chaptr 2 modernism

7/28/2019 Chaptr 2 Modernism

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With the rise of the 20 th century the seeds of modernism had started to sprout.

The modernist moment would grow stronger until the 1950s when it would be

dethroned by postmodernism. Yet we cannot completely separate a particular

movement in fiction from another. There is no complete breaking up or separation but

only an evolution into a newer and better form which would reflect the tides of the

times. Modernist authors tried to dislodge the various constrains imposed by time and

space on the narration of a text. They mostly ignored chronological ordering. The

events and incidents in the lives of the characters were presented in a fragmented form.

Most of these novels did not have a particular beginning or ending. The traditional

heroes or protagonists were absent from the narrative space and in their place was

introduced the anti-hero. Modernist writers were also against the absolute

representation of reality using detailed setting, props, environment in order to give a

sense of the actual space. The essential belief in the goodness of man, the order of

things, and other such humanitarian concepts were shaken with the terrible outcome of

the two world wars which saw the inhuman cruelties of the holocaust and the dropping

of the atomic bombs on Japan.

Philosophers and thinkers including scientists played a major role in shaping a

modernist sensibility especially in fiction. These include Charles Darwin, Karl Marx,

Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Max Plank, Albert Einstein, and Jean

Paul Sartre. There was massive disillusionment during this period which affected the

novelists also. There was a general disregard for order of any kind. The human

conscious and unconscious mind with its unique space was observed and represented in


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and external as possible? [ ] Let us record the atoms as they fall upon

the mind in order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however

disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident

scores upon the consciousness (Woolf 106-7).

Like every other sub-genres of the novel form before it, the modernist novel also

tried to comprehend and evaluate time. They too were concerned with the artificiality

imposed on the novel form by linear time in narration. As Ford Madox Ford noted,

what was wrong with the novel, and with the British novel in particular, was that it

went straight forward (Ford 192). Events seem to happen in a linear way but we never

identify them so. Experiences and memories of the past intervene with the present

experiences in most cases; the mind can also take us to a supposed future outcome or

event and thus blend our present with images of the future. Thus, In recognition of

these ways in which time is actually experienced, modern novelists often tried to break

the sequence, to put things out of order, to work from the present back into the past, to

dissolve linear time (Matz 62). Modernist novels were thus a kind of rebellion

against the order imposed on form and narration by time; they were thus highly

experimental yet did not completely disregard the importance of time. The protest was

against the notions of linear and absolute time.

During the late 19th century the very concept of time achieved popular and mass

attention. In the 1880s time became standardized; this was done in order to synchronize

the running of trains, to enhance the working of factories, and thus, in a way, to order

life itself. Clocks around the world were synchronized, time was standardized. This


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resulted in people seeing time as a powerful entity that controlled their activities thus

there was a general sense of resentment towards it. People started to equate freedom to a

break from the monotony and linearity of time. What also happened was that, People

came to feel that they had within themselves a private time that was different from

public time. Public time was lived by the clock; private time was idiosyncratic, and

free (Matz 62). Writers of modernist fiction mostly concerned themselves with the

realm of private time, which was associated with the consciousness of a person. The

attitude towards time was changing with scientific discoveries including the theories of

Albert Einstein who proclaimed time to be relative and not linear. The philosophical

theories of Henry Bergson also played a major role in the observing of time in the realm

of the conscious mind.

According to Jesse Matz this new attitude towards time is seen in the episode

where Quentin Compson smashes the watch which was given to him by his father in

William Faulkners The Sound and the Fury:

When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between

seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It

was Grandfathers and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the

mausoleum of all hope and desireI went to the dresser and took up the

watch, with the face still down. I tapped the crystal on the corner of the

dresser and caught the fragments of glass in my hand and put them into

the ashtray and twisted the hands off and put them in the tray. The watch


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ticked on. I turned the face up, the blank dial with little wheels clicking

and clicking behind it, not knowing any better (Matz 63).

According to Matz, when Quentin smashes the clock-time, William Faulkner was

establishing norms for modernist writers and imploring them to do the same by defying

chronological and linear time. In her workOrlando, Virginia Woolf also expresses her

desire to break free from the bondage of linear temporality and to explore a whole new

time as perceived by the consciousness, she says:

An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be

stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand,

an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by

one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock

and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller

investigation (Matz 63).

Writers thus focused on building up a new temporality, stress was laid on the

examination of the present moment which could only be read in association with the

past. Memories associated with the past may be flawed because the human

consciousness does not have the capacity to retrieve past events from the memory in its

exactness. This was also reflected in the narration of novels. A good example would be

to observe the French novelist Marcel Proust and his workIn Search of Lost Time.

