By Lechi Eke
Out of the five major characteristics of Literary Modernism which are: Individualism, Experimentation, Absurdity, Symbolism and Formalism, apart from Individualism which is very pronounced in such works as Virginia Woolf‘s (1882-1941) Mrs Dollaway (1925), and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1896-1940) The Great Gatsby (1925), etc. (mentioning authors we are familiar with), Experimentation stands out in the works of literary modernists.
It is well known that Modernist writers broke free from old forms and techniques of writing literature, shunning rhymes and adopting free verse. Innovative techniques which arose from the querying of reality which early 19th century writers employed in telling their stories are: stream of consciousness, interior monologue, and the use of multiple points of view. Interior monologue and the use of multiple points of view can be seen in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land published last week.
The poet’s personae are talking to no one, but are engaged in interior monologue as seen below. For example this excerpt from Section 1 (The Burial of the Dead) of The Waste Land:
“And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”
Excerpt from Section 2, A Game of Chess
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said,
Others can pick and choose if you can’t.
But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be alright, but I’ve never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don’t want children?
From the above excerpts, we see both interior monologue and multiple points of view as two different voices speak in one poem, The Waste Land.
These two literary techniques are innovations of 20th C Literary Modernism shunning traditional poetic techniques.
Still under Modernism’s Experimentation, we examine how Eliot employs free verse (not rhyming), uses monologue which is a literary device or technique of prose to write his poem, The Waste Land.
Virginia Woolf on the other hand, employs verse in writing her novel (a prose work), as seen in her 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway. Here is an excerpt below:
For having lived in Westminster-how many years now? over twenty,-one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, ir-revocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the up-roar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sand-wich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven-over. It was June. The King and Queen were at the Palace. And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing po-nies whose forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this hour, discreet old dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of mystery; and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans (but one must economise, not buy things rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, loving it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it, since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party. But how strange, on entering the Park, the silence; the mist; the hum; the slow-swimming happy ducks; the pouched birds waddling; and who should be coming along with his back against the Government buildings, most ap-propriately, carrying a despatch box stamped with the Royal Arms, who but Hugh Whitbread; her old friend Hugh-the admirable Hugh!
They had just come up-unfortunately-to see doc-tors. Other people came to see pictures; go to the opera; take their daughters out; the Whitbreads came “to see doctors.” Times without number Clarissa had visited Evelyn Whitbread in a nursing home. Was Evelyn ill again? Evelyn was a good deal out of sorts, said Hugh, intimating by a kind of pout or swell of his very well-covered, manly, extremely handsome, perfectly uphol-stered body (he was almost too well dressed always, but presumably had to be, with his little job at Court) that his wife had some internal ailment, nothing serious, which, as an old friend, Clarissa Dalloway would quite understand without requiring him to specify. Ah yes, she did of course; what a nuisance; and felt very sisterly and oddly conscious at the same time of her hat. Not the right hat for the early morning, was that it? For Hugh always made her feel, as he bustled on, raising his hat rather extravagantly and assuring her that she might be a girl of eighteen, and of course he was coming to her party to-night, Evelyn absolutely insisted, only a little late he might be after the party at the Palace to which he had to take one of Jim’s boys,-she always felt a little skimpy beside Hugh; schoolgirlish; but attached to him, partly from having known him always, but she did think him a good sort in his own way, though Richard was nearly driven mad by him, and as for Peter Walsh, he had never to this day forgiven her for liking him.
As can be seen from the above, Modernist Experimentation drove modernist writers to write verse in prose work and prose in poetry – quite an innovation!
Before we say good bye to Literary Modernism, we have to consider their achievements. There must be merits of this literary school and the demerits. Yes, they tried to do away with tradition, but, did they? Totally? I think not! The different genres (poetry, prose and drama) they employed to tell their stories are still traditional – they did not create new genres. They still used the novel form, poetry and drama to tell their stories! T. S. Eliot copied Realism’s Dramatic Monologue and changed it to interior monologue (interior because the poet’s personae are not talking to anyone). Examples are found in the excerpts from Sections 1 and 2 of the poem, The Waste Land, as shown above.
Some of the drawbacks of modernist literature are: a. it is intrinsically elitist, b. it is highly allusive or rhetorical, hermetic, and cerebral, appealing only to a limited audience. All these make modernism literature an exclusive art. They weaken public support for the arts. One critic wrote, “Taken with the standard mode of modernism being critique, artistic modernism can end up in unintended de facto opposition to the art.” Modernism focuses on the interior and the psychological and plays down on external influences, unlike Literary Naturalism before it.
WHAT ARE THE MERITS OF MODERNISM?
- the ability to break away from tradition is a great achievement. The “obfuscation of boundaries between genres,” for instance prose work are rendered poetically. Not only in literature and philosophy, but in the virtual arts, there is a break away from inherited notions of perspective, modeling and subject-matter. In music also, modernism gave us what is called atonality.
- the self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing, in both prose and poetry, paved way for a more realistic representation of life and man’s activities. There are no more rules to follow rigidly.
- modernism literary movement gave us the relativity of truth.
- it gave us a clear break from ancient classics giving us freedom to explore new techniques.
- Modernism is also a reaction against industrialization, urbanization and the new technology.
- It grew out of the changing landscape of life. It also largely represented the struggle that many people had with the way new ideas and discoveries challenged their previous lifestyle at a time tradition ceased to be important.
- This challenges our knowledge of realism, revealing the need for deeper emotional realism.
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