Introduction to Modernism

Political events in Britain Death of Queen Victoria in 1901: general feeling that an age had ended but her legacy lived on intact. The Boer War (1899-1902): was fought by the British to establish political and economic power over the Boer republics of South Africa. The war was won by the British but was a great embarrassment to the most powerful nation of the world. It also signalled the end of British global influence. Kipling for, Forster against imperialism. The British Empire reached its zenith c.1920, when over 600 million people were ruled from London. In the later 19th century movements for home-rule had begun in all the white colonies. Starting in Canada, but spreading to Australasia and South Africa, such moves resulted in 1931 in dominion status for these lands. It was only after 1945 that the process of decolonisation began, which by 1964 was largely complete. Edwardian period: reign of King Edward VII (1901-1910): conscious of no longer being Victorian; enjoyment of life by the upper classes. Alienation of the artist. Social and economic stability of Victorian period maintained, but on the level of ideas there was change and liberation. Georgian period (1910-1914): King George V: seen as a golden age. The last years of stability, and of peace and order before the war. The Great War ended the long 19th c in 1914: loss of innocence in global terms; the first largescale war fought with modern technology such as aeroplanes and submarines; broke Europe into pieces. It also meant the consolidation of Britain for a short period: self-definition against an evil external force, menace from abroad. In literature: War Poets (Owen, Brooke, Sassoon), Yeats (An Irish Airman Foresees His Death); and affected many other writers indirectly (Eliot, The Waste Land) Womens rights in focus: vote extended to women over 21 in 1928. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 suspended part of the 1920 Act: while Northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom, the 26 counties gained separate dominion status as the Irish Free State and in 1949 attained full independence as the Republic of Ireland. 1920s and 1930s: post-war disillusionment, depression and unemployment. 1929-32: Great Depression. Rise of Fascism in Europe in the 1930s, growing threat of another war. In literature: the new generation of intellectuals and artists move gradually to the political left (e.g. Thirties Poets). The Spanish Civil War is an important experience for many Thirties Poets because they see it as a test case of Marxist ideology. World War II: 1939-45. Shocked and disillusioned many young left-wing writers who then turned to conservatism. Writers tried to retain their integrity. No artistic experiment. No great

war poetry (as in WWI). UK wins a war and loses an empire. India becomes independent in 1947, the Irish Republic withdraws from the Commonwealth in 1949. New ideas In the sciences empirical observation is replaced by speculative, theoretical approaches (Einstein), as observation was problematic in subatomic scales. As a result, science is seen as a construction of the human mind before it is a reflection of the natural world. X-ray is invented in 1895 and becomes a suggestive image of modernism (Mann, The Magic Mountain). Realism (description of the surface of things) is combined with symbolism and suggestiveness (to suggest a truth which is hidden from human perception). Science is no more seen as an objective truth. There are competing theories. 1900: foundations of quantum theory were laid by Einstein; Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams. 1901: Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. 1905: Einstein, The Special and General Theory of Relativity 1907: start of Cubism: radical break with the past (with tradition) in the arts 1909: Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto: calling arts to a recognition of modern technology, speed, noise of urban life; demanding the abolition of syntax in poetry, the representation of movement in painting. 1916: the most terrible year of the war; in neutral Switzerland the most radical and influential of these abolitionist movements, the Dada was founded: denying progress, knowledge, morality, family, logic, the past, and all that is not the immediate product of spontaneity and all that does not reflect the assumption that everything happens in a completely idiotic way. Alienation of the artist: a gap between the artist and ordinary readers, began in 1890s (Aesthetic movement, which promoted art for arts sake); artists rejecting and rejected by society. Yeats and Shaw attacked middle-class life; Joyces and Lawrences works were banned, they went into exile. Patronage system in literature was ended (with the few exceptions of Yeats and Joyce). Education act of 1870: made elementary education compulsory and universal. This lead to the rapid emergence of a large but unsophisticated literary public. As a result literature was divided into popular and high-brow literature. Fin de siecle: (end of the century) general mood at the end of the 19thc., late-Victorian period, meaning the decrease of Victorian self-confidence. Withdrawal into nostalgia and art. Art for arts sake, aestheticism. Literature is the pursuit of the upper classes. Wilde as a typical representative. Pessimism: end of conventional religious beliefs and of belief in Providence (partly as a result of Darwins work), which led to disappointment, stoicism esp. in Hardy, Housman, Yeats.