Marcel Proust can be regarded as the pioneer in the study of the working of

time in novels. He himself claimed that his novels always carried an invisible form of

time in them. As Joseph Frank observed: He [Proust] has, almost invariably, been


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considered the novelist of timepar excellence (Frank 6). According to Joseph Frank

Proust was highly obsessed with the study of time and his obsession is said to have led

to his encountering of certain quasi-mystical experiences which provided him with a

spiritual technique to transcend the effects of time and thus to escape from the

domination of time. Further, By writing a novel, by translating the transcendent, extra-

temporal quality of these experiences to the level of esthetic form, Proust hoped to

reveal their nature to the world (Frank 7).

Proust and his experiments with time were indeed revolutionary. His novels

literally taught his readers about the importance of the past in perceiving and

understanding the present. He observed that it was only when a certain event, which

was experienced in some past time returned to combine with an experience in the

present moment did we actually comprehend reality. Edmund Wilson says that the

workRemembrance of Things Pastwas not just a mere novel on time but was Prousts

invention to conquer time, a work of art which would remain untouched by the ravages

of time.

Proust aimed at creating a work which would stand closer to real time as

experienced by people in their daily lives. To make his work more real, he paid

special attention to characterization where Proust brought in some revolutionary

experiments in time. Proust never presented one character as appearing throughout the

narrative of the novel, instead a character is made to appear after a long gap in

narration. This indirectly generates a sense of time having passed with relation to the

characters. As Joseph Frank clearly describes in his Spatial Form in Modern Literature,


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To experience the passage of time, Proust learned, it was necessary to

rise above it, and to grasp both past and present simultaneously in a

moment of what he called pure time. But pure time, obviously, is not

time at all it is perception in a moment of time, that is to say, space

(Frank 10).

Thus we can also recognize that the works of Marcel Proust laid stress on the findings

which considered time and space as not separate entities but as a unified form.

Prousts idea of past recollections being flawed was also applied to storytelling

by many modernist writers. Through the use of such an ideology in narrating events, the

narration lost its linearity and became more fragmented, confused, and chaotic. Ford

Madox Fords novel The Good Soldiercan be considered as an example for a narration

where the narrator openly confirms the fact that his memories of a time in the past have

become flawed:

I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may

be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of

maze. I cannot help it [W]hen one discussed an affair a long, sad

affair - one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers points that one

has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely since one

recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper

places I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that,

after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a

story would tell them (Matz 64).


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This question of remembering the past correctly destroys the idea of linear time,

modernist fiction proves that the past can never be truly and exactly recollected. When

incidents and events which happened in the past cannot be recollected as it is in the

present, the narration of incidents one after the other in an orderly fashion in fiction

would seem too artificial.

There is also the problem of catching hold of the moment called the present.

Time cannot be easily distinguished from the present, the past, and the future. What is

the present now has already become the past within the time we contemplate about it

and what is to be the future is already becoming the present within the time that we

are using to perceive the present. Writers have always faced the dilemma of

generating the impression of the present in the readers. Some tried to achieve this by

the detailed description of events and incidents, and thus to capture the exact shape of

these moments; while others focused on the portrayal of intense moments in their

works of fiction, such moments were presented in such a way that they defied change

for a certain period of time which could then be viewed as a prolonged incident

happening in the present. Pioneers of modernist fiction like James Joyce and Virginia

Woolf implemented the concept of epiphanies in their novels. These epiphanies were

called by Woolf as moments of being. In such moments time was made to stand still

and characters were able to distinguish these moments from the continuous flow of

incidents in time and thus to experience them to the fullest.

Writers of modernist fiction thus toyed with time by making it stop abruptly or

by projecting it quickly into the past or the future. In most modernist novels the linear


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time sequence is broken up by including short scenes where there are long

descriptions of events. In such scenes, in a limited period of time, a number of events

occur. Thus modernist writers also try to defy the temporality of modernity. It was a

protest against the mechanization of life during that period as a result of modernity.

Human life was being restricted to the ticking of clocks; time was becoming more

relevant than life itself. Thus the aim was to get unshackled from the dry rut created by

a linear time and to explore the possibilities of a more vibrant and free temporal space

where human capacities, ideas would achieve free expression. As Jesse Matz observed:

The hope was that breaking linear sequences could help people toward a

fuller sense of open possibilities toward a sense of the way things

could have been otherwise, and yet might change; or a truer sense of the

past, in all the ambiguity memory contributes to it: or, finally, a keener

sense of the richness of the present, and how one might even make time

seem to stop by appreciating all of the being in any single moment

(Matz 67).

