Why Is Modern Literature So Difficult—And Why It Needs to Be
Talk at the Gunnery, 4/10/09
By
Daniel S. Burt
I am delighted and honored to be invited back to The Gunnery to speak to you this evening, particularly in
this serene and august setting. I will have to try and raise my game to suit this arena and this distinguished
assembly. Accordingly, I realize that my original title for this talk is woefully inappropriate: “Why
Modern Literature Doesn’t . . . “ and here I added a common colloquial term derived from a word
indicating the act of inhalation. As I give you a chance to figure that out, let me substitute the less vulgar
title, “Why Modern Literature Is So Difficult” and a corollary statement: “And Why It Needs to Be.”
Tonight I would like to deal with the challenges and indeed the frustrations many of have in contending
with a work of modern literature. I want to address the issue of why the works of the giants of literature in
the first decades of the twentieth century—Conrad, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, and their
descendants still baffle and bewilder and leave many readers clutching for dear life to older, more
reassuringly familiar poem, stories, and plays—to mysteries, thrillers, romances—or forcing many
readers to abandon modern literature entirely for film, television, or the computer screen.
In the interest of time, I will restrict my comments mainly to modern fiction though there is clearly
applicability to poetry and drama as well. It is worth noting that we have largely made our peace with
modern architecture, we flocked to see the latest Picasso, Cubist, or abstract expression show. We have
Paul Klee and Kandisky, even Dali prints above our sofas; we accept the dissonance and atonality of
much modern music and relish the imagistic overload and quick cuts of film and television but much
modern literature we resist as too demanding and too difficult. I think the reason for this is that, although
we have accepted the conventions and methods of other modern arts we still may be using a set of criteria,
Daniel S. Burt
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a set of assumptions and expectations appropriate for earlier literary works that simply no longer apply.
The way we read Jane Austen or Charles Dickens do not work for Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf,
Faulkner, and others. Try applying a standard derived from Rembrandt, Vermeer, and David to Monet,
Cezanne, Manet, Van Gogh, Picasso, Pollack, Rothko. To allow all of these paintings to express
themselves appropriately we need to meet them on their terms, to try to understand what they are trying to
do, not to critique them for what they never intended. An apple need not be an orange. In encountering
such works as Heart of Darkness, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Sons and Lovers, Ulysses, Mrs.
Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Sound and the Fury you will quickly discover that established
assumptions of what a narrative should be—a story with a clear beginning, middle, and end with a
definite resolution, characters who are easily categorized in moral, social, and psychological terms—have
been fundamentally altered. The rules about how a novel or short story should look and proceed have
radically changed.
I want to explore why this happened, the impact of this change on narrative form, and finally some
compensation for your labors in engaging in the often demanding but I think ultimately liberating and
exhilarating modernist aesthetic.
The modern writers I have mentioned are all part of the experimental and avant-garde movement in the
literary and visual arts at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century that is called the modernist
movement. Every age is modern in its own eyes, so what give the modernists their exclusive claim to
modernity? The term, modernist, was coined to insist on a break from the values of predecessors in the
19th century. There is nothing unusual about succeeding generations breaking with a previous era in a
search for new forms of expression, new ways to understand a changed world. But it can be argued that
no period in Western history had change been so profound and therefore demanded a more radical
alteration to capture that change than in the modernist period, between roughly 1880 and 1950. Virginia
Woolf famously declared that “In or about December, 1910, human character changed.” D. H. Lawrence
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would assert that “It was in 1915 that the old world ended.” Both writers sound the essential credo of the
modernist that the world hads unalterably been changed requiring a radical response.
What had changed? Let me quickly summarize some of the major assaults to the sense of certainty, order,
and belief that produced this sense of an altered world:
•
New technologies in work, transportation, and communication changed the human environment
and produced new pressures on human interactions, sense of self and connectiveness to place and
traditions.
•
Marx showed the ways in which economic forces and class struggle shape consciousness,
producing a dominant psychological characteristic of alienation as the individual is shown cut off
from the means of finding satisfaction in work or economic security in the dehumanizing
operation of competition.
•
Freud also destabilized inherited notions of the self with his idea that we are driven by forces we
do not understand or even acknowledge to exist: the unconscious, our sexual drives, the role
played by the trivial details of everyday life. Freud offered a more complex notion of human
consciousness more shaped by the irrational than by reason.
•
Darwin’s theory of evolution displaced man from the center of the universe, replacing the notion
of divine purpose with natural forces that found more cogency not in man’s will and reason but in
sheer brute survival.
•
Einstein’s special theory of relativity (1905) showed that time and motion are not absolute but
relative to the observer, thus fundamentally challenging the Newtonian world view.
