Key Concepts in Literary Modernism and Postmodernism
Why James and Conrad are Fathers of Modernism
Henry James and Joseph Conrad are considered the “fathers” of experimental modernism, first of all, because both saw the novel as art. That is, it must be as well-organized as a picture, where form and content are integrated. In addition to this, their interest in psychology was also very modern, as they started to use a character narrator to tell a story from his perspective and not from an omniscient narrator.
James, Reality, and the Omniscient Narrator
James believed that reality is relative and that there are as many realities as people or perceivers. Due to this, he started to use a character narrator to show the action through his/her eyes and not through an omniscient narrator. The technical principle of dramatization or focalization of the action through the eyes of the character narrator involves the disappearance of the omniscient narrator.
James’ and Conrad’s ‘Impressionist’ Style
They were described as such because “Impressionism” suggests techniques in which external reality (events of the novel) is shown through the subjective consciousness of the character narrator. Therefore, the interest of the novel shifts from WHAT is perceived/narrated to HOW it is perceived/narrated.
Modernism Fathers vs. Edwardian Writers
The “fathers” of modernism were James and Conrad, while the popular Edwardian novelists were Galsworthy, H.G. Wells, and Arnold Bennett. There are not many similarities between them, only the fact that both groups sometimes write from the perspective of a character narrator. However, there are key differences:
- Focus: While James and Conrad are more interested in the characters’ individual psychology, the other three writers use the social type of the character in order to make social criticism.
- View of the Novel: The “fathers” see the novel as art, while the popular Edwardian writers think that the task of a novelist is to represent political, religious, or social questions of England.
Shift from Social to Psychic Realism in Modernism
According to modernist novelists, reality in the novel is always mediated by consciousness. This is why human consciousness became the main object in modernist texts and why writers turned from social to psychic realism, as the latter enabled them to look at psychological life with a kind of microscope. This left little space for the simple narration of external events, which is why social realism started to occupy much less textual space.
Why Psychic Realism is Modernism’s New Method
This is due to the fact that modernist writers rejected traditional realism because of the wrong supposition that reality is the same for everyone. According to them, there are as many realities as people.
Defining Psychic Realism and Its Technique
Psychic realism is characterized by an extremely detailed representation of the inner life, of the moment-to-moment mental processes, which meant that writers looked at psychological life with a kind of microscope, where the characters’ subjectivity appears enlarged, occupying most of the fictional space. In order to do so, they experimented with the form of their texts, which was linked to the content. For example, poets invented free verse to better express the inner world of the poet and in order to create new rhythms. However, the most important technique was the stream-of-consciousness, with which writers could “look within” and focus on the mind of the perceiver. It represented subjectivity, inner life.
Content Embodied by Stream-of-Consciousness
The stream-of-consciousness form tries to directly record the thoughts and impressions in the character’s mind. There is no psychological analysis from an omniscient voice but only the direct representation of mental life in its complexity. This also shows how unstable, contradictory, and multiple the identity of a person could be by reflecting the normal chaos in our subjective life.
Modernist Techniques Representing New Content
Modernist writers see form not only as a means of expressing content but as part of the content itself. They employed several techniques:
- Stream-of-Consciousness: This technique’s objective was to represent the psychic realism of their novels. Writers could “look within” and focus on the mind of the perceiver, recording thoughts and impressions directly through the character’s subjective expression, not via an omniscient narrator.
- Open Ending: This prevents the reader from finding any final meaning or truth, since there is no final resolution, no closure. The ending is ambiguous, uncertain, inconclusive.
- Multiplication of Narrative Voices: Different characters tell a story from their perspectives.
- Unreliable Narrator: This is a narrator the reader cannot trust, making the reader participate actively in the story as he/she must reach his/her own conclusions.
New Representation of Temporality in Modernism
Modernists, in contrast to 19th-century writers, valued what Virginia Woolf called “time in the mind” (the mental experience of time) rather than “time on the clock”. This resulted in the construction of non-linear plots. Although chronological time was not completely abandoned for the sake of intelligibility, the non-linear plot was mainly used because our consciousness does not often follow chronological time. Our consciousness is full of memories, which is why the present carries the past with it in our memory. That is, there is a fluid interaction between the present and the past.
