space that is a “Grand Project” is the endeavour that Barthes hypothesises and which, according to Buurma and Heffernan, novels of commission also pursue These novels do not merely conjoin the realms of economic and creative value-production but rather stage a collapsing of their distinctions They go beyond depicting what sociologist Bernard Lahire describes as a “literary game” in an article entitled “The Double Life of Writers” (2010) Lahire argues that Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, which includes a conception of the literary field, fails to account for the experience of a majority of writers, who juggle between at least two, if not multiple, social fields. Out of financial necessity, writers “seldom have both feet in that [the literary] field, but rather keep one foot outside: the money-making foot that allows the other one to ‘dance ’” 16 The “literary game” according to Lahire entails the continuous shuffling between fields whose activities aim at generating either economic or creative value Lahire’s point is that “in seeking to account for the specificity of the workings of the literary universe, the investigator must […] ask what the agents located in the literary universe do and who they are outside literature ” 17 Novels of commission, however, follow Barthes’ goal of seeking 14 Buurma/ Heffernan, “Notation,” 87 15 Cited in ibid , 87 Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the College de France (1978-1979 and 1979-1980) (New York: Columbia UP, 2011), 8 16 Bernard Lahire, “The Double Life of Writers,” New Literary History 42 2 (2010), 448 17 Ibid , 445-446 191 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 Collapsing the Economic and Creative Values of Contemporary Literature a way out of such a game - of narrating a time and space beyond the notions of “inside” and “outside,” or back and forth, between fields of economic and creative value A key aspect of this strategy is the mixture of fictional with autobiographical material, often referred to as an autofictional mode of narration. In his unfinished novel The Pale King (2011), for instance, David Foster Wallace directly thematises the value of writing in both monetary and creative senses by inserting his authorial voice into the narrative The novel depicts the experiences of employees at the Internal Revenue Service in the Regional Examination Center of Peoria, Illinois in the 1980s Wallace’s descriptions of tax agents’ work, interactions, and life stories are based on his own experience as a government-employed bureaucrat: Wallace worked at this very centre from 1985-1986 while on a forced leave from college In chapter 9, Wallace breaks away from the story and begins with the lines, “Author here Meaning the real author, the living human holding the pencil, not some abstract narrative persona ” 18 He goes on to stress that The Pale King “is really true,” 19 a fact that contradicts the publication’s legal disclaimer about the novel being pure fiction. He makes clear that his intention is not to trap the reader between opposing claims of truthfulness and fiction: Please know that I find these sort of cute, self-referential paradoxes irksome, too - at least now that I’m over thirty I do - and that the very last thing this book is is some kind of clever metafictional titty-pincher. That’s why I’m making it a point to violate protocol and address you here directly […] 20 Rather than construct a playful work of metafiction, Wallace intends to capture a “true” and decisive moment in IRS history, during which significant changes were made to the procedures and philosophy of U S taxation He believes that a candid recording of his experience of this historical moment is of “significant social and artistic value. That might sound conceited, but rest assured that I wouldn’t and couldn’t have put three years’ hard labor […] into The Pale King if I were not convinced it was true ” 21 Wallace frames his “hard labor” as an effort to make a “social and artistic” contribution Yet this lofty ambition is tethered to a practical one Wallace hastens to add that his decision to write a “memoir” is also fuelled by monetary considerations: 18 David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (New York/ Boston/ London: Little, Brown and Company, 2011), 66 19 Ibid , 67 20 Ibid 21 Ibid , 82 192 e lizabeth K oVach 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 I, like so many other Americans, have suffered reverses in the volatile economy of the last few years […]; and meanwhile all sorts of US writers […] have made it big with memoirs, 22 and I would be a rank hypocrite if I pretended that I was less attuned and receptive to market forces than anyone else 22 Wallace cites the “market forces” of a post-financial-crisis economy as central in shaping his writing He positions himself as an author motivated by an impulse to create something of non-monetary value who is also at the mercy of economic pressures in postmillennial U S -America His writing is a product of both of these motivations They function in tandem in shaping the novel When Wallace writes that he labours for the sake of achieving something of “social and artistic value” as well as producing value in monetary terms, he draws attention to writing as something that both “produces ideas” and “enriches the publisher ” He labours towards both ends, engaging in a process of economic production while also attempting to contribute to social consciousness He is a worker-writer in Marx’s sense and committed to another kind of work - that of affecting thought and expression through a creative/ configurative act. In bringing these dual senses of his literature’s value to the fore, Wallace announces his breach of the divide between fact and fiction. Yet a clear distinction