At the beginning of the 20th Century, there was a
literary/social movement that still influences our culture today. This was the Modernist movement. Modernists were all about re-assessing the
way we look at the world.
To fully understand Modernism, we need to know what came
beforehand. I already talked a great
deal about the Victorian Era in an earlier post. In the United States, Realism was the
literary style of the latter part of the 19th Century. It tried to represent life truthfully. Mark Twain wrote Regional Realism, in which he
spelled words differently to get across a variety of accents from the
South. Realists tried to include many
details into their stories, even ones that didn’t really matter in the
plot. Real life has details that don’t
mean much, like the design on the rug, how many birds are in the sky, but they
are there nonetheless and Realists wanted to include them in stories that were
supposed to represent reality. Many will
say Realism is depressing because, in order to be truthful, many Realists felt
not every story should be happy, since life isn’t always happy.
Modernism, on the other hand, sought to be even more real
than Realism. The latter had included
physical details, but what about the unseen?
What goes on in the human mind is just as real, and perhaps even more
so, than the physical world. Although I
disagree with much of Freud’s theories, psychology had a huge effect on
Modernism and on literature today. Writers like William Faulkner represented
reality by getting inside the protagonist’s mind. All five senses were written of, and thought
process made its way into literature.
And that means thoughts the way we actually think them. Thought is not linear or chronological. One second we can be thinking about dinner
and then we’ll remember something we have to do beforehand. And different people think differently.
Faulkner wrote a book my dad and I love called As I Lay Dying. It’s about a family whose mother has just
died and they are on their way to bury her body; however, it’s told completely
in internal dialogue. Each chapter is a
different family member’s point of view.
Every now and then the characters speak to each other, but the rest of
it is only what the character is thinking about. The youngest son, Vardaman, tries to come to
grips with his mother’s death by associating her with a dead fish. One chapter of his internal dialogue has only
one line, “My mother is a fish.” We
might think this Modernist book is a little confusing, but in actuality it is
more realistic than many literary works that came before.
While trying to characterize life in a more realistic,
psychological way, Modernists also accepted the fact that we can never really
represent truth correctly. A famous
painting by a Surrealist/Post-Modern artist, René Magritte, shows a picture of
a pipe and underneath in French it reads, “This is not a pipe.” It’s true.
It is only a painting of one. And
moreover, the word “pipe” itself is just a bunch of letters, which are only
scribbles on a page assigned certain values.
Who is to say that this object should be called a “pipe”? Modernists are often ridiculed for being
confusing and meaningless or doesn’t look like anything. The point isn’t that it’s impressive or even
that it looks just like the real thing.
The point is to make you think about the fact that everything we call
reality is only how we perceive it.
Many of my friends dislike Modernism all the same, but I
think, “If you enjoy contemporary literature, you have to at least appreciate
the Modernists, because their influence is still rampant in our culture.” We would not have the society or literature
we have today if it weren’t for the Modernists.
Give me any book told in first-person or third-person omniscient, and
I’ll tell you that the author is getting inside the human mind, which the
Modernists did more than anyone, and therefore the author is relying on a
tradition started by the Modernists. You
may not understand them, but you think just the way the Modernists did.
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