Reading Matter: Modernism and the Book

The library is an obsessional site in literary modernism. From the incendiary impulses of F. T. Marinetti to Walter Benjamin's sedate unpacking of his library, modernists characterize the library as a repository of the material past. In particular, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and E. M. Forster demonstrate a striking attunement to the materiality of books, archives, and libraries in their fiction. In The House of Mirth, books are aesthetic objects as well as commodities that advertise cultural capital. The contents of a private archive threaten public scandal in The Aspern Papers. Private libraries display cultural taste in Howards End and The Age of Innocence. With the rise of the public library movement, the obsolescence of the nineteenth-century private library, and the burning and blasting of books during warfare, these texts offered a renewed recognition that libraries and books, as metonyms of culture, are disputed objects. Modernist novels reflect a crisis in which bibliophilia encounters biblioclasm. A genuine appreciation of the past, embodied in the compulsions of reading, writing, editing, and collecting books, belies the desire to be unburdened of material relics. Profound engagement with the past marks modern fiction. James, Wharton, and Forster, as well as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Evelyn Waugh, figure the reading of classics as a prerequisite to writing them. The bibliophilia that grips characters manifests the modernists' preoccupation with cultural heritage. Thus the past intrudes on libraries, sometimes in violent ways. Falling books crush Leonard Bast in Howards End. In Woolf's Orlando, books flood the front hall of a bibliophile who orders "the whole of Victorian literature" from a London bookseller. Reading is an enthralling but potentially dangerous activity. Confronted by rows of ageless classics, the modern writer is haunted by the spectre of literary influence in the library. In this regard, James, Wharton, and Forster revive Swift's "battle of the books." The modernists' jealous custody of the past and their keen sense of property contradict their resentment about guardianship and their desire to be dispossessed of the past.