Modernist Literature - Various Responses to the Concept of Modernism - Book Report/Review Example

Various responses to the concept of Modernism English and American Modernism can be seen as a reaction to the Realist movements of the late nineteenth century. 'Modernism' is a blanket term which encompasses the extensive literary innovations in the first decades of the twentieth century which manifest themselves under the influence of psychoanalysis and other such cultural-historical phenomena. It may also be viewed as a collective term for the remarkable variety of competing groups, movements, and schools in literature, art, and music throughout Europe over the same period: Symbolism, Decadence, Cubism, Expressionism, Imagism, Vorticism, Surrealism and so on. The period expressed a break from the past, as well as from Western civilization's classical traditions. Modern life was more scientific, faster, more technological and more mechanized. James Joyce, who has exerted a profound influence on modern literature was born in Dublin and educated in Jesuit schools. His extremely weak eyesight forced him to hear the world more than to see it, and this is reflected both in Joyce's delicate ear for the nuances and cadences of language and in his predominantly auditory imagery. Early in his life he turned his back on both his native city and his childhood religion, and yet wherever he went he carried with him the vision of his home and the emotions of his faith. Joyce with his highly developed sensitivity was responsive to trends and conflicts - social, moral, intellectual, spiritual, and therefore sought new forms, new languages, in which to project these changing ideas. Joyce's early work Dubliners shows the germ of his later development. The strategy of producing a longer and more complicated text by stringing together a series of formally self-contained units is essential not only to the design of Dubliners, where the structural building blocks are short stories, but also to the increasingly complex episodic structures of A Portrait, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. It should not be misplaced to say that Dubliners is clearly an early piece of modernist literature. In this book, Joyce uses a clear and hard prose. He deals with subjective things, but he presents them with amazing clarity of outline. His writing is characterized by no wastage of words, no amalgamation of irrelevant phrases, complete absence of slosh. The book's modernist characteristics are: uncertainty, particularly in the stories' endings, symbolism, linguistic intensity, an aesthetic rather than a moral focus, linguistic experimentation and a drive to throw off the old in favor of the new and an interest in the internal workings of the individual mind as much as a shared external reality. The first story from Dubliners, The Sisters is full of hidden meanings, indecent suggestion and moral ambivalence. The story Father Flynn's death, narrated by a young boy is prominent more for the questions it raises than the answers it provides. The vocabulary lacks precision and is evasive. For example, it is said that "something" was wrong with the priest but what that "something" was is never revealed. Joyce chooses not to name characters, or describe their actions and while this choice maybe attribute to desire for compactness, it also indicates a decisive move toward the defamiliarization of Russian formalists and Ezra Pound. To distance the death scene and to make it appear vague, Joyce does not depict death literally; it is only spoken about i.e. he 'told' me she died. Death in Dubliners occurs "offstage" spatially and temporally removed from the mourners who must write its narrative. The impact of death comes through as narrative absence as opposed to its traditional depiction as a climactic scene. In A Painful Case Duffy is haunted and unmasked by Mrs. Sinico's suicide four years after their acquaintance. Once again the death act occurs far removed in time and space from its retelling. As Sinico's death is revealed through an obituary far removed from the actual event, Joyce denies both Duffy and the reader direct access to the pivotal death scene though it is the key to our full understanding of the story's kernels. Therefore, Joyce subverts the traditional plot endings. Joyce's story The Dead presents a character, Gabriel Conroy, watching his wife on the stairs as she listens to a singer in another room whom he cannot hear: "he stood stillthere was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of somethingIf he were a painter, he would paint her in that attitudedark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant music he would call the picture if he were a painter." Love here, is tackled through the optic of the nature and structure of the aesthetic. Gabriel is a sophisticated, Europeanized aesthete, who can view love in terms of aesthetic experience. What is interesting is the way in which Gabriel, following in the tracks of the late 19th century Aesthetic Movement associated with Pater and Wilde, breaks down his experience into visual, aural, verbal, symbolic realms. "Joyce demonstrates an interest in the way that experience is brought by senses which are unrelated to each other. On the one hand, there is a suggestion that what we experience as the world is a unity; on the other hand, we experience the world in sensory fragments which have a life, identity or moment of their own. What Joyce shows in this passage, then, is that the Aesthetic moment is always about some deferred totality, not about some fully present thing" (Ayers,David. Modernism: A Short Introduction). This technique is a break from the traditional Victorian style. Victorian narrative is not characterized