Dubious Modernism:
Fraud Discourse in Modernist Culture

2005 SSHRC Grant Proposal

Summary of Proposed Research

Suspicious readers, at times musing, at times letting fly with a grand j’accuse, have had doubts about the validity of much art in the twentieth century, suspecting it of “charlatanry,” created by poseurs who were “playing a joke on the world” (Untermeyer: 126; Kreymborg: 169). From Herbert Palmer’s 1931 assertion that a work as central to modernism as The Waste Land was “the most stupendous literary hoax since Adam” (17) to the 2001 scandal in which a janitor at London’s Eyestorm gallery tossed a work by Damien Hirst into the trash, much high art has been unable to get out from under a cloud of suspicion that it might, after all, be nothing more than a fraud. Yet despite the centrality of fraud as a discourse, these responses to modernism have not risen above the status of amusing anecdotes; we know almost nothing about these readers and their reading practices. The oversight is perhaps understandable: these are, after all, comments made about modernist cultural icons by modernism’s ugly readers, readers typified by angry letters to the local newspaper, venting reactions generated in the heat of the moment. A systematic look at these comments, however, reveals something more important. First, it is not often acknowledged that this reaction had a wide base of support, extending to once-powerful literary professionals such as J.C. Squire (editor of The London Mercury, which had a circulation that rivaled the TLS) and the most influential anthologist of the twentieth century, Louis Untermeyer. Second, and more important, these comments performed work central to the rise of modernism.

Dubious Modernism will be the first major project to explore how suspicion as a reading practice inflected modern literary culture. Locating its centre in the first half of the twentieth century, this project will create the first sustained analysis of what the accusation of hoax as a category of response—instead of isolated responses—was like. In doing so, this project will consequently offer the first systematic look at an enormous amount of primary materials which have thus far been used only anecdotally. These readers’ suspicions had much work to do, but they did it obliquely, for readers never uncovered the necessary evidence: a confession, by the perpetrators, of fraudulent intent. But neither did modernism’s critics attempt to find this clinching evidence, for the accusation of fraud was not a claim that asked to be tested for its veracity. The work of fraud discourse lay elsewhere. Suspicion thus became more essentially an attempted performative gesture, a trump card which announced these readers’ refusal to participate in the cultural game apparently posited by high modernism and shifted the grounds for engagement, putting accused works beyond the pale of aesthetic evaluation. It was an accusation, by calling up the larger context, of modernism’s deep moral failing, its non-“serious” commitment to art.

This project will explore how fraud discourse unleashed some major conceptual battles: 1) a struggle over the place of theory in art, with skeptics arguing that reliance on theory was both banal and an ethical failing; 2) sincerity’s nervous place in modern aesthetics, arising from aesthetic change being understood as a deliberate process; 3) the relationship between mass behaviour and trust in gaining cultural power; 4) the awkward place of intent in twentieth-century aesthetics; and 5) divergent senses of the role of honesty in aesthetic evaluation. This project will also explore how modernism responded to these attacks, and whether current professionalist reading practices can find anything to work with in this form of questioning modernism’s hegemony. As a result of this project we will have a better understanding of how this scandalized reaction functioned in modern culture. While this project will be useful to anyone teaching or researching the contexts of modern culture (in the arts, sociology, or history), this project also will interest the general public, for the implications will reach beyond modern culture to today. The aesthetic and reading practice that found modernism suspect, after all, has not disappeared. Aesthetic struggle and scandal arise regularly in Western cultures; this project provides a unique opportunity to provide perspective on and contribute to the debates that arise from these struggles.

