Modernism and the Modern Novel

The term modernism refers to the radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities evident in the art and literature of the post-World War One period. The ordered, stable and inherently meaningful world view of the nineteenth century could not, wrote T.S. Eliot, accord with "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." Modernism thus marks a distinctive break with Victorian bourgeois morality; rejecting nineteenth-century optimism, they presented a profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray. This despair often results in an apparent apathy and moral relativism.

In literature, the movement is associated with the works of (among others) Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Franz Kafka and Knut Hamsun. In their attempt to throw off the aesthetic burden of the realist novel, these writers introduced a variety of literary tactics and devices:

the radical disruption of linear flow of narrative; the frustration of conventional expectations concerning unity and coherence of plot and character and the cause and effect development thereof; the deployment of ironic and ambiguous juxtapositions to call into question the moral and philosophical meaning of literary action; the adoption of a tone of epistemological self-mockery aimed at naive pretensions of bourgeois rationality; the opposition of inward consciousness to rational, public, objective discourse; and an inclination to subjective distortion to point up the evanescence of the social world of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. (Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment" 68)

Modernism is often derided for abandoning the social world in favour of its narcissistic interest in language and its processes. Recognizing the failure of language to ever fully communicate meaning ("That's not it at all, that's not what I meant at all" laments Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock), the modernists generally downplayed content in favour of an investigation of form. The fragmented, non-chronological, poetic forms utilized by Eliot and Pound revolutionized poetic language.

Modernist formalism, however, was not without its political cost. Many of the chief Modernists either flirted with fascism or openly espoused it (Eliot, Yeats, Hamsun and Pound). This should not be surprising: modernism is markedly non-egalitarian; its disregard for the shared conventions of meaning make many of its supreme accomplishments (eg. Eliot's "The Wasteland," Pound's "Cantos," Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Woolf's The Waves) largely inaccessible to the common reader. For Eliot, such obscurantism was necessary to halt the erosion of art in the age of commodity circulation and a literature adjusted to the lowest common denominator.

It could be argued that the achievements of the Modernists have made little impact on the practices of reading and writing as those terms and activities are generally understood. The opening of Finnegans Wake, "riverrun, past Eve's and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of

bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs," seems scarcely less strange and new than when it was first published in 1939. Little wonder, then, that it is probably the least read of the acknowledged "masterpieces" of English literature. In looking to carry on many of the aesthetic goals of the Modernist project, hypertext fiction must confront again the politics of its achievements in order to position itself anew with regard to reader. With its reliance on expensive technology and its interest in re-thinking the linear nature of The Book, hypertext fiction may find itself accused of the same elitism as its modernist predecessors.

What are characteristics of Modernist literature, fiction in particular?

Modernist literature was a predominantly English genre of fiction writing, popular from roughly the 1910s into the 1960s. Modernist literature came into its own due to increasing industrialization and globalization. New technology and the horrifying events of both World Wars (but specifically World War I) made many people question the future of humanity: What was becoming of the world?

Writers reacted to this question by turning toward Modernist sentiments. Gone was the Romantic period that focused on nature and being. Modernist fiction spoke of the inner self and consciousness. Instead of progress, the Modernist writer saw a decline of civilization. Instead of new technology, the Modernist writer saw cold machinery and increased capitalism, which alienated the individual and led to loneliness. (Sounds like the same arguments you hear about the Internet age, doesn't it?)

To achieve the emotions described above, most Modernist fiction was cast in first person. Whereas earlier, most literature had a clear beginning, middle, and end (or introduction, conflict, and resolution), the Modernist story was often more of a stream of consciousness. Irony, satire, and comparisons were often employed to point out society's ills. For the first-time Modernist reader, this can all add up to feel like the story is going nowhere.

A short list of some of famous Modernist writers includes Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, E.E. Cummings, Sylvia Plath, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and Gertrude Stein.

From the above list, two specific works that epitomize Modernist literature are Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

Some Characteristics of Modernism in Literature

Modernist writers proclaimed a new "subject matter" for literature and they felt that their new way of looking at life required a new form, a new way of writing. Writers of this period

tend to pursue more experimental and usually more highly individualistic forms of writing. The sense of a changing world was stimulated by radical new developments, such as:

new insights from the emerging fields of psychology and sociology anthropological studies of comparative religion new theories of electromagnetism and quantum physics a growing critique of British imperialism and the ideology of empire the growing force of doctrines of racial superiority in Germany the escalation of warfare to a global level shifting power structures, particularly as women enter the work force the emergence of a new "city consciousness" new information technologies such as radio and cinema the advent of mass democracy and the rise of mass communication fin-de-siècle ["end-of-the-century"] consciousness

