In the years immediately following World War I, attitudes shifted dramatically. Not only were socio-economic systems modified to cope with new realities, but literary values and priorities were also restructured to reflect new thinking in an age of despair and uncertainty. The previous century had romanticized life and had encapsulated the sensibilities and sentiments of Western Society within a system of structured logic, manifested by the schools of Naturalism and Positivism. The present paper will trace the development of a new style of thinking, critiquing and writing which evolved into what, casting their gaze retrospectively, today's critics have dubbed the Modernist School. Ultimately, this phenomenon evolved, in turn, and assumed the characteristics of postmodernism which will also be briefly addressed.
Human suffering and the abject state of affairs prevailing during and after the First World War were mirrored in the writings of D.H. Lawrence, for example, whose class-consciousness and preoccupation with social disarray and upward mobility in the midst of social chaos appeared, notably, in Sons and Lovers. Other authors also strived to mirror the society they perceived around them , bringing into perspective the agony and the turbulence of their societies. Making order of chaos required a strong hand and many of these "modernist" writers -- Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats -- embraced the tenets of elitism and fascism, casting aside the egalitarian values of many social theorists of the previous century. They did so in desperation, perhaps, not out of personal enmity and wrath. Numbed by the pain around them, they chose to nurture the swans and ducks at the local park, or to write convoluted prose such as that found in Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. or more so in his Finnigan'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."
Indeed, this type of wording is still "modernist" by today's standards where such turns of the phrase would be considered arcane and counterproductive from the reader's perspective.
Whether Joyce writes in tones of brown, Yeats dwells poetically on emotionally somber events, or Pound speaks out cacophonously in his Cantos, their writing, although reflective of the modernist school, does not approach nihilism. There is still room to argue that intrinsic beauty and hope lie beneath the surface of these dark musings.
The Modernists' break with the conventions of the previous century did not, as we have stated, lead to a dominant overlay of gloom in Modernist writings. Indeed, there were accounts of subdued mirth and frolic in many of the novels of Lawrence and in the poems of Pound and Yeats. This uplifting nature, because it was exclusive and elitist, may have seemed to some a bit serious in contrast to the late 19th Century vaudevillian and rocambolesque antics of earlier authors such as Dickens (Oliver Twist) or Twain (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court)
However, it is not fitting to define a literary movement in terms of what it is not. Examination of the basic principles which motivated Modernist writers, whether they lapsed into tragic or light hearted themes, would reveal far more about the trends and patterns which emerged in the works of this period.
As has been intimated in the foregoing remarks, there occasionally entered into the prose of Lawrence a sense of self-mockery, reflective of the frustration which typified the modernists' break with conventional logic and reason. There were traces in Eliot, as well, of this tendency toward ironic descriptive passages calling into question the conventional thinking of the past, and challenging logic in its classic form. In The Wasteland, for example, Eliot moves toward a choppiness and terseness which, in the estimation of many critics, is indicative of ambiguity and dissatisfaction with the pretentiousness of highly structured bourgeois thinking. Here, in fact, were the roots of later protest and pre-anarchist thinking. Joyce and Eliot, like Yeats, were content in the early stages of their careers with literary innovation; later, they launched into socio-political almost polemical themes breaking with tradition and embracing fascist values which began, perhaps to some degree because of their influence, to surge to the forefront during the 1920s and 1930s both on the Continent as in England.
Upon close examination of what has been asserted, it can be noted that Modernism served to replenish certain break-away tendencies in literature which had begun to emerge toward the end of the Romantic Era. With the advent of new meanings and symbols, as Roland Barthes might be tempted to state, a flourishing of sub-surface communication became more and more apparent. Much of this communication centered on protest, divergence and radical stylistic innovation.
What made Yeats and Lawrence so popular in these days was their use of language to tear apart some of the stale thinking of bygone eras. Obviously, they and Virginia Woolf, part of the Bloomsbury Group in addition to the Modernist School, were disenchanted with the ideologies which produced the First World War. The antiquated thinking of their forefathers yielded disaster and mere illusion. This generation of Modernists sought something more viable, more constructive. Their contribution led to a renewal of thinking and to a questioning of prior values. Some of their writings were extremely popular, such as those of Lawrence, while those of Pound and Eliot were perhaps considered more esoteric. Yet, the Modernist School, characterized by a distinct desire to contrast the objectivity of clear writing with the distortion of subjectivity in certain descriptive passages, contributed -- because it lapsed into non-conventionality -- to the growth and development of the literary arts during the inter-bellum years prior to World War Two.
