Modernism

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Modernism

It is helpful to distinguish between “modernism” and that which is “modern.” What is known as “modern” is that which is in step with the times, or not so far out of step as to have vanished from cultural memory. A list of what is “modern” would surely include automobiles and paved roads, photography, electric lights, travel by rail and by air, mass transit and mass production, the telegraph and telephone and television, motion pictures, recorded sound, and so on, whereas a butter churn or reading by candlelight would not qualify.

Most of what is known as “modern” today had its beginnings in one brief historical period of Western culture. Although there is some dispute over exact dates, the “modern” period is generally held to extend from the third quarter of the nineteenth century to the beginning of World War II. During this timeframe there were overwhelming changes in American lifestyles. From the landing at Plymouth Rock until the 1920s, for instance, a majority of Americans had taken their living in one form or another from the land. By 1920 this had changed as American society became more industrialized and moved away from agrarian culture, changing into a mercantile and commercial society, not to mention a metropolitan one. The 1920 census reported that for the first time in history, more Americans were living in urban environments than were living beyond them. The census suggested as well that a new strata of society was well along in its making. A “modern” middle class was developing as people left the land and came to work in the industries of major metropolitan areas, and this was an important modification economically because they were one and all consumers. The majority of Americans were earning their livings from some form of mass manufacture, and their buying power was likely to increase because higher wages were available to those able to acquire the greatest industrial skills. This, in turn, provided the chance to rise out of the circumstances in which one was born, not just for a few, but for the majority. Never before had a promise of upward mobility been so widely extended. Never had the American Dream seemed so American.

But it was coming at a price. Urban life was isolating. Factory work was unfulfilling. Nothing seemed sacred anymore. The result was a greater level of unhappiness.

The term modernism refers to the responses to this period of turbulence and change. T. S. Eliot's essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), for instance, articulated the central challenges for those setting foot in the modern era. Eliot warned the poets of his generation they would have to put aside traditional poetic forms and long-standing poetic techniques. Modern life was so far removed from what earlier generations had experienced, poets would have to abstract what was best from the past, then find new forms of their own making in which to articulate what it now meant to be human. Most immediately, Eliot was calling for a break with the nineteenth-century notion of metrics and rhyme. Still, the implications of his call are far-reaching, for “Tradition and the Individual Talent” also served as a challenge to verities about human experience that dated back to the seventeenth century, or, more specifically, to the Age of Enlightenment, when thinkers such as René Descartes (1596–1650) broke with the mysticism and superstition of the Dark and Middle Ages and held out the possibility that human reason could, over time, gain a full understanding of our world and our lives. Foregrounding the human capacity for reason—particularly the human capacity for inductive and deductive thought—the Age of Enlightenment posited a world that was subject to a matrix of fixed principles, many of which remain the core of the sciences today. If there were fixed principles to be found at the core of the sciences, it stood to reason that this was also true of all of human experience. Surely life was comprehensible if only we could grasp the causal relationships at its center, properly sequence related events, and so on.

But what if the world was not “fixed”? The modernists were suspicious. What if it was fluid, contiguous, ever-changing, always a step or two ahead of what anyone might grasp? What if we were losing our way? What if this overriding faith in ourselves had left us now with nothing to believe in? These were the questions modernist writers were posing in their novels, particularly Marcel Proust (1871–1922), James Joyce (1882–1941), and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) in Europe, as well as Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), William Faulkner (1897–1962), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) in the United States. None of these novelists rejected out of hand what Enlightenment thought had achieved. The periodic tables developed in the 1890s were valuable; clearly there were ways in which the world was fixed and stable. What modern experience was proving was just that being alive was a more intricate matter than the Enlightenment had allowed, the powers of science be hanged; to draw from the Irish poet William Butler Yeats's famous “The Second Coming” (1920):

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
mere anarchy is loosed upon the world …

The greatest novels of the modernist period are concerned with remembrance and reconstruction. Work as otherwise diverse as Proust's Á la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927), Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929), and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) all deal with protagonists who are trying to organize the confusion of their pasts into a coherent, viable text. They are doing their best to take fragments of experience and place them in a meaningful, causal sequence. That they can only make sense of their lives through a process sure to falsify or otherwise misrepresent some of what actually happened is a “given,” but, for the modernist novel, that is the best one can do. Everything is approximate. Everything is relative. Meaning is in a constant state of flux, so, to make meaning out of our experience is to reconfigure life into forms simple enough to make sense of.

