Literary Modernism: Its Concerns

30th Aug 2005

Literary Modernism: Its Concerns and Inter-Disciplinary Roots

Graham Hough, in his book Image and Experience: Studies in a Literary Revolution (1960), writes:
The years between 1910 and the Second World War saw a revolution in the literature of the English language as momentous as the Romantic one of a century before…[But it] has not yet acquired a name (Faulkner, ix).
This certainly is an interesting observation by a major critic in 1960. The revolution in literature (and also in art) during the period 1900-1939 was a fact which no art connoisseur or literary critic will deny if she sees the Cubist paintings of Pablo Picasso, and reads the poems of Pound and Eliot and the novels such as Ulysses, Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. These works register a clear paradigm shift in the very mode of _expression. Graham Hough’s statement means that the name modern is an unlikely appellation for an era and for that reason, finding a new name is necessary. In its adjectival form, modern is the antonym of traditional. That is to say modern has to be understood as a binary of traditional. In the historical context, most of the eras styled themselves as modern, meaning forward-looking and avant-garde, in order to distinguish themselves from their previous periods. It may be remembered that in the fifth century B.C, the Athenian tragedian Euripides (484-406) was called a modern, though contemptuously, by his contemporaries for his irreverential and unconventional treatment of myths and gods in his plays. In that sense, the twentieth century British writers distinguished themselves from their Victorian counterparts by calling themselves moderns. But they were in need of a name all the same. But the name stuck, and the adjective modern meaning contemporary and avant-garde in the general sense curiously became a term descriptive of the period between 1900 and 1939 in a particular sense.
Assigning characteristics to a particular period is generally an after-thought, dictated, as it were, by pedagogic convenience and scholarly systematization. Again, a pat definition of an age, though it may appear broadly convincing and homogeneous, does not necessarily encompass the less pronounced, but by no means less important, voices of that age. Again, whether the spirit of an age shapes the sensibility of its major writers or the major writers, while pursuing their individualistic, innovative (and sometimes super realistic) modes of _expression endow the age with its peculiar characteristics, will always remain a debatable issue. Yet again, the possibility that both the assertions may be equally valid or complementary to each other cannot be ruled out.
Equally difficult it is to find a name for a particular age or period. The characteristics of an age are supposed to be reflected in the appellation of that age, though there cannot be a valid reason to suppose that the name is the mirror, which reflects all the trends of that age. This general arbitrariness of taxonomy -of fixing and conflating characteristics and names- becomes more noticeable in the context of Modern Age. That is because, the word “modern” while denoting a particular age, a period in the intellectual history of certain nations in general and the western civilization in particular, carries with it the sense of ‘making it new’, an implication of the avant-garde and a deliberate distancing on the part of certain writers and artists from the dominant prevailing tradition with a view to introducing the unconventional in art and literature. The former, here, refers to what we understand by Modernism, and the latter to what we mean by Modernity, the noun form of the adjective modern. The former is time-specific, to some extent, area-specific, a proper noun, whereas the latter is universal, a common noun, descriptive of an eccentric, experimental tendency. But when we talk of the Modern Age, that is, the first four decades of 20th century in the western culture, we have to take both the implications as valid. Modernism is a versatile signified, an omnibus term incorporating the descriptive and ascriptive senses of modern. When we say T.S.Eliot is a modern poet, we mean both the implications of the term modern. That is to say, he is avant-gardist and modernist at the same time. That is to say, the writers like Pound, Joyce and Eliot have introduced such innovative techniques as would appear modern for all time to come. They have, to a great extent, succeeded in capturing the altered condition of modern man. While discussing modern fiction, John Orr writes:
It still continues to surprise us. It still fragments, shocks and uncovers. Through its fluid mixture of tenses, narrators and styles the modernist novel brings home to us the fragilities of our space-time continuum, the fragility of our uncertain selfhood, and the evil ruptures of history in a century of war and apocalypse (Coyle 621).
Orr’s observations are true for modernist art and poetry as well. With the progress of the eventful 20th century, the plight of man as a thinking being and a social being has remained more or less the same. The fragmentation of self, the loss of innocence and its resultant alienation appear almost irreversible. They have come to stay.
Galsworthy and D.H.Lawrence were contemporaries. But literary critics consider Lawrence modern and Galsworthy Victorian. In this case, they take the form, technique and the subject matter of their novels into consideration while determining their respective sobriquets. Galsworthy subscribed to the typically Victorian attitude to literature as a transparent medium through which the writers would establish a meaningful rapport with their readers and improve their moral standard, and distanced himself from the new knowledge that had already made inroads into the popular domain. He found fault with Charles Dickens for straining the credulity of the readers by introducing so many coincidences and improbable situations in his novels. For Galsworthy, anything that is not immediately believable and morally uplifting is not acceptable. On the other hand, Lawrence considered that sort of adherence to reality and moral code delimiting.
Before attempting to bring out the salient features of modernism, it has to be made clear that the features we call indubitably modernist are not prominently or uniformly present in all of the major writers who were active during the first four decades of the twentieth century. Writers like G.B. Shaw, Henry James, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy and D.H.Lawrence, to quote a few, were transitional figures who traversed both the Victorian and the Modern ages. Some of their works clearly manifest their quarrel with conservative norms we generally associate with Victorianism. They also made insightful use of the new knowledge, new complexities that had entered into the world’s repertoire from science, psychoanalysis, social and political philosophies, and anthropology in some of their works, but they did not depart significantly from their inherited modes of _expression in their other works. The writers such as Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T.S.Eliot, Virginia Woolf in literature and Pablo Picasso in art figure more prominently in any discussion on modernism because of their radical and deliberate departure from the conventional form and techniques.
While discussing literary modernism, it is safe to foreground those works that unmistakably represent the characteristics of a new age from an experimental perspective, in unconventional forms and modes, marking a radical break with the past in order to “make it new.”
We are more or less aware of the creative plurality of an age, which cannot be assimilated into a single most dominant voice. Different voices and narrative styles exist side by side in tension, in contradistinction, in mutual antagonism, that too simultaneously. The continuing traditional forms in the twentieth century serve as backdrops against which the newness of modernism becomes more pronounced.
There are divergent opinions about the beginning and duration of the Modern Age. Some say it began with the end of the Victorian Age, i.e., 1901, and continued till the beginning of the Second World War in 1939. Some say it ended in 1930. Yet there are others who contend that Modernism has a life span of just twenty years, from 1910 to 1930. There are eminent scholars like Richard Ellmann who locate the starting point of Modernism in the last decade of the 19th century. Taking all facts into consideration, it is reasonable to say that the Modern Age began in the last decade of 19th century and ended with the beginning of the Second World War in 1939.
