Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 (review)

In discussing the eminent British literary figures secretly gathered at Wellington House on September 2, 1914, invited to participate in pro-war British propaganda, Mark Wollaeger notes wryly, "the gathering marked the last moment in which literature would hold such cultural prestige in England," as it was shortly to be supplanted by film in the war effort (17). Using this meeting as a starting point of sorts, Wollaeger seeks to further complicate the relationship between modernism and propaganda, elucidating the ways in which "Mass media [. . .] became both cause and cure," overwhelming the public with so much information that they desired both "propagandistic simplifications" and those "deep structures of signification" provided by modernism (xiii). Of particular interest to Conradians will be the examinations of Heart of Darkness, "The Tale," and "The Unlighted Coast" in the introduction and the reading of The Secret Agent and Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage in the first chapter, as well as the third chapter on Ford Madox Ford. Chapters on the Woolfs, James Joyce, and Hitchcock and Orson Welles also provide engaging readings.

In his introduction, Wollaeger notes the complexity of modern responses to propaganda: Conrad and Virginia Woolf "felt threatened by the cultural adjacency" of art and propaganda; Ford develops a theory of impressionism that is opposed to propaganda even as he uses impressionist techniques in his propaganda; Orwell's work critiques totalitarianism rather than propaganda, which, he feels, has become necessary for modern governments (1, 5-6). To develop the theoretical underpinnings of his argument, Wollaeger turns to Jacques Ellul's consideration of propaganda, which addresses the manner in which "propaganda and modernism were defined adversatively but constituted symbiotically" (xiii). Wollaeger reads the "knowing innocence" of modernism, "so intent on disavowing knowledge in favor of being" as a response to the overwhelming information saturation of the time (13). He turns to the history of Wellington House, with its commitment to propaganda constituted by factual information—though the very concept of factuality becomes contested—to develop the intersection between modernism and propaganda, which culminates in a reading of Heart of Darkness alongside Conrad's propaganda essay for the Admiralty from 1916, "The Unlighted Coast."

Noting the deep concern with lying and the complex relationship of lies to truth in Heart of Darkness, Wollaeger reads Kurtz as a kind of "seductive" propagandist who supplies "consoling coherence" to Charlie Marlow (27). Marlow both propagates "popular myths," notably to the Intended, and accedes to them, demonstrating that "even a skeptical humanist like Marlow" cannot easily evade the power of propaganda (28). As Wollaeger argues, "If Kurtz's death constitutes Conrad's disavowal of propaganda's powers of persuasion, his lingering appeal, mirroring the appeal of the accountant, testifies to the ambivalence of Conrad's engagement with the eroding distinction between information and propaganda that characterizes the early twentieth century" (30). Sixteen years after the publication of Heart of Darkness, Conrad was asked to promote the Mercantile Navy and sailed on a "brigantine disguised as a merchant vessel" for ten days, then wrote "The Unlighted Coast" a month later (30). Wollaeger links this essay and Heart of Darkness as "instances of late imperial romance," though the essay is a failure (seemingly lost even by the Admiralty), and invites us to read it as a retrospective account of "Conrad's latent engagement with new media" in Heart of Darkness and as a successful modernist text in its own right (31-33, 35, 32). Wollaeger explains that darkness in the essay indicates something more than "erasure," functioning as an "ether" for radio transmissions: "the unheard messages propagating through darkness simultaneously create in literature the romance they were erasing in historical experience" (36). Thus, "The Unlighted Coast" evokes the intersection of modernism, media, and propaganda that is the subject of this study, demonstrating the dynamic nature of these terms and their relationship to each other.

The first chapter addresses the multilayered concept of mastery in Conrad's The Secret Agent...