Disciplining Modernism

Disciplining Modernism

Also by Pamela L. Caughie PASSING AND PEDAGOGY: The Dynamics of Responsibility VIRGINIA WOOLF AND POSTMODERNISM: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself VIRGINIA WOOLF IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION (editor)

Disciplining Modernism Edited by

Pamela L. Caughie

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Pamela L. Caughie 2009 Individual chapters © contributors 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–23508–3 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Acknowledgments

vii

List of Illustrations

viii

Notes on Contributors

ix

Introduction Pamela L. Caughie

1

1 Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/ Modernity/Modernism Susan Stanford Friedman 2 Uncanny Modernism, or Analysis Interminable Stephen Ross

11 33

3 Imagining World Literatures: Modernism and Comparative Literature Jessica Berman

53

4 Taking the Detour, Finding the Rebels: Crossroads of Caribbean and Modernist Studies Mary Lou Emery

71

5 Religion and Modernity: The Case of the Lourdes Shrine in Nineteenth-Century France Suzanne K. Kaufman

92

6 Balzac’s Golden Triangles in the Colonial Genealogies of French Modernism Liz Constable

109

7 Modern, Moderne, and Modernistic: Le Corbusier, Thomas Wallis and the Problem of Art Deco Bridget Elliott

128

8 Fantasies of the New Class: New Criticism, Harvard Sociology, and the Idea of the University Stephen Schryer

147

9 Downsizing the ‘Great Divide’: A Reflexive Approach to Modernism, Disciplinarity, and Class Lois Cucullu

167

v

vi

Contents

10 Lady Chatterley’s Broker: Banking on Modernism Jonathan Rose

182

11 Modernism, Economics, Anthropology Glenn Willmott

197

12

Modernist Studies and Anthropology: Reflections on the Past, Present, and Possible Futures Marc Manganaro

210

13 ‘The Famished Roar of Automobiles’: Modernity, the Internal Combustion Engine, and Modernism Garry Leonard

221

14

The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism Miriam Bratu Hansen

242

Afterword Susan Stanford Friedman

259

Works Cited

264

Index

283

Acknowledgments The chapters in Disciplining Modernism (with the exception of Friedman’s, Hansen’s and Manganaro’s) were written for a seminar at the 2005 conference of the Modernist Studies Association. I gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint the following as chapters: Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Definitional Excursions; The Meanings of Modern/ Modernity/Modernism,’ Modernism/modernity 8.3 (2001): 493–513; Miriam Hansen, The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism, published in Linda Williams and Christine Gledhill, eds., Reinventing Film Studies (London: Edward Arnold, 2000), first appeared in Modernism/modernity 6.2 (1999): 59–77. Some material written for this collection has since been published, in whole or in part, and is reprinted with permission: Stephen Schryer, ‘Fantasies of the New Class: New Criticism, Harvard Sociology, and the Idea of the University,’ PMLA 122.3 (May 2007): 663–78; Jonathan Rose, ‘Lady Chatterley’s Broker: Banking on Modernism,’ The Common Review 6.3 (Winter 2008): 13–24; Suzanne Kaufman’s essay contains material from her book Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2005); and, Mary Lou Emery’s essay contains material from her book Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 2007). I want to thank our editor at Palgrave Macmillan, Paula Kennedy, for supporting this project, and Steven Hall, Editorial Assistant, for his patient and gracious replies to an endless barrage of E-mails during the preparation of the manuscript. I am especially indebted to my graduate research assistants, Erin Holliday-Karre and Sean Labbe, for their invaluable help on preparing the manuscript for publication. Bridget Elliott would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their support for her research, and Jon Sarma, who helped secure copyright permissions for her plates. Lois Cucullo wishes to thank the Huntington Library and the NEH for their generous support of the research and writing of her chapter. Finally, I wish to thank Loyola University Chicago for its generous research support. We thank the following for permission to reprint illustrations: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Tate, London; The National Gallery of Jamaica; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; ADAGP Paris and DACS, London; Angelo Hornak; The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller, and, The Architectural Review. vii

Illustrations

1 Paul Poiret, (French, 1879–1944), Irudrée Dress, c.1922

4

2

Ronald Moody, Johanaan (1936)

85

3

Edna Manley, Negro Aroused (1935)

87

4

Edna Manley, Prophet (1935)

88

5

J. M. W. Turner, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On (1840)

89

Panoramic postcard of the Lourdes shrine, early twentieth century

99

6 7 8 9 10

Postcard of the basilica over the grotto, early twentieth century

100

Postcard of female pilgrims sipping Lourdes water, early twentieth century

101

Le Corbusier, Pavillon d’Esprit Nouveau, exterior view (1925)

129

Wallis, Gilbert & Partners, Hoover Factory, Building 1, exterior view (1932)

130

11 Le Corbusier, Pavillon d’Esprit Nouveau, interior view with Voisin Plan (1925) 12

Le Corbusier, Pavillon d’Esprit Nouveau, interior view (1925)

13 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, working sketches (c.1925) 14 15

133 135 137

William Edmeston, cartoon of Hoover Factory, Architectural Review, July 1932

138

Francis Picabia, Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité (1915)

233

viii

Contributors Jessica Berman is an Associate Professor and Chair of English and Affiliate Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She is the author of Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community (2001) and is currently completing a book about the relationship between ethics and politics in transnational modernism. Pamela L. Caughie is Professor and Graduate Program Director of English at Loyola University Chicago where she teaches twentieth-century literature and feminist theory. Books include Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism (1991), Passing and Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility (1999), and Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Editor) (2000). President of the Modernist Studies Association in 2010, she is currently writing a book entitled Class Acts. Liz Constable teaches in the French department and Women and Gender Studies at the University of California-Davis. She is co-editor of Perennial Decay: The Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (1999). She has published in various journals, including Modern Language Notes, Esprit Créateur, and South Central Review, and is currently working on a longer project on the films of French director Catherine Breillat. Lois Cucullu is Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. Her essays have appeared in such journals as Novel, Differences, and Signs, and her book Expert Modernists, Matricide, and Modern Culture: Woolf, Forster, Joyce appeared in 2004. Her current book-length project examines adolescence as the apparatus par excellence for the modernist imperative ‘faire nouveau.’ Bridget Elliott is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Western Ontario where she teaches in the areas of nineteenth- and twentieth- century art history, visual culture and film studies. With Jo-Ann Wallace she is the author of Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (Im)Positionings (1994) and with Anthony Purdy, Peter Greenaway: Architecture and Allegory (1997). With Janice Helland, she has co-edited Women Artists and the Decorative Arts in the Early Modernist Era: The Gender of Ornament (2004). Mary Lou Emery is Professor of English at the University of Iowa. Her research and teaching explores intersections of British modernist, Caribbean, and postcolonial literatures. Books include Jean Rhys at World’s End: Novels ix

x

Contributors

of Colonial and Sexual Exile (1990) and Modernism, The Visual, and Caribbean Literature (2007). Susan Stanford Friedman holds the Sally Mead Hands Bascom Professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is a former chair of the English Department. Her book Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (1998) won the Perkins Prize for Best Book in Narrative Studies, awarded by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature in 1999. Other publications include Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction (1990), Joyce: The Return of the Repressed (1993), and Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. (l981). Miriam Bratu Hansen is Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago where she teaches in the Departments of English, and Cinema and Media Studies. She is author of Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (1991) and has published numerous articles in journals such as Critical Inquiry, New German Critique, Screen, and Film Quarterly, and various collections. Suzanne K. Kaufman is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago where she teaches courses in modern European social and cultural history and modern French history. Her scholarly interests include the history of religion and popular culture and women’s and gender history. She is the author of Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine (2005). Garry Leonard is Professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. He has published two books on Joyce, Reading Dubliners Again: A Lacanian Perspective (1993) and Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce (1998), and numerous essays on Joyce, Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Hitchcock in journals such as Novel, American Imago, and Modern Fiction Studies. His current project is titled Cinematic Genres: Six Ways of Looking at Modernity. Marc Manganaro, formerly Pofessor of English at Rutgers University, is now Dean of Arts and Sciences at Gonzaga University. A specialist on the relations between anthropology, folklore, myth, and modern literature, criticism, and theory, his publications include: Culture 1922 (2002); Myth, Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority: A Critique of Frazer, Eliot, Frye, and Campbell (1992); and Modernist Anthropology (Editor) (1990). Jonathan Rose is William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University, where he also directs the graduate program in History and Culture. He was the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing. His publications include A Companion to the History of the Book (with Simon Eliot, 2007), The Intellectual Life of the British Working

Contributors xi

Classes (2001), and The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (2001). Stephen Ross is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria. He is author of Conrad and Empire (2004) as well as several articles on Conrad, Woolf, and other modernists in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, Cultural Critique, and Canadian Literature. He has recently edited Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate (2009). He is currently at work on a book on spectral tropes in modernist literature. Stephen Schryer, who recently completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of California-Irvine, held a Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2008–09 at Concordia University and is now assistant professor of English at the University of New Brunswick. His essay written for, and included in, this collection appeared in PMLA (May 2007). He has also published in Modern Fiction Studies. Glenn Willmott is Professor and Chair of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at Queen’s University, Canada, where he teaches courses on modernism, Canadian literature, and literary theory. His recent publications include the book, Unreal Country: Modernity and the Canadian Novel in English (2002), and essays on modernism, cultural appropriation, and digital aesthetics. His current book project is entitled Abject Fetishes: Modernism and the Repression of Aboriginal Modernity.

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction Pamela L. Caughie

The new modernisms Over the past two decades scholarship in the humanities and social sciences has been returning to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reexamining initial assumptions about and approaches to that time period in light of recent changes in those disciplines. The ascendance of interdisciplinary fields such as gender studies, ethnic studies, and cultural studies, and new theoretical perspectives such as postcolonial theory, queer theory, and critical race theory, along with increasing attention to globalization, cosmopolitanism, and transatlantic studies across disciplines, has brought about a reconsideration of those quintessentially mutable concepts, modernism and modernity. Much of this recent work aspires to be interdisciplinary. Yet definitions of the key terms of these studies differ markedly from one discipline to another, and even within disciplines. Disciplining Modernism confronts this terminological confusion in an effort to advance interdisciplinary work in the field of modernist studies. Philosophers and political theorists, for example, typically date modernity from the seventeenth century, historians and theologians from the nineteenth century. Modernity is associated with Hegel in philosophy, with Baudelaire in aesthetics (Felski, Gender 12). In literary studies, modernism often refers to an experimental aesthetic style that reacted against traditional literary forms; in architecture it designates a reform in design in response to industrialization and mass production.1 For social scientists, modern may be defined in terms of the professionalization of social services and new wage scales, while humanities scholars define modern in terms of ideas, ‘a distinctive kind of imagination’ (Ellmann and Feidelson v). In literature as in fashion, key figures of modernism (James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Paul Poiret) produced major works in 1922. In sociology, a central figure, Talcott Parsons, published his major work in the 1950s. As Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane write in their comprehensive critical anthology, Modernism (1978): ‘The notion of 1

2

Pamela L. Caughie

the “modern” undergoes semantic shift much faster than similar terms of comparable function, like “romantic” or “neo-classical”’ because, like modernity, ‘it is tied up with definitions of our situation which are subject to change’ (21–22). Clearly consistent definitions of these terms across disciplines are neither possible nor, necessarily, desirable. Indeed, in the past 15 years, scholars have begun to question the appropriateness of these concepts for new interdisciplinary work. For example, in The Gender of Modernity (1995), Rita Felski notes that modernity cannot be ‘synthesized into a single, unified ideology or world-view,’ an insight that raises the question of the ‘continuing usefulness of the modern as an analytical category’ (8–9). Hazel Carby has argued that geopolitical encounters, the ‘violent transactions’ that produced modernity, raise questions about terms like modernist, and invite reconsideration of the modern as a series of encounters, not a period or an aesthetic. In ‘The New Modernist Studies,’ Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz write that the recent expansion of period-centered studies temporally, spatially and vertically, has exerted a ‘disruptive force on modernist studies’ and led to ‘an extremely fruitful rethinking of relations among the key terms modernism, modernization, and modernity’ (738). Such challenges make all the more evident the extent to which the differences in the use of these terms need to be articulated and negotiated in any effort to develop the new interdisciplinary field of modernist studies. The resurgence of interest in modernism and modernity in many humanities and social science disciplines makes confronting such definitional confusion all the more urgent. One of the first manifestations of this renewed interest in literary studies was the founding of the journal Modernism/modernity in 1994 with its twin objectives: ‘to maintain a sense of the international dimensions of modernism’ and ‘to bring into dialogue writers in the social sciences engaged by issues of modernity and modernization and scholars of the literary and fine arts committed to the history of modernism in the arts.’ The latter is, the editors acknowledge, the ‘more difficult objective’; for however much the humanities and social science disciplines have borrowed from one another, they continue, ‘we have a long way to go before we can claim that these two large divisions of professional intellectual activity are in dialogue with one another (Rainey and von Hallberg 2).2 Four years later Michael Coyle and others founded the Modernist Studies Association (MSA), which held its first conference at Penn State University in fall 1999. Its mission statement also emphasizes interdisciplinarity: ‘The Modernist Studies Association is devoted to the study of the arts in their social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts from the later nineteenth through the midtwentieth century. The organization aims to develop an international and interdisciplinary forum to promote exchange among scholars in this revitalized and rapidly changing field.’ More recently, Michael Moses and his coeditors at University of Birmingham have launched another journal in the

Introduction 3

growing field of modernist studies, Modernist Cultures, that, like Modernism/ modernity and the MSA, promotes interdisciplinary scholarship: The editors’ intention is to create a genuinely interdisciplinary space for the lively, polemical discussion of contemporary trends in the field, a discussion that will, we hope, represent the heterogeneity of current critical approaches and foster debate between scholars working within different intellectual traditions. We invite essays from various fields of inquiry, including anthropology, art history, cultural studies, economic history, ethnography, film studies, geography, history, literature, musicology, philosophy, political theory, sociology, urban studies, and visual culture. We look above all for essays that cross the boundaries between such fields, bringing together disparate modes of thinking and writing in an attempt to reanimate the discourses through which modernist cultures have hitherto been conceived. And in 2006, The European Network for Avant-garde and Modernism Studies (EAM) was founded, focusing on ‘avant-garde and modernism in Europe within a global setting’ and promoting ‘interdisciplinary and intermedial research on experimental aesthetics and poetics.’3 Despite the objective to promote a ‘genuinely interdisciplinary’ field of modernist studies, most contributors to these journals and most members of these associations initially were—and to a large extent, still are—literary scholars. Yet other disciplines have also given renewed attention to the phenomenon of modernism and the modernist era. For example, in March 2001 the Film Studies program at the University of Chicago sponsored a conference on ‘Vernacular Modernism’ (Miriam Hansen’s term from the essay reprinted here as Chapter 14) at which scholars reconsidered traditional approaches to classical Hollywood cinema. Instead of looking at films in terms of their aesthetic style, participants discussed cinema as an industry-produced, mass-consumed, machine-made art that not only reflected modern culture but also taught its audiences how modernity might be experienced. With ‘vernacular modernism,’ the approach to early twentieth-century cinema has shifted from aesthetics to cultural studies. In summer 2004, the Terra Museum of American Art (then located in Chicago) began a year-long series of exhibitions entitled ‘Modern Matters,’ a series exploring modernism in American art. The exhibit presented Chicago as the ‘quintessentially modern city’ whose artists ‘forged a regional consciousness through experimental means’ (‘Chicago Modern, 1893–1945: Pursuit of the New,’ July 17–October 31, 2004). In summer 2007, The Metropolitan Museum of Art held an exhibit on fashion designer Paul Poiret, whose dresses and coats were considered hallmarks of modernism. Poiret’s modernism was not limited to his clothing styles, however. He was concerned as well with issues of

4

Pamela L. Caughie

representation, choosing to represent his fashions through illustrations by avant-garde artists, such as Raoul Dufy, rather than through photography as a way of foregrounding both the artistic nature of his designs and their modernity. And his lines of accessories, perfumes, and interior designs, the curators noted, ‘effectively invented the modern concept of “lifestylemarketing” ’ (‘Poiret: King of Fashion,’ May 9–August 5, 2007).4 Recent publications in a number of fields also attest to the renewed interest in, and new approaches to, scholarship on modernism and modernity. In sociology, Anthony Giddens’s work has been especially influential, beginning with Consequences of Modernity (1990) and Modernity and Self-Identity (1991) and continuing through his current work on globalization. In history, works such as Heidi Adrizzone and Earl Lewis’s Love on Trial (2001) and Suzanne K. Kaufman’s Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine (2005), explore the two very different phenomena—a 1925 American divorce trial and a Catholic pilgrimage shrine in France, respectively—in terms of how modern technologies, such as photojournalism, and new commercial practices transformed conventional notions of identity and spirituality (see Chapter 5). In anthropology, Paul Rabinow, whose work has long focused on the problem of modernity, has published new studies on DNA and biotechnology. In philosophy and aesthetics, examples include Sara Danius, Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics and Fredric Jameson, Singular Modernity: Essays on the Ontology of the Present, both 2002 publications. In literary studies, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel present their edited collection, Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (2005), as an effort to ‘un-discipline’ modernist studies. In 2007 Bonnie Kime Scott published a sequel to her highly influential anthology, The Gender of Modernism (1990), one of the texts, along with Kevin Dettmar’s collection, Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism (1992), that began this renewal of interest in the

Figure 1 Paul Poiret, (French, 1879–1944), Irudrée Dress, c.1922 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Friends of The Costume Institute Gifts, 2007.

Introduction 5

modernist period. Scott’s new volume, Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections, restructures the essays around concepts rather than authors, allowing for a more interdisciplinary approach to modernism. Also in 2007 Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska published their two-volume Modernism: A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages that chronicles and represents ‘a new “modernist revolution” [ ... ] in scholarly investigation and critical inquiry’ (4).5 And two essay collections, Modernity and Identity (1992) and NowHere: Space, Time and Modernity (1994), bring together scholars from a range of disciplines—sociology, philosophy, history, art history, anthropology, religious studies—to explore changing conceptions of subjectivity and time and space, respectively, that define modernity. However, the diverse and sometimes conflicting ways of conceiving modernism and modernity in this new body of scholarship have not always been explicitly articulated, if even acknowledged. Only one essay, Susan Stanford Friedman’s ‘Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/ Modernism’ (reprinted here as Chapter 1), fully and self-reflexively engages the range of definitions of these key concepts. As such, it marks an important intervention in recent scholarly discussions of modernism and modernity. At the annual conference of the Modernist Studies Association in 2001, the same year in which Friedman’s article appeared, Andreas Huyssen, perhaps responding to such definitional confusion, called for a return to disciplinarity to counter the premature anti-disciplinarity of cultural studies, especially the abandonment of aesthetics in U.S. cultural studies, and to create a set of conceptual models for comparative studies of modernism, models that allow for alternative modernities.6

Disciplinarity Huyssen’s challenge raises the question of whether this new body of scholarship is truly interdisciplinary and brings home the importance of disciplinarity as a topic of discussion in any effort to negotiate the meanings of modernism and modernity across disciplines. Disciplining Modernism, then, is not just another entry in the emerging interdisciplinary field of modernist studies; it also participates in a growing body of scholarship across disciplines that takes disciplinarity as a research object in itself. Recent examples include Beyond Boundaries?: Disciplines, Paradigms, and Theoretical Integration in International Studies, edited by Rundra Sil and Eileen Doherty (2000), and Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle, edited by Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente (2002). A 2003 issue of Feminist Studies features articles exploring how the discipline-specific training of many women’s studies faculty affects interdisciplinary work in graduate women’s studies programs, and a special issue of Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender, and Culture (summer 2004) is devoted to ‘disciplines and disciplinarity.’ The Chronicle of Higher Education has featured articles discussing the changing nature of

6

Pamela L. Caughie

disciplines as well, including an excerpt from Marjorie Garber’s Academic Instincts (2001) discussed below. These are just a few examples of the many articles and books that take the study of the formation, structure, and function of disciplines as, well, a kind of discipline. Thus, disciplinarity and its related concept, professionalism, receive attention here as well (see e.g., Chapters 8 and 9). Professionalism, as Stanley Fish defines it, is ‘a form of organization in which membership is acquired by a course of special training whose end is the production of persons who recognize one another [ ... ] because they perform the same “moves” in the same “game” ’ (32).7 Professionalism requires discipline, a normalizing, codifying, discriminating apparatus that distinguishes one research agenda from another. What should students in the discipline be exposed to? What should they be able to do? What questions should they ask? How should they proceed to answer them? These are the kinds of questions that define disciplines. Disciplines, as Michel Foucault has taught us, do not simply operate by restricting our behavior but, more importantly, by producing subjects as well as objects of knowledge (Sawicki 83). To talk about the disciplines in which we teach and write is to talk about a quite personal as well as professional understanding of who we are. A discipline entails knowing what questions are appropriate to ask; knowing what answers fall within the range of shared intelligibility; knowing what boundaries must be respected and which can be extended; and, as Fish puts it, knowing that the purpose of one’s scholarship is this and not that (65). Both Fish and Marjorie Garber define a discipline relationally, in terms of its differences from other disciplines: ‘A practice acquires identity,’ Fish says, ‘by not being other practices,’ and by extension, a scholar acquires her or his professional identity by not being another kind of scholar (79–80). Garber shares this view: ‘Disciplines normalize, codify, collect, select; by means of documentation, they make each individual a “case” [ ... ]. Thus they are “gated communities” ’ (89). This assertion of difference breeds rivalry, distrust, even envy. Garber suggests interdisciplinarity might be a response to such disciplinary envy (72), a term she uses to designate a mechanism or structure, specifically a structure of desire, not simply the desire of an individual scholar (61, 67). While interdisciplinarity is disturbing to some because it breaks down boundaries (74), making it difficult to discriminate, Garber sees interdisciplinarity as the effect of disciplinary envy in a more positive light, as the ‘continuing sense of restlessness or ambivalence of intellectual projects’ (76). ‘Our task as scholars,’ she concludes, ‘is to reimagine the boundaries of what we have come to believe are disciplines and to have the courage to rethink them’ (96). Clearly, in expanding the boundaries of modernist studies, contemporary scholars are rethinking disciplinary boundaries as well. Undoubtedly disciplines are changing, and have been for some time, as much from external pressures as internal rifts. Literary studies today looks

Introduction 7

very different from even 20 years ago, a difference signaled by its name, literary studies as opposed to English. And the emergence of modernist studies is part of this trend toward more interdisciplinary forms of investigation. Twenty-five years ago when I prepared for my qualifying exams in modernism, we read that hefty tome The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature (1965), edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr.. Dating the modern tradition to the Romantic era, the book aspires to present ‘the universe of discourse’ to which the moderns belonged (vii), with sections devoted to Symbolism, Imagination, the Unconscious, and Myth, and selections by Kant, Rousseau, Coleridge, Keats, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Pater, Balzac, William James, Nietzsche, Marx and Engels, Freud, as well as such familiar modernists as Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Yeats. Twenty years later my students in the same field were reading instead Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Felski’s The Gender of Modernity, Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Michael North’s The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and TwentiethCentury Literature, Ann Douglas’s Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the Twenties, Giddens’s, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, and Tim Armstrong’s Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study. To the extent that the focus of modernist studies remains on the ‘imaginative whole,’ as Ellman and Feidelson put it (and that is an arguable point), the ‘universe of discourse’ that makes up that whole has changed dramatically. Yet it is not enough to say (however true it is) that disciplines were never as bounded and homogeneous as our treatment of them makes them seem. For the change in the kinds of questions we pursue or in the boundaries of our disciplines has not changed the structure of disciplines. Disciplines, Garber says, are nostalgic; they long for a unitary self, what Fish discusses in terms of recognizing oneself as like others. Although each of us knows only too well the conflicts and differences within our disciplines, recognizing how much we are not like others in our field, the point is that from the outside, those within a discipline all look alike. The idealization of a discipline, says Garber, always comes from those outside the discipline, and that is why disciplinary envy, she says, is a structure of desire (65). That structure remains the same; disciplines change or dissolve. In his essay in Modernism/modernity, based on his talk at the 2001 MSA conference cited above, Huyssen writes: ‘At a time when literary studies is asked to cover ever more territory both geographically and historically (thus overloading any individual critic’s circuits), the discipline is in danger of losing its coherence as a field of investigation . [ ... ] The U.S. model of cultural studies in particular can not adequately face the new challenges. Among its critical limitations,’ Huyssen continues, are ‘a lack of historical depth; and an abandonment of aesthetic and formal issues coupled with its unquestioned privileging of popular and mass culture’ (365). Historical

8

Pamela L. Caughie

depth seems to have been replaced by disciplinary breadth. And while that move has perhaps opened up the possibilities for the kind of comparative and cross-disciplinary scholarship the new modernist studies promotes, it has been at the cost, some argue, of issues of aesthetics once central to literary studies. These are the issues at stake today in the discipline of literary studies generally. What do they mean for the future of modernist studies?

Disciplining modernism That question, among others raised in this volume, was discussed at a seminar on ‘Disciplining Modernism’ at the 2005 MSA convention held in Chicago. Inspired by Friedman’s ‘Definitional Excursions,’ the seminar brought together 16 scholars to consider the ways modernity, modernism, and the modern have been conceptualized and studied in various disciplines, including anthropology, history, the visual arts, women’s studies, literary studies, film studies, sociology, and economics. How have these disciplines defined the terms modern, modernity, and modernism? What changes in these disciplinary definitions might be necessary in order to establish models for comparative studies? What characterizes the disciplinary-specific approaches to modernist studies in these fields? How have these disciplinary approaches changed in the past few decades? How might the various foci, methodologies, or research imperatives of different disciplines be integrated into a model for the comparative study of modernism and modernity? These are just some of the questions the participants were asked to address from different disciplinary perspectives. Not all the participants in that seminar are included in this volume, but all the contributors (with the exception of Hansen and Manganaro) participated in the seminar. Definitional confusion and disciplinary differences, however, were not simply the subject of the seminar discussion; they were enacted in the papers themselves. A participant from the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration, for example, whose research is primarily on urban political economies and social movements, ended up presenting on the jazz artist Sun Ra, while two scholars trained in literary studies presented on sociology and economics. A specialist in cinema studies discussed the mechanics of the internal combustion engine, while a historian discussed literary modernism. In other words, border crossings were already in play before we could even articulate the disciplinary differences that were the subject of the seminar, undermining the objective of clarifying discipline-specific definitions of our key terms. And the seminar discussion itself showed not only a lack of consensus on what our key concepts mean, but also no clear sense of where to begin to address our differences. It was not just that ‘modernity can mean something very different in the work of political theorists, literary critics, sociologists, and philosophers,’ as Rita Felski writes (12); it was that the ‘disorder’ and ‘anarchy’ that Felski

Introduction 9

says defines one sense of ‘the modern’ structured the very effort to clarify that disorder. In an effort to articulate disciplinary differences, no clear disciplinary boundaries emerged. That in itself suggests the extent to which modernism was interdisciplinary avant la lettre. Yet the very interdisciplinary nature of the beast itself raised concerns in the seminar (as it did in Huyssen’s talk) about disciplinary rigor as well. Participants who were already crossing disciplinary boundaries and who were open to expanding the range of what falls under ‘modernist studies’ were nonetheless resistant to saying ‘anything goes’ when it comes to defining modernism and modernity. They still wanted discipline, if not necessarily their own. Yet as this collection attests, that seminar was anything but a failure. Meryl Altman, one of the participants, eloquently states the benefit of the seminar’s inability to keep disciplinary boundaries intact long enough to discuss their differences: There was a real payoff to what you did, gave a bunch of smart people a clear and focused assignment, even though what resulted was not exactly what you thought you were going to get. It reminds me of the thing literary reviews used to do, perhaps more in England and France than in the U.S., sending a bunch of public figures/well-known writers a sort of questionnaire. In a way what you did was to take the temperature of the field, and you discovered a quite healthy multiplicity of both methods and value-systems, [ ... ] And meanwhile, by asking each person to focus on a concrete cultural work or worker, you avoided some of the aridity that can sometimes ruin these ‘where have we been, where are we going’ kinds of efforts. In a sense, then, the seminar, and the resulting volume, are as much a symptom of the phenomenon they explore as a cure for what ails it. In the end, the purpose of the collection became less to clarify confusion over the use of modernism, modernity, and the modern by scholars in different disciplines than to show the divergent perspectives and motives within any one discipline that creates such confusion; less to articulate and illustrate discipline-specific assumptions and methodologies than to facilitate interdisciplinary work by providing a broad range of examples of new scholarship in a field whose disciplinary boundaries are uncertain. Yet one initial objective remains: to serve as an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of modernist studies and to contribute to that emerging, and exciting, body of scholarship on the fin de siècle and early twentieth century. A word about the cover: At a recent Buckminster Fuller exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (‘Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe,’ March 14–June 21, 2009), it occurred to me that R. Buckminster Fuller might well serve as an exemplum of interdisciplinary

10 Pamela L. Caughie

modernism. Indeed, the exhibition billed him as one of the first interdisciplinary thinkers of the twentieth century insofar as his work spans numerous disciplinary fields, including architecture, engineering, mathematics, physics, philosophy, the visual arts, and the environmental sciences. His 1927 Dymaxion House plan (cover) envisioned the mass production of low-cost, energy- efficient houses.

Notes 1. According to Charles Jencks, modernism in architecture is ‘the direct opposite of the more widespread Modernism in the other arts’ (28). 2. One could date this resurgence from Robert Kiely’s Modernism Reconsidered (1983), published a decade earlier. Kiely’s collection responds to the waning interest in modernism at that time. Asking ‘what’s left to be done?,’ the contributors attempt to reinvigorate modernist studies by reading previously neglected writers (e.g., Willa Cather) or neglected works (e.g., Woolf’s Jacob’s Room) or by applying new theoretical perspectives (e.g., deconstruction and feminism) to familiar works. However, Kiely’s collection expands on work already done on early twentieth-century writers more than it redefines the boundaries of modernist studies or reconsiders its central concept. 3. At its inaugural conference in May 2008, Astradur Eysteinsson delivered a paper, ‘ “What’s the Difference?” Revisiting the Concepts of Modernism and the AvantGarde,’ on, in his words, ‘one of the most obstinately contentious issues in areas of literary study [ ... ]. What is the relationship between modernism and the avantgarde?’ In an E-mail exchange with the editor, Friedman commented that debate in the 1980s and ‘90s centered on whether the avant-garde was distinct from modernism, especially ‘high modernism’ or whether modernism was itself the avant-garde. This debate was entirely focused on European and British modernism as well as ‘manifesto modernisms’ such as futurism, surrealism, dadaism, and Blast. ‘I always thought that Raymond Williams’s essay on how what was rebellious and avant-garde BECAME “the established modernism” after the 1950s was a better way to approach those issues—rather than getting into fights about who was more radically experimental than whom,’ Friedman writes. Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (translated into English in 1984) sought to apply the concerns of the historical avant-garde of the early twentieth century (which he distinguishes from the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s) to a general theory of art, especially the role of political engagement and the critique of art’s autonomy. On the avant-garde, see Chapters 6 and 7. 4. My thanks to Nancy Chilton for providing me with a copy of the exhibit catalog. 5. Winner of the 2008 book award from the Modernist Studies Association, Modernism contains essays by two contributors to this collection, Friedman and Elliott. 6. Translocal Modernisms: International Perspectives (2008) is one such effort to define an alternative to the traditional notion of modernism by focusing on those long relegated to the margins of modernism: ‘women, people of color, slaves, colonized populations, non-Europeans, gays and lesbians, the homeless and the poor—to name a few’ (Meltzer xi–xii). 7. Part of this discussion of disciplinarity comes from my essay, ‘Professional Identity Politics.’

1 Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/ Modernity/Modernism Susan Stanford Friedman

What is modernity? What is or was modernism? Why is the energetic, expanding, multidisciplinary field of modernist studies so filled with contestation over the very ground of study? Definitional activities are fictionalizing processes, however much they sound like rational categorization. As such, I will begin with three stories, allegorized but rooted in my own experience in an evolving field.1

Story 1: Where have all the rebels gone? Imagine a young woman starting graduate school in 1965 in an American land grant university. Remember the suburban dream of the 1950s for middle-class (white) girls: the penny loafers and saddle shoes; the poodle skirts and prom chiffon; the cheerleaders and Elvis screamers; college for the MRS degree; the station wagon and four kids. NO books. NO art. NO ideas. NO passion. Conformity was the name of the game. Conformity and materialism. Then. The first butts of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Fuck. Shit. Sex. Pot. Buttons. Pierced ears. Long hair. Unisex style. Civil Rights. Vietnam. Pigs. Feminism. Gay Rights. Welfare Rights. Union Rights. ‘What was modernism’ to a graduate student in English and American literature in the heady days of the 1960s? Modernism was rebellion. Modernism was ‘make it new.’2 Modernism was resistance, rupture. To its progenitors. To its students. Modernism was the antidote to the poison of tradition, obligation.

Story 2: What does a cyberpunk really want? Picture an aging scholar in 1995, past the half-century mark, entering into her first graduate seminar on modernism in a land grant university. ‘What was modernism?’ she asks. A circle of eyes and silences. A couple to the 11

12

Susan Stanford Friedman

side shift uncomfortably. She has cropped purple hair and kohled eyes. He wears fishnet stockings and thick buckled Pilgrim heels. A tidy tail of silky golden hair flows down his back. So thin in black, so pale in whiteface, they are their own shadows. They know ‘what modernism was.’ Modernism was elitism. Modernism was the Establishment. ‘High Culture’ lifting its skirts against the taint of the ‘low,’ the masses, the popular. Modernism was the supreme fiction, the master narrative, the great white hope. To its Po-Mo descendents, Modernism is the enemy. Postmodernism is the antidote to the poison of tradition, obligation.

Story 3: What’s a poor student to do? Listen in on an exchange between two scholars, the one graying and the other balding in the wisdom of their seniorities—she a cultural critic, he a social scientist. Children of the 1960s, teachers of the 1990s. It is 1995 as their manuscripts cross through snail mail. ‘What was modernism?’ they ask, both acknowledging it as a historical phenomenon, but neither willing to assert that it is fully over and done with. For both, modernism both was and is. But what was modernism? She knows. It is the (illusory) break with the past, a willed forgetting of tradition, continuity, order. It is the embrace of chaos. It is the crisis of representation, fragmentation, alienation. It is indeterminacy, the rupture of certainty—material and symbolic. It is the poetics of modernity—change—and the aesthetic inscriptions thereof. (Pace cyberpunks, for whom modernism no longer ‘is’ as it recedes into the deadness of postmodernism’s past.) He knows too. Modernism is state planning. Modernism is totalization, centralized system. Modernism is the Enlightenment’s rational schemata. ‘Progress’—‘Science’—‘Reason’—‘Truth.’ Modernism is the ideology of postRenaissance modernity—conquest—and the inscriptions thereof. (Pace cyborgs, modernism still lives in the danger of ever-forming centralized hegemonies and utopian totalitarianisms.) Moral of the Stories: Just what IS modernism in an exchange where the word means not just different things, but precisely opposite things? *

*

*

The opposition of meanings produced over time (from Story 1 to Story 2) morphs into a binary of oppositions existing across space (Story 3). In toto, the stories represent a conjuncture of temporal and spatial oppositions. So. Let’s move from storytelling to another kind of conjuncture: parataxis—the juxtaposition of things without providing connectives. Parataxis: a common aesthetic strategy in modernist writing and art, developed to disrupt and fragment conventional sequencing, causality, and perspective. Parataxis: the opposite of hypotaxis in linguistics, thus the opposite of hierarchical

Definitional Excursions 13

relationships of syntactic units. Parataxis: a mechanism of the ‘dream work’ in Freud’s grammar for the unconscious processes of disguised expression of the forbidden, indicating unresolved or conflicting desires. Parataxis 1 ●

●

‘Modernism [ ... ] is the one art that responds to the scenario of our chaos’ (Bradbury and McFarlane 27). ‘ “Who says modernity says organization,” it has been remarked’ (Giddens, Foreword to Friedland and Boden, xii).

Parataxis 2 ●

●

‘We have seen that the creators of modernist works are negative demystifiers: they unmask absolutism, rationalism, idealism—and all illusions’ (Caserio 82). ‘But I do not think we shall begin to understand modernism unless we look at the way it was seemingly compelled, over and over, at moments it knew were both testing ground and breaking point, to set itself [ ... ] the task of Enlightenment, or the task of bourgeois philosophy, in its ruthless, world-breaking and world-making mode’ (Clark 139).

Parataxis 3 ●

●

‘Indeed Modernism would seem to be the point at which the idea of the radical and innovating arts, the experimental, technical, aesthetic ideal that had been growing forward from Romanticism, reaches formal crisis—in which myth, structure and organization in a traditional sense collapse, and not only for formal reasons. The crisis is a crisis of culture’ (Bradbury and McFarlane 26). ‘What is “high modernism” then? It is best conceived as a strong, one might say muscle-bound, version of the beliefs in scientific and technical progress associated with the process of industrialization in Western Europe and North America from roughly 1830 until the First World War. At its center was a supreme self-confidence about continued linear progress, the development of scientific and technical knowledge, the expansion of production, the rational design of social order, the growing satisfaction of human needs, and, not least, an increasing control over nature (including human nature) commensurate with scientific understanding of natural laws. High modernism is thus a particularly comprehensive vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be applied—usually through the state—in every field of human activity’ (J. Scott 89–90).

Parataxis 4 ●

‘To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything

14

●

Susan Stanford Friedman

we know, everything we are. [ ... ] To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, “all that is solid melts into air” ’ (M. Berman 151). ‘The paramount figure in modernism is that of the static and abstract model separated from the dynamic ebb and flow of reality. This figure is that of the Cartesian “I,” of the abstract natural rights of the French Revolution, of Kantian reason, of the unsuccessful blueprints of the worst of orthodox Marxism, of city grids, of Corbusier’s machine à habiter, of Habermas’s ideal speech situation’ (Lash and Friedman 1).3

Parataxis 5 ●

●

‘[I]ntrinsic to the condition of modernity. [ ... ] has been a rejection by and within those [Enlightenment] narratives of what seem to have been the strongest pillars of their history: Anthropomorphism, Humanism, and Truth. [ ... ] In France, such rethinking has involved, above all, a reincorporation and reconceptualization of that which has been the master narratives’ own “non-knowledge,” what has eluded them, what has engulfed them. This other- than-themselves is almost always a “space” of some kind [ ... ] coded as feminine, as woman’ (Jardine 25). ‘I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse [ ... ] making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth [ ... ]: this is the Enlightenment narrative, in which the hero of knowledge works toward a good ethico-political end—universal peace. [ ... ]’ (Lyotard, Postmodern Condition 6).

Parataxis 6 ●

●

‘If it is possible to talk about “modernism” as the major movement in Western literature (and art in general) of the first half of the twentieth century, I would argue that it is also possible to talk about “modernist form,” a shorthand term used to designate that cluster of stylistic practices [ ... ]: (1) aesthetic self-consciousness; (2) simultaneity, juxtaposition, or “montage” [and] [ ... ] “fragmentation”; (3) paradox, ambiguity, and uncertainty; and (4) [ ... ] the demise of the integrated or unified subject. [ ... ] I would add [ ... ]: abstraction and highly conscious artifice, taking us behind familiar reality, breaking away from familiar functions of language and conventions of form [ ... ] the shock, the violation of expected continuities, the element of de-creation and crisis. [ ... ]’ (DeKoven 6). ‘Certain schematic differences ...’

Modernism Romanticism/Symbolism Form (conjunctive, closed) Purpose

Postmodernism Pataphysics/Dadaism Antiform (disjunctive, open) Play

Definitional Excursions 15

Design Hierarchy Mastery/Logos Art Object/Finished Work Creation/Totalization/ Synthesis Presence Centering Genre/Boundary Hypotaxis Signified Narrative/Grande Histoire Master Code Genital/Phallic Origin/Cause Metaphysics Determinacy Transcendence

Chance Anarchy Exhaustion/Silence Process/Performance/ Happening Decreation/Deconstruction/ Antithesis Absence Dispersal Text/Intertext [ ... ] Parataxis [ ... ] Signifier Anti-narrative/Petite Histoire Idiolect Polymorphous/Androgynous Difference-Differance/Trace Irony Indeterminacy Immanence (Hassan 267–68)

Parataxis 7 ●

●

‘Modernity, therefore, not only entails a ruthless break with any or all preceding historical conditions, but is characterized by a never-ending process of internal ruptures and fragmentations within itself’ (Harvey 10–12). ‘The belief “in linear progress, absolute truths, and rational planning of ideal social orders” under standardized conditions of knowledge and production was particularly strong. The modernism that resulted was, as a result, “positivist, technocratic, and rationalistic” at the same time as it was imposed as the work of an elite avant-garde of planners, artists, architects, critics, and other guardians of high taste’ (Harvey 35).4

Moral 1 As terms in an evolving scholarly discourse, modern, modernity, and modernism constitute a critical Tower of Babel, a cacophony of categories that become increasingly useless the more inconsistently they are used. We can regard them as a parody of critical discourse in which everyone keeps talking at the same time in a language without common meanings. When terms mean radically different or contradictory things to people, then their use appears to threaten the project of scholarship/teaching altogether. Moral 2 As contradictory terms resisting consensual definition, modern, modernism, and modernity form a fertile terrain for interrogation, providing ever

16

Susan Stanford Friedman

more sites for examination with each new meaning spawned. As parody of rational discourse, their contradictions highlight the production of meaning possible by attention to what will not be tamed, by what refuses consistency and homogenization. Their use ensures the open-ended ongoingness of the scholarly/pedagogical project whose first task is to sustain the continuation of interrogation, to ensure, in short, its own perpetuation. *

*

*

Modernisms is one thing, but modernism as absolute contradiction is quite another. Definitions spawn plurality in the very act of attempting to herd meaning inside consensual boundaries. Definitions mean to fence in, to fix, and to stabilize. But they often end up being fluid, in a destabilized state of ongoing formation, deformation, and reformation that serves the changing needs of the moment. They reflect the standpoint of their makers. They emerge out of the spatio/temporal context of their production. They serve different needs and interests. They accomplish different kinds of cultural work. They change dramatically over time and through space. Definitions wear the mask of synchronic abstraction, but they are always subject to diachronic histories and spatial geographies of continuity, change, and difference. I have no expectation, therefore, of determining or discovering a fixed meaning for terms like modern, modernity, and modernism. I expect differences. But opposition of meanings is something else. It goes beyond difference, beyond resistance to totalizing metanarratives, beyond the provisional, strategic, fluid, permeable, and situationally adaptable meanings that characterize the most useful definitional exercises. I do not seek fixity or plurality. I seek instead to confront directly the contradictory status of meanings.5 *

*

*

The stories began with the problematic of modernism, but drew us inexorably into a web of words—modernism and its siblings, modern, modernity, and modernization. Not only does the meaning of the concept deny fixity but so do its grammatical and semantic aspects. The root word modern is both noun and adjective, whether signifying descriptively or normatively. The different suffixes herd the word into different grammatical functions that carry semantic weight. The -ity of modernity limits the word modern to a noun—a status as a thing or condition that is distinguishable from other things or conditions. The -ism of modernism turns the noun modern into an advocacy, a promotion, a movement presumably centered around a systematic philosophy, politics, ideology, or aesthetics. The -ization of modernization signifies a process, an evolution or revolution from one condition to another, with modernity as the condition achieved by modernization.6

Definitional Excursions 17

And what about the cousins of the siblings—premodern, postmodern, postmodernity, postmodernism? How do pre- and post- inflect the root meanings? To what extent are these categories distinctly separate when they appear to merely qualify modern, modernity, and modernism?7 In what way is the entire family of terms dependent on their variously implied or invoked antonyms—traditional, classical, ancient, feudal, agrarian, past? Once upon a time, literary and art critics used modernism—especially with the orthographic marker of the capital, Modernism, or the intensifying adjective high, as in High Modernism—to delineate movements in the arts based in loose affiliations or parallel developments. In contrast, social theorists, historians, and social scientists used modern, modernity, and modernization to refer to historical periods, conditions, and processes. But now, such disciplinary boundaries have ceased to function, as people appropriate all forms of the root concept to serve their different purposes. Symptomatically and provocatively, the interdisciplinary journal Modernism/ modernity yokes two of these terms, as if the slash between them signaled their interchangeability on the one hand and yet their permanent separation on the other. The slash is a bar that forever connects and disconnects (like the Saussurian/Lacanian bar between signifier/signified). This is yet another contradiction that demands attention. Is there a slash/bar separating and conjoining modern/modernity/modernism/modernization with all its cognates and antonyms as well? *

*

*

A psychoanalytic detour: The family romance of squabbling siblings and cousins invites a psychoanalysis of definitional debate. The dissonance of meanings—particularly the opposition of meanings—opens the possibility of a psychodynamic reading that looks for the irrational and covert processes of repression, return, and transference in modernist studies across the disciplines as these processes reflect unresolved complexes within modernity itself. The scene of analysis for Freud is a psychodynamic one, a stage onto which the analysand and the analyst transfer repressed desires and complexes long since seemingly forgotten. Transference (and countertransference) in analysis involves the repetition of what cannot be consciously remembered, the reenactment of repressed patterns not yet consciously faced. Freud’s clinical practice involved the deliberate incitement of the transference so that the drama of repetition could become the grounds for analysis itself.8 The terminological quagmire of modernist studies may be the result of a transferential process in which people become caught in a repetition of the unresolved contradictions present and largely repressed in modernity itself. The stories and parataxes of this chapter deliberately stage this dissonant drama to shift the focus from the debate about signifieds for the disputed

18 Susan Stanford Friedman

terms to an analysis of what produces the dissonance in the first place. I am adapting and blending Julia Kristeva’s notion of the ‘textual unconscious,’ Fredric Jameson’s concept of the ‘political unconscious,’ and Shoshana Felman’s psychoanalytic interpretations of contentious critical literatures on Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.9 Particularly heated and unresolvable debates about literary meaning, Felman argues, can be read as transferential scenes of resistance and repetition. Such scenes, often confrontational and even bitter, have an ‘unconscious’ that can be read psychoanalytically as a ‘case history’ that brings to light hidden complexes repressed and unresolved in the original literary texts. Adapting Jameson’s notion of the political unconscious for this scenario allows for a reading of how oppositional views encrypt a politics not immediately evident or intended. Similarly, multidisciplinary modernist studies spawns terminological debates that reenact contradictions already present within the terms and the phenomena to which they allude. What then is hidden within the proliferation of meanings for modern, modernity, and modernism? How might the dissonances and oppositions constitute fault lines inviting interpretation in and of themselves? What might such fault lines tell us about the contradictory and complex-ridden meanings and politics of the phenomena to which the terms refer as they change and vary in different historical moments and spatial locations? Pathways in the wanderland of modernist studies: How to enter into and perhaps emerge out of the maze of contestation and opposition in modernist studies? I suggest two routes for definitional excursion—the first, grammatical and philosophical; the second, political and cultural. They engage the issue of oppositional meanings in complementary ways. Without resolving anything, they open up different routes to the contradiction of meaning, different ways of negotiating definitional debate, each necessary in its own way. Without resolving or silencing it, they clarify what is at stake in the debate and why interrogating what produces it can loosen fixed loyalties to partial meanings. Grammatical/philosophical route: This pathway starts with the recognition of the difference between nominal and relational modes of definition—that is regarding the terms (the siblings, modern/modernity/modernism) as nouns with a specific, definable content (however debated) and viewing them as adjectives implying comparison to some other condition of being.10 The difference between these approaches to definitional tasks accounts for some of the opposition in modernist studies, but not all. Contradiction exists not only between the modes but within each mode as well.11

Nominal mode—The noun In nominal terms, the words modern, modernity, and modernism signify a specific content: a set of characteristics with particular material conditions

Definitional Excursions 19

and spatio/temporal locations. This is not to say, however, that there is always agreement about this specific content. But for those working within or seeking a nominal framework, the definitional project centers on fixing the categories to a set of meanings to which others might be persuaded. Whether canonical or revisionist, such projects assume the nominal status of modernism or modernity: it is a noun, with a specific meaning, albeit subject to disagreement about its potential explanatory power. Nominal discussions of modern/modernity/modernism tend to be very field-specific, with definitional dissonance and even outright contradiction developing as a result of disciplinary boundaries and considerable isolation of disciplinary discourses from each other. The most radical disjuncture of nominal meanings exists in the chasm between the social sciences and the humanities. Social theorists, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists tend to follow the lead of historians of Europe, who typically periodize their field into the subfields of classical, medieval, early modern, and modern, thus defining modern as the initial break with medieval institutions and outlooks that evolved over time. Within this context, modernity signifies a specific set of historical conditions developing in the West, including the industrial revolution, conquest of and expansion economically and politically into other continents, the transition to urban culture, the rise of the nation state, and growing power of the bourgeoisie. Consistent with this periodization, philosophers often regard the theories of reason in Locke, Kant, and Hegel as the embodiment of a distinctly modern secularism and humanism. For political scientists, modernity often involves the development of specific kinds of political systems, away from feudalism to limited monarchies, democracies, and various autocracies; for economists, types of markets, capital, or labor; for anthropologists, the eradication or (forced) assimilation of traditional cultures through conquest or encroachment by nation states, market systems, more ‘advanced’ technologies, or hegemonic cultural groups. Postcolonial theorists often link modernity with imperialism and the national struggles for emergence within the contradictory conditions of hybridization and continued dependence on the colonial power. And so forth.12 In the humanities, on the other hand, modernity and modernism are most often associated with the radical rupture from rather than the supreme embodiment of post-Renaissance Enlightenment humanism and accompanying formations in the West. Artists and writers, within this view, constitute an avant-garde of change, seeing sooner and more searchingly the profound significance and future effects of epistemological, ontological, political, technological, demographic, cultural, and aesthetic transformations. The dating, location, and forms of rupture associated with a modernist style sometimes overlap, sometimes vary considerably. Critics of modernist poetry often identify a poetics of fragmentation, parataxis, image, and idiosyncratic rhythms and sound patterns. Art historians often focus on the rupture from realism in the heightening attention to form, especially pure geometric

20

Susan Stanford Friedman

shapes and planes. Architectural historians often look to the stark, functionalist minimalism of Bauhaus design or cityscape towers as the expression of modernity and its aesthetic in the age of the machine. For music historians, the embrace of primitivism and atonality in a composer like Stravinsky might constitute modernism. Media critics look to the radical impact of the new mechanical means of reproduction—photography, radio, cinema, television—for the sights and sounds of modernity. And so forth.13 However debated, modernism in the context of the humanities is most often understood as the loosely affiliated movements and individuals in the arts and literature that reflect and contribute to the conditions and consciousness of modernity in Europe, Britain, and the United States.14 Periodization, however much it varies among different subfields, differs sharply from that proposed by social theorists and historians. Moreover, the epitome of modernity for those in the social sciences is precisely what modernity dismantles for those in the humanities. At first glance, this definitional divide seems arbitrary, produced through the accident of disciplinary location and isolationism in the academy and thus not particularly interesting for definitional interrogation. However, several factors challenge such a view. First, the opposition between the social sciences and the humanities cannot be so easily dismissed as arbitrary or insignificant because some fields like cultural anthropology, history, geography, political theory, media studies, ethnic studies, women’s studies, and postcolonial studies are multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary. They exist on the liminal threshold between the two divisions, equally engaging in questions of representation, theory, social organization, power relations, and empirical as well as imaginative formations. Consequently, the oppositional meanings of modern/modernity/ modernism often coexist within certain disciplines, fields, and institutional units in the academy. Second, the borders between disciplines and divisions of knowledge have become increasingly porous in the past 30 years with the re-legitimation of interdisciplinarity. Such cross-disciplinary work with modernity produces rich hybridities, but also some confusion. For example, in his collection Modernist Anthropology, Marc Manganaro (who holds an appointment in a literature department) brings together anthropologists and literary critics to examine the interplay between literary modernism and modernist anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century. The result is an exciting interdisciplinary examination of the intermingling of aesthetic and ethnographic projects in the period. But the term modernism slips and slides between oppositional meanings—from rational ordering sought in Boasian or Malinowskian anthropology to anarchistic disordering found in avantgarde art and poetics. This oscillation is never directly confronted anywhere in the volume and is even reproduced in many individual chapters. The collection intensifies rather than illuminates the definitional problems evident

Definitional Excursions 21

in an uninterrogated mixing of social theory and aesthetic meanings of modernism (Manganaro, Modernist 3–50). To take another example, the geographer David Harvey begins his influential book The Condition of Postmodernity with an invocation to Charles Baudelaire’s notion of modern life as ‘the transient, the fleeting, the contingent,’ cites the literary critic Marshall Berman on modernism and modernity in All That Is Solid Melts into Air, and then quotes W. B. Yeats’s paradigmatic modernist lines in ‘The Second Coming’: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’ (Harvey 10). Firmly entrenched in the conventional literary meanings of modernism as disruption, Harvey develops his discussion of postmodernism with a thoroughgoing association of modernism, particularly what he calls High Modernism, with the Enlightenment project of the ‘development of rational forms of social organization and rational modes of thought’ (Harvey 12). Having detailed the formalist ruptures of modernist epistemology, ontology, and representation, he then cites Ihab Hassan’s famous schematic chart asserting the absolute break between modernism and postmodernism over modernism’s supposed alignment with the Cartesian subject and Enlightenment reason (Harvey 42–44). In his splendid book, influential across the disciplines in modernist studies, Harvey slides back and forth between ‘anarchy’ and ‘organization’ as the defining modes of High Modernism with only occasional allusion to the tension between these meanings. Third, the insistence on arbitrary disciplinary difference obscures what is shared across the social sciences and humanities—namely, the emphasis on rupture from the past; debate about the politics of modernity/modernism, and a pervasive Eurocentrism. Just what ‘past’ modernity abandons differs, but transformative change is a constant component of definition. Social theorists and art critics alike argue fiercely among themselves about the value of modernity and modernism in debates that are more similar than different across the methodological divides. Is modernity or modernism liberating or oppressive, progressive or regressive, something to be reinforced or dismantled? Do its ideas and ideals require the oppression or exclusion of some for the benefit of others? Or do they open doors for ever-expanding, ever-more inclusive conditions of freedom and plenty? The questions are similar, whether addressed to issues of revolution and slavery or avant-garde art and mass culture. Some defend modernity/modernism; others attack it. Underlying all these nominal debates is the problematic assumption that modernity/modernism originated in the West and is either forced upon or imitated in diluted form by the Rest. Given these similarities, the dissonance in the core meanings of modern/modernity/modernism is deafening. A nominal approach to defining modern/modernity/modernism presumes the possibility of consensual agreement about the meanings of the terms as nouns with a specific content: a set of characteristics existing within discernable boundaries of meaning, space, and time. However, a closer look

22

Susan Stanford Friedman

reveals little consensus, either across disciplines or within them. This capacity of the nominal approach to spawn diverse and even opposite meanings undermines the naming function of nouns. If what a noun signifies cannot be consistently named, of what use is it as a category?

Relational mode—The adjective A relational approach to the meaning of modern/modernity/modernism looks for the latent structure rather than the manifest contents of the root term. Instead of locating modernity in the specific time of the post-Renaissance or post-Enlightenment West, a relational definition stresses the condition or sensibility of radical disruption and accelerating change wherever and whenever such a phenomenon appears, particularly if it manifests widely.15 What is modern or modernist gains its meaning through negation, as a rebellion against what once was or was presumed to be. Just as adjectives such as tall or big have meaning only in reference to other adjectives like short or small, the relational meaning for modern (and its siblings) exists within a comparative binary in which the opposite is traditional. Neither term has a fixed or universal meaning in and of itself, but rather acquires meaning only in relation to its implied opposite. Where tradition signals the unfolding of the future within the continuous pathways of the past, modernity calls for perpetual subversion of the past as the precondition of the future. Relationally speaking, modernity is the insistence upon the Now—the present and its future as resistance to the past, especially the immediate past. It establishes a cult of the new that constructs retrospectively a sense of tradition from which it declares independence. Paradoxically, such a tradition—or, the awareness of it as ‘tradition’—might come into existence only at the moment of rebellion against it. Precisely because a relational definition does not seek the fixity of nominal definitions, modernity need no longer reside solely in a specific set of institutional, ideological, or aesthetic characteristics emergent in the post-Renaissance West, radiating globally along the pathways of empire and postcoloniality, and appearing as pale copies of western genius. Instead, a particularized modernity located in space and time could potentially emerge wherever and whenever the winds of radical disruption blew, the conditions of rapid change flared up, or the reflexive consciousness of newness spread—whether these were eagerly sought or resisted; whether imposed from without or developed within. But the relational approach to defining modern/modernity/modernism raises as many questions as it appears to resolve. First, there is the impossibility of perpetual disruption or revolution as change becomes institutionalized. What begin as multiple acts of rebellion against prevailing hegemonies become through their very success a newly codified, often commodified system. Margins become centers with the proliferation and dissemination of

Definitional Excursions 23

rupture. In intellectual and aesthetic realms, for example, outsiders become insiders; pariahs become icons; the rebels become the Establishment. The new science of the Enlightenment that overturned the symbolic order based on religious faith itself became the hegemonic norm based in a faith in Reason. The avant-garde artists initially greeted with hoots of derision— the impressionists, postimpressionists, cubists, abstract expressionists—are now the great masters whose works are mainstays of museums and sell for fabulous sums. Rejected, banned, ridiculed, and often unread in the beginning, figures like Freud and Joyce are for many the supreme avatars of the age, essential reading in any history of ideas and literature. As Raymond Williams argues, the antibourgeois origins of modernism are lost as modernism is canonized in the post-World War II era (R. Williams 32–36).16 As the principle of disruption, the more widespread modernity becomes, the more codified and authoritative it becomes, thus undermining its character as the spirit of explosive rebellion and change. Institutionalized, the avantgarde of rupture becomes the new Establishment to be revoked in the making of new avant-gardes. The very success of modernity (and its modernist expressivities) evident in its institutionalization accomplishes its demise— the imperative of postmodernity. Second, for all its insistence on the new, a relational modernity is inevitably part of a generational dynamic. Modernity rebels against its parental precursors, only to be rebelled against by its inheritors: yet another form of the family romance. It occupies an uneasy location between the pre-modern that it disrupts and the post-modern that disrupts it. Never fully stable, it exists in the middle of a prepositional chain, defined by its coming after the traditional and before the postmodern. Third, this chain of prepositions in generational succession challenges the relational assumption of freedom from history. The (self)consciousness of modernity—the sense of radical rupture from the immediate past—refuses the principle of historical continuity and evolution in its insistence on origin, newness, and revolution. Indeed, it denies its own production as a historical formation. History produces change as well as continuity; the new cultural and institutional formations of modernity are themselves the product of historical process. Moreover, the relational notion of modernity tends to resist just the immediate past, often leapfrogging the prior generation in a reinvocation of a more distant past as an inspiration of rebellion. To justify this rejection, inaccurate or heuristic readings or even demonizations of one’s recent precursors are common, much as the modernists (inaccurately) condemned the Victorian realists to epistemological and psychological naïveté, much as the postmodernists (inaccurately) reduce the modernists to mere makers of Enlightenment grand narratives. As Paul de Man suggests in echoing Nietzsche, modernity involves a form of ‘ruthless forgetting,’ the ‘desire to wipe out whatever came earlier,’ not the actual erasure of the past (De Man 147–48).17 As such, the

24 Susan Stanford Friedman

relational consciousness of modernity is based in historical illusionism—an insistence on ‘making it new’ as a manifesto that refuses to acknowledge the presence of the past in the present and future. The more modernity protests its absolute newness, the more it suppresses its rootedness in history. And the more that history is repressed, the more it returns in symbolic forms to haunt and disrupt the illusionary and ideological mythology of the new. A relational approach to defining modern/modernity/modernism presumes the possibility of consensual agreement about the meanings of the terms as the structural principle of radical rupture—wherever, whenever, and in whatever forms it might occur. Freed from the fixity a noun suggests, the relational definition appears to garner more agreement across and within disciplines. However, a closer look reveals a pattern of contradiction just as the nominal approach does. Like the noun modernity, the adjectival form slips and slides between meanings rooted in the possibility and impossibility of ‘making it new.’ If the adjectival form of modernity signifies both revolution and evolution, both the break from history and its return, of what descriptive use is it? *

*

*

Both nominal and relational meanings of modern/modernity/modernism end in contradiction, signaling a phenomenon that signifies both the formation of hegemonies and their dissolution, the production of grand narratives and their dismantling. As noun and adjective, modernity is a term at war with itself, a term that unravels its own definition, a term that codifies the principle of indeterminacy and in so doing opposes its own commitment to perpetual change. In sum, the grammatical/philosophical approach to a definitional project confirms the partial and misleading nature of any definition that focuses on only the nominal or only the relational meanings of modernity. Modernity is not solely a fixed set of characteristics that might have appeared in a given space and time, such as the European Enlightenment or the twentieth- century avant-garde in the arts. Nor is modernity exclusively the principle of rupture. Modernity is best grasped as a set of meanings that encompasses both the specificities of nouns and the relational structures of comparative adjectives. Additionally, this combined approach suggests that meaning does not lie exclusively with either the formation of hegemonies or their dismantling. Instead, modernity encompasses both centripetal and centrifugal forces in contradiction and constant interplay. I pose this neither as a concept of historical stages nor as a utopian dialectic. Rather, I insist upon a meaning produced liminally in between, a dialogic that pits the contradictory processes of formation and deformation against each other, each as necessary to the other. Political/cultural route: The grammatical/philosophical excursions lack historical and geographical contextualization, lack reflexivity about the production and consumption of meaning, lack attention to issues of power

Definitional Excursions 25

and the institutionalization of knowledge in the definitional project itself. Definitions do not come into being or function in an abstract cosmos of pure reason or arbitrary signification. (Pace linguists and philosophers: decontextualized definitions have their place, but only a partial one in the arena of contestation.) The textual unconscious of definitional debate is also a political unconscious. More issues must be posed under a broadly defined umbrella of cultural studies in historical, global, and comparative contexts. We need to ask: Who is producing a given set of meanings for modern/modernity/modernism? For what audience? From what position or standpoint in space and time? For what purpose and with what effect? What cultural work do these meanings perform? In what way was and is modernity a set of cultural formations with diverse parts and functions, manifesting differently in various temporal and spatial situations, with different effects? How do power relations condition the production, dissemination, and reception of contested meanings? In short, how do questions of power and politics shape both the concept of modernity and the historical phenomena to which the term refers? These are questions upon which a cultural studies approach to definitional power relations focuses.18 Modernist studies tends to produce three distinct configurations in the politics of definition: the binary, the circle, and the metonym. Recognizing all three helps to expose the flows of power in the institutionalization of knowledge.

The binary The definitional act itself typically depends upon a binary of inclusion and exclusion. Depending on who does the defining, certain phenomena belong to the category of modern, modernity, or modernism. Other phenomena do not. By definition. Definitional acts establish territories, map terrains, determine centers, margins, and areas ‘beyond the pale.’ Attempts to establish permeable borderlands instead of fixed boundaries and liminal spaces of considerable intermixing between differences diffuse to some extent the territorial imperative of definition but cannot ultimately eliminate the function of categories to demarcate some phenomena in opposition to others which do not belong. As Toni Morrison writes about canon formation (a type of definitional act in literary, art, and religious history), ‘Canon building is Empire building. Canon defense is national defense. Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature and range [ ... ] is the clash of cultures. And all of the interests are vested’ (Morrison 8). Take, for example, the conventional social theory concept of modernity as the invention of the West, as reflected in this assertion by a leading sociologist of modernity, Anthony Giddens: When we speak of modernity, however, we refer to institutional transformations that have their origins in the West. How far is modernity

26 Susan Stanford Friedman

distinctively Western? [ ... ] [T]wo distinct organisational complexes are of particular significance in the development of modernity: the nation-state and systematic capitalist production. Both have their roots in specific characteristics of European history and have few parallels in prior periods or in other cultural settings. If, in close conjunction with one another, they have since swept across the world, this is above all because of the power they have generated. [ ... ] Is modernity distinctively a Western project in terms of the ways of life fostered by these two great transformative agencies? To this query, the blunt answer must be ‘yes.’ (Consequences 174–75) To what extent does this definition reflect the western standpoint of Giddens and social theorists like him—not only as products themselves of the West but also as specialists in western societies and history? Without a sufficient knowledge base in the civilizations of Asia, Africa, and the non-Anglo Americas, is it any surprise that the definitional binary of inclusion/exclusion is profoundly Eurocentric, all the more so when the approach is more nominal than relational? (No.) Such Eurocentrism is pervasive in the field whether the writer is celebrating (like Habermas) or critiquing (like Harvey) western modernity. Left intact is a center/periphery model of globalization in which the West invents and exports, while the periphery assimilates and copies. Left unexamined is the degree to which the production of western forms of modernity resulted from the heightened interaction western societies had with nonwestern others—with the Other of the western imaginary; and, with the real, heterogenous, multiplicitous others outside the West. Also left unexplored is the production of different modernities through the histories of nonwestern peoples. Listen to the difference between Giddens’s binarist logic and that evident in Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s view, which originates in his standpoint and knowledge base outside the West, foregrounds intercultural contact among civilizations as constitutive of modernity, and assumes multiple nodal points for the modern around the globe: I have tried to argue that modernity is historically a global and conjunctural phenomenon, not a virus that spreads from one place to another. It is located in a series of historical processes that brought hitherto relatively isolated societies into contact, and we must seek its roots in a set of diverse phenomena—the Mongol dream of world conquest, European voyages of exploration, activities of Indian textile traders in the diaspora [ ... ] and so forth. (99–100)19 Subrahmanyam’s notion still establishes an inside/outside for modernity, but the center is not by definition western and singular. Rather, it is scattered, interactive, and multiple. His approach invites a rethinking of the times and places of modernity. Where else might accelerated societal change

Definitional Excursions 27

brought about by a combination of new technologies, knowledge revolutions, state formations, and expanding intercultural contacts contribute to radical questioning and dismantling of traditional ontologies, epistemologies, and institutional structures? What about the Tang Dynasty in China, with its great metropolis as the cultural/political center of a vast empire (about ad 600–900)? Or Mughal India? Or Timbuktu, a large city and mercantile hub in West Africa at about the same time the cities of Europe were, relatively speaking, backwaters to the great centers of learning and trade in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East?

The circle The approach of Giddens and Subrahmanyam to defining modernity— however different their politics—exhibits the familiar problem of the hermeneutic circle as well as the binary of inclusion and exclusion.20 Defining historical periods and conditions or movements in the arts and writing depends upon a circular process. Definers often identify the characteristics of the modern, modernity, and modernism by describing the qualities of the phenomena that they have already assumed to exist within the boundaries of the category. Put differently, definitional mapping relies upon prior assumptions of where the boundary belongs, assumptions that reflect the preexisting beliefs or standpoint of the mapmaker. Such circularity has a politics—all the interests are vested, as Morrison says. Take for example the literary history of modernism. Periodization, canonization, and the naming of the defining characteristics of modernism are all based on a pool of tenets, people, and/or events whose selection depends upon preexisting notions of the period. Thus, Hugh Kenner declares that expatriate internationalism is a central defining characteristic of High Modernism and uses writers like Pound, Eliot, and Joyce to demonstrate his assertions. On this basis, he asserts that Williams, Faulkner, and Woolf are ‘provincial’ or ‘regional’ writers, not modernists. But if he had included these writers in his pool of modernists to begin with, his generalizations about modernism would have been different. So might his concept of the internationalism of modernism if his pool had included writers from Africa, South America, and Asia (Kenner 49–61). The case of the Harlem Renaissance in modernist studies is even more striking. The literature, arts, and music of African Americans centered in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s are simply missing from conventional maps of modernism. Not even represented with an occasional token figure, as female modernists like Woolf and Stein sometimes are. Simply not there. Picasso’s primitivism, Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age, Eliot’s apelike Sweeney, Sherwood Anderson’s ‘dark laughter,’ Faulkner’s racially divided South—all exist on the terrain of canonical modernist studies. But not the primary producers of jazz, not the black artists turning to an imaginary (or real)

28

Susan Stanford Friedman

Africa, not the blues singers and the folk, leaving the rural South for the urban North in the Great Migration, not the soldiers returning from a brutal war to demand more freedoms. Their linguistic and rhythmic experimentation, intertextual ‘signifyin,’ Africanist mythmaking, parodic mimicry, revolutionary fervor, and self-identification with the New do not seem to qualify them for literary modernism in most histories of the movement even though these same histories frequently list formalist experimentation, citation, mythic analogues, irony, and self-reflexivity as definitional markers. Since the Harlem Renaissance is largely absent from the pool of texts out of which literary historians generate definitional characterizations of modernism, the particular formulations of modernity produced by African Americans are also missing.21

The metonym Another form the politics of definition takes is the identification of certain figures or qualities to stand for the whole. This metonymic substitution of the part for the whole is widespread in the establishment of the reigning characteristics of the historical condition of modernity or the aesthetic constellation of modernism. To some, Locke or Rousseau are supreme embodiments of Enlightenment modernity; to others, Joyce is the defining icon of modernism. Similarly, some might characterize western modernity in terms of the rise of the bourgeoisie, democracy, and science; others might define modernism in terms of utopian social planning or the poetics of disruption. Common to all such definitional generalizations is the heuristic tendency to characterize the whole in terms of what the historian retrospectively believes to be its most influential or significant components. In this way, categories like modernity and modernism govern or contain different cultural formations, absorbing their specificities within the definitional boundaries of the privileged metonymic part. And such categorical discipline returns us to the locational question of who is producing these metonymic histories. Who and what has been left out? For what purposes? With what effects? *

*

*

The tendency of binarist, circular, and metonymic definitional acts to reproduce the play of power relations within institutions of knowledge might lead some to affirm the need for epistemological anarchy—the elimination of all such periodizing categories. However, the problematic of definitional history should not, in my view, result in its abandonment. Rather, as Jameson writes, ‘The problem of periodization and its categories, which are certainly in crisis today [ ... ] seem to be as indispensable as they are unsatisfactory for any kind of work in cultural study’ (Jameson, Political 28).

Definitional Excursions 29

Without historical categories, we would face an infinity of singularities, an approach to knowledge that requires some form of selection that is no more politically neutral than the heuristic construction of historical narratives. Without some definitional categories, the politics of choice would be driven further underground, rendered even less visible. Given our need for definitional categories, however imperfect they are, what, then, does the political/cultural route have to offer? I regard the binarist, circular, and metonymic problems inherent in definitional acts not as dead ends but rather as opportunities for interrogation that lead right into the heart of the dialogic meanings of modern, modernity, and modernism. They insist upon a recognition of how such terms are themselves historical constructions—with their own history, development, function, and effect, all of which invite interpretation and critique. Different configurations of modernity reflect the different positionalities of their producers, serve different interests, and have different effects. It is this that returns us to the question of politics—how power relations inform not only the cultural artifacts of modernity but also the subsequent readings of them. BangClash: In a Nietzschean (or perhaps Fanonian) mood, Amiri Baraka writes: Harlem is vicious modernism. BangClash. [ ... ] Can you stand such beauty. So violent and transforming.22 Whether the BangClash of definitional contestation produces such transformative beauty is doubtful. But this excursion—through the byways of story, parataxis, hypertextual detour, aphorism, and collage—has an end point. I have been resisting the desire to come up with my own product, yet another definition of modernity and modernism for others to argue about or ignore. (Resistance is never easy. The magnetic slide toward fixed meaning feels irresistible at times.) Instead, I have attempted to shift attention to the processes and patterns of definitional contestation. In these terms, there is a conclusion of sorts to be made. Definitional dissonance matters. The fact of not only diverse but downright opposite meanings signifies. These differences should not be ignored as accidental or arbitrary, the ordinary product of disciplinary background or semantic disagreement. Nor should they be tamed within the deceptive inclusiveness of pluralism. In practice, the pluralization of modernity and modernism runs the risk of covertly reinstating a center/periphery pattern in which a hegemonic norm is covertly privileged over marginal variations.23 Instead the BangClash should be confronted directly. The grammatical/philosophical and political/cultural routes I explored suggest that the oppositional meanings of modern/modernity/modernism point to the contradictory dialogic running through the historical and expressive

30 Susan Stanford Friedman

formations of the phenomena to which the terms allude. Order and disruption are symbiotically necessary to each other for each to have its distinctive meaning. The center comes into being as it dissipates. Modernity’s grand narratives institute their own radical dismantling. The lifeblood of modernity’s chaos is its order. The impulse to order is the product of chaos. Modernism requires tradition to ‘make it new.’ Tradition comes into being only as it is rebelled against. Definitional excursions into the meanings of modern, modernity, and modernism begin and end in reading the specificities of these contradictions.

Notes This chapter was originally published in Modernism/modernity 8.3 (2001): 493–513. The notes have been changed to conform to house style for this collection. All references to this chapter in subsequent chapters are to the version printed here. 1. This chapter is a short version of a chapter in my work-in-progress, ‘Planetary Modernism and the Modernities of Empire, Nation, and Diaspora.’ An even shorter version was presented at the University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal, May 2000, and at the Modernist Studies Association conference, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, October 2000. I am indebted to these audiences for their questions and encouragement and to Rita Felski for an astute reading and critique. 2. I echo here Ezra Pound’s famous slogan and two influential early essays, Harry Levin’s ‘What Was Modernism?’ and Maurice Beebe’s ‘What Modernism Was.’ 3. But they also write, ‘modernity is a matter of movement, of flux, of change, of unpredictability’ (1). 4. I end this chain of paratactic pairs with quotations from the same author to highlight the existence of unexamined and seemingly un-self-reflexive contradiction within the work of the same person. 5. In ways different from my own, others have noted contradictions in passing or in an attempt to resolve the conflict. See for example Felski’s Gender of Modernity, where her succinct summary paves the way for her advocacy of a cultural studies approach to western modernity from the Enlightenment to its break up in the early twentieth century (12–13); Yack’s Fetishism of Modernities, where he reviews four distinct concepts of modernity in the West (philosophical, sociological, political, and aesthetic) and argues that for all their differences they share ‘an emphasis on innovation and challenge to traditional authority’ (35, 1–40); Rothstein emphasizes the heterogeneous distributions of modernity within the modern while refusing nominal, relational, and stagist approaches; and Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air resolves the contradictions with a notion of evolutionary stages within modernity. 6. I do not examine the term modernization because there is more consensus about its basic meaning as the process that brings about modernity (however that may be defined); debates about the causes, effects, and politics of modernization of course abound. 7. The relation between the terms modern/postmodern and modernism/postmodernism is as contested as the meanings of the root words and beyond the scope of this chapter. Many social theorists use postmodern or postmodernism to refer to the rupture from Enlightenment modernity, regarding the aesthetic dismantlings of

Definitional Excursions 31 this modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as early harbingers of the change to come later and more broadly in the twentieth century. What many others understand to be modernity and modernism are thus folded into postmodernism. See for example Lyotard, Postmodern Condition and Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity. Because of the inconsistency in terminology, their critiques of societal modernism are often misunderstood to be attacks on aesthetic modernism as well. The difficulty in determining whether postmodernism represents an intensification of modernism or a radical rupture from it is compounded by these differing uses of the terms modernity/modernism and postmodern/postmodernism. Left unexplored is the possibility that the most significant break from modernity is just now in the making, through the knowledge revolution instituted by the computer and the related effects of accelerating globalization. 8. See Freud’s Papers on Technique, especially ‘The Dynamics of the Transference’ and ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’ (Standard Edition, v.13, 85–327). Yack characterizes the postmodernists’ attention to modernity as an ‘obsession’ and a ‘fetishism’ that leads to misleading totalizations of a epoch much at odds with their advocacy of petits récits and heterogeneity (1–16). 9. See especially Kristeva 36–91; Jameson, Political; Felman, Literature 94–207; and Felman, Lacan 27–51. 10. I am indebted to Noel Carroll for bringing to my attention nominal and relational modes of definition in the discipline of philosophy. I have added to his observation the grammatical dimension, emphasizing the distinction between nouns and adjectives in definitions of modern/modernity/modernism. 11. Although some scholars invoke one mode rather than the other, many use both. See for example Giddens’s nominal assertion in Modernity and Self-Identity: ‘I use the term “modernity” in a very general sense, to refer to the institutions and modes of behavior established first of all in post-feudal Europe, but which in the twentieth-century increasingly have become world-historical in their impact. “Modernity” can be understood as roughly equivalent to “the industrialised world,” so long as it is recognised that industrialism is not its only institutional dimension’ (14–15). But in a relational mode, he writes, ‘Inherent in the idea of modernity is a contrast with tradition’ (Consequences 36). 12. See, for example, Giddens, Modernity; Harvey; Lyotard, Postmodern Condition; J. Scott, cited earlier Yack; Habermas, ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’; Appadurai; Hall et al. 13. See for example, Bradbury and McFarlane, and Ellmann and Feidelson, collections which in spite of their exclusions maintain a seminal position in defining the meanings and canon of aesthetic modernism. For more recent definitional overviews, see Eysteinsson Concept; Norris; Perloff; Calinescu; Nicholls; B. Scott; Clark; and Jardine. 14. The association of modernism and modernity with Europe and the United States in the humanities not only excludes non-western locations but also contains peripheries within ‘the West’—including, for example, margins based on gender, race, and geography, namely those of women, ethnic and racial minorities, and locations such as Spain, Portugal, the Balkans and Eastern Europe, Brazil, and the Caribbean. See for example B. Scott; DeKoven; Felski, Gender; DuPlessis; Boone; Benstock; Gilbert and Gubar; Gikandi, Writing; Baker; Gilroy; Gambrell; Davison. 15. In developing a ‘scalar’ model of modernity in ‘Broaching a Cultural Logic of Modernity,’ Rothstein works with a relational mode in describing societies as

32 Susan Stanford Friedman

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

‘hot,’ ‘warm,’ or ‘cold’ in reference to how intense or pervasive the phenomenon or phenomenology of rupture are in a given time and space. His relational approach to periodization takes into account the heterogeneity within any socalled period at the same time that some measure of nominal generalization is acknowledged. The first essay in this collection, ‘When Was Modernism?’ alludes to and revises the earlier essays by Levin and Beebe. For variations on this argument, see Felski, Gender; Harvey 36–38, and Yack 12–13. See Felski, Gender and ‘New Cultural Theories of Modernity’ in Doing, in which she claims that the blend of aesthetics and sociology that characterizes cultural studies fosters consideration of not only elite culture but also the cultural practices of everyday life, popular and mass culture, and the voices of those often marginalized or regarded as sheer victims. Himself part of the South Asian diaspora, Subrahmanyam lives and works in Paris. His essay is part of a special issue of Daedalus edited by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Wolfgang Schluchter entitled ‘Early Modernities’ that critiques the use of the West as ‘the major yardstick’ by which other modernities are measured and calls for the exploration of alternative early modernities (Eisenstadt and Schluchter 7). Eisenstadt followed up this pathbreaking issue with another special issue called ‘Multiple Modernities,’ Daedalus 129.1 (2000). For another attack on western diffusionist models of modernity, see Maier. I am indebted to Cyrena Pondrom’s application of the notion of the hermeneutic circle to definitional issues in modernist studies (unpublished paper). For related critiques of the circularity of literary history, see for example Nelson 9–12, and Jameson’s Political 27–28. This absence has begun to change with the publication of literary histories that incorporate black writers into the landscape of a diverse modernism, although some critics still segregate black modernism and others discuss only white appropriations of black art forms. See for example Gilroy; Baker; DuPlessis; Boone; Nelson; Gambrell; De Jongh; Torgovnick; North, Dialect; Doyle; and Gubar. Baraka, ‘Return of the Native,’ cited as epigraph for De Jongh’s Vicious Modernism. See for example, Nicholls’s Modernisms; its plural title suggests heterogeneity, but its contents devote 12 chapters to western, white, male modernism and female modernism is herded into one chapter entitled ‘At a Tangent: Other Modernisms.’ In ‘Transnational Modernism,’ I argue for the resingularization of modernity and modernism, suggesting that these phenomena take on historical and geographical specificity within a transnational and global landscape.

2 Uncanny Modernism, or Analysis Interminable Stephen Ross

The very premise of this volume and the ongoing debate in which it intervenes testifies to an anxiety at the core of the new modernist studies. The one topic of discussion you can count on hearing at conferences of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) is the question of what modernism is and how it is to be determined. It is a meta-critical problem, one of the discipline, of disciplinarity itself, and its interminable hashing-out marks a fundamental concern that in remaking modernist studies we may risk losing modernism. Put another way, the ongoing concern with (re-)defining modernism/modernity/modern is testimony to a desire to preserve the validity of what we do as modernist studies, even as we recognize the necessity and desirability of expanding its contours and reconfiguring accepted understandings. There is a genuine anxiety here, one that keeps us returning to the problem of what, exactly, we are supposed to be working on. The question is pertinent, even if the ways of posing it seem impertinent at times, and demands that we really consider whether we can make what we do modernist studies simply by declaring it to be so—and why it matters so much that it should be modernist studies, after all. These questions circulate around issues and tropes of doubling, repetition, repression, and the reanimation of the dead; that is, they are decidedly uncanny. This uncanniness points to an undercurrent of anxiety, repression, and disavowal. Taking up both the general dimensions of the current concern with how to delimit modernism and modernity and specific, highly influential, interventions in that debate, I aim to show that the new modernist project itself is tendentially uncanny, and that this uncanniness points to unsettling truths about its stakes. Perhaps the ideal place to begin is Susan Stanford Friedman’s seminal ‘definitional excursion’ into the terrain of modern/modernism/modernity (see Chapter 1). Here Friedman treats the task of definition as a ‘fictionalizing process [ ]’ 11, turning first to a set of exemplary vignettes and then to a series of parataxes whose purpose is to show that the terms modern/ modernism/modernity are subject to contradictory (as opposed to just plural, 33

34

Stephen Ross

‘provisional, strategic, fluid, permeable, and situationally adaptable’) meanings (16). The narrative it thus constructs is one of perplexity. As Friedman says, we ‘expect differences’ in definitions, ‘but opposition of meanings is something else’ (16) altogether. Such radical uncertainty, particularly in relation to such familiar terms, is unsettling, vertiginous: what is ‘known of old and long familiar’ has become strange, even a little frightening—that is to say, uncanny. Such a conclusion might seem a little forced if it were not for three corroborating factors that provide more than enough reason to proceed in these terms, at least for the time being. The first of these has to do with Friedman’s method. Friedman’s pairing of opposed quotations to show that the terms modern/modernism/modernity mean not just different but in fact contradictory things to different people repeats (albeit with an incremental difference) Freud’s opening gambit in ‘The Uncanny.’ There, Freud begins by consulting his dictionary for the meaning of heimlich. As he proceeds through the various definitions, he finds that ‘heimlich [ ... ] finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich’ (934). Not only are the conclusions similar, but a homology obtains between the methods: Friedman’s approach to the problem of defining modernism repeats (compulsively repeats?) Freud’s approach to the problem of the uncanny, doubling it in a remarkably suggestive way, and pointing towards a potentially fruitful approach to ‘the contradictory status of meanings’ (Friedman 16) and to the larger problem of disciplining modernist studies today. The similarity in methods and conclusions is striking, but not yet compelling—not sufficiently uncanny—on its own. For a coincidence to take on the aura of a compulsive, meaningful repetition, it must either happen more than once or else bear a special significance. To these parallels, then, I would adduce Friedman’s own invocation of Freud as a justification for reading the ‘dissonances and oppositions’ in the proliferating meanings of modern/modernity/modernism (18). As she puts it at the outset of the section ‘Psychoanalytical Detour,’ ‘The family romance of squabbling siblings and cousins invites a psychoanalysis of definitional debate. The dissonance of meanings—particularly the opposition of meanings—opens the possibility of a psychodynamic reading that looks for the irrational and covert processes of repression, return, and transference in modernist studies across the disciplines’ (17). Refusing ‘repression’ and ‘return,’ Friedman opts for ‘transference’ as her focus (17). This refusal immediately rebounds on Friedman, though, as she goes on to introduce precisely the dynamics of repression and return that typify the uncanny: ‘the repetition of what cannot be consciously remembered, the reenactment of repressed patterns not yet consciously faced, [ ... ] a repetition of the unresolved contradictions [ ... ] scenes of resistance and repetition [ ... ] hidden complexes [that remain] repressed and unresolved’ (17–18). Such an approach promises to make ‘the drama of repetition [ ... ] the grounds

Uncanny Modernism

35

for analysis itself, ‘shift[ing] the focus from the debate about signifieds for the disputed terms to an analysis of what produces the dissonance in the first place’ to read their ‘unconscious’ (17). Though Friedman quickly moves on to other approaches, leaving the psychoanalytic to one side, her introduction of these terms and concepts positively invokes us to read her own engagement with the reinvention of modernist studies psychoanalytically. Her opening repetition of Freud’s gambit begins to seem less coincidental and more like ‘the repetition of what cannot be consciously remembered,’ just as—I hope to show—the new modernist studies itself does. Picking up where Friedman leaves off so temptingly, I claim that her incursion into the realm of psychoanalysis is itself an uncanny address to us, openly thematizing and doubling what we might otherwise miss: the opening repetition of Freud’s own ‘definitional excursion,’ a gesture that infuses her foray with its own strangeness no matter how many times we read it and how familiar it becomes. Friedman’s psychoanalytic invocations are not the only reason for reading the problematic posed by reinventing modernist studies as uncanny, though. There is also the fact of modernism’s and modernist criticism’s own predilection for uncanny moments and tropes. Leon Surette has argued that the ‘birth of modernism’ is attended by an abiding fascination with the occult, and it is by now accepted knowledge that as they were defining their projects, writers like Pound, Yeats, Eliot, Aldington, Woolf, Conrad, Ford, Lawrence, Lewis, and Joyce were exploring alternative traditions to the rationalism of the western Enlightenment. Attending séances, toying with telepathy, extra-sensory perception, metempsychosis, clairvoyance, dematerialization, and so on, many modernists regularly dabbled in spiritualism and the occult, actively seeking out uncanny experiences and phenomena. Moreover, modernist texts are suffused with tropes and instances of specters, phantoms, ghouls, spirits, doppelgängers, galvanized corpses, and so on; the hint of an occulted order beneath the apparently random events of modern life was simply too tempting and gratifying to be ignored, however much it was disavowed. In a very real sense, modernism is rooted in the uncanny. So, for that matter, is the reinvention of modernist studies. Repeating modernism’s fascination with the occult, modernist studies itself rediscovered the uncanny in the pregnant pause before the new modernist studies appeared: Surette’s, James Longenbach’s, Timothy Materer’s, Daniel Cottom’s, and Demetres Tryphonopoulos’s studies of modernism and the occult/spiritualism all appear in a cluster between 1988 and 2002, just before the advent of the Modernist Studies Association and the new modernist studies (Helen Sword’s is after). This advent itself is further marked by uncanny repetitions of modernism itself, and is even characterized in uncanny terms by Jennifer Wicke in the same issue of Modernism/modernity anchored by Friedman’s ‘Definitional Excursions.’ Without making too much of any one of these instances (Friedman’s repetitions of Freud, her invitation to consider ‘the

36 Stephen Ross

very ground of study’ [11] in psychoanalytic terms, modernism’s uncanny origins, and the new modernist studies’ repetition thereof) I do claim that together they provide enough momentum to proceed with an inquiry into how this proliferation of uncanny moments gives us a means of addressing the undecidability of modernism. Doublings and repetitions will continue to proliferate, and if they do not finally come to seem frightening, exactly, I hope that their strangeness will settle upon the discussion and provoke closer scrutiny.

