Modernist Literature - Origins of Modernist Literature

Origins of Modernist Literature

Modernist literature attempts to take into account changing ideas about reality developed by Darwin, Mach, Freud, Einstein, Nietzsche, Bergson and others. From this developed innovative literary techniques such as stream-of-consciousness, interior monologue, as well as the use of multiple points-of-view. This can reflect doubts about the philosophical basis of realism, or alternatively an expansion of our understanding of what is meant by realism. So that, for example the use of stream-of-consciousness, or interior monologue reflects the need for greater psychological realism. World War I, and the disillusionment that followed, further shaped modernist views of human nature.

It is of course debatable when the modernist literary movement began, though some have chosen 1910 as roughly marking the beginning and quote novelist Virginia Woolf, who declared that human nature underwent a fundamental change "on or about December 1910." But modernism was already stirring at least by 1902, with a work such as Joseph Conrad's (1857-1924) Heart of Darkness, while Alfred Jarry's (1873-1907) absurdist play, Ubu Roi appeared, even earlier, in 1896. Modernists broke the implicit contract with the general public that artists were the interpreters and representatives of bourgeois culture and ideas. Among early modernist non-literary landmarks is the atonal ending of Arnold Schoenberg's Second String Quartet in 1908, the Expressionist paintings of Wassily Kandinsky starting in 1903 and culminating with his first abstract painting and the founding of the Expressionist Blue Rider group in Munich in 1911, and the rise of fauvism and the inventions of cubism from the studios of Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and others in the years between 1900 and 1910.

Some important early modernist writers (and selected works) are: Marcel Proust (1871-1922): Du Cote de chez Swann (1913), the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27); Franz Kafka The Metamorphosis (1915), The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926); Dorothy Richardson: Pointed Roofs (1915), the first volume of Pilgrimage (1915-1938; post. 1967); Andrei Bely (1880-1934): Petersburg (1913); Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918): Alcools (1913); Georg Trakl (1887-1914): Poems (1913); Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926): The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), Sonnets to Orpheus (1922), Duino Elegies (1922); Gottfried Benn (1886-1956): Morgue and other Poems (1912); Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936): Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921); D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930): Sons and Lovers (1913),The Rainbow (1915); Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957): Tarr (1918); W. B. Yeats (1865-1939): The Green Helmet (1910), Wild Swans at Coole (1917); Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953): Anna Christie (1920), The Emperor Jones (1920); Karel Čapek (1890-1938): R.U.R. (1920); T. S. Eliot (1888-1965): "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1916), The Waste Land (1922), Four Quartets (1935–42); Ezra Pound (1885-1972): Ripostes (1912), The Cantos, published variously over the period 1917-1964, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920); James Joyce (1882-1941), Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922).

James Joyce was a major modernist writer whose strategies in his novel Ulysses (1921) for depicting the events in the life of his protagonist, Leopold Bloom, have come to epitomize modernism's approach to fiction. The poet T.S. Eliot described these qualities in 1923, noting that Joyce's technique is "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.... Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art." Eliot's own modernist poem The Waste Land (1922) mirrors "the futility and anarchy" in its own way, in its fragmented structure, and the absence of an obvious central, unifying narrative. This is in fact a rhetorical technique to convey the poem's theme: "The decay and fragmentation of Western Culture". The poem, despite the absence of a linear narrative, does have a structure: this is provided by both fertility symbolism derived from anthropology, and other elements such as the use of quotations and juxtaposition.

Modernist literature addressed similar aesthetic problems as contemporary Modernist art, and Gertrude Stein's abstract writings, for example, have been compared to the fragmentary and multi-perspective Cubist paintings of her friend Pablo Picasso. The questioning spirit of modernism, as part of a necessary search for ways to make sense of a broken world, can be also seen in a different form in the marxist, Scottish nationalist poet Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926). In this poem MacDiarmid applies Eliot's techniques to respond to the question of nationalism, using comedy, parody, in an optimistic (though no less hopeless) form of modernism in which the artist as "hero" seeks to embrace complexity and locate new meanings.