Confession was always one of my favourite things about growing up Roman Catholic, so in grateful anticipation of a newly cleansed conscience I ask your forgiveness for approaching my discussion of Joyce's Portrait through the patently not Joyce. The patently not Joyce in this context are propaganda and writers who clearly were not Joyce, such as Clive Bell and George Orwell. By the end of my talk, Joyce will still not be Orwell or Bell. Nor will he be a propagandist. But propaganda itself, I hope, will become more closely connected to modernism, and Joyce thereby to propaganda.
I recently completed a book manuscript on the topic of modernism and propaganda, and I realize that the relationship I posit between them is relatively counter-intuitive. So in order to make the project seem more plausible, let me begin by blurting out three major claims.(1)
Claim #1: The longstanding difficulty of defining propaganda--the sense that one person's information is another's propaganda--is an important legacy of the modernist period and a key context for understanding modern British narrative. My use of the word "propaganda" here rather than the more common "ideology" is deliberate: over the first half of the twentieth century, owing to the rise of modern propaganda, public relations, and market research, the omnipresent discourses through which ideologies were disseminated--that is, propaganda--became as much a matter for public concern as ideologies themselves. The clandestine British propaganda campaign in World War I--the British secretly hired famous writers and intellectuals whose books were then published by commercial and university presses secretly subsidized by the government(2)--started a twentieth-century revolution in propaganda techniques by inventing new ways to manipulate factual accounts distributed by modern media.(3) The United States was a major target of British propaganda, but so were the Irish, many of whom were for obvious reasons sympathetic to Germany. This massive mobilization of what Roy Foster characterized in his plenary address as soft power led to the so-called propaganda boom of the thirties.(4) Hence Orwell in a 1941 radio address asserted that "propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book." The phrase "in some form or other" speaks to the problem of definition, for the sentence goes on to equate propaganda serially with "meaning," "purpose," "prejudices," and "beliefs."(5) Orwell's confusion betrays a characteristically modernist structure of ambivalence: if propaganda is equivalent not only to "prejudice" but to "meaning" and "purpose," it can't be all bad. Which leads to
Claim #2: From the perspective of modernists themselves, propaganda operated less as an index of absolute difference than as a proximate other, an other so different and yet so close that it had to be acknowledged in order to be rejected. Here I'm adapting Jonathan Dollimore's concept of the proximate, which he uses to talk about heterosexual attitudes toward homosexuality.(6) My focus, however, is not on erotic economies but on a literary-political one. That is to say, my fundamental contention is that through its real and imagined proximity to propaganda, modernism knew what it was in contrast to what it definitely was not and must not become. To put this yet another way: if common definitions of propaganda and modernism tend to place them in an adversative relationship, they are nevertheless constituted symbiotically. Broadening the perspective, all this can be recast as
Claim #3: the fact of propaganda and the ideal of aesthetic autonomy are two sides of the same coin of modernity. To gloss this, consider for a moment Clive Bell's influential 1914 book entitled Art. In this book, Bell offers an account of "significant form," a key term in Bloomsbury modernism and the history of formalism that implicitly theorizes aesthetic autonomy as a defence against persuasion through the isolation of what he calls "aesthetic emotion." According to Bell, everyday emotions "may move us . . . in a hundred different ways, but they do not move us aesthetically." Mere "descriptive art" moves us in the same way, but true art does not convey information, ideas, or emotions; it is rather the object of emotion.(7) That is, like T.S. Eliot's "objective correlative," true art neutralizes the persuasive or kinetic effects of emotion by fusing it with the object of representation.(8) The aesthetic is a kind of inert residue left over.
If all this is so, one might reasonably ask why the wave of historicizing that has swept through modernist studies over the past decade or so has never explored the topic of modernism and propaganda in a sustained way.(9) After all, for some time now critics of modernism have been revising older assumptions about modernist insularity by arguing that modernists and their texts were always more actively engaged with their cultural surroundings than earlier historians of modernism were inclined to admit.(10) So either I'm simply wrong--and I've been told as much--or I need to have an account of why this connection is rarely made. I have two accounts.
