Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes a set of cultural tendencies and movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world. The first half of the 20th century is then normally referred to in literary histories as ‘Modernism’, a very general term used to talk about a series of different movements and tendencies (impressionism, expressionism, imagism, futurism, dadaism, surrealism...) that tried to break with old tradition and the realistic concept of art. Modernism challenged the assumption of reality which is at the roots of realism: that there is a common phenomenal world that can be reliably described. Psychoanalysis, Darwinism, Nietzche and Marxism questioned traditional assumptions and so did World War I and the skeptical spirit it brought about. They all helped to shatter traditional beliefs. (((Regardless of the specific year it was produced, modernism is characterized primarily by a complete and unambiguous embrace of what Andreas Huyssen calls the "Great Divide." That is, it believes that there is a clear distinction between capital-A Art and mass culture, and it places itself firmly on the side of Art and in opposition to popular or mass culture. (Postmodernism, according to Huyssen, may be defined precisely by its rejection of this distinction.)))))
The artistic response to all these changes took place both in the realm of form and content. From the point of view of content, the horrors of WW I and the arrival of the ideas mentioned before brought about a general spirit of pessimism, disillusionment and skepticism (reflected in The Waste Land, for instance). There was an important group of American writers (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, e.e.cummings, Hart Crane) who shared this spirit of post-war alienation and lived in
1. HIGH MODERNISM
Just as in painting artists were looking for a new form of expression, in literature writers were trying to experiment and find a new vocabulary and new techniques. Poets dislocated grammar and punctuation looking for new images and ways of expression, and novelists experimented with new points of view and a different conception of time and plot to try to reflect the hidden consciousness of the characters. The term ‘HIGH MODERNISM’ is sometimes used to describe a group of writers particularly interested in this formal revolution. With the exception of William Faulkner, this group is more European-based than American. The two masterpieces in English that best represent this movement are probably T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses, both first published in 1922. These are some of the FORMAL INNOVATIONS introduced by these writers:
- In poetry, the concept of ‘image’ (Imagism): the writer’s response to a visual object or scene.
- Obscurity, opacity. The reader is required to make an effort to understand the works. In Eliot’s and Pound’s poetry, for example, there are all kinds of cultural references the reader must work hard to understand.
- Time is not presented in chronological order. Flashbacks and flash-forwards are used instead.
- Fragmented plots, sometimes without a beginning or an end are also frequent.
- Disappearance of the traditional omniscient narrator in the novel. In their search for different ways to represent reality, they replaced this narrator by partial points of view or by interior monologues or soliloquies that try to reproduce the ‘stream of consciousness’ of the characters. A few theoretical considerations will probably be welcome: bearing in mind the distinction between focalization and narration (‘who sees?’ versus ‘who speaks?’), we can establish different kinds of narrators:
- First person narrator (major participant, as in Huck Finn; minor, as in The Great Gatsby; or even non-participant, as in The Scarlet Letter). In some cases, the narrator is unreliable, and therefore everything that s/he tells is suspect and must be interpreted by the reader (for example, children telling stories where adults do things they don’t really understand. Huck Finn might be a good example).
- Second person narrator. Quite uncommon. An example: Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter Night a Traveller.
- Third person narrator. When the narration is in the third person, the focalization becomes extremely important. We can then talk about
- an omniscient point of view (typical of 19th century realist novels. The voice that tells the story is in total control, knows everything and has authoritative value),
- a dramatic or objective point of view (Hemingway’s short stories: the narrator is like the lens of a camera that simply records what s/he sees), or
- a selected or limited point of view (also called ‘Jamesian’ after Henry James: a character is the ‘focus’ or ‘center of consciousness’, and the reader sees the action through the focus of that character).
