Modernism in Literature : A Comprehensive Note

 

The general sense of the term 'modern' is something related to contemporary or belongs to present, but when it comes to the literary movement it has got a definite location and a wider significance as well. It denotes a movement covering all creative arts, especially poetry, fiction, drama, painting, music and architecture beginning around the onset of the twentieth century. Talking about the manifestation of modernism in literature, M.H. Abrams remarks that this term is "widely used to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts, and styles of literature and other arts in the early decades of the twentieth century, but especially after World War I (1914-18)”.

Modernism involves a deliberate and radical break with tradition in Western art and culture. Literary historians place the beginning of the modernist revolt as far back as the 1890s, but the period of high modernism is definitely placed after the First World War and before the 1960s, when postmodernism took over. This period was marked by unparalleled changes which occurred rapidly in the form of a series of movements in Europe and America. Some of the leading figures of the movement include Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Virginia Wolf, etc.

 

The ferocity of violence during the First World War questioned the durability of the Western civilization which had so far considered Christianity as a cementing force among the nations. The seemingly sure foundation of the traditional Western art and culture, social organizations and religion, even literary modes and styles seemed suspect. Many scholars in Europe and America attacked the rationalist philosophy. The frustrated modern thinkers found the world chaotic and fragmented. The old ideologies of rationality, science, progress, civilization, imperialism, etc. did not fit into this world. The writers and the artists felt alienated and marginalized. This was a world where language was perceived to be an inadequate instrument for expression and understanding.

 

When it comes to the Philosophical dimension of modernism, it’s indeed a blatant rejection of a continuity between worlds of subject and object, the self and the world. The human self is now regarded as fluid, flexible and fragmented. There is a perception of the complex roles of time, memory, and history in the mutual construction of self and world. Time is not conceived as static to be separated into past, present and future as discrete elements and in a linear relation. The intellectual roots of modernism are traced to the transcendental idealism (a philosophical approach to knowledge which transcends mere consideration of sensory evidence) of German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). In his ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, he expressed. The view that absolute reality cannot be known.Kant also distinguished between logical discourse that was fit for science and the aesthetic discourse fit for literature. This distinction is fundamental to modernism because modern art is not logical; it is abstract, irrational and surreal.

Schopenhauer's (1788-1860) nihilism and his disciple Nietzsche's (1844-1900) rejection of both reason and conscience as guides to truth and his pronouncement of ‘death of God’ influenced modern literature which shows a sense of despair and disillusionment. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), through his findings in the field of psychology, gave an encouragement to the exploration of inner reality in modern art. His discovery of a chaotic unconscious alienated from the conscious mind became an important theme in modern literature.

The French term ‘avant-garde’ is closely connected to Modernism. Etymologically, it stands for the 'advance guard in military. By that token, in arts and literature, avant-garde should refer to leaders or pioneers. However, the term is primarily identified with a small group of artists and authors, who went against the themes and forms prevalent in their time at the start of the Modernist phase. They intentionally alienated themselves from the mainstream art and literature and chose to challenge the accepted norms of society. The avant-garde shocked the readers with astonishing new forms and techniques and bolder subjects. Artistic movements like Cubism (an avant-garde art movement in modernism which represents the multi-dimension of art and literature), Dadaism (a movement emerged in Switzerland. It’s a reaction against all kinds of mainstream enlightenment. It may often nonsensical, illogical, absurd as well as meaningless ), Vorticism (a short lived British movement formed by Wyndham Lewis, offshoot of Cubism. It highlights the abstract representation of language), etc. are clubbed under it. Even the French symbolist poets like Verlaine and Mallarme were the first members of the avant-garde. Likewise, the playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd were counted among the avant-garde.

In English literature, one of the early groups of artists-critics associated with modernism was the Bloomsbury Group which included novelists E.M. Forster (1879-1970) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf's sister), art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell, economist J.M. Keynes, biographer Lytton Strachey and the painter Duncan Grant. The group exerted influence on the literary and intellectual scene for nearly two decades. The members of the group believed in informal relationships and stressed the importance of pleasure-personal as well as aesthetic-over other ideals. Their successors also indulged in political activism. In the main, the Bloomsbury Group is known for its criticism of materialistic realism in arts and literature.