Uncanny modernism So how exactly are modernist studies uncanny? Let us begin with Freud’s definition: ‘the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’ (930). Deriving from repressed infantile complexes (e.g., womb fantasies) or—most relevantly here— surmounted primitive beliefs (e.g., animism, magical thinking), the uncanny’s main modalities are ‘uncertainty whether an object is living or inanimate’ (937), ‘the phenomenon of the double’ (940), ‘involuntary repetition’ (942), and ‘apparent death and the re-animation of the dead’ (948). Taking the first and the last of these together, we can turn to Jennifer Wicke for a remarkable account of the ‘new modernist’ project as an effort to revivify the moribund body of modernism: Modernism’s brand name, as we know, lingered for decades in such a boring twilight sleep, etherized upon a dissecting table, or slumbering in a jar. Efforts such as the Modernist Studies Association, the ‘New Modernisms’ conferences, and even a provocative journal devoted to modernism/modernity, share credit for reawakening a slumbering critical and scholarly aesthetic spirit—modernism’s brand. Each has something to do with resurrecting and refurbishing a brand in advanced moribundity [ ... ]. (394–95) As recently as 1998, it seems, anyone coming upon the corpus of modernism could have been forgiven for her ‘uncertainty whether [it was] living or inanimate.’ Sleeping, anesthetized or possibly on the brink of death, the slumbering ‘spirit’ of modernism needed not just awakening, but resurrection if it was going to be around for its centenary. Now, of course, the reanimated ‘critical and scholarly and aesthetic spirit’ of modernism walks among us, a galvanized (near-) corpse or phantom still hauling around the chains of ‘formalism, tradition, hierarchies, social Darwinism, commercialism, bourgeois modernism, neo-imperialism, and totalization of all kinds’ which the ‘arbiters of the new modernisms’ disavow (Wicke 394). ‘Known of old and long familiar,’ but still strange in their new incarnation, the new modernist studies also partake of ‘the phenomenon of the

Uncanny Modernism

37

double.’ Modernist studies both are and are not what they used to be. The same figures are there, but they signify differently—everyone looks the same, but they are also clearly different: maybe they have lost weight or gained it; is that a new hairstyle, new glasses? Though we never, of course, had access to the ‘authentic’ Pound, for example, the new Pound still appears as a doppelgänger of the old one, a double with a difference. And though this doubling might optimistically be taken as ‘an assurance of immortality’ for ‘Pound,’ it also ‘becomes the uncanny harbinger of death’ (Freud 940)—the more real the new Pound, the less substantial the old, and the more ephemeral each. As Wicke puts it, ‘the modernist brand can only be resurrected by ironizing or implicitly denying its original cultural status’ (395). Pound must die in order that ‘Pound’ may live. Such doubling is part of the ‘parallel disavowals’ Wicke sees as necessary to the new modernist enterprise: the first is the rejection of ‘formalism, tradition,’ and so forth with which the old modernist studies were concerned; the second is ‘how much we rely on the modernist brand’ (394). To these I would add a third disavowal that seems worth mentioning since it smacks so palpably of willed repression. Though ‘Appreciation, Depreciation’ appeared in the same inaugural MSA volume of Modernism/modernity as Friedman’s ‘Definitional Excursions,’ it has received much less attention. I believe this is at least in part because of the more self-conscious approach it takes, raising troubling questions about our own investment in the ‘brand’ of modernism. My aim here is to bring Wicke’s insights together with Friedman’s project in ‘Definitional Excursions,’ to force a dialogue that has thus far been foreclosed. This brings us to the third modality of the uncanny operating in the new modernist studies, involuntary repetition. Just as Friedman’s definitional excursion repeats (always with a difference) Freud’s, and just as she invokes the ‘drama of repetition’ as the basis for her chapter (17), so the new modernist studies repeat modernism in certain ways. This is, in one sense, unavoidable. When one studies something one re-presents it and thus attempts to repeat it; as Derrida taught us, this is the very nature of iterability. Moreover, depending on your commitment to the empiricist model, the accuracy of such repetition may be the whole aim of the research (e.g., North, Reading). But, as Derrida also taught us, not all such repetitions are equal, and each must be scrutinized in turn for the particular resonances and distortions it introduces. In this vein, the new modernist repetition of modernism still requires assessment, not for its veracity, but for its motivations, distortions, and biases. The key repetitions on which I want to focus here are of the gestures towards the ‘new’ and the plural. As to the repetition of the gesture toward the new, there is no secret here: Cassandra Laity entitled her introduction to the first MSA issue of Modernism/modernity ‘Making it New,’ and no doubt the MSA founders decided on ‘The New Modernisms’ as a rubric with Pound’s famous dictum firmly in mind. But the specifics of this repetition bear scrutiny. In the

38

Stephen Ross

first place, the new modernisms self-consciously repeat the self-conscious gesture of the old modernism; just as the study repeats (or imagines itself to repeat) the object of study (however these are construed), so its impetus mimics that of the ‘original.’ The new modernisms is a new approach to a phenomenon or group of phenomena that was itself a new approach to the newness of modernity. This compulsively repeated fetishization of the new is, in the case of the new modernist scholars, precisely a species of that which is ‘known of old and long familiar’ but also strange. It is an old claim to newness (much older, of course, than modernism) being made anew and, perhaps, bringing with it more of the old than we might like to have to admit. As Fredric Jameson points out throughout A Singular Modernity, such a gesture is perhaps unavoidable as various ‘modernities’ construe themselves as both radically new and singular.1 What is crucially important here is not so much the actual newness of what is declared, but the repeated compulsion to declare such newness, to insist upon it, to enforce it as an imperative; such insistence bespeaks anxiety. In the same vein, the pluralization of modernism is both a repetition like that of making it new (again) and a sub-species of that repetition. On the one hand, its authority comes precisely from its claim to repeat modernism: modernism was never singular and thus the declaration of plural modernisms only does justice to a multifarious and complex set of global phenomena occurring at different rates and times, and in different places. On the other hand, the new modernist drive to render the monolithic ‘old’ modernism plural is itself a form of the imperative to make it new (again). It is a recovery effort that seeks in part to leapfrog the previous critical constructions of modernism and to confront the phenomena themselves in their myriad complexity with an unprecedented authenticity and accuracy. In a real sense, it is an effort to clarify the problematic situation confronting anyone who tries to define modernism; rather than consulting the authorities (e.g., Greenberg, Kenner, Eysteinsson, Bradbury and Macfarlane, Berman) who presented a singular modernism, the new modernists propose to return to what Michael North calls ‘the scene of the modern’ (subtitle to Reading 1922), making it new (to us) by allowing its full multiplicity. In an equally real sense, it is a genuinely Oedipal move essential to differentiating the new modernist studies from the old ones that have by now become so utterly discredited. Born of a twin desire to salvage the aesthetic objects we love from the ravages of a new critical orthodoxy and to break from the tyranny of our critical forebears,2 the new modernists’ pluralization of modernism attempts both to discredit previous constructions of modernism and to acknowledge a debt to the model that drew them to modernism in the first place. Make it new and make it multiple are, then, anything but simple directives to rediscover the glorious variety of modernism wherever and whenever it flourishes; they are, instead, complicated acts of aggression, affection, and disavowal, of doubling and repetition that evoke Hegel’s

Uncanny Modernism

39

lord and bondsman fully as much as the enchanted browser in modernism’s ‘conjectural bookstore’ (North, Reading v).

It’s all about me There is, in addition to the four elements of the uncanny enumerated by Freud, a fifth element of which he makes only the briefest mention (940), but that seems absolutely central to understanding how the uncanny differs from mere coincidence: the fact that we are implicated in it. The uncanny does not simply happen to us, it happens for us and because of us even— mostly—when we have no consciousness of our participation in it. Uncanny events differ from coincidental events inasmuch as they seem intended for us rather than just happening around us. Our unconscious selection of particular details from the welter of stimuli around us manifests through the return of a surmounted primitive belief in an occulted order, an animated universe that speaks to us. It transforms a particular kind of perception (we are noticing things) into an intentional message (those things are pregnant with meaning). An internal process is experienced as external as we project unconscious processes on to the phenomenal world and thereby experience it as uncanny. The repetition of a specific number only becomes uncanny when we come to believe that the repetition has to do with us specifically (i.e., it is my lucky number, home address, age). Freud’s opening experience of the uncanny is compelling because it is he who consistently finds himself in the red-light district of a small Italian town, and seeing someone else’s double doesn’t pack nearly the same wallop as seeing one’s own doppelgänger. Consequent upon this sense that the uncanny directly implicates us is the sense that it has significance for us. The random series of signs we encounter on a daily basis suddenly coheres into a message, the signified suddenly looms large—larger still if it remains enigmatic or out of reach. In psychoanalytic terms, the uncanny thus appears in this fifth element to be conveying a message to us, about us, from someplace/one other; perhaps even the Other itself. Naturally, then, when we feel ourselves thus addressed by the universe, the cosmos, God, the Unconscious, or the Symbolic order, we seek to understand. We want to know what it all means, why the number is repeated, why the route keeps leading back to this part of town, why everyone we meet seems to share a name with the ex-. Our questioning on this score generally takes one of two forms: we want to know either the specifics of the message or what the experience itself means. In Freudian terms, we want to know either the latent message behind the manifest text or the meaning encoded into the dynamic. There are, then, two dimensions to this fifth element of the uncanny: how we are implicated in it, and what that implication means. In what follows, I would like to take up these two dimensions in relation to the reconfiguration of modernist studies as ‘new.’ Along the way, I hope to show how

40 Stephen Ross

we are all invested in the project of disciplining modernism in multiple and contradictory ways.

Other modernisms The first way in which we have become implicated in the new modernisms is ethical. It involves a desire to be open to the other in general and to modernism’s others in particular. Recognizing that modernism constituted itself through exclusion and that modernist studies had been complicit in that exclusion for decades, the new modernist studies is motivated by a profoundly ethical determination to limit as far as possible the foreclosure of alternative perspectives, contributions, engagements, and figures. As such, it is clearly rooted in earlier efforts to revise our understanding of modernism, going back at least to feminist challenges and postcolonialist challenges to the prevalent model of male-dominated and Eurocentric modernism in the 1970s and 1980s. From Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank and Chana Kronfeld’s On the Margins of Modernism to Bonnie Kime Scott’s Gender in Modernism and Laura Winkiel and Laura Doyle’s Geomodernisms, the ethical drive to include works and figures who have too often been excluded from modernism has been a boon. Moreover, this work is far from complete, as the 2004 MSA conference theme, ‘Modernism’s Others/Other Modernisms,’ and the September 2006 special issue of Modernism/modernity, ‘Modernism and Transnationalisms,’ demonstrate. The ethical responsibility to the other, to otherness per se, is admirably in evidence in this evolution, but it also comes with its own set of problems regarding our implication in the project. These problems are manifest in the insistence upon a singular modernism even in such overt and explicit efforts to pluralize and ecumenicize it. Consider the examples cited above: modernism retains its singular character in the journal title, Kronfeld’s title, Scott’s title, one half of the conference title, and in the special issue title, where the singular modernism is tellingly paired with the plural transnationalisms. The two strongest pieces in the issue, Gikandi’s and Friedman’s, deploy this singularity even as they make eloquent and compelling claims for the need to de-singularize modernism: Gikandi allows that postcolonial modernisms themselves imitate and draw inspiration from Anglo-Euro-America’s primary modernism; and though Friedman is utterly persuasive on the need to expand our conception of modernity and modernism in spatial as well as temporal terms, she still relies upon that primary modernism as the test-case for her claims. Other modernities and modernisms are recognizable in Friedman’s article largely because they have features in common with the primary modernism at the core of the contemporary disciplinary agon. The only plural modernisms in evidence appear in the neologism geomodernisms and the ‘other’ modernisms of the conference’s chiasmus: modernism’s others are plural and other modernisms are plural, but our modernism, the genuine article, remains singular and primary.

Uncanny Modernism

41

Clearly, I am overstating my case a little here; Friedman and Gikandi are compelling in their arguments, and there is no doubt that the restrictive model of modernism with which we are all struggling today is a problem we must confront if we wish to break from the exclusivist paradigm that led to modernism’s moribundity in the first place. My effort to demonstrate that a singular modernism remains powerfully cathected even in the midst of explicit efforts to destabilize any such entity is not an accusation of complicity or weakness of mind. Rather, it is an effort to show how deeply this cathexis penetrates, and to begin asking what motivates it. That is, if we know a singular modernism to be a problem, and many of modernism’s smartest scholars are actively working to pluralize and extend it temporally, spatially, and materially (or vertically, as Mao and Walkowitz have it), how do we account for its persistently uncanny endurance? The answer, it seems to me, is that no matter how you slice or redefine it, modernism remains an evaluative term, even if only because of its history of functioning as such. Much of this is due to the evaluative hegemony of the New Criticism in the twentieth century. New Critical aesthetics gained credibility from their alignment with modernist practice, which was then validated as good by the mandarins of the New Criticism. Modernism thus became another way of saying good: modernist works were obviously good and their characteristics thus extracted as markers of value; works that do not share those characteristics are not only not modernist, but not good either. Difficulty, ambiguity, tension, complexity, density, formal innovation became—and remain—markers of aesthetic quality. On the flipside, consider what Georg Lukács called the ideology of modernism and you are likewise instantly in the realm of the evaluative, but on the opposite end of the spectrum, thinking instead of exclusivism, chauvinism, Eurocentrism, misogyny, racism, homophobia, singularity, hegemony, patriarchy, technophilia, fascism, and eco-antagonism. Either way, there is no avoiding the fact that modernism is anything but a purely descriptive term; it notoriously designates no solid historical or (now, thanks to Friedman, Doyle and Winkiel, among others) geographical boundaries, and cannot be tied decisively to any set of descriptors. Indeed, the conflicting evaluations of modernism, depending on where you stand, are arguably at the root of both the resurgence of modernist studies at the end of the last century and the ongoing debates over its proper provenance today. From the perspective of those who came to modernism initially because we fell in love with it, as I suspect is the case for most of those interested in the question of disciplining modernism, the term carries with it first and foremost the whiff of the excellent, the elite, as well as the well-loved. Thanks to the efforts of Clement Greenberg, F. R. Leavis, T. S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, among legions of others, modernist elitism gets to us before anything else; long before we enter into the debates about the production of literary value, cultural capital, various ideologies of modernism, we learn

42

Stephen Ross

that modernist art and literature is great, that Ulysses is the greatest novel ever written, that The Waste Land is the greatest poem, that the incantations YeatsPoundEliot and ConradWoolfFaulkner carry with them magical properties and that their knowing invocation elevates us too. By recognizing the greatness of the works we study as modernist when others fail to see their attraction or even to understand them, we, too, are raised to the level of the cultural elite: a joke about Finnegans Wake gets a knowing chuckle from initiates while lesser lights wonder why the apostrophe is missing. We thus simultaneously reaffirm the value of the works and bask in its reflected glow. And no matter how skeptical we become, how thoroughly we interrogate the cultural privilege whose production we participate in, our identity as scholars of modernism, even scholars of the new modernist studies, remains inextricably bound up with the term’s evaluative dimension. This is why, I would submit, even though very few scholars of modernism today really want or believe that it is viable to retain the old singular Modernism, many of us continue to use the term even when we are trying our best to re-work it in plural and inclusive senses. Rather than follow our colleagues in the erstwhile fields of Renaissance or Romanticism, now reduced to early modern and Georgian studies respectively, even the most astute and insightful of modernist scholars are working hard to show how the term can be retained and brought into line with the new imperatives of modernist study. Instead of acknowledging the contracting boundaries of our realm, it seems, modernist scholars are intent upon advancing into any and all contiguous regions, making modernism into a truly transhistorical and global term: modernity and modernism become portable terms that can be deployed in a seemingly infinite range of contexts and situations, the particularity of which reinforces rather than limits their applicability. The parallel to modernist imperialism is hard to resist, and can perhaps be instructive if we think carefully about how our good intentions for modernism can have unintended consequences. In effect, scholars of modernism who wish to include works that are not traditionally considered modernist have two options: abandon the label modernist for something more general, like twentieth-century literature, or show how the new works are modernist. Clearly, the former is the easier route to take; rather than insisting that, for example, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North is an authentically modernist text—a move that involves being able to say what makes a text modernist in the first place and then showing that Salih’s novel meets those criteria—we could much more easily obviate the whole question by not begging it in the first place: it is a twentieth-century novel and as such falls under the proper purview of studies of twentieth-century literature. Such a move avoids the turf-war with postcolonial studies over whether the novel is properly modernist or postcolonial and clears the way for considering its relation to its cultural moment without having to carry the baggage of modernism and modernity. Case closed.

Uncanny Modernism

43

But the new modernist studies does not do this. Instead, intentionally, at times seemingly perversely, it takes the hard way out, seeking to integrate traditionally non-modernist texts into modernist studies. Why do such a thing? What drives the cathexis of modernism so deep that we would rather tie ourselves in knots to sustain its integrity rather than simply moving on to another term? To answer these questions, we need to turn to Friedman’s ‘Periodizing Modernism,’ which remains the smartest engagement with the shifting and slippery project of defining modernism and modernity in the new modernist studies to date. Friedman’s project here is to make the case for expanding the terms to include not just other historical moments in the West, but also other places (with their own histories) around the world. The periodization at issue is also a spatialization that would recognize that western history is not History tout court, nor western modernity (or modernities) and modernism(s) modernity and modernism per se. At the heart of this article is Friedman’s effort to define modernism and modernity, however provisionally. In fact, everything turns on these definitions: one cannot reasonably define modernism without knowing what modernity is, and how one defines both these terms will ultimately dictate who and what gets included/excluded from them. It is a contentious thing to do, but it is also necessary; the political dangers alone of undertaking such a task are massive, particularly given modernism’s history of exclusion, not to mention the inherent difficulties in defining terms whose value is ultimately—as Friedman declares at the start—relational (433). Perhaps it is only to be expected, then, that Friedman’s effort here ultimately comes up short, revealing in its limitations characteristics that are symptomatic of the tension between the new modernist imperative to move away from the negative connotations of modernism and its tenacious desire to retain and remake the term. These characteristics recapitulate the uncanny tenor of the new modernist studies and speak to the various anxieties that drive it. The first of these symptomatic characteristics is, unsurprisingly (by now), doubling. Friedman’s efforts to define modernity repeatedly evoke the current state of the discipline every bit as much as any objective historical conditions. First, Friedman carefully asserts that her definitional project is ‘provisional,’ and that her definition of modernity in particular has ‘porous [ ... ] conceptual boundaries’ (433). This definition doubles the character of modernity itself, which she defines in one place as having ‘increasingly porous borders’ (433). The porosity of the phenomenon transfers itself to the effort to define it, producing an effect of strange familiarity, as well as a sense that the discursive object itself may be as much projection as phenomenon. Friedman’s ensuing claims that ‘modernity and tradition are relational concepts that modernity produces to cut itself off from the past, to distinguish the “now” from the “then,”’ that ‘modernity invents tradition, suppressed its own continuities with the past, and often produces nostalgia for what

44

Stephen Ross

has seemingly been lost,’ and that ‘the struggle between modernizing and traditionalizing forces within a given society is itself a defining characteristic of modernity’ (434) equally evoke the current state of the debate over the terms and the future of modernist studies at least as much as they describe modernity itself. Now, clearly, since Friedman’s effort is itself part of a generally modern taxonomical urge and the debate over the field of study is itself an effect of modernity, a certain amount of doubling and repetition is to be expected. But there are other aspects of her project in ‘Periodizing Modernism’ that encourage us to ask what is really driving it, if the terms are so avowedly and obviously intractable. On this score, we can turn to Friedman’s awareness that however ‘porous’ the boundaries she invokes, she must nonetheless draw some distinctions. These distinctions fade almost as quickly as they are invoked, though, making them seem more spectral than even provisionally solid. Early in her engagement with the terms modernism and modernity, Friedman asserts forcefully, ‘Let me be clear: I do not regard every historical period as “modern”; nor do I regard every creative expression produced in the context of modernity to be “modernist” ’ (433). And yet precisely on what basis distinctions amongst historical moments and their cultural productions will be made is unclear. Acknowledging that she must first define modernity before she can define modernism in relation to it, Friedman tries to capture the basic elements of modernity but without assigning them any specific content: modernity is a powerful vortex of historical conditions that coalesce to produce sharp ruptures from the past that range widely across various sectors of a given society. The velocity, acceleration, and dynamism of shattering change across a wide spectrum of societal institutions are key components of modernity as I see it—change that interweaves the cultural, economic, political, religious, familial, sexual, aesthetic, technological, and so forth, and can move in both utopic and dystopic directions. (433) Eschewing any reference to theorists of modernity who might have given her definition some traction (e.g., Anthony Giddens, Fredric Jameson, Jürgen Habermas, Matei Calinescu, Christa Bürger, Jonathan Friedman, Martin Jay, Michel Foucault, Fernand Braudel, Arjun Appadurai), Friedman instead aestheticizes modernity with a series of abstract nouns and adjectives that lack any more specific referent than ‘societal institutions.’ The tone of the prose echoes Marshall Berman’s famously overheated description of modernity in All That is Solid Melts into Air,3 but strips it of its specifics: industrialization, corporate power, demographic upheavals, urbanization, mass communication, nation-states, and global capitalism (16). The problem for Friedman— and the new modernist studies more generally—is that descriptions like Berman’s universalize modernity on the basis of its particular manifestation

Uncanny Modernism

45

in the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The specificity of its features precludes its application in non-western contexts. In her commitment to preserve modernity, and thus modernism, for materials that have traditionally been excluded from modernist studies, however, Friedman describes modernity in terms that are seemingly applicable almost anywhere and at any time. Given the stakes involved in identifying one’s period of research as a time of such radical change and the ingenuity scholars can marshal to make their cases, it is hard to see how this description actually includes ‘some phenomena and [ ... ] exclu[des] others,’ as Friedman concedes any definitional category must do (433). The disclaimer that Friedman’s ‘strategic definition of modernity here is relational, emphasizing the temporal rupture of before/after wherever and whenever such ruptures might occur in time and space’ (433) does little to alleviate the sense that pretty much any historical period could reasonably be considered a modernity. Moreover, it tries to square the intransigent circle of whether the break constitutes modernity (as she maintains here) or if modernity constructs a narrative of the break (as she argues on the next page, quoted just above); the surmounted belief in modernity as a catastrophic break with tradition returns compulsively to disrupt even Friedman’s sophisticated effort to rethink this key term. The phantasmal quality of both modernity and Friedman’s definition of it also infects her definition of modernism. As she puts it, ‘if modernity lacks particularity as a concept, then the claim that modernism is modernity’s expressive domain is necessarily emptied of specificity as well’ (432–33). Though Friedman tries to insist upon the specificity of her definition of modernity, it ultimately vanishes with the cock’s crow, appearing to each observer as the incarnation of his or her own chosen placement at the crux of epochal change. And if modernity becomes a spectral entity in both its objective and discursive manifestations, it stands to reason that modernism too will suffer a certain insubstantiality. Though Friedman is explicit about her denial that ‘every creative expression produced in the context of modernity [is] “modernist,” ’ her definitions of modernism are plagued by the same sort of pliable open-endedness as her definitions of modernity: for Friedman in ‘Periodizing Modernism,’ modernism is ‘the expressive dimension of modernity, one that encompasses a range of styles among creative forms that share family resemblances based on an engagement with the historical conditions of modernity in a particular location’ (432). Or, alternatively, it is ‘a range of creative meaning-making forms and cultural practices that engage in substantial and different ways with the historical conditions of a particular modernity’ (433). The key terms here are ‘substantial’ and ‘different.’ What constitute ‘substantial’ ways of engaging, and from what they are ‘different’ is never specified. We are assumed simply to know when we encounter them which ‘creative meaning-making forms’ engage substantially and differently enough—and, importantly, share ‘family resemblances’—with modernity.

46

Stephen Ross

Again, we seem to witness the uncanny return of a belief in an indefinable quality that announces some works as modernist, rather than a set of criteria by which to ascertain their modernism. The result is a circularity very much like that by which the New Criticism established modernist aesthetics as the touchstone of value, a circularity that depends upon doubling and repetition to establish and guarantee value, and that parallels the uncanny in its revelation that there is no objective basis for its claims. Friedman’s reinscription of this move thus repeats the New Criticism’s repetition of modernist aesthetics, the original circularity of which lends a vertiginous quality to the whole and estranges the familiar (New Critical aesthetics) even as it familiarizes the strange (a new definition of modernism). The result of this particular uncanny moment in Friedman’s engagement with modernism is that—as with the distinction between modernities and other types of historical epoch—the distinction itself melts into air. Modernism becomes every bit as spectral as modernity in Friedman’s account, each ‘definitional excursion’ producing only the ghostly after-image of the impossible but necessary substantive characterization. Toward the end of Friedman’s direct engagement with modernism and modernity in ‘Periodizing Modernism’ things seem to reach a point of critical mass, tipping decisively into the uncanny as though to corroborate the significance of the doubling, repetition, and spectrality I have been trying to trace. The last characteristic of modernity Friedman cites repeats Paul de Man’s repetition of Nietzsche in defining modernity as ‘a ruthless forgetting’ of the past: ‘ “Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier.” The past that is repressed, that will not be remembered, comes back to haunt and trouble the present. Buried within the radical ruptures from the past are hidden continuities—all the things that refuse to change or cannot change, often having to do with the uneven distributions of power and violent histories’ (434). From the bold, brave effort to provide even provisional definitions of these notoriously slippery terms, through the pitfalls of their inherently porous boundaries, the repetitions they seem compulsively to provoke, and their essential spectrality, we finally arrive at the end of this excursion in the realm of desire, haunting, trouble, burial, and violence. This choice of terms is highly symptomatic, itself repeating the uncanny terminology of Friedman’s earlier engagement with the labyrinthine field of modern/modernism/modernity. It represents a resurgence of a repressed dimension of the whole new modernist project, articulated so carefully and with such sophistication by Friedman. This returns us to precisely the terrain from which Friedman set out in 2001, terrain on which we do better to focus on ‘the repetition of what cannot be consciously remembered, the reenactment of repressed patterns not yet consciously faced’ rather than the surface drama of definition. Indeed, as Jacques Derrida taught us long ago, ‘coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire’ (‘Structure’ 915); as I started out this section

Uncanny Modernism

47

by suggesting, the force of desire that drives the new modernist engagement with, rather than abandonment of, modernity and modernism relates directly to these terms’ status as evaluative, as terms of approbation (at least in the present context). It is true that Friedman acknowledges the ‘dystopic directions’ (433) that shadow modernity’s productive welter, but the emphasis here, the implicit values behind the distinctions Friedman wants to establish but can’t quite bring herself to avow turn on terms like ‘expressive,’ ‘creative,’ ‘meaning-making,’ and ‘substantial,’ all of which are set against the kind of indiscriminate attitude that would accept ‘every creative expression produced in the context of modernity [ ... as] “modernist.” ’ Questions of value and identity are thus inextricably bound up together, with the question of value leading directly to the question of identity in a deeply perplexing spiral; however thorough and sincere our efforts to remake modernism, the fact that we are remaking rather than abandoning it can only confirm its essentially evaluative tenor. When we remake modernist studies we also remake ourselves as modernist scholars; in fact, we primarily remake ourselves in this endeavor. The quarrel we prosecute is not with modernism itself, but with a certain critical model of modernism that has been reified, ingrained, attacked, and is now disavowed. The frustrating dimension of this for scholars of modernism from all generations is that modernism itself was hardly ever at issue. Instead, the conflicts were almost exclusively over critical constructions of modernism. The doubling of the object of study in the critical discourse about it—a doubling that always distorts (hence its uncanniness)—invariably colors every subsequent approach to it. Every attempt to rectify the distortions only produces more distortions—hence the longevity of the scholarly enterprise. This is the uncanny element—if we disavow this knowledge and believe (as many today seem to do) that we can approach modernism with unblinkered eyes, rediscovering it as it really was and representing it to the world after years of misrepresentation tarnished its reputation, we simply make the same mistakes and furnish future generations of scholars with scholarly careers. Perhaps this is inevitable. But what I am trying to get at here is the possibility of shifting things a bit, asking slightly different questions—as, I believe, are Friedman and Wicke. The past of modernist studies is something we cannot utterly repudiate, but from which we must distinguish ourselves. The future of modernist studies is our future, the future we are going to make, and thus a future in which our identity (and future posterity) is intimately bound up. The position is vexed. If we really wanted to break decisively with the past critical models, we would jettison the term modernism without a second thought. But it persists in almost everything we do, and it persists in its old guise as a singular often capitalized signifier of value, power, prestige. Even when it is pluralized, one cannot help but see, to a certain extent, old wine in new bottles; the inclusion of texts by women, people of color, geographically and temporally disparate figures, and so on might well appear as an

48

Stephen Ross

elevation of these texts to the level of the erstwhile greats of high modernism rather than a catholic expansion of the rubric.

Brother, can you spare a (para)digm? A further way in which our interests are implicated directly in the reinvention of modernist studies has to do with simple career imperatives and takes two forms. First, there is the scandalous problem of scarcity; without new angles of approach or a newly configured area of inquiry, we face the horrifying (and embarrassing) prospect of running out of things to say—and thus publish. Despite an increasing wave of discontent with the drive to (pre-) professionalize graduate students and to insist upon ever-longer lists of publications for promotion and tenure, the fact remains that until a sea change takes place in academia we are all going to need to keep publishing articles and books in order simply to get and keep jobs, make tenure requirements, and advance through the ranks of the professoriate. Given this, and given that the moribundity of modernist studies at the end of the twentieth century seemed to indicate that most of what was worth saying about modernism had already been said, it is plainly apparent that if we were going to go on being modernist scholars, we had to revivify modernist studies. Our very identities not just as scholars of modernism but as active scholars, period—producers of ‘new knowledge’ as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada likes to put it—themselves were on the line. Failure to find something new to say might well give rise to the impression that modernism itself is exhausted as an area of inquiry, that we are no longer doing pertinent scholarly work, that the field had gone soft and was mired only in arcane internal disputes, and so on. The motivation provided by such threats and the fear they engender in all those who love modernism, have staked their careers on it, base their professional identities on it, and/or literally depend upon its vitality for a living cannot be overestimated. Second, there is the imperative afoot in all disciplines and fields to prove the relevance of research, to submit to the utilitarian ethic that has overrun universities in the past 40 years. On the one hand, this imperative issues from the boom in political criticism perhaps best captured by Jameson’s clarion call to ‘Always historicize!,’ and is perfectly valid. Particularly in the wake of the New Criticism, linking literary works to their ‘social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts’ (Laity 385) is an imperative for understanding them more fully. When the polarity of this relationship gets reversed, though, when the study of literary works becomes a means to knowing more fully the contexts in which we find them, a utilitarian ethic threatens to take over. Now, I am not knocking cultural studies per se. But it does seem to me that the imperative of making literary—in this case specifically modernist—studies relevant has authorized a value reversal: where the contexts were initially sought in order to enhance our understanding of literary

Uncanny Modernism

49

works, literary works are now often studied only for a better understanding of those contexts. The logic here is clear: the study of literature as literature is not useful, but the study of literature as cultural document is useful. It answers the question: how does your research matter? And with budgets and grants increasingly tied to a sense of relevance it is not hard to see how the advent of a ‘new modernist’ studies paradigm might well be read as opportunistic. That is, the break from the high modernist canon and the brand of modernist studies that went with it might well be read in terms of the imperative to prove that our research is useful. Part of this has clearly been the outcome of theory’s displacement of the uncritically humanist values of mid-twentieth-century critics, but we seem to have come to a pretty pass when theory’s rigorous critique of Enlightenment values aligns with the imperatives of instrumental reason. I do not mean to make this appear to be anyone’s fault in particular—the slip from historicizing/politicizing literary works to insisting on their relevance in terms of use value is surprisingly subtle and easy to make. But I do want to draw attention to the fact that the new modernist tendency to study the ‘social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts’ of modernism, though often passed off as a means of showing them to be modernist in and of themselves, is just as clearly an instance of hearing the renewed imperative to ‘make it new!’ as ‘make it useful!’

Ghostmodernism The problematic of overdetermined personal investment in a definitional process which itself turns around problems of repetition, difference, and knowledge finds an illuminating parallel in the ultimately uncanny development of phenomenology in the twentieth century. Concerned with definitions of phenomena taken to exist outside the observing individual and yet of necessity engaged with the ways in which the observing individual influences all such definitions, phenomenology seems an appropriate discourse through which to think the disciplinarity of modernist studies. From Husserl through Heidegger and on to Sartre, most phenomenologists believed that we could eliminate the distracting knowledge we already have, the specificity of our own subject positions, and any contextual disturbances to focus on the experience of a phenomenon in complete isolation. This works well enough when the phenomenon in question is a coffee cup or a statue, but when the phenomenon is a person, and especially when it is the self of the observing individual herself, things get much more complicated. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty points out, temporality is inescapable even within the phenomenological epoche, so that the observing individual can never coincide with the observed individual or even with the self which started observing just a moment ago: Never therefore will the philosophy of reflection be able to install itself in the mind it discloses, whence to see the world as its correlative. Precisely

50 Stephen Ross

because it is reflection, re-turn, re-conquest, or re-covery, it cannot flatter itself that it would simply coincide with a constitutive principle already at work in the spectacle of the world, that, starting with this spectacle, it would travel the very route that the constitutive principle had followed in the opposite direction. (341) Faced with this gap, Merleau-Ponty proposes that ‘the search for the conditions of possibility is in principle posterior to an actual experience, and ... that even if subsequently one determines rigorously the sine qua non of that experience, it can never be washed of the original stain of having been discovered post festum’ (341). Even the practice of hyper-reflexion (surréflexion), where the observer observes his or her own observing as well as that which he or she is trying to observe will not serve, for, as Derrida has shown, there is always one more level to the analysis, one more vantage point to be taken into consideration in pursuit of a full knowledge. The mise-en-abîme inherent to all texts, to all textuality, to all manifestations of being, is uncanniness itself. One is never fully present, either to oneself or to the phenomenal world. Sartre put this ontological dilemma in clear—and explicitly uncanny—terms when he declared that ‘to-be-in-the-world is to haunt the world’ (331). And, of course, Derrida famously ratified Sartre’s insight into the problem of ontology—that is, the problem of definition— with his own uncanny neologism, ‘hauntology.’ The coinage ‘hauntology’ means that all being is essentially spectral, that human existence is no more fully present than anything else. In the simplest terms, this is just an elaboration of Merleau-Ponty’s insight (and Lacan’s, built upon by the likes as well of Butler and Irigaray) that the self is ultimately non-coincident with itself. All that is, is perpetually changing, becoming something other than what it appears to be (Heraclitus redux!). In other terms, all being is becoming (or, alternatively, all being is dying). Anything that has not ceased to exist cannot be said to be (in the sense of being full, complete, self-consistent), but only to be in process, to be incomplete, unfinished, not fully present. Nor, of course, can anything that has ceased to exist be said to be, either; ontology is only ever hauntology, the apparent consistency of the range of phenomena grouped together under the category of identity is always a phantasm generated posthumously. There is no being designated by Stephen Ross, but only a collection of disparate phenomena that are brought together in a phantasmatic unity by a range of observing consciousnesses, including my own. This logic applies all the more clearly to discursive entities like modernism. A term rarely, if ever, used by those we call modernists today (or used to), modernism dramatizes graphically Lacan’s claim that the letter killeth: modernism was ‘still a relatively new coinage’ when Harry Levin asked what it had been (Rainey, ‘Introduction’ xx). Thus coined and killed within the span of a few years, modernism has nevertheless enjoyed a vibrant and productive

Uncanny Modernism

51

afterlife. As I have been trying to argue, its persistence, and the impossibility of settling what it means—its refusal to be disciplined—reveals something important about those of us who continue to conjure with it. That is, modernism persists as a phantom, a symptom whose particular content is vastly less important than the form it takes and the effects it produces. It derives its consistency from the subjects who sustain it, from our very attentiveness, just as being itself derives its consistency from the consciousness(es) observing it. Moreover, it takes its particular character from the character of our attentiveness, and sustains our identities by reflecting that attentiveness back to us as something we can recognize. We see ourselves in modernism and modernism in ourselves in a perpetual tension that can never give us a clear understanding of what modernism was any more than it can give us a clear understanding of who precisely we are. Refraction and distortion are the handmaidens of doubling and repetition, always giving us in modernism some version of ‘what was known of old and long familiar’ and yet also strange, generating untold anxiety—and volumes of scholarship—if not outright fear. This is the situation we find ourselves in when we try to engage with the problem of how to discipline modernism. Even an effort like Friedman’s to ‘confront directly the contradictory status of meanings’ in lieu of defining modernism yet again presents a frame to crack (Chapter 1, 9). Near the end of ‘Definitional Excursions’ she writes that she regard[s] the binarist, circular, and metonymic problems inherent in definitional acts not as dead ends but rather as opportunities for interrogation that lead right into the heart of the dialogic meanings of modern, modernity, and modernism. They insist upon a recognition of how such terms are themselves historical constructions—with their own history, development, function, and effect, all of which invite interpretation and critique. Different configurations of modernity reflect the different positionalities of their producers, serve different interests, and have different effects. (29) Temporality in the guise of history appears here as surely as it does in Merleau-Ponty, as does the limit of practical self-awareness. I have tried to follow Friedman’s lead here—with Wicke as guide—skirting the fray over the political stakes involved in different definitions of modernism, and asking instead whose interests are served by concentrating on the contradictions rather than trying to resolve them: it is a sur-réflexion on the issue raised by Friedman, if you like. Friedman asks us to pay attention to the whom and whence of efforts to answer the question ‘what was modernism?’ She wants us to concentrate on the contradictions produced by the myriad answers and to interrogate those answers from a relatively disinterested perspective—the heat is off, since we aren’t trying to figure out

52

Stephen Ross

what modernism was, but who gains by particular answers to the problem. But as Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Levinas, and numerous others in the (post-) phenomenological tradition have shown—and this volume itself corroborates—the heat is never off, and one might equally respond to Friedman’s chapter by asking (perhaps with a modernist sneer) ‘who wants to know?’ We are, after all, confronted with the problem of trying to know something about a discursive object (modernism) which was constituted as such post festum and with which we are complicit by virtue of our investment in its fortunes. And whether we try to define modernism, or to ‘confront directly’ the contradictions which make such defining impossible, the fact remains that we are also always talking about—and to—ourselves.

Notes 1. There are echoes of this position in Friedman’s ‘Periodizing Modernism,’ which is almost certainly a response to A Singular Modernity, even though any mention of Jameson’s book remains—uncannily—absent. 2. For a fuller account of this dynamic, see my ‘Introduction: The Missing Link’ to Modernism and Theory. 3. Berman’s title repeats Marx’s repetition of Hamlet’s ‘O that this too too solid flesh would melt’ (I.ii), returning us to one of the uncanniest works of English literature.

3 Imagining World Literatures: Modernism and Comparative Literature Jessica Berman

To think about the relationship between modernism and comparative literature today, it bears examining the well-known debate regarding the Chinese poet Bei Dao. In a 1990 review, sinologist Stephen Owen attacked Dao’s reputation, claiming that it was undeserved, and based only on the ease with which Dao could be translated and read by westerners. Disparagingly, Owen called Bei Dao’s work poetry ‘written to travel’ (Owen, ‘What is World Poetry?’ 31) and commented that it appeared to lose nothing in translation because it turned its back on Chinese literary tradition and shunned reference to locality. Owen also disparaged what has come to be known as ‘world poetry,’ especially because it seems to come at the expense of the local. According to Owen, the market demand for ‘world poetry’ drives writers to adjust their content and language in order to become palatable on the global scene. Poets who write in the ‘wrong language’(even exceedingly populous languages like Chinese) not only must imagine themselves being translated in order to reach an audience of a satisfying magnitude, they must also engage in the peculiar act of imagining a world poetry and placing themselves within it. And, although it is supposedly free of all local history, this ‘world poetry’ turns out, unsurprisingly, to be a version of AngloAmerican modernism or French modernism, depending on which wave of colonial culture first washed over the intellectuals of the country in question. (Owen, ‘What is World Poetry?’ 28) In a 2003 essay, Owen reiterates his belief in the distinction between poetry that occupies itself primarily with a national tradition and poetry written in order to be comprehensible in translation and thus active on a world stage. On the other hand, in his book What is World Literature? as well as another essay published in 2003, David Damrosch argues for the importance of world 53

54

Jessica Berman

literature, and delights in the transformative potential of the very process of shifting and translating texts. For him, the making and remaking of texts, like Bei Dao’s, as they move towards global audiences, ensures that literary works acquire new meanings as they enter new contexts, without losing their ability to speak to their languages and cultures of origin. He proposes a new version of comparative literature that would focus on world literature, defined as ‘all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language’ (Damrosch, What 4). Within this new discipline of comparative literature, Damrosch acknowledges the importance of reading texts in their original language when possible, and of leaning on specialists to provide contextual information and ‘local knowledge’ (‘National’ 517). Yet he argues not only in favor of using translations to access texts in less familiar languages but also to follow the literary work as it begins a new life in a new national (or international) context (‘National’ 521). Many recent theorists have taken up this question of what comparative literature can be in an era of constant movement of electronic data and instantaneous translation of texts. In the United States, Charles Bernheimer, and more recently Damrosch, Franco Moretti, Emily Apter, Sandra Bermann, and Michael Wood have all published major work on translation, world literature, and the discipline of comparative literature. A 2006 publication sponsored by the American Comparative Literature Association, often referred to as the Saussy report, brings together a number of scholarly responses to the question of what comparative literature in an age of globalization can mean.1 Gayatri Spivak’s Death of a Discipline argues vociferously for knowledge of cultural specifics and original languages and calls for comparative literature to move into more and more locations and less-read literatures. In 2005 the journal Comparative Literature devoted an entire issue to scholarly responses to Spivak (Responding). In her 1999 La République mondiale des lettres (translated as The World Republic of Letters in 2004), Pascale Casanova discusses a world literary sphere rather than world literature per se in terms of its conflict with local political imperatives, national literary canons, and the use of what she sometimes calls, albeit with sympathy, ‘marginalized’ languages. But what is most striking here, and what will be the focus of this chapter, is the crucial role modernism plays in most of these re-examinations of comparative literature. In fact modernism seems at the heart of the new comparative literature in a way not seen since the final chapter of Erich Auerbach’s foundational text, Mimesis. Why? Why does Owen claim that the adoption of a version of ‘Anglo-American or French modernism’ ensures Bei Dao’s success within the world literary scene? Why does nearly half of Casanova’s long book revolve around Joyce, Faulkner, Beckett, and Kafka? What does the intersection of comparative literature with modernism say about the relationship between the two fields? To begin to answer these questions we need to look to the way that modernism is both defined and employed in the arguments surrounding world

Imagining World Literatures

55

literature and to examine the benefits of associating modernism with the new comparative literature. Can, for example, current efforts to bring texts from less-read languages into the mainstream of modernist studies benefit from relying on some of the models of a new comparative literature? Or, will the notion of a unified world republic of letters mean that under-appreciated writers will continue to lose out in the global competition for readers? As Damrosch points out, the addition of a sort of ‘countercanon’ of minor or world literature to the still predominant ‘hypercanon’ might further marginalize minor authors (‘Postcanonical’ 45). It seems certain that texts that have not achieved hypercanonical status in their home languages will never have the chance to make their entrance onto the world stage. We need to understand the stakes involved for modernist studies. If comparative literature remakes itself around a model of international modernism that is, for example, committed to reading in translation or to focusing on the kinds of texts with broad appeal that Owen, Casanova, and Damrosch, despite their varied perspectives, all agree become popular within the sphere of worldwide readership, will that limit the current expansion of modernist studies into languages and literatures previously neglected? Or will it mean a further split between modernist studies as practiced in national literature departments and that which is understood among comparatists? While it may be true that looking for ways that a work ‘reaches out and away from its point of origin’ (Damrosch, ‘National’ 531) adds another dimension to reading, it may also work against efforts to read new traditions into the modernist canon or to bring to the fore a new set of locations for modernism. As Haun Saussy makes clear, ‘world literature and translations are modes of understanding, and they are also filtering techniques: they unavoidably impart their selective bias to the literary field in the act of representing it’ (Saussy 14). When the goal is world literature in translation or comparative literature from a worldwide sphere of readership, the text that exhibits its modernism by responding to the problematic of modernity in a particular time and place, rather than to the European hypercanon, may not look modernist at all. Yet, I will argue, we need not promote an irrevocable division between world and ‘located’ literature, the forced separation of comparative literature from national or area studies, or the assumption that modernism represents the triumph of internationalism over more local traditions. Even among writers usually considered ‘cosmopolitan,’ the lure of the local, however fraught, is clearly apparent, as most readers of Joyce or James will readily attest. Cosmopolitanism for modernist writers rarely means complete lack of connection to an area or tradition, or an absolute choice between local and worldly allegiances. On the contrary, the model of cosmopolitanism more often described in the works of Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and others revolves around what I have called ‘cosmopolitan community’—a model of cosmopolitanism that emphasizes community

56 Jessica Berman

belonging as a primary condition of social life and that rarely pits the local against the worldly (Berman, Modernist). Both Owen and Damrosch seem to have the cosmopolitan writers Eliot and Pound in mind when they allude to Bei Dao’s ‘modernist’ international sensibility. Yet who would deny that London surges through The Waste Land or that Pound’s ‘Mauberly’ bemoans a specific civilization when he calls it an ‘old bitch gone in the teeth’? (Pound, Selected Poems 61). The choice between local and international, community member and cosmopolitan, is a false dichotomy. It is also, it must be said, a critical dichotomy that helps excise women’s experiences, which historically have grown out of the local but nonetheless often yearn for worldwide spheres of significance. If we are to produce a new version of world literature, in concert with our revision of modernist studies, we should not fall victim to a false choice between local and international. To begin, we need to look further into the way that modernism is employed in the Bei Dao debate. Unsurprisingly, to borrow his own word, modernism is for Owen ‘international modernism,’ an entity familiar to many readers of Bradbury and MacFarlane’s Modernism or a legion of postwar critical texts that both canonized and often excoriated modernism in literature, art, and architecture. For them modernism is often seen as universalist, univocal, and ‘international’ in a fashion that sweeps away all the local color it encounters, just as Le Corbusier’s modern vision of Paris sought to clear away the ages-old disorder of the city. As David Harvey describes it, this ‘heroic’ modernism between the world wars ‘can be interpreted as a dogged fight of the universalist against localist sensibility within the arena of cultural production’ (279). To be fair, in his 1990 article, Owen attributes this sort of assimilative uniformity primarily to the power of market-driven international readership and asks us to account for ourselves as consumers of world literature. Certainly we all recognize the power of connection to canonical figures within the international publishing marketplace. If a poet is said to be like Eliot or Pound, his or her work is more likely to be published and read seriously. Yet if modernism is to stand as the symbol of all that is wrong in world poetry (for Owen) or the converse for Damrosch (all that is right?), then we must also attend to the definition in play here. For Owen, ‘international modernism’ stands as a clear sign of the absence of the local and a priority on the new. For him the problem in world poetry, and in particular, the problem of the reception of Bei Dao’s poetry, is the pressure to erase the signs of local culture and history and to fashion something that will sell in the international marketplace. He speaks with sadness about the lack of readership for many of the world’s literary languages and opposes this ‘world poetry’ to one that would be inserted back within the notion of ‘national literature.’ This is precisely the perspective that Damrosch seeks to dismantle, arguing that poetry often gains through the process of translation, leaving behind

Imagining World Literatures

57

what can be the limiting field of national literature (though not always the local context) and entering the domain of the worldly. For Damrosch, becoming worldly means circulating in a new way that need not erase the local. ‘Our reading of Bei Dao, or of Dante, will benefit from a leavening of local knowledge, an amount that may vary from work to work and from reader to reader but that will remain less than is needed for a full contextual understanding of a work within its home tradition’ (Damrosch, What 22). And yet Damrosch is willing to dissociate a translated poem, read in a world context, from its original, read presumably within the national tradition (though the question of what happens when the poem is read abroad but in the original is not here addressed). ‘To read Bei Dao’s poems in English we should be alive to relevant aspects of the context of their production, but we don’t finally need the Chinese context in all its particularity. When all is said and done, Bei Dao in English isn’t Bei Dao in Chinese’ (Damrosch, What 22). Thus, while Damrosch still advocates close reading, and devotes a whole chapter to the pitfalls of translating Kafka, he often subordinates original language and local knowledge in order to be able to allow texts to circulate as world literature.2 Franco Moretti goes even further, arguing in ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ for the specific benefits of a non-local vantage point and for what he terms ‘distant reading.’ By comparing a quantity of texts across a variety of locations one can recognize where they share traits or work against their national traditions. ‘See the beauty of distant reading plus world literature: they go against the grain of national historiography’ (155). For both Damrosch and Moretti, world literature is defined by its opposition to fully local or national ways of reading and modernism comes to stand for the literary mode that most exemplifies this opposition. But as Susan Stanford Friedman argues, we must treat with suspicion these sorts of critical binaries where they arise in our efforts at definition, for they often hide a more complicated set of relationships. Here the notion of the excision of the local, either from Bei Dao’s poetry or from international modernism writ large, is in question. For example, in Bei Dao’s poetry (in particular, the collection translated as The August Sleepwalker which is the subject of Owen’s original review), the question of what is properly ‘Chinese’ or local must be raised. If knowledgeable readers can hear echoes of the Chinese poetic tradition in some of his lines (Damrosch, What 21) and even readers in translation can see Dao’s references to the Yellow River, to playing on lutes, or to other specific markers of Chinese context, then who is to say that the poetry is not local? For example, one section of the poem ‘An End or a Beginning’ from The August Sleepwalker clearly refers to China and the Chinese tradition: Ah my beloved land Why don’t you sing any more Can it be true that even the ropes of the Yellow River towmen

58 Jessica Berman

Like sundered lute-strings Reverberate no more (ll. 20–24) These moments in the poetry, as Owen points out, occur infrequently. Still, if Bei Dao uses local color ‘only sparsely’ (Owens, ‘What is World Poetry?’ 31) does that necessarily mean this writing is any less Chinese? Here it is important to note that Bei Dao became celebrated as a poet associated with the events at Tiananmen Square, and that this poem is dedicated to Yu Luoke, a Chinese critic of the Cultural Revolution who was executed in 1970.3 A later stanza of the poem, while without specific Chinese imagery or metaphor, nonetheless situates the poet within this political landscape Here I stand Replacing another, who has been murdered I have no other choice And where I fall Another will stand A wind rests on my shoulders Stars glimmer in the wind (ll. 70–76) The situation of the poem is therefore local and specific, even when, as in much of Bei Dao’s work, the language is carefully universal. Clearly, even without linguistic markers of local context, a poem may be nonetheless deeply engaged with its location. Owen calls Bei Dao’s poetry a poetry written to travel (‘What is World Poetry?’ 31) and comments that it appears not to lose anything in translation because it is seems designed to be read that way. Damrosch applauds this quality as its entrance into world literature. Both critics seem to imply that Dao’s poetry could only be designed to enter a dialog with international modernism, rather than with any local tradition. But in what sense does Dao’s mode of writing necessarily demonstrate an attitude imported from Europe rather than a development within Chinese poetry itself? To assume that Dao’s infrequent reference to local geography or his use of easily translated language must be due to the influence of Pound and Eliot seems absurd, especially in light of the political engagement of the poetry. David E. Pollard, a much published translator of Chinese literature and the reviewer of Bei Dao’s Notes From the City of the Sun for The China Quarterly, remarks that ‘Bei Dao’s references to “film montage,” “the subconscious,” “the capture of instantaneous impressions” [ ... ] seem to cement his own connection with Modernism, but I think his is a home-grown variety. He would have needed no assistance from abroad to have come to the conclusion that poetry in China was faced with a “crisis in form” that required that the “stale old techniques” needed replacing’ (887). The neat division between local and international poetry, or between national literature and

Imagining World Literatures

59

‘world literature,’ which both Damrosch and Owen want to uphold, seems impossible to demonstrate, and becomes more so for a poet living, like Bei Dao, in exile. Here again the specter of an ‘international modernism’ that has somehow ‘taught’ this poet to write for European sensibilities lies at the heart of the debate. International modernism, in this simplified definition, is so abstract as to be impervious to errors of translation, and is so essentially cosmopolitan as to be permanently dislocated. But why must we accept the assumption that modernist poetry is not local? Even if we consider the small cadre of modernists we might classify as clearly cosmopolitan (and it is no surprise that they are the ones who appear most often in the theoretical texts at the center of this debate),4 this assumption rings clearly false. As I have argued, cosmopolitan feeling does not necessarily preclude local connection, nor do cosmopolitan writers eschew reference to local culture or habits of language use. We might imagine cosmopolitanism as a series of interlocking circles of affiliation (not necessarily concentric) that will sometimes include both local feeling and connection to the world at large and that will sometimes focus more strictly on one or the other. Clearly there is no shortage of examples of modernist writers who display such complex attitudes. Virginia Woolf, coiner of that famous cosmopolitan mantra ‘As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world’ (Three Guineas 109), was deeply attached to British cultural and literary history, as the novel Orlando surely demonstrates. Gertrude Stein was perfectly comfortable proclaiming, ‘America is my country and Paris is my home town’ (‘An American and France’ 61 ). Yet, for both Owen and Damrosch, as in a different way for Casanova, international modernism has come to stand for a literature that aspires to the universal, that offers only a smattering of local history and politics, and that uses a common stock of images and devices to accomplish its end. Modernism also stands for the familiar and easily accessible, that which sounds easy to our ears, and that which satisfies a ready market, in a way that ignores both its reception history and its variety. One look at a Futurist manifesto, whose words still strike panic into the hearts of undergraduates, or at Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist journal BLAST, which he described as a ‘battering ram,’ at the conundrums of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, or at the censorship of Ulysses, should convince us that the model of modernism as cozily familiar, easily accessible, or uniform is anachronistic. On the other hand, in comparing two different translations, and in arguing for the power of translated world literature, Damrosch reads Bei Dao into the guise of the modernist familiar, because that is what helps the poetry to ‘work well in the new language’ (Damrosch, What 22). Damrosch promotes a less literal translation of Bei Dao’s most famous poem ‘The Answer’ because it seems to him ‘more readable’ and increases its ability to ‘bring out uses of modernist motifs’ (Damrosch, What 23). If it is better to translate a line ‘I don’t

60

Jessica Berman

believe what the thunder says,’ clearly echoing The Waste Land, rather than the more literal ‘I don’t believe in thunder’s echoes,’ or, to use Pound’s term ‘ideogram’ instead of ‘pictograph,’ without clear evidence from the original that these allusions are accurate, then modernism as employed by these critics has become a homogenizing force, one which can ride roughshod over local differences and habits of language use.5 To her credit, in The World Republic of Letters Casanova never assimilates the modern with the familiar, and hopes that writers from more marginalized literatures will also gain access to the world republic of letters. ‘It is not sufficient,’ she argues ‘to imagine a simple binary opposition between dominant and dominated literary spaces. One would do better to speak of a continuum’ (83). And yet she returns again and again to the most canonical of figures: Shakespeare, Goethe, Kafka, Faulkner, Beckett, and Joyce. In a book that sets out to work against the domination of what she calls the ‘literary Greenwich meridian’ (112), and to resist the magnetic force of literary capitals like Paris, much of the discussion revolves around writers who lived, wrote or made their reputations in both. The problem with this focus is that the model of the world republic that Casanova forms, despite her mention of a tremendous variety of writers, reinforces the hegemony of the literary West. India is represented by Tagore, R. K. Narayan, Salmon Rushdie, and Naipaul while Africa has only a handful of entries. Asian literature is hardly mentioned, nor are literary rivalries that do not focus on Europe. Shockingly, hardly a woman graces Casanova’s 350 pages, other than quick appearances by Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. Casanova’s worldwide republic, then, becomes more like a male version of La République française, with a few added guests. The limitations of a Euro-focused world republic of letters and its use of modernism are fully revealed in Casanova’s discussion of Faulkner. As with many French writers on Faulkner, Casanova never separates the writer and his texts from his French reception and translation by the editor and power broker Larbaud. Looking at the extraordinary place accorded Faulkner by Larbaud, Sartre, et al., and at the way Faulkner’s works circulated to Spain, South America and around the world via this attention makes concrete the functioning of a world literary sphere (Palmer 5). Yet if we speak of the French Faulkner, and his role in the dissemination of literary modernism worldwide, are we speaking of the same Faulkner as the one read in the United States? Can we claim that As I Lay Dying translated without the slang, or The Sound and the Fury read primarily for its temporal dislocations, can substitute for the American Faulkner (though we know that it often did)? It is important to address the transformations and translocations effected by Larbaud and others and to recognize that, as Asynith Palmer demonstrates, the French recreated Faulkner along more abstract and universal lines when they championed him. The Faulkner Casanova claims as a member of her world republic is this formal experimenter who brought modernist style to many corners of

Imagining World Literatures

61

the globe, rather than the local, colloquial Faulkner who used geographical, environmental, and social history to build his novels. I would argue instead that neither one of these ‘Faulkners’ can exist without the other. The result of literature that travels the world is not the substitution of a new way of reading a text for an older one, or a false valorization of the original mode of reception, but rather the multiplication of the possible scenes of reading and of texts. Casanova’s model of a world republic of letters demonstrates the convergence of many texts within the worldwide sphere of reception. Yet this model of a unified worldwide zone can serve as a vehicle for the homogenization of literature, or at least, for the critical tendency to avoid the difficult issues of translation and textual diversity, rather than a realm in which various world texts and scenes of reading come in contact with each other.

Comparative world modernisms I would like to switch perspectives and now examine what modernist studies might teach a new comparative literature, imagined as global in its scope, committed to reading literatures as situated in specific languages and places, but also as they travel, and are inevitably ‘translated’ in some manner. It is my argument that the interconnection between the two disciplines, never a matter of pure coincidence, becomes crucial when we re-envision the study of world literature from the twentieth century as a process that seeks to bring marginalized languages and literatures into the main stream and that attempts to understand the variety of locations, time-frames, languages, and histories that make up modernist literature. Once we have given up the old version of ‘international modernism’ (and I must say, it is high time), there will be no critical recourse to the story of a homogenizing universal modernism, complete with the mythology of its inward turn, or its dissociation from history. Critics will be forced instead to look at specific examples and traditions of modernist writing in their own terms as well as in relationship to each other and to follow the nodes of interconnection that make up modernist literary history. As Jameson puts it, modernism ‘must be seen as a project that re-emerges over and over again with the various national situations as a specific and unique national-literary task or imperative, whose cross cultural kinship with its neighbors is not always evident’ (Singular Modernity 180). There can be no avoiding the task of approaching different modernisms differently. Beyond that, if we conceive of modernity, and the modernism that responds to it, as a set of questions or problems (for Moretti) or ideologies (for Jameson) rather than a substantive set of texts, then modernist studies will become a field of inquiry that attempts to organize and compare responses to those questions rather than to bring them together into a universal narrative or a select canon. Giving up the old ‘international modernism’ means more than simply letting go of a restrictive canon, though to be sure we need to do that. As Susan

62 Jessica Berman

Stanford Friedman puts it, defining modernism metonymically, whether by reference to certain literary components (the easily recognized phrases that appear in Bei Dao), or by allusion to a certain cadre of writers who are allowed to stand in for the whole (Pound, Eliot, Joyce, et al.), always invites the question ‘who, or what, is missing?’ It is sometimes difficult to remember, as Friedman reminds us, that Hugh Kenner defined his canon against Faulkner, Williams, and Woolf, on the basis of their not being international enough (Chapter 1, 27). If we can hardly imagine modernist literature today without those three writers, we should also reject the power of the term ‘local’ or regional to disqualify them, especially since it has so often been used to disqualify women and minority writers. Further, it is clear from Owen and Damrosch’s disagreement over Bei Dao as from Casanova’s reading of Faulkner, among many other possible examples, that the matter of being local depends upon the reader’s vantage point. Certainly we can say that French Faulkner is less local than American Faulkner and this is not only because the translations leave out much of Faulkner’s colloquial language. French critics emphasized Faulkner’s formal experimentation, while Americans remarked on his Southernness. Casanova is quick to point out another version of Faulkner—that taken up (from the French translation) by writers in marginalized locations. ‘But while in the centers, and especially in Paris, the technical innovations of the American novelist were understood and valued only as formalistic devices, in the outlying countries of the literary world they were welcomed as tools of liberation’ (336). Thus we might say that by the 1960s there were three Faulkners. Certainly by now there are many, many more. We might take this multiplication of versions of Faulkner made possible by the circulation of his novels in French translation as ratification of Damrosch’s point about translation. The translated work becomes new as it moves into a new language and new context, and need not necessarily be constrained by the reception of the original. Apter too focuses on this aspect of translation, which, to be sure, was also at the heart of the humanist vision of comparative literature, as we might derive it from its key defining text, Auerbach’s Mimesis. And yet there is a moment that gives one pause in accepting one’s choice of a multiplicity of Faulkners. Or, can we claim that nothing gets lost in translation? Apter presents what at times seems to be a utopian vision of comparative literature as ‘the translation zone’ that ‘expands centripetally toward a genuinely planetary criticism’ which she envisages ‘as the source of an ambitious mandate for literary and social analysis, translation becomes the name for the ways in which the humanities negotiates past and future technologies of communication, while shifting the parameters by which language itself is culturally and politically transformed’ (11). But the process of transposing texts from one language to another on its own does not always accomplish the range of activities that she mentions

Imagining World Literatures

63

here. Even if, as many theorists remind us, the act of translation asks us to confront the difficult hermeneutics of reading as well as the specific cultural politics that privilege one target language or one mode of expression over another, the monolingual reader of such a text may also avoid these complexities entirely, blithely reading the text at hand.6 Translation might occasion simply the choice of one version of a text over another, or the substitution of one for another, not engagement with the implications of their multiplicity. For example, we are certainly free to decide to read either the French or American Faulkner—and to avoid entirely confrontation with Faulkner as a version of ‘liberation novelist’ among the disenfranchised. Or are we? In approaching Bei Dao, for example, I would argue that the very problem of both Damrosch’s and Owen’s readings is that each critic has simply picked one or another version of the poet, rather than having to grapple with the multiple ways in which Bei Dao’s poetry circulates at once. For example, neither critic has focused on the appeal of Bei Dao as a political poet, despite the fact that much of his audience reads him that way. As appealing as it may be to focus on one sphere of readership, or as difficult as it may be to gain access to another, which may exist in an unfamiliar place or language, it seems crucial to both modernist studies and to comparative literature to do so. This is precisely what Spivak calls for in Death of a Discipline. She argues for the reorientation of comparative literature towards the many non-European languages of the world, retaining the best of the old field (‘close reading in the original’ [6]) and adding the best of the lessons learned from area studies. Most importantly, Spivak insists that we take each literary work in its specificity and as nearly as possible from within its own cultural contexts, rather than assuming that it will travel or translate easily into Euro-modernist frameworks. ‘We must take the languages of the Southern hemisphere as active cultural media rather than as objects of cultural study by the sanctioned ignorance of the metropolitan migrant. We cannot dictate a model for this from the offices of the American Comparative Literature Association. We can, however, qualify ourselves and our students to attend upon this as it happens elsewhere’ (9). Thus we cannot appropriate a Tamil or Bengali text into the universal modernist canon through translation without also treating it as local, active within its own sphere, and in conversation with its linguistic and cultural context. Whatever our specific language background (and Spivak certainly seems to be arguing for more reading in the original, not less), we must attempt to situate the text we read in as many of its spheres as possible. This attention requires something like Geertzian ‘thick description’—a process of reading that seeks to describe the text in as many of its historical, literary, and cultural contexts as possible, following lines of contact between and among them as they appear. In addition, however, when dealing with texts in translation, or in circulation as world literature, that description must acknowledge that contexts are not (always) ‘original’ and that the writing and reading

64

Jessica Berman

of texts works inevitably along paths and nexuses of worldwide interconnection, even when, to echo Jameson again, the connections are not obvious. The nagging question raised by Haun Saussy in the ACLA Report on the State of the Discipline published as Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization— that reading in translation might imply simply ‘thematic reading’ of ‘subject matter’ (14)—can not be explained away merely by challenging the idea that themes and subjects pass unchanged through the process of translation while language and form do not. Comparative reading requires negotiating rather than negating this problem, while confronting the necessity to attend to the specificity of language, and what Steven Unger calls ‘the sensitivity to language grounded in poesis and poetics’ (130). Comparative modernist studies might also bring with it the anthropological perspective of Geertzian thick description, insisting that a reading of a distant text become an effort in transcultural understanding and not ‘simple’ translation. It might practice what Anthony Appiah has described as ‘thick translation,’ which acknowledges the importance of moving beyond literal meanings in creating translations, so that cultural understandings of proverbs, of metaphors, of genres or other modes become important (Appiah 389). Still, this process need not over-valorize the local. If, following Spivak, we can be ready to ‘attend’ to the cultural activity of a text, we need not necessarily give over our role as readers or ignore our own positions in the world in favor of what we might like to call the ‘purely local.’ This last point is important for any truly comparative modernist studies. While Moretti discusses distant reading at the expense of close reading, it seems necessary instead to marry the view from afar to local description and textual analysis. Spivak’s use of the phrase, ‘active cultural media,’ to describe literary texts certainly evokes the possibility of movement beyond the purely local, asking us to imagine the ways that the many versions of texts, like Faulkner’s novels, become new in new contexts, and work in varying ways depending upon how and where they are read. In this sense, then, we might employ Apter’s notion of a ‘translation zone’ as a means of focusing on the activity of the text as it ‘expands centripetally,’ without giving up the idea of an original text in the language in which it was written. Apter also asks us to take seriously the process of creolization or hybridity as a condition of language use, both before and after ‘translation.’ Even when we begin from an ‘original’ language it can not be considered ‘pure’ in any absolute sense. We can return to the lessons of Kafka and Faulkner, where the question of the original language, whether in terms of evidence of linguistic sub-grouping or simply dialect or slang, has always been at stake. Here we might also take a lesson from the Internet. Though there has been important criticism of the world wide web as a vehicle for English language dominance, as Apter points out, it has also spawned its own hybrid languages, like the ‘Netlish’ written by non-native speakers of English worldwide. It has afforded a means of access to texts as they make their way around the globe. If readers buying books of poetry in the United States might pick up a copy

Imagining World Literatures

65

of Bei Dao translated by McDougall, or hear a lecture on his political exile that refers to his works in English, on the Internet, at a website like <www. lyrikline.org> they can easily find the poetry in English and Chinese, as well as other languages, and if they have the language skills, can read them simultaneously.7 Increasingly this is the way that international blogs and websites work: a site might be hosted in a particular country and begin in the local language but new postings might appear in other languages with simultaneous translations alongside.8 There is then less dominance of any one particular language; translation is performed simultaneously, with some sites posting lists of specific language editors who are in charge of postings in and out of that language. This is the supreme example of a translation zone, but one where the original is also available for public viewing, and the work need not exist in only one or the other version. This is not to say that computer translation of worldwide texts is a panacea. Clearly, translation is more of an art than any computer program can replicate and even sites using human translators cannot always generate or reproduce an expert version. Also, the constant chatter of web conversation that fuels these multilingual sites and provides continual opportunity for correction and revision might work well for living authors, but for those long dead, who only matter to a small subset of the global readership, blogs seem hardly the place for a new mode of reading to arise. And, as Owen points out, the Internet is still a sorting device, privileging texts that refer beyond their national literatures and that can speak to émigré communities and literary tourists at the same time. Still, we can take international blogs as a model of reading that can be heterogeneous between original language and translation, that can be local and ‘close’ while preserving the value of distant perspectives, and that, despite the dominance of the English language on the Internet, might still be decentralized in a way that neither the notion of ‘world literature’ nor the ‘world republic of letters’ has yet been able to become. To summarize then, comparative modernist studies might become a mode of reading rather than a canon-building activity focused on the problem of modernity and the texts that it generates in multiple locations and time frames. It would begin from the assumption that locatedness and cosmopolitanism are not mutually exclusive, either in writing or in reading, and that modernist texts might group themselves in overlapping circles of interconnection that do not always accord with national boundaries, pre-defined genres or modes (e.g., decadent poetry, the experimental novel), or received narratives of literary development. Comparative modernist studies of this kind would also insist on the negotiation between close and distant reading, acknowledging not only the importance of close attention to matters of language and style, but also the inevitability of distance, no matter how familiar the context. As studies of modernism often remind us, linguistic meaning is invariably intertextual, language always an encounter with what can not

66

Jessica Berman

be said, and translation not only a way of coming to terms with the foreignness of language but an apt metaphor for literary hermeneutics. These are precisely the kinds of problems that modernist texts often foreground and part of the reason why modernism has been so ubiquitous in discussions of world literature. Critical practice that begins from these assumptions might become cosmopolitan in a profound sense, drawing on both local connection and interrelations at a distance and acknowledging the contest and revision of language use even in texts that appear in the same language. By way of example I want to offer a case of comparative modernist studies focused on two English language writers to point out the implications for the comparative reading of modernist texts even within the same language. In comparing James Joyce and the celebrated Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand, who began his career as a novelist seeking to pattern himself after Joyce, we might ask the questions: What is it that connects the writers across distance and cultural background? What does placing Joyce’s highly experimental novels side by side with Anand’s deeply engagé work show us? Certainly we can see important elements of Joyce’s style appear in Anand’s early work, especially his insistence on reality rather than what Anand calls ‘religious illusionism,’ his use of limited perspective and focalization as a means to representing and critiquing Bildung, and his emphasis on sound as a marker for the uncontrollability of language. Further, as I have elsewhere argued, Anand’s use of Joycean techniques to trace the life of a displaced, wandering laborer in his novel Coolie can also help highlight the political implications of The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (Berman, ‘Comparative’ 466). That Anand becomes a follower of Gandhi, and embarks upon a long career as a social activist and writer of political fiction, even as he remains a follower of Joyce, points to the path between Joyce’s experimental prose and the politically engaged novels of Anand, even as it brings to the fore the many ways that language use in Anand’s writing is far more ‘experimental’ than has been previously thought. In Coolie we see the young hero Munoo forced out of his home in a hill village and sent to find his way through a number of menial jobs in an extraordinary series of locations throughout India. While working as a servant for a bank official, in a pickle factory, in a cotton mill, or as a rickshaw boy, before his death at 15 from consumption, Munoo encounters the entire social fabric of India. He is befriended in unexpected places: among other servants, coolies, and cotton mill workers but also in the house of the pickle factory owner and in the home of an emancipated Anglo-Indian woman.9 Yet the brilliance of the novel is not in the specific details of the various trials that Munoo is made to face: it lies in the novel’s focus on Munoo’s internal life and his struggle to respond to the varieties of discourse that surround him and the power hierarchies associated with them. When we place this novel next to The Portrait of an Artist we can see the extent to which Munoo’s life history extends Joyce’s critique of the

Imagining World Literatures

67

Bildungsroman in that novel. If Portrait leaves Stephen at what critics have seen as a moment well before maturity, Coolie cuts its hero down in his mid-teens. Munoo in Coolie never has the potential to aspire to universality or self-completeness, and his failure to mature as in a proper Bildungsroman is even more starkly drawn than in Portrait. The political engagement of the novel begins with this critique of the Bildungsroman tradition, because we know that the colonial power hierarchies and discourses surrounding Munoo prevent him from ever approaching the possibility of civic citizenship. But that he nonetheless commands our attention and compassion, and eventually rises in the climax of the novel to direct political engagement as a member of a worker’s action, also means that the novel has proposed an alternate route to politics, which we can also use for reading Joyce. It is possible, then, that Coolie is teaching us a lesson about how to read Portrait rather than the other way around. The situation of a Bildungsroman set in a colony struggling for its independence practically ensures that the biography cannot go far. The politics of the Bildungsroman in this place and time must be one of disruption, disillusionment, and dislocation. On another level, the unusual quality of language in Anand’s fiction, which has been marked as crucial to the development of Indian writing in English, also helps address the question of linguistic hybridity and its connection to world literature. Anand in Coolie takes a significant step toward the incorporation of local languages and habits of speech into English language writing. At times he attempts to translate Hindi and Punjabi phrases into English, at other moments what emerges is a representation of the sound of that language in English, without concern for its absolute intelligibility. As he puts it, I found, while writing spontaneously, that I was always translating dialogue from the original Punjabi into English. The way in which my mother said something in the dialect of Central Punjab could not have been expressed in any other way except in an almost literal translation, which might carry over the sound and sense of the original speech. (qtd. in Jussawalla 84) At other times Anand will mix the two languages, putting snippets of English within a Hindi phrase or vice versa. He incorporates new coinages without apology, arguing in his essay, ‘Pigeon-Indian: Some Notes on Indian Writing in English,’ that the real everyday use of a combined language, no matter whether it is transparent in meaning or not, ought to be represented in the fiction that emerges out of India. Reading Anand from a comparative perspective, and in connection with Joyce, makes clear the inadequacy of describing these quasi-Hindi, quasi-English moments in his work purely in terms of verisimilitude or only within the framework of the development of Indian writing in English.

68

Jessica Berman

However important they may be to the development of a new vernacular in India, they are equally crucial as moments of disruption and play and as markers of the moments of intra-linguistic hybridity so important to Apter’s notion of the translation zone. Further, if the new ‘pigeon-English’ of the Coolie or the Untouchable cannot be assimilated into either the standard English of Empire or the Hindi of a caste-conscious India, then it contains the possibility of resistance to both. This neither/nor language can provide the moment of potential power for those shut out of conventional hierarchies, since it creates its own system of signification. This language use also points the way out of Stephen’s famous conundrum regarding the Dean of Studies’ use of the words ‘detain’ and ‘tundish,’ for a newly developed syncretic language can never be called ‘his before it is mine,’ nor will it always succumb to the possessor of power over the literary tradition (169). Placing Joyce and Anand together, with specific attention to modes of language use, makes possible important new readings of both one of the most canonical and one of the least canonical modernists. By the same token, it also forces us to re-examine the canon of modernists, in order to place those like Anand, who wrote outside the ‘world republic of letters,’ into one key node of modernist work. Here the ‘world republic’ of modernism would be one of textual interrelationship, in addition to readership, and the translations would be ongoing. Modernism from this new comparative perspective would also have to move well beyond the ‘metonymic’ representation of a multivalent collection of texts by a short list of canonical figures. Moretti plays the provocateur in his push for distant reading. But he also makes the point that narrowing in on a specific text worthy of detailed close reading inherently privileges that text and its version of modernism. If we are genuinely interested in shifting the center of gravity within modernist studies to other modernisms, other locations, and other time frames, so that there remains no central Euro-American vantage point, then we will need to alternate between close and distant views, and acknowledge a nodal model of worldwide modernism, where the patterns of intertextual exchange move from place to place as the connections among texts and languages shift. Modernist studies has already begun this shift, looking at Pacific rim modernisms, queer modernisms, and postcolonial modernisms, which all have revealed different geographies and habits of language use. What might still emerge out of the coming together of modernist studies and the new comparative literature is attention to the matter of translation or reading beyond the original context as a transformative matter. If we attempt to allow modernist texts to work as ‘active cultural media,’ as Spivak suggests, and discard any set definitions of modernism, as others have asked us to do, then we may be able to generate a new global modernism that allows for the creole, the hybrid, and the interlinguistic along with more locally oriented texts. Finally, comparative modernist studies must at last kill that old bogey, ‘international modernism,’ along with its homogenizing impulses and its

Imagining World Literatures

69

insistence on a singular universal sphere of readership. Instead it might turn to a more specifically cosmopolitan model, where interlocking circles of affiliation would allow specific local modes to coexist with a dynamic and varied global interconnection. This new version of modernism would thus resist the development of what Apter calls a ‘transnationally translatable monoculture’ as a result of world movement of texts and the demands of the marketplace. Modernism understood as potentially creole, decentered and moving along worldwide nodes of intertextuality and readership would replace the old universalist model of both reading and writing. The fear of the taint of the local would also disappear, along with the binary of local/ international. Thus the problem with which we began, that of Bei Dao and the debate over his traveling poetry, would become moot. Jameson’s exploration of modernism and modernity begins from the assumption that there can be no correct use of the word modernity (Singular 13). Susan Stanford Friedman argues that in reading modernism ‘dissonance matters’ (Chapter 1, 29). The comparative modernist studies that I have described here hopes to rise to these challenges. It insists that both near and distant reading are necessary and that the cultural activity of a text in its original context may be at odds with its global circulation, but that both of these must claim our attention. It argues for close reading in the original language where possible, but in the context of the transformative work of translocation and thick translation. It focuses on the many nodes and circles of interconnection among modernisms, rather than on a single homogenizing worldwide literary sphere. Bringing together the insights of the best of the new comparative literature and the new modernist studies, comparative modernist studies might be able to take us beyond ‘international modernism’ and its power to homogenize what we consider deserving of worldwide readership, and past the tendency to seek world literature as a new canon of texts, united in their ability to interest a common set of readers. Finally, it hopes to gesture towards a more profoundly cosmopolitan reading practice, one that would allow the many literary modernisms worldwide to be active within their own cultural situations as well as within the sphere of world literature. If texts everywhere invite us to a transcultural encounter with contextualized meanings, they also invoke a process of discovery that is always one of translation, revision, and recreation. This oscillation between the situated and the foreign, the original and the translation, loyalty to the familiar and the lure of the worldly—perhaps this is where we begin to imagine world literature?

Notes 1. Saussy himself is an important scholar of Chinese poetry who has written on Bei Dao. See his introduction to the poet’s presidential lectures at Stanford in 1999: .

70 Jessica Berman 2. Damrosch proposes a threefold definition of world literature: ‘1. World literature is an elliptical refraction of national literatures. 2. World literature is writing that gains in translation. 3. World literature is not a set canon of texts but a mode of reading: a form of detached engagement with world beyond our own place and time’ ( What 281). The concept of ‘elliptical refraction’ posits the ellipse with twin foci—the source and host cultures—as the ‘space within which the world lives as world literature’ (What 283). Though this is an intriguing concept, it is unclear how this ellipse might accommodate more than one ‘host’ culture, or continued interactions among ‘sources’ and ‘hosts.’ 3. The poem also concludes with the following Author’s Note: ‘The first draft of this poem was written in 1975. Some good friends of mine fought side by side with Yu Luoke, and two of them were thrown into prison where they languished for three years. This poem records our tragic and indignant protest in that tragic and indignant period’ (August 64). 4. That is, Eliot, Pound, Faulkner, Joyce, Beckett, Kafka. 5. I want to make clear that I do not read Chinese and have not read Bei Dao in the original. The comparisons I refer to here are derived from Damrosch’s essay. There have been others who have critiqued Bonnie McDougall’s original translations, including Haun Saussy. Interestingly, recent editions of the poetry have been issued in bilingual editions, one of which brought its translator the Landon Translation Award (David Hinton, trans., Landscape Over Zero). 6. See essays by Unger, Benjamin, Steiner, Venuti in Venuti. 7. To be fair, more recent editions of Bei Dao, such as those by David Hinton, have been bilingual. 8. See for example the website: . Or, for some of the principles behind this approach to intercultural and interlinguistic ‘bridging’: . 9. See Jane Marcus’s wonderful reading of this relationship in her Hearts of Darkness.

4 Taking the Detour, Finding the Rebels: Crossroads of Caribbean and Modernist Studies Mary Lou Emery

‘Where have all the rebels gone?’ With this question, Susan Stanford Friedman launches an illuminating analysis of the conflicting uses of the terms modern, modernity, and modernism (Chapter 1, 11 ). Friedman refers to student rebels of the 1960s, who found the study of literary modernism in accord with their own ideals. In her quest, however, she finds another kind of rebellion, one that continually unsettles the definitional order in modernist studies. She concludes her examination of the history and scope of these conflicts by resisting definitions and, instead, exposing patterns of contestation: order and disruption as necessary to one another’s meaning; the center’s dissipation even as it comes into being; the self-dismantling of modernity’s grand narratives; the invention of tradition in order to ‘make it new’ (30). On the terrain of these contradictory dynamics, we might explore again the question Friedman asks at the essay’s beginning. It seems that the rebellion surges beyond definitional control and perhaps beyond Friedman’s attempts to resist definition. For even in the patterns she locates, something else seems to brew alongside or beneath the conflicting impulses. Friedman’s resistance to definitional conclusion opens the territory of modernist studies to further excursions along and also off the paths she insightfully maps. One signpost appears in a footnote where she mentions the work of critics, such as Paul Gilroy and Simon Gikandi, who contest the association of the modern with strictly European and U.S. cultures. Another appears in the paragraph on the Harlem Renaissance and its omission from conventional histories of modernism. Different in kind from these two possible excursions but, I would argue, intrinsically related to them, appears a third, which Friedman subtitles ‘A Psychoanalytic Detour.’ If we were to follow this detour, we would shift our focus to ‘the irrational and covert processes of repression, return, and transference’ in modernist studies ‘as these processes reflect unresolved complexes within modernity itself’ (17). As I understand it, the psychoanalytic detour invites us to analyze, not only 71

72 Mary Lou Emery

the contradictions, but also their recurrence as symptom of something unresolved in what we call, with so much repetitious controversy, modernity. Taking these signposts as points of departure, I would like to suggest that in the field of Caribbean studies (also rife with definitional problems), we catch a glimpse of what remains unresolved and also largely unseen in our conflicted use of terms such as modernism and modernity. Reviewing fiction, poetry, visual art, and criticism in this field, we begin to sense a significant political unconscious generating the conflicts of terminology in modernist studies, and we can begin to understand the analytical and historical necessity of their recurrence. On that barely glimpsed site, the lost rebels reappear as historical actors and foundational agents of modernity. In the spirit of this detour (if not in absolute fidelity to Freudian analysis), I propose three case studies: (1) the unthinkable modernity of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804); (2) Caribbean literary contra-modernism; and (3) a transatlantic Caribbean ‘art of seeing’1 that responds critically and creatively to Enlightenment aesthetics. Through these case studies, the founding of freedom in the practice and, more significantly, the experience of slavery emerge as preconditions for the troubles with modern/ modernity/ modernism. Exposing and responding to this complex of modernity, writers and artists from the Caribbean recreate a radically universal black Atlantic subject as revolutionary agent of a new, ‘modernist’ vision and language.

Unthinkable modernity In the Jamaican writer Claude McKay’s novel Home to Harlem (1928), an educated Haitian named Ray instructs the unschooled African American Jake in the history of the Haitian Revolution. The story opens doors in Jake’s mind as to the history of his ‘race’ and stirs a new longing to fight alongside a heroic black leader such as Toussaint L’Ouverture, a desire that contrasts strikingly with his recent desertion of the U.S. Army. Denied the right to battle with white soldiers and assigned instead to manual labor, Jake has abandoned the France of World War I for England and then, faced with racial riots there, taken a freighter back to the United States. Expanding his sense of identity historically, geographically, and culturally, the knowledge of Haiti becomes as crucial to Jake’s migrant sensibility as the Blues or the railways on which he works and travels.2 Expecting to feel ecstatically at home in Harlem, Jake eventually recognizes its limits and departs Harlem at the end for Chicago, with an even broader cosmopolitan spirit. It is a ‘cosmopolitan, universalist’ spirit that the Caribbean scholar J. Michael Dash has attributed to the Haitian Revolution. Following on the earlier work of Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James, Dash stresses that, while Europe reacted against its own Enlightenment ideals in pursuing colonialist ventures, the Haitian Revolution took those ideals further than the French Revolution ever intended. The uprising slaves of St. Dominique

Taking the Detour

73

pursued liberty, equality, and fraternity as fervently as their white masters and in opposition to them. Seeking a modern freedom, emblematic of Enlightenment modernity, they revolted against what was arguably the first modern system of labor, plantation slavery. Their successful defeat of three European armies resulted in a new postcolonial and hybrid nation. Named in the language of the indigenous Taino, ruled by an emperor in the European manner of their enemy Napoleon, and populated by newly declared black citizens, including the Polish who fought with them against the French, the rebels in Haiti created a new universal subject—free, creolized, and ‘black’ all at once. In its earliest formation, this universal subject crossed also the boundaries of nationhood. Originally, the slaves had fought with France against the colonists and the English. But Napoleon’s rise to power, the imprisonment of Toussaint, and attempt to reenslave the black population forced the rebels into a national war of independence. Subsequently, the earlier alliance with France has been historically repressed in favor of other images—variously romantic, savage, or tragic—of the Haitian Revolution. In that earlier alliance, Dash sees a ‘radical black Atlantic modernity’ that he urges us to understand in terms of a cosmopolitan and ‘universalist radicalism’ (17). More than the struggle of France for social justice or that of the United States for independence from colonial rule, the slaves of St. Dominique fought for the full extent of eighteenth-century ideals of liberty. As Dash claims, ‘The Haitian revolution then becomes, above all else, the first and most dramatic emergence of the ideal of human rights in the modern world’ (18). However, this momentous revolution has been cast to the margins of history, recovered on occasion, and forgotten again. As Susan Buck-Morss has argued, a central and insistent historical blindness drives the forgetting of Haiti. She and, more recently, Christopher Miller point to the eighteenth-century paradox in which philosophers such as Locke and Rousseau expressed outrage at the condition of slavery but only as a ‘metaphor for legal tyranny.’3 Since liberty involved the right to property, and slaves were categorized as property, denial of the existence and conditions of actual slavery persisted. That actual slaves might demand their liberty became, thus, impossible. Indeed, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot has stressed, ‘The Haitian Revolution [ ... ] entered history with the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as it happened’ (73). It was unthinkable because of a worldview that denied enslaved Africans the capacity to envision freedom much less to organize themselves to secure it. Subsequently, historians have treated it either through ‘formulas of erasure’ or ‘formulas of silence’ (96). Dash, Buck-Morss, Miller, and Trouillot rely on copious references to the Trinidadian intellectual C. L. R. James in making their arguments. In 1936, James brought the Haitian Revolution to the London stage and into contemporary politics. In writing the play Toussaint Louverture [sic] when he did,4 James followed McKay’s lead in situating the revolution alongside

74 Mary Lou Emery

contemporary imperialist events. In Home to Harlem, McKay’s character Ray not only recounts the history of the revolution to awe-struck Jake, he also explains that he no longer attends Howard University because the recent U.S. invasion of Haiti resulted in the death of his brother, the imprisonment of his father, and loss of family financial support. It was the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (then Abyssinia) and the refusal of England to defend the world’s only continuously black-ruled country from fascist invasion that prompted James to write and produce his play. He intended to remind its London audience—which included Pan-Africanists and émigrés from the Caribbean, Africa, and India, as well as others eager to see Paul Robeson’s performance as Toussaint—of the successful revolutionary history of an enslaved and colonized people. Expanded and rewritten as an historical study titled The Black Jacobins, James’s history of the Haitian Revolution reached another and wider audience in 1938. In their insistence on the cosmopolitan nature of the revolution, its universalist spirit, and its radical extension of Enlightenment ideals of liberty, both McKay and James recover for the modernist period of the 1920s and ‘30s a repressed moment in the historical development of modern subjects and what we might call modernity itself. Other Caribbean writers such as George Lamming have had to repeatedly liberate the Haitian Revolution from the recesses of history and recover James’s earlier work on the revolution from out-of-print obscurity. In an essay published in 1960 titled ‘Caliban Orders History,’ Lamming returned to The Black Jacobins, offering an extended commentary on James’s insights in 1938 to the Haitian Revolution. He offers also, I would argue, an unforgettable image of the uprising slave of black Atlantic modernity as the emerging writer of modernism. In that image, we can see through the alternating suppression/ recovery of the Haitian Revolution to glimpse a crucial relationship—that between the new cosmopolitan subject created by forces of modernity in Haiti and the aesthetics of freedom claimed by literary modernism. Lamming recounts the conditions that prompted the revolution, quoting James on the paradox in which the slave owners found themselves: they owned property which, nevertheless, remained ‘quite invincibly human beings’ (“Caliban” 121). To preserve their own safety, the owners brutalized the slaves into submission, creating ‘the unusual spectacle of propertyowners apparently careless of preserving their property’ (121). Lamming asks us to consider the mystery of the change thus inherent in the condition of the slave: Imagine a plough in the field. Ordinary as ever, prongs and spine unchanged, it is simply there, stuck to its post beside the cane shoot. Then some hand, identical with the routine of its work, reaches to lift this familiar instrument. But the plough escapes contact. It refuses to surrender its present position [ ... ]. More hands arrive [ ... ]. Some new sight

Taking the Detour

75

as well as some new sense of language is required to bear witness to the miracle of the plough which now talks. For as those hands in unison move forward, the plough achieves a somersault which reverses its traditional posture. Its head goes into the ground, and the prongs, throatnear, stand erect in the air, ten points of steel announcing danger. (121) In this imagined scene of the slave as mere instrument, reversing its posture and ‘announcing danger,’ comes also the call for ‘some new sight as well as some new sense of language.’ Both are required to ‘bear witness,’ and both emanate from the ‘plough which now talks.’ Announcing its revolt, its humanity, and its modernity all in the same action, the ‘plough’ has made language anew. Writing this passage in 1960, Lamming comments not only on the enormous consequences of the change in the Haitian slave’s position, he also links that revolutionary action, new consciousness, new sense of sight and of language to contemporary movements for independence throughout the Caribbean region. The figure who stands for this new vision and language is the former slave (and thus ‘Caliban’) Toussaint L’Ouverture, who read the works of Abbé Raynal and wrote letters to, among many others, Napoleon. Simultaneously devoted to gaining freedom for his enslaved people and creating the conditions for a modern state according to the ideals of the French Enlightenment, Toussaint battled overwhelming odds in his attempt to break apart the paradox of a modern freedom constituted through slavery. The act of writing and, especially, that of writing novels becomes for Lamming a continuation of that effort in the 1950s and ‘60s, the period of Caribbean independence. It is as if the plough, now standing upright and speaking, takes up the pen in a new generation of Caribbean writers that includes Lamming, Wilson Harris, Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul, and others. I would argue further that when these writers participate in modernism, it is not a delayed mimicry of an earlier canonical and European movement in the arts. Though highly aware of and engaged with that movement, their Caribbean modernism draws on its own predecessors of the 1920s and ‘30s such as Jean Rhys, Una Marson, and Claude McKay, and responds to unique conditions of modernity.5 Its deeply historical and ontological tenets emerge from conditions of diaspora, beginning in the late fifteenth century with the slave trade and subsequent development of the plantation system, and continuing into the present. Moreover, it continues the tradition begun by Rhys, Marson, and McKay of signifying on Anglo-European modernism and its relation to a European modernity that excluded colonized people from universal subjecthood.6 Following on Lamming’s attention in 1960 to The Black Jacobins, a revised edition appeared in 1963, bringing the Haitian Revolution once again into contemporary events, this time of African and Caribbean independence, the American Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, and

76 Mary Lou Emery

the student revolts that Susan Stanford Friedman recalls in her essay on definitions of modernism. It remained in print long enough for me to find it in the late 1970s and to move from reading it to reading for the first time the explosively modernist, surrealist poem of Négritude that James quotes at length in the 1963 edition’s Appendix—Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. For James, this modernism of 1939, both anti-fascist and anti-imperialist, followed directly from the modernity constituted through the Haitian Revolution. Yet, as Dash, Trouillot, Buck-Morss, and Christopher Miller point out, this revolution and all that it signifies for the development of the modern subject and, I would add, of modernism in the arts, continues to lapse into the margins of history or its clichés. Recently, another Caribbean intellectual, David Scott, has returned to this revolution and to the revised 1963 edition of James’s book, recovering them again for critical review. In Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, Scott focuses on the revised edition of The Black Jacobins because he finds in the changes and additions James made a new kind of narrative through which we might again interpret contemporary events, this time what Scott considers the tragedy of the postcolonial situation. Scott applauds Lamming’s twinning of Toussaint L’Ouverture and Caliban but argues for a triplet in Hamlet, the European modern intellectual, ‘suffering [ ... ] the modern fracturing of thought and action’ (16). Toussaint’s simultaneous triumph and failure, as James saw it, lay in his dual and absolute commitments to freedom for the slaves and the freedom of the French Enlightenment. When France betrayed him, he could not decide against the French. Here Scott stresses the tragic outcome for Toussaint and, ultimately, for Haiti, while Dash, in contrast, stresses the obscured early moments of the revolution, the universal cosmopolitanism created in the initial alliance with France. Scott departs also from an earlier argument put forward by Trouillot who criticizes the assumption ‘that the French connection is both sufficient and necessary to the Haitian Revolution’ (104). Trouillot emphasizes instead a more practical sense of freedom independent of western European ideas as guiding the mostly African-born revolutionaries of St. Dominique. Scott, however, wishes to move beyond what he considers a static paradigm of revolutionary agency struggling against imperialist modernity. He argues that the subjectivity that might imagine freedom in any terms was, nevertheless, constituted within modernity’s global sweep. Scott sees himself as following James in claiming that the Haitian revolutionaries did not choose to be modern; they were conscripted into modernity through the plantation system with its large mechanized and highly regularized means of agricultural production, its importation of cloth and food through which to reproduce their labor, its exportation of the products of their labor, and their proximity to the colonial European culture of the plantation owners. As the subject of colonial Enlightenment, Toussaint could not help but fail tragically, though not through a flaw in character: ‘Toussaint L’Ouverture is placed at a crossroads

Taking the Detour

77

of absolute choice between options to which he is equally committed and in circumstances in which he must choose and yet cannot choose without fatal cost’ (14). Accordingly, Scott urges us now to take critical thought away from a no longer useful ‘romance of revolutionary overcoming’ (14) to a narrative that recognizes the tragedy of the postcolonial condition. The knotted roots of the tragedy are further exposed when we recognize that the colonial powers of Europe could not answer the call for liberty on the part of enslaved Africans or Afro-Haitians without dismantling their own enlightenment projects. Toussaint is caught in this multiple double-bind, as is the modern subject. Or, to be more precise, the modern subject is constructed through it. Scott’s debate with Trouillot concerning the extent to which the revolutionaries of St. Dominque were inspired by ‘the French connection’ invites us to consider an alternative to both positions. This alternative might allow for the shaping forces of modernity in the plantation economy to which the slaves were subjected, yet also grant the possibility of a more independent agenda, influenced by their past lives in Africa. We need not subscribe to a romantic narrative of revolutionary overcoming to acknowledge the unsettling nature of such an encounter and to see its legacies in the ‘new sight as well as some new sense of language’ identified by Lamming. Furthermore, we might grant to the imaginative arts the power of envisioning the suppressed radical universality of the modern black Atlantic subject created through the alliances that initially strengthened the Haitian Revolution.

