Modernist Experiments in Genre, Media, and Transatlantic Print Culture

Jennifer Julia Sorensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317094531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Moderne Literaturkritik

The years from 1890 through 1935 witnessed an explosion of print, both in terms of the variety of venues for publication and in the vast circulation figures and the quantity of print forums. Arguing that the formal strategies of modernist texts can only be fully understood in the context of the material forms and circuits of print culture through which they were produced and distributed, Jennifer Sorensen shows how authors and publishers conceptualized the material text as an object, as a body, and as an ontological problem. She examines works by Henry James, Jean Toomer, Djuna Barnes, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf, showing that they understood acts of reading as materially mediated encounters. Sorensen draws on recent textual theory, media theory, archival materials, and paratexts such as advertisements, illustrations, book designs, drafts, diaries, dust jackets, notes, and frontispieces, to demonstrate how these writers radically redefined literary genres and refashioned the material forms through which their literary experiments reached the public. Placing the literary text at the center of inquiry while simultaneously expanding the boundaries of what counts as that,  Sorensen shows that modernist generic and formal experimentation was deeply engaged with specific print histories that generated competitive media ecologies of competition and hybridization.

Part I

Play with periodical pagescapes

1 Henry James experiments with print culture pagescapes in transatlantic periodicals

The recursive style and material aesthetics of “The Real Thing”

At the turn of the twentieth century, Henry James was ideally positioned to negotiate and to reflect upon the cultures of print through which he disseminated his works. As an American citizen by birth and as a resident of England, James was able to exploit his situation to effectively maximize his advantages – both in terms of marketing his texts in multiple forms on both sides of the Atlantic and in terms of experimenting with the multiple landscapes of print culture available to him.¹ I refer to the various material formats through which James published his work as “landscapes” because the word evokes the sense of a constructed view that is not natural, but man-made – a framed perspective designed to emphasize a particular viewpoint, to serve particular generic purposes, and to meet specific expectations for different audiences. I read James’s career-long experimentation with different formats for circulating his texts as indicative of his enduring interest in the ways in which new fields of vision and publishing contexts could interact with his artistic experimentations. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, as James was beginning to develop a style more akin to later modernist fiction and less similar to the realist narratives of his early career, he began to explore the new venue of theatre and also focused on producing shorter narratives that he usually published first in magazines and newspapers. As James wrote and published his story “The Real Thing” in 1892, he was poised at a transitional moment in his literary development, and he used his vantage point to access and to assess both American and British cultures of print. James’s production of this story is an important starting point for my larger argument; his transition into a style that would come to shape a modernist aesthetic was intimately related to his increasing investigation of how different material forms of textuality and circulation shape reading in modernity.² In other words, I argue that for James, this story functioned as a literary experiment in transatlantic print culture. Rather than expressing an anxiety about the masses of readers who would read his story through its popular periodical sites of publication – in the illustrated periodical Black and White magazine and in multiple American newspapers – James constructed the form and content of his story to play with the material form of its publishing contexts. The story – thematically and formally – experiments with its embeddedness within the landscape of transatlantic print culture.

“The Real Thing” was first published during the month of April in 1892 in Black and White magazine and in multiple American newspapers. It tells the story of a frustrated illustrator and his strangely memorable encounter with an aristocratic-looking married couple, the Monarchs, who have fallen on hard times and who come to seek employment as artist’s models. The story begins with an account of the artist-narrator’s first impressions of the couple and narrates his developing knowledge of them and his attempts to make use of them in his illustrations. Ultimately, the Monarchs prove unillustratable – they distort the narrator’s medium as they continually come out looking too tall and too much like themselves in each image – and the artist-narrator pays them to “go away.”³ The story ends with the artist-narrator’s claim that although the encounter may have done his art “a permanent harm” he is “content to have paid the price – for the memory” (B&W 507). In the story, James takes illustration – and its costs and benefits – as his theme and as a key foil for his formal maneuverings. By looking at the periodical contexts for this story, we can appreciate how James used his experiences of “friction with the market” not only to line his pocketbook (as Michael Anesko has persuasively argued), but also to shape both the form and content of his narrative experiments.⁴ In this chapter, I argue that James’s formal techniques in “The Real Thing” were developed as strategies in anticipation of the initial publication contexts of the story – the material forms of the illustrated weekly magazine and illustrated newspapers. At the level of the sentence and at the level of the plot, James engages productively with these contexts and their illustrations, their use of advertisements, and their mass circulation on both sides of the Atlantic. James experiments with multiple aspects of the landscape of print within which this story was circulated – the story plays with its own embeddedness on sheets full of illustrations, advertisements, scraps of news, reviews, and cartoons, and reflects upon its status as part of a broader visual terrain constructed on the pages of illustrated periodicals and newspapers.

