Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity

Chapter 2. James Joyce and Modernist Exceptionalism

[ 55 James Joyce and Modernist Exceptionalism his chapter arrives at the heart of the matter of this book, exploring celebrity’s mutually enabling relationship with high modernism via the works of James Joyce. Joyce, I will show, picked up where Wilde left off, in the sense that he followed Wilde’s model of self-fashioning in ways that appropriate, mimic, and revise celebrity discourse. Of course, Joyce never reached Wilde’s particular pinnacle of fame, though it might now seem like Joyce has always been a celebrity author. In our time, his image appears on T-shirts, rock album covers, tote bags, bookstore chain mugs, Irish postal stamps, and an episode of The Simpsons. But in his day, Joyce’s fame, like his readership , was not particularly widespread. True, Joyce was the subject of a 1934 Time cover story, but during his lifetime and for a period after his death in 1941 there was scant information about his private life available to the public.1 It is the fact that his writings turn him into an irreproducible figure of the modernist author par excellence, the zenith of modernist exceptionalism —rather than the celebrity status he achieved in life—that T ChaPter 2 56 ] Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity makes Joyce the perfect nexus of the intertwining histories of modernist literature and celebrity culture that this book explores. Indeed, as Fritz Senn notes, “Joyce has been selected a prototype” for modern authorship by critics (70). We can think of Joyce’s relationship to high modernism now, seventy years after his death, as an echo of Wilde’s complex relationship to aestheticism at the time he set off for America over a century ago. In each case, issues of originality—the degree to which the figure generates the movement in question—become irrelevant as the writer performs and realizes his personification of a cultural movement. In this chapter, I examine Joyce’s use of the logic of celebrity to constitute his identity as author of, and in, Ulysses, the work that guaranteed this reputation. Rather than showing that Ulysses is “about” celebrity in the way of Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson, I am primarily examining the ways that the explosion of celebrity as a popular phenomenon informs the novel. My analysis of celebrity in Ulysses revises the way we look at Joyce’s manipulation of the autobiographical figure Stephen Dedalus; at the schema, the chapter-by-chapter guides for reading Ulysses that Joyce disseminated and that have actually been overlooked as objects of critical study themselves; and, most of all and most central to this volume, at Joyce’s legendary technical mastery—his stylistic variations. Between Wilde’s death and Ulysses’s publication, and specifically during the years 1914 to 1922 when Joyce was writing the novel, popular culture —the cinema especially—was churning out a historically unprecedented version of celebrity. Critics consense upon this moment as when traditional achievement constituted the basis of celebrity. “In this period,” writes Schickel, “the public ceased to insist that there be an obvious correlation between achievement and fame” (“His Picture in the Papers” 125). That is, in Braudy’s terminology, fame, which was dependent on traditional hierarchies of class, was transforming into celebrity, dependent on the mass reproduction of images. In particular, the variety of celebrity most visible and most documented—the Hollywood variety—was based on the notion that each image of a star refers to an “identity that is constituted elsewhere, in the discourses ‘outside’ the [text]” (deCordova 19). In other words, cinematic images of actors such as Valentino or Mary Pickford were meant to combine with advertising and promotion to evoke an individual who lives outside of the film, in the real world. The Hollywood star system made this possible with its own aesthetics and its marketing strategies. That this new version of celebrity became as widespread as it did at the moment of high modernism—Joyce’s moment—is, of course, no coincidence. Joyce, I will argue, manipulates this version of celebrity in his self- James Joyce and Modernist Exceptionalism [ 57 production as author, supplanting the celebrity image with the written text. Distrusting the idea of “discourses ‘outside’ ” the text, Joyce turns Ulysses into an object that simultaneously embodies and refers not to the celebrity but to the author—an idealized, non-corporeal entity. The author serves both as origin and referent of Ulysses, and moreover, as a discourse...