The context of Modernism
What is modernism?
The world, in the first part of the 20th century was changing cataclysmically
- WWI, the mechanization of war and slaughter, industrialization of death
- Technology of speed, fragmentation and uncertainty: telephones, automobiles, aircraft
- Developments in science (such as Einstein's 1905 Theory of Special Relativity) and collapse of faith in progress and grand narratives.
- The grand narratives of religion, positivist science, empire and class which gave centre and shape to life no longer held as much sway � they had been undermined.
By 1920, after WWI, Yeats wrote �The Second Coming' in response to his spiritualist belief that a 2000 year cycle, which gave order to a European civilization, was coming to an end.
Modernism and metanarrative
The reaction to this cultural collapse was modernism
Modernism was not a uniform movement but either responded with alarm to the break down of the old order or embraced the collapse and attempted to hasten it, seeing itself as an agent in discarding the old order perhaps to forge a new order.
Freud's psychoanalysis is an example of the rise of a new grand narrative that replaced older, more certain, concepts of the self that had their basis in Descartes' 17th century positivist dictum �cogito ergo sum' or � I think, therefore I am.'
Uncertainty about the nature of the self produces Freud's concept of the unconscious. This new narrative of uncertainty � which can be unlocked through Freud's psychoanalytic method attempts to form a new meta-narrative.
Modernist cultural forms
- Visual Art
- Music
- Architecture
- Design
- Cinema
- Literature
Modernist cultural forms
Visual Art: Impressionism
- Beginning with Monet's �Impression: Sunrise' (1872)
- Attempted to escape the kind of photographic realism that had come to dominate European painting by portraying visual reality in a way that accurately recorded the experienced effect of light and colour.
Visual Art: Cubism
- A more radical break from traditional perspective and forms.
- Eg: Georges Braque: �Woman with a guitar' 1913
Visual Art: Expressionism
- Distorts �reality' for emotionally expressive effect.
- Eg: Egon Schiele �Death and the Maiden 1915/16
Visual Art: Surrealism
- Movement led by Andre Breton
- Anti-rational
- Characterised by strangeness and combination of elements not usually seen together
- Influenced by Freud's psychoanalysis.
- Eg: Magritte's �This is not a pipe'
Architecture
- The concern of modernist architecture was to no longer base their designs on historical forms, but to invent new forms to be used with modern materials.
- Mies van der Rohe. Weissenhof Apartments 1927
- Le Corbusier Plan for Paris
- Involved tearing down an entire quarter of historical Paris and replacing it with a grid of modernist apartment blocks.
- Corbusier famous for his famous: Unite de habitation
- These public housing projects were realised in many places (including Melbourne) and are derided as alienating.
Design
Bauhaus School
- Lead by architect Walter Gropius.
- Included artists such as Kandinsky.
- Gave form to many of the domestic objects we recognize today. (eg: Wassily chair)
- Again broke with old forms.
Cinema
- New art form for the modern age.
- Moving image, fragmented time.
- Eg: Fritz Lang's Metropolis 1927
- Nightmarish visions of the future and technology
Romance in literary modernism
- Romantic literary form was concerned with valuing human feeling over inherited abstract convention.
- This is reflected in a text like �Pride and Prejudice' which while it can be read as socially conservative, reflecting a traditional romance narrative form which is carefully, almost symmetrically, plotted leading to the happy union of the virtuous protagonists, remains focused not on the maintenance of rigid class distinctions � it suggests, idealistically, that class boundaries can be made porous through the force of �real' love.
- In its more radical incarnation Romanticism was concerned with reacting against the �soulless' civilization that had been delivered to the late 18th century through the enlightenment and industrialization.
- In this sense there is some strong continuity between romanticism and modernism.
- Modernism might be considered as Romantic in its attitude � radical, breaking with tradition and convention
Realism and literary modernism
- Modernism as literary movement was determined to break boundaries � to say things in a new way � to suit and define the times.
- Modernism breaks with the positivist and progressive realism of the 19th century.
- Novels like �Great Expectations' which worked in the realist tradition concerned themselves with large social questions like prison conditions and urbanization and within existing literary institutions
- Realism contributed to the sense of a narrative of civilization as progressing � improving � in increments en masse.
- Literary modernism brings into question the social project of literary realism.
Literary modernism
- The literary influence of modernism is found in the radical approach taken to:
- Character � focus on inner experience and sensation
- Plot � many elements of the traditional plot, such as chronological ordering, are jettisoned.
- Action � the main action of the story might shift from external events to a focus on shifts of emotion or perception.
- Narrative voice � limited point of view and stream of consciousness
- Metaphor and symbol emerge as highly important.
Virginia Woolf
1882 � 1941
- An important figure in modernist literature in England.