The first is lexical. The English word "propaganda" derives from a Latin term that originally referred to a committee of Cardinals, or Congregation of Propaganda, established by Pope Gregory XV in 1622 to spread Roman Catholicism; it was later extended to designate "any association, systematic scheme, or concerted movement for the propagation of a particular doctrine or practice" (OED). In the late nineteenth century, propaganda was a relatively innocuous term that most often designated persuasive information or mere boosterism; by the mid-20th century, in the wake of Nazi propaganda, which took as its model the massively influential and effective British propaganda campaign in World War I, the word had acquired the sinister connotations so familiar in today's world of government-sponsored fake news, doctored facts, and transnational public relations firms. These strongly negative connotations have a lot to do with the sense that propaganda and modernism must inhabit entirely separate cultural domains. Second, these verbal associations resonate with--or perhaps produce--an intuitive sense that modernism and propaganda must be antithetical in ways that do not require much elaboration. According to Jacques Ellul, the foremost theorist in the field, propaganda gives citizens increasingly deprived of traditional forms of support, such as church, family, or village life, precisely what they need: personal involvement in public events and a justification for otherwise useless feelings of anger and resentment.(11) Finding a use value for negative affect, often by channelling alienation into safely xenophobic forms, propaganda rushes into the vacuum produced by deracination and rising scepticism in order to organize psyches hungry for belief. Modernism, in contrast, arguably elicits resentment by equating civilization with its discontents and so adds to the surplus of negativity in modernity's affective economy. All this is true enough, as far as it goes, but the assumption of an antithetical relation between modernism and propaganda has blocked recognition of what I am characterizing as their symbiosis.
A closer look at Ellul's sociological analysis begins to get at the deeper logic by which propaganda and modernism are defined in opposition to one another but constituted symbiotically. If propaganda provides the social glue that modernity otherwise tends to dissolve, propaganda also contributes to the alienation it exploits. And if modernism amplifies civilization's disenchantment with itself, it may also operate as a form of solace. Propaganda and modernism can so easily switch places in these formulations, with propaganda generating the discomfort that modernism eases, because the two emerged concurrently as interrelated languages of the new information age. Propaganda has always existed, but modern propaganda, operating through techniques of saturation and multiple media channels, developed contemporaneously with literary modernism.(12) Ford Madox Ford spoke for many when he complained in 1911 that the English were "overwhelmed every morning with a white spray of facts" from the newly dominant popular press,(13) and the alienating effects of information overload were soon exacerbated by photo-journalism and the wireless.
Mass media thus became both cause and cure: the propagation of too much information by the media created a need for the propagandistic simplifications disseminated by media as well as a receptive audience for the deep structures of significance posited by modernism. Provisionally holding at bay obvious differences, then, we can recognize that both modernism and propaganda provided mechanisms for coping with information flows that had begun to outstrip the processing capacity of the mind; both fabricated new forms of coherence in response to new experiences of chaos.
With public affairs becoming too complex for the average person to grasp, citizens became increasingly dependent on professionals boasting expertise. The professional propagandist emerged as one such specialist; the modernist writer as another.(14) T.S. Eliot took Joyce's "mythic method" as a model for "The Waste Land" because Ulysses provided "myths" that gave "a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and chaos which is contemporary history."(15) When British propagandists in World War I needed consoling myths to send abroad, they turned to some of the most influential literary intellectuals of the day, including Ford, whose propaganda books, written expressly for the government, redeploy the modernist techniques he perfected earlier that year in The Good Soldier.(16)
Neither uniformly antithetical nor identical, then, modernism and propaganda were sometimes agonistic, sometimes allied, and sometimes nearly indistinguishable. Both raise the problem of the separation of form from content, both try to make meaning effective through ambiguity. In practice, some modernists self-consciously assisted state efforts to mould public opinion (Ford); others theorized that art by its very nature seals itself off from the propaganda (Bell); and others actively contested the cultural work performed by propaganda (Joyce). So here's what I try to do in the larger project: through detailed readings of canonical texts situated in relation to multiple discourses of propaganda, I show how modernist narrative performed its cultural work within a kind of psycho-social contact zone, a highly contested liminal space defined at one extreme by subjectivity construed as an unsullied sanctuary for being, and at the other by propaganda as an encompassing array of manipulative discourses.
Which brings me, finally, to Joyce. To the extent that propaganda depends on the internalization of authority, and insofar as the project of Ulysses can be said to be the killing of the priest and king within, it seems indisputable that Ulysses is a textual machine designed to neutralize propaganda. Or at least so I have argued elsewhere.(17) Here I want to suggest that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man represents an earlier phase of Joyce's project of distanciating ideology, a phase distinctly engaged with the rise of modern propaganda, and that the conjunction of modernism and propaganda is inscribed in the structure of the novel.
