(essay on Modernism)

This essay discusses in brief British Modernism and Modernist trends in literary works. The discussion on literary works will examine only a few aspects of Modernism and will not be a comprehensive assessment.

To understand Modernism – British Modernism, in particular – it is helpful to revisit the last decade of the nineteenth century. Science had the authority previously held by religious institutions. The tone of the period was of rationality and reason. In “Modern Mind”, McFarlane confirms that “the nineteenth century (was) a positivist universe“ (74). The society was “a whole which is not an accumulation of self-willed individuals but an ordered organization ruled by general and definable laws and within which the chief and indisputable agency was reason.” (74) Positivism, McFarlane wrote, “(governed) the field of social philosophy, naturalism in the field of literature.” (73)
In literature, naturalism seeks to replicate everyday reality. Positivism presumes truth to be based on sense experience. Since the only phenomena that can be understood are those that pertain to the senses, reality was consequently limited to physical reality. Governed by such reasoning, the society cannot admit the possibility of yet unattained knowledge. If it is not yet known, it is not worth knowing. The approach to social sciences and liberal arts was scientific in the sense that only physically observable facts can be true. This way of thinking must have proven particularly harmful in the period following World War I.

The war was the first to happen on such a massive scale, and this was difficult to comprehend even with the assistance of reason. Science, which was thought of as having brought about development, was proven to be as insufficient as religion. It is also inevitable that subject citizens rethought the relationship between individuals and the nation. The war was, after all, a clash between nations. How far were individuals implicated? Could this be validated? These are difficult questions to answer, particularly if one insists on employing the method of scientific enquiry prevalent in the period preceding the First World War. If scientific reasoning – that moves from collecting physical data to the formulation of theory / hypothesis – was insufficient, philosophical thinking must have proven heartening. Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ, carrying his philosophy of transvaluation, was published in 1888. Transvaluation contrasts, among other things, the Western society and its Christian traditions with the tenets of Buddhism and life in early Greek civilization. There is, in the explication of Buddhist philosophy and Greek civilization, an emphasis on the subjectivity of the individual. While the proposition for individual subjectivity might constitute a life option in the period before the Great War, in the time following, the idea was likely to have proven appealing. External order, as the War demonstrated, had disintegrated. Individuals needed now to turn to themselves for order.

The development of technology in communication made it possible for ideas – new ideas, such as those of Nietzsche’s – to travel far and fast. McFarlane admits “Nietzsche was almost unknown before May 1888, when he was made the subject of a series of lectures in Copenhagen by…Georg Brandes. …(T)he word spread…to Germany’s avant-garde and then to Europe at large.” He says further that “(Nietzsche’s) ruthless questioning of the nineteenth’s century’s idees recus, his total repudiation of traditional morality…won a response from the generations of the fin-de-siecle and the First World War which gave him a uniquely influential role in the Modernist period.” (78)
It is this, really – the need to re-establish order in individual scales (merely because external order was so unsteady and unrealiable) – that characterizes the works of art later considered to belong to the tradition of Modernism. When individuals turn to themselves to create individual order, they take in the chaos and mess of external reality, rearrange and restructure them, and give them individual significance. This individual significance constitutes an internal essence – of an individual’s experience of life – that replaces the external order. One agrees then with McFarlane when he concludes “…the defining thing in the Modernist mode is not so much that things fall apart but that they fall together…In Modernism, the center is seen exerting not a centrifugal but a centripetal force; and the consequence is not disintegration but (as it were) superintegration.” (92)

Fletcher and McFarlane mention ambiguity as characteristic of Modernist drama in “Modernist Drama: Origins and Patterns”. Ambiguity is present as one of the thematic concerns, but it is also evident in the form and presentation of the plays. This characteristic corresponds to the claim for subjectivity discussed earlier. If individuals seek for order inwardly, there is no central, absolute, external order. Consequently, the standard for morals and meaning(s) of life, if any, is ambiguous. In its complexity, Modernist drama is a reflection and a comment on, this condition.

Fletcher’s essay quotes the episode in Waiting for Godot in which Estragon, having loosened the rope from his trousers to hang himself, has his trousers pooled around his ankles. He never manages to hang himself; the rope snaps. This is an event that is neither comedic nor tragic. The situation is ambiguous; one may laugh, one may take pity. Martin Esslin would later describe the situation as absurd – presumably a characteristic Modernist situation – in which there is emphasis in the uncertainty of things and where any interpretation is subjective at best.

