Modernism in American Fiction

Gertrude Stein

"Reflections on the Atomic Bomb" (Gertrude Stein, 1946)

They asked me what I thought of the atomic bomb. I said I had not been able to take any interest in it. I like to read detective and mystery stories. I never get enough of them but whenever one of them is or was about death rays and atomic bombs I never could read them. What is the use, if they are really as destructive as all that there is nothing left and if there is nothing there nobody to be interested and nothing to be interested about. If they are not as destructive as all that then they are just a little more or less destructive than other things and that means that in spite of all destruction there are always lots left on this earth to be interested or to be willing and the thing that destroys is just one of the things that concerns the people inventing it or the people starting it off, but really nobody else can do anything about it so you have to just live along like always, so you see the atomic [bomb] 23323e419x is not at all interesting, not any more interesting than any other machine, and machines are only interesting in being invented or in what they do, so why be interested.

"Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"

The sentence is part of Stein's 1913 poem Sacred Emily (published in the 1922 book Geography and Plays).

In that poem, the first 'Rose' is the name of a woman. Stein later used variations on the phrase in other writings.

"A rose is a rose is a rose" is probably her most famous quote, often interpreted as "things are what they are".

In Stein's view, the sentence expresses the fact that simply using the name of a thing already invokes the imagery and emotions associated with it. Stein once remarked "Now listen! I'm no fool. I know that in daily life we don't go around saying 'is a . is a . is a .' Yes, I'm no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years." (Four in America)

Other American expatriates in Paris

The Modernist Novel

Typical features:

l          Experimentation with form

l          Representation of inward states of consciousness

l          Perspectivism

l          Impressionism

l          Use of interior or symbolic space

l         Re-structuring literature and the experience of reality it re-presents

l         Language is no longer seen as a transparent vehicle

l         Use of structural approaches to experience

l         Time is moved into the interior

l         'Open' or ambiguous endings as opposed to 'closed' endings

Experimentation with form

l         a sense of art as artifact, art as 'other' than diurnal reality (art is seen as 'high', as opposed to popular)

l         emphasis on cohesion, interrelatedness and depth in the structure of the aesthetic object and of experience

l         freeing of narrative art from the determination of a burdensome, oppressive plot

l         use of various devices such as fragmentation, juxtaposition, significant parallels, different voices, shifts and overlays in time, place and perspective

Representation of inward states of consciousness

l         Internal monologue, or 'interior monologue', 'inner voice', 'internal speech', 'train of thought', 'stream of thought', 'chain of thought' or 'stream of consciousness' is thinking in words.

l        

Much of what people consciously report 'thinking about' may be thought of as an internal monologue, a conversation with oneself (and is generally conducted in one's mother tongue).

l         Stream-of-consciousness is a special form of interior monologue, characterized by associative (or dissociative) leaps in syntax and punctuation, tracing a character's fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings. The speaker's thought processes are more often depicted as overheard (or addressed to oneself).

Perspectivism

l         locating of meaning from the viewpoint of the individual

l         use of narrators located within the action of the fiction, experiencing from a personal, particular (as opposed to an omniscient, 'objective') perspective

l         use of many voices, contrasts and contestations of perspective

the disappearance of the omniscient narrator as 'spokesperson' for the author

the author retires from the scene of representation, pares her or his fingernails (Joyce)

Impressionism

l         emphasis on the process of perception and knowing

l         use of devices (formal, linguistic, representational) to present more closely the texture or process or structure of knowing and perceiving

Use of interior or symbolic landscape

l         the world is moved 'inside', structured symbolically or metaphorically as opposed to

l         the Romantic interaction with transcendent forces acting through the exterior world or

l         realist representations of the exterior world as a physical, historical, contiguous site of experience

l         whereas the realist mode of fiction is based on metonymy, or contiguity, the modernist mode is based on metaphor, or substitution (David Lodge, Modes of Modern Writing)

Re-structuring literature and the experience of reality

l         break with the sequential, developmental, cause-and-effect presentation of the 'reality' of realist fiction

l         presentation of experience as layered, allusive, discontinuous

l         use of fragmentation and juxtaposition, motif, symbol, allusion

Language is no longer seen as a transparent vehicle

l         language doesn't allow us to 'see through' to reality

l         language is seen as a complex site of our construction of the 'real'

l         language is 'thick': its multiple meanings and connotative forces are essential to our elusive, multiple, complex sense of and cultural construction of reality

Use of structural approaches to experience

l         psychoanalysis, myth

l         symbolic apprehension and comprehension of reality

Time is moved into the interior

l         psychological time (time as innerly experienced)

l         symbolic time (time or measures of time as symbols, or time as it accommodates a symbolic rather than a historical reality), not the 'historical' or railway time of realism

l         time as a structuring device through a movement backwards and forwards through time, the juxtaposing of events of different times

Search for symbolic, ontological or epistemic ground for reality

by such devices as:

epiphany: a sudden realisation or comprehension of the essence or meaning of something (James Joyce)

inscape: "the unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it from other things" (G. M. Hopkins)

moment of being: "a moment when an individual is fully conscious of his experience, a moment when he is not only aware of himself but catches a glimpse of his connection to a larger pattern hidden behind the opaque surface of daily life." (Virginia Woolf)

Jetztzeit:  "For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. [Jetztzeit]. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate." (Walter Benjamin)

Features of Modernism: Summary

Formal Characteristics

Open form

Discontinuous narrative

Juxtaposition and parataxis

Intertextuality

Classical allusions

Borrowings from other cultures and languages

Unconventional use of metaphor

Thematic Characteristics

l         Breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties

l         Dislocation of meaning and sense from its normal context

l         Valorization of the despairing individual in the face of an unmanageable future

l         Disillusionment

l         Rejection of history and the substitution of a mythical past, borrowed without chronology

l         Product of the metropolis, of cities and urbanscapes

l         Stream of consciousness

Typical themes

l         questioning the reality of experience itself

l         search for a ground of meaning in a world without God

l         critique of the traditional values of the culture

l         loss of meaning and hope in the modern world and an exploration of how this loss may be faced

Modernism versus Romanticism & Victorianism

Modernist literature is defined by its move away from Romanticism, venturing into subject matter that is traditionally mundane - for example The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot.

Modernist literature often features a marked pessimism, a clear rejection of the optimism apparent in Victorian literature. In fact, a common motif in Modernist fiction is that of an alienated individual - a dysfunctional individual trying in vain to make sense of a predominantly urban and fragmented society.

However, many Modernist works like T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land are marked by the absence of a central, heroic figure; in rejecting the solipsism of Romantics like Shelley and Byron, these works reject the subject of Cartesian dualism and collapse narrative and narrator into a collection of disjointed fragments and overlapping voices.