Program of Research

Objectives

From its beginnings, modernism has never been able to shake itself free of an air of fraudulence. Suspicious readers, at times quietly musing, at times letting fly with a grand j’accuse, have had doubts about modernism’s validity, suspecting it of “charlatanry,” created by poseurs who were “playing a joke on the world” (Untermeyer: 126; Kreymborg: 169). Dubious Modernism will be the first major project to explore how suspicion as a reading practice inflected literary culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Working within Rita Felski’s two-fold sense of modernism as a term for those “texts which display . . . formally self-conscious, experimental, [and] antimimetic features . . . while simultaneously questioning the assumption that such texts are necessarily the most important or representative works of the modern period” (25), this project will analyze the cultural role of this central argument about modernism’s value. This project’s original contribution to scholarship lies in its ability to:

1) Create the first sustained analysis of a frequent response to modernism, allowing us to see the kind of work performed by the accusation of hoax as a category of response (i.e., not merely isolated responses). In doing so, this project will also offer the first systematic look at an enormous amount of primary materials, materials which have thus far been used only anecdotally. Some of the material is archival, such as Gertrude Stein’s unexplored clipping service (unexplored, despite Stein being the modernist whose reception history is the one most blanketed with accusations of fraud) and the yet-untouched massive newspaper coverage of the Armory Show in Chicago.

2) Examine the mechanisms and the consequences of how the charge of fraud, as the time’s dominant sign of a refusal to read modernism, attempted to change the status of the work under discussion, creating a form of evaluation in which the relevant criteria weren’t aesthetic, but ethical.

3) Provide an understanding of the aesthetic commitments that most easily came to hand to readers disoriented by the changes in the aesthetic landscape. Dubious Modernism will articulate modernist issues from the viewpoint of those who were left behind: modernism’s “ugly” readers, readers typified by angry letters to the local newspaper, but also of such once-powerful literary professionals as J.C. Squire (editor of The London Mercury, which had a circulation that rivaled the TLS) and the most influential anthologist of the twentieth century, Louis Untermeyer.

4) Analyze the role and consequences of key arguments in that debate (such as the role of theory, mass behaviour, intent, and honesty). This project will explore why this aesthetic was so vulnerable to high modernism, how modernism responded to these attacks, and whether current professionalist reading practices can find anything to work with in this form of questioning modernism’s hegemony.

Context

Modernism has been the frequent recipient of a seemingly outré yet constantly recurring accusation: the assertion that it might all be a huge fraud. In 1939 Oliver Gogarty described Finnegans Wake as “the most colossal leg-pull in literature since McPherson’s Ossian;” Herbert Palmer asserted that a work as central to modernism as The Waste Land was “the most stupendous literary hoax since Adam” (1931: 17); Michael Gold wrote in The New Masses that Gertrude Stein “was looked upon by those who believed in her as the greatest revolutionist in the history of contemporary literature, and by those who scoffed as the perpetrator of a gigantic literary hoax.” This response is common, being addressed not just to these writers, but to William Faulkner, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, E.E. Cummings, and, larger, to modernism as a movement. These accusations form a massive, unexplored archive, found in anthologies, reviews, publicity, parodies, advertising, letters to the editor, and so on. Not first of all addressing the aesthetic failures of a work but instead addressing its motivation, this kind of suspicion can seem an odd way to disparage a literary movement. Its oddity, coupled with the kinds of people who made these charges, may be why suspicion has received only anecdotal attention, typically being exhibited as a particularly intolerant form of middlebrow reaction to modernism. This is unfortunate, for the odd pointedness of the disparagement is central to the ambitious work it attempted to perform.

A reception history which will analyze the social function of a reading practice, Dubious Modernism is uniquely positioned to advance knowledge of early twentieth-century culture. It does so with some help: in the past ten years new theoretical approaches, immersing modernism in its social context and questions of value, have signaled a sea-change in modernist studies. From having typically been understood as removed from tawdry associations with daily life, modernism is now seen to be deeply enmeshed within the public sphere—not standing aloof from, but adjusting itself in negotiation with larger social forces. A larger critical climate as well has inflected this change. Reader-response writing has become more contextualized and sociologically oriented, from Janice Radway’s work on middlebrow reading habits to Jonathan Rose’s studies of the working-class reader. Additionally, literary theory has provided theoretical models for analyzing the creation of cultural value (in particular, the sociologically-based work of Pierre Bourdieu and John Guillory). These critical practices have changed how scholars perceive the development of the institutional study of literature, the rise of New Criticism and of close reading, and the relationship of professionalism and mass culture to modernism.