Contra-modernity/-modernism In Lamming’s image of ‘Caliban’ reversing his posture and ‘ordering history,’ we find another version of that universal black Atlantic subject. However, calling this new radically cosmopolitan subject ‘modern,’ as David Scott insists, risks suppressing the contradictory forces within modernity that require, repeatedly, the forgetting of Haiti. We may stand a better chance of keeping the contradictions discursively present if we borrow Homi Bhabha’s term ‘contra-modernity’ to describe this continually repressed yet shaping event and its subjects. And extending Bhabha’s notion of a ‘contra-modernity,’ we might think of Caribbean modernist writers, who simultaneously participate in and sometimes resist the tenets of modernist aesthetics, as creating a contra-modernism. Adapting Bhabha’s description, such a contra-modernism ‘may be contingent to modern[ism], discontinuous or in contention with it’ (6). This concept can help to fully acknowledge the constitutive alterity within modernism and to identify the ways in which writers and artists from the colonies have contributed to, reshaped and recircuited elements of what we now consider the modernist canon. It also allows us to recognize the full significance of a Caribbean modernism with its own traditions in dialogue and contest with the already contested

78

Mary Lou Emery

terrain of European, British, and U.S. modernisms. Rethinking modernism in this way is not just a matter of recovering lost or suppressed writers and artists; rather, it is a matter of recognizing the unassimilated as necessarily so—to acknowledge their significance as, to adapt another of Bhabha’s phrases, ‘otherwise than modernism.’ Moreover, in the case of Caribbean contra-modernism, we find an historical and ontological bridge crossing the disciplinary differences that Friedman identifies in the use of terms such as modernity and modernism. An anthropologist, David Scott uses the term modernism in a way that does not accord with that common in literary studies. For example, he calls Toussaint a ‘modernist’ revolutionary because he was an intellectual whose mind was formed in the modern conditions of plantation slavery. But turning to his source, the 1963 edition of The Black Jacobins, where James quotes at length from Aimé Césaire’s highly modernist Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, we find also several pages devoted to discussion of Anglophone Caribbean writers, including George Lamming and Wilson Harris, writers whose fiction develops within, against, and beyond the confines of the canonical modernism of Europe and England. James’s comments on these writers stress their expression of the newly independent West Indian identities of the 1960s. However, we can return to them with the eyes of the literary modernist critic and find that these expressions depend on highly creative experiments with the language of fiction. When Lamming writes about the experiences of West Indian emigrants in Britain, for example, he represents them in recognizably modernist prose— alternations between ‘realist’ third-person narration and interior monologue, occasional shifts into verse form, and shifts from the third-person narration of fiction into dramatic dialogue. Through these experimental techniques, Lamming represents the breakdown of taken-for-granted reality into fragments of perception, ritual performance, and streams of collective and individual consciousness. At the same time, he highlights forms of literary representation and the shaping of experience through genre. Most importantly for the experiences conveyed, Lamming’s diasporic Caribbean modernism portrays radical transformations of the sensory body as new subject positions—‘West Indian,’ ‘Emigrant,’ and ‘Exile’—emerge through geographical and cultural dislocation. For example in The Emigrants (1954), Lamming portrays a train journey taken by the new arrivals from their ship’s landing in Plymouth to London’s Paddington Station. In a passage that extends to 15 pages, multiple voices speaking (or thinking) variously inflected Englishes collide with and at times merge into one another as the emigrants, all British subjects, encounter England for the first time: WILL PASSENGERS KEEP THEIR HEADS WITHIN THE TRAIN Look partner dat’s where they make the

Taking the Detour

79

blades, partner, all yuh shaving you say you shave you do cause o’ that place. Look it, ol’ man, they make yuh blades there. Ponds, ol’ man, look Ponds. They make cream there. All those women back home depend on what happen in there. Look, Ponds Cream. Look Tornado you see that. Paint. They make paint there. Look. Paint. You dint see that, partner. You see that. They make life there. Life. What life partner. Where you say they make what. Life partner. Read it. Hermivita gives life. You ain’t see it. In the same direction, look, they make death there, ol’ man. Look. Dissecticide kills once and for all. Read partner. Look what they make. They make everything here on this side. All England like this. (119) Recalling the collage poetics and multiple voices of Eliot or Dos Passos, as this passage continues it evokes also the train rhythms of the Blues and writing of the Harlem Renaissance, the dialects of McKay, and the colonial ironies of Rhys. This particular passage recalls several from Rhys’s earlier novel, Voyage in the Dark (1934), in which a young woman from Dominica has emigrated to England, been abandoned by her family, and taken as a mistress by a wealthy young man who then drops her. The novel’s narrative irony appears especially in the interior monologues of the protagonist, Anna, who focuses on brand names and advertisements as if reflecting on her own sexual commodification: ‘There was an advertisement at the back of the newspaper: “What is Purity? For Thirty-five Years the Answer has been Bourne’s Cocoa” ’(49). Rhys’s narrative also conveys through interior monologue a similar experience of arrival, in which England appears through the windows of a train: ... This is England Hester said and I watched it through the train-window divided into squares like pocket-handkerchiefs; a small tidy look it had everywhere fenced off from everywhere else—what are those things— those are haystacks—oh those are haystacks—I had read about England ever since I could read—smaller meaner everything is never mind—this is London—hundreds thousands of white people white people rushing along and the dark houses all alike frowning down one after the other all alike all stuck together—the streets like smooth shut-in ravines and the

80

Mary Lou Emery

dark houses frowning down—oh I’m not going to like this place I’m not going to like this place I’m not going to like this place—you’ll get used to it Hester kept saying [ ... ]. (15) Anna comes to England alone and, when her father in Dominica dies and her stepmother, Hester, refuses to help, her alienation and isolation only increase. Whatever identity she might have fashioned disappears in one that seems scripted for her, that of a prostitute, vulnerable to poverty, illness, unwanted pregnancy, and a near-fatal abortion.7 Like Lamming’s characters, but in social isolation, Anna’s experience of her body undergoes profound alteration. Lamming’s characters, however, arrive en masse, part of the Windrush generation that begins to experience an emigrant subjectivity both individual and collective, and an identity emerges that is no longer simply Jamaican or Trinidadian or Grenadian, but in the face of ‘all England like this,’ newly and vulnerably ‘West Indian’: We never hear so much talk till lately ‘bout West Indies. Everybody say’ me is West Indian. We is West Indians. West Indian this, West Indian that. You want to know w’at happenin’ all of a sudden. Me look into hist’ry a little an’ say to myself, when a man start callin’ his name all the time, for all and sundry to know, watch out, him ain’t sure w’at his name is. This West Indies talk is w’at a class o’ doctor call symptomatic. It hold more than the eye can see one time[ ... ]. (Emigrants 67) Recognizing, as it comes into precarious shape, the new identity of ‘West Indian,’ these voices refer often to the ‘eye’ and enjoin one another to ‘look’ and to ‘see.’ At the same time, they become aware of what remains ‘more than the eye can see one time,’ a larger picture in which they figure as commodified objects of the domestic imperial gaze, much as the razor blades, face cream, and insecticide they view on their train journey appear to their eyes, and all ‘made’ by England. Eventually one of the major characters suffers an impairment of vision; another becomes chronically disoriented, terrified of being ‘seen,’ as the dislocations of exile and racist discrimination faced by the emigrants radically alter their perceptions. This ‘making new’ does not always signify liberation yet it does require and generate a new ‘sense’ of language that, as I will argue in the next section depends on a ‘new sight.’ In the 1963 Appendix to The Black Jacobins, James comments also on Wilson Harris’s extraordinary fiction, often set in South America. While it frequently invites a valid comparison to magical realism, Harris’s epigraphs, imagery, and allusions make clear his engagement with Anglo-European modernism. Most important, the representation, through syntactical ruptures, of ongoing conditions of metamorphosis brings the imagery of magical realism into the very bones of language. A striking characteristic of Harris’s prose resides in phrases such as ‘half-economic, half-miraculous’ or ‘half-human, half-god’

Taking the Detour

81

(Da Silva 68), which indicate a state of being only half present and joined to another partial presence, in a condition, then, of metamorphosis. The joining of entities with their negation, such as ‘tone’ and ‘non-tone,’ throughout his narratives also indicates, though differently, the lack of discrete identity in any thing; its partiality and condition of being both what it is and what it isn’t. Through these and other devices, Harris conveys the cognitive disruption of a sometimes violently cross-cultural history that has also generated the potential for tremendous creativity. Harris’s language registers what he sees as the partially present Amerindian legacy in the Caribbean, encountering the many European, Asian, South Asian, and African peoples who arrived, explored, and settled the region. His prose performs the interconnections, erupting through the surface of conventional and coherent narrative realism, navigating between suppressed cultures, people, and events. In his most well-known novel, Palace of the Peacock (1960), Harris presents the transformation of a masculine questing figure from imperial ruler to a man made blind by his own obsession, then reformed, as his crew undergoes a rebirth to their ancestral kinship with one another. On a journey upriver, deliberately reminiscent of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the crew encounter an Amerindian woman who becomes their guide as they seek the vanished laboring ‘folk’: Before the sun was much higher we were in the grip of the straits of memory. The sudden dreaming fury of the stream was naught else but the ancient spit of all flying insolence in the voiceless and terrible humility of the folk. Tiny embroideries resembling the handwork on the Arawak woman’s kerchief and the wrinkles on her brow turned to incredible and fast soundless breakers of foam. Her crumpled bosom and river grew agitated with desire, bottling and shaking every fear and inhibition and outcry. The ruffles in the water were her dress rolling and rising to embrace the crew. The sudden insolence of soul rose and caught them[ ... ]. The crew were transformed[ ... ]. They saw the naked unequivocal flowing peril and beauty and soul of the pursuer and pursued all together, and they knew they would perish if they dreamed to turn back. (Palace 73) The passage performs the trope, reminiscent of Joyce’s ALP, of woman as river while carrying forward a vision of transforming colonial identities specific to the former British Guiana. As in Lamming’s narrative, though in a different kind of language, the transformations undergone by these characters profoundly and continually alter their senses: ‘It was a new sensation and alien body and experience encompassing the ends of the earth’ (145). Emerging from a transatlantic Caribbean experience of migration and diaspora, grounded in the South American rain forests of Guyana where Harris worked as a land surveyor, and sparked by movements for colonial independence, Harris’s writing aims at more than modernist innovation, yet

82 Mary Lou Emery

requires a radical experimentation with language. Through it, he attempts the recognition of the stranger in the self and emancipation from what he calls ‘death-dealing regimes.’ We might add a number of other writers to this discussion and trace among them a pattern of interconnections within and across generations. Lamming’s contra-modernism, in novels such as In the Castle of My Skin (1953), The Emigrants (1954), and Season of Adventure (1960), follows on that of Césaire, influenced by French existentialism and Négritude; as previously argued, it also bears recognizable traces of Jean Rhys’s writing from the 1920s and ‘30s. Rhys’s narratives of migrant women of uncertain nationality, in novels such as After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939), become part of a larger Caribbean modernist tradition when read alongside those of Claude McKay; McKay’s fiction, in turn, especially Banjo (1928), has been credited with sparking the Négritude movement; and the Harlem Renaissance with which McKay is most often associated deeply influenced the Blues poetry in The Moth and the Star (1937) of Jamaican writer and activist Una Marson. The burst of creativity from Caribbean women writers in the 1970s and ‘80s also carries forward in new ways the modernism of earlier decades as evidenced in Jamaica Kincaid’s experimental prose poems in At the Bottom of the River (1983) and her acknowledged literary debt to modernists as canonical as Joyce and Woolf. Erna Brodber’s wildly uncategorizable fiction in Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980), Myal (1988), and Louisiana (1994) resembles that of Wilson Harris in its incorporation of cross-cultural and Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions and its play with linguistic literary structure, while drawing on the work of African American women modernists such as Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen as well as her own experiences as a sociologist and ethnographer. All these writers take seriously the necessity for what Lamming termed ‘some new sight as well as some new sense of language’ (‘Caliban’ 121) in portraying the radical black Atlantic subject of modernity located by Dash in the early period of the Haitian Revolution. The aesthetic freedom they claim springs from a deep sense of history’s dominant narratives and the past events and subjectivities such narratives repress. That understanding involves another dimension to the multiple double-bind of the (contra)modern subject, one involving the sense of sight. Crucially, Lamming names first the requirement of a ‘new sight’ as condition for the new sense of language in Caribbean contra-modernism.

Arts of seeing: Transatlantic Caribbean modernism The emphasis on seeing and transformation of the entire sensory body that I have stressed in my readings of Lamming’s, Rhys’s, and Harris’s prose recurs in the work of many Caribbean writers, from Rhys, McKay, Marson, and James, through Lamming, Harris, Derek Walcott, and a younger generation

Taking the Detour

83

that includes Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, Dionne Brand, Fred D’Aguiar, and David Dabydeen. Though this argument departs from the usual emphasis on the oral and sound cultures of the black Atlantic, I contend that throughout the twentieth century, Caribbean artists and writers have been obsessed with vision and with gaining what Lamming has also called ‘the power to see’ (‘Monster’107). Their continual returns to vision—whether the social act of seeing, reflections on visual art, or representations of inner sight— help us to understand further the recurring instabilities and contradictions in the larger picture of modernity/modernism. I have argued that we can locate those instabilities in the formation of the modern subject through a multiple double-bind that denies enslaved and colonized people the ability to envision freedom or to act to secure it. Hence the Haitian Revolution and the radically universal cosmopolitan subject it created were ‘unthinkable.’ Central to the impossibility of ‘liberty for the Negroes’8 was the construction of the modern subject as capable of a formal, distant, and contemplative vision. Especially in the eighteenth century, at the height of the slave trade, philosophers such as Kant, Schiller, and Hume constructed the European man as the universal modern subject, imbued with reason and, most significantly, the capacity for sight that made aesthetic judgment possible. In the exercise of a theoretically disinterested aesthetic judgment, the European man also exercised his freedom. As Simon Gikandi, Sander Gilman, Paul Gilroy, and David Lloyd have stressed, these aesthetic philosophies depended on the exclusion of Africa and of black people from the domains of history, reason, and art. In their construction of the universal modern subject as free in the exercise of his capacity for contemplative sight, eighteenth-century philosophers defined also those who were not free socially and politically. They described the person of Africa or African descent as either ‘naturally inferior’ or stalled at an early state of sensory development and thus lacking the reason, judgment, and taste necessary to the free individual and participant in a civilized public sphere. The idea of the aesthetic, based on a formalized sense of sight, thus helped to shape Enlightenment ideas of freedom. And as Susan Buck-Morss reminds us, that freedom extended to the right to own property, including enslaved Africans. The ‘new language’ spoken by Lamming’s Caliban arose in the crux of these contradictory forces of modernity; yet because of those same contradictions, it could not be recognized. In claiming their liberty, the rebels of St. Dominique became entrapped in this ontological paradox: to be fully human, they must exercise the very qualities that, by definition, depended on their exclusion from the full humanity of universal subjecthood. Like Francis Williams, the Jamaican poet dismissed by David Hume as only ‘parroting’ literary art, they could be forgotten as marginal imitators of the real revolutionaries, inherently incapable of imagining and organizing themselves as free men or women and certainly incapable of original cultural creation (236n).9 As late as 1920, even the progressive critic

84 Mary Lou Emery

of modernist art Roger Fry praised the form and stylistic features of ‘Negro sculpture’ only to insist that ‘[i]t is for want of a conscious critical sense and the intellectual powers of comparison and classification that the negro has failed to create one of the great cultures of the world’ (73). If the Haitian revolutionaries fought within a tragically impossible set of contradictions, artists and writers from the Caribbean have also faced the legacies of this double-bind in their efforts to enter the world of the arts. They must enter it in order to be considered fully and universally modern, that is fully human; yet they immediately risk dismissal of their abilities to do so in any original way. The ontological economy of the modern subjectwho-sees requires that dismissal.10 Beginning in the early twentieth century, the contra-modernism of Caribbean artists and writers addressed this ‘complex’ of modernity at its heart, by directly addressing vision itself. Joining Rhys, James, McKay, and Marson in the period often considered that of British ‘high modernism,’ the Jamaican sculptors Edna Manley and Ronald Moody participated in and helped to shape the modernist arts of England, Europe, and the United States, crafting an inter-artistic and transatlantic Caribbean contra-modernism. They also created a Jamaican arts movement alongside the rising movement for independence from colonial rule. Moreover, their carvings portray the colonized person of African descent as a universal subject exercising a capacity for contemplative vision long thought impossible in anyone but the European man. Emigrating across the Atlantic—Manley from England to Jamaica, and Moody from Jamaica to England—these two sculptors carried forward traditional African, Asian, and Amerindian arts, rerouted European primitivism through the African diaspora, and deliberately modeled black figures as seers. Their exhibitions in England, Jamaica, France, and the United States joined with the literary modernism of writers such as McKay to lay a foundation for a near obsession with vision as practiced by writers from the Caribbean across generations that recurs in counterpoint to the forgetting of Haiti and its visionary rebels. As I have argued elsewhere, twentieth-century Caribbean sculptors and writers confront vision directly: they reflect on its role in determining the European man as the universal subject; they create alternate, creolized figures of Caribbean visionaries; and they see through the double-bind of colonial imitation to which eighteenth-century aesthetic philosophy condemned them, achieving in the process visual subjecthood and creative agency.11 Among the many examples of this creative encounter with the legacies of European Enlightenment aesthetics, we might turn to the wood carvings of Manley and Moody and then to texts by a younger generation of writers from the Caribbean which reflect on the visual arts. In 1924 Edna Manley and Ronald Moody both traveled from Jamaica to England, Manley to exhibit a sculpture called Beadseller and Moody to practice dentistry. Moody, however, soon began studying philosophy, especially

Taking the Detour

85

the philosophies of China and India, and to experiment with modeling, soon choosing to sculpt in wood. By 1937 Moody had produced enough work and achieved sufficient recognition to hold his first solo exhibit in Paris. This was the same year in which Edna Manley held dual one-person shows, first in Jamaica and then in London and becomes, therefore, even more significant as the year in which Jamaican modernism received international recognition. The modernism created by these two Jamaican artists was not confined, however, within national or nationalist boundaries, or even within their transatlantic passages between Jamaica and England. Ronald Moody described his work in an interview conducted after World War II: My past is a mixture of African, Asian, and European influences and, as I have lived many years in Europe, my present is the result of the friction of Europe with my past. This has not resulted in my becoming an ersatz European, but has shown what is valuable in my inheritance, which I think shows in my work.12 Manley’s work, too, represented a multiplicity of cultural influences including those of West African sculpture, European primitivism, English Romanticism and Neoclassicism, the Maroon carvings of Jamaica and, it is likely, Amerindian zemi carvings. Additionally, her work and that of the Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas show the imprint of mutual influence. In their works of the 1930s, Manley and Moody achieved international recognition through pieces that address directly, through the medium of visual art, the act of seeing. Finished in 1936, Moody’s Johanaan appeared as one of only two works by black British artists chosen for the Tate Gallery’s retrospective exhibit ‘RePresenting Britain, 1500–2000.’13 Carved in elm, it stands taller than a

Figure 2 Ronald Moody, Johanaan (1936), wood (elm) 1550 x 725 x 388 mm © Tate, London 2009, courtesy the Estate of Ronald Moody.

86

Mary Lou Emery

man, though it represents only the head and torso of a male figure. The display caption in the 2000 Tate exhibition referred to ‘Moody’s understanding of Eastern philosophies and their expression through art.’ It also mentioned the influence of Egyptian sculpture and compared Moody to Epstein in his ability to exploit ‘the properties of his chosen material to present a monumental and universal image of man.’14 Evidence from Moody’s writing indicates that he conceived the universal aspects of humanity in terms very different from those of western humanism. Drawn to spiritual traditions of the East, he indicated in notes concerning his works that he viewed the bourgeois self to be a form of spiritual imprisonment. He referred to a larger ‘Self’ that ‘can be overshadowed by the many selves and appear not to exist.’15 In another document, he wrote that his idea for Johanaan was that of the ‘Spiritual Man.’16 In the context of Moody’s philosophy and the transcultural influences shaping his work, we can read Johanaan as a portrait of the act of vision. Most striking, apart from the figure’s size and its square-shouldered posture, is the head with its large eyes and peaceful expression. As critics have commented, the shape of the head and ears resembles the heads of Buddha in sculptures from Asia. The eyes, however, though large, are not directed at anything, nor are they focused downwards as in many portrayals of the Buddha. Undelineated by iris or pupil, they project openly and directly forward. While looking straight ahead or perhaps slightly upwards, they appear simultaneously to gaze within. Or perhaps, it is better to say that they gaze beyond the immediately visible world. Wondering what and where they see prompts the imagination of the viewer also to see differently and, perhaps more, to reconsider the meaning of sight and the kind of world one can construct through vision. In Manley’s Negro Aroused (1935) and Prophet (1935), we find similar representations of alternate acts of vision. Figuring the head, arms, and torso of what Jamaican artist and critic, David Boxer, describes as an ‘unmistakably black man,’ Negro Aroused conveys enormous physical strength but also a sense of lightness. Carved in mahogany, the arms and large hands press downwards toward the earth as the neck and head lift upwards. The gaze of the Negro Aroused turns directly skyward, as toward a vision of the divine, but also as Boxer describes it, an expression of the Jamaican people’s ‘yearning for a better existence’ (24–25). It has become a national icon, one recently parodied by young artists and critics, eager to unsettle what they consider a static and confining Jamaican art scene.17 However, its cultural and historical impact extends far beyond that of a national symbol. Negro Aroused appeared with over 12 other sculptures including Prophet, a figure of powerful revolutionary vision, in her first one-person exhibition, held in Kingston in January 1937 and again that year in March at the French Gallery in London. This solo show, located almost simultaneously in Jamaica and England, marks a moment of crossing cultures in modernism that reached

Taking the Detour

87

across the Atlantic to shape both the colonizing country’s art world as well as that of the colonized. Manley’s election to the London Group in 1930 and the exhibition of many of her works alongside those of Jacob Epstein, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore placed her securely among the most well-known sculptors in England. Further, echoes in Negro Aroused of Aaron Douglas’s Harlem Renaissance murals of the same years indicate the influence of Manley’s work in another transatlantic direction and as part of another modernist movement in the arts. David Boxer sees Negro Aroused and Prophet as companion pieces, the first representing a contemplative posture, in ‘concentrated repose’; the second representing the aroused black man ‘moved to action’ (25). Grouped with Moody’s Johanaan, these carvings resurrect the ‘cosmopolitan, universalist’ spirit that Dash locates in the early moments of the Haitian Revolution, giving it an even greater cultural reach and ontological depth with their portraits of the act of seeing in multicultural ‘black’ figures. These powerful representations of black visionaries heralded the 1930s Caribbean movements for independence and also the intense explorations of vision practiced by Caribbean writers. While this preoccupation with vision includes writers from the 1920s throughout the twentieth century, among a younger generation, three very different writers—Michelle Cliff, David Dabydeen, and Fred D’Aguiar—have shared a similar project. Each of them has turned, in novels and poetry, to the notorious painting by J. M. W. Turner titled Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On, or Slave Ship. Rescripting Turner’s painting, they also bring forward circumAtlantic arts of Amerindia and Africa, threading through their narratives an alternate aesthetic that, nevertheless, joins with and reshapes modernism. Turner’s painting depicts in his characteristic impressionist style the manacled bodies of enslaved Africans thrown overboard during a violent

Figure 3 Edna Manley, Negro Aroused (1935), wood (mahogany) H. 25 in Collection of the National Gallery of Jamaica, courtesy The Edna Manley Foundation, photograph Maria La Yacona.

88 Mary Lou Emery

Figure 4 Edna Manley, Prophet (1935), wood (mahogany) H. 30 ¼ in Collection of the National Gallery of Jamaica, courtesy The Edna Manley Foundation, photograph Maria La Yacona.

storm at sea. The actual incident took place on the slave ship Zong in 1781, just as rebels in Haiti began their struggle for liberty. The Zong’s captain ordered his crew to throw overboard 132 ill, but still living, slaves and then billed the insurance company for the loss.18 The ensuing legal case shocked the public who were reminded of it again, this time in terms of aesthetic rather than legal judgment, when Turner exhibited his painting at the Royal Academy in 1840, the same year that the world anti-slavery convention took place in London. In their literary returns to a visual scene of the Middle Passage, Cliff, Dabydeen, and D’Aguiar indicate an inability to stop looking for what is not visible, as much as for what is, horrifically, represented in the painting. In their emphasis on what is only partially present or glimpsed in fragments, these writers register a subjectivity apparently denied within, yet constitutive of, modernity. They do so through ekphrasis—the verbal representation of visual art—in narratives that reflect on the act of seeing and its limitations; critique the institutions through which art is made, circulated, and viewed; and resurrect the suppressed indigenous arts of the Americas and the African diaspora. Cliff’s novel Free Enterprise examines the contradictory interrelation among concepts of freedom, art, and commerce. The title indicates as much and refers variously and simultaneously to the enterprise of slavery as ‘free trade’ and to the enterprise of freeing slaves. The repetition of this phrase in its many diverse contexts, including the historical raid on Harpers Ferry, raises questions about the nature of freedom—as a civil right, an act (political, commercial, or existential), an ideal, an ideology, a collective goal, a social condition—and the means of achieving it. The presence of Turner’s painting, given to a young woman in Boston as a gift, generates multiple reflections on ways of seeing and on the value of a free or disinterested

Taking the Detour

89

Figure 5 Joseph Mallard William Turner, English, 1775–1851, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On) (1840), oil on canvas, 90.8 x 122.6 cm (35 ¾ x 48 ¼ in.) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Henry Lillie Pierce Fund. 99.22, Photograph ©2009 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

aesthetic gaze. As counter-point to the painting, Cliff’s narrative charts the efforts of another young woman to take her place as a professional photographer and also alludes to African diasporic and Caribbean native arts, which often appear in flashes, momentarily seen, imagined, or dreamed, sometimes only partly understood. Returning throughout the text to the scene of drowning bodies, David Dabydeen’s poem ‘Turner,’ creates a complex subjectivity for ‘the submerged head of the African in the foreground of Turner’s painting’ (7). This ambiguously gendered drowning figure awakens on discovering a still-born infant floating towards ‘him,’ attempts to mother the child, and names it Turner. In the awakened consciousness of the ‘submerged head,’ the temporal and spatial settings of the poem expand so that multiple times, places, and subjectivities interleave with one another, yet remain partial. These partial presences inhabit the painting as the limbs, arms, hands, and submerged heads of the drowning Africans. They signal simultaneous states of metamorphosis and repression, the power of what cannot yet be represented. Fred D’Aguiar’s novel Feeding the Ghosts narrates the story of Mintah, one of the slaves who, thrown overboard, manages to climb back on to the ship, spark a rebellion, and survive the crossing, living to an old age in Jamaica where she practices the art of wood carving learned from her father in Africa. The elderly Mintah recalls that in her initial meeting with the ship’s first mate, he had been ill with fever and, confused, replied to her questions, ‘I am Mintah?’ so that she remembers, ‘I was him, he me’ (195). This merging of identities echoes in the trial scene when Captain Cunningham, accused of fraud, suffers a dizzying hallucinatory spell in which he imagines himself as ‘[a]ll the Africans he had ever dumped into the sea, living or dead’ (165).

90 Mary Lou Emery

The narrative thus indicates the power of the slaves to affect the consciousness and actions of the slavers. In this way, by momentarily becoming her, they cannot help but see Mintah and even see as Mintah. We can certainly read the intersubjectivity and multiplicity of selves in Turner and Feeding the Ghosts as effects of modernist literary experiments with subjectivity. However, they relate also to the art Mintah practices when she earns her freedom. Recalling the choice made by Edna Manley and Ronald Moody to carve in wood, Mintah renews in the Americas the traditions of African wood carving she learned from her father. We can read in the 132 wooden figures she sculpts the ‘self-multiplying power’ that Robert Farris Thompson has identified in carvings made in the Americas of the Yoruba god Eshu—a way of seeing that Mintah activates in her wood carving and that visually echoes the narrative multiplication of selves (28). *

*

*

The detour indicated by Susan Stanford Friedman into the ‘unresolved complexes within modernity itself’ (11) reveals, through the field of Caribbean studies, a continually repressed, yet returning dynamic of freedom based in slavery. The complex requires that the successful efforts of enslaved Africans and Afro-Caribbean people to achieve for themselves the full extent of Enlightenment ideals of liberty be repeatedly forgotten. Yet the Haitian revolutionaries and the more radically universal and cosmopolitan subject they created continue to agitate through the work of visual artists and writers of the Caribbean. Returning to the scenes of repression of what Dash terms a ‘radical black Atlantic modernity,’ they insist on the relevance of Haiti to analysis of contemporary imperialist ventures. They also expose the contradictions inherent in ‘free enterprise,’ imaginatively awaken to consciousness the partially submerged figures of the Middle Passage, claim for the colonized person ‘the power to see’ and, thus, create a new sense of language. Attention to their work brings the rebels back to modernist studies.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

I am adapting this phrase from Walcott (7). For a full analysis of Haiti in Home to Harlem, see Lowney. Buck-Morss, ‘Hegel’ 826 and 830. See also C. L. Miller, especially ch. 3, 63–82. James changed the spelling of L’Ouverture for the title of his play, omitting the apostrophe to signal that Toussaint was deliberately ‘naming himself rather than accept[ing] a name given to him by the French.’ See Cudjoe 124–36. 5. For discussions of the politics and arts of black internationalism in the early twentieth century, see Edwards and Stephens. 6. As Susan Stanford Friedman has stressed in a more recent article, ‘These [“nonWestern”] modernisms are different not derivative’ (‘Periodizing’ 432). 7. Two endings to the novel exist: in the original, Anna dies from a hemorrhage; in the one revised for publication, she seems to live.

Taking the Detour

91

8. Quoted by C. L. R. James in his play Toussaint Louverture from the speech given by the President of the new Republic in Paris on February 3 and 4, 1794. ‘Original Typescript.’ 9. Gikandi discusses Hume’s essay and the footnote concerning Francis Williams. 10. Here we find an ontological and historical source for the ‘curse of presumed derivativeness for non-Western modernisms’ (Friedman, ‘Periodizing’ 432). 11. See Emery, Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature for extended analysis of visuality in the work of writers and artists of the Anglophone Caribbean throughout the twentieth century. This article draws heavily on material from that book, reproduced with permission from Cambridge University Press. 12. ‘Ronald Moody Talks ... Sculpting,’ National Gallery Archives, Kingston, Jamaica. 13. In 2003, the Tate held an exhibition of Moody’s work, and an article about him appeared in the Tate Magazine by Guy Brett, ‘A Reputation Restored,’ now available on-line in condensed version at . 14. Tate Collections June 7, 2000 . 15. Ronald Moody, ‘The “Wheel” Within,’ Ronald Moody Papers, Tate Gallery Archive. 16. On a list written in 1973 of works to be included in an exhibit, Moody lists Johanaan and then notes ‘Idea: The Spiritual Man.’ Ronald Moody Papers, Tate Gallery Archive. 17. For a graduation project at the Edna Manley School of Visual Art, Andrew Dixon created an image that clearly echoes Negro Aroused in form and gesture. However, instead of reaching upwards to express a powerful new consciousness, the figure reaches to pull the chain of a toilet in the act of flushing himself away. The image appears on the cover of a special issue of Small Axe 6 (September 1999) devoted to the state of Jamaica’s visual art. 18. For a detailed account and brilliant analysis of the Zong atrocity, see Baucom. Other critics, including Paul Gilroy, Tobias Döring, Albert Boime, and Marcus Wood have recently commented on the painting in relation to the actual incident.

5 Religion and Modernity: The Case of the Lourdes Shrine in Nineteenth-Century France Suzanne K. Kaufman

This chapter investigates the claim that modernity is synonymous with secularism. The idea has long been an orthodoxy among historians of western Europe and North America. Indeed, many historians of the West have embraced an appealingly simple notion of modern progressive development that runs something like this: As societies modernize, with scientific rationality emerging hand in hand with capitalist economic development and liberal political democracy, they experience what German sociologist Max Weber labeled the progressive ‘disenchantment of the world’ (Weber 155). In this scenario, the emergence of modern life is identified with a set of historical conditions that include the industrial revolution, the transition to urban culture, the rise of the nation-state, and the emerging power of the bourgeoisie, all of which were shaped by and also shaped specific political, intellectual, and cultural discourses around rationality and secularism. In short, the conventional historical narrative of western modernity is predicated on the inevitability of religious decline. This narrative of modern development has had a particularly profound influence on the writing of French history, my own area of specialization. For many historians, the traumatic events of the French Revolution of 1789 ensured that the Catholic Church henceforth would look backwards to monarchism and the forces of the Old Regime for its authority whereas French republicans would tie their desire for a liberal republic ever more firmly to a forward-looking politics of anticlericalism. Studies showing a steady decline in church attendance throughout the nineteenth century, especially among urbanites and male citizens, have been understood by scholars as clear evidence of an increasingly secularized public sphere.1 When religious expression did manifest itself—often in the form of popular devotions dominated by women—it has been seen by scholars as an attempt to preserve traditional worship in the face of a changing society. The rash of young women and peasant children who claimed to see the Virgin Mary, along with the 92

Religion and Modernity

93

outpouring of faith around these Marian apparitions as well as other lay devotions such as the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, appear in historical accounts of nineteenth-century France as part of a momentary resurgence— often cultivated by a politically reactionary Church—in a moribund peasant religiosity.2 While historians treat popular faith as a type of holdover from the past, they often look upon the development of modern mass culture and new consumer practices, in turn, as a modernizing phenomenon linked to growing urbanization. Indeed, the Parisian department store, with its wondrous display of material goods, represents the quintessentially modern form of enchantment, made possible by the profane magic of the marketplace.3 In these analyses, the sacred aura of the relic gives way to the seductive allure of the mass-produced object. Nineteenth-century Parisian exhibitions become ‘places of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish,’ as Walter Benjamin put it, whereas religious worship, if visible at all in such analyses, embodies a vestige of the way things used to be (Benjamin, ‘Paris’ 7).4 What emerges from this scholarly narrative are, typically, accounts of modern development that pit the religious against the modern and that portray religious believers as traditionalists at odds with the forces of industrial growth, urbanization, mass culture, and liberal democracy. At the heart of such analyses linking secularism and modernity lurks Émile Durkheim’s enormously influential distinction between the sacred and the profane. In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) the French sociologist argued that all religions, whether simple or complex, tend to divide the world into these two mutually opposing categories. For Durkheim, sacred and profane ‘have always and everywhere been conceived by the human mind as two distinct classes, as two worlds between which there is nothing in common.’ These two realms ‘cannot even approach each other and keep their own nature at the same time,’ and thus, when the sacred and profane do interact, it can only be a sign of growing secularization (Durkheim 54–55). Following this logic, many historians of the modern see the sacred—whether a belief in the magical or a sense of the sublime and the rapturous—as simply receding to those ever-smaller spaces left uncolonized by secular society. One of the consequences of the sacred/profane opposition is that the interrelation of religion and commerce has remained virtually unexplored in histories of the modern West. Scholars interested in consumer culture have tended to see the interplay between religion and commerce as irrelevant to the larger development of capitalist society. Meanwhile, historians of religion have shunned any link between faith and the marketplace for fear of ‘denigrating’ or debasing the integrity of their subject matter.5 That commerciality has played little visible part in scholarly views of modern religious experience and belief is not surprising. Indeed, a scholarly bias against commercialized religion may be one of the most enduring legacies left by sixteenth-century Protestant and Catholic Reformers. Historian Colleen McDannell has observed that the

94 Suzanne K. Kaufman

Protestant Reformation bequeathed to modern-day scholars a deep suspicion of visual piety, while the Catholic Counter-Reformation handed down its own fears about the devotional excesses of the illiterate masses (4–13).6 These religious concerns furnish important historical antecedents of discomfort with commercialized forms of devotion. Modern unease with commercialized religious practices also reflects the largely negative assessments of mass culture found in more recent cultural criticism. Twentieth-century theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer developed a compelling critique of the modern ‘culture industry,’ an interlocking set of capitalist institutions—media, popular arts, entertainment, and fashion—that constitute an apparatus of domination and ‘mass deception.’ Such wholly condemnatory assessments of mass culture, combined with enduring prejudices against visual and material forms of piety, have exerted an enormous influence, in turn, on how scholars have approached the subject of popular religion in the modern era. The persistence of such concerns helps to explain why historians have dismissed as superficial or inauthentic those religious expressions that are tied to the marketplace. Terms such as ‘sacred kitsch,’ ‘packaged piety,’ and ‘Christian Disneyland’ not only encapsulate this derogatory view of commercialized religion, but they also illuminate why scholars of popular religion still prefer to focus on the experiences of ‘rural innocents’—female mystics or child visionaries and their devoted followers—as exemplars of nineteenth-century popular religion: these phenomena represent what scholars understand as authentic religious experience. In short, Durkheim’s categories continue to dictate the paradigms of much of today’s scholarship on religion and modernity. I would like to offer a different approach to the study of popular religious practice, one that emphasizes its commercial character as a way to examine the modernity of lay devotion. By looking briefly at the historical development of the Lourdes sanctuary, a Catholic pilgrimage shrine in rural France, I think it is possible not only to shed light on modern devotional practice but on modernity itself. To do this, I think that we have to define the modern in ways that are temporally specific, but move beyond a conception based solely on processes of modernization. This is not an easy task for the historian. At the very least, the idea of modernity implies periodization for most scholars of history. And while the precise chronology of the modern has been hotly debated, most historians acknowledge the nineteenth century as one of the key moments of transition. Yet as historians have started to take account of the way other academic disciplines have conceived of modernity, they have increasingly complicated the idea of modernity as a periodizing device by attempting to see it also as a philosophical discourse and a discrete set of social practices—that is, as particular kinds of lived experience and modes of representation. In the analysis of Lourdes that follows, I have adopted such an approach by defining modernity in terms of capitalist industrialization—that is, the material social relations connected to the market economy, industrial production, and mass consumption—but

Religion and Modernity

95

also as a set of representational practices reflecting a new and profound awareness of temporality. These modes of representation (which in late nineteenth-century France included lithography and photography, popular newspapers, billboards, and films) came to shape an emerging cultural consciousness that embraced, in the words of Charles Baudelaire, ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, and the contingent’ (‘Painter’ 13).7 By taking seriously the central technological innovations of capitalist development as well as new social practices that emerge along with them, my understanding of modernity focuses on the interconnections between a commodity-driven mass culture and the lived experience of ordinary people.8 Where and how does religion fit into this definition of modernity? I will suggest that religious sites and religious practices are not immune to these commercial developments. Indeed, they may even help to create them. The Lourdes pilgrimage shrine offers an especially compelling case for substantiating this claim because this Catholic sanctuary was itself a creation of the late nineteenth century. On February 11, 1858, a fourteen-year-old peasant girl named Bernadette Soubirous saw her first vision of the Virgin Mary in a grotto near the town of Lourdes in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. During the next five months, the young visionary would see the Virgin 17 more times before thousands of witnesses. Bernadette and her visions became objects of popular fascination first for the inhabitants of the Pyrenees and then throughout France. By the summer of that year, multitudes of visitors—the devout and the curious—came from as far away as Paris to see the peasant girl who was said to be in mystical contact with the Blessed Virgin. Many came to pray and atone for their sins or to seek out the healing powers of a spring that Bernadette had discovered during one of her visionary encounters. This display of popular religiosity was not extraordinary for the period. Throughout the nineteenth century women and children claimed to have visions of the Virgin Mary. Popular cults quickly developed around these seers, and the places where their supernatural experiences occurred grew into sites of pilgrimage. What became unusual about Lourdes was the Church’s swift approval of the Marian visions and the extraordinary development of the shrine over the final quarter of the nineteenth century. After initially trying to ignore, even discount, Bernadette’s visions and the crowds that flocked to the grotto, the local bishop recognized the staying power of the new devotion and in 1862 proclaimed the apparitions to be authentic. He then built a large basilica at the site of the grotto, and Church-sanctioned pilgrimages to the curative waters of Lourdes began in earnest. Some ten years later the Augustinian Fathers of the Assumption, a Paris-based religious order, made Lourdes the site of their national pilgrimage. With the help of the railway and the Catholic popular press, the Assumptionists (as the Paris order was commonly called) transformed Lourdes into a site of mass pilgrimage, bringing hundreds of thousands of devout Catholics to the shrine each year. By the early 1900s, close to half

96

Suzanne K. Kaufman

a million pilgrims were going to Lourdes on Church-sponsored national pilgrimages.9 What was responsible for the extraordinary popularity of this turn-ofthe-century Catholic shrine? Developments such as railway travel, new advertising techniques, and the mass production of goods—all adapted and even innovated by the clerical and lay promoters of the shrine—effectively transformed what had been a set of locally defined pilgrimage practices into an organized mass spectacle. In this sense, religious devotion at Lourdes was dramatically different from premodern Catholic pilgrimage, both more democratic but also more homogeneous. By this I mean, first, that capitalist development made the shrine broadly known and highly accessible. A mass public—rich and poor, urban and rural—participated in the Church’s largescale pilgrimages to Lourdes and visited the site in huge numbers as tourists. And second, what these visitors encountered was a pilgrimage shrine that offered highly orchestrated rituals, mechanically produced religious goods and low-cost entertainments.10 The appeal of Lourdes lay precisely in its ability to fuse older pilgrimage practices with a new commercial culture, infusing religious life with powerful elements of the ephemeral, the contingent, and the spectacular. It is in this sense that going to Lourdes on a pilgrimage was, for the devout, a distinctly modern experience.

The modern spectacle of Catholic pilgrimage To understand how the Lourdes shrine became a site for the emergence of a modern culture of consumption, one must first trace a number of developments in nineteenth-century France that paved the way for a modern consumer society. Following the 1840s, the technological innovations of the industrial revolution (railways, steamships, the telegraph) began to expand the nation’s capacities of production and circulation, and along with them, the availability and affordability of consumer goods. Meanwhile, overhaul of the banking system ensured the growing reliability of the bank check and of credit, laying the basis for a gradual rise in purchasing power among many sectors of French society. A cheap, advertising-oriented press, which had sprung up as early as the 1830s, further stimulated the desire for new goods within regional and, increasingly, national markets. Taken together, these economic and technological developments set the stage for a consumer revolution that altered daily life in much of the country over the second half of the nineteenth century.11 The initial beneficiary of this transformation was the urban bourgeoisie, whose members enjoyed both the discretionary income and the leisure time needed to take advantage of the new commodity-driven mass culture emerging in most large French cities, especially Paris. These urban dwellers shopped in department stores, read newspapers in cafés, and strolled the city streets. They also sojourned in the French countryside, relaxing in mountain spas and seaside resorts—places

Religion and Modernity

97

that, as a result of their growing popularity, were hardly immune to the impact of the consumer revolution. Indeed, ‘what began as rural resorts,’ historian Eugen Weber has noted, ‘eventually turned into showcases of specifically urban lifestyles, propagating a consumer economy long before more normal towns had one’ (179–80).12 These resort destinations, then, introduced key elements of the new urban mass culture to the provinces. Lourdes emerged at the forefront of this process of rural modernization. Becoming a site of sanctioned pilgrimage shortly after Bernadette’s 1858 apparitions, the shrine developed much like secular resort towns, particularly after the success of the annual national pilgrimage in the 1870s. As in Biarritz or Vittel, elites remade Lourdes, pulling down old neighborhoods and building new streets, shops, and hotels to accommodate the city’s burgeoning cohort of visitors. In the process, Lourdes increasingly organized itself around new forms of mass consumption—in this case religious consumption—for the thousands, eventually hundreds of thousands, who visited during the six-month pilgrimage season. Although many such travelers to Lourdes were members of the urban middle classes, the site also welcomed large numbers of more humble pilgrims, particularly those from the south-west region but from other rural areas as well. These non-elite visitors, the majority of whom were women, thus found themselves—many for the first time—face to face with a vibrant, commercially dynamic pilgrimage town that offered an astonishing variety of religious spectacles and devotional goods.13 Of course, religious commerce at Catholic pilgrimage sites was not a new phenomenon. Historians of medieval and early modern Europe have long understood that devout believers, elites as well as plebeians, commingled the spiritual and the material, the religious and the commercial when they went on pilgrimage.14 Not only did pilgrims pray, atone for past behaviors, and petition the saints or the Virgin Mary for aid at religious shrines and local holy places, but they also searched for tangible proof of God’s presence by touching the physical site, looking at relics, and buying souvenirs. The material practices and rituals associated with premodern Catholic pilgrimage did not disappear with the advent of industrial society. Yet they were significantly remade in the emerging commercial culture of the late nineteenth century. At Lourdes, the adoption of new technologies to attract a mass audience set the stage for dramatic changes in the devotional culture of Catholic pilgrimage. Church authorities and local business elites developed an array of religious guidebooks, mass-produced picture postcards, and print advertisements to promote the national pilgrimages and to publicize various goods and services available to the devout. These new written and visual media introduced significant innovations in two related registers: first, they represented the Lourdes shrine as strikingly new, different, and modern; second, the use of these media by massive waves of visitors integrated new

98 Suzanne K. Kaufman

practices—such as reading guidebooks and writing postcards—into the religious culture of pilgrimage itself. In effect, the introduction of new ways of perceiving landscapes, consuming goods, and interacting with fellow pilgrims fashioned a devotional experience at Lourdes that was profoundly animated by its links to mass consumer culture. The guidebook, for example, became a particularly important device for shaping how the pilgrim came to interact with the shrine. Ranging in price from 30 centimes to a couple of francs, guides to Lourdes were relatively cheap to buy and many dioceses throughout France—as well as the shrine itself—published them. Like secular guides of the same period, these texts on Lourdes organized the travel experience for large numbers of visitors who were often of limited means.15 Yet guidebooks were also intended to be promotional devices used to excite the imagination of tourists, or pilgrims, enticing them to visit a specific site. These texts shaped a visitor’s sense of place, determining significant sites to be seen and directing how the visitor should see them. Guidebooks to Lourdes were no different in this respect. What is striking about the Lourdes guides, however, was the strategy to promote the shrine as a new and lavish pilgrimage site. They publicized the shrine not as a traditional holy place, detached from the modern world, but rather as a religious site that was also a bustling resort-town with magnificent hotels and lively forms of commercial activity. For example, a 1893 guide written by Abbé Martin praised ‘the new neighborhood adorned with sumptuous hotels of colossal proportions and numerous shops.’ Using similar language to capture the richness of the sacred city, another guide instructed pilgrims to ‘stroll down the boulevard and the avenue of the Grotto, admire the sumptuous hotels and magnificent shops selling religious articles.’ A 1914 guide described Lourdes as a ‘new city,’ a ‘religious city’ that was ‘full of mystery, prayer and contemplation, whose striking convents and villas, sumptuous hotels and piety shops form a white ring around the miraculous Grotto and the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Lourdes.’ The opulence of the town, then, promised an enticing tourist adventure for pilgrims.16 Presenting Lourdes as a new and monumental pilgrimage shrine may have served strategic purposes. In using this kind of marketing rhetoric, pilgrimage organizers and local entrepreneurs, who produced much of the Lourdes promotional literature, seemed to be playing quite directly on the desires of female pilgrims from small towns and villages to see the wonders of modern urban life—sumptuous hotels, lavish shops, the exciting railway—within a safe and reassuringly devotional environment. Moreover, portraying Lourdes as a new kind of religious shrine was crucial to persuade rural pilgrims devoted to local holy sites to embark on a much longer and more expensive journey. This is not to say that religious devotion—the desire to pray for France or to seek out the powers of the grotto’s healing waters for oneself or a family member—was insufficient to justify such a

Religion and Modernity

99

trip. For many devout Catholics, it no doubt was. Nevertheless, guides to Lourdes did evoke forms of festive entertainment and sociability long associated with Catholic pilgrimage, while presenting them in new and exciting ways. In this sense, the Church employed the tools of bourgeois tourism to produce images of travel that spoke to a different and, in key respects, much broader audience. Lourdes postcards performed a similar kind of cultural work, directing how pilgrims should see the shrine, the town and the very act of pilgrimage. As souvenir items intended to memorialize the devotional experience, postcards to Lourdes were instrumental in constructing the recognizable face of the shrine and town. Here, too, the emblematic image of Lourdes was of a strikingly modern religious site. Produced during the first decade of the twentieth century, when postcard collecting was rapidly becoming a craze in France, Lourdes postcards imitated the style and format of popular Parisian postcard series or the cards of well-known resorts.17 Local photographers developed their own series of postcards while also supplying photographs to companies in Paris and Strasbourg that manufactured postcard sets of Lourdes. Yet whether they were produced regionally or in faraway cities, these cards presented similar images of Lourdes as a reconstructed, modern-looking shrine. The most common postcard image was the panoramic landscape of the shrine. This sweeping vista of the physical site portrayed the sanctuary as a monumental structure dominating the horizon. Another popular landscape view depicted the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Lourdes sitting astride the grotto, furnishing the Church with a ready-made image of Catholic orthodoxy. Both views of Lourdes circulated a representation of the shrine that, like guidebooks of the period, highlighted the grandeur of a newly reconstructed milieu.

Figure 6

Panoramic postcard of the Lourdes shrine, early twentieth century

Author’s personal collection.

100 Suzanne K. Kaufman

Figure 7 Postcard of the basilica over the grotto, early twentieth century Author’s personal collection.

Postcard entrepreneurs soon expanded their stock of images to include photographs of the devotional life of pilgrimage. Many postcard series presented a visual narrative of the sacred journey of Catholic pilgrimage by depicting arrivals of pilgrims, grand processions around the town and shrine, crowds praying at the grotto, and sick pilgrims being carried to the sacred waters. Images showing pilgrims drinking water from the fountains or praying before the grotto became quite popular, as did depictions of sick pilgrims lying on stretchers or being wheeled in elaborate carriages. These images captured intimate moments of pilgrims interacting with the site and reinforced an emerging rhetoric of service to the sick. Such images were undoubtedly intended to appeal to women, who came to Lourdes by the hundreds as volunteer helpers, humble pilgrims, and the blessed sick. Yet even within these depictions of prayer, ritual, and service, modern technological forms emerged as integral to the scene. The train, in particular, was featured as an icon of the religious landscape. Several different postcard series provided closeup views of the special trains designed to transport sick pilgrims to Lourdes. The electric tramway system and funicular, designed to transport sick pilgrims from the town to the grotto, also appeared in numerous postcards. Often juxtaposing these modern marvels of transportation alongside pilgrims marching in traditional peasant costume, the cards asserted the routinized compatibility of traditional religious practice and modern industrial technology. Even the partaking of Lourdes water became an activity that resembled secular thermalism, as postcards showed women sipping water from tin cups or featured the new stone bathhouses where pilgrims were now immersed in private, individual tubs.18 While Lourdes guidebooks and postcards were clearly used as visual technologies to represent the shrine and the act of pilgrimage to a mass audience, these items also became valued goods in their own right. As a souvenir that was inexpensive to buy and send, the postcard served both as an

Religion and Modernity

Figure 8

101

Postcard of female pilgrims sipping Lourdes water, early twentieth century

Author’s personal collection.

important means for envisioning Lourdes and as a new kind of objet de piété. Pilgrims could retain postcards as mementos of their own journeys or give them to family and friends as acts of love and devotion. In this same vein, guidebooks also functioned as cherished keepsakes. Indeed, by the early twentieth century, when entrepreneurs began to illustrate their guides with photographs of the sights and rituals of pilgrimage, these publishers explicitly marketed their inexpensive booklets as instruments of inspiration. One guide directed readers to look back through its pages ‘during long winter nights.’ Sharing the book with family and friends, it claimed, would ‘contribute, in a small way, to attracting crowds of believing Catholics and even indifferent observers to the grotto’ (Couret 3–4). In this sense, guidebooks and postcards were part of a newly thriving trade of pilgrimage goods and services designed to inspire faith and to link the devout to a larger Catholic community. Mass-produced guidebooks and postcards, of course, were just some of the many new kinds of religious goods being marketed to Lourdes pilgrims. As national pilgrimages took hold at Lourdes, local businessmen lost no time in trying to sell both novel and traditional religious items to the large numbers of pilgrims now converging on the shrine. Yet success was by no means guaranteed. For while hundreds of thousands of pilgrims came to Lourdes each year, many were on very limited budgets and not yet accustomed to the material abundance on display. Staying for only a few days, these pilgrims had to be taught to spend their money very quickly, if only on one special item. To do so, religious entrepreneurs sought out new venues to advertise and often used clever slogans to sell their wares and services. Adapting the marketing strategies used at Paris-based department stores to move bulk goods very rapidly, these advertisements celebrated distinctly modern forms of commercial exchange while also touting the value of mass-produced religious articles.19 This kind of marketing not only shaped how pilgrims

102

Suzanne K. Kaufman

interacted with the sacred site, it also introduced the faithful to a retail world of mass consumption. Small piety shops and religious emporiums, for example, used guidebooks, postcards, and the shrine’s own newspaper, Journal de la Grotte, to advertise their goods. Les Grands Magasins des Galeries Catholiques ran newspaper advertisements proclaiming themselves to be ‘the largest and the most important stores with the best deals’ while their major competitor, Les Grands Magasins de l’Alliance Catholique, invented catchphrases— ‘High volume means low prices / low prices mean high volume!’—for its own catalog of factory-made religious statuettes, rosaries, medallions, and newfangled items such as postcards.20 Small family-run piety shops sought to compete with these large retailers by distributing postcards to pilgrims as they passed by the store. With a simple caption—such as ‘over 10,000 models of different-sized saints’—these promotional postcards sought to assure the devout that they would find something to satisfy their tastes and budgets.21 By promoting bountiful goods at affordable prices, this religious advertising embraced the wonders of industrial development that made possible such consumer abundance. Indeed, the logic of many Lourdes advertisements explicitly linked the value of their religious goods to new powers of mechanical reproduction. The ability to produce many copies of a desired object was vaunted by entrepreneurs as a great improvement for the religious world because it provided a larger number of people with greater access to the sacred. In an era marked by the rise of reproducible religious art (commonly referred to as the Saint-Sulpice style), the fact that even the smallest figurine or illustration in these stores was typically identical to statues and images found in churches across France linked such mass-produced goods visually to official religious iconography. Indeed, the thousands of statuettes of Notre-Dame de Lourdes found in small and large religious shops were direct copies of the shrine’s statue of the Virgin Mary that was erected in the grotto to memorialize Bernadette’s apparitions.22 The modern-day emphasis of this promotional logic was apparent in the marketing of entirely new kinds of devotional objects as well. Perhaps the most striking of these new goods being sold at Lourdes were the Pastilles de Lourdes, lozenges made from sugar and the grotto’s water. The maker of this novel product, the F. Valette Company, celebrated its pastilles as a modern marvel of science and industry that would give Catholics greater access to the healing powers of the shrine. As early as 1888, the company’s advertising brochures were using such rhetoric. One leaflet praised the factory-made tablets for providing a new and better means for Lourdes water to be carried home: ‘It is in order to render more easily the transport of the miraculous water and have it arrive, without mishap and without annoyance, to any location, even the most remote countries on the earth, that we have tried to do for the water of Lourdes what doctors have done so well for thermal

Religion and Modernity

103

sources.’ Touted as a superior and up-to-date alternative to water, the pastilles were lightweight, easy to carry in their own tin, which was beautifully decorated with the imprint of the spring and basilica. The ad further assured pilgrims that the factory was located near the grotto, which, perhaps, was intended to support the proud claim that one single drop of water contained in a tablet was ‘powerful enough to cure both suffering body and soul.’ Buying these sugar-coated lozenges would also ‘enable parents and friends remaining at home to be supplied with perfectly authentic souvenirs of a pilgrimage which the privileged alone can carry out.’ As the brochure smoothly noted, ‘Not everyone can come to the waters of the Spring [ ... ] but now the waters of the Spring can go to everyone.’23 Commercial transactions for religious goods, of course, had long been part of the pilgrimage experience, and many pilgrims probably arrived at Lourdes expecting to procure religious souvenirs. Yet the advertising around Lourdes goods tried to reorient how pilgrims shopped for such items, proclaiming the benefits of no-haggling exchanges and encouraging new behaviors such as ‘window shopping’ and spontaneous consumption that were relatively unfamiliar to visitors from rural parts of France. Indeed, ads for the Alliance Catholique invited pilgrims to engage in comparison shopping: ‘Pilgrims, don’t settle on any purchases until you’ve visited the Alliance Catholique.’24 Guidebooks offered similar advice on shopping techniques. One guide instructed pilgrims to ‘scour the city for material souvenirs, images, rosaries with all the benedictions and indulgences, medals and pretty trinkets and jewelry’ because such goods would place ‘under the protection of Mary’ their parents, friends and, especially, new-born babies (Couret 44–45). Such claims sought to appeal to devout women, who saw themselves as guardians of religious values and caretakers of their family’s salvation. By linking these products to the shrine’s power to heal bodies and save souls, this promotional literature introduced female pilgrims to new forms of commercial exchange that became an integral part of women’s devotional work. Thus far, I have argued that the use of new visual technologies at the shrine and the marketing of religious goods around the town encouraged pilgrims at Lourdes to treat them as central to modern Catholic pilgrimage. There is some evidence to suggest that faithful Catholics who incorporated these new technologies and products into their devotional practices embraced them as part of the sacred experience. Published accounts of journeys to Lourdes, written by educated female pilgrims for women’s periodicals, often discuss—almost in passing—how mass-produced religious articles could provide pilgrims with both joy and excitement. Such accounts, while often quite conventional and formulaic, are interesting precisely because they were written to inspire other pious women to go on pilgrimage to Lourdes. One such narrative, written by Madeleine D., drew a direct link between religious goods and her own devotion to the Virgin of

104

Suzanne K. Kaufman

Lourdes. In describing her first glimpse of the sacred grotto, she highlighted a moment of profound recognition: ‘there stood the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, just like the one that I have at home atop of my chest of drawers, but much larger.’ Dropping to her knees, she kissed the ground and stared at the statue as she prayed. It was not simply that Madeleine’s first thought on seeing the cave where the Virgin appeared to Bernadette was of her own small statue of the Virgin Mary, one that she had long gazed upon while praying at home. For Madeleine, the statuette actually facilitated a powerfully experienced connection to the sacred site. Similarly enabling was her mad rush, in preparation for a candlelight procession at the shrine, to buy ‘candles wrapped in beautiful paper printed with a blue image of the Blessed Virgin and a reproduction of the Grotto’ (3, 7). These seeming digressions imply that mass-produced goods—the religious articles that surrounded her at home and at Lourdes—were not only treasured objects but aids to worship, fully integrated into devotional practices. For Madeleine D., these articles became valued sources of inspiration, even mediation, in building a relationship with the Virgin of Lourdes. Catholic believers, to be sure, had for centuries used and interacted with material objects in order to feel closer to the saints, the Virgin Mary and God. Buying a small medal, holy card, or amulet at a pilgrimage site became, as far back as the Middle Ages, an accepted practice for devout believers to memorialize their religious journeys and keep nearby a piece of the sacred. Pilgrims at Lourdes were no different in this respect. They, too, relied on material objects to help mediate their relationships with the spiritual world. The point that I wish to emphasize is that the emergence of mass-produced goods and novel souvenirs did not necessarily diminish such a relationship; in fact, for many Catholics these objects actually may have enhanced it. The availability of inexpensive votive candles at the shrine, for example, enabled masses of pilgrims to purchase devotional objects that might have facilitated their participation in the shrine’s candlelight processions. The proliferation of inexpensive plaster statuettes of the Virgin of Lourdes, and of the saints, meant that growing numbers of late nineteenth-century Catholics could now buy such objects, imbuing their own homes with the shrine’s sacred aura and (as with Madeleine D.) the spiritual ties between a faraway shrine and their everyday lives. In this sense, the mass production of religious articles not only expanded the use of material objects in Catholic devotional practice but also promised, by combining novelty with reassuring familiarity, to integrate pilgrimage and everyday practice into an enhanced religious experience. Perhaps the use of postcards is an even better example of how devout pilgrims, and the women among them in particular, so ably integrated novel items into their worship at the shrine. Female pilgrims endowed this modern tool of communication with religious meaning when they sent postcards from the shrine. By writing words of prayer and reassurance to family

Religion and Modernity

105

and friends at home, devout women found a new way to provide religious comfort and to affirm their own pious work at the site.25 Most pilgrims wrote postcards to inspire hope and to convey to the recipient that he or she had not been forgotten at Lourdes. A number of pilgrims penned only a sentence or two; ‘fond remembrances and prayers’ or ‘I’m thinking of you at Lourdes’ were popular phrases. Certain postcard writers, however, wrote lengthy notes, often emphasizing their own diligent work in praying for others. A postcard displaying pilgrims saying the rosary before the grotto, dated 1913, announced: ‘Dear Madame Lainé, I am thinking affectionately of you. I have not forgotten anyone here, and I am praying especially for you and for those who are dear to you.’ On another postcard, a pilgrim named Madeleine wrote to Madame and Monsieur Pitre of Paris: ‘I am thinking very affectionately of you both at the foot of the grotto, where my fervent prayers for you and your wishes are growing.’ A Madame Rousseau assured her ‘dear Marcel’ that his mother had said a novena for him and added that ‘for all those whom we love, we carried candles [and] flowers to the grotto.’ Such messages, sent through the mail, enabled pilgrims at Lourdes to share moments of prayer and devotion with friends and families at home.26 Indeed, these messages of religious comfort—juxtaposed as they were with the vivid photographic imagery of the cards themselves—were intended, no doubt, to spark the imagination of believers who were unable to see, touch, and interact with the shrine in person. Postcard writing from Lourdes thus became one of many novel ways to tie the devout together into a larger Catholic community. Sending such comforting messages of prayer became, for thousands of pious women, an established ritual of modern Catholic pilgrimage.27 *

*

*

In this chapter, I have tried to heed Susan Stanford Friedman’s call to rethink the times and places of modernity by integrating religious experience into a historical narrative of nineteenth-century economic development (Chapter 1). Taking seriously the complex interconnections between faith and commerce at the Lourdes shrine, I have argued that these interactions were rooted in late nineteenth-century processes of commercial exchange, commodification, and spectatorship that accompanied the development of large-scale industrial capitalism in France. Defining features of a modern culture of consumption, such processes have typically been linked to finde-siècle urban society, with its new shopping venues, low-cost entertainments, and the bustling street life engaged in by mobile individuals. Yet these elements also defined religious life at Lourdes, imparting to the shrine a profoundly modern character. As I have shown, new visual technologies and capitalist market practices were integral to the rituals of pilgrimage as they developed at Lourdes, creating a devotional culture—indeed a form of

106

Suzanne K. Kaufman

spirituality—that was entirely consonant with the larger trends of an emerging consumer culture. I would even argue that Lourdes became a pivotal site of Catholic devotion because it developed in concert with a newly commercializing French society. The shrine’s devotional culture enabled faith, and the Church itself, to remain a relevant, meaningful and exciting part of modern life. That this remains as true today as it was in the late nineteenth century is perhaps suggested by the fact that some five million pilgrims still go to Lourdes on pilgrimage every year.28 The case of Lourdes thus shows that there is much to be gained by expanding our definition of the modern to include a significant role for religious experience. First, if we begin to see religious worship as a modern activity, we can complicate theories of secularization that have served to solidify a convenient fiction that religious worship, faith itself, is anti-worldly, somehow operating outside of modern social and economic developments. I say convenient fiction because this appealingly simple narrative of modern development has served both ‘secular moderns’ and devout believers alike. For secular moderns, such accounts enable them to hold on to an unambiguous story of progress, in which rationality is twinned with economic prosperity and both triumph over older forms of superstition. For the devout, these secularization narratives lead to the depiction of spirituality as beyond the dross of the marketplace. The example of Lourdes thus pushes us to ask what is at stake for scholars when they conflate modernity with secularity and, by extension, treat religion as an anti-modern phenomenon. These approaches, I would suggest, have actually closed down avenues of exploration. By dismissing commercialized religious experience, scholars have too often misunderstood such novel developments as televangelism, Christian theme parks, or the evolving practices of Catholic pilgrimage as the debasement of genuine faith. If, instead, we take seriously contemporary religious practices as modern phenomena—not in spite of their commerciality but because of their commerciality—then we might begin to understand religious devotion as a significant force in the creation of the modern.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

For a summary of these studies, see Gibson, chs. 6 and 7. See, for example, Kselman, Boutry and Cinquin, and Jonas. For examples, see R. H. Williams, and M. B. Miller. Here, Benjamin is building on Karl Marx’s discussion of the ‘fetishism of the commodity and its secret;’ see Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York, 1976), 163–77. 5. For this tendency in the consumer culture literature, see McKendrick, and Koshar. For this tendency in scholarship on popular religion, see R. Harris. 6. McDannell’s discussion of religion and materiality has helped to shape my own approach to these questions. 7. Works that have been especially helpful in shaping my view of modernity include: M. Berman, Nava and O’Shea, Richards, and Schwartz.

Religion and Modernity

107

8. Here, I wish to distinguish between popular culture—which comprises beliefs, practices, and objects that are locally produced and shared—and mass culture, in which producers and consumers typically are distinct and in which cultural forms reflect and construct urban social life while also being shared by large numbers of people outside of urban centers. For more on this idea, see Morgan, ch. 1. 9. For more on the apparitions of Bernadette Soubirous and the development of the Lourdes grotto as a modern Catholic healing shrine, see Kaufman. 10. Due to the space constraints of this chapter, I can not elaborate on the entertainments, which included dioramas, panoramas, wax museums and later films, that emerged at Lourdes. For a discussion of these popular attractions, see Kaufman, ch. 1. 11. On nineteenth-century French economic modernization, see Verley. 12. For more on nineteenth-century French spa and resort towns, see Mackaman, and Corbin. 13. For statistical data by sex on pilgrimages to Lourdes, see Archives de l’Œuvre de la Grotte (hereafter AG) 18E4, Statistiques générales (1893–1977). For pilgrimages according to region, see AG 12E2, Liste des localités venues en pèlerinage à Lourdes (1868–87). 14. On premodern pilgrimage, see Chelini and Branthomme, and Finucane. 15. On nineteenth-century secular guidebooks, see essays by Young and Palmowski in Koshar, 105–31 and 169–89. 16. Abbé Martin, Guide de Lourdes et ses environs à l’usage des pèlerins (Saumur, 1893), 3, Bernard Dauberive, Lourdes et ses environs: Guide du pèlerin et du touriste (Poitiers, 1896), 88, and Lourdes en deux jours: Guide religieux, historique, pittoresque et documentaire (Tarbes, 1914). 17. On postcard collecting in France, see Ripert and Frère. 18. Many of these postcards are part of the shrine’s collection (not yet catalogued) housed at the Archives de la Grotte; other cards are part of the author’s personal collection. For a published catalog of Lourdes postcards produced between 1900 and 1914, see Laurentin. 19. On French department store advertising, see M. B. Miller, chs. 5 and 6. 20. Advertisements for the Grands Magasins des Galeries Catholiques appeared regularly on the back page of the shrine’s Journal de la Grotte. For a sampling, see the issues dated July 11, 1909, July 24, 1910, and December 10, 1911. A copy of a catalog for the Grands Magasins de l’Alliance Catholique is part of the Clugnet Collection housed at the Marian Library at the University of Dayton; see Cantiques de Lourdes, Offerts par les Magasins de l’Alliance Catholique (Lourdes, 1911), 4, for its advertising copy: ‘Vendre beaucoup pour vendre bon marché / Vendre bon marché pour vendre beaucoup!’ 21. For an example of this kind of promotional postcard, see Kaufman 47. 22. On Saint-Sulpice Church art, see Savart. 23. AG, 7P3, Affaire vente d’eau de la grotte (1879–88), dossier 1, advertising brochure for Pastilles à l’Eau de Lourdes, F. Valette & Co., 1888. 24. Cantiques de Lourdes, Offerts par les Magasins de l’Alliance Catholique (Lourdes, 1911). 25. Literary scholar Naomi Schor has noted that early twentieth-century postcard writing and collecting were seen by contemporaries as feminine preoccupations. These same activities at Lourdes, where female pilgrims dramatically outnumbered male pilgrims, were even more likely to be seen as women’s work. See Schor.

108 Suzanne K. Kaufman 26. All cards are from the author’s personal collection. 27. One indication of the popularity of postcard writing for pilgrims is the extraordinary revenue made by the state from the sale of postage stamps at Lourdes; the prefect of the region claimed revenues of over 100,000 francs from the sale of stamps for 1907 alone; see Archives Nationales F7 12734, Rapport du préfet des Hautes-Pyrénées, 6–7. 28. For statistics on visitors to Lourdes today, see the official Lourdes Web page, .

6 Balzac’s Golden Triangles in the Colonial Genealogies of French Modernism Liz Constable

Sometimes, however, the compensatory fantasies of the naive man are more accurate about the world than the realist Balzac is credited with being. The alienation that occasioned his writing—it is as though every sentence of his industrious pen were constructing a bridge into the unknown—is itself the secret life he was trying to discover by guesswork. The same thing that separates people from one another and keeps the writer isolated from them is what keeps the movement of society going, the movement whose rhythm Balzac’s novels are imitating. (Theodor W. Adorno ‘Reading Balzac’) The past decade has seen far-reaching shifts and revisions in scholars’ use of the terms modern, modernity, and modernism as periodizing and critical lenses. Prompted by the stark divergences between disciplinary understandings of the terms, Mary Gluck (intellectual and cultural historian) and Susan Stanford Friedman (feminist literary and cultural critic) take the divergent disciplinary definitions as grounds to ask how interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scholars can productively rethink these terms. Friedman identifies one of the most stymieing divergences when she writes that, ‘the epitome of modernity for those in the social sciences is precisely what modernity dismantles for those in the humanities’ (Chapter 1, 20). As Friedman and Gluck both note, from their interdisciplinary sites, if social scientists tend to follow historians, and define modernity through reference to the initial break with Medieval institutions and the gradual emergence of secular, rational humanism, the bourgeoisie, the nation state, and transitions to urban culture, by contrast, scholars in the humanities understand the modern as a break away from, or interruption to, many of those developments. Both scholars of modernism, however, work with and through such disciplinary divergences. For Friedman, ‘definitional dissonance matters’ (29) and she 109

110

Liz Constable

suggests that scholars resist attempts to further corral the definitions from outside, so to speak, and work instead from the midst of the dissonance. Friedman proposes that one productive response for interdisciplinary scholars of modernity, modernisms, and the avant-garde is to examine how the dissonance matters, and to consider such tensions as indicators of the ‘contradictory dialogic running through the historical and expressive formations to which the terms themselves allude’ (29–30). Cultural artifacts supposedly defined, located, or identified by the terms modern, modernism, or modernity, she suggests, are themselves invariably engaged in what I call ‘dramas of differentiation,’ and in Balzac’s case, a ‘melo-drama of differentiation,’ around the meanings to give to the very same names, categories and identifications. For my research on the metropolitan/colonial genealogies of French modernism, Friedman’s proposal contains an inviting call to attend to cultural genealogies of medium, language, genre, and image as they respond to and are transformed by early nineteenth-century globalizing forces. In this chapter, I examine questions raised by Friedman’s and Gluck’s work for interdisciplinary scholars of French modernity, modernism and the avant-garde through a case study of just such a transnational drama of differentiation, of migrations and translations, in Balzac’s Girl with the Golden Eyes [La Fille aux yeux d’or ] (1834).1 By analyzing first how its reception history has attempted to corral the text’s own definitional dissonances around modernity and modernism through allusions to, rather than analysis of, its so-called decadence, I show how this lens misses the text’s formative role in colonial genealogies of consuming subjects of modernity. I undertake a historicizing materialist and psychoanalytic reading of Balzac’s text in dialogue with Gluck’s cultural historical and literary reappraisal of modernism and urban culture in nineteenth-century Paris. I expand Gluck’s framework to engage with the metropolitan–colonial geo-political grounds of emergence of The Girl with the Golden Eyes in ways that complement and concretize critics’ all-important, yet under-analyzed, references to Orientalist structures of representation. Critics frequently cite Balzac’s 1834 text when they point to the emergence of a specifically French nineteenth-century cultural/literary topos that is, later in the century, more familiarly designated as decadently modern, though not necessarily modernist—for reasons I discuss later—urban, and Orientalizing.2 A text ahead of its time, critics observe. ‘For, isn’t French decadence a fin-de-siècle phenomenon?’ their analyses legitimately imply. Yes, and yet, as I will argue, such a consensus is simply the point of departure for a critical historicizing perspective on the text’s relationship to French modernism and modernity, not an end-point. Set in 1830s Paris, the text’s narrative motor and hermeneutic quest are set in motion by Henri de Marsay, a dandified protagonist, proto-modernist artist who desires to know more about, and to possess, ‘the girl with the golden eyes,’ Paquita, a young mixed-race woman living in Paris. When Paquita turns out to be the

Balzac’s Golden Triangles 111

lover of a half-sister of De Marsay whom he has never met, the Marquess of San-Réal, the recognition of shared bloodlines and a shared object of desire triggers a murderous crescendo to the erotic rivalry. Such a bare-bones overview of the narrative nevertheless discloses a familiar taxonomy of topoi—metropolitan exoticist fantasies about a feminized object of desire, incestuous desire, non-reproductive, and indeterminate sexualities, and violent death triggered by desire—that have prompted critics to define the text as decadent and Orientalizing. Yet, when critics resort to identifying and taxonomizing in the guise of analysis, and situate the text in terms of decadent and Orientalizing strategies, this can constitute as unhelpful a critical engagement as is recourse to the supposedly defining anchor of ‘modern’ for interdisciplinary scholars. Since Orientalizing strategies rely on intertextual repetitions and citations, to simply identify ‘Orientalist’ structures of representation in a text can inadvertently reinforce an ahistoricizing approach to literary and cultural analysis.3 ‘Decadence,’ too, is as unsatisfying a critical lens as Orientalism, because with the exception of a very small group of nineteenth-century writers, French modernist artists and writers rarely adopt the term as one by which they identify themselves. Functioning instead somewhat analogously to the term ‘postmodernism’ in recent decades, decadence is deployed invariably as a term proffered as denunciation, what Richard Gilman refers to as ‘an onlooker’s term,’ and designating a regrettable hiatus in modernism (19). The would-be critical lenses interposed between readers and The Girl with the Golden Eyes—decadence, decadent subjects, and Orientalism—obscure most significantly the text’s informative fictional mediation of formative stages of consuming subjects of modernity in relation to the aesthetics and politics of French modernism. In so doing, they get close to, but miss, analyzing nineteenth-century French metropolitan modernity as a conjunctural phenomenon that is inseparable from its global context of metropolitan–colonial economic interdependencies, and fail to read the large geo-political contexts shaping aesthetic boundary-drawing in nineteenth-century France. To expose the text’s participation as a cultural artifact that itself engages in the very drama of differentiation about meanings of modernity and modernism allows readers to discern the narrative attempts to try out historically available concepts and frames of meaning for social changes related to substance dependency, colonial trade, and the impact of commodification on patterns of aesthetic and sexual desire.4 And so following Friedman, rather than corral from outside, I argue with her that the messiness of the insides matter and embody material histories: text and context have permeable borders, and textual dissonance materializes the continuities and breaks that are subsequently consolidated to mark the boundaries and distinctions in critical histories. When Henry James writes on Balzac in 1875, his perspective constitutes an early and yet very apposite opening critical chapter that prefigures many

112

Liz Constable

of the subsequent problems in the text’s reception history much closer to our time. His words open up the matter of definitional dissonances within the text. He writes here about Henri de Marsay, the protagonist of The Girl with the Golden Eyes, and offers an example of the equivocal and evocative strategy that yokes decadence to Orientalism: ‘the account of De Marsay in La Fille aux yeux d’or is an example of the “sumptuous” gone mad’ (114).5 By placing quotation marks around his usage of the ‘sumptuous,’ James exemplifies the allusive motor of decadence that fuels a steamrolling of material histories just as references to Orientalist representations gather ahistorical and uncritical mass when they simply identify intertextual networks of references. Sumptuousness could take us to consumption and the beginnings and ends of production and consumption routes. Yet an understanding of how The Girl with the Golden Eye’s mediates early nineteenth-century sumptuousness—a textual phenomenon that needs to be analyzed through the ways that commercial and colonial trade extended possibilities of consumption to new social groups—hovers just out of critical range. And the resulting changes in the matrices of domestic social distinction are alluded to, yet left unexplained. When we turn to Mario Praz’s magisterial work on decadent literature, The Romantic Agony, in his chapter entitled, appropriately, ‘Byzantium,’ he dispenses with James’s coyness, and points readers directly to the figure of the hermaphrodite. Praz’s metonymic reduction of the text to the hermaphrodite, presumably an allusion on his part to Paquita’s mixed race, and her erotic relations with both sexes, makes of her a stock character in familiar decadent, exoticizing line-ups. But if Praz’s metonymic reduction may do little in and of itself to advance critical analyses of the text’s engagement with modernity or modernism, it is significant that he does not refer to the androgyne, more commonly featured as a figure of modernism (Praz 318). The figure of the hermaphrodite, understood as a structure marked by superfluity and inadequacy, too much and too little, could do quite significant critical work if we use it to make visible the narrative’s contradictory, and split, representation of the effects that transnational translations and deals have on consuming subjects of global modernity in the early decades of the nineteenth century.6 It is striking that critics have not attended to the implications of the text’s dense network of references to the nineteenth-century opium trade. Nor have they examined its split, and contradictory, dissonant discourses on consuming subjects in metropolitan and colonial contexts, or the significance of opium in the text’s mediation of effects of market capitalism on space, time, desire, sociality, desires, and aesthetics. The Girl with the Golden Eyes can be usefully understood, I suggest, as an attempt to find terms for, and narrate, commodity logic’s capacity to efface the connections between political economy and culture, production and consumption, and colonies and metropolis. At the same time, the text undertakes a narrative and epistemological attempt to situate the significance of altered states of consciousness

Balzac’s Golden Triangles 113

for the artist in modernity within evidence of the forces of globalization barely understood as such in the 1830s.7 The dramas of differentiation, then, that remain stuck in the craw of Balzac’s text, and that The Girl with the Golden Eyes is unable to digest, metabolize or define in narrative terms, are posed at the global level by early nineteenth-century colonial and commercial triangles of interdependency.8 One narrative about the ingestion of substances (literal consumption) finds form through a narrative about the impacts of commodification on consciousness, and vice versa. Balzac’s narrative melodrama functions, I suggest, as a search for the concepts, and the abstractions, that make sense of narrative relations and boundaries between needs and desires, will and compulsion, states of consciousness and altered states of consciousness, and mastery and enslavement. It transposes the emerging visibility of (colonial) production of bodies, as well as goods, in the world of (metropolitan) consumption, in the form of narrative interference about labor, production, and the high human price of consumption through concrete geographic and spatial contexts.9 Finally, in addition to the foggy critical lenses provided by decadence and Orientalism in the early and contemporary reception history of this text, critics’ earlier tendency to focus on individual desires (James and Praz), and closer to our contemporary period, on the de-naturalizing and performativity of gendered subjects (Felman, ‘Re-reading,’ Kelly, Beizer) have also somewhat obscured the literary text’s own contextualizing of the sexual secret in a larger socio-historical drama of differentiation. Faced with a text that recounts Henri de Marsay’s infatuation with a young woman of mixed race, the ‘girl with the golden eyes’ (Paquita Valdès), and that narrates his desire to wrest her from an unknown rival’s fiercely possessive affections, critics have focused on analyzing the ‘sexual secret,’ and have traced the workings of literal and rhetorical transvestism, or his specular narcissism (the difference between the visible and the seeable in a framework of sexual difference) in order to account for de Marsay’s consistent misreadings of the cast of characters in his own life drama. However, the focus exclusively on individual characters, and the readability made possible through this prismatic mediation of specular desire and performativity of gender roles both overlook the significance that The Girl with the Golden Eyes presents us with at the level of what Fredric Jameson defines as a ‘character system’ in Balzac’s work (Political 161). When Jameson identifies ‘character systems’ in Balzac’s texts, he suggests that we misunderstand a crucial aspect of Balzac’s narrative apparatus if we attribute primary focus to the hermeneutic quest at the level of the individual protagonists. For Jameson, in attributing character or psychological traits to individual protagonists, critics miss Balzac’s distribution of the workings of desire across a character system that does not privilege, or valorize, the monadized experience of the subject. In the 1830s, the medical and juridical consternation and concern that were later gathered together, and contained, so to speak, under the model of addiction, and the equally questionable

114

Liz Constable

concept of ‘addicted subjects,’ found expression, instead, as a mass of questions, and conflictingly dissonant responses, swirling around issues of will, morality, sickness vs. health, productive subjects vs. non-productive subjects, realist representation vs. imaginative transformation of that reality. It is Paquita’s luminously radiant golden eyes that provide an initial clue to the opium trade motor in the narrative structure. And then the text’s obsessive representation of the dazzling connotations of gold as universal equivalent in monetary terms points unambiguously towards the text’s interweaving of narrative perspectives on the two processes: the process of literal consumption (the taking of substances into the body) and the structural transformation of subjective experiences of need and desire through commodification. The interweaving becomes even more explicit because the text’s metaphoric network combines consumption and pleasure through a series of transactions where Paquita with the ‘golden eyes’ functions more significantly as a site of interchanges or deals than as a character in her own right. Balzac’s narrative is organized as rounds in a melodrama of differentiation that is staged as a series of transnational intersemiotic encounters and translations where characters make deals through and across different sign systems: racial, linguistic, sexual, and topographical.10

Tangles between triangles of desire and colonial golden triangles Although opium was well established in France by the 1830s both as medicine and drug, sedative and stimulant, Balzac’s opening description of Paris does not immediately announce subjects ‘under the influence.’ Instead Balzac anthropomorphizes the city as living death through the hermaphrodite (too much and too little) as an underlying structure and character system. The city is a writhing, tormented monster, exhausted, poisoned, too young and too old, subject to labor pains, yet also in its death throes, and for whom there is no escape through death. Multiplication, mutation, and deformation replace growth and generation. Unnatural growth figures chronological confusion, where youth and old age, birth and death, combine to represent Paris as a capricious tyrant, as both, ‘a queen, who always with child is vexed with the irresistible desires of a pregnant woman’ (Girl 324) and also as exhausted world leader, who has ‘premature wrinkles’ (324). The city has the undead quality later attributed to the addict, consumed by desire, yet whose appetites are never sated by consumption, and whose melancholic recourse to drugs offers temporary release from awareness of an undefined and inarticulable loss. Although the dependent social body Balzac describes bears the traits of what medical and legal discourses later in the century attributed to the shortcomings of the individual psyche, the same description of a self-poisoning city—exhausted by its desires, and yet also abuzz with the desire for further stimulation—also describes

Balzac’s Golden Triangles 115

and defines a key dimension of the structural impact of commodification as the deathly binding of living forms into dead ones through the universal equivalent of money.11 In this respect, commodification’s creation of needs at a structural level parallels the melancholic cravings of the person in a state of addiction, who seeks out external supplements to summon into being an object where before there was nothing. The text’s narrative confusion about how to represent social phenomena resulting from commodification and changing patterns of consumption (structural or subjective?) drives its melodrama of differentiation, which in turn demands that protagonists (and critics) constantly refocus their reading lenses. Things are never quite what they seem at first, nor does the text settle on a single epistemological framing lens through which to explain the changes it represents. However, as I mentioned above, critics themselves have tended to do the opposite—that is, settle on a frame—and have focused primarily on the confusion in the economy of socio-sexual roles to the exclusion of the metropolitan–colonial narrative. And here, a look at one of the most insightful psychoanalytic readings of illegibility, the difference between the visible and the seeable in the socio-sexual economy, Shoshana Felman’s ‘Rereading Femininity,’ makes clear why the textual evidence ought to point critics to take into account the triangular interdependency of metropolitan and colonial economies as inseparable from the socio-sexual economy.12 Without doubt, Felman’s article is one of the most insightful and enticing ‘Open Sesames’ to Balzac’s text. She interprets Henri de Marsay’s desire for Paquita as a desire that her golden eyes reflect back to him an image of the integrity of his masculinity. Felman argues that Henri’s failure to find the desired reflection of his own masculinity in Paquita throws his specular, narcissistic economy progressively into crisis: what is visible is not the same as what he can see, or the seeable. However, not until the final scene of the narration does Henri discover that his rival for Paquita’s affections is not a Marquis, but a Marquise, and in fact his own half-sister, unknown to him, Margarita-Euphémia Porrabéril, Marquise de San-Réal, and owner of her lesbian lover, Paquita Valdès, whom she has purchased from Paquita’s mother. The critical strengths of Felman’s post-structuralist psychoanalytic approach emerge clearly. However, so do the shortcomings of abstracting textual subjects of modernity from the very social structures that produce their desires, and of overlooking the historical genealogies of central working concepts of psychoanalysis itself, part and parcel of the histories of modernity. If we expand the focus of Felman’s analysis outwards to examine the larger transnational narratives embedded in The Girl with the Golden Eyes, a psychoanalytic understanding of socio-psychic specularity, and of the gap between the visible and the seeable finds itself reframed within the text’s own perspective on the economic monster of global speculation and colonialism in modernity, and within the text’s historicizing of fetishism. Balzac’s text chronicles

116

Liz Constable

as it transforms the social text of urban modernity in its interdependence with its colonies: it takes the concrete social realities resulting from a loss of unequivocal topographical boundaries between metropolis and colonies, and narrates them as heroic melodramatic epic of the modern world. This dimension of Balzac’s narrative corresponds to what Gluck defines as popular flânerie, which she defines not just as a cultural identity for the artist in modernity, ‘but a particular kind of textual and visual practice’ adopted by the urban realist whose perception of urban modernity allows him to ‘imagine objects and phenomena within larger contexts that remain inaccessible to ordinary observers’ (77). Just as the popular melodrama, Balzac’s text embodies the work of a popular flâneur of the 1830s and ‘40s in that it provides, ‘a language and an ideology that could [ ... ] make transparent to ordinary citizens the hidden workings of the modern world’ (Gluck 45). It attempts to enlarge the seeable to account for what is visible but not known. And yet, simultaneously, through the figure of the exoticizing dandy Henri de Marsay, the text puts into play another, later figure of the artist in modernity, a rudimentary prefiguring of what would subsequently develop as the Baudelairian avant-garde flâneur, for whom, ‘Modernity had ceased to be a social text, that waited to be deciphered by the urban writers, and became an aesthetic construct, that needed to be freshly created through the artist’s imaginative act’ (103). Balzac represents De Marsay with an almost hyperbolically (perhaps parodically) proleptic imaginative expansiveness that extends (via exoticism) through and beyond the ordinary and everyday to the extraordinary. He emerges as an almost ‘wild’ (to return to James’s term) artist of modernity who reopens, so to speak, a rhetorical distance within metropolitan–colonial interdependencies and asymmetries through the enclosed world of autonomous artistic creation. Balzac’s own contradictory logic about the modes of experiencing and consuming what is ‘new’ in early nineteenth-century France takes form, then, through a split discourse about the impact of changing patterns of consumption, and their impact on French modernity, modernism and avantgarde aesthetics. But if, following Gluck’s re-evaluation of French modernity and modernism, the latter, which she aligns with avant-gardism in France, can be ‘seen as a radically new cultural practice and artistic identity that emerged sometime around 1830 (2), Balzac’s text is doubly split. From her perspective, the various arguments made to define modernism solely in terms of aesthetic autonomy (Huyssen, After, Bourdieu, Rules, Calinescu) do little to help us understand French ‘low modernism,’ or ‘modernism in the street’ by which she designates the popular flâneurs as modernist artists who are the spokespeople and translators of the experiences of everyday life in modernity. In directing cultural historians to consider relational logics at work and the unstable middle grounds between divergent French modernist logics at work in cultural artifacts of modernity, her work prompts a question about how to make sense of that unstable ground in Balzac.

