137
Le Petit Journal des Refusées:
A Graphical Reading
JOHANNA DRUCKER
G
elett Burgess’ witty 1896 San Francisco publication Le Petit Journal des
Refusées provokes two important questions that make us think about
how we understand the cultural role and aesthetic identity of certain modern
works of innovative art. First, can we do a critical reading of a literary work
through attention to its graphic properties? Second, can we talk about an
aesthetic work as modern without either straining to align it with the utopian
vision and politics of the nineteenth-century avant-garde or reading it only as
a product of mass culture?
1
In the case of Le Petit Journal, a study of its graphic
characteristics leads us into analysis of a work whose innovative expression
is situated within a middle-brow world, far from radical ideals except those
of playful humor but wonderfully self-conscious about the scene on which
it depends.
My first encounter with this publication came long before I would have
been able to frame the critical issues I address here. I spotted it on the desk of
the then curator of the History Department at the Oakland Museum when
I was an assistant to the Registrar.
2
I had been hired for my typing skills, and
such an encounter was as unlikely as it was life changing. Already actively im-
mersed in a world of small press printers and experimental writers, I could
recognize how unique a graphic work it was at a glance. The wallpaper cover,
the trapezoidal shape, the strangely weird and wonderfully intriguing image
on the front were so fascinating I could not keep myself from transgressing
decorum and seizing the thing for examination. Questions immediately arose
to drive my research. I wanted to know how this publication compared to its
contemporary context and whether its graphic form was as unusual as it looked,
or whether it borrowed and recycled graphic elements already in use. Return-
ing to this after three decades, I can frame that original response in terms of
critical considerations about experimental work and modern publications.
Studies of modernism have suffered from two binarisms.The first
critical formulation divided works of art from those of mass production.
3

The various proponents of Frankfurt school and critical theory argued that
the rarified aesthetics of esoteric fine art was a political tool to counter the
mind-numbing, formulaic products of the culture industries.
4
Since so many
modern artists, especially in the twentieth century, are fascinated with mass

138 / VICTORIAN POETRY
culture, practitioners of critical theory had to justify these acts of appropria-
tion and media transformation. Theoretical language assigned a redemptive
uplift, specifically, a quality of critique, to the act of bringing the dross of mass
production across the line and into the realm of fine art but never allowed
for the flow of ideas and values to praise mass cultural works.
5
In the second
binarism, cultural studies theorists condemned esoteric art as elitist and
argued for the empowering effects of subculture audiences created through
mass-culture artifacts.
6

In these dreary struggles, the supporters of Brecht or Beckett do mortal
combat with the fans of Stephen King and Star Wars (usually in academic
realms far removed from any but the most symbolic political acts). But critical
theorists and cultural studies proponents are united by their adherence to
a larger principle: the myth of a utopian role for art or aesthetic experience
as a politicizing force in culture. To argue otherwise, they suggest, is to fall
into the camp of the neo-conservatives and align one’s aspirations for fine
art to either an Arnoldian notion of moral improvement, or abandon all
moral responsibility and give over to mere hedonistic pleasure or rampant
consumerist tactics.
7
But between the pole of art as politics (whether through
esoteric resistance, activist didacticism, interventionist strategies, or organizing
principles) and that of art as product, lies an enormous terrain filled with
works of fine art that were not and never could be considered utopian—but
which are indisputably modern.

This outline of critical positions is over-simplified, but is meant to point
to the problem that arises immediately in trying to read a work like Le Petit
Journal, which remains absolutely, squarely, in the middle-brow cultural realm.
Conceived as a parody of the ways literary elitism is produced and received in
print culture, it is also a highly consumable piece, meant to be enjoyed by the
very scene and circles whose activities and attitudes it exposes. Its audience is
the same as that of The Wave and The Wasp, San Francisco journals detailing
the current theater and social scene, for which Burgess also wrote and did
interviews. We have few critical models for addressing such a playful work,
at least in the modern era, though if we survey the field of modern art and
literature, we see example after example of work that is part of the cultural
milieu it parodies. (I am thinking of the creations of John Singer Sargeant,
Winslow Homer, William Merritt Chase, Edith Wharton, and others in the
American scene that were quite consumable to their bourgeois audiences, even
popular, and rarely challenged formal conventions even when they cast their
tales and themes in a critical light.) Not by accident has so much of this work
fallen out of the lineage of “modernism” defined as a critical study based on the
two innovative engines of formal experimentation or the radical avant-garde.
Work suited to parlor or sitting room may be deemed worthy of sociological
or cultural historical attention, but art, in the modern era, is supposed to