Before Modernism

At the turn of the century, western literature was dominated by realism. With the development of the camera, people could see every detail about a new place or culture--they no longer had to rely on the perspective of a painter or sculpture or other artist to mediate the experience. Meanwhile, the world continued to industrialize. More people left small towns and villages to work in large cities and impersonal factories. In turn, the Industrial Revolution brought innovations like electric lights, radiated heating, and indoor plumbing to the masses. As the world changed around them, the realists promoted the objective perspective, an unbiased view of the world outside of any subjective feeling. This objectivism gave them grounding: they could look at the details of the world and determine the best course of action based on the world as it was.

Then came Einstein.

The Rise of Modernism

Realism depends upon a single "correct" objective perspective, yet what defined that perspective came into question more frequently as more and more people of diverse backgrounds and beliefs moved into cities and began to challenge one another's cultural ideas. For example, Protestant Christianity was the objective religious perspective of the early realists... until Catholic and Jewish and Muslim and Hindu authors started to challenge that reality as truly objective. Finding the one fixed point of objectivism became increasingly difficult to find. Finally, Albert Einstein published his scientific Theory of Relativity, which held that there was no fixed point in the universe, a discovery that shattered any idea of realist objectivism.

Yet Einstein was not alone in questioning the unconscious bias in the "unbiased" realist perspective. Sigmund Freud questioned the objective idea that people make their own choices consciously: his research revealed the unconscious id motivations of eros and thanatos that often determine our behavior before we even act (this was the basis for psychoanalysis). Meanwhile, Karl Marx questioned if the industrial revolution was truly making people happier: his theories of how the worker was seen by society and his employers evolved into Marxism. Feeding off these two, Emile Durkheim started documenting how the changing times were affecting people, such as their relationships with others and rates of suicide: this led to the discipline of sociology. Across the globe, Northrop Frye collected similar mythologies from around the globe in his book The Golden Bough, which demonstrated both the diversity and similarities of the world's religious tradition. When Einstein shattered the objective perspective, it was not the first hit but the knockout punch--the foundations of question objectivism started long before.

Modernism began at the turn of the century but grew to prominence after World War I. The original push for realism--for looking at everything in dispassionate objective terms--was for the prevention of war. As the photos of carnage of the American Civil War circulated the globe, leading thinkers believed that showing the detailed gory consequences of war would prevent war in the future. Yet World War I still happened and killed far more men than the Civil War. Machine guns, aerial attacks, poison gas, tanks, and grenades made the war especially brutal and shocked the world (whose idea of warfare involved horses and bayonets) at how many men could be killed by the new war machines in a single minute. Some Modernists even termed themselves "the Lost Generation," as they saw an entire generation of people killed on the battlefield.

With no objective moorings, the crux of modernism became trying to figure out an anchor for our lives. This idea drove modernism and was called...

Existentialism was a new way of considering the world. Instead of starting from the outside world and an outside force (laws, tradition, God, etc), existentialism starts at the idea that everybody is an individual actor in the world with free will. With so many different people with different motivations and ideas, the world should be an anarchic crazy place... yet it isn't. Underlying our lives is a grand narrative, which is the idea that there are invisible rules and barriers in our would that we can't perceive that keep us from chaos. We can do as we choose--this is why people can rape, murder, and self-harm--but these invisible barriers push most people in the "right" direction to serve the narrative--which is why most people see rape, murder, and self-harming as wrong.

Furthermore, the existence of a grand narrative implies that there is a point to the narrative--a purpose to the story, so to speak. This became the essential goal of existentialism: they sought to discover the meaning behind life. This is the "exist" part of existentialism. Existential writers sought to figure out why people exist, why we struggle the way we do, and what the ultimate value of a human life really was.

Spoiler alert: the existentialists are still looking for the answer to why we're here. The reason they can't agree upon the meaning of life is the same reason why the traditional meanings of life unraveled: relativity. Relativity is the belief that everything in the universe can only be measured in relation to where the observer is. The metaphor the modernists used for this was the flaneur. Imagine setting up a camera on a busy street (this is our fixed observer). Now, this camera does not just take a quick photo but a photo over half an hour. What would it see? There would be some unchanging points: the street, the lamppost, maybe the facades of buildings. Yet there would be tons of streaks across the frame, representing people and cars passing by. If the camera stayed there long enough, even the unchanging points would change: snow would enter the picture at winter, storekeepers would update their signage, and eventually the road and the lamppost would wear down and change. Nothing is forever or unchanging, which begs the question: so then what anchors our grand narrative?

The modernists struggled with this idea. If there are no absolute fixed points and everything is relational, then it's hard to be absolute about anything. No standards could exist... like the invisible barriers that guided society. Still, modernists thought that there was some objective point to existence that we could find if we looked hard enough, a long-buried code below the chaos. The modernists cited derivative functions for their belief: the main function is unpredictable and extremely variable, yet the function behind the function is predictable and steady. While they trusted that most everything was relative, they hoped that SOMETHING was not relative.

The modernists agreed that they could not access the deeper truth to existence if they continued to do the same old thing and write the same types of books. Thus, the modernists celebrated novelty, or the development of new ideas and writing that no one had tried before. Ezra Pound became the voice of the modernists when he declared "Make it new!"

