The Challenge of Modernism

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” These apocalyptic lines, written by poet William Butler Yeats in 1919, perfectly captured the uncertainty of the early 20^th c. The old empires of Turkey and Austria-Hungary had fallen to pieces; Russia was in upheaval, Germany crushed. In England, a stable social order based on rigid class distinctions was giving way, and as cities continued to swell—London’s population reached 5 million by 1910—a sense of community disappeared, replaced by the rootlessness and anonymity of urban life.

In the arts, modernism was a way of trying to make sense of this new, fragmented world. Before, the artist’s task had been to represent a recognizable shared reality. Painters created portraits and landscapes; novelists took their heroes and villains through stories that had a beginning, a middle, and a satisfying end. These traditional forms, however, seemed inadequate as a response to modern life. A new kind of art was needed—one that would reject old versions of reality, create its own values rather than relying on any common assumptions, and somehow connect the disjointed pieces of human experience into a coherent, yet not false or artificial, whole.

This was a daunting task, but British writers were inspired by the bold innovations of modern artists such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso and of composers such as Igor Stravinsky. Writers, however, faced unique challenges. Musicians still had notes, and painters still had line and color; but the basic materials of the narrative—character and plot—were being called into question.

During the 1920s, the works of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud first appeared in English, published by novelist Virginia Woolfand her husband, Leonard. Freud showed that character could not be easily understood; people were complex, inconsistent, and unpredictable, driven by irrational urges that might be hidden even from themselves. Writers’ past assumptions about plot—that events should move in a straight line from here to there—were also being rethought. The French philosopher and writer Henri Bergson, for example, argued that time was like a stream in which past, present, and future all flowed together continuously.

Under the influence of these ideas, writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf experimented with stream of consciousness, a technique in which the reader is inside the character’s mind, hearing his or her thoughts just as they occur, in an apparently jumbled and random order. Because memories of the past, impressions of the present, and hopes and fears for the future are all mixed together in the character’s consciousness, there is no need to follow the character through a series of important events; any ordinary day will do, and in fact, both Joyce and Woolf wrote novels taking place entirely in a single day. This approach, emphasizing depth rather than breadth and calling for a subtly perceptive use of detail and symbolism, led many writers to a fresh interest in the short story.

No longer able to assume that readers shared a common set of values, writers as diverse as Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and D.H. Lawrence shifted concern to the human being in isolation, to human relationships, and to common human strengths and vulnerabilities. Yet the modernists did not all think or write alike; while they struggled with the same problems, they arrived at different solutions. What they shared, mainly, was a sense of alienation from their own society—many lived as expatriates—and especially from many readers and critics, whose reactions to their work ranged from bewilderment to fury.

As a result, their audience was limited at first to an elite minority known as the avant-garde. For example, T.S. Eliot’spoetic masterpiece The Waste Land was first published in a tiny magazine with a circulation of only 600. It is no wonder that the work of modernist poets such as Eliot and Yeats took some time to catch on. They were writing an entirely new kind of poetry—intellectually challenging, ironic, and often disquieting.

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 781