Recently, Jamesian critics have paid increasing attention to James’s engagement with print culture and the literary marketplace. Amy Tucker’s excellent recent monograph, The Illustration of the Master: Henry James and the Magazine Revolution, traces James’s extensive experience of the illustration of his work in magazines; Tucker begins by citing James’s commentary on the birth of magazine illustration:

Henry James remarked in later life that the “illustration of books, even more of magazines, may be said to have been born in our time, so far as variety and abundance are the signs of it,” for he and the modern illustrated press had come of age together.⁵

While focusing on other Jamesian stories and novels and only briefly touching on “The Real Thing” in passing, Tucker compellingly documents that the final decades of the nineteenth century constituted “a pivotal moment in the history of publishing […] when literature figured in the public imagination as an overwhelmingly visual experience” (1). Tucker comments on the critical neglect of James’s engagement with illustration and the magazine form as fostered by the “the author’s own career-long screed against the hegemony of the pictorial” (12). Indeed, in a letter that critics often cite to reinforce claims about James’s aversion to the marketplace and his dislike of illustrated print formats, James wrote to W. D. Howells in January 1895 asserting his dislike of being “subordinate” in this format – but only after acknowledging that the magazines “have cold-shouldered” him:

I have always hated the magazine form, magazine conditions & manners, & much of the magazine company. I hate the horrid little subordinate part that one plays in the catchpenny picture book – & the negation of all literature that the insolence of the picture book imposes.⁶

While James did disparage the “magazine form” as a “catchpenny picture book” that negated literature by the insolent “company” of pictures, he did repeatedly consent to have his work appear in these illustrated, magazine formats and often aggressively sought out opportunities to circulate his work in these venues.⁷

James’s relation to illustration and pictures accompanying texts was a complex and life-long engagement. At times, he reveled in looking at illustrations (fondly reflecting on the illustrations accompanying works of other writers that he encountered as a young boy), and at others he wrote of his fear of their encroachment upon the literary.⁸ In a letter he wrote to Howells in 1902, after some readers and reviewers had struggled with the style of The Wings of the Dove, James lamented the loss of attention fostered by periodical formats:

The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the general anglosaxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big blatant Bayadère of Journalism, of the newspaper & the picture (above all) magazine; who keeps screaming “Look at me, I am the thing, & I only, the thing that will keep you in relation with me all the time without your having to attend one minute of the time.”⁹

Until recently, critics have tended to take James’s statements against the “screaming” “big blatant” formats of the illustrated periodicals as reasons to neglect James’s work in these print contexts. Even the critics increasingly attending to James’s work in these contexts – like Amy Tucker and Charles Johanningsmeier and Adam Sonstegard – have focused primarily on the viewing/reading experience of the readers who would have encountered James in these illustrated formats and have not focused on the development of James’s formal stylistics in response to these mixed-media publication sites. James’s recursive style in “The Real Thing” demanded that the reader “Look at it” and spend much more than a “minute of time” to uncoil the sentences and make sense of the narrative.

