Journalistic modernism

Modernism on Fleet Street

by Patrick Collier

Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. 257 pages

Operating at the intersection of recent "new modernist" revaluations of consumption, promotion, and relations between modernism and mass culture, Patrick Collier's provocative study establishes a complex pattern of negotiation between modernist practitioners and the press, centering around early twentieth-century anxieties about newspapers as "a threat to British civic and cultural life" (2).Though Collier acknowledges that the newspaper was "a natural strawman for the aesthetic project of modernism" (4), he emphasizes, rather, that "the distinction between journalism and literature was part of the structure of thought through which contemporaries viewed the print marketplace, part of the intellectual matrix in which modernism took shape" (202). Thus no writer of the period, says Collier, could stay aloof from what T. S. Eliot termed "the journalistic struggle"; "one could neither ignore the opportunities offered by periodicals nor refrain from taking a position in the widespread discussion of the state of British journalism" (3).

Collier's fascinating first chapter, after a brief overview of changing conditions in journalism at the turn of the century, outlines the various strands of this discussion, tracing concerns about the debased nature of the public sphere that resulted from the perceived threat of a newly enlarged and literate "public" seen often as "volatile, unpredictable, inscrutable" (18). The projection of a half-educated, sprawling, and undifferentiated public led to fears not only for the intellectual but also for the political health of the nation, with newspaper proprietors seen as stoking the appetite of "the public" for scandal, commercialism, and catchwords. Collier is careful to distinguish here between commentators who saw newspapers as reflecting the debased tastes of the public and those who "saw themselves critiquing the press on behalf of a public that needed better information" (22)--between those, in other words, whose impulses were primarily antidemocratic and those whose were the reverse. Yet these impulses often coexisted, as Collier's analyses of individual writers make clear. His subsequent chapters--on T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Rose Macaulay, and Rebecca West--take a series of cross-bearings on these questions, with each case study centering on a particular issue within the journalistic debates. His chapter on T. S. Eliot, for example, focuses on Eliot's perception that journalism had helped to erode the English language and thus bring about cultural and national decline. Eliot's campaign for a reinvigorated language was dependent on his self-crafting as a literary arbiter--an image, ironically, initially "constructed and promoted through journalism" even as it was defined in opposition to journalism (54). Eliot, Collier convincingly shows, rejected the very notion of a healthy contemporary public sphere as "an undifferentiated mass of ideas"; he supported instead the model of an elite coterie, a "minority public sphere ... that cooperatively seeks truth within its border but does not engage with the larger, debased society" (61).

In chapter 3, "Virginia Woolf and the Conditions of Reviewing," Collier engages in a subtle correction of much recent Woolf scholarship, sensitively probing the limits of Woolf's progressive politics of reading. Tracing in her essays a shifting attitude toward the reading public, he notes the growing conflict between her "gendered critique of professionalism" (94), figured as the ceding of critical authority to the "common reader," and her intermittently expressed distrust of the untrained audience's ability to navigate the choices of a saturated book market. "Holding these tensions in equilibrium," argues Collier, "became more difficult as external forces pushed Woolf toward a more pessimistic view of the public." In the 1930s, her "conception of readers as a republic" and the faith in a literary public sphere it implied "could not withstand the pressure of looming global conflict" (100).

Chapter 4 necessarily proceeds according to a different analytic protocol than Collier's other chapters, since James Joyce was not a prolific journalistic contributor and did not make in his own voice extended statements about the role of the press. Collier weighs Joyce's depictions of the press in Dubliners and Ulysses, arguing that Joyce saw "reformative potential in print culture" (116), particularly as a tool for Irish liberation, but condemned its "assertive, normative" (109) role in relation to private behaviors. The specter of the Parnell case, in which press exposure of the politician's affair with Katharine O'Shea led to his humiliation and ruin, serves as the template for Leopold Bloom's own anxieties of exposure. Drawing on this evidence, Collier finds in Ulysses a severe critique of newspaper practices, yet one, paradoxically, conducted "from a marginal position" separated from the public sphere; located "in a textual space unavailable to both consumers and practitioners of British journalism," Joyce's criticisms miss those readers the novel "arguably sought to liberate" (134).