modernism and postmodernism, part one

Sorry about the wait, but now I'm back! Again! I've lost track of how many times I've declared myself back now, but that's neither here nor there. However, there is a bright side to this latest delay: the first half of my absence was taken up by the aforementioned flurry of small problems, but the second half was entirely due to a serious, loving relationship smacking me square on the nose while I was least expecting it. Romance is a stealthy little bugger.

But, enough about that for now. Today I want to talk about modernist and postmodernist fiction, those two literary categories that everyone has heard of but never been able to find a comprehensible description for. This is because these two words and straightforward, useful definition have rarely ever been allowed to occupy the same building as one another, let alone develop a working relationship. Ask twelve academics to define postmodernism in particular and you'll get twelve different answers, each more deranged and riddled with obscure terminology than the last. Think "The Emperor's New Clothes," but with the alarmist young child securely bound and gagged while everyone else takes turns playing the emperor.

To begin with, modernism and postmodernism can be used to describe a whole lot of things--art, movies, culture, society, etc.--but all I'm interested in here is talking about them in terms of literature. That being said, modernism and postmodernism are literary genres, but they're also literary eras: modernism begins in earnest with the end of World War I and tapers off in the 1940s before ending sometime around the mid-60s, whereas postmodernism begins after World War II and ends...well, that gets a bit nebulous because either we are still very much in the postmodern era or we're just watching its ambulatory remains lurch around the room until the next big thing comes along.

You've probably noticed that there's some overlap between when the modernist era ends and the postmodernist era begins, and that overlap carries over into the distinctions between the modernist and postmodernist genres as well. The two of them are different enough that they deserve individual names, but they are also connected in enough ways that they can't be completely separated into two self-contained genres, either; they are two genres and one genre at the same time (Schroedinger's genre, if I'm permitted to make a terrible science joke). However, in order to enforce some structure on all of this so that your head and mine don't explode after three paragraphs, I'll be talking almost exclusively about modernist fiction in this installment and waiting until part two to cover postmodernist fiction and how it relates to modernist fiction.

Modernism
-or-
Hooray, We're Finally On Topic!

Like most new movements, modernism is in many respects a reaction to what came before it--in this case, those stuffy, snobby Victorians. Aside from a few notable exceptions like Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, Victorian authors kept up the centuries-old tradition of focusing on people who were worthy of that focus, i.e. the rich, the upper-class, and the aristocrats. If you didn't own a mansion and a half-dozen servants, or have a cool title like Earl or King or Duchess attached to your name, then you simply weren't worth anyone's literary consideration.

Likewise, Victorian sensibilities demanded that their fiction adhere to a rather draconian sense of propriety, so only prim and proper subject matter need apply. When authors like Kate Chopin deviated from this norm, their scandalous output tended to get them quickly and effectively blacklisted from ever being published again--after all, we musn't tolerate a novel like The Awakening that has the audacity to star a female protagonist who leaves her husband (gasp!) or has affairs (double gasp!) or otherwise makes her own decisions about how she wants to live her life without asking a man to make them for her (triple gasp!). That kind of thing is just unseemly.

Thankfully, the Modernists promptly laughed these ideas right out of the building and locked the door behind them. For example, blue collar protagonists--y'know, people who have to work for their money and know how to balance a checkbook--abound in Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, and while F. Scott Fitzgerald still wrote about the rich, it's hard to characterize a novel like The Great Gatsby as being especially kind to their sheltered, money-having selves. As for prudishness and propriety, the manipulations and affairs in Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier or the implied pedophilia in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury would have gotten both authors dumped on the same no-fly list as Chopin by the Victorians, and James Joyce would have given them all heart attacks (or not--after all, the Victorians did give us the god-emperor of perverts, Sigmund Freud).

So, as you can see modernist literature had a much different viewpoint and treatment of society at large, but why the sudden change? What could have happened to so quickly and irrevocably...



