The Modernist Party ed. by Kate McLoughlin (review)

This elegant gathering of essays addresses the significance of the party for the modernist period and its literature, both as a conduit for sociality and as a literary topos. It represents a brilliantly unique approach not only to the editorial task of shaping a collection of varied thematic conversations but also to gathering deeper material for a textual understanding of modernist literature. In the collection’s reception room, Kate McLoughlin’s marvelously clever introductory “Welcome From the Host” invites consideration of the great diversity of actual and fictional modernist parties: from the bland tea party or luncheon to the convivial cocktail soirée, the extended and often socially fraught dinner party, and the more risqué and bohemian house party, all of which lit and limned the modernist period in its salons, bookshops, living rooms, nightclubs, and artist studios.

These parties come in all modes: from edifying, tasteful, and intellectually stimulating to over-animating, decadent, bacchanalian, and carnivalesque. Several of the collection’s contributors draw on Habermasian ideals of the party as the epitome of public-private social interaction at the height of modernity—a salon space in the public sphere on the cusp of fracturing into class interests and splintering in the face of Fordist massification and the rise of privatized bourgeois global capitalism.¹ Contributors examine the party as a recurrent symbol in modernist literature, as a mode of reading, as a way of understanding reception and the literary community, and as a frequent occurrence in the modernist period.

On the whole, the prospect of a party raises the promise of piquant, witty fun but frequently deflates as readers come to discover, unsurprisingly perhaps, that the likes of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce were not convivial doyennes of the party scene, bantering witty repartee across London or Paris or Boston like bright sparklers, but were instead (it must be said) party poopers.

In the face of brutalization caused by World War I, several of the most famous modernist partiers were nervous and unsettled guests and hosts. Eliot—McLoughlin renders him in the collection’s second chapter as both creator and correlative of “Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea”—was, like the protagonist J. Alfred Prufrock, “[d]istinctly lacking in conviviality” and wearied by “[s]ocial banalities” and “small talk,” which did “weary and repel the serious-minded, contemplative” poet (45, 46). Bryony Randall tells us in her chapter on Woolf that she experienced routine sexual abuse after parties at the hands of her half-brother George and that she understandably found “the whole experience of party-going fraught with potential distress” (95).

“Party Joyce,” as Jean-Michel Rabaté renders him in his rich chapter “Party Joyce: From the ‘Dead’ to When We ‘Wake,’” reflects upon the author’s early work from his position in exile in a mode of nostalgia, regretful about the harsh tone with which he portrayed Dublin and its parochialism in the famous party thrown by the Misses Morkan. Yet despite his regrets, Rabaté suggests a reading of a Joyce unable to make amends for that harsh picture in “The Dead,” because the “hospitable party [of Dubliners] is fraught with tension and ambivalence” (68). As Rabaté astutely observes, “[t]he constant tension between the ecumenism of the ‘party’ and the fractiousness of antagonistic political parties is recurrent in Joyce” (70). Ultimately, Rabaté connects Joyce’s final party, the wake, to the author’s own social life in Parisian exile, marked, as it were, by ritualistic gatherings such as book launches, birthdays, or weddings, occasions during which he was known to dance the Italian tarantella (76). Rabaté reads these Joycean reactions to ritualized sociality in terms of extended correlatives in Finnegans Wake, in which Joyce portrays an Irish culture in the death embrace of the Catholic Church and British imperialism, yet nonetheless bursting to life with a subaltern and resilient “carnivalesque inversion of ‘high’ values” (77).

As this might suggest, while each of the contributors offers deep...