is maintained between the fields of his real life and the fictionalised account of his time at the IRS. In novels of commission, however, fiction and autobiography are not marked by authorial insertions or footnotes as in Wallace’s work. Rather, distinctions between fields are dissolved to create narratives of indeterminate status with regard to fact and fiction. This dissolution, I contend, works in conjunction with the project of collapsing the divide between literature’s economic and creative value The world of the novel’s institutional and economic setting and the world constructed creatively are placed on a shared plane Wallace’s novel could thus be read as a forerunner to the novels of commission by Heti and Lerner. It conjoins two fields and notions of literary value within a single work but maintains the “game” of shuffling back and forth that Lahire finds is characteristic of “the double life of writers.” Heti and Lerner blend these fields as part of a single project in the spirit of Barthes 22 Ibid , 81 (footnote 22 in original) 193 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 Collapsing the Economic and Creative Values of Contemporary Literature 3 Negotiating and Affirming the Value of Literature Through Further Deviations Since Buurma and Heffernan defined novels of commission based on the examples of Heti’s How Should a Person Be? and Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station in 2014, Heti and Lerner have published further novels that are thematic continuations of those preceding them Heti’s Motherhood returns to the protagonist of How Should a Person Be? , Sheila Heti herself, who is now age 37, an established writer, and living with a boyfriend The book centres on Heti’s concern over whether to have a child before it is too late In Lerner’s novel 10: 04, we find an unnamed protagonist very similar to Adam Gordon of Atocha, presumably Ben Lerner himself, who now resides in Brooklyn and, due to the success of his first novel, is promised a sizable advance from a New York publisher for a second book Like Heti, Lerner’s narrator has reached his mid-to-late thirties and is also preoccupied by the prospect of parenthood: his best female friend Alex asks him to donate sperm and play a role in raising their child The parallels between these two works are striking in their shared focus on writers who have recently broken into the literary scene and are grappling with the bourgeois concerns of 21 st -century thirty-somethings Both also complicate and thereby push the genre of the novel of commission in new directions Their previous works performed the blending of two distinct worlds and values of literature: that of the creative project and the world in which the writer attempts yet fails to realise the intended project and generates a work that describes this very process In these continuations, further layers of identity and activity are added to the blend, while the issue of literature’s value remains central In Heti’s case, deliberation over whether to become a mother or not is what keeps Heti from pursuing other planned projects Motherhood is a recording of this deliberation Instead of describing the ways in which she avoids writing an intended and commissioned project, as in How Should a Person Be? , Heti turns her ambivalence about a personal decision into the subject of her writing - a decision that would directly affect her ability to generate both economic and creative value through writing During “a long conversation about women having children,” Heti’s boyfriend Miles states that, “one can either be a great artist and a mediocre parent, or the reverse, but not great at both, because art and parenthood take all of one’s time and attention ” 23 It is interesting to find this notion of the creative artist devoted exclusively to 23 Sheila Heti, Motherhood (London: Harvill Secker, 2018), 35 Subsequent quotations from this novel are referenced in parentheses in the text 194 e lizabeth K oVach 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 her work within a piece of writing that is structurally arranged to topple the notion of art as something generated outside of - or apart from - institutional, economic, personal, and familial concerns and constraints Such ambivalence and undermining of messages persists throughout this Heti’s meditation on authorship and motherhood Heti wavers between many positions on these subjects, yet repeatedly arrives at the conclusion that motherhood would result in a compromise of the potential to create value through literature At one point she writes, “I wonder if my thinking about having children is connected to losing faith in the bigger ideas - art, politics, romance. […] Maybe it reflects a cynicism about literature […] ” (84) Here she clearly speaks of a loss of faith in the value of literature in a creative sense, in its ability to have an impact on expression, thought, and action Motherhood is positioned as something that would require giving up on the generation of creative value and directing energies to a project disassociated from “bigger ideas ” Earlier, however, she draws a direct parallel between the projects of authorship and motherhood: The egoism of childbearing is like the egoism of colonizing a country - both carry the wish of imprinting yourself on the world […] Yet perhaps I am not so different from such people - spreading myself over so many pages, with my dream of my pages spreading over the world My religious cousin, who is the same age as I am, she had six kids And I have six books Maybe there is no great difference between us, just the slightest difference in our faith - in what parts of ourselves we feel called to spread (84-85) While Heti entertains the idea that the motives behind childbearing and