In this larger critical context, theoretical research on fraud (Schrero, Truzzi, Stein) finds a useful spot, making two points that are central to my project. First, theorists understand fraud as an action with predictable activities and consequences. Second, there is something purposive about a fraud; fraud is an event which attempts to do something. Works thus have to be created with a fraudulent intent in order to be fraudulent— fraud cannot be discussed without intent.

Using that specific understanding of fraud, this project’s theoretical approach will address a central gap in how fraud has been understood in literary criticism, for there has been little analysis of the kinds of work that suspicion and talk about frauds actually accomplished. Thus, Dubious Modernism will take on a bigger piece of cultural activity than have major theoretical works like K.K. Ruthven’s Faking Literature (2001) and Susan Stewart’s Crimes of Writing (1991). These writers, in limiting themselves to actual frauds as case studies, conceive of fraud in a smaller sense than is indicated by its role in modernism. I mean part of this literally—much of my project’s expansion of the terrain is based on the amount of evidence available, for there are many more suspicions and accusations of fraud than there are real frauds. But I also mean this expansion conceptually, for this larger fraud discourse has a markedly different emphasis and function than do actual instances of fraud. By basing their theory on actual frauds, Ruthven and Stewart do not make fraud into a question of interpretive practice, they don’t find central the viewpoint of those apparently unmasking the fraud, and they miss the larger senses in which fraud discourse has been a part of the construction of modernist aesthetic value. Jeffrey Weiss’s The Popular Culture of Modern Art (1994), with its analysis of popular reactions to French cubism is, from another discipline, the closest analogue to the work I propose. Weiss makes an important turn, pointing out that accusations were a lot more frequent than actual frauds, and that these accusations did a lot more work in the formation of high modernism (xv). Like Weiss,’ mine is a study whose theoretical grounding is on the discourse of fraud, and how this discourse was put to use.

Dubious Modernism will be a cultural history, but with a sociological bent, looking at reading practices typical for a particular group of readers. It will survey the function of that general reading practice; my theoretical framework combines rhetorical analysis of the gestures themselves with the social consequences for modernism of those gestures. Using this framework, I will continue in a new direction my work on a social history of modern reading strategies. My last book briefly touched on the idea of hoaxes, noting that skeptical readers suspected some difficult works of being hoaxes. But the archival record of fraud is much larger than difficulty, and the previous book, because it was moving in a different direction, did not look at fraud discourse as a category, and thus did not explore its function in aesthetic discourse. Further, while researching The Difficulties of Modernism I repeatedly noticed something that lay outside of that book’s purposes: there was not just an opposition to modernism, but a refusal to take it seriously. The implications of this refusal have not been explored, and thus there are important things to learn about the consequences of this refusal for modernism and its skeptics. The project’s subject matter has implications for my focus: unlike in the difficulty book, I plan to immerse my analysis not in modernism’s defences, but in the viewpoint of its detractors, creating a fresh look at the aesthetic viewpoint most challenged by modernist aesthetics.

This new project develops from my earlier work in other ways as well. More generally, beginning with my mid-1990s work on difficulty and Eliot’s sense of his audience, I have been researching the development of professionalism, the reading processes of “ordinary intellectuals,” and the consequences of those reading practices for the rise of modernism. In this work, I have argued that modernism was not just a change in poetic practices; it was a change in reading practices. This project develops my interest in the origins and social function of the early negative attacks on modernism, and asserts the usefulness of understanding the forms of reading that were supplanted by high modernism. Dubious Modernism will also continue to explore a central aspect of my research in both literature and visual art: what is revealed when modernism is understood as a series of social postures, as a way of interacting with art. Finally, this project expands my inquiry into how high modernism was constructed as a concept (work that shows up in my recent ESC article on anthologies), and how the particular form of that conceptualization aided the rise of institutional English and its reading practices.

