What is
Modernism?
Modernism is variously argued to be a period, style, genre, or
combination of the above; but it is first of all a word; one which exists
alongside cognate words. It’s stem, ‘Modern', is a term that, from the Latin ‘modo’,
means 'current’, and so has a far wider currency and range of meanings than ‘Modernism'.
In the late 5th century, for example, the Latin ‘modernus’ referred to the
Christian present in opposition to the Roman past, modern English is
distinguished from Middle English, and the modern period in literature is
considered to be from the sixteenth century on, although it is sometimes used
to describe twentieth-century writing.
More generally, 'modern' has been frequently used to
refer to the avant-garde, though since World War II this sense has been
embraced by the term ‘contemporary’ while 'modern' has shifted from meaning
'now' to 'just now'. It is this sense of the avant-garde, radical, progressive
or even revolutionary side to the modern which was the catalyst for the coinage
'Modernism', and it is to this meaning that Rimbaud appealed when insisting
"Il faut etre absolument moderne"
The Modern movement in the arts, although seen as
being almost synonymous with the advent of the twentieth century, actually goes
back to the last decades of the nineteenth century when the foundations of high
Victorian culture were facing serious threats from various agencies. As a
cultural phenomenon, Modernism saw the departure from preexisting modes of aesthetic
engagement to the sphere of art.
Modernism applies to literature, music, painting,
film, and architecture and to some works before and after this period). In
poetry, Modernism is associated with moves to break from the iambic pentameter
as the basic unit of verse, to introduce vers libre, (free verse) symbolism,
and other new forms of writing. In prose, Modernism is associated with attempts
to render human subjectivity in more authentic ways than realism: to represent
consciousness, perception, emotion, meaning and the individual's relation to
society through interior monologue, stream of consciousness, tunneling,
defamiliarisation, rhythm, irresolution and other techniques. The Modernist writers therefore strove,
in Ezra Pound's brief phrase, to make it new"
With regard to literature, Modernism is best
understood through the work of the Modernist authors who wrote in the decades
before and after the turn of the twentieth century. One of the first aspects of
Modernist writing to strike readers is the way in which such novels, stories,
plays and poems immerse them in an unfamiliar world. Modernist writing
frequently immerses the reader in a confusing and difficult mental landscape
which cannot be immediately understood but which must be moved through and
mapped by the reader in order to understand its limits and meanings.
History of
Modernism
By contrast ‘Modernism’ was first used in the early 18th
century simply to denote trends characteristics of modern times, while in the
19th century its meaning encompassed a sympathy with modern
opinions, styles or expressions. In the later part of the 19th
century modernism referred to progressive trends in the Catholic Church. In
literature it surfaced in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of D'Urbervilles (1891), to
denote what he called a general and unwelcome creeping industrial "ache of
Modernism". In criticism, the context with which this article is
concerned, the expression was used, but failed to gain currency by Robert
Graves and Laura Riding in their 1927 A
Survey of Modernist Poetry. It was only in the 1960s that the term
became widely used as a description of a literary phase that was both
identifiable and in some sense over. Its literary roots have been said to be in
the work of the French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire and the novelist
Gustave Flaubert, in the Romantics, or in the 1890s fin de siècle writers,
while its culmination or apogee arguably occurred before World War I, by which
point radical experimentation had impacted on all the arts, or in 1922, the annus mirabilis of James Joyce's
Ulysses, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Katherine
Mansfield's The Garden Party,
and Virginia Woolf's Jacob Room.
Post-war dates for Modernism's high-point make sense
in terms of British literature but
not European. Its end is variously defined in terms of chronology, as 1930,
1950, or yet to happen, and, in terms of genre, as the rise of neo-realism or
postmodernism. As an international art term it covers the many avant-garde
styles and movements that proliferated under the names of Expressionism, Imagism, Surrealism, Futurism, Dadaism, Vorticism, Formalism and
(in writing if not painting) Impressionism. Its forebears were Darwin, Marx and
Nietzsche; its intellectual guru was Freud. Modernist writing is most particularly noted for its
experimentation, its complexity, its formalism, and for its attempt to create a
“tradition of the new".
