Modernism in English Literature

Modernism was the revolution in literature, painting, music and architecture that swept the Western world in the first decades of the twentieth century. In English literature it is associated with a handful of writers who produced, in a few extraordinary years, works that broke with the forms, values and assumptions of the nineteenth century: Joseph Conrad, Henry James, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Wyndham Lewis, Katherine Mansfield, and later Samuel Samuel Beckett. Its annus mirabilis was 1922, which saw the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land (and, on the Continent, Proust’s last volumes and Rilke’s Duino Elegies). Virginia Woolf wrote that “on or about December 1910 human character changed”.

Many of its central figures were outsiders to England: Conrad was a Pole, Henry James and Eliot and Pound were Americans, Joyce, Yeats and Beckett were Irish, Mansfield a New Zealander. Modernism was international, metropolitan, polyglot, made in London, Paris, Dublin, Trieste and Zurich.

Why a revolution?

The modernists felt that the world had changed so profoundly that the old ways of writing could no longer represent it.

• Science and thought. Darwin had made humanity an animal among animals; Nietzsche declared the death of God; Freud revealed an unconscious mind driven by forces it does not know; Einstein’s relativity (1905, 1915) dissolved absolute space and time; Henri Bergson distinguished clock time from lived time (durée); William James described consciousness as a “stream”. The stable, knowable self and the ordered, providential world assumed by the Victorian novel seemed illusions.
• The city and the machine. The motor car, the aeroplane, the telephone, the cinema, electric light, mass newspapers and advertising changed the texture of experience: speed, fragmentation, simultaneity, crowds of strangers.
• The First World War (1914–18). Nine million soldiers died in four years of industrialised slaughter. The war destroyed faith in progress, in the wisdom of rulers, and in the language of patriotism and honour. The war poets — Wilfred Owen (“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?”; “Dulce et Decorum Est”), Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg — wrote the first literature of disillusion.

Ezra Pound’s slogan was “Make it new”.

Techniques

Stream of consciousness and interior monologue. Instead of an omniscient narrator describing characters from outside, the modernist novel renders the flow of a mind from within — perceptions, memories, associations, half-formed thoughts — often without punctuation or logical connection. Woolf’s essay “Modern Fiction” (1919) asks the novelist to “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall”.

Fragmentation and collage. Narrative is broken up; scenes are juxtaposed without transitions; voices, quotations and languages are spliced together. The Waste Land moves among dozens of speakers and quotes Dante, Shakespeare, the Upanishads, music-hall songs and pub talk.

Myth as structure. Eliot, reviewing Ulysses, praised Joyce’s “mythical method” — using the Odyssey as a scaffolding for a day in Dublin — as “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”

Free verse and the image. The Imagists — Pound, H. D., Amy Lowell — rejected Victorian rhetoric and regular metre for “direct treatment of the thing”, economy and the clear image. Pound’s two-line “In a Station of the Metro” — “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough” — is the movement’s emblem.

Difficulty and allusion. Modernist works are often hard, demanding learned readers and rewarding rereading. Eliot argued that “poets in our civilization… must be difficult”.

Impersonality. Against Romantic self-expression, Eliot argued in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) that “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”

The writers

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), born Józef Korzeniowski in Russian Poland, spent twenty years as a merchant seaman before writing, in his third language, novels of moral isolation and the darkness of the human heart: Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Heart of Darkness (1899), the journey up the Congo river to the ivory-trader Kurtz, who has become a god to the natives and whose last words are “The horror! The horror!” — a founding text of modernism and of postcolonial criticism (Chinua Achebe called it racist).

Henry James (1843–1916), an American who lived in England, refined the “point of view” technique and the psychological novel (The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl), bridging Victorian and modern.

W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), Irish nationalist, occultist and Nobel laureate (1923), moved from Celtic Twilight romanticism to a hard, modern style: “Easter, 1916” (“A terrible beauty is born”), “Sailing to Byzantium”, and “The Second Coming” (1919): “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), from St Louis, became a London banker and publisher and a British subject. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) — “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table” — introduced a new voice of modern paralysis and irony. The Waste Land (1922), edited by Pound, is a 434-line collage of a spiritually dead civilisation. Eliot later became an Anglican and wrote Four Quartets (1936–42), meditations on time and eternity.

James Joyce (1882–1941) left Dublin for exile in Trieste, Zurich and Paris but wrote only about Dublin: the stories of Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922) — a single day, 16 June 1904, in the life of the advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom, mapped onto Homer’s Odyssey, ending with Molly Bloom’s unpunctuated monologue “…yes I said yes I will Yes” — and the dream-language of Finnegans Wake (1939).

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), at the heart of the Bloomsbury Group with her husband Leonard, the economist Keynes, the biographer Lytton Strachey and the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, wrote Mrs Dalloway (1925), a single June day in London in which a society hostess prepares for a party and a shell-shocked veteran kills himself; To the Lighthouse (1927); Orlando; The Waves; and the feminist essay A Room of One’s Own (1929): “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), a miner’s son from Nottinghamshire, wrote Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (banned in Britain until a celebrated obscenity trial in 1960), seeking a renewal of life through instinct, sexuality and “blood-consciousness” against industrial deadness. E. M. Forster (1879–1970), less experimental, wrote Howards End (“Only connect…”) and A Passage to India (1924).

After high modernism

The 1930s brought a more political generation — W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice — and the documentary realism of George Orwell. The Irish line of experiment passed from Joyce to his assistant Samuel Beckett, whose Waiting for Godot (1953) carried modernism into the theatre of the absurd. Later twentieth-century writers either extended modernism or reacted against it; “postmodernism” named a later, more playful attitude to its fragments.

In conversation

• “Make it new” — Pound’s modernist rallying cry, used for any radical renovation.
• “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” — Yeats on the disintegration of order; quoted at every crisis.
• Stream of consciousness — writing that follows the unbroken flow of a mind.