Modernism and the marketplace: the case of Conrad's Chance.(Joseph Conrad)(Critical essay)

Many early twentieth-century authors now associated with protomodernist or modernist experimentation appeared initially in weekly or monthly journals before proceeding to book form, partly as a matter of economic necessity, partly to ensure a broad dissemination of their work. Experimental writers relied on journal publication in the British Isles and the United States to make a living, while their innovations in narrative method often failed to fit the contexts of their initial appearance. Thus, three of Joyce's Dubliners stories, "The Sisters," "Eveline," and "After the Race" were first published in 1904 in a popular Dublin agricultural journal, The Irish Homestead, a journal Joyce later referred to in Ulysses as "the pigs' paper" (Joyce 1992, 27).

Moreover, a distinctive eclecticism characterised many journals in the period, where writers such as Thomas Hardy or Joseph Conrad appeared in Harper's (then a far more broadly-based journal than the current publication) or The Pictorial Review alongside the romances of Baroness Orzcy, Marjorie Bowen or Marie Corelli. Instalments of fiction were often framed by features on beauty and fashion, advertisements for household goods, articles on topical issues, and photographs of distinguished personalities. In the July issue of The London Magazine for 1912 an advertisement directs its female readers to "Obliterate Fatness and Restore Beauty," while the October number offers a fictional romance by Arnold Bennett, whose content questions the very conventions of representation that implicitly shape female identity in this context.

Recent critical debates have revealed the complexity of the relationship between modernism and popular forms. Tim Armstrong, for example, asks whether modernism might not be understood as "a phenomenon of the market" (2005, 48). He cites competing accounts presented by Lawrence Rainey (1998) and Mark Morrisson (2001), who both establish, in different ways, modernism's response to market forces and the emergence of popular journal publication. Both critics try to avoid the polarisation implied by Andrea Huyssens's notion of "the great divide," in which modernist authors' relationship to mass culture is seen as "an anxiety of contamination" (1986, vii). Even so, Rainey's account of the development of Little Magazines sometimes reflects the enduring Greenbergian distinction between "lowbrow" and "highbrow." As Armstrong observes, Rainey argues for modernism's elitist tendency "to create a new niche market for an 'advanced literature' structured by scarcity rather than abundance" (2005, 48).

It is true that with the development of the Little Magazines and literary journals, experimental fiction moved out of the broad-ranging popular contexts like Pall Mall, London Magazine, and Metropolitan Magazine and found a more exclusive niche. Pound and Eliot's The Egoist, which ran 1914-1919 as a mouthpiece for Imagism, serialised Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; John Middleton Murry's The Adelphi published Dorothy Richardson in London, Margaret Anderson's Chicago The Little Review published work by Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford and chapters of Ulysses. However, Rainey's account of modernism's emergence through systems of patronage rather than through direct commercial relations changes the emphasis from a polarisation of "high" and "low" to a more nuanced identification of authors' individual relations with figures associated with the mass market, such as the newspaper magnate, Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe) or C. Arthur Pearson in England, Randolph Hearst or S.S. McClure in the United States.

On the other hand, Morrisson suggests a more fluid interaction between modernism and the popular market, outlining the ways in which modernism exploits techniques of advertising and popular publishing, "even where it seems to create a 'counter-public' sphere" (Armstrong 2005, 48-49). Morrisson argues for the adaptation of mass publication techniques by contemporary political groups such as suffragists, socialists, and anarchists and the argument for a strong relationship between experimental work and the popular press can be illustrated by the fact that the popular context for "highbrow" fiction does not disappear in the twentieth century. After all, Sylvia Plath published short stories such as "Sunday at the Mintons" in Mademoiselle in August 1952, and "Initiation" in January 1953 in Seventeen.

Studies such as those of Rainey or Morrisson give rise to general theories of modernism's relationship to the marketplace, yet they have not always explored fully the close textual problems arising from this context, in particular the implications of a transformation from serial to book text of much modernist writing. Critics such as Alfred Habegger (1989) or R.B. Kerschner (1996) have led the way by exploring the periodical publication of the works of protomodernist and high modernist figures ranging from Henry James to James Joyce. Likewise, Linda Hughes and Michael Lund have observed an important relationship between the serial context and the protomodernist novel, noting that "serialization was the dominant form for the first appearance of major works by Stevenson, Hardy, Wells, Kipling, James, Conrad, and others" (Hughes and Lund 1991, 230).

Yet for those writers who sought a wide readership as well as integrity for the novel as art form, a tension often arose in the period between aesthetic aims and marketing incentives, where the themes and content of fiction did not always meet the generic expectations of a mass audience. The censored serial text of Hardy's Jude the Obscure, for example, appeared in Harper's in 1895 under the editor's somewhat misleading title of Hearts Insurgent. As Hughes and Lund observe, this title suggests the "romantic fulfilment, ascension through the social ranks and expansion of real influence" that conformed more readily to serial readers' expectations than to the harsh scepticism of Hardy's book text (1991, 232). Moreover, Hardy's manuscript was bowdlerized in the serial, the editor having cut such events as the pig-killing or Arabella's seduction of Jude (230).