Modernism in poetry and prose

The term Modernism encompasses several trends both in literature, visual arts (impressionism, cubism, surrealism, Dadaism) and music (jazz, blues). The 1920s as the aftermath of the Great War had a huge impact on aesthetic understating and psychology. Victorian authors believed in the science and progress but the new modernist artists thought that Victorian values led to the WW1 so they wanted to break the old tradition and displayed cultural revolt. Experimentation resulted in avant-garde art and rejection of traditional narratives.

Poets wrote poetry about things that were not considered poetical before and all modernists were influenced by an American philosopher and psychologist WILLIAM JAMES (brother of Henry James) who came up with the term stream of consciousness = uncontrolled stream of thoughts and feelings that really flows thought head without order (the most often used modernist technique). Note that on contrast, internal monologue has a structure and is controlled by the author. Writers used technique of fragmentation, alienation and defamiliarization to make things look different and force readers to look differently on common objects.

Modernism in prose

JAMES JOYCE

This Irish author mastered the stream of consciousness technique. He believed that human consciousness is the mosaic of fragments that is not coherent and therefore wrote in scattered fragmentation because that is how mind really works, thought it is hard to read. He was a cosmopolitan intellectual who believed in the idea of Irish independence but he did not agree with violence and backwardness so he left Ireland on self-imposed exile and continued writing about his country.

In his novel Ulysses (Latinized name of Odysseus) Joyce does not use punctuations and presents disjointed sentences to demonstrate how the mind actually works. It presents what happens one day in Dublin (but can be about any city), showing all the usual things of one the main character Leopold Bloom who is eating, shopping, thinking of sex etc.

He wrote also a comical novel about dreams and associations of a drunkard from Dublin Finnegans Wake and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (protagonist’s language gets more complicated and abstract as he gets older) that Dylan Thomas parodied.

Dubliners is a collection of 15 stories, meant to depict Irish middle-class and written when Irish nationalist was at its peak. The Dead is the final short. It contains his famous epiphany = (originally religious term for manifestation of God) that he used for moment of clarity, sudden unexpected realisation of how things really are. The themes are death, gap between classes and genders, divided political conflict or Ireland as nation, Catholic religion and pride on Celtic heritage.

The story centres on Gabriel. When arriving at the party with his wife, Gabriel makes an unfunny joke about the maid Lily's marriage prospects since he considers himself to be better than her. This shows also conflict of gender. Gabriel is unsure about quoting a poem as he is afraid if his speech is good enough. But, at the same time, Gabriel considers himself above the others when he speculates that his audience would not understand the words he uses. Later he speaks with Miss Ivors, an Irish nationalist. She does not like that he works for London newspapers, not the Irish and accuses Gabriel of being unpatriotic and supports it that he says he is going for a holiday to France she replies he should spent it at home. Theme of religion shows when aunt Juvia expresses her resentment. She sang at church but the Pope declared that women are no longer allowed to do that so she had to quit the choir. On one hand, she acknowledges Pope´s decision since he has to be always right but still feels sad about her expulsion and takes it as injustice - conflict of loyalty.

As Gabriel is preparing to leave the party, he sees a woman absorbed in thought, standing at the staircase. He stares at her for a moment before he recognizes her as his wife Gretta. Her distracted mood arouses sexual interest but in the hotel room she starts to talk about her past instead. As a girl she was in love with a boy named Michael who was terribly sick. Despite being bedridden, when it came time for her to leave the city, Michael travelled through the rain to be able to speak with her again and dies because of it. Gabriel realises that he never knew much about his wife and that he will never love her as deeply as Michael. Marriage is about unity but Gabriel and Gretta are completely isolated from each other. His wife is always in thought somewhere else always and language does not connect them. Only the snow signifies unifying element because he falls on both the living and the dead and all social classes without difference. It suggest winter season of death but also restoration.

DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE

He was one of the few writers of modernist stream who was born in poor family of Nottingham, the filthy city of coal with a lot of alcoholism and violence. However, he managed to get into university which was unspeakable for someone from the working class in those times. Presumably, he had issues with his mother, resulting possibly in Oedipus complex. He was also the first critic of American literature and established American literary canon. He left Britain because he hated British culture.

He was interested in finding an ideal relationship between man and woman. In his opinion the key point is sexual attraction and he criticised Victorian attitude to sex which was paralysing and resulted in unhealthy marriages. He proposed natural attitude to sexuality and thought that sexual attraction was basis for successful relationship so some novels seen as pornographic and could not be published.

With an interest in erotic relationship, he wrote a shocking open pornography Lady Chatterley's Lover that was immediately banned. The main character, Mrs Chatterley, is an aristocratic lady whose husband is in the wheelchair so she finds a lover - a woodsman, spends her time making love and feels free. In Sons and Lovers he retells of the Oedipus story in a mining area in Britain where sons realize that they cannot love any other woman than their mother. Women in Love deals with the conflict between civilization and animal sexuality and freedom.