Proust's novel is best known in English by its earliest translated title, Remembrance of Things Past, but “In Search of Lost Time” is a closer approximation to what Proust seems to have had in mind. Both titles, though, speak to the modernist experience, a concern with organizing experience into spatial, temporal patterns so that they might be understood and appreciated. This is literally the case in Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), in which one of her protagonists, Lily Brisco, discovers that the ocean scene she means to paint is so mutable it alters before she can fix it on her canvas. To complicate matters, her perspective is mutable as well, she discovers. One can apprehend the scene, but never quite comprehend it before it changes, or, a more daunting thought still, before Lily changes herself.

For such modernists, this is true not just in art but in all of life. The human mind is no match for a world so contiguous and contradictory, so replete with fleeting images, sounds, and sensations. In an attempt to affix meaning, we actually make meaning. We are constantly recapitulating our experiences, making them simpler than we know them to be, forever fitting them into patterns of our own very personal design.

When Henry Ford (1863–1947) introduced the $5, 8-hour workday in 1914 for the workers on his assembly line in Michigan, he was recognizing the changes taking place in the social fabric of the country. This was to be an era of mass production, one in which more goods would be made available to more people than had ever been known throughout human history. But mass production meant that the aesthetics of what was desired would have to be carefully adjusted. For one thing, standardization of a product would have to be accepted in the marketplace as a virtue. Ford recognized that mass production was dependent upon mass consumption bringing about “mass taste.” Modern business practice would have to create a consumer with predictable spending habits; it would have to find ways to compensate those it employed and socialize them to both the boredom and rigors of “routinized” labor, and a delicate balance would have to be struck between the nation-state, large capital, and labor organizations.

Modernist architects such as the Dutch Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) and the French Le Corbusier (1887–1965) realized that creating living and working space in the cities of their day meant accommodating the need for flexibility and easy modification. Architecture had to be responsive to an incredible variety of diverse experiences and ever-changing catalysts. But this would have to be balanced against a host of conflicting demands. Architects were being called upon by a powerful capitalist agenda to design in ways that signaled permanence, that were highly functional. If the freedoms and opportunities of urban living often made life seem formless, even chaotic, it was up to them to find new forms that might bring order to bear. The more fragmented and fractured and unstable life came to seem, the more they would have to design with an eye toward historical continuity and collective memory.

The French painter Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) rocked the art world in 1913 when his painting Nude Descending a Staircase was displayed at the Armory Show in New York City. One saw neither a nude nor a staircase, but rather a dizzying series of fragments, one atop the other, suggesting body parts in sequential motion—yet, somehow, in no particular order. Other painters such as Georges Braque (1882–1963), Paul Klee (1879–1940), and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) were working in a similar vein, defying convention, thwarting long-standing aesthetics of artistic representation. It would be a mistake to equate this with a rejection of the past, however. Much of this modernist avant garde actually owed a significant debt to “primitive” work from Egypt, Sumeria, China, and, in Picasso's case, to African art in general. Was it meaningful to speak any longer of divisions between the modern and the ancient, the East and the West, the avant garde and primitive?

Surely it is not coincidental that at much the same time Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was challenging Euclidian geometry, James Joyce was challenging how a novel should be written with his dizzying tour de force Finnegans Wake (1939). Neither is it coincidental that in this same period, Béla Bartók (1881–1945), Alban Berg (1885–1935), and Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) were creating atonal musical scores that were calling into question precisely what “music” was in general, and a “modern” music in particular. Nor is it coincidental that in this same period economists such as John Maynard Keynes were creating new economic models to fit the peculiar demands brought about in the modern era as compromises were being struck between fixity and stability on the one hand, and the flux of global capitalism on the other.

All found themselves facing the overriding question of modernism itself: How does one respond to an era so unlike any other in the history of all humankind?

SEE ALSO Alienation; Alienation-Anomie; Architecture; Colonialism; Critical Theory; Culture; Decolonization; Development; Keynes, John Maynard; Literature; Metropolis; Modernity; Modernization; Postcolonialism; Postmodernism; Relativism; Technological Progress, Economic Growth; Urbanization; Visual Arts; Work Day