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The philosophic foundations of
modernism are traced back from Marx right up to Einstein. The
inclusion of Marx as a front-line modernist is quite daring
because in terms of its ideological underpinnings modernism is
normally linked with industrial capitalism. Marxist concept of
alienation, which was subsequently used by later Marxists from
Lukacs to Jameson as a tool against the exploitative regime of
the capitalist, is seen as the first major step towards a
sustained critical theorisation of modernism. Modern art with
its accent on the disenchanted fragmented self is seen as a
direct outcome of alienating European capitalism.
The theory of
evolution propounded by Darwin in his "The Origin of
Species" (1859) is seen as the next significant step in the
formation of modernist mindset. Darwinian evolution and
subsequently social Darwinism, observes the writer,
"embodied the assault on traditional beliefs concerning
God". Notions of evolution, progress and reform, led to an
urgent fascination for their apparent opposites — regression,
decline and degeneration. Modernism becomes a discourse both of
progress and decline, emancipation and exploitation. Darwin’s
theories precipitated a kind of agnosticism in an otherwise
relatively linear European society unsettling their faith in
Church or religion as such.
After Darwin’s
theory of evolution, it was Freud’s theory of dreams as a
"product of repressed desires" that created quite a
stir in the realm of ideas. The concept of a definable unified
normative self gave way to discontinuous, divided self. Self is
seen in terms of hidden drives, dark designs of the unconscious.
With the advent of psychoanalysis, the theological search for
God was replaced by the epistemological quest for
self-knowledge.
Nietzsche is
easily the fountainhead or "prophet" of modernist,
even post-modernist European thought. In his iconoclastic
world-view, human will to power eclipses the divine will. This
paves the way for a secular modern literature wherein natural
selection replaces God’s ordering of creation. Nietzsche’s
questioning of all certainties, in his assertions that truths
are undisclosed errors or that facts are temporary, and his
emphasis on relativity, interpretation and uncertainty,
anticipates not only the art but also the science of the 20th
century.
Einstein who
overturned structural physics of Newton should ideally be placed
within the rubric of "decentred" post-modern
world-view, but Peter Childs places his theory of relativity as
a seminal principle within the rubric of modernism only.
Einstein’s four dimensional space-time continuum "found
parallels in the compression of the world into a single
consciousness outlined by Joycean epiphanies and Woolfian
moments of being, and detailed in Pound’s image".
Saussure, a structuralist, is also included as one among the
leading modernist thinkers.
Modernism
configures in unprecedented art forms. In the hands of
innovative writers like James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Virginia
Woolf, D.H.Lawrence, Henry James, Dostoevsky, etc, the novel
breaks free from the binds of realistic narratives of linear
time. Temporal re-ordering engendered through extended dream
sequences, flashbacks, memory lapses, juxtaposition of events,
etc generates complex mosaic narratives. The focus shifts from
broader moral concerns of society to deeper psychological
problems of the individual, from external details of the events
to their finer internal dynamics, and from a telescopic
perspective of reality to a microscopic view of it.
Short story as
a genre independent of the larger category of fiction figures
prominently in the book. This is definitely a positive move as
it not only marks the coming of age of short story as an
autonomous genre, it also proves the relevance of short story as
the most appropriate way of expressing the petty and small
truths and lies of human existence. The complex variegated
patterns that the stories of Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe,
Maupassant, Chekhov and other continental short story writers
generate, are explored in precise terms. From a slice of life
realism, the story becomes far more allusive, ambivalent and
self-reflexive.
Under the
intellectual spell of modernism poetry loses its purple
imagination as it turns more inward. "Writing turns in on
itself in a profound act of narcissism," says Terry
Eagleton. Inner chaos necessitates a rather eclectic idiom and
style. French symbolists and British imagists help in forging a
precise, objective and concrete expression for the intricate
inner. Peter Childs accords greater value to Eliots’s "Prufrock’
over his much acknowledged poem "The Waste Land." This
is really not a landmark evaluation because, of late, the
critical consensus is veering in favour of "Prufrock"
as a poem far more sophisticated and introspective than
"The Waste Land".
Discussion on
modern drama revolves around two Scandinavian dramatists,
Strinberg and Ibsen. Shaw, Wilde, Yeats and Samuel Beckett are
reckoned more as Irish dramatists than mainstream British
writers. But more significant than usual literary forms, it is
the discussion of various art movements — Dadaism, Futurism,
Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism, etc. that lends a more
comprehensive dimension to the understanding of the entire gamut
of the dynamics of modern art in different mediums. The
inclusion of film as a leading modern genre is indeed
path-breaking.
The final
chapter of the book does undertake presumably an extended
discussion of a few chosen literary stalwarts of the modernist
period, but given the scope of the book, this discussion borders
on a neat little survey of these writers.
The book
carries a brief glossary of critical terms that have acquired
immense currency today. Terms like "discourse",
"hegemony," "ideology",
"teleology" "langue/parole", etc. need more
elaborate explication. The definitions given are too precise and
technical that only one who is on to modern critical theory can
understand well. There is no relief for the beginner. The
bibliography concentrates more on texts related to
post-modernism than to modernism as such.
Written under
the project of new critical idiom series, the book hardly opens
"new" vistas on the discourse of modernism. It does
offer an extended account of Euro-centric modernism with a
renewed emphasis on its wider philosophic and cultural
foundations, but it fails to "address radical changes which
have taken place in the study of literature during the last
decades of the 20th century."
Despite its
claim to "internationalise" modernism as a cultural
phenomenon, the book continues to confine modernism to a 20th
century European phenomenon with Italy, Britain, Germany,
France, Russia, etc. as the possible sites of its cultural
blossoming. Downplaying the colonial impulse embedded in the
very project of Euro-modernism, it holds modernism to be very
democratic, rational, liberal, human project of progress. All
the sources, markers and models of and references to modernism
are foregrounded in the West. As true descendents of Macaulayian
enterprise, we gratefully receive these notions of the powerful
West and its so-called success with awe and wonder. Modernism
with its credo of doubt and objectivity appears quite innocuous
and apolitical. We are made to believe that modernism is a very
benign, most logical project of progress, social transformation
and emancipation. The irony of the situation is that modernism
becomes almost mythical as it reaches the shores of the Third
World. Its successes turn into excesses.
The book only consolidates the
claims of the West to modernisation foreclosing the possibility
of its alternative sites in the Third World.
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MODERNISM
is a continuous project that subsumes within itself all the
discourses of change and progress. Though as a movement of
empirical inquiry it begins from the 14th century European
renaissance onwards, it becomes a distinct cultural movement
only in the first half of the 20th century. As a cultural
trend it rocked the western world around the 1920s, but the
tremors unleashed by it continue to leave their traces on the
cultural seismograph till the very end of the century. The
intensity of the tremors kept increasing over the years,
signifying its relentless presence in our cultural
environment. Such is its sweep and range that even at the
close of the 20th century it remains a powerful cultural
project for practically all societies of the world in one form
or the other.