Dates become significant only if they are qualified by, and coincide with, landmark events capable of defining that era. Events could be political, economic, literary, or any other, which are capable of causing a radical changeover from one mode of _expression to another, from one dominant world-view or attitude to another by supplying adequate incentive and raison d’etre for the same. Most often a landmark event, such as the publication of books and new findings in science, psychology or social science, takes time to mature into a worldview and become a powerful source of influence. For example, Charles Darwin published his findings on the descent of man from the apes and the survival of the strongest animals in the process of natural selection in the mid-nineteenth century, but it took nearly fifty years for the world to take full cognizance of this finding. That was because, those scientific findings were made to look like mere assumptions, not an incontrovertible scientific fact by the conservative and religious people of his time. Even the contemporary scientific community was skeptical about Darwin’s findings about the evolution of man.
Like wise, Karl Marx wrote his Communist Manifesto in the mid-nineteenth century, and Das Kapital in the second half of 19th century. The practical power of Marx’s thought as an alternative political system was felt when it inspired the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in the early 20th century .The scientific findings of Darwin and the sociological ideas of Marx took time to enter the collective unconscious of mankind and to influence the way they thought, acted and wrote. Though these landmark events such as the publication of those books cannot be said to be the starting point of the modernist era, they inevitably contributed to the growth of the modernist temper and, in the process, became formative influences on twentieth century thought and literature.
The modern temper, which has occasioned the creative efflorescence in the 1920s, to be specific, seems to have been slowly snowballing into a turning point since the middle of the previous century, with the publication of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin in 1859. Darwin’s findings were not confined to biological and anthropological research. It affected the religious beliefs of the Christendom in more ways than one. It influenced philosophical speculation. It invaded the realms of the sacred, the public and the secular. The popular opinion that man is a fallen angel underwent a significant change when Darwin scientifically proved that man is only an evolved orangutan, to use his exact words, “a risen ape.” The burden of the Original Sin, which the western world had been made to carry for nearly two thousand years, did not appear that heavy and real. Again, the pride of man for being made by God in His own image was replaced by an embarrassed humility. Just as in the mid sixteenth century Copernicus’s astronomical findings recorded in his epoch-making book On the Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies (1543) caused a profound shift of perspective, Darwin’s scientific findings such as natural selection, the branching process called speciation by means of which a particular species is diversified in the course of the evolution, the idea of the survival of the fittest that reduced struggle to an existential necessity, the descent of man from non-human species, etc. have shocked the complacent 19th century world into a brand new awareness. The historical process of the unshackling of the human intellect from the religious straitjacket has always been a prerequisite for any radical shift of attitude. As the American playwright Tennessee Williams has summed up the human condition in the post-Darwinian world in his Expressionist play Camino Real: “We’re all of us guinea-pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress” (203). By the end of the century, Darwin’s theories had not only been proved correct and accepted as true by other scientists working in that area, but they had affected the general public awareness and invaded other disciplines as well.
Karl Marx (1818-1883), the German philosopher and social scientist, supplied a scientific legitimacy to his theory of class struggle between the factory-owning middle class and the labour class by referring to the biological process of survival of the fittest through natural selection a la Charles Darwin. Marx offered a radical reinterpretation of the shaping forces of the society and history in his Communist Manifesto (1848) and his four -volume tours de force Das Kapital (1867-1883). His theory of Dialectical Materialism or Historical Materialism questioned the traditional determinants of social changes and historical changes. According to him, it is not God but man who is the most powerful presence, and he has become what he always wanted to become. The history of human civilization is the history of class struggle between the owners of the means of production and actual producers, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, between the exploiters and the exploited, between those who formulate rules and those who abide by these rules. According to Marx, the capitalist pattern or mindset will be replaced by socialism only when the exploited proletariat becomes fully aware of the ruling class’s clever stratagems of exploitation, when it empowers itself and fights for political emancipation. Most of Marx’s ideas realized their full potential several years after his death. Three volumes of Das Kapital were translated and published in the beginning of the twentieth century. Both in his life and his writing, Marx was a fully committed revolutionary. His radical redefining of the historical process of human civilization and his prescriptive messages of transformation of the society through mass revolution, divided the intellectual and political world into two camps: those who agreed with him and those who differed with him. Inspired by Marx’s ideas, Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) mobilized the workers and peasants of Czarist Russia, and established the Communist rule there in October 1917. He, however, revised Marx’s idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat by adding that a small group of inspired and committed leaders would be required to lead the labourers, factory workers and peasants to achieve their goal.
The influence of Marxist ideas as an instrument of social, political and intellectual transformation was felt in the first half of twentieth century. It contributed to the birth of modernism. It also made its presence felt in literature and arts. Writers in a capitalist or traditional system, according to Marx, stabilize the world in which they live through imaginative writings, interpretation, evaluation, etc. by yielding, consciously or unconsciously, to ‘the ideological formations’ of the same society. Those ideological formations, like the operating signifying system of the language they use, have already been made complex by the centuries of class struggle. And the powerful bourgeois society, which controls all means of production including the production of literature, tends to downplay this complexity and encourage writers to privilege private emotions and personal crises of characters. Inspired by Marx’s attitude towards bourgeoisie literature, Bertotl Brecht used his plays as an instrument of social change. He wanted to make his spectators think instead of getting emotional. The dramatic convention requires that the audience should identify with the protagonist and the actor should identify with his role. As a result of this identification, both the spectator and the actor get emotionally involved in the action and have no inclination to analyze and brood upon the serious social issues the playwright wants to foreground. In order to ward off this unthinking sentimentality, he decided to estrange both the spectator and the actor from the dramatic action. He called his plays Epic Theatre, for it contained narration in the manner of epics. He introduced slightly cynical and down-to-earth compeers who are familiar with the actors and the spectators. The actors in the traditional drama identify with their roles and the spectators get involved in the dramatic action by identifying with the characters. These compeers comment freely on the actors and action with a view to shattering the illusion of both. They also reveal the plot outline at the outset in order to minimize the thrill of suspense and the anticipation of the audience. This technique is known as the Verfremdunseffekt or Alienation Effect.
It can be a distancing technique, for it enables the spectators to discover the contradictions in the normal quotidian events and newness in the most commonplace things by being less involved and more rational. This idea has certain similarity with that of the Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky who had coined the term ostranenie meaning defamiliarization in 1917. The job of the artist or the writer, Shklovsky maintains, is to present the commonplace in such a way that they would appear strange and startling. The word estrangement also contains the same connotation of making strange. Brecht wanted that his plays should make the spectators critically alert to their immediate social reality and thereby preparing them to play an active role in social transformation. According to Brecht, people’s emotional participation in drama or any literature cancels out their ability to think objectively and act independently by making them passive recipients. Through the dramatic works of Brecht revolutionary ideas of Marx entered the public domain and the collective unconscious of the modern man. Brecht was one of the most popular playwrights of the modern age.
Marx maintained that scientific socialism (as opposed to utopian socialism) would come when the proletariat overthrew the bourgeoisie and it would replace the capitalist form of society. Based on this idea Fabian Society was founded in England in 1884. George Bernard Shaw was its most prominent member. The Fabians slightly modified the radical ideas inherent in Marxism, which required a total over-throw of the existing system in order to usher in the new one. They maintained that socialism could be achieved gradually through a series of reforms within the framework of existing political and social institutions, just as Quintus Fabius Maximus (275-203 B.C.), the Roman general and dictator, who overcame the redoubtable Carthaginian emperor Hannibal by wearing him down through the sheer force of patience and the strategy of delay.