Balzac’s Golden Triangles 117

Spacing out: Reversals of spaces and vectors of power in colonial interdependencies Balzac’s representation of the city of Paris as dependent social body adopts the structural psychic motility of the master–slave dynamic, later to be associated with the addictive state. Social ambition and the desire for wealth transform social relations, which in turn produce a master–slave dynamic, marked by the caprices and whims of ‘the despotism of aristocratic desire’ (Balzac, Girl 316). ‘The whip of self-interest’ (316) and ‘the plague of ambition’ (316) drive citizens towards greater and greater inequalities in power relations, yet also wear them down to an all-pervasive social uniformity attributable to their servile condition, their enslaved dependency on the despotic ruler represented by the desire for ‘gold or pleasure’ (309).13 The second countermovement, which renders social classes uniformly enslaved, through their shared dependency on fulfilling desire, is a phenomenon the text defines as a conversion of social bonds into commercial bonds, a familiar metaphoric move in Balzac. Yet what critics have overlooked is that the text presents a yellowed, discolored tableau of social usure, or exhaustion: ‘a population revolting to look on—gaunt, yellow, sallow’ (309). Balzac’s choice of epithets emphasizes the yellowish, ochre hues of the physiognomies commonly and unequivocally associated with individuals dependent upon opium. Indeed, in his writings on the impact of different stimulants, Balzac himself drew up connections between the ingestion of various substances and the resulting physiologies, including skin color in Le Traité des excitants modernes (part of Pathologie de la vie sociale, published in 1838). The connections to The Girl with the Golden Eyes appear when social class, and not just national difference, functions as a differentiating marker through which Balzac’s text starts to embody, and identify, subjects prone to dependency. Multiple references reinforce earlier indications from the previous passage—the unnatural, yellow, pasty complexion of the population—and it becomes clear that we are dealing with the adoption of the dual functions of opium (drug and medicine) to give form to the structure of a master–slave social dynamic in Balzac’s description of Paris. Paris is an opiate city, simultaneously over-stimulated by the pursuit of pleasure, mastery, and self-mastery, and deadened, or sedated, through its enslavement to this same pursuit. The upper classes indulge in gambling, the pleasures of the table and sex, which are all likened to the fascination held by opium for Turkish opium-eaters. Balzac’s text here joins other early nineteenth-century attempts to come to terms with the patterns of consumption, ways to demarcate the use and abuse of substances ingested, a social, medical drama of differentiation around boundaries separating what De Quincey referred to as ‘the bare relief of pain’ from ‘the excitement of positive pleasure’ (21), and a domestic, or metropolitan drama of differentiation inseparable in form and content from the colonial economic stages on which it played itself out.

118

Liz Constable

Balzac’s familiarity with the contemporary literature on opium has been well documented, though left unanalyzed, somewhat surprisingly, by critics beyond the stage of documentation.14 Nor has this perspective been brought to bear in any way on analyses of The Girl with the Golden Eyes. Although Balzac could not read De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) in the English original, he owned his own copy of Musset’s L’Anglais mangeur d’opium (1828), the first French adaptation of Thomas De Quincey’s 1821 text. In a little-known article in 1830, Litanies romantiques, we find Musset’s Le Mangeur d’Opium heading the list of texts Balzac considered to have most marked the period. He also wrote a short story entitled ‘L’Opium’ (1830).15 Balzac embodies early Romanticism’s familiar opium narrative— opium as stimulant of poetic creation—in the proto-modernist artist/ flâneur Henri de Marsay. De Quincey’s reference to the portability of opium, a stimulant that can be ‘carried in the waistcoat pocket’ (39) finds its way, via De Musset’s translation, in an almost identical form in the words Balzac attributes to De Marsay as he describes Paquita’s eyes: ‘a golden yellow that shines, living gold, gold that has a mind of its own, that desires and wants to come into your waistcoat pocket’ [trans. modified] (338). In the years preceding the publication of Girl with the Golden Eyes, in France, both the medical world and the artistic world focused their attentions on the uses of opium as a remedy and as a mind-altering drug. As Paul Butel recounts, in the early 1800s, around fifteen medical theses on opium were defended in Paris and Strasbourg, and this trend continued through the Restoration, with Paul-Émile Botta’s 1829 thesis, ‘De l’usage de fumer de l’opium.’ As is clear from Balzac’s shot at a social theorizing of patterns of consumption in his Traité des excitants modernes, throughout his writings in the 1830s, he strives to determine the boundaries between quantities of substances that give pleasure in moderate doses, even stimulate the aesthetic imagination, and yet become harmful in excessive doses. As we have noted, medical-juridical authorities would later in the century reframe such subjects as ‘objects’ of their reformist intentions through embodying practices and acts in the subject-identity of the pathologized ‘addict.’16 When we examine the respective roles he attributes to various imported commodities in Parisian society, Balzac differentiates three different ‘dosages,’ and three different types, of sustenance, or provisions of ‘foreign substances’ according to social class. At the level of the lower classes, abstract ideas and images of an Orient sustain sexual desire and fantasies; at the next social level up, Oriental goods sustain the bourgeoisie, while in the upper classes, the aristocracy preys on the Orient through its appetite for Oriental bodies. As the description ascends through the social classes, Oriental sustenance progressively materializes, moving from a provocative fantasy in the minds of Parisians to an embodied presence in their lives. Yet, as our analysis of the text will demonstrate, as an abstract non-West turns into a materialized, embodied metropolitan presence, we find a completely predictable rhetorical

Balzac’s Golden Triangles 119

distancing and devalorizing of the hybrid metropolis. Simultaneously, the increasing proximity of an embodied non-West, the shrinking gap between Paris and its colonies, is matched by a contradictory rhetorical countermovement reopening that distance, re-establishing an exoticist Orient as imagined, tellingly, by the hyperbolically self-fashioning artist, Henri de Marsay, Baudelairian modernist-artist flâneur of modernity. In the upper classes, where the commodities in question are human bodies, and where the Marquise de San-Réal purchases Paquita from Paquita’s own mother, the isolated colonial details in a Parisian landscape have now materialized, spread, and taken over. The text emphasizes that the upper classes’ dependence on pleasure-seeking activities, likened to the habits of Turkish opium-eaters, feminizes them. However, the devirilized impotency and lack of will associated with an Oriental invasion of the upper classes, dependent upon satisfying their needs for pleasure, stands in sharp contrast to another representation of those same upper classes, a few pages later, when they are represented as sheltered beauties, chaste, youthful, and sober compared to nuns in a convent but also to hothouse flowers, ‘like rare plants which only unfold their petals at certain seasons and really are exceptional’ (Balzac, Girl 326).17 The metaphors produce dissonance: the cloistered life of religious orders, chastity, sobriety, youthful freshness and innocence clashes rather conspicuously with the hothouse flowers. Balzac superimposes onto the eighteenth-century discourse of Oriental political servility the nineteenth-century associations of bodies susceptible to opium:18 opium-dependent bodies (Chari). It is no news that the discursive consolidation of the lethargic and slothful body of the Oriental addict as an identity is one that the West generated, by encouraging Indian workers to take opium to endure intolerable working conditions, and by selling opium to the Chinese through the triangular trade between England, India, and China.19 Marx, when referring to the East India Company’s manipulation of both Indian and Chinese populations in its profiteering goals, describes the opium trade as, ‘European despotism, planted upon Asiatic despotism by the British East India Company, forming a more monstrous combination than any of the divine monsters startling us in the Temple of Salsette’ (36). Marx replays and reproduces a familiar refrain about Asiastic despotism, but in order to redirect its stigmatizing force back against the ‘monstrous’ western commercial forces responsible for establishing the horrors of the opium trade.20 Marx points us clearly to the structure of this particular economic interdependency: the British East India Company, and European industrialization, urbanization, and modernization are dependent, to a large extent, upon the profits that the colonial trade in opium provides for their growth. In Marx’s analysis of the interdependency connecting Europe and Asia around the desired object, opium, the colonies are the provider and European industry is dependent. In terms of what we are discovering about the text’s double relationship to French modernity in its global contexts, it

120 Liz Constable

is crucial to note that Marx likens the ‘planting’ of European despotism in Asia to the planting of a poisonous seed, giving us a new global economic resonances for the classic topoi of texts labeled as decadently modern. When we turn to Balzac’s text, the cause and effect relationship governing the metaphorics of economic deals noted by Marx is, unsurprisingly, at first, simply reversed in that The Girl with the Golden Eyes presents the commercial contacts with colonies as sources of familial degeneration. In turn, the degenerative contact would seem to be responsible for deviations in the paternal guarantor of authority. The fathers in the text are absent. There is no sign of Paquita’s father, and Henri’s own father, Lord Dudley, is not only absent, but located through two references to dubious commercial dealings and sexual involvements in the colonies. Father of Henri, he is also the father of Euphémie (the Marquise), Henri’s half Spanish half-sister, who returns to Paris ‘with a young Creole from the Antilles, both of them burdened with the ruinous tastes customary in the colonies’ (331). The unspecified, yet ruinous, tastes associated with the colonies are alluded to again later when the text connects Lord Dudley directly with the English masterminding of the opium trade through the East India Company as it alludes to his sexual encounters that will remain unprotected, the text states, by English law. Balzac’s text confirms Eve Koskfsky Sedgwick’s argument about the ‘historical interimplications’ (589) of the emergence of the identities of the addict and the homosexual in temporal and structural terms.21 In Balzac’s text, written several decades earlier, what we find instead are textual intimations of such a development. Balzac figures the derailing of the paternal metaphor through a figure familiar to later decadent texts, as a forced, artificially grown hothouse flower, and he provides an otherwise invisible genealogy for the later turnof-the-century topos of the decadently modern hothouse of artifice.22 And in reference to Lord Dudley’s neglect of his illegitimate son, and his purchasing of a surrogate patronym, ‘De Marsay,’ for him, the narrator comments that, ‘paternity is a hot house product cultivated by women, convention and the law’ (328). Henri has two (bad) fathers, yet not even one good one. But the choice of figure does not simply lament a loss of propriety, or locate genealogical degeneration in colonial contexts. All this would be familiar. The metaphor of the hothouse plant, an exotic and topographically hybrid hothouse plant reintroduces the pervasive role of West–East (metropolitan–colonial) relations in structuring Balzac’s metaphoric network. The metaphor materializes, as it displaces, the desirable straight lines of filiation. Balzac is not alone in using the figure of the hothouse in the context of commercial and colonial interdependencies in the nineteenth century. Marx uses the same figure in the first volume of Capital to describe the acceleration of one-sidedly lucrative and monopolistic commercial connections between Europe and her colonies: The colonial system ripened trade and navigation as in a hothouse [ ... ] The colonies provided a market for the budding manufactures, and a vast

Balzac’s Golden Triangles 121

increase in accumulation which was guaranteed by the mother country’s monopoly of the market. The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder flowed back to the mother-country and were turned into capital there. (918, emphasis added) By juxtaposing Balzac’s use of the metaphor with its function in Marx’s text, we see more clearly that the form and structure of Balzac’s narrative operates, at one level, through disavowals and displacements of the human relations of exploitation producing the wealth originating in the colonies, which, in turn, augments domestic capital. In these disavowals, we have a reversal of the relations of provider and dependent as they structured European trade with the colonies; European dependence on colonial labor is disavowed. And yet, allusions to hothouse plants play another role in the colonial genealogy of decadent modernity, one which I am suggesting is specific to post-Romantic texts, and centrally dramatized within Balzac’s short story.23 Marx notes, in the passage from which we quoted above, that national debt remains, in fact, the only collective possession of the nation heavily engaged in colonial trade. In semiological terms, national debt implies a void where one would expect to find a standard, or measure of values, a paternal metaphor, or a general equivalent guaranteeing the circulation of signs in a given sign system. We have already examined the way Balzac’s text narrativizes the bankruptcy of the paternal metaphor through Lord Dudley’s purchase of a patronym, and the effective loss of his own patronym. Balzac’s split, or contradictory, discourse on the colonial contexts for metropolitan modernity unfolds in his narrative as if it were independent, but certainly not ignorant, of Marx’s economic frame of reference. The Girl with the Golden Eyes signals the interdependencies that it fails to recognize as such, but that it nevertheless narrates through semiotic, translational, and transnational bankruptcy. Balzac’s text exhibits the resulting anxiety about reading signs that occurs when a sign system lacks such a guarantor, a general equivalent, and loses its claims to universality. The loss of a general equivalent can expose the linchpins of society, religion, government, and sexuality, as elaborate, naturalized sign systems, and the resulting anxiety about reading signs is equivalent to Freud’s description (in his essay ‘Fetishism’) of the panic which adults experience ‘when the cry goes up that throne and altar are in danger’ (Freud, Sexuality 215).24

Drug deals, expendable intermediaries, and deadly journeys In The Girl with the Golden Eyes, the text leaves us in no doubt that crises are triggered for protagonists through their dealings with different sign systems, through intersemiotic translation between value systems, and through efforts to express value of one thing in terms of another, or, in Marx’s terms, through attempts to search for the relative forms of value. However, the intersemiotic crises surface in scenes of transnational, interlingual, and commercial translations between perplexed protagonists. Intersemiotic crises matter differently

122 Liz Constable

when their historical grounds become accessible. Read together with Freud’s essay on fetishism, Girl with the Golden Eyes becomes a literary stepping-stone back to the eighteenth-century anthropological definition of the fetish, where it not only has a specifically colonial origin, but where it emerges as a boundary concept in the cross-cultural encounters between Portuguese traders and West Africans.25 The space of fetishism is not simply a space of mediation in a discursive sense, but also as a space where mediation of structural (commercial and economic) interdependencies occurs. Balzac’s text, in its urban chronicler’s narrative thread ‘sees things’ from this perspective of spaces of commercial and economic interdependency and this appears as narrative interference to De Marsay’s metropolitan fictions of hyperbolically autonomous subjects, autonomous states of consciousness; Balzac’s urban melodrama narrative exposes economic interdependencies by materializing these structures in human commodity form. Paquita, introduced as ‘a young Creole from the Antilles’ [‘une jeune créole des Antilles’] (331), a slave purchased in the Caribbean by the Marquise de San-Réal, leaves us in no doubt as to her status as human commodity. However, the allusions in her name, to both gold and opium, further reinforce her position as both literal human commodity. Paquita’s admirers (Henri and his friend Paul de Manerville), refer to Paquita as The Girl with the Golden Eyes, the title of Balzac’s text itself.26 This suggests, first, that she herself is the vehicle for a distinct narrative within the larger narrative frame, and also that the protagonists consider Paquita as a text to be deciphered. In this respect, Paquita’s mysteriousness, an enigma of a narrative nature, aligns her with Marx’s definition of the ‘fetishism of the commodity and its secret.’ Paquita’s fetishized status for Henri (as a potential lover he seeks to possess as physical object) presents him with a form that conceals a narrative, or as Marx puts it, ‘The riddle of the money fetish is therefore the riddle of the commodity fetish, now become visible and dazzling to our eyes’ (Capital, vol. 1, 187). As soon as Henri undertakes his quest to know and possess Paquita, the text teems with scenes where characters engage in confused and complicated translation, interpretation and mediation that recall the deals that define drug trading, deals always made between people who must remain strangers to each other. The routes and routines of drug trajectories from producers to consumer, past and present, involve the mediations of expendable human intermediaries in order to protect the traffic itself. In effect, through Henri’s quest, the narrative restages a series of such mediations between expendable human intermediaries in the form of transnational and interlingual encounters between different sign systems that replay the boundary encounters of fetishism’s colonial roots, but now displaced to the metropolis. In this respect, Balzac’s text gives us a narrative about the early stages of the displacement of conflictual ‘contact zones’ of colonial domination from the colonial territories to the metropolis, a historical development that accelerates much later in the twentieth century through the migrations of population after decolonization (Pratt 6).

Balzac’s Golden Triangles 123

Gaining access to Paquita is quite explicitly staged as a problem of decoding and translation between differently coded transnational, linguistic and sign systems. As Henri comments, Paquita appears to him as a translation exercise, or an enigmatic word puzzle, as, ‘a living charade where the right word seems difficult to find’ (369, translation modified). Not only does this description of Paquita take us back to Marx’s description of the narrative ‘riddle’ concealed in the objectified form of the commodity. It also takes us back via a different epistemological and textual route to the questions of visibility and the seeable. These are the dimensions of the narrative that Shoshana Felman analyzes in terms of Henri de Marsay’s narcissistic economy of vision as knowledge (difference seen in terms of the same). By then routing psychoanalytic fictions back through the anthropological and colonial genealogy that remains invisible in Felman’s analysis, distinctions between the visible and seeable become necessarily historically produced knowledges. By this I mean that what is seeable in a given situation is inseparable from the available historical and social frames of meaning-making, and that what is potentially visible is not necessarily seeable through the dominant historical and social frames of intelligibility.27 And indeed, in The Girl with the Golden Eyes, when we take into account the role of social relations mediating the visible and the seeable; and when we take into account commodity logic’s effacing of the connections between political economy and culture, and between production and consumption, it becomes possible to have a firmer critical grasp of the function of Balzac’s split discourse on modernity, the modern and modernism. De Marsay’s exoticist discourse of a modernist artist allows him not to ‘see’ the human labor producing the conditions of possibility for his exoticizing, escapist, trips. At the same time, his blindspot trips him up, as we observe in Henri’s constant stumbling to negotiate the pitfalls implicit in mediating the intersemiotic space separating him from Paquita. De Marsay effects a would-be strategic and self-interested mistranslation of all of his primary texts, one might say, as the Caribbean and the Asia, both sites of disavowed colonial labor and production merge into his drug-enhanced fantasy about greater aesthetic and imaginative stimulation. So taken with what he sees, that is, so preoccupied with feeding his imagined vision of Paquita, he is also incapable of reading the signs of the narrative she is implicitly telling him about production. He remains unable to make the connections between the saids and the unsaids that would allow him to link his narrative about consumption to her narrative about human labor and colonial production. As a luminously visible, yet not seeable, figure for De Marsay, her mediating position in the text between narratives of consumption and production in the opium triangle is most explicitly thematized through her position as lover of both Henri and his half-sister, the marquise. Paquita’s position as mediator might signal that she occupies a space that becomes the site of the undoing of his modernist imagination. De Marsay

124 Liz Constable

had expected her to be a living translation of his exoticist narratives, an embodiment of otherness, yet defined comfortably in the terms of his own specular economy. She is an unfaithful go-between in semiotic terms, and betrays De Marsay’s idealizing narratives, because, as we have seen, his own narratives are exoticizing mistranslations in the first place. As such, she embodies the Neoclassical notion of translation as the beautiful, but disloyal woman, ‘la belle infidèle.’28 However, Balzac goes beyond a simple association between Paquita and opium by linking both to the circulation of meaning in the text. De Marsay’s blindness—his literal bedazzlement in the face of her luminous eyes—is not simply the product of Romantic pride, but more significantly, the formative stages of a modernist subject of modernity, whose illusions of aesthetic autonomy, and of sovereign agency, can be argued to be inextricable from the subject–object, consumption–production, processes of subject-formation that establish subjective autonomy. As we have seen, opium figures the means by which De Marsay enthrones himself as an imaginary divinity; its stimulus inspires him to believe his own fictions, and to see opium as an instrument in his own hands. However, at the same time, he seeks to use opium in order to sedate and control others, specifically Paquita’s mother, la duenna, who keeps guard over the daughter. As a ruse to obtain access to Paquita, he provides her with two separate tiny phials of ink and opium. He intends Paquita to use the former to respond to him, and in effect, by so doing, to write herself into his exoticist fictions. The latter, he intends as a sedative for her mother, ‘l’Argus’ as he calls her since she is the one whose complicity has to be purchased to prevent those same fictions from imploding to disclose the structure of the metropolitan– colonial commerce in which he plays a role. And yet, the opium that De Marsay designs as enhancer of exoticizing fictions, will become the opium which undoes those same fictions, as if the two phials of opium and ink have in fact been confused from the outset, and as if their shared identity brings to its finale the precarious balancing act of De Marsay’s, and not the text’s, keeping the two ends of a narrative about consumption and production apart. When De Marsay seeks to write himself into another imaginary world through opium/Paquita, he provides the ink and opium while oblivious that he is also the dependent figure in a larger colonial and economic narrative, which Paquita exposes, and through which we understand that the ink and opium have written him into that narrative of economic dependency despite himself. Paquita, fetishized as exotic fantasy, to screen the realities of metropolitan–colonial interdependency, turns into a Paquita who exposes those very realities. In the final chapter, the marquise comments that Paquita’s mother’s sale of her daughter attests to an aberrant devaluing of human life in the mother’s culture, and an absence of maternal love. However, her comment obviously points just as tragically and ironically to her misrecognition of the larger context in which the marquise and De Marsay are the ones whose commercial deals find them trading in human bodies as if they were objects. The narrative reaches its gruesome concluding scene when the

Balzac’s Golden Triangles 125

marquise brutally stabs Paquita to death out of jealous rage over her betrayal of her to another. An explosion of vengeful anger, the explosion turns out immediately, however, to have been more of an implosion. I call it an implosion because after this vengefully explosive murder, the marquise and Henri de Marsay meet for the first time, recognize each other, and realize that they had been competing in a quasi-incestuous bond for Paquita’s affections. This scene of recognition between half-sister and half-brother signifies an implosive breaking open, and making visible, of the structures of economic interdependency, substance dependency, and familial relationality that linked the three characters from the beginning. Entitled, ‘La Force du Sang,’ this chapter alludes to Paquita’s unknowing fidelity to bloodlines in her role as the lover of both the half-brother and half-sister. De Marsay repeats the reference about fidelity to blood in his comment that, ‘She remained true to the blood’ (390), and we need to note that Paquita was faithful not only to familial bloodlines in her unwitting participation in a quasi-incestuous triangle. All three characters are related beyond familial bloodlines. They are also related through the opiates that are in their bloodstreams, and through their respective roles in two colonial triangles of economic interdependency, where each one of them plays simultaneously roles of provider and dependent. De Marsay and the marquise have participated in the colonial triangles of interdependency while disavowing their roles as dependents, and it is this concluding scene that enacts the recognition of those roles. When we return to our opening questions, we see that attempting to frame the text through either French ‘modernity’ or French ‘modernism’ would be somewhat unhelpful. Such a critical move would likely obscure the double, and contradictory, narrative threads that Balzac’s text presents on modernity and modernism: on the roles of modes of consumption, substance dependency, colonial trade, and the impact of commodification on modern urban life, and on the roles of French modernist aesthetics. Henri de Marsay, figure of metropolitan degeneracy, also bears the aestheticizing vision of the modernist artist, enclosed in a desired aesthetic and economic autonomy. And the text’s own causal mystifications (its Orientalizing strategies) are also embedded in a much more informative, latent, and yet legible text of what Gluck calls early French modernist ‘popular flânerie,’ a ‘kind of textual and visual practice’ of metropolitan modernity in a global context that allows ‘imagines objects and phenomena within larger contexts that remain inaccessible to ordinary observers’ (77): the material embodiments of commercial returns that link the three main characters’ triangle of desire to the global golden triangles of colonial trade in opium.

Notes 1. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to the English translation of Balzac’s La Fille aux Yeux d’Or refer to the Hunt translation. 2. See Prendergast, Balzac, 19–44; Beizer; Perry; and Kelly.

126

Liz Constable

3. To borrow Frank Kermode’s terms for the reduction of texts to codes implanted in us by culture or institutions, Orientalism reduced to a list of intertextual topoi no longer has any critical bite because it has been ‘processed to coherence’ (54). 4. See Burke’s insightful chapter where he defines each work of literature as ‘the addition of a word to an informal dictionary’ (300). 5. See also Tintner. 6. See Weil; Felski, Gender; Benjamin, Baudelaire; Garber, Vested; Epstein and Straub. 7. It should be noted that for Balzac, the term ‘the Orient’ has no referential significance, and represents a somewhat haphazard amalgam of the Far East, the Middle East, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain, a referential misconnection whose effects we will turn to later. For a detailed study of Balzac’s use of the term ‘the Orient,’ see Citron. 8. See Memmi’s study of the triangle structuring relations between the dependent, the provider, and the object (substance, ideal, experience, feeling) desired. 9. The colonial trade in question is defined by two distinct triangles: the triangular trade developed in the eighteenth-century between France, Africa, and the New World colonies, and the triangular trade linking England, India, and China through the British East India Company’s opium trade. 10. The term ‘intersemiotic translation,’ or transmutation, is Roman Jakobson’s term for translation between different sign systems. This term is distinct from intralingual translation (rewording) and interlingual translation (translation proper). See Jakobson 233. 11. See Teresa Brennan’s recent study of the deadly the depletion of the environment that comes with capitalism’s commodification. 12. For an exception to this critical tendency, and for a convincing materialist historical analysis of the text’s hybrid figures in terms of socio-political changes internal to French society, see Kadish, ‘Hybrids’. 13. See Montesquieu, on the uniformity and submissiveness of individuals living under a despotic ruler: ‘un gouvernement despotique ... saute, pour ainsi dire, aux yeux; il est uniforme partout: comme il ne faut que des passions pour l’établir, tout le monde est bon pour cela’ (552). 14. See Hughes, Crépet, and Astre, all quoted by Stäuble-Lipman Wulf (Baudelaire, Un Mangeur 33–42). 15. Alfred de Musset’s adaptation of De Quincey, L’Anglais mangeur d’opium, which appeared in 1828, was the first version of De Quincey to have any significant impact in France. In 1827, a few selected passages of The Confessions of an Opium Eater appeared in translation in the September 29 and 30 issues of La Pandore. However, writers influenced by De Quincey appear to have turned to Musset rather than the La Pandore articles. See ch. 4, ‘La fortune des Confessions en France,’ in Baudelaire, Un Mangeur 33–42. 16. In addition to Sedgwick, see also Berridge and Edwards. 17. Familiarity with Balzac’s corpus suggests that indeed, the transposition of the harem into the convent exists elsewhere in his writings, for example, in the Contes Drôlatiques (1833). 18. I use the term ‘susceptible to opium’ quite deliberately here since part of the creation of the opium-dependent body relies on such a notion: that certain bodies, marked in certain ways (as lower class, etc.,) are more likely to develop a dependency. See Rowntree, who opens his third chapter, entitled ‘Burma,’ by commenting ‘Burma occupies a distinct position in regard to the opium habit. Its people are said to be peculiarly susceptible to the drug’ (144).

Balzac’s Golden Triangles 127 19. See Karl Marx on the opium trade: ‘We cannot leave this part of the subject without singling out one flagrant self-contradiction of the Christianity-canting and civilization-mongering British government. In its imperial capacity it affects to be a thorough stranger to the contraband opium trade, and even to enter into treaties proscribing it. Yet, in its Indian capacity, it forces the opium cultivation upon Bengal, to the great damage of the productive resources of that country; compels one part of the Indian ryots to engage in the poppy culture; entices another part into the same by dint of money advances; keeps the wholesale manufacture of the deleterious drug a close monopoly in its hands; watches by a whole army of official spies its growth, its delivery at appointed times, its inspissations and preparation for the taste for the Chinese consumers, its formation into packages especially adapted to the conveniency of smuggling, and finally its conveyance to Calcutta, where it is put up for auction at the Government sales, and made over by the state officers to the speculators, thence to pass into the hands of the contrabandists who land it in China’ (Marx and Engels, On Colonialism, 219–20). 20. Marx’s writings on colonialism have been discussed at length by various critics in terms of their problematic representations of non-western modes of production. This is not the place to go into these issues. 21. Referring to The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Sedgwick writes, ‘drug addiction is both a camouflage and an expression of the dynamics of male same-sex desire and its prohibition: both books begin by looking like stories of erotic tensions between men, and end up as cautionary tales of solitary substance-abusers’ (589). 22. The hothouse flower is a very familiar figure in later texts more conventionally associated with the phenomenon of decadence, from Des Esseintes’s cultivation of exotic flowers in Huysmans’s À Rebours, through Oscar Wilde’s green carnations, to Theodore Wratislaw’s little-known poem ‘Hothouse Flowers.’ 23. See Bongie’s argument on fin-de-siècle European writers who indulge in an intensified exoticist discourse as a compensatory gesture in response to a loss of social differentiations (11). Bongie’s argument about the split nature of exoticist discourse is one with which I agree, but I would locate the split earlier in the nineteenth century. 24. In Freud’s text, the anthropological origins are not completely effaced, since Freud’s understanding of fetishism theorizes the fetishistic double logic of affirmation and disavowal as a form of credulity that is childlike. 25. In the eighteenth-century context, however, this cross-cultural encounter was specifically a religious one, as alluded to in Freud’s comment on the panic when throne and altar are in danger. Charles De Brosses’s argument rests upon maintaining the belief in a distinction between a western cultural zone of Enlightenment and rationality, preserved by an understanding of the invisible workings of a Christian God (religion as a conceptual abstraction, prerogative of civilized peoples) and a contrasting non-western zone—ancient Egypt and contemporary Africa—of superstition, and primitive, childlike practices of fetishism (religion as the over-valuing of material objects deemed the only ‘spirituality’ accessible to fetishistic peoples). 26. The Garnier–Flammarion edition points out that in the manuscript version, ‘La Fille aux yeux jaunes’ appears at several moments instead of ‘La Fille aux yeux d’or’ (334). 27. For an analysis of the materialist grounds the visible and the seeable, see Hennessy. 28. See Kadish ‘Translation’; see also Chamberlain.

7 Modern, Moderne, and Modernistic: Le Corbusier, Thomas Wallis and the Problem of Art Deco Bridget Elliott

The 1925 exhibition covered the Esplanade of the Invalides and the banks of the Seine from Concorde to Alma with constructions of plaster. Plaster was king, and there was an astonishing display of fancy and foliate ornament. The exhibition left behind some ‘1925 Yearbooks’ which spread the style all over Paris and the rest of France. We had undertaken to put up a Pavillon of L’Esprit Nouveau which would indissolubly link the equipment of the home (furniture) to architecture (the space inhabited, the dwelling), and to town-planning (the conditions of life of a society). In the face of mass difficulties—without a penny—we had put up the Esprit Nouveau Pavillon, built ‘for real’ [ ... ]. It stayed intact throughout the following winter, while as soon as the autumn of 1925 set in the plaster palaces started crumbling [ ... ]. Le Corbusier, The Decorative Arts of Today, 1925, xiii–xv. At the risk of being criticized, I will go further and say that a little money wisely spent in the incorporation of some form of decoration, especially colour, is not money wasted. Thomas Wallis, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 1933, 307. The modern movement in architecture has developed rapidly in this country during the last few years. By this I do not refer to the increase of modernistic garages, or the moderne dance halls and amusement palaces of our seaside resorts. Whilst at first glance these ‘imitations’ may seem to point to a growing interest in contemporary design, on closer observation it becomes clear that they are not only misguided effort but even a positive danger. It should be said at once that the appeal of the ‘modernistic’ is the spurious appeal 128

Modern, Moderne, and Modernist 129

of surface decoration: yet another manifestation of that passion for ‘façade’ which dragged its life through the nineteenth century and which now presents itself in its most heterogeneous form. (John) Leslie Martin, Circle International Survey of Constructive Art, 1937, 215.1 Whether or not they felt it was a good thing, by the 1930s most English architectural critics agreed that Le Corbusier was probably the best-known figure in the modern architectural movement. Some had visited his Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris and many had read Frederick Etchell’s English translations of his Towards a New Architecture (1927) and The City of Tomorrow (1929).2 According to one critic writing for the Architectural Review in 1928, ‘Le Corbusier’s book in Mr. Etchell’s spirited translation has raised a storm,’ dividing traditionalists from those receptive to the new ideas (P. M. Stratton, qtd. in Hinchcliffe 4). As Tanis Hinchcliffe observes, the translation of Le Corbusier’s work unleashed a wave of articles introducing British readers to contemporary architectural practice on the Continent. ‘By now the isolation of the English architects had been broken, and although they might not like the developments going on in Europe, at least, if they read any of the architectural magazines or even the secular press, they were no longer ignorant of them’ (Hinchcliffe 12–13). By 1931 the architectural critic John Gloag could report that Le Corbusier’s books have ‘stimulated, irritated or amused many English architects’ and that ‘few discussions about modern architecture take place, either in the Press or in books or at meetings of societies that devote their time to aesthetic analysis, without the name of M. Le Corbusier being mentioned, either with acrimony or approval’ (Gloag 200). The following year, in the midst of these turbulent debates, Thomas Wallis, a prominent industrial architect, designed the Hoover Factory on the Great

Figure 9

Le Corbusier, Pavillon d’Esprit Nouveau, exterior view (1925)

© ADAGP Paris and DACS, London 2009.

130 Bridget Elliott

West Road in the London suburb of Perivale, a building which, for better or worse, has been considered a leading example of English art deco architecture. The showpiece of the factory complex was Building Number 1 (see far right section), a sleek, white, two-storey structure with an ornately decorated façade comprised of Egyptian elements, such as a battered frame and recessed colonnade, further enlivened by a sprinkling of Central and North American Indian, cubist and machine motifs (Mackertich and Mackertich 2; Skinner 151). The central façade, flanked by a tower at each end whose corner windows were clearly inspired by Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower in Potsdam (1920–24), alluded to scientific experimentation and indicated that Wallis had kept abreast of new continental architectural trends. As the ‘fanciest of the Fancy factories’ that Thomas Wallis designed between 1927 and 1935 (including the Firestone Factory (1929) and the Pyrene Factory (1930) in the London suburb of Brentford as well as the India Tyre & Rubber Company (1930) in the Glasgow suburb of Inchinnan), the Hoover Factory soon attracted the wrath of certain English proponents of Le Corbusier’s modernist agenda (Skinner 149). In 1934 Maxwell Fry condemned the factories along the Great West Road for exhibiting ‘all the worst sentimentalities of uncultured commercialism,’ a view that was later echoed in 1951 by Nikolaus Pevsner who claimed the Hoover Factory was ‘perhaps the most offensive of the modernistic atrocities along this road of typical by-pass factories’ (Fry qtd. in Skinner 127; Pevsner 130). Pevsner’s choice of the word modernistic was deliberately abusive, echoing the sentiments of earlier writers such as Leslie Martin, an up-and-coming architect and critic who argued that, as misguided imitations, the spuriously decorated modernistic garages and moderne dance halls and seaside palaces were positively dangerous. But what exactly were these modernistic architectural imposters pretending to be and who was being fooled? According to Martin, this dangerous

Figure 10

Wallis, Gilbert & Partners, Hoover Factory, Building 1, exterior view (1932)

© Angelo Hornak Photo Library.

Modern, Moderne, and Modernist 131

category of modernistic architecture utilized recent construction techniques and materials such as steel and reinforced concrete to erect buildings that were clothed (or decorated) in older historical styles. What Martin perceived as a time lag between modern engineering and older aesthetic sensibilities (or the separation of technique and form) was a source of serious concern; irrefutable proof of the fact that, in failing to find new modes of expression, architecture and the arts were ceasing to exert a formative influence in the life of modern, industrial society (218–19). The lamentable result was ‘acres of jerrybuilding’ which is ‘now tudor, now Georgian, now “modernistic” ’ (216). From Martin’s perspective, the general public was being duped by most of the architectural profession. Despite the fact that the public had enthusiastically responded to a machine aesthetic in the realm of engineering by embracing the design of airplanes, it was sadly unaware of ‘the incongruity between its motorcars and its tudor villas’ (218). To rectify the situation, Martin hoped that architects would start using the same machine aesthetic that industrial designers had already perfected in cars, planes, steel bridges, and electric pylons; an aesthetic that valued precision, economy, and exact finish (216). Instead of disguising industrial processes, which prevented people from understanding them, architects needed to develop a style that complemented them. Martin’s essay was published in Circle, a journal he edited with Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, which was devoted to abstract art and avant-garde architecture. Emerging as a leading advocate of International Style architecture, he was already familiar with the work of Le Corbusier, whose 1925 Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau was one of the earliest and most polemical architectural demonstrations of a new industrial aesthetic. It was these proponents of the International School and their followers who would establish the criteria for judging architectural innovation, ultimately determining what belonged to the modernist canon during the interwar years. Unlike the English proponents of Le Corbusier and the International Style who condemned his building as modernistic, Thomas Wallis believed his Egyptian-styled Hoover building was a thoroughly modern testament to the present age of progress, as he explained in a lecture on the subject of factory architecture presented to the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in 1933. As one of very few English architects specializing in this area of work, Wallis urged his colleagues to assist the postwar economic recovery by taking up the challenge of designing efficient factories that fostered the health and well-being of those who worked in them. Modernistic or modern? How does one decide? Clearly the critical stakes are high and much depends on who is using the terms. This is an issue that literary and cultural critic Susan Stanford Friedman has recently addressed by arguing that in the field of modernist studies ‘[d]efinitional dissonance matters. The fact of not only diverse but downright opposite meanings signifies’ (Chapter 1, 29 ). As she explains, ‘[d]ifferent configurations of modernity reflect the different positionalities of

132 Bridget Elliott

their producers, serve different interests, and have different effects. It is this which returns us to the question of politics—how power relations inform not only the cultural artifacts of modernity but also the subsequent readings of them’ (28). This chapter teases out some of these definitional dissonances in the field of art history, by looking at the slippery nature of words like modern, moderne, modernistic, and modernist which have been routinely invoked to make value judgments that have shaped the early twentieth-century architectural canon. In particular we will look at the way that two buildings have been differently positioned within that canon: Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau and Thomas Wallis’s Hoover Factory. While the former has been regarded as stylistically innovative and critically engaged, occupying a central position, the latter has been criticized for its historicist façade and superficial appeal, making occasional (usually not very flattering) cameo appearances in survey textbooks of modern architecture. Modern Architecture since 1900 by William Curtis is such a textbook. Two full chapters are devoted to the early work of Le Corbusier (including his 1925 pavilion), while his later projects are prominently featured in another chapter on the International Style. In contrast, the Hoover Factory by Wallis, along with the Richfield Building in Los Angeles (1928) by Morgan Walls and Clements and the Chrysler Building in New York (1928–30) by William Van Alen, are mentioned only in passing as works of ‘considerable richness’ in the art deco style. Curtis’s dismissive description of these buildings and their art deco qualities is worth citing because it raises a number of issues we will explore further: In each of these [buildings], an armature of Beaux-Arts axial planning was cloaked in modern materials and elaborately decorated and coloured wall surfaces. The attitude behind such forms was far indeed from the ideals of dematerialization, ‘honesty’ and Puritanism which were inherent in the smooth white planes and stark surfaces of the International Style. Ornament was embraced and elaborated in polychrome stripes and violent contrasts of texture; and the style was frequently and blatantly employed in the service of commercial advertising—to attract, to delight, and to persuade. It enjoyed a vogue in the design of things as diverse as cinemas and toasters. There was a notable lack of that cultural highmindedness with regard to industrialism which had propelled the more profound thinkers of the modern movement. (290–91) It is instructive to compare Curtis’s observation that these art deco buildings were superficial and blatantly commercial with his earlier discussion of Le Corbusier’s pavilion that, like the 1925 Soviet pavilion of Konstantin Melnikov, is a ‘masterly propaganda instrument’ (207). Thus, both the Hoover Factory and the Pavillon de L’Espirt Nouveau are cast as highly performative: the one devoted to advertising and the other to propaganda. The

Modern, Moderne, and Modernist 133

rest of this chapter will consider the implications of this architectural performativity, arguing that Le Corbusier’s art pavilion was dressed up as a factory while Wallis’s factory masqueraded as an Egyptian work of art. Despite their ostensibly different styles and functions, we will discover some surprising similarities as both architects tried to find an adequate architectural response to industrial modernity. The modernistic will start to look surprisingly modern (or modernist) and vice versa. *

*

*

The 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes and the debates surrounding it have long been considered an important turning point in modernist visual culture, particularly in the spheres of architecture and design, where the time-honored French tradition of producing an elite range of highly decorated, handcrafted objects (many of which were on display at the exhibition) was called into question by those who advocated simpler, more affordable forms of industrial production. Le Corbusier is usually placed at the forefront of this paradigm shift, leading the charge against the historicist, the handmade, and the decorative in both his Pavillon d’Esprit Nouveau, erected at the edge of the exhibition site, and in a number of publications, including The Decorative Arts of Today which documented the building and provided a more extended explanation of the larger rationale behind it.3 Christopher Green typically describes the Pavillon as being ‘built in the teeth of official hostility’ and functioning as a criticism of the entire exhibition, particularly luxurious pavilions such as Ruhlmann’s ‘Hôtel d’un riche collectionneur.’ According to Green, ‘it was Le Corbusier’s conclusion to the series of L’Esprit Nouveau articles with which, in 1924, he had attacked the very idea of decorative art as alien to the precise logic of a functional approach’ (287).

Figure 11 Le Corbusier, Pavillon d’Esprit Nouveau, interior view with Voisin Plan (1925) © ADAGP Paris and DACS, London 2009.

134 Bridget Elliott

Unlike the temporary ‘plaster palaces’ of the other exhibitors, Le Corbusier’s Pavillon was designed as a durable ‘Citrohan House,’ the smallest individual unit in the large apartment blocks of his Voisin plan to rebuild the centre of Paris.4 Large dioramas and detailed explanations of Le Corbusier’s plan to accommodate some three million people in high-rises were on display in the curved annex of the pavilion. This macro-vision of the future was complemented by other rooms containing carefully arranged displays of home furnishings demonstrating how everyday life would be lived in Le Corbusier’s utopia. The controversies over the Pavillon d’Esprit Nouveau project are like many others surrounding Le Corbusier, who is arguably the best-known figure in the modernist architectural canon.5 An ardent champion of American-style Taylorism and Fordism during the 1920s, he lost his faith in technocratic ideals after the stock market crash of 1929. During the 1930s, he became involved with the regional syndicalist movement that inspired his incorporation of local building traditions, techniques and materials (McLeod 143). This dramatic shift in his architectural practice has generated a wide range of responses to his work, from denunciations of his capitalist complicity and naïve utopianism to celebrations of his humanist architecture during a period of reductive functionalism.6 What interests me here, however, is not so much the debates about the value of Le Corbusier’s architecture, as the way they have overshadowed other important aspects of this reorganization of modernist visual culture. One site of such reorganization is The Decorative Arts of Today, a book that has recently been revisited by several scholars seeking more complex insights into Le Corbusier’s own agenda and position within French culture during the 1920s. Nancy Troy reminds us that Le Corbusier’s anti-decorative stance should not be taken at face value since it obscures the extent to which he participated in the decorative arts before eventually rejecting them (159). According to Troy, it was in his pavilion and The Decorative Arts of Today that Le Corbusier instituted the decisive break between the fine and decorative arts, allowing the former to survive intact and replacing the latter with industrially produced utilitarian objects. In the pavilion, fine art was represented by oil paintings by himself (signed Jeanneret) and Ozenfant which, much like scientific theories, served to demonstrate eternal aesthetic laws and harmonious proportions. In contrast, the objects, ranging from pots and glass beakers to bent-wood chairs and modular storage units, were carefully staged in the model rooms in order to suggest how they might be used in everyday life. Le Corbusier’s claim that ‘decorative art can no longer be considered compatible with the framework of contemporary thought’ (Decorative 127) served, according to Troy, as a pretext for wresting domestic art away from the interior decorator and allocating it to the architect, whose buildings bridged the gap between fine art and utility (196). While the fine arts appealed to the

Modern, Moderne, and Modernist 135

Figure 12

Le Corbusier, Pavillon d’Esprit Nouveau, interior view (1925)

© ADAGP Paris and DACS, London 2009.

cultured mind, the best type of utilitarian objects (progressively perfected through the process of mechanical selection) catered to the body. As Troy reminds us, by reentrenching these sorts of mind/body, artistic/mechanical, male/female divisions, Le Corbusier was resurrecting an old hierarchy of the arts that had prevailed since the Renaissance. The inferior position of the decorative arts had only recently been reversed in 1891 when they were first admitted to the Paris salon and shown next to paintings and sculptures (197). In this respect, Le Corbusier participated in the postwar ‘return to order’ that affected many aspects of French culture, including the practice of leading artists and writers.7 However, he went further than most by claiming that the decorative arts were obsolete rather than merely inferior. For his part, Mark Wigley uses The Decorative Arts of Today to show that Le Corbusier’s radical new ideas about architecture as a flexible, sometimes immaterial system of visual communication can be traced back through the work of Adolf Loos to Gottfried Semper’s ‘Principle of Dressing.’ Arguing that architecture originated with the use of textiles to demarcate dwelling spaces, Semper claimed that ‘[s]pace, house and social structure arrive with ornament’ (Wigley 11). According to Wigley, Loos incorporated Semper’s ideas into essays that appealed to Le Corbusier. However, both Loos and Le Corbusier substituted industrially manufactured goods for Semper’s handmade textiles in the belief that they were the modern equivalent of folk crafts. Like Troy, Wigley shows that the decorative arts played a formative role in the evolution of Le Corbusier’s theory and practice, only to be disavowed as the architect found his own solutions to the problems of modernity. Although Le Corbusier publicly denounced the decorative arts in the 1920s, Tag Gronberg argues that they continued to haunt his Purist fantasy of the modern (60). Despite his repeated assertions that his pavilion was made of ‘real’ materials and contained only useful objects, in the end it, too,

136 Bridget Elliott

was a simulacrum of domestic space. Gronberg observes that Le Corbusier’s insistence on the use value of his objects stretches the limits of credibility when he describes them as a new form of the decorative that has become an orthopaedic extension of human limbs (Le Corbusier, Decorative 72). The constant foregrounding of ‘useful’ objects such as pots in his model rooms bestows upon them a narrative function. In the first instance, the simplicity of the industrial pots reproaches the decorated objects in the other pavilions. Making the decorative seem old-fashioned, such contrasts deploy a developmental logic that Le Corbusier claims to have experienced on a personal level when his naïve enthusiasm for the simple forms of orientalist folk cultures was replaced by a more mature appreciation of western industrial production, something he ‘discovered’ as a young man during a journey through Eastern Europe, Istanbul, and Byzantium (Gronberg 61–62). Above all, it is the figure of Diogenes as the new Purist hero that keeps the threatening specter of decadent excess at bay. Gronberg draws our attention to the number of times he is evoked in Le Corbusier’s book as a naked man who lived in a barrel and rejected all forms of the superfluous, a selfsufficient and invulnerable role model, whose basic housing module could inspire the architects and engineers of modern cities (64). If, as Gronberg argues, the Purist insistence on use value is more fantastic and less pragmatic than we have been led to believe, it is perhaps worth revisiting the equally fantastic and decadent tendencies of art deco that Le Corbusier so insistently attacks in his book. But first we need to take stock of his book’s unorthodox design, which undermines any sense of hierarchy by interspersing short sloganeering texts with images culled indiscriminately from art history books, newspapers, industrial catalogues, and manufacturers’ brochures. Using a process that Beatriz Colomina describes as ‘continuous editing,’ Le Corbusier makes his facts ‘explode under the eyes of the reader by force of the images’ rather than by relying on long passages of descriptive prose (Colomina, Privacy 118–19). In effect, as his working sketches for the project indicate, he envisioned his book as functioning much like a storyboard with different sequences of ‘moving ideas.’ Each chapter was polemically introduced under what he called the sign of the 1925 exhibition (see uppermost square in Fig. 5), functioning as a marker of everything that Purism rejected. At points, Le Corbusier seems almost messianic as he resists deco’s sensuous temptation: What shimmering silks, what fancy, glittering marbles, what opulent bronzes and golds! What fashionable blacks, what striking vermilions, what silver lames from Byzantium and the Orient! Such stuff founders in a narcotic haze. Let’s have done with it. We will soon have had more than enough. It is time to crusade for whitewash and Diogenes. (Decorative 135)

Modern, Moderne, and Modernist 137

Figure 13

Le Corbusier, The Decorative Arts of Today, working sketches (c.1925)

© ADAGP Paris and DACS, London 2009.

These rich colors and materials appeal to the overheated senses of young ladies in boarding schools (134) and to shop-girls (87), not to the rational intellect of the Purist man. As well as serving as a recurrent chapter heading, the 1925 sign functions as a structuring device. Each chapter offers a different way of looking at the 1925 watershed between art deco as the last style of the past and Purism as the threshold of the future. Things reach a crescendo in two chapters near the end of the book. ‘Milestones’ addresses the past and presents a rapid visual survey from art nouveau to art deco.8 In contrast, ‘The Sense of Truth’ celebrates the clean lines of imagery drawn from children’s art, science, industry, and male sport that will inspire a Purist future. However, if Le Corbusier’s Purist present is, as Gronberg has stressed, a fantasy of the future, a critical examination of his characterization of the past might also be in order. As we know only too well, notions of the past, history, and tradition are more complicated than most associated with the early twentiethcentury avant-garde, including Le Corbusier, would have us believe.9 We would do well to heed Rita Felski’s cautionary reminder not to equate modernity with technological, social and cultural change, given the unevenness of development in the twentieth century and the habit the past has of resurfacing in new guises (Doing 69–70). These are issues I want to pursue by reading against the grain of The Decorative Arts of Today and examining Wallis’s Hoover Factory which was precisely the kind of art deco architecture that fell out of critical favor as Le Corbusier’s ideas increasingly gained sway in leading architectural circles. As we have already seen, the supporters of Le Corbusier and the International Style, such as Leslie Martin, Maxwell Fry, Nikolaus Pevsner and, more recently, William J. R. Curtis, strenuously denounced such modernistic atrocities. But were they really as stylistically regressive and reprehensible as these critics have claimed?

138 Bridget Elliott

Figure 14 William Edmeston, cartoon of Hoover Factory, Architectural Review, July 1932, p. 40 © The Architectural Review.

According to proponents of the International Style, it was both dishonest and commercially crass to add a decorative façade to a factory building. A cartoon of the Hoover Building by William Edmeston published in the July 1932 issue of the Architectural Review emphasizes this point by showing readers what the unadorned building might have looked like, implying its decoration was simply an afterthought, not something integral to its design. The accompanying poem, ‘Ornamentia Praecox,’ by Michael Dugdale goes to considerable lengths to drive this point home: The plans are done, the work is over, Finished now the toil and stress. Hark! The draughtsmen sing together Of the joys of wantonness. Past the weary months of labour, Months of planning and of thought. Nought remains (or very little) Ere the good ship comes to port. Plainly limned upon the paper, Comely soon and fair to see, Waiting but for decoration Lies the factory to be. Now complete in all essentials See the plans precise and clear; Practical, but still inhuman, Simple, but a shade severe. Long, too long, have we been thinking, No more need to think again.

Modern, Moderne, and Modernist 139

Now’s the time for fun and frolic, Not for labours of the brain. Leave no space undecorated; Hide those ugly wheels and pipes. Cover them with noughts and crosses, Mess them up with stars and stripes. Now for curves and now for colour, Swags and friezes, urns and jars. Now for little bits of faience, Now for giddy glazing bars. Whoops! Tra-la! let’s all go crazy, Tirra-lirra! let’s go gay. Sanity may come tomorrow, Ornament is in today. What the country wants is beauty, Art’s the thing for industry. Who’d suppose such curves and zig-zags Could conceal a factory.10 In the poem, Dugdale associates the decorative impulse with both an intellectually vacuous popular taste that would find the unadorned rectangular shape of the building too severe, and a crass advertising hype employed by American companies, such as Hoover, that were building branch-plants in Britain. It is no coincidence that the cartoon building was to be dressed in stars and stripes. Although the cartoon structure is identified as the Mechanical Furniture Factory on the Great South Road, Wallis’s exuberant façade is unmistakable. Writing four years later in a more serious vein for the architectural journal, Building, J. R. Leathart condemned the ‘pretty architectural treatments’ of factories that were typically used in elevations facing the main road. He singled out those along the Great ‘Worst’ Road as particularly pernicious because their immediate popularity had spawned a whole host of imitations. According to Leathart, purely rationalized factory buildings (i.e., unadorned and functional) were infinitely preferable, albeit far less popular and numerous (136). The concern voiced by both Dugdale and Leathart that the spheres of art and industry were becoming increasingly confused by this new decorative treatment of factories, warrants further investigation. Evidently they did not want art to become ‘the thing for industry’ which, as a modern, functional, and rational process of production (or so they believed), needed to look the part. In this respect, Dugdale and Leathart seem to have subscribed to the logic expressed in Le Corbusier’s ‘Sense of Truth’ chapter from The Decorative Arts of Today, celebrating the clean lines of imagery drawn from science and industry that would pave the way to a Purist future. In short, industry had to look like industry in order to function as a signifier of modernity in

140

Bridget Elliott

the Purist style. Thus, only a one-way flow of traffic between modern art and industry was acceptable: art had to look like industry in order to be ‘modern’ but industry should not look like art, and especially not like art from the past, because it would undermine their system of signification, not to mention raise questions about the industrial rationality and progress they championed.11 Understanding this logic helps us come to terms with the double standard that was applied to buildings that might be described as self-consciously architecturally performative rather than merely functional. While the Hoover Factory was roundly condemned for sporting a theatrical Egyptian façade, Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau was revered as an icon of modernity despite the fact that much of it only pretended to look as if it were made from industrial parts in order to illustrate Le Corbusier’s famous 1923 dictum from Vers une architecture that the ‘house was a machine for living in.’ As Mary McLeod reveals, many of the pavilion’s utilitarian objects such as the modular storage units and industrial windows were actually custom-made replicas of industrial goods scaled down to fit the confined space. ‘Perhaps most ironic were the specially made copies of Maples’s leather club chairs: the market models were too large for Le Corbusier’s new “standard doors” ’ (141). Furthermore, several houses Le Corbusier built during this period incorporated equally theatrical devices such as the allusions to ship’s funnels, decks and railings on the rooftop terrace of the Villa Stein-de Monzie in Garches (1926–28) or the turning radius of a 1927 Citroën which formed the basis of the curved proportions of the Villa Savoye in Poissy (1929–30). In these instances, his industrial references ‘dress up’ the architecture rather than playing a practical role or, in the words of Stanislaus von Moos, they are ‘architectural metaphors of an industrial reality’ (35). Such theatrical devices inevitably raise the specter of a cinematic sensibility that, by and large, has been denounced in the case of the Hoover Factory but viewed more positively in Le Corbusier’s early work. Many writers have drawn analogies between the Hollywood film industry and the Hoover Factory, perhaps because Hoover was an American corporation. A 1975 RIBA architectural guide described the Hoover complex as ‘the Granada Tooting [interwar cinema] of the factory’ (cited in Skinner 157) and more recently the architectural historian Patricia Bayer has pointed out that the streamlined canteen block with its central stepped section, just to the left of the main building (Fig. 2), deliberately echoes the structure of art deco cinemas (Bayer 117).12 Similarly, Wendy Hitchmouch suggests there is ‘an irresistible temptation to see Wallis as a Hollywood creation for a 1930s movie: a self-made man in a sharp suit, fast-talking with the high-flyers,’ noting that the personality of the architect spilled over into his factories where ‘his taste for applied decoration got him into trouble with the Modernists of the day’ (9). Even Joan Skinner, who rejects the art deco label for Wallis’s other fancy factories (124–25), admits the Hoover Factory

Modern, Moderne, and Modernist 141

with its extravagant decoration is the only one to fall into this category. More than Wallis’s other factories, it became an advertising icon that was floodlit at night and widely reproduced on the company’s stationery, jigsaw puzzles, penknives and ashtrays (153). Its exuberant façade was meant to be seen from the road, leaving a lasting impression on passing motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians.13 This was particularly true of the dramatic main entrance on Western Road with its decorative wrought iron gateway and railings, punctuated by concrete piers supporting lanterns, all of which led to a stylized sunburst of flowerbeds on land the company leased from the metropolitan Water Board. ‘Only royalty, racing drivers, movie stars and the big order boys would have dared to enter the main gates. The office staff went in through doorways at the foot of each stair tower, repair staff entered through the works entrance on the west side, and kitchen staff had a separate entrance at the rear’ (Hitchmouch 15). In short, critics have stressed how the building functioned as a kind of Hollywood stage set, serving the corporate agenda of the Hoover Company. In contrast, architectural historians have treated the cinematic component of Le Corbusier’s architecture quite differently, focusing on typical features of his early work such as white stucco walls and ribbon windows, rather than individual buildings. For instance, Mark Wigley asserts that Le Corbusier’s architecture of white walls subverts the notion of traditional architecture that concerns itself with how buildings look, replacing it with a more radical conception of architecture as a series of representational strategies that takes its place amongst other newly emergent systems of communication such as the ‘railway, automobile, aeroplane, gramophone, radio, camera, cinema and telephone.’ ‘The white wall is a screen on which culture is projected’ (31). ‘The whitewash dematerializes building in order to make space for these systems, a space for new spacings, new sensualities. It is a double gesture. Architecture accommodates new systems and is, at the same time, accommodated within them’ (31). Instead of making buildings that look like cinemas and filmsets, Le Corbusier’s structures embrace a cinematic logic by functioning as projective screens. Colomina makes a similar case in relation to Le Corbusier’s early domestic architecture by claiming it embraces the logic of portable cameras and motion pictures with architectural promenades that direct the moving visitor through a series of framed landscapes and ribbon windows which function much like movie strips (‘Split Wall’ 98, 120). For Wigley and Colomina, Le Corbusier’s architecture is radically modern because he structurally reproduces the effects of a new photographic and cinematic visuality for his architectural visitors and clients. The implication is that the more perceptive users of Le Corbusier’s architecture will recognize these new forms of mechanical vision and be made aware of the larger industrial systems that encompass them. Instead of educating viewers, modernistic buildings such as the Hoover Factory were charged with seducing the eye and corrupting aesthetic

142

Bridget Elliott

sensibility. J. B. Priestly’s 1933 description typically compares the Hoover Factory to the seaside amusement palaces that Leslie Martin detested: Being new it did not look English. We might have suddenly rolled into California. Or for that matter into one of the main avenues of the old exhibitions. [ ... ] It was the new factories on each side that suggested the exhibition. [ ... ]These decorative little buildings, all glass and concrete and chromium plate, seem to my barbaric mind to be merely playing at being factories. You could go up to any one of these charming little fellows, I feel, and safely order an ice-cream or select a few picture post-cards [ ... ] at night they look as exciting as Blackpool. (10) While Priestly found this architecture of amusement a pleasing distraction, Osbert Lancaster was more caustic, denouncing the modernistic as ‘a bogus Hollywood modernism’ which was a ‘nightmare amalgam of a variety of elements from different sources’ including the Jazz style, the Ballets Russes and a ‘hopelessly vulgarized version of cubism’ to which were added elements of the style colonial from the 1937 Paris Exhibition and ‘a half-hearted simplicity that derived from a complete misunderstanding of the ideals of the Le Corbusier-Gropius School of architects,’ all of which undermined public taste and produced such monstrosities as ‘gramophones masquerad[ing] as cocktail cabinets; cocktail cabinets as bookcases; radios lurk[ing] in tea caddies and bronze nudes burst[ing] asunder at the waist-line to reveal cigarette lighters’ (160). For Lancaster, there was no unifying aesthetic or underlying logic that could be taken seriously. For the most part, such charges continue to be leveled at art deco artifacts that remain marginal within a modernist canon. On the one hand, they are considered intellectually and critically lightweight and, on the other, they are viewed as an attempt to make industrial modernity more palatable by cloaking its innovations in various historical disguises to foster the illusion of a smooth historical transition from past to present, thus allaying any fears of radical disjuncture.14 Skinner certainly acknowledges that Wallis’s Firestone Factory appealed to social memory and ‘an ancient appetite for decoration’ inspiring confidence in the future, a claim that could easily be extended to his Hoover Factory which was also inspired by Egyptian sources (125). But before we accept this as a complaisant domestication of industrial modernity in relation to Le Corbusier’s more critical interrogation of its logic, we must consider both the use and users of their buildings. Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau was a temporary structure at the 1925 Paris exhibition whose displays, although primarily pitched to the upper middle classes, also attracted large numbers of Parisian workers in the retail and other trades. However, the fact that the organizing committee exiled Le Corbusier’s pavilion to a marginal location next to the Grand Palais would have likely limited the number of its working-class visitors, just

Modern, Moderne, and Modernist 143

as Le Corbusier’s discussion of the pavilion in various books and articles would have further increased its currency amongst the educated middle classes. Le Corbusier’s other architectural projects of this period that resembled the pavilion were the houses he designed for middle-class patrons and these were often located in fairly secluded, well-heeled, Parisian suburbs. As with the pavilion, the discussion of his houses was largely confined to professional architectural circles and journals. In stark contrast, the Hoover Factory was located on a major arterial road, five miles from central London, and its opening was extensively covered in the popular as well as architectural press. Although the company’s owners commissioned the building, a large workforce ranging from managers to canteen staff used it on a daily basis. The fact that Le Cobusier worked for enlightened upper middle-class patrons, often with a substantial interest in the arts, while Wallis had to appeal to factory owners and workers as well as members of the general public may seem obvious, but it is seldom taken into account in the critical assessments of their work during the interwar years. It is easy to understand why the owners of Le Corbusier’s houses appreciated a series of complex references to the industrial logic of cameras, cars, ocean-liners, and films, consumer goods they likely enjoyed using during their leisure hours. Factory workers, however, were more likely to make cars and cameras than own them and had less leisure time and cultural capital to help them come to terms with a more subtly embedded set of cultural references. Or, to put the matter differently, most of the industrial references in Le Corbusier’s pavilion and houses demonstrated how industrial products and processes could benefit the consumer by making life more efficient and less onerous. While the smooth, streamlined white forms and modernist towers of Wallis’s Hoover Factory conveyed a similar message about the scientific, hygienic, and labor-saving merits of their vacuums, this alone would not have afforded a great deal of pleasure to the workforce that was there to make them. In short, architectural allusions to industry in the art world and domestic architecture connoted upward mobility and consumer satisfaction, while in a factory they simply emphasized the work of producing industrial goods. Small wonder then that Leathart had reported in 1936 that there were relatively few examples of English factories using ‘a purely rationalized type of building’ in relation to those with ‘some pretty architectural treatment, particularly on the elevation facing the main road’ (136). To offer the workforce some sort of pleasurable equivalent, Wallis turned to more accessible references and leisure pursuits such as art deco movie theatres and exotic Egyptian motifs that would have conjured up not only the prospect of exhibition pavilions and seaside palaces but also Howard Carter’s dramatic archaeological discovery of King Tut’s tomb only ten years earlier in 1922, an event which made newspaper headlines for months and generated a wave of Eyptomania in architecture, advertising, and product design

144

Bridget Elliott

not to mention popular films, novels, and short stories.15 In the 1920s and 1930s, ancient Egyptian motifs could seem as new as Le Corbusier’s whitewashed walls. To return to our earlier question, was Wallis’s Hoover Factory modernistic or modern? The answer of course depends on one’s point of view. As we have seen, proponents of the International Style deliberately coined terms like moderne and modernistic to separate what they considered the falsely modern from the truly modern, which over time became known as modernist. By invoking criteria such as structural integrity, the absence of decoration and historicist reference, and the celebration of an industrial logic and aesthetic, such mid-twentieth-century critics created a modernist canon that perpetuated their own professional, middle-class standards of value, deliberately excluding more eclectic and hybrid forms of popular culture. According to these standards, Wallis’s Hoover Factory was modernistic. Looking at the question from a postmodern perspective, however, after the publication of books like Venturi, Brown and Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas (1972) that argued for a return to popular forms in architectural design, we can better appreciate the multiple stylistic references and cinematic performativity of Wallis’s factory, which seems to anticipate architectural innovations at the turn of the twenty-first century. To argue that the Hoover Factory disguised modern industrial realities also seems patently absurd given that the managers and factory hands of Wallis’s day greatly appreciated the efficient use of space, better lighting and ventilation, not to mention the provision of sanitary washrooms, canteens, and recreational facilities. As C. H. Reilly noted as he thanked Thomas Wallis for his RIBA lecture on factory architecture, the improvement of working conditions ‘is a very important human fact, which does, I think, tend to suggest the importance of our encouraging manufacturers to take advantage of the opportunities that can be afforded by these new factories’ (Wallis 312). Hence, we need to understand what is at stake in the use of terms like modernistic so we do not lose sight of other equally valid responses to modernity. Definitional dissonance matters.

Notes 1. My title and use of Leslie Martin’s work are indebted to Geoffrey Baker’s 1975 Open University film Moderne and Modernistic, which considers the architectural debates over the modernistic and International Style in Britain. I would also like to thank David Murphy who located several key periodical articles from the period for me. 2. The original French titles were Vers une architecture (1923) and Urbanisme (1925). 3. As Tag Gronberg observes, the Pavillon d’Esprit Nouveau project consisted of the pavillon itself as well as several books published in Paris under the L’Esprit Nouveau imprint by Les Éditions G. Crès Et Cie including Vers une Architecture originally published in 1923 and reprinted in 1925, Urbanisme published in 1924, L’Art Décoratif d’Aujourd’hui (1925) and Almanach d’Architecture Moderne (1926).

Modern, Moderne, and Modernist 145

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

The last work consisted of a ‘retrospective intervention overtly focused on the Pavillon’ while L’Art Décoratif d’Aujourd’hui was culled from articles written prior to the exhibition and published in the magazine L’Esprit Nouveau (Silver 59–60). ‘Constructions of plaster’ was the disparaging phrase that Le Corbusier used in The Decorative Arts of Today (xiii–xv). These were contrasted with his Pavillon ‘built from “real” materials.’ Although at the end of the exhibition, Le Corbusier tried to find a permanent use for his durable structure, he failed to do so. Like the other temporary structures from the exhibition, it too was demolished in 1926. Le Corbusier drew attention to the industrial efficiency of his designs (not to mention his desire to solicit funding) by naming them after leading industrialists: his house was named after the automobile manufacturer, André Citroën and his urban plan after the airplane and automobile producer, Gabriel Voisin (McLeod 141). Mark Wigley mentions the stream of obituaries after Le Corbusier’s death that began the process of turning him into a saint (xxi) as well as the fact that his characteristic white walls have functioned as one of the most important indications of modernism in popular architectural writing (xvii–xix). Another factor is the sheer volume of archival evidence that Le Corbusier left behind (now housed in the Fondation Le Corbusier) which has contributed to making him ‘probably the most written about architect of this century’ as pointed out by Beatriz Colomina (Privacy 2–3). On the subject of canon-formation in the visual arts, see Johanna Drucker. The criticisms of Le Corbusier for accepting the terms of capitalist production and being utopian made by Charles Jencks and others are discussed in McLeod (132) while praise for Le Corbusier’s humanism appears in the entry on Le Corbusier in Grove Art Online . This phenomenon has been well documented by Kenneth Silver. Le Corbusier notes that all of the material in this chapter, mainly photographs of interior design schemes, was drawn from a 25 year run of the French magazine Art et Décoration (Decorative 162). My use of the term ‘avant-garde’ refers to those who rejected conventional concepts, values and standards in order to develop original works of art and new forms of socio-political critique. It has usually been reserved for a vanguard group of modernists whose formal experimentation was directed toward political change (see Berghaus, ch. 1). In early twentieth-century architectural circles such as the Bauhaus, this involved rejecting applied ornamental decoration in past historical styles, a position Le Corbusier shared. However, as Tim Benton notes, Le Corbusier incorporated the shapes and proportions of classical architecture into his own buildings in the belief it enhanced their aesthetic qualities so he was not merely a functionalist despite his passion for machines, industrial processes, and engineering. On the subject of the early twentieth-century European avant-garde, see the influential formulation of Peter Bürger as well as subsequent responses by Dietrich Scheunemann and Richard Murphey. My argument that many important cultural responses to modernity have been left out of the modernist canon in art history applies equally to the many studies that fetichize avant-garde practice. The Dugdale poem appears on page 40 of the Architectural Review. As Bevis Hillier and Stephen Escritt note on page 23, Dugdale was part of the Tecton Group. Dugdale was part of the Tecton team that built the Peguin Pool at Regent’s Park (1933), a leading example of International Style architecture in England. On

146

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

Bridget Elliott this project Dugdale worked with Bertthold Lubetkin, one of the moving forces behind Tecton and another English proponent Le Corbusier’s work. Lubetkin had specially gone to Paris to study Le Corbusier’s early work, particularly his use of reinforced concrete. Stanislaus von Moos points out that Le Corbusier rejected the Bauhaus’s desire to bring art into industry by making a priori aesthetic decisions about industrial designs rather than drawing them exclusively from the nature of the objects and the problems they posed in conjunction with the industrial processes used to make them. Moos argues that ‘as a whole L’Esprit Nouveau can be viewed as an attempt by the industrial elite of France to understand the logic of their own industrial activity and to raise an awareness that ‘artistic design’ is not needed for its products’ (26). This was Building 4 of the factory complex that was designed by Wallis, Gilbert & Partners in 1937 to house a new canteen, garage, and car wash. Elvis Costello’s ‘Hoover Factory’ song from his 1980 album Get Happy attests to the building’s enduring popular appeal. This strategy for coping with modernity is discussed at some length by Jeffrey Miekle in relation to American artistic production. On the subject of Egyptomania and the many modern aspects of discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb, see Frayling, Face.

8 Fantasies of the New Class: New Criticism, Harvard Sociology, and the Idea of the University Stephen Schryer

In The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979), sociologist Alvin Gouldner predicted that a ‘new class’ of professional knowledge workers would soon displace the moneyed bourgeoisie (the ‘old class’) as the pre-eminent elite in modern U.S. society. This new class encompassed a broad array of occupations: teachers, engineers, scientists, professors, anyone who laid claim to a saleable body of knowledge acquired at the postsecondary level of education—what Gouldner, echoing Pierre Bourdieu, called ‘cultural capital.’ Hitherto, the class had been divided between two groups—humanistic intellectuals and the technical intelligentsia. The former’s interests were ‘primarily critical, emancipatory, hermeneutic and hence often political’ (48). The latter’s interests were technical and concerned with improving the means of production owned by the old class. Gouldner imagined, however, that the two groups were united by their joint dependence upon the university and the ‘culture of critical discourse’ that it fosters. Because of this institutional and cultural tie, the intellectuals and intelligentsia would join together into a single class that would promote a fusion of morality and techne in the modern state. The old class was powerless to prevent this, since it depended upon the technical capabilities of the intelligentsia and thus had to support the new class’s institutions. Gouldner thus imagined the emergence of a new social order of professionals, centered in the university, that would extend and perfect the U.S. welfare state. In retrospect, Gouldner’s theory was one of the most dramatic failed prophecies of the late twentieth century. His chief example of the senescence of the bourgeoisie was the failure of Ronald Reagan, the representative of the ‘most politically backward and less educated sections of the old class’ (92), to win the 1976 nomination for the Republican Party. As the events of the 1980s showed, the old class in America was in fact alive and well; it survived and flourished in the decades after Gouldner’s prophecy. In particular, it found a powerful voice within the New Right and rejuvenated Republican 147

148

Stephen Schryer

Party, which gutted what was left of the welfare state and launched an allout attack on the educated liberal morality of the intellectuals. Gouldner’s imagined synthesis of techne and morality was therefore a fantasy, and the problem with it was that it came at the end, rather than the beginning of an era. It had been the central fantasy of the U.S. professional class, one that had governed it since the late nineteenth century. It was the ideal that had propelled most of the political movements dominated by professionals, from early twentieth century Progressivism, to the New Deal, to the Great Society. And it was the ideal of the modern research university, which divided the new class into specialized professions yet also promised to bind them together according to common social ends. Steven Brint, in a more recent history of U.S. professionalism, describes this ideal as the ‘socialtrustee’ ideology of early professionals: ‘Technically, it promised competent performance of skilled work involving the application of broad and complex knowledge, the acquisition of which required formal academic study. Morally, it promised to be guided by an appreciation of the important social ends it served’ (7). The ultimate goal of this ideology was to replace the capital-owning bourgeoisie with a new elite distinguished by its technical accomplishments and its moral desire to reform society for the benefit of all. The problem, however, is that the logic of specialization, rather than binding together the new class, atomized it into a concatenation of disciplines. As Barbara and John Ehrenreich argue, ‘specialization was the PMC [professional managerial class] member’s chief selling point, the quality which justified his or her claim to a unique niche in society, but it acted as a centrifugal force on the class as a whole’ (27). In particular, for both Brint and the Ehrenreichs, professionalization drove a wedge between the two factions of the new class identified by Gouldner—the humanist intellectuals and the technical intelligentsia. The former increasingly took over the moral claims of professionalism, generally combined with a distrust of technical accomplishment. The latter, meanwhile, cultivated techne for its own sake, often unmoored from moral considerations. The university, rather than becoming the site of techne and morality’s reconciliation, became the site of their disconnection. Recently, this new class theory account of a split in social-trustee professionalism has been taken up by several sociologically minded literary critics, who have tried to account for the evolution of their discipline since the end of World War II in these terms.1 John Guillory, for instance, has repeatedly drawn attention to the disciplinary consequences of literary studies’ marginal position in the academy, especially in relation to the disciplines favored by the technical intelligentsia. In a recent article on the Sokal hoax, he tries to show how anti-scientific skepticism (usually linked to some sort of emancipatory politics) has become the ‘spontaneous philosophy’ of literary criticism, an un-argued ideology that emerges in moments when the discipline has to

Fantasies of the New Class 149

defend itself against outsiders. Literary critics, in other words, typically conceive of their discipline as the moral and anti-technical profession par excellence. In Guillory’s account, this spontaneous philosophy originated in the 1940s–60s, the period of massive university expansion in the United States. It originated in the discipline’s efforts to define a place for itself within the academy in opposition to the social sciences and in particular sociology, the disciplines that most clearly embodied the threatened intrusion of the technical intelligentsia into humanistic territory. This definition by exclusion was mutual; literary criticism claimed interpretation as its exclusive methodological principle and viewed positivist knowledge with suspicion, while the social sciences did just the opposite: ‘First, the social sciences were led to discard interpretation as much as possible from their methodological repertoire. And, second, the humanities came to be identified as the disciplines whose only method was interpretation’ (498).2 Within U.S. sociology and literary studies, the paradigms that instituted this transformation were the structural functionalism of Talcott Parsons and the New Criticism of John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and others. Parsons’s sociology represented the apogee of his discipline’s technocratic ambitions. He pushed sociology away from the interpretive tendencies of earlier paradigms such as the Chicago School and tried to refashion it as an objective science. The New Criticism, meanwhile, marked the turning point when academic literary studies became anti-scientific. The New Critics viewed literature as the only remaining moral counterweight to the triumph of technical rationality, and they therefore tried to purge all social scientific techniques and claims from literary interpretation. Under the guidance of structural functionalism and the New Criticism, sociology and literary studies thus became professionalized in seemingly opposite ways; they became attracted to opposite poles of social-trustee professionalism. This differential professionalization is reflected in the two disciplinary accounts of modernism that Susan Stanford Friedman describes in ‘Definitional Excursions, which were institutionalized within the social sciences and humanities in this period. Structural functionalism was one of the last sociological paradigms to offer unqualified support for the project of modernity, characterized by a technocratic enthusiasm for ‘totalization [ ... ] centralized system [ ... ] the Enlightenment’s rational schemata’ (Chapter 1, 12). The New Critics, in contrast, embraced a characteristically humanist, critical stance toward that project—one embodied in the high modernist texts around which they fashioned the academic literary canon. In this chapter, I will try to draw a more complicated picture of the separation of sociology and literary studies that took place under the aegis of structural functionalism and the New Criticism after World War II. This picture will show that the different perspectives on the project of modernity described in Friedman’s essay (technocratic enthusiasm vs. aesthetic dissent) embodied competing but ultimately complementary attempts to imagine

150 Stephen Schryer

the social function of disciplinary knowledge. As I will argue, the separation of these disciplines was not simply a divorce between techne and morality but in fact involved a disciplinary dialectic, whereby each discipline sought to recuperate both the moral and technical claims of social-trustee professionalism, albeit in irreconcilable ways. Parsons’s structural functionalism did indeed try to push sociology closer to the natural sciences by excluding interpretation and by inventing a new technical vocabulary for the discipline. However, at the heart of his byzantine theoretical edifice was the notion that social systems are held together by non-rational moral values that once originated from the pulpit but today come from the universities. The purpose of sociologists and other welfare state professionals is to maintain and reproduce these values, which ensure the ‘homeostasis’ of the social system. Hence, Parsons’s conception of the sociologist’s function was essentially humanistic and cleaved to the lineaments of social-trustee ideology. Similarly, the New Criticism was indeed rooted in an overt hostility toward the technocratic tendencies of the sciences and social sciences. However, the effect of the New Critics’ work was to reshape literary studies in imitation of these disciplines; the method of close reading, as John Crowe Ransom argued in ‘Criticism, Inc.’ (1937) (Selected Essays 93–106), was supposed to make criticism more scientific—that is, more predictable and rigorous. Close reading became the discipline’s specialized techne, its claim to professional identity, and the New Critics linked this techne to the imagined moral effects of literature in modern society. The ideal of the university, in other words, was to generate a synthesis of morality and specialized techne, forging a meritocratic professional class that could displace the old bourgeoisie as society’s intelligent and moral elite. However, in the case of sociology and literature, the process of specialization meant that this synthesis took place in isolation within each discipline. The result was two distinct disciplinary fantasies; sociology and literature each imagined itself as a self-sufficient new class unto itself, one that played a central role in generating the moral unity of modern society. Structural functionalism and the New Criticism therefore exemplify the extent to which social-trustee professionalism was often a fractured ideology. It responded within the two disciplines to the same institutional pressures but shaped each one as an autonomous field.

The United States as university The differentiation of sociology and literary studies that began in the mid1930s is particularly striking given that the two disciplines had often overlapped in the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. Prior to the emergence of the New Criticism and functional sociology, many sociologists incorporated the methods and assumptions of novelists into their work and vice versa. In particular, as Carla Cappetti argues in Writing

Fantasies of the New Class 151

Chicago, a rich cross-fertilization of sociology and literature took place in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. The dominant U.S. sociological paradigm at this time was the Chicago School of Sociology, generally remembered for its empirical studies of Chicago’s ethnic neighborhoods and subcultures. This school relied on qualitative methods, especially ethnographic techniques borrowed from the Boasian tradition in anthropology. According to Cappetti, the Chicago School also borrowed from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary naturalism—especially the work of urban writers such as Émile Zola and Theodore Dreiser; this was particularly evident in their style, which relied on rich description in order to convey a phenomenal sense of Chicago’s communities. The Chicago sociologists in turn influenced the generation of naturalists that emerged in the 1930s—James Farrell, Nelson Algren, and Richard Wright. By the late 1930s, in Cappetti’s account, Chicago sociology and literary naturalism were converging toward a common writing practice: ‘on the one hand the tendency toward a more subjective sociology, a sociology that rediscovered the subjectivity of the individual as a social and cultural being; on the other the tendency toward a more objective literature, a literature that rediscovered the individual’s unbreachable ties with the larger cultural and social spheres’ (199).3 In the mid-1930s, a disciplinary backlash set in against the Chicago School. In part, this backlash was regional. Eastern sociologists chafed against the Midwestern dominance of their field; Chicago sociologists at this time dominated both the discipline’s major professional association (the American Sociological Society, later renamed the American Sociological Association) and its premier journal (the American Sociological Review). However, the backlash was primarily against the ostensibly unprofessional tendencies of the Chicago School; their sociology seemed too qualitative, too amateurish, and too unscientific. These deficiencies were particularly galling, since sociology seemed poised on the brink of becoming a discipline that would be centrally involved in government administration and industrial management; the reaction against the Chicago School roughly coincided with the rise of industrial sociology and the increased use of social scientists within the New Deal.4 In the place of the Chicago School, Talcott Parsons gradually emerged as the discipline’s major theorist. By the 1950s, a plurality of sociologists worked within a structural functionalist framework derived from Parsons’s second major book, The Social System (1951) and from articles written by students such as Robert Merton.5 Parsons exemplified the desire of sociologists to establish their discipline on a firmer methodological footing by purging from it the literary influences of the Chicago School. This ambition was announced in his first book, The Structure of Social Action (1937), an attempt to create a grand synthesis of preexisting sociological theory through detailed readings of Alfred Marshall, Alfredo Pareto, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber. The program announced by the book was the antithesis of everything represented by the Chicago

152 Stephen Schryer

School. The Chicago School sociologists, as we have seen, focused on qualitative investigation, sometimes to the detriment of theory. Perhaps because of the influence of Chicago pragmatists such as John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, they treated sociological concepts as tools to be picked up or discarded, depending on their utility for a given project. This pragmatic attitude toward theory can be seen in Park and Burgess’s Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921), which was supposed to be the school’s basic theoretical text. In fact, it was a compendium of lengthy excerpts from other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social theorists, tied together by the two editors’ introductions and conclusions to each chapter. Parsons’s goal, in contrast, was to reemphasize the priority of general theory in sociology. For him, the problem with American sociology was that it was no more than a series of discrete analyses, devoid of any theoretical framework or consistent methodology. Sociology, in the hands of the Chicago School, had degenerated into an unprofessional and pre-scientific exercise in observing and recording the social world. Parsons described his alternative methodological position as one of ‘analytical realism.’ In contrast to the qualitative empiricism of the Chicago School, Parsons argued that theory should come first: Scientific ‘theory’—most generally defined as a body of logically interrelated ‘general concepts’ of empirical reference—is not only a dependent but an independent variable in the development of science. It goes without saying that a theory to be sound must fit the facts but it does not follow that the facts alone, discovered independently of theory, determine what the theory is to be, nor that theory is not a factor in determining what facts will be discovered, what is to be the direction of interest of scientific investigation. (Structure 6) For this reason, Parsons’s work operated at a greater level of abstraction than that of any previous sociologist; in book after book, he developed an ever more elaborate conceptual apparatus intended to categorize and systematize all possible sociological knowledge. Even more important in terms of its effect upon his discipline, Parsons reinvented the language of sociology. Most members of the Chicago School had written in a non-technical style, enriched with lengthy quotations from subjects and evocations of Chicago neighborhoods. This style had been a virtual necessity given the Chicago sociologists’ use of participant- observation methods, and it was one of the aspects of their work that so appealed to 1930s naturalists such as Farrell and Wright. Parsons, in contrast, invented a convoluted, technical vocabulary, which many of his students referred to as ‘Parsonese.’ It was a style intended to give the reader a sense of the abstract, technical level at which Parsons’s sociology functioned. It was distinctly unliterary, and it made few concessions to the lay reader. C. Wright Mills, in

Fantasies of the New Class 153

The Sociological Imagination (1959), quoted the following passage from The Social System in order to reveal the stylistic depths to which his discipline had sunk under Parsons: A role then is a sector of the total orientation system of an individual actor which is organized about expectations in relation to a particular interaction context, that is integrated with a particular set of valuestandards which govern interaction with one or more alters in the appropriate complementary roles. These alters need not be a defined group of individuals, but can involve any alter if and when he comes into a particular complementary interaction relationship with ego which involves a reciprocity of expectations with reference to common standards of value-orientation. (39)6 This style privileged conceptual difficulty for its own sake, and it lent a veneer of professional and scientific dignity to a discipline struggling to defend its position in relation to the other social sciences. However, if Parsons wanted to professionalize his discipline by liberating it from the literary tendencies of the Chicago School, he also, in a different way, wanted to claim for his discipline the moral concerns typically associated with the humanities. Beginning with The Structure of Social Action, he initiated a running polemic against sociological positivism and mechanistic thinking. ‘[Herbert] Spenser is dead’ (3), Parsons announced in his introduction; it is no longer possible to conceive of human behavior in purely deterministic terms, as if human beings were machines or brute animals. Instead, Parsons emphasized the role of non-rational values and customs, which he believed ensure the cohesion of all societies. Hence, the central effort of The Structure of Social Action was to show that his four theorists—Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim, and Weber—were converging toward a common ‘social action theory’ that conceived of social behavior as fundamentally non-rational. In his later social systems theory or structural functionalism, which departed from his early action theory in important ways, Parsons maintained this emphasis upon the determining role of nonrational values. At the heart of his later theory, with its systems within systems within systems, was the idea that every society has a central cultural system, consisting of that society’s values and traditions. The purpose of a modern society’s social institutions (schools, hospitals, courts of law, etc.) is to integrate these non-rational values into the psyche of every individual and to therapeutically recondition them when they go astray. This process ensures the ‘equilibrium’ or ‘homeostasis’ of the social system—two of the key terms of Parsons’s critical vocabulary. Hence, at the center of Parsons’s work was a social-trustee fantasy about the moral function of professionals and professional institutions within U.S. society, and this fantasy managed to be at once humanistic and technocratic.

