Literary History and its Incorporations

Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde by Loren Glass Stanford University Press, 2013. 272 pages Loren Glass's Counterculture Colophon offers a history of Grove Press and its offshoot, the Evergreen Review, from the time of Barney Rosset's purchase of Grove in 1951 up to the decline of Groves influence in the 1970s and Rosset's eventual sale of the press in 1985. While the book covers the full span of Grove Press under Rosset's charge, Glass places his primary emphasis on the turbulent years from the 1950s to the 1960s, when the press achieved its greatest success and notoriety as a publisher of avant-garde and obscene literature. Its authors, to name just a few, included Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Kenzaburo Oe, Harold Pinter, and Frantz Fanon. Focusing on these two decades, Glass seeks to chronicle the emergence of avant-garde and countercultural writing in postwar America, and to track this writing's eventual entrance into mainstream American culture. Glass's subtitle describes what he sees as the long-term trajectory of the curious assemblage of aesthetic and political impulses that form Grove Press and the Evergreen Review. On this front, Glass's work is conversant with Jeremy Braddock's recent book, Collecting as Modernist Practice, which argues that the modernist collection functions as a "provisional institution, a mode of public engagement modeling future--and often more democratic (although the meaning of this word would be contentious)--relationships between audience and artwork" (3). Counterculture Colophon complements Braddock's work with its claim that Grove's "most significant achievement was to establish and expand the circuits through which experimental and radical literature was distributed, particularly to the burgeoning college and university populations that were the seedbed of the counterculture, effectively democratizing the avant-garde" (12). The close publication dates of Glass's and Braddock's studies--Braddock's book appeared in 2012--prevent Glass from addressing Braddock's work directly. Still, Glass reaffirms and redirects Braddock's claims by drawing on Max Weber to name Grove a '"charismatic community,' a small group of people who come together out of loyalty to a figure whose authority is based in his charismatic appeal" (7). But while Glass's charismatic community thus institutes the kind of provisionality Braddock identifies with modernist practices, Glass's narrative of "incorporation" ultimately works against the purely provisional. This is to say that the incorporation of the avant-garde implies its eventual integration into, and containment in, a more dominant cultural field. If Grove began as a charismatic community enabled by Rosset's passion and financial backing, it ended up as a financially dubious corporation and a remnant of its own success. "By the end of the 1960s," Glass writes, "the avant-garde had in essence become a component of the mainstream, and Grove Press, more than any other single institution, was responsible for this fundamental transformation of the cultural field, the consequences of which are still with us" (12). Glass thus charts the transition from emergent to dominant culture, specifically as Grove's unique history embodies and incorporates that transition. To support his claim for the singularity of Grove's influence in the American counterculture, Glass situates Grove as a "central node" in a "colophonic network" (9) which spreads across the United States, and even the world. While Glass understands that multiple agents contribute to the production of a book--and a culture, for that matter--he locates Grove at the center of "a network extending out from Rosset and his crew and linking authors, academics, editors, readers, and activists around the world. The Grove colophon became a kind of quilting point enabling this network to coalesce around a distinct set of aesthetic sensibilities and political affiliations" (7-8). …