Its historical and social background includes the
emergence of the New Woman, the peak and downturn of the British Empire,
unprecedented technological change, the rise of the Labour party, the
appearance of factory-line mass production, war in Africa, Europe and
elsewhere. Modernism has therefore almost universally been considered a
literature of not just change but crisis.
Social
context of modernism
Technology contributed to the erosion of many
cherished values. It broke up the systems of social integration - the concepts
of the happy family. Not that simply one credo was replaced by another but
there was change in the pace in which life moved it became faster, freer, and
grossly materialistic. The twentieth century saw a host of material benefits
available to man-luxury items, popular entertainments like cinema, an
unprecedented comfort in basic living conditions. Materialism also enhanced the class divide, but that was not an
unknown experience for the industrial West.
The foundations of faith were also battered by the
onslaught of Darwinism. The
challenge to faith is one of the key characteristics in modern literature. In
the early poetry of T.S. Eliot, for instance, the anxiety of modern living the
experience of chaos capture this loss of centre Eliot's Prufrock Joyce's
Dedalus are questers without direction.
The modern experience was not confined England alone.
The twentieth century saw the internationalisation literature - the literary
horizons of English were inhabited by writers who used the language but not
necessarily the territorial condition. Writers like James Joyce, T.S. Eliot,
Joseph Conrad, Henry James, a Hemingway found in the modern experience the resource
through engaged their creative impulses.
Modern
literature is characterised by a
process of cross-fertilisation of ideas, images, experiences. When Joseph
Conrad writes about Marlow he is a modern
man, but not simply an Englishman. In the world of Charles Dickens in the
19th century, Micawber belongs to a tradition that traces its
sources to a robust English optimism.
What are the
characteristics of Modernism?
Another approach is to attempt to construct a
description of the representative features of Modernist writing. Norman Cantor,
in Twentieth Century Culture,
Modernism to Deconstruction (1988), has offered what he calls a Model of Modernism, with the following
characteristics. Modernism favoured anti-historicism because truth is not
evolutionary and progressive but something requiring analysis. It focussed on
the micro- rather than the macrocosm, and hence the individual more than the
social. It leant towards the disjointed, disintegrating, and discordant in
opposition to Victorian harmony.
Modernism also advocated that an object exists in
terms of its function, a house is therefore seen as a machine for living in (Le
Corbusier) and a poem "a machine made for words" (William Carlos
Williams). In terms of sexuality and the family, Modernism introduced a new
openness, with candid descriptions often sympathetic to feminism, homosexuality, androgyny and bisexuality, besides a
questioning of the constraints of the nuclear family which seemed to hamper the
individual's search for personal values, Modernists did not view ethics as
superior to art, seeing the latter instead as the highest form of human achievement.
If Victorian literature was concerned with morality, Modernist writing was
concerned with aesthetics.
Lastly, Cantor notes tendency towards feelings of
apocalypse and despair following decades creeping Victorian doubt. In this
spirit, Modernist texts often focus on social, spiritual, or personal collapse
and subsume history under mythology and symbolism.
Other characteristics are a focus on the city and a
championing as a fear of technology, technical experimentation allied with
radical stylistic innovation, a suspicion of language as a medium for
comprehending or explaining the world, and an attack on nineteenth-century
stalwarts such as empiricism and rationalism. Above all, however, what
has come to be called Modernism appears retrospectively to have been a
wide-ranging and far reaching series of vigorous and persistent attempts to
multiply and disturb modes of representation. Its artistic expansion seemed to
follow on from other kinds of growth: scientific, imperial, and social. These
lucrative material changes were accompanied by individual and collective
crises, especially spiritual, which issued in a new literature that was
rebellious, questioning, doubtful, and introspective, but confident and even aggressive
in its aesthetic conviction.
Modernism in
Literature
Modern Fiction
The novel was the dominant literary form in the
Victorian period and while engagement with the reading public of the early
twentieth century continued. The high Victorian fascination for social
drama was somewhat pushed to the margins in the attempts of the modern to
accommodate new situations and attitudes. It may be argued that the modern
moment in English diction was brought about by the writings of Joseph Conrad,
especially his Lord Jim
(1900) and Heart of Darkness
(1902).
