A Short History of Celebrity (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Short History of Celebrity Aaron Jaffe A Short History of Celebrity. Fred Inglis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. x + 311. $29.95 (cloth). If the word means anything, celebrity gets at something different from fame. Unlike fame, for example, it's difficult to say with any certainty if celebrity is any good. It's hard to get close enough to tell. Celebrity organizes feelings for people we don't know, after all, intimacy with strangers, as Richard Schickel says. Unnerving examples of the known nobodies of modernity, celebrities seem to carry with them a reflexive sense of irritation. There's a need to append disclaimers whenever they're up for consideration: love 'em or hate 'em, they're here to stay. The convulsions of celebrity, borrowing an image from Djuna Barnes, are like "the fluids of the oyster, that must cover [an] itch with a pearl."1 And, it's not an accident that the Hollywood system prefers the term stars. As Colin MacCabe notes, it dresses up "crucial ambiguity" in the concept. Namely, celebrity value is value injected with risk: "Today's celebrity is tomorrow's nobody. Today's nobody is tomorrow's celebrity. Such a notion of change seems fundamentally democratic; celebrity is a fame that everybody can enjoy."2 If one of celebrity's cardinal qualities is that it captures the very ambivalence of its value, the same can't be said for fame. Fame designates an unalloyed good, a test of time, withstood. Fame heralds, celebrity has side-effects and hidden workings. Fame has an opposite—infamy, or bad fame. With celebrity, badness is already on-board—inevitably, inexorably it fades, expires, goes stale. Mel Gibson? Who? One useful distinction between fame and celebrity is that the latter approximates immortality, the old virtue of being forever, while the former aspires to ubiquity, the new value of being everywhere, which all too quickly spills into over-exposure and semiotic overkill. Fred Inglis's Short History of Celebrity is an intelligent, well written, and wide-ranging book, hopping smartly from discussions of Elizabeth I's coronation, Lord Byron, and Sarah Bernhardt, to reflections on Cary Grant, Princess Diana, Oprah Winfrey, and Tiger Woods. Rightly, Inglis argues that celebrity is tangled up with modernity. It's new but not brand new. His account gives it 250+ years in the making, dished out from a long simmering soup-pot of democratic, city-dwelling sentiments for theatrical spectacle, fashion and the romantic cult of personality. Decidedly, this version of The Long Now shifts the explanatory emphasis away from later technical developments. Inglis's account isn't interested (enough) in the role of the rise of photographic image and new forms of professional authority in making celebrities. One might invoke Walter Benjamin here but even Gilbert Seldes knew that something was afoot. Seldes didn't name celebrity per se alongside slapstick and comic strips in The 7 Lively Arts, but its work is tangled in each of the seven—the new vernacular media of modernism—anatomized in his 1924 study. The ways mass-mediated celebrity warps the empire of words and things deserves more attention than Inglis gives it. In effect, celebrity is the ultimate fan fiction. So, it should be no surprise that this short history of celebrity is short on theory (about the engines of celebrity, authorship, and celebrification and its attendant audience structures) and long on celebrity stories. The learned historian himself serves as a vital receiver of celebrity's strong signal, a high fidelity tuner, which—in its rebroadcast of Diana's death, for instance, or Seamus Heaney's sanctification—often resembles an all-too-marveled fan testimony. "[S]tories about celebrities must and should grip us," he avers, "fastidious distaste will not do; these people have things to tell us about the meaning of our lives" (104). Indeed, despite its title, Inglis's book isn't so much a short history of celebrity as it is a short history of celebrities. History-as-celebrity-fanzine is a suggestive gloss on DeMan's literary modernity after literary history. Despite Inglis's assertion of a poet ("Famous Seamus") as a last, consummate example of celebrity...