Three Aspects of Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Project
Woolf’s feminist literary project involved several key aspects:
- Psychic Realism and Truthful Representation: Woolf employed psychic realism to represent the historical truth about the different identities of women and men, based on their “difference in experience.” She aimed at truthful self-representation and the representation of other women.
- Recording Unnarrated Lives: Woolf’s feminist modernist project was to record women’s “obscure lives” and “the things people do not say,” particularly the things women could not say. Literary modernism and political feminism were integrated; she wanted to find new forms for women’s as-yet unnarrated lives.
- Form and Gender Identity: She wrote about the stream-of-consciousness technique as a literary strategy allowing the uninhibited and uncensored representation of women’s minds. The process of becoming is related to gender identity in her essays – something complex and unstable, dependent both on individual experiential self-expression or self-discovery and on collective, historical, or cultural conditioning forces. Private life is given priority.
Woolf’s Concept of ‘A Woman’s Sentence’
In a review of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, Virginia Woolf introduced this concept. “A woman’s sentence” is not a literal linguistic sentence, but a utopian one that expresses Woolf’s desire for a new literature where the old conventions, repressions, and prohibitions regarding what a woman could or should express did not exist.
*Look Back in Anger* and ‘Kitchen Sink’ Drama
This play is an example of “Kitchen Sink” drama due to its old-fashioned style and its “simplicity.” That is, it is a linear play with a set depicting shabby disorder, featuring ordinary-people characters who have ordinary jobs, and all the events happen on an ordinary Sunday. This represents this new level of realism called “Kitchen Sink” drama.
Characteristics of the ‘Angry Young Man’ Narrative
Novels and plays featuring an “Angry Young Man” protagonist share several characteristics:
- Written by authors expressing their own social indignation and existential frustration through the voice of a terribly angry young character.
- Presentation of a young man from low-middle-class or working-class origins in a provincial setting.
- The protagonist struggles against the barriers set by the English class system, just as these barriers were becoming less rigid.
- Reflection of important societal changes, as social realism or naturalism has always done.
- The characters are often rebels without a specific political cause.
Existentialist Ideas in the Theatre of the Absurd
The Theatre of the Absurd negatively represents several existentialist ideas:
- Meaninglessness: The perception of the meaninglessness or absurdity of the human condition; the useless or purposeless existence.
- Alienation: The feeling of alienation from one’s own self and from the world. The Theatre of the Absurd represents these feelings of alienation or estrangement, the sense of existential uprootedness, of inner exile, and the absurdity of mechanical, meaningless actions.
- Freedom (Negated): Freedom is a key concept in existentialist philosophy (which is optimistic, but hard). Meaning and value depend on our actions; they are not given. The idea of freedom is linked to temporality, where the past, and particularly the future, shape the present. In Absurdist plays, characters often fail to exercise freedom, remaining passive or trapped.
Language Devaluation in the Theatre of the Absurd
In the Theatre of the Absurd, language is often used to evade communication rather than facilitate it. A radical devaluation of language is created in three ways:
- Action Over Words: What happens on the stage is often more important than what is said; what matters dramatically is the situation in which the words are spoken.
- Language as One Component: Language is used as merely one component of the play. An absurdist play on stage consists of the complex interaction of elements such as visual objects, lights, and movements, with language itself reduced to a subordinate role.
- Meaningless Patterns: Language is often reduced to meaningless patterns; it is often deprived of discursive logic, or it contradicts the action.
By devaluing language, the Theatre of the Absurd shows that communication is often in a state of breakdown in the modern world. It also reflects the importance of visual images in the modern world.
