By Lechi Eke
At the heels of Literary Naturalism is the school of thought or literary movement known as Modernist Literature or Literary Modernism. While realism and naturalism focus on the society, the lower class (the literary representation of everyday life of ordinary people), modernism focuses on the individual.
While realism accepts that great developments are going on in their time and tried to portray how these developments/industrialization affected the poor enslaving them to work for capitalists and the state, and thereby making them poorer and more frustrated with little wages that could not give a better life; naturalists on the other hand, blamed the woes of the lower class on the environment, nature and the circumstances sometimes brought about by the upper class, people in power or capitalists. Naturalists went further to explore themes of pessimism and determinism (as we would say in 21st century Nigeria, people living “as if they cursed them” – nothing they do ends well).
Modernism tends to focus on the individual and how all the changes in the society have affected the individual person. So modernism puts the interests of the individual as paramount. This perspective is that values, rights and duties originate in individuals. So the individual is more interesting or important than the society as a whole. Modernism seeks the political and economic independence of the individual. So the focal point of modernist literature is on individual action, initiative and interests.
Although scholars disagree on the period and duration of Literary Modernism, but traces of it started to show as early as the 1880s and went well into the 1940s. In the works of Joseph Conrad’s (1857-1924) Heart of Darkness, and Alfred Jarry’s (1873-1907) absurdist play, Ubu Roi – these works appeared early, at the twilight years of the 19th century, we see the early sprout of modernism in literature.
Literary Modernism or Modernist Literature which started in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly, in Europe and North America is characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing, not only in prose fiction but also in poetry.
However, at the time literary modernism began, writers were not looking at the effects of wars on the individual, but on how the dizzying rapid development at the time, was affecting the individual, and not the society or any class of people. So we can divide modernism between the prewar period and the war or post war period.
Doubtless, the war became a domineering focus of modernist writers soon after. War and industrialization became devaluing factors to the individual. The telephone had been invented reducing the world’s distances – people could reach people very faraway. Change was rapid and terrifying.
Modernist writers tried to portray these changes in different ways in order to make meaning out of life. They wrote against the effects of WW1 in the lives of individuals, how devastating the effects of the war on individuals, and how technology had turned out to be disastrous instead of a blessing in the world they lived in.
Because changes were occurring at a rapid pace, writers chose to study and portray how the individual coped with and adapted to the new changes. They depicted how individuals coped. We see from different literary works how some individuals just managed to keep their heads above water; for some, the changes became challenges to the individual; some individuals took head-on the challenges and persevered.
Because things had fallen apart at this time, and the centre could not hold, writers abandoned traditional ways of writing, like forms and techniques of earlier periods. Rhymes were abandoned for free verse; images from the past were mixed with modern languages and themes creating a collage of styles. Writers tried to get into the head of characters to portray the inner working of their consciousness, and this led to a literary device known as stream-of-consciousness – this creates a point of view that resembles human thought.
Such authors as Adeline Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) who is considered as a pioneer of the narrative device known as stream-of-consciousness, and James Joyce (1882-1941) who perfected that device in his novel, Ullyses (if you find a copy of Ullyses and you cannot read it, you’re not alone. I’ve not finished reading mine since my undergraduate years) are some of the people famous for this narrative device.
Some authors took on the absurdity of the carnage that took place during WW1 to portray how absurd and “un-understandable” life had become – this state of things pushed writers into modernist avant-garde literature – James Joyce dabbled into this device, Samuel Beckett too.
There were global capitalism (the rich preying on the poor and getting richer by them), the carnage of war showing man as still primitive, killing other men, despite the ongoing development, all these created absurdity in the minds of writers which they attempted to portray in their work. In Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, a travelling salesman transformed into an insect-like creature.
At the end of WW1, Modernism became darker and more cynical, frequently including social commentary and themes of alienation, hedonism (pleasure-seeking or self-gratification) and despair. Major American modernist authors of 1920s’ modernism include Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. On the English side, we have T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, etc. Others are Samuel Beckett, Thomas Mann, etc.
A notable characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness concerning artistic and social traditions, which often led to experimentation with form, along with the use of techniques that drew attention to the processes and materials used in creating works of art.
The elements of modernism are thematic, formal, and stylistic, and these are seen in: a. worldwide destruction: the world witnessed the chaos and destruction of which modern man was capable of, considering that these are modern men, not primitive people! b. cultural fragmentation, c. cycles of life , d. loss and Exile, e. Narrative Authority. f. social evils, etc
Themes of Modernism
The themes of modernism reflect the distinct sensibilities of both modernist and postmodern aesthetic movements, such themes are: alienation, transformation, consumption, and the relativity of truth.
Elements or Features of literary modernism:
Individualism – In Modernist Literature, the individual is viewed to be more interesting than the society.
Experimentation – Modernist writers broke free of old forms and techniques such as shunning rhymes and adopting free verse.
Absurdity – The carnage of two world wars profoundly affected writers of this period as they portray the effects of war on their characters.
Symbolism – Use of symbols like the cross for Christianity or church, the use of heart to portray love, the dove with a tiny plan in its mouth is a sign of peace. These were normal in earlier writings, but the modernist created a new innovation in symbolism , such as using riddles to be cracked as poems, the use of open ended symbols in narratives in novels such as James Joyce’ Ulysses.
Formalism – Adherence to prescribed or external forms, as in arts or art; marked attention to arrangement, style, or artistic means as in art or literature. Modernists saw literature as craft, and were inspired to creativity and originality. Their poetry includes foreign languages, dense vocabularies and invented words. They rebelled against traditional forms. For instance, Poet E.E. Cummings chose to write everything in small letters, and abandoned structure, and spread his poem all over the page.
Imagism – 20th c movement in poetry advocating free verse and expression of ideas and emotions through clear precise images (likeness of an object) – a representation as in the image of a goat meaning foolish.
Vorticism – an English natural art movement (1912-1915) embracing cubist and futurist concepts.
Expressionism – a theory or practice in art seeking to depict the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in artists.
Others are: Futurism, Surrealism, Acmeist poetry, Dada, etc.
Works of the literary modernists include Great Gatsby, Ullyses, Dubliners, Mrs Dalloway, A Room of One’s Own, Dr Faustus, Waiting for Godot, etc.