- Modernist fiction became extremely interested in characters’ psychology and the concept of ‘stream of consciousness’ that psychologist William James had developed. This term refers to the thoughts, memories and feelings that exist in our mind in what he called the Pre-Speech level. They are not censored, rationally controlled or logically ordered and are formed instead by a method of free association. Modernist writers tried to show the hidden aspects of a character’s personality through the representation of this level of consciousness, and the different techniques they developed were:
- Description: the narrator describes with his/her own language the hidden thoughts of a character.
- Interior Monologue: reproduction of these thoughts in the character’s own language.
- Soliloquy: Its purpose is not only to communicate psychic identity (like the interior monologue), but also to advance the plot. It communicates ideas and emotions which are related to plot and action.
This period has sometimes been described as the ‘coming of age’ of American Literature, and it is certainly an extraordinarily productive time with an outstanding number of excellent writers in English, whether British, Irish or American.
JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941) might the best modernist writer in the English language. Born in
GERTRUDE STEIN (1874-1948) lived in
But the most important poets of the group were EZRA POUND (1885-1972) and T. S. ELIOT (1888-1965), who were both born in
T. S. ELIOT (1888-1965) went to
Other important American poets of this movement are:
· WALLACE STEVENS (1879-1955). Wrote abstract, difficult poetry, with very deep meanings: “Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully”, he said. One of his most famous poems is “
· HILDA DOOLITTLE or H.D. for short (1886-1961) and MARIANNE MOORE (1887-1972) were influenced by Pound and imagism and wrote excellent poetry.
· e. e. cummings (he never wrote capitals in his name) (1894-1962). A member of the ‘Lost Generation’. Innovative verse distinguished for its humor, celebration of love and eroticism, and the experimentation with punctuation and visual format on the page. “O sweet spontaneous”
· WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883-1963). Influenced by Eliot and Pound, but more interested in the language and scenes of everyday life. Warmer feeling for real people and real life. Colloquial language. Easier to understand. “The Young Housewife”, “The Dead Baby”.
► See Poems in “Twentieth Century Poetry”, pp. 177 & 178, by Ezra Pound, H.D. Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens and cummings.
2. THE LOST GENERATION
There was an important group of American writers (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, e.e.cummings, Hart Crane) who shared this spirit of post-war alienation and lived in Paris for some time, who came to be known as the Lost Generation (term used by Gertrude Stein talking to Hemingway). They were ‘lost’ because they had lost their ideals, ‘lost’ to America because they lived abroad, and ‘lost’ because they did not accept older values but couldn’t really find the writer’s place in this new society
FRANCIS SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896-1940) found rapid success in the 20s with his novel This Side of Paradise (1921) and his Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), with which he became the official spokesman of the ‘Jazz Age’. The Great Gatsby (1925) was also received with enthusiastic reviews, but soon afterwards his literary eclipse started. He went to
WILLIAM FAULKNER (1897-1962) is probably the best representative of ‘high modernism’ in the American novel. His use of different narrative voices and focalizations, interior monologues and soliloquies, or use of ‘continuous present’ (mixture of past, present and future actions) make novels like The Sound and the Fury (1929) or As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932) or Absalom, Absalom! (1936) stand out as some of the best of 20th century world literature. Faulkner was also the first writer to create a fictional territory (
ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899-1961) was a very different kind of modernist. He developed a sparse, concise style which he combined with what has been called the ‘Dramatic’ or ‘Objective’ point of view, that is, the perspective of an impartial observer who describes everything from the outside, without explanations or comments. Hemingway says as little as possible, and he then lets the characters speak. Therefore, his use of dialogue becomes fundamental to understand both the action and the characters’ motives. He also described his technique of implying things rather than explaining them using the metaphor of an iceberg (“There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows”). All these techniques are typically modernistic, because they put the reader in an uncomfortable position: he/she has to make an effort to guess what exactly is going on and what the implications and possible deeper meanings are. Hemingway lived in Paris between 1921 and 1928 and this is the time when he wrote some of his best short stories (“Hills like White Elephants” and “The Killers” among them), collected in In Our Time and Men Without Women. His experience in
SHERWOOD ANDERSON (1876-1941) was a precursor of Modernism. Considered by Faulkner “the father of [his] generation of writers”, his best work is
JOHN DOS PASSOS (1896-1970). A left-wing radical in the beginning, he combined a realistic use of language with modernist techniques to try to show the daily life of citizens in Manhattan Transfer (1925) or the evolution of the recent history of his country in U.S.A., a trilogy that included The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932) and The Big Money (1936). He shared with the ‘Lost Generation’ the spirit of disillusionment, with the naturalists before him a strong sense of fate and a realistic style, and with the modernists the ideas about the difficulty of perceiving reality. His solution to try to reflect the complex reality of life is to use strategies coming from the movies, like the combination of whole scene ‘shots’ with ‘close-ups’ to show the feelings of individual people. He also used ‘collage’ techniques, mixing popular songs with newspaper headlines, phrases from advertisements, short biographies of contemporary public figures and impressionistic visions of reality (that he called ‘camera eye’).