It is generally recognized that the Modernist School of Thought terminated just as World War II began. The concentration of mental energy and supreme effort which the Allied Powers exerted against the Fascist Axis during the war years seemed to drain the creative resources of several major nations' literary pools. Authors such as André Gide of France went into exile in Tunisia, for example, and others fought valiantly in various theaters of military activity. The once fashionable influence of Yeats, Pound, Woolf and Stein diminished as attention turned to issues of survival.
While skepticism was a distinct characteristic of Modernism, the direction of style and critique which evolved after World War II delved even deeper into the psyches of twentieth century mankind. This new school of thought was identified as Postmodernism. It has been found to be divided into two dichotomous camps: (1) the constructive or affirmative postmodernists, arguably typified by Jean-Francoise Lyotard who dwells on the notion of the meta-narrative, and, (2) in opposition, the postmodern deconstructionists, such as Jacques Derrida at Yale. According to Jason Griffith of Southern Illinois University, in a statement made in response to a recent Postmodernist Debate sponsored by Chico State University in California:
" It is valuable to know that not all postmodernists are Derridian Skeptics. Affirmative postmodernism holds that a type of truth statement can be reached by a group of people to reflect their concept of truth at one place and time. These authors claim that we can deconstruct to a certain extent to find something that can be held as true within a limited scope."
The important distinction between those who find some room for affirmation of past values in postmodern literary endeavor, and those who wish to tear down all past models and structures seems to lie at the heart of the full range of thinking among those who study postmodernism. It would seem fair to state, however, that both those who "affirm" and those who would "deconstruct" are still imbued with an intensity of emotion and purpose which reflect the tensions of both World Wars and the virtual breakdown of 19th and early 20th century systems. There is on-going dialogue among those who observe literary trends as to the true nature of postmodern thought. That it revolves around seeking a new truth, and around rejection of Modernist values such as the embrace of elitism, in favor of more progressive and radical thinking is not open to debate. Jacques Derrida and his colleagues at Yale worked their way toward the bleak skepticism of wholesale rejection of past meaning, convention and order in literary works, with implications for society in general. Others affirmed the existence of hope and, while seeking dramatic change, acknowledged that some values should be perpetuated for the sake of ensuring effective understanding and broad-based communication.
One post-modern British poet who may have helped ensure such communication has not yet been mentioned. This author, Sylvia Plath, often goes unheralded by critics. Although she was born in Massachusetts, she moved to London with her new husband, an aspiring poet himself, and settled into literary circles. Plath is the author of The Bell Jar and Ariel, among other works, and could be construed as a postmodernist. Her verse focuses on feminist themes and on the futility of life.
Both her book, The Bell Jar, and her collection of poems, Ariel, belie a sense of suffocation, of dissatisfaction and of protest. Her use of language arguably qualifies her as a postmodernist because it expresses, not only the need to restructure meaning, but rather a rejection of convention and superficiality.
Plath later committed suicide in London out of despair, internal suffering and perhaps disgust with societal norms and vlues. She follows in the tradition of Woolf and Stein and could be cast into the school of postmodernism by virtue of the power of her protest and call for reform, in literature as in society.
There seems to be little doubt that the development of the Modernist School at the beginning of this century in response to cataclysmic events impacting Western Society affected the entire nature of literary endeavor. That it was followed by Postmodernism, an intrinsically more radical response to ever-deteriorating conditions, on the moral, ethical and societal fronts, would seem an even more revealing phenomenon. Together, Modernism and Postmodernism expose the century-long quest of literati and cognoscenti, such as Lawrence, Eliot, Woolf, Derrida and Lyotard, to seek truths that were ignored or de-emphasized in previous centuries. By adopting radical tactics they have succeeded in revealing truths that were not exposed by their predecessors.
Although there are unifying factors in both the modernist and postmodernist schools, there is certainly an intensity of destructive potential in postmodern writings, such as those of Derrida and Lyotard, which does not exist in the modernists' comparatively gentle break with earlier convention. While self-styled modernist Gertrude Stein, for example, plays with meaning in a tame and innovative vein, her successors, not only Plath, but also perhaps the American Beat Writers reach for dismantling of meaning in a more aggressive thrust against established literary practice. In this sense, they, too, can be considered exponents of the postmodern wave which swept post World War II circles in Europe and North America.
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