Joyce often used the trope of the voice to suggest that individual consciousness is a cacophony of public voices inhabiting the seemingly private theatre of the mind, and in Portrait Stephen struggles to find a voice he can consider his own within the babble that speaks within. Joyce clearly understood what all propagandists know: in the words of Garth Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell, "the persuader is a voice from without, speaking the language of the audience members' voices within."(18) Through much of Portrait Stephen finds himself overwhelmed by competing authorities that produce what Joyce describes as "the din of all these hollowsounding voices."(19) Some of Stephen's earliest memories, echoing throughout the novel, derive from his struggle to understand symbols tied to propaganda wars over Irish national autonomy: Dante's maroon and green brushes, for example, symbols of Davitt and Parnell, become symbols of Church and State when Dante tears off Parnell's green velvet backing. When the battle boils over at Christmas dinner, Stephen is left terrified and confused: "Who was right then?" (35).
At the heart of the novel, an under-discussed episode settles the question, at least for a time. Precisely in the middle of the narrative, the religious retreat renews Stephen's faith in God through what amounts to a series of atrocity stories. Recalling the original meaning of propaganda, the retreat features three long sermons worthy of Pope Gregory's efforts centuries earlier to propagate the faith. After being treated to a vision of hell in which "brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a redhot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls," Stephen is haunted by waking dreams of "goatish creatures with human faces" that frighten him back onto the path of righteousness (121, 137). Stephen's prospects for purging these images begin to look up later in the book when the rector, turning from fear to the lure of power, tries to draw Stephen into the priesthood. As if following the precepts of Jacques Ellul, the rector offers Stephen a vision of agency in a world that otherwise doesn't have much use for him: "No king or emperor on this earth," he says, "has the power of the priest of God" (158). A flame flickers on Stephen's cheek at these words, and as he imagines himself performing the sacrament, "his will seemed drawn to go forth to encounter reality" (159). Moments later, however, a breath of fresh air and a few bars of music are enough to dissolve "the fantastic fabrics of his mind" (160).
But the "nets" of "nationality, language, religion" are not so easily unwoven. When challenged by MacCann on his refusal to sign a peace petition, the contrast between Stephen's ironic disdain and Temple's eager credulity seems to leverage him out of the dispute: "[Stephen's] smiling eyes," we read, "were fixed on the silverwrapped tablet of milk chocolate which peeped out of the propagandist's breastpocket." Meanwhile Temple, poised between them, seemed "to try to catch each flying phrase in his open moist mouth" (196). Stephen isn't biting, but he blushes when MacCann dismisses his urbane resistance: "Metaphors! . . . Come to facts" (197). It is to be expected that the propagandist will deploy facts--indeed, this is one of the techniques that the British pioneered in World War I--but the appeal is one Stephen knows well from his own experience. After his turn as the headmaster in the Whitsuntide play, Stephen attempts to dispel romantic illusion through the bracing aroma of the real: "horse piss and rotted straw. . . . It is a good odour to breathe. It will calm my heart" (86). But as the novel's insistent dialectical scheme reveals, neither fact (the brute reality of Dublin, hard currency, or, by extension, Naturalism) nor metaphor (literary romance, divine grace, Symbolism) can guarantee the autonomy he so desires.
In a world in which MacCann as propagandist is simply the local agent of a global phenomenon, nothing remains innocent of political inflection. When Cranly thrusts a handball between Stephen and MacCann as "a peace offering" (198), he seems to say: "Relax; all this is just a game." But handball was one of the games revived as a gesture of cultural nationalism by the Gaelic Athletic Association; moments later, as if drawn by the magnetic pull of national desires for autonomy, Stephen arrives at, of course, a handball match where he finds Davin, whose attempt to enlist the aspiring artist in the nationalist cause impels Stephen to condemn his native land as "the old sow that eats her farrow" (203). Irish autonomy, it would seem, can exist only at the expense of his own. When Stephen announces his intention on the novel's last page "to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience," the "reality" he seeks is not the romantic nationalism urged by Davin, or the "pseudo-reality" the priest would foist upon him.(20)
But Stephen's notorious desire "to forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race" suggests why Stephen is still trying to kill the inner priest and king in Ulysses. Created, not inborn, conscience always bears traces of its formative influences. We're still learning how to read Stephen's voice within Portrait's mechanics of meaning. My closing contribution to this discussion is to return to Clive Bell to say that as significant form is to everyday emotions that "move us . . . in a hundred different ways," so Stephen's famous theory of aesthetic autonomy--with its bias against the kinetic--is to the scene of propaganda that splits the novel in two.
(c) Mark Wollaeger, 2006