The Status of Literature in the Modern Society - Essay Example

Literary Status in Modern Society Table of Contents Introduction The relationship between modernity insociety and aesthetic activity like literature or art is a fascinating topic that spans a variety of concerns. Since the nineteenth century, the development of science and an industrial capitalism has had an enormous effect on not only people’s lifestyles but also their sense of cultural value in the modern society. Utilitarianism emerged as the dominant ideology of the industrial middle class and reducing the status of a work of art as little more than another basic commodity. According to renowned critic Terry Eagleton, contrary to their claim to be a ‘representative’ of humankind speaking with the voice of the people, Romantic writers existed more and more on the margins of a society which was no longer inclined to pay high wages to self-proclaimed or insinuated ‘prophets.’1 Such a passionate idealism of Romantic writers made the gap between poetic vision and social and political activity wider. At the beginning of the twentieth century, this material civilization provided an affluent and materially accessible society. Yet, it also brought on a new desolation of the spirit that cast its shadow on the industrial society in both physical and spiritual aspects. Another contributor to this desolation of spirit could be found in the ‘failure of religion’ that occurred in conjunction with the new sciences. In the Victorian age, religion, which had provided people with a mental fallback position, lost its previous unquestioned ideological dominance for the majority of people living in this time period. In other words, under these two influences of scientific development and religious/social change, many experienced ideological chaos. Therefore, in order to put order to the chaos, artists attempted to identify their creative activities with an effective form of ideological control over societal concerns. However, we can find a discrepancy between the status of literature and art that modernists highlighted and the social value of literary and art works in capitalist society. This essay will be devoted to analyzing the status of art and literature of the modern age. In other words, how did artists build up the position of themselves and that of art in society? Then, it will address the discrepancy between the status of literature and art that modernists, especially high modernists, highlighted and the actual social demand. It will conclude with a discussion of the significance of literature and art in the modern society. The Development of Modernism In the late nineteenth century, the organization of social and cultural life in Britain shifted severely as a result of increased social mobility with the introduction of the middle class, technical complexity with the advent of complicated machinery, and social diversity as the result of increased colonialisation. These radical changes contributed significantly to the dissolution of the forms of ideology and belief that had sustained society throughout its earlier history. While rationalization and utilitarianism have been respected as ideas, they led to a mode of thinking in which intelligence and culture became underestimated and unappreciated. In other words, literature and art that contained creative and imaginative characteristics tended to become alienated from the social system. As a result, people were being deprived of ways to creatively and positively express their irrational feelings such as fear or desire. However, artists had never relied on existing subjective techniques and embraced the challenge of using objective expression to appeal to man’s rational nature. The resulting work expressed a sense of crisis in thought that the development of the mass culture, hungry in its pursuit of profit, was neglecting. Therefore, these artists and writers attempted to make a distinction between high culture and low culture by keeping intelligence and creativity a mainstay of their efforts. Moreover, these artists felt disgust for the traditional aesthetic expressions in literary or art works as a means of revealing the world emerging around them. It was felt that the more traditional forms of art and literature were not capable of meeting the challenges faced in the obvious corruption of modern political regimes or in the cruel and deadly realities seen in the enormous number of war victims following World War I. They also recognized that existing forms and styles could not allow them to appeal their thought and mind to the modern public, which had fallen out of touch with the more traditional methods of expression. In other words, modernists such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot rejected Romanticism as incapable and inadequate to modern needs and instead proposed new and unconventional techniques for poetry such as a free verse or rich allusions. The Modern Style All the complexity and significance of the modernistic idea of style seems to be summed up in T.S. Eliot’s famous poem The Waste Land. This poem deals directly with the decline of civilization and the resulting impossibility of recovering meaning in life. In this poem, Eliot alludes to and quotes from various classic works and myths such as Greek mythology, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare and so on. These allusions to various classical works are referred in a seemingly fragmentary form that lends significance to the meaning of the poem as it is in this fragmentary approach that Eliot is able to make a comment on the nature of modern society in general. Rather than focusing on the words of the poem itself, Leavis sees the significance of The Waste Land as residing principally in the disorganization of the poem.2 By definition, a wasteland denotes an area that has been devastated spiritually, emotionally, physically and culturally. In short, Eliot attempted to reveal the complication involved in the lapse of attention given to mentality and culture in the modern capitalist society. Moreover, Leavis phrases the modern predicament as a breach of continuity and an uprooting of life as is expected in a wasteland. He insists that a major cause of this uprooting lies in the incessant rapid change that characterizes the Machine Age.3 An important point brought out regarding Eliot’s poem is its strange disconnection with nature, a statement that could be made of modern society as it made its transition from a mostly agrarian society to an urban society, from the old ways of life to the new. This can be seen in Eliot’s poem through the disjointed, confused accumulation of traditional stories and myths. Additionally, it can be said that Eliot, in this poem, intends not only to depict the chaotic situation of the modern civilization but also to urge us to reaffirm the significance of cultural tradition in the modern society. His idea of succession of tradition does not mean to recognize classic and old works as heritages, which are cut off from the present, nor to protect them from extinction. It is defined in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ as follows: No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artist. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.4 Although this citation is quite long, it illustrates adequately the interrelation between the present and the past, and the fluidity of tradition. Eliot exhorts that a poet has to be aware of tradition when writing a poem. According to his writings, he felt a tradition is not acquired unconsciously but is like an image which is emerged in artificial perspective. In other words: The time is now propitious, as he guesses, The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, Endeavours to engage her in caresses Which still are unreproved, if undesired. Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference. (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Enacted on this same divan or bed; I who have sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead.).5 It can be said that Tiresias personifies Eliot’s dilemma between his attempt of a unification of the modern and traditional world as a solution to social fragmentation. This attempt to unification of the world can be shown from Eliot’s note on the character. Eliot explains it as follows; Tiresias as an observer instead of as a character is “the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.”6 As is indicated in this quote, it is in the body of this character alone that the reader is able to see modern commentary on social aspects of life in the figure of a traditional character who both reminds us that social ills are not new concepts as well as provides hope for a revival of moral outrage sufficient to bring about societal change.7 This disjointed, cerebral approach to poetry represented a fundamental shift away from the traditional methods that was suited to the new era. On the other hand, such experimental introduction of new technique and form brought the fact that a work of art of modernism, in particular poetry, is not created for the public but rather for the elite. Through this motion, Modernist art became identified as high art. As Leaves points out, the erudition and the richness of literary citations and allusions limited the range of readers.8 As Modernism continued to grow out of the dislocation and destruction of the war years, the works produced continued to pull together fragments of bygone eras in an attempt to create a new life of the fragments.9 However, by pulling piecemeal from these previous texts, the reader was required to have a full knowledge of the original version to fully appreciate the effect of the fragmented parts. In addition, the advent of mass production had the effect of creating a thorw away society in which consumers began expecting all things to be presented to them clearly, succinctly and without effort on their part, something Modern Art worked directly against. Artist’s commitment to social and political activities In making the transition into the modern period, authors and artists took on a new political agenda as well as a new voice and direction. Although the art of the past had dedicated itself somewhat to the societal and political concerns of their day, they did so in a more abstract, suggestive manner. The new voice of the Modernists directly focused on these ideas, working to illustrate the chaos they saw occurring around them in both arenas. Yet, even in this time period, the function of poetry remained a much discussed and debated topic. Eliot himself wrote on the subject: “One might take up the various kinds of poetry, one after another, and discuss the social function of each kind in turn without reaching the general question of what is the function of poetry as poetry.”10 In discussing the various roles poetry plays in society, Eliot condenses its purpose down to pleasure first, “communication of some new experience, or some fresh understanding of the familiar, or the expression of something we have experienced but have no words for”11 which must necessarily be unique to each society in order to convey the depth of meaning intended. Through this definition, then, it becomes obvious that a change in voice and style for poetry was necessary as the world emerged from World War I into the almost fully mechanized world of the Industrial society. The commitment of the artist to the social and political well-being of society grew as a natural consequence of the modern age in which people were seeking a redefinition of everything they had thought they knew. As was described by the poet Ezra Pound, the practice of writing poetry was a means of discovering himself, a quest for the real as the poet worked to throw off the masks he had been obliged to wear in a search for true self-expression free of the influences of the world around him.12 This individual identity is necessarily an accumulation of the various great cultures of the past, but only accumulated in a fragmentary form which varies from person to person. As has been illustrated through the works of Eliot, it became the task of the artist to put these fragments together in such a way that a new meaning and purpose could be attained that met the unique challenges and concerns of the modern world, enabling the individual to finally achieve a new acceptance of himself and clear placement of himself within this new world view. As a result of this working out of the individual mind, the artists and poets of the Modern age reflect a new dedication to the exploration of the major social and political questions of their time. While the poets of the postwar era sought to find meaning in their experiences and devastating new realizations, other new writers and artists were able to find a voice, particularly women and minority groups who had been previously suppressed as the world sought new meaning.13 The new voices that rose up out of this time period directly addressed the concerns of the city – poverty, hunger, homelessness, meaningless labor, factory work, mechanized thought and the dissolution of the family unit – not only because these were the concerns of the time, but because they were the direct concerns of the authors and artists involved. Conclusion In considering the relationship between artistic or cultural activity and society, we will find that artists always face issues regarding the discrepancy between the value of their works of art in society, which the artist demands, and the actual function of the artwork in society. Probably, as Auden suggests, there might not be art that can fit both artistic and social purposes. However, then the question remains what is the significance of art and literature in society? Before estimating aesthetic value or effectiveness of a work of art, it should be recognized that there exists ‘something’ in a work of art that does not necessarily exist elsewhere. ‘Something’ usually refers to a sense of primitive and human feeling or energy which the individual has experienced or longed for in his life. It is not a concrete belief or idea. It is not a subjective feeling which cannot be shared with others, but is instead a shared feeling among people who experience it in the same community or period. This ‘something’ embodied in a creative work works on the mind of the individual who brings into existence a creative work and then as it is interpreted by the reader capable of understanding it. If this interaction between a creative work and the mind of the individual comes into effect, this creative work is recognized as a work of art. This interaction can be identified with the ‘Structure of Feeling’ addressed by Williams. However, while Williams pays attention to the significance of ‘Structure of Feeling’ in the public in a specific age, ‘something’ can exist in everyone and in every age, as well as in differing ages, although because experiences, symbols and other contexts are not shared, neither does the meaning, emotion or energy remain the same when the work transfers from one culture to another geographically or chronologically. Works Cited Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd Ed. Oxford: Blackwells, 1996. Eliot, T.S. On Poetry and Poets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1943. Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and Individual Talent.” (1919). Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber, 1951. Eliot, Thomas. Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1963. Leavis, F.R. New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary Situation. London: Chatto & Windus, 1932. Persoon, James. Modern British Poetry: 1900-1939. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999. Sutton, Walter. Twentieth Century Views: Ezra Pound. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963. Weiskel, Portia Williams. “On the Writings of T.S. Eliot.” Bloom’s BioCritiques. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003. Read More