Another dominant influence on the literatures of the second half of the 19th century was Naturalism. As a theory of literature, it put great emphasis on heredity and environment as determinants of human life. Whereas Realism accorded man a moral choice, Naturalism denied that choice to man. Naturalism considered man a byproduct of heredity and his social environment. A heroic fighter is merely admirable, but he is doomed to failure, not always owing to his own faults, but to a genetically programmed determinism over which he had hardly any control. Hunger, possessive instinct and sexual drive are three most important forces which humans share with other animals. Thus programmed, the protagonists of Naturalistic novels and dramas have little chance of success. They are inexorably destroyed by their own drives as well as by the same set of drives of other people they interact with. According to Emile Zola, the writer of fiction should treat his material just as a scientist treats his guinea pigs in the laboratory. He insisted on a brutal frankness of the artist or writer while describing the instinctual urges of humans. So far as instinct was concerned, humans are not different from other animals. Moral edification was not one of his concerns. Nor did he subscribe to the sanctimonious shyness of typically Victorian writers in the matters of sex. The French novelist developed a theory of literature, particularly of fiction, which delimited the freedom of the novelist. The job of a writer was to observe and report. The artist or the writer was allowed to use his imagination to capture the reality per se that he shared with the rest of mankind. He should not write that which might strain the credulity of his readers.
Naturalism was the literary equivalent of religious bigotry. As a post-Darwinian and post-Mendelian movement, it might have derived its main theoretical argument from the science-inspired form of atheism, which the theories of Darwin and Mendel unwittingly exuded. Evolutionary determinism (Darwin), environmental determinism (Zola) and hereditary determinism (Mendel) have replaced the providential or cosmic determinism that the God-dominated world-order usually envisaged. In other words, Naturalism does not vouchsafe any transcendental destiny to man. But such exaggerated enthusiasm generates its own refutation, as a rule. A radical disagreement with Victorian form of didacticism and Zola-type Naturalism gave rise to an ideological movement known as Aestheticism. The proponents of this school of thought claimed that art or literature should be admired and practiced not because it is useful to the society and individuals, but because it is beautiful. Beauty of an object is not connected to, and dependent on, that object’s practical utility. French poets like Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) and Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898), German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883), French artist Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) and British writers, such as, Walter Horatio Pater (1839-1894) and Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), to quote the most prominent, strongly disapproved of the didactic and utilitarian tendencies that treat art or poetry as a means to an end, as a means of fortifying conscience by imparting moral teachings, of serving social needs and purposes. Poetry exists for its own sake. It makes possible most exquisite sensations. It is not the business of the artist or the poet to try conclusions and arrive at them. “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book,” writes Oscar Wilde in the preface to his un-Victorian novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and adds: “Books are well-written, or badly written. That’s all.” Walter Pater in his equally un-Victorian novel titled Marius the Epicure (1885) narrates the story a young man in ancient Rome whose life is a quest for beauty in its pristine aspect. In his influential essays and this novel, Pater championed Aestheticism. He maintained that beauty is the most meaningful thing in life; that in a work of art the love of beauty should overpower all other considerations, social and moral.
Oscar Wilde mocked at Naturalistic/ Victorian fiction writers for their concern for verisimilitude. He declared that the novelist instead of trying to make a lie appear as truth should speak the truth at once and save himself the trouble. Taking the idea of art for art’s sake from the French writer Theophile Gautier (1811-1872), he wrote an excellent essay “The Decay of Lying” in which he lamented the damages done to imaginative writing in contemporary Europe owing to the debilitating influences of Naturalism. “The Decay of Lying”, which Wilde presents as a friendly dialogue between Vivian and Cyril in the library of a country house in Nottinghamshire, is arguably the most eloquent defense of Aestheticism in English language. He countered the Victorian emphasis on the social utility of literature as an edifying and ennobling apparatus, by describing it as an aesthetic enterprise of the artist who is least interested in the social reform. Art was considered genuine when the artist made no effort to conceal its unreality, its artificiality. The fear of the fiction writer to appear fictitious to his readers forces him to be dishonest to his own art. He tries all methods to appear faithful to reality just as historians and journalists do to appear reliable. Oscar Wilde writes:
“If a man is sufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the truth at once. … The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction…. He is to be found at the Librairie Nationale, or at the British Museum, shamelessly reading up his subject. He has not even the courage of other people’s ideas, but insists on going directly to life of everything, and ultimately, between encyclopaedias and personal experience, he comes to the ground, having drawn his types from the family circle or from the weekly washerwoman, and having acquired an amount of useful information from which never, even in his most meditative moments, can he thoroughly free himself” (Selected Essays, 59-60).
Wilde maintained that true art is not imitative but creative; that “realism is a complete failure” as an art form, because it imitates life and makes much ado about the obvious (ibid, 69). Arguing in the Aristotelian line that art completes what Nature has left unfinished, Wilde goes to the extent of saying that “Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life”; that “The imagination is essentially creative, and always seeks for a new form”; that true pessimism was actually invented by Hamlet and “Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau.” That’s because “Literature always anticipates life”, and not the other way round (Selected Essays, 74-75). This privileging of the text as an autonomous entity paved the way for New Critical theories of literature, which dominated the first fifty years of twentieth century. This theory stressed that the meaning of a poem is to be discovered in the poem itself by employing certain techniques of interpretation, and is totally independent of the author’s intention and the reader’s emotional participation.
While stating that Naturalism was replaced by Aestheticism and other super- or extra-realisms of various denominations during the late 19th and early 20th century, it has to be stressed that some of the salient features of Naturalism were retained in Expressionist dramas and in the literatures of high modernism, such as, Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Virginia Woolf’s Stream-of-Consciousness novels. These features were: a ruthlessly frank probing into the human psyche; a relentless preoccupation with social evils and biological appetites besetting the human creature; the bleak fate that would inevitably befall the tormented protagonist in spite of all his struggles to overcome these forces. Modernist literature has inherited a profound pessimism from Naturalism. Modernist writers were in possession of some advanced tools to excavate the pyramid of the mind.