The White Stocking is a short story about relationship problems, love triangle, theme of social division (low class couldn’t dance because they had no time for it),  fight for domination and different versions of love in different relationships (Adam´s love is different from Elsie´s). Elsie is childish, enjoys presents, likes to draw the attention of men, impulsive and irrational. Ted Whiston is looking for comfort, he is a wealthy and confident man, a bit of father figure, very masculine type, not intellectual but not stupid either. He is jealous that he cannot dance, in addition, his grammar and accent shows his background which is a big disadvantage for him. Sam Adams is an upper class womanizer that tries to seduce all local women. Bold, with moustache, showy, funny and can dance which attracts Elsie, not his appearance.

For Elsie marriage is a platform to fly off occasionally but safely come back to her husband who will always be there for her. Ted expects sense of safety and security which stereotypically seeks woman. When she struggles, he shuts her by hitting but after an attack they are both crying, he did it only out of rage. He dominates her only physically. During dance Elsie drops her white stocking which suggests intimacy and symbolises that she is prepared to give herself to Adams and commit adultery. The whole passage about dance is erotic; Elsie is intoxicated by the dance like erotic experience. Lawrence thought women should be sexually totally subjected to men but he does not mean them to become slaves since he thought that act of submission would liberate women. He was against abuse of this dominating men power that could result in violence against women.

Bloomsbury Group was an intellectual circle of artists, writers and philosophers. This loose group of friends and relatives lived, worked of studied together near Bloomsbury, London. They believed that important things in life are beauty, art and study of relationship between art and love.

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941) was a novelist, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century and one of the greatest innovators in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream of consciousness but never broke syntax like Joyce, her style was impressionistic, a visual art in writing. The sentences resemble strokes of a paintbrush and  catching the fleeting moment. Her husband Leonard Woolf was also a novelist. The sudden deaths of her parents and a sister in her teenage years led to mental breakdowns. It greatly affected her social functioning, though her literary abilities remained intact. In 1941, Woolf drowned herself in the river near her home when Nazi destroyed her house during bombing.

Her father claimed that women should stay in the kitchen so Virginia became a feminist. A Room of One’s Own is an essay in which she argued for cultural independence of women, stating that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Mrs Dalloway centres on the efforts of Mrs Dalloway, a middle-aged high-society woman, to organize a party. Her life is paralleled with that a working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War bearing deep psychological scars, a shell-shock. When Clarissa hears about his suicide, she admires the act of this stranger which she considers an effort to preserve the purity of his happiness. Woolf was a master of depicting a sick mind while preserving its beauty.

To the Lighthouse is a novel made most of it is interior monologue of the characters, impressions, light, colours and no real action. The plot centres on the family's anticipation of a visit to a lighthouse. The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation's inhabitants in the midst of war.

The Mark on the Wall is a experimental short story about a mark on the wall and Virginia makes up stories about what else it could be. It shows how the mind works with the streams of associations.

Kew Garden is set in the botanic garden in London and the narrative gives glimpses of four groups of people as they pass by a flowerbed: married couple, two men, two elderly women and the snail that one after another moves through the gardens with the same aimlessness.

A Haunted House is not an actual horror actually but a dream. A nameless narrator falls asleep and dreams of the ghost couple of previous owners who left some treasure behind. The treasure is love they shared in the house and they only check if the house is in good hands. The house is breathing, almost alive, it contains fragments of memories.

Lappin and Lapinova is about a marriage of upper-class muscular Ernest and a shy orphaned woman Rosalind. She has doubts in the beginning if the marriage will last. They have nothing in common so he comes up with a fantasy Ernest agrees to play. She transforms him into a male rabbit who is a king to other rabbits so he remains upper-class. She becomes a hair which is a different species but their territories touch. Rabbits are smaller, slower, born blind, mother takes care of them, always move in group, easily domesticated and need leader which symbolizes Ernest’s family since they are a lot of them as if they breed as rabbits. On the other hand, hares live alone, are independent from birth and flee from danger which describes Rosalind’s solitary wild nature. When Ernest does not feel like playing the game anymore, he symbolically kills the hair to end the fantasy which also kills their marriage.

Orlando is a novel about gender-bending where a young aristocrat Orlando suddenly found himself to be a woman but enjoys the fact, though; he has to change his behaviour. It is possibly autobiographical, reflecting her love affair with an aristocratic woman Vita. The book was name into a movie.

