Modernism

The early years of the twentieth century have been characterized by the emergence of
a new type of literature which marks a point of departure from nineteenth century modes of
thought and writing. Within the span of twelve years, a succession of outstanding writers such
as D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats opened new
horizons of experimentation and discovery in an outburst of innovation. Undoubtedly, this
demarcation from pre-existing modes of thought was not confined to the province of literature
as a similar outbreak manifested itself in other forms of art, more particularly in painting
where a new emphasis on design and the modulation of colors left its print. The best example
can be traced to Picasso’s Cubism which promotes the elaboration of a significant form based
on experience rather than a mere photographic representation of reality. Music has also
witnessed a complete disruption of the preceding nineteenth century rhythms into strident and
complex compositions mainly introduced by the bold experiments of Stravinsky in the ballet
The Rite of Spring, which has not failed to provoke a riot in its first representation in Paris in
1913.

Modernism embodies a revolt against nineteenth century methodology which in the

modernist view is ill-equipped to capture the elusive nature of the modern world. Undeniably,
authors in the nineteenth century strive to render an aspect of reality known as verisimilitude
in their literary productions. This tendency to depict as faithfully as possible the world around
us explains why this type of literature bristles with outward descriptions. By the end of the
Victorian era, the flourishing of a new form of writing betrays a rupture with naturalistic
methods applied to literature. In this respect, Nietzsche philosophy has been of considerable
impact with its stress on instinct rather than reason. Nietzsche is notable for his attacks on
positivism and its scientific methods for explaining all phenomena, and his questioning of
established ideas, mainly traditional morality. Thus, modern writers found their inspiration in
Nietzsche’s seminal philosophy by turning from naturalistic methodology towards an
emphasis on a subjective and irrational approach to human nature. There is also an enormous
importance placed in the theories of instinct with the mighty figure of Freud. Features of his
work are pointing to a considerable skepticism about the findings of reason. Freud’s view
places a great emphasis on the power of the unconscious to affect conduct. His discovery that
man’s actions can be motivated by forces which he may know nothing introduces a palpable

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irrationality into human behavior which is profoundly disturbing. Certainly, the theories of
Freud and Nietzsche did much to foster a climate that enabled the psychological literature of
the twentieth century to flourish. Hence, the principal focus of modern fiction is on man, but
very particularly on man as he exists within himself, including the fears impulses and inner
conflicts that motivate him. D.H. Lawrence seeks to examine the unconscious part of man,
which is for him the true realm of reality. He has faith in instinct and intuition, in the “blood”
as he sometimes calls it. He expresses it in a letter:

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as

being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our
minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says
is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.
What do I care about knowledge? All I want is to
answer to my blood, direct without fribbling
intervention of mind, or moral, or what not. I conceive
of man’s body as a flame, like a candle flame forever
upright and yet flowing: and the intellect is just the
light that is shed onto the things around. And I am not
so much concerned with the things around; -which is
really mind: -but with the mystery of the flame forever
flowing coming God knows how from out of practically
nowhere, and being itself, whatever there is around it,
that it lights up.

Then reality, as seen through the lenses of modern writers, is no more limited by ideas
of a fixed and solid world of phenomena; it can be evasive, evanescent, and protean, like the
fleeting, elusive images, mysterious associations and perceptions of the conscious and
subconscious mind. In this line of thought, William James formulates the theory of
consciousness which lies behind the attempts to define psychic life:

…consciousness, then does not appear to itself

chopped up in bits…It is nothing jointed; it flows. A
‘river’ or ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is
most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let
us call it the stream of consciousness, or of subjective
life.

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 The intention of authors such as Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson
and James Joyce to cite a few, who make extensive use of the technique of ‘the stream of
consciousness’ is to reassert a balance between the ever-changing being and the world rather
than remain stuck in the recurrences of a fixed past. They saw Victorian literature as
embracing a rigid portrayal of the outer world through burdening descriptions of the
environment in an attempt to render the truthfulness of life. They definitely failed to identify
with the lengthy flow of language in its accuracy of description and meticulousness of details
as merely reflecting the events and situations that come to existence in this literature. As a
consequence, modernist approach to literature rejected this kind of ‘photographic’ style and
preferred a subjective attitude towards human nature with its strong emphasis on the workings
of the individual mind. Hence, it sought to detach itself from naturalism and resorted to a
glorification of form in itself.