by absence. Young Joyce recognized quite early on, that the world portrayed by Victorian artists no longer existed. A generation before the ravages of the World War I and its aftermath at Versailles destroyed certainty forever, Joyce understood that reality survived in the interstices alone and not in the writer's depiction of complete realistic surfaces - although from the surfaces of these stories of his, we can indeed recreate a lost way of life in a Dublin long gone. It is the unspoken worlds beneath this surface which constitute reality for Joyce. Joyce has mentioned that Dubliners was written in a language of "scrupulous meanness", meaning that the scanty and flat style was in fact carefully designed to capture the sense of ordinariness and apathy in the lives of the different protagonists. In this sense, the language imitates the consciousness of the people residing in Dublin without actually directly commenting upon it. Repetitive patterns in Eveline emphasize the monotony and limitations of the lives of people and their lack of power to break free. "She sat at the window [] her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne [] she continued to sit by the window, leaning her head against the window curtain, inhaling the odour of dusty cretonne []" However straightforward the realism of the short stories may be, literary critics have also pointed out that there is more Symbolism and Modernism in Dubliners than apparent at first sight. Throughout the book, there are numerous allusions to Irish myths and Christian symbols and some stories even give direct hints that they should not be taken as a realistic account but rather as allegories, like "The Dead", beginning with the sentence "Lily [] was literally run off her feet" It is generally understood that the crisis of Modernism was felt particularly sharply in poetry, because poetry above all genres, tends to experience changes of relationship and belief in a culture at the direct levels of subject-and-object relationship, and at the very base of form and language. T.S. Eliot was one of the most respected poets. The act of the young Eliot's individual talent occurred, as Taine put it, in a particular milieu, and at a "moment" when, on subsequent evidence, English poetry was ready for something new. While Eliot often is associated with the Symbolist-metaphysical tradition, his bold experiments with form, phrasing, and tone helped usher in the Modernist period in American and English letters. In fact, his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," published in its entirety for the first time in Eliot's first volume of poetry in 1917, often is credited by critics as being the first Modernist poem. Several themes permeate "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" that would later come to characterize both Modernist literature specifically and twentieth-century literature in general: particularly alienation and loneliness, the disintegration of culture in bourgeois society, and the fear of aging and mortality. Because Prufrock's specific intent is unspoken, critics have read the poem on many different levels. Allusion-jammed, though Eliot's poetry is, and dealing with complex emotions and complex ideas as he does, the language of his poems is still concrete; the images which he uses are fresh; they are striking and never completely decorative. And so, for instance, in the "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" the evening is described as being spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table. "Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table;" This image is fresh and striking; it is a most unusual kind of image, and the image is also functional: that image describes the passivity of the evening as Prufrock sees it. Prufrock lives in a world in which art and music have become the idle conversation of dilettante women, who are spiritually, sexually, and intellectually dead, who spend their lives in an eternal round of afternoon tea parties, who may talk of art because it is expected that the class to which they belong should know something about it, but for whom the meaning and the vitality of art have long since been drained in the cycle of their teacups. "My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin- [They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"] Do I dare Disturb the universe In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. For I have known them all already, known them all:- Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;" Prufrock also is concerned about his own ability to age with dignity. Ultimately, Prufrock is aware of the absurdity of existence despite his constant fears. He realizes that he is not Hamlet and seems content with his role in life as an inferior being. He seems to have accepted to play a supporting role to the more dynamic men of the world, and even to be a fool at times. "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use,115 Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous- Almost, at times, the Fool." Prufrock's identity crisis is exacerbated by the historical, social, and political upheavals that ripped Europe apart in the early twentieth century. His passivity, his lack of self-confidence, and the cultural squalor created by mediocrity constitute a searing indictment of a man bewildered by a world seemingly beyond his control, who lacks the moral courage to confront the situation, to assert himself and to change it. Prufrock mirrors the hostility and contempt Eliot felt toward modern twentieth century culture; he also depicts the type of individual Eliot felt the modern culture would create. Prufrock is an ineffectual boor whose singular identity is being