The Symbolist Movement, which originated in France in mid-nineteenth century, has certain resemblance to Aestheticism. Aestheticism encourages the artist to create something beautiful without worrying about its social or practical usefulness. The Symbolists, likewise, encourage the artist to freely use private symbols without bothering about their general receptivity and the crises of communication they would generate. A symbol in the literary sense means a word or an _expression that signifies a particular object or an event, which, in its turn, signifies something else, something beyond itself. A sign, in a sense, is a symbol. But while forming the part of a larger poetic statement, a symbol is much more than a semiotic sign; it refers to a variety of things and signs outside of it; it has a substratum of implications which readers are expected to dredge up. In this sense, the use of symbols is as old as literature itself. But the French brand of symbolists loaded this old poetic tool with some “new” insights. Their so-called new insights were somewhat mystical in that they found an extrasensory correspondence between the inner world and the outer, between the natural and the spiritual, between the personal and the universal. Charles Baudelaire puts it thus: “Everything, form, movement, number, colour, perfume, in the spiritual as in the natural world, is significative, reciprocal, converse, correspondent” (Abrams, 209). Four major French poets who came after Baudelaire such as Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Stephane Mallarme and Paul Valery subscribed to that mystical correspondence theory. They avoided explicit signification and relied on private suggestiveness of symbols. The influence of the French symbolists on English poets writing in the first half of the twentieth century is seen in the last poems of W.B.Yeats (Byzantium, The Tower), T.S.Eliot (The Waste Land, Four Quartets, The Love-song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Gerontion, Hollow Men, etc.), Ezra Pound (Cantos) and Dylan Thomas and in James Joyce’s Ulysses. These writers (and many others) believed in the existence of an inherent and systematic analogy between the functioning of their creative imagination and the world outside, between the private symbols the mind chooses to express itself and the possibility of their being understood by others. They, therefore, dispensed with “sharable” signification and made use of highly internalized personal symbols. The writers who subscribed to the basic premises of Aestheticism and French brand of Symbolism put greater emphasis on the sanctity and purity of the poetic _expression.
Another typically modernist movement in poetry was Imagism. Formed in 1912 by a small group pf poets such as Hilda Doolittle, T.E.Hulme, Richard Aldington, F.S.Flint, Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound, this movement aimed at purifying poetry of all superfluities. They decided to write such type of poetry as an intellectual statement without any frippery or ornamentation, thereby achieving utmost precision and concreteness. Pound defined an image as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex at an instant of time by a process called enjambment. Poetic enjambment means the method of continuing the sense without a pause beyond the end of the line. Pound and Flint jointly issued a sort of Imagist manifesto in 1913. They advised the poets to desist from using abstract and rhetorical language and to use the exact word in order to achieve “highest concentration and hard clearness.” In so far as its philosophical position was concerned, it considered man as an “extraordinarily fixed and limited animal” whose views or apprehension of reality could only be expressed through finite and isolated glimpses of reality. Like the Naturalist playwright, the Imagist poet must be utterly faithful to reality. The decorative language expressive of emotion, which the Romantic and Victorian poets used, was dismissed outright as “sentimental, blurry, manneristic.” On the other hand, they found their best models in the ancient classical writers such as Sappho, Catullus and Villon. F.S.Flint spelt out the main rules of imagist poetry. “One: Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective; two: To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation; and three: As regards rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome” (Ellmann, 142). In other words, the metaphor used to highlight a ‘thing’ should be an interpretation of that thing, not merely an ornament of that thing. Ezra Pound’s brief poem titled “In a station of the Metro” clearly illustrates the Imagist idea of a metaphor. It reads:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals, on a wet, black bough.
In an essay titled “Vorticism,” Pound quotes another Haiku-like poem composed by a Japanese Naval officer when they were walking together on a snow-covered land:
The footsteps of the cat upon the snow:
(are like) plum-blossoms.
(Ellmann, 150).
In each of these two poems, two distinct acts of perception of reality are juxtaposed; and their comparability is inherent, not arbitrary or whimsical. In the first poem, these two acts of perception contribute to the state of disintegration (of petals separated from the flower) and alienation of each face in the shapeless crowd. In the second poem, there is an inherent similarity between the footmarks of the cat on the snow and the plum-blossoms. This similarity is stated in a precise and direct manner.
In spite of its well-defined agenda and able practitioners, Imagism could not enjoy popularity for long. Its minimalist, bare syntax demanded a lot from the readers. It was branded as the poetry of unintelligibility. In its enthusiasm to achieve precision and purity of sorts, Imagist poetry forgot to become poetic. But its critique of the Romantic sentimentality and Victorian decorativeness helped poetry achieve moderation.
Man’s yearning to know his own mind was an ancient one. It has always been the job of the philosopher and the creative artists to chart out the mental landscape and to know how human behaviour and actions are merely the surface symptoms of what takes place in the mind. Sigmund Freud located Oedipus complex in Sophocles’s Oedipus the King and Electra complex in Aeschylus’s Orestes. Fyodor Dostyevsky, the 19th century Russian novelist, plumbs the depths of the mind more than any novelist before him. The new and systematic probing into the human mind, spearheaded by Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud and his colleagues, generated widespread interest in the beginning of the 20th century. It may be considered one of the shaping influences of modernism. Although a psychological insight into less comprehensible areas of the mind has been the staple of philosophers and novelists from Aristotle to Nietzsche to Dostoyevsky, Freudian psychology, for the first time, offered a scientific and systematic analysis of the functioning of the mind. In other words, its primary aim was to enable the mind to peep into itself and map out its inaccessible terrains. Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905. The human mind, according to him, has a three-tier operating system: the Ego, the Id, and the Superego. The Id is the seat of sexual desires and all types of appetites. It relentlessly goads man to fulfill all these desires. The Super Ego, on the other hand, sets high goals that are often unreachable and impractical. The Ego mediates between the social taboos, restrictions, socially approved behaviour and the compelling urges of the Id. The Ego mediates between instinctive urges of the Id and the transcendental urges of the Super ego in order to enable man to adhere to a balanced code of conduct. The great German novelist Thomas Mann, after seeing and realizing the profound connection between literature and Freudian psychoanalysis, writes in1936:
The close relation between literature and psychoanalysis has been known for a long time to both sides…. The connection, the bond between them, is twofold: it consists first in a love of truth, in a sense of truth, a sensitiveness and receptivity for truth’s sweet and bitter, which largely expresses itself in a psychological excitation, a clarity of vision, to such an extent that the conception of truth actually almost coincide with that of psychological perception and recognition. And secondly it consists in an understanding of disease, a certain affinity with it… and an understanding of its productive significance (Ellmann, 585-86).
Some other psychologists, particularly his one-time disciple C.G.Jung, have contested some of the fundamental premises of Freud. But to a majority of people living in the first half of the 20th century Freud’s findings were nothing short of oracles. Mann’s essay expresses the high respect with which his contemporaries regarded Freud’s findings about the functioning of the human mind. The psychological fiction, written during the modernist era was deeply indebted to the Freudian psychology. Freud taught the novelists to treat the surface activities their protagonists as the visible mass of an iceberg whose major portion lies submerged. To probe the source from which human action springs was considered a more worthwhile activity than to make much ado about the mere details of obvious reality.
The quest for the unconscious received a new boost from another great psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung who was a disciple of Freud. They fell apart for some minor disagreement on the nature of the libido, but they have many other things in common. Just as Nietzsche was called a literary philosopher, Jung may be called a literary psychologist. He considered the “creative human being” a “unique personality” who deserved a special psychological investigation. In his famous book Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1930), he writes:
“It is obvious enough that psychology, being a study of psychic processes, can be brought to bear upon the study of literature, for the human psyche is the womb of all the sciences and arts. We may expect psychological research, on the one hand, to explain the formation of a work of art, and on the other to reveal the factors that make a person artistically creative” (Lodge, 175).
