9. Modernism

MODERNISM The term for an international tendency in the arts brought about by a creative renaissance during the last decade of the 19th century and lasting into the post-war years. Strictly speaking, modernism cannot be described as a 'movement' or reliably characterized by a uniform style. Indeed it may be said to have embraced a wide range of artistic movements (including symbolism, impressionism, post-impressionism, futurism, constructivism, imagism, vorticism, expressionism, dada and surrealism) and to have originated in cosmopolitan circles in Berlin, Vienna, Munich, Prague, Moscow, London and Paris. At a slightly later period it spread to New York and Chicago, and became synonymous with a world-wide reaction against positivism and representational art. Its most notable landmarks in English literature are commonly understood to include Henry James's The Ambassadors (1903), Conrad's Nostromo (1904), T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), and Joyce's Ulysses (1922). One might add the work of Pound, Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf and, in America, Faulkner, to a list which is by no means exhaustive.

Technically, modernism was distinguished by its opposition to traditional forms and to the aesthetic perceptions associated with those forms. It was persistently experimental. A common quality was the highly self-conscious manipulation of form, together with an awareness of pioneering studies which were contemporaneous in other disciplines. These included, in psychology, William James's Principles of Psychology(1890) and Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1899); in physics, Einstein's General Principles of Relativity (1915); and in anthropology, SirJames Frazer's Тле Golden Bough (1890-1915).

Herbert Read suggested that modernism 'is not so much a revolution, which implies a turning over, even a turning back, but rather a break-up, a devolution, some would say a dissolution. Its character is catastrophic'. Much of the difficulty of modernist texts, which has intimidated some readers, stems from this attempt to 'break up' or re-create the experience of reading. Stream of consciousness, the use of myth as a structural principle, and the primary status given to the poetic image, all challenged traditional representation.

Modernism marks:

- a distinctive break with Victorian bourgeois morality;

• rejects nineteenth-century optimism;

• presents a profoundly pessimistic/decadent picture of a culture in disarray.

This despair often results in an apparent apathy and moral relativism.

Modernism, by a number of theoreticians, is sometimes referred to the epoch of decadence.

English intelligent people stopped idealizing their world, lost spiritual values and optimism they vowed for in the 19^th century. But having lost all the illusions, being at war with the present, they were frightened by the future. The crises of values was perceived as the collapse of the civilization, - these led to the skeptical and pessimistic ideas in both philosophy and literature. The war (World War I) and the Bolshevik’s Revolution in Russia discredited all the cultural and spiritual aspirations. A lot of people were lost and confused, they didn’t know what to believe in, what ideology to follow. That generation was called ‘the lost generation’.

The literary workers of the time had a tendency to escape from the acute and topical problems into the world of private feelings and emotions. This kind of literature was called an escapist one. The writers closed in on the depiction of an isolated character, on this individualistic perceptions, sufferings and reflections. In their works they preferred to delve into the investigation of the subconscious level of their characters rather then to show the causers of social discrepancies. The writers of the ‘lost generation’ adhered to the “privateworldism” – the sphere of personal, individual, intimate.

The ideas of Z. Freud became very popular, the ones that explained the motives of behavior of a man by means of biological instincts. Many adherents of the privateworldism developed their works on the basis of the teachings of Freud, their books dedicated to the investigation of the psychic and inner world of isolated people

Major English exponents: T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield.

These writers introduced a variety of literary tactics and devices:

- the radical disruption of linear flow of narrative;

- the frustration of conventional expectations concerning unity and coherence of plot and character and the cause and effect development thereof;

- the deployment of ironic and ambiguous juxtapositions to call into question the moral and philosophical meaning of literary action;

- the adoption of a tone of epistemological self-mockery aimed at naive pretensions of bourgeois rationality;

- the opposition of inward consciousness to rational, public, objective discourse;

- and an inclination to subjective distortion to point up the evanescence of the social world of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie.

“Stream of consciousness ('interior monologue' an alternate term), in literature, technique that records the multifarious thoughts and feelings of a character without regard to logical argument or narrative sequence.

A technique used by novelists to represent a character’s thoughts and sense impressions without syntax or logical sequence. The writer attempts by the stream of consciousness to reflect all the forces, external and internal, influencing the psychology of a character at a single moment.

Four main types have been identified:

1. soliloquy, 2) omniscient narration of mental processes, 3) direct interior monologue,

4) indirect interior monologue.

Firstly William James used the term stream of consciousness in his work “Principles of psychology” where he noted that mind plays the greater role in life of the people, it is in charge of all emotions and feeling and also wishes which constantly appear. He described the random flocks of conscious and subconscious thoughts and impressions in the mind.

Stream of consciousness - a form of narration wherein the author attempts to record life by setting down everything that comes into the character’s mind, without any reasonable selection. It is based on the conception of the prevalence of the subconscious over the conscious.

Stream of consciousness brought into literature a deeper insight into human psychology, but on the other hand it led to the disintegration of the form of the realistic novel and the character.

Stream of consciousness is a narrative technique in nondramatic fiction intended to render the flow of myriad expressions – visual, auditory, physical, associative, and subliminal – that impinge on the consciousness of an individual and form part of his awareness along with the trend of his rational thoughts.

It attempts to give the illusion of overhearing the actual workings of a human mind by recording the continuous and random flow of ideas, feelings, sensations, perceptions and associations as they register in the human consciousness.