Modernism and the Idea of the Crowd by Judith Paltin (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Modernism and the Idea of the Crowd by Judith Paltin
• Jana M. Giles (bio)

Judith Paltin. Modernism and the Idea of the Crowd.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 225 pp.
ISBN: 9781108842235.

Crowds are in the news again in our time, as mass protests surge around the world and intellectuals debate their effectiveness at moving recalcitrant power structures to change their ways for the greater good.¹ At the end of her wide-ranging reconsideration of the crowd in modernist studies, Judith Paltin reminds us that the alienated individual has dominated modernist studies, a limitation she attributes to the tendency of literary analysis to focus on individual actors, as well as its origins in theological hermeneutics. Paltin’s book aims to find an exit from this blind alley, which prevents literary studies from extending theories of the “structure/agency problem” (167) and allows group dynamics to be overlooked.

Crowds were historically considered both a threat and a potential source of energy for the power elite, as elaborated by many of the theorists Paltin engages. What she calls the “servile crowd” is grounded in the rationalist/idealist traditions; against this, she introduces the performative, self-generative “agile crowd.” What hardens the first into subservience is adherence to a particular ideology, whereas the fluidity of the second coalesces around motile pragmatism and affective connection, bridging historical notions of liberal subjectivity and contemporary views of the heterogenous, intersectional multitude. Drawing upon an extensive group of theorists, including Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Bion, Ernesto Laclau, Paolo Virno, Jacques Rancière, and Theresa Brennan, she argues that modernist representations of crowds anticipate the post-Fordist political multitude. Modernism and the Idea of the Crowd is organized [End Page 200] conceptually, rather than by author or chronology, in four chapters and a conclusion. Joseph Conrad and James Joyce are the central literary authors, with minor appearances from Virginia Woolf, Flann O’Brien, Sinclair Lewis, Sean O’Casey, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, and others, as well as examples drawn from historical crowd events.

The argument is structured around sets of binaries that elucidate the same fundamental opposition. I will discuss some of these terms below, here noting they can be categorized as follows:

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Chapter 1, “Composition of the Crowds in Modernism,” offers evidence for the new thinking about crowds in the early twentieth century. Conrad’s Nostromo, illustrating how crowds may move towards either servility or democracy, tracks closely with Le Bon’s theory of the irrational crowd easily intoxicated by its father-leaders. On the one hand, Paltin finds that the Costa-guanans fail to produce beneficial material change, regardless of which political party is in power since, she suggests, the silver functions as a totalizing force that anticipates Hannah Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism. Nevertheless, she claims that “the crowds in Nostromo make the political difference and do wield power, that Nostromo’s elites and would-be revolutionaries alike need the crowd and must learn to communicate with it” (17). This conclusion is not convincing, however, due to one of the flaws in the book: the literary analyses are often carried by broad assertions rather than ample textual evidence. It’s difficult to see what kind of power the crowd wields in Nostromo when it effects little change in the people’s material conditions. A discussion of Joyce’s “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” more persuasively tracks a change in the emotional character of the gathering. At first hostile to deviation from “group-thought,” based on an idealization of a shared referent, the crowd is moved by Hynes’s performance to a more open “crowd-thought,” for which “it is preferable that it not be too highly developed or elaborated” (28). [End Page 201]

Chapter 2, “Crowd Involvements and Attachments,” offers an alternative to the leader principle in crowd theory in an “attractor,” someone who becomes the psychological center of group dynamics without taking on a leadership role. In The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” the ship’s crew is hierarchical, and the authority of the officers averts a populist mutiny, in keeping with traditional group psychology theory. However, the crew is not unified...