Modern Age in English Literature

 Modern Age in English Literature 

Modern Age in English literature 

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Modernism was a 20th century literary movement, driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation in both prose and poetry, instead it sought to express the new sensibilities of the time and the consequent feelings of uncertainties through experimental forms and contents, often rejecting the nineteenth century realism, as exemplified by Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new". 

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On the context of Modernism

While discussing the different aspects of Modernism in literature, it is imperative to take a look at the socio-cultural arena of the time that insisted an intellectual query to look around and find the “meaning” of existence and its validity to look it through the lens of “civilization”, “progress”, “culture”, “gender” and its “obvious” binaries. The events that led to question all these foundational principles were the two World Wars, the Cultural Upheavals in colonies and the philosophical questioning by the triumvirate —- Marx, Freud and Nietzsche who tried to decode the meaning of “meaning” in the context of capitalism, psychoanalysis and radical questioning. 

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WWI : World War I seemed to shatter the so called narratives of “peace”, “progress” and “prosperity”, reflected in the 19th century optimism catered through Victorian literature. The First World War brought a sense of disillusionment with the ideals that then appeared to be superficial and outdated in the face of the large-scale destruction and loss of life. Gertrude Stein coined the term "Lost Generation", later popularized by Ernest Hemingway in his novel The Sun Also Rises, to refer to the "disoriented, wandering, directionless" spirit of many of the war-survivors in the early interwar period. 

WWII : The Second World War's devastation fueled an intense sense of disillusionment and cynicism with which the authors and artists were already grappling. The immense loss of lives, economic collapses, failures of government led to even darker aspects of alienation, psychological trauma and a complete breakdown of “rationality”. Instead, it paved the way for the Post-modernistic celebration of fragmentation, chaos, and contradiction through ambiguity, pluralism, and the interconnectedness of things explored with the techniques of pastiche and irony that deconstructed the earlier ideas and forms and found the notion of “meaning” to be “absurd”. 

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The Great Depression : Another phenomena that effected the Modernist disillusionment with the reality was The Great Depression, worldwide economic downturn that began in 1929 and lasted until about 1939, characterized by high rates of unemployment and poverty, drastic reductions in industrial production and international trade that shattered the notion of both Victorian optimism and “American dream”.

The Impact of the Triumvirate:  

Each of the triumvirates looked upon the human condition and the process of meaning making from different perspectives.

I. Siegmund Freud investigated the inner realm of psyche and discussed that how human consciousness, through the process of “sublimation” (a defense mechanism where unacceptable impulses or energies, especially sexual or primitive traits are unconsciously redirected into socially positive outlets like art, science, or sports, helping individuals to cope with the expected social norms) restricts the realisation of the true nature of instinctual desire which is grounded in the fundamentals of “civilization”. 

II. Karl Marx analyzed the social and economic process that creates the hierarchy of power and laid bare the idea of “false consciousness”(This state of mind is created by the capitalist system, its institutions, and dominant ideologies, which prevent the working class from recognizing the injustice of their situation and uniting to improve it) by which the privileged social class rationalized their own condition and the social system which is infused to us through “ideological coercion” and “cultural hegemony” as later extended by Althussar and Gramsci. 

III. Nietzsche identified a falsity in the entire Western canon of metaphysics from Socrates, Christianity and the Enlightenment as it emphasized an inner suppression and an outer domination. 

In a nutshell, the technological advancements of the 19th century and its rapid societal changes of modernity along with the immense human cry of the World Wars resulted in a break from the mainstream narratives of “happily ever after”, “bliss”, “progress” “heroism” and “revelation”. Instead, Modernism reflected the collapse of the “centre” from which meanings are produced and circulated to be consumed. Modernism in its desire for metaphysical truths, often searched for a metaphysical 'centre’ but understood and pointed out its collapse and the impossibility to hold it up as W.B. Yeats said in his 'The Second Coming', "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold". 

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Contrast with Romanticism 

 Modernism can be compared to and contrast with Romanticism, as both are the quest for metaphysical truths about self, nature, a “higher power” and meaning in the world____a metaphysical centre, after their respective disillusionment with reality. 

But Modernism contrast with Romanticism on the ground that Romanticism embraced the essential relation between the symbol and its meaning, perceived the meaning of nature in the language of divinity, or a higher world beyond the sense perception, Modernism failed to find meaning in nature and suggested a non-rational sense of meaning which is essentially arbitrary and without a “centre”. 

Early Modern Techniques  

Fragmentation: 

• Fragmentation refers to the disintegration or breaking apart of a cohesive narrative, structure, or form in literature, often reflecting the complexities of modern life and philosophical ideas that question objective reality—-- of traditional values, social order, and a singular, unified truth, reflecting a sense of chaos, instability and uncertainty. 
• The Modernist authors employed fragmentation as a desperate attempt to give “shape and significance to the contemporary fragmented reality”, echoing the modernist desire to find unity and coherence amidst apparent fragmentation. 
• T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, using a collage of different voices, images, and allusions, creates a picture of a shattered modern world. William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury uses multiple perspectives, including a stream-of-consciousness narrator, to represent a fragmented family and its unraveling. 