publishing literature are perhaps not very different from one another, she maintains a sense that one path must be chosen over another in an all-or-nothing fashion Either she loses faith in the creative value of literature and becomes a mother or she resists cynicism about the potential impact of “my pages” along with the urge to procreate The writing of Motherhood is positioned as an act of delay and avoidance of becoming a mother: “the longer I work on this book, the less likely it is I will have a child Maybe that is why I am writing it - to get myself to the other shore, childless and alone ” (193) In the end, she decides against children and is relieved that she was able to resist personal temptation and cultural expectations in order to realise and honour how much writing has given me, and feeling so lucky that this passion was mine - right there, in the center of my life And you are never lonely while writing, I thought, it’s impossible to be - categorically impossible - because writing is a relation- 195 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 Collapsing the Economic and Creative Values of Contemporary Literature ship You’re in a relationship with some force that is more mysterious than yourself As for me, I suppose it has been the central relationship of my life (93) In wishing to maintain conditions in which writing can be the “center of my life,” Heti affirms her belief in the value of literature as “the central relationship” of her life With “relationship” she means a tie to a world of ideas, a “force” that awakens “passion” through the process of creative production Yet, in her cultivation of the novel of commission, Heti’s contribution is that of a side project pursued in lieu of other officially commissioned works. Motherhood is a more complex form of creative deviation than How Should a Person Be? Instead of describing the many ways in which she avoids commissioned projects that are waiting in the pipeline, Heti makes a project out of a personal decision that preoccupies and distracts her from this other work While Motherhood delays other literary projects, it also delays and diminishes the likelihood of the narrator becoming a mother It is a deviation in two directions, moving away from officially commissioned creative projects, on the one hand, and the project of becoming a mother, on the other hand Heti thereby complicates the novel of commission by generating a work that not only foregrounds its own institutional and economic environment but also the structures of class, gender, and social norms through and against which Heti writes throughout her contemplations on the social meaning of motherhood Heti turns a description of her positioning within a complex scheme of the social pressures, gender norms, financial institutions and economies into the project itself What Motherhood clearly demonstrates, however, is that, for Heti, this kind of project, which entered the market on the shoulders of major publishing houses, is as valuable as any other creative pursuit It is not that such a side project is inferior to or stands in the shadow of some other more central works but rather comprises her principal creative task While she refers to her writing as “a relationship” between herself and a world of ideas and “mysterious” creative energies, it is also defined by the mapping and description of many further relationships - institutional, social, economic, amorous, and familial The novel of commission thus moves from focusing on institutional ties related to funding of a specific work to engaging in a dense description of the myriad and entangled relations through which literature’s economic and creative values are generated Ben Lerner’s 10: 04 maintains a much stronger focus on the commissioning institutions that made its writing possible The novel begins with the narrator eating baby octopus in an expensive New York restaurant with his literary agent He writes: 196 e lizabeth K oVach 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 A few months before, the agent had e-mailed me that she believed I could get a ‘strong six-figure’ advance based on a story of mine that had appeared in The New Yorker; all I had to do was promise to turn it into a novel I managed to draft an earnest if indefinite proposal and soon there was a competitive auction among the major New York houses and we were eating cephalopods in what would become the opening scene 24 The “opening scene” of the novel to which the narrator refers is thus the opening scene of 10: 04, which details the story of its commissioning, among other themes. Lerner immediately positions the novel in terms of its “six-figure” economic value and the market-driven aims of the agent that initiated its writing in the first place. The novel that gets written, however, is not an expansion of the story that appeared in The New Yorker (a story entitled “The Golden Vanity” that was actually published in the magazine’s June 18, 2012 issue) When the narrator asks his agent what would happen if he were not to deliver on the promise of what he described in his proposal, the agent responds, “Depends. If they like it, fine. But you need to keep the New Yorker story in there, I think ”(157) The New Yorker story is “in there” but as a verbatim copy of what was published in 2012, isolated as a chapter that interrupts 10: 04’s principle narrative 10: 04 does not deliver on the proposal upon which “a competitive auction” was based It presents itself as a workaround, a narration of how the writer arrives at this very commission and what he does instead of produce what had been promised In this novel, the narrator chronicles various processes of work and social activity He puts in hours preparing groceries at the Park Slope Coop, his neighbourhood community