by Robert Scholes
Hey what! You here, dear fellow! You, in a house of ill fame? You, the drinker of quintessences! You, the ambrosia eater? Really, this takes me by surprise.
(Charles Baudelaire, "Loss of Halo," Petits Poèmes en prose)
But it is precisely modernity that is always quoting primeval history. This happens through the ambiguity attending the social relationships and products of this epoch. Ambiguity is the pictorial image of dialectics, the law of dialectics seen at a standstill. This standstill is utopia and the dialectical image therefore a dream image. Such an image is presented by the pure commodity: as fetish. Such an image are the arcades, which are both house and stars. Such an image is the prostitute, who is saleswoman and wares in one.
(Walter Benjamin, Reflections, 157)
Let me begin, then, by quoting, from Professor Spivak's letter to me of 31
January 1991, what I take to be the heart of her objections to my talk: "there
was a qualitative absence of assuming woman as agent of Modernism in your paper
laced with masculist humor and what, in that qualitative absence, seemed like a
voyeurism painful to many of us. I spoke because many women lamented this after
your talk." A serious objection, powerfully stated. My response is that
modernism, especially around its Parisian center of activity, was indeed a
masculist activity that positioned women voyeuristically and turned would-be
agents into patients to an astonishing extent. The careers of Djuna Barnes and
Jean Rhys, for instance, show how difficult it was--and what a price had to be
paid--for a woman to function as a modernist writer in Paris. My argument, then,
is that modernism was never a level playing field but was a gendered movement,
driven by the anxieties and ambivalences of male artists and writers--anxieties
and ambivalences that worked to bring the figure of the prostitute to the center
of the modernist stage.
Any such argument will be heavily dependent upon definitions. I shall begin,
then, by trying to define and locate modernism as I understand it, and to
explain why Joyce and Picasso are so central to it. In terms of the history of
art and literature, modernism follows impressionism (or post-impressionism). All
of these new movements in art and literature emerge from a crisis of confidence
in aesthetic realism--a crisis shaped by the development of new means of
representation, more mechanical or more scientific than the arts had been, and
by a growing fragmentation in social life itself. This crisis was marked in
painting by the rise of photography and a turning away from the linear
perspectivism first generated by the camera obscura in the Renaissance--and
marked in literature by the rise of social science and a questioning of the
power of a single omniscient viewpoint to capture social realities for art. In
both visual and verbal art this move away from realism emphasizes the unique
perspectives of individual artists, so that it may be said to complete a
Romantic swerve away from an aesthetic of imitation toward one based on the
creator's own struggle for expression. In the writing of English fiction,
impressionism emerges from the work of Walter Pater and Henry James to flourish
in the hands of Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and the early James Joyce,
among others. It is characterized, to an important extent, by an emphasis on the
interior monologue as a form, in which various impressions (directly from the
senses and from memory and imagination as well) are presented as a stream of
prose textuality. Virginia Woolf (who seems to me a writer at least as
interesting as Joyce) remains an impressionist or post-impressionist throughout
her career. In this she is like the painters to whom she was close--her sister
Vanessa and Duncan Grant, for instance. She never quite becomes a modernist, in
my view, though I see this as a purely descriptive matter rather than an
evaluative one. It is only if one accepts the modernist position on art and
literature that becoming a modernist assumes a crucial evaluative role. And I do
not accept that position.
The modernist position on art is one most of us have internalized to such a
degree that we take it to be natural. To free ourselves from it we need to
situate it and examine its workings with a more critical eye. I now see
modernism as a late--perhaps the last?--phase of the Romantic movement in art
and letters. From Romanticism, modernism gets its emphasis on originality, on
the need to make things "new"--to be perpetually innovative at the level of both
form and content. It is their perpetual restlessness and formal innovation,
among other things, that have put Joyce and Picasso at the center of modernist
art and literature. And from Romanticism modernism also gets its sense of the
artist as a kind of secular priest or prophet, whose role it is to purify the
language of the tribe or free vision from the shackles of older perspectives,
and whose struggle to accomplish this is held to be interesting in itself. And
finally, it is from Romanticism that modernism gets its special form of
classicism, an emphasis on myths and archetypes that buttress the modernist
claims to timely originality with equally powerful claims to the representation
of eternal archetypes or recurring aspects of reality. In modernist literature
such archetypal gestures produce what T. S. Eliot himself called "the mythic
method" of writing.