While Amy Tucker has argued that the illustrations might have helped convince readers to overlook the difficulty of James’s prose, I contend that James’s style attempts to create an unillustratable form that would force readers to attend to his text even when squeezed and jostled by competitive illustrations. Tucker contends that the magazine illustrations accompanying James’s texts may have made his challenging late style easier for readers to swallow: she argues that the pictures “served to ‘domesticate’ James’s fiction, making strange and difficult narrative strategies somewhat less daunting […] As James’s style became increasingly knotty, the illustrations would remain comfortably recognizable and comprehensible” (15). Tucker suggests that these images would have suggested connections between James’s writing and other more familiar and popular genres:

The author’s experiments in technique, his much-parodied complications of diction and syntax, were perhaps more easily broached through images familiar to an audience clamoring for the kind of historical romances and sentimental fictions that cosseted James’s stories in the magazine.

(15)

While I agree with Tucker that syndicates and editors may have attempted to make James’s fiction less foreign through illustrations – and as I will show later through misleading headlines that suggested James’s texts were similar to other popular genres and stories – I contend that James’s “knotty” style in “The Real Thing” would have ultimately challenged any readerly acceptance of this likeness and comprehensibility once they began to read. While Tucker asserts that the illustrations may have lessened the problem of James’s difficulty for readers, I argue that James’s stylistic play engages with the print landscapes of periodicals filled with competing illustrations and advertisements to flaunt his own medium of language.

By providing a more thorough discussion of the ways in which James’s formal experimentation interacted with the print marketplace, my chapter contributes a new focus on form to the scholarly conversation surrounding James’s experiences in and manipulations of the literary marketplace. My argument intervenes in the lively debate that has sprung up in the wake of Michael Anesko’s compelling archival project in Friction with the Market and in response to the excellent work on the New York Edition exemplified by David McWhirter’s edited volume, Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship.¹⁰ As Anesko points out in his preface, critics have often uncritically accepted the self-portrait of the artist presented in James’s prefaces – as secluded from and disdainful of the market – in their aligning of James’s “great and often difficult works” with “ ‘art’ rather than ‘the world.’ ”¹¹ While Anesko’s seminal work has greatly contributed to an increase of work on a more “worldly” James and his interactions with the marketplace, almost all of these works neglect to carefully consider the formal elements and techniques in James’s texts and instead concentrate intensively on his biographical and content-based links with the market.

My reading of “The Real Thing” builds on the work of Amy Tucker, Charles Johanningsmeier, Anne Margolis, and Marcia Jacobson to consider James’s interaction with newspaper and magazine publics and formats and both sides of the Atlantic, but unlike their projects my argument focuses on the ways in which James responds formally to his interactions with these markets, publishing formats, and readerships.¹² As Anesko and others have noted, James’s “status as a transatlantic author gave him a peculiar and prophetic insight into the evolution of an Anglo-American market for literary work, and he actively pressed this advantage in his dealings with publishers in both countries.”¹³ My chapter explores the ways in which James used his special position to experiment with his evolving literary form and with forms of transatlantic print culture. As Anesko and others have documented, Henry James enjoyed a privileged position by living in England while still being an American citizen, as he was able to enjoy the protection of both countries’ copyright laws before the International Copyright Act of 1891 extended such protection to all authors selling their wares on the transatlantic print culture market. James only suffered piracy in volume form twice, and as Anesko notes, he

promptly learned from his mistakes to safeguard his interests in both countries by timing his publications carefully and registering pre- publication copyright editions of his work with the Library of Congress when material that was to appear first in England anticipated the American issue by more than a few weeks.

(36)¹⁴

James was especially savvy about marketing his work to periodical venues and he often would play American magazines off against one another to get the best price for his work.¹⁵ In this chapter, I focus on the synchronic periodical publications of James’s story “The Real Thing” in order to consider how James used his special vantage point on the transatlantic landscape of print culture to experiment with negotiating those contexts – filled with i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: material formalism and dynamic materiality
• Part I Play with periodical pagescapes
• Part II Bookish bodies
• Part III Mixed-media material aesthetics
• Coda: modernism’s material afterlives: the un-death of the book
• Bibliography
• Index