Freud locates the source of all creativity in neurosis and repression, but Jung disagrees with him. For him a creative artist is a mystery, a riddle. Psychologists can unravel this riddle by the help of the collective unconscious. For Jung, collective unconscious is the source of all visions, all creativity, and all dreams. He calls it the law of phylogeny. Just as in the physical structure of the body of the modern man we find all the traces of human evolution, the collective unconscious is formed of all the stages of consciousness human beings have already passed through. It is the racial memory, which we inherit. This racial memory connects us with our primordial roots. The mind preserves the traces of hereditary traits in the form of archetypes. Jung defines archetypes as the “psychic residua of numberless experiences of the same type”, which express themselves in the shape of recurrent images, stories and figures.
Even when he accords a special status to the creative writer (“a unique personality” he calls him), he does not give him a will of his own. He is only a medium through which the collective unconscious, the racial memory expresses itself in the form of archetypes. He writes:
“Great poetry draws its strength from the life of mankind, and we completely miss its meaning if we try to derive it from personal factors. Whenever the collective unconscious becomes a living experience and is brought to bear upon the conscious outlook of an age, this event is a creative act which is of importance to everyone living in that age…The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him” (Lodge, 184, 186).
A poet may have a desire, or an aim, but as an artist he carries the psychic life of mankind; he is the collective man. Jung’s theory of the creative process resembles T.S.Eliot’s “impersonality” theory. “The progress of an artist,” writes Eliot, “is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” He even compares the poet’s mind in the act of writing poetry with a “bit of a finely filiated platinum…introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide” (Lodge, 73).
The vast untapped world lying within appeared more interesting, more complex and more meaningful than the quotidian external world. The theoretical justification offered by Aestheticism and Symbolism received a scientific legitimacy from Freudian psychoanalysis. Modernist novelists like Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner dived deep into the subconscious to capture what they considered the true source of human action. James Joyce (1882-1941) based his novel Ulysses on the wanderings of Leopold Bloom in the city of Dublin on 16 June 1904. He imposed an epical pattern on Bloom’s wanderings a la Homer’s The Odyssey. Odysseus took ten long years to return from Troy to his home island Ithaca. Here Leopold Bloom, a modern incarnation of Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin) is on a mental and symbolic journey. Molly Bloom is a modern incarnation of Penelope. Stephen Dedalus is a modern avatar of Telemachus, Odysseus’s son. By employing several narrative styles, by breaking and combining words, Joyce tried to capture the nuances of a mind perpetually engaged in thinking, fantasizing, interacting with others, dreaming and taking stock of its own preoccupation with reality. Joyce did not give an explanation for writing the way he did. But his recognizable alter ego Stephen Dedalus states the author’s position: “You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought” (Ulysses, 20) and a few pages later: “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (ibid, 34). Freedom to think and devise his own mode of _expression, a total rejection of historical certitudes, and desperation to exorcise the ghost of Naturalism are his leit-motifs as a writer of new fiction. But Virginia Woolf, his contemporary novelist, offered a forceful defense of the modernist fiction in general and psychological fiction in particular. In her influential essay “Modern Fiction”(1919), Woolf, a bourgeoning writer then, pillories the Victorian novelists such as H.G.Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy for writing “unimportant things”, for spending “immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring”(Lodge, 87-88). She calls these writers materialists. At that time Joyce’s Ulysses was being serialized in Little Review. She was the first great admirer of that book. Joyce, according to her, “is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain, and in order to preserve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious” (Lodge, 89). She admires Joyce for having the “complete courage” to be more faithful to his inner life. The future of modern fiction lies in such faithfulness. She writes:
Look within…Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The receives a myriad impressions- trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel…Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it” (Lodge, 88-89).
Virginia Woolf has not only spelt out the direction the new fiction would have to choose to be truly modern, she also herself wrote her novels in the new mode. Her first Stream of Consciousness novel was Jacob’ Room, which was published in 1922. This year was significant for modernism. A number of major books that are considered to be representative of modernism were published in that year: Ulysses, The Waste Land, The Sound and the Fury and Jacob’s Room.
Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890-1915) is a seminal work and a source of influence on culture and literature of the first part of the twentieth century. Frazer’s book, a tome of twelve volumes, is an anthropological study of myths, religious cults, rituals, totems, taboos, magical rites and customs of ancient societies, and their striking resemblance to those of Christians. Sir Frazer brought out a compact single-volume edition of The Golden Bough in 1922 for the benefit of common readers. Some of the fundamental Christian beliefs such as the transference of sin from one person to another had Asiatic and African origin (Frazer, pp. 542-546,). Most of the Christian festivals related to the Nativity, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ and their dates of observance mysteriously tally with Greek, Roman and Egyptian festivals of much older origin. Sir Frazer writes in his 1922-edition:
“Taken together, the coincidences of the Christian with the heathen festivals are too close and too numerous to be accidental. They mark the compromise which the Church in the hour of its triumph was compelled to make with its vanquished yet still dangerous rivals” (Frazer, 361).
Just as Darwin’s findings undermined orthodox faith in Original Sin by showing man’s descent from primates in the course of evolution, Frazer’s study of ancient cultures established the fact that religion has evolved from purely social practices, from the recurring patterns of primitive myths and rituals, and from the early man’s awe-inspired worship of natural objects and forces with a view to warding off natural calamities threatening him. Christopher Nash writes in his essay “Myth and Modern Literature”:
“Arising variably out of etiological speculation, euhemerist historiography, fetishism, mimicry of natural events, and allegorical thinking, myth is always a by-product of man’s way of dramatizing and ceremonializing the pragmatics of Darwinian survival” (Bell, 171).
Eliot has acknowledged in his Notes to The Waste Land that he owed a great deal to Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Miss Jessie Weston’s book From Ritual to Romance (1920) for writing that book. In her book, Miss Weston describes the ritualistic search for the Holy Grail which is a symbol of fertility combining the sexual and religious elements. While talking about the influence of From Ritual to Romance on The Waste Land, F.O.Matthiessen, in his famous book The Achievement of T.S.Eliot (1935), observes:
For reading that book gave to his mind the very fillip which it needed in order to crystallize. What he learned especially from it was the recurring pattern in various myths, the basic resemblance, for example, between the vegetation myths of the rebirth of the year, the fertility myths of the rebirth of the potency of man, the Christian story of the Resurrection, and the Grail legend of purification. The common source of all these myths lay in the fundamental rhythm of nature – that of the death and rebirth of the year; and their varying symbolism was an effort to explain the origin of life (Cox, 110).
