The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents

304 Pages·2013·1.399 MB·English

by  Laura Frost

The Problem
wiTh Pleasure
modernism and iTs disconTenTs
Laura Frost
Columbia University Press New York
The Problem wiTh Pleasure

Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
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Copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press
Paperback edition, 2015
All rights reserved
Versions of chapters 3, 4, and 6 were published as:
“The Romance of Cliché: E. M. Hull, D. H. Lawrence, and Interwar Erotic
Fiction” in Bad Modernisms, ed. Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 94–118.
“Huxley’s Feelies: The Cinema of Sensation in Brave New World,”
Twentieth-Century Literature 52, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 443–473.
“Blondes Have More Fun: Anita Loos and the Language of Silent
Cinema,” Modernism/modernity 17, no. 2 (April 2010): 291–311.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Frost, Laura Catherine, 1967–
The problem with pleasure : modernism and its discontents /
Laura Frost.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-231-15272-3 (cloth : acid-free paper)—
isbn 978-0-231-15273-0 (pbk. : acid-free paper)—
isbn 978-0-231-52646-3 (e-book)
1. Modernism (Literature) 2. Pleasure in literature. I. Title.
PN56.M54F76 2013
809'.9112—dc23 2012036521
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and
durable acid-free paper.
This book is printed on paper with recycled content.
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p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Cover design by Noah Arlow.
Cover art: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art
Resource, NY
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Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs
that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Repudiation of Pleasure 1
1. James Joyce and the Scent of Modernity 33
2. Stein’s Tickle 63
3. Orgasmic Discipline: D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Hull, and
Interwar Erotic Fiction 89
4. Huxley’s Feelies: Engineered Pleasure in Brave New World 130
5. The Impasse of Pleasure: Patrick Hamilton and Jean Rhys 162
6. Blondes Have More Fun: Anita Loos and the Language
of Silent Cinema 209
Coda: Modernism’s Afterlife in the Age of Prosthetic
Pleasure 236
Notes 245
Index 281

