Modernism: A Critical Analysis

T. S. Eliot did non invent modism in literature, merely his poem The wasteland stain (1922) expresses more distinctly than anyone else what the modernist purpose in truth was. More than a poem, it was an occasion, a cry that defined a turn in time, and which it is not possible to repeat. Eliot himself declared that he had moved on from the style of The counterbalance Land immediately after. Shortly after its issuance he verbalised in a private correspondence, As for The Waste Land, that is a thing of the past so far as I am concerned and I am now feeling toward a bleak form and style (qtd. in Chinitz 69).The Hollow Men (1926) is vigor as fragmentary, chaotic and nihilistic as is the 1922 poem. In The Waste Land we seem he hear an unalloyed expression of despair the despair that purposeful art in no more possible in the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history (qtd. in Sigg 182). yet the poem is not a complete negation of art. It hu humani tynessages a sort of coherence towards the end, in which we whitethorn read a suggestion that art may still be possible amidst desolate implicationlessness of the modern age.The low World contend is the event that finally shattered the cozy certainties of the squared-toe age. At a more protean level, it annulled the optimism of the humanist endeavor which gave line up to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the scientific world view. It is significant that the major part of this endeavor was carried out in art and literature. In the aftermath to the Great War came disillusionment, because it was widely perceived that progress did not bring peace and war the most brutal and mindless sort. It was not just corpses and rubble that littered Europe, but the Western psyche too was littered with rubble.The Waste Land is essentially a collection of fragments from the tradition of literature. The ultimate statement made by Eliot is that there is no more meaning in which the artist can take his tradition and further it. Yet he cannot abandon the past either, for his identity is still contained within those fragments. These fragments I gift shored against my ruins, says the Fisher King, who is not able to redeem the wasteland that stretches before him (Eliot 69). This expresses the shopping mall sentiment of the poem, which is in the end a mere collection of literary fragments. It is a demonstration of what the function of the artist has become, for the message of Eliot is that the artist is thus reduced to gathering debris from his cultural past.Eliots poem is not meant to be imitated. Its function is to locate the spirit of the age and give it voice. So successful was it in this latter role that many of its literary features began to be adopted, curiously so in the novel form, towards the creation of the modernist novel. The most parkland feature of this fiction is the dysfunctional and alienated virtuoso in an urban narrowting who presss against encr oaching meaninglessness. Of this fiction Federman says, The creatures of the new fiction will be as changeable, as illusory, as nameless, as unnamable, as fraudulent, as temporary as the discourse that makes them (12).To render such a news report powerful novelists were in short employing a device known as stream of ken. It sacrifices coherence for an arrange which seems to suggest that we are privy to the unexpurgated thoughts and impressions of the protagonist. Ulysses by James Joyce is composed entirely I this mode, and another novelist who use this system effectively is Virginia Woolf. Most often it is used for effect in novels which stay on some meaningfulness, therefore are not entirely nihilistic. In such novels we identify the contining oceanrch for possibilities in art which Eliot had instigated.The novels of Franz Kafka use the conventional narrative voice, yet depict a world that is fragmented and devoid of meaning. The protagonist in The Trial wakes up one mornin g to discover that he is under arrest, subject to trial, but free to move about in the meantime. There is no immediate explanation of his wrong-doing, and none is forthcoming as the trial grinds on. Not only self-preservation, the protagonist is as well as seeking for meaning. scarce the only meaning that emerges is that the system has decided that he is the accused, which has set into motion a process whose eventual and inevitable outcome is a brutal execution.Everybody seems to be helpless before the system, both friend and foe. They cannot effect its course, and neither can they extract meaning from it. The state embodies logic, of which Kafka says, Logic is doubtlessly unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on nutriment (Kafka 263). Instead of war, Kafkas focus is on the bureaucratization of the modern state, but evokes the same(p) sense of despair and the helplessness of the idiosyncratic before greater and transcendental forces, the unmistakable stamp o f modernism.The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway is also considered a modernist novel. Though more famed for his hard-edged realism, in this put up safari before his death Hemingway has created a powerful parable of futility. capital of Chile is a Cuban fisherman who has met bad luck, having not caught a fish for 84 days. On the 85th day he becomes reckless and ventures further into the ocean than anyone else before. He hooks a marlin of such tremendous size that it hauls Santiago and his boat around sea for and entire day.The old fisherman is soon locked in an epic battle of strength, guile and wits with the marlin, and expends every last bit of himself for over three days of struggle. Bloodied and drained, he has his catch in the end, which he begins to drag shoreward. further sharks then fall upon the marlin, and the old man cannot battle them off with his harpoon. Though futile, Hemingway suggests that the old mans struggle has transcendental value.He makes frequent co mparisons between the old man and Christ, and describes the old man in awe of the nobility of the marlin, even while locked in a life and death battle with it. He is described as musing, But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the cheer or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers (Hemingway 75). In its tenor of unremitting futility the novel is modernist. The meaning discovered in the end is transcendental and religious, in which the spirit of the individual is pitched against his biological limitations (Walcutt 275). This is significant when we recall that Eliot too discovered worship later in life.In conclusion, in his poem The Waste Land Eliot expressed a feeling that conventional motivation of the artist was no long-lived relevant in the modern age, because the aspirations of the previous age, that which had motivated writers and artists in the squared-toe era, had been rendered null and void. But at the same time it initiat ed a new quest in literature, which became a movement known as modernism, and especially employed by novelists. In their novels, which mostly emphasized the meaninglessness of modern existence, the modernist novelist nevertheless tends to dicover transcendental or religious meaning.Works CitedChinitz, David. T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide. shekels University of Chicago Press, 2003.Eliot, Thomas Stearns. The Waste Land and Other Poems. New York Penguin Classics, 1998.Federman, Raymond. Surfiction Fiction in a flash and Tomorrow. Athens OH Swallow Press, 1975.Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. New York Simon & Schuster, 1995.Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Trans. Willa Muir, Edwin Muir. New York Schocken Books, 1995.Sigg, Eric Whitman. The American T. S. Eliot A Study of the Early Writings. Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press, 1989.Walcutt, Charles Child. American Literary Naturalism, A divided Stream. Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press, 1974.