By the standards of this classical modernism, it is Virginia Woolf's refusal
to be sufficiently avant-gardist in form and subject matter that relegate her to
what Hugh Kenner has called "provincial" status with respect to modernism, and,
in the case of Gertrude Stein, who was as avant-gardist as one could wish, it is
her refusal to be mythic and archetypal that keeps her on the margins of
modernist writing. Let me hasten to say again that I am not making value
judgments here. Woolf and Stein are two of the writers of this period to whom I
find myself continually returning, both for the pleasure of reading them and
because of their importance in the history of modern culture. In the case of
Stein, it is fair to say that she moved directly toward post-modernism in her
"portrait" style, without lingering in modernism. In the case of Woolf, she
found room for further development of impression in ways that suited her chosen
subject matter extremely well. Her work has lasted because she solved the
problems of impressionism much more successfully than Dorothy Richardson, for
example, who never found the best way to focus her obvious talent as an
impressionist so as to give narrative as well as descriptive power to her
enormous text. By way of contrast, we might think of Proust, also a late or
post-impressionist, who solved the narrative problem brilliantly.
Other women writing fiction in English during the modern period found other
viable solutions to the breakdown of realism, without feeling it necessary to
attain the level of flamboyant experimentalism so characteristic of modernism
and so obvious in Joyce. I think of May Sinclair, E. H. Young, E. M. Delafield,
Rebecca West, Elizabeth Von Arnim, Rose Macaulay, Rosamund Lehman, Storm
Jameson, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Winifred Holtby--a list that could be
extended. Nor do I mean to exclude the cases of those international figures
whose relationships to modernism are problematic in various ways, such as Djuna
Barnes, Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield, Hilda Doolittle, and Kay Boyle. One
could produce durable fiction during the heyday of modernism without being
entirely, or even mainly, a modernist. That is part of my point. But another
part of it is that the modernists were adept at claiming the central aesthetic
ground. They made artistic life difficult for many writers who lacked patrons,
who needed to be published and read regularly for financial reasons or simply
did not share the modernist aesthetic. And one of the ways they made life
difficult will be the burden of the bulk of this essay.
My claim here, is that modernism as a literary and artistic movement seems to
have been structured in such a way as to exclude, marginalize, and devalue the
work of women--or to extract a price from them that hampered their development.
This can be traced in specific historical incidents, such as the attacks on her
intellectual integrity that damaged the reputation of Edith Sitwell during her
career as a modernist poet, or the rejections by publishers of Stevie Smith's
poetry along with instructions to her to go and write a novel, or the seduction
of Jean Rhys by Ford Madox Ford as a way of assisting her with her career, or
the impregnation of Rebecca West by H. G. Wells, which hindered West's progress
in getting established as a writer, or the misogynistic and anti-semitic attack
of Wyndham Lewis on Gertrude Stein's prose, or Ezra Pound's expulsion of Amy
Lowell from the imagists--and so on. Modernism's exclusion or marginalization of
women can also be shown in the extraordinary role that prostitution played in
the development as modernists of those two giants of the movement, Joyce and
Picasso--and that is the burden of the following discussion.