grocery store that requires members to contribute labour each month He details his interactions with a young schoolboy, Roberto, whom he tutors on a regular volunteer basis He describes his encounter with a protester participating in the Occupy movement, to whom he offers his bathroom and a warm meal as part of a volunteer support team for the cause And he describes his and his best female friend Alex’s decision to have a child together; the novel ends with the two of them on an epic walk through Manhattan and Brooklyn after public transportation has been brought to a standstill by a hurricane. They are returning from a first ultrasound appointment At one point in the baby-planning process, Alex warns, “I don’t want what we’re doing to just end up as notes for a novel ” (137) The narrator has obviously gone against these wishes, turning their experiences into the notes that serve as the basis for 10: 04 All the while, the depiction of these experi- 24 Ben Lerner, 10: 04 (London: Granta, 2014), 4 Subsequent quotations are referenced in parentheses in the text 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 197 Collapsing the Economic and Creative Values of Contemporary Literature ences maintains a precision of language, includes various reflections on the meaning of art and literature, and is rife with allusions to the poetry of Walt Whitman These elements turn the description of activities that comprise the novel into a poetic endeavour 10: 04 is dedicated to bringing forth the creative value in everyday life It also complicates the genre of the novel of commission by compounding forms of deviation from the originally intended work The protagonist has been awarded “a house, a stipend, a car” to work as a writer-in-residency at a “foundation in Marfa, Texas,” and part of the novel details his temporary hiatus in Marfa (159) He intends to use the time away to write his commissioned novel and plans a strict writing schedule ahead of time Yet both the schedule and the writing are replaced by their opposites For one, “instead of beginning my residency by rising at 6: 00 a m and walking several miles in the early morning dark, then working until lunch, walking again, then working again until dinner,” the narrator sleeps throughout the day and works by night (166) What is more, he was at work, but on the wrong thing Instead of […] earning my advance, I was writing a poem, a weird meditative lyric in which I was sometimes Whitman, and in which the strangeness of the residency itself was the theme Having monetized the future of my fiction, I turned my back on it, albeit to compose verse underwritten by a millionaire’s foundation (168) While urged by his agent to produce something more mainstream for his second novel, the narrator works on “a weird meditative lyric” during the night These scenes suggest that his creative productivity springs from acts of deviation. His defiance of what is institutionally and contractually expected of him is what frees him to productively “compose verse ” The novel suggests that the defiance of expectations can spur creativity. Yet this creativity is no less tethered to financial value, having been made possible by “a millionaire’s foundation ” Values creative and monetary remain part of a shared scheme As both Heti and Lerner slowly reach mid-life, they develop the novel of commission in terms of thematic complexity Their originally clear bifurcations of commissioned proposals, on the one hand, and the projects they actually complete, on the other hand, are complicated by further kinds of deviation not simply creative but also social and personal Motherhood and 10: 04 demonstrate that the novel of commission can encompass more than the collapsing of literature’s monetary and creative values into a mutually constitutive relationship These projects are about showing how the depiction of this very collapse can itself affirm literature’s potential to simultaneously 198 e lizabeth K oVach 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 expose the determinates of its own institutional and financial value and generate creative value 4 Conclusion: Values of Literature in the Age of Creativity As the examples of Heti and Lerner demonstrate, novels of commission erase the divide between their own financial and institutional settings and the settings of their narratives. In doing so, they function as reflections upon literature’s value in both its economic and creative dimensions This fusing of worlds and values, I would argue, is indicative of a culture in which the notions of creative labour and the creative class have dissolved boundaries between many forms of white-collar work and artistic practice, workers and artists, creativity and commerce In Literature and the Creative Economy (2009), Sarah Brouillette summarises the development as follows: “The artist has been subsumed into the creative class, bohemian values persist only as lifestyle choices, and creativity and market circulation are synonymous and unfold in tandem ” 25 In The Invention of Creativity (2017 [2012]), Andreas Reckwitz observes “the coupling of the wish to be creative with the imperative to be creative” as something that “encompasses the whole structure of the social and the self in contemporary society” since the late twentieth century, a phenomenon he names “a heterogeneous yet powerful creativity dispositif ” 26 The realms of art and other commercial activities enter a blend: The dissolution of the borders between and around artistic practices in the context of the creativity dispositif poses the problem of how to maintain a clear-cut distinction between art and its social environment What remains of art’s particularity when aesthetic social forms have spread into other areas of society and placed them under the regime of aesthetic novelty? 