becomes a period of his maturity. He finds himself side by side with common
soldiers & this confrontation with simple people makes him aware of real
human values – those of courage, friendship, support. Nothing can be more
precious than pure trust in man. Life in the trenches makes him think about
life in general & he started to ask questions. How does it happen that
government finds huge amount of money to kill Germans in the war but cannot
find it to fight poverty in London. He becomes aware of social
contradiction & antagonism. He thought that social hostility broke through
in the outburst of hatred. He still feels very much lonely & isolated. He
feels that he differs from others, he is very much of an individual soul.
He doesn’t belong to the soldiers, their roughness makes him feel very
uncomfortable. He is completely lost. With all these problems he doesn’t
see any way out but to terminate his life by his own free will (he commits
a suicide). By all the narration Aldington makes us see that this way is
the logical ending for the person who was lost before the war started.
It is a sarcastic book. Aldington was eager to tell the truth about the
society openly. But it was impossible to overcome individualism, the author
is not objective, he shows the whole range of feelings. That’s why the end
of the book is so bitter & hopeless. The title itself is very sarcastic.
His death is also a symbol how senseless the war is, it’s just a torture.
His satire has many shades, but also a definite target & purpose. Sometimes
it reminds Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” because of the social character of
satire. “Death of a Hero” is an absolutely disillusioned novel. Aldington
called this book “a jazz novel”. This jazz effect is achieved by
kaleidoscopic change of contrasted images. The novel is characterized by
multitude of emotional states. The style is rather nervous. He is easily
overcome by despair & negation, carried to the very extreme. These feelings
are the features of the lost generation people. “The Death of a Hero” is
the first big & most successful of all his works. His other novels are:
“Colonel’s Daughter”
“All Men Are Enemies”
“Very Heaven”
All are about those people who came back from the war alive but still
couldn’t find their place in life. The main characters are akin to George
Winterborne. The critics say that Aldington predominantly is the writer of
one theme & one hero, & that he just treats this topic in different
aspects.
He also wrote some critical works on D. H. Lawrence, & other writings.
He died in 1962.
Modernism.
The word “modern” means “up-to-date”. Critics & historians used it to
denote roughly the first half of the XX century. The representatives of
this movement were anxious to set themselves apart from the previous
generations. They totally rejected their predecessors. The term was
suggested by the authors themselves. The difference between past & present
tradition is qualitative. Modernist writers clearly defined the borderline
between Victorian age & modernism: in 1910 – the death of king Edward & the
first post-impressionist exhibition in London (Virginia Woolf), in 1915 –
the first year of World War I (D. H. Lawrence). They had a deep conviction
that modern experience is a unique one. They tried to point the change in
modernism. This change was – massive disillusionment, destruction of faith
in a number of basic social & moral principles, which laid the foundation
of Western civilization. This change was to some degree intellectual as the
result of late XIX theories & discoveries.
Karl Marx “Das Kapital”. He shaped the imperialistic ideology, he showed
it was not the pattern of progress. He believed that the world would not be
dominated by enlightened bourgeoisie. The struggle is inevitable.
Charles Darwin “On Origin of Species”(1859) & “The Descent of
Man”(1871). A human being was placed in the animal world. The forces that
determine human behaviour are not of intellect & reason but is determined
by the need of physical survival.
James Frazer’s “The Golden Bough”(1890-1915) showed similarities between
primitive & civilized cultures. The primitive tribes appeared to be not so
savage as they seemed to be. They were just like the civilized ones.
Nietzsche’s “Birth of Tragedy”. In this book he exposes dark sides of
human psyche, glorified the belief in ancient heroic philosophers.
Max Planck’s “Quantum Theory of Atomic & Subatomic Particles”. This
model of discreet beats of energy behaving in apparently unpredictable ways
seize the imagination of people so much that they extrapolated it beyond
the limits of physics. They believed that human behaviour was also chaotic,
disorderly & unpredictable.
Freud’s “Interpretation of Dream”. This work created a new model of
human personality itself as a complex, multilayed & governed by irrational
& unconscious survival of fantasies.
These theories were in fact not very new they were known in the XIX but
in XIX they never destroyed the general principles & ideas.
Modern writers after the WWI found themselves in so-called “empty
world”. Their world was deprived of its stability. Nothing can be taken for
granted. They didn’t believe that life they were living. Being
disillusioned & contemplating the society & cosmos most of them looked
within themselves for the principles of order. They turned to eternal
things. For that matter we see modern literature being pre-occupied with
its own self, process of perception, nature of consciousness. In its
extreme subjectivity modern literature went parallelly with other modern
arts (e.g. painting).
The main feature – subjectivity & self-interest. Modernist aesthetics
was formed under the influence of French symbolist poets :
Charles Baudleúr
Arthur Rimbaut
Paul Verlaine
Stephan Mallarmé
Their aim was to capture the most perishable of personal experience in
open-ended & essentially private symbols, to express the inexpressible, to
express the slightest movements of the soul, or at least evoke it subtly if
not express, create the atmosphere of the soul. The symbolist concentration
upon single moments of individual perception. Life in their reproduction
was reduced to small fragments of experience. This fragmentation influenced
not only composition of the work but also the character. The character was
disassembled in fragmentary pieces & these pieces of human character were
not held together by any theory of human type, like a collagé,
juxtaposition – all transitions are removed. You just put the fragments
together. The widely used technique “stream of consciousness” takes the
form from a fluid associations, often illogical moment to moment sequence
of ideas, feelings & impressions of a single mind. Traditional literary
forms & genres merged & overlapped. The introduction of poetry into prose
became possible, imagery characteristic of poetry – into prosaic text. The
forms of the past were also employed but to produce the satirical effect.
An equally important principle – “the stream of unconsciousness” – the
use of irrational logic of dreams & fantasies, denies ordinary logic
(“exhausted rationality”). They employed the shadowy structure of dream.
The idea “time & space” didn’t exist & the imagination was only slightly
grounded in reality but generally it created new patterns by combining
previous experiences, etc.
The authors employed myth very much as a kind of collective dream.
Modernist’s myth was stripped of its religious & magical associations.
Joyce’s “Ulysses” is based on the ground of Homer’s ”Odyssey”. Eliot said:
“In using the myth, in manipulating the contentious parallel between
contemporaniety & antiquity Mr. Joyce is pursuing the method which others
must persue after him. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of
giving a shape & significance to an immense panorama of futility & anarchy
which is contemporary history”. Myth is the way of organizing history. The
writers’ quest for order lead to their preoccupation with the artist
himself & with the artistic process. The imaginary character stood for the
author himself:
Marsel Proust “Remembrance of the Things Past”
Lawrence “Sons & Lovers”
Joyce “The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”
We can’t say that the artist became modernists’ hero. Not all writers of
that period were modernists. There was the co-existence of different
styles.
James Joyce (1882 – 1941)
He was born in Ireland (Dublin). Although he spent many years not in
Ireland he is considered one of Irish writers. Primarily he wrote about
himself, transforming his experiences in his books, & relatives & friends –
into symbols. His works are said to be “expansive & inclusive”. Expansive –
because he gave a very wide panorama of Dublin life at the turn of the
century