We begin with a myth. The Roman poet Ovid tells us how Pasiphae, the wife of
king Minos of Crete, desired sexual contact with a bull and hid herself inside a
wooden cow to achieve this. This offspring of this unnatural love was a creature
half man and half bull, called the Minotaur. Embarrassed by the existence of
this creature who partly bore his name and made his wife's shame visible to all,
Minos hired an architect named Daedalus to construct a labyrinth in which the
Minotaur could be hidden away. In the midst of this maze the monster lived, and
was given girls and boys from Athens to feast upon at regular intervals, until
the hero Theseus killed him. Daedalus, desiring to leave the island of Crete,
set his mind to unknown arts and designed wings for flight. He and his son
Icarus flew off the island, but Icarus, ignoring his father's prudent flight
plan, flew too high, so that the sun melted the wax holding his wings together,
and he fall into the sea where he drowned. This familiar story has a strange
connection with modern art, which I shall make plain in a moment, but first I
must tell, very briefly the stories of two lives.
In late October of 1881 a child was born in Málaga, Spain, just across the
sea from Africa, who was destined to become the richest and most famous of
modern artists. His name was Pablo Ruiz Picasso, and it is said that he could
draw before he could speak. His father was an artist, and legend has it that the
young Picasso painted so well that his father gave the boy his own palette and
brushes and vowed never to paint again, since his son had surpassed him. Picasso
grew up in Barcelona and attended art school there, but moved to Paris early in
the twentieth century. There he soon attracted attention as a painter, but he
was never satisfied with any one mode of art and kept innovating relentlessly,
developing the cubist mode of painting but then abandoning his followers, ever
moving onward toward new methods, new media, and new ways of recycling found
objects and old artifacts. Whenever modernism in the arts is mentioned,
Picasso's name holds a central place.
A few months after Picasso was born, in February of 1882, a boy was born in
Dublin, Ireland who was destined to share with Picasso a central position in
modernism. Christened James Augustine Joyce, he was exceptionally gifted as a
writer, as precocious with words as Picasso was with visual forms. He, too, was
drawn to Paris, arriving there first in the same year as Picasso but not
settling there until after the first World War. He did not become rich, but he
did become a figure as dominant in modern letters as Picasso was in visual art,
whose relelentless formal innovations kept the rest of the literary world
panting helplessly behind him. It is a curious fact that these two men, born in
Catholic countries far from the centers of culture and power in modern Europe,
came to live in Paris, the city that Walter Benjamin called "The Capitol of the
Nineteenth Century," and helped to make it the capitol of modernism as well.
These two are linked by other curious facts, so many that their tale becomes,
as Alice said, curiouser and curiouser, the more we look into it. Such looking
is just what I propose we do on this occasion. We can begin this enterprise by
noting how they come together most strikingly of all through the mythic
structure I have cited from Ovid. Picasso regularly thought of himself and
painted himself in the figure of the Minotaur, as a brutal creature with a man's
body with a bull's head, the devourer of youths and maidens, ruthless but
fascinating in his Nietzschean exultation, in which creation and destruction
were merged. Joyce, on the other hand, regularly thought of himself and
represented himself in the figure of Daedalus, setting his mind to unknown arts,
escaping from his island prison, and building labyrinths of textuality. As the
Minotaur, raging against his imprisonment in the labyrinths of tradition,
Picasso shares the same myth of self-definition as Joyce, as the indefatigable
builder of new labyrinths in which to capture in a web of words the monstrosity
of modern life.
I am not suggesting that these two encountered one another meaningfully in
life, for they did not, Picasso once even refusing to paint Joyce's portrait
when asked. But they belong together nonetheless, not only because they chose
different aspects of the same myth in which to figure themselves, but because
they shared a preoccupation with bestiality that was intimately connected with
the formal innovations that gave each of them a dominant position in modern art.
Moreover, at a crucial moment, each of them chose to embody his most striking
formal innovations, aesthetic breakthroughs that changed the face of modern art
and literature altogether, in scenes that share an astonishing number of formal
and thematic features. These breakthroughs came, for each one of them, as he
labored furiously to present a scene set in a house of prostitution, located in
the city in which he had spent his youth. This fact, I want to argue, is a
coincidence of such monstrous proportions that it requires our most serious
consideration if we are to understand what modernism itself was all about. Any
such consideration will reveal that modernism and the representation of
prostitution are linked in ways that extend well beyond the two texts on which
we shall be focussing our attention here.
