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of becoming aware that in this new age, heroic or successful action is not only
unattainable, but also perhaps undesirable.
Plot and Chronology
If heroism became a literary impossibility for many modern writers, so did the
conventional way of telling a story from beginning to end; in the process, the
modernists rejected traditional notions of plot and time. The nineteenth century saw
time as comprising three distinct stages -- past, present and future -- through which
an orderly progression of events evolves. Such a view of time produced, by
necessity, a literature that focused on the major events in the life of a character and
showed a rational, cause-effect relationship between those events and the
character's development. By contradicting these traditional assumptions, modern
authors produced an entirely different type of literature. This impulse may be
traced, in part at least, to a non-literary source, the theories of the French
philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941). In his influential study, Time and Free
Will (1922), Bergson reasoned that time is not a series of logically sequential or
separate stages. Rather, time is a continuous, uninterruptible flux or stream, with
past, present and future simultaneously present in and indistinguishable from each
other. Or, as T. S. Eliot would later write in Four Quartets (1943):
Time present and time past
Are both present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
Theoretically, then, always starting a story at the beginning became irrelevant, even
misleading, because, in a sense, there was no real beginning. Freed from the
tyranny of time, modern writers felt justified in dislocating normal narrative
chronology through flashbacks, repetitions, or even by omitting transitions entirely.
This dislocation, they believed, could more truly reflect reality than a narrative
structure based on the artificial Aristotelian divisions of beginning, middle, and
end.
Furthermore, the idea of time as flux implicitly challenges the practice of focusing
on major events in a character's life. In a temporal stream, any occurrence, even the
most trivial or mundane, possesses importance and is capable of revealing much
about a person or the true nature of reality. This new attention to life's isolated,
commonplace moments perhaps explains the great interest of modern novelists in
the short story. Writers such as James Joyce (1882-1941), Joseph Conrad (18571924), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), William
Faulkner (1897-1962), F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), Ernest Hemingway (18991961), and Franz Kafka (1883-1924) achieved considerable success with this
literary form.
distinction between art and life by containing two sets of characters, characters who
are actors and actors who are characters. Their confrontation produced the same
effect as that of two mirrors placed to reflect each other; one cannot tell what is real
and what is merely an image of reality. Samuel Beckett's Waiting for
Godot revolves around its own axis, with Act II duplicating Act I. The last sentence
of the centerpiece of modernist fiction, James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (1939),
leads directly into its first. Thus, modernist literature becomes a closed system, its
own object and its own subject.