Explanation: Modernism
I hardly consider myself an expert on the movement, but I am certainly a fan, if only for the wonderful writing of Virginia Woolf. So what is modernism?
Well, to put it into a historical context, it was a movement in literature and the other arts, beginning just before the turn of the twentieth century and lasting until the start of the second world war. It came after the literature of the Victorian age, which generally featured idealised versions of life in which the good people were good, worked hard and got their reward at the end, and the bad people were bad, and got their just-desserts.
All very nice, but not very realistic, is it? So then we had the short-lived Realist movement, an attempt to portray objects exactly as they appeared in life, without embellishment. George Eliot was apparently a proponent of this movement and, although I’m sorry to say I haven’t yet read any of her work, I must admit it sounds a little boring, at least compared to Modernism.
Modernism then: I think it can best be described as a celebration of the mundane, the everyday. There aren’t any heroes or villians in modernist literature, no black-and-white saintly goodliness or irredeemable evil; just ordinary people in all the shades of grey they come.
Modernist literature often examines and evaluates what it means to be an ordinary human and, even without epic plots or even linear narratives, writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce got a surprising amount of mileage out of this. Take Joyce’s Ullysses for example: it’s a 933 page book following the very ordinary actions of two ordinary men during a single ordinary day, and yet, somehow, not only is it considered one of the greatest works of Modernist literature, but one of the greatest works of any kind of literature (but I’ll return to that in a later post, since I haven’t finished reading it yet).
Now I’m going to try to answer a difficult question: Is Modernist literature still relevant?
To answer this you must first consider why it was relevant at its creation, why a need was felt for this celebration of the mundane, for this re-examination of the human condition. There were several factors that made it relevant. One of these was the First World War. While I can’t say for certain why this specifically was a factor, I can tell it definitely was, for mentions of war crop up so often in the works of Modernist literature, particularly those of Virginia Woolf, who was terribly afraid of the impending Second World War. And it’s not surprising that this should be a factor in everything produced afterwards: I can only imagine how shook up everyone must have been after that global conflict, how shocked, how they would have needed to pick up all the pieces and examine them, examine themselves, try to explain why it had happened, why so many had killed so many.
Incidentally, there’s a wonderful line in Ulysses that illustrates this theme in which a charcter (Stephen Dedalus) wonders “how can people aim guns at each other? Sometimes they go off. Poor kids.”
The second, equally important factor in the development of Modernism, was the new ideas that emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century, particularly those of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Charles Darwin. If you’re unfamiliar with any of these, here’s a brief run down of their most important ideas, as relevant to Modernism:
Marx: The nature of a person is determined by their social and historical context.
Freud: The workings and personality of the conscious mind are the result of the unconscious mind.
Darwin: Everything we are is the result of natural selection, not design.
Naturally, you can see that people would be a little shaken after hearing all these, when for hundreds of years they had believed they determined their own character and actions, and the rest was up to God. People needed to re-evaluate themselves and their place in the world, and Modernism was the vehicle with which they did this. Now I shan’t bore you with a long list of all the techniques the Modernist writers used, and why they used them, I shall just mention one of the most prominent: Stream-of-consciousness.
Stream-of-consciousness, as the name implies, seeks to recreate the exact thoughts of a character in writing. As you might expect, this can get a little confusing, with all the disjointedness and random association of a person’s thought, but at the same time it’s exciting; it’s very fast-paced, it flows quite naturally, and it creates a greater connect to the character, since you’re being given their thoughts directly, not second-hand through speech or narrative. It also relates to the influential ideas of Freud about the importance of the unconscious mind in what we consciously think.
Modernism, however, as I have already said, came to an end with the start of World War II. Understandable really: James Joyce was half-blind by this time, Virginia Woolf had drowned herself, and everyone else presumably had things other than writing literature on their mind. Furthermore, Modernism had always been characterised by a kind of pessimism, which just didn’t chime with the post-war optimism everyone felt as they endeavoured to take all the energy used to kill each other and put it into rebuilding countries.
So, to return to my earlier question: Is Modernism still relevant? In my opinion it entirely is; human nature will always be a fascinating subject, and no other movement examines it in such minute detail. I also feel it is important to celebrate the mundane from time, to look at the beauty of our surroundings, without inventing epic fantasies and symbolic heroes. But I am sure there’s those that would disagree, on account of the archaic language, the disjointed narratives and the sheer ordinariness of the depicted events.
Whatever your view on the relevance of Modernist literature, you could do a lot worse than reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Even if you think such novels are outdated, you will find it difficult to deny the beauty of her writing, the elegant way she captures and describes every day emotions.
(Most of the information for this essay came from here and here the rest was from Wikipedia and those times I paid attention in A-level literature.)
Tags: Darwin, Freud, history, James Joyce, Marx, Modernism, Ulysses, Virginia Woolf
