Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity (review)

If we can characterize, or perhaps caricature, modernism as an inductive category, a generalization developed from a collection of figures and works deemed “modernist,” then the processes through which certain objects acquire value and ultimately come to bear a historically recognizable label should be of central concern to the project of modernist studies. Jonathan Goldman’s Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity contributes to our understanding of these processes by examining how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists created texts that “participate in the phenomenon of celebrity.” They did this, he claims, through stylistic innovations that point to the presence of a “master choreographer,” an exceptional author-figure who seems to exist beyond the text but is actually produced through it (7). Building on the proposition that modernist literature and popular celebrity discourse arise from the same historical conditions, Goldman concludes that “these two supposedly separate aspects of culture are, in truth, mutually constitutive, two sides of the same cultural coin” (2).

For scholars of modernism and celebrity, neither of these claims will seem particularly surprising. The interrelation of so-called high and low culture has been important in modernist criticism for decades, and the identification of style as a promotional tool is a reworking of early critical formulations that, in this case, has been explicitly borrowed from Aaron Jaffe’s Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity,¹ a text that Goldman relies on extensively throughout his work. I mention this not as a criticism. Goldman is refreshingly open about his critical debts in the introduction and has an established professional relationship with Jaffe.² Instead, I am trying to pinpoint what seems to me to be the focus of this collection and its critical appeal. Despite its title, this book does not spend much time discussing celebrity culture or modernism (as a socio-historical formation). Instead, it is primarily interested in modernist texts, which Goldman examines with the skill of a first-rate literary analyst.

A brief glance at the cast of characters should suggest the range of Goldman’s vision. After opening with a group common in studies of literary celebrity, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein, there are chapters on Charlie Chaplin, Jean Rhys, and John Dos Passos. It is not surprising to see any one of these figures in a work on celebrity, but together they make for a curious collection. The focus is not entirely literary. It draws heavily, but not exclusively, on major European/expatriate figures. It is not even entirely modernist, at least in strictly chronological terms. (Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a central text in Goldman’s fifth chapter, was first published in 1966.) Goldman is not afraid to pursue complex interrelations among these figures and, as the self-aware bravado of the title suggests, make bold assertions about them.

It is both of these aspects of the text that make a quick linear summary particularly unsatisfying. In its simplest terms, Goldman uses the first chapters to show how Oscar Wilde (prefiguring modernist strategies in De Profundis), James Joyce (in Ulysses), and Gertrude Stein (in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) create idealized author-figures in and through their works. However, what this outline, or any of the other (quite elaborate) ones that I attempted for this review, cannot properly convey is the extensive analytic work that brings each chapter to its seemingly straightforward conclusion. To give just one personal example, in a recent book on celebrity, I challenge critics who readily accept Stein’s democratic posturing by noting that “no matter how much [Stein] attempts to fragment, abstract, or generalize her identity on a theoretical level, the cultural and economic capital that accrues from the expression of such theories will always come back to the author. Put differently, the autobiography of everybody will always be ‘by Gertrude Stein.’”³ My off-hand comment becomes, in Goldman’s text, the climax of a complex thirty-page argument that addresses key aspects of Stein’s style, referentiality, gender...