Paper Bombs

This chapter examines the literary response to the Nazi book-burnings, as well as to the piles of papery waste left behind by bombing raids. It begins with a reading of the now iconic photograph of readers browsing the stacks of the bombed Holland House library. Widely circulated, but entirely staged, the propagandistic photograph embodies a curious Blitz-era fascination with book violence, a fascination that wavers precariously between dread and desire. In novels written during the war, books are grotesquely transformed into weapons that, in Elizabeth Bowen’s words, have the potential to “blow whole places into existence.” This desire has its aftermath in the post-war imagination of new worlds emerging out of the ashes of destroyed books.

Coda

Wastepaper Modernism concludes by briefly turning towards our current age of new media technologies and networks. Where literature’s first media age of cinemas and radios brought about an acute anxiety about the novel’s status as a print-based medium, by the end of the century this turned into a state of wistfulness towards all things paper. This change exposes what was at stake in wastepaper modernism’s imagination of literature as a decayed medium. Wastepaper modernism marked a brief but vital moment in which literature recognized its own materials as occupying the border between meaning and unmeaning.

Introduction

Drawing on a number of examples from writers such as D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, the introduction develops the concept of “wastepaper modernism”: an awareness of communicative failure that finds its most potent manifestation in images of wasted and ruined print. While “wastepaper modernism” finds its fullest constellation at mid-century, its origins lie at the end of the Victorian era. In a moment that is symptomatic of an emerging ambivalence towards the printed residue of history, Henry James, watching the media spectacle of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, figures the transition of one age into another as a layering of papery debris over papery debris: the presentable “historic page” becomes only another peeling poster or discarded billet that accumulates in the Jubilee’s aftermath. To be modern, for James, is to anticipate ruination.

Henry James’s Literary Remains

In his critically neglected autobiographical writings, Henry James depicts himself as a young boy given to cooing over school notebooks, gazing dreamily at peeling bills, and luxuriating in the grease of theatrical posters. Such tattered wastepaper acts as a kind of material plug with which James fills his many confessed memorial gaps: James, that is, stuffs the blank spots of his memory with paper. But the persistence of a tangible past can be a dangerous thing, as James—a prodigious destroyer of his own literary remains—was well aware. Letter-burning, a recurring motif in his fiction from “The Aspern Papers” to The Wings of the Dove, is for James a surprisingly ethical act of destruction: it not only lays troubled ghosts to rest but, at the same time, re-enchants the past by eradicating its ability to speak through matter, transforming the palpable objects of memory into impalpable objects of desire.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Identity Papers

This chapter examines the disciplinary power of “identity papers,” such as passports and citizenship cards, in Nabokov’s fiction. The loss of such documents does more than alienate so many of Nabokov’s characters from their homelands: it estranges them from their very selves. To be without papers in Nabokov’s fiction is not just to be stateless, but to be without any identity at all. Passports and citizenship cards both reflect their holders and supplant them, becoming papery doubles that, in mirroring the self, take its place. In “fictitious biographies” like The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov depicts lives that rely entirely on documentation and paperwork—selves quite literally made out of paper.

Elizabeth Bowen’s Junk Mail

In Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart (1938), the novel’s victimized, orphan-heroine Portia is said to cherish a “wretched little escritoire” stuffed full, as if it “were a bin,” with junk mail. Crammed into an overflowing desk, the advertisements and begging letters that Portia collects have been rendered void: they are circulars that have been taken out of circulation. Like Portia’s desk, Bowen’s fiction is stuffed full of letters: letters sent, lost, found, returned to sender, read, unread, buried, and burned. Such letters offer an image of intimate print reduced to wastepaper. In Bowen’s fiction, the degraded materiality of print corrupts the privacy of the epistolary form, mediating the depths of feeling into clutter. And when wrongly re-circulated—as happens to the letters intercepted by the orphan Leopold in The House in Paris (1935), or the mysterious packet left behind by Guy Danby in A World of Love (1955)—junk mail transforms into a menacing remainder that shatters the boundary between the interior world of memory and consciousness and the exterior world of objects and others.