In her essay entitled Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown, Virginia Woolf sharply criticized the
writing modes of her predecessors, that she qualified too much conventional. She discussed at
length the problem of characterization the writer is faced with; however, according to her the
Edwardians focused on outward descriptions rather than on the personality of the individual.
She viewed this writing as remote from the genuine nature of the human being and stated that
to render in the closest manner human consciousness and its epiphanies the writer needs to
adopt a new approach to capture what she termed ‘moments of being’. Her vision which she
shared with James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, and other modernists was clearly focused on
the lived experience and its intensity in the very moment of its occurrence, and all the richness
of the external factors that impinge upon the human mind to make it generate and interpret the
world through guttural feelings. The following quotation provides ample description of her
revolutionary vision of life:

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 come, an
incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape
themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls
differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but
there; so that if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could

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 write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon
his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no
comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted
style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street
tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically
arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope
surrounding us from beginning of consciousness to the end... 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? 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

The subconscious influence on human interpretation of the outer world has radically
altered the way in which modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence, and
many others used to create their fiction. Their writings have been equally influenced by the
discoveries of the human mind’s functioning and the collapse of western civilization at the
wake of the twentieth century. The major cause behind the radical shift from a past age
towards a new one is undoubtedly the First World War, which has had an unprecedented
impact on the emergence of the modernist movement, as it altered the way people perceived
the external environment and how they related to it. The Great War, as it was also known,
brought chaos and shattered the greatest cities and capitals in the western world, leaving the
individuals in a state of shock that entailed traumas, a sense of meaninglessness, loss of
landmarks, and alienation. The war made the humanity desperately grasp for a little sense it
could find in a world where everything was destroyed.

Trying to cope with the distressing shower of perceptions that impinge of man, writers
excelled in their intricate style which also captured the glittering light of a different lifestyle
that started to emerge in the early years of the twentieth century. The boost of the economic
life was a double-edged knife as it offered a material improvement in man’s life but a deep
spiritual disturbance. Indeed, 1914 saw a rapid boom in the heavy industrial output and a
momentous industrial revolution. Major European capitals underwent a massive surge in

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urbanization. The population of London increased to 4.5 million people as there was a
continuous shift from rural to urban centre. In cities the routines of urban life were becoming
increasingly dominated by the rigid routines of office and factory. The day of mass
productions had dawned with industry sustaining vast mass-markets. It is the picture of the
individual overwhelmed and subjugated to colossal dehumanizing forces of industry,
commerce and production.

The sociologist Emile Durkheim observes that rapid industrialization happening at the
beginning of the twentieth century was “incompatible with the biological hardwiring of the
human organism”. Changes in the environment affected his perception in a way it was
necessary to rethink the position of the self in it. The end of the nineteenth century and the
beginning of the twentieth century was considered “a crucial period of transition” of the
society to “consumption-based economic environment”. The inexorable change in the fabric
of society and its materialistic orientation confirm the clear cut between past and present, and
unfold a world where everything has to be considered in a new light. In a much-divided
civilization, where the stigmata of the war pervade all minds and the claims of technology are
becoming more insistent, the greatest writers point a way to ‘unity of being’ and attempt to
render the uniqueness of this chaotic, unreachable world of new perceptions amidst a
landscape of the ashes of the previous Victorian age.

Bibliography

Encyclopedias:

Modernism (1995). Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature. Springfield, MA:

Merriam-Webster. p. 1236.
J. H. Dettmar "Modernism" in The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature ed. by David
Scott Kastan. Oxford University Press, 2006.
Critical Works:
David Thorburn, MIT, The Great Courses, The Teaching Company, 2007, Masterworks of
Early 20th-Century Literature, see p. 12 of guidebook Part I, Accessed Aug. 24, 2013
Boulton, James (ed.), Selected Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Lehan, R., Literary Modernist man and Beyond. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 2009.
Pound, Ezra, Make it New, Essays, London, 1935

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James, William (1890), The Principles of Psychology. ed. George A. Miller, Harvard
University Press, 1983.

Woolf, Virginia, Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown, Columbia University, USA, 1924.
Website: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/MrBennettAndMrsBrown.pdf

Campbell, D. E., Reinventing the Self: The Construction and Consumption of Identity Within
Transatlantic Modernism (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from:
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5m91h2z9, 2011.