eroded by the instability of his society; he is a face prepared for other faces. His vision at the end of the poem is one of possible redemption, of "mermaids singing," but his resignation is complete; he does not think that they will sing to him. "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me." English novelist May Sinclair notes Eliot's concern with reality, with his careful presentation "of the street and the drawing-room as they are," as well as "[w]ith ideas ... that are realities and not abstractions...." Thus "Prufrock" presents not only a man in the world but, as James F. Knapp says, "a mind shaped along the lines of [Modernist] depth psychology...." He sees this reflected in the poem by the abandonment of "logical continuity" necessitated by Eliot's material. The radicalness of "Prufrock," according to Knapp, is not simply in its break with poetic tradition, but in its use of old conventions and new ones to keep poetry "in touch with a changing world." Edward Thomas, another modernist poet was more reticent than Eliot in his 'intolerable wrestle/ with words and meanings'. Instead of toying with incoherence in order to reflect a bafflingly complex and fragmented society, he prefers to record individual moods and intuitions hovering at the limit of articulation. As he struggles to bring himself as close as is possible in language to the very grain and texture of experience, he is aware that the words he employs establish a difference between themselves and their object. The opening of Adlestrop is a neglected instance: "Yes, I remember Adlestrop- The name, because one afternoon Of heat the express-train drew up there Unwontedly. It was late June." This poem exemplifies some of the virtues and constraints of a specifically English, modest version of modernism, the hallmark of which is the use of casual, colloquial speech-rhythms and the avoidance of outmoded poetic rhetoric. The regular metre (iambic tetrameter) claims a place for the poem in relation to the main English tradition. There is little 'clarity of statement' in Adlestrop, despite the apparent simplicity of its form. Its 'confidence' is that of an artist whose subject is precisely that collapsing of inner and outer worlds which is believed to characterize the Modernist poem, but whose talent is equal to the task of expression imposed on him by his subject-matter. In the poem both language itself and the world to which it refers are problematic, and the self attenuated to the point of mere existence, present only in the two moments of remembering and seeing. Dismantling romantic sentimentalism, it nevertheless hovers uneasily between a bleak realism, giving voice to the doubts, feelings and searches of a disaffected, even alienated speaker, and the evocation of momentary happiness. Modern technology, noises and people "the express train," "the steam hissed," "the bare platform" are contrasted with an idyllic English scene which culminates in the image of a singing bird. Adlestrop is an updated, modernized version of the Wordsworthian lyric focusing on the traveler's and poet's therapeutic memory of an epiphanic experience. There is even a touch a touch of anamnesis in the subtle hint at a timeless mystical moment. Significantly the pervasive silence punctuated by industrial and 'natural' sounds appears to be charged with profound and elusive meanings. Thus, the poem provokes memories of the Romantic period and its most typical genre, the retrospective lyric. The intertextuality that is present is charged with values, since Wordsworth's brand of Romanticism represents a cherished cultural achievement. But one should not overlook the difference between, let us say, Wordsworth's I wandered as a cloud and Adlestrop. The suggestion of anonymity and even alienation with modern technology discernible at the beginning of Adlestrop is not to be found in the Wordsworth poem. "On the bare platform. What I saw Was Adlestrop-only the name" Even more importantly, a railway journey and its connotations of linearity, rapidity and historical progress are suddenly displaced by and metamorphosed into a circular image signifying timeless, even ecological perfection in the here and now of a natural and cultural environment emphatically linking the earth and the sky, the "haycocks" and the "cloudlets". The image both reproduces and transcends chronological time. "And willows, willow-herb, and grass, And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry, No whit less still and lonely fair Than the high cloudlets in the sky." Despite the praise of a few, until 1932, when literary critic F. R. Leavis singled him out as "an original poet of rare quality" and suggested that he, in "record[ing] the modern disintegration succeeded in expressing in poetry a representative modern sensibility," Thomas had been generally dismissed as a Georgian nature poet (a category that referred to the generally romantic, sentimental poems published in five anthologies between 1911 and 1912; it included Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke, and Walter de la Mare), or a poet of World War I, along with Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. In 1987, J. P. Ward called him a "twentieth-century existentialist" who "is concerned with poetry's and language's difficulty." One can therefore see that Modernism is not restricted to a single genre or mode. Modernism, while recognizably an international movement was not homogenous. The personal and national identities of three writers mentioned are different and the Modernist Movement impacts them differently. However, all of them reject Victorian superficiality and espouse a new language and a new technique to come to terms with the changing times. Read More