The scientific investigators such as Darwin, Marx, Freud and anthropologist s such as Frazer and Jessie Weston might or might not have been aware of social repercussions of their findings. They might or might not have anticipated the symbolic potential of their oeuvres. But their findings had certainly affected the opinions and beliefs of people who came after them. Most importantly, they affected the way people thought; they altered the general attitude towards literature and art. Religion was one of the first casualties. Many of its basic and sacred claims were challenged. For the first time in the history of human civilization, religion found itself on the defensive. Those three major trendsetters, Darwin, Marx and Freud, were not known for their religious belief. Darwin could not have possibly proved his theory of evolution without subverting the traditional belief that man came into being as a finished product. Karl Marx could not have justified revolution by subscribing to the assumptions of orthodox religion. According to religious faith, the poor people are blessed, because they would inherit the earth. God will take care of their future inheritance and prosperity; there is no need for political revolution. Because all religions glorify the tolerant attitude towards exploitations of all kinds and explain all human suffering in the terms of an ineluctable fatalism, they have always been the most effective deterrence to revolution in the history of mankind. Marx equated religion with opium, for both neutralize man’s ability to protest through slow addiction. Freud, while dissecting the human mind, could not locate God. “The origin of religious attitude,” he commented sarcastically, “can be traced back in clear outlines as far as the feeling of infantile helplessness” (Civilization and Its Discontents, 19). The 19th century world-view was summed up in the famous lines of Robert Browning: “God’s in His Heaven, / And all’s right with the world.” The Victorian writers more or less believed in the possibility of communication between themselves and their readers. If both the writer and the reader lived in the same world and shared the same set of beliefs, there was no reason why there should be any hiatus in the communicating process. They also subscribed to the notion that literature is capable of transforming the society for the better through moral education. Novelists like Thackeray, George Eliot and Galsworthy tried to establish a direct contact with their readers by addressing them directly, by taking them into confidence. Bernard Shaw used his plays as a platform for public education by supplying lengthy introductions to his plays. He asked for a thinking readership or audience, rather than emotionally involved, unthinking readers and audience. Dickens also firmly believed in the effectiveness of his moral message. But he was criticized by Thackeray for his introducing incredible coincidences, sensational melodrama and selective representation of reality in his novels, for that sort of narrative might violate the unstated, though time-honoured, contract between the writer and the reader. This faith in a shared ethical stratum distinguished the typically Victorian sensibility. It went well with the relatively simple world-view. A realistic literature with a desire to teach was well suited to that society.
Even in the Victorian England, there were writers who introduced new forms in poetry and fiction. G.M.Hopkins composed his “experimental” poems in the seclusion of his room. He never wanted to, nor was capable of becoming, reader-friendly like other Victorian poets. Like his contemporary Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, he allowed his imagination to express itself freely choosing its own medium. His unorthodox diction, his “intricately woven tapestry of language”, his ideas of the sprung rhythm and inscape, demonstrated in his “The Wreck of the Deutschland”, “The Windhover”, “Pied Beauty”, “Duns Scotus’ Oxford”, etc. might have astonished and embarrassed his contemporaries. But he could not publish his poems during his lifetime. He died in 1889, and his poems were published as a collection in 1918. Though living in Victorian England, Hopkins had anticipated modernism.
By the beginning of the 20th century, an epistemological shift was slowly taking place, not only in the domain of poetry, but also in that of general awareness. That one observable phenomenon could be viewed differently by different people from different angles, was one of the epiphanies of the modern writer. That epiphany encouraged poets and novelists to capture the complexities of the new world in their creative work without getting anxious about the readers’ response and the ethical dimensions of their messages. Their main purpose was to make their work a true reflection of the complexities of life, of society and of reality. Their commitment to their craft, their sincerity to their individual awareness of the multitudinous, conflicting reality confronting them replaced the inherited concern for clarity and morality. That is not to say that the modern poets consciously desired to be ambiguous and difficult. It was not their disregard for their readers, but their desire to express themselves with greater freedom and greater sincerity, which made them write or paint in the way they did. Or they might have believed that a complex mode of _expression was needed to express the complexities of modern life. Whereas the typically Victorian poets and novelists tried to reach out to their readers, the typically modern poets and novelists intended, consciously or unconsciously, to reverse that process. That is to say, they wanted that their readers should reach out to them. As one of the greatest modern French novelists Marcel Proust commented, the reality for a writer is not outside world but the world that lies stored in his deep unconscious. His novel Remembrance of Things Past, a tome of seven volumes, is a faithful recapitulation of that stored-up memory, a prodigious surfacing of the submerged consciousness. The reality we meet in Modernist novels is a manipulated reality, a refraction of reality that has passed through the dense medium of the writers’ subconscious.
“The Sunflowers” of Van Gogh are different from the sunflowers we see in a garden, and yet they retain some general aspects, which distinguish them from other flowers. The observer of Van Gogh’s sunset, sunflowers and wheat field will not only know that they are so, but also know what the artist wants to express through them. For Van Gogh and other expressionist painters art is not an imitation of reality but a subjective interpretation of reality; it is a medium through which the Self or the creative mind expresses itself. The Cubist artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris tried to introduce geometric forms in their paintings. According to Apollinaire, Cubism “does not aim at an art of imitation, but at an art of conception”. While comparing the paintings of Van Gogh and Gauguin with those of Picasso, we find in the art of the latter a greater degree of complexity. The expressionist subjectivity is replaced by a subjectivity of a more fragmented kind.
The Cubists were at the height of their creativity between 1907 and 1914. They shunned the conventional treatment of space and form, and tried to show the subject from several viewpoints at the same time. “Scientific Cubism”, writes Apollinaire,
is one of the pure tendencies. It is the art of painting new structures out of elements borrowed not from the reality of sight, but from the reality of insight. All men have a sense of this interior reality. The new art clothes its creations with a grandiose and monumental appearance which surpasses anything else conceived by the artists of our time (Apollinaire, 15-16).
In the field of drama, such a tendency was noticeable in the latter plays of August Strindberg. Dramatic Expressionism is exemplified in the plays like To Damascus in three parts (two in 1898, one in 1904), A Dream Play (1902), and The Ghost Sonata or The Spook Sonata (1907). Strindberg, like the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh and the French artist Paul Gauguin before him, and the Cubists shortly after him, tried to give _expression to his subjective emotion, rather than to objective reality. The mid-nineteenth century Impressionism is an account of how the objective reality projects itself on the subjective consciousness of the artist. Thus, it was a subjective account of an objective perception. In Expressionism, sometimes referred to as Postimpressionism by art historians, the wedge of individuation was driven deeper. It was an imposition on the outside world of the artist’s perception of it. Thus, it was a subjective account of a subjective perception. Celebration of the Self as the ultimate source of creativity and reference started to take root. Strindberg writes in the Preface to his A Dream Play (1902):
“Everything can happen; everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on an insignificant basis of reality the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations. The characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense, disperse, assemble” (Strindberg, 175).