27 According to this narrative, as the ideal, white-collar worker is increasingly encouraged to adopt the dispositions and practices traditionally associated with artists, the social role of the artist loses distinction Novels of commission draw attention to this trend, explicitly presenting themselves as works of literature in which “creativity and market circulation are synonymous and run in tandem ” From the Marxist-theoretical perspective presented earlier in this article, this tandem between the economic base and superstructural creative pro- 25 Sarah Brouillette, Literature and Creative Economy (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009), 145 26 Andreas Reckwitz, The Invention of Creativity (Cambridge/ Malden: Polity, 2017), 5 27 Ibid , 82 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 duction has always existed. The late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, have witnessed an acceleration and exaggeration of the reciprocal relationship between economic and creative values Literature both absorbs and critically comments upon this development in myriad ways David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King exemplifies a novel in which the author interjects his financial motives as a writer into a narrative aimed at generating creative value While The Pale King maintains a clear distinction between the author’s actual world and the world(s) of the narrative presented, novels of commission blur fact with fiction as a means of erasing the ontological distinction between themselves and the institutional and financial worlds that make their writing possible This turns them into meditations on both the economic and creative values of literature in an era of the ‘creativity dispositif ’ Heti and Lerner’s second novels, Motherhood and 10: 04, are thematically more complex than their predecessors and thereby question multiple senses of their own value As literary projects that turn everyday, personal life into Works themselves, they might be read as mere dupes of the era - relinquishing literature’s autonomy and subsuming all activity under the rubric of ‘creative project ’ Yet this would miss these novels’ critical edges, which have to do with what they ask of the reader Reckwitz suggests that some art, which he terms “centrifugal art,” continues to be of a value other than that of “non-artistic artistic practices” in the era of the ‘creativity dispositif’ by directing audience reception in such a way as to nurture an attitude of aesthetic reflection. The audience is encouraged to go beyond its sensuous-affective stimulation and excitement and to reflect on it from without. Centrifugal art thereby promotes second-order operations - artistic operations taking account of the conditions of their own possibility 28 The novel of commission is committed to these very aims in its focus on “the conditions of [its] own possibility ” It pushes the reader into “second-order” considerations of its - literature’s - institutional, economic, personal, and social motivations and entanglements Near the end of 10: 04, the narrator passes by the Goldman Sachs building in New York City’s Financial District It is one of the only illuminated buildings in the entire city after a hurricane has caused a widespread power outage The narrator mentions that an image of the bright building would eventually be used “for the cover of my book - not the one I was contracted to write […], but the one I’ve written in its place for you, on the very edge of fiction.” (237) To use an image of one of the most powerful financial institutions of the world 28 Ibid , 82 Collapsing the Economic and Creative Values of Contemporary Literature 199 200 e lizabeth K oVach 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 as the cover image of this novel is a most blatant instance of how novels of commission strive to direct our view to both the economic and creative values of literature The novel is written “for you,” the reader, to consider its value as both a commercial product and an effort to push the limits of expressive and creative possibility Works Cited Barthes, Roland The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the College de France (1978-1979 and 1979-1980) Ed Nathalie Léger Trans Kate Briggs New York: Columbia UP, 2011 Brouillette, Sarah Literature and the Creative Economy Stanford: Stanford UP, 2014 Buurma, Rachel Sagner/ Laura Heffernan “Notation After the ‘Reality Effect’: Remaking Reference with Roland Barthes and Sheila Heti ” Representations 125 1 (2014), 80-102 Eagleton, Terry Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976) New York: Routledge Classics, 2002 Hartley, Daniel The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017 Heti, Sheila Motherhood London: Harvill Secker, 2018 Lahire, Bernard “The Double Life of Writers ” New Literary History 42 2 (2010), 443-465 Lerner, Ben 10: 04 London: Granta, 2014 Marx, Karl A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) Marxists.org, 15 October 2019 www marxists org/ archive/ marx/ works/ 1859/ critique-pol-economy/ Last accessed 15 February 2019 Reckwitz, Andreas The Invention of Creativity Trans Steven Black 2012 Cambridge/ Malden: Polity, 2017 Schwartz, Alexandra “Sheila Heti Wrestles With a Big Decision in Motherhood ” The New Yorker 7 May 2018 www newyorker com/ magazine/ 2018/ 05/ 07/ sheila-heti-wrestleswith-a-big-decision-in-motherhood Last accessed 15 November 2019 “Value, n ” The Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed , 2011 oed com/ view/ Entry/ 221253 Last accessed 17 December 2019 Wallace, David Foster The Pale King New York/ Boston/ London: Little, Brown and Company, 2011 Williams, Raymond Marxism and Literature 1977 Oxford/ New York: OUP, 2009