154

Stephen Schryer

Professionals, for him, are the chief agents of socialization in U.S. society; they are secular priests. Alvin Gouldner, commenting on this aspect of Parsons’s work in The Future of Intellectuals, thus notes that ‘Talcott Parsons’s vast oeuvre can best be understood as a complex ideology of the New Class, expressed by and through his flattering conception of professionalism’ (37).7 In fact, Parsons had two flattering concepts or fantasies of professionalism. The first, which he worked through in The Social System, focused on professionals’ role as cultivators of public morality. The second, which appeared intermittently throughout his writings, focused on the social structure of the professions, which he believed would soon transform U.S. society into the best of all possible social systems. In particular, Parsons conceived of professionalism as a mediating term between two of the central concepts of sociological theory—Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Gemeinschaft, or traditional community, is collectivist and immediate, bound together by face-toface contacts. Gesellschaft, or modern society, is individualistic and abstract, bound by contractual relations and therefore prone to anomie. For Parsons, the professions combine the best elements of both. In Parsons’s terms, they are ‘societal communities,’ organic villages of professionals sprouting up within the impersonal, bureaucratic state. Parsons’s example par excellence of this type of association is the academic department: ‘the collegial pattern is today perhaps most fully institutionalized in the academic world, which contrary to what many have argued, is not giving way to bureaucratization, even though higher education has recently undergone unprecedented expansion. The basic equality of “colleagues” in a faculty or department is in particularly sharp and persistent contrast with bureaucratic hierarchy’ (System 105). According to Parsons, this type of organization is spreading throughout the United States as more citizens receive a higher education and flood the marketplace. Academia stands at the center of what Parsons called an educational revolution, akin to the industrial and democratic revolutions of previous centuries. This revolution will transform the United States into a massive societal community of free professionals. Even in business, ‘organizations have become more associational, for it is essential to secure the cooperation of specialists without asserting sheer authority. Much of modern “bureaucracy” thus verges on the collegial pattern’ (105). Parsons thus imagined that the technical intelligentsia, trained by socialtrustee professionals within the academy, would reform both government and the modern corporation in its image. America, for Parsons, is becoming a university. Parsons’s sociology, then, eschewed the literary methodology and discursive style of the Chicago School, which it treated as a disciplinary ‘outside’ that threatened its professional identity; the discipline’s essential techne had to be kept pure of anything that seemed like an amateurish import from a humanistic discipline. At the same time, Parsons recuperated many of the concerns of literary intellectuals and other humanists by claiming

Fantasies of the New Class 155

non-rational moral consensus as the central object of sociological study. This social-trustee synthesis of anti-literary techne and humanistic morality was crucial to Parsons’s conception of the role of sociologists and other professionals in the welfare state, and it explained the basic conservatism and fantasy element of his position. Parsons’s sociology, justifiably attacked as a typical example of ‘establishment thinking’ by New Left sociologists of the late 1960s, was in fact rooted in liberal ideals. He hoped for a greater distribution of educational advantages, greater inclusion of African-Americans in the U.S. ‘societal community,’ a concerted professional effort to eliminate poverty, and so forth. The problem with these social ideals was that they were rarely coupled with any pragmatic program for their implementation; he assumed his ideals were already embodied in the practice of professionalism and need only await the progress of time to spread throughout the rest of U.S. society. Professionals, in other words, are not active reformers; by safeguarding and reproducing their society’s already existing central values, they ensure the continuity and homeostasis of the social system. However, what is most striking about Parsons’s work is the extent to which his social-trustee ideal contradicted the actual effects of his work upon his discipline. According to Parsons’s notion of professionalism, society’s central moral values radiate out from the professions to the rest of the social system, but the effect of Parsons’s work was to help transform sociology into an insular discipline, disconnected from public discourse. This effect stemmed directly from his methodological rejection of sociology’s literary tendencies—in particular, the Chicago School’s readable, non-technical style. Ironically, the sociologists of the 1950s and ‘60s who best fulfilled Parsons’s social-trustee ambitions were those who most vehemently rejected his methods—maverick sociologists who cultivated an accessible style and wrote for a non-disciplinary audience, such as C. Wright Mills.

From the Old South to the Academy of Letters While most U.S. sociologists after the mid-1930s were trying to distance themselves from the literary-minded Chicago School, American literary critics were involved in a dialectical interplay with their own disciplinary other—the social sciences. This was particularly true of the New Critics, who responded to the same pressures of professionalization as Parsons and created a disciplinary synthesis of techne and morality that became a potent force in the post-World War II academy. In the case of U.S. sociology, as we have seen, the eschewal of literary methods marked the changing of the guard between the University of Chicago and Harvard. With the New Critics, in contrast, we can directly trace the influence of disciplinary specialization upon their work; it dramatically altered their theory over the course of the 1930s and ‘40s. In the early 1930s, most of the New Critics were political Agrarians chiefly interested in protecting the South from industrialism; by

156

Stephen Schryer

the 1940s, they were formalist aesthetes interested in disseminating the apolitical practice of close reading throughout the academy. This transition has been the focus of several studies of New Critical professionalization—in particular John Guillory’s Cultural Capital and Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature. Both these studies highlight the essential continuity between the Agrarians’ early political ideals and New Critical formalism; hence, Graff argues that ‘New Critics like Ransoms did not think they were turning their backs on the moral and social function of literature. For them, rather, the point was to define these social and moral functions as they operated within the internal structure of literary works themselves’ (148). Similarly, Guillory shows how the Agrarians’ interest in social doxa—in a preconscious commonality of belief that the Agrarians believed was embodied in traditional communities—became translated into their later formalist criticism as an essential quality of literature. Graff’s and Guillory’s identification of this larger continuity underlying Agrarianism and New Critical professionalism provides a useful corrective to most accounts of the New Critics’ depoliticization.8 However, it overlooks an important discontinuity in the Agrarians and New Critics’ relationship to disciplinary specialization, exemplified by their changing attitudes toward the sciences and social sciences. Both the Agrarians and the New Critics engaged in frequent polemics against the sciences and social sciences, which they viewed as harbingers of atheist rationalism and technocratic industrialism. However, the Agrarians viewed these technical professions as cultural, rather than disciplinary threats. Resisting them meant becoming aware of one’s identity as a Southerner; it entailed no particular vigilance toward one’s own disciplinary practices. Indeed, many of the Agrarians’ early essays exemplified the same intermingling of disciplinary practices that we have seen in the case of the Chicago School. Much of this work was not literary criticism at all but rather amateur sociology; it dabbled in economics, anthropology, and history in order to theorize the difference between rural communities and industrial society. This changed with the emergence of New Critical professionalism. Increasingly, the New Critics saw the academy, rather than the region, as the critic’s primary object of identification; in Antonio Gramsci’s terms, they came to imagine themselves as an independent class of traditional intellectuals rather than as organic intellectuals intimately connected to the South. It was now the discipline that needed to be defended from outsiders, and this could only occur through a process of professionalization—that is, by inventing and disseminating specialized reading techniques that could compete with the technical disciplines. The New Critics thus came to imagine themselves as dissident members of the new class they had once shunned—as members with a special access to aesthetic sensibility and moral values unavailable to the other disciplines. This changed awareness seeped into their work over the course of the 1930s—in particular into the work of John Crowe Ransom, the U.S. New Critics’ mentor and chief theorist.

Fantasies of the New Class 157

Agrarianism, from the beginning, was a movement of traditional intellectuals; most of the writers and critics associated with it never strayed far from the academy. It got its start at Vanderbilt University in the early 1920s, when Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and Allen Tate were undergraduate students of John Crowe Ransom. With the exception of Brooks, they were members of a campus-based poetry group called the Fugitives, part of the Southern literary renaissance.9 These poet–critics turned from literature to conservative cultural criticism in the mid-1920s, inspired in part by the Scopes ‘monkey’ trial of 1925. This was the widely publicized trial of John Scopes, a Tennessee high school teacher charged with teaching evolution against state law. The trial pitted Clarence Darrow, the noted agnostic lawyer, against William Jennings Bryan, the one-time Democratic presidential candidate and representative of Christian fundamentalism. Like the Northern reporters who descended en masse upon Dayton, Tennessee to witness the trial, the Agrarians viewed it as an epochal conflict between religious traditionalism and scientific rationalism, only they were on the traditionalists’ side. They began to write polemics on behalf of their region, which culminated in the publication of I’ll Take My Stand (1930). This book, the Agrarians’ manifesto, condemned the impact of industrialism upon the economy, folkways, and racial hierarchy of the Old South.10 In this early work, the Agrarians replayed the conflict at the heart of the Scopes trial between scientific and traditional ways of understanding the world. Ransom’s first book, published at the same time as I’ll Take My Stand, was God Without Thunder (1930), a philosophical defense of religious fundamentalism that exemplified his early, interdisciplinary approach. In it, he complained that the sciences and social sciences efface the full complexity of lived experience, what Ransom called the ‘world’s body’; ‘when our thinking is scientific or conceptual, we fail to observe the particular objects as particulars, or as objects which are different, and contain a great many features not at all covered by the given concept. We attend only to what is constant or like among them, or to what has repetition-value’ (59). This aesthetic failure, for Ransom, has consequences that are cultural, economic, and moral. Science leads directly to industrialism, which physically manifests the urge to reduce all phenomena to sameness. Culturally, industrialism effaces the differences between local regions, dissolving all folk cultures into a universal mass society that is everywhere the same. Economically, it treats nature as a resource to be exploited, robbing human beings of their ability to aesthetically appreciate the environment in which they live. Morally, it distorts the relations between human beings, leading them to treat each other as means to selfish ends. In this last regard, social science is particularly dangerous, since it tries to turn human beings into objects of research and control. Ransom’s solution was to defend traditions and conventions, which place limits on the rapacious energies and conceptual tyranny of industrialism

158 Stephen Schryer

and the sciences. His argument was based upon an elaborate series of homologies between poetry, religion, social custom, and economics. Poetry, for instance, relies upon conventional devices of meter, rhyme, and poetic style. These devices introduce linguistic texture into the poem—local variations of meaning that prevent the poem from ever making a direct statement of fact. Poetry, in other words, incorporates a kind of surface complexity that forces the reader to pay attention to the language itself and thus disrupts any illusion of linguistic transparency. However, this distancing enables a new, aesthetic appreciation of the lived experience that the poem gestures toward but can never comprehend; Ransom thus developed the paradox that in order to get closer to reality, we need poetic conventions that distance us from it. Social conventions work the same way. The ingrained traditions, rituals, and beliefs of a community place limits on social interaction and thus distance the citizen from a crude, materialist relationship to other people.11Similarly with regard to economics, Ransom argued that Agrarian communities are limited systems, which open men and women to a more complex, aesthetic appreciation of nature by restricting their relations with it. Ransom’s nativist example, from ‘The Aesthetic of Regionalism’ (1934), is a New Mexican Indian pueblo that the critic glimpsed through a train window on a journey across the United States. Observing the Indians’ threshing with primitive tools, Ransom commented that it ‘ “feels” right, it has aesthetic quality’ (Selected Essays 46). Once labor becomes conventional, it loses its character as mere work and becomes folk art, liberating the peasant’s aesthetic faculties. Moreover, it lends to the society as a whole an aesthetic unity, derived from that society’s adaptation to its local environment. The Agrarian lifestyle, Ransom explained in the introduction to I’ll Take My Stand, is ‘not an abstract system, but a culture, the whole way in which we live, act, think, and feel. It is a kind of imaginatively balanced life lived out in a definite social tradition’ (xxvi). Ransom’s Agrarianism thus culminates in a nostalgic and sociological vision of a perfectly integrated community. The Agrarians, then, were distrustful of modern forms of techne, which were destructive of the ontologically richer knowledge embodied in poetry and traditional communities. The opposition they constructed was between the humanist intellectual as traditional craftsman, akin to Ransom’s Pueblo Indians, and the technical intelligentsia as mass producer. This notion of humanist as craftsman was connected to their strong sense of regional identity; both the poet and the peasant experience lived particularity by subjecting themselves to their local customs and environment. Already in this early work, however, we can see inklings of the New Critical notion of academic professionalism, which entailed abandoning their early regionalism, reconciling themselves somewhat to modernity, and focusing on cultivating a pure or intrinsic theory of literary language. The Agrarians could not become like the Pueblo Indians from Ransom’s nativist fantasy, working the land with crude implements. Embedded in the modern university,

Fantasies of the New Class 159

they were more like Ransom’s narrator, watching the Agrarian past rush by through the windows of an industrial-era train, on his way to another conference. The proper site for the critic was not the Old South but rather the modern academy, a shelter from industrial society in which he or she could recollect a lost cultural innocence. This awareness was already implicit in ‘The Aesthetic of Regionalism,’ in which Ransom invoked an elaborate architectural analogy in order to explain the difference between industrialism and regionalism. Industrialism, Ransom argued, produces a debased form of architecture that reflects its effacement of regional particularities. Ransom’s example is the State Capitol at Baton Rouge. The building accurately represents the ‘power and opulence’ of the State of Louisiana. However, when the state planned the building, it ‘took its bag and went shopping in the biggest market; it came back with New York artists, French and Italian marbles, African mahogany, Vesuvian lava for the paving’ (Selected Essays 57). Regional motifs only appear ‘in some bas-reliefs and statues, and in the alligators, pelicans, magnolias, sugar canes, and cat-tails worked in bronze in the gates and door-panels’ (57). In an industrial society, the regional environment no longer determines all aspects of local culture. Rather, the region becomes merely ornamental, etched onto a characterless economic market that is global in scope. Ransom’s contrasting example of a regional architecture, perfectly adapted to its environment, is the building within which he first read ‘The Aesthetic of Regionalism’ as a lecture—one of the new buildings at Louisiana State University: The old buildings still stand, or at least the ‘Barracks’ do, in the heart of the city; the others had to go, since the city needed their room, and the University, with four thousand students, needed still more room and larger buildings. The old buildings are simple, genuine, and moving; precisely the sort of thing that would make a European town famous among the tourists. When the much larger plant of the new university was constructed it seems probable that buildings on the order of the Barracks but on the new scale would not have been economical, nor successful; therefore the builders conceived a harmonious plan for the campus in a modified Spanish, and it suits the regional landscape, and is not altogether foreign to the regional history. (57) Unlike the State Capitol, the university successfully embodies its region; however, it does so by compromising with the industrial economy that had devoured the old campus. The architects’ new plan is not a rejection of the city’s modernization. Rather, it is an attempt to complement it aesthetically, already an attenuation of Ransom’s regionalist ideal. In fact, the architecture of LSU is no more indigenous to Baton Rouge than that of the State Capitol. The buildings to which Ransom refers were designed by a Massachusetts

160

Stephen Schryer

firm in an Italian style in imitation of Stanford University.12 If they signify anything, it is not the local region but rather the history of the research university in the United States. This identification of regionalism with the university prefigured Ransom’s abandonment of Agrarianism. Increasingly, in essays after ‘The Aesthetic of Regionalism,’ he imagined that the academy, rather than any particular region, is the critic’s primary community. In a 1936 letter to Allen Tate, he confessed, ‘patriotism has nearly eaten me up, and I’ve got to get out of it’ (Selected Letters 217). As an alternative to Agrarianism, Ransom proposed the development of an ‘American Academy of Letters,’ devoted to securing ‘an objective literary standard’ in the United States. This proposal was perhaps an allusion to Coleridge’s solution to the British industrial revolution— the creation of a ‘Clerisy’ or National Church devoted to the cultivation of British culture. The Academy of Letters would be a new cosmopolitan community, no longer rooted in any particular region. Rather, it would be a community of diverse writers held together by their professional interest in literature. After listing about thirty qualified and almost qualified names (including his own and Tate’s), Ransom explained, ‘an Academy has got to be pretty catholic; a lot of them will necessarily be strange bedfellows. If too many alien persons seem to go into any nationalist list, our only alternative would be a Southern Academy’ (219). Ransom’s academy thus seems like the literary equivalent of the State Capitol in Baton Rouge—a hodge podge of writers and critics ranging from Theodore Dreiser to Marianne Moore. Shortly after writing this letter, Ransom put his new eclecticism into practice. He abandoned his regional roots in Tennessee and moved to Kenyon College in Ohio. His primary accomplishment there, his editorship of the Kenyon Review, was an approximation to his Academy of Letters. One of the reasons this journal was so influential was its broad inclusiveness; the journal published non-Southern critics such as Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, and Leslie Fiedler. As Ransom explained to Tate in a 1937 letter, his purpose in establishing the journal was to avoid partisan politics altogether; ‘it seems to me our cue would be to stick to literature entirely. There’s no decent consistent group writing politics [ ... ]. In the severe field of letters there’s vocation enough for us: in criticism, in poetry, in fiction’ (223). This turn from the Old South to the cosmopolitan academy was the context for Ransom’s effort to transform his theory of poetry and method of close reading into a new disciplinary paradigm, capable of imitating the rigor and consistency of the sciences and social sciences. ‘Criticism must become more scientific,’ he argued in his aptly titled ‘Criticism, Inc.’ (1937), ‘or precise and systematic, and this means that it must be developed by the collective and sustained efforts of learned persons—which means that its proper seat is in the universities’ (Selected Essays 94). Of course, criticism will never become a very exact science, ‘but neither will psychology, if that term continues to refer to psychic rather than physical phenomena; nor will

Fantasies of the New Class 161

sociology [ ... ]’ (94). Ransom’s basic conception of literature, by this point in the late 1930s, had not changed. Poetry still embodies an ontologically distinct type of knowledge, one that aims at recovering the particularity of lived experience; ‘We live in a world,’ he argued in ‘The New Criticism’ (1941), ‘that must be distinguished from the world, or the worlds, for there are many of them, which we treat in our scientific discourses. They are its reduced, emasculated, and docile versions. Poetry intends to recover the denser and more refractory original world which we know loosely through our perceptions and memories’ (Selected Essays 148). However, in his later work, he abandoned the notion that this original world can be recovered by non-professionals, such as his Pueblo Indians. Rather, the ontological experience of poetry can only be recovered by the professional critic, working within the academy. And it can only be recovered through the ‘scientific’ technique of close reading, whose exactitude enables it to trace the ‘desperate ontological or metaphysical maneuver’ (105) by which poetry evades the conceptual drive of scientific thought. Ransom’s animus against the sciences and industrialism also shifted. He became reconciled to the existence of an industrial economy and thus to the existence of the technical class; ‘without consenting to a division of labor,’ he argued in a 1945 essay that disavowed his former politics, ‘and hence modern society, we should have not only no effective science, invention, and scholarship, but nothing to speak of in art, e.g., reviews and contributions to reviews, fine poems and their exegesis.’ Poetry and criticism, he concluded, at best constitute ‘beautiful expiations’ for the horrors of industrialism (Selected Essays 189). Instead, his diatribes against scientific rationality began to focus on threats internal to his discipline. Gerald Graff has reconstructed the debates into which the New Critics inserted themselves in the mid-1930s. In his account, the discipline at this time was divided between two groups—literary historians and generalist critics. The former embodied the discipline’s techne, which consisted of positivist research into biographical and textual facts. The latter, among whom the New Critics once ranked, embodied its traditional moral concerns. Literary studies, in other words, replicated within itself the distinction between technical intelligentsia and humanist intellectuals. The accomplishment of the New Critics was to present both of these groups as insufficiently professional and to synthesize their competing claims; both the scholars and the critics neglect the aesthetic dimension proper to poetry itself. In Ransom’s case, these disciplinary others replace the Northern industrialists and carpetbaggers of his early essays; they threaten the identity of literary studies in the same way that industrialism, he once believed, had threatened the South. They threaten to dissolve its boundaries, fusing it into the other disciplines and especially the social sciences.13 Literary studies can only preserve its distinctive disciplinary culture if it embraces close reading as its new tradition or custom.

162

Stephen Schryer

Indeed, in his later work, Ransom used much the same language to describe his new cosmopolitan, literary communities as he had earlier used in his Agrarian polemics. In a late essay, ‘The Communities of Letters’ (1952), written at the height of New Criticism’s influence in the academy, he imagined that works of art create alternative communities of critics within industrial society: ‘there comes into existence among readers, clustered of course round the presiding genius of the author, a community of a sort which could scarcely have been contemplated in the formal organization of society, a community of letters based on a common sympathy’ (Poems and Essays 116). Because there are many authors, there are also many reader communities, each one akin to ‘one of those minority cultural groups which have their rights in a free society as surely as individuals do’ (117). These communities parallel Ransom and other Agrarians’ proposal in I’ll Take My Stand that the South join together with other regional cultures and minority groups to combat industrialism. In Ransom’s later work, however, the reader communities are no longer opposed to industrial society. Rather, they together form another society within society: ‘if in some rude sense we add all the communities up, we will have, in theory at least, a total community having a peculiar role. It may be regarded as a secondary society, branching off from the formal or primary society, and easing its requirements, compelling its members to approach to the sense of a common humanity’ (117). Ransom thus envisaged the academy as a republic of letters, bound together by the professional activities of a National Clerisy consisting of himself and other critics, and sheltering the society’s common morality from the effects of industrialization. Hence, Ransom’s version of professionalism, like Parsons’s, ends in a fantasy of the academic department as an ideal community. These two fantasies differ in their imagined effects upon the technical intelligentsia. For Parsons, as we have seen, the academic department is a harbinger of a liberal revolution in industrial society, one that will transform it into a perfected form of the modern welfare state. Parsons’s model is an evolutionary one; it depends upon the students of the academy leaving it in order to transform business and government in its image. Within the university, they are trained to become wise and humane professionals ready to take over key positions in society at large. Ransom, in contrast, envisaged the ‘communities of letters’ as retreats from industrial society; the professional critic escapes into the academy in order to keep aesthetic experience alive in a society hostile toward it. Put in other terms, both Parsons and Ransom imagined scholars as secular priests, but for Parsons they are Jesuits, while for Ransom they are cloistered monks. However, both fantasies involve similar mutations of social-trustee professionalism. Both appropriate the social-trustee emphasis upon technical expertise and its argument that the professional is the caretaker of public morality. But both undercut the essential assumption of the socialtrustee—the idea that disciplinary knowledge can or should be used

Fantasies of the New Class 163

to actively reform society in accordance with that morality. Instead, professionalism becomes reflexively oriented toward the self-perpetuation of the discipline itself, which becomes increasingly isolated from the other disciplines and from the public it is supposed to educate and reform.

The crisis of the new class The disciplinary consensuses represented by Parsons’s sociology and the New Criticism lasted through to the mid-1960s, when the next generation of new class intellectuals rebelled against them in the name of a more politicized sociology and literary studies. These rebellions culminated in the ASA and MLA conferences of 1968, which were each disrupted by a ‘Radical Caucus’ of younger professors and graduate students with ties to the New Left. In many ways, these internal rebellions were efforts to revive and radicalize the moral function of professional work and reconnect with a broader public. As Louis Kampf and Paul Lauter argued in their introduction to The Politics of Literature (1972), one of the texts that emerged from the 1968 MLA disruption, ‘our classroom objective is to make literature a vital part of students’ lives, rather than an antiquarian or formal study or a means of forcing them into feelings of “cultural deprivation” ’ (44). The effects of these revolutions upon each discipline’s politics and imagined relationship to the new class cannot be overestimated. In the long term, however, both literary critics and sociologists became increasingly skeptical about whether their disciplines did indeed play any useful function in U.S. society, or whether they had merely replaced one set of disciplinary fantasies with another. By the 1990s, these doubts had generated an extensive literature in each field. Donald Levine, for instance, in Visions of the Sociological Tradition, describes a ‘reduction in public deference shown to the social science enterprise, following a period in the 1950s to early 1960s when virtually all branches of the U.S. federal government—from the Supreme Court to Congress to many executive departments—made unprecedented use of social scientists in such areas as the fight against segregation, analysis of foreign elites, international economic development, and domestic antipoverty programs.’ The backlash against the social sciences, he continues, originated in the sense that their techniques had failed; ‘the demand for solutions to social problems far exceeded the capacity of the social sciences to deliver them. There grew a sense that the social sciences have not been and do not seem likely to produce the kinds of results their earlier proponents anticipated’ (289).14 Literary critics similarly questioned the continued viability of their discipline in the face of the growing prominence of the technical intelligentsia. As John Guillory argues in Cultural Capital, there has been a ‘large scale “capital flight” in the domain of culture’ away from the humanities (45). This capital flight has made the remaining political commitments of literary intellectuals seem increasingly unreal.

164

Stephen Schryer

This sense of failure on the part of sociologists and literary critics should be contextualized in terms of the more general evolution of postwar U.S. professionalism. In Steven Brint’s terms, social-trustee professionalism gave way in the second half of the twentieth century to a new ideology of ‘expert professionalism.’ This ideology emphasizes ‘intellectual training in the service of purposes determined by organizational authorities or market forces’ (7), and it provides a much clearer justification for the technical professions than the struggling humanities. Similarly, Barbara Ehrenreich describes a crisis of confidence on the part of the non-technical professional stratum in the late 1960s. It manifested itself, she argues, in the discovery of the ‘silent majority’ of the working-class hitherto absent from professional discourse: ‘the commentators, professors, and Ivy League radicals awoke with a rude jolt to the idea that they were no longer the authentic voice of the American people but something more like a special-interest group, a minority, or, as some were eventually to decide, a “new class” unto themselves’ (97–98). For both Brint and Ehrenreich, the moral claims that once accompanied professionalism have eroded, and both link this erosion to the gradual whittling away of the U.S. welfare state. As this essay has shown, however, within literature and sociology, this moral dimension of social-trustee professionalism was never very robust to begin with. The process of professionalization divided the two disciplines into isolated fiefdoms, each of which deluded itself into believing that it embodied the interests of the entire new class.

Notes 1. See especially Liu; Newfield; Guillory, ‘The Sokal Hoax’; Guillory, Cultural Capital; and Graff. 2. As Guillory notes, the division between the sociology and literature in fact stretches back to the mid-nineteenth century, when sociology first emerged as a discipline in France and England. In the United States, however, the boundaries between the two disciplines were more fluid prior to the mid-1930s. For more on the relationship between sociology and literature in nineteenth century Europe, see Lepenies. 3. Other examples of the convergence between literature and the social sciences in the 1930s include Zora Neale Hurston’s association with Boasian anthropology, which produced hybrid literary/social scientific texts such as Mules and Men (1935). In addition, the ‘documentary’ trend of much 1930s literature exemplifies this convergence; James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) is a particularly striking hybrid text. 4. Industrial sociology began with the Hawthorne experiments, which were conducted by Harvard researchers and extended from the late 1920s through to the mid-1930s. The management innovations that came from these experiments, however, only became common practice during and after World War II. For more on the emergence of industrial sociology, see Baritz. On the New Deal’s use of social scientists, some statistics are available. According to Biderman and Crawford, the number of social scientists engaged in government work was

Fantasies of the New Class 165

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

12.

13.

about 680 in 1931. This figure rose to 2,150 over the next six years, as New Deal programs were implemented (41). For an empirical account of the influence of structural functionalism in the 1950s and 1960s, see Lipset and Ladd. They cite a series of surveys of ‘the frequency with which various individuals are cited in the literature’ of sociology, which showed that Parsons and his student, Merton, were the two most referenced figures. See also Huaco. Even in the 1950s, sociology was a diverse discipline; many quantitative sociologists remained untouched by Parsonian functionalism. In addition, popular sociologists associated with the New York Intellectuals, like David Riesman, Daniel Bell, and C. Wright Mills, did not rely on a Parsonian framework. Mills’s book initiated the backlash in sociology against Parsons’s work, which culminated in Alvin Gouldner’s The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, essentially a book-length critique of Parsons. For more on Parsons’s emphasis on professionalism, see Brick. See in particular Terry Eagleton’s discussion of the New Critics in Literary Theory: ‘having begun life as a humanistic supplement or alternative to technocratic society, the movement thus found itself reproducing such technocracy in its own methods. The rebel merged into the image of his master, and as the 1940s and 1950s drew on was fairly quickly co-opted by the academic Establishment’ (49). Eagleton also briefly draws a homology between the New Critical conception of poetry and the structural functionalist notion of the social system: ‘The literary text, for American New Criticism as for I. A. Richards, was therefore grasped in what may be called “functionalist” terms: just as American functionalist sociology developed a “conflict-free” model of society, in which every element “adapted” to every other, so the poem abolished all friction, irregularity and contradiction in the symmetrical cooperation of its various features’ (47). Two excellent accounts of the Fugitives’ evolution into Agrarians and subsequently New Critics are Stewart’s The Burden of Time and Young’s biography of Ransom, Gentleman in a Dustcoat. The three groups do not overlap exactly. Cleanth Brooks, for instance, was an Agrarian and New Critic but never a Fugitive. Conversely, Donald Davidson was a Fugitive and Agrarian but never a New Critic. The Agrarians’ attitude toward race relations was predictable for conservative Southern intellectuals of their era. They nostalgically recollected the plantation economy of the Old South and in so doing elided the problem of slavery and race discrimination; ‘slavery,’ Ransom argued in one of his contributions to I’ll Take My Stand, ‘was a feature monstrous enough in theory, but, more often than not, humane in practice’ (14). Other contributors, such as Frank Lawrence Owsley and Robert Penn Warren, offered qualified defences of the South’s post-Civil War rejection of black suffrage. 11. Ransom developed this argument in ‘A Poem Nearly Anonymous’ (1933), later reprinted as ‘Forms and Citizens’ in The World’s Body and Selected Essays. The buildings constructed in the 1920s and 1930s were initially designed by the noted landscape architect company Olmsted Brothers, who had also designed the campus layout for Stanford University in 1888. Another architect, Theodore Link, scrapped parts of their original plans in order to design LSU’s well-known quadrangle. Cleanth Brooks also expressed this anxiety about disciplinary boundaries in The Well-Wrought Urn (1947); if the proponents of the Humanities ‘are to be merely

166

Stephen Schryer

cultural historians, they must not be surprised if they are quietly relegated to a comparatively obscure corner of the history division. If one man’s taste is really as good as another’s, and they can pretend to offer nothing more than a neutral and objective commentary on tastes, they must expect to be treated as sociologists, though perhaps not as a very important kind of sociologist’ (235). 14. For other accounts of the crisis in sociology, especially as related to the use of sociology in public policy, see the essays collected in Halliday and Janowitz.

9 Downsizing the ‘Great Divide’: A Reflexive Approach to Modernism, Disciplinarity, and Class Lois Cucullu

Why the past and continued contestation, asks Susan Stanford Friedman in ‘Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism,’ over the ground of modernism? On exhausting grammatical and philosophical explanations, Friedman turns to a series of reflexive questions that allow her to probe ‘issues of power and the institutionalization of knowledge in the definitional project itself’ (Chapter 1 , 24–25). Yet while her essay successfully engages the problem of disciplines and knowledge production, it overlooks the very structure of disciplinarity to include those whom disciplinarity actively serves. What escapes notice is the simple fact that to succeed and persist disciplines need disciples as much as they need knowledge objects and a public to instruct. This sociological truism may seem too obvious a genealogy to warrant further comment except that it is precisely those structures hidden in plain sight, if you will, that most enable the formation of disciplines and the reproduction of agents and, yet, most often come to operate without acknowledgment. If we agree with Foucault that what characterizes modernity is ‘a way of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task,’ then, in the case of modernism, it makes much critical sense to query the structural reproduction of its knowledge brokers, their relation to and task of belonging (Foucault 39). To remedy this situation, I propose a different route to the problem of modernism and disciplinarity from the paths Friedman follows. This route returns us to the ‘great divide’ of high and mass culture.1 Such recent scholarship as Michael North’s on popular culture in Reading 1922 discloses how sharply defined, yet unresolved, the ‘divide’ debate was in the opening two decades of the twentieth century. North in fact traces the very name modernism to disagreements early in the new century over whether the novelty and new forms of expression espoused by a group of young highbrow intellectuals challenging the status quo were serious works or sham popular exhibitions.2 That the intellectuals who were both derided and defended—among them 167

168

Lois Cucullu

T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Georgia O’Keefe, William Carlos Williams—now make up an ‘A list’ of highbrow modernists underscores one outcome of the divide debate. Another is Horkheimer and Adorno’s famous 1944 denunciation of the culture industry that lamented the cultural uniformity late capitalism was spawning.3 In all, one thing seems clear: modernism has remained inextricably tied to the disposition of the so-called great divide. Clear evidence of its ongoing importance and the continuing contest over its configuration is Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide, the critique that most concerns this chapter. It importantly helped redefine and resuscitate aesthetic modernism for the generation of scholars of Friedman’s address, particularly those with feminist or postmodern allegiances. Huyssen’s 1986 work, it will be remembered, raised the question once again of the categorical impermeability of the high culture/mass culture dichotomy and in so doing persuasively exposed the anxiety aroused by mass culture’s gendered identification with woman. Uncovering ‘the powerful masculinist mystique explicit in modernists such as Marinetti, Jünger, Benn, Wyndham Lewis, Céline et al. (not to speak of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud), and implicit in many others,’ Huyssen forcefully challenged the greatness of any work that relied on ‘the often one-dimensional gender inscriptions inherent in their very constitution as autonomous masterworks of modernity’ (After 55). Profound as was Huyssen’s reassessment of modernism in exposing the gender bias that upheld the high/low divide and its leading dogma of the autonomous great art work, his proposed solution—of restoring an adversarial avant-garde to a privileged position in this purported postmodern epoch of a porous divide—remains problematic. This move entails not only leaving undisturbed the historical standing of the avant-garde as laid out in Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde but also importantly leaving unexamined the agents that compose it. Informed by Bürger’s cherry-picking of those modernist artists whose formal devices he deemed disruptive, unruly, radical, or progressive meant that Huyssen could return the avant-garde to the front line of critiquing modernity, with the remaining modernists relegated to the rearguard associated with the forces of authority, conformity, and the status quo. This realignment doubtless has its attraction in aligning present-day postmodern scholars’ critique of modernity with the elite works of charismatic artists of the avant-garde while dismissing the rest. But Huyssen pulls this maneuver off only by resorting to the same disciplinary logic that gave rise to modernism’s claim to exclusivity in the first place. This very logic Lawrence Rainey subsequently contested in ‘The Price of Modernism,’ asserting that ‘there was no single or essential feature that distinguished the avant-garde from modernism’ (112). In Rainey’s view, ‘[w]hen seen in institutional terms, the avant-garde was neither more nor less than a structural feature in the institutional configuration of modernism’ (112). In demonstrating the avantgarde’s position as connected to, not distinct from, the marketing and retailing of modernist aesthetic works in the time of their cultural production, Rainey

Downsizing the ‘Great Divide’

169

opened up a rich line of inquiry into the complex structural institutionalization of modernism and the avant-garde that went well beyond Bürger’s and Huyssen’s focus on formal properties and content analyses.4 Yet more than Rainey’s keen insight into the commodification of artworks is needed if we are to grasp, as Friedman’s foray suggests, modernism’s institutionalization as a disciplinary formation. Pursuing its disciplinary roots is key to understanding not only the functioning of modernist and vanguard alike, past and present, but as well their disciples and the structures that reproduce them. Such scrutiny goes to the heart of knowledge production and is especially relevant given Huyssen’s claim that this time around a more enlightened, self-conscious, and inclusive vanguard would and could get the modernist project right. To begin then, we might ask, what exactly is modernism and the avantgarde’s class location in terms of the high/mass split? Or, for that matter, what is Huyssen’s or even Friedman’s relation to the divide, especially in its now more permeable and postmodern condition? Further, from which position does the vanguard or the aforementioned scholars speak and how did they arrive there? Or to pose the question from a different angle, what transpires if the cultural divide is dismantled, but not the cultural elite? What are we to make of the so-called postmodern era in which the divide between vanguard and public appears to carry on? To respond to these questions and to consider the implications for modernism and disciplinarity that Huyssen’s premise and overall intervention have had, I turn to one avatar of the divide and his latter-day disciples who will link together modernism, class location, and the process of disciplinary formations and the reproduction of disciples in particularly revealing ways. Variously identified as an American modernist, Anglo modernist, cosmopolitan modernist, modernist exile, and self-identified, in his heyday, as a British modernist, T. S. Eliot provides an exemplary instance to trace the emergence of modernism as knowledge production across one formidable bulwark of disciplinary heft, English literary studies. In what follows, I argue that while Huyssen’s divide and the division between high and mass culture were indisputably in play in the period in which modernism began to assert its novel and exclusive claims to subjective and aesthetic truth, just as relevant to modernism’s standing and its continued contestation are the structures that granted its practitioners prestige and made their successors gatekeepers. This chapter continues, then, the conversation that Friedman’s essay at the macro level and Rainey’s earlier one at the micro began on the structural work modernism performs as social actualization.

Corpses, clerics, and clerks Ezra Pound’s moribund 1930 tribute to the ‘at times excellent poet’ T. S. Eliot— that he had ‘arrived at the supreme Eminence among English critics largely

170 Lois Cucullu

through disguising himself as a corpse’—has long since been read as evidence of Eliot’s legendary, if faintly unwholesome, exceptionality (‘Credo’ 53). As the disembodied ideal of the modern English writer, so the modernist fable goes, Eliot could be hailed for his extraordinary output in the decades of the teens and twenties. Or, to take Pound’s earlier acknowledgment that Eliot ‘actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own,’ this encomium, too, contributed to the myth of a sui generis Eliot bursting upon London and then the world literary scene by the sheer force of his poetic talent (Pound, Letters 40). Contrary to this narrative of modernist hagiography, such recent interpreters of Eliot such as Leonard Diepeveen have held that this corpse-like eminence was very consciously conceived and marketed and by none more than the aspiring young American himself.5 Unpacking Pound’s accolade, Diepeveen accounts for Eliot’s impressive rise by tracing how the poet carefully crafted his self-presentation which he then promoted to a very cannily constructed audience. As with North’s 1922 slice of ‘20s’ culture, Diepeveen restores a more complex record of the period and the self-awareness of its participants. What most interests me in Diepeveen’s reexamination, however, is the observation that ‘Eliot’s elitism is conceptually set up as one of professionalization.’ As he explains, and this is key to my argument, ‘Eliot’s version of professionalization did not entail a specific class alignment’ (57n13). Eliot, to extend Pound’s conceit of ‘disguising himself as a corpse,’ apparently not only managed to transcend the limits of his own body, but also that of the ‘classed’ body as well. To this disembodied and detached conceptualization of the artist, Eliot himself would partly and very self-consciously agree. In several essays written in the same decade as Horkheimer and Adorno are bemoaning the emergence of the culture industry, Eliot, with his reputation secure and his most innovative work behind him, argues for the position and power of elites as the surest means to safeguard what he calls ‘minority culture,’ here read: highbrow culture. In his 1944 paper entitled ‘On the Place and Function of the Clerisy,’ the poet begins by asserting that the ‘clerisy,’ his designation for the minority of cultural arbiters, ‘must be an élite and not a class’ (240).6 The difference he explains is that ‘[a] man is born a member of a class but becomes a member of an élite by virtue of individual superiority developed by training; he does not thereby cease to be a member of the class into which he was born, nevertheless he is partially separated from the other members of his class who are not members of the same élite’ (240). Not so subtly, Eliot de-emphasizes class standing in order to accentuate the merit and training of a select group of superior individuals. That the affiliations of this elite, as Eliot subsequently remarks, have conspicuously narrowed since the Victorian epoch, he explains by noting the tendency toward smaller and smaller audiences, this despite the unprecedented increase in educational opportunity, not to mention literacy. ‘The authors who (frequently derided) write for a small public,’ avers Eliot, ‘are not writing for a more cultivated class, but

Downsizing the ‘Great Divide’

171

for a heterogeneous number of peculiar individuals of various classes—for a kind of elite. The clerisy writing for the clerisy’ (242). The modernist cleric, then, according to Eliot, ‘should be partly, though not altogether, emancipated from the class into which he is born; an out-caste’ (243). Who or what is served by this out-caste elite Eliot makes clear in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, his own definitional excursion into the boundaries of modern culture.7 As he tellingly observes in the chapter entitled ‘The Class and the Elite’: What is important is a structure of society in which there will be, from ‘top’ to ‘bottom’, a continuous gradation of cultural levels: it is important to remember that we should not consider the upper levels as possessing more culture than the lower, but as representing a more conscious culture and a greater specialisation of culture. I incline to believe that no true democracy can maintain itself unless it contains these different levels of culture. (48) This egalitarian gesture towards democracy and the ‘bottom’ rung of an otherwise settled hierarchy, what Eliot calls a ‘graded society,’ is undercut when, in the next breath, he asserts that ‘[t]he levels of culture may also be seen as levels of power,’ insisting that ‘a smaller group will have equal power with a larger group at a lower level,’ and concluding that ‘it may be argued that complete equality means universal irresponsibility’ (48). Here Eliot envisages society ranked according to its cultural associations with the bottom tier presided over by an oblivious majority that, despite its numerical advantage, is nonetheless in parity with a self-conscious, savvy, and specialized minority at the top. And less we mistake the intention, he closes Notes by declaring: ‘For it is an essential condition of the preservation of the quality of the culture of the minority, that it should continue to be a minority culture’ (107). In peroration, he openly espouses a specialized and self-conscious elite that will continue to serve as cultural stewards. Is there, I wonder, a better demonstration of the kind of definitional thinking that granted the great divide its demarcation or a better demonstration of the high modernist configuration that ultimately became the basis for its institutionalization within literary studies and the arts? Even more, Eliot’s essays make clear how mutually enabling the pair of elite and minority culture were. From his 1944 vantage point, an elite was indispensable to minority culture and without minority culture there was no elite. In this regard, his notable shift from outright class identification to that of a partly emancipated ‘out-caste’ in ‘On the Place and Function of the Clerisy’ is a striking one. As Eliot explains, the literary cleric could ‘be critical of, and subversive of, the class in power’ (241). More to the point, his assertion of out-caste privilege, when added to literary modernists’ claims of serving as arbiters and interpreters of subjective and aesthetic truth, offers a

172

Lois Cucullu

rather compelling account of the very professionalization of the expert class that scholars, among them, Harold Perkin, Alvin Gouldner, Barbara and John Ehrenreich, Magali Sarfatti Larson, Pierre Bourdieu, and John Guillory, have subsequently mapped in the decades since the poet’s essays appeared.8 These scholars demonstrate how the consolidation of an expert class of intellectuals and technocrats in service to the propertied classes of merchants and industrialists gradually developed over the course of some three centuries, so that by the twentieth century, the expert class had become indispensable to social, political, and economic rule. Moreover, as Perkin importantly notes, these specialists made themselves essential to governance to such an extent that their knowledges and disciplines eventually assumed the status of property—so-called ‘cultural capital’ established their authority, repaid them liberally, and granted them prestige (5–11). According to Gouldner: The special privileges and powers of the New Class [of experts] are grounded in their individual control of special cultures, languages, techniques, and of the skills resulting from these. The New Class is a cultural bourgeoisie who appropriates privately the advantages of an historically and collectively produced cultural capital. (Future 19) Particularly significant about Perkin’s and Gouldner’s ‘New Class’ is that its knowledges became transformed into material assets. Though imparted as objective social or scientific verities, these knowledges were ultimately quantified as types of property that yielded yet another mechanism for social and economic differentiation, and specifically the embourgeoisement of its agents. Moreover, the accreditation of new knowledges worked, according to Barbara and John Ehrenreich, by ‘the suppression of skills and functions which had been indigenous to working class women and men’ (319). Larson takes the analysis of the expert class a step further in describing the process as one in which ‘producers of special services sought to constitute and control a market for their expertise’ (xvi). For her, expert culture ‘inaugurated a new form of structured inequality,’ the implementation of which ‘prefigure[d] the general restructuring of social inequality in contemporary capitalist societies.’ Expert ascription, in Larson’s view, became the structure of ‘modern inequality’ (xvii). Monopoly of expertise, structured inequality, control of local knowledges, such logic and terms surely describe the ethos of high modernism, with its elitism, claims of technical and aesthetic mastery, insistence on autonomy and rupture with the past, promotion of difficulty, and an experimental practice patterned on scientific inquiry.9 Thus, Diepeveen’s assertion that ‘Eliot’s version of professionalization did not entail a specific class alignment’ needs additional refinement (57). A more precise rendering of the out-caste cleric’s relation to traditional class formations may be found in Pierre Bourdieu’s description of the expert class as ‘the dominated fraction

Downsizing the ‘Great Divide’

173

of the dominant class.’10 In fact in ‘The Class and the Elite,’ Eliot comes close to arguing a similar point when he insists that elites be distinguished from ‘the dominant section of society, which the elites served’ (Notes 39).11 From this standpoint alone, it is long overdue to pressure Huyssen’s reappraisal of the ‘great divide,’ this time around along its class and elite axes. In the case of Eliot and in view of his distinction between class and clerisy, let us consider for a moment the meanings that class might have held for him. To be sure, if we accept his judgment that one is born into a class, there can be no denying the middle-class, mid-western American background into which he was born. Eliot and his biographers after him, however, have been quick to enhance his provincial bourgeois upbringing in St. Louis by references to his venerable New England lineage and his family’s distinguished religious heritage. This calculated emphasis on his New England connections has had the effect of elevating Eliot’s class standing as it muted his middle-class provincial origins. More difficult to pin down is the moment of his would-be class emancipation that grants him the ‘out-caste’ status of a modernist cleric. Whichever moment we identify, what stands out is the eastbound path he pursues in asserting his elite bona fides. Thus emancipation might well originate with his study at Harvard, a necessary complement to his New England pedigree, to which is then added the cosmopolitan polish of subsequent study at the Sorbonne and then at Oxford. Or emancipation might commence with the Clark Lectures he delivers at Trinity College, Cambridge or on being named editor at Faber and Faber. So far so good. But where in this class and out-caste pageant do to we place his day job at a London bank? How do we reconcile his so-called class standing and out-caste emancipation within modernist hagiography with his position as a bank clerk and wage earner at Lloyd’s of London from 1917 to 1925, the period in which, coincidentally, he publishes his most provocative and, as it turns out, most canonical works of poetry and prose—‘Gerontion,’ Prufrock, The Waste Land, ‘Hamlet,’ ‘The Function of Criticism,’ ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’? Do we simply dismiss his hobnobbing with day workers as a temporary expedient—a job, not a profession? Or does his stint as a glorified bank clerk make clear to Eliot what transpires should the aspiring modernist miss the mark of out-caste elite and become just out-cast instead? What if he descends into a lower class, to, for example, the clerk class of his employment that his poems of the teens and twenties painfully at times illuminate? The possibility of a respectable, if once provincial, bourgeois rubbing more than elbows with the petty bourgeoisie of the clerkocracy must have been glaringly obvious to Eliot as a nine to five bank employee frequenting Baker’s Chop House and the wine shop in Cowper’s Court and relishing his three in four Saturdays off (Ackroyd 78). That he and his biographers have done much to minimize the reality of his bank employment, as they had his mid-western bonds, does not alter Eliot’s circumstances. Lloyd’s may still have enjoyed the aura of a

174

Lois Cucullu

gentleman’s club in 1917, but a clerk’s salary, even a high ranking clerk’s salary, which Peter Ackroyd puts at £270 per annum in 1918 (77) and Ezra Pound at £500 in 1922 (Kojecky 50n45), was hardly the independent £500 that Woolf deemed the necessary supplement for a self-sufficient and selfrespecting artist, much less for an artist and family man like Eliot who had the added class complication of wedding a well-to-do English girl.12 What’s more, while much is made over the demands that his occupation placed on the time of the struggling poet/critic, less attention is given to the stigma of being an able-bodied young male employed at a bank in wartime. Eliot’s presence stands out especially in an insurance company such as Lloyd’s that relied heavily for its routine functions, not to mention the extraordinary ones necessitated by a protracted war of attrition, on a clerk class that had been largely conscripted into the military.13 Given the straightened and, to many, problematic circumstances of Eliot’s employment, it seems worthwhile to consider his state of mind in the period during which it was not yet certain whether his intellectual and creative work would ever be recognized much less capitalized. In Eliot’s instance, can we find in his poems what could be characterized as class ressentiment? Let me interpose here Maurizia Boscagli’s perceptive reading in Eye on the Flesh of Eliot’s gender and class anxiety in The Waste Land. According to Boscagli, in ‘The Fire Sermon,’ Eliot portrays a debased and sterile seduction at the violet trysting hour between clerk and typist. Boscagli perceives that Eliot as fabricator of the poem may have inadvertently registered his own masculine insecurities and ‘intense anxiety about potential transgressions of class boundaries’ by the presumptuous clerk in the scene (57). Ultimately, however, her reading of the pair turns on Huyssen’s argument of the ‘great divide,’ and particularly his trope of woman as the degraded supplement of mass culture. The figure of the typist, explains Boscagli, ‘was fully entwined with the male bourgeois subject’s fear of the “feminine” masses and their engulfing power’ (63). The masses, marked as feminine, are conveniently collectivized in this reading, and, as a result, their threatening and dreaded location is thereby positioned below and outside not only of ‘the young man carbuncular,’ but also that of the poem’s speaker and of the poet himself who retains his autonomy as a fully individuated subject. ‘Situating the typist and clerk on two opposite sides of the “great divide” of mass culture’ results, I suggest, in minimizing the poem’s class insecurities (Boscagli 62). Most notably, working within the assumptions of Huyssen’s gendered divide, Boscagli grants Eliot the position of avant-garde modernist and continually refers to him as the scornful haute bourgeois or upper-class poet. To call the poet’s Waste Land the most ‘vehement’ expression of ‘the high bourgeois skepticism of the new class’ of clerks (Boscagli 61) is to be perhaps unaware that Eliot and his wife were themselves just then getting by on a clerk’s salary that was well below the £1,000 that, by Boscagli’s own reckoning, was barely ‘considered adequate’ for artists and intellectuals (60).

Downsizing the ‘Great Divide’

175

Neglected is the fact, as we know, that Eliot composes Waste Land while a Lloyd’s clerk, and, further, that, at the time of composing the poem, he was under considerable fiscal and psychological duress, leading him to apply for medical leave from Lloyd’s in 1921 to seek therapy abroad for his own and his wife’s failing mental health, an entirely bourgeois cure that was scarcely affordable on a clerk’s wages. The point here is not to read biography simplistically into the poem or to disregard the gender unease patent in the work—or to be dismissive of the couple’s real infirmity. The point is rather to observe that the gendered chasm of the high/mass divide overrides other possible divisions, even the insightful reading begun over the class abjection experienced by both clerk and typist in the poem, and in all likelihood by their artificer clerk outside the poem.14 In sum, the modernist cleric Eliot may well promote out-caste emancipation in the 1940s when his class and elite standing is on firm footing as well as on adopted English soil. But was out-caste emancipation an entirely liberating prospect for him in the early 1920s when the threat of sliding into the class below was perhaps more real and closer at hand for this provincial American than qualifying as an authentic English poet and critic? Of this threat, John Guillory notably observes ‘that knowledge, like money, is only capital when it is capitalized, when it produces the effect of embourgeoisement; and conversely, that knowledge can be devalued in such a way that its possessors become indistinguishable from wage-labor’ (‘Literary Critics’ 125).

Ascending the great divide: Divining the great ascent There is good reason to pose this question of the poet’s class and artistic ambitions and the anxieties they aroused inasmuch as no other literary modernist better exemplifies arriviste tendencies than does the immigrant Eliot. To become in 1927 a national British subject and member of its national Church is to accede to what Perry Anderson has argued is the dominant pattern of English class ascription. Observing that ‘the industrial bourgeoisie [ ... ] never took the risk of a confrontation of the dominant aristocracy’ but chose instead to ascend to it, Anderson contends that the English bourgeoisie therein instituted a pattern which the professional middle class and the intelligentsia in turn followed into the twentieth century (235–36). And as he further asserts, this same pattern applies to those intellectuals who immigrated to England in the aftermath of World War I.15 For them, and for the expatriate Eliot, England represented, as Anderson puts it, ‘tradition, continuity and orderly empire’ (231). It is more than a little ironic, then, for Eliot to assert that class is a function of birth when he himself adopts citizenship in a nation that is historically famous for its class stratification, the upper-class layer of which he strives to identify with in contrast to his own undistinguished American birth. In retrospect, it is small wonder that so much biographical energy has gone into downplaying

176

Lois Cucullu

his middle-class Missouri origins, especially as his family’s fortune and class standing there were fast declining. It is in this light we should read Eliot’s self-professed Anglophilic trinity of ‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion’ that he avowed in the preface of his 1928 book of essays For Lancelot Andrewes. All are class markers and signifiers of his British class aspirations that he in turn incorporated into his cultural capital as highbrow modernist. When all is said and done, the American Eliot was not ‘to the manner born,’ but to the manner brought, by education, ambition, affectation, and, yes, talent too. Indeed, we might view his British naturalization as an extreme form of overcompensation or what social linguists call hyper-correction in order to claim membership in a class and country superior, in his view, to his own by birth.16 Furthermore, it is surely no coincidence that as English literature develops into a discrete discipline within the university with the reciprocal missions of gaining status and of shaping social differentiation, so too does the parvenu Eliot and his modernist oeuvre effect a comparable institutionalization, leaving behind only a vestigial trace of the high clerk employed at Lloyd’s at a critical and productive moment in his writing life. A similar and more contemporary class transformation, one that notably transpires well after the institutionalization of English literature as a discrete field of knowledge, is Rita Felski’s confessional moment in her study Doing Time. Contrary to Eliot’s equivocation, Felski makes plain the stakes of being educated out of one’s class at birth and into the expert class, in her case, of academe. As she notes, academic ‘culture inescapably alters the class identities of those who inhabit it’ (47). What makes her description particularly relevant here is that the class of her birth is neither Eliot’s allegedly respectable middle class nor the radically chic working class but the ever unfashionable petite bourgeoisie, the class, as she explains, that ‘cannot be assimilated into a discourse of progressive identity politics’ (46). This class, which possesses, according to her, a ‘negative identity,’ when expressed in lived experience ‘becomes an object of irony, humor, or scorn rather than a term around which people rally and with which they identify’ (46). Although Felski views her background as an anomaly among academics, and, by implication, among the expert class overall, there is much that suggests otherwise. Take for example the class background of the Leavises, who were instrumental in advancing literary modernism in England and in establishing English studies as a distinct discipline at Cambridge which Terry Eagleton discusses in Literary Theory.17 As Eagleton reminds us, F. R. Leavis’s father sold musical instruments, and the father of Q. D. Roth (later married to Leavis) was a draper. This couple, of whom Eagleton designates F. R. as Matthew Arnold’s cultural heir, suggests that the expert class not only shaped the interests of the middle class broadly defined, but it also significantly enfolded members from the arriviste petty bourgeoisie into a new secular elite (Literary 30–53). Or, for a more continental example, consider

Downsizing the ‘Great Divide’

177

the case of Freud’s petty bourgeois background that he largely expunged from his biography by marrying up into the Bernays family, by gaining professional standing as a credentialed doctor, and then by establishing psychoanalysis as an innovative field of knowledge (Ellenberger 419–44). As Eagleton insinuates and as scholars of the professions before him have borne out, it was the lower middle class, after all, that most benefited from using education (and expertise) for class improvement. According to Eric Hobsbawm, in English society, the direct beneficiaries of the passage of the 1880 education reform bill were none other than the children of the lower middle classes who, by virtue of compulsory education, soon came to compete for positions in the professions and government service (117–19). As a passkey to the expert class, education operated as a vehicle for upward mobility. In becoming accredited experts, members of the lower middle classes, such as the Leavises and Freud or, later, such as Felski, effectively educated themselves out of the class of their birth and into a class whose occupation as ‘mental workers’ depended on, according to Alvin Gouldner, ‘both incomes and quality objects’ (Future 20), the very indices—salary stream, commodity aesthetics, symbolic and material practices—we associate with the new modern cultural class of experts and capital. In other words, those who had the most to gain from improving their culture—the petite bourgeoisie—came to populate, albeit gradually, the class most dependent on it for their standing—the expert class. What I am suggesting is that the class configuration of late modern culture, by which the petite bourgeoisie assimilates into the middle class proper, is organized and reproduced differently from the way in which classes based strictly on physical labor and real property have been organized and reproduced. Nicos Poulantzas in Classes in Contemporary Capitalism describes how education effects this class formation: The main role of the capitalist school is not to ‘qualify’ manual and mental labour in different ways, but far more to disqualify manual labour (to subjugate it), by only qualifying mental labour. From this standpoint, the role of the educational apparatus in training the new petty bourgeoisie is a considerable one. (266) Within the process, Poulantzas identifies an additional screening practice. ‘The secrecy and monopoly of knowledge, which become the “function of capital,” draw lines of domination and subordination within the very mental labour in which they are reproduced’ (270). To extrapolate, experts’ reliance on education, on ‘the secrecy and monopoly of knowledge,’ as a means of accrediting successors or of reproducing disciples operates whether we are discussing exceptional modernist poets or contemporary academic intellectuals. And, as Poulantzas implies, this operation depends on there remaining a ‘small’ bourgeoisie just below who can be judged crass, counterfeit,

178 Lois Cucullu

inept, and, most of all, less knowledgeable. Thus while ‘mental labourers,’ to use Poulantzas’s lexical phrase, are able to champion the rights of manual workers, given that their forms of labor and structures of reproduction are distinctly different, these same mental laborers cannot champion the petty bourgeoisie as a class if they are to maintain their legitimacy. To ameliorate the petty bourgeoisie would put in jeopardy experts’ standing as experts, in essence, the value of their knowledge and the source of their capital. The jeopardy is real, for, as Bourdieu has noted, the petit bourgeois has the ‘capacity to make “middle-brow” whatever it touches’ (Distinction 327). One stroke can level the distinction that the expert class strives to effect in order to maintain its monopoly and superiority. In other words, as Felski seems to recognize, the petty bourgeoisie is the ‘negative,’ and perhaps unavoidable, identity of the modern cultural class that experts inhabit. And more, as Eliot’s example as a clerk at Lloyd’s indicates, those without success or with only marginal success in capitalizing their cultural capital are fated to fall to the liminal class space that is neither fully bourgeois nor strictly proletarian. This class demarcation returns us to modernism, disciplinarity, and the ‘great divide.’ If the antithesis of the cultural class that expert clerics like Eliot come to occupy and help define is the petite bourgeoisie, then we have reason to see more than the gender taint of provincial Emma Bovary or feminized mass culture as the abject underside of modernists’ well-wrought urns. In Huyssen’s reconsideration of the ‘great divide,’ mass gender or gendered mass becomes a way of producing the divide as a chasm rather than confronting it outright. Huyssen’s gothic depiction in ‘Mass Culture as Woman’ of the modernist ‘nightmare of being devoured by mass culture,’ instead of offering critical lucidity, appears to offer a trope to distance and overdramatize that which might otherwise be more intimate, immediate, and contiguous, than the chimera of excessive feminized voracity (After 53). Modernists’ other may in fact be none other than the petite bourgeoisie. Indeed, it is not only the romance-reading Emma Bovary, as the excrescence of provincial or proto-suburban middle-brow tastes, who threatened to deflate the value and cachet of modernism’s aesthetic merchandise. Given Bourdieu’s calculation that ‘[t]he petit bourgeois is a proletarian who makes himself small to become bourgeois’ (Distinction 338), we might well construe that an expert, such as the modernist cleric Eliot, is but a petit bourgeois who makes himself great to stay bourgeois. The expert, observes Perkin, ‘had to assert the high quality and scarcity value of the service he provided or forgo the status and rewards that went with it’ (390). Under this calculus, Huyssen’s divide obstructs most, not in its claims about gender, but in its claim to be great. In lieu of greatness, what emerges is the rather slight divide separating modernists and experts from their nearer relations, ‘the class that,’ in Felski’s words, ‘holds back the wheel of history’(Doing 28). Indeed, the petite bourgeoisie not only impedes history but also changes our

Downsizing the ‘Great Divide’

179

apperception of it and of temporal progression. That this class creates a divide is indisputable, but it has done so in a way and for reasons that experts and modernists, and after them their disciples in the arts and the academy, have had a vested interest in leaving unacknowledged and unchallenged. Expert ascription and the formation of modern culture demanded that they make themselves and any divide appear great—as is evident in Eliot’s formulation of an elite and minority culture. Marking the divide along a gendered mass axis in a postmodern period may have exposed the real problem of gendered exclusion, but in doing so it left untouched the process of modernists’ accession and allowed succession to proceed, a process that we, their heirs and disciples, as well as Huyssen’s revived avant-garde, have inherited and now replicate in the alleged moment of a leveled divide. That we, too, in the final analysis, dissemble as did Eliot, in order to achieve our own measure of eminence and an audience to go with it, only testifies to our dependence on the cultural capital our study of modernity still garners and to our status as disciples within a disciplinary formation. It is surely instructive that only once in Friedman’s essay does the issue of class arise. In the opening ‘Story 1,’ the female middle-class dream of fifties’ conformity is trumped by modernist rebellion (Chapter 1, 1). From then on, class never resurfaces. Though we can all certainly agree on the importance of Friedman’s analysis, we have to admit that the contestation over modernism will never adequately be plumbed so long as we exempt its disciples, their class formation and negative identification from scrutiny. Whichever way we split it, breaching the cultural divide that once lent modernists like Eliot their status and capital does nothing to disturb the ongoing claims to high or foremost, great or unique that persist among its latter-day disciples. Through the hierarchizing structure its knowledge brokers manage, modernism as object of study and practice lives on.

Notes 1. See Elliott, and Rose in this collection for a similar approach. 2. It is worth restating North’s quotation of J. E. Spingarn’s essay in The Freeman ‘The Younger Generation, A New Manifesto’: ‘ “[modernism] is a disease of the intellectualist who strives to make up for his artistic emptiness by the purely intellectual creation of ‘new forms,’ ” one that subjects both ideas and art to the sole test of “modernity” ’ (Spingarn 296–98 qtd. in North 142). Spingarn notably attacks these ‘les jeunes’ for being ‘as “age conscious” as certain groups of workingmen are “class conscious” ’ (Spingarn 297). What is interesting here is the alleged ‘new’ consciousness of this group that, according to Spingarn, identifies itself as a class apart, an observation critical to the argument that follows. Beyond North’s genealogy of the term ‘modernism,’ see as well Stan Smith’s The Origins of Modernism that locates the term’s first appearance in print to A Survey of Modernist Poetry edited by Laura Riding and Robert Graves in 1927 but suggests that in the two decades before ‘the name was always in waiting’ (S. Smith 1, 3). 3. See Kaufman in this collection for a critical response to Horkheimer and Adorno.

180

Lois Cucullu

4. Rainey later republished this essay in his 1998 volume Institutions of Modernism. In the interim, such scholars as Dettmar and Watt in Marketing Modernism, Willison, Gould, and Chernaik in Modernist Writers and the Marketplace, and Wexler in Who Paid for Modernism? productively pursued his line of inquiry. 5. An earlier version of this argument on Eliot and the ‘great divide’ appeared in my book Expert Modernists, Matricide, and Modern Culture, here further elaborated. Additionally, in the case of the marketing of The Waste Land, Rainey documents how negotiations for the sale took place without competing publishers ever actually reading what they understood to be a groundbreaking work of literature (‘Price of Modernism’ 120–21). 6. Eliot later defines clerisy in the essay as ‘at the top those individuals who originate the dominant ideas, and alter the sensibility, of their time’ (‘Clerisy’ 243). ‘On the Place and Function of the Clerisy’ is hereafter cited as ‘Clerisy.’ Eliot, of course, owes his use of the term ‘clerisy’ to Coleridge. For a discussion of the distinction between their uses of this term, see Kojecky, T.S. Eliot’s Social Criticism 19–30. 7. Interestingly, the epigraph to Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, hereafter Notes, is the OED definition of ‘definition.’ Significantly, it is published in the same year that Eliot receives the Nobel Prize in literature. 8. For a discussion of the Ehrenreichs, Guillory, and others on professionalization, see Schryer in this collection. 9. For a similar catalog of high modernist attributes, see Huyssen’s list (After 53–54). 10. For the graphic representation of this relation, see Figure 1 (Field of Cultural Production 38 and thereafter 39–44). 11. See also Notes towards the Definition of Culture on the relation of this elite to its class (42). As Eliot observes: ‘An élite must therefore be attached to some class, whether higher or lower: but so long as there are classes at all it is likely to be the dominant class that attracts this élite to itself’ (42). 12. On the status of employment at Lloyd’s, see Brown 5. Let me not also fail to cite his £9 per quarter as assistant editor of the Egoist (Ackroyd 82). 13. For the effects of World War I on Lloyd’s, see Cockerell 24. Ackroyd and Kojecky point to Eliot’s disquiet over his lack of wartime service, noting Eliot’s attempt to join U.S. Navy Intelligence, which necessitated a resignation from Lloyd’s. When his effort failed, he rejoined the bank. In the end, the armistice made any service moot (Ackroyd 87; Kojecky 47). 14. It is surely noteworthy to record that the rendezvous presented between clerk and typist comes full circle in that the poet/clerk Eliot eventually finds marital bliss via an office romance, by wedding, if the stretch be granted, the typist Valerie Fletcher, his assistant at Faber and Faber. 15. The circumstances of Eliot’s departure from America are of course different from those of the European intellectuals who were fleeing the tyranny and volatility of their homelands. As Anderson notes, however, the stranded Eliot along with James, Pound, and the Pole Conrad ‘foreshadowed later and more dramatic dispossessions’ (232). It is worth mentioning that Karl Manheim, a notable exception in Anderson’s gallery of ‘white emigration,’ is one interlocutor with whom Eliot disagrees in his essays, in particular over Manheim’s espousal of the democratization of knowledge and of a pluralist society (Kojecky 196). For a contrary view of Eliot’s attachment to England, see Crawford 216–35. While I agree about Eliot’s discomfort, I argue that his ambition exacerbated his unease and in due

Downsizing the ‘Great Divide’

181

course ambition prevailed. On the relation of Eliot to popular culture, see also Chinitz. 16. I am thinking here in particular of the linguist Deborah Cameron’s Verbal Hygiene that shows how individuals attempt to ‘clean up’ their language or attempt to conform to idealized notions of language behaviors in order to become identified with a particular movement or special group. 17. Eagleton’s account of his own rise as Britain’s foremost Marxist literary critic is worth referencing here. That his memoir The Gatekeeper frankly records his working-class upbringing in Salford, suffused with Irish Catholic asceticism and sociality, is further evidence of Felski’s keen insight on the appropriate class background needed for the progressive narrative of elites to continue. Allow me also to quote Guillory here to suggest how Eliot’s status as a modernist cleric works to support opposite ideological positions by authorizing similar structures of disciplinary reproduction: ‘Leavis’s progressive but anti-Marxist critique of modernity, the New Critics’ conservative advocacy of Christian, “agrarian” values—both set out from the same revisionist judgments about English literary history, for which the authority of Eliot as critical arbiter was constantly invoked’ (Cultural Capital 134).

10 Lady Chatterley’s Broker: Banking on Modernism Jonathan Rose

Historians of the book are the hard-boiled detectives of literary studies: they ask embarrassing but necessary questions, they follow the money, and nothing shocks them. Book historians know the gritty truth that books are not created solely by their authors: patrons, publishers, editors, literary agents, designers, booksellers, and lawyers all contribute to the final product. And book historians recognize that books are bought and sold. Marxists may call that ‘commodification,’ but book historians usually respond to that critique with a Seinfeldist shrug: ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with that.’ They accept that books are a business, and they often write literary history as business history: one of the seminal works in the field was Robert Darnton’s The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie (1979). What, then, was the business of modernism? Rather than simply examine the texts themselves, book historians have investigated publishers’ ledgers, authors’ contracts, literary agents’ correspondence, and advertising campaigns. And they have found that while modernists professed their dedication to pure art and their disdain for commercial success, they were intensely concerned with profit maximization and the effective marketing of their work. A critical case study involves the Bodley Head, founded in 1889 by Charles Elkin Mathews and John Lane, which published Richard Le Gallienne, John Davidson, and Oscar Wilde, as well as the Yellow Book. Mathews and Lane made poetry profitable through imaginative packaging. They bought very cheaply remainders of quality paper, and produced small books of verses in large type with wide leading and margins, leaving the pages uncut and printing perhaps 500 copies. The customers felt that they were buying an austerely tasteful limited edition, and probably didn’t mind that they weren’t getting many poems for their shillings. According to Margaret Stetz, ‘John Lane devised the first modern sales campaign in publishing: the first to focus not on individual authors or titles, but on an entire line of new and unfamiliar merchandise; the first to create and to sell an image of the publishing firm itself’ (75). And that image reflected on the purchasers, who could validate themselves as ‘artistic’ simply by buying Bodley Head volumes. 182

Lady Chatterly’s Broker 183

Oscar Wilde published a limited signed edition of his poems with the Bodley Head in 1892 and got away with charging 15 shillings for it. As Josephine Guy and Ian Small concluded, Wilde was ‘more the conformist than the rebel, much more complicit with, than critical of the commercial interests of late nineteenth-century British literary and theatrical culture.[...] [He] saw no real disjunction between making and selling his work, between art and its market’ (12). Though he professed a lofty distain for popular tastes, he was quite ready to write and rewrite with an eye on sales. Like any author who had to sweat a living, he produced plenty of hack work, he promised editors more than he could immediately deliver, he recycled material (especially witticisms), he padded, he was derivative, and he gave priority to genres that yielded the greatest financial return (theater, after the 1892 success of Lady Windermere’s Fan). Wilde followed the advice of actor-manager George Alexander in doctoring his scripts, because Alexander clearly had a better sense of what would appeal to a late Victorian audience. Thus ‘Modernism’ should be treated as a kind of trademark for cultural products that have three main selling points: They are (Point 1) advertised as radically new, and hence vulnerable to rapid obsolescence and replacement, (Point 2) marketed as unconcerned with commercialism, and (Point 3) sold to a select audience. Whether they in fact are genuinely new, uncommercial, and bought by a particularly tasteful elite is another question. Point 1 does not rule out the possibility that West Chelsea galleries may exaggerate the newness of their products as much as Proctor and Gamble. Point 2 is obviously a contradiction, though a potentially lucrative contradiction. And Point 3 leaves open the commercial opportunity of first selling modernist consumer goods to an exclusive clientele, and then mass-marketing cheaper knockoffs. The evolution of modernism as a business strategy has been boldly outlined by Lawrence Rainey. In Institutions of Modernism he demonstrates that Ezra Pound initially hoped to revive the Renaissance tradition of patronage, with himself as a beneficiary. In that sense he was not avant-garde at all, but hopelessly retrograde in the age of universal literacy and commercialized publishing. In order to compete with the overnight success of Filippo Marinetti’s Futurism, Pound invented Imagism as a brand name for the poetry he and some of his friends were writing, though it was at first marketed as a traditional rather than revolutionary movement. Unable either to obtain handouts from the aristocracy or to sell their work to the masses, the modernists arrived at an ingenious compromise. They would appeal to what Rainey calls ‘patron-investors,’ among them John Quinn, Harriet Shaw Weaver, and Scofield Thayer. As patrons, they were genuine aesthetes, but as investors they realized that shares in Pound, Joyce, and Lawrence were bound to appreciate. Typically, their work would appear first in little magazines (such as the Little Review and the Egoist), which functioned something like investor tip sheets, alerting a small circle

184

Jonathan Rose

of readers to new and undervalued prospects. Then they would be published in expensive limited editions (200 copies of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 1,000 copies of Ulysses), and were often purchased by book dealers purely for their resale value. Pound told his parents, who were planning for retirement, ‘I don’t, en passant, know any sounder investment (even commercially) than the first edition of Ulysses’ (Rainey, Institutions 71). Within a few weeks of publication Ulysses was selling at 350 percent above its initial offer price on the New York market. Of course there was bad faith here, on several levels. Precisely because modernist literature professed to be above commercialism, it appealed to investors who could pretend that they purchased Ulysses as disinterested patrons of the arts. When the price of Ulysses predictably soared, that (in the minds of many purchasers and critics) validated it as a work of art: there was no arguing with the market. The arrangement was handsomely profitable for authors, collectors, and Sylvia Beach. ‘It’s going to make us famous rah rah!’ she bragged (privately). ‘Ulysses means thousands of dollars of publicity for me’ (Rainey, Institutions 49). Here book historians bring into the discussion Pierre Bourdieu, who argued that cultural capital can only be generated through a ‘disavowal of commercial interests and profit.’ However, that disavowal can be paradoxically profitable: a commitment to pure art is an effective selling point for authors and publishers alike (Field 75). As Joyce Wexler revealed in Who Paid for Modernism?, Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence ‘had to conceal their professional aims to maintain their aesthetic reputations’ (xii). All three began by assuming no necessary conflict between art and profit. In fact, after 1900, publishers and authors could earn a respectable income by addressing a growing niche market for modernist fiction. However, it was only a niche: though the modernists ‘actually earned more as writers than they would have been able to earn in any other career open to them at the time,’ they could only envy the enormous sales and royalties garnered by bestselling authors (Wexler 5). Defensively, the modernists styled themselves as uncommercial artists, but that pose was itself a marketing device: readers could purchase a sense of distinction by patronizing elite literature. Those same readers might feel cheated if one of their favorite modernists scored a surprise popular success, as Conrad did with Chance (1913). As for the myth that modernists starved in garrets, Conrad was quite emphatic on that point: ‘I won’t live in an attic’ (qtd. in Wexler 27). So was Lawrence: ‘I’ll make two thousand a year!’ he exulted. Far from regarding his early work as untouchable art, he readily allowed his publisher to perform radical surgery in the interest of profit maximization. ‘I don’t mind if Duckworth crosses out a hundred shady pages of Sons and Lovers,’ he admitted. ‘It’s got to sell’ (qtd. in Wexler 87). Wexler’s devastating conclusion is that Joyce and Lawrence ultimately did sacrifice art to profit—by abandoning the mainstream literary marketplace

Lady Chatterly’s Broker 185

for private presses in France. Harriet Shaw Weaver and Sylvia Beach were worshipful patrons who bankrolled Joyce, but they could not offer the kind of constructive criticism provided by experienced editors like Grant Richards and Edward Garnett, who knew how to prepare a book for the market. Imagine a Joyce or Lawrence in the hands of Maxwell Perkins, and one begins to glimpse the missed possibilities. As it was, Wexler concludes, Joyce abandoned his original audience and original aesthetic aims while writing Ulysses. Deprived of critical or popular feedback, he harbored an image of himself as a martyr to his art, persecuted by philistines on Publishers Row. He used this pose to justify his increasing absorption in questions of style. Joyce’s earlier books had been written for a wide public, and A Portrait generated critical acclaim as well as commercial success. In contrast, Ulysses addressed an avant-garde audience. Although it was also bought by people who could not read it but who wanted to be part of a coterie, its narrative form stipulated a restricted audience. (Wexler 61) Joyce would leave even that limited audience behind with Finnegans Wake (1939), enjoying ‘the then rare phenomenon of acclaim without appreciation’ (Wexler 71). In the 1920s Lawrence would likewise repudiate the disciplines of the literary marketplace, lose touch with his audience, and retreat to a narrative style distinguished by hectoring and insults: ‘Am I writing this book or are you?’ (qtd. in Wexler 108). The sexuality of Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover created both problems and possibilities in marketing. When faced with prosecution, their publishers had to draw a sharp but artificial distinction between modernist art and pornography, contending that no work written for an elite audience could be obscene. This argument was dishonest (Lawrence correctly calculated that a privately published two-guinea Lady Chatterley would be his most profitable book) but very persuasive: in 1959 Judge Frederick Bryan ruled in favor of the Grove Press edition of the book, on the grounds that it was issued by ‘a reputable publisher’ and not ‘sold for the purpose of profiting by the titillation of the dirty-minded.’ At any rate, it was immensely profitable, selling 3,225,000 copies in eight months (Wexler 18). There is no denying that Grove Press took a huge risk: if the ruling had gone against them, they would have had to pulp the entire edition, and either way the legal fees were costly. But all capitalist ventures are gambles, and this particular well came up a gusher. The Penguin paperback edition proved so lucrative that the company went public: among London stockbrokers, the shares were known as ‘Chatterleys’ (McCleery 173–78). So where did we get the idea that commerce and modern art were incompatible? One answer might be Paris, in or around 1830. At that point two new social classes were gelling: the industrial bourgeoisie and an artistic bohemia. The two became locked in a long-term culture war, inevitably: while

186

Jonathan Rose

the former upheld the capitalist virtues of self-discipline, hard work, and standardized production, the latter celebrated creativity, innovation, and transgression. At least that’s the simple version of the story. Actually, bohemians needed the bourgeoisie as patrons, and they often brought a positively Victorian work ethic to their experimental art. Nevertheless, by the era of high modernism, Aldous Huxley and the Frankfurt School portrayed themselves as locked in a titanic struggle against ‘Fordification.’ However, they misread capitalism, which was moving instead toward Sloanification. As the CEO of General Motors, Alfred P. Sloan realized that no business could long prosper by selling the same old model to everyone. GM was able to eclipse Ford by selling different makes of cars for niche markets and having them redesigned on an annual basis. Aaron Jaffe recently suggested that the Model T of poetry anthologies was F. T. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, first published in 1861, and reprinted 23 times by 1888. In 1916 Ezra Pound proposed that it was due for replacement, but its publisher, Macmillan, had invested heavily in the existing plant, much as Henry Ford had done at River Rouge. And that, according to Pound, explains why Macmillan would have nothing to do with any poetic revolutions: ‘There were thousands of pounds sterling invested in electro-plate, and the least change in public taste, let alone swift, catastrophic changes, would depreciate the values of those electros’ (qtd. in Jaffe 140). But there were already formidable new competitors on the scene: Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse appeared in 1900 and sold a half million copies by 1944. Jaffe goes on to provide a long list of still newer anthologies aiming at the modernist niche market, starting with Edward Marsh’s Georgian Poetry (1912) and Pound’s Des Imagistes (1914). In fact the ‘Georgians’ and ‘Imagists’ had little in common: these labels functioned as brand names more that anything else. And Marsh chose his contributors largely for their ability to promote the volume and secure laudatory reviews: except that he had good connections at the Birmingham Post, what other excuse was there for including John Drinkwater? Marsh’s publicity campaign was a masterpiece of public relations: it reminded Rupert Brooke of Tono-Bungay (1909), H. G. Wells’s satire of mass-market advertising. Harold Monro, Marsh’s co-entrepreneur, described their marketing strategy in these terms: the ‘true revolutionary [ ... ] brings his vision to the marketplace and urges the people to destroy their city and rebuild it’ (qtd. in Jaffe 151). Joseph Schumpeter’s definition of modern capitalism was pithier but otherwise identical: ‘creative destruction.’ By 1949, in his anthology Poetry of the Present, Geoffrey Grigson was defining ‘modernity’ as the latest in a succession of new consumer models: ‘Modernity’ is made up of several generations. When I was sixteen I bought a selection called ‘An Anthology of Modern Verse’; and then—it was compiled in 1921—‘modern’ could still bracket poets from Masefield

Lady Chatterly’s Broker 187

and de la Mare to Arthur Symons and Robert Louis Stevenson.[ ... ] Since then the generations have slipped by. I aim in this book to include the good poets of what appear to be the last three poetic generations, the last three instalments of modernity—since Eliot. No poet herein was born earlier than 1904. (qtd. in Jaffe 143–44) In fact Palgrave’s publishers were not quite as flat-footed as Pound made them appear. Very much like Alfred P. Sloan, Macmillan realized that The Golden Treasury could not stand alone, but had to be sold as part of a product line appealing to different market segments. By 1889 it was just one of 44 titles in the Golden Treasury series, which also included Coventry Patmore’s Children’s Garland, M. C. Aitken’s Scottish Song, and Matthew Arnold’s anthologies of Wordsworth and Byron. And far from resisting retooling, Palgrave frequently revised and updated the Golden Treasury in the light of new scholarly discoveries and critical standards, so much so that Christopher Ricks has called it ‘a fascinating organism in the evolution of taste.’ The 1861 edition (the first) contained nothing by William Blake, but there were four of his poems in the 1891 edition (the last edited by Palgrave). That continuous modernization made The Golden Treasury a steady seller (averaging more than 10,000 copies a year before World War II) and has kept it in print right up to the present (see Ricks). That kind of dynamic literary capitalism can be traced all the way back to Gutenberg. Arguably, all the basic elements of industrial consumerism began with the printing press and movable type: a large capital investment in machinery used to produce standardized goods, which carry a distinctive trademark (the printer’s device) and are sold in a national or international market. But standardization did not mean that products never changed: almost 500 years before General Motors, printers understood that they could only keep their expensive plant running if they frequently redesigned their product and retooled their equipment. As soon as one book saturated its market, type had to be cleaned, redistributed, reset, and used to print another book. Thus print technology created an insatiable and evergrowing demand for new literature, a process observed by both Elizabeth Eisenstein (for the age of Gutenberg) and Alvin Kernan (for the era of Samuel Johnson). May we then conclude that human character changed in or about 1455 in Mainz, and that Johnson’s dictionary was every bit as modernist as The Waste Land? In fact most book historians do see print technology as an engine of modernization which, over the past five centuries, has been used by innovative authors and publishers to elbow their way into a competitive literary marketplace. If that context makes what is commonly understood as ‘Modernism’ lose some of its distinctiveness, then perhaps we have gained something in historical perspective. But a book historian might point out that while modernity may have begun with Gutenberg, there emerged

188

Jonathan Rose

in or around 1890 a number of new London publishers who deliberately, aggressively and explicitly carved out a market niche for modernist authors. The trend began in 1889 with the Bodley Head and Methuen (Yeats, Eliot, Henry James, and Albert Einstein’s Relativity), followed by Edward Arnold (E. M. Forster), Archibald Constable (Bernard Shaw), and William Heinemann (Ibsen, Masefield, Lawrence, George Moore) in 1890. Leonard Smithers (Wilde and Beardsley) started in 1895, Grant Richards (The Way of All Flesh, Dubliners, Baron Corvo, Ronald Firbank) in 1897, and Gerald Duckworth (Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh) in 1898. Meanwhile Blackwood’s, a gentlemanly Victorian firm, relied on its backlist (George Eliot accounted for more than half its profits) and declined to publish Shaw, Wells, and Hardy. Its earnings suffered accordingly until it hired an aggressive new editor (David Meldrum), who recruited Conrad, Stephen Crane, and Miles Franklin. Publishers, like any other business, had to constantly modernize or die. After World War I the audience for modernism was large enough to support mass-circulation magazines. In New York Vanity Fair candidly admitted that ‘bohemianism is no longer a profession but a business which draws its trade chiefly from the suburbs and upper west side of the town’ (Murphy 61). For that affluent bourgeois audience, it provided an early warning system for new bohemian trends coming up over the cultural horizon. Alongside Jean Cocteau, André Gide, T. S. Eliot, Picasso, Matisse, e. e. cummings, Gertrude Stein, and D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Polemic against Mass Thinking and Men’s Modern Indifference to the Ancient Rewards,’ it ran Vorticist ads for Saks Fifth Avenue and Steinway Pianos—and saw no contradiction therein (Murphy 62–64, 68–78). Across the Atlantic, the same function was performed by the British edition of Vogue, which reported on psychoanalysis, experimental films, Jazz, and art deco alongside the usual coverage of couture, cosmetics, travel, and homemaking hints. It reviewed Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Gertrude Stein, and its contributors included Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, Edith Sitwell, H. D., Clive Bell, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Privately Virginia Woolf dismissed Vogue as a ‘vulgar,’ ‘shameless,’ ‘commercial,’ preoccupied with ‘ladies’ clothes and aristocrats playing golf’—while the magazine published five of her articles and even featured her in a photo shoot, wearing one of her mother’s Victorian dresses. She was quite happy ‘sweeping guineas off the Vogue counter’ (in fact she earned as much as £50 per essay) but excoriated Dorothy Todd, the editor who commissioned them, as ‘money-grubbing.’ As Jane Garrity recognizes, Woolf was protecting her self-image as a disinterested artist by projecting her self-interested commercialism onto Todd, but the arrangement was profitable for everyone. The money was good, and Vogue validated Woolf as great modern author, publicizing her among a much broader audience than the Hogarth Press could ever hope to reach. Subscribers to Vogue could feel that they were keeping up with the latest fashions in literature as well as frocks. Reading Virginia Woolf, they could feel less guilty about

Lady Chatterly’s Broker 189

looking at gorgeously dressed women—much as Bertrand Russell, Ernest Hemingway, and Norman Mailer made Playboy readers feel less guilty about looking at gorgeously undressed women. It was, as an economist might put it, ‘Pareto optimal,’ a transaction where mutual benefits are maximized and no party can gain more except by beggaring his neighbor. The apparent contradiction in modernist attitudes toward capitalism can be largely explained by drawing a distinction between two successive phases of capitalism. In 1931 Woolf summed up that ambivalence in another consumer magazine with a still larger circulation, Good Housekeeping. The old industrial economy of the London docks—the economy of rust, sweat, soot, rubbish, and longshoremen—struck her as surely the most dismal prospect in the world. The banks of the river are lines with dingy, decrepit-looking warehouses. They huddle on land that has become flat and slimy mud. The same air of decrepitude and of being run up provisionally stamps them all. If a window is broken, broken it remains. A fire that has lately blackened and blistered one of them seems to have left it no more forlorn and joyless than its neighbours. Behind the masts and funnels lies a sinister dwarf city of workmen’s houses. (Woolf, London 8–9)1 But Woolf was immediately cheered by the realization that this bleak harborscape was redeemed by one tremendous fact—it was all controlled by the sovereign consumer: Suppose, for instance, that we gave up drinking claret, or took to using rubber instead of wool for our blankets, the whole machinery of production and distribution would rock and reel and seek about to adapt itself afresh. It is we—our tastes, our needs, our fashions—that make the cranes dip and swing, that call the ships from the sea. Our body is their master. We demand shoes, furs, bags, stoves, oil, rice puddings, candles; and they are brought us. Trade watches us anxiously to see what new desires are beginning to grow in us, what new dislikes. One feels an important, a complex, a necessary animal as one stands on the quayside watching the cranes hoist this barrel, that crate, that other bale from the holds of the ships that have come to anchor. Because one chooses to light a cigarette, all those barrels of Virginian tobacco are swung on shore. (14) That was the economic role of modernist artists: to create tastes, needs, fashions, new desires and dislikes. They took raw materials unloaded at the docks, in all ‘their crudity, their bulk, their enormity,’ and they ‘refined and transformed’ them into aesthetic consumer goods, adding enormously to their value. For instance, in Oxford Street shops one might find that those ‘huge barrels of damp tobacco have been rolled into innumerable neat

190

Jonathan Rose

cigarettes laid in silver paper’ (16). And in another boutique (I might add) the shopper could purchase raw paper and ink transmuted into Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf compared the great department store magnates favorably to the old aristocracy, for unlike the Percys and Cavendishes, the Selfridges opened their palaces for all to enjoy. True, their stores did not have the permanence or tradition of a stately home: every year the displays were torn down, redone, and stocked with new goods. But in this creative destruction lay the charm of capitalism: ‘We knock down and rebuild as we expect to be knocked down and rebuilt. It is an impulse that makes for creation and fertility. Discovery is stimulated and invention on the alert’ (London 19–20). This consumption-side economics was of course the economics of Woolf’s good friend John Maynard Keynes, and it depended on relentless advertising. The example of American publisher B. W. Huebsch illustrates the fate of someone who took seriously modernism’s professed disdain for commercialism. Huebsch actually believed that great books and serious readers would somehow find each other without unseemly ballyhoo. Though he built up an impressive list of modern literature, he was reluctant to advertise it aggressively. His marketing of The Rainbow was so reticent (no publicity, no review copies) that D. H. Lawrence wasn’t entirely sure that the book had actually been published. Ultimately, his firm suffered the fate of all underperforming businesses: it was taken over by Viking, whose owners realized that the Huebsch list could easily generate more profits (see Turner ch. 2). Alfred A. Knopf was more successful at striking a balance between high art and salesmanship, highbrow taste and popular taste. He certainly employed snob appeal to sell Thomas Mann, suggesting that he would soon win the Nobel Prize (he did). But at the same time Knopf made modern literature less intimidating by publishing testimonials from ordinary people, the same advertising technique used by Fleischmann’s Yeast. Catherine Turner specifically compares Knopf’s Borzoi trademark with the Campbell’s Soup logo: both were means of assuring consumers that they were buying a product of consistently high quality. If this suggests that art and commerce are compatible, well, wasn’t that the point that Andy Warhol was trying to make? Where Huebsch and Knopf were genuine connoisseurs of modern literature, their competitor Alfred Harcourt was Babbitt incarnate. His favorite reading, according to Bennett Cerf, was the stock exchange listings. But he understood what Norman Mailer and Arthur Miller failed to grasp: that a good salesman is better attuned to cutting-edge cultural movements than any hipster. After all, the hipster tends to fixate all his life on what was cool when he was age 20, but Harcourt’s own sales work, he recalled, was ‘an unequalled course of study in public taste and trends in literature, in disclosing comparative vacancies in the realms of knowledge, [and] in developing zeal for the cause of literature’ (Turner 114). His theory of marketing was in fact more nuanced than Bourdieu’s. The secret of selling modernism was not to make it seem astringently uncommercial and intimidatingly

