Rishona Zimring: Kate McLoughlin, The Modernist Party

Summary

In the film Tom and Viv (1994), a morose Eliot (Willem Dafoe) looks on in brooding silence as Vivienne (Miranda Richardson) dances with another male partner. We recognise in this scene how creativity originates in alienation from the festive crowd. The individual retreats from an oppressive sociality, cultivating a private refuge that rejects noise, clamour, motion, frivolity. But Tom himself makes a scene; he throws an adult tantrum, sulking in a way that gets him the fascinated attention of any spectator who has been trained by Austen's novels to pay close attention to the edges of the dance floor, where gossipy onlookers whisper sotto voce commentaries, or where longing gazes speak eloquently of unrequited desire. Tom's sulk is an old-fashioned, if not obsolete, version of modernism: the canonical modernist in geographic, cultural and personal exile, wrestling with alienation to produce a great art of authenticity and originality.

While this experience of the modernist party may seem unappealing, threatening to implode into grouchy individuals greatly preferring to go their separate ways, readers can readily join the festivities of The Modernist Party. This welcome collection of fascinating and timely essays reassesses the significance of social gatherings in a range of modernist literary texts and contexts. McLoughlin's introduction considers the modernist party's relationship to similar categories – the public sphere, the carnivalesque, the network, the salon – delineating at the outset a spectrum on which the party can serve at one end as ‘a model for creativity’ and at the other as ‘the vehicle for nihilistic experiences of despair and self-effacement’ (2). She synthesises a well-chosen guest-list of philosophers and theorists to introduce the collection, drawing on Kant, Bourdieu, Habermas, Bakhtin and Freud to construct a vocabulary for a ‘party paradigm’ (1). She also explains the collection's contribution to the exuberantly productive field of the New Modernist Studies, with its recent turns to materiality and the everyday.

Angela Smith's essay on Mansfield's ‘party stories’ provides illuminating interpretations of five key stories in her oeuvre: ‘Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding’, ‘Sun and Moon’, ‘Bliss’, ‘Her First Ball’ and ‘The Garden Party’.