Modernist novels tried to explain small packets of time. The modernized city life

provided with the idea of a fast changing, rapid paced life where the time is also forced

to change at a rapid pace. Thus to project a piece of life, truer to reality, writers of

modernist fiction had to describe a lot of people and places simultaneously. For such a

description spatial form was necessary. Through this, time was effectively stopped

and the urban spaces were described in vivid detail. The readers were meant to connect


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these descriptions and to understand them by juxtaposing them, not in time, but in

space. A good example for this is James Joyces Ulysses.

In one of the chapters the author presents before us a panoramic view of

Dublins inhabitants and the daily routine life of the Dublin city. The chapter presents a

maze like narrative of incidents, events, which are to be read as a single picture. The

incidents narrated are not ordered or sequenced in time. They are not like normal

narrations in a well ordered plot. Thus Ulysses takes an entirely new approach towards

describing events in time which is non linear. In Ulysses James Joyce discarded the

possibilities of an ordered time sequence in narration by placing a number of events

which, while relating to one another, are devoid of any particular order. He leaves it to

the readers to put into pieces all these references and cross-references in order to

acquire any sort of meaning. The real intention behind this might be that Joyce desires

to present the reader with a day in Dublin complete with all sounds, scents, and sights.

There is a kind of unified impact on the senses and a sensation of observing multiple

activities happening simultaneously. Joyce puts an end to a linear narrative style and

can be seen continuously breaking up the narration throughout the work. This seems to

be his method of protest towards the monotony established by absolute or linear time

which promoted a chronological ordering of events in fiction. Joyce is also successful in

informing the fact that in real life, events do not happen one after the other in an orderly

fashion.

James Joyce conceived Ulysses as a modern day epic. In the novel, Homers

Odyssey and all the myths associated with it forms the background for a modern day


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tale set in Joyces contemporary Dublin. Thus modernist novels successfully bring back

myths or epics from a time in the past and blend it ingeniously with a modern time in

the present. Temporal space is no longer distinctive in modern fiction; different spaces

from different periods intermingle and evolve in the modern novel. The idea of the

omniscient author or narrator is also discarded in the narration of modern novels. This

helps the author to blend multiple narrative spaces into a single narrative sequence.

Time is seen easily manipulated by modernist novelists. As Jesse Matz

observed: The fixed, predictable back-grounds of the past the stereotypical settings,

which served mainly to set the scene gave way to places as inchoate as the minds that

perceived them (Matz 69). Space and time in novels was stretched, restructured in

chaos and disorder, yet was also becoming closer to life. The Relativity theory of

Albert Einstein was starting to take effect in modern fiction. In this theory time and

space was seen as varying, depending upon the different people who perceived it. A

good example for this is Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, where Londons parks are

seen by some characters as threatening spaces while others observe them as places of

seclusion and peace.

The tendency of alienation slowly crept into modernist fiction; where a person

or character found itself terribly alone in a space and time of their own construct. The

Kafkaesque settings of the novels of Franz Kafka, where there is no rational

explanation to events that happen in a particular time and which might seem familiar or

contemporary, are good examples for this. His novels The Trial, The Castle are filled

with spaces where strange incidents happen which are beyond any logical explanation.


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Absurd fiction of Albert Camus, including novels like The Outsider, The Plague and

others, contributed to the whole idea of the meaninglessness of life and subsequently of

that of time. In such fiction, time got personified into something threatening. Meursault,

Joseph K. and a whole lot of other characters who struggled against a universe which

was indifferent to human existence were in a way protesting against the

meaninglessness in the blind following of the authority of time. Time was, wholly

remade in the mind- to become but projects of the alienated human consciousness

(Matz 70).

What modern fiction does through such experimentation and protest is that it

helps the readers to understand and discard the complacency that had set in. This kind

of complacency made readers of fiction take everything for granted, even the idea of the

linear nature of time. Thus modernist writers were successful to some extent in

restructuring our ways of perception. What modernist novels did was that they paved

the way for postmodernist fiction by setting itself, for the first time by any method of

fiction, against literary norms and conventions. Modern novelists tried to make the

readers observe the changes as they happened inside the text itself. Through the

perception of the changes a reader became aware of the presence of time, it was not

linear or absolute time but relative and fluctuating time. The one real advantage

of viewing objects in time is that it brings a certain level of order into things. With

modern novels this tendency was challenged. In a world where there was no order at all

the prospect of an ordered form in literature would seem out of place. Thus with

modernism the hierarchy of absolute time began to decline.

chaptr 2 modernism

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