•
Other philosophers further developed this sense of relativity. Nietzsche’s famous declaration that
“God is dead” was meant to be understood in the context of the fact that there is no single Truth,
no god’s eye view, no privileged perspectives; there are only multiple perspectives—moral,
scientific, aesthetic—none necessarily better than another. Nietzsche: “There are no facts, only
interpretations.”
Daniel S. Burt
[email protected]
www.burtfelder.com
(508) 432-9669
Darwin, Marx, Freud, Einstein, Nietzche, and others all eroded a faith in religion, moral certainty,
progress, reason. The catalyst for the full acceptance of the implications of these ideas was World War I,
a war that slaughtered an entire generation bringing home the realization that previous conceptions of the
world and human values were now inoperative. How could God exist to allow such carnage? The
technological promise of industrialization led to the invention of more and more efficient means of selfdestruction. Humanity’s right to a certain dignity by virtue of its special place in creation was cancelled
by the ignominy of trench warfare. The supremacy of reason in human affairs was debunked by the
madness of the war. Hemingway memorable has his protagonist Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms
say:
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain.
We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted
words came through, and had read them, on proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen
nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the
stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many
words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain
numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all
hyou could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or
hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of
rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
The modernist agenda very much begins with the dilemma Frederic Henry identifies: language, literature,
and all belief had to be reassessed under the pressure of this new understanding. Heaven for the first time
in Western civilization seemed empty. Much of modernist literature is born from this spiritual
confrontation with emptiness. With the cosmos and society either without order or so disordered to defy
understanding writers sought new principles for order: what can you believe in the absence of the
possibility of belief.
Modernist writer turned back to the isolated, alienated, vulnerable individual, establishing the central
preoccupation of modernist art in a preoccupation with human consciousness and the process of
perception. Parallels in the visual arts: in the movement from realism to impressionism: capturing the
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viewer’s coloring of the external world in the act of perception. In Post-Impressionism, movement toward
abstraction, in reaching truth via distortion. Cezanne famously declared: “Exactitude is not truth.” Picasso
and the cubists would shatter the features of the human face and reassemble body parts in grotesque
method of caricature. Modernists would perform a similar shattering.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession
of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his
first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds
of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property
of some one or other of their daughters.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster
Was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were
hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit.
Then they went on, and I wnet along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we
Went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence
While Luster was hunting in the grass.
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether
that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was
born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve
o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike,
and I began to cry, simultaneously.
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming
down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road
met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a
glass: he had a hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne
lived: she sold lemon platt.
O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place.
He sang that song. That was his song.
O, the green wothe botheth.
When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put
on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Daniel S. Burt
[email protected]
www.burtfelder.com
(508) 432-9669
Modernists narrative would reject established notion of plot and story as inauthentic and falsifying. Time
in the modernists novel would be broken into a series of nonchronological, nonlinear fragments glimpsed
from limited perspective. Character and identity are not held together by an overarching theory of human
types or simple psychology. Individuals and experience itself is shown as multiple, contradictory, illusive,
forever eluding our grasp and understanding.
Given this fragmentation, there is a search for a new form of organization. Plot with clear beginnings,
middles and end are reductive and simplistic. Instead the novel began to relay on juxtaposition as in a
collage in which the connection between scene, incident, and significance must be supplied by the reader.
Consiousness itself would be rendered directly in the associational, often illogical, moment-to-moment
sequence of ideas, feelings, memories.
Differences Between the 19th-century Novel and the Modern Novel
Subject
Plot
19th Century
Broad, crowded, and comprehensive
Paramount and theatrical
Character
Central, viewed primarily from the outside
through manners and dialogue
Society
Scope
Technique
Structure
Non-alienated, fixed, accepted
Normal life, wide angle, panoramic
Recognition of familiar and representative
Episodic, loose, emphasis on message
Point of view
Omniscient and authoritative
Modern
Narrow and deep
Neglected, avoids arrangement of
events into dramatic climaxes
Sensibility over personality/what one
thinks rather what one does/viewed
from inside and unconscious as well
as conscious life
Disaffected, fluid
Exceptional, still life
Shock of the unfamiliar
Patterned by image and situation like
mosaic/montage; emphasis on
medium
Limited and unreliable
What are the compensations?
Virginia Woolf: “Examine for moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad
impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they
come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life
of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here
but there; so that if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he
must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no
comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style . . . . Life is not a series of gig
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lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the
beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this
unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little
mixture of the alien and external as possible? . . . Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the
order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance,
which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists
more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.--Modern Fiction
Let us prophecy: Mrs. Brown will not always escape. One of these days, Mrs Brown will be caught. The
capture of Mrs. Brown is the title of the next chapter in the history of literature; and . . . that chapter will
be one of the most important, the most illustrious, the most epoch-making of them all.--Mr Bennett nd
Mrs Brown
Daniel S. Burt
[email protected]
www.burtfelder.com
(508) 432-9669