Context of the period

A curious point about modernism is that the 'modern' part of this name tag is confusing. How could literature that began to flourish over a century ago be understood as 'modern'? From a twenty-first century perspective, shouldn't this movement be called 'oldism'? The Model T Ford was not even on the road when European writers began to break away from their Victorian predecessors and create art that recorded something of what it was like to live in the 'modern' age (the first half of the twentieth century). Nevertheless, there is a strong connection between the methods and concerns of modernist literature and the philosophy, politics and art of the early twentieth century. It was these methods and concerns that provoked a rethinking of cultural and social values.

Commentators in the 1950s and 1960s agreed that in the period between 1890 and 1940 (with a high point in the 1920s) the work of a range of writers shared distinctive forms and features. It was also obvious in hindsight that modernist literature in English participated in a much wider movement towards change an experimentation in European art at that time. The cutting-edge (avant-garde) rejection of 'stuffy' Victorian realism and, as poet and critic Ezra Pound put it, the urge to 'make it new', were responses to what people saw as the strangeness and urgency of the new twentieth century. And what newness there was: new machines, new industrialisation, new capitalism and a whole new world order. Society felt as if it had disembarked from the quaint old horse and buggy and re-embarked on the hurtling steam train of progress. This may have been exhilarating but it was also frightening and alienating.

Lesson 1: Understanding the Context of Modernist Poetry

Literary Context

The modernists made a conscious break with the developmental cause-and-effect narratives of Victorian Realist novels. Novels began to be organised in different ways: sometimes discontinuous, fragmented, or structured through symbols, allusions, unreliable memories and parallels with stories from mythology.

By experimenting with form the modernists produced the 'new'. In poetry, this meant rejecting traditional forms and metre in favour of imagism, free verse, fragmentation, frequent allusions to other texts and a strong emphasis on symbolism (often at the expense of accessibility). Fiction shared the emphasis on allusion and symbol and there was the emergence of unreliable narrators or at least individual narrators with highly individual points of view.

The interest in 'external reality' obvious in nineteenth-century realist fiction was replaced by an emphasis on internal reality - the experience inside the mind. Sometimes this resulted in quite impressionistic writing with a focus on the individual's perception or perspective. It could also lead to an emphasis on the strange mechanism of memory and the individual experience of time passing.

Modernists were interested in really facing up to the 'new'. They wanted to show what they saw being the truly 'real' experience (rather than ideal). The modernists were concerned with considering a world without an 'old-fashioned' God. They criticised traditional values about culture and individual behaviour and wanted to face the loss of innocence caused by the horror of World War 1.

Philosophical, cultural and historical context

Friedrich Nietzsche felt that humankind was being held back by values that had been learnt from religious beliefs. Humankind had progressed as far as it had through the strong conquering the weak (Darwinism) and yet our moral philosophies held that people should be equal; that is, the feeble should have the same rights as the strong. Nietzsche felt that people should instead develop their maximum life potential, untrammeled by the 'slave morality' of the conscience. Only then, by using their 'will to power', would they become fulfilled 'supermen'.

Karl Marx worked on looking at history scientifically, which meant he believed he could predict future stages of history. He studied the 'current' stage in which a small number of capitalists held most of the means of production (such as factories), and said that it was inevitable that this would be overthrown in revolution by the exploited but numerically larger working class. This would result in a conflict-free, communist society.

Sigmund Freud explored the application of scientific principles to the sphere of the mind. He believed that all behaviour had causes and explanations. If these causes could not be found in the conscious mind, then one had to go looking in the 'unconscious' mind. The unconscious mind was like the section of an iceberg hidden underneath the water, and it manifested itself in areas such as dreams. This theory put rational humans at the mercy of unconscious drives (such as sexual urges) and emotions (such as a child's envy of his or her parent) that humans are not even aware of themselves.

The groundbreaking work delivered by these three (as well as parallel developments in science, sociology and the study of language) led to the kinds of writing experiments that were famous in literature from the early twentieth century. It is important to note here the importance of Darwin's work to the dismantling of Victorian certainties. The post-Darwinian world questioned all the stabilisers of Victorian society: religion, social structures and ethics.

Not everybody was enthusiastically modernist. For example, György Lukács, an influential Marxist critic working after the Russian Revolution of 1917, saw the modernist movement as a typical example of a waste of bourgeois leisure time. He thought that a focus on oneself and one's own linguistic experiments led to a lack of commitment to political reality and revolution. Why waste time being radical about a novel, he thought, when you could spend it being radical about bringing down the bourgeoisie? He had no taste for the chaotic and difficult writing of Western modernism, seeing it as essentially elitist.

There was a great deal of fuss about the turn from the nineteenth century into the twentieth century. After all, society wasn't merely clicking over from one century to another, but from one millennium to another. The twentieth century was also much associated with the 'new' because of the enormous acceleration in technology. This growth spurt also brought with it the arms race, and the kind of military technology that caused such unprecedented slaughter in World Wars I and II. The expansion of urban life as opposed to traditional rural life, was also a feature of this period.

Some writers were making forays into modernist styles as early as the late nineteenth century. Henry James became more and more interested in psychological realism in books such as Portrait of a Lady (1881). Thomas Hardy was writing increasingly bleak portrayals of the loss of community in novels such as Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891). This novel actually refers to the 'ache of modernism'. Novels such as these were the trailblazers for the fully developed modern pieces. Writers were also beginning to record aspects of England's colonialist endeavours. This made for a very different theme than that of the social and moral experience of the English. Such writers included Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad and EM Forster. Kipling very much wrote from an imperialist perspective. However, others such as Conrad engaged with and criticised the colonial project.

Characteristics of Modernist Literature

Individualism

In Modernist literature, the individual is more interesting than society. Specifically, modernist writers were fascinated with how the individual adapted to the changing world. In some cases, the individual triumphed over obstacles. For the most part, Modernist literature featured characters who just kept their heads above water. Writers presented the world or society as a challenge to the integrity of their characters. Ernest Hemingway is especially remembered for vivid characters who accepted their circumstances at face value and persevered.

Experimentation

Modernist writers broke free of old forms and techniques. Poets abandoned traditional rhyme schemes and wrote in free verse. Novelists defied all expectations. Writers mixed images from the past with modern languages and themes, creating a collage of styles. The inner workings of consciousness were a common subject for modernists. This preoccupation led to a form of narration called stream of consciousness, where the point of view of the novel meanders in a pattern resembling human thought. Authors James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, along with poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, are well known for their experimental Modernist works.

Absurdity

The carnage of two World Wars profoundly affected writers of the period. Several great English poets died or were wounded in WWI. At the same time, global capitalism was reorganizing society at every level. For many writers, the world was becoming a more absurd place every day. The mysteriousness of life was being lost in the rush of daily life. The senseless violence of WWII was yet more evidence that humanity had lost its way. Modernist authors depicted this absurdity in their works. Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," in which a traveling salesman is transformed into an insect-like creature, is an example of modern absurdism.

Symbolism

The Modernist writers infused objects, people, places and events with significant meanings. They imagined a reality with multiple layers, many of them hidden or in a sort of code. The idea of a poem as a riddle to be cracked had its beginnings in the Modernist period. Symbolism was not a new concept in literature, but the Modernists' particular use of symbols was an innovation. They left much more to the reader's imagination than earlier writers, leading to open-ended narratives with multiple interpretations. For example, James Joyce's "Ulysses" incorporates distinctive, open-ended symbols in each chapter.

Formalism

Writers of the Modernist period saw literature more as a craft than a flowering of creativity. They believed that poems and novels were constructed from smaller parts instead of the organic, internal process that earlier generations had described. The idea of literature as craft fed the Modernists' desire for creativity and originality. Modernist poetry often includes foreign languages, dense vocabulary and invented words. The poet e.e. cummings abandoned all structure and spread his words all across the page.