Going No-Name: Celebrity and Its Refusers

Abstract

The nineteenth century witnessed a profound transformation in the literary field: as industrial capitalism reshaped the book trade and the press, celebrity emerged as a structuring force in cultural life. Yet the very mechanisms driving this new economy of visibility also generated countermovements. Artistic minorities, fiercely protective of their autonomy, devised strategies of resistance against a public sphere that increasingly demanded the spectacle of the authorial self. What resulted was a fundamental tension between two irreconcilable imperatives: the commodification of literary identity and the insistence on withdrawal from public view, however elusive such withdrawal might prove in practice. The defiant stance of the artist who refuses popular recognition was never simply a matter of aesthetic principle; it was also a direct response to journalistic pressures that left writers with little control over their own public image. Tracing a path from Mirecourt's Les Contemporains to Verlaine's Poètes maudits, and from the collegial solidarities of the Romantic generation to Mallarmé's vision of a slow, underground transmission of literary value, this essay maps the contradictions that beset literary glory in an age when visibility had become inescapable.