Definitions of Modernism A movement in the arts and literature in the first half of the 20th c., which: 1) demanded an open breach with the past or for the abolition of the past (eg Dadaism); a sense of discontinuity with the past; sense of newness was essential. Most important recurrent theme is break with the past, or with mainstream tradition the remaking or realigning of tradition (Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent); stems from the recognition of discontinuities discovered in the world: fragmentation of experience, legitimacy of multiple perspectives, rapid technological development. Novelty becomes essential. 2) but also created a new tradition (esp. Eliot), and stressed the continuity of ideas: they turned for inspiration and example to French Symbolism (1850s); Dante (14th c.), Metaphysical poetry (17th c.). Continuity of ideologies: French Symbolism underpins Modernism in the way that Romanticism underpins Symbolism. Find the depths of the unknown and newness professed by Baudelaire in the 1850s and much of the abolitionism of Modernism had been invented by Rimbaud in the 1870s. Modernism finds its precedents in African art, Byzantine painting, in Dante. Rather than breaking with tradition it finds and founds its own tradition (this is especially acute in Eliot). Dates In Britain, Modernism started in 1899, with the publication of Arthur Symonss The Symbolist Movement in France and lasted until about the mid-1920s. The great years of Modernism: 1922-25. 1922: Joyce, Ulysses, Eliot, The Waste Land, Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil 1923: Lawrence, Studies in Classic and American Literature, Forster, A Passage to India 1924: Richards, The Principles of Literary Criticism, Mann, The Magic Mountain, Breton, Surrealist Manifesto 1925: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Franz Kafka, The Trial, Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, Sean OCasey, Juno and the Paycock; Ezra Pound, Cantos, etc. The Main features of Modernism The linguistic turn: in the 19th c. the study of language was historical and was concerned with the origin and development of languages in the past. 1916: Ferdinand Saussure, Course in General Linguistics. Introduces synchronic view of language, is concerned with the structure and uses of language in the present. shows there is an arbitrary relation between linguistic sign and the thing it refers to. Meaning is created within the system of language. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921): the limits of my language mean the limits of my world, meaning: our perception of the world is subjective and the expression of the way we see the world depends on our linguistic capacities. (The view of the organic development of language was also problematic and paradoxical for Irish writers whose mother tongue was English rather than Irish, e.g. Yeats and Joyce. They

tried to express native Irish sensibilities in a language which was not a native tongue. Importance of dialect in Scotland.) Language is a depository of individual consciousness but it is also a medium of cultural tradition. Eliot and Pound saw that civilisation depends on words and it is the function of the poet to keep words accurate. But there is also an implicit or unconscious side of language that cannot be known. An interest in anthropology: the study and contrast of the culture, mythology and psychology of primitive and civilised societies. Interest in universal truths and behaviour rather than in the individual. An interest in primitive or exotic societies and their arts: Cubism owes a debt to African paintings, carvings and masks; literature: Conrad, Heart of Darkness. Why? Earlier: primitive people were seen as a simpler and purer version of civilised people (Rousseau) but essentially the same as ourselves. Modernism: primitive people were believed to have a different way of thinking. They were believed to have psychological continuity with the world. The primitive mind was valorised but for a different reason than earlier (belief in absolute and universal values). This view was influenced by Frazers interpretation of rites and rituals, and Freuds interpretation of psychic structures. A concern for the primitive world suddenly becomes a concern for the civilised world. Colonialism: anthropology as scientific justification of colonial expansion and mission in the 19th c. (Kipling, The White Mans Burden, 1903) Primitive people were to be civilised an enlightened. Modernism: changing perception of colonial other. Civilisation represents the conscious mind and primitive or colonised people represent the subconscious mind. Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930): identified the subconscious part of the human mind with the regions to be colonised and controlled by the ego. Civilisation was built on the suppression and sublimation of the instincts. He saw a parallel between the psyche and politics. Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899): real darkness is not in Africa, but in the human (especially European) heart. Horrified by the recognition. There is an inner struggle to preserve sanity, which is really the veneer of civilisation. You want to suppress that darkness but you cant. D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (1915): you have to recognise and come to terms with that darkness. Colonial experience helps you make contact with your inner self. Forster, A Passage to India (1924): liberalism. An interest in mythology as a repository of universal ideas. Classical scholarship was seeking the origins of Greek poetry and religion behind the classical texts. 1911-15: Sir James Frazer, leader of the Cambridge School of Anthropology, publishes The Golden Bough (12 vols., abridged 1922). Frazer discovered a coherent ritual pattern in diverse mythological materials: the sacrificial killing of the king as the main fertility rite. He showed that the Christian myth of a dying and resurrected god was merely one of an enormous class of