Lady Chatterly’s Broker 191

highbrow (that was Huebsch’s error) but to strike a balance between seriousness and accessibility. Perhaps the best way to grasp this strategy is to imagine Sinclair Lewis and Babbitt collaborating on an ad campaign, which is in fact more or less what happened. To promote Main Street, Harcourt and Lewis designed dignified advertisements modeled on Tiffany’s and sold 600,000 copies. When Gertrude Stein’s agent offered him The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and promised ‘a pot of money in it for all concerned,’ Harcourt saw how it could be sold: as a sophisticated introduction to ‘the people that crowd her atelier,’ yet more readable and gossipy than her earlier books (Turner 116). Fearing that most readers might regard John Dos Passos as too experimental and too red, Harcourt advertised 1919 as popular social history, comparing it to Frederick Lewis Allen’s recent bestseller Only Yesterday. Dos Passos himself aimed for the mainstream, proposing that a blurb be obtained from ‘one of the old, strong, popular novelists of the type of Booth Tarkington’ (Turner 137). This synthesis of high art and hucksterism would not have worked so well with Europeans, who saw a great gulf fixed between the two. They could only come together in America, where clergymen talked like salesmen and salesmen talked like clergymen. One of the most successful books of the decade was Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows (1925), which portrayed Jesus as a marketing genius. Charles Scribner and his brilliant editor Maxwell Perkins declined to publish anything so crass, a decision they regretted when the book turned out to be a blockbuster. That explains in part why the genteel firm of Scribner was willing to publish the raw prose of Ernest Hemingway: if they continued to uphold Victorian standards of good taste, they would go out of business. It was not an easy decision for Scribner’s, which had always been identified with ‘moral’ literature, so they negotiated this product shift by redefining morality. In the nineteenth century it meant avoiding sexuality and offensiveness, but Scribner’s advertising campaign for The Sun Also Rises gave the term its distinctively modernist definition: terrible honesty, unflinching authenticity, ‘raw reality.’ Scribner’s offered blurbs from London authors to give Hemingway cachet, but also secured endorsements from down-to-earth American writers like Owen Wister and (yes) Bruce Barton (see Turner ch. 5). Likewise, the Modern Library succeeded because it wasn’t too modern: it included classics as well as contemporary literature, Kipling as well as Nietzsche. Thus it avoided the mustiness of Everyman’s Library and the Harvard Classics without intimidating the reader. An early advertisement suggested that the Modern Library was designed for two very different kinds of readers—those who could not be happy without access to a Carnegie Library and those who read only the sports pages (Satterfield 21). Rather than target highbrows (who were few in number) or lowbrows (who normally would not buy books), it maximized its audience by aiming broadly at what postmodernists would later call ‘nobrows.’ Its publisher was Horace

192

Jonathan Rose

Liveright, who, even in the feverishly entrepreneurial 1920s, stood out as a ruthless sales genius. He invented the book launching party. He defeated censorship legislation by playing poker with New York politicians and losing expensively (all part of the cost of doing publishing). He held an industry record for indictments for publishing obscenity: for him it was simply a form of high-risk venture capitalism, which might land him in jail but more likely would produce a hugely profitable succés de scandale (Satterfield 31–32). And he built a list that included Pound, Eliot, Dreiser, Faulkner, Hemingway, e. e, cummings, and Eugene O’Neill. In 1925 Liveright sold the Modern Library to Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer for $200,000, more than anyone had ever paid for a reprint series, but actually less than its true value. Even Liveright had failed to exploit fully its potential: Cerf and Klopfer would introduce marketing techniques that raised annual sales from 275,000 volumes to more than a million by 1930 (Satterfield 34–37). Their advertising claimed that the Modern Library was aimed at the ‘civilized minority,’ not ‘Babbitt,’ but it employed methods that Babbitt would have admired and understood. Cerf and Klopfer realized that the modernist audience was in fact several different audiences with different tastes and susceptible to different kinds of sales pitches, and they tailored their advertising campaign accordingly. For the intellectuals who read the New Republic, an austere listing of new titles was sufficient. For the avant-gardists of the Little Review the names of Proust, Joyce, and O’Neill were highlighted. The lefties of New Masses were sold Best Russian Short Stories, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Sons and Lovers, and Ten Days That Shook the World. An ad in the New Yorker, ‘The Worst Sellers in The Modern Library,’ emulated the whimsy of ‘The Talk of the Town.’ And the less adventurous readers of the mainstream New York Times Book Review were assured that everyone was reading the Modern Library, ‘the best sellers of yesterday and today.’ Cerf and Klopfer recognized a basic retailing principle that every supermarket clerk knows—that buyer resistance drops significantly if an item is priced just under a round number—so they offered Modern Library volumes for 95 cents each. Thus they were able to make a killing during the Depression, when new novels usually sold for two or three dollars. It was literally bargain-basement modernism: in 1930 Macy’s and Gimbels engaged in a price war, offering Modern Library volumes as loss leaders for as little as 10 cents apiece. And the imprint ruthlessly discontinued merchandise that wasn’t moving off the shelves quickly enough, even axing The Charterhouse of Parma and The Great Gatsby (see Satterfield, chs. 2–3). Perhaps the shrewdest marketing of modernist literature followed the 1932 acquisition of Ulysses by Random House. At the time it was a reprint house known mainly for the Modern Library, and buying Joyce was a means of establishing itself as a legitimate literary publisher. But first the legal ban on Ulysses had to be lifted, and for that job Bennett Cerf secured Morris L. Ernst, a civil liberties lawyer with a reputation for doing good and doing

Lady Chatterly’s Broker 193

well. Ernst offered an unusual and ultimately very lucrative contingency fee arrangement: a 10 percent royalty on every book sold. He was able to swing public opinion in Joyce’s favor (Ernst ‘loves publicity as much as I do!’ crowed Cerf), and he steered the case to Judge John M. Woolsey, who was known to have liberal attitudes toward modern literature. With perfect timing, Woolsey handed down his favorable decision on December 6, 1933, one day after the repeal of Prohibition. As journalists throughout the country proclaimed, both represented the triumph of commonsense free market principles over bluenosed morality (Turner 195–98). But Cerf still faced a serious sales obstacle. Sylvia Beach’s costly 1922 edition of Ulysses, published out of Paris, had already sold more than 30,000 copies, apparently exhausting the market among highbrows, bibliophiles, and wellheeled bohemians. Cerf could only sell his $3.50 edition by appealing to a broader range of readers, who might find Joyce’s prose baffling. Actually, Babbitt didn’t necessarily have a problem with difficult literature. ‘The best reading may be hard reading,’ Samuel Rea, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, affirmed in 1925. ‘Businessmen ought to be the first to know that’: surely corporate memoranda, legal contracts, and technical reports were as challenging as anything Joyce could bang out (Turner 21). Much like personal computers, modernist literature had a technical complexity that might appeal to sophisticated consumers, but to reach a mass market it had to be made user-friendly and supplied with clear instruction manuals. Over Joyce’s objections, Cerf published just such a manual (‘How to enjoy James Joyce’s great novel Ulysses’) in a two-page spread in the Saturday Review of Literature, a middlebrow magazine that neither loved nor was loved by modernists. The ad included a mail-in order coupon, which sold 25,000 books in three weeks. Admen immediately recognized it as a singular achievement in their profession (Turner 204–13). Meanwhile, advertising itself was undergoing a typographical revolution, driven by designers that Claire Badaracco labels ‘commercial modernists.’ They believed that new forms of design could be harnessed both to sell products and to package them in ways that were handsome and aesthetically stimulating. They promoted distinctively modern sans serif typefaces, used in less than 10 percent of display advertising in 1928 but rising to 87 percent by 1960. That burst of innovation was driven by capitalism: ‘As long as we have cigarette makers shouting across the pages we have to have new types and various types, in order to see that one cigarette advertisement may not look like another,’ argued Stanley Morison, the inventor of Times New Roman (Badaracco 99). He spoke those words at the 1928 unveiling of the Monotype corporation’s Gill Sans typeface: the commercial breakthrough for sans serif came when it was adopted as the standard typeface for the vast London and North Eastern Rail network. Gill Sans won fame and commissions for its designer, Eric Gill, but he grew tired of posing for productlaunch photographs, and his bohemian soul revolted against all forms of

194

Jonathan Rose

advertising (‘a filthy business [ ... ] absolutely stinking’). Beatrice Warde, who developed and publicized innovative faces for Monotype, sharply reminded Gill that there simply were not enough Kelmscott Press books to supply the great masses of readers, that commercialism was the only way to make books beautiful, affordable, and modern: Lots of wealthy collectors of ‘fine books’ in the renaissance times would have hooted at Jenson for trying to print a ‘beautiful’ letter on his abominable machine, the press. ‘Leave Beauty to the scribe, and get on with your mass-production, you mechanized slave!’ Yet the printers kept trying to see how good in appearance they could make a mass-produced article. Was that a fatuous desire? (Badaracco 104–105) If I seem to equate modernism and capitalism, that is precisely the point recently made John Xiros Cooper: The modernist bohemias were the social places where an unrestrained market society first began to reveal itself in its most concrete forms, including offering a social space in which the gender and sexual emancipation that characterizes fully developed market societies could begin. [ ... ] To be free in this new sense means the creative destruction of the vestiges of the past that limited the possibilities and potential for unlimited change and self-development. (4–7) There’s that phrase again: ‘Creative destruction.’ The point of modernism was to render old culture obsolescent in order to induce consumers to buy new culture. It performed precisely the function that Marx attributed to capitalism: it dissolved tradition and commodified everything. A truly capitalist society, based on the principle of free exchange between consenting adults, would never have sent a successful homosexual playwright to Reading Gaol. The Oscar Wilde described by Josephine Guy and Ian Small, who churned out subversive literature for profit, embodied the soul of man under modernist capitalism. As Cooper puts it, ‘Markets “institutionalize” unorthodox practices,’ simply because newness sells: ‘How, after all, does what the admirable delinquency business schools like to call “thinking outside the box” happen?’ (164). Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop represented an early outside-the-box attempt to mass-market new design, a project now carried forward far more successfully by Habitat, Ikea, Pottery Barn, hundreds of microbreweries, and that vast Manhattan shopping mall known as Soho (Cooper 178). Far from stifling bohemia, capitalism called into existence an ever-expanding cadre of innovative cultural workers: not only avant-garde artists and writers per se, but also couturiers, interior decorators, exotic cuisine chefs, pop entrepreneurs, software mavericks, and designers who are constantly engaged in

Lady Chatterly’s Broker 195

making consumer goods new. In Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks recognized that modernist capitalism had, by Bill Clinton’s first inaugural, effectively fused bohemia and the bourgeoisie. Brooks drew on Bourdieu (who says Republicans are hostile to French theory?) to argue that this new class of ‘Bobos’ both produced and purchased cultural goods that stamped the buyer as creative and unmaterialistic, such as those Vietnamese peasant outfits on sale at Anthropologie, which of course can be awfully pricey (D. Brooks 151–52). The vanguard of bohemianism has always been expensive (think of those early editions of Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover), and for that reason modernism held little appeal for working-class readers (see Rose, chs. 4 and 13). But it could be sold to the middle classes through a classic sales tactic: first arouse the potential buyer’s anxieties by convincing him that he is hopelessly bourgeois, and then sell him art that will make him feel less bourgeois. In a 1919 ad Vanity Fair promised to help ‘the Tired Business Man’ avoid embarrassment when cocktail party conversation turned to Gertrude Stein and Jacob Epstein: He is chain-lightning in his office. He knows all about the bank-statement, the corn crop, the freightcar shortage. [ ... ] But SOCIALLY! Great Beatrice Fairfax! He is lost at a dance: swamped at a dinner; helpless when confronted with hostesses, buds, dowagers, visiting French generals, literary lions, Hindu musicians, Japanese dancers; dumb at discussions of Eli Nadelman’s sculpture. [ ... ] All he needs is to tear off that coupon and spend three insignificant dollars for a year of the forward-marching magazine of modern American life [ ... ]. (qtd. in Murphy 63) It was essentially the same strategy used to sell deodorant. This conspiracy between modernism and capitalism explains the phenomenon noted by Thomas Frank in The Conquest of Cool, the adoption and use of the counterculture by admen starting in or around 1960. As a case in point, consider the consumer product which had been most resistant to modern trends: menswear. In 1959 a New York executive might work in Lever House or the Seagram Building, he might have abstract art hanging on his wall, he might read Joyce or even Ginsberg, but he still wore business attire that had not changed significantly since the early nineteenth century. The gray flannel suit, though universally read as symbol of corporate capitalism, was in fact inimical to everything capitalism stood for. It was ruthlessly egalitarian, permitting no displays of rank or conspicuous consumption: the suit worn by Nelson Rockefeller was indistinguishable from what an auto worker might wear to church. Women’s fashions changed every year, but in the 1950s a man could buy one suit and wear it throughout the decade, a fact that enraged and baffled garment manufacturers. It was, in fact, a socialist suit, which explains why it was so readily adopted by Ralph Nader and the Soviet Politburo. The dam finally broke in the 1960s

196

Jonathan Rose

with the arrival of modernist menswear, though it was usually called simply mod. (Ad writers appreciate the psychological impact of one-syllable contractions, such as Coke and Bud.) A heretofore stodgy industry whipped up a sudden hurricane of rapid innovation, consumption, and obsolescence: sales of men’s tailored jackets jumped from roughly 8 million to 20 million between 1955 and 1971 (Frank, ch. 9). Thanks to modernism, then, our students today can buy hipness whenever they buy clothes. When the Gap tells them that ‘Kerouac wore khakis,’ they know exactly what’s going on. By now it should be apparent why Susan Stanford Friedman has such difficulty fixing a definition of modernism. It is not, and never was, a stable aesthetic or ideological category. It is rather an endlessly protean market phenomenon, which briefly embraces and then rapidly discards fashions in art and ideology. For a moment in time, even poodle skirts and Elvis were modern; then pierced ears and unisex style replaced them in the shop windows. All that is solid does not necessarily melt into air, but it does have a short shelf life. Like all revisionist scholarship, this approach to modernism must to some extent overstate its case in order to challenge naïve misconceptions and prod the reader into thinking along unfamiliar lines. In An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, historian Charles Beard did not mean to imply that our founding fathers had no motive other than the profit motive, but when the book was published in 1913 it did serve the useful purpose of encouraging more clear-eyed readings of what had always been treated as a sacred text. That is my sole objective here. Having made my case, it remains to affirm that modernism was by no means entirely about marketing—and to pursue that line of argument further, I turn the floor over to Glenn Willmott (see Chapter 11).

Note 1. On this collection of essays by Woolf, see Pamela L. Caughie’s Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism, ch. 4.

11 Modernism, Economics, Anthropology Glenn Willmott

Commodity, investment, capital, prices, costs, surplus value, marginal profit, market and submarket, speculation, credit, producer, shareholder, buyer and seller, exchange .... Such economic terms and models, once selectively represented in the dry jargon of a modernist Marxist criticism, have more recently multiplied and diversified in a range of literary-critical discourses (postmodern, new historicist, materialist, and sociological) that attempt to build genuine interdisciplinary bridges with economic theory and history. How do concepts of modernism and modernity, as ideas of distinct cultural production and historical period, mesh with this variegated, newer economic criticism? There is no universal answer, of course, but an intriguing affinity exists between landmarks in this heterogeneous scholarly field. This affinity is critically registered, at the same time that it is replicated, in the detailed overview and critique of the field by Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen which has provided the rubric, ‘new economic criticism,’ and which introduces their 1999 essay collection on literature and economics. The collection addresses literature from the Renaissance to the present, yet curiously enough, its only period-specific subsection is given to ‘modernism and markets’ (Pt. VI). This emphasis, they feel, begins to compensate for a relative dearth of attention to economics in modernist criticism as opposed to that in earlier periods (34). Perhaps the notorious antagonism between modernism and the marketplace, as locations of culture, has deterred such analysis. But this is not the only impediment: another lies in the ambivalence of modernism as a period concept (hence as a typology of cultural and historical projects). Predicting Susan Stanford Friedman’s meditation upon this definitional problem for interdisciplinary scholarship, Woodmansee and Osteen observe that ‘the conflict at work between literary and social-scientific definitions of modernism’ is one that ‘needs to be clarified in order for literary and economic theorists to reach any mutual understanding’ (27).1 As long as our view of economic modernity is based on the social-scientific model, one might expect the tendency in economic criticism to play down 197

198

Glenn Willmott

the distinctiveness of modernism as a consequential economic field, or at least subordinate it to the discourse of an economic modernity referring to those systems developed from the Renaissance forward that have received the most attention from economists themselves, namely those belonging to the capitalist marketplace. And we do see this in the essays collected under Woodmansee and Osteen’s modernist heading, which quite brilliantly assimilate its literature to particular elements of modern period consumer capitalism—those of rentier culture (Paul Delany),2 of Keynesian ideology (Davis Houck), and of deficit spending (Michael Tratner). Yet in such studies the market can become not merely a focus but an interpretive horizon. In his subsequent book, Delany explicitly aligns the market, along with its social modes and relations, with an emergent modernity, as against the aristocratic economy of ‘begging’ and ‘domination’ that it overtakes (3–4). Modernism is then characterized as that cultural moment when a residual, hierarchical ‘prestige’ economy can be reproduced in concert with market segments that have distanced themselves from industrial activity. I cannot discuss here the subtlety and reach of this argument, which should ultimately be more important than the symptom I am concerned with here. That symptom is a market fatalism that casts the market as the final arbiter of value for modernist works of art, their ‘settlement day’ (Delany 159), as if it were the only consequential (and perhaps only desirable) economic system of valuation and dissemination. In Delany’s view, the ephemeral and elitist, anti-capitalist posturing of a rentier modernist is played out at the edges of the market; rarely does this reach beyond posturing, to the more substantial and dangerous barbarism of the modernist as fascist—a stark alternative supposed to be exemplified by Pound (Delaney 157). Indeed, Delany is able to view the mimicry of non-market culture produced by modernist market segments as a tour de force of commodity power (156) and modernism generally as an ultimate form of, rather than alternative to, capitalist progress (158). This market fatalism is even more starkly expressed in Lawrence Rainey’s powerful, pioneering study of modernism’s literary economy, but without the tincture of Delany’s neoclassical, pro-market culture concepts (Rainey, Institutions). Like Delany, Rainey allows a revelatory examination of the modernist marketplace to expand into a prejudicial exclusion of other economic forms and institutions; so much so that, when it comes to a writer such as H. D., whose work seems in some way authentically outside the market realm, he can only see the work’s meaning as such falling into a void—into a private or domestic place with people but no public sphere, a monologic ‘cocoon’ with books but no readers (155–56). But why should marketplace media, as opposed to non-market social realms, be thought to constitute the only institutions of consequence for the inhibition or production of new values, freedoms or social change? Rainey’s and Delany’s market fatalism is not shared by Woodmansee and Osteen, but its pressure can be felt even there, when they have trouble

Modernism, Economics, Anthropology

199

keeping economics in general distinct from the study of money, commerce, and finance (13, 14, 21), or when they assimilate gift theory, the study of non-commodity exchanges begun by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss— which they recognize to be an underdeveloped area in the new economic criticism—to a discourse of exchange scripted by post-Marxist philosophy, without roots in either contemporary anthropology or economics (28–32). The principle danger of this ideology of market fatalism is that it will skew the way we read studies such as Tratner’s on deficit spending, which has intriguing things to say about the State as an economic organization complicit with yet distinct (especially as a politically contested institution during this period) from the market and its relations; or the way we read Mark Morrisson’s work on modernist publishing institutions as only partially assimilated to market forms; or more generally, I believe, the way we read the politics of what have been called the private and domestic spheres, whose ideological and gendered antithesis to political economy has already been mapped out by Nancy Armstrong. There is an outside to the market, and it is particularly important to articulate in modernism for any criticism that aims to evaluate the political significance, or speculate upon the social consequence, of writers’ activities and works. I even suspect that modernism is generally fascinating for its record of creative if ambivalent syntheses of market and non-market modes of production, and that its value, as a heritage for us in subsequent decades, is inseparable from its attempts to reverse appropriately the former to the latter (this view would see a continuity, for example, where Rainey sees a rupture, between the value of H. D.’s work in her own lifetime and its value to academic and other feminists, a consequential group not primarily constituted by market institutions, in later decades). Hence we not only want to know how modernists used capitalist instruments to produce and disseminate their work (and reproduce their lives); we want to know how these meshed with non-market activities, how books and periodicals moved about, were bought, kept, borrowed, sold, or given away—actually, or in the form of lectures and readings—within and across the non-capitalist structures in families, friendships, coteries, religious and political organizations, bookshop cultures, educational institutions, and public libraries. This outside to the market, and to market fatalism, appears to me most visible in the work of contemporary anthropology, where current economic concepts of the gift and social concepts of the House may be put together to suggest a powerful field of institutions that are irreducible to market forms. Just as contemporary anthropology has begun to apply its methodology to the social and cultural analysis of western as well as non-western societies, of what were once thought to be modern (progressive) as opposed to traditional (salvaged) life worlds, the literary scholar may import the same methodology to the study of the economic projects of western as well as non-western modernisms. To this end, I will briefly mention four exemplary

200 Glenn Willmott

texts: Inalienable Possessions, Savage Money, Beyond Kinship, and The Gender of the Gift. Annette Weiner’s influential revision of gift theory in Inalienable Possessions illuminates the importance of what she calls ‘keeping’ as well as ‘giving’ in a range of tribal economies, and especially, the political and cultural power of women who typically as opposed to men produce soft/ cloth objects of sacred value that are the gold standard of these economies. Literary texts may be valued as objects not to be sold or given away, but to be kept as inalienable possessions that serve to ground or frame the valuation of other objects and acts (diverse examples of which might include a badge of membership in a group, a heritage ritual or story, a marriage partner, or a land claim). Have we not all, at one time or another, wished to possess some special book, and resisted giving it away, because it represents for us a kind of secular totem, a symbolic node in the meaning we attach to the decisions we have made and make, and to the things we do make (or write!) to sell or to give? It is not even absurd, I think, pace Rainey, that The Waste Land should be caught in a bidding war for periodical publication by editors who had not yet read it: its meaning may thus be understood not only by its value as a speculative commodity, but also by its value as prestige object—as a promised totem of secure belonging to an uncertain, emergent subculture with a loose network of liberal and radical aesthetic, sexual, and political values, powerfully mediated in this instance by two other social objects, the brazen counter-cultural persona of Pound and the infamous icon of Joyce’s Ulysses. If the significance of literary texts is entangled in their institutional meanings—the socially conditioned ways that readers value texts as objects—then such significance encompasses conventions by which texts are sold, bought, kept, and given away; and the same text may take on a different type of value in any transaction. There is no evidence that market revaluations are more historically, culturally, or ‘ultimately’ more significant, to modernist period readers or to us, than other networks of valuation. There remains evidence that modernists committed themselves to the contrary. Weiner’s work also invites comparisons in the role and representation of women in such non-market networks. This is a point to which I shall return. In Savage Money, Chris Gregory clarifies Weiner’s theory by making further discriminations while simplifying its nomenclature. To objects that must if possible be kept, like the inalienable keepsakes described above, he gives the name ‘goods’; the term ‘gifts,’ on the other hand, he restricts to inalienable detachables, things that must be exchanged in order to realize the value placed upon them or fulfill their social function, yet which remain personal parts of its givers. He also insists, with other recent anthropologists, on the modernity of tribal societies once thrust into the past by ideological fiat, and hence too, on the need to apply anthropological study to coevally modern western societies (the title, Savage Money, refers to President Richard

Modernism, Economics, Anthropology

201

Nixon’s financial policies).3 Most provocatively, I think, for literary studies seeking a general economic basis, Gregory proposes a tripartite model of political economy, in which Market, State, and House institutions are distinct systems, with unique manifestations and interactions in any given society (13–14). Just as Gregory then views modern agrarian ‘peasant’ economies in terms of mixed, interacting Market, State, and House institutions—and signally, of the ‘production of commodities by means of goods’ (123)—we are henceforth invited to study modernist literary production as a field in which goods, gifts, and commodities interact and overlap in the development and lifetime of each text. It is just as valuable, in other words, to consider the production of (texts as) goods or gifts by means of commodities in modernism, as to consider the production of (texts as) commodities alone. It follows, too, that it is just as valuable to consider the social realms of the House, in which goods are valued and kept, and gifts primarily circulated, as those of the Market, for the former are not merely empty, private, domestic ‘cocoons,’ to borrow Rainey’s metaphor, but a productive part of society: the realm of the family and larger kinship affiliations, until recently feminized and occluded from the public sphere and its history (as Armstrong and Weiner remind us from very different vantage points), as well as other institutions (not always progressive or free of patriarchy) that remain, like the public university and its academic holdings, resources, and exchanges, or like the semi-autonomous economies of class or ethnic urban ghettos, not structured and motivated by the marketplace alone. W. B. Yeats’s first book, from the unprofitable, socialist, and feminist-inspired Irish nationalist textile factory and small press Dun Emer Industries, was In the Seven Woods (1903). This text, whose title refers to the lands around Lady Gregory’s feudal Big House, was bought and sold as a commodity through subscription, bookstores, and a collector’s market. It was advertised, bought, and kept as a nationalist keepsake (the purchase understood as a donation to social projects of a nationalist movement). It was borrowed and lent by individuals in literary and intellectual circles. It was read from, by Yeats, to various audiences. It was kept by public and academic libraries to be borrowed and read by various publics defined in economic and social terms (class, age, geopolitical region). Was there one institutional form of this book, one revaluation in its economic lives, that ultimately marks its cultural significance for us? For the men and women of the early twentieth century, was their own welter of non-market social formations, residual or creative, nought but a rash of mere enclaves in an already hegemonic, capitalist modernity? Or were they, rather, the scattered seeds of an alternative modern history, to be raised like a phoenix from the ashes of bourgeois, imperialist, and patriarchal violence? However we might speculate upon the answer to this historical question, we would err to impose either our own, renewed fin de siècle fatalism, or its fantasy antimony in anti-market idealism, upon the feelings and projects of the modernists.

202 Glenn Willmott

Beyond Kinship, a collection of essays edited by Rosemary Joyce and Susan Gillespie on the House, uses the term originally proposed by Lévi-Strauss to dismantle the myth of tribal societies as operating under myriad strict rules and regulations of genealogy and locality (contributing to their timeless image) in order to study the more fluid, elective, and ‘fictive’ sorts of relations that respond to the contingencies of history, and are embodied in the imaginary (vs. symbolic, as in clans or tribes) coherence of the House.4 But House formations are neither exclusive to tribal societies, nor universal among them. An important aspect of the House concept is its applicability, as Lévi-Strauss himself suggested, to western social formations as well. Because he defined the House as a ‘corporate body holding an estate made up of both material and immaterial wealth, which perpetuates itself through the transmission of its name, its goods, and its titles down a real or imaginary line,’ a line legitimated by a ‘language of kinship [descent] or of affinity [alliance]’ (Joyce and Gillespie 27), we may return to the kind of gift and family relations that Adalaide Morris thought central to H. D.’s work and life, in order to find in the coterie, and perhaps other small networks of modernist readers and writers, not only the parasitical market formation of the rentier, but an attempt to forge new House formations out of a cosmopolitan modernity. Such a conception is necessary if we are to avoid idealizing gift economies or existing House heritages as social formations either independent of Market institutions or free of their own relations of domination or social injustice. On this last point, where it is a matter of analyzing and evaluating social justice in non-capitalist heritage societies, Marilyn Strathern’s The Gender of the Gift provides the most challenging and interesting starting points. Strathern rejects a dualism of gift and commodity that opposes spiritual to material or human to reified valuations, or more broadly, subjective to objective categories, a dualism that she claims is a projection of modern western commodity thinking. She affirms the radical difference between gift and commodity relations of the kind studied by Weiner and Gregory, but reinterprets the difference as one between twin modes of objectification itself: commodity cultures objectify identities, gift cultures objectify relationships. Domination exists in gift economies as well as in commodity economies, but is different in ideology and effect. Therefore, to understand how mixed economies of any scale—whether imposed by imperialist histories or invented by modernist writers—reproduce or resist oppressive relations, it may help to consider writers, publishers, sellers, readers, and other agents of modernist literary institutions as the self-conscious, experimental personae of such relational thinking as they seek alternative grounds for revaluing persons and things in the context of a common sense of commodity objectifications that was felt to be hegemonic. Thus the utopian impulse in modernism is not expressed in the enclave of the pure gift, in the mere hatred of the imperialist marketplace: Yeats knew this hatred, first among the high modernists similarly impassioned, and both cherished and refused

Modernism, Economics, Anthropology

203

to idealize it, for he foresaw its horrific realization in the ‘rule of kindred’ that would sweep Europe in the 1930s (Yeats, Essays 526). As a nationalist Protestant of partly English descent, worried about ethnic cleansing on the one hand and devoted to a global exchange of non-market heritages on the other, Yeats also exemplifies a modernist struggle to imagine instead a new course between the potential Scylla and Charybdis in both Marketand House-regulated cultures: reinventing the self-reproducing, relational ideologies of the one amid the liberal, multicultural traffic zones of the other. Such an imaginative struggle must indeed depend on a rethinking of non-market social formations as constitutively fictive and elective, rather than, in a primitivist view, biologically determined, rigid and xenophobic. The perspectives of current anthropology upon Houses, goods, and gifts allow us to see the economies of modernism and modernity not only as market forms, arranged in a line of continuous development from early mercantile and industrialist through properly ‘modern’ (in most modernist periodizations) consumerist or late capitalist phases, but to see them as an interacting, mutually supportive or outright conflicting, set of Market, State, and House institutions in local situations. The latter perspective may even restore some of the ‘rebellion’ that even Friedman seems hesitant today to accord to modernism, when she refers to it as ‘the (illusory) break with the past’ (Chapter 1, 12) ; perhaps it often really was such a break—but as a rewriting of House and State, and their interaction with the Market, rather than a writing beyond the market altogether. In looking at economies as systems of valuation and revaluation, I have drawn the concept of culture within the ambit of economic analysis. Culture is a key term here, because more is at stake than a revelation of the conservative material grounds of so many ideologically and aesthetically challenging modes of literary expression. Modernism has always been colored by its association with counter-cultural realms such as bohemia and the avant-garde, which are unthinkable except as cultural categories. Indeed, to the extent that new economic criticisms have laid bare an essential rather than sporadic or parasitical array of market projects in modernism, they would seem to strike at the heart of the concept of counter-culture generally, whose significance extends into the postwar institutionalization of modernism contemplated by Lionel Trilling, one coextensive with the rise of the very notion of counter-culture itself in the ‘60s. This nascent deconstruction of the culture/counter-culture antimony in modernist literary history would seem to harbor consequences for the heritage of the Left among politicized readers and writers. What follows is therefore a meditation on the political implications of the association of cultural with economic concepts suggested above, where modernisms are themselves understood as institutionally mediated inheritances. Nowhere are the implications of these cultural stakes more starkly, and I must say thrillingly, pursued than in John Xiros Cooper’s Modernism and

204

Glenn Willmott

the Culture of Market Society. In this work, Cooper argues that modernist avant-garde and bohemian cultures experimented with—and the writing of modernists represented—new forms of social relationship opened up by the cultural logic of market capitalism. Modernism as a whole may be regarded as a laboratory for new kinds of (liberalized or radicalized) social experience that have long lost their novel aspect, and have instead become quotidian and even normative. A key feature of this experience is the ‘pure relationship,’ a phrase Cooper draws from D. H. Lawrence’s double in Women in Love, Rupert Birkin, and ties to contemporary social theories of sociologist Anthony Giddens and legal historian Lawrence Friedman. Pure relationships are elective, contractual bonds created between individuals who consider themselves autonomous identities. Friedman’s work puts an even more idealistic spin on this, which is assimilated to Cooper’s argument: modern individuals, contrary to traditional people, are horizontally, that is nonhierarchically, related in economic and social fields of power and choice. While this model has revelatory merits when it comes to reading modernism, I suggest that its concept of the traditional society is too simple and inaccurate both with respect to contemporary anthropology and aboriginal studies, and additionally with respect to modernists’ representations of non-market societies, with the result that the model overlooks the precisely ‘impure relationships’ alternative to market norms that are just as creatively (i.e., with radical or liberal novelty) articulated by modernist writers of every stripe, and perhaps unsurprisingly, are frequently cast in a discourse of ethnographic difference or primitivism more broadly. I would prefer to argue that ‘impure relationships,’ in which the distinction between modern and traditional bond is dissolved, lie equally, perhaps even more definitively, in the acts and images of modernism as a cultural field. For a binary opposition between modern and traditional, horizontal and vertical, choice and obligation, commodity and gift, self-fashioning and kinship, is certainly one of the great ideological creations of the long modern era, and one that contemporary anthropology and aboriginal studies alike have shown to be false and (it is not too much to say) oppressive in its effects. However, in the wasteland of signs and affects confronting the men and women of the 1920s and ‘30s, the languages of heritages prior to or exotic to the great imperialist capitalist marketplaces, languages grasped by varieties of the ‘mythical method,’ if you like, were appropriated to new ends. The slogan ‘make it new’ is itself just such an appropriation, and an explicit, selfarchiving one, across nearly four millenia from an eighteenth-century bce Chinese washbasin to Pound’s twentieth-century books. To better illustrate my contention, there is no better place to begin than Joyce’s Ulysses, a building block in both Rainey’s and Cooper’s analyses as well as the site of Cooper’s own, genially self-deprecating renunciations of the ‘60s cultures that first brought him that book. For Cooper, the counter-cultures of 1967 and the institution of Ulysses in 1967 share a

Modernism, Economics, Anthropology

205

similar problem: they both look backwards to the bohemian enclaves of modernism, those which yearn, along with Marxism itself, to revive earlier, pre-capitalist forms of community against the alienations of market society, even as they actually create definitively new forms of social bond peculiar to market society itself, based on the pure relationship and its liberated consciousness. But this latter bond is barely substantial, and too ephemeral to be a building block in societal bonding. ‘The liberation of human energies in the context of a radical individualism is accompanied by a loosening of the social bond,’ writes Cooper, and in response, Ulysses ‘traces Bloom’s and Stephen’s attempts to find again a coherent network of communal relations, those which are given, but cannot satisfy, because they are no longer vital or significant, and those which are created and sustained by the conscious effort of the participants’(169). One might think the latter efforts successful in the novel, or even hold, as I do, that its social spheres are held together by detailed, mundane networks of non-commodity exchanges and obligations, and in either case affirm some non-market outcome in the symbolic order of the novel; but Cooper rejects such affirmation when he sweeps aside the novel’s ‘documentary realism’ as entirely ‘disconnected from [its] sociopolitical imaginary,’ and asserts that the novel does not represent for us ‘the lived relations of possibly actual historical actors and communities,’ but instead, relations ‘disembedded and re-presented as myths or transhistorical typologies, of Bloom as the Wandering Jew, of man and woman, father and son as primordial relations.’ ‘We still have a family,’ Cooper claims, ‘but a family as myth, not a family you can go home to. The total effect is of human relations without human contact [ ... ]’ (176–77). This understanding diverges from my own reading of the novel’s careful tracing of relations between Stephen and his employer, his different friends, his mother, and Bloom, not to mention Bloom’s own web of relations and other networks (e.g., the talkers in the Tavern, the girls on the Rocks, or the mourners with the Dignam family), a sociological narration that seems too hastily, if not impossibly, recast in grand, transcendentally mythic terms. But Cooper’s reading is necessary if he is to firmly lodge all that ‘non-capitalist’ social content, the utopian narratives of kinship and community apart from the market, in abstractions of symbol and language that can find no concrete foothold for counter-cultural resistance in alternative ways of life, so that they remain a regressive fantasy. The same covertly alienating fate awaits Ulysses itself, argues Cooper, whose ‘decommunalized reader in 1967, in search of his own vital community of kindred spirits [perhaps fuelled, as he says he was, by “angry rebelliousness” (180)], is able to find it finally in his own head’ (185), in a ‘phantom’ community of the past (183). Here as elsewhere all alternatives to market society are deemed regressive, fantasy worlds of the past; any counter-cultural projects are anachronistic and futile. The argument tends toward a result that Cooper would be unlikely to affirm, which is to devalue heritage itself as a cultural category—both the

206 Glenn Willmott

heritages in modernism, and the heritage of modernism itself—since the economy of heritage and inheritance is embedded in gifts and appropriations, and does not march to the commodity logic supposed to be ultimately determining. The economic culture of Ulysses might better be explored with an eye to Stephen’s denunciation of Buck Mulligan—surely the great advocate of the pure relationship in the novel—not only on the grounds of (1) Mulligan’s betrayal of friendship as a bond of gifts and debts (164), but in the context of (2) Mulligan’s no-strings indifference to Stephen’s bond with his mother, which is significantly coded without irony in the neo-Celtic mythography of Yeats (Ulysses 9, 496–97), along with (3) Mulligan’s similar no-strings indifference to literature, as observed by Stephen in Mulligan’s mockery of Synge (here, with pointed reference to Synge’s Irish primitivism, seen unlike that of the dabbler Haines in a positive light, and already a haunting revenant, proleptically mourned, 164). For remember that Mulligan is paired with Haines, the decadent neo-pagan with the Celtic Revival dilettante, and that it is this sentimental primitivism (or the degraded, xenophobic one expressed by the Tavern citizen) that the 1922 Joyce scorns, not Celtic or other pre-capitalist heritages tout court. Joyce’s sympathetic allusions to Yeats and Synge demonstrate his positive interest in the latter, while his proper scorn is expressed in the lengthy analysis of Shakespeare’s family relations, economic life, and last will, in which Joyce finds England’s national icon a proto-capitalist entrepreneur who mirrors himself in the creation of Shylock (168), whose marriage bond is one of mutual betrayal in ‘an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god’ (169), and whose wife is shucked off, in his will, without obligations (167). Indeed, in Joyce’s brilliant postcolonial revision, Shakespeare is the epic bard of the market and its pure relationship, but more than that, of its disturbing impurity, its haunting by ‘agenbite of inwit,’ ‘remorse of conscience’ (169), and the ghosts of inevitable kinships. ‘Two deeds are rank in that ghost’s mind,’ says Stephen: ‘a broken vow and the dullbrained yokel on whom her favour has declined’ (166). It is in this context of a discussion of Shakespeare’s early modern ‘den[ial] [of] kindred’ that Stephen links his exposition of Jews as ‘of all races most given to intermarriage’ with his memory of the generosity, and the specifically ‘unknowing’ love given to him by Bloom, in stark contrast to that of Mulligan, on the occasion of his mother’s death: ‘Your own [kindred]?’ Stephen asks himself, ‘He knows your old fellow. The widower. Hurrying to her squalid deathlair from gay Paris on the quayside I touched his hand. The voice, new warmth, speaking. Dr Bob Kenny is attending her. The eyes that wished me well. But do not know me’ (170). This memory not only bids another adieu to Mulligan, of course, but sets the stage for Bloom lifting Stephen from the ground mumbling the Celtic bard’s song from Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen, ‘Who Goes with Fergus,’ that was his last gift to his dying mother (Ulysses 496–97). And sets the stage, too, for a decidedly unsentimental, ‘taciturn’

Modernism, Economics, Anthropology

207

Stephen going with Fergus-Bloom to accept a drink at the late-night cabman’s shelter (502). Such stagings mobilize the fictive and elective kinship principles available to the reproduction of House cultures, while personifying their relations in gifts. The pure relationship is a starting point, then, not end point of the novel, which depends upon the impure social obligations, object personifications, and objectified persons of actually existing, if marginal, non-market exchanges and heritages (Irish and European) to craft its ambitions for a modern community that escapes the market-driven dichotomy of choice vs. obligation, kinship vs. freedom, consciousness vs. organism, past vs. future.5 The relationship of Leopold and Molly Bloom also encapsulates this impurity: though on the face of it a modern liberal marriage of the kind described by Cooper, on closer consideration it lacks the passion that is supposed to justify the pure relationship, as well as the cognitive transparency of a noetic kinship. Hardly understanding each other’s way of thinking and feeling, having for nearly a decade lacked both ‘complete carnal’ and ‘complete mental intercourse’ (605), they are nevertheless intimately bound by mundane obligations and gifts to each other—the breakfasts-in-bed that frame the novel, descendents of the seedcake passed from mouth to mouth in their courtship. It is the genius of Joyce to have found ‘the only true thing in life,’ amor matris (170), in such mundane gestures, rather than the parodic rituals and salvage ethnography—the museum worship—of Mulligan and Haines. Yet we should not too quickly celebrate this newly imagined House, for it remains a male-dominated one that, in an uncanny reflection of the tribal cultures studied by Strathern, results from men operating in a double economy of cross-sex (domestic) and same-sex (public) exchanges that is denied to women in the novel, however much they may share with men capacities for wit, dignity, social labor, and creative freedom. The postcard photograph of an abject ‘group of savage women’ at whom Stephen and Bloom raptly, wordlessly stare (511–12) is perhaps the novel’s own revenant, disturbing its fictive plotting of male–male bonding, and its celebrated male–female dependencies, with unassimilated forms of female–female relationship. In conclusion, I will turn briefly to consider Zora Neale Hurston’s use of her own anthropological training and research, in relation to her ambitious articulation, in a very different context, of creative, modern, impure relationships.6 Hurston’s first book based upon folktale collection, Mules and Men of 1935, emphasizes right at the start its debt to her employer, patron, and elective ‘godmother,’ Charlotte Osgood Mason: ‘She backed my falling in a hearty way, in a spiritual way, and in addition, financed the whole expedition in the manner of the Great Soul that she is. The world’s most gallant woman’ (Folklore 12). Her chivalric and spiritual vocabulary identifies a non-market relationship that was real enough, but obscures the legal property terms of her folklore collection and writing, that in Osgood’s zeal

208 Glenn Willmott

to possess as her own spiritual property, blends with market instruments and forms. The book itself is such a blending: a deluxe, illustrated edition by a major trade publisher that would secure Hurston some income as well as status in her incredible range of market and non-market projects in theatre, music, literature, and education. The anthropological content of Mules and Men continues to surprise us for its firm footing in, rather than primitivist exclusion from, Hurston’s modern social world—a world of proletarian labor and status automobiles in which thrive Black American and underclass oral traditions, and the gifts and alliances that elicit them. Observe how kinship and property subvert without undoing the market regulation that supports them, when Hurston describes her arrival in a Polk County lumber camp: ‘We halted beside two women walking to the commissary and asked where we could get a place to stay, despite the signs all over that this was private property and that no one could enter without the consent of the company. One of the women was named “Babe” Hill and she sent me to her mother’s house to get a room. I learned later that Mrs. Allen ran the boarding-house under the patronage of the company. So we put up at Mrs. Allen’s’ (62). As time passes, she is able to enter into the wealth of this community (in intellectual property as well as mundane hospitality forms) only after she has shown that she is on the wrong side of the law (a bootlegger [63]), that her fancy dress was a gift (66), and that she not only knows ‘John Henry,’ but knows how to sing it with zest and with others (67). After this, she has proven she is ‘their kind,’ and as for the suspiciously bourgeois car, now ‘my car was everybody’s car’ (67). Only then is she given ‘that which the soul lives by,’ the imaginative heritage that in her Introduction she says is kept from appropriation by ‘the white man’ (10). The inalienability of such transactions is testified to when Hurston realizes she is willing to risk her life to defend Big Sweet, who has helped her in her collecting, if it came to a knife fight (147). Yet in Mules and Men it is not the market itself that is anywhere an enemy, only its vast, alienating, white-colored power, which to flaunt by alternative ideas of property and pleasure is here a counter-cultural sign; just as the market is not an enemy as such in Hurston’s ambitions for her book or her career. The enemy is rather a market ideology that sets itself, and its whole train of liberal values—free thought, individuality, historicity, choice, the here-and-now—in phantom opposition with something called tradition that is supposed to be fenced in by rules, comprised of non-individual, less conscious identities, glued together by blood, frozen in historical stasis, and set firmly in the past. To the extent that modernist writers defied and deformed this ideology, and more generally, to the extent that modernist scholarship itself has always depended on some kind of modern–traditional distinction, it is possible to assert a double maxim: that modernism is always an anthropological category, and hence, modernist studies is always a cultural project.

Modernism, Economics, Anthropology

209

One might do worse, at present, than to look to contemporary anthropologists and Native scholars to refine one’s basic category assumptions about the modern, whether as culture or economy.

Notes 1. In her subsequent ‘Periodizing Modernism,’ Friedman argues for transhistorical, ‘relational’ rather than ‘nominal’ definitions of modernity and modernism, in order to avoid giving unjust privilege to European and American literary histories that would occult alternative experiences and expressions of modern change. The present essay retains a narrower, nominal definition based upon the conventional periodization of western capitalist and imperialist expansion, imperial and colonial, from the 1890s to the 1940s. This is not to reject Friedman’s salutary, dialectical challenge, but in part to affirm the continued relevance of research limited as such without any logical corollary that the experience of modernity in other times and places is less valuable or ‘modernist,’ and in part simply to reflect the literary scholarship which I am here attempting to synthesize. 2. ‘Rentier culture,’ a concept developed by Delany, refers to a typically anti- capitalist, anti-bourgeois arts and intellectual culture whose income derives primarily from interest returns on invested capital, for example sons or daughters of wealthy families, or spouses and intimates thereof. Delany shows that most modernists were supported by rentier inheritances or alliances. 3. The notion of modern and contemporary tribal societies and their cultures as modern and historical, rather than antiquated and unchanging, is an important corrective to mainstream twentieth-century anthropology and to early twentieth-century ideas of dying races and cultural salvage. The most influential source for this corrective is Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. 4. It is significant, in this context, that the gift has also been anchored in the imaginary order, rather than in symbolic circulation or exchange; see Godelier 3–20. 5. This argument can be extended to the Random House edition of Ulysses printed in 1966 that Cooper bought, and which both he and Rainey view, in any significant economic sense, solely as commodities. It is significant that he, like Rainey, forgets that books such as this were available to the same consumer audience for free, through public and university lending libraries. Cooper bought his, which meant that it became his private property, rather than something of which he was a keeper or guardian while on loan. If it were merely kept to be resold, one could say it remained a commodity; if to be read, that it was converted to a use value. But Cooper admits that while he reveled in the first words of the novel, he did not make it past ‘about page 36,’ but nevertheless, ‘was conspicuously carrying it around with me wherever I went that summer’ (Cooper 180, 184). Given the aura of youthful rebelliousness and bohemian counter-culture which he says surrounded the book, I take this to be a generic rather than idiosyncratic gesture— one that renders the book a cultural object, a kind of totemic sign to self and others of connection to—I’d even like to say kinship in—a counter-cultural field organized around diverse responses to imperialist American history in the summer of ‘67. 6. For a related discussion of Hurston, see Manganaro in this collection.

12 Modernist Studies and Anthropology: Reflections on the Past, Present, and Possible Futures Marc Manganaro

This chapter is part of a projected book on the subject of what has variously been called postmodern anthropology, interpretive anthropology, or the ethnography-as-text movement in the past 30 years, with a special focus on the literary and ‘modernist’ aspects of the enterprise. Now that we are well into the twenty-first century, I am considering this postmodern movement or period as historical, as having passed, but continuing to exert influence. Also, and quite significantly for the purposes of this chapter, I consider this movement not only within the context of what was produced in the field of cultural anthropology, but also what was produced in the field of literary study, and perhaps most significantly in the work that was produced in the interstices between the fields.1 This is, of course, especially appropriate because of what was seen as the literary and interpretive turn in ethnographic writing, and in the attitudes and theorizing on that writing, and its relation to literature and to creativity in general. Finally, and most specifically, the project focuses in part upon work done on the history of the disciplines themselves, of anthropology and literature/literary study, particularly work on the formation and meaning of the culture concept. Although I do not see this project as a comprehensive history of a movement, I do intend it to cover a lot of ground, from the early 1970s to the first years of the twenty-first century, doing interpretation of writings by authors, anthropological and literary, ranging from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Edward Said, Ruth Behar, James Clifford, George Marcus, Virginia Dominguez, Walter Benn Michaels, and literary critical writings on the anthropological dimensions of modern literature. This chapter functions as a kind of prelude or preamble to that study, and divides into several related sections: the first, a brief pre-history of how modern literary study treated anthropology before this movement, and then a look at several of the key collections, produced in the 1980s and early ‘90s, on the 210

Modernist Studies and Anthropology

211

ethnography-as-text movement and what came to be called ‘modernist anthropology.’ I will discuss some feminist approaches, reactions, and contributions to the postmodern anthropology, and go to a brief consideration of the significance of Zora Neale Hurston in the context of this movement. Then I will move to consider the contributions and complications of one of the architects of the ethnography-as-text movement, the late Clifford Geertz, and his relation to modernist literary criticism and theory. Finally, I will turn briefly to the importance of culture as the key concept aligning, and separating, the fields of anthropology and literary study, and consider the work done on the history of the concept and the emergence of the two fields. As recently as 30 years ago the relation of anthropology to modern literature was primarily one of influence, especially as seen in the monumental work of John B. Vickery in his early ‘70s book, The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough. Vickery’s writings, and that of others in the period, traced the influence of Frazerian anthropology, primarily late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century comparativist speculations upon ‘primitive’ and ancient ritual and myth, upon the high modernist masterworks of Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Joyce, and others. As I have noted elsewhere, literary criticism concerned with anthropology in that period, roughly the 1950s through the 1970s, focused upon how literary modernists borrowed particular Frazerian assertions or assumptions (such as the link between ritual king-killing and certain vegetation ceremonies) to give form and significance to the literary art work (most famously, Eliot’s The Waste Land) (Manganaro, Modernist 12). On the whole, I believe, the treatment of ethnographic texts as sources for great literary art presumed a great divide separating the fields of modernist study and anthropology. My own dissertation, written in the early to mid-‘80s, was a study of anthropological influence upon the writings of T. S. Eliot. While it extended the range of anthropologists and mythologists who impacted on Eliot beyond Frazer to include Jane Harrison, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Émile Durkheim, and numerous others, it inherited the anxiety of proving the influence of anthropology upon literature, thereby, in effect, valorizing literature over that which influenced it, anthropology. It was at about this same time, 1984, that a group of American cultural anthropologists met for an ‘advanced seminar’ at the School of American Research in Santa Fe. Resulting from this seminar was the publication, in 1986, of a highly influential anthology of essays, edited by James Clifford and George Marcus, entitled Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. This collection, as indicated by its subtitle, marked a rather bold departure from the conventional approaches to anthropological writing by focusing on both the literary and political/ideological aspects of ethnography. It is not as though these aspects of anthropological writing had never before been considered: note the semiotic approach to anthropological writing by Clifford Geertz,

212

Marc Manganaro

beginning in the 1970s, and the attention put upon the imperial and colonial aspects of anthropological research and writing by Talal Asad (and, dating back to the 1950s, the marvelously poetic-structural meditations upon the West and the rest—or at least, the modern West and the Bororo—in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s landmark Tristes Tropiques). What was new about Writing Culture—becoming quite generative for literary critics and anthropologists alike, and providing fodder for debate in the anthropological community—was not only the intensity of focus upon the fact that ethnographies were written, and how they were written, and upon the less than objective motives and methods of anthropologists, but the contemplation of the very relation between the writerly nature of ethnography and the participation of said ethnography in colonialist and imperialist schemas and systems and mentalities. Essays in the volume, by anthropologists, intellectual historians, and literary critics (such as Clifford, Marcus, Asad, Mary Louise Pratt, Renato Rosaldo, Stephen Tyler, Michael Fischer, and Paul Rabinow) were deeply influenced by the structuralist, post-structuralist, and colonialist writings of, among others, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, and Said. The essays did a new kind of reading of the history of ethnography (including classic works of ethnography by Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Lienhardt, and others); considered the ethnographic aspects of works not conventionally considered ethnography—such as travel accounts by Goethe, George Catlin, and Mary Kingsley; and did interpretations of more contemporary experimental ethnography by figures such as Geertz and James Boon. Finally, and quite significantly, they also speculated on the possibilities of new kinds of ethnographic methods and text-writing: see, for example, Tyler’s call for a new ‘post-modern ethnography,’ Rabinow’s envisioning of ‘post-modernity’ in new ethnography, and Fischer’s articulation of the uses of ethnicity and memory in contemporary ethnography. So what impact did the appearance of Writing Culture, and the works appearing by its contributors, have upon those working on modernist literature, and, more broadly, upon literary scholars? For some of us literary scholars still under the spell of the anxiety of anthropological influence, the effect was dramatic, almost revolutionary: for one thing, much of what the authors were doing in Writing Culture—that is, doing ‘readings,’ even close readings, of texts—was our forte, especially since we were generally until then primarily trained in New Critical close reading.2 True, much of this involved the close reading of ethnographies rather than literary texts, but it was close reading just the same. The hazard there, of course, was that literary scholars doing readings of anthropological texts ran the risk, especially if they adopted a more or less New Critical hermetical approach to the text, of ignoring the historical contexts of the ethnography—and by that I mean the relation of a given ethnographic text to others in the history of anthropology.

Modernist Studies and Anthropology

213

This opening up to close reading of non-literary texts was not novel to anthropology, in the sense that previously semiotics and structuralism opened up many sorts of texts, and even non-texts, to textual reading: wrestling matches, bus tickets, eating habits, attitudes toward dirt, alongside, yes, Baudelaire poems and travel accounts. Despite the fact that this kind of thing had been going on for some time, the invasion of literary critics, and anthropologists acting like literary critics, on to the terrain of anthropology provoked anger and defensiveness among a number of anthropologists, and in some cases for good reason. At the heart of that conflict was the issue of whether doing readings that showed the writerly, poetic, and ideological, political, aspects of ethnography was actually calling into question the validity of anthropology as a social science, as the Science of Man. That is a question not easily answered, and with many facets. As concerns how this ‘textual turn’ within anthropology impacted on writing on modern literature, the effect of Writing Culture and aligned texts was not only to encourage literary critics to do literary readings of anthropological texts, but also to revisit the general question of how to relate anthropology to our own field of study, literature, and more specifically, modernist literature. For some of us there was a revelation of converseness—if literary approaches can be brought to the analysis of ethnography, then aspects of anthropology can be brought into or toward our understanding of modern literature. From the get-go it was understood that the former almost exclusive focus upon anthropological influence was insufficient, and in fact demeaning to anthropology. In the late 1980s a number of us, both in the fields of literary study and anthropology, worked together on the collection that would become Modernist Anthropology. One premise, or perhaps I should say discovery, among us was that the relation of anthropology to modernist literature was one of shared relations and concerns: yes, anthropology influenced modern literature, but modern literature influenced anthropology, and more to the point historically anthropologists and literary artists and critics were grappling with the same or similar challenges, crises, and opportunities, though often coming to different conclusions and in differing genres. For example, in the first decades of the twentieth century both literary critics and anthropologists were creating institutional, university-based, fields of study; and both were also reacting to the geo-political cataclysm of the Great War, each responding with an ethic and/or practice of salvage: within anthropology, of the salvaging, say, of ‘primitive’ cultures; and within literature and criticism, the salvaging of ‘Culture’ (with a capital ‘C’) itself (Manganaro, Culture 59–60). I would also note that the contributors to Modernist Anthropology used the term itself, ‘modernist anthropology,’ to denote, or cover, texts both within the fields of anthropology, literature, and literary criticism and theory. And even more importantly, perhaps, we used the term ‘modernist’ to apply

214

Marc Manganaro

not only to literature and literary criticism, or even the arts, but as well to anthropology and even the social sciences in general. One important recurring question in the collection had to do with what constitutes a modernist anthropology, and how that differed from literary modernism. Of course, the more those kinds of queries were posed, the more we realized that just as there was not one literary modernism, there were also plural conceptions of modernism within anthropology. In Writing Culture the focus within the history of anthropology was upon the writings of Malinowski and other classic figures who made the field an academic discipline in Great Britain in the 1920s through the 1940s. Modernist Anthropology differed in that one of its sections returned to the darling anthropologist of literary study, James Frazer, but considered not the influence of Frazer upon modernist literature but the literary influence upon Frazer and, more generally, the writerly and rhetorical strategies of Frazer that both tie him to and make him distinct from modern literature and other modern anthropology. As well, Modernist Anthropology devoted a section to the formation of professional anthropology in America, specifically to the work of Franz Boas and his disciples, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ruth Benedict, again focusing upon the literary influences and textual strategies that indicated their ideological tendencies and pointed to the similarities and differences between them. The treatment in Modernist Anthropology of the constellation of Boasian women anthropologists—Mead, Benedict, and Hurston—turned attention to the issue of the professional legitimacy of women anthropologists in this era. One essay, by Deborah Gordon, noted that while the era saw great strides being made by women within the profession of anthropology, this advance was certainly not uniform, and in fact was dependent upon the ethnographic authority wielded by the particular anthropologist—for example, Mead’s race and professional practices made her a highly prominent figure, while Hurston’s race and unorthodox methods made her reputation suffer for some years, and even until recently her status as an anthropologist (to be distinguished from her reputation as a literary artist and collector of folklore) was questionable. Gordon, a former graduate student of James Clifford, went so far as to note that while Writing Culture profitably applied theories and methods of post-structuralism and power relations to modern anthropology, it failed to apply or sufficiently consider feminist concerns and theories to the understanding of the history of anthropology and to the articulation of how anthropology, and ethnography, might be done differently (Gordon 146–62). Of course there were some signal texts on feminist approaches to anthropology produced before the appearance of Writing Culture, among them the important mid-‘70s volumes Woman, Culture, and Society and Toward an Anthropology of Women, featuring historic essays by Michelle Rosaldo, Louise Lamphere, and Gayle Rubin. That scholarship on feminist ethnography was

Modernist Studies and Anthropology

215

well underway by the 1980s made its omission in Writing Culture rather striking, and the appearance of essays in Modernist Anthropology welcome though less than surprising. It was not until 1995, however, that a collection appeared that was fully devoted to the past, present, and possible future of anthropology written by women and conceptions of feminist anthropology—that is, the anthology Women Writing Culture, edited by Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon. Women Writing Culture posed and attempted to answer some key and pressing questions of the time, and here I am quoting directly from the Preface: ‘What does it mean to be a woman writer in anthropology, a discipline deeply rooted in the narrative of the male quest? How does it change the history of anthropology to truly take seriously the writing of women anthropologists? Is there an ethnographic practice that is truly feminist?’ (ix). Essentially the collection devoted a section to each of these questions, significantly advancing thinking beyond, in their own words, ‘the anthropology of women’ of the 1970s and ‘analysis of gender’ of the 1980s. In addition, the section concerning the history of anthropology written by women expanded beyond the more well-known Boasians Mead, Benedict, and Hurston, and focused on anthropologists less recognized in the late twentieth-century: Elsie Clew Parsons, Ella Deloria, Ruth Landes, and others. Essays focusing on Hurston appeared in both Modernist Anthropology and Women Writing Culture, and the case can arguably be made that since the 1980s, or perhaps since Alice Walker’s rediscovery of Hurston in the 1970s, no woman anthropologist has been written about more. One reason for this sustained and productive attention was Hurston’s work in several related and historically shifting (or mutating) fields—anthropology, folklore, and literature—and I would argue that it is this multi-disciplinariness that makes her especially interesting as a modernist. But as I have said elsewhere, it is Hurston’s simultaneous work in those fields, and her deliberate blurring of the boundaries between them, that in her own day confounded her readership and for a time dimmed her reputation, and ultimately, at least in our day, championed her (Manganaro, Culture 176–77). Indeed, the history of reading a text like Tell My Horse, or Mules and Men, is characterized by evaluations, positive or negative, based upon its disciplinary or genre identification—over the decades these works have been judged as bad ethnography, good literature mistaken as ethnography, or bad art couched in bad ethnography (Culture 178–80). Hurston’s writing is characteristically and interestingly modernist precisely because it not only contains both species of literature and ethnography, but that it is actually about the very transmissions, or trafficking, between literature and ethnography, and those traffickings as exhibited in her texts anticipate and influence later works that blur, or perhaps better put shuttle between, the twentieth-century institutional and generic boundaries between the provinces of the arts and the social sciences. Put another

216

Marc Manganaro

way, Hurston’s writings are emblematically modernist because they signal a tendency, in the late twentieth and very early twenty-first centuries, toward the production of creative texts that are simultaneously and complexly both literary and anthropological. Hurston’s work alone, of course, has not moved us in that direction—there are a number of theorists, of both literary and social scientific institutional origins, who have blurred and profited from the borrowing (or poaching) of their neighboring professions. Clifford Geertz has been one such poacher, who named the habit henceforth known as ‘genre-blurring.’ A key point to be noted here is that once genres get blurred, and re-blurred, and blurred again and again, the genres themselves change, and the boundaries separating them change as well, and sometimes disappear. Geertz, that most notorious boundary-crosser in modern anthropology, functions as an exemplar of the complex cross-pollinating relation between modern literature, literary study, and anthropology. He is, after all, an anthropologist who is thought to ‘write well,’ which always has attracted literary critics to him and drawn some damning faint praise from colleagues within anthropology (as was the case with Ruth Benedict a half-century earlier). His ‘writing well’ may be due to the little-known fact that Geertz began his career not as a student of anthropology but as an undergraduate English major in the dawn of the age of New Criticism. In one late essay he likens the rise of the history of anthropology as a respectable field of study to the emergence of the New Criticism as he experienced it in the classroom, and compares New Critical pedagogy to that which preceded it: The New Criticism, now itself attacked for its formalism, aestheticism, technism, and a certain high culture congoscenti elitism, nevertheless profoundly transformed the ‘field’ of literature—if a field, rather than a morass, is what it is. The teaching of literature and its explication that had been in fact either romantic biography about poor Shelley or some other unhappy or unrecognised genius, dumbing-down comparisons of Paradise Lost and Flash Gordon, obsessive philology that was all petrified trees and no forest, amateur social history—a sort of milktoast marxism—or perhaps more commonly a rather adolescent enthusiasm as to how altogether wonderful and utterly beyond our comprehension such marvels as Shakespeare, Blake, Wordsworth or Milton were, changed almost overnight into a systematic inquiry into what this or that text meant and how it managed to mean it. Literature professors had, god preserve us, suddenly to read poems intelligently aloud in class, to demonstrate that they had at least some grasp of what they were celebrating—a test only some of them passed. You had to have been there. Whatever end the revolution eventually came to (close reading beyond the call of duty, a certain political traditionalism), bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. (Geertz, ‘Introduction’ 306)

Modernist Studies and Anthropology

217

It is hardly surprising then that Geertz’s later highly influential semiotic theory of culture is stipulated upon the notion that indicative, meaning-laden, ‘deep’ cultural forms—for example, his famous cockfight— are actually expressive art forms and thus can be read, interpreted, and here I am quoting, ‘as texts, as imaginative works built out of social materials’ (Interpretation 449). Indeed, Geertz begins the penultimate section of ‘Deep Play,’ his essay on the Cockfight, quoting modernist poetry, Auden’s elegy on Yeats: ‘ “poetry makes nothing happen ... it survives in the valley of its saying ... a way of happening, a mouth,” ’—and then goes on to assert that ‘the cockfight too, in this colloquial sense, makes nothing happen.’ As Geertz asserts, what with all the sound and ‘animal fury’ of the cockfight, ‘no one’s status really changes. You cannot ascend the ladder by winning cockfights’ (443). In the cockfight, as in the poem, or a mid-century New Critical conception of the poem, anyway, the cockfight is wrought into a world in miniature that makes nothing ‘happen’ in the worldly and timely world out there: ‘each [cockfight] match is a world unto itself’ (443), Geertz notes. Real life, the life of real consequence, goes on (less formally, less readably) in those places where, to do my own borrowing from Auden, ‘the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse/ Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.’ This cordoning off of ritual action from consequence, from making things happen in the world, certainly hearkens back to the New Critical emphasis upon the world in and as autonomous text. In New Critical terms, Geertz in fact claims that the cockfight does what ‘Lear and Crime and Punishment do; it catches up these themes—death, masculinity, rage, pride, loss, beneficence, chance—and ordering them into an encompassing structure, presents them in such a way as to throw into relief a particular view of their essential nature’ (443). The issue here is not really whether poetry or the cockfight really makes things happen but, rather, why and how Geertz chooses to focus upon cultural performances, or telling cultural performances anyway, as things that make nothing happen. What about, one might ask, looking at, reading, things that make things happen—why do those things fall outside of the purview of the eminently readable and/or culturally telling? And what about the institutional precedents and consequences of a view of art as that which makes nothing happen? While the New Critical poem and the Geertzian cockfight are both articulated as things that make nothing happen, in both cases the work that goes into reading that which makes nothing happen is posed as disciplined and very down to earth. In each case, theory-light, practice-heavy claims are made. The New Critical insistence to stick to the close reading of the text and not venture off into more dubiously speculative territory finds correspondence in Geertz’s statement, in his essay ‘Thick Description,’ on ‘the

218 Marc Manganaro

need for theory to stay rather close to the ground’ (Interpretation 24). Now, indeed, a lot of theorizing goes into any argument that theory ought to stay close to the ground, that, in both the arguments of Cleanth Brooks and Geertz, what makes the field a ‘field’ is the close-to-the-ground grunt-work of reading text, whether that text be the New Critical poem or the cultural performance that is the cockfight. One could say that if we were to start pointing fingers at the modernist American literary critic who had the palpable impact on Geertz, one would not go to Brooks but, rather, to Kenneth Burke. Clearly Geertz’s reference in ‘Thick Description’ to ‘the symbolic dimensions of social action,’ and his assertion that ‘in the study of culture the signifiers are ... symbolic acts or clusters of symbolic acts’ (Interpretation 30) owe much to Burke. And when near the end of the essay he points to the then-current (early 1970s) inter-disciplinary interest in ‘the role of symbolic forms in human life,’ he quips that ‘even Marxists are quoting Cassirer, even positivists, Kenneth Burke’ (29). Burke, it needs noting, began as a kind of New Critic who in the 1930s was driven out (or drove himself out) of the New Critical camp as he developed his own eclectic brand of Marxist-inflected formalism that engaged the outer world in art through conceptions of the socially symbolic: over the course of his career, Burke’s model took on increasingly dramatistic terms. The ties to Geertzian anthropology, as a formalist approach shot through with the imperative of reading culture as socially symbolic action, come pretty clear. Both Burke and Geertz are disciplinary iconoclasts who profitably borrow from each other’s fields: Geertz borrows from Burke; Burke, as early as the 1930s, from Malinowski. It pays to view their relationship, I think, in roughly reciprocal and diametrical, rather than parallel, terms. To wit, whereas Burke goes to Malinowski to press the point that even in situations where nothing seems to be happening—according to Malinowski’s concept of the phatic, even in small talk, big things are getting done—Geertz goes to Burke’s notion of socially symbolic action to make the ultimate point that the most meaningful of cultural performances is symbolic, in the sense that it does not change things in the world. So while the literary critic uses anthropology to make the claim, in Burke’s words, that literature is, can be, ‘equipment for living,’ can, that is, help us live our lives—the anthropologist goes to literary analysis to show that cultural action works like literature, that is, by making nothing happen. Turning, diametrically and reciprocally, to another Geertz-literary critic relationship, in the past decade or so Geertz and another prominent cultural theorist, the late Edward Said, both of whom in their day did so much in their respective fields to blur institutional boundaries and by doing so expand the power of their own disciplines, made the call for a measured return to the core institutional strengths, or activities, of their fields: in Said’s case, close reading; in Geertz’s case, fieldwork. Said late in life criticized the tendency

Modernist Studies and Anthropology

219

of contemporary critics to transition ‘immediately [ ... ] from a quick, superficial reading into general or even concrete statements about vast structures of power or into vaguely therapeutic structures of salutary redemption.’ He called instead for a practice which he termed ‘philological, that is, a detailed, patient scrutiny of and a lifelong attentiveness to the words and rhetoric by which language is used by human beings in history’ (61). In Geertz’s case, the call back to fieldwork is really an appeal to return to that good oldfashioned grunt-work in the field, not cultural studies interpretation occasioned by snippets of real experience. Geertz’s review of James Clifford’s book at the time was indicatively entitled ‘Deep Hanging-Out,’ and there Geertz takes aim at Clifford’s cultural-studies brand of writing on cultures as ‘this sort of non-immersive, hit-and-run ethnography’ (72). Have the calls of Geertz and Said, or anyone else’s calls, created or occasioned a return to core institutional activities and values in those fields? It is hard to say in a nutshell, but if I had to put it in a nutshell, I would say yes, they have. Over the past two decades in general the ethnographies produced by younger anthropologists are very field-based, relying on empirical evidence to a large degree, and yet also often profitably engaging and being shaped by contemporary work in feminist and gender studies, postmodernist theory, postcolonial study, and theories of globalization/indigenization. On the part of literary study, I would argue analogously the same—based in part upon graduate students and younger colleagues in the field with whom I have worked in the past decade or more, I would say that the work of younger literary scholars has for the most part never departed from healthy doses of close reading, although the varieties of close reading strategies have multiplied. What we have much less of (than say, 30 years ago) is close reading unattended by theorization or meditation upon alternate methodological possibilities, or at least I would like to think we do. Both Geertz and Said’s projects, at their heart, and in their words, revolved around the challenge of explicating ‘culture,’ whether that be culture as socially symbolic semiotic system, or as the nexus of power relations of imperialism as woven through and exemplified in text. Both are textually based forms of the analysis of culture, in other words, and it is culture as such that has been the common organizing principle in the fields of literary and anthropological study in the past century and a half, and of course this dates back to two foundational definitions of cultures, Arnold’s essentially aesthetic one, of ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’ (Culture 5) and Edward Tylor’s anthropological one that pretty much founded the field of anthropology, that is ‘culture’ as a ‘complex whole’ (1) of habits, rituals, artifacts, that make a people a people. I say that one is essentially aesthetic in that it clarified the humanities as a division of learning, and the other anthropological in that it launched the field of anthropology, but in fact work that has been done recently on the history of the modern culture concept, such as books by Susan Hegeman,

220

Marc Manganaro

Michael Elliott, myself, and most recently Brad Evans, all are arguing in various ways that culture developed over the past 150 years not simply in different fields along distinct disciplinary trajectories, but rather through a complex trafficking across the disciplinary divide (see Hegeman; Elliott; Manganaro, Culture; Evans). In that trafficking, literary artists and theorists, such as Joyce, Eliot, Burke, Van Wyck Brooks and Cleanth Brooks, shifted the boundary lines of what counted as literature through the importation of anthropological conceptions of culture, and anthropologists like Ruth Benedict, Frank Cushing, and Edward Sapir articulated culture in literary and literary critical language and method. Reading into the history of both fields in fact shows that the divide between those fields was not always so great, in some periods and instances greater than others, and indeed to some extent the boundaries have always been blurred. In saying this I am resisting the normative narrative of a pre-lapsarian or pre-professional period (sometime in the hazy nineteenth century), prior to the institutionalization of the fields of literary study and anthropology, when the boundary between the activities of anthropology and literary pursuit was supposedly non-existent, when cultural definitions and disciplinary practices were not defined by a great divide. By the same token, I would resist the ‘two cultures’ argument as applied to the two fields once they became institutionalized, and would say, quite simply, that anthropologists and literary artists have always been talking to each other. And I would conclude by taking that a step further, by saying that in talking to themselves, T. S. Eliot working out his own cultural poetics and politics, or Edward Sapir his, the modernist anthropologist and literary artist each had a big say, whether the case be Eliot summoning a theory of cultural collapse as exemplified in the typist at tea with the ‘young man carbuncular’ in The Waste Land, or Sapir in ‘Culture, Genuine and Spurious’ waxing apocalyptically poetic about the dreary life of the typist versus that of the Native American spearfisher (604).3

Notes 1. It is important to remember that cultural anthropology should not be conflated with the discipline of anthropology as a whole, which contains its own divisions between scientists and humanists. As Paul Breidenbach, Professor of Anthropology, remarked after Marc Manganaro’s lecture on this topic at Loyola University Chicago: ‘Natural science and modernity are one and the same in the minds of some anthropologists, mainly those whose research tends more toward the biological and archaeological than the cultural. Many of these science-influenced anthropologists see writing in only utilitarian terms, as a means to an end, not as a cultural practice in and of itself. They seldom consider the form of the writing.’ (Editor’s note) 2. On close reading and the New Criticism, see Schryer in this collection. 3. For an extended treatment of this comparison, see my Culture 23–29.

13 ‘The Famished Roar of Automobiles’: Modernity, the Internal Combustion Engine, and Modernism Garry Leonard

Under our windows we suddenly heard the famished roar of automobiles. ‘Let’s go!’ I said. Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto, 1909 the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting, T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922 One can very well measure the authenticity and power of a work by its truth to its time. There are other measures, but the truth to its time is most easily seen by comparing or confusing it with the typical real created product of the time, in our case the internal combustion engine surely. ... Sooner or later criticism will have to get used to thinking in terms of forces, tensions, movements, speeds, attractions, etc. Gertrude Stein, ‘Conversations with Gertrude Stein,’ 1935 As Modernism/modernity—the title of the leading journal in modernist studies—makes clear, the major catalyst in the ongoing reassessment of modernism is the need to factor in ‘modernity.’ New Criticism, since it concentrated on the text ‘as text’ and forbade the reader from looking up, delayed our now hyper-acute awareness of the constitutive interplay between modernism and modernity. Recently, Tom Gunning has characterized modernity itself as the result of cyclical opposition between the explosive energy of constant change and relentless mutability in modernity, and the equally tireless design of a systematic organization designed to not only contain that energy, but convert it into a useable force for some kind of forward motion: ‘Modernity involves systems of containment and control as much as a new, explosive energy’ (Gunning 310; L. Marcus).1 He goes on to illustrate 221

222

Garry Leonard

this dynamic in the development of cinema where the explosive shots of Eisensteinian montage are both utilized, and yet contained, by simultaneous developments in the narrative cinema of D. W. Griffith and others. The dynamic of volatile forces, systematically exploded at regular intervals, in order to be contained, redirected, and used as a manipulable force to create controlled movement is also the dynamic of the internal combustion engine where ‘a contained explosion is converted into consistent motion’ (Gunning 309) by using the pressure generated by the force of the explosion to press against a piston, which then is able to translate what would otherwise be an indiscriminate outward force into controlled forward motion. When Gunning seeks to explain how modernity continued to be represented in the development of cinema, from Benjamin’s ‘series of shocks’ in a ‘cinema of attractions,’ through so-called ‘narrative cinema,’ he metaphorizes the dynamic of the internal combustion engine to make his point: ‘later forms of chase or suspense translated the sudden impact of shocks into a kind of shock with duration, a continuous forward motion, often creating a jagged rhythm of stops and starts. The piston in the gasoline motor provides a model; a contained explosion is converted into consistent motion’ (310). At the heart of Eisenstein’s theory of montage is ‘collision’; one image collides with another and the resulting explosion is the ‘third term’ resulting yet different from either of the two images that provoked the collision. The Dadaist manifesto makes a similar request: ‘ Every page should explode’ (Kolocotroni et al. 277). The internal combustion engine is a machine that requires explosion and repetitive rupture to produce smooth, continuous, forward motion. As such, it is an apt metaphor for modernity where a continually renewed series of ‘shocks’ is systematically converted into ‘progress.’ One does not normally look at the sleek outlines of a Porsche or a Ferrari and think about explosions and ruptures because surrounding the internal combustion engine are mufflers, shock absorbers, and other buffers, continuing out to the design of the auto body itself with its emphasis on speed and unfettered movement. There is a contradiction, in other words, between the elegant exterior and the controlled bomb it surrounds and without which it would have no function. At a key moment in her argument in ‘Definitional Excursions,’ Friedman postulates that the ‘terminological quagmire of modernist studies’ might be connected to the ‘unresolved contradictions present and largely repressed in modernity itself’ (Chapter 1, 17). In contesting ways to define, delimit, and legitimate various directions in modernist studies, she suggests we scholars ‘become caught in a repetition of the unresolved contradictions’ (10). This is a powerful and important formulation, not only for what it states, but for what, I think, it implies: we who seek to define modernist studies also seek to resolve the ‘unresolved contradictions’ of modernity itself. But why? Why not just leave them unresolved? Why this drive for their resolution? Why not ‘get used to thinking in terms of forces, tensions,

‘The Famished Roar of Automobiles’

223

movements, speeds, attractions, etc.’ As Gertrude Stein advises? Because the myths that permit the tolerance for, and furtherance of, modernity expressly forbid thinking this way, that’s why. These myths, to suggest four, include: the myth of progress; the myth of efficiency; the myth of satisfaction and the myth of perfectibility. All these myths are legacies of Enlightenment philosophy, but what is contemporary about them is how much they have been personalized and politicized, written into social policy as well as selfhelp books. In other words, the myth of modern subjectivity—the myth of our own coherence—depends on upholding these other myths. What this means is that modernity itself, like modern subjectivity, is an irresolvable contradiction: a drive towards something unreachable that must never be understood as such if we are to continue to understand ourselves. In other words, a productive tension: a mechanism. Not man as machine, but man as tension, contradiction, cycles of engagement, explosion, resolution, renewed engagement, explosion—the rhythm of the internal combustion engine. Perhaps the reader will recognize the outline of Lacanian desire in this formulation: the object of desire is not what you want, but what causes you to want. There is something Lacan calls the objet a; it is not part of the object and it has no existence apart from its marker of our desire transecting the object. The object of desire fuels our desire, the objet a is the spark that ignites it resulting in a surge that we then attempt to direct forward. Once transected by the objet a, the object of desire is spent, exhausted, a new object must be found. And so the process repeats, an anxious ballet of tension and resolution creating motion. Lacanian subjectivity, in other words, posits subjectivity as an irresolvable contradiction—and insists that the tension of the contradiction is at the core of its dynamic as a driving force. Both the object of desire and the problems of modernity present themselves as either the thing that must be obtained (in the case of desire) or the thing that must be resolved (in the case of modernity); but, indeed, both depend on this very fundamental lack of permanent resolution to provide the basic rhythm of their drive forward. There must be a problem to resolve, or an object to desire, for both modernity and subjectivity to ‘move forward,’ but neither must ever reach the sense of resolution or acquisition that would effectively terminate the basic dynamic of the mutually constitutive engine of subjectivity/modernity. Lacan’s model of the subject, in other words, can be historicized as that of an engine that drives forward in pursuit of a ‘completion’ it must never reach. The constant ‘failure,’ however, caused by the chronic ‘lack’ at the base of subjectivity, does not threaten modern subjectivity: it IS modern subjectivity. In a similar way, the contradictions of modernity are not what threaten modernity, but what constitute it. Trying to complete the lack at the base of subjectivity, or resolve the contradiction at the base of modernity, provides the forward drive for the modern subject in modernity, but to complete that lack would cause the engine to ‘seize.’ Therefore, the myths of

224 Garry Leonard

modernity are similar to the myths of coherency that underwrite the modern ego; a crisis in one is a crisis in the other. ‘Man loves to create roads,’ says Dostoyevsky’s underground man, ‘that is beyond dispute. But [ ... ] may it not be [ ... ] that he is instinctively afraid of attaining his goal [ ... ]’ (qtd. in M. Berman 111).2 Subjectivity and modernity thrive on the attempt to foreclose lack, or resolve contradiction, but only if the attempt to resolve fails, and fails in a particular way: by hinting at the possibility of success at some future date. ‘Oh do not ask what is it,’ Prufrock intones, ‘let us go and make our visit’ (Complete 1028). He does not ask the ‘overwhelming question’ as he motors through his life—‘there will be time, there will be time’—and when old age is upon him he wonders ‘would it have mattered, after all?’ Probably not, because, as with an internal combustion engine, the point is to keep repeating the same dynamic over and over again. The only way an engine can question itself is to break down, and then the only answer to its question is how to fix it. So Prufrock can ask his question, but it will be useless. Someone will adjust a pillow behind their head and murmur ‘that is not what I meant at all.’ The engine of modern subjectivity and modernity must never reach the point of perfect stasis it is striving for—utopia in the case of the project of modernity, or contentment in the case of the modern subject. If the various myths of modernity stress improvement and progress, they also aggressively deny any sense of loss in the face of all this relentless forward motion. Even before Lacan, Freud was also a mechanic of sorts. He based all his formulations of the relationship between conscious, unconscious, and id on the irresolvable tensions exemplified by pressure being brought to bear on a closed system of liquid. It is well known that Freud took as his model of the psyche a phenomenon of modernity: the discovery of hydraulics. Hydraulics is a branch of fluid mechanics that deals with the flow of pressurized water or steam in closed conduits. Utilizing the force of water was hardly a discovery of the twentieth century—mills and primitive factories had been built next to running streams and rivers for some time. What the twentieth century discovered in fluid mechanics is how to artificially compress water and steam to produce a pressure not found in nature. The locomotive and the electrical generator—arguably the two most distinctive forces driving the economy and the culture of the twentieth century—were the result. So Freud’s system is a pressure system. The key to a successful pressure system designed to generate a controllable force is the continual maintenance of contrary energies in such a way that at no point are they able to resolve themselves. A hydraulic system that resolves its contrary forces ceases to operate, just as the human psyche, were it to resolve its sense of a ‘lack’ at the base of subjectivity, would lapse out of the Symbolic Order and lose all its force as an agent of human desire. Lacan and Freud both strove to discover ‘universal’ properties of human consciousness, and they may have, to some extent, but their models are copied straight from the discoveries of

‘The Famished Roar of Automobiles’

225

the industrial revolution which made ‘modernity,’ as we understand it, possible. Modernity, like these models, both strives to resolve its own contradictions and depends on the inability to do so as the cornerstone of its own renewable and sustainable force. Freud’s concepts of repression, displacement, and sublimation—all three fundamental to his configuration of the human psyche—are unimaginable outside the reference to the dynamics of a hydraulic system. In essence, Stein’s interviewer asks, ‘are we to confuse the human psyche with the internal combustion engine?’ And to paraphrase Stein’s response: ‘It seems one has to confuse the human psyche with something if one is to think about it articulately’ (Gertrude Stein 103). Nothing was ever lost in Freud’s hydraulic model of the psyche. A thought or feeling unavailable to the conscious mind took up a different form elsewhere, but this time in a pressurized form. Psychoanalysis accepts that it is dealing with a hermeneutically sealed hydraulic system, and then sets out to discover what has gone wrong, relying on the patient’s confusing and incomplete report of the ‘symptom’ in a manner similar to the way a mechanic listens patiently while the owner of a car recounts the peculiar noise the engine makes. In Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, the very energy that builds ‘civilization’ is configured as the triumph of taking the energy of chronic repression and rechanneling it into the rods and pistons of a sublimated ‘drive.’ Repression and displacement that are not channeled into a drive through sublimation would be like a repeated pressurization and explosion that remained uncontained and impossible to direct; that is to say, a symptom. Depression, as the term hints, is a loss of pressurization—a leak in the system—and if the capacity to generate pressure is lost, the possibility of exerting force on the drive is lost, as well. So much for the mechanics of modernity and subjectivity; but what of its ideologies? Because they are not at all the same thing. The production and distribution systems of modernity generate as much deprivation as they generate compensation. The modern money economy is not so much the discovery of greater energy resources and how to utilize them, as it is the reallocation of the profits thereby generated in an unprecedentedly unequal manner. In order to rationalize the stark contrasts in the distribution of wealth and resources that modernity allows, modernity must generate a number of interrelated ideologies, most prominent among them, those of progress, efficiency, satisfaction, and perfectibility. What all these ideologies have in common is that they promise to submit themselves to an impartial view of their relative value, but only at some unspecified future date. Like Lacan’s theory of desire in the modern subject, they are ideologies of deferral, of the ‘not yet’ variety. As such, they, too, mimic the perfect hydraulic system by creating a productive state (for some) of perpetual irreconcilability, with the point of actual accountability permanently postponed. If the point of accountability is suddenly forced on the mechanism, it breaks

226

Garry Leonard

down, as in the massive mechanical seizure of Enron. But as long as this can be avoided, the emphasis can shift from the ‘why’ of the machine to the ‘how’: How to make it more efficient; how to make further progress with it; how to perfect it, and never ‘why’ it is, or why it is the particular way it is, in the first place. The unequal distribution of wealth and opportunity is frankly acknowledged in modernity, but only in the context of discussing how it will be eliminated. In other words, the irresolvable tensions that permit a modernity that forces various inequities is posited as ‘a work in progress.’ Like Lacan’s model of desire, the problems of modernity are then tolerable because the purpose of modernity is to resolve them (eventually). A model of an engine and a model of modern subjectivity become oddly similar and mutually constitutive in that both generate energy from irreconcilable dynamics (explosion and containment) that are nonetheless envisioned as productively and efficiently ‘moving forward’ in a manner that is always cast as an improvement on efficiency, productivity, satisfaction, or all three. The so-called self-help book phenomenon, the first version of which was Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), is inseparable from the concept of ‘improvement’ in business and industry (of which Carnegie was a leading representative). Six years before this, The Little Engine that Could (1930) is described as follows: ‘With her courageous refrain, I Think I Can, I Think I Can, the little blue engine is part of American folklore, symbolizing the rewards of determination and good will’ (see Awdry qtd. in Piper 3). The engine as ego; the ego as engine. But also, the engine as an example of Foucauldian biopolitics. In defiance of the rules of physics, the little engine ‘finds’ extra energy—designated as ‘determination and good will’ (as opposed to free will?) to get up the hill—without, of course, questioning the hill, or for whose benefit she is climbing it (what exactly is her ‘reward’?). The Thomas the Train series, first published in 1945, elaborates this quite a bit with numerous engines vying for the famous accolade of the Fat controller—‘you are a truly useful engine’—before being sent off to get a new coat of paint as reward. Confidence—a belief in the possibility of completing one’s assigned task—becomes the human equivalent of pressurized steam, and a loss of confidence is a loss of pressure, and thus prelude to a nervous/mechanical breakdown. Everyone who attempts to define modernity, no matter how much they disagree, seems to concede it involves a somewhat unpredictable cycle between pressure and rupture. The pressure, while exerting great force that permits increased productivity, is also liable to produce the very rupture that robs it of all its force. Lyotard puts it this way: ‘Modernity, wherever it appears, does not occur without a shattering of belief, without a discovery of the lack of reality in reality—a discovery linked to the intersection of other realities’(Postmodern Condition 9). Unreal ‘reality’ is not a contradiction to resolve in order to make good on the promise of modernity; it IS

‘The Famished Roar of Automobiles’

227

modernity. One indication of this in various modernist techniques is the interest in placing things next to each other (juxtaposition, collage) rather than one after the other (linearity, perspective). Stream of consciousness, montage, cubism, and Woolf’s construction of ‘the moment’ have crucial differences in priority and emphasis, but they all share this tendency to juxtapose rather than delineate. When the officious Mr. Deasy defines God to Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, he describes all history ‘as moving towards a manifestation of God.’ ‘That’s god to me,’ Stephen says, gesturing towards the window. ‘What?’ a puzzled Deasy asks. ‘A shout in the street,’ Stephen replies (28). Where Deasy insists on history as cause and effect, overseen by a transcendental certitude which all events bend, Stephen nominates convergence and explosion—history as an engine, events as a divergent group of elements coming to an explosive point. The explosion seems an apt metaphor for the loss of transcendental certitude that seems a hallmark of modernity. Matthew Arnold, as early as 1867, was noting: The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, And the result is the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude ... And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. (Dover Beach 86) It is the loss of certitude leading to the ignorant ‘clash’ I would draw attention to. This connection between a loss of transcendental certitude and the undirected explosion is traced again by Yeats in ‘The Second Coming’ when he begins: ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world [ ... ].’ The result: ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity. / Surely some revelation is at hand’ (Poems 187). But the revelation is far from being Mr. Deasy’s complacent imagining of a glorious, pre-ordained ‘manifestation of God’ that makes the ways of god clear to mankind. Rather, what the speaker ‘knows’ is there is no plan and no way to predict an outcome: ‘now I know / That twenty centuries of stony sleep / were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, / And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem

228 Garry Leonard

to be born?’ (188). Certainly Picasso’s Guernica is a visual equivalent of this sentiment where an ‘event’ is depicted as an explosion, with no suggestion this is ‘progress’ or a step towards the eventual ‘manifestation of God.’ What Friedman’s formulation also suggests to me is that we will never agree on the various social qualities of what modernity is—nor should we—but we might be able to agree on some of the significatory strategies in modernist texts that signal how modernity feels—how its reality affect registers itself, and how this unreal reality is present in the various strategies of modernism, however different they might be in their specifics. What are the affective qualities of the experience of modernity, regardless of how we delineate its historical, socio-economic infrastructure? What is the engine of modernity—what drives it—from a subjective point of view? What prompts us to celebrate it? What forces us to lament it? What makes us dependent upon it, even as we seek to redirect or reject it? Modernity, whatever it is, seems determined to keep going until it cannot go anymore. So not what it is, but what it feels like—which, in the end, is all that is, anyway. ‘History,’ as Jameson reminds us, ‘is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis [...]’ (Political 102). And literature, after all, is not economics. Or, if it is, it is about the economics of affect, the credit and debit of negative and positive emotions struggling for equilibrium in an ever changing climate of compensation and deprivation, driving the modern subject forward. Indeed, the experience of modernity can be mapped on to an emotional matrix using compensation and deprivation as its two axes. Any conceivable subjective encounter with it partakes of both in some measure. This irresolvable contradiction, which I am locating at the center of modernity, is also at the center of the dominant theories contemporaneous with modernity’s emergence as a felt entity: Freud’s notion of the ‘pleasure’ principle and the ‘reality’ principle, for example; or the ‘lack’ at the heart of Lacan’s mirror stage which launches the subject into a permanent quest for wholeness; or the irresolvable contradiction at the heart of Marx’s famous definition of the commodity as a ‘fetish’ that seems to offer compensation for labor, even as it reifies social relations and further alienates the worker from him or herself and everybody else as well. In modernity, we need to buy because we work and we need to work because we buy; they both require one another and they both make the other necessary. So, side-stepping the nominal, relational and political/cultural debates so ably outlined by Friedman, I’m going to stick with what she calls the ‘dissonant drama’ taking place in the minds and hearts of those of us who compete to make our own discourse the authorized version of what modern/ modernism/modernity should be taken to be. In seeking to lay the groundwork not for what modernity is, but for what it feels like, I have no less a champion than Karl Marx himself who remarked in a letter to Engels ‘each of us walks around under twenty thousand pounds of pressure per square

‘The Famished Roar of Automobiles’

229

inch, but does anybody feel it?’ (qtd. in M. Berman 27). From Dorian Gray’s locking away of his portrait to Pink Floyd’s modern anthem, ‘Comfortably Numb,’ the answer seems to be no, nobody does. But what we do not feel, we act out, even in something as intellectual as defining modern/modernity/ modernism. And what modernity feels like, when we do feel it, roughly speaking, is a bewildering but exciting onslaught of aggressively promoted compensations offered to (secretly) combat completely unadvertised and unacknowledged deprivations. The compensations are organized, ubiquitous, clamoring for us to avail ourselves of them. The deprivations are scattered, private, and vaguely embarrassing as they appear to somehow be our fault. Modernism, as a reaction to this unresolvable contradiction, becomes not a strategy for ‘representing’ modernity, but a symptom enigmatically embodying the displaced feelings it evokes in us. In such a model, modernity and modernism become mutually constitutive: modernist art becomes a symptomatic signifier for the felt experience of modernity, and modernity responds to this symptomatology with renewed efforts to seek better and more efficient ways for compensating the unacknowledged deprivations that form the kernel of its symptom. Modernist ‘high art’ tends to delineate the deprivations; modernist ‘low art,’ or popular culture and advertising, tends to emphasize the compensations. But our compensations can also tell us a great deal about our deprivations, so this is a point where high and low art, long understood to be in some kind of dialogue in modernism, might also be seen as a dialectic.3

The case for vulgar modernism As early as 1909, the Futurists are deliriously clear future art will celebrate all that is modern in order to consume it in a ‘famished roar’ and power itself forward, in an ever accelerating manner, without brakes. There is an unqualified belief in the indomitable triumph of the engine. Eliot, by contrast, will argue for all kinds of checks and balances (shock absorbers and mufflers), most predominantly ‘the mythic method,’ but it amounts to the same thing: contain the explosion of modernity and build an artistic mechanism around the explosive energy to convert its indiscriminate force into sustained and sustainable forward motion. We can discuss differing attitudes to this ‘internal combustion engine’—the full gamut, from Marinetti’s self-immolating celebration to Eliot’s delicate lament that it should ever be so—but the alternative seems to be to abandon all hope of creating an art that meaningfully engages with modernity if the explosion-containmentdrive model is not employed in some sort of design. The problem, which Eliot takes the time to explain, and Marinetti ignores lest he deflate his poorly examined euphoria, is that no expression ‘captures’ modernity; it can only be ‘sampled,’ and its effects can only be shown as the various changes generated by its unpredictable force.

