The term Modernism usually refers
to the early part of the twentieth century -- sometimes beginning with
the First World War in 1914, and continuing through the 1930s or so --
perhaps up to the Second World War. Some of the most influential Modernist
writers tried some radical experiments with form: poets like Pound and
Eliot working in free verse, for instance, and novelists like Joyce, Woolf,
and Stein experimenting with stream of consciousness and elaborate language
games.(1)
THE MODERNISM AND THE MODERN NOVEL
The term modernism refers to the
radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities evident in the art
and literature of the post-World War One period. The ordered, stable and
inherently meaningful world view of the nineteenth century could not, wrote
T.S. Eliot, accord with "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which
is contemporary history." Modernism thus marks a distinctive break with
Victorian bourgeois morality; rejecting nineteenth-century optimism, they
presented a profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray. This
despair often results in an apparent apathy and moral relativism.
In literature, the movement is
associated with the works of (among others) Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia
Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Franz Kafka and Knut
Hamsun. In their attempt to throw off the aesthetic burden of the realist
novel, 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. (Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment" 68)
Modernism is often derided for
abandoning the social world in favour of its narcissistic interest in language
and its processes. Recognizing the failure of language to ever fully communicate
meaning ("That's not it at all, that's not what I meant at all" laments
Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock), the modernists generally downplayed content
in favour of an investigation of form. The fragmented, non-chronological,
poetic forms utilized by Eliot and Pound revolutionized poetic language.
Modernist formalism, however, was
not without its political cost. Many of the chief Modernists either flirted
with fascism or openly espoused it (Eliot, Yeats, Hamsun and Pound). This
should not be surprising: modernism is markedly non-egalitarian; its disregard
for the shared conventions of meaning make many of its supreme accomplishments
(eg. Eliot's "The Wasteland," Pound's "Cantos," Joyce's Finnegan's Wake,
Woolf's The Waves) largely inaccessible to the common reader. For Eliot,
such obscurantism was necessary to halt the erosion of art in the age of
commodity circulation and a literature adjusted to the lowest common denominator.
It could be argued that the achievements
of the Modernists have made little impact on the practices of reading and
writing as those terms and activities are generally understood. The opening
of Finnegan's Wake, "riverrun, past Eve's and Adam's, from swerve of shore
to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to
Howth Castle and Environs," seems scarcely less strange and new than when
it was first published in 1939. Little wonder, then, that it is probably
the least read of the acknowledged "masterpieces" of English literature.
In looking to carry on many of the aesthetic goals of the Modernist project,
hypertext fiction must confront again the politics of its achievements
in order to position itself anew with regard to reader. With its reliance
on expensive technology and its interest in re-thinking the linear nature
of The Book, hypertext fiction may find itself accused of the same elitism
as its modernist predecessors.(2)
(1) From the Guide to Literary Terms by Jack Lynch
(2) ?1995 Christopher Keep, Tim McLaughlin, robin
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0255.html