Some of the features of the new sense of reality:

the replacement of a belief in absolute, knowable truth with a sense of relative, provisional truths (Einstein's first book on relativity 1905);an awareness of "reality" as a constructed fiction

a focus on the unconscious as an important source of motivation (Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams 1900)

a turning away from teleological ways of thinking about time to a sense of time as discontinuous, overlapping, non-chronological in the way we experience it; a shift from linear time to "moment time"

less emphasis on art's reflection of external reality and a greater emphasis on art's reflection of the perceiving mind; [compare developments in painting: moving from "representational" Victorian painting (painting that represents identifiable, often narrative, scenes in external reality) through Impressionism (e.g. Whistler; the attempt to paint the quality of the sensations stimulated by the external scene) to Post-Impressionism (e.g. Matisse; painting the "painterly" scene, the pure elements of colour and form--perhaps as a way of painting the perceiving mind, the aesthetic consciousness]

a focus on epistemological concerns (how do we know what we know?) and linguistic concerns (how is the way we think inseparable from the forms in which we think?); a sense of the break-down of a shared linguistic community; a reaction against the dominance of rational, logical, "patriarchal" discourse and its monopoly of power

Some manifestations of new approaches in modernist writing:

character: a disappearance of character summary, of discrete well-demarcated characters as in Dickens; the representation of the self as diverse, contradictory, ambiguous, multiple

plot: scepticism about linear plots with sudden climactic turning points and clear resolutions; the use instead of discontinuous fragments, "moment time," a-chronological leaps in time, contrapuntal multiple plots, open unresolved endings

style: "stream of consciousness"--tracing non-linear thought processes, moving by the "logic of association" or the "logic of the unconscious"; imagistic rather than logical connections

point of view (or focalization): a rejection of the single, authoritative, omniscient point of view for a narrative focalized instead through the consciousness of one character whose point of view is limited--or through several characters who establish relative, multiple points of view--or through several simultaneously-held positions maintained by the one character

CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF MODERNIST FICTION

Based on

Some Attributes of Modernist Literature

by Professor John Lye, http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/2F55/modernism.php Perspectivism: the locating of meaning from the viewpoint of the individual

(narrator’s position important); realist novel > omniscient narrator > knows everything > background, thoughts, wishes, reasons for actions, ‘more than human’, Modernist narrator > gives his/her point of view, emotions, subjective, limited

Impressionism: an emphasis on the process of perception and knowing: the use of devices (formal, linguistic, representational), to present more closely the texture or process or structure of knowing and perceiving. A re-structuring of literature and the experience of reality it re-presents.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-

transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display; with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?

Virginia Woolf “Modern Fiction”

A break with the sequential, developmental, cause-and-effect presentation of the 'reality' of realist fiction > presentation of experience as layered, allusive, discontinuous; the use, to these ends, of fragmentation and juxtaposition, motif, symbol, allusion.

Language is seen as a complex, nuanced site of our construction of the 'real'; language is 'thick', its multiple meanings and varied connotative forces are essential to our elusive, multiple, complex sense of and cultural construction of reality.

Experimentation in form in order to present differently, afresh, the structure, the connections, and the experience of life; an emphasis on cohesion, interrelatedness and depth in the structure of the aesthetic object and of experience (motif, juxtaposition, significant parallels, different voices, shifts and overlays in time and place and perspective)

A sense of art as artifact, art as 'other' than diurnal reality

The (re)presentation of inner (psychological) reality, including the 'flow' of experience, through devices such as stream of consciousness.

Stream of consciousness: the continuous flow of sense perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories in the human mind; or a literary method of representing such a blending of mental processes in fictional characters, usually in an unpunctuated or disjointed form of interior monologue. Stream of consciousness is a special style of interior monologue that without the apparent intervention of a summarizing and selecting narrator, mingles the thoughts of the character with impressions and perceptions, often violating the norms of grammar, syntax, and logic.

Example of stream of consciousness: Joyce’s UlyssesPineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. A sugar-sticky girl shoveling scoopfuls of creams for a christian brother. Some school great. Bad for their tummies. Lozenge and comfit manufacturer to His Majesty the King. God. Save. Our. Sitting on his throne, sucking red jujubes white.

The use of interior or symbolic landscape: the world is moved 'inside', structured symbolically or metaphorically;

Time becomes psychological time (time as innerly experienced) or symbolic time

(time or measures of time as symbols, or time as it accommodates a symbolic rather than a historical reality), not the 'historical' or railway time of realism.

A turn to 'open' or ambiguous endings, again seen to be more representative of 'reality' -- as opposed to 'closed' endings, in which matters are resolved.

The search for symbolic ground or an ontological or epistemic ground for reality, especially through the device of 'epiphany' (Joyce), 'inscape' (Hopkins), 'moment of being' (Woolf), 'Jetztzeit' (Benjamin) (no, evidently not the source of 'jet-set') -- the moment of revelation of a reality beneath and grounding appearances. This relates as well to the move to tighten up form, to move experience inwards, and to explore the structural aspects of experience.

If my life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills-then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St. Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind... It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and of feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive... the feeling, as I describe it sometimes to myself, of lying in a grape and seeing through a film of semi-transparent yellow." Virginia Woolf, “Moments of Being”

The appearance of various typical themes: reality of experience itself, experience of reality = what is it? the search for a ground of meaning in a world without God > w. without guidance,

rules, clear distinction between good and bad, without a hope for redemption > modernist redemption > art

critique of the traditional values of culture loss of meaning and hope in the modern world and an exploration of how this loss

may be faced (or overcome?).