The idea that there is a special relationship between prostitution and
modernism is not a new one. T. J. Clark, Charles Bernheimer and others have
drawn our attention to this powerfully in recent years. But for me the
connection of Joyce and Picasso to this theme--and to one another--did not
become clear until I taught a course at Brown University on the work of these
two modern artists. And even then, I did not quite grasp the situation until I
happened, while trapped in a motel in Indianapolis, to see on television a film
by Louis Malle called Pretty Baby. Let me tell you about that film.
The action takes place in New Orleans during the First World War--in a brothel,
for the most part. As it begins we are with a girl (played by a very young
Brooke Shields) who is watching something out of our range of vision. Watching
her watching, we are aware of sounds: grunts, groans, heavy breathing. Knowing
where we are, we quickly jump to the conclusion that the little girl is watching
a scene of sexual intercourse. Not exactly, as it turns out. She is watching her
mother give birth to her baby brother, whose arrival she is soon announcing to
everyone in the house. Pretty Baby is the story of a child
prostitute and a photographer, set, appropriately enough, in Storyville, New
Orleans, from 1917 to 1920. For reasons that I hope to explain adequately, I
want to read this film as an allegory or parable of modernism itself.
The story it presents to us is a familiar one in certain respects, in that it
is about a male artist and his female model--a text with deep roots and long
ramifications in the history of Western culture. What is special about this
version is that the model is a child prostitute and the artist is a
photographer--a photographer who finds the ideal motifs for his art in the
prostitutes who pose for him in their off-duty moments, in natural sunlight, as
if he were an impressionist painter. This situation links him to such precursors
of modernism as Delacroix, Manet, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Delacroix, in his
later years, posed nude models to be photographed by his friend Eugène Durieu
and then sketched from the photographs, regretting that "this wonderful
invention," as he called it had arrived so late in his life (Newhall, 82).
Manet, of course, shocked Paris with his paintings of Victorine Meurent in the
DŽjeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia . Degas--in addition
to painting horses, dancers, milliners, and laundresses--produced over a hundred
of his stark brothel monotpyes. And Toulouse-Lautrec, who in 1893 and 1894 lived
a good deal of the time in two high-class brothels (Bernheimer, 195), produced
some paintings and drawings of prostitutes in their habitat that are
extraordinary in their freedom from both condemnation and condescension. His
work leads directly to the early Parisian paintings of Picasso--and to the
photographs of the real E. J. Bellocq, who looked more like Toulouse-Lautrec
than like Keith Carradine, who played him in Pretty Baby . What
distinguished Bellocq from these painters, of course, in life and in Louis
Malle's film, is that he was a photographer rather than a painter, but in this
film he is specifically inscribed as an artist rather than a mechanical hack. He
is a photographer of the old school, an anachronism even in 1917, working under
a black hood with glass plates, developing his pictures with dangerous
chemicals. In this film the brothel is a refuge, a sanctuary for photography as
a form of art. E. J. Bellocq is presented as a licensed voyeur in the brothel,
of which he neither approves nor disapproves but accepts as providing the best
material for his art. After a time he comes to belong in the brothel, on much
the same footing as the elegant Negro who plays an equally elegant jazz
piano--and is called "Professor," of course. Neither of these two "goes
upstairs" with the prostitutes. They are, themselves, prostitutes of a sort,
making their livings off the comodification of their arts rather than with the
sweat of their bodies. This situation, in which musician and photographer manage
to exist both in and on prostitution, practicing their arts in an accomodation
with commodity culture, offers us a fruitful image for the situation of the
artist under the cultural and economic regime we know as modernism.
