From a “Spiritual Instrument” to a “Moving Type Spectacle”: Mallarmé, Stein, and Brown in the Discursive Infrastructure of Modernism

Abstract

Since the nineteenth century, newspapers have contributed to the democratization and industrialization of reading, establishing an increasingly distinct front between the advocates of these processes and those literary practices committed to the “de-automatization” of linguistic production. Many authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries construct their definition of poetic language precisely through its contrast or resonance with newspaper language. Thus, Stéphane Mallarmé asserts that poetry in language exists wherever there is rhythm — “except on the fourth page of the newspapers.” Gertrude Stein makes the rhythm of the teletype into the technological unconscious of the literary technique of “stream of consciousness,” yet she continues to regard “newspaper time” as false. Finally, Ezra Pound defines poems as “news that stays news,” thereby also betraying the opposition of his poetics to the operations of the rotary press. Only Bob Brown — a journalist close to the avant-garde — proposes to industrialize reading itself. To this end, he envisions “a moving type spectacle,” which is meant not only to transform the act of reading but also to reshape the very nature of literary creation in adaptation to this apparatus. This brings him closest to the Soviet project of an industrial revolution of language, within which newspaper language ceases to serve as the constitutive antithesis of the literary, and the very genre and medial form of the newspaper becomes “our epic” (Sergei Tretyakov). The first article in this series on the discursive infrastructure of modernism examines whether it is possible to determine the specificity of newspaper speech and to rehabilitate verbal mechanization as a discursive effect of industrial modernity within the poetics of Western European modernism.