Utilizing these tools, Dubious Modernism will be the first major work to discuss how suspicion worked as an interpretive practice in the creation of modernism. A central aspect of this study’s originality lies in its systematic look at the people who made this attack, at modernism’s ugly readers: those who have been thought of as obtuse middlebrows, as philistines, and whom the passage of time, apparently, has proven wrong. These readers’ suspicions had much work to do, but they did it obliquely, for readers never uncovered the necessary evidence: a confession, by the perpetrators, of fraudulent intent. Modernism’s skeptics presented no smoking gun, no sudden unwrapping that, as theorists have shown, is central to the way real frauds and hoaxes do their work. But neither did modernism’s critics attempt to find this clinching piece of evidence, for the accusation of fraud was not a claim that asked to be tested for its veracity. The work of fraud discourse lay elsewhere. This accusation instead displayed a refusal to participate in the cultural game apparently posited by high modernism. The assertion of fraud functioned as a belief: a conviction of value/truth without evidence—here, evidence of intent. Fraud discourse was a way of refusing to engage seriously with the work that often resisted being read. Suspicion thus became more essentially an attempted performative gesture, a trump card which shifted the grounds for engagement and interpretation, putting accused works beyond the pale of aesthetic evaluation.

These fraudulent works were understood to be so far off the mark that they couldn’t be adequately explained as mere aesthetic failures. The accusation of fraud stood in as a sign for other more seriously shoddy things about the work that were revealed by the larger context, and that left the work undeserving of serious attention. It was an accusation of modernism’s deep moral failing, its non-“serious” commitment to art. Fraud discourse’s central role was to call up the social signs of this lack of commitment, giving an un-nuanced but powerful gloss on the following topics:

Theory. Modernism marks a moment when the discourse surrounding art was made apparent and problematized. My project’s originality arises from its looking at a particular form of contesting aesthetic theory. Against modernist self-presentations of theory as culturally necessary or as bringing in needed precision, skeptics understood the fraudulent work to be completely explainable by banal theories and arbitrary principles that motivated its structure. Early in modernist history, Émile Cardon complained that the Impressionists followed these directions for composition: “Daub three-quarters of a canvas with black and white, rub the remaining space with red and yellow, sprinkle a few red and blue spots, and you have an impression of spring which will send the fans into ecstasy.” Some decades later, Aldous Huxley argued that “Almost all the contents of the ‘advanced’ reviews are just ‘Mary had a little lamb’ translated into Hebrew and written in cipher” (1933: 226). The default understanding was that works that depended on an explanatory theory were impoverished, lacking the “value-added” qualities of great art. Dubious modernism’s reliance on theory to justify its status, or to explain how individual works came to be, changed the glorious nuances of art into something rhetorical, mechanical, unable to adjust to the life before it. Indeed, reliance on theory was seen as an ethical failing. Skeptical readers refused to participate in the theory game, and argued that these works’ poverty was proven by how easy it was to imitate works that were based on theory. Redirecting theory, they made parody central to how one might read modernism. In hundreds of newspapers and anthologies, a new kind of parody was born, parody that didn’t just make fun of the weak qualities of the spoofed art, but that presented modernism as being in the grip of a soulless process.

Sincerity. Fraud discourse heightened the sense that modernism’s practitioners were deliberate about what they were doing, a self-conscious that created problems for traditional notions of sincerity. Now, cultural change is always susceptible to this critique, for the first time anyone does anything new in art it will likely be the product of a deliberate choice—in 1913 one couldn’t take on free verse, for example, without being intentional about it. But according to the default aesthetic of the time, artistic activities undertaken deliberately (rather than organically or intuitively) were seen as rhetorical, not “pure,” and motivationally suspect. Fraudulent modernism, part of the era’s rapid aesthetic and cultural changes, was suspect because it was too intentional and directed about what it set out to do. Against this problem sincerity was the trump card: wherever it appeared, sincerity was an aesthetic good. Sincerity had positive indicators, such as simplicity; as one early critic of cubism noted, “all effort to be simple is the supreme guarantee of sincerity” (qtd. in Weiss, 94). Artless, sincere works gave little attention to formal craft. Working intuitively, they were rich in emotional expression and had a seamless biographical impetus. These qualities resulted in what Ruthven terms the “authenticity-effect” (74), an unverifiable but irresistible aesthetic quality that performs the same kind of work as does “aura.” Dubious Modernism will explore how it became one of modernism’s tasks to respond to this charge, and redefine or replace sincerity with aesthetic value that could make modernism’s deliberateness productive.