The book tells the story of a young exceptionally handsome aristocrat named Orlando, born in England during the reign of Elizabeth I, who decides not to grow old. He is briefly a lover to the elderly queen, but after her death has a brief, intense love affair with Sasha, a princess that visited England with Russian embassy. Their excitement about love is shown as a contrast to the Great Frost; also Orlando finds passion he did not know with the elderly queen. After Sasha betrays him and sails back to Russia, heartbroken Orlando is expelled out of the royal palace and returns to writing The Oak Tree, a poem started and abandoned in his youth. Orlando is chased by a persistent suitor, the Archduchess Harriet so he flees the country when appointed by King Charles II as British ambassador to Constantinople. Orlando performs his duties well, until a night of civil unrest and murderous riots. One day upon awakening he finds, quite unsurprised, that he has metamorphosed into a woman! He is still a person with the same personality and intellect, but in a woman's body.

New Lady Orlando escapes Constantinople in the company of a Gypsy clan, adopting their way of life until its essential conflict with her upbringing leads her to head home. Only on the ship back to England in an incident in which a flash of her ankle nearly results in a sailor's falling to his death, does she realise the magnitude of becoming a woman; yet she concludes the overall advantages, declaring 'Praise God I'm a woman!' Orlando becomes more conceited and feminine. Back in England, Orlando is welcomed by his estate servants (strangely, nobody doubts his identity, they are convinced immediately because dogs recognize their master), however, she is hounded once again by the archduchess, who now reveals herself in fact to be a man, the Archduke Harry, who camouflaged himself in order to get close to Orlando. Ardchuke is happy with his metamorphose into a woman but Orlando evades his marriage proposals, switching between gender roles, dressing as both man and woman. Orlando wins a lawsuit over her property and marries a sea captain Shel. However, Shel used to be a woman because Orlando dated her when he was still a man so they have to explicit their genders to each other to convince themselves. In 1928, Orlando publishes The Oak Tree centuries after starting it, winning a prize. As her husband's ship returns, in the aftermath of her success, she rushes to greet him.

EDWARD MORGAN FORSTER was important is his critical work Aspects of the Novel where some of the terms he introduced (like a flat character) are still used for literary analysis. In most of his fiction books, there is a clash between two cultures. He found the British society crippled and in his novels he compares other countries to England. A Room with a View (made into a movie,) Passage to India was a critical colonial novel, pessimistic message about impossible communication between Britain and India but made a new tradition - growing concern with colonial legacy.

Modernist poetry

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS /jejts/ (1865-1939) was born into a mixed Anglo-Irish family, in 1922 awarded a Nobel Prize. His father was a famous painter and his mother introduced him into mythological stories. He attended Trinity College and became a part of an occult group Golden Dawn. He turned to national poetry, however, he was against violence and when the Civil War broke out, he bought a tower and hid there with his family. His writing features several tendencies and he was both Romantic and Modernist, mystical and political at the same time.

His work could be divided into two stages: The end of Victorian Era till the WWI of Celtic Revival when he published The Wanderings of Oisin /ušin/ based mainly on the Celtic mythology and The Lake Isle of Innisfree presenting idyllic portrayal of the untouched Irish countryside. In 1910 upon meeting Ezra Pound, he became writing also modernist poetry.

The Rose is a collection where the rose is a symbol of something beautiful that can defend itself. He uses it as a symbol for Ireland. In the poem The Rose Tree, two rebels have to water a rose tree but all wells dried so they have to use their own blood to water it.

The Tower is the most famous work, he really lived there.

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death was based on a true story of his friend who died in war. It is about a pilot who does not care about the war itself because whether the Germans or the English for whom he is forced to fight win, win, it will remain the same for the Irish. He sees his life as pointless, (“a waste of breath the year behind”) he just loves flying.

Easter 1916 is about the uprising of the same year. Yeats is strongly against violence and criticises death in fighting for freedom “terrible beauty is born” and “glorious death.” Rebels are celebrated as heroes but they paid with their lives.

Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen is about soldiers who survived but got traumatised and deal with it by alcohol (“drunken soldier”). It is difficult to understand, one has to know historical circumstances.

Sixteen Dead Men is about men executed after uprising 1916. It mentions concrete names like Wolfe Tone and Roger Casement. Yeats calls Ireland “the boiling pot.” The English wanted to calm down the Irish because they had their hands full of WW1 but the Irish saw it as a chance. “Give and take converse bone to bone” criticises that while Britain gave freedom to Europe after winning the war, they took it from the Irish.

Meditations in Time of Civil War was written in 1922 when Yeats was hiding in his tower. He mentions the mythological Irish and Irregulars, members of IRA standing at his door, threatening his family. He calls those who want independence with violence “phantoms of hatred.” “Of the heart’s fullness” implies good intentions, love for the country but “coming emptiness” hatred and death, the result of fighting.

+ POETS OF ANGLO-AMERICAN MODERNISM