Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (review)

On the cover of Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity is a picture of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses. In his analysis of this image, Aaron Jaffe comments: "Each cultural entity—the celebrity and the modernist—assumes its characteristic form as cultural capital." Like the star image, he explains, the modernist's "textual imprimatur is a metonym for its subject, a metonym that represents it as an object of cultural production, circulation and consumption" (1). This insight, central to the book, is elaborated persuasively through a series of case studies.

The first chapter considers modernist stories of literary life, tracing the ideas about literary authority and the writerly persona which are inscribed in Portrait of the Artist and a selection of other texts. The next chapter, a particularly innovative one, analyzes the making of modernist reputation through literary criticism, arguing that the modes developed by Pound and Eliot, and later by Richards and Leavis, "were predicated on certain assumptions about the scarcity of elite literary reputation" (4). Chapter Three turns to collaboration, considering individual relationships between authors and focusing on Eliot's and Pound's editing, framing, and introducing of texts by women modernists. The fourth chapter examines anthologies, suggesting that the Georgian, imagist, and Wheels anthologies, among others, created literary brand names, and exemplified modernist promotional networking. A final chapter "concerns the symbiosis of modernist reputation and the arts and culture superstructure emerging in interwar England" (4), discussing in particular Wyndham Lewis's relation to modernist portraiture.

The bulk of the discussion in Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity is devoted to just four authors: Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Lewis. Since Jaffe is concerned with the ways in which modernists fashioned their reputations and created a market for elite textual signatures, he deliberately concentrates on the most high-profile careers, noting that his book "makes the looming presence of the familiar exchanges of modernist author-geniuses in modernist studies the very object of its analysis" (9). Yet even as it uncovers the market and ideological forces which resulted in a deliberately restricted canon of modernist "masterpieces," the book inevitably reinforces that canon. Recirculating and privileging the names and images of Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Lewis, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity becomes itself a channel for the ongoing constitution of major (male) modernists as stars.

The account of the four "Men of 1914" is—to be sure—amplified by reference to many other literary figures: editors and critics as well as novelists and poets. Waugh, Isherwood, Upward, Barnes, Moore, and Sitwell receive particular attention. But their persistent placing as "minor" in relation to the modernist canon is re-staged by this book, even as it is analyzed. The whole of the discussion on Barnes, for example, is about the way in which editions of her books are introduced by Eliot. Jaffe's argument about the introducer's enactment of his superiority over the writer introduced is both convincing and thought-provoking, yet I was left with many unanswered questions about how Barnes's own strategies of career fashioning might compare with Eliot's, and to what extent the so-called "minor" modernists contributed to their own marginality through ineffective negotiations with publicity and the marketplace.

In addition, Jaffe's perception of "the modernist and the popular partaking in a continuous logic" (200) misses out the whole realm of the middlebrow. Admittedly, most other studies of modernism and popular culture ignore the middlebrow, but it seems a particularly odd omission in a book focussing on celebrity. Joe Moran, in Star Authors (2000), has noted the intimate connection between the advent of the literary celebrity and the rise of middlebrow print culture; moreover, the ambiguous cultural positioning of the celebrity author is in some respects comparable to the location of the middlebrow between the restricted and extended fields of literary production.

None of this, however, invalidates any of Jaffe's arguments, and whilst he has not had space to pursue the directions I have mentioned, his book will doubtless inspire other...