- Famous for her novels, short fiction and literary criticism
- Her novels include:
- Mrs Dalloway
- The Waves
- Orlando
- To The Lighhouse
- Woolf's essay �Modern Fiction' (1919) sets the tone for modernist literature by critiquing the realist form, attempting to define the modern age and then describing a form of writing appropriate to that age.
Woolf: Critique of Realism
- In this essay Woolf is concerned to critique those forms of contemporary fiction she finds �materialistic' � we might say this is writing overly burdened by the formal chains of 19th century realism.
- She critiques them as being composed of �unimportant things; that they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and enduring.'
- Clearly what Woolf is interested in is a new form which moves beyond realism which she regards as unable to �secure the thing we seek.'
Woolf: Defining the modern age
- For Woolf the early 20th century is an entirely new age in which �life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide'
- The modern age demands a new type of writing to capture life.
- �Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being �like this'. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives myriad impressions � trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they comes, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms�'
- �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?
Woolf: Modernist subject matter, style and form.
- Modernist subject matter is tied up with style and form. It discards convention.
- �[W]e are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.'
- The style of modernist writing is, for Woolf one which explores what has become known as the �stream of consciousness.'
- �Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.'
- Woolf locates Joyce's Ulysses as being a work of fiction appropriate to this modern sensibility. Nevertheless she regards it as �spiritual'. There is still a yearning here for the essential, what she calls the �innermost flame'.
- �For the modern�the point of interest, lies very likely in the dark places of psychology'
- Woolf praises Chekhov for his story �Gusev' whose effect is one of unexpected emphasis, it is characteristic of what she claims as the Russian influence on modern English fiction. Chekhov's work is tied up with the �inconclusiveness of the Russian mind'
- � �The proper stuff of fiction' does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.'
Anton Chekhov
- 1860 - 1904
- Born and lived in a Tsarist Russia that was becoming more and more volatile in the lead up to the 1905 and then the 1917 revolution.
- Represents a transition between realism and modernism.
- Use of the �objective correlative' to describe the internal world by external means.
- His work is not tied to highly conventional narrative.
- Chekhov's mode is primarily realist but shows the influence of impressionism
Realism and modernism in Chekhov
- Chekhov's realism:
- Emphasis on specific detail
- Historical particularity
- Everyday life
- Makes comment on social norms of the day
- Chekhov's modernism
- Social reality of the day was increasing acknowledgement of rupturing social norms. (cf Lady with Lapdog: subject matter � an affair described with frankness �women like his wife who made love without sincerity, with unnecessary talk, affectedly, hysterically, with such an expression as though it were not love or passion, but something much more significant; and of two or three very beautiful, frigid women, whose faces suddenly lit up with a predatory expression, an obstinate desire to take�the lace trimmings on their negligees looked to him then like the scales of a snake.')
- Captures moments and moods and is concerned with the inner life.
- Characters are depicted in terms of mood and memory.
Lady with Lapdog
- Title reflects a painterly sensibilty
- Note the description of light in this story.
- �They walked, and talked about the strange light that fell on the sea; the water was of such a soft and warm lilac, and the moon threw a shaft of gold across it.'
- The emphasis here is on an attempt to capture a moment literally using the same techniques as the impressionist painters � light.
- An emphasis on memory and thought as the principal action of the story
- �Later, in his hotel room, he thought about her and felt sure that he would meet her again the next day. It had to be. As he went to bed he remembered that she had only recently left her boarding school, that she had been a schoolgirl like his own daughter; he recalled how much diffidence and angularity there was in her laughter and her conversation with a stranger�He remembered her slender, weak neck, her beautiful grey eyes.'
- There is a recognition in the story, as Gurov comes to realise his deep love for Anna Sergeyevna, that identity, convention and civilisation is tied up with artifice, that existence is nonsensical.
- �You were quite right: the sturgeon was a bit off.'
- These words, so ordinary in themselves, for some reason hurt Gurov's feelings: they seemed to him humiliating and indecent. What savage manners! What faces! What stupid nights! What uninteresting, wasted days! Crazy gambling at cards, gluttony, endless talk about one and the same thing. Business that was of no use to anyone and talk about one and the same thing absorbed the greater part of one's time and energy, and what was left in the end was a sort of dock-tailed, barren life, a sort of non-sensical existence, and it was impossible to escape from it, just as though you were in a lunatic asylum or a convict chain gang!'
Katherine Mansfield
- 1888 � 1923
- Born in NZ � lived most of her adult life in Europe.
- Known primarily as a short story writer
- Later life has a deep interest in �new age' spiritualism
- Died in Russian spiritualist Gurdijeff's clinic in Switzerland of tuberculosis.
- Story �Bliss' published in 1920 toward the end of her life.
