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6. Museum Dreams
- University of Virginia Press
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6 Museum Dreams ‘‘The history of Modernism,’’ according to James Putnam, ‘‘is strewn with the ruins of the museum.’’1 In fact, anti-museum sentiment goes back to the very origins of the public museum, in the late eighteenth century.2 But the fiercest anti-museal sentiment has generally been associated with the efforts of post-Victorian artists and writers to define themselves against nineteenth-century conventionality, against the pressures of past models at a time when they were eager, in the words of Ezra Pound, to ‘‘make it new.’’ Marinetti set the tone with his 1909 announcement, ‘‘We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind.’’3 Marinetti was not alone in his attack on these symbols of the past and of the state. A number of modernists echo this insistence on novelty, on change, on the future. E. M. Forster’s 1920 review essay ‘‘For the Museum’s Sake’’ criticizes museums for their encouragement of nationalism, competition , and snobbery. ‘‘After the Treaty of Vienna,’’ he writes, ‘‘every progressive government felt it a duty to amass old objects and to exhibit a fraction of them in a building called a Museum, which was occasionally open free. ‘National possessions’ they were now called.’’ Encouraging only a ‘‘glib familiarity with labels,’’ such museums fulfill no real purpose. ‘‘After all,’’ Forster concludes, ‘‘what is the use of old objects. They breathe their dead words into too dead an ear.’’4 Virginia Woolf condemns museums in Three Guineas, urging, ‘‘Do not have museums and libraries with chained books and first editions under glass cases. Let the pictures and the books be new and always changing.’’5 In John Cournos’s Babel, a roman à clef set shortly before World War I, a Marinetti-influenced character makes common cause with the suffragist attacks on museum-displayed masterpieces: ‘‘We ought to support the suffragettes . . . in their campaign of destroying passéiste 166 Museum Dreams masterpieces,’’ he tells his friends. ‘‘We don’t want any cemeteries in our midst. We have our own lives to live, and all that hinders us—the old, the decrepit and the traditional—ought to go.’’6 It would be easy to assume, based on these comments, that the ‘‘modernists ’’—those whose careers took shape immediately after World War I, and who are generally defined in terms of their technical experimentalism and rejection of Victorian values—rejected the museum as an outmoded and destructive institution. I want to argue, however, that modernism emerged not out of the museum’s ‘‘ruins,’’ as Putnam suggests, but out of its heyday, constructed by the conflicts and ironies dramatized in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century museum narratives. In the introduction, I outlined a number of concerns evident in turn-ofthe -century representations of the museum, among them the relation of aesthetic to economic value; the relation of aura and originating context to the artifact’s meaning; the relation of literary to visual representation; the role of the body in the aesthetic encounter; and the museum as ‘‘imperial archive,’’ aligning knowledge-collecting with national and imperial identity. In this final chapter, I want to demonstrate the relevance of these concerns to three canonical modernists: W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. I am not arguing for a seamless continuity between Edwardian fiction and the work of Yeats, Joyce, and Woolf. But I do want to suggest that the aspects of their work most intimately connected to ‘‘high modernism’’ are, in fact, ‘‘museum dreams’’: imaginative responses to problems posed by the turn-of-the-century museum and depicted in Edwardian fiction. Theodor Adorno, in his famous essay ‘‘Valéry Proust Museum,’’ provides a useful model for understanding how the museum works not only in the turn-of-the-century narratives that have been my focus here, but also in the work of modernists during the 1920s. While he begins by linking the museum with the mausoleum, suggesting that museums display ‘‘objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship,’’ he concludes that the museum can only be understood when the contrasting responses of Paul Valéry and Marcel Proust are read in relation to each other. Valéry, he explains, dislikes the disorder, the exhausting excess, and the artificial constraints of the museum, where ‘‘dead visions are entombed.’’7 Proust, in contrast, finds happiness in the museum, ‘‘where the rooms, in their sober abstinence from all decorative detail, symbolize the inner spaces into which the artist withdraws...