The literary works which heralded the modern age are recognized as James Joyce's Ulysses, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room. All the three works were published in the year 1922, thus the year is known as the moment of ‘high modernism’. Many other literary experiments also mark this period. In considering with the scenario of futility and anarchy of the contemporary world, literature too had to dispense with the concepts of order and ‘literary’ language. Therefore, The Waste Land has fragments of utterances and allusions and the reader is hard put to find the connections between them. This discontinuity of narrative takes the form of stream-of-consciousness in the works of Joyce and Woolf. Inner life becomes more important for these authors than the external world. Techniques like surrealism, impressionism and expressionism were used to advantage. Among the literary figures associated with modernism are Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke, Eugene O'Neil, Bertolt Brecht, etc.

Twentieth century poetry was deeply influenced by symbolism. Irish poet and critic W.B. Yeats (1865-1939), the American poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and the Anglo-American poet and critic T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) made use of symbolism in their poetry. Some assumptions that form the basis of Eliot's critical notions such as 'tradition', 'dissociation of sensibility and 'objective correlative' may have had roots in the thoughts of symbolists, especially Remy de Gourmont.

Various modernist groups tended to be formalistic in focusing on the formal structure of a work of art. Indeed, literary Critics of various historical periods have placed emphasis on the formal aspects of art and literature, but this emphasis scaled new heights in literatures and critical theories of the early twentieth century. It began with the Formalist movement in Russia and Practical Criticism in England. It was during this period that the foundations of New Criticism were laid by such figures as William Empson and I.A. Richards. The latter's Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929) are considered important landmarks. New Criticism treated a literary work as an autonomous and self-contained structure of words only.

Literary modernism was marked by a lot of complexity and heterogeneity. We may understand this complexity through an example: the experience of ‘love' could be quite different from one person to another. The feeling depends on relationships between friends, spouses, parents, colleagues and so on and the connotation of the expression love changes with the change of context. so, one might find the signifier love' lacking in conveying the feeling in the perfect sense when the persons involved do not ascribe to love as it is known to exist in the categories pointed out here. It is not difficult to comprehend the deficiency of language to express love between two beings. Therefore, modernist poetry, instead of making use of plain language in an overt statement, relies far more on suggestion and allusion.The definitions of reality became increasingly complex.

 

Modernist theory believes in the breakdown of any linear narrative structure which hitherto followed the conventional Aristotelian model of beginning, middle and end. Modern poetry tends to be fragmented, creating its own logic' of emotion, image, sound, symbol and mood. Major works of modernist fiction following James Joyce's Ulysses and even his more radical Finnegans Wake (1939) subvert the basic conventions of earlier prose fiction. This was done through breaking up the narrative continuity, departing from the standard ways of representing characters and violating the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language by using stream of consciousness and other modes of narration. Gertrude Stein, an American writer often linked with Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Woolf as a trail-blazing modernist, experimented with automatic writing. Such writing achieved its effect by violating the norms of standard-English syntax.

The general reader found it difficult to understand modernist writing cause of the fragmentation and lack of conciseness in writing. The plot, characters, and themes of the text are not always linear, making the reader confused about what is being said. A rejection of history, social systems and a sense of loneliness are also common themes. Jean Francois Lyotard, the postmodern theoretician, in his report The Postmodern Condition, also studies the philosophy of modernism, According to him, modernism was influenced by the Kantian theme of the sublime, which is an equivocal emotion, for it carries with it both pleasure and pain. The sublime is only present when the imagination fails to present an object that could match the concept. "Modern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing content; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure."

 

Modernism, then, can be summed up as an aesthetic movement of the twentieth century that repudiates the traditional purpose of art to represent reality and address timeless human values. Some of the important characteristics of the literary modernism includes the following:

A new emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity.

A blurring of the distinctions between genres, so that novels tend to become more lyrical and poetic and poems become more documentary and prose-like.

A new liking for fragmented forms, discontinuous narrative and random-seeming collages of disparate materials. And

A tendency towards ‘reflexivity’, so that poems, plays and novels raise issues concerning their own nature, status and role.