This brief manifesto has cast a long shadow. Traditionally, drama is a popular art form and a law-abiding genre. Dramatic rules and conventions are most resistant to change. Full credit has to be accorded to this Swedish master for trifling with the sacrosanct rules of drama. What happens in a dream took place on the stage. The unities of time, place and characterization were flouted to accommodate the playwright’s perception of reality and life, to express his personal nightmares and his chilling analyses of the world per se. It came to full flowering in Europe, particularly in Germany, during the period between the two World Wars (1919-1939). Expressionistic form and technique paved the way for a variety of artistic and literary movements during the first forty years of the twentieth century. In the Theatre of the Absurd of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, in such short-lived movements as Dadaism, Surrealism, Vorticism, Futurism, etc. the extra-realistic traits first introduced by artistic and dramatic forms of Expressionism are clearly noticeable. Many major playwrights active during the period under discussion tried to introduce some of the Expressionistic techniques in their plays. Elmer Rice in his Adding Machine (1923), Tennessee Williams in Camino Real (1953), Eugene O’Neill in his Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape (1922) Pirandello in his Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), Henry IV (1922), and Right You Are, if You Think You Are (1917), Thornton Wilder in his Our Town (1938), just to quote the most important, have introduced some technical aspects of dramatic Expressionism.
An inner necessity for self-_expression which helped produce a bumper harvest of experimental literature such as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Pound’s Cantos, Eliot’s The Waste Land and Other Poems, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and To the Light House and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Each work cited above is a monument containing the author’s sublimated self in its sanctum sanctorum. The “inner necessity” referred to here arises out of the writers’ desire to record the tumult in their alert mind caused by the overwhelming complexities of the external world and to withdraw into their inner space.
The end of the nineteenth century had marked the end of simplicity, of the belief in effective communication between the author and the reader. The external complexity of the world matched the writers’ awareness of their inner complexity thanks to the new light shed on the human subconscious by psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. Even man’s traditional faith in his free choice was shaken by these psychoanalytical findings. He became a passive medium through which the interface of the Id and Superego expressed itself. The Ego, the mediating presence, formed, as it were, of so many formative influences in the childhood, both traumatic and puzzling, was an unreliable agent of mediation. Complex forms and techniques were devised to express a writer’s response to an equally complex world. Peter Faulkner writes:
“The characteristic demandingness of Modernism arose from the writers’ sense of the difficulty of their task. Only a complex and demanding art, it was felt, could adequately render a modern consciousness of the world….it could be argued that the consciousness of the modern artist has been rendered more self-directed by the influence of psychological investigation, revealing the complexity of human personality, and of philosophical enquiry, emphasizing the role of the agent in creating the reality which he experiences” (20-21).
The philosophical factor that largely contributed to the formation of the modern sensibility came from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Bertrand Russell rightly calls Nietzsche a literary philosopher. Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-1892), his magnum opus, is written in verse. Some of the ideas Nietzsche advocated are unacceptable, even revolting to taste and reason. But his concept of Superman as the incarnation of “will to power” has an evolutionary foundation. Charles Darwin had proved that the creatures of the world have to evolve through a ruthless process of natural selection. The world offers no concession to the weak and the also-ran. The strong have to dominate and even weed out the weak in order to survive as a superior race. Nietzsche offered a philosophical justification for this predatorial process. His prophet Zarathustra tells his listeners:
I teach you the superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?
All creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great tide, and return to the animals rather than overcome man?
What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment.
You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now man is more of an ape than any ape. (Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1-2).
Nietzsche’s ideas exerted a great influence on the twentieth century thought and literature. His advocacy for the emergence of an amoral aristocracy, and of a race of superior beings and rugged individualists found ready takers in the Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. A few years after, Adolf Hitler became what Nietzsche would have wished to become had he been given physical health and an opportunity to rule. He would have killed six million Jews and sent twice that number to extermination camps with a clear conscience just to sanitize the Aryan race. However, the positive aspect of Nietzsche’s thought as a mobilizing influence on modern sensibility cannot and should not be underestimated. It was an antidote to unexamined claims of religions, particularly Christianity, as a cure-all of all the human problems. His thoughts supplied an ideological basis for the creative writers and artists to give _expression to their feelings and ideas by devising their subjective hieroglyphics without trying to be easily intelligible or accessible to their target audience. The major innovators of modernist art and literature, such as, Picasso, Ezra Pound, Joyce and Eliot filled the shoes of the Nietzschean supermen in so far as their disregard for their general readers or audience was concerned. Their works were more a caviar to the general (read, connoisseur) than the resole for the ordinary mortals. The ordinary readers were expected to acquire a certain degree of skill in appreciation and to raise themselves intellectually if they wished to penetrate the complex subjectivity of modernist writers encoded in their chefs-d’oeuvres. In the case of less original and emulating modernist poets particularly, deliberate obfuscation of form and unintelligibility of substance were raised to the level of excellence. Unintelligibility became legitimate in the name of subjectivity. Figuratively, the ball was thrown to the readers’ court. What could not be comprehended was accorded a benefit of doubt. Joyce had a few emulators thanks to his forbidding and austere craftsmanship, but Eliot and Pound had a legion. Pound and Eliot liberated poetry from the moral responsibility of being legible, which convention imposed on it. That liberation radically altered the phenomenon of poetry. Poetic imagery and diction became trenchantly personal, hence obtuse. In course of time, understanding poetry and fiction became more a specialized activity than a pleasant, leisurely pilgrimage to enjoyment and consequent edification.
As understanding poetry in particular and literature in general became a specialized activity, criticism of literature emerged as a specialized branch of study. Until I.A.Richards published his Principles of Literary Criticism in 1924 and Practical Criticism in 1929, literary criticism or analysis used to follow certain conventions and time-honoured practices. The nature of criticism, appreciation and analysis was humanistic in the broad sense of the term. The critic of a poem or a book generally used to discuss the available biographical information about the author, the historical context and period in which that work was created, the possible sources of influence on the author, comparisons with other texts of similar nature, etc. along with the textual analysis. But Richards dispensed with all such extra-textual referentiality of the text. The text under discussion was considered to be containing all the meanings that can be known or worthy of knowing. The job of the critic, according to Richards, was to interpret (closely read) and evaluate a poem by using such tools as theme, tension, irony, paradox, figures of speech like metaphor, metonym, synecdoche, symbols, etc. using his skill as a trained, well-informed person. Richards’ ideas were germane to the growth of New Criticism in America. Professor Richards tried to elevate literary criticism to an exact science and put great stress on the ability of the reader to extract meaning from a poem or any text.
T.S.Eliot was arguably the most influential writer of the modernist era. He scores over James Joyce by being simultaneously a literary critic of astonishing courage and a poet of surpassing originality. When Eliot’s poems were first published, the entire community of literary critics was equally divided into the two categories: his admirers and his detractors. His prominent detractors considered his poems too artificial, too strange. His admirers considered him refreshingly new.
His first poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, published in 1915, was a trailblazer. Even before he published his great poems (The Waste Land, Four Quartets), he had already established his reputation as a critic by publishing his collection of essays titled The Sacred Wood (1920). In his 1921 essay “The Metaphysical Poets”, he declared that the poets writing in the modern world “must be difficult”; that they have no option but to become “more allusive, more indirect.”