It is not a new image of course, nor is it merely an image. As early as 1843,
the arch Bohemian Alexandre Privat had proposed (in a letter asking the help of
Eugène Sue) to write two novels (which, being a true bohemian, he never wrote):
one about "the lives of girls who started out working in various Paris
manufactures, and who then became grisettes of the Latin Quarter before going on
to lives as prostitutes," and the other about "young men who have had their arms
broken by secondary education and have no occupation"; these young men as
Jerrold Siegel has reminded us, "lived by selling their intelligence. . . . Like
the grisettes, therefore, they were prostitutes, putting their minds up for sale
just as the young women put up their bodies" (Seigel, 137-138). Charles
Baudelaire was the first major literary figure to realize fully the cultural
importance of prostitution and its resemblance to artistic production in modern,
capitalistic Europe. As Susan Buck-Morss has pointed out (following Walter
Benjamin), "Baudelaire makes modern, metropolitain prostitution 'one of the main
objects of his poetry.' Not only is the whore the subject matter of his lyrical
expression; she is the model for his own activity. The 'prostitution of the
poet,' Baudelaire believed, was 'an unavoidable necessity.'" As Benjamin himself
put it, "Baudelaire knew how things really stood for the literary man: As
flâneur, he goes to the literary marketplace, supposedly to take a look at it,
but already in reality to find a buyer" (B-M, 185).
Benjamin also observed that the prostitute held a special fascination for the
modern artist because she was subject and object in one, both the seller of
flesh and the fleshly commodity that was sold. This parallel between the
situations of artist and prostitute was both fascinating and troubling for male
writers and artists. For painters in particular, it was complicated by the
relationship between artist and model, which recapulates in certain respects the
situation of client and prostitute, and indeed, many models were also the sexual
objects of their painters. We should pause, however, and consider how much more
complicated this relationship was for female painters and sculptors in
particular. Many of them were both models and artists, objects and subjects with
a vengeance. The case of Camille Claudel, one of the sculptor Rodin's models and
mistresses, yet a talented scuptor herself, is now, thanks to film, well known.
Less well known is the case of Gwen John, one of the finest of English painters,
who was also a mistress of Rodin, posing for his scupture called "The Muse,"
whose work is only beginning to be properly known and respected today. A "Muse,"
of course is a woman who inspires an artist, rather than an artist in her own
right. This list could be extended specifically to include the women artists who
became models, mistresses, muses, whatever for Picasso himself--but, for the
moment, a mere mention of this aspect of the situation will have to suffice.
Now we are concerned with the other side of this relationship--specifically,
the ambivalence of male artists who saw that they, too, sometimes played the
role of prostitute in order to function as artists. Under the commodity culture
which spawned modernism, even succesful artists could scarcely avoid thinking of
themselves in this manner. The greatest of modernists were often as jealous of
one another as any prostitute might be of another who was getting a higher rate.
Thus we find James Joyce, in a 1920 letter to his friend Frank Budgen
complaining in this vein: "If you see the October Dial in any reading room you
will find a long film about me. I observe a furtive attempt to run a certain Mr
Marcel Proust of here against the signatory of this letter. I have read some
pages of his. I can't see any special talent but I am a bad critic" (Let. I,
148); and in 1927 he complained to his patron, Harriet Weaver about yet another
rival or competitor: "My position is a farce. Picasso has not a higher name than
I have, I suppose, and he can get 20,000 or30,000 francs for a few hours work. I
am not worth a penny a line. . ." (Sel. Let. 327).
Joyce here was measuring himself against those he saw as his main competitors for the title of major modernist. The comparison with Picasso is the main burden of this essay. But before getting on with that, it will be useful to pause and consider this brief reference to Proust and The Dial . Joyce's relationship with Scofield Thayer, the editor of The Dial magazine, was a strange one. In 1919, persuaded by Mary and Padraic Colum, Thayer cabled Joyce the substantial sum of seven hundred dollars, but his magazine was never interested in the seamy side of modernism, which Joyce represented all too clearly for him. The Dial really did preach the gospel of Proust, who expressed his gratitude in appropriately fulsome terms: "Au trés cher Dial qui m'a mieux compris et plus chaleureusement soutenue qu'aucune journal, aucune revue. Tout ma reconnaissance pour tout de lumire qu'illumine la pensŽe et réchauffe le coeur" (Joost, 192).
