Celebrity and Glamour: Modernism for the Masses

Many authors and their critical readers from the early twentieth century forward have positioned literary modernism against so much that was, more broadly speaking, modern. If the first decades of the twentieth century witnessed the advent of a luxuriously developed consumer and mass culture—the emergence of modern advertising firms, the apotheosis of the department store, the wide ownership of the automobile, and the increasingly glamorous vision of Hollywood celebrity—high literary modernists, with their perplexing narratives, manipulations of syntax, and erudite references to arcane texts, often stood opposed to mass culture, even finding it contemptible. Literary modernism, in this account, broke from the conventional forms of narrative and poetry that preceded it, even as it claimed to guard and promote with great care the idea of an elite authorial tradition. In Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity (2009), Karen Leick suggests that “Fredric Jameson and Andreas Huyssen have been particularly influential in suggesting that modernists negatively construed mass culture as the distinct, defining other of modernism,” and she may have a point (4). But from my angle of vision, the definitive efforts to construct this polarity were sometimes written by modernists themselves. I’m thinking, to offer but one example, of T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Here, Eliot tells us that only the tasteless and undiscriminating “attend to the confused cries of newspaper critics” and, with his eye no doubt on the bestseller lists, he laments the introduction of “personality” into the literary realm, condemning “pretentious modes of publicity” (“Tradition”). Eliot, it seems safe to say, saw so much of what was modern about the early twentieth century and the commercial modes of authorship it enabled as emblematic of a cultural wasteland.

Gertrude Stein, Leick insists, experienced her relationship to modern culture, mass media, and consumerism very differently. Judith Brown’s Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form (2009) also finds several canonical literary modernists—including Stein—firmly rooted in a culture of consumption rather than standing above or apart from it with a contemptuous eye. Both books situate themselves relative to a “new modernist studies” born in the last 10 to 20 years that seeks precisely to challenge the idea of an elite literary modernism standing apart from the material conditions of authorship in the first part of the twentieth century (Brown 8). For Leick, this means we ought to question the idea that modernist literature was “an elite literature . . . only understandable by literary specialists” (4). Brown is also preoccupied with literary modernism’s relationship to mass culture, particularly where both come to privilege what she calls an aesthetics and discourse of glamour. This discourse centers largely on the negation of any idea of an essential human self or body, and an embrace of the streamlined, the mechanical, the orchestrated, stylized, conspicuously presentational subject.

1. Modernist Celebrity and Mass Culture

That celebrity and glamour should become primary foci of current studies of literary modernism is not without its ironies when we think of Eliot, but in a very real measure that seems to be the case. Brown tells us that “in recent years, the study of celebrity has emerged as a disciplinary field” and both she and Leick note several compelling works in modernist studies that have made themselves a part of it—Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (2005); Faye Hammill, Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars (2007); and Loren Glass, Authors, Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 (2004)—to name some among many possibilities (Brown 103, 186; Leick 3). Scholarly work on film, design, and other cultural forms than the literary has also focused on the links between the once-thought-to-be highbrow modernists and the mass culture they sometimes ambivalently inhabited. Indeed, Brown’s book, with its interest in Greta Garbo, Chanel No. 5, and cellophane as elements of an aesthetic of modernist glamour...