Lessons from the Modernists
The Modernists have become something of an intellectual pariah in the minds of many, either because of the fact that their fame is far below what it once was or else because much of their fiction relied upon complex vocabulary, heavy experimentalism, and a certain social wit which, for some, seems snobbish and unconnected to everyday reality.
For those who are a little more familiar with “literature,” it is likely to be the latter reason that has driven them away from modernism, although the fact that they have never heard of the modernists may also play a part. When one hears the name Ulysses, one is instantly told either of the half-mad Irishman who wrote it or else is informed that it is ‘pretentious’ to think that reading it could be ‘recreational’ rather than a sort of mental torture. And there is perhaps something to render this view just: after all, what possible appeal can a book whose eleventh episode (yes, not chapter) is described entirely through sounds? Most of us, surely, can only handle so much onomatopoeia.
But to reject such texts is, to my mind, to commit a gross intellectual error. It is easy to condemn T.S. Eliot in favour of George Eliot, or else to say that the works of Edwardians such as Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells with their polished plots and narratives surpass the high-minded experimentalism of Dorothy Richardson and Katherine Mansfield. After all, “popular fiction” of the pre-Modernists offers us both a stable model of the novelistic form and at the same time allows us to feel as though we are tapping into a different age. The world of a Rudyard Kipling is, of course, very different to our own, and broadening our horizons whilst learning some archaic words along the way allows the “common reader” to bask in the glow of a great illusion: that he or she has been able to learn something of the past and transport it into their own life while also passing judgment on writers and thinkers who, whilst erudite, humorous and entertaining, seem (by the “standards” of today) bigoted, prejudiced and in many ways “backward.”
Our supposedly ‘higher’ plurality, and an underlying pessimism which seems to be en vogue, is intellectually supported by the digestion — wholeheartedly — of such literature. Edwardian Realism (in particular) has supplied the artistic means to entrench a narrow view of the world which seeks to hide itself within its own ‘enlightened scepticism’ and denounce any meaningful social change as either ‘nostalgic’ when it looks to the past for precedence, or as ‘idealistic’ when it seeks to develop existing institutions. For example, many Marxists today, albeit not all of them, have decided that total passivity is the best means of socialist revolution after the crippling failure of the USSR.
In contrast to this are the modernists, whom have been denounced as in turn too pessimistic and too optimistic, too sterile and too artificial, too obsessed with poetic and novelistic technique. A lot of the criticism, fundamentally, boils down to the fact that — like all great artists in history— the Modernists were not ‘of their time’. The great writers of the 19th century railed against the status quo: Tolstoy (whose War & Peace is currently being adapted by the BBC) fought against the Russian Establishment’s praise of state repression and the seeking of personal fame, Dostoevsky against nihilism and fanatical Liberalism, Oscar Wilde against Victorianism — and this is to name but a few. The modernists likewise emerged from the aftermath of the First World War criticising both the Victorian and Edwardian mindsets (which many people sought to return to) and the descent into barbarity of the civilized world — which movements like Absurdism would later revel in. For many, the apocalypse which had been foretold at the fin-de-siècle (end of the 19th century) seemed to have been prophetic. The modernists on the whole, although they were not a united movement, wanted to first and foremost understand the world — the ‘why’ — and then explain ‘how to live’.
As Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist (1916) explains to his friend Cranly:
“The soul is born […] it has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country [Ireland] there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”
This masterful piece of writing could very well serve as both the rallying cry of and preface to a ‘modernist manifesto’. The ‘slowness’ of the modern epoch, in contrast to the fast-paced innovations of Victorian science, the ‘darkness’ which seems to envelop the modern mind (and many, frighteningly, see as only being curable by alcohol) and the ‘mysterious’ nature of human existence which seems to mount an unsurpassable wall which knowledge is constantly attempting to climb are all part of the human Geist (spirit or mind): they are what it first appeals to and to many only seem the natural recess of the human mind, not the starting point. Modernism is about separating oneself from the constraints of time, of taking tradition which can impede the search for truth and using its positive qualities to create ‘something new’.
Virginia Woolf (who by many accounts disliked Joyce’s work) also, in her idiosyncratic way, looked to change the nature of the way we think. In her early pre-war novels, The Voyage Out and Night and Day, Woolf very much conformed to the style of the writers of her time, although her feminism, pacifism, and progressivism (for which she would become iconic) already were beginning to shine through. It would be the war, however, which would allow her to reach fruition and become one of the leading — if not the leading- modernists.
A lifetime sufferer from mental illness — she in one bout reportedly heard the birds ‘speaking Greek’ — her fiction takes a different dimension to Joyce. Whereas Joyce threw himself into self-exile, symbolism, and personal flair, Woolf remained thoroughly within the English literary scene. Her correspondence with the bohemian Bloomsbury Group, her unique friendship with T.S. Eliot, and her association with avant-garde post-impressionists such as Roger Fry and Jacques Raverat (who proposed that a book should have one word per page and then an association of ideas sprawling from it, like a pebble with ‘splashes in the outer air in every direction’) were all part of the framework which were to inform her move toward a ‘stream-of-consciousness’ narrative in her much-loved novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). These novels, like Joyce’s Ulysses, trace the inner-thoughts of a selection of characters over a concentrated period of time.
The real value of Woolf’s work, especially her magnum opus To the Lighthouse, is its affiliation to everyday reality. Centred on 3–4 days over a period of 10 years, To the Lighthouse traces the fortunes and misfortunes of the Ramsay family at their home in the Hebrides. The aim of this new shift in the novel, along with the radical implications it provided, was a focus on life as it was lived, especially in the seeming hopelessness of the post-war era, just as the French Impressionists wanted to move away from the historical idealism of the then dominant Classicists and look at Parisian and agricultural life. Far from the criticism which is often levied upon the modernists, Woolf is one example of a novelist who used modernism to elevate experience and her experimental devices were like a pair of new glasses which, whilst initially difficult to adjust to, soon provided a far clearer vision of how to pursue a more meaningful life. And even in Woolf’s fiction, despite the fact that her personal life was racked with difficulties, the protagonists often find the path to a purer, more optimistic life in the end (in their own complex and individual way which is never fully revealed to the reader).
That the modern nets of pessimism, stagnation, and indifference are to be used to reach the truth, that we can look at both the past without being nostalgic, and contemplate the future without sounding idealistic — that is the fundamental message of modernism, one which most have been keen to reject. In their own day Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce were prominent social figures involved in the political and philosophical, not to mention artistic, spheres of their era. They were, far from what many critics have claimed, obsessed with experience and everyday life.
Whilst they all differed in opinions and developed in different ways the modernist tradition bound them all together, as did their preoccupation with remaining ‘true to life’.
As Lily Briscoe says in To the Lighthouse, ‘I have had my vision’ (albeit an abstract one) on the direction toward living a purer and more optimistic life, and I hope that through an introduction to Modernism, you will begin to do so too.