- It is during this latter period that she produced of her most remembered writing.
- Chekhov a major influence.
Bliss
- Bliss begins in the midst of a sensation � without context or cause. The eruption of Bertha Young's feeling of bliss is irrational. The narration, following the simple events, is told in a stream-of-consciousness style.
- It attempts to seize, rather than explain, the wholeness of the irrational, but wholly pleasurable sensation.
- The first synaesthetic image of the �absolute bliss' is an irrational but arresting one:
- �as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe.'
Bliss � Modernist Style
- Internal monologue:
- �how idiotic civilisation is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up like a rare, rare fiddle'
- Stream of consciousness: Inexact, unfinished, un-centred thought:
- � �No, that about the fiddle is not quite what I mean,� she thought, running up the steps and feeling in her bag for the key � she'd forgotten in, as usual � and rattling the letter-box. �It's not what I mean because� Thank you, Mary� �she went into the hall. �is nurse back?� '
- The internal monologue allows the expression of the voice that imagines the Freudian super-ego � the imagined other, the conscience. �yes, that did sound rather far-fetched and absurd, but it was really what she had brought them.'
Modernist symbolism
- The repetition of the symbolism and exact phrasing highlights the emphasis on metaphor and form as central to modernist writing.
- �How absurd it was. Why have a baby if it has to be kept � not in a case like a rare, rare fiddle � but in another woman's arms?'
- In this case the use of the �rare, rare fiddle' returns us to the theme of alienation.
- The story questions the aspects of civilisation which alienate the self from one's own body, children, lovers, feelings, sexuality.
- The other, perhaps more important symbol in Bliss is the pear tree. It is tied up with Bertha's perception of an excess of perfection � and through this the elusive source of her Bliss.
- �At the far end against the wall, there was a tall, slender pear tree in fullest, richest bloom; it stood perfect , as though becalmed against the jade-green sky. Bertha couldn't help feeling, even from this distance, that it had not a single bud or a faded petal�And she seemed to see on her eyelids the lovely pear tree with its wide open blossoms as a symbol of her own life.'
Bliss 1
- Bertha is certain of the bliss that she feels but it is based not on reality.
- The bliss is misplaced as it finds its locus in the apparent shared attraction between herself and Miss Fulton which depends on Bertha's �reading' of the pear tree's perfection. .
- It is a parallel with Joyce's story �The Dead', a kind of extended moment of epiphanaic expectation followed by disappointment.
- Bertha's �bliss' is factored on shallow materialistic piling of sensation upon sensation:
- �They had this absolutely satisfactory house and garden. And friends � modern, thrilling friends, writers and painters and poets or people keen on social questions � just the kind of friends they wanted. And then there were books, and there was music, and she had found a wonderful little dressmaker, and they were going abroad in the summer, and their new cook made the most superb omelettes�.'
Bliss 2
- The �bliss' of the story is a romance � one imagined by Bertha using the pear tree and its impossible perfection as symbolic motif.
- �And the two women stood side by side looking at the slender, flowering tree. Although it was so still it seemed, like the flame of a candle, to stretch up, to point, to quiver in the bright air, to grow taller and taller as they gazed � almost to touch the rim of the round, silver moon.
- How long did they stand there? Both, as it were, caught in that circle of unearthly light, understanding each other perfectly, creatures of another world, and wondering what they were to do in this one with all this blissful treasure that burned in their bosoms and dropped, in silver flowers, from their hair and hands?'
Bliss 3
- Bertha desires her husband � but at first does so only half consciously. The narrating, using the stream of consciousness, the rupture of the unconscious and the almost hysterical, automatic externalised response to he unconscious knowledge, reveals deeper anxieties underlying, repressed, under Bertha's bliss. The hysteria of the repressive act � is of the same order as the shallow entertainments that have been returned to over and again in the story.
- �At those last words something strange and almost terrifying darted into Bertha's mind. And this something blind and smiling whispered to her: �Soon these people will go. The house will be quiet � quiet. The lights will be out. And you and he will be alone together in the dark room � the warm bed�'
- She jumped up from her chair and ran over to the piano.
- �What a pity someone does not play!� she cried. �What a pity someone does not play.�
- She uncertainly romanticises the feeling of ardour she has for her husband: �was this what that feeling of bliss had been leading up to?
Bliss 4
- When the secret relationship between Miss Fulton and Harry is made clear, Miss Fulton points again to the pear tree. It turns out that it is still perfect, but it is merely form, without further symbolic content. Bertha returns to it: �But the pear tree was as lovely as ever and as fill of flower and as still.'
- The essence of the pear tree � its romantic and real value are uncertain.
Critique of modernism
- Elitist
- Obscure
- Sets new conventions � defies its own dictum of breaking with convention.
|