The possibilities suggested by Conrad were taken
further by other modern novelists such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. In
novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
and To the Lighthouse (1927),
Virginia Woolf readdressed the issue of the genre itself by suggesting that
external structuring of events through the frame of the novel was not adequate
justify the complexities of modern experience.
Among other members, the novelist E.M. Forster was
associated with the Bloomsbury group. Like Woolf's stream of consciousness
technique, Forster's best known work is A
Passage to India (1924) where he wave through the thread of cultural
differences with dexterity. His views regarding India have been
controversial to say the least.
James Joyce’s novel has become a cult text of modern
literature. In Ulysses, ahead
with his quest figure, Stephen Dedalus (whom he had introduced in A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man, 1913), in a narrative that to present the modern day Dublin as the
archetype of the civilized city, and these characters are epitome of modern
man.
D. H. Lawrence relied more on the thematic evocation of
the modern experience than narrative jugglery to further his thesis on
modernity. The logic of autobiographical association was used initially to read
his first novel Sons Lovers
(1913). Lawrence did not want to impress upon his audience, or it could be
argued that his visualisation of obscenity and vulgarity operated through a completely
different matrix than the one that normally did. The Rainbow (1915), Women
in Love (1920). Aaron's Rod
(1922), and Lady Chatterley's
Lover (1928/1960) are some of Lawrence's other novels.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) wrote a futuristic novel
about modern chaos in his Brave New
World (1932). The combination of tragedy and satire was successfully
packaged in the novels of Evelyn Waugh (1902 66) especially A Handful of Dust (1934) and Brideshead Revisited (1945). The
plight of the personal occupied a very important place in Greene's fiction
which was portrayed in The Power and
the Glory (1940) and The
Heart of the Matter (1948)
Modern
Poetry
The advent of the twentieth century saw interesting
explorations in the field of poetry, which were further quickened by
developments in the contemporary world. The first major change came in the writing
of the group known as the War poets (Modernist
Poets). The First World War was a major political as well as a cultural
event. The poetry of Rupert Brooke was often seen in conjunction with his image
of the ‘young patriot' who died for the country.
The contemporaries of Brooke who provided responses
protest and frustration included Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967). Sassoon wrote
anti-war poems with a quiet but very effective ironic thrust in the Old
Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack (1918). Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). Ivor
Gurney (1890-1937). Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918), Edward Thomas (1878-1917), and
Charles Sorley (1896-1916) were some of the other poets of the war period, who
didn't survive it.
The First World
War provides a very convenient marker to read the emergence of new trends
in English poetry and figures like William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), who in
fact had been writing from the last decades of the preceding century, and T.S.
Eliot (1888-1965) moved to suggest interesting departures from the
available poetic modes. The conflict between the romantic idyll and the
potentially corrupt urban world is beautifully evoked in his "The Lake
Isle of Innisfree”. Yeats' romanticism found another counter in the spirit of
Irish nationalism.
Eliot, on the other hand, began his poetic career by
reacting to the romantic assumptions of the nineteenth century brand practised
by poets like William Wordsworth. One of his earliest poems, "The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is today as an example of trademark modernism for
its constructed allusiveness and for subsisting in a parodic engagement that
undercut many of the Victoria certainties, including love. In his classic The Waste Land (1922), where he presents
the angst, corruption, and materialism of modernist society within the frame of
a quest that draws on various cultural structures. The poem is characterised by
a robust cosmopolitanism. The collection of four poems called “Four Quartets”
(1943) dealt with the complexities of religious experience in the modern world.
Poets like W. H. Auden. Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day
Lewis swerved towards the political ideologies and such alignments
eventually compelled a confinement of some of their poems to purely topical
contexts. The poetry of Stephen Spender (1909-1995) is organized to manifest
his concern for the contemporary scene, and from his first collection Poems (1930) to Dolphins (1994), he exudes a
sober sophistication. The poetry of Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) exhibits the marks
of a genius that, according to many, wasn't completely fulfilled.
Modern Art
Like many other Modernist
movements, the origins of modern art can be traced back to some late
nineteenth century movements. Impressionism was one such influence. The
impressionists stayed away from the established modes of European painting and
sought to represent scene from daily life. The impressionists many species of
popular culture and introduced new techniques such application of broken
brushstrokes or the employment of intensely concentrated colours.
Vincent Van Gogh sought to relay on his emotion
pressures through the can and used symbolic structures in his paintings
including representations of the self. Edward Munch, on the other hand,
recourse to exaggerate and colourful representations of modern man anguish in a
mechanized society. Georges Seurat, who used the benefits of scientific
knowledge by violating the norms of realism. Paul Cézanne combined a solid
conception of objects with a remarkable reorientation of perspective altering
the overall effect of the printing, Cleanne's radical perspectives were more
apparent in his still-life paintings.
The late nineteenth century and early Modernist focus
on a re-visualisation of art objects was also evident in developments that
heralded a form of abstractionism. Henri Matisse's use of disparate shapes in
his apparently simple' drawings suggests a fascination for abstraction that was
unprecedented. Cubism, another
radical revisualisation of perception am technique in the early twentieth
century, is associated with Modernism in Pablo
Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Aviron (1907) a classic Cubist Art challenged
the formal structure of conventional paintings. Many other artists like Albert
Gleizes, Jean Metzinger Delaunay, Fernand Lager and Juan Gris followed Picasso
in reinventing the form and idea of modern
paintings.
Futurists like Umberto Boccioni used the idea of
motion that came from the placement of sequential photographs,
especially those by the photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Boccioni’s “Dynamism of a Soccer Player"
(1913) is a trademark futurist
painting and modern sculptor.
Modern Drama
Henrik Ibsen is often regarded as the first modernist
in the history of European theatre, which is conflated with his placement as a
pioneer in terms of the development of realist theatre also. Even though the
plays of Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934) and Henry Arthur Jones (1851-1929)
preceded the innovative theatrics of modern drama, some of their plays do show
the potential of a serious engagement with the problems of modernity. The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893)
by Pinero, for instance, combines the Ibsenite penchant for critical readings
of contemporary malaises. A similar foray into the theatrics of Ibsen is seen
in Henry Arthur Jones' Mrs Dane's Defence
(1900) which enlarges the parameters of society drama to accommodate the sexual
politics that also served as themes in novels of the period.
The only comic reinvention of the time came from the
writings of Oscar Wilde, whose deliberately undercut the familiar by exposing
oppositional facets with those very structures that characterised contemporary
conditions. Outwardly, the four major plays (Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892: A Woman of No Importance, 1893: The Ideal Husband. 1895 And
The Importance of Being Ernest, 1895) of Wilde exhibit striking
similarities with the theatre of social convention as epitomised by Jones and
Pinero.
Georege Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) inherited, or rather
consciously appropriated, the Ibsenite model and exploited the resources of
such theatrical conditioning in his dramatic experiments. The adoption of
themes of familiar understanding in plays like Androcles and the Lion (1913), Pygmalion (1914) and Saint
Joan (1924), Arms and the Man
suggests the potentialities of these stories that could be dramatically
extended beyond the conventions that framed them.
The works of John Galsworthy, coming at around theme
time, utilised the benefits of plotting to show how engaged the chosen subjects
were: Strife is Galsworthy's best example of this condition. The success of The Silver Box (1905) was
further emulated by some of his other plays like Justice and The Skin
Game (1920).
Another Irishman who left a mark on the modern stage
was John Millington Synge (1871-1909). In brief but exciting career Synge
exploited the resources of his culture to experiment and engage the potential
of Irish theatre in a way that wasn't attempted before him. The Shadow of the Glen (1903), Riders
to the Sea (1904), The Well
of the Saints (1905) and The
Playboy of the Western World (1907) are Synge’s plays that move through
terrains of heightened pessimism and given their placement within a culture of
Irish indomitableness.
Sean O’Casey occupies a position in the history of
Irish theatre. His early adventure with Irish nationalism and contemporary life
was manifested in three of his plays. -
The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars.
T. S. Eliot wrote innumerable plays which are worth
mentioning - Murder in Cathedral,
The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk etc.
The 1920s and the 30s were fertile years for the
English theatre. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) successfully demonstrated the
possibilities of satire in his plays. They include Our Betters (1917), The Circle (1921), The Constant Wife
(1927) and For Services Rendered (1932).
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