Mass Behaviour. A further original aspect of this study will be the nature of its engagement with advertising and mass behaviour. While the suspicion of mass culture has been examined by historians of modernism, it has not often been considered from the viewpoint of modernism’s skeptics, and not in the context of fraud. For modernism’s skeptics, modernism’s frauds depended on destabilized mass behaviour, on cultural consumerism gone wild, on a speculative bubble in which the rush to believe was like the rush to buy—what one art critic called “bandwagonomania” (Cortissoz). Exclaimed a frustrated reviewer of Stein’s Tender Buttons, “Was there ever in the known history of man a time when the faker and poseur had as good a chance as he has today” (Burton: 163). Celebrity culture and advertising, the reasoning went, can’t lead to authenticity and the pure, sincere motivations that lead to great art. They are much more likely to lead to gullibility and fraud.

Two implications arise from this viewpoint. First, contemporary theorists of fraud argue that accusations of fraud come from those who present themselves as being less powerful than the alleged trickster. This project will explore how modernism, early in its history and with a tiny readership, was presented as powerful, and in the majority and ascendancy. Second, early in the twentieth century mass behaviour and trust were not only necessary for mass cultural frauds and consumer speculation, they were also present in the public’s relationship with professionalism. Both con artists and professionals need public trust to be able to accomplish their work. As professionals, modernists marketed themselves as needing the kind of trust and good faith accorded scientists and doctors. Like doctors, they required trust from the public, which could not understand and so needed to trust central aspects of their practice. But there was a further dynamic at work: it was also because of modernism’s sudden transition from earlier writing that readers had to take aspects of modernist work on faith. And it was this good faith that modernisms’s skeptics, by their refusal to read, refused to offer.

Intent. This first generation of modernism also marks a time, just before the rise of formalism and the intentional fallacy, when intent was central to aesthetic discussion. The accusation of fraud refuses to acknowledge the possibility that modernists’ intentions were serious (in the sense that skeptics understood “serious”). Modernist work emphasized the wrong things (like theory), rather than sincerity of intent. This moment also marks the beginning of an equally powerful counter-response, the response that intentions don’t matter—that is, the rise of formalism. As Time magazine snarkily commented, “It is rumored that The Waste Land was written as a hoax. Several of its supporters explain that that is immaterial, literature being concerned not with intentions but results” (1923). One of the original aspects of this project, then, will be its exploration of the awkward history of intent in modern culture.

Honesty. For skeptics, the refusal to read was often warranted by a turn to honesty. Reaching not outward to the social, but inward to the personal, many readers articulated a profound belief in the power of the “natural” response to discriminate between the dubious and the authentic—if not as the result of a “burst of sanity or honesty” on the part of its practitioners (Wood: 310), then on the part of its audience. Even Herbert Read, apologist for the actually fraudulent poetry of “Ern Malley,” noted that “There are charlatans among us, skilful imitators and venal impresarios. But our best protection against such deception is a virgin sensibility” (291). Two forms of “pure” honesty thus circulated at the same time, both asserting that the social context was too unstable to provide a reliable interpretive guide. For both forms, honesty would restore true aesthetic values. For modernism’s skeptics, honesty involved examining one’s soul, a practice which would result in an infallible recognition of sincerity or sham in current art. For the formalist bent of New Criticism, proper reading was also created by a form of honesty: here, a “virgin sensibility,” a removal of the extraneous, such as intent and historical context. This removal opened one up to the aesthetic realm. This study thus will also be original in its look at how modernism was partly a struggle to control honesty, and the ability to speak from that standpoint.

The book aspect of this research project will end with a look at a curious aspect of some actual hoaxes. It will look at how modernism responded to and attempted to validate actually fraudulent work that had been initially created in order to discredit modernism. Looking at the poetry of Ern Malley and the “Disumbrationist” art of Paul Jordan Smith, modernism’s apologists argued that this art was in fact aesthetically good, and that the original intent of their creators was irrelevant. In essence, they were arguing that it made more sense to think of these works as forgeries than as hoaxes. The argument indicates a turning point in modernism’s canonization: at the time that people could plausibly assert that actual frauds were in fact really forgeries, modernism’s aesthetic had succeeded. —September, 2004