Unreliable narrators: 

• The term "unreliable narrator" was coined by Wayne C. Booth in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction to refer to a narrator is one who tells lies, conceals information, misjudges with respect to the narrative audience – that is, one whose statements are untrue not by the standards of the real world or of the authorial audience (the hypothetical group of real people the author intends to reach) but by the standards of his own narrative audience (fictional group within the story to whom the narrator is speaking). 
• The lack of credibility may be due to unintentional distortion like madness, personal bias and immaturity or intentional deception by lying, omitting information, or misleading the reader. William Riggan analysed four types of unreliable narrators,
• ____ i)The Pícaro, an anti-hero whose "behavior is marked by rebelliousness" and "world view is characterized by resignation and pessimism” that creates a gap between his whimsical account and self-indulgent explanations of morality on the one hand, and the perceptions of the more sensitive author and reader on the other. Notable examples include Moll in Moll Flanders; Augie March in The Adventures of Augie March; Felix Krull in Confessions of Felix Krull. ii) The Clown whose unreliable narration includes "irony, variations of meaning, ambiguities of definition, and possibilities for reversal and counter-reversal” as to be found in Folly in In Praise of Folly ; Tristram Shandy in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman;Humbert in Lolita. iii)The Madman, a narrator whose untrustworthiness is due to an "unbalanced mind" and serves as a case study in the pathology of insanity as can be found in the narrator of Notes from Underground and the narrator of The Blind Owl. iv)The Naïf who lacks the experience such as Huckleberry Finn in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye.
• With the disillusionment of the WWI, early Modernist writers deliberately broke the image of an artist as a reliable interpreter and representatives of mainstream "bourgeois" culture and ideas, by using the antidote of “unreliable narrators” to counter the irrationality at the roots of a supposedly rational world.

Interior Monologue and Stream of Consciousness: 

• Stream of consciousness is a narrative technique in non dramatic fiction intended to represent the flow of a character's thoughts and sense impressions "usually in an unpunctuated or disjointed form of interior monologue”, with little to no authorial intervention or traditional narration. 
• With the development of the psychological novel in the 20th century, some writers attempted to capture the flow of their characters’ consciousness, rather than limit themselves to rational thoughts. To represent the full richness, speed, and subtlety of the mind at work, the writer incorporated snatches of incoherent thoughts through long, continuous sentences, unusual punctuation, ungrammatical constructions, and free association of ideas, images, and words at the pre-speech level.
• The term was first used by the psychologist William James in The Principles of Psychology (1890). It was popularized by Modernist authors such as James Joyce in his Ulysses and Virginia Woolf in her Mrs. Dalloway to provide a direct and realistic glimpse into their characters’ inner world. 

Epiphany 

• An epiphany refers to a sudden and significant realization or insight that a character experiences which provokes a deeper understanding or change in perspective, leading to a change in the character's beliefs, feelings, or actions, and the development of the characters as well as the overall narrative. 
• In ancient Greek usage, the term epiphany, derived from epiphania meant to manifest or to bring to light. It often described the visible manifestation of a god or goddess to mortal eyes. The Modernist authors used epiphany to deviate from the “happy ending” and linear narratives focusing on the realisation of the character that “things fall apart, the Centre can not hold”. 
• In Virginia Woolf's "Mrs Dalloway", Clarissa Dalloway's stream of consciousness about the choices she made in life and her feelings towards Peter Walsh receives a clarity during a moment of reflection, offering her a new perspective on her past and present. In Joyce’s Araby the Young Narrator’s disillusionment with Araby at the end brought him the epiphanic realization that "fancy can not cheat so well”.  

Multigeneric : 

• A "multigeneric" work combines elements from more than one genre. Modern literature sought to create new and innovative forms of storytelling, and this hybrid approach served their purpose of challenging the traditional genre classifications and linearity. It is through multigeneric forms that the Modernist authors incorporated various styles, narrative techniques, and thematic elements within the single framework of a text. 
• Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale blends dystopian fiction with feminist concerns, in the framework of science fiction to address the issue of gender, power, and human rights in the 20th century social context. 

Late Modernism/ Post-modernism in literature after WWII

Expressionism: 

• Expressionism is a 20th century literary movement in poetry and painting that sought to express the meaning of subjective emotional experience rather than objectively narrating the physical reality. 
• This movement emerged as a reaction against the realistic materialism of the time and focuses on a character's mental state through intense emotion, often distorted or exaggerated to evoke strong emotional responses and the internal truths. 
• Expressionist writers often include fragmented narratives, grotesque imagery, themes of alienation, spiritual crisis, and social critique, in symbolic or distorted settings, through characters who are symbolic types rather than fully developed individuals. The literary works of Franz Kafka, Georg Kaiser, and August Strindberg are frequently cited as crucial to this movement. 

 Absurdism: 

• Absurdism was a literary movement between 1940 and 1960 by certain European and American dramatists who agreed with the Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus’s assessment, in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942), that the human situation is essentially absurd, devoid of purpose. 
• Absurdist writings seemed to lack the structural cohesion that used to characterize the earlier texts. The characters perform frantically and their busyness serves to underscore the fact that nothing happens to change their existence as the a universe is inherently chaotic and purposeless.
• Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus are the foundational works. 

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Magic realism

• Magical realism is a literary style that integrates fantastical or mythical elements into a realistic setting and narrative, presenting the supernatural as a normal part of everyday life blurring the binaries between real and fantastical, creating a unique blend of the two. 
• Notable examples include Gabriel García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children etc. 

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