Modernist Star Maps: Celebrity Modernity Culture (review)

Celebrity serves as the scintillating subject of this essay collection, which correlates modernist innovation, celebrity representation, and cultural transformation in the early twentieth century and beyond. Rather than viewing celebrity culture as the well-lit anteroom to the shadowy room-of-one's-own of modernist literary production, this collection suggests that both stars and modernists (not to mention modernist stars) court and direct the spotlight, theatricalizing the production of personality. Editors Aaron Jaffe and Jonathan Goldman adopt the metaphor of the star map, suggesting that, like the astrological association of stars, these linkages of literary modernists and celebrity icons illuminate previously unseen connections and remind us that star systems say as much about those who gaze upon the firmament as they do about the heavenly bodies upon which they gaze.

The fourteen contributors to this volume chiefly explore an early-twentieth-century moment of shared genesis for literary modernism and modern celebrity, though the essays range forward to considerations of Elvis Presley and (briefly) Princess Diana. To marshal this diverse material, Jaffe and Goldman divide their collection into three thematic sections arranged more or less chronologically: "Celebrity Modernisms," "Modernist Celebrities/Modernist Vernaculars," and "Stellar Afterimages." Each of the essays in the collection grants the title's key terms different weight. Some define the stylistic achievement of particular celebrities and read them as recognizable forms of authorship and image manipulation. Some align modernist literary themes and characters with emergent celebrity culture. Still others contemplate what happens when modernist writers try to be celebrities, fail to be celebrities, attempt to theorize celebrity, or simultaneously manage to do all three.

As Nancy Armstrong underscores in her afterword, the thematic preoccupation of this collection is the simultaneous elevation and evacuation of individualism in the modern moment. Even though "celebrity seems to erode [the] cardinal modernist myth of discrete individual subjectivity," Jaffe and Goldman argue that literary modernism shares with celebrity discourse the impulse to crystallize personality, to turn it into a thing, "an expression of the same need for the subject to become an object" that motivates "modernist style as a means of self-production within the text" (10). The first essay in the collection demonstrates the power of this thesis most directly. Lois Cucullu's essay on The Picture of Dorian Gray traces the emergence of adolescence in psychology and sociology as a period in life privileging experimentation and sensuousness. Adolescence becomes an appealing developmental category, Cucullu suggests, because of the economic irrationality demanded by consumer culture. Adolescence, like celebrity, both exalts the primacy of the subject and erodes it through the privileging of objects and desire. In a tour de force reading, Cucullu interprets the ending of Dorian Gray as an attempt to recuperate the separation of the subject and the object worlds, a failure that ironically serves to infect other consumers with dispersed desire.

In another consideration of literary characters and celebrity, Jaffe offers a compelling juxtaposition of modernist icon Orlando with the popular character the Scarlet Pimpernel. Jaffe argues that mass media fuels the desire for status (imagined as aristocratic lineage and sartorial fashion) in the shape of a celebrity that relies on ubiquity instead of the singular author-function. Thus, Jaffe notes, cult characters begin to take over the celebrity role for their authors (like Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes).

Modernist Star Maps productively explores the tension between intimacy and impersonality that inheres both in modernist authorship and in celebrity culture. Brown's eloquent and evocative analysis of Greta Garbo epitomizes this contribution to modernism and celebrity studies. Brown speculates about the fan's passionate subjective investment in a blank or inaccessible form like Garbo's face: "This, perhaps, is where pleasure resides, in the stark contrast between the absolute on the one hand and the entirely contingent or subjective on the other, or at least in the imagined absolute against the reality of one's feelings" (112). Even as the modernist author (or auteur) challenges presence with insistent self...