3. OTHER WRITERS
There are other excellent writers who shared the spirit of the times but were not part of any group and did not attempt a formal revolution. In the United States, these are some important poets:
· CARL SANDBURG (1878-1967) is probably the clearest heir of the Emerson-Whitman spirit, and shares with them his faith in
· ROBERT FROST (1874-1963). Very popular poet. A farmer in
And some American novelists:
SINCLAIR LEWIS (1885-1951). A socialist, his writing is more realistic than modernistic, but shows a new spirit: instead of portraying the typical realistic fight for life, his characters have everything they need from a material point of view, but they show a kind of spiritual dissatisfaction.
JOHN STEINBECK (1902-1968). A late heir of the Naturalist movement, his work is a response to the Depression era after the 1929 Stock Market Crash. The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is probably the book that has best pictured the spirit of the times. It’s another story of a trip to the west and a sweet-and-sour portrayal of the American Dream, a mixture of realism and deep concern about other human beings. Also a Nobel Prize, other important works of Steinbeck are Of Mice and Men (1937) and East of Eden (1952). He is part of a movement called Proletarian Realism, to which JAMES AGEE (1909-1955) and MICHAEL GOLD (1896-1967) also belong.
Apart from the ‘sacred cows’ (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner) and the writers described above, there are other novelists that don’t fit exactly within any of the movements mentioned but that should at least be mentioned: THOMAS WOLFE (1900-1938), whose autobiographic ‘anti-novels’ were years ahead of his time; HENRY MILLER (1891-1980), a big rebel whose ‘obscene’ novels, like Tropic of Cancer (1934), could not be published in the USA until the 60s, when he became a kind of guru for the ‘beats’ and ‘hippies’; and NATHANIEL WEST (1902-1940), whose Days of the Locust (1939) is an inversion of the American Dream set in Hollywood.
In the American South, a movement called ‘The Fugitives’ (J, C. RANSOM, ALLEN TATE AND ROBERT PENN WARREN) criticized the business and commercial base of American society and praised the agrarian traditions of the Old South. Also from that part of the country, KATHERINE ANN PORTER (1894-1980) combined the false world of dreams and fantasies with the cruelty of real experience. In her works, tradition and the nostalgic longing for a romantic past create a suffocating atmosphere.
- D. H.
- E. M. FORSTER (1879-1979) wrote ironic, well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy and also the attitudes towards gender and homosexuality in early 20th-century British society. A Room with a View (1908), A Passage to India (1924), Howard's End (1910).
- JOSEPH CONRAD (1857-1924) is another important literary figure, frequently considered a precursor of Modernist literature. Born in
- EVELYN WAUGH (1903-1966) wrote satires of British high society. ALDOUS HUXLEY (1894-1963) is the author of the dystopia Brave New World (1932). KATHERINE MANSFIELD (1888-1923) was born in
Poets from the
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1865-1939), an excellent Irish poet and dramatist, he has been considered one of the twentieth century's key English language poets. Received the Noble Prize in