230 Garry Leonard

The ‘science’ of economics, for instance, is a science of how to foresee—or adapt if you fail to foresee—the nearly infinite varieties of change possible in the modern economy. Using various agreed upon indicators, economics looks at the ‘spray pattern’ of sudden shifts that have already occurred in an attempt to anticipate and prepare for what might follow. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf does something oddly similar. Septimus’s friend Evans has already been ‘exploded,’ as has the psyche of Septimus, but the whole of London culture conspires to keep this contained: ‘The War was over [ ... ]’ (5).4 But right in the opening pages Woolf supplies, literally, a small explosion from an internal combustion engine: ‘oh! a pistol shot in the street outside!’ Clarissa initially thinks. But, no. ‘Dear, those motor cars,’ Miss Pym the florist explains, and the narrator agrees: ‘The violent explosion which made Mrs. Dalloway jump and Miss Pym go to the windows and apologize came from a motor car [ ... ]’ (14). Miss Pym’s apology to her customer is one containment strategy, and suffices within the confines of the floral shop, but the explosion continues to radiate outwards; only now there is a curious shift because what radiates outward is no longer the ‘violent explosion’ itself, but its subjective affects—how it makes people feel: ‘rumours were at once in circulation from the middle of bond Street to Oxford Street on one side, to Atkinson’s scent shop on the other, passing invisibly, inaudibly, like a cloud, swift, veil-like upon the hill, falling indeed with something of a cloud’s sudden sobriety and stillness upon faces which a second before had been utterly disorderly’ (14). The backfire of an internal combustion engine radiates outward as the gossip—a sort of psychological shrapnel— establishing a ‘spray pattern’ that impacts and affects numerous people in numerous different ways. Woolf’s second ‘explosive’ device will be a description of a meandering airplane sky-writing the name of a toffee in the sky. Her final ‘radiating’ device will be the sound of Big Ben. This, of course, is a planned ‘explosion,’ linked to a timing device, and indicating not merely itself, but the time of day. As such, it trumps and contains the other two, calling everyone to a rededication of themselves to their duty, a renewed desire to be ‘a truly useful engine,’ after which ‘the leaden circles dissolve in the air’ (14). But Septimus no longer has any capacity to function as an engine; he has ‘blown a gasket’ and the force of modernity blows right through him—uncontained, unchanneled, undirected, unproductive and unbearably beautiful—something he feels compelled to tell someone, the Queen, if possible. But you cannot communicate modernity directly—virtually every modernist says so—and so he feels explosion after explosion inside himself with no mechanism that might permit him to harness its disruptive force into a message. As for the rest of us, we communicate more or less, but we do not ‘see’ modernity, or, we do see it, but its gone as soon as we register seeing it, so all we can see, really, is what it does, and all we can know of it is how it feels: how it drives us forward, or threatens to stop us in our tracks. The

‘The Famished Roar of Automobiles’

231

dynamic is there yet again in Joyce’s notion of ‘the epiphany,’ his ‘engine design’ if you will, for ‘sampling’ the raw fuel of modernity, exploding it in a contained space, and using the force to press various pistons into a ‘sudden manifestation’ full of numerous interpretive possibilities. The ‘epiphany’ of the boy in ‘Araby’ is a sudden unexpected convergence of multiple moments of modernity: the girl who didn’t really notice him, the electrically and magically lit bazaar now dark, the dreary life with Aunt and Uncle completely unrelieved, the future efficacy of his powerful fantasy compensations permanently compromised—it all hits him like the thunderbolt hit Saul on his way to Damascus, or the way a truck might hit you if you step obliviously into an intersection. There is an equivalent moment in Chaplin’s Modern Times, at the point where the Tramp is about to be released from the asylum where he was taken after his apparent ‘breakdown’ at the factory (significantly, his ‘breakdown’ consists of breaking the assembly line machinery with elegant, poetic, highly personalized movements). Shaking his hand goodbye, the Doctor imparts his final advice: ‘Take it easy out there.’ What follows is a bewildering montage, a lurching, disorienting, tilted sequence of automobiles bearing down, crowds hustling this way and that, and the little Tramp frozen in fear. I suggested this was the equivalent of the boy’s epiphany in ‘Araby,’ but it would be more accurate to say it is the inverse. The boy experiences the fragmentation as internal, as the destruction of his idealized self, and he sees it, in Catholic terms, as somehow deserved because he ‘sees himself’ as ‘a creature of vanity’ (Dubliners 23). This rather ancient judgment he delivers on himself is strikingly at odds with the brief innocuous encounter with modernity that inspired it. Chaplin, through his figure of the Tramp, creates a character who is pre-lapsarian in relation to modernity. Unacquainted with its many myths of progress, satisfaction and soon-tobe-achieved utopias, he is equally immune to mistaking its effect on him as the result of internal defects, character flaws, or ‘sins.’ The modern world is insane. He does the best he can. End of story. The narrator of Joyce’s story, however, is an early example of a character being hassled by electrified modernity and then unceremoniously plunged into a darkness he then misrecognizes as one of his own making. I have stressed the importance of the internal combustion engine as a model for the relationship between modernity and modernism, but it is equally a model for the construction of modern subjectivity and the modern ego. Of course, Freud was attempting a universal construct, not a historical one, when he postulated the ego as a sort of overloaded switchboard operator trying to work out the conflicting signals of the id and the superego. Freud’s own self-conscious model for this was, as I have said, hydraulics. Both rely on building a strong container so that otherwise undirected energy can be made to perform specifically defined tasks. Freud’s concept of repression would make no sense outside the assumption that the mind is a ‘closed system’ and

232 Garry Leonard

that pressure generated by an act of repression will issue forth at some other point, either productively as sublimation, or unproductively as a symptom. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud is clear that the ‘energy’ required to power civilization is produced through repression and sublimation. No wonder consulting a therapist is sometimes referred to as a ‘tune up’ because there is an element of mechanics to Freud’s model. Too much pressure generated, or too much pressure directed at the wrong point, and the symptom is what we bring to the psychoanalyst’s office in a manner not so different from the peculiar rattle we try to describe to our local auto mechanic. There is much brilliance in Freud’s model, but one puzzle has always been what is the ‘fuel’ for this engine of the mind? Fire is applied to the boiler of a steam engine, gasoline is poured into the internal combustion engine—both are ‘closed systems,’ but with an access point to the outside world where the fuel can be applied to generate the pressure that starts the wheels turning. If the id-ego-superego model were truly universal, the easy answer would be ‘life,’ and that is right, in a general sort of way, but if we insist, as I do here, that Freud’s model is a modern engine, we can then conclude the particular fuel is modern life, or the experience of modernity, not just ‘life’ in some ahistorical sense. But to get some sense of how ‘modernity’ can generate pressure in the closed system of the psyche, we need to turn to a scholar of modernity who aggressively historicizes the specifically ‘modern’ psyche, Georg Simmel: ‘The psychological foundation, upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli’ (54). For ‘intensification’ read ‘pressure.’ The energy of the city operates with force against the psyche; so much so, and so persistently, that it gradually wears down its parts: ‘There is perhaps no psychic phenomenon which is so unconditionally reserved to the city as the blasé outlook. It is at first the consequence of those rapidly shifting stimulations of the nerves which are thrown together in all their contrasts and from which it seems to us the intensification of metropolitan intellectuality seems to be derived. [ ... ] it stimulates the nerves to their utmost reactivity until they finally can no longer produce any reaction at all’ (56). Simmel goes on to discuss the need for ‘strategies of delimitation’ whereby the individual designs ways to slow down and/or filter out this constant supply of ‘fuel’ so the mechanics of the psyche are not overwhelmed. ‘Thus the metropolitan type—which naturally takes on a thousand individual modifications—creates a protective organ for itself against the profound disruption with which the fluctuations and discontinuities of the external milieu threaten it’ (57). The model of the internal combustion engine is neither explicit or implicit in this theorizing, but the dynamic is recognizable: Input(fuel). Spark. Explosion. Pressure. Drive. Forward motion. Francis Picabia did a drawing of a spark plug in 1916, with the word ‘forever’ engraved on it, and gave it the title Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité (Portrait of a Young American Girl in a State of Nudity), which

‘The Famished Roar of Automobiles’

233

would seem to effectively combine the components I am trying to align in this chapter: modern subjective desire, internal combustion engine, modernity, myth of progress. ‘Strategies of delimitation,’ or a ‘protective organ,’ therefore, are the psychic equivalent of effective engine design, a proper alignment—buffers, baffles, and mufflers—strategically placed within the mechanism in relation to the fuel taken in, the pressure generated when it is exploded, and the pistons thrust forward by the resulting force. Explosion. Containment. Forward drive: Ever since trying to factor in modernity, we have seen more and more clearly that ‘Modernism’ is not merely an aesthetic, or a strategy of representation for presenting the ‘modern’; it is also a reaction to modernity—a compromise formation in response to itand, in turn, an influence on its development. Miriam Hansen, attempting to find a way to see Hollywood cinema as an example of modernism, or what she calls ‘vernacular modernism,’ also cites the extent to which popular cinema, from its inception, seemed to find a way to ‘contain’ the shocks and disappointments and failures of modernity and, at the same time— primarily through the invention of narrative driven genres—produce works that both registered ‘shock’ and offered containment systems to ‘convert’ that shock into a forward moving narrative (see Chapter 14). The Hollywood genre film certainly bears a resemblance to a ‘mechanism,’ and it is a mechanism that uses the irresolvable contradictions of modernity to drive forward a narrative that appears to resolve them. Eisenstein, in a similar vein, insisted on montage as the ‘collision’ of two images. Out of this collision came a force that the structure of the overall film must then contain and utilize through the ‘rhythm’ and ‘tonality’ of the film as a whole. The technique of montage also operates as an ‘engine’: in this case, a mechanism ‘fueled’ by taking two inert images and allowing

Figure 15 (1915)

Francis Picabia, Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité

© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009.

234 Garry Leonard

them to ‘collide’ at intervals throughout a film. The result is short, regular bursts of explosive force generating the raw energy that the structure of the film then contains and uses to drive forward the interpretive arc of the film. As mechanical engineers will tell you, the theory of the internal combustion energy is simple, and present in countless designs of nearly infinite variety, from lawnmowers to scooters, Porsches and jets. So identifying the internal combustion engine as a metaphor for a central dynamic of how modernity and modernism interface permits us to see underlying relationship where previously we might have argued for fundamental difference. So how is it Hollywood cinema is never discussed as an example of ‘modernism’? Part of the problem is the emphasis on ‘classical’ Hollywood cinema, a term that refers to various editing styles, pioneered by Griffith, that permitted the ‘classical’ telling of a story. But as Miriam Hansen notes, ‘the temporal dynamics of the term classical as applied to the cinema is retrospective; the emphasis, is on tradition and continuity rather than newness as difference, disruption, and change’ (‘America’ 361). So ‘classical’ cinema, as well, has been saved from the explosive energies of modernity by insisting on its ‘continuity’ and appealing to ‘tradition.’ Of course, Eliot’s appeal to tradition is perfectly plausible when it comes to the written word, but it is, on the face of it, quite absurd when referring to cinema—which only began around 1900 and has no ‘tradition’ whatsoever, properly speaking. To emphasize continuity and tradition, rather than disruption, is to declare cinema an ‘instant classic’—to borrow a phrase from advertising parlance—and thus not really classical at all. ‘Classical’ Hollywood is a structural reading of the film, based on a developed concept of editing related to the formation of various narrative possibilities within a visual field. But what is ignored in this is the purpose of Hollywood film—to make money—and how that relates to the primary function they discovered to do this: compensation for the deprivations of modernity. A focus on the function of Hollywood cinema as compensatory to its viewers for their lived experience of deprivation in modernity points to another blind spot in the ‘classical’ approach: the importance of the rise of genre films as a containment strategy for the repeated sparks and explosions of subjective life in modernity. In a ‘classical’ film analysis, a ‘shot counter shot’ in a musical is not any different from a shot counter shot in film noir—but few would suggest the two films affect their audience the same way, or that they take a similar attitude to the lived experience of modernity. As befits a compensatory structure, Hollywood genres are more of a symptom formation that offers what appears to be a solution for the irresolvable contradictions of modernity, but which wind up reinscribing the problem even while apparently resolving it. Hansen comes up with the phrase ‘vernacular modernism’ to describe the modernist quality of Hollywood genre films and suggests ‘[o]nce we begin looking at Hollywood films as both a provincial response to modernization and a vernacular for different, diverse,

‘The Famished Roar of Automobiles’

235

yet also comparable experiences, we may find that genres such as the musical, horror, or melodrama may offer [ ... ] reflexive potential [ ... ] with appeals specific to those genres and specific resonances in different contexts of reception’ (‘America’ 373). So if we take the most obvious Hollywood genres—melodrama, film noir, the Western, romance, horror, science fiction, and the musical—we have, with apologies to Wallace Stevens, seven ways of looking at modernity. Each way has a unique emphasis and unique assumptions about what is of most value in modernity, and what should be protected and how, to navigate it successfully. Each, in other words, features a different engine design with the same purpose: convert the shock and rupture of experience in modernity into a smooth and continuous forward motion. Having recast Hollywood genre formations and modernist manifestos as engine design, we are able to see more fundamental connections between ‘high art’ and ‘low art’ in modernism. It has been a commonplace idea for some time that modernist ‘high art’ borrows from the energy of advertising and pop culture, but it has been seen as a somewhat one-way street. To put it another way, Eliot never held forth on what popular culture should or should not do, what its problems were, or how it should cope, or even what function it had in modernity. It was regrettable. It was pervasive. ‘Art’ had to find a way to exist in spite of it. As a result, no one, until very recently, seemed to regard popular cinema—that is to say, a cinema specifically designed as entertainment in a manner best suited to generate profit—as an example of modernism, or as anything that could shed light on the trials and tribulations of modernism. But if modernist ‘high art’ chronicles with patient horror the deprivations of modernity, popular film tries just as hard to offer compensation. Gertrude Stein remarked ‘this our period was undoubtedly the period of the cinema and series production’ (‘Portraits’ 116). The phrase ‘series production’ makes it clear Stein is not thinking of avant-garde cinema, but popular cinema. Her use of the word ‘production’ points to another reason cinema would seem to be an example of modernism par excellence, or at least par excellence for ‘modernism’ as defined here: Hollywood genres as so many ‘engine designs’ for drawing in the explosive fuel of modernity and using it in a properly aligned mechanism to produce forward motion; it is a machine medium, and, in the case of Hollywood, the studio system adapted ‘Fordism’ production line logistics wholesale so that the apparently ‘classical’ film up on the screen was produced in an assembly line fashion like a Model T. ‘I was doing what the cinema was doing,’ Stein said, when commenting on her compositional style in The Making of Americans (Gertrude Stein 103), and what Stein saw cinema ‘doing’ had nothing to do with the skillful employment of a ‘seamless editing’ that permitted the ‘continuous’ unfolding of a narrative, as the ‘classical’ theory of Hollywood would suggest. Instead, what Stein noticed was that ‘by a continuously moving picture of any one there is no memory of any other thing and there is that thing

236

Garry Leonard

existing. [ ... ] I was making a continuous succession of the statement of what that person was until I had not many things but one thing’ (Gertrude Stein 104). A sense of immediacy generated by a continual succession, an insistence on the moment as moment and not as part of a larger sequence: cinema as a succession of moments that nonetheless is a continual moment. Stein’s compositional style, like cinema, is ‘made up of succession and each moment having its own emphasis that is its own difference and so there was the moving and the existence of each moment as it was in me’ (‘Portraits’ 176). This also reminds us cinema may be structured, but its primary effect is sensational and quotidian; we feel it, and we feel it now, and in a way that is always in excess of whatever ‘story’ it seems to be narrating. The surrealist Louis Aragon noticed this when he spoke passionately of all the ‘really common objects, everything that celebrates life, not some artificial convention that excludes corned beef and tins of polish’ (Hansen, ‘America’ 374). His choice of everyday objects—corned beef and tins of polish—also make it clear he is thinking of popular cinema and not avant-garde experimentation. If we want to understand what is modernist about Hollywood cinema, and how it is an example of modernism, we have to ask how it offers up the sensation of modernity within a compensatory fantasy that corresponds to the more familiar high modernist treatment of deprivation. How, to use Hansen’s phrase, it ‘suggests a different organization of the daily world’ (‘America’ 375). If we posit the ‘classical’ narrative continuity of cinema as the sum total of how cinema works, then, indeed, there is little that suggests a modernist engagement with modernity. But what Stein and Aragon are responding to—two pillars of modernism by any one’s account—is the visuality and optics of cinema, not the editing conventions which generate the illusion of narrative ‘continuity.’ Indeed, the ‘story’ of this or that film never seems to make any impression or be of the slightest importance. So it is not the ‘story,’ however much ‘classical’ seamless editing makes that possible, but the sheer fact of the visual, arranged into a formula of compensatory fantasy, that fascinates. Perhaps another reason why Hollywood cinema is never set against, or along side of, ‘high modernist’ texts, or viewed as ‘modernism’ at all, is that Hollywood cinema appears to aggressively foreground its ability to tell stories, to smooth out discontinuities, to reincorporate ruptures. Understanding this dynamic of deprivation and compensation permits another way to think about what modernist writers such as Eliot are proposing when they put forth techniques such as the ‘mythic method’—that is, the use of myth to restore a sense of antiquity and tradition to the pell mell, hither and thither chaos of modernity. What an odd conflation of aesthetics and science, unless we view the ‘mythic method’ as a new sort of ‘strategy of delimitation,’ a new sort of ‘engine’ more able to convert the chaos of modernity into the recognizable forward thrust of literature.

‘The Famished Roar of Automobiles’

237

The melodramatic Mr. Eliot The Waste Land appears to foreground discontinuity and fragmentation and therefore have little in common with Hollywood cinema. But as the above comments by Stein and Aragon suggest about cinema, even in popular cinema, the story is entirely incidental. With Hollywood cinema, we must learn to look past the apparent continuity to the discontinuity that is contained by it, and in The Waste Land we are often urged to discern patterns despite the relentless fragmentation. Both cases suggest a manner of approach in inverse relationship with one another, yet both are not so different from the way Freud urged the analyst to ignore the ‘manifest’ content of a dream and study the form it takes instead, for clues about its ‘latent’ message. When it came to dreams, Freud viewed ‘content’ as a distraction from ‘meaning.’ If we think of the problem of how to ‘contain’ the explosive fragmentary nature of modernity so that it can be represented in some way—a problem that preoccupied Eliot—then the strategy of Eliot using Tieresias as a framing device and the strategy of a Hollywood film using the genre formulation (melodrama, horror, science fiction, the Western, etc.) as a framing device, will allow both endeavors to be seen as taking part in the overall ‘modernist’ project of finding a way to make literature, or art, or even feelings, possible in the age of modernity. When Eliot said Tieresias was the key to The Waste Land, he gave us a hint that the framing device in a modernist work is every bit as significant, perhaps more so, than what is inside the frame. Similarly, he heralded Joyce’s Ulysses as having ‘the importance of a scientific discovery’ because ‘in using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him’ (‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’ 371). For Eliot, modernist writers must find a way to feature the chaos of modernity, so that it can be registered as chaos, and yet also submit it to the artistic process where art’s capacity to explore meaning and significance will impose some sort of order. Eliot admits modern art that ignores modernity is pointless, and yet, equally, he insists, Modern Art that tries to represent it directly is incomprehensible—and so equally pointless. Antiquity must be aligned with modernity for Eliot because ‘it is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’ (‘Ulysses’ 372). Finally, Modern Art that purports to ‘explain’ modernity is kidding both itself and the reader and merely offering a false sense of coherency. Eliot does not leave us in the dark about his preference for antiquity and his distaste for modernity. Put most simply, the one reassures him and the other makes him nervous. His point is less how to represent ‘modernity’ and more how to capture it, contain it, and connect it to some kind of tradition, in order to force its anarchic energy into the projection of a discernable pattern.

238 Garry Leonard

Modernist art, in other words, must take in the ‘explosion’ of modernity, but do so on its own terms, with its own rhythms, and its own containment strategies, just like an internal combustion engine or a Hollywood genre film. Factoring modernity into our study of modernism has forced us to see modernism as much as a containment strategy for the explosion of modernity as it is a strategy for representing its indubitable presence. Indeed, a distinctive feature of modernism is the extent to which it is uncomfortable with the contemporaneity that it also admits can be its only credible subject. As Woolf noted, in trying to explain ‘what demon whispered in my ear and urged me to my doom’ that is, set her on her path to becoming a novelist, it was ‘a little figure’ who rose before her who said, ‘My name is Brown. Catch me if you can’ (‘Mr. Bennett’ 634). Woolf urges an acceptance on the part of the reader for the panic and haste made necessary by this chase: ‘Tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure’ (637). Eliot is inclined to put all this oppositional antagonism within the boundaries of a resilient form borrowed from antiquity: ‘Instead of narrative method,’ he concludes, ‘we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art’ (‘Ulysses’ 177). But the ‘mythical method’ does not ‘make’ the modern world at all; rather, it draws in a sample of it—a trace—and though this trace reacts, explodes and disintegrates, the durable form of antiquity—‘the mythical method’—keeps it before us long enough for us to observe it and feel its effects. More importantly, it provides the raw energy that drives the work forward—spasmodically—just like ‘the typical real created product of the time,’ according to Stein: the internal combustion engine. Although Woolf does not identify the mythical method as a part of Joyce’s strategy, she does characterize his ambition as requiring a similar dynamic of capturing a fleeting trace of volatile modernity and containing it, however briefly, for the only moment we have before it disappears: ‘he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain, and in order to preserve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious [ ... ]’ (‘Modern Fiction’ 631). Both Eliot and Woolf, admittedly in different ways, and with different emphases, self-consciously fashion modernism as a search for a type of containment strategy to capture something of what would otherwise be an overwhelming influx of unprocessed sensation: ‘The mind receives myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms’ (631). Again, this challenge is similar to that of the audience watching a film—images rush at him or her in an ‘incessant shower.’ For there to be sensation and affect, this rush must be contained. ‘We murder to dissect,’ Wordsworth had said, thinking of the approach of science to nature, but the same dilemma is faced by the modernist facing modernity: how to sample it without killing it. It is something Stein felt

‘The Famished Roar of Automobiles’

239

Cézanne knew how to do; he creates ‘a feeling of movement inside the painting not a painting of a thing moving but the thing painted having inside it the existence of moving.’ Joyce does something similar—not a description of something moving, but a sense of something moving within the subject who is moving within modernity. He captures trivial moments ‘on the fly,’ but then explodes them as a shattering point of convergence between the ordinary and the transcendental. Once again there is a curious similarity between the aesthetic mechanisms these writers design and the central dynamic of the internal combustion engine. The genius of this engine as well is to take a ‘trace’ from the world— gasoline—submit it to a steel crank case, introduce a spark, explode it, and then allow this otherwise uncontainable energy to drive the various shafts and pistons in such a way that controlled forward motion is possible. Isn’t Joyce’s epiphany—the careful selection of volatile traces confined to a moment, then sparked by an insight—a similar operating principle to the internal combustion engine where ‘the burning of a fuel occurs in a confined space called a combustion chamber’? And isn’t the description of what is called ‘the defining feature of an internal combustion engine’ oddly similar to what Eliot insists must be done if literature is to be possible in modernity: ‘useful work is performed by the expanding hot gases acting directly to cause movement, for example by acting on pistons, rotors, or even by pressing on and moving the entire engine itself’ (‘Internal Combustion Engine’, Wikipedia. Web. 21 April 2008). Explosive ‘moments’ drive the pistons and rotors so that the otherwise unmanageable ‘innumerable atoms’ (Woolf) of modern consciousness can be incorporated and ‘burned’ to produce the forward momentum of modern fiction as exemplified by ‘the typical real created product of the time, in our case the internal combustion engine’ (Stein). Tieresias, in The Waste Land, to examine this more closely, is a framing device who also operates rather like a combustion engine—taking in the volatile moments of modernity and allowing the subsequent internal explosion to convert the otherwise random and myriad impressions into a beautiful arc of a fully modern encounter. He is, by his own account, perpetually exhausted, and small wonder since he can only watch and record and seems to have no mandate to interfere. He can sample, burn, explode, and surge; but he cannot interfere. The connection between the internal combustion engine and modern consciousness is suggested to me when Eliot allows Tieresias to describe ‘quitting time’ at the office as ‘the violet hour, when the eyes and back / Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting’ (‘Waste Land’ 61, italics mine). Tieresias may well be from antiquity, sent by Eliot to London to impose a ‘pattern’ on the otherwise futile anarchy of a modern encounter, but he is still a recognizably modern voyeur, recording for us the disaffected motions of a meaningless urban sexual encounter with the dispassionate accuracy of a web cam: ‘He, the young man carbuncular, arrives, [ ... ]’ Tieresias begins.

240 Garry Leonard

Notice the echo of a screenplay direction. Tieresias already appears to have been ‘set up’ in advance, somehow. We don’t know how he got there, we don’t know why he doesn’t leave, or why he’s there and not somewhere else, but, as with cinema, especially at this time, he is ‘in position’ and the ‘action’ can take place only after the young man carbuncular has ‘entered’ the visual field just in front of him. The boundary created by this ‘mythic method’ is as much cinematic as it is an effect of ‘antiquity’; it is the visual range of the camera, and, by extension, the scene before us is a screen with nerves thrown up upon it in a pattern. ‘Exploring hands encounter no defense’ Tieresias intones, but with its sense of immediacy, disembodiment and imposition on the visual field, this sounds less like narration and more like ‘voice-over.’ Furthermore, it is not so much a description as it is, to use cinematic terminology, a carefully selected close-up: ‘Exploring hands,’ followed by a screenplay direction: ‘encounter no defense.’ Film actors would find this perfectly adequate to describe for them where the camera is focused and what needs to happen in this prescribed visual space before the director shouts ‘cut!’ Instead of a more generic narrative description (‘the lovers embrace’, for example) we get a ‘close-up’ of his hands ‘exploring’ and her hands not resisting. It was just this sort of use of visual synecdoche—a combination of close-ups, medium shots and long shots, snipped and pasted into a specific sequence through editing, that allowed Griffith and others to formulate the visual language of narrative cinema. Although Tieresias insists on his credentials as a being from antiquity—‘I who have sat by Thebes below the wall / And walked among the lowest of the dead’—his introduction of himself serves as both a ‘voice-over’ cuing us to the dreariness of the scene, and a ‘shot by shot’ description: ‘[The young man carbuncular]Bestows one final patronising kiss, / And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit. ...’ The ellipsis is in the poem and it signals a ‘fade out’—the young man carbuncular ‘exits’ and Tieresias tells of hearing him groping his way down what must be unlit stairs, but ‘the camera’ stays in the room: ‘She turns and looks a moment in the glass.’ The use of the present tense, the hint at duration in the word ‘moment’—a hint both for the ‘actress’ and the ‘camera man’—all identify this as belonging to the genre of a screenplay—and suggest to me that the reason Tieresias can observe this intimate act right next to them, and yet remain unseen is because he is in a movie theater—what better place for a visitor from ancient times to observe modern behavior in extreme proximity without calling attention to himself. Or, to put this another way, Eliot borrows his own experience of watching an intimate scene of screen, unseen by the film actors, but seeing everything, cut together and pasted in close-ups, medium shots, cut aways, and so forth. In order for this random scene of ‘futility and anarchy’ to register as an ‘event,’ the ‘frame’ is held steady for Tieresias and the action takes place before his neutralized presence. Eliot might identify this ‘frame’ as ‘antiquity’ and the process of framing it as ‘the mythic method,’ but it also looks a great deal like a movie scene projected on to a screen with Tieresias

‘The Famished Roar of Automobiles’

241

serving as an audience of one. The ‘screen’ becomes luminous in its apparently unstinting offering of what is in fact an imaginary plenitude; various ‘shots’ are broken up and spliced together to produce a reality effect of ‘modernity’ even though modernity itself is far too chaotic and multifaceted to be straight forwardly represented. Eliot’s use of Tieresias as an example of a ‘mythical method,’ in other words, is very like the use of a camera and the process of editing to produce a reality effect of modernity through the cinematic method. In both cases—narrative cinema and The Waste Land— modern ‘fragments’ are brought into a ‘classical’ framework in order to give ‘shape and significance’ to what would otherwise chaotically flash past as ‘futility and anarchy’ (‘Ulysses’ 178). But as we continue slouching into the twentieth-first century, few would argue we have been spared ‘futility and anarchy.’ The engine of modernity churns on, even if oil is dwindling, even if the earth is warming, even if the engine itself no longer stands in as a metaphor of ‘progress.’

Notes 1. In her book The Tenth Muse, Laura Marcus notes the persistent affiliation of cinema with the locomotive in writers such as Virginia Woolf: ‘Early cinema came into being with the representation of the moving train [ ... ] and extreme motion was in general the filmic mort in the first decades of the medium, with its chase sequences, representations of city transport, the automobile, and machine-imagery’ (106). It is interesting that the locomotive—a highly public form of engine that predates the internal combustion engine—is associated with early cinema in general, but the subsequent formation of cinematic genres, and their close affiliation with containing and directing personal affect, is presented with far more metaphorical precision by the ‘personal’ motor of the internal combustion engine. 2. Dostoyevsky’s early observation has been updated in Justus Nieland’s recent book Feeling Modern: ‘What uniquely modernist technologies of inwardness and exteriority follow from feeling’s circulation within a social horizon at once structured by restrictive norms of recognition, stultifying expressive codes and forceful calls to identification, but also repeatedly undone by the very wildness of feeling?’ (qtd. in M. Berman 51). The structured urge to build a road, the terror that one might complete it and pave over ‘wild feelings’—the genre formation, like the internal combustion engine, thrives on this irresolvable paradox, this reliably repeated explosion that can be converted into a sustainable forward drive. 3. On the high art/popular culture divide, see Cucullo and Kaufman in this collection. 4. The general populace of London on this particular day in June, is merely assuming an essence beneath the fragmentary, but their assumption is nostalgic and doomed because their models of inheritance and ‘proportion’ are outmoded and oppressive. But, as Saler reminds us in his book The Avant-Garde in Interwar England, the modernists were looking for this totalizing essence, as well, but more in an effort to organize and contain modernity than pretend it had somehow never come about. In other words, the modernist artist is not completely aloof from the same quest as the myopic Lady Bruton and the Procrustean Sir William Bradshaw.

14 The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism Miriam Bratu Hansen

In this chapter, I wish to reassess the juncture of cinema and modernism, and I will do so by moving from the example of early Soviet cinema to a seemingly less likely case, that of the classical Hollywood film. My inquiry is inspired by two complementary sets of questions: one pertaining to what cinema studies can contribute to our understanding of modernism and modernity; the other aimed at whether and how the perspective of modernist aesthetics may help us to elucidate and reframe the history and theory of cinema. The juncture of cinema and modernism has been explored in a number of ways, ranging from research on early cinema’s interrelations with the industrial-technological modernity of the late nineteenth century, through an emphasis on the international art cinemas of both interwar and new wave periods, to speculations on the cinema’s implication in the distinction between the modern and the postmodern. My focus here is more squarely on mid-twentieth-century modernity, roughly from the 1920s through the 1950s—the modernity of mass production, mass consumption, and mass annihilation—and the contemporaneity of a particular kind of cinema, mainstream Hollywood, with what has variously been labeled ‘high’ or ‘hegemonic modernism.’ Whether or not one agrees with the postmodernist challenge to modernism and modernity at large, it did open up a space for understanding modernism as a much wider, more diverse phenomenon, eluding any single-logic genealogy that runs, say, from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism, from T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka to Samuel Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet, from Arnold Schönberg to Karlheinz Stockhausen. Since the 1980s scholars have been dislodging that genealogy and delineating alternative forms of modernism, both in the West and in other parts of the world, that vary according to their social and geopolitical locations, often configured along the axis of post/coloniality, and according to the specific subcultural and indigenous traditions to which they responded. In 242

The Mass Production of the Senses 243

addition to opening up the modernist canon, these studies assume a notion of modernism that is ‘more than a repertory of artistic styles,’ more than sets of ideas pursued by groups of artists and intellectuals (Rainey and von Hallberg 1). Rather, modernism encompasses a whole range of cultural and artistic practices that register, respond to, and reflect upon processes of modernization and the experience of modernity, including a paradigmatic transformation of the conditions under which art is produced, transmitted, and consumed. In other words, just as modernist aesthetics are not reducible to the category of style, they tend to blur the boundaries of the institution of art in its traditional, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century incarnation that turns on the ideal of aesthetic autonomy and the distinction of ‘high’ vs. ‘low,’ of autonomous art vs. popular and mass culture.1 Focusing on the nexus between modernism and modernity, then, also implies a wider notion of the aesthetic, one that situates artistic practices within a larger history and economy of sensory perception that Walter Benjamin for one saw as the decisive battleground for the meaning and fate of modernity.2 While the spread of urban industrial technology, the large-scale disembedding of social (and gender) relations, and the shift to mass consumption entailed processes of real destruction and loss, there also emerged new modes of organizing vision and sensory perception, a new relationship with ‘things,’ different forms of mimetic experience and expression, of affectivity, temporality, and reflexivity, a changing fabric of everyday life, sociability, and leisure. From this perspective, I take the study of modernist aesthetics to encompass cultural practices that both articulated and mediated the experience of modernity, such as the mass-produced and mass-consumed phenomena of fashion, design, advertising, architecture and urban environment, of photography, radio, and cinema. I am referring to this kind of modernism as ‘vernacular’ (and avoiding the ideologically overdetermined term ‘popular’) because the term vernacular combines the dimension of the quotidian, of everyday usage, with connotations of discourse, idiom, and dialect, with circulation, promiscuity, and translatability. In the latter sense, finally, this chapter will also address the vexed issue of Americanism, the question of why and how an aesthetic idiom developed in one country could achieve transnational and global currency, and how this account might add to and modify our understanding of classical cinema. I begin with an example that takes us back to one standard paradigm of twentieth-century modernism: Soviet cinema and the context of Soviet avant-garde aesthetics. At the 1996 festival of silent film in Pordenone, the featured program was a selection of early Soviet films made between 1918 and 1924, that is, before the great era of montage cinema, before the canonical works of Sergei Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov, and Alexandr Dovzhenko. The question that guided the viewing of these films was, of course, how Russian cinema got from the Old to the New within a rather short span of time; how the sophisticated mise-en-scène cinema of the Czarist era,

244 Miriam Bratu Hansen

epitomized by the work of Yevgenij Bauer, was displaced by Soviet montage aesthetics. Many of the films shown confirmed what film historians, following Lev Kuleshov, had vaguely assumed before: that this transformation was mediated, to a significant degree, by the impact of Hollywood. American films began to dominate Russian screens as early as 1915 and by 1916 had become the main foreign import. Films made during the years following 1917, even as they stage revolutionary plots for ‘agit’ purposes, may display interesting thematic continuities with Czarist cinema (in particular a strong critique of patriarchy) and still contain remarkable compositions in depth.3 Increasingly, however, the mise-en-scène is broken down according to classical American principles of continuity editing, spatio-temporal coherence, and narrative causality. A famous case in point is Kuleshov’s 1918 directorial debut, Engineer Prait’s Project, a film that employed Hollywood-style continuity guidelines in a polemical break with the slow pace of Russian ‘quality pictures.’4 But the ‘American accent’ in Soviet film—a faster cutting rate, closer framing, and the breakdown of diegetic space—was more pervasive and can be found as well, in varying degrees of consistency, in the work of other directors (Vladimir Gardin, Ceslav Sabinskij, Ivan Perestiani). Hyperbolically speaking, one might say that Russian cinema became Soviet cinema by going through a process of Americanization. To be sure, Soviet montage aesthetics did not emerge fullblown from the encounter with Hollywood-style continuity editing; it is unthinkable without the new avant-garde movements in art and theater, without Constructivism, Suprematism, Productivism, Futurism—unthinkable without a politics of radical transformation. Nor was continuity editing perceived as neutral, as simply the most ‘efficient’ way of telling a story. It was part and parcel of the complex of ‘Americanism’ (or, as Kuleshov referred to it, ‘Americanitis’) that catalyzed debates on modernity and modernist movements in Russia as it did in other countries.5 As elsewhere, the enthusiasm for things American, tempered by a critique of capitalism, took on a variety of meanings, forms, and functions. Discussing the impact of American on Soviet cinema, Yuri Tsivian distinguishes between two kinds of Americanism: one, stylistic borrowings of the classical kind described above (‘American montage,’ ‘American foreground’), and two, a fascination with the ‘lower genres,’ with adventure serials, detective thrillers, and slapstick comedies that, Tsivian argues, were actually more influential during the transitional years. If the former kind of Americanism aspired to formal standards of narrative efficiency, coherence, and motivation, the latter was concerned with external appearance, the sensual, material surface of American films; their use of exterior locations; their focus on action and thrills, physical stunts and attractions; their tempo, directness, and flatness; their eccentricity and excess of situations over plot (Tsivian, ‘Between’ 39–43). Tsivian analyzes the Americanism of the ‘lower’ genres as an intellectual fashion or taste. Discerning ‘something of a slumming mentality’ in

The Mass Production of the Senses 245

Eisenstein’s or FEKS’ fascination with ‘serial queen’ melodramas, he situates the preference of Soviet filmmakers for ‘cinematic pulp fiction’ (Victor Shklovsky) in the context of the leftist avant-garde’s attack on high art, cultural pretensions, and western ideals of naturalism (Tsivian, ‘Between’ 43).6 What interests me in this account is less the intellectual and artistic intertext than the connection it suggests, across the distinction, between the two faces of American cinema: the classical norm, as an emergent form that was to dominate domestic as well as foreign markets for decades to come, and the seemingly nonclassical, or less classical, undercurrent of genres that thrive on something other than or, at the very least, oblique to the classical norm. What also interests me in the dynamics of Americanism and Soviet film is the way they urge us to reconsider the relationship between classical cinema and modernism, a relationship that within cinema studies has habitually been thought of as an opposition, as one of fundamentally incompatible registers. The opposition between classicism and modernism has a venerable history in literature, art, and philosophy, with classicism linked to the model of tradition and modernism to the rhetoric of a break with precisely that tradition (Pippin 4). In that general sense, there would be no problem with importing this opposition into the field of cinema and film history, with classical cinema falling on the side of tradition and alternative film practices on the side of modernism. If, however, we consider the cinema as part of the historical formation of modernity, as a larger set of cultural and aesthetic, technological, economic, social, and political transformations, the opposition of classical cinema and modernism, the latter understood as a discourse articulating and responding to modernity, becomes a more complicated issue. I am using ‘classical cinema’ here as a technical term that has played a crucial part in the formation of cinema studies as an academic discipline. The term came to serve as a foundational concept in the analysis of the dominant form of narrative cinema, epitomized by Hollywood during the studio era. In that endeavor, ‘classical cinema’ referred to roughly the same thing whether you were doing semiotics, psychoanalytic film theory, neoformalist poetics, or revisionist film history. This is not to say that it meant the same thing, and just a brief glimpse at its key moments will illustrate the transvaluations and disjunctures of the term. Not coincidentally, the reference to Hollywood products as ‘classical’ has a French pedigree. As early as 1926, Jean Renoir uses the phrase ‘cinematic classicism’ (in this case referring to Charlie Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch) (qtd. in Elsaesser 52). More specific usage of the term occurs in Robert Brasillach and Maurice Bardèche’s Histoire de cinéma, in particular in the second edition of 1943, revised with a collaborationist bent, where the authors refer to the style evolved in American sound film of 1933–39 as the ‘classicism of the “talkie” ’ (qtd. in Bordwell, History 47).7 After the Occupation, critics,

246

Miriam Bratu Hansen

notably André Bazin, began to speak of Hollywood filmmaking as ‘a classical art.’ By the 1950s, Bazin would celebrate John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) as ‘the ideal example of the maturity of a style brought to classic perfection,’ comparing the film to ‘a wheel, so perfectly made that it remains in equilibrium on its axis in any position’ (Bazin, ‘Evolution’ 149). This classical quality of American film, to quote Bazin’s well-known statement, is due not to individual talent but to ‘the genius of the system, the richness of its ever-vigorous tradition, and its fertility when it comes into contact with new elements’(Bazin, ‘La Politique’ 143, 154). The first major transvaluation of the concept of classical cinema came with post-1968 film theory, in the all-round critique of ideology directed against the very system celebrated by Bazin. In this critique, formulated along Althusserian and Lacanian lines and from Marxist and later feminist positions, classical Hollywood cinema was analyzed as a mode of representation that masks the process and fact of production, turns discourse into diegesis, history into story and myth; as an apparatus that sutures the subject in an illusory coherence and identity; and as a system of stylistic strategies that weld pleasure and meaning to reproduce dominant social and sexual hierarchies.8 The notion of classical cinema elaborated in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma, Cinéthique, Screen, Camera Obscura and elsewhere was less indebted to a neoclassicist ideal, as it still was for Bazin and Rohmer, than to the writings of Roland Barthes, in particular S/Z (1970), which attached the label of a ‘classic,’ ‘readerly,’ ostensibly transparent text to the nineteenthcentury realist novel.9 Another turn in the conception of classical cinema entails the rejection of any evaluative usage of the term, whether celebratory or critical, in favor of a more descriptive, presumably value-free and scientifically valid account. This project has found its most comprehensive realization to date in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson’s monumental and impressive study, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (1985). The authors conceive of classical cinema as an integral, coherent system, a system that interrelates a specific mode of production (based on Fordist principles of industrial organization) and a set of interdependent stylistic norms that were elaborated by 1917 and remained more or less in place until about 1960. The underlying notion of classical film style, rooted in neoformalist poetics and cognitive psychology, overlaps in part with the account of the classical paradigm in 1970s film theory, particularly with regard to principles of narrative dominance, linear and unobtrusive narration centering on the psychology and agency of individual characters, and continuity editing. But where psychoanalytic-semiotic theorists pinpoint unconscious mechanisms of identification and the ideological effects of ‘realism,’ Bordwell and Thompson stress thorough motivation and coherence of causality, space, and time; clarity and redundancy in guiding the viewer’s mental operations; formal patterns of repetition and variation,

The Mass Production of the Senses 247

rhyming, balance, and symmetry; and overall compositional unity and closure. In Bordwell’s formulation, ‘the principles which Hollywood claims as its own rely on notions of decorum, proportion, formal harmony, respect for tradition, mimesis, self-effacing craftsmanship, and cool control of the perceiver’s response—canons which critics in any medium usually call “classical” ’ (Bordwell et al. 3–4). Such a definition is not just generally ‘classical’ but more specifically recalls neoclassicist standards, from seventeenth-century neo-Aristotelian theories of drama to eighteenth-century ideals in music, architecture, and aesthetic theory.10 (I do not wish to equate eighteenth-century aesthetics at large with the neoclassicist tradition, nor with an ahistorical reduction to neoformalist principles; the eighteenth century was at least as much concerned with affect and effect, with theatricality and sensation, passion and sentiment, as with the balance of form and function.) As in literary and aesthetic antecedents that invoke classical antiquity as a model—recall Stendhal’s definition of classicism as a style that ‘gives the greatest possible pleasure to an audience’s ancestors’ (qtd. in Bordwell et al. 367–68)—the temporal dynamics of the term classical as applied to the cinema is retrospective; the emphasis is on tradition and continuity rather than newness as difference, disruption, and change. I can see a certain revisionist pleasure in asserting the power and persistence of classical standards in the face of a popular image of Hollywood as anything but decorous, harmonious, traditional, and cool. But how does this help us account for the appeal of films as diverse as Lonesome, Liberty, Freaks, Gold Diggers of 1933, Stella Dallas, Fallen Angel, Kiss Me Deadly, Bigger Than Life, Rock-a-Bye Baby (add your own examples)? And even if we succeeded in showing these films to be constructed on classical principles— which I’m sure can be done—what have we demonstrated? To repeat Rick Altman’s question in an essay that challenges Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson’s model: ‘How classical was classical narrative?’(14). Attempts to answer that rhetorical question have focused on what is left out, marginalized or repressed, in the totalizing account of classical cinema—in particular, the strong substratum of theatrical melodrama with its uses of spectacle and coincidence but also genres like comedy, horror, and pornography that involve the viewer’s body and sensory-affective responses in ways that may not exactly conform to classical ideals.11 Also minimized is the role of genre in general, specifically the affective-aesthetic division of labor among genres in structuring the consumption of Hollywood films. An even lesser role is granted to stars and stardom, which cannot be reduced to the narrative function of character and, like genre but even more so, involve the spheres of distribution, exhibition practices, and reception. The Classical Hollywood Cinema explicitly and, it should be said, with self-imposed consistency, brackets the history of reception and film culture—along with the cinema’s interrelations with American culture at large.

248

Miriam Bratu Hansen

It is not my intention to contest the achievement of Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson’s work; the book does illuminate crucial aspects of how Hollywood cinema works and goes a long way toward accounting for the stability and persistence of this particular cultural form. My interest is rather in two questions that the book does not address, or addresses only to close off. One question pertains to the historicity of classical cinema, in particular its contemporaneity with twentieth-century modernisms and modern culture; the other question is to what extent and how the concept can be used to account for Hollywood’s worldwide hegemony. To begin with, there is a certain anachronism involved in asserting the priority of stylistic principles modeled on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century neoclassicism. We are dealing with a cultural formation that was, after all, perceived as the incarnation of the modern, an aesthetic medium up-to-date with Fordist–Taylorist methods of industrial production and mass consumption, with drastic changes in social, sexual, and gender relations, in the material fabric of everyday life, in the organization of sensory perception and experience. For contemporaries, Hollywood at its presumably most classical figured as the very symbol of contemporaneity, the present, modern times: ‘this our period,’ as Gertrude Stein famously put it, ‘was undoubtedly the period of the cinema and series production’ (Stein, ‘Portraits’ 177).12 And it held that appeal not only for avant-garde artists and intellectuals in the United States and the modernizing capitals of the world (Berlin, Paris, Moscow, Shanghai, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Sydney, Bombay) but also for emerging mass publics both at home and abroad. Whatever the economic and ideological conditions of its hegemony—and I wish by no means to discount them—classical Hollywood cinema could be imagined as a cultural practice on a par with the experience of modernity, as an industrially produced, mass-based, vernacular modernism. In cinema studies, the juncture of the classical and the modern has, for the most part, been written as a bifurcated history. The critique of classical cinema in 1970s film theory took over a structuralist legacy of binarisms, such as Barthes’s opposition between the ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly,’ which translated into the binary conception of film practice as either ‘classicalidealist,’ that is, ideological, or ‘modernist-materialist,’ that is, self-reflexive and progressive. This is particularly the case for the theory and practice of ‘counter cinema’ that David Rodowick has dubbed ‘political modernism’— from Jean-Luc Godard and Peter Gidal through Noel Burch, Peter Wollen, Stephen Heath, Laura Mulvey, and others—that owes much to the revival or belated reception of the 1920s and 1930s leftist avant-garde, notably Bertolt Brecht.13 Moreover, the polarization of classical cinema and modernism seemed sufficiently warranted by skepticism vis-à-vis Hollywood’s selfpromotion as ‘international modern,’ considering how much the celebration of American cinema’s contemporaneity, youth, vitality, and directness was part of the industry’s own mythology deployed to legitimate cutthroat business practices and the relentless expansion of economic power worldwide.

The Mass Production of the Senses 249

While Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson’s neoformalist approach is to some extent indebted to the political-modernist tradition, The Classical Hollywood Cinema recasts the binarism of classicism and modernism in two ways.14 At the level of industrial organization, the modernity of Hollywood’s mode of production (Fordism) is subsumed under the goal of maintaining the stability of the system as a whole; thus major technological and economic changes, such as the transition to sound, are discussed in terms of a search for ‘functional equivalents’ by which the institution ensures the overall continuity of the paradigm (Bordwell et al. 304). In a similar vein, any stylistic deviations of the modernist kind within classical cinema— whether imports from European avant-garde and art films, native films noir, or work of idiosyncratic auteurs like Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and Otto Preminger—are cited as proof of the system’s amazing appropriative flexibility: ‘So powerful is the classical paradigm that it regulates what may violate it’ (Bordwell et al. 81).15 To be sure, there is ample precedent outside film history for the assimilation of the modern to classical or neoclassicist standards; after all, art historians speak of ‘classical modernism’ (Picasso, de Chirico, Léger, Picabia) and there were related tendencies in music (Reger, Stravinsky, Poulenc, de Falla, to name just a few). In modern architecture (Le Corbusier, Gropius, the Bauhaus), we can see the wedding of machine aesthetics to a notion of presumably natural functions, and in literary modernism, we have selfproclaimed neoclassicists such as T. E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, Ernst Jünger, and Jean Cocteau. In the genealogy of film theory, one of the founding manifestos of classical cinema is Hugo Münsterberg’s The Psychology of the Photoplay (1916), a treatise in neo-Kantian aesthetics applied to the cinema. Its author was actually better known for books on psychology and industrial efficiency that became standard works for modern advertising and management. Yet these examples should be all the more reason for the historian to step back and consider the implications of these junctures that reveal themselves as increasingly less disjunctive with the passing of modernity, the disintegration of hegemonic or high modernism, and the emergence of alternative modernisms from the perspective of postmodernity. A key problem seems to lie in the very concept of the ‘classical’—as a historical category that implies the transcendence of mere historicity, as a hegemonic form that claims transcultural appeal and universality. Already in its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century usages, the neoclassicist recourse to tradition, in whatever way it may misread or invent a prior original, does not take us through history, but instead to a transhistorical ideal, a timeless sense of beauty, proportion, harmony, and balance derived from nature. It is no coincidence that the neoformalist account of classical cinema is linked and elaborated in Bordwell’s work to the project of grounding film studies in the framework of cognitive psychology.16 The Classical Hollywood Cinema offers an impressive account of a particular historical formation of

250 Miriam Bratu Hansen

the institution of American cinema, tracking its emergence in terms of the evolution of film style (Thompson) and mode of production (Staiger). But once ‘the system’ is in place (from about 1917 on), its ingenuity and stability are attributed to the optimal engagement of mental structures and perceptual capacities that are, in Bordwell’s words, ‘biologically hard-wired’ and have been so for tens of thousands of years.17 Classical narration ultimately amounts to a method of optimally guiding the viewer’s attention and maximizing his or her response by way of more intricate plots and emotional tensions. The attempt to account for the efficacy of classical stylistic principles with recourse to cognitive psychology coincides with the effort to expand the reign of classical objectives to types of film practice outside Hollywood that had hitherto been perceived as alternative (most recently in Bordwell’s work on Feuillade and other European traditions of staging-indepth) as well as beyond the historical period demarcated in the book (i.e., up to 1960).18 How can we restore historical specificity to the concept of classical Hollywood cinema? How can we make the anachronistic tension in the combination of neoclassicist style and Fordist mass culture productive for an understanding of both Hollywood cinema and mass-mediated modernity? How do we distinguish, within the category of the classical, between natural norm, canonical cultural form, and a rhetorical strategy that perhaps enabled the articulation of something radically new and different under the guise of a continuity with tradition? Can there be an account of classicality that does not unwittingly reproduce, at the level of academic discourse, the universalist norms mobilized not least for purposes of profit, expansion, and ideological containment? Or wouldn’t we do better to abandon the concept of classical cinema altogether and instead, as Philip Rosen and others have opted to do, use the more neutral term ‘mainstream cinema’ (8)? For one thing, I do not think that the term ‘mainstream’ is necessarily clearer, let alone neutral or innocent; in addition to the connotation of a quasi-natural flow, it suggests a homogeneity that locates side streams and countercurrents on the outside or margins rather than addressing the ways in which they at once become part of the institution and blur its boundaries. For another, I would argue that, for the time being, classical cinema is still a more precise term because it names a regime of productivity and intelligibility that is both historically and culturally specific, much as it gets passed off as timeless and natural (and the efforts to do so are part of its history). In that sense, however, I take the term to refer less to a system of functionally interrelated norms and a corresponding set of empirical objects than to a scaffold, matrix, or web that allows for a wide range of aesthetic effects and experiences—that is, for cultural configurations that are more complex and dynamic than the most accurate account of their function within any single system may convey and that require more open-ended, promiscuous, and imaginative types of inquiry.19

The Mass Production of the Senses 251

From this perspective, one might argue that it would be more appropriate to consider classical Hollywood cinema within the framework of ‘American national cinema.’ Such a reframing would allow us, among other things, to include independent film practices outside and against the pull of Hollywood, such as ‘race films,’ regional, subcultural, and experimental film practices. While this strategy is important, especially for teaching American cinema, the issue of Hollywood’s role in defining and negotiating American nationality strikes me as more complicated. If we wish to ‘provincialize Hollywood,’ to invoke Dipesh Chakrabarty’s injunction to ‘provincialize’ European accounts of modernity, it is not enough to consider American cinema on a par with any other national cinema—inasmuch as that very category in many cases describes defensive formations shaped in competition with and resistance to Hollywood products (20). In other words, the issue of classicality is bound up with the question of what constituted the hegemony of American movies worldwide and what assured them the historic impact they had, for better or for worse, within a wide range of different local contexts and diverse national cinemas. The question of what constitutes Hollywood’s power on a global scale returns us to the phenomenon of Americanism discussed earlier in connection with Soviet film. I am concerned with Americanism here less as a question of exceptionalism, consensus ideology, or crude economic power, though none of these aspects can be ignored, than as a practice of cultural circulation and hegemony. Victoria de Grazia has argued that Americanism still awaits analysis, beyond the polarized labels of, respectively, cultural imperialism and a worldwide spreading of the American Dream, as ‘the historical process by which the American experience was transformed into a universal model of business society based on advanced technology and promising formal equality and unlimited mass consumption’ (73). However ideological these promises may, or may not, turn out to be, de Grazia observes that, unlike earlier imperial practices of colonial dumping, American cultural exports ‘were designed to go as far as the market would take them, starting at home.’ In other words, ‘cultural exports shared the basic features of American mass culture, intending by that term not only the cultural artifacts and associated forms, but also the civic values and social relations of the first capitalist mass society’ (77). Regarding classical cinema, one could take this argument to suggest that the hegemonic mechanisms by which Hollywood succeeded in amalgamating a diversity of competing traditions, discourses, and interests on the domestic level may have accounted for at least some of the generalized appeal and robustness of Hollywood products abroad (a success in which the diasporic, relatively cosmopolitan profile of the Hollywood community no doubt played a part as well). In other words, by forging a mass market out of an ethnically and culturally heterogeneous society, if often at the expense of racial others, American classical cinema had developed an idiom, or idioms,

252

Miriam Bratu Hansen

that traveled more easily than its national popular rivals. I do not wish to resuscitate the myth of film as a new ‘universal language’ whose early promoters included D. W. Griffith and Carl Laemmle, founder of the Universal Film Company, nor do I mean to gloss over the business practices by which the American film industry secured the dominance of its products on foreign markets, in particular through control of distribution and exhibition venues.20 But I do think that, whether we like it or not, American movies of the classical period offered something like the first global vernacular. If this vernacular had a transnational and translatable resonance, it was not just because of its optimal mobilization of biologically hardwired structures and universal narrative templates but, more important, because it played a key role in mediating competing cultural discourses on modernity and modernization, because it articulated, multiplied, and globalized a particular historical experience. If classical Hollywood cinema succeeded as an international modernist idiom on a mass basis, it did so not because of its presumably universal narrative form but because it meant different things to different people and publics, both at home and abroad. We must not forget that these films, along with other mass-cultural exports, were consumed in locally quite specific, and unequally developed, contexts and conditions of reception; that they not only had a leveling impact on indigenous cultures but also challenged prevailing social and sexual arrangements and advanced new possibilities of social identity and cultural styles; and that the films were also changed in that process. Many films were literally changed, both for particular export markets (e.g., the conversion of American happy endings into tragic endings for Russian release) and by censorship, marketing, and programming practices in the countries in which they were distributed, not to mention practices of dubbing and subtitling. As systematic as the effort to conquer foreign markets undoubtedly was, the actual reception of Hollywood films was likely a much more haphazard and eclectic process depending on a variety of factors. How were the films programmed in the context of local film cultures, in particular conventions of exhibition and reception? Which genres were preferred in which places (for instance, slapstick in European and African countries, musical and historical costume dramas in India), and how were American genres dissolved and assimilated into different generic traditions, different concepts of genre? And how did American imports figure within the public horizon of reception that likely included both indigenous products and films from other foreign countries? To write the international history of classical American cinema, therefore, is a matter of tracing not just its mechanisms of standardization and hegemony but also the diversity of ways in which this cinema was translated and reconfigured in both local and translocal contexts of reception. Americanism, notwithstanding Antonio Gramsci (as well as recent critiques of Gramsci and left Fordism), cannot simply be reduced to a regime

The Mass Production of the Senses 253

of mechanized production, an ideological veneer for discipline, abstraction, reification, for new hierarchies and routes of power. Nor can it be reduced to the machine aesthetics of intellectual and high modernism. We cannot understand the appeal of Americanism unless we take seriously the promises of mass consumption and the dreams of a mass culture often in excess of and in conflict with the regime of production that spawned that mass culture (a phenomenon that has been dubbed ‘Americanization from below’).21 In other words, we have to understand the material, sensory conditions under which American mass culture, including Hollywood, was received and could have functioned as a powerful matrix for modernity’s liberatory impulses—its moments of abundance, play, and radical possibility, its glimpses of collectivity and gender equality (the latter signaled by its opponents’ excoriation of Americanism as a ‘new matriarchy’).22 The juncture of classical cinema and modernity reminds us, finally, that the cinema was not only part and symptom of modernity’s experience and perception of crisis and upheaval; it was also, most importantly, the single most inclusive cultural horizon in which the traumatic effects of modernity were reflected, rejected or disavowed, transmuted or negotiated. That the cinema was capable of a reflexive relation with modernity and modernization was registered by contemporaries early on. I read Benjamin’s and Siegfried Kracauer’s writings of the 1920s and 1930s as, among other things, an effort to theorize this relation as a new mode of reflexivity (Hansen, ‘Benjamin and Cinema,’ and ‘America, Paris, the Alps’). Neither simply a medium for realistic representation (in the sense of Marxist notions of reflection or Widerspiegelung), nor particularly concerned with formalist selfreflexivity, commercial cinema appeared to realize Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s troping of reflection as ‘seeing with an added eye’ in an almost literal sense, and it did so not just on the level of individual, philosophical cognition but on a mass scale (J. G. Fichte, qtd. in Beck, Giddens, and Lash 175). I am also drawing on more recent sociological debates on ‘reflexive modernization’ (Beck, Giddens, and Lash), a concept deployed to distinguish the risk- conscious phase of current post- or second modernity from a presumably more single-minded, orthodox, and simple first modernity. However, I would argue (although I cannot do so in detail here) that modernization inevitably provokes the need for reflexivity and that, if sociologists considered the cinema in aesthetic and sensorial terms rather than as just another medium of information and communication, they would find ample evidence in both American and other cinemas of the interwar period of an at once modernist and vernacular reflexivity.23 This dimension of reflexivity is key to the claim that the cinema not only represented a specifically modern type of public sphere, the public here understood as a ‘social horizon of experience,’ but also that this new mass public could have functioned as a discursive form in which individual experience could be articulated and find recognition by both subjects

254 Miriam Bratu Hansen

and others, including strangers.24 Kracauer, in his more utopian moments, understood the cinema as an alternative public sphere—alternative to both bourgeois institutions of art, education, and culture, and the traditional arenas of politics—an imaginative horizon in which, however compromised by its capitalist foundations, something like an actual democratization of culture seemed to be taking shape, in his words, a ‘self-representation of the masses subject to the process of mechanization.’25 The cinema suggested this possibility not only because it attracted and made visible to itself and society an emerging, heterogeneous mass public ignored and despised by dominant culture. The new medium also offered an alternative because it engaged the contradictions of modernity at the level of the senses, the level at which the impact of modern technology on human experience was most palpable and irreversible. In other words, the cinema not only traded in the mass production of the senses but also provided an aesthetic horizon for the experience of industrial mass society. While Kracauer’s observations were based on moviegoing in Weimar Germany, he attributed this sensory reflexivity more often than not to American film, in particular slapstick comedy with its well-choreographed orgies of demolition and clashes between people and things. The logic he discerned in slapstick films pointed up a disjuncture within Fordist mass culture, the possibility of an anarchic supplement generated on the same principles: ‘One has to hand this to the Americans: with slapstick films they have created a form that offers a counterweight to their reality. If in that reality they subject the world to an often unbearable discipline, the film in turn dismantles this self-imposed order quite forcefully.’26 The reflexive potential of slapstick comedy can be, and has been, argued on a number of counts, at the levels of plot, performance, and mise-en-scène, and depending on the particular inflection of the genre. In addition to articulating and playing games with the violence of technological regimes, mechanization and clock time, slapstick films also specialized in deflating the terror of consumption, of a new culture of status and distinction. Likewise, the genre was a vital site for engaging the conflicts and pressures of a multiethnic society (think of the many Jewish performers who thematized the discrepancies between diasporic identity and upward mobility, from Larry Semon through Max Davidson and George Sydney). And, not least, slapstick comedy allowed for a playful and physical expression of anxieties over changed gender roles and new forms of sexuality and intimacy. But what about other genres? And what about popular narrative films that conform more closely to classical norms? Once we begin looking at Hollywood films as both a provincial response to modernization and a vernacular for different, diverse, yet also comparable experiences, we may find that genres such as the musical, horror, or melodrama may offer just as much reflexive potential as slapstick comedy, with appeals specific to those genres and specific resonances in different contexts of reception. This is

The Mass Production of the Senses 255

to suggest that reflexivity can take different forms and different affective directions, both in individual films and directorial oeuvres and in the aesthetic division of labor among Hollywood genres, and that reflexivity does not always have to be critical or unequivocal. On the contrary, the reflexive dimension of these films may consist precisely in the ways in which they allow their viewers to confront the constitutive ambivalence of modernity. The reflexive dimension of Hollywood films in relation to modernity may take cognitive, discursive, and narrativized forms, but it is crucially anchored in sensory experience and sensational affect, in processes of mimetic identification that are more often than not partial and excessive in relation to narrative comprehension. Benjamin, writing about the elimination of distance in the new perceptual regimes of advertising and cinema, sees in the giant billboards that present things in new proportions and colors a backdrop for a ‘sentimentality [ ... ] restored to health and liberated in American style,’ just as in the cinema ‘people whom nothing moves or touches any longer learn to cry again’(Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’ 476; translation modified). The reason slapstick comedy hit home and flourished worldwide was not critical reason but the films’ propulsion of their viewers’ bodies into laughter. And adventure serials succeeded because they conveyed a new immediacy, energy, and sexual economy, not only in Soviet Russia and not only among avant-garde intellectuals. Again and again, writings on the American cinema of the interwar period stress the new physicality, the exterior surface or ‘outer skin’ of things (Antonin Artaud), the material presence of the quotidian, as Louis Aragon put it, ‘really common objects, everything that celebrates life, not some artificial convention that excludes corned beef and tins of polish’ (Antonin Artaud, qtd in Kracauer 189; Aragon 165). I take such statements to suggest that the reflexive, modernist dimension of American cinema does not necessarily require that we demonstrate a cognitive, compensatory, or therapeutic function in relation to the experience of modernity but that, in a very basic sense, even the most ordinary commercial films were involved in producing a new sensory culture. Hollywood did not just circulate images and sounds; it produced and globalized a new sensorium; it constituted, or tried to constitute, new subjectivities and subjects. The mass appeal of these films resided as much in their ability to engage viewers at the narrative cognitive level or in their providing models of identification for being modern as it did in the register of what Benjamin troped as the ‘optical unconscious.’27 It was not just what these films showed, what they brought into optical consciousness, as it were, but the way they opened up hitherto unperceived modes of sensory perception and experience, their ability to suggest a different organization of the daily world. Whether this new visuality took the shape of dreams or of nightmares, it marked an aesthetic mode that was decidedly not classical—at least not if we literalize that term and reduce it to neoclassicist formal and stylistic principles. Yet, if we understand the classical in American cinema as a

256 Miriam Bratu Hansen

metaphor of a global sensory vernacular rather than a universal narrative idiom, then it might be possible to imagine the two Americanisms operating in the development of Soviet cinema—the modernist fascination with the ‘low,’ sensational, attractionist genres and the classicist ideal of formal and narrative efficiency—as two vectors of the same phenomenon, both contributing to the hegemony of Hollywood film. This may well be a fantasy: the fantasy of a cinema that could help its viewers negotiate the tension between reification and the aesthetic, strongly understood, the possibilities, anxieties, and costs of an expanded sensory and experiential horizon—the fantasy, in other words, of a mass-mediated public sphere capable of responding to modernity and its failed promises. Now that postmodern media culture is busy recycling the ruins of both classical cinema and modernity, we may be in a better position to see the residues of a dreamworld of mass culture that is no longer ours—and yet to some extent still is.

Notes This chapter was originally published in Modernism/modernity 6.2 (1999): 59–77. The notes have been changed to conform to house style for this collection, and some sources in the original notes have been deleted. All references to this chapter in previous chapters are to the version printed here. 1. Peter Bürger, following Adorno, asserts that the very category of ‘style’ is rendered problematic by the advanced commodification of art in the twentieth century and considers the refusal to develop a coherent style (as in dada and surrealism) a salient feature of avant-gardist, as distinct from modernist, aesthetics. See Bürger, ch. 2. The opening up of both modernist and avant-garde canons, however, shows a great overlap between the two, just as the effort on the part of particular modernist artists and movements to restore the institutional status of art may well go along with avant-gardist modes of behavior and publicity. See Hansen, Ezra. See also Huyssen, After, esp. ch. 2. 2. In the second version of his famous essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’ (1936), Benjamin wrote of the ‘the theory [die Lehre] of perception which the Greeks called aesthetics’. He conceived of the politics of this essay very much as an effort to confront the aesthetic tradition narrowly understood, in particular the persistence of aestheticism in contemporary literature and art, with the changes wrought upon the human sensorium by industrial and military technology. See Buck-Morss, ‘Aesthetics’; see also Hansen, ‘Benjamin.’ 3. On the cinema of the Czarist period, see the contributions of Paolo Cherchi Usai, Mary Ann Doane, Heide Schlüpmann, and myself to two special issues of the journal Cinefocus 2.1 (fall 1991) and 2.2 (spring 1992). 4. See Tsivian, ‘Between’ and ‘Cutting’; and Thompson and Bordwell, 130. 5. See, for instance, Gramsci. See also Nolan; Saunders, esp. chs. 4 and 5. 6. A related recruiting of ‘low’ popular culture for the programmatic attack on the institution of art can be found in western European avant-garde movements, in particular dada and surrealism. 7. With regard to the earlier edition (1935), which bestows the term ‘classic’ on international silent film of the period 1924–29, Bordwell remarks that the invocation of the term recalls ‘the common art-historical conception of classicism as a dynamic

The Mass Production of the Senses 257

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

stability in which innovations submit to an overall balance of form and function’ (History 40). On the political stance of the authors, in particular Brasillach, see Kaplan, chs. 6 and 7; and Bordwell, History 38–41. See, for example, Comolli, Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour, Stephen Heath, Laura Mulvey, and Colin MacCabe in Rosen. See Mayne. A notable exception to this tendency is Raymond Bellour who stresses the formal and stylistic principles at work in classical cinema (patterns of repetition-resolution, rhyming, symmetry, redundancy, interlacing of microand macrostructures) by which classical films produce their conscious and unconscious meanings and effects. See Bellour in Rosen. Rick Altman discusses the problematic relationship of Bordwell’s concept of cinematic classicism with its French literary antecedents (15–17). The debate on melodrama in cinema studies is extensive. See Hansen’s original essay for sources. For a critical account of the industrial, political, and cultural dimensions of Fordism, see Smith. See Rodowick. Also see Hansen’s original essay for additional sources. See, for instance, Thompson and Bordwell, ‘Space’; Thompson, Breaking, pt. 6; and Bordwell, Narration, ch. 12. Such statements bear an uncanny similarity with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s analysis of the ‘Culture Industry’ as an all-absorbing totality in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; 1947), though obviously without the despair and pessimism that prompted that analysis. See Bordwell et al. 7–9, 58–59; Bordwell, Narration, ch. 3 and passim; and Bordwell, ‘Cognitivism.’ In the effort to make cognitivism a central paradigm in film studies, Bordwell is joined by, among others, Noël Carroll; see Bordwell and Carroll. Bordwell, ‘La Nouvelle Mission’ 23; see also On the History of Film Style, 142; and Bordwell, ‘Convention’ 87–107. See Bordwell, ‘La Nouvelle Mission’; On the History of Film Style, ch. 6; and Bordwell et al. ch. 30. Patrice Petro, drawing on the work of Karsten Witte and Eric Rentschler, contrasts this centrifugal quality of Hollywood cinema with the literalization of classical norms in Nazi cinema: ‘The Nazi cinema [in its strategies of visual enticement and simultaneous narrative containment] represents the theory (of classical Hollywood narrative) put into practice rather than the practice (of Hollywood filmmaking) put into theory’ (Petro 54). On the role of foreign markets for the American film industry, see Thompson, Exporting. Also see Hansen, Babel 76–81, 183–87. The phrase ‘Americanization from below’ is used by Maase in his study of West German youth culture of the 1950s (19). On the different economy of gender relations connoted by American culture in Weimar Germany, see Nolan 120–27. See Beck, Giddens, Lash; see also Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. Lash, ‘Reflexive Modernization,’ criticizes his coauthors for both the notion of a ‘high’ or ‘simple’ modernity and for their neglect of the ‘aesthetic dimension,’ but he does not develop the latter in terms of changes in the institution of art and the new regimes of sensory perception emerging with mass-mediated modernity. This is not to say that the cinema was unique or original in forging a modern type of publicness. It was part of, and borrowed from, a whole array of institutions— department stores, world fairs, tourism, amusement parks, vaudeville, etc.—that involved new regimes of sensory perception and new forms of sociability. At the

258

Miriam Bratu Hansen

same time, the cinema represented, multiplied, and deterritorialized these new experiential regimes. My understanding of the public sphere as a general, social ‘horizon of experience’ is indebted to Negt and Kluge. 25. [Siegfried Kracauer], ‘Berliner Nebeneinander: Kara-Iki—Scala-Ball im Savoy— Menschen im Hotel,’ Frankfurter Zeitung, February 17, 1933, my translation. 26. [Siegfried Kracauer], ‘Artistisches und Amerikanisches,’ Frankfurter Zeitung, January 29, 1926, my translation. 27. Benjamin develops the notion of an ‘optical unconscious’ in ‘A Short History of Photography’ and ‘The Work of Art.’

Afterword Susan Stanford Friedman

Can modernism be disciplined? Can it be contained within consensual definitional boundaries or within the borders of the disciplines that took shape in the twentieth-century academy? Has modernism been institutionalized into a discipline—namely, modernist studies, with its associations, journals, conferences, and reproductive training of new generations of scholars? What is the ethics/politics of such ‘disciplining’? For its stand on these questions, Disciplining Modernism might just as aptly have been titled Undisciplining Modernism. For the contributors do not agree on what modernism was or is, most advocate for the open-ended undecidability of terms, and some question the politics of its institutionalization. All refuse simplistic representation of what modernism means within their respective disciplines. Moreover, the interdisciplinary travels of some contributors into economics, psychoanalysis, anthropology, history, religious studies, gender studies, and postcolonial studies perform a twenty-first century insistence on interdisciplinarity as essential to the survival of the disciplines. Modernism, like modernity, exceeds definitional and disciplinary limitations. And yet, these terms require some set of implied or self-reflexively articulated meanings in order to provide functional use. This conjunction of the need for limits and their failure to contain characterizes both the potential and problematic of analytic thought and the foundations of disciplinary specialization. However, modernism itself intensifies this contradictory conjunction, and as such the definitional dissonance matters. Garry Leonard suggests just that with his resonant metaphor of modernity/modernism as the internal combustion engine: the endlessly recurring dynamic of explosion and containment, the hydraulics of pressure and release into motion which itself must be controlled. There is a palpable definitional anxiety that pervades modernist studies, according to Stephen Ross. This is no anxiety of influence, he argues, but rather a meta-critical angst about the nature of the field rooted in uncertainty about the meanings of the terms modernism and modernity and manifested in interminable (echoing Freud) attempts to define it, ‘make it new’ (echoing Pound). How broad should we let them become before they lose all specificity? What is at stake in expansion or contraction of the terms? Recognizing the necessity and desirability of expanded definitions, he nonetheless detects an uncanny presence of the ‘old’ modernist studies in the ‘new’ modernist studies. Just as the modernists broke with their immediate precursors, so we in modernist studies—repeating the logic of 259

260 Susan Stanford Friedman

the phenomena we study—break with our precursor scholars to ‘rebrand’ modernist studies, to read it (a)new, and thereby to make it ‘useful’ to ourselves as a professorial elite. Rebranding ensures the perpetuation of the discipline, a challenge to elites that is echoed in Lois Callucu’s chapter. Ross questions not only the categorical legitimacy of the new but also its ethics. The uncanny ghosting of the old within the new encompasses the self-perpetuating logic of the disciplines. Disciplines, as modern guilds, are driven to reproduce themselves and the necessity of their interminably new expertise. Ross’s argument is both cogent and troubling. Psychoanalytic concepts like the uncanny do indeed open up ways of thinking about how modernist studies repeats modernism’s repression of the old and its symptomatic return. But in effect his argument comes down on the side of containment rather than expansion. It undermines one project of the humanities as a mode of knowledge production: to create new ways of seeing human experience, thought, and creativity. Such new frameworks for interpretation—the scaffolding of scholarship—have produced the expansions that put pressure on past definitional boundaries for modernism. Undermining the fluid hermeneutical dimension of modernist studies as a branch of the humanities is clearly not Ross’s intent, as he openly favors a Derridean undecidability and deferral of fixities, as well as the politically more inclusive canons of the new modernist studies. But psychoanalyzing the new, more inclusive modernist studies as symptomatic of the old, ends up discrediting the new, leaving little recourse but to return to the older, safer, and still powerful formulations. And what is the ethics/politics of that move? In my view, modernist studies was not defunct by the 1990s as Ross and others suggest. Rather, it was split into camps: an old guard holding on to restrictive canons of a Eurocentric experimentalism and avant-garde and/or predominantly formalist definitions of modernism; and a raucous crowd at the gate assaulting such restrictions and insisting on the inclusion of those the field had marginalized (e.g., women) or excluded (e.g., the Harlem Renaissance; non-western; popular culture). The uprising of the interdisciplines—women’s studies, race studies, popular culture studies, gay/lesbian/queer studies, postcolonial studies—into the heart of modernist studies in the 1980s and 1990s divided the field, reenacting the logic of pressure, explosion, containment, and movement that Leonard identifies as endemic to modernity. The new modernist studies, more expansionist and interdisciplinary than the old, was born of this split and embodied the problems as well as the potential of all rebellions that institutionalize. In formalizing the field into the Modernist Studies Association, the visionary group of young scholars who founded the organization in 1999 established a ‘big tent’ organization where both contained and expansive understandings of modernism could interact and flourish. Build it and they will come. And they did—from both sides of the divide, rebuilding in the process a

Afterword

261

near defunct journal, Modernism/modernity, and catalyzing the formation of other modernist studies associations, conferences, and journals, outside the United States. Lest I lapse into utopianism, I hasten to add that the alliance is fragile, filled with the anxieties Ross perceptively analyzes, filled also with the jockeying, posturing, and power-broking that characterize all professions and intellectual elites. Disciplining Modernism includes many essays that embody the explosive pressures for expansion that challenge the politics of exclusion at the heart of all definitional enterprises. Indeed, interdisciplinarity is a major engine of that pressure on modernist studies. Suzanne Kaufman’s case study of the Lourdes shrine in nineteenth-century France questions the too-easy assumption that modernity signifies metropolitan secularism, since modernity’s consumerism and technology fostered rural religious practices. Jessica Berman throws out the old universalist model of ‘international modernism’ and adopts a ‘cosmopolitan’ modernism that enables her juxtaposition of Joyce’s Portrait with Anand’s Coolie. Leonard and Miriam Hansen break vertical borders in modernist studies by considering ‘classical’ Hollywood cinema and avant-garde cinema as symbiotically linked aspects of modernism, the first addressing the compensatory fantasies engendered by modernity, the latter reflecting modernity’s deprivations. Glenn Willmott argues that both economics and anthropology provide insights for understanding modernism as a ‘cultural project’ interwoven with its participation in market and gift economies. Also contributing to the rich economic thread running through Disciplining Modernism, Jonathan Rose challenges the conventional view of modernism’s retreat from commercial mass culture (as in Adorno, Huyssen) by detailing the marketing of high modernism by authors and publishing houses. Bridget Elliot examines the interpenetration of ‘modernist’ (i.e., high architecture of Le Corbusier) and ‘modernistic’ (i.e., ‘low’ style of Thomas Wallis’s Hoover Factory). And so forth. Whether the pressure is definitional, disciplinary, spatial, temporal, authorial, or cultural, the contributors participate in the expansions of the field that provoke excitement in some quarters and anxiety in others. I want to resist, however, a simple model of (ever greater) definitional expansion of what gets studied under the rubric ‘modernism’ or its pluralized form ‘modernisms.’ Ross is correct to point out the danger of an all-inclusive modernism lapsing into meaninglessness. Moreover, expansionism can be an imperial extension of existing hegemonies, a form of colonizing other cultural artifacts and fields which may want to remain distinct. Attuned to these problems, I regard the new modernist studies as potentially transformational, not just expansionist. (And I stress potentiality because it remains to be seen just how much the field actually changes; the failure of lasting substantial change seems to me to be the real threat.) The root of this transformational potential is what Hansen calls ‘the nexus of modernism and modernity’ and what Leonard refers to as the critical

262

Susan Stanford Friedman

yoking of modernism and modernity institutionally initiated by Modernism/ modernity. Conjoining the historical conditions of modernity centrally with the aesthetic practices of modernism enables not just expansions of modernism but more fundamentally transformations of what we mean by modernism itself. Curiously, this linkage began in 1977, in the widely influential introduction to Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane’s Modernism, which remains one of the most eloquent statements about the connection between modernism’s crisis of representation and the historical conditions that produced it. In spite of Modernism’s Eurocentric, male canon, the seed was sown for a radical departure from aestheticism as the definitional foundation for modernism. Modernism, for many, ceased to be a collection of aesthetic styles in literature and the arts but a reflection of and engagement with a wide spectrum of historical and philosophical ruptures. Not as well known, but equally as prescient for the later cultural studies turn in modernist studies, was Hugh Kenner’s The Mechanic Muse (1987), which examines the impact on modernism of technological inventions like the typewriter. Once modernity became the defining cause of aesthetic engagements with it, the door opened to thinking about the specific conditions of modernity for different genders, races, classes, and locations of cultural producers. Modernity became modernities: multiple, polycentric, transnational, global, colonial, diasporic, vernacular, and so forth. The pluralization of historical modernities spawned a pluralization of modernisms as well as the study of circulations among them. Similarly, different dimensions or modes of modernity—for example, technological, political, economic, international, cultural, and so on—led to studies of their intersections with aesthetic modernisms. Thus the pressures built to expand modernism spatially, temporally, and vertically to incorporate what had initially been excluded. To fight the definitional expansions in modernist studies is to fight modernism’s constitutive link with modernity. Disciplining Modernism embraces this link between modernity and modernism, and therein lays its transformational potential. For Berman, Mary Lou Emery and Liz Constable, modernity is inseparable from European and American imperialism, its racist and Orientalist legacies, and resistances to them—and thus its modernisms. Emery regards the Haitian Revolution as the repressed of modernity and discusses a colonial ‘counter-modernism’ that is not mimicry, but exhibits alternate kinds of formal experimentation rooted in that forgotten Haitian resistance. Constable focuses on Balzac (Balzac! that quintessentially realist writer!) as modernist exemplum in the French context because his novel La Fille aux yeux d’or (1834) projects the opiate decadence of French modernity on to its colonial slave subjects. Aesthetic engagement with modernity—however variously understood— trumps stylistic and formal attributes in the name-game of modernism. Why might such definitional moves produce anxiety? Is it an uncanny desire to reestablish a particular early twentieth-century western aesthetic

Afterword

263

style as the sine qua non of modernism? What is the ethics of that interminably the same comfort zone? I do think that the slash uniting and separating modernity/modernism needs more sustained interrogation, something I only briefly addressed in my 2006 Modernism/modernity article on periodizing modernism (see Ross’s robust critique). For social scientists like James C. Scott and David Harvey (both of whom draw extensively from modernist literature and arts) modernism is an –ism, that is, the ideology of modernity, not an aesthetic response to it. But in the humanities, modernism is typically regarded as the ideas, thought, and creativity spawned in modernity’s wake. Disciplining Modernism’s contributors regularly assume that modernism mirrors, reflects, and reacts to modernity. I want to suggest, however, that the transformational potential of modernism/modernity is more likely to be achieved if we stop positing modernism as modernity’s self-reflexive other, its symptomatic reaction formation. As I strategically use the term in my work, modernism is a powerful domain within modernity (however located), not something outside of it, caused by it or responding to it. It is a force effecting change as much as it intersects other domains of change, thereby inviting interdisciplinary examination. And yes, it can be a site of repression, ruthless forgetting, and uncanny returns. More specifically, it is the domain of creative expressivity (in whatever forms and styles) at play with changing symbolic systems, signification, and meaning-making that interact with the multiple domains of modernity. The approach to modernism/modernity that I suggest here can be challenged as a politically suspect universalism; a fixing of meaning at odds with my own ‘Definitional Excursions’; an inclusiveness so vast that all periods and creativities become ‘modern’ and ‘modernist,’ thus rendering the terms useless for analytic work. This is not the place to defend my approach; nor do I have illusions of or desires for stilling debate. Why seek resolution, as Leonard questions. Rather, I ask that we do not ignore the definitional project and its politics of what modernity and modernism mean within the field and our own studies. Since there is no definitional consensus within disciplines and across disciplines, each of us needs to bring to consciousness what assumptions shape our thought. Such reflexivity does not fix what is fluid and diverse so much as it establishes the parameters for specific work. In this view of self-consciously capacious and limited definition—of explosion, containment, movement—there is plenty of room for modernism’s fluidity, its undecidability, and its bang/clash of contradiction.

