Modernism & Celebrity

ELT 49 : 3 2006 the change of character being the difference in behavior of one's cook! Her effort was to make us think in fresh ways about developments in all the arts in the early twentieth century. Despite my disagreements with this study and my regret that the language is needlessly trendy and opaque, there are many valuable insights here. The World in Paint has enabled us to acquire a better understanding of English art from 1848 to 1914. PETER STANSKY __________________ Stanford University Modernism & Celebrity Aaron Jaffe. Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xi + 248 pp. $75.00 IN 1918 T. S. ELIOT complained that the British public was unfamiliar with T. E. Hulme's writing but was familiar with "the poems of Lady Precocia Pondoeuf and has seen a photograph of the nursery in which she wrote them" ("Professional, or...."Egoist, 4 [April 1918], 61). In this gesture's neat, binary logic, the fictional straw woman becomes a metonym for a trivial, feminized literary marketplace (and its submissive readers), ignorant of the new, vital art and obsessed with mere celebrity; Hulme represents the heroic, struggling set of artists laboring to bring the restorative, new art to ascendancy. The statement is a cagey act of self-promotion, at once advertising the new literature— seeking, in fact, to establish Hulme (and Eliot) as names—even as it seems to distance itself from the promotional, name-raising practices of the larger marketplace. Such gestures, which modernist writers used to devise a promotional logic by which their names could accrue cultural value without assuming the taint of sheer commercialism, lie at the heart of Aaron Jaffe's ambitious Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity. Building on the work of Lawrence Rainey in Institutions of Modernism, the contributors to Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt's Marketing Modernisms, and other practitioners of the materialist turn in modernist studies, Jaffe constructs an original and vigorously theorized account of modernist self-promotion. In devising practices, publishing venues, and (most importantly) an ideology of authorship that allowed them to successfully promote themselves, Jaffe argues, writers such as Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound created modernism's "most formidable institutions." Confronting a publishing landscape in which serious writing seemed economically untenable, Jaffe writes, modernists needed to imagine a system of value that functioned economically—that is, worked as a 346 book reviews way of both apportioning value (differentiating between the great, the merely good, and the also-ran) and allowing a select group of producers of "unpopular writing" to make a living. But, since their distinction lay largely in their rejection of the commercial logic of the marketplace, this system of value needed to hide its relationships and resemblances to the mainstream economy, where value was measured as salability and notoriety took the form of sensational celebrity—the commercial exploitation of bodily images and facile constructions of personality. The modernist response consisted, most importantly for Jaffe, of an ideology of authorship that simultaneously fetishized and depersonalized the author. Unlike the vacuous celebrity images thrown up by the mass media, the value of modernist authors was to lie not in their personalities (or their sales) but in their imprimaturs—the one-of-akind , inimitable, eccentric signatures etched indelibly in their texts. This need to create imprimaturs as the "currency" of modernist value underlies, in Jaffe's view, modernism's emphasis on the impersonality of art and the self-sufficiency of the artwork. In the alchemy of the imprimatur, the author's name becomes disassociated from his ephemeral body and from the private life that is the purview of celebrity gossip , and becomes both a container and a standard of value, that value underwritten by the textual object that bears the name. By reproducing and trading in imprimaturs in little magazines and quality journals , and later in group anthologies and via other secondary literary labors, modernist writers created a sort of alternative symbolic economy , "the ultimate makeshift register, the closed system of interdependent , inter-signfied names which enables the name of an individual author to circulate as elite currency." This was an economy of "rigorously maintained scarcity." "The extant names must be constantly...