On the grounds that other people seemed to think this was valuable...

[rax]

...I make it available to others, free of charge, on the int0rnet. Someone asked me to explain Modernism and this is what I came up with. I think it's a vast and horrible simplification but everyone seems to like it and I am too lazy to put it on my webspace, which no one ever (justifiably, I last changed it in like 2004) goes to. So you get to read:

"Rachel Explains High Modernism"

So back in the day you've got the Greeks, and the Greeks are all "Let's have this stylized theater and these Platonic ideals and this concept of "tragic hero" and this concept of "virtue."" Then back in the more recent day came the Middle Ages and they were like "Dude dude dude you've got to get God in here, let's do it with God OMGod. Also, form poetry. If it's not in some sort of form from the book of approved form, fuck it." (Greek and Roman poetry, while metered, was often much more free and loose.)

Then back in the evening you've got the Romantic period. The Romantic poets were like "No, man! You've got to be chill! Let's take a little of the form out of poetry, but not too much, because you don't want to, like, scare people off. Also, human beings have so much intrinsic worth! See the intrinsic worth that humans have!" This intrinsic worth has always been kicking around. As things approach the 1870s ( think for example Conrad, _Heart of Darkness_ ), though, some of the ideas of intrinsic human worth start to be questioned and writers start to chafe a little at form --- I have a mimeograph (seriously) somewhere of the first sentences of major novels from 1800 to 1930 and you can see that it goes from straight-up Novel to something much more freeform. But this subtle degradation of form and ideals really fucking explodes when World War I hit.

The leaders of the Modern movement, with a couple of exceptions (William Carlos Williams, I think, was one), were people who were involved in or very near World War I. A lot of them --- Hemingway, Pound, Owen, &c. --- were directly involved and found that the war affected their writing from then on. World War I, when you look at it from their persepctive, was staggeringly fucked --- this was a war that killed order of 10 million people, yet it was a war that virtually no one wanted to be fighting. There was corruption and apathy at the top of the nations involved in the wars, and attempts to speak out against this in traditional ways were silenced. The old idea of the war hero (one of the things that sums this up is "Dulce Et Decorum Est") was rendered obsolete --- war and human conflict was no longer beautiful but grisly, no longer honorable but gross and nasty and human.

At the same time you have a lot of conflict between man and religion --- partially caused by the war but partially a long time coming --- and racial and societal tensions caused by the downfall of colonialism (well sort of). The old Greek ideas, which had sort of been subsumed into the less old Christian ideas, about what a hero was and was tragedy was and what comedy was were all fucked. You didn't have to have a tragic flaw to die at war. Being the protagonist didn't save you. People weren't beautiful or perfect. In the late 1910s and 1920s, a whole lot of people wrote things that dealt with parts of the human experience that hadn't been explored thoroughly before, at least in a literary circuit. _Ulysses_ has an extensive discussion of a man defecating.

And while you have all these changes in what is being writen about, you also have --- almost more importantly --- changes in how these stories are being told, and massive changes in poetry. (Some of the changes in poetry came from an Asian influence that hadn't been able to work its way in before, but I understand that less.) The big ideas here were: * The old Greek and Christian heroes were no good (Things fall apart! or the various Odyssey retellings without a happy ending) * Form is arbitrary and trapping (if you look at J. Alfred Prufrock, he is most free of his neuroses when he is not in iambic pentameter, and the form comes and goes with his mood, it's almost like he is trapped in it) and can also be part of --- sometimes the most important part of --- the work in question. (Ulysses is as important for what it says about what we can and can't say about human nature with the written word as for what it says about human nature. It also offers commentary on pretty much every way of telling stories that existed up until it.)

The third major tenet I think is * "Life sucks and everything isn't roses." Some people took sort-of-uplifting approaches to this (Joyce, Hemingway on a good day) and others were like "Fuck it, nihilism" (Hemingway on a bad day). The ironic thing, to the postmodernists, was how all of these Modernist authors, trying so hard to break out of the old traditions and stories, were retelling but twisting them, unable to actually create new ideas or ideals without referencing the old. Most of the major High Modern work (at least that I can call to mind) was based directly or indirectly on older literature, and borrowed major images, themes, and forms from them. As I understand it, but this part is fuzzy, this spawned off two groups --- people sort of like OuLiPo who set out to seriously create something not based on the old forms, doing shit like cutting up words and pasting them back together --- and postmodernists who decided that this was a feature and not a bug, and even the people pasting words together were tied down to the ancient framework of _words_, and you could create art by taking ideas that already existed and combining them in new and different ways, and then exploring (a) what they said when put next to each other and (b) why someone, often the author specifically, might have chosen those ideas to juxtapose.

(Edited: God I hate how LiveJournal handles plaintext.)

Comments

[wolfmudenaugen.livejournal.com]

Wow, it's hard to read a chunk of text that large without paragraphs.

[rax.livejournal.com]

There were paragraphs when I posted it; LiveJournal munged my formatting, because it expects HTML or something. This is why I usually just email things. Let me see what I can do...

[wolfmudenaugen.livejournal.com]

Wacky. It generally respects paragraphs. It expects html, but it also does some auto-formatting.

[rainfae.livejournal.com]

I see that Rax decided to make a one-paragraph post.

I'm a little intimidated and pretty unlikely to read it. *smooches*

[rax.livejournal.com]

It was a technical problem, I've fixed it.

[cshiley.livejournal.com]

Seriously, Rax, paragraphs. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Everyone else, read it anyway. :)

[ocschwar.livejournal.com]

But, paragraphs are form, and form is trapping!

[cshiley.livejournal.com]

So are em-dashes, and you don't see our friend giving those up any time soon, do you?

[rax.livejournal.com]

It looked fine in w3m!

[kayunderscore.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I haven't thought about literature in a while.

And, zomg, this is why I can't be a literary writer. I'm still stuck in the Romantic period.