*Waiting for Godot* as a ‘Negative Parable’
The play is a parable or a fable because it remains on the level of abstraction. It is a philosophical play that represents existentialist ideas shaped as situations, but it is a negative parable. Existentialist ideas about fundamental issues such as freedom and authenticity are represented negatively, not positively. Vladimir and Estragon embody existentialist ideas in a negative way: they are passively waiting for their future (Godot) to come, doing nothing meaningful. They live in a constant present, without a beginning or an end, just passing the time, not living in time. This timelessness is another negative aspect of the play.
Linguistic Self-Consciousness and Relativism
In metafictional works:
- Linguistic Self-Consciousness: This occurs when certain texts explicitly point to the fact that they are texts; in other words, their identity is linguistic as well as narrative.
- Linguistic Relativism: Metafiction shows that the novel defies a clear-cut, absolute definition; its linguistic instability is part of its definition. Novels are constructed through the integration of different forms of communication, different languages, genres, or discourses. In metafiction, there is no dominant language or discourse; therefore, the different languages relativize each other.
Metafiction and Framing Processes
A frame is any symbolic construction that we consciously or unconsciously use to give order and meaning to experience. Frames allow us to apprehend the reality of everyday life as a coherent and meaningful reality. Metafiction foregrounds and examines framing procedures in the construction of both the real world and novels. Metafiction does not separate art or fiction from life or reality inasmuch as they both depend on frames to organize experience and make it meaningful. The mise-en-abyme is the most frequently used literary device to foreground framing processes. There is a mise-en-abyme when an object’s part copies the object itself: the text mirrors itself in various ways (e.g., a novel about a writer writing a novel). When the mirroring fragment is very extended, the novel becomes an allegory.
Historiographic Metafiction vs. Historical Fiction
Historiographic metafiction, unlike traditional historical novels where history is seen as a collection of external facts that can be represented objectively, “as it really was,” questions the objectivity of historical representation. These works even question the status, the very nature of historical facts, at least of official historical facts. In historiographic metafiction, the main theme is the epistemological question of “how we know history.”
*The Passion of New Eve* and America as ‘The Zone’
The “America” represented by Carter in *The Passion of New Eve* is the symbolic space of the postmodern condition: an anarchic landscape of worlds in the plural, typical of a culture in a period of rapid change, in a chaotic state. This space is called “the zone,” in which many fragmentary worlds exist.
Rewriting Woolf’s *Orlando* in Carter’s Novel
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is an intertext in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve*. Several aspects are rewritten:
- Gender Transformation and Performance: In *Orlando*, the protagonist is a man who is magically reborn with a biologically female body. Like Eve in Carter’s novel, the new Orlando, although biologically female, must learn how to be feminine, how to *become* a woman, illustrating fictionally Simone de Beauvoir’s idea that “one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one.”
- Cultural Compulsion: The new Orlando, like the new Eve, does eventually become a woman, but always under a cultural compulsion to become one. Clearly, this compulsion does not come from biological “sex.”
- Femininity as Masquerade: Both authors represent femininity as a masquerade in their respective works.
Angela Carter’s ‘Demythologising Business’
Angela Carter asserted, “I’m in the demythologising business.” This is evident in her treatment of female archetypes in *The Passion of New Eve*, such as Tristessa and Mother:
- Tristessa and the Eternal Feminine: The myth of the eternal feminine is embodied by Tristessa. She embodies Carter’s vision of gender as a masquerade, of gender performativity not conditioned by biology. Tristessa’s characteristic Hollywood role is simply *to be* a woman. Her masquerading as a woman is such a perfect performance that she is said to be the most perfect woman in the world, highlighting the artificiality of the construct.
- Mother and Mythic Complexity: Carter attacks the stereotype: Mother with a capital M does not exist. The Mother figure, demythologized parodically, is complex: she embodies three different myths – the “castrating mother,” Mother-Earth, and the Matriarchal Goddess of radical feminists. Carter’s complex Mother illustrates the explosive tendency of stereotypes when examined closely. Mother’s function, like Tristessa’s, is purely symbolic: to embody mythical ideas about essential femininity with kitsch excess, only to show the fallacy of the myth.