Works Cited Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot, A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. Adorno, Theodor W. ‘Reading Balzac.’ Notes to Literature. Vol. 1. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. 121–36. Adrizzone, Heidi and Earl Lewis. Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White. New York: Norton, 2001. Agee, James and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Altman, Meryl. Message to the editor. 28 Dec. 2008. E-mail. Altman, Rick. ‘Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today.’ Classical Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars. Ed. Jane Gaines. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1992. 9–47. Anand, Mulk Raj. ‘Pigeon-Indian: Some Notes on Indian-English Writing.’ World Literature Written in English 21.2 (1982): 325–36. Anderson, Amanda and Joseph Valente, eds. Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002. Anderson, Perry. ‘Components of the National Culture.’ Student Power/Problems, Diagnosis, Action. Eds. Cockburn, Alexander and Robin Blackburn. Baltimore: Penguin Press, 1969. 214–84. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton, 2006. ———. ‘Thick Translation.’ Venuti 389–401. Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. Aragon, Louis. ‘On Decor’ (1918). French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939. Vol. 1. Ed. Richard Abel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Armstrong, Tim. Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. Ed. Samuel Lipman. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. ———. Dover Beach and Other Poems. New York: Dover Thrift editions, 1990. Astre, G. A. ‘H. de Balzac et L’Anglais mangeur d’opium.’ Revue de Littérature comparée (Dec. 1935): 755–72. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1953. Badaracco, Claire Hoertz. Trading Words: Poetry, Typography, and Illustrated Books in the Modern Literary Economy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Baker, Houston A., Jr. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Balzac, Honoré de. Histoire des Treize: Ferragus. La Duchesse de Langeais. La Fille aux yeux d’or. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1966. Balzac, Honoré de. The Girl with the Golden Eyes, History of the Thirteen. Trans. Herbert J. Hunt. Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1987. 307–91. 264

Works Cited 265 ———. ‘Traité des Excitants Modernes.’ La Comédie humaine. Vol. 12. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1981. Baritz, Loren. Servants of Power: A History of the Use of Social Science in American Industry. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1960. Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Baudelaire, Charles. Un Mangeur d’Opium. Critical edition with commentary by Michèle Stäuble-Lipman Wulf. Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1976. ———. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Trans. Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon, 1964. Bayer, Patricia. Art Deco Architecture. London: Thames & Hudson, 1992. Bazin, André. ‘The Evolution of the Western.’ What Is Cinema? Sel. and Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971. 149–57. ———. ‘La Politique des auteurs.’ The New Wave. Ed. Peter Graham. New York: Doubleday, 1968. Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. Beebe, Maurice. ‘What Modernism Was.’ Journal of Modern Literature 3 (July 1974): 1065–84. Behar, Ruth and Deborah A. Gordon, eds. Women Writing Culture. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. Bei Dao. The August Sleepwalker. Trans. Bonnie S. McDougall. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1988. ———. Landscape Over Zero. Trans. David Hinton. New York: New Directions, 1996. ———. Notes from the City of the Sun: Poems by Bei Dao. Trans. Bonnie S. McDougall. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983. Beizer, Janet L. Family Plots: Balzac’s Narrative Generations. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986. Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: Verso, 1983. ———. ‘One-Way Street’ (1928). Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Selected Writings. Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. ———. ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century.’ The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002. ———. ‘A Short History of Photography’ 1931. Trans. Stanley Mitchell. Screen 13 (Spring 1972): 5–26. ———. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936). Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. 217–51. ———. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility: Second Version.’ 1936. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn. Selected Writings, Vol. 3. Ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002. 101–33. Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. Berghaus, Günter. Avant-Garde Performance: Live Events and Electronic Technologies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Berman, Jessica. ‘Comparative Colonialisms: Joyce, Anand, and the Question of Engagement.’ Modernism/modernity 13.2 (Fall 2006): 465–85. ———. Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin, 1982.

266

Works Cited

Bermann, Sandra and Michael Wood, eds. Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. Bernheimer, Charles. Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Berridge, Virginia and Griffith Edwards. Opium and the People: Opiate Use in NineteenthCentury England. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. Bhabha, Homi K. Introduction. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Biderman, Albert and Elizabeth Crawford. The Political Economics of Social Research: The Case of Sociology. Washington: Bureau of Social Science Research, 1968. Bongie, Chris. Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism and the Fin de Siècle. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. Boone, Joseph Allen. Libindinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Bordwell, David. ‘A Case for Cognitivism.’ Iris 5.2 (1989): 11–40. ———. ‘Convention, Construction, and Cinematic Vision.’ Bordwell and Carroll 87–107. ———. ‘La Nouvelle Mission de Feuillade; or, What Was Mise-en-Scène?’ The Velvet Light Trap 37 (Spring 1996). 10–29. ———. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1985. ———. On the History of Film Style. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Bordwell, David and Noël Carroll, eds. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1996. 37–70. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. Boscagli, Maurizia. Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Westview Press, 1995. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. ———. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. ———. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. 1992. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford UP, 1996. Boutry, Philippe and Michel Cinquin. Deux Pèlerinages au XIXe siècle: Ars et Paray-leMonial. Paris: Beauchesne, 1980. Boxer, David. Edna Manley, Sculptor. Kingston: National Gallery of Jamaica and Edna Manley Foundation, 1990. Bradbury, Malcolm and James McFarlane, eds. Modernism. A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930. 1978. Reprint. New York: Penguin, 1991. Brennan, Teresa. Exhausting Modernity: Grounds for A New Economy. London: Routledge, 2000. Brick, Howard. ‘The Reformist Dimension of Talcott Parsons’s Early Social Theory.’ The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays. Ed. Thomas Haskell and Richard Teichgraeber III. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 357–96. Brint, Steven. In an Age of Experts: The Changing Role of Professionals in Politics and Public Life. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. Brodber, Erna. Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home. London: New Beacon Books, 1980. Brodber, Erna. Louisiana: A Novel. Jackson, MI: U of Mississippi P, 1997. ———. Myal: A Novel. London: New Beacon Books, 1988.

Works Cited 267 Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1947. Brooks, David. Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Brown, Anthony. Hazards Unlimited, From Ships to Satellites, 300 Years of Lloyd’s of London: An Intimate Portrait. 3rd ed. London: Lloyd’s of London Press Limited, 1987. Buck-Morss, Susan. ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered.’ October 62 (Fall 1992): 3–41. ———. ‘Hegel and Haiti.’ Critical Inquiry 26:4 (Summer 2000): 821–65. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Burke, Kenneth. ‘Literature as Equipment for Living.’ The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. Berkeley: UC Press, 1973. 293–304. Butel, Paul. L’opium: L’Histoire d’une fascination. Paris: Perrin, 1995. Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham: Duke UP, 1987. Cameron, Deborah. Verbal Hygiene. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Cappetti, Carla. Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Carby, Hazel V. ‘Becoming Modern: The Racialization of Britain 1943–1948.’ Modernist Studies Association Convention. Chicago. 5 Nov. 2005. Address. Carnegie, Dale. How to Win Friends and Influence People. New York: Pocket Books, 1936. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Caserio, Robert. The Novel in England, 1900–1950. New York: Twayne, 1999. Caughie, Pamela L. ‘Professional Identity Politics.’ Feminist Studies 29.2 (Summer 2003): 402–4 and 422–34. ———. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1991. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?’ Representations 37 (Winter 1992):1–26. Chamberlain, Lori. ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation.’ Signs 13:3 (1988): 455–58. Chari, Hema. ‘Imperial Dependency, Addiction, and the Decadent Body.’ Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence. Eds. Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff and Matthew Potolsky. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999. 215–32. Charney, Leo and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. Chelini, Jean and Henry Branthomme. Les Chemins de Dieu: Histoire des pèlerinages chrétiens des origines à nos jours. Paris: Hachette, 1982. Chinitz, David. T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Citron, Pierre. ‘Le Rêve Asiatique de Balzac.’ L’Année Balzacienne. Paris: Garnier Freres, 1968. 303–36. Clark, T. J. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999. Clifford, James and George Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. Cockerell, Hugh. Lloyd’s of London: A Portrait. Homewood, IL: Dow Jones-Irwin, 1984. Colomina, Beatriz. Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.

268 Works Cited Colomina, Beatriz. ‘The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism.’ Sexuality and Space. Ed. Beatriz Colomina. New Brunswick: Princeton Architectural P, 1992. 73–80. Cooper, John Xiros. Modernism and the Culture of Market Society. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Corbin, Alain. The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750–1840. Trans. Jocelyn Phelps. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Couret, J. Guide-Almanach de Notre-Dame de Lourdes, 1900. Bordeux, J. Couret, 1900. Crawford, Robert. Devolving English Literature. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000. Crépet, J. ‘À Propos de L’Anglais mangeur d’opium.’ Mercure de France (1 Nov. 1939): 210–15. Cucullu, Lois. Expert Modernists, Matricide, and Modern Culture: Woolf, Forster, Joyce. Houndsmills, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004. Cudjoe, Selwyn. ‘C.L.R. James Misbound.’ Transition Under Review 58 (1992): 124–36. Curtis, William J. R. Modern Architecture since 1900. 3rd ed. London: Phaidon, 1996. D., Madeleine. Mon Pèlerinage de Lourdes. Blois: Impr. De C. Migault, 1912. Dabydeen, David. Preface. Turner: New and Selected Poems. 1995. Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree Press, 2002. 7–8. D’Aguiar, Fred. Feeding the Ghosts. London: Chatto and Windus, 1997. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. ———. ‘World Literature in a Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age.’ Saussy 43–53. ———. ‘World Literature, National Contexts.’ Modern Philology 100.4 (2003): 512–31. Danius, Sara. Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002. Darnton, Robert. The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1175–1800. Cambridge: Belknap P, 1979. Dash, J. Michael. ‘The Theater of the Haitian Revolution/The Haitian Revolution as Theater.’ Small Axe 9.2 (Sep. 2005): 16–23. Dauberive, Bernard. Lourdes et ses environs: Guide du pèlerin et du touriste. Poitiers: G. Bonamy, 1896. Davison, Ned J. The Concept of Modernism in Hispanic Criticism. Boulder: Pruett Press, 1966. De Grazia, Victoria. ‘Americanism for Export.’ Wedge 7–8 (Winter–Spring 1985): 73–81. De Jongh, James. Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990. DeKoven, Marianne. Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. Delany, Paul. Literature, Money and the Market: From Trollope to Amis. New York: Palgrave, 2002. ———. ‘Who Paid for Modernism?’ Woodmansee and Osteen 335–51. De Man, Paul. ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity.’ Blindness and Insight. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. 142–65. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. ———. ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.’ 1967. Trans. Richard Macksey and Eguenio Donato. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Dettmar, Kevin J., ed. Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1992.

Works Cited 269 Dettmar, Kevin J.H., and Stephen Watt, eds. Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, and Rereading. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996. De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings. Ed. and Introduction. Grevel Lindop. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Diepeveen, Leonard. ‘ “I Can Have More Than Enough Power to Satisfy Me”: T.S. Eliot’s Construction of His Audience.’ Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, and Rereading. Ed. Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996. 37–60. Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the Twenties. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995. Doyle, Laura. Bordering the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Doyle, Laura and Laura Winkiel, eds. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005. Drucker, Johanna. Theorizing Modernism: Visual Art and the Critical Tradition. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Dugdale, Michael. ‘Ornamentia Praecox.’ Architectural Review 72 (July 1932): 40. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934. New York: Cambridge UP, 2001. Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Trans. Joseph Ward Swain. New York: Macmillan, 1915. 54–55. Eagleton, Terry. The Gatekeeper, A Memoir. London: Penguin, 2001. ———. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 2003. Ehrenreich, Barbara. Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. New York: Pantheon Books, 1989. Ehrenreich, Barbara and John Ehrenreich. ‘The Professional-Managerial Class.’ Between Labor and Capital. Ed. Pat Walker. Boston: South End, 1979. 5–45. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. and Wolfgang Schluchter, eds. Early Modernities. Spec. issue of Daedalus 127.3 (Summer 1998): V–VIII, 1–279. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., ed. Multiple Modernities. Spec. issue of Daedalus 129.1 (Winter 2000): I–XII, 1–260. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 98–106. Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971. ———. For Lancelot Andrewes, Essays on Style and Order. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1928. ———. Notes towards the Definition of Culture. London: Faber & Faber, 1948. ———. ‘On the Place and Function of the Clerisy’ (1944). T.S. Eliot’s Social Criticism. Ed. Roger Kojecky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971. 241–48. ———. ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth.’ Kolocotroni 371–73. ———. ‘The Waste Land.’ Collected Poems, 1909–1962. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. 51–70. Ellenberger, Henri F. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books, 1970. Elliott, Michael A. The Culture Concept: Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. Ellmann, Richard and Charles Feidelson, Jr., eds. The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1965.

270

Works Cited

Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘What Makes Hollywood Run?’ American Film 10.7 (May 1985): 52–5, 68. Emery, Mary Lou. Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2007. Epstein, Julia and Kristina Straub, eds. Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity. New York: Routledge, 1991. European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies. 6 Mar. 2009. Ghent University. Web. 25 Mar. 2009 < http://www.eam-europe.ugent.be/>. Evans, Brad. Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865– 1920. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Eysteinsson, Astradur. The Concept of Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990. ———. ‘ “What’s the Difference?” Revisiting the Concepts of Modernism and the Avant-Garde.’ European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM). Ghent, Belgium. 30 May 2008. Address. Eysteinsson, Astradur and Vivian Liska, eds. Modernism: A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages. 2 vols. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2007. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. Felman, Shoshana, ed. Lacan and the Adventure of Insight. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987. ———. Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. ———. ‘Rereading Femininity.’ Yale French Studies 62 (1982): 19–44. Felski, Rita. Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture. New York: New York UP, 2000. ———. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. ———. ‘Modernist Studies and Cultural Studies: Reflections on Method.’ Modernism/ modernity 10.3 (Sep. 2003): 501–17. Finucane, Ronald C. Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England. London: J. M. Dent, 1977. Fish, Stanley. Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Foucault, Michel. ‘What is Enlightenment?’ The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 32–50. Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Frayling, Christopher. ‘Egypt mania.’ Art Deco 1910–1939. Ed. Charlotte Benton, Tim Benton and Ghislaine Wood. London: V&A Publications, 2003. 41–9, 431. ———. The Face of Tutankhamun. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1989. ———. On the Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. A. A. Brill. New York: Modern Library (Random House), 1994. ———. Sexuality and the Psychology of Love. Introduction. Philip Rieff. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963. ———. Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1958. ———‘The Uncanny.’ Trans. Alix Strachey. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch, et al. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001. 929–52. Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Works Cited 271 Friedland, Roger and Deirdre Boden, eds. NowHere: Space, Time and Modernity. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Message to the editor. 6 Jan. 2009. E-mail. ———. ‘Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies.’ Modernism/modernity 13.3 (Sept. 2006): 425–43. Fry, Roger. ‘Negro Sculpture.’ Vision and Design. 1920. Ed. J. B. Bullen. London and NY: Oxford UP, 1990. 70–73. Gambrell, Alice. Women Intellectuals, Modernism, and Difference: Transatlantic Culture, 1919–1945. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. Garber, Marjorie. Academic Instincts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001. ———. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992. Garrity, Jane. ‘Virginia Woolf, Intellectual Harlotry, and 1920s British Vogue.’ Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Ed. Pamela L. Caughie. New York and London: Garland, 2000. 185–218. Geertz, Clifford. ‘Deep Hanging Out.’ Rev. Of Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. The New York Review of Books 45.16 (Oct. 22, 1998). 69–72. ———. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. ———. ‘The Introduction into Anthropology of a Genuinely History Eye.’ Journal of Victorian Culture 4 (1999): 305–10. Gibson, Ralph. A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789–1914. London: Routledge, 1989. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. ———. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. Gikandi, Simon. ‘Aesthetic Reflection and the Colonial Event: The Work of Art in the Age of Slavery.’ The Journal of the International Institute. The University of Michigan. 16 Sep. 2003 . ———. Preface: Modernism in the World. Modernism/modernity 13.3 (Sep. 2006): 419–24. ———. ‘Race and the Idea of the Aesthetic.’ Michigan Quarterly Review 40.2 (Spring 2001): 318–50. ———. Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988–94. Gilman, Richard. Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979. Gilman, Sander. ‘The Figure of the Black in German Aesthetic Theory.’ EighteenthCentury Studies 8.4 (Summer 1975): 373–91. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Gloag, John. Men and Buildings. London: Country Life, 1931. Gluck, Mary. Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Godelier, Maurice. ‘What Mauss Did Not Say.’ Values and Valuables: From the Sacred to the Symbolic. Ed. Cynthia Werner and Duran Bell. New York: Altamira, 2004. Gordon, Deborah. ‘The Politics of Ethnographic Authority: Race and Writing in the Ethnography of Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston.’ Managanaro 146–62. Gouldner, Alvin W. The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Basic Books, 1970.

272 Works Cited Gouldner, Alvin W. The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class: A Frame of Reference, Theses, Conjectures, Arguments, and an Historical Perspective on the Role of Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in the International Class Contest of the Modern Era. New York: Continuum, 1979. Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Gramsci, Antonio. ‘Americanism and Fordism.’ Selections from the Prison Notebooks. 1929–35. Ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971. 277–318. Green, Christopher. Leger and the Avant-Garde. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976. Gregory, C. A. Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange. Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997. Gronberg, Tag. ‘Speaking Volumes: The Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau.’ Oxford Art Journal 15.2 (1992): 58–69. Gubar, Susan. Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1992. ———. ‘Literary Critics as Intellectuals: Class Analysis and the Crisis of the Humanities.’ Rethinking Class, Literary Studies and Social Formations. Ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Michael Gilmore. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 108–49. ———. ‘The Sokal Hoax and the History of Criticism.’ Critical Inquiry 28.2 (2002): 470–509. Gunning, Tom. ‘Modernity and Cinema: A Culture of Shocks and Flows.’ Cinema and Modernity. Ed. Murray Pomerance. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2006. 297–315. Guy, Josephine M. and Ian Small. Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Habermas, Jürgen. ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity.’ New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981): 3–14. ———. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Hall, Stuart, et al. ed. Model Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies. Malden, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1996. Halliday, Terence and Morris Janowitz, eds. Sociology and its Publics: The Forms and Fates of Disciplinary Organization. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Hansen, Miriam. ‘America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity.’ Charney and Schwartz 362–402. ———. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. ———. ‘Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street.’ Critical Inquiry 25.2 (Winter 1999): 306–43. ———. Ezra Pounds frühe Poetik zwischen Aufklärung und Avantgarde. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979. Harris, Ruth. Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age. London: Penguin 1999. Harris, Wilson. Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness. London: Faber and Faber, 1977. ———. Palace of the Peacock. London: Faber and Faber, 1960. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. London: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Hassan, Ihab. The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1992. Hegeman, Susan. Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999.

Works Cited 273 Hennessy, Rosemary. ‘Sexual Alibis, Colonial Displacement: Materializing Myth in The Crying Game.’ Profit and Pleasure: Sexual identities in Late Capitalism. London: Routledge, 2000. 143–74. Hillier, Bevis and Steven Stephen. Art Deco Style. London: Phaidon Press, 1997. Hinchcliffe, Tanis. ‘Towards a Translation.’ Issues in Architecture, Art and Design 2.2 (1992): 4–14. Hitchmouch, Wendy. Hoover Factory: Wallis, Gilbert and Partners. London: Phaidon, 1992. Hobsbawm, Eric. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1944. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Seabury Press, 1972. Houck, Davis. ‘Rhetoric, Science, and Economic Prophecy.’ Woodmansee and Osteen 352–64. Huaco, George. ‘Ideology and General Theory: The Case of Sociological Functionalism.’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 28.1 (1986): 34–54. Hughes, Randolph. ‘Vers la Contrée du rêve, Balzac, Gautier et Baudelaire, disciples de Quincey.’ Mercure de France (Aug. 1, 1939): 545–93. Hume, David. Philosophical Works, Vol. III. Edinburgh and London: Adam Black and William Tait, and Charles Tait, 1826. Hurston, Zora Neale. Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. New York: Library of America, 1995. ———. Mules and Men. New York: HarperCollins, 1935. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. ———. ‘High/Low in an Expanded Field.’ Modernism/modernity 9.3 (Sep. 2002): 363–74. Jaffe, Aaron. Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Jakobson, Roman. ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.’ On Translation. Ed. Reuben A. Brower. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1959. James, C. L. R. Toussaint Louverture. ‘Original Typescript.’ Special Collections Library, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, 1936. James, Henry. ‘Honoré de Balzac.’ French Poets and Novelists. London: Macmillan, 1904. 66–118. Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. ———. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. New York: Verso, 2002. Jardine, Alice. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. Jencks, Charles. What is Post-Modernism? 3rd ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Jonas, Raymond. France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. Joyce, James. Dubliners. Ed. Robert Scholes. New York: Viking Press, 1967. ———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Bedford Books, Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, 1992. ———. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Vintage, 1986. Joyce, Rosemary A. and Susan D. Gillespie. Beyond Kinship: Social and Material Reproduction in House Societies. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. Jussawalla, Feroza. Family Quarrels: Towards a Criticism of Indian Writing in English. New York: Peter Lang, 1985.

274 Works Cited Kadish, Doris. ‘Hybrids in Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or.’ Nineteenth Century French Studies 16.3–4 (1988): 270–78. ———. ‘Translation in Context.’ Translating Slavery: Gender and Race in Women’s Writing, 1783–1823. Eds. Doris Y. Kadish and Françoise Massardier-Kenney. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1994. 26–61. Kampf, Louis and Paul Lauter, eds. The Politics of Literature: Dissenting Essays on the Teaching of English. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. Kaplan, Alice. Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Kaufman, Suzanne K. Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2005. Kelly, Dorothy. ‘The Primal Scene of Castration, Voyeurism, and La Fille aux yeux d’or.’ Telling Glances: Voyeurism in the French Novel. Rutgers UP, 1993. 34–53. Kenner, Hugh. ‘The Making of the Modernist Canon.’ Chicago Review 34 (Spring 1984): 49–61. ———. The Mechanic Muse. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. ———. The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Kermode, Frank. The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979. Kernan, Alvin. Samuel Johnson & the Impact of Print. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987. Kiely, Robert. Modernism Reconsidered. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983. Kojecky, Roger. T.S. Eliot’s Social Criticism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971. Kolocotroni, Vassiliki, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou, eds. Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Koshar, Rudy, ed. Histories of Leisure. New York: Berg Publishers, 2002. Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film. 1960. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997. Krauss, Rosalind. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Languag. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. Kronfeld, Chana. On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. Kselman, Thomas A. Miracles and Prophesies in Nineteenth-Century France. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1983. Laity, Cassandra. Editor’s Introduction. Modernism/modernity 8.3 (Sep. 2001): 385–87. Lamming, George. ‘Caliban Orders History.’ The Pleasures of Exile. Foreword by Sandra Pouchet-Paquet. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1960. 118–50. ———. ‘A Monster, A Child, A Slave.’ Lamming 95–117. ———. The Emigrants. 1954. London and New York: Allison and Busby, 1980. ———. In the Castle of My Skin. New York, Toronto, and London: McGraw-Hill, 1953. ———. Season of Adventure. London: Michael Joseph, 1960. Lancaster, Osbert. A Cartoon History of Architecture. 1959. Reprint. London: John Murray, 1975. Larson, Magali Sarfatti. The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977. Lash, Scott. ‘Reflexive Modernization: The Aesthetic Dimension.’ Theory, Culture and Society 10.1 (1993): 1–23. Lash, Scott and Jonathan Friedman, eds. Modernity and Identity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992.

Works Cited 275 Laurentin, René. Lourdes: Cartes postales d’hier. Paris: Editions S.O.S., 1979. Leathart, J. R. ‘A Review of Current Factory Design.’ Building 11 (Apr. 1936): 136–42. Le Corbusier [Charles-Edouard Jeanneret]. Almanach d’architecture moderne. Paris: G. Crès, 1925–26. ———. The Decorative Arts of Today. 1925. Reprint. Trans. James I Dunnett. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987. Lepenies, Wolf. Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1988. Levin, Harry. ‘What Was Modernism?’ Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1965. 271–95. Levine, Donald. Visions of the Sociological Tradition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Lipset, Seymour Martin and Everett Carll Ladd, Jr. ‘The Politics of American Sociologists.’ American Journal of Sociology 78.1 (1972): 67–104. Liu, Alan. The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Lloyd, David. ‘Race Under Representation.’ The Oxford Literary Review. Ed. by Robert Young 13.1–2 (1991): 62–94. Longenbach, James. Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Lourdes en deux jours: Guide religieux, historique, pittoresque et documentaire. Tarbes: Impr. De Lesbordes, 1914. Lowney, John. ‘Haiti and Black Transnationalism: Remapping the Migrant Geography of Home to Harlem.’ African American Review 34:3 (Fall 2000): 413–29. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. ———. The Postmodern Explained. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1993. Maase, Kaspar. BRAVO Amerika: Erkundungen zur Jugendkultur der Bundesrepublik in den fünfziger Jahren. Hamburg: Junius, 1992. Mackaman, Douglas. Leisure Settings: Bourgeois Culture, Medicine, and the Spa in Modern France. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Mackertich, Tony and Peter Mackertich. Façade: A Decade of British and American Commercial Architecture. London: Mathews Miller Dunbar, 1976. Maier, Charles S. ‘Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era.’ American Historical Review 105.3 (2000): 1–47. Manganaro, Marc. Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002. ———, ed. Modernist Anthropology. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. ———. ‘T. S. Eliot and the Primitive Mind.’ Ph.D. Dissertation. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1985. Mao, Douglas and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. ‘The New Modernist Studies.’ PMLA 123.3 (May 2008): 737–48. Marcus, Jane. Hearts of Darkness. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004. Marcus, Laura. The Tenth Muse: Writing About Cinema in the Modernist Period. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Marinetti, Flippo Tommaso. ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909.’ Kolocotroni 249–51. Marson, Una. The Moth and the Star. Kingston, Jamaica: Published by the Author, 1937. Martin, Abbé. Guide de Lourdes et ses environs à l’usage des pèlerins. Saumur: C. Charier, 1893. Martin, John Leslie. ‘The State of Transition.’ Circle. Eds. J. L. Martin, Ben Nicholson, and N. Gabo. London: Faber & Faber, 1937. 215–18

276 Works Cited Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: 1976. 163–77. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. On Colonialism: Articles from The New York Tribune and Other Writings. New York: International Publishers, 1972. Materer, Timothy. Modernist Alchemy: Poetry and the Occult. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. Mayne, Judith. ‘S/Z and Film Theory.’ Jump Cut 12–13 (Dec. 1976): 41–5. McCleery, Alistair. ‘The Return of the Publisher to Book History: The Case of Allen Lane.’ Book History 5 (2002): 161–85. McDannell, Colleen. Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. 1st ed. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1995. 4–13. McKay, Claude. Banjo: A Story without a Plot. London, New York, and San Diego: Harvest/HBJ, 1929. ———. Home to Harlem. 1928. Boston: Northeastern Library of Black Literature, 1987. McKendrick, Neil. The Birth of Consumer Society: The Commercialization of EighteenthCentury England. Eds. John Brewer and J. H. Plumb. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. McLeod, Mary. ‘ “Architecture or Revolution”: Taylorism, Technocracy, and Social Change.’ Art Journal 43 (Summer 1983): 132–47. Meltzer, Françoise. Preface: Jeanne Duval. Translocal Modernisms: International Perspectives. Ed. Irene Ramalho Santos and António Sousa Ribeiro. Bern: Peter Lang, 2008. ix–xiii. Memmi, Albert. La Dépendance: Esquisse pour un portrait du dépendant. Paris: Folio, 1979. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. ‘From the Visible and the Invisible.’ Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy. Ed. Mark C. Taylor. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 318–44. Miekle, Jeffrey L. ‘Domesticating Modernity: Ambivalence and Appropriation 1920– 1940.’ Designing Modernity : The Arts of Reform and Persuasion 1885–1945. Ed. Wendy Kaplan. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996. 143–67. Miller, Christopher L. The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2008. Miller, Michael B. The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869– 1920. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981. Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1959. Modern Times. Dir. Charlie Chaplin, 1936. Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat. ‘Comment les lois sont relatives au principe du gouvernement despotique.’ De L’Esprit des Lois. Book V. Chapter 14. Ed. Robert Derathé Paris: Garnier, 1973. 67–72. Moos, Stanislaus von. ‘Le Corbusier and Loos.’ Assemblage 4 (Oct. 1987): 24–37. Moretti, Franco. ‘Conjectures on World Literature.’ Prendergast. 148–62. Morgan, David. Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Morris, Adalaide. ‘A Relay of Power and of Peace: H. D. and the Spirit of the Gift,’ Contemporary Literature 27.4 (1986), 493–524. Morrison, Toni. ‘Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.’ Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (Winter 1989): 1–34. Morrisson, Mark S. The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2001. Moses, Michael, et al. ‘About Us.’ Modernist Cultures. Birmingham University. Web. 25 March 2009 .

Works Cited 277 Murphey, Richard. Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism and the Problem of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Murphy, Michael. ‘‘One Hundred Per Cent Bohemia’: Pop Decadence and the Aestheticization of Commodity in the Rise of the Slicks.’ Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, and Rereading. Eds. Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996: 61–89. Nava, Mica and Alan O’Shea, eds. Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity. London: Routledge, 1996. Negt, Oskar and Alexander Kluge. The Public Sphere and Experience. 1972. Trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Daniel, Assenka Oksiloff. Introduction. Miriam Hansen. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Meaning, 1910–1945. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989. Newfield, Christopher. Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880–1980. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms. A Literary Guide. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. Nieland, Justus. Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2008. Nolan, Mary. Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Norris, Margot. ‘Modernist Eruptions.’ The Columbia History of the American Novel. Ed. Emory Elliot. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. 311–30. North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, language and Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. ———. Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Orr, John. Cinema and Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1993. Owen, Stephen. ‘Stepping Forward and Back: Issues and Possibilities for “World” Poetry.’ Modern Philology 100.4 (2003): 532–48. ———. ‘What is World Poetry?’ The New Republic (Nov. 19, 1990): 28–32. Palmer, Asynith. William Faulkner’s Critical Reception in France in the 1930s–1950s: A Historically Contextualized Perspective. Unpublished Thesis. U of Maryland Baltimore County, May 2006. Park, Robert and Ernest Burgess. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. 1921. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1924. Parsons, Talcott. The Social System. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1951. ———. The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers. 1937. New York: Free Press, 1968. ———. The System of Modern Societies. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971. Perkin, Harold. The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880. London: Routledge, 1989. Perloff, Marjorie. ‘Modernist Studies.’ Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn. New York: Modern Language Publications, 1992. 154–78. Perry, Catherine. ‘ “La Fille aux yeux d’or,” et la quête paradoxale de l’infini.’ L’Année Balzacienne 14 (1993): 261–84. Petro, Patrice. ‘Nazi Cinema at the Intersection of the Classical and the Popular.’ New German Critique 74 (Spring–Summer 1998): 41–55. Pevsner, Nikolaus. Middlesex. Buildings of England. Vol. 3. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951.

278

Works Cited

Piper, Watty. The Little Engine That Could. Illus. Lois Lenski. New York: Platt & Munk, 1930. Pippin, Robert B. Modernism as a Philosophical Problem. London: Blackwell, 1991. Pollard, D. E. Review of Notes from the City of the Sun: Poems by Bei Dao. Ed. and trans. Bonnie MacDougall. The China Quarterly 100 (Dec. 1984): 886–88. Poulantzas, Nicos. Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. Trans. David Gernbach. London: Verso, 1978. Pound, Ezra. ‘Credo.’ Selected Prose 53. ———. ‘Ezra Pound to Harriet Monroe, September 30, 1914.’ Letters of Ezra Pound. Ed. D. D. Paige. London: Faber & Faber, 1951. 40. ———. Selected Poems. New York.: New Directions, 1957. ———. Selected Prose, 1909–1965. Ed. William Cookson. New York: New Directions, 1975. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Praz, Mario. ‘Byzantium.’ The Romantic Agony. Trans. Angus Davidson. New York: Meridian Books, 1957. Prendergast, Christopher. Balzac: Fiction and Melodrama. London: Edward Arnold, 1978. ———, ed. Debating World Literature. New York: Verso, 2004. ———. ‘The World Republic of Letters.’ Prendergast 1–25. Priestly, John Boynton. English Journey or the Road to Milton Keynes. 1934. Reprint. London: Duckworth, 1984. Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1998. ———. Introduction. Modernism: An Anthology. Ed. Rainey. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005: xix–xxix. ———. ‘The Price of Modernism.’ T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History. Ed. Ronald Bush. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. 91–133. Rainey, Lawrence and Robert von Hallberg. Editorial Introduction. Modernism/modernity 1.1 (1994): 1–3. Ransom, John Crowe. God Without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy. 1930. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1965. ———. Poems and Essays. New York: Vintage Books, 1955. ———. Selected Essays of John Crowe Ransom. Ed. Thomas Daniel Young and John Hindle. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1984. ———. Selected Letters of John Crowe Ransom. Ed. Thomas Daniel Young and George Core. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1985. Ransom, John Crowe, et al. I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Reiter, Rayna R. Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review P, 1975. Responding to ‘Death of a Discipline’: An ACLA Forum. Spec. issue of Comparative Literature 57.3 (Summer 2005): 199–255. Rhys, Jean. After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. 1931. New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1974. ———. Good Morning, Midnight. London: Constable, 1939. ———.Voyage in the Dark. 1934. New York: Popular Library, n.d. Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Ricks, Christopher. ‘The Making of The Golden Treasury.’ The Golden Treasury. Ed. F. T. Palgrave. London: Penguin, 1991: 437–50.

Works Cited 279 Riding, Laura and Robert Graves. A Survey of Modernist Poetry. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1928. Ripert, Aline and Claude Frère. La Carte postale: Son Histoire, sa fonction sociale. Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1983. Rodowick, D. N. The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist. Woman, Culture and Society. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1974. Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2001. Rosen, Philip, ed. Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. Ross, Stephen. ‘Introduction: The Missing Link.’ Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate. Ed. Stephen Ross. New York: Routledge, 2009. 1–17. Rothstein, Eric. ‘Broaching a Cultural Logic of Modernity.’ Modern Language Quarterly 61.2 (2000): 359–94. Rowntree, Joshua. The Imperial Drug Trade: A Re-statement of the Opium Question, in the Light of Recent Evidence and New Developments in the East. London: Methuen, 1906. Said, Edward. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. Saler, Michael T. The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground . London, Oxford UP, 1999. Salih, Tayeb. Season of Migration to the North. New York: NYRB Classics, 2009. Santos, Irene Ramalho and António Sousa Ribeiro, eds. Translocal Modernisms: International Perspectives. Bern: Peter Lang, 2008. Sapir, Edward. Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality. Ed. David G. Mandelbaum. Berkeley: U of California P, 1949. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. 1943. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1984. Satterfield, Jay. ‘The World’s Best Books’: Taste, Culture, and the Modern Library. Amherst and Boston: U of Massachusetts P, 2002. Saunders, Thomas J. Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Saussy, Haun, ed. Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. The American Comparative Literature Association Report on the State of the Discipline, 2004. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. Savart, Claude. ‘À la recherche de l’ ‘art’ dit de Saint-Sulpice.’ Revue d’Histoire de la Spiritualité 52 (1976): 265–82. Sawicki, Jana. Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body. New York and London: Routledge, 2001. Scheunemann, Dietrich. European Avant-Garde: New Perspectives. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Schor, Naomi. ‘Cartes Postales: Representing Paris 1900.’ Critical Inquiry 18 (Winter 1992): 211–12 Schwartz, Vanessa R. Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. Scott, Bonnie Kime, ed. Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2007. ———, ed. The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.

280 Works Cited Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. ‘Epidemics of the Will.’ Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. 130–42. Sil, Rudra and Eileen M. Doherty, eds. Beyond Boundaries?: Disciplines, Paradigms, and Theoretical Integration in International Studies. Albany: SUNY Press, 2000. Silver, Kenneth. Esprit de Corps: The Rise of the Parisian Avant-Garde in the First World War, 1914–1925. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. Simmel, Georg. ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life.’ Kolocotroni 51–60. Skinner, Joan S. Form and Fancy: Factories and Factory Buildings by Wallis, Gilbert & Partners, 1916–1939. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1997. Smith, Stan. The Origins of Modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and the Rhetorics of Renewal. New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994. Smith, Terry. Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Spingarn, J. E. ‘The Young Generation: A New Manifesto.’ The Freeman (7 June 1922): 296–98. Spivak, Gayatri. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. Stein, Gertrude. ‘An American and France.’ What Are Masterpieces. Ed. Robert Haas. New York: Pitman, 1970. 59–70. ———. Gertrude Stein: Writing and Lectures, 1909–1945. Ed. Patricia Meyerowitz. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1967. ———. ‘Portraits and Repetition.’ Lectures in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1935. Stephens, Michelle Ann. Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2005. Stetz, Margaret. ‘Sex, Lies, and Printed Cloth: Bookselling at the Bodley Head in the Eighteen-Nineties.’ Victorian Studies 35 (Autumn 1991): 71–87. Stewart, John. The Burden of Time: The Fugitives and the Agrarians. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965. Strathern, Marilyn. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: U California P, 1988. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. ‘Hearing Voices: Vignettes of Early Modernity in South Asia, 1400– 1750.’ Daedalus 127.3 (1998): 99–100. Surette, Leon. The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and the Occult. Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1994. Sword, Helen. Ghostwriting Modernism. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2002. Thompson, Kristin. Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988. ———. Exporting Entertainment. London: British Film Institute, 1985. Thompson, Kristin and David Bordwell. Film History: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994. ———. ‘Space and Narrative in the Films of Ozu.’ Screen 17.2 (Summer 1976): 41–73. Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Vintage Books, 1984. Tintner, Adeline. ‘James and Balzac: The Bostonians and “La Fille aux yeux d’or.” ’ Comparative Literature 29 (1977): 241–54. Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellectuals, Modern Lives. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. Tratner, Michael. Deficits and Desires: Economics and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001. ———. ‘A Man Is His Bonds.’ Woodmansee and Osteen 365–78.

Works Cited 281 Trilling, Lionel. Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning. London: Secker and Warburg, 1966. Trouillot, Michel-Rolphe. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Troy, Nancy. Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991. Tryphonopoulos, Demetres and Leon Surette, eds. Literary Modernism and the Occult Tradition. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1996. Tsivian, Yuri. ‘Between the Old and the New: Soviet Film Culture in 1918–1924.’ Griffithiana 55/56 (1996): 15–63. ———. ‘Cutting and Framing in Bauer’s and Kuleshov’s Films.’ Kintop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films 1 (1992): 103–13. Turner, Catherine. Marketing Modernism between the Two World Wars. Amherst and Boston: U of Massachusetts P, 2003. Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture. 1871. Reprint. New York: Harper & Row, 1958. Unger, Steven. ‘Writing in Tongues: Thoughts on the Work of Translation.’ Saussy 127–38. Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972. Venuti, Lawrence, ed. The Translation Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2000. Verley, Patrick. Nouvelle histoire économique de la France contemporaine. Vol. II. Paris: La Découverte, 1989. Vickery, John B. The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973. Walcott, Derek. Tiepolo’s Hound. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2000. Wallis, Thomas. ‘Factories.’ Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects (25 Feb. 1933): 301–7. Weber, Eugen. France, Fin de Siècle. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986. 179–80. Weber, Max. ‘Science as a Vocation.’ From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: OUP, 1946. 129–56. Weil, Kari. Androgyny and the Denial of Difference. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1992. Weiner, Annette. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping While Giving. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1992. Wexler, Joyce Piell. Who Paid for Modernism?: Art, Money, and the Fiction of Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 1997. Wicke, Jennifer. ‘Appreciation, Depreciation: Modernism’s Speculative Bubble.’ Modernism/modernity 8.3 (Sep. 2001): 389–403. Wigley, Mark. White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. Ed. Thomas Pinkney. New York: Verso, 1989. Williams, Rosalind H. Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982. Willison, lan, Warwick Gould, and Warren Chernaik, eds. Modernist Writers and the Marketplace. London: Macmillan, 1996. Woodmansee, Martha and Mark Osteen, eds. The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Woolf, Virginia. ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.’ Scott 634–41. Woodmansee, Martha and Mark Osteen, eds. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Penguin, 2000.

282

Works Cited

Woodmansee, Martha and Mark Osteen, eds. Jacob’s Room. 1922. New York: Penguin, 1992. ———. The London Scene. New York: Frank Hallman, 1975. ———. ‘Modern Fiction.’ Scott 628–33. ———. Three Guineas. New York: Harcourt, 1938. Yack, Bernard. The Fetishism of Modernities: Epochal Self-Consciousness in Contemporary Social and Political Thought. Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP, 1997. Yeats, W. B. The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. ———. Essays and Introductions. London: Macmillan, 1961. Young, Thomas Daniel. Gentleman in a Dustcoat: A Biography of John Crowe Ransom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1976.

Index Academic Instincts (Garber), 6 Ackroyd, Peter, 174, 180n.13 Adorno, Theodor: ‘culture industry,’ 94, 168, 170, 256–7nn.1, 157; ‘Reading Balzac,’ 261; See also Dialectic of Enlightenment Adrizzone, Heidi and Earl Lewis, 4 Aesthetics: 1, 5, 8, 32n.18, 112, 177, 256n.2; and cinema, 244, 247, 249, 253; and modernism, 3, 4, 16, 74, 111, 236; and New Criticism, 41, 46; avant-garde, 116, 243, 256n1; Enlightenment, 72, 84; modernist, 77, 125, 242, 243 Aestheticism: 216, 256n.2, 262 After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (Rhys), 82 After the Great Divide (Huyssen), 168 Agee, James and Walker Evans: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 164n.3 Aitken, M. C.: Scottish Song, 187 Aldington, Richard, 35 Algren, Nelson, 151 All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (M. Berman), 21, 30n.5, 44 Allen, Frederick Lewis: Only Yesterday, 191 Altman, Meryl, 9 Altman, Rick, 247, 257 Anand, Mulk Raj: Coolie, 66–8, 261 Anderson, Perry, 175, 180 Anderson, Sherwood, 27 Anthropology: (See also Literature: and anthropology) 3, 4, 5, 8, 20, 151, 156, 164n.3, 199, 203, 204, 209n.3, 210, 213, 218, 219, 259, 261; cultural, 20, 210, 220n.1; modernist, 20, 211, 213; postmodern, 210, 211 Appadurai, Arjun, 7, 44; Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, 7 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 64 Apter, Emily, 69; ‘creolization,’ 64; translation, 54, 62 Aragon, Louis, 236–7, 255

Armstrong, Nancy, 199, 201 Armstrong, Tim, 7 Arnold, Matthew, 176, 187, 219; ‘Dover Beach,’ 227 Art deco: 130, 132, 136, 137, 140, 142, 143, 188 Artaud, Antonin, 255 Arts, the: 88, 89, 90n.5, 94, 129, 131–5, 143, 214, 215; and modernism, 2, 10n.1, 13, 17, 20, 27, 75, 76, 84, 87, 171, 179, 184, 209n.2, 262, 63; and modernity, 24, 27, 77; fine, 2, 134; visual, 8, 10, 84, 145n.5 Asad, Talal, 212 At the Bottom of the River (Kincaid), 82 Auden, W. H., 217 Auerbach, Erich: Mimesis, 54, 62 August Sleepwalker, The (Bei Dao), 57 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, (Stein), 191 Avant-garde: 21, 23, 194, 145n.9, 256n.6, 260; and architecture, 131, 137; and bohemia, 203, 204; and cinema, 235, 236, 243, 244, 245, 248, 249, 255, 261; and Eliot, 174; and modernism, 3, 10n.3, 15, 19, 110, 116, 168–9, 179, 256n.1; and modernity, 24, 110, 116, 168; and Pound, 183; and Ulysses, 185; European, 3, 249; European Network for, 3 The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (Saler), 241n.4 Badaracco, Claire, 193 Balzac, Honoré, 7; The Girl with the Golden Eyes 109–11, 113–27, 262 Banjo (McKay), 82 Baraka, Amiri, 29 Barnes, Djuna: Nightwood, 59. Barthes, Roland, 212, 248; S/Z, 246 Barton, Bruce: The Man Nobody Knows, 191 Baudelaire, Charles, 1, 7, 21, 126n.15, 213; modes of represetation, 95 283

284

Index

Bauer, Yevgenij, 244 Bayer, Patricia, 140 Bazin, André, 246 Beach, Sylvia, 184–5, 193 Beard, Charles: An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, 196 Beardsely, Aubrey, 188 Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash, 257n.23 Beckett, Samuel, 54, 60, 242 Beebe, Maurice, 30n.2 Behar, Ruth, 210, 215; Behar, Ruth and Deborah Gordon: Women Writing Culture, 215 Bei Dao: The August Sleepwalker, 57; Chinese context, 56–9, 62–3, 65; local/international contexts, 69–70; Notes from the City of the Sun, 58; as political poet, 63–5; reputation as poet, 53–4 Bell, Clive, 188 Bell, David, 165n.5 Bellour, Raymond, 257 Benedict, Ruth, 214–16, 220 Benjamin, Walter: commodity fetishism, 93, 106; cinema and cinematic effects, 222, 243, 253, 255–6n.2, 258 Benn, Gottfried, 168 Benstock, Shari, 31n.14; Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940, 40 Benton, Tim, 145 Berman, Jessica, 261–2 Berman, Marshall, 38, 52n.3; All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, 21, 30n.5, 44 Bermann, Sandra, 54 Bernheimer, Charles, 54 Best Russian Short Stories (Seltzer), 192 Beyond Kinship (Joyce, Gillespie) 200, 202 Bhabha, Homi K., 77–8 Biderman, Albert and Elizabeth Crawford, 164 Bigger than Life (Ray), 247 The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Gilroy), 7 The Black Jacobins (C.L.R. James), 74–6, 78, 80 Blake, William, 187

Blues: 28, 72, 79, 82 Boas, Franz, 214; ‘Boasian’ anthropology, 20, 151, 164, 214–15 Bobos in Paradise (D. Brooks), 195 Boime, Albert, 91n.18 Bongie, Chris, 127n.23 Boon, James, 212 Bordwell, David, 257nn.7, 10, 16 Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, 246–50 Boscagli, Maurizia: Eye on the Flesh, 174 Botta, Paul-Émile, 118 Bourdieu, Pierre, 190, 195; ’cultural capital,’ 116, 147, 184; the ‘expert class,’ 172–3; ‘petit bourgeois,’ 178 Bourgeoisie: (See also Class) 19, 28, 92, 96, 109, 185–6 Boxer, David, 86–7 Bradbury, Malcolm and James McFarlane: Modernism, 1, 31n.13, 38, 56; Eurocentrism of, 262 Brand, Dionne, 83 Brasillach, Robert and Maurice Bardèche: Histoire de cinéma, 245 Braudel, Fernand, 44 Brecht, Bertolt, 248 Breidenbach, Paul, 220n.1 Brennan, Teresa, 126n.11 Brint, Steven, 148, 164 Brodber, Erna: Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Louisiana, Myal, 82 Brooke, Rupert, 186 Brooks, Cleanth: Agrarianism, 157, 165n.9; elitist association, 149; methods of reading ‘texts,’ 218, 220; The Well-Wrought Urn, 165n.13 Brooks, David, 41; Bobos in Paradise, 195 Brooks, Van Wyck, 220 Buck-Morss, Susan, 73, 76, 83, Burch, Noel, 248 The Burden of Time (Stewart), 165 Bürger, Christa, 44 Bürger, Peter: commodification of art, 256n.1; Theory of the Avant-Garde, 10, 145n.10, 168–9 Burke, Kenneth, 126n.4, 218, 220 The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1175–1800 (Darnton), 182 Butel, Paul, 118

Index 285 Butler, Judith, 50 Byron, Lord, 187 Calinescu, Matei, 44 Cameron, Deborah: Verbal Hygine, 181n.16 Capital (Marx), 106n.4, 120 Capitalism: 44, 105, 112, 126n11, 168, 177, 186, 204; and modernism: 187, 189–90, 192–5, 198 Cappetti, Carla, 150–1 Carby, Hazel, 2 Carnegie, Dale, 226 Carroll, Noel, 31n.10 Casanova, Pascale: reading of Faulkner, 59–62; The World Republic of Letters, 54–5, 60 Cassirer, Ernst, 218 Cather, Willa, 10n.2 Catlin, George, 212 Caughie, Pamela L.: “Professional Identity Politics,” 10n.7; Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism, 196n.1. See also Disciplining Modernism Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 168 Cerf, Bennett, 190, 192–93 Cesaire, Aimé, 82; Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, 76, 78 Cezanne, Paul, 239 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 251 Chance (Conrad), 184 Chaplin, Charlie, 245; Modern Times, 231 The Charterhouse of Parma (Stendhal), 192 Cherchi Usai, Paolo, 256n.3 Children’s Garland (Patmore), 187 Chinitz, David, 181n.15 Cinema: 20, 132, 140, 141, 144; and modernism, 3, 233–8, 240–1, 241n1, 242–5, 248–9, 255, 261; and modernity, 222, 233–4, 253–5; and The Waste Land, 237, 240–1; classical, 234, 243, 245, 257n.9; Hollywood, 3, 233–4, 236–7, 242, 246–52, 256, 257n.19, 261; industry, 140, 252, 257n.20 Citron, Pierre, 126n.7 The City of Tomorrow (Urbanisme) (Le Corbusier), 129 Civilization and its Discontents (Freud), 225, 232

Class: 117, 118, 126n.18, 142, 161, 167, 192, 201; and T. S. Eliot, 169–77, 180n.11; and modernism, 169–70, 177–9, 179n.2; lower, 126n.18, 173; middle, 11, 143–4, 173, 175–7, 179; new, 147, 148, 150, 154, 156, 163–4, 172, 174, 195; upper, 174, 175; working, 142, 164, 172, 176, 181n.17, 195 Classes in Contemporary Capitalism The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (Poulantzas), 177 Cliff, Michelle, 83, 87–8; Free Enterprise, 88 Clifford, James, 210–12, 214 Clifford, James and George Marcus: Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, 211–15 Cockerell, Hugh, 180n.13 Cocteau, Jean, 188, 249 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 7, 160; ‘clerisy,’ 180 Colomina, Beatriz, 136, 141, 145, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (Gouldner), 165n.6 Commerce: 88, 93, 97, 105, 124, 185, 190, 199 Commodification: 105, 111, 113, 114, 115, 125, 126n.11, 169, 182, 256n.1; sexual, 79 The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Social Change (Harvey), 21, 30–1n.7 The Conquest of Cool (Frank), 195 Conrad, Joseph, 35, 42, 180n.15, 188; Chance, 184; Heart of Darkness, 81 Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (D. Scott), 76 The Consequences of Modernity (Giddens), 4 Constable, Liz, 262 Coolie (Anand), 66–8, 261 Cooper, John Xiros, 194, 203–5, 207, 209 Corbin, Alain, 107n.12 Corvo, Baron, 188 Cosmopolitanism: 1, 55, 59, 65, 76 The Countess Cathleen (Yeats), 206 Coyle, Michael, 2 Crane, Stephen, 188

286

Index

Crawford, Robert, 180n.15 Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky), 217 Cudjoe, Selwyn, 90n.4 Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Guillory), 156, 163, 181n.17 Cultural criticism: 94, 157 Cultural studies: 1, 3, 5, 7, 25, 30n.5, 32n.18, 48, 219, 262 Culture (See also Culture industry, Mass culture): 13, 53, 70n.2, 112, 123, 124, 126n.3, 141, 147, 163, 170–2, 194, 197; academic, 176; American, 247, 257; British, 160, 183; colonial, 53; consumer, 93, 98, 106; devotional, 97–8, 105, 106; disciplinary, 161; European, 76; French, 134, 135; local, 56, 59, 159; modern, 3, 96, 105, 171, 177, 179, 219, 248; popular, 107n.8, 144, 167, 181n.15, 229, 235, 241, 256n6, 260; urban, 19, 92, 109, 110; visual, 3, 133, 134 Culture industry: 94, 168, 170, 257n15 cummings, e. e., 188, 192 Curtis, William, 132, 137; Modern Architecture since 1900, 132 Cushing, Frank, 220 Dabydeen, David, 83, 87–8 D’Aguiar, Fred, 88; Feeding the Ghosts, 89–90 Damrosch, David, 53–9, 70 Danius, Sara, 4 Dante, 57 Dash, J. Michael, 72–3, 76, 82, 87, 90 Davidson, Donald, 165n.9 Davidson, John, 182 Davidson, Max, 254 Death of a Discipline (Spivak), 54, 63 De Chirico, Giorgio, 249 The Decorative Art of Today (L’Art Décoratif d’Aujourd’hui) (Le Corbusier), 128, 133–5, 137; building materials, 145n.4; ‘Sense of Truth’ chapter, 139 De Falla, Manuel, 249 De Grazia, Victoria, 251 De Jongh, James, 32n.21 DeKoven, Marianne, 31n.14 De la Mare, Walter, 187 Deloria, Ella, 215

De Man, Paul, 23 De Musset, Alfred, 126n.15 De Quincey, Thomas, 117, 126n.15 Derrida, Jacques, 37, 46, 50, 52, 212 Descartes: Cartesian ‘I’/subject, 14, 21 Des Imagistes (Pound), 186 Dettmar, Kevin: Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism, 4, Dettmar, Kevin and Stephen Watt: Marketing Modernisms, 180n.4 Dewey, John, 152 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer, Adorno), 257n.15 The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (North), 7 Diepeveen, Leonard, 170, 172 Disciplinarity: (See also Interdisciplinarity) 5, 6, 33, 49, 167, 169, 178 Discipline: (See also Disciplinarity) 1, 4, 7–9, 28, 31n.10, 43, 51, 253, 260; of anthropology, 214–15, 220n.1; of cinema studies, 3, 8, 245, 249, 257n.16; of comparative literature, 54, 64; of literature, 156, 161, 163, 176; of sociology, 148–55, 164n.2, 165n.5 Disciplining Modernism (Caughie), 259, 261–3 Dixon, Andrew, 91n.17 Doane, Mary Ann, 256n.3 Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (Felski), 176 Dominguez, Virginia, 210 Doolittle, Hilda. See H.D. Döring, Tobias, 91n.18 Dos Passos, John, 79; 1919, 191 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 224, 241; Crime and Punishment, 217 Douglas, Aaron, 85, 87 Douglas, Ann, 7 ‘Dover Beach’ (Arnold), 227 Dovzhenko, Alexandr, 243 Doyle, Laura and Laura Winkiel : Geomodernisms, 4, 40–1 Dreiser, Theodore, 151, 160, 192 Drucker, Johanna, 145n.5 Dubliners (Joyce), 188, 231 Dufy, Raoul, 4

Index 287 Dugdale, Michael, 145–6; ‘Ornamentia Praecox,’ 138–9 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 31n.14, 32n.21 Durkheim, Émile, 93–4, 151, 153, 211 Eagleton, Terry, 176–7; The Gatekeeper, 181n.17; Literary Theory: An Introduction, 165n.8, 176 An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (Beard), 196 Economics: 8, 156, 158, 190, 197, 199, 228, 230, 259, 261 Economy: 77, 94, 123, 124, 131, 157, 198, 206, 207, 209, 224, 225, 230, 243; industrial, 159, 161, 189; plantation, 77, 165n.10; political, 112, 123, 199, 201; sexual 115, 255 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 164 Ehrenreich, Barbara and John Ehrenreich, 148, 172, 180n.8 Einstein, Albert: Relativity, 188 Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., 32n.19 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 187 Eistenstein, Sergei, 222–3, 243, 245 Eliot, George, 188 Eliot, T. S., 41–2, 79, 187–8, 192, 242; class, 168–79, 180nn5–6, 14, 181n.17; expatriate, 27, 180n.15; For Lancelot Andrewes, 176; influence of, 56, 58, 62; key figure of Modernism, 1, 7; lack of wartime service, 180n.13; ‘mythic method,’ 229, 234–41; Notes Towards the Definition of a Culture, 171, 180nn.7, 11; occult, 35; ritual, 211, 220. See also The Waste Land Elliot, Michael, 220 Elliott, Bridget, 261 Ellmann, Richard and Charles Feidelson: The Modern Tradition, 7, 31n.13 Emery, Mary Lou, 262; Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature, 91n.11 The Emigrants (Lamming), 78, 80, 82 Engels, Friedrich, 7, 228 Enlightenment: 13, 14, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 30n.5, 35, 49, 74, 75, 76, 83, 90, 127n.25, 223; aesthetics, 72, 84; modernity, 28, 30n.7, 73

Epstein, Jacob, 86–7, 195 Etchell, Frederick, 129 Evans, Brad, 220 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 212 Expert Modernists, Matricide, and Modern Culture: Woolf, Forster, Joyce (Cucullu), 180n.5 Eye on the Flesh (Boscagli), 174 Eysteinsson, Astradur, 10n.3, 31n.13, 38 Eysteinsson, Astradur and Vivan Liska, 5 Fabian, Johannes : Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, 209n.3 Fallen Angel (Preminger), 247 Farrell, James, 151–2 Faulkner, William, 27, 42, 54, 60–4, 192 Feeding the Ghosts (D’Aguiar), 89–90 Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (Nieland), 241n.2 Felman, Shoshana: gendered subjects, 113, 115; psychoanalytic interpretations, 18, 123 Felski, Rita, 2, 7–9, 30–2nn.1, 5, 14, 17, 137, 176–8, 181n.17; Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (Felski), 176; The Gender of Modernity, 2, 7, 30n.5 Fetishism: 31n.8, 106n.4, 115, 122, 127n.24, 127n.25 The Fetishism of Modernities: Epochal Self-Consciousness in Contemporary Social and Political Thought (Yack), 30n.5 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 253 Fiedler, Leslie, 160 Film (See Cinema) Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 42, 185 Firbank, Ronald, 188 Fischer, Michael, 212 Fish, Stanley, 6–7 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 27; The Great Gatsby, 192 Flaubert, Gustave, 7 For Lancelot Andrewes (Eliot), 176 Ford, Ford Madox, 35 Ford, Henry, 186 Ford, John, 246 Fordism: 134, 235, 249, 252, 257n.12

288

Index

Formalism: 36, 37, 156, 216, 218 Forster, E. M., 188 Foucault, Michel, 6, 44, 167, 212 Frank, Thomas: The Conquest of Cool, 195 Franklin, Miles, 188 Frayling, Christopher, 146n.15 Frazer, James, 214; Frazerian anthropology, 211 Free Enterprise (Cliff), 88 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 23, 168, 259; background, 177; Civilization and its Discontents, 225, 232; clinical practice, 17; dream work, 13, 237; fetishism, 121–2, 127nn.24–5; ‘pleasure principle,’ 228; properties of human consciousness, 224–5, 231–2; techniques 31n.8, 72; the ‘uncanny,’ 34–7, 39 Friedman, Jonathan, 44 Friedman, Lawrence, 204 Friedman, Susan Stanford: 57, 62, 69, 105, 76, 203, 228; ‘Definitional Excursions’ debate, 5, 8, 10n.3, 33–5, 37; ‘Periodizing Modernism,’ 209n.1; ‘plural Modernisms,’ 40–1, 43–7, 51–2, 52n.1, 90n.6, 91n.10; resistance to definitional conclusion, 71, 78, 109–11, 131, 149, 167–9, 179, 196–7, 222, 228 Fry, Maxwell, 130, 137 Fry, Roger, 84, 194 The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (Gouldner), 147, 154 Futurism: 10n.3, 183, 244 Futurist Manifesto (Marinetti), 221 Gabo, Naum, 131 Gambrell, Alice, 31–2nn.14, 21 Gandhi, Mohandas, 66 Garber, Marjorie: Academic Instincts, 6–7 Gardin, Vladimir, 244 Garrity, Jane, 188 The Gatekeeper (Eagleton), 181n.17 Geertz, Clifford, 210–12, 216–19 Gender: 2, 4, 31n.14, 40, 89, 113, 215, 243, 248, 253, 254, 257n.22, 262; and economics, 199, 200, 202; and modernism, 168, 174–5, 178–9, 194; g. studies, 1, 219, 259 Gender in Modernism (B. Scott), 4, 40

The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (B. Scott), 4 The Gender of Modernity (Felski), 2, 7, 30n.5 The Gender of the Gift (Strathern), 200, 202 Genealogy: 120, 121, 123, 167, 179n2, 202, 242, 249 Gentleman in a Dustcoat (Young),165n.9 Geomodernisms (Doyle, Winkiel), 4, 40 Georgian Poetry (Marsh), 186 Gidal, Peter, 248 Giddens, Anthony, 27, 31nn.11–12, 44, 204; The Consequences of Modernity, 4, 25–6; Modernity and Self-Identity, 4, 7, 31n.11, 257n.23 Gide, André, 188 Gikandi, Simon, 31n.14, 40–1, 71, 83, 91n.9 Gilbert, Sandra, 31n.14 Gilman, Richard, 111 Gilman, Sander, 83 Gilroy, Paul, 31–2nn.14, 21, 71, 83, 91n.18; The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, 7 Ginsberg, Allen, 195 The Girl with the Golden Eyes (Balzac), 110–13, 115, 117–18, 120–3 Globalization: 1, 4, 26, 31n.7, 54, 113, 219 Gluck, Mary, 109–10, 116, 125 God without Thunder (Ransom), 157 Godard, Jean-Luc, 248 Godelier, Maurice, 209n.4 Goethe, 60, 212 Gold Diggers of 1933, 247 The Golden Treasury (Palgrave), 186–7 Good Morning, Midnight (Rhys), 82 Gordon, Deborah, 214–15 Gouldner, Alvin, 147–8, 154, 165n.6, 172, 177; The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, 147, 154 Graff, Gerald, 161; Professing Literature, 156 Gramsci, Antonio, 156, 252 The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald), 192 Green, Christopher, 133 Greenberg, Clement, 38, 41 Gregory, Chris, 200–2

Index 289 Griffith, D. W., 222, 234, 240, 252 Grigson, Geoffery: Poetry of the Present, 186 Gronberg, Tag, 135–7, 144 Gubar, Susan, 31–2nn.14, 21 Guillory, John, 148–9, 164n.2, 172, 175; Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, 156, 163, 181n.17 Gunning, Tom, 221–2 Guy, Josephine, 183, 194 Habermas, Jürgen, 14, 26, 44 Halliday, Terence and Morris Janowitz, 166n.14 Hansen, Miriam, 3, 8, 233–6, 256nn.1–2 Hardy, Thomas, 188 Harlem Renaissance: 27, 28, 71, 79, 82, 85, 87, 260 Harris, Ruth, 106n.5 Harris, Wilson, 75, 78–82; Palace of the Peacock, 81 Harrison, Jane, 211 Harvey, David, 26, 56, 263; The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Social Change, 21, 30–1n.7 Hassan, Ihab, 21 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 81 Heath, Stephen, 248 Hegel, G. W. F., 1, 19, 38 Hegeman, Susan, 219–20 Heidegger, Martin, 49 Hemingway, Ernest, 189, 191–2 Hennessey, Rosemary, 127n.27 Hepworth, Barbara, 87 H. D., 188, 198–9, 202 Hillier, Bevis and Stephen Escritt, 145n.10 Hinchcliffe, Tanis, 129 Histoire de cinéma (Brasillach, Bardèche), 245 History: 4, 5, 8, 20, 23, 24, 26, 43, 53, 61, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 83, 92, 94, 137, 148, 156, 160, 166n.13, 178, 197, 201, 202, 209, 210, 211, 219, 227, 228, 237, 243, 246, 249, 250, 252, 259; art, 3, 5, 132, 136, 145; definitional, 28, 29, 71; film, 245, 249; literary, 27, 32, 59, 61, 181, 182, 203; local, 53, 56, 59; reception, 59, 110, 112, 113, 247;

religious, 25; social, 61, 191, 216; of anthropology, 212, 214–16; of cinema, 242, 248; of disciplines, 210; of modernism, 2, 27, 41, 43, 51 Hitchcock, Alfred, 249 Hitchmouch, Wendy, 140–1 Hobsbawm, Eric, 177 Home to Harlem (McKay), 72, 74 Horkheimer, Max, 94, 168, 170, 257n.15; Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer, Adorno), 257n.15 Howe, Irving, 160 Huaco, George, 165n.5 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Pound), 184 Hulme, T. E., 249 Hume, David, 83, 91n.9 Hurston, Zora Neale, influence of, 82; ‘modernist anthropology,’ 211, 214–16; Mules and Men, 164n.3, 207–8, 215; Tell My Horse, 215 Husserl, Edmund, 49 Huxley, Aldous, 186, 189 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 127n.22 Huyssen, Andreas, 116, 180n.9, 256n.1, 261; After the Great Divide, 168–9, 173–4, 178–9; disciplinarity, 5, 7, 9 Ibsen, Henrik, 188 I’ll Take My Stand (Ransom), 157–8, 162, 165n.10 Imperialism: 19, 36, 42, 219, 251, 262 Industrialization: 1, 13, 44, 94, 119, 162 Interdisciplinarity: (See also Disciplinarity) 2, 6, 20, 259, 261 In the Castle of My Skin (Lamming), 82 In the Seven Woods (Yeats), 201 Inalienable Possessions (Weiner), 200 Institutions of Modernism (Rainey), 180n.4 Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Park, Burgess), 152 Irigaray, Luce, 50 Jaffe, Aaron, 186–7 Jakobson, Roman, 126n.10 James. C. L. R., 72–6, 82, 84, 90–1nn.4, 8; The Black Jacobins, 74–6, 78, 80; Toussaint Louverture (C.L.R. James), 73, 91n.8

290 Index James, Henry, 55, 111–13, 180n.15, 188; The Turn of the Screw, 18 James, William, 7 Jameson, Fredric, 28, 44, 64, 113, 228; A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, 4, 38, 52n.1, 61 Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (Brodber), 82 Jay, Martin, 44 Jazz: 8, 27, 142, 188 Jencks, Charles, 10, 145 Johnson, Samuel, 187 Joyce, James, 211, 220, 242; Dubliners, 188, 231; epiphany, 231; Finnegans Wake, 42, 82, 185; influences, 206–7; key figure of modernism, 1, 7, 23, 27–8, 54–5, 60, 62, 200, 204; mythical method, 237, 239; patronage, 183–5; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 66–8 ‘uncanny’ aspects, 35, 62; reception of works, 188, 192–3, 195. See also Ulysses Jünger, Ernst, 168, 249 Kadish, Doris, 126n.12 Kafka, Franz, 54, 57, 242; difficulty of translating, 60, 64 Kampf, Louis and Paul Lauter: The Politics of Literature, 163 Kant, Immanuel, 7, 19, 83 Kaplan, Alice, 257n.7 Kaufman, Suzanne, 179n.3, 241n.3 Keats, John, 7 Kenner, Hugh, 27, 38, 62; The Mechanic Muse, 262 Kermode, Frank, 126n.3 Kernan, Alvin, 187 Kerouac, Jack, 196 Keynes, John Maynard, 190, 198 Kiely, Robert, 10n.1 Kincaid, Jamaica: At the Bottom of the River, 82–3 King Lear (Shakespeare), 217 Kingsley, Mary, 212 Kipling, Rudyard, 191 Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich), 247 Kojecky, Roger: T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism, 180n.6 Koshar, Rudy, 106–7nn.5, 15

Kracauer, Siegfried, 253–5 Kristeva, Julia, 18, 212 Kronfeld, Chana: On the Margins of Modernism, 40 Kuleshov, Lev, 244 La fille aux yeux d’or (Balzac). See The Girl with the Golden Eyes. Lacan, Jacques, 50, 223–8; ‘Lacanian,’ 17, 223, 246 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence), 185, 195 Lady Windermere’s Fan (Wilde), 183 Laemmle, Carl, 252 Laity, Cassandra, 37 Lamming, George, 74–8, 80–3; The Emigrants, 78, 80; In the Castle of My Skin, 82; Season of Adventure, 82 Lamphere, Louise, 214 Lancaster, Osbert, 142 Landes, Ruth, 215 Larbaud, Valery, 60 Larsen, Nella, 82 Larson, Magali Sarfatti, 172 Laurentin, René, 107n.18 Lawrence, D. H., 35, 183–5, 188–90, 204, 211; Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 185, 195; The Rainbow, 190; Sons and Lovers, 184, 192; Women in Love, 204 Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi, Brown, Izenour), 144 Leathart, J. R., 139, 143 Leavis, F. R., 41, 176–7, 181 Le Corbusier, 14, 56, 128–46, 249, 261; The City of Tomorrow (Urbanisme), 129 ; The Decorative Art of Today, 128, 133–5, 137; building materials, 145n.4; ‘Sense of Truth’ chapter, 139; Towards a New Architecture (Vers une architecture), 129 Le Gallienne, Richard, 182 Leger, Fernand, 249 Leonard, Garry, 259 Lepenies, Wolf, 164n.2 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee, Evans), 164n.3 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 202, 210 ; Tristes Tropiques, 212 Levin, Harry, 30n.2, 32n.16, 50

Index 291 Levinas, Emmanuel, 52 Levine, Donald: Visions of the Sociological Tradition, 163 Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, 211 Lewis, Sinclair: Main Street, 191 Lewis, Wyndham, 35, 59, 168, 249 Liberty (Roach, McCarey), 247 Lienhardt, Godfrey, 212 Lipset, Seymour Martin and Everett Carll Ladd, Jr., 165n.5 The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough (Vickery), 211 Literary studies: (See also Literature) 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 78, 148, 161, 169, 171, 182, 201; and sociology, 149, 150, 163 Literary Theory : An Introduction (Eagleton), 165n.8, 176 Literature: 1, 3, 11, 14, 20, 23, 27, 112, 126n.4, 160–1, 163, 176, 187, 188, 194, 236, 237, 239, 245, 256n.2, 262; and anthropology, 210–11, 213–16, 218, 220; and economics, 197–8, 206, 208, 228; and New Criticism, 149–50, 156–67; and sociology, 149, 150–1, 161, 163, 164, 164n.2, 165n.5; modern, 190–1, 193, 210, 211, 216; modernist, 42, 61, 62, 68–9, 184, 192, 193, 212–14, 263; world, 54–9, 61, 63, 65–7, 69, 70n.2 The Little Engine that Could (Piper), 226 Lloyd, David, 83 Locke, John, 19, 28, 73 Longenbach, James, 35 Lonesome (Fejos), 247 Louisiana (Brodber), 82 Lubitsch, Ernst, 245 Lukács, Georg, 41 Lyotard, Jean-François: The Postmodern Condition, 30–1nn.7, 12, 226 Maase, Kaspar, 257n.21 Mailer, Norman, 189–90 Main Street (Lewis), 191 The Making of Americans (Stein), 235 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 20, 212, 214, 218 The Man Nobody Knows (Barton), 191 Manganaro, Marc, 8, 20; Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text, 20, 213–15 Manheim, Karl, 180n.15

Mann, Thomas, 190 Mao, Douglas and Rebecca Walkowitz, 2, 41 Marcus, George, 210–12 Marcus, Laura: The Tenth Muse, 241n.1 Marinetti, Filippo, 168, 183, 229; Futurist Manifesto, 221 Marketing Modernisms (Dettmar, Watt), 180n.4 Marketplace: 56, 93, 94, 106, 154, 186; and modernism, 69, 197, 198, 201, 202; literary, 184–5, 18 Marsh, Edward: Georgian Poetry, 186 Marshall, Alfred, 151, 153 Marson, Una, 75, 82, 84; The Moth and the Star, 82 Mass culture: 7, 21, 32n.18, 93–7, 107n.8, 251, 256, 261; American, 251, 253; and woman, 174, 178; Fordist, 250, 254; v. high culture, 167–9, 243 Martin, (John) Leslie, 129–31, 137, 142 Marx, Karl, 7, 52n.3, 168; Capital, 106n.4, 120; commodification, 194, 228; economic despotism, 119–23; Marxism, 14, 205, 216; Marxist criticism, 181n.17, 182, 197–9, 218, 246, 253; opium trade, 127nn.19–20, 228 Masefield, John, 186 Matisse, Henri, 188 Mauss, Marcel, 199 McDannell, Colleen, 93, 106n.6 McDougall, Bonnie S., 65, 70, McKay, Claude, 75, 84; Banjo, 82; Home to Harlem, 72–4; Voyage in the Dark, 79 McLeod, Mary, 140, 145n.6 Mead, George Herbert, 152 Mead, Margaret, 214–15 The Mechanic Muse (Kenner), 262 Memmi, Albert, 126n.8 Mendelsohn, Erich, 130 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 49–52 Merton, Robert, 151, 165 Michaels, Walter Benn, 210 Miller, Arthur, 190 Miller, Christopher, 73, 76 Mills, C. Wright, 152, 155, 165n.5; The Sociological Imagination (Mills), 153 Milton, John, 216

292

Index

Mimesis (Auerbach), 54, 62 Modern, the: 2, 8, 9, 26, 27, 30n.5, 38, 60, 71, 76, 93, 94, 106, 109, 123, 135, 209, 242, 248, 249 Modern Architecture since 1900 (Curtis), 132 Modern subject, the: 76, 77, 83, 223, 224, 225, 228 Modern Times (Chaplin), 231 The Modern Tradition (Ellmann, Feidelson), 7 Modern world, the: 73, 98, 116, 231, 238 Modernism, 1890–1930 (Bradbury, McFarlane), 1–2, 31n.13, 56, 262 Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature (Emery), 91n.11 Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Nicholls), 32n.23 Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text (Manganaro), 20, 213–15 Modernist studies: 1–9, 10n2, 11, 17, 18, 21, 25, 27, 33–45, 47–9, 55–6, 61, 71–2, 90, 131, 208, 221–2, 259–62; comparative, 63–6, 68–9 Modernist Studies Association: 2, 5, 10n.5, 30n.1, 32n.20, 33, 36, 260 Modernity: 11–29, 30n3, 30n.6, 30n.11, 32n.15, 32n.19, 33–4, 36, 38, 43–7, 51, 65, 71–8, 82–4, 88, 90, 92, 94–5, 105–6, 109–13, 115–16, 119, 121, 123–5, 131–2, 133, 135, 137, 139, 140, 142, 144, 145n.9, 146.n14, 149, 158, 167, 168, 179, 179n.2, 181n.17, 186–7, 198, 200–2, 209n.1, 220n.1, 221–39, 241, 242n.4, 242–5, 248–56, 257n.23, 260–3; and modernism, 1–5, 8–9, 15–19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27–9, 30, 31n.7, 31n.14, 32n.23, 33, 36, 40, 42–4, 46–7, 51, 61, 69, 71–2, 78, 109–12, 116, 125, 197, 203, 209n.1, 221, 229, 231, 234, 242, 243, 259, 261–3; and postmodernism, 30n.7, 31n.8; black Atlantic, 73, 74, 90; Enlightment, 28, 30n.7, 73; western, 26, 28, 30, 30n.5, 43, 92 Modernity and Identity (Lash, J. Friedman), 5 Modernity and Self-Identity (Giddens), 4, 7, 31n.11, 257n.23 Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Appadurai), 7

Modernization: 119, 159, 187, 234, 252–4 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, 126n.13 Moore, George, 188 Moore, Henry, 87 Moore, Marianne, 160 Moretti, Franco, 54, 57, 61, 64, 68 Morris, Adalaide, 202 Morrison, Mark, 199 Morrison, Toni, 25, 27 Moses, Michael, 2 The Moth and the Star (Marson), 82 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 190, 230 Mules and Men (Hurston), 164n.3, 207–8, 215 Mulvey, Laura, 248 Münsterberg, Hugo: The Psychology of Photoplay, 249 Murphey, Richard, 145n.9 Myal (Brodber), 82 Nader, Ralph, 195 Naipaul, V. S., 60, 75 Narayan, R. K., 60 New Criticism: 41, 46, 48, 149–50, 161, 163, 165n.8, 216, 221 Nicholls, Peter: Modernisms: A Literary Guide, 32n.23 Nicholson, Ben, 131 Nieland, Justus: Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life, 241n.2 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7, 23, 46, 168, 191 1919 (Dos Passos), 191 Nightwood (Barnes), 59 North, Michael, 38–9, 167, 170, 179n.1; The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature, 7; Reading 1922, 38, 167 Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (Césaire), 76, 78 Notes Towards the Definition of a Culture (Eliot), 171, 180nn.7, 11 NowHere: Space, Time and Modernity (Friedland, Boden), 5 O’Keefe, Georgia, 168 On the Margins of Modernism (Kronfeld), 40 O’Neill, Eugene, 192 Only Yesterday (Allen), 191

Index 293 ‘Ornamentia Praecox’ (Dugdale), 138 The Origins of Modernism (S. Smith), 179 Osteen, Mark and Martha Woodmansee, 197–8 Owen, Stephen, 53–9, 62–3, 65 Oxford Book of English Verse (Quiller-Couch), 186 Palace of the Peacock (W. Harris), 81 Palgrave, F. T.: The Golden Treasury, 186–7 Palmer, Asynith, 60 Pareto, Alfredo, 151, 153, 189 Park, Robert E. and Ernest W. Burgess: Introduction to the Science of Sociology, 152 Parsons, Elsie Clew, 215 Parsons, Talcott, 1, 149, 162, 165nn.5–6; The Social System (Parsons), 151–5 Pater, Walter, 7 Patmore, Coventry: Children’s Garland, 187 Perestiani, Ivan, 244 Periodization: 19, 20, 27, 28, 32n.15, 43, 94, 209n.1 Perkin, Harold, 172, 178 Perkins, Maxwell, 185, 191 Petro, Patrice, 257n.19 Pevsner, Nikolaus, 130, 137 Philosophy: 1, 3, 4, 5, 13, 16, 31n.10, 86, 148, 149, 245; aesthetic, 84; post-Marist, 99; Enlightenment, 223 Picabia, Francis, 232–3, 249 Picasso, Pablo, 27, 188, 228, 249 Pink Floyd, 229 Poe, Edgar Allan, 18 Poems and Essays (Ransom), 162 Poetry of the Present (Grigson), 186 Poiret, Paul, 1, 3–4 Political Theory: 3, 20 Politics: 16, 18, 25, 27, 29, 59, 67, 73, 90n.5, 92, 111, 132, 148, 160, 161, 163, 176, 199, 200, 244, 254, 256n.2; and modernism, 21, 259, 260, 263; and modernity, 21, 25; cultural, 63; identity, 10n.7, 176; of definition, 25, 28, 261; of modernization, 30n.6 The Politics of Literature (Kampf, Lauter), 163 Pollard, D. E., 58

Pondrom, Cyrena, 32n.20 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce), 66 Postmodernism: 12, 14, 17, 21, 30n.7, 31n.8, 111 The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard), 30–1nn.7, 12, 226 Postmodernism: 12, 14, 17, 21, 30n.7, 31n.8, 111 Postmodernity: (See also Postmodernism) 23, 212, 249 Poulantzas, Nicos: Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, 177 The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, 176–7 Poulenc, Francis, 249 Pound, Ezra, 7, 42, 62, 168, 192, 198, 204, 242; anthropology, 211; cosmopolitanism, 27, 56, 58, 180n.15; ‘counter-cultural persona,’ 200; Des Imagistes, 186; Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, 186–68; Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 184; ‘ideogram,’ 60; ‘make it new’ dictum, 30n.2, 37, 259; 1922 earnings, 174; occult, 35; patronage, 183–4; T. S. Eliot, 169–70 Pratt, Mary Louise, 212 Praz, Mario, 112–13 Preminger, Otto, 249 Priestly, J. B., 142 Primitivism: 20, 27, 84, 85, 204, 206 Professing Literature (Graff), 156 Professionalization: 1, 148, 149, 155, 156, 162–4, 170, 172 Proust, Marcel, 192 Psychoanalysis: (See also Freud, Lacan) 17, 34, 35, 115, 177, 188, 225, 259 The Psychology of Photoplay (Münsterberg), 249 Pudovkin, V. I., 243 Quiller-Couch, Arthur: Oxford Book of English Verse, 186 Rabinow, Paul, 4, 212 Race: 4, 31n.14, 72, 110, 112–13, 165n10, 214, 251; r. studies, 260 The Rainbow (Lawrence), 190

294

Index

Rainey, Lawrence, 200–1, 204; Institutions of Modernism, 168–9, 180nn.4–5, 198–201, 204, 209n.5; ‘patron-investors,’ 183–4 Ransom, John Crowe, 149–50, 156–62, 165nn.9–10; God without Thunder, 157; I’ll Take My Stand, 157–8, 162, 165.10; Poems and Essays, 162; Selected Essays, 150, 158–61, 165n.11; Selected Letters, 160; The World’s Body, 165n.10 Reading 1922 (North), 38, 167 Reilly, C. H., 144 Reger, Max, 249 Relativity (Einstein), 188 Religion: 93, 121, 127n.25, 158, 176; and modernity, 94, 95, 106; popular, 94, 106n.5 Renoir, Jean, 245 Rhys, Jean, 75, 84; After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 82; Good Morning, Midnight, 82; Voyage in the Dark, 79, 82 Richards, Grant, 185, 188 Richards, I. A., 165n.8 Richardson, Dorothy, 188 Ricks, Christopher, 187 Riesman, David, 165n.5 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 242 Rodowick, David, 248 Rohmer, Éric, 246 Rosaldo, Michelle: Woman, Culture and Society, 214 Rosaldo, Renato, 212 Rose, Jonathan, 261 Rosen, Philip, 250 Ross, Stephen, 259–61, 263 Rothstein, Eric, 30n.5, 31n.15 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 7, 28, 73 Rowntree, Joshua, 126n.18 Rubin, Gayle, 214 Rushdie, Salman, 60 Russell, Bertrand, 189 Sabinskij, Ceslav, 244 Said, Edward, 210, 212, 218–19 Saler, Michael T.: The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground, 241n.4 Salih, Tayeb: Season of Migration to the North, 42

Sapir, Edward, 220 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 49–50, 60 Saussy, Haun, 54–5, 64, 69–70nn.1, 5 Savage Money (Gregory), 200 Scheunemann, Dietrich, 145n.9 Schiller, Friedrich, 83 Schlüpmann, Heide, 256n.3 Schönberg, Arnold, 242 Schor, Naomi, 107 Schumpeter, Joseph, 186 Science: 161, 236, 238; of economics, 230; natural, 220n.1; social, 163, 213 Scott, Bonnie Kime, 31nn.13–14; Gender in Modernism, 4, 40; The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, 4 Scott, David, 76–8; Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, 76 Scott, James C., 263 Scottish Song (Aitken), 187 Scribner, Charles, 191 Season of Adventure (Lamming), 82 Season of Migration to the North (Salih), 42 ‘The Second Coming’ (Yeats), 21, 227 Sedgwick, Eve Koskfsky, 120, 127n.21 Selected Essays (Ransom), 150, 158–61, 165n.11 Selected Letters (Ransom), 160 Selvon, Sam, 75 Shakespeare, William, 60, 206, 216; King Lear (Shakespeare), 217 Shaw, Bernard, 188 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 216 Shklovsky, Victor, 245 Sil, Rundra and Eileen Doherty, 5 Simmel, Georg, 232 A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (Jameson), 4, 38,52n.1, 61 Sitwell, Edith, 188 Skinner, Joan, 140–2 Slavery: 21, 72, 73, 75, 78, 88, 90, 165n.10 Small, Ian, 183, 194 Smith, Stan: The Origins of Modernism,179n.2 The Social System (Parsons), 151–5 The Sociological Imagination (Mills), 153

Index 295 Sociology: (See also Literature: and sociology) 1, 3, 4, 5, 8, 32n.18, 165n.5, 165n.6, 165n.8, 166n.14; Chicago School, 149, 151–6; industrial, 151, 164n.4; Parson’s, 149, 152, 154, 155, 163 Sons and Lovers (Lawrence), 184, 192 Spingarn, J. E., 179n.2 Spivak, Gayatri, 63–4, 68 ; Death of a Discipline, 54, 63 Stagecoach (Ford), 246 Stein, Gertrude, 27, 188, 195; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 191; cinema and popular film, 235–58, 248; ‘Conversations with Gertrude Stein,’ 221, 223, 225; cosmopolitanism, 59–60; The Making of Americans, 235 Stella Dallas (King), 247 Stendhal, 247 ; The Charterhouse of Parma, 192 Stetz, Margaret, 182 Stevens, Wallace, 235 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 187 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 242 Strathern, Marilyn, 202, 207; The Gender of the Gift, 200, 202 Stravinsky, Igor, 20, 249 The Structure of Social Action (Parsons),151–3 Subject: See Modern subject Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, 26–7, 32n.19 The Sun also Rises (Hemingway), 191 Sun Ra, 8 Surette, Leon, 35 A Survey of Modernist Poetry (Riding, Graves), 179n.2 Sword, Helen, 35 Symons, Arthur, 187 Synge, John Millington, 206 S/Z (Barthes), 246 Tagore, Rabindranath, 60 Tarkington, Booth, 191 Tate, Allen, 149, 157, 160 Technology: 251, 254, 256n.2, 261; industrial, 100, 243; print, 187 Tell My Horse (Hurston), 215 Temporality: 49, 51, 95, 243 Ten Days that Shook the World (Reed), 192

The Tenth Muse (Laura Marcus), 241 Theory of the Avant-Garde (Bürger), 10n.3, 168 The Theory of the Leisure Class (Veblen), 192 Thompson, Robert Farris, 90 Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (Fabian), 209n.3 Tono-Bungay (Wells), 186 Tourism: 99, 258n24 Toussaint Louverture (C.L.R. James), 73, 91n.8 Toward an Anthropology of Women (Reiter), 214 Towards a New Architecture (Vers une architecture) (Le Corbusier), 129 Tratner, Michael, 198–9 Trilling, Lionel, 160, 203 Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss), 212 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 73, 76–7 Troy, Nancy, 134–5 Tryphonopoulos, Demetres, 35 T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism (Kojecky), 180n.6 Tsivian, Yuri, 244–55 The Turn of the Screw (James), 18 ‘Turner’ (Dabydeen), 89–90 Turner, Catherine, 190–3 Turner, J. M. W., 87–9 Tyler, Stephen, 212 Tylor, Edward, 219 Ulysses (Joyce), 204–6, 227; importance, 42, 200, 237–8; censorship, 59; publication, 184–5, 192–3, 209n.5 Unger, Steven, 64 Urbanisme See The City of Tomorrow (Le Corbusier) Urbanization: 44, 93, 119 Verbal Hygiene (Cameron), 181n.16 Vers une archictecture See Towards a New Architecture (Le Corbusier) Vertov, Dziga, 243 Vickery, John B.: The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough, 211 Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism (Caughie), 196n.1 Visions of the Sociological Tradition (Levine), 163

296 Index Voyage in the Dark (Rhys), 79, 82 Von Moos, Stanislaus, 140, 146n.11 Walcott, Derek, 82 Walker, Alice, 215 Wallis, Thomas, 128–33, 137, 139–44, 261 Warren, Robert Penn, 149, 157, 165n.10 The Waste Land (Eliot), 187, 221; anthropology, 211, 220; cinematic aspects 237–9, 241;class and gender anxiety 173–5; echoes in Bei Dao, 59–60; ‘greatest poem’ 42; marketing 180n.5, 200; setting 56 Waugh, Evelyn, 188 The Way of All Flesh (S. Butler), 188 Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 183–5 Weber, Eugen, 97 Weber, Max, 92, 151–3 Weiner, Annette, 200–2; Inalienable Possessions, 200 The Well-Wrought Urn (Brooks), 165n.13 Welles, Orson, 249 Wells, H. G., 188; Tono-Bungay, 186 Wexler, Joyce, 184–5; Who Paid for Modernism?, 180n.4 Who Paid for Modernism? (Wexler), 180n.4, 184 Wicke, Jennifer, 35–7, 47, 51 Wigley, Mark, 135, 141, 145n.5 Wilde, Oscar, 127n.22, 182–3, 188, 194; Lady Windermere’s Fan, 183 Williams, Francis, 83 Williams, Raymond, 10n.3, 23 Williams, William Carlos, 27, 62, 168 Willmott, Glenn, 261 Wister, Owen, 191 Witte, Karsten, 257n.19 Wollen, Peter, 248

Woman, Culture and Society (Michelle Rosaldo), 214 Women in Love (Lawrence), 204 Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 (Benstock), 40 Women Writing Culture (Behar, Gordon), 215 Wood, Marcus, 91n.18 Wood, Michael, 54 Woolf, Virginia, 1, 35, 42, 238; cinema, 241n.1; cosmopolitanism, 55, 59–60; financial considerations, 174; Jacob’s Room, 10n.2; key figure of modernism, 82; Mrs. Dalloway, 190, 230; periodical writings, 188–90; ‘provincial/regional writer,’ 27, 62; techniques, 227, 238–9 Wordsworth, William, 187, 216, 238 The World’s Body (Ransom), 165n.10 Wratislaw, Theodore, 127n.22 Wright, Richard, 151 Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Clifford, G. Marcus), 211–15 Yack, Bernard, 30–2nn.5, 8, 12, 17; The Fetishism of Modernities: Epochal SelfConsciousness in Contemporary Social and Political Thought, 30n.5 Yeats, W. B., 7, 35, 42; anthropology, 211; Auden’s elegy, 217; Celtism, 206; The Countess Cathleen, 206; In the Seven Woods, 201; publishers, 188, 201–3; ‘The Second Coming,’ 21, 227 Yellow Book (Mathews, Lane), 182 Young, Thomas Daniel: Gentleman in a Dustcoat, 165n.9 Yu Luoke, 58, 70 Zola, Émile, 151