Close/Reading

Abstract

Lauren Berlant writes of intimacy as a kind of intimation (promise; expectation; agreement), and as having, therefore, the quality of a pact. That pact links to the matter of bringing-close that is at the heart of Elsa Högberg’s edited collection Modernist Intimacies—creating intimate proximity between people; between person and text; or between person and person, as mediated by text. Such closeness has its emotional aspects, but is also about specifically bodily proximity (or, in the case of text, its imagined or projected equivalents), bringing the tactile into view, adding tact to pact. The late, lamented Berlant operates as a presiding spirit for this group of 12 essays, although she is more often glancingly acknowledged than fully deployed, with the exception of Högberg’s own valuable chapter on Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933). Here, Högberg uses both Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’ and Eva Illouz’s ‘cold intimacies’ to read West as offering an exploration of emotional solace (via the advice column indicated by his title) as not just cover for but obstruction to the collapse of material inequality and the pursuit of a happy life. Högberg deftly situates her own arguments amongst extant West criticism, and draws a thread from the US inter-war advice industry toward modernity’s cold intimacies, suggesting that in the present day, too, intimacy and compassion have political dimensions that may pull them clear of care. Our Covid-affected times are marked by the apparent absence of new intimacies, yet shaped by public regulations and discourses that recalibrate regimes of the intimate, including those previously, precariously considered private. As a result, this collection, while its focus is on the early years of the twentieth-century and for the most part on artistic production considered ‘modernist,’ can also be read as excavating the pre-history of today’s formulations of our intimate lives. Högberg’s ‘Acknowledgements’make reference to the joy of compiling and editing the collection, and some of that joy can surely be attributed to the first chapter, from Axel Englund, on the seep of Wagner’s music into the intimate spaces of the bourgeois home—both cover for and prompt to Elsa Högberg, ed., Modernist Intimacies, Edinburgh University Press, 2021, £75 hardback 9781474441834