One of the most common attempts at novelty was stream of consciousness writing, which was unedited writing that reflected how they author or character was thinking moment to moment. As our brains are easily distracted and tend to need time to construct our thoughts, stream of consciousness creates writing that is both broken and foreign and, at the same time, reflects an authentic experience.

Other attempts at novelty includes several submovements such as the Harlem Renaissance, Beat Generation, the Lost Generation, and the Bloomsbury Group. The Harlem Renaissance (1919-1935) was a strictly African-American exploration of what it meant to be their type of human-- i.e., what is the meaning of a black American's life? Similarly, the Beats (1945-1964) questioned the materialism, conformity, and consumerism popular after World War II and instead called for individual freedom and a rejection of social norms in order to discover real truth. The Lost Generation searched Europe for any threads of old-world truth left over from ancient times, while the Bloomsbury Group believed the making and enjoying of art would derive the unconscious truth hiding behind the world.

While the submovements above grabbed the popular consciousness, other submovements were short-lived and, frankly, bizarre. For example, Dada (1913-1920) was started by German artists who believed that structure and rule lead to misery and the death of beauty, so their art reflected chaos and tried to offend aesthetic sensibilities. Visual art was taken over by collage, drama was mostly improvised and involved the audience, and literature would be unfinished or require the reader to finish it. Similarly, surrealism (1924-1942) held that there existed that there is a superior reality, and the only way we could see it would be by violating the rules of logic. Surrealist writing would switch styles midway through a piece and include non sequitur, or scenes or ideas that are inserted at random to break the action. By contrast, Futurism (1909-1920) stated that industrialization was the meaning of life: man was meant to craft better and better machines, with these machines solving all of our problems, including our existential crises. Futurism focused on the idea of speed as well as intuition, irony, onomatopoeia, and rhythm over grammar.

The various submovements and answers to the questions of existence ultimately divided the modernists into different camps... and occasionally divided society. Futurism actually caught on and enabled the rise of a leader that would increase the nation's mechanical power and efficiency: the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. The fragmentation of movements was simply another example of a larger trend in modernism: alienation.

Alienation is the isolation of an individual from things they would naturally be part of. Karl Marx identified three levels of alienation:

• Alienation from others: Industrial capitalism thrives on people getting the most: the most customers, the most profit, the most brand recognition, etc. Thus, it puts both businesses and individuals in competition, which alienates them from working together. Part of this is that certain jobs are valued over others economically, which leads to status.
• Alienation from labor: In the pre-industrial days, craftsman were more numerous and skilled. If you wanted a shirt, for example, you would go to the tailor, he'd take your measurements, and handcraft you a shirt. For Marx, this attention to craft and detail would make both the tailor and customer feel like what they had made was special and of worth. Yet in a factory, a worker who is unskilled may only sew a single button on the same mass-produced shirt as it goes down the line. This alienates the worker from the pride of creating something with worth; it also makes the consumer see produced goods as something of less worth, alienating them from their consumption habits (this is why eating a home-cooked meal tastes better than fast food).
• Alienation from purpose: Going back to the pre-industrial days yet again, having a craft was a badge of honor that gave a person a since of purpose. You want bread? Go to the baker. Advice on a legal matter? Better talk to the reeve. Professions became so identified with personal pride that sons often entered their fathers profession, and families took as a surname their profession (Smith, Taylor, Mason, Potter, etc). Yet when workers are alienated from labor, they also get alienated from this higher purpose. As Billy Crystal laments in the film City Slickers, "I sell advertising space on the radio, so basically, I sell air. At least my father was an upholsterer: he made a sofa or a couch you could sit on. It was something tangible. What can I point to? Where's my work? It's air. I sell air."

Novelists

The Lost Generation (1918-1930)

• Ernest Hemingway
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• James Joyce
• John Dos Pasos.

The Harlem Renaissance (1919-1935)

• Zora Neale Hurston
• W.E.B. Dubois

Dada (1913-1920)

• Hugo Ball
• Marcel Duchamp
• Tristan Tzara
• Jean Arp
• Marcel Janco
• Beatrice Wood
• Sophie Tzuber
• Hans Richter

Futurism (1909-1920)

• Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Surrealism (1924-1942)

• Antonin Artaud
• Ren Crevel
• Robert Desnos
• Michel Leiris
• Benjamin Pret

Bloomsbury Group (1903-1964)

• Virginia Woolf
• J.M. Keyes
• E.M. Forster

The Beat Generation (1945-1964)

• Jack Kerouac
• William Burroughs,
• Lenny Bruce

Southern Gothic (1935-1975, 2010-present)

• Harper Lee
• Margaret Mitchell
• Tennessee Williams
• Carson McCullers
• Eudora Welty
• William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury (1929), "A Good Man is Hard to Find" (1930), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932)

Poets

• Langston Hughes
• Gertrude Stein (Lost Generation)
• T.S. Elliot (Lost Generation)
• Alan Ginsberg (Beats)
• Ezra Pound
• Dylan Thomas
• Robert Frost
• Wallace Stevens

Films

• The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920)
• Battleship Potemkin (1925)
• Metropolis (1927)
• Un Chien Andalou (1929)
• M (1931)
• Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)
• Gone With the Wind (1938)
• Modern Times (1938)
• Citizen Kane (1941)
• Casablanca (1942)
• It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
• 12 Angry Men (1957)
• The Seventh Seal (1957)
• The 400 Blows (1959)
• 8 1/2 (1963)