4/22/2020 Modernism: Literature between the Wars | Literary Theory and Criticism

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Literary Theory and

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ENGL I S H L ITERATURE, LITERARY THEORY, L I N G U I S T I C S , F I L M T H E O R Y ,
MEDI A T H E ORY, UGC NET JRF EXAM PREPAR A T I O N , N O V E L A N A L Y S I S ,
RESE A R C H PAPERS NASRULLAH MAMBROL

HOME › LITE R A R Y CRITICISM › MODE R N I SM: LITERAT URE BETWEEN THE W A R S

Modernism: Literature between the Wars

BY NASR U L L AH MAMBRO L on MARC H 2 4 , 2016 • ( 2 )

In 1924, Virginia Woolf wrote, “On or about December 1910 human nature changed.
All human relations shifted, and when human relations change there is at the same
time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.” It was an era of turbulence,
socio-political changes and the beginning of a new world order in global politics and
word order in literature and arts.

Modernism thus designates a broad literary and cultural movement that spanned all of
the arts and even spilled into politics and philosophy. It was the fear of an impending
war that dominated the rst decades of the 20th century.

The publication of Origin of Species in 1859 marked the erosion of religious belief
simultaneous with the rise of new technologies. The foundations of Christianity were
shaken and Nietzsche made his controversial statement, “God is dead, we have killed
him”.

A change over from an agrarian society to the industrial resulted in the destabilization
of moral values resulting in a state of acute identity crisis depicted in “the heap of
broken images” in The Waste Land. Modernism marks a break in the Renaissance
tradition of Humanism and rejects the centrality of the human subject/author, the
notion of a permanent reality, and the belief in the perennial signi cance and
meanings of the literary text established with the invention of printing.
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The main point of contention in the Modernist framework was the technique of realism
which can be traced back to The Canterbury Tales and practised by Da Vinci and
Michelangelo in art.  Renaissance entailed geographical explorations inaugurating
colonial projects. Modernism is simultaneous with the material progress and industrial
mechanization that colonialism promised the Third Word. The owering of the human
spirit in the Renaissance led to the assertion of Reason in the 17th century. Reason,
nding its fullest expression in the philosophy of Descartes, which legitimized the
Eurocentrism of colonialism, was the founding principle of the age of Enlightenment in
the 16th century. Modernism consistently rejected the ideals of objectivity, rationality
and unity.

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Modernism was also in opposition to the romantic approach to art. The rigid classical
perceptions on art and life were undermined in the late 18th century with the ideals of
the French Revolution, discovery of Shakespeare, industrial progress, revival of the
Gothic traditions and through the works of the transitional writers that paved the way
for Romanticism. Romantic era endorsed the humanistic, realist and the essentialist in
the insistence on the noble and essential values of simple rustic life and language.
Western civilization took a drastic turn in the second half of the 19th century, when the
belief in the essential reality was toppled, the value of the human being interrogated
and the text destabilized.

This disorientation of European culture was re ected in the movements of Surrealism

(Andre Breton, Salvador Dali), Impressionism (Monet), Imagism (Pound), Symbolism
(Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme), Cubism (Picasso), Expressionism (Van Gogh,
Gauguin, Munch), Dadaism (Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp) etc. These artists
questioned the tyranny of conventional forms, colours, rhythm and harmony and
represented reality as plural and subjective, af rming that art which exists for its own
sake will provide the unity that is lost in contemporary society.

Modernism emerged from this “immense panorama of futility and anarchy” that is
rightly represented in Klee‘s painting The Angel of History. In literature, Modernism
employed the techniques of Impressionism and subjectivity as exempli ed in the
stream of consciousness method against the conventional omniscient third person
narrator. Modernist literature did not employ continuous narratives, xed points of
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view and clear cut moral positions. It employed the technical qualities like paradox and
ambiguity praised by the New Critics. Writers like ee cummings and TS Eliot wrote
prosaic poetry while Virginia Woolf and DH Lawrence wrote poetic prose.

Modernist writers highlighted self-re exivity and self-consciousness employing

fragmentation and collage as illustrated in The Waste Land. One of the major motifs
of Modernist literature was myth which was employed in order to give shape and
signi cance to the contemporary fragmented reality. Eliot employed the mythical
method to accentuate the experiences of loss of fertility and death-in-life in the waste
land which are tied together by the multiperspectival and mythical character Tiresias.

Like Yeats in his Byzantium poems, the lost spirituality can be revived from the
ancient and oriental cultures. Fragmentary technique of The Waste Land is also
employed by Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury in the multiple and ambiguous
representation of the character Caddy. The “Unreal Cities” of Jerusalem, Alexandria,
Dublin, London, Paris etc in Modernist literature represent the turmoiling. Metropolis
formed as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution and is the seat of alienation,
darkness, rootlessness and disorientation as illustrated in Chaplin’s Modern Times. The
Modernist individual is caught in an existential angst, devoid of dignity, purpose, value
and meaning reminiscent of a Beckettian void and Kafkaesque claustrophobia manifest
in Lucky, Pozzo and Gregor Samsa.

Modernist ction vindicated colonial ideology to a large extent. It involved a lament for
the loss of a European centre. The novels of Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness and E M
Forster A Passage to India offer ambiguous moral positions related to colonial issues.
These novels illustrate Modernist features such as psychological profundity, denial of
closure and poetic prose. DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and Joyce’s A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man exemplify another Modernist motif — that of the artist
protagonist escaping the shackles of conventional existence in search of self
realization. While Stephen Dedalus evokes the spirit of the mythical Greek sculptor

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and in a series of epiphanies ful lls his desire to y away and escape, Paul Morel is
trapped in psychologically intense and ambiguous relationships which he cannot
transcend.

Virginia Woolf took a resisting feminist stance against the mainstream male/ female
Künstlerroman Mrs Dalloway and her critical essay A Room of One’s Own which
examine how women are denied their creative existence. Woolf’s novels depicted the
unbroken ow of thoughts, perceptions and feelings in the minds of the characters by
perfecting the stream of consciousness technique. Other artists like Henry James and
Dorothy Richardson made use of this technique which has its origins in the 19th
century French writer Edouard Dujardin and even in Lawrence Sterne.

Modernist poetry employed the technique of condensation, especially in Imagism, and

Symbolism, methods exempli ed in the critical concepts like objective correlative and
uni cation of sensibility. Modernist art and poetry was in uenced by African art
especially of the Harlem Renaissance for its fresh motives, simplicity and originality
of expression. It resisted as Adomo and Greenberg put it, the element of kitsch —
sentimental imitative art – and advocated the virtues of alienation, experimentation
and Art for Art’s Sake such as seen in Anti-art movement and Jazz music. Modernism
evolved into Postmodernism which is a continuation and break away from the
modernist tradition. Both schools reject genre distinctions, emphasize parody, pastiche
and re exivity, and favour the decentred and dehumanized subject.

However while Modernism considers fragmentation tragic, postmodernism celebrates

it. Modernism believed that unity and coherence are important and possible but
Postmodernism belongs to the late capitalist phase which breeds insecurity and regards
neither coherence nor unity important. Though modernism is a thoroughly European
practice it has had its repercussions throughout world literatures.

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1. Postmodernism – Literary Theory and Criticism Notes

2. The Poetics of Modernism: Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot – Literary Theory and
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