More than a hundred years before him William Wordsworth wrote in his Preface to The Lyrical Ballads (1800): “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Eliot redefined the position of the poet in relation to his poetry. According to him, Poetry is not an _expression of the poet’s emotion, but an escape from it; it is not a reflection of the poet’s personality, but an escape from his personality. The poet’s mind, he wrote, is a mere catalyst. When put in a closed container, the two gases such as, oxygen and sulphur dioxide do not interact with each other. If a platinum filament is introduced into that container, the gases interact with each other, the chemical reaction takes place and they get converted into sulphurous acid. But interestingly, sulphurous acid does not contain any trace of platinum. The platinum filament is not affected either. Its presence causes reaction. It remains totally unaffected. Such is the poet’s mind, which is a receptacle of all the images, feelings, phrases collected from all the poems written before him and assimilated by him. Poetry is produced when the mind of a poet intervenes as an impersonal agent, converting the stored data into new verbal combinations. The personality of the poet is not present in the poem just as platinum is not present in the sulphurous acid. In his 1919 essay “Tradition and Individual Talent” Eliot writes:
“(The modern poet) must be aware that the mind of Europe – the mind of his own country – a mind which he learns in time to be more important than his own private mind – is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock-drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsman” (Lodge, 73).
It was not the process of writing poetry, but the poet’s role in it, which made this essay one of the most discussed essays of twentieth century. His essays inspired I.A.Richards, and both of them inspired a whole generation of critics and influenced academic practices world over. He made it clear that finding Shakespeare’s laundry bills would not help us understand and appreciate his plays. “To divert interest from the poet to the poetry,” he asserts, “is a laudable aim; for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad” (ibid, 76).
Any discussion on modernism will not be complete without mentioning the name and contributions of the French-speaking Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. His lecture notes were published as Course in General Linguistics in 1916 two years after his death. Though mankind has used language for thousands of years, no systematic study of synchronic linguistics has been attempted. Saussure’s insightful discovery of the obvious, yet unnoticed aspects of language has enormously influenced many other branches of knowledge such as literature, philosophy, psychology and anthropology. Semiology (known also as semiotic) is a scientific study of language. Saussure called language a system of signs. A sign is produced when a concept, an object, or an idea is given a name. The verbal _expression denoting an idea or an object or a concept is called a signifier. The concept, or the idea or the object is called the signified. It is the meaning of the sign. This process is called signification. But there is no intrinsic connection between the signifier and the signified. It is arbitrary. In a particular linguistic system, the meaning of a sign is determined by its difference from other signs, not by its positive qualities. Saussure also divided the language into two distinct categories: the parole and the langue. A parole is in utterance, the language as it is used in writing or in speech acts. It obtains in the langue, derives its particular form from a vast reservoir of signs. That reservoir of signs is the langue. It is the store of all implicit differentiations, rules of combination peculiar to a particular language-speaking community. Noted linguist Noam Chomsky’s terms such as performance and competence correspond to Saussure’s parole and langue respectively. Anthropologists like Levi Strauss, philosophers like Jacques Derrida, Structuralist critics like Rolland Barthes have used the Saussurean models in their respective fields of study.
Before concluding this essay, it has to be stated that the mind of man in the first quarter of the twentieth century was a rapidly expanding universe. Epoch-making inventions and discoveries in the field of science and technology had influenced the thinking process and also the writing process, and changed the general life-style of people. Telephone, invented by Graham Bell in 1876, had already become widespread. The public screening of projected motion pictures by the Lumiere brothers in 1898 quickly followed the invention of Kinetoscope by Thomas Edison in 1893. Edwin S. Porter made his first motion picture The Great Train Robbery, an 11-minute Western in 1903. Charlie Chaplin emerged as the greatest film personality in the second decade. In 1919 he established United Artists Film Corporation comprising of Douglas Fairbanks, actress Mary Pickford and director D.W.Griffith. That “Little Tramp”, known as the funniest man in the world, starred in The Kid (1920), The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936). Then arrived the radio, the ultimate source of home entertainment. Guglielmo Marconi was able to send radio signals through the air in 1895 and Reginald Fessenden was the first to broadcast human voice by radio in 1925. Almost at the same time, Vladimir Zworykin, a Russian-born American scientist, invented the iconoscope, a camera tube capable of converting light images into electric signals, and the kinescope, the picture tube used in television receivers. He demonstrated the first completely electronic, practical television system in 1929.
Henry Ford made his first petrol car engine in 1896 and established the Ford Motor Company in 1903, which produced millions of cars with affordable price tags. Then came the Wright brothers, Wilbur and Orville, who made their first flight in 1903. The world was beginning to shrink. The newly acquired ability to fly fired the imagination of the modern man. James Joyce was perhaps inspired by that enthusiasm when he chose the name Stephen Dedalus for his hero (recognizably, his alter ego) in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. George Stephenson was the maker of the first locomotive rocket in 1829 and the builder of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. And Daedalus, the mythological Greek architect, was the first man to fly like a bird with artificial wings from the island kingdom of Crete to Sicily.
So far as the natural/ artificial binary was concerned, the traditional/ Victorian world-view privileged natural and considered artificial inferior. In the modernist context, artificial was privileged. The man-made artifacts stated above succeeded in convincing the modern man that science and technology were an improvement on nature. Many critics condemned both Eliot and Joyce for writing in an artificial manner. But artificiality was no longer taboo. In a sense, all literary techniques and all scientific or technological inventions were artificial in that men made them.
It was the time when Albert Einstein revolutionized and redefined the terms like space, time, mass, motion, gravitation, matter, energy, etc. Arguably the greatest scientist after Isaac Newton, Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905 and General Theory of Relativity in 1915. His famous equation that Energy equals Mass times the velocity of light squared proved that matter is a form of energy; that matter and energy are interchangeable. The nuclear age was born. Though a few great scientists were able to understand the mathematical methods by which Einstein reached his conclusions, average people of his time were aware of the implications of his findings and were hugely excited.
To the people living in the twenty-first century, all these inventions and findings may appear quite passé, for they have been exposed to the full impact of these inventions and discoveries from their childhood; but to the people living in the first part of twentieth century, they were stranger than science fiction. Many believed that after five thousand years of gradual growth, the human mind was realizing its full potential and the tree of civilization was beginning to bloom, to blossom forth.
But there were also a few prophets of doom. They warned that the tree of civilization would bear the poison fruit. The Second World War quickly followed the First World War, just twenty years after. Some of those inventions and discoveries were put to destructive uses. The world had never seen such large-scale devastation before. Invincible faith in the progress was contending with hard facts of despair. But the process was irreversible. The modern age was a nodal point of human civilization, a period of branching out. On the whole, it was a period of happenings, and those happenings shaped the character of the century, warts and all.
Works Cited and Consulted:
Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms.
New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1993
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