Proust's choice of words is illuminating. A souteneur may be one who
sustains, but in French he is also, specifically, a pimp. The language of
patronage and the language of prostitution often proved painfully smilar to
those being patronized. It is clear, however, that Thayer had no intention of
"sustaining" Joyce. It is true that he testified at the Ulysses trial on behalf
of Joyce's book, but he admitted on the witness stand that he would not have
published the novel's "Nausicaa" episode in The Dial. Given his feeling about
Joyce, it is a wonder that he did print the poem of Joyce's that appeared in the
July 1920 number. It is called "A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at
Midnight." Written in Zurich in 1917, it was later included in Pomes Pennyeach.
They mouth love's language. Gnash
The thirteen teeth
Your lean jaws grin with. Lash
Your itch and quailing, nude greed of the flesh.
Love's breath in you is stale, worded or sung,
As sour as cat's breath,
Harsh of tongue.
This grey that stares
Lies not, stark skin and bone.
Leave greasy lips their kissing. None
Will choose her what you see to mouth upon.
Dire hunger holds his hour.
Pluck forth your heart, saltblood, a fruit of tears:
Pluck and devour!
What Joyce referred to (in his letter to Frank Budgen) as "a long film about
me," is in fact a critical essay by Evelyn Scott, which was the first extended
discussion of Joyce's work to appear in America and still ranks as one of the
best essays written about Joyce by anybody at any time. This should have pleased
him, and perhaps it did, since Scott's biographer says that Joyce wrote her a
thank-you note, though such a note does not appear in any volume of Joyce's
letters (Callard, 39). But why did Joyce call this essay a "film"? Perhaps
because it rolled along through his work and only stopped with the latest
serialized publications of the unfinished Ulysses . As we know,
film was frequently on Joyce's mind, and especially in 1917, when "A Memory of
the Players in a Mirror at Midnight" (not a bad metaphor for film in itself) was
composed. At that time, in addition to being very involved in the theatre, Joyce
was working on a scheme with a man who called himself Jules Martin, for making a
film (or pretending to make a film): "'We'll get wealthy women into it,' Martin
said, 'women in fur pelts. We'll teach them how to walk and then charge them a
fee for being in the film.' The studio was to have a Kino Schule as an adjunct"
(Ellmann 423). Martin, who at one time proposed himself for the Joycean role of
Richard Rowan in a performance of Exiles, was a bohemian confidence
man (a metempsychotic version of Alexandre Privat, perhaps), whose real name was
Juda de Vries, and who ultimately had to be helped out of jail and into a
hospital by Joyce. Nevertheless, Joyce, who was a bit of a bohemian confidence
man himself, went along with the film project for a while.
Joyce's cinematic inclinations (let us not forget the Volta theatre project)
encourage me to find a place for him in Louis Malle's cinematic brothel. We
shall return to that, but first it should be acknowledged that his jealousy over
The Dial's preference for Proust was well founded, for Scott's
article was preceded by a short selection from Proust's massive work in
progress, with a fulsome introduction by Richard Aldington, in which Joyce was
relegated, along with Dorothy Richardson and May Sinclair, to the ranks of
Proust's inferior contemporaries. Perhaps by "film" Joyce meant to include both
Scott's and Aldington's pieces, but my point is that in 1920 The
Dial provided both the public location for his poem on the horrors of
sexuality and the occasion for his jealousy of a rival who was described by
Aldington as "more coherent than Mr Joyce, more urbane, less preoccupied with
slops and viscera," but nonetheless capable of describing "a public convenience
with a precision and verve which would have aroused the jealousy even of
Flaubert" (345). Joyce, who, after all, was no mean describer of public
conveniences himself, must have bitterly resented being called a purveyor of
"slops and viscera," and then being positioned as a poor third behind Proust and
Flaubert in the public convenience Derby.
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