similar myths. It was evidence that we can find universal ideas in different communities in different ages and that underneath modern sceptical intelligence there are elements of mystical, primitive, ancient ways of thinking. The book had a huge effect on literature, esp. on the work of Eliot. Frazer assumes that the primitive affects our behaviour as it is repressed by civilisation. An interest in psychology and psychiatry. C. G. Jung believed that in dream or in neurosis we recreate or remember these primitive myths or archetypes (as also appears in the poetry of Yeats). Archetypes are universal, shared ideas. Sigmund Freud (1856-1938) said that the place of this antiquity or primitive thinking is in our individual childhood, and childhood is an abbreviated version of the development of the human race. Childhood recreates the development of the human race. We behave according to universal patterns. These universal patterns or layers are repressed by education, civilisation, and expected normal behaviour. Freud also proposed that hidden layers of the human mind have an influence on human behaviour but also on the production and interpretation of works of art. Key terms of Freudian theory: 1) id or subconscious: layer of instincts, archetypes, primitive forces 2) ego: our social self, the seat of reason 3) super-ego: the agent of authority and repression 4) dreams: the super-ego is not alert (is asleep), so dreams allow us too deal with our problems on a subconscious level 5) dreamwork: dreams modify our primitive or instinctive impulses to make them acceptable for the ego. Those impulses are censored, condensed, distorted, and have nothing to do with logic. 6) interpretation of dreams: the rational process of interpreting or explaining the subjects of a dream in order to recover the deep, subconscious impulses that have been modified in dream. Why? In order to learn more about our personality. Or psychological problems that disturb us. 7) free association: Freuds clinical technique, another way of recovering the impulses by suspending the reasonable self. The implications of Freuds views on the interpretation of dreams, and his clinical techniques, such as free association, on literature, are immense: e.g. stream of consciousness technique in Joyce and Woolf; or the a-logical structure in The Waste Land; Surrealism seeks the truth by suspending reason; in general works of art conform to the logic of dreams and to the logic of the suppressed self rather than to the logic of reason, which is an artefact and the result of civilisation and education, and so it is not our true self. Freuds significance in literature: he restored a confidence in irrationality, the primitive, the mythical, and the original or true self uncorrupted by civilisation. Political conservatism. Modernism was revolutionary in the arts, but not in politics; writers were conservative, or even reactionary. Yeats: supported the Irish aristocracy and despised common middle-class people (the mob), and flirted with European dictatorships, Eliot: conservative, royalist and Anglican, Lawrence: spoke about the submission of women, threat of Jews, Pound: identified with Italian fascism

The Aesthetics of Modernism Formalism. T.E. Hulme (philosopher), Wyndham Lewis (painter), Ezra Pound (poet), the leading figures in the magazine Vortex: the art object must be dry, hard, clearly defined, discontinuous with ordinary space and time, abstract. Why? Because abstraction (ie formal, geometric, impersonal art) embodies order and authority (as in Byzantine art). Influences can be found in The Waste Land (non-temporal set of interrelated, abstract images); in Yeats who said that a work of art must lack any humanity or life. Imagism. An Image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. (Pound) i.e.: wants to avoid feeling, and wants to achieve the exact curve of the thing as opposed to providing the reader with an interpretation of or a ready-made approximation to the thing. Provincialism. The affirmation of the peripheral, the provincial, the outsider. Modernist writers are great outsiders to the English literary establishment (white, male, Anglo-Saxon in origin, heterosexual in sexual orientation, Oxbridge education, Anglican in religion, upper-middle class, based in London). Often they are exiles, migrs. Eliot and Pound are Americans; Yeats, Shaw, Joyce are Irish; Conrad is Polish, Woolf a woman and bisexual, EM Forster homosexual; MacDiarmid Scottish, Joyce lived in exile; DH Lawrence came from a working-class background in northern England. Main developments in literature in the first half of the 20th century Poetry Imagism is against romanticism and emotion in poetry, insists on the direct treatment of the thing, wants to avoid everything that does not contribute directly to the presentation of the subject. Free rhythmic movement as opposed to strict metrical verse. Encouraged precise images. Typically short. Descriptive poems. Imagism could not develop a technique for the production of longer and more complex poems. T.S. Eliot is the leading figure of a new aesthetic and critical movement. Extends the concerns of Imagism by bringing in English metaphysical poetry of the 17th century (wit, intellectual complexity, irony, colloquial rhythm of poetry); French Symbolist poets (suggestiveness, both precise and complex images). Added the new criteria of allusiveness and complexity to the Imagist criteria of being concrete and precise. W.B. Yeats had a long career stretching across the Modernist period (1890s to 1930s), but developed a highly individual voice, making use of symbolism, mythology and rhythm. Came from a Protestant minority in Ireland, a small but influential social group. His early period is representative of the aesthetic attitude to life (as explained by Pater). Yeats presented himself as a late-Romantic poet: major love poems, evocative melody, creation of myths, based on folklore, hated middle-class, member of the political elite and admires the simple life of peasants. W. H. Auden and the Thirties Poets: rhythm of poetry very important for them too. The poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins was published posthumously in 1918. Hopkinss poetry combines precision of image with original metrical patterns that go back to the patterns of Anglo-Saxon

