Literary Modernism: Fiction {Synopsis of a Lecture Delivered in Pandu College, Guwahati, in November 2003} As a designatory term, “modernism” has been variously used to situate literary developments in the twentieth century. All associations that have been called upon to serve and justify modernism, however, do not necessarily belong to a homogeneous category. Interestingly, the attachment of the word “modern” to different genres like drama, fiction, poetry and art has not been of a particular order. That is why we find differences in the way the history of modernism is retrospectively situated in terms of its alliance with different literary genres. While the genesis of modern poetry can be traced to the novelties introduced by Charles Baudelaire in the middle of the nineteenth century, such Victorian placement in the case of the genealogy of modern fiction would not actually be justified. When we talk of the implications of literary modernism in terms of twentieth century fiction we must be alive to the distinctive features of novelistic practice that mark its departure from previous approaches. There are different ways of appreciating fiction writing, and one conventional method is to relate it to its context. For instance, the majority of Victorian fiction grappled with social manners, family values, religious issues, scepticism and doubt, industrial development, love and marriage; similar concerns with equal emphases, however, do not dominate the sphere of the modern novel. The experience of modernity drew from the novelists responses and reactions that required a wholly different apparatus – one that was not readily available for adoption. So, when the modern novelist sought to present a story in the early part of the twentieth century, the plot-character-structure equation (which served the Victorian novelist’s purpose very well) seemed inadequate. The experimentation associated with modernism was thus, among other things, also conditioned by the experience of modernity; unlike the nineteenth century realist writer (Gustave Flaubert and George Eliot are good exemplars), for whom reality was objectively situated, to the modern novelist the acceptance of a similar view seemed to betray his understanding of life. Novelists like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka therefore sought to work out fictional engagements that addressed the modern experience well. Some novelists in the modern period thus felt the need to stress the importance of the storytelling process itself rather than the story-element alone. In a novel by Joseph Conrad and James Joyce, for instance, how the story is told is as important as what is being told; we can use two alternative terms – form and content – to appreciate the shift from just a preoccupation with the latter to a negotiation between the two in the modern novel. All modern novelists, however, were not experimenters (D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster exemplify this category); yet we consider such writers modern. This is because the modern novelist problematized the seemingly stable ideas (love, subjectivity, society) that acquired complexities not previously associated with them. Then we have the international character of the modern novel. The fictions of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway – all non-English writers – reached an ever-growing audience that was not merely confined to England. The cross-fertilisation of ideas and writers across the different cultural capitals of Europe granted to the modern novel a truly cosmopolitan character. The modern in fiction is thus both a response to and a recognition of the material and technological change in twentieth century society. At the same time, depending on the paradigm adopted by the writer, the nature of fiction was devised to address specific priorities. That is why it is not easy to pigeonhole all fiction writers within the same bracket, even though they were responding to the same world. Or so it seemed. The variety in modern fiction reflects both: the changed times, and the change in style and method brought about by an innovative response to human experience.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Jun 2013 18:24:25 +0000
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