I n t r o d u c t I o n
the repudiation of Pleasure
“Pleasure is not always fun. . . .”
—Lauren Berlant1
In Jean Rhys’s 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight, the protagonist,
who calls herself Sasha, is picked up by a male stranger on the Boule-
vard Arago during an evening walk. They go to a café and drink Per-
nod: one, two. . . . “I feel like a goddess,” she thinks. “I want more of
this feeling—fire and wings.” The man puts his hand on her knee and
invites her back to his flat. Sasha doesn’t particularly like him, but she
remarks, “Well, why not?” When they walk out onto the street, she
stumbles. “What’s the matter?” he asks. “Have you been dancing too
much? . . . All you young women . . . dance too much. Mad for pleasure,
all the young people. . . . Ah, what will happen to this after-war genera-
tion? I ask myself. What will happen? Mad for pleasure.”2
This is a comically flawed conclusion, as the man mistakes Sasha for
a good-time girl, a shingled flapper out for thrills. Although Sasha is,
in fact, eager to get drunk, she is poor, alone, and depressed, a broken
marriage and a child’s death in her past. She sleeps most of the time
and contemplates chloroforming herself, were it not for the fact that
her hotel board has been paid for the month. She lurches in the street
not because she is giddy from dancing, but because she is hungry
and drinks on an empty stomach. Sasha goes along with the stranger
2 IntroductIon: the rePudIatIon of Pleasure
even though she describes the encounter as “unhoped-for” and “quite
unwanted” (397). In the novel’s final act, when she leaves her hotel-
room door propped open to invite a menacing neighbor into her bed,
her pleasure is dubious by any conventional definition.
Rhys’s transnational flâneuse would seem to epitomize modern fem-
inine cosmopolitanism, as a creature who orbits contemporary amuse-
ments (clubs and restaurants, the cinema, popular music, cocktails, and
freely chosen sexual companionship), yet she is plagued by anxiety and
alienation. Sasha’s decisions are not calculated to produce what most
would recognize as bliss or joy. Rhys’s narrative enacts Sasha’s erratic
psychology through its fragmented form, shifting abruptly from one
time frame and one scene to another, and dispensing with causality.
Communication is cryptic; people are ciphers. On a local level, some
individual scenes are poetic, playful, or witty, but the overall impres-
sion is one of disorientation and dislocation. Like Sasha, Rhys’s reader
lurches from one episode to the next, a succession of flights and drops,
delight and mostly dysphoria.
Sasha’s companion’s conception of “this after-war generation” as
“mad for pleasure” echoes stereotypes of the interwar period: Daisy
Buchanan jazz babies drinking cocktails and dancing in sleek art deco
dresses, swooning in the cinema or listening to the latest thing on the
gramophone. Rhys subsumes these experiences into the landscape of
malaise and depression through which her protagonist drifts. In other
modernist texts from the period—an era preoccupied by the miser-
ies of the past war and the impending rise of fascism as well as the
exhilaration and anxiety of shifting gender roles and new sensory
cultures—embodied, direct, and easy pleasures have a dark side. Fig-
ured as a siren call, alluring and dangerous, they are both a compulsion
and a disorder of the age. What would usually register as pleasure often
becomes empty, dangerous, or even anhedonic. “Well now that’s done:
and I’m glad it’s over,” T. S. Eliot’s typist in The Waste Land remarks,
following a mechanical lovemaking session.3 As with Rhys’s novel, the
form of Eliot’s poem echoes its representations of compromised plea-
sure, confronting its reader with language that is as demanding as it
is captivating. Between the disjointed imagery, the foreign languages,
and recondite, dense allusions, by the time the (at least first-time)
reader reaches the poem’s final “Shantih shantih shantih” (69), she
may breathe a sigh of relief too: “Well now that’s done.”
IntroductIon: the rePudIatIon of Pleasure 3
Many other modern and most high modernist texts complicate or
defy classical conceptions of literature as an experience of pleasure
(Aristotle4) or delight (Horace5) that continue into contemporary criti-
cism. Posing the query, “What do stories do?” Jonathan Culler speci-
fies that “First, they give pleasure.” Harold Bloom, who bemoans that
“reading is scarcely taught as a pleasure, in any of the deeper senses of
the aesthetics of pleasure,” proposes that literature’s purpose is reha-
bilitative and redemptive: it is “healing” and “alleviates loneliness.”6
To the contrary, modernists offer a challenging and even hostile read-
ing experience that calls into question the most axiomatic premises of
what literature and pleasure can do.
The man in Good Morning, Midnight misunderstands Sasha, but his
notion of a generation “mad for pleasure” reflects two truths about
the interwar period: that there was widespread suspicion of particular
categories of pleasure, and that the broader idea of pleasure itself was
undergoing a radical reconceptualization, and nowhere more than in
the literary culture of the time. This book will argue that the funda-
mental goal of modernism is the redefinition of pleasure: specifically,
exposing easily achieved and primarily somatic pleasures as facile, hol-
low, and false, and cultivating those that require more ambitious ana-
lytical work. Essential paradigms of modernism, such as the high/low
or elite/popular culture divide and the attention to formal difficulty,
I claim, revolve around pleasure. That is, the so-called “great divide”7
is fundamentally a way of managing different kinds of pleasure, and
modernism’s signature formal rhetorics, including irony, fragmenta-
tion, indirection, and allusiveness, are a parallel means of promoting a
particularly knotty, arduous reading effect. The discrepancies between
the modernist theory and practice of pleasure signal how denigrated
pleasures are never actually banished, but are rather presented in a
reformulated guise. Focusing on the tension in modernist literature
between the artistic commitment to discipline—of ideas, form, and
cultural activity—and the voluptuous appeal of embodied, accessible
culture, the following chapters will show that modernists disavow but
nevertheless engage with the pleasures they otherwise reject and, at
the same time, invent textual effects that include daunting, onerous,
and demanding reading practices.
In a 1963 essay called “The Fate of Pleasure,” Lionel Trilling con-
tends that “at some point in modern history, the principle of pleasure
4 IntroductIon: the rePudIatIon of Pleasure
came to be regarded with . . . ambivalence.”8 Trilling points to Roman-
ticism as a contrast, exemplified by Keats’s writing (“O for a Life of
Sensations rather than of Thoughts”) as well as Wordsworth’s praise in
his preface to Lyrical Ballads for “the naked and native dignity of man”
that is found in “the grand elementary principle of pleasure” (Trill-
ing, 428). Trilling argues that early twentieth-century writers came to
regard sensuous, simple, mainstream pleasures as a false consolation,
a “specious good” (445). Conventional bliss, Trilling maintains, did
not interest a generation of artists committed to exploring the “dark
places of psychology,” as Virginia Woolf put it.9 Trilling describes mod-
ernists as a group of writers who “imposed upon themselves difficult
and painful tasks, they committed themselves to strange, ‘unnatural’
modes of life, they sought out distressing emotions, in order to know
psychic energies which are not to be summoned up in felicity.”10 This,
along with the desire to destroy “the habits, manners, and ‘values’ of
the bourgeois world” (442), resulted in a full-blown “repudiation” of
pleasure (439). While acknowledging that the impulse to look beyond
the pleasure principle is not exclusive to the twentieth century—for
example, Keats explored a “dialectic of pleasure,” a “divided state of
feeling” by which “the desire for pleasure denies itself” (433–434)—
Trilling asserts that this impulse to free “the self from its thralldom to
pleasure” (445) reached an unprecedented peak in modernism.
Trilling was a great promoter of modern literature as an art of dis-
ruption, rebellion, opposition, and crisis. Like any myth, this is in part
a distortion. Recent scholarship informed by cultural studies tells
another story about pleasure. Instead of Trilling’s brooding, ponder-
ous modernism, we now have a more effervescent one that writes for
Vogue, courts celebrity, and adores Chaplin films. Through this lens,
even high modernism can look downright user-friendly. However,
at the same time that scholars produce a more vernacular, culturally
savvy, and accessible field, modernism’s own overt rhetoric about its
relationship to pleasure upholds the great divide. Neither Trilling’s
“repudiation” nor cultural studies’ enthusiasm exactly captures mod-
ernism’s central conflict about pleasure.
While Trilling is right that pleasure is a major preoccupation of
modern literature, it is not precisely “bourgeois” pleasure that mod-
ern writers purport to reject; nor is the defense against pleasure as
straightforward as “repudiation.” To choose two memorable episodes