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By the turn of the 19th century, four great minds had pioneered
‘progress’. Freud, with his discovery of the latent
behaviour which could be linked to sexual repression, revealed a
world of frustrated desire hitherto unknown. Darwin shocked the
world by discarding our white parents, Adam and Eve, allowing
Evolution to replace Genesis. Marx displaced tradition by
rejecting the aristocracy in his dream of bringing classlessness
while Nietzsche completely disallowed the existence of God. With
the ensuing of certainties’, more and more intellectuals
turned away from these prophets of Despair, expressing their
disillusionment with the Myth of Progress through their art. And
it would be no ordinary art — its manifestations were
Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism..
Introducing
Modernism attempts to
answer all the above ambiguities for the new reader. Chris
Rodrigues, along with the fine strokes of the artist, Chris
Garratt, explains how Modernism is a movement in the early 20th
century which is marked by innovation and experimentation in
art, architecture, poetry and novel writing. If a date has to be
given, we could roughly date it around the 1890s or even the
beginning of the twentieth century, or perhaps after the First
World War. Many feel that if there was one year which
characterised the Modernist impulse, it would be 1922 when T. S.
Eliot’s The Wasteland, James Joyce’s Ulysses,
and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room were published.
These writings were characterised by avant-garde
techniques: they primarily brought in anti-representationalism
i.e. reality was no longer available in the standard form one
had been accustomed to; so how could literature or art represent
it in a linear manner? Tonality in music likewise required a
suspension of agreed conventions. The emergence of the
psychological novel or the stream-of-consciousness technique
which exhibited the brokenness of actual experience and its
circularity is another landmark of this time. But there is
another covert dimension related to the development of Modernism
which this book highlights. Modernism’s emergence coincided
with the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the 1880s: as the European
powers busied themselves in grabbing parts of Africa, another
facet of ‘progess’ was revealed — the materialistic. By
and by, Europe was flooded with African, Asian and Latin
American masks, carvings, jewellery and other artifacts. Its
museums of Natural History sometimes exhibited Dodos and other
times drums..
Though ‘backward’
and ‘barbaric’, these primitive communities were attractive
centres of preserved culture for many romantic conservatives.
Ordered and stabilised, they represented a return to innocence,
to a still point in the turning world, in an otherwise
disintegrated and chaotic world. Around 1870, Sir Henry Maine’s
philological enthusiasm brought forth exaggerated notions of
permanence in his theory of racial diffusion that saw Europe and
the Orient as different phases in the same passage of
development, with the Orient as the earliest form of European
civilisation. In this schema, the primitive tribe symbolised the
fossilised remains of the then contemporary Europe that had
remained intact owing to geographical isolation and represented
‘the early European village community extant.’ The
author-anthropologist began to imagine Africa as a stage of
European civilisation arrested half way. Europe could even
imagine Africa to be its dark Other, its primitive Alter Ego
that rendered its own civilisational status as a mere veneer.
When Conrad’s Kurtz cries out ‘The Horror, the Horror’ in
the modernist novella Heart of Darkness, his exclamation
shows his inability to come to terms with not just the soul of
Africa but also his anguish at acknowledging the enemy within,
his own European mind. To read Eliot’s lines about the end of
civilisation as a ‘heap of broken images’ or to witness Emil
Nolde’s Expressionist primitivism can have meaning only within
this context. This was the artist’s rejection of ‘antiquated
Europe’ which was dedicated in some obscure way to an
idealised vision of progress.
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MODERNISM
must be understood as separate from Modernity. It is undoubtedly a
modern movement: experimentalism in writing is definitely modern.
But so was the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Modernism should
be seen as a continuation of these movements as well as a reaction
to them. All significant movements are progressive and, at the same
time, regressive. If Modernism shows itself as innovating and
creating newness, it also criticises what came before it. The
Enlightenment principles of the 17th and 18th centuries had produced
enough Reason and Rationality to satisfy the mind of Europe.
Explanations to all problems were sought and defined and natural
laws had been outlined. Hadn’t Newton discovered gravity? And Pope
had said: ‘True wit is nature to advantage dressed, What oft was
thought but ne’er so well expressed.’ And as far as New
Criticism goes, had it not outlined the hard, gritty rules needed
for the right kinds of compositions in literature? In spite of the
‘enlightened’ thinking of the time, what, then, brought on the
First World War and revealed the barbarism beneath all the
civilisational good? Can the Russian Revolution of 1917 or the Nazi
Holocaust in the 1940s be considered an experiment in modernity? Was
the A-bomb which exterminated millions an instance of modernity?
Nothing enshrined in the Enlightenment principles could prepare the
European intellectual for the mood of bleakness and gloom brought on
by the early ravages of the twentieth century.