“Tradition and Individual Talent” is Eliot’s attempt to clarify the orientation of Modernist poetry. He speaks of literature as a tradition that is compromised whenever a new work is introduced into the canon. “Art never improves,” he writes, “but…the material of art is never quite the same.” (39) Certainly writing from different time periods and locations, every poet has unique, particular concerns to be introduced into their poetry. Yet differences in concerns do not mean that poetry of a particular period or location is better than others; if the chain of tradition is readjusted with the introduction of new works, than a new work of art can only be measured in value based on how it responds to the existing canon. After all, “the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.” (40) It is only in the reinterpretation of the past on the basis of contemporary tendencies will the poet be able to realize his “contemporaneity.”

Modernist poetry has often been defined against the form of its predecessors. The definition of Modernist poetry as not being written in the ‘traditional’ verse from and to have ceased to employ an extravagant diction and subject matter is to set Modernist poetry in contrast to poetry of earlier times. Hough discusses the Modernist tendency to utilize the lyric form. The lyric form – in contrast to the epic form, for instance, which speaks of collective morals – explores the inner dialogues of the poet. This tendency corresponds too with the earlier discussion on the emphasis on subjectivity in the beginning of the Twentieth century.

Yeats’ The Circus Animals’ Desertion is an example of Modernist poetry. In the poem, the speaker speaks of having written two plays with protagonists from the Irish mythology – Oisin and Cathleen nee Houlihan. He confesses to have found parallels between the myths and his life experiences. What the poem discusses then is the rewriting of already existing myths with a contemporary perspective. In this way, contemporary perspectives are elucidated in a familiar context. The poem is at once public and personal: the epic element of the mythology belongs to the public, but there is a personal significance that the speaker gathers from these mythological tales so that he is able to weave his stories into them. The poem is a part of Yeats’ socio-cultural context, but is also a response to an already existing cannon – the one Eliot speaks of. The Circus’ Animals Desertion is also a lyric poem where it derives private meaning from mythological tales.

Of the Modernist novel, Woolf writes, “the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it: life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

Life is not solid; it is made so by one’s acquisition of and insistence on routines that systematize time into meaningful sections. If fiction is structured to mirror this systematization then (to Woolf) the writer has fallen into the trap of considering as real what is really the illusion of life. This kind of fiction resembles, rather than explains, life. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway shows characters inferring other people’s personality, motives and intentions from their speeches, their acts, and what have been said about them by other characters. The ‘real’ person can never be known, because s/he is the total of everything that s/he says, does, thinks and feels. While this is something that will never be fully known to anyone – not even to the person himself. The book carries only descriptions of feelings that exist and go away, things that strike one as ridiculous when they happen (when the first thing clarissa remembers about Peter are remarks on cabbages), or when a particular event results in a sudden understanding (the moment Clarissa thinks of Septimus’ death). Life as described in a Modernist novel is never wholly comic or tragic (similar to the way it is represented in the Modernist drama), never fully governed by a particular purpose. The stream of consciousness replaces the chronological plot, which is seen as a human device. Plot, like daily routines, is the creation of human imagination to apprehend the chaos of real life, structuring it into tidiness.

To return to the earlier idea of subjectivity as characteristic of Modernism or Modernist tendencies, what really makes human beings distinct from each other is the internal processess of the mind. There are, for every individual, a public and a private self. The public self is of course one that is publicly shared, the self that one has chosen to present to the world. The private self incorporates desires, motives, and reasonings that are known only to the self, unknown to anybody else. In insisting to place emphasis on the processess of human mind in the writing of fiction, Woolf chooses to call attention to human subjectivity. It is this, the insistence on human subjectivity, that most illustrates the works of the Modernists.



Works Cited:

Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. London: Faber & Faber, 1975. 37-43.

McFarlane, James and John Fletcher. “Modernist Drama: Origins and Patterns.” Modernism: 1890 – 1930. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane. Penguin: London, 1976. 499 – 513.

McFarlane, James. “The Mind of Modernism.” Modernism: 1890-1930. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane. London: Penguin, 1976.

Woolf, Virginia. “Chapter 13: Modern Fiction.” Modern Fiction. London: Harvest, 2002