What Was Modernism?

The concept of modernism is very broad historically and in terms of expression, but in general modernism is the movement of art and thinking to explore new forms and new responses to the understanding of human nature in the early 20th century. The period of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries brought forth an astonishing number of technological scientific and artistic innovations. As the world in its seemingly objective form became more complex and varied, so the processes of reflection, expression and self-awareness became more complex and varied. The interplay between new versions of physical reality, such as Einstein’s theories of relativity, so the representation of human experience and responses became more varied and often contradictory. The era of literary modernism at its height spans the time between the beginning of the First World War(1914) and the beginning of the Second(1939). In the English speaking world, the works of James Joyce, Virginia Wolff, and T.S. Elliot represent major artistic innovation and reassessment of the subject of art in ways that have had broad cultural impact.

T.S. Elliot’s, The Wasteland, published in 1922, remains a compact but challenging poetic text that manifests a broad range of modernist ideas. The poem came out of Elliot’s own psychological crises, but it echoes with the historical and social conflicts of its age: the displacements of war, the intrusion of technology on personal life, and the apparent withdrawal of a higher conceptual or theological meaning. While The Wasteland is particularly skeptical of human meaning, other works like Joyce’s Ulysses seem to offer a more positive reading of human experience. Still, Elliot’s personal epic can make the most important psychological, artistic and formal aspects of modernism available to the thoughtful reader.

Like many works of Modernism, The Wasteland is noted for its apparent difficulty. Fragmentation, broad ranging allusion and cryptic pronouncements make the poem a challenge even for the post-Modern reader of today. The personal patterning of the poem would seem to be a persona, probably drawn from Elliot himself, who is aware of and suffers the fragmentation of modern life. This persona’s frustrations include sexual frustration, personal disorientation and an intense yearning for the revelation of a significance, which is never revealed. The poem begins with a famous allusion to the open of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but with a despondent twist.

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tube.

Where Chaucer celebrates the new life of April with its sweet showers, as the eruption of emotional and physical vigor, Elliot’s persona shrinks back from the energies of spring. Winter is warmer and safer than Spring for it allows a kind of suspended animation of the emotions and the soul. The beginning of new growth, breeding and stirring bring awareness, conflict and adumbration of despair as a model of psychological and spiritual frustration. The central persona of The Wasteland both responds to new energies and yet fearfully draws back from them. He carries within him the history of his culture as well as the new uncertainties of the modern era and like the poet of Wordsworth’s work, he must speak of his own personal experience and understanding. As an intense figure in the modernist movement though, Elliot knows and is shaped by the fragments of the culture from which he has come forth. So even in the opening section of the poem, ominously titled, The Burial of the Dead, he evokes Chaucer, the wealthy seeking escape and other lands, biblical evocations, reference to Wagner’s Tristan, mystical fortune tellers, crowds flowing over London Bridge to work, ancient battles, and the first anti-establishment modern poet, Baudelaire. Where this section begins with the allusion to Chaucer, it ends by sighting Baudelaire’s address to the reader in Flowers of Evil. “You hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, - mon frère!” (Hypocrite reader, my double, my brother!)

Even at the opening of The Wasteland, Elliot combines personal psychological crisis with the multiplicity of historical and cultural experience. In a way, Elliot’s Modernism is both a protest against the overbearing and conflicted world that surrounds him and a personal quest for artistic and spiritual meaning. The invocation of the complexity of his modern world externally, makes emotional an artistic sense only as it gives rise to the sense of genuine need in personal experience. In this sense, even with the difficulty of the poem, Elliot claims that the problem of history and culture is critically bound to the crisis of individual experience and meaning. He claims in his avocation of Baudelaire’s line, that any reader who sees him or herself aloof from these crises would be a hypocrite reader. He addresses us with the help of Baudelaire as his double and his brother or sister. If this is true, or if we find it in some way true, then the poem is about us, our relation to history and culture and to the enigma of the meaning of our own lives.

The claims of Elliot as a representative of Modernism maybe a bit stretched here, however the dynamism of the Modernist movement involves both daring experimentation and the proposal that the complexity of existence needs to be confronted by the writer and by the reader. As Emmanuel Levinas suggests in his essay, “Reality and its Shadow” difficult Modern art, is in many ways far more honest about human understanding, than any straightforward narrative could ever claim.

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Our investigations will continue with an encounter of Elliot’s The Wasteland, to show some of the salient aspects of Modernism, but will then proceed to explore a number of the most compelling antecedents to Modernism. While we could start at any of a number of places, the revolution of Darwin’s conception of biological time and consequently human origins and Baudelaire’s annunciation of the rebellious and decadent poet will suffice.