Modernism and the Idea of the Crowd by Judith Paltin (review)

Every once in a while, we encounter a monograph whose central idea seems so integral to modernist studies that we wonder how it did not exist before. How have the crowds of crowds in modernist literature gone largely unnoticed? Like many other questions that you may have about crowds at the beginning of the twentieth century, Judith Paltin has an answer for that: "I have wondered whether the critical neglect within literary studies may partly arise because narrative analyses are traditionally weighted toward discussing individual actors within plots and settings, and a fortiori, modernist studies, in particular, analyzed so closely and for so many decades the alienated individual who surveys the world from an insulating distance, or who is acting unconventionally against its demands" (166). Evidently, we have not seen the forest through the trees. And in Modernism and the Idea of the Crowd, Paltin reveals some illuminating insights about the crowded forest of modernist literature.

Importantly, Paltin clearly defines a crowd as a distinct kind of gathering that does not absorb any grouping of humans, like a mob or horde. The members of the crowd do not necessarily exchange their individual identities for the opportunity to become part of the collective whole: crowds are temporary and heterogeneous. This clarification of the definition of the book's uniting concept is essential as Paltin examines and builds upon earlier theories of the crowd (by thinkers like Wilfred R. Bion, Gustave Le Bon, Serge Moscovici, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Judith Butler¹) to emerge with her own. If this makes it sound like Paltin confronts her reader with a dense crowd of theorists, it is more that she uses a prismatic theoretical approach to present a nuanced and scaffolded vision of the modern crowd. This multi-perspectival and recursive use of theory facilitates a more surprising and revelatory reading of crowds than would otherwise be possible.

Among the topics you may not expect to learn about in this book (if you anticipate it to be limited to readings of representations of large gatherings of nameless characters) are how objects shape crowds, how the form of a text can evoke a crowd, the relative legibility of crowds, crowds' responses to natural and built environments, and crowd symbols. The diversity of ways in which Paltin asks us to think about crowds enriches rather than diminishes the central political and historical question about modernist crowds and their relationships to the rise of and resistance to fascist and autocratic governments and empires. A particularly interesting example of how Paltin accomplishes this occurs in the third chapter "Crowds and Transformation" (83) where she presents social-psychological explanations of how crowds think together, temporarily shifting the boundaries of individuals, so that they can perform social functions, like the anti-fascist crowd who blocked the British Union of Fascists at the 1936 Battle of Cable Street in London. Here Paltin delineates between the fascist group, which operates through exclusion, and the anti-fascist crowd, which takes all comers (103). These theoretical and historical insights about the formation of crowds help us to see hard-to-pin-down crowds in modernist literature (like the "Wandering Rocks" episode of Ulysses) in a new light: their fluidity, mobility, and impermanence are markers of their democratic potential.

Modernism and the Idea of the Crowd examines the concept of the crowd across an array of modernist writers (like Virginia Woolf, Flann O'Brien, H. G. Wells, Wyndham Lewis, Christopher Isherwood, and Sean O'Casey), but those interested in Joyce and Joseph Conrad may find this study especially edifying because of the frequency with which Paltin returns to their work. This is not to say that the text is a comparative study of Conrad and Joyce, which would miss the point of the book's structure and argument. Rather, Joyce and Conrad are often evoked to demonstrate how twentieth-century preoccupations with the crowd permeate and transform the modernist text. Joyceans...