poetry (number of syllables variable, number of stresses, usually 4, is invariable). Hopkins influenced Eliot (e.g. The Waste Land), who influenced W.H. Auden. They were influenced by the poetry of Eliot but not by the political or aesthetic convictions of Eliot. While Eliot was conservative and traditionalist, Thirties Poets were progressive and Marxists. They were also influenced by the poetry of WWI: they believed in the public role of poetry. They wrote a poetry that was directly relevant to contemporary social life, they wrote about topical issues rather than about mythology and oriental religions. However, they tried to maintain a neutral tone. New Apocalypse School: as the war began, neutral tone disappeared, and gave way to vehemence, violence, representations of the subconscious mind. Often seen as a late-Romantic movement. The greatest representative was Dylan Thomas (a Welshman). Fiction High modernism: 1910-1925, the great age of the novel. Main influences: Disappearance of a common system of beliefs, shared by the greater part of society. The public values of the Victorian age gave way to personal notions of value, which depended on the writers own intuitions and sensibilities rather than on public agreement. Writers had to convince their readers that their personal sense of truth was also universal. And therefore relevant for their readers too. They achieved that in different ways. Woolf: to give credit to her personal opinion, used poetic devices (symbols, metaphors, allegories). Joyce: did not want to represent a single personal attitude, but represented multiple point of views, and as a writer remained objective. New perception of time: old sense of chronological sequence (past, present, future) of Victorian novels have way to a conception of time as a continuous flow in the consciousness of the individual. What are the implications? Our memories of the past and anticipation of the future are there in any single moment of the present and in turn our attitudes in any present moment are influenced by our past and future. Time is highly subjective (Henri Bergson). The way we perceive time is different from measured time, and writers tried to represent that in their novels. Thats why it is possible that Woolfs Mrs Dalloway and Joyces Ulysses record the events of a single day. In both novels in that single day the whole past and future of the characters (in Joyce the whole of mankind) are present. Technical implication: stream of consciousness technique. The writer represents the consciousness (ideas, thoughts, feelings taking place in the human mind) without reporting it in formal, quoted remarks. In Victorian novels the 3rd person narrator is outside the characters but can look into the mind of the characters, and reports not only what they say but also what they think feel, etc. In Modernism the writer enters the consciousness of the characters, and often these characters can hardly be distinguished from the autobiographical self of the writer, e.g. in

Woolf, Joyce or Conrad. Often there are no quotation marks at all. It is difficult to follow who is speaking. New notions of the nature of consciousness: Freud, Jung, association of ideas (Locke), general sense of the loneliness of the individual and alienation from society. How is communication and understanding possible if we are locked up in our personal universe? (Isolation and misunderstanding is also a central issue in Conrad.) Importance of emotions (empathy, love) in human relationships in Joyce, Forster, D.H. Lawrence. (All of them were strongly influenced by 18th c. Sentimentalism.) To summarise: new techniques were employed to give timeless and universal significance to the present moment and the individual character: multiple point of view; stream of consciousness; poetic symbolism (Woolf); Greek and Roman myths (Forster, Joyce). Drama Wilde: 1890s. drawing-room comedies, witty plays meant to entertain the audience, wit and paradoxes applied for their own sake express the writers aesthetic and moral nihilism and alienation from his audience. Influenced by Restoration comedy (comedy of manners). Sophisticated language, addressed to the upper classes. Other genres: fiction, poetry, tales. Art has nothing to do with morality. Art survives while life passes. Social life seen as a farce. Shaw: witty plays, too, but also provocative and challenging. Criticises not his characters but the audience. Theatre is a means of social criticism. He learned his craft as a dramatic critic and so he displays a strong critical approach, anti-Victorianism, but together with Wilde he belongs to the late-Victorian period rather than to the age of Modernism. (The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891) Yeats: the Irish Literary Theatre was founded in 1899 with Yeatss play The Countess Cathleen. He wanted to make a contribution to the Irish Literary Revival. The theatre becomes in 1902 the Irish National Theatre. Yeats makes use of old Irish legends and writes poetic dramas. Other important Irish playwrights. J.M. Synge: speech and imagination of Irish country people. Sean OCasey: combination of tragedy and irony, background of Irish Civil war. T.S. Eliot: revived ritual poetic drama. Strong religious symbolism, eg. Murder in the Cathedral (1935), about Thomas Beckett: sermons, chorus of the women of Canterbury. Very formal thatre, like Greek plays. Foreign influence: Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen: criticism of middle-class society, realism, poetic plays, strong symbolism. British and Irish drama in the first half of the 20th century was less innovative or revolutionary than for example fiction. Major innovations came after the war: Osborne, Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard.