1 lost generation

7/30/2019 1 Lost Generation

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20th century American Literature

Modernism in Fiction: The LostGeneration


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Modernism

(Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms [New York:Oxford University Press, 1991])

"a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental andavant-garde trends in the literature (and other arts) of the early 20thcentury.... Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of19th-century traditions and of their consensus between author andreader: conventions of realism ... or traditional meter. Modernist writerstended to see themselves as an avant-garde disengaged from bourgeois

values, and disturbed their readers by adopting complex and difficult newforms and styles. In fiction, the accepted continuity of chronologicaldevelopment was upset by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, and WilliamFaulkner, while James Joyce and Virginia Woolf attempted new ways oftracing the flow of characters' thoughts in their stream-of-consciousnessstyles. In poetry, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot replaced the logical expositionof thoughts with collages of fragmentary images and complex allusions.....Modernist writing is predominantly cosmopolitan, and often expresses asense of urban cultural dislocation, along with an awareness of newanthropological and psychological theories. Its favoured techniques ofjuxtaposition and multiple point of view challenge the reader to re-establish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms."


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Modernist trends

ImpressionismArt Nouveau

Post-Impressionism

Expressionism

Cubism, Futurism

Symbolism

Imagism

VorticismDadaism

Surrealism


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Cubism

An early 20th-century school of painting andsculpture in which the subject matter isportrayed by geometric forms without realistic

detail, stressing abstract form at the expenseof other pictorial elements largely by use ofintersecting often transparent cubes and

cones.


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Cubism, highly influential visual arts style of the 20thcentury that was created principally by the paintersPablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris between1907 and 1914. The Cubist style emphasized the flat,

two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, rejectingthe traditional techniques of perspective,foreshortening, modelling, and chiaroscuro andrefuting time-honoured theories of art as the imitationof nature. Cubist painters were not bound to copying

form, texture, colour, and space; instead, theypresented a new reality in paintings that depictedradically fragmented objects, whose several sides wereseen simultaneously.


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Pablo Picasso, Les demoisellesdAvignon, 1907


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Gertrude Stein (18741946).

Tender Buttons (1914)

- prose poems (Objects, Food, Rooms)atranslation of the art of the cubists into prose

poems


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OBJECTS

A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a singlehurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this andnot ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is

spreading.GLAZED GLITTER.

Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover.

The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change hascome. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and thatinterpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometimethere is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming verycharming is that clean and cleansing. Certainly glittering ishandsome and convincing.


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The stream of consciousness

technique

Stream of consciousness = (in literature) technique thatrecords the multifarious thoughts and feelings of acharacter without regard to logical argument ornarrative sequence. The writer attempts by the streamof consciousness to reflect all the forces, external and

internal, influencing the psychology of a character at asingle moment. The technique was first employed bydouard Dujardin (18611949) in his novel Leslaurierssont coups (1888) and was subsequently used by suchnotable writers as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, andWilliam Faulkner. The phrase stream ofconsciousness to indicate the flow of inner experiencewas first used by William James in Principles ofPsychology (1890).(The Columbia Encyclopedia, SixthEdition. 2001)


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Groupwork

Comment briefly upon the relevance the followingstatement by Virginia Woolf has in relation to thestream of consciousness technique novel. Pointout in what sense the latter differs from the

Victorian novel:

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetricallyarranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-

transparent envelope surrounding us from thebeginning of consciousness to the end. (ModernFiction, in V. Woolf, The Common Reader, 1925)


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The ambivalence of Modernism

Celebration of progress

Nostalgia for past values


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Modernisms Second Generation:The Jazz Age

The Roaring Twenties: prosperity, frivolity,

optimism and loosening morals (Tindall)

Disillusionment and shock

Challenge to the old values of progress, faith,reason and optimism


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The Lost Generation

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920): here was a new

generation, grown up to find all Gods dead,

all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken

Gertrude Stein: You are all a lost generation

1931: Fitzgerald called the past decade ofeconomic boom and high personality The

Jazz Age (an age of bootlegging, flappers and

bohemians): a new lifestyle + a new lifephilosophy


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Defining the Twenties: F. ScottFitzgerald, Echoes of the Jazz Age

It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it

was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.

A whole age was going hedonistic, deciding on

pleasure. The precocious intimacies of theyounger generation would have come about with

or without prohibition they were implicit in theattempt to adapt English customs to Americanconditions.


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JazzThe word jazz in its progress toward respectability has meant

first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with astate of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big citiesbehind the lines of a war. To many English the War still goeson because all the forces that menace them are still active Wherefore eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

But different causes had now brought about acorresponding state in America though there were entireclasses (people over fifty, for example) who spent a wholedecade denying its existence even when its puckish facepeered into the family circle. () The honest citizens of

every class, who believe in a strict public morality and werepowerful enough to enforce the necessary legislation, didnot know that they would necessarily be served bycriminals and quacks, and do not really believe it to-day.(Fitzgerald, Echoes of the Jazz Age)


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F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

This Side of Paradise (1920)

The Beautiful and the Damned(1922)

Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) The Vegetable (play, 1923)

The Great Gatsby(1925)

Tender Is the Night(1934) The Last Tycoon (1941)


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The Great Gatsby: The Valley of Ashes

About half way between West Egg and New York the motorroad hastily joins the railroads and runs beside it for aquarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certaindesolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes a fantasticfarm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and

grotesque gardens; where ashes take the form of housesand chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with atranscendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly andalready crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally, aline of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a

ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up animpenetrable cloud, which screens their obscureoperations from your sight.


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The Great Gatsby: T. J. Eckleburg

But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dustwhich drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after amoment, the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Dr.T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic their retinas are

one yeard high. They look out of no face, but, instead,from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which passover a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag ofan oculist set them there to fatten his practice in theborough of Queens, and then sank down himself into

eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. Buthis eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, undersun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumpingground.


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Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

1925 - In Our Time (stories) 1926 - The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta)

1929 -A Farewell to Arms

1932 - Death in the Afternoon

1933 - Winner Takes Nothing(stories) 1935 - Green Hills of Africa

1937 - To Have and Have Not

1940 - For Whom the Bell Tolls

1952 - The Old Man and the Sea

1964 -A Moveable Feast(posthumous)


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The Hemingway hero

- Religion (perverted by events such as Francosregime in Spain, which Hemingway experienceddirectly) replaced by his own code of humanconduct: a mixture of hedonism and sentimental

humanism.- Carpe diem

- Nada

- Expressing himself in few words, oftern chargedwith meaning (the core of Hemingwaysminimalist fiction-writing style)


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The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1938)

Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710

feet high, and is said to be the highest

mountain in Africa. Its western summit is

called the Masai "Ngaje Ngai," the House of

God. Close to the western summit there is the

dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one

has explained what the leopard was seeking atthat altitude.


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THE MARVELLOUS THING IS THAT ITS painless,"

he said. "That's how you know when it starts."

"Is it really?"

"Absolutely. I'm awfully sorry about the odorthough. That must bother you."

"Don't! Please don't."

"Look at them," he said. "Now is it sight or is itscent that brings them like that?"


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Buthe had never written a line of that, nor ofthat cold, bright Christmas day with themountains showing across the plain that

Barker had flown across the lines to bomb theAustrian officers' leave train, machine-gunningthem as they scattered and ran. Heremembered Barker afterwards coming into

the mess and starting to tell about it. And howquiet it got and then somebody saying, ''Youbloody murderous bastard.''


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She shot very well this good, this rich bitch, thiskindly caretaker and destroyer of his talent.Nonsense. He had destroyed his talent himself.

Why should he blame this woman because shekept him well? He had destroyed his talent by notusing it, by betrayals of himself and what hebelieved in, by drinking so much that he blunted

the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth,and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, byhook and by crook.


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He had traded it for security, for comfort too,there was no denying that, and for what else?He did not know. She would have bought him

anything he wanted. He knew that. She was adamned nice woman too. He would as soonbe in bed with her as any one; rather with her,

because she was richer, because she was verypleasant and appreciative and because shenever made scenes.


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She didn't drink so much, now, since she hadhim. But if he lived he would never writeabout her, he knew that now. Nor about any

of them. The rich were dull and they drank toomuch, or they played too much backgammon.They were dull and they were repetitious.


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"Molo," she called, "Molo! Molo!

Then she said, "Harry, Harry!" Then her voicerising, "Harry! Please. Oh Harry!"

There was no answer and she could not hearhim breathing.

Outside the tent the hyena made the samestrange noise that had awakened her. But shedid not hear him for the beating of her heart.

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