...oh, right. It can be difficult sometimes to clearly picture the impact of World War I, separated from it as we are by the glorified rah-rah god-and-country Nazi killing of the Second World War, but to put it as bluntly as possible there was absolutely nothing about WWI for anyone to be proud about. It wasn't fought for justice, or truth, or decency, or any other nauseatingly patriotic reason, it was fought because there hadn't been a good war for so long that the jackasses in charge of all those European countries were suffering from a nasty case of genocidal blue balls--all that saber-rattling with no gory payoff was starting to wear thin, you see. And once the war got underway, it was fought under some of the most hellish conditions ever experienced on a battlefield--mustard gas, machine guns, field artillery, septic living conditions in the trenches, and much, much more combined to scar and disillusion an entire generation.

Several authors experienced the war firsthand. Hemingway drove ambulances for the Red Cross until he was wounded by mortar shrapnel, followed by a burst of machine gun fire for good measure. Ford was so shellshocked after the Battle of the Somme that he was sent home as an invalid. C.S. Lewis (more a critic of modernism than an adherent) was nearly killed by friendly fire in the Battle of Arras. And Wilfred Owen was killed in action while leading troops in a river crossing just a week before armistice was declared (if you haven't already, you owe it to yourself to read his poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est").

So yes, the Great War had a profound effect on the literature of the period. Before the war broke out there was already a great deal of unrest and alienation stemming from the industrial revolution (re: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, etc.); add to that the distrust and disillusionment in both the government and church after WWI and things really began to kick into overdrive. After all (as many authors thought) why should I write novels starring those asshole aristocrats? They're the ones who talked me in to signing up so that I could nearly get my legs blown off. And why should I put god and country on a pedestal like those Victorians did? Fuck the both of 'em--I'm going to focus on something more secular and tangible than patriotism and religion (this secular bent was Lewis' beef with Modernism, in case you were wondering).

In short, blind nationalism has lost its luster, religion is on the outs, four years of trench warfare have proven that the government doesn't have your best interests at heart, and the hours and working conditions at your factory job are conspiring to horribly mutilate if not outright kill you. So then, who or what can you believe? Is there anything you can rely on--and if so, how do you even begin to try identifying it?

This last series of questions leads us to the last characteristic of modernist fiction I want to cover, and for this one we get to trot out one of those twenty-five cent words we all dutifully wrote down in Philosophy 101 and promptly forgot all about at the end of the quarter: epistemology. Epistemology is the study of knowledge--how it is obtained, how its accuracy is verified, and the ways in which the knowledge-seeking process fails to work. It's in service of this murky epistemological territory that some modernists began to experiment with different ways to tell their stories. Faulkner's favorite method was to use multiple narrators who each in turn discuss the same subject or person or events, thereby providing the reader with a sort of collage of witness statements instead of a more traditional narrative where information is filtered through a single narrator's perspective. Others, like Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse, chose to employ a stream of consciousness technique which presented the reader with an unfiltered stream of thoughts and impressions and internal dialogues straight from the minds of their characters. This technique often results in some meandering and ofttimes confusing prose, but prose that is nonetheless written in the hope that a character's tangled, unedited thoughts are a more accurate way to convey his or her viewpoint than forcing those thoughts into the mold of more traditionally structured narrative.

For those of you who think this is all relevant only to high-falutin' snobby literary stuff, allow me to direct your attention to modernist fiction's sister genre, detective fiction. Detective fiction's golden age, i.e. when Agatha Christie and Dashiell Hammett and company were hard at work producing their great works, begins around the end of World War I and tapers off around the early 40s--funny, those sound exactly like the dates I cited earlier for modernist fiction, don't they? That isn't a coincidence; the same cultural and historical influences that made those decades such a fertile breeding ground for modernism--government paranoia, post-industrial alienation, distrust of things once held to be great unassailable truths--also happen to be the very things that detective fiction thrives on. I mean, if you think modernist fiction thrives on epistemology, what do you think detective fiction centers around if not the pursuit and authentication of knowledge? So, while there is plenty of blurring of the boundaries between modernism and postmodernism (which I'll get into in the next installment), the line that separates modernism from detective fiction is even more fuzzy than that.

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Phew! I don't know about you, but I need a break. Part two will follow, hopefully sooner rather than later.