Chapter 4 - Global Hollywood

Summary

This chapter considers the literary ramifications of Hollywood’s global presence during the brief epoch of World War II and its immediate aftermath. For the queer American poet and film critic Parker Tyler and the Anglo-Canadian novelist Malcolm Lowry, Hollywood functioned like the ordering myths employed by the high modernists. Tyler’s The Granite Butterfly (1945) and Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), works of grand self-consciously modernist ambition, took shape as the war radically altered everyday life. When defending the form of Under the Volcano to his publisher Jonathan Cape, Lowry insisted that the “book is written on numerous planes with provision made, it was my fond hope, for almost every kind of reader.” This belief resonates with film theorist Miriam Hansen’s vernacular modernism thesis, which hold that Hollywood films achieved dominance by meaning different things to different people. For Tyler and especially Lowry, the myth of Hollywood functions as a means of exploring an implicit theoretical problem – can a work of literature be both meaningful (i.e., authored) and open to any interpretation? – and it provides scholars one way to observe how modernism found its limits.