Modernist Fiction and News: Representing Experience in the Early Twentieth Century (review)

David Rando’s meticulous and thought-provoking Modernist Fiction and News nevertheless begins with a somewhat misleading title. Rando is less concerned with specific news sources or the publication history of little magazines, and much more interested in “the news” broadly conceived in opposition, and apposition, to modernist literature. Rando’s main interest is the important ways in which literary output in the early twentieth century—he concentrates on works appearing in the 1930s—reacted to and against the proliferation of newsprint in the space of the “media ecology,” building on Mark Wollaeger’s 2006 Modernism, Media and Propaganda.

Literature, according to Rando, both appropriates and questions the methods used in popular newspapers, using techniques like “nearness” and “delay” to open up an anecdotal space within the story itself. Rando draws heavily on Benjamin’s writings about the modes of experience to lay out his argument; Benjamin also gets the very first lines of the book: “Every instant brings us news from across the globe, yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. The previous sentence is adapted from Walter Benjamin’s statement in his 1936 essay, ‘The Storyteller’; I have substituted ‘instant’ for ‘morning’ and perhaps that is modification enough to make Benjamin’s idea absolutely contemporary” (1).

The idea of contemporaneity saturates this book, and Rando is at pains to stress the relevance of his comments about the relationality of literature and newsprint to current times: “Modernist novelists are . . . the first tentative denizens of the information age who responded creatively, and thus, for us, importantly, to a media environment and public orientation toward experience that has by now become quite naturalized” (23). Nearness, contiguity in time and space on multiple levels, is an important thematic concern: there is first the nearness of a page of newsprint, where each story bears little or no relation to the one contiguous to it except a random simultaneity; contrasted to this is the nearness engendered by Benjamin’s idea of the anecdote, where authorial specificity “shocks” the reader into an immediate awareness of events in a way that the newspaper never can. In other words, the physical nearness of news stories on the printed page paradoxically results in a distancing and flattening of affect that, for Rando as for Benjamin, is a problem addressed through literature: “[M]odernists perceived a growing distance between news reporting and lived experience, and they developed and honed narrative techniques and an experimental resolve that made nearness and experience defining values. Improving on what the newspaper promised but failed to do, modernist novelists hoped not just to ‘make it new,’ but also to ‘make it near’” (18).

To this end, Rando devotes his attention in this slim volume to a “limited” set of literary texts that includes Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Dos Passos’s U.S.A., and Stein’s three major autobiographical works, as well as the many references to Benjamin’s writing, especially from The Arcades Project (20). He invokes Derrida’s Archive Fever to theorize about the simultaneous acts of recording and repression involved in modernist literature’s desire to be a better record of the times than newsprint could be. Rando’s bibliography is both current and theoretically rigorous, and his revisiting of critical texts like Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide (1987) revitalizes older works that have already had an important impact on the field of modernist studies.

The chapter titled “Nearness” begins Rando’s exploration of literary space and Benjamin’s understanding of experience. Beginning with the division between erfahrung and erlebnis, Rando explains that the move from the former toward the latter parallels the move from anecdotal, personal storytelling toward nuggets of information for immediate consumption, that is, the news. In this light, modernist fiction’s use of the newspaper both as raw material for plot and also as props within stories, becomes a resistance to the assimilative, easy-to-consume nature of...