Understanding Modernism, A Summary

 

It’s useful to think of Modernism in two ways: first, as a “condition”, rather than an intellectual movement, and second as a general literary movement.

 

The Modern Condition

 

The Modern Condition can be understood as having its philosophical roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and its historical roots in the Industrial Revolution and the major wars and genocide of the Twentieth Century.

 

Unlike the Enlightenment and Romanticism, however, when we speak of Modernism we often refer to it as a “condition” rather than a movement; while the Enlightenment argued that Rationality and Freedom would save man from himself, and while Romanticism argued that Love and Emotion would correct the sterility and “heartlessness” of the Enlightenment, Modernism is in many ways a critique of the empty or impossible promises of both previous movements.

 

Thus, Enlightenment works such as Tartuffe and Candide conclude with well balanced, moderate, rational solutions to social problems; in Romantic works such as Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein realizes, albeit too late, that his lack of love has created a monster and destroyed his own family, and the reader is left clearly understanding the nature of the problem and its solution.

 

But the works of T.S. Eliot and Joseph Conrad mainly expose the problem and despair over ever finding another solution: they expose the hypocritical “whited sepulchers” of the Enlightenment and mourn the failure of love, and yet they remain too jaded to offer up another easy solution.

 

In many ways, the Modern Condition is this willingness to realize and honestly admit to the failure of previous solutions. 

 

Why This Despair? 

 

Colonialism: Unwillingness of "Enlightened" Western Civilization to truly treat all peoples as "equal".  See Conrad and Achebe Notes

 

War:

 

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” – Yeats

 

The Enlightenment offered the promise of freedom and prosperity: through rationality man would build new, democratic, egalitarian, just, utopias that would harness emerging scientific technologies and deliver man from slavery.

 

Instead, the 19th and 20th Centuries proved vastly more bloody and brutal than any other in written history. By many estimates, at least 170,000,000 people were killed by their own governments during the 20th Century.

 

The American Civil War cost the States 618,000 lives. Even Americans proved themselves willing to slaughter one another for the right to enslave one another.

 

World War I caused 9 million military and 6.6 million civilian deaths. Modern technology proved itself adaptable to "modern warfare", which proved itself vastly more destructive than "primitive" technologies and methods.

 

World War II caused 62 million casualties, 37 million of which were civilian.

 

The Holocaust is perhaps the clearest representation or symbol of the failure of Enlightenment and Romantic principles. Under Hitler and the Nazis, the three most "civilized" elements of Western Civilization -- modern "Enlightenment" technology and rationalism, Romanticism, and Christianity -- teamed up to carry out the most "barbaric" systematic extermination of people, ever. 

 

Under both Mao and Stalin, the relatively “modern”, “rationally” based, utopian Communist states led to the two greatest recorded acts of genocide, ever.

 

Rational, scientific man, it turned out, had perhaps simply learned how to kill more efficiently.

 

Freedom, The Primacy of the Individual, and Alienation

 

The Enlightenment call for greater civic freedoms and the Romantic call for increased individual freedoms further led to a culture of alienation: freed from the social constrictions of the church, Modern man found himself freed from both community and recourse to faith.  In other words, in times of need, the Modern man found himself alone.  Freed from the constrictions of formal religion, Modern man was freed from the comforts of ritual and forced to figure out life’s existential questions alone.  Freed from the village and farm, Modern man was freed from the security of family, common culture and community. The alienation from the natural world bemoaned by the Romantics only deepened as societies increasingly urbanized. Industrialization further alienated Modern man from the product of his own hands.

 

And so we find Kurtz not simply armed with reason but armed and dangerous, far from cultural constraints, reaching deep inside only himself for morality, only to find…nothing.

 

We find Anna Karenina freed from the constraints of traditional marriage, a truly modern, sexually liberated woman, yet she is also utterly alienated from her children, her church, her community.

 

Modern Literature

 

Modern literature of often reflects or represents this alienation and despair.

 

Its other qualities are, with some relevant adaptations, also continuations of Enlightenment and Romantic trends:

 

Realism

 

The empirical element of the Enlightenment tells us to observe, and this focus on the actualities of our surroundings finds its artistic expression in Realism.  In its simplest terms, Realism attempts to paint an unflinchingly objective, un-romanticized portrayal of people, places and occurrences: real people, as they are, with all their faults fully presented, regardless of the author or culture’s subjective, moral biases.  Things as they are, not as they should be.

 

In Realism, characters are also drawn directly from common life, rather than nobility or from Classical mythology etc. 

 

This focus has its roots in Romanticism, starting with Rousseau’s Confessions and clearly outlined in Wordsworth’s Preface To Lyrical Ballads.

 

Humanism

 

“I have divested myself of everything but pity.” – Conrad 

 

This attention to the real lives of real people, often devoid to a large degree from moral judgment, traces its roots back to Neo-Classical, Renaissance Humanism.  When Michelangelo paints the Holy Family he looks to the beauty of mankind, not to idealized forms.  When Shakespeare describes the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, he does so because the folly of human love is itself beautiful and worthy of our attention, not because he wants us to learn a moral lesson.

 

This humanist thread is implicit throughout Realism; Tolstoy’s first conception and drafts of Anna Karenina paint Anna a repulsive, selfish cow, deserving of her tragic fate, yet the character of a beautiful, sympathetic woman asserts itself on the manuscript until it is clear that the author not only loves the character but understands and feels the emotions that destroy her. It is this empathy, this understanding, that best defines the Humanist thread in modern literature; stripped of everything else, what’s most important is that the author and reader alike grasp the characters’ conditions, and this understanding must transcend judgement.

 

This humanist thread  is often tempered with strong elements of Romanticism. Dickens does not want Scrooge to save Tiny Tim for simply rational, objective reasons; Scrooge must learn to love. Anna’s death is tragic, and therefore beautiful, because it is predicated on love, but the characters who cannot love at all face a greater, living-death in which life itself is still born.

 

Psychology

 

Locke posits that all understanding comes from Experience and Reflection, and so the Realists are keen to show how both taint understanding and how this tainted understanding leads us toward our destinies. The Modern, Realist landscape is as concerned with the psychological realities of the human experience as with the temporal ones; what people think and feel is as interesting, or often more interesting, than what they actually do, and, of course, what we do is based on what we believe…yet our beliefs are constantly shaped as much by our fears and hopes and desires as by some Empirical grasp of reality.

 

Anna Karenina is destroyed as much by her own irrational fears and jealousies as by corrupt social forces…like Hamlet, we see her march toward a tragic destiny formed on the inside of her mind, rather than simply from her actual environment or life.

 

This psychological trend in modern literature shares many qualities with Impressionism, as both attempt to represent human perception.

 

Symbolism

 

While much Modern literature attempts to simply portray events as they really are, in a journalistic, quasi-scientific, Empirical fashion, Freud’s dream-scape impinges on much literature and offers another lens through which events and characters may be interpreted. See: Freud and Dreams

 

Conrad’s Thames and Congo are not “hazy” due to geo-thermal events alone; haze, fog, gloom all resonate with thematic meaning so that the color of the sky and water themselves symbolize the novella’s meaning. 

 

Early in Anna Karenina, Vronsky woos Anna after a man falls beneath a train’s wheels (he donates money to the man's family to impress Anna), then, later in the novel he accidentally breaks his horse’s, Frou-Frou’s, back trying to prove his manhood during a steeple chase, and later Anna will throw herself beneath a similar fate.

 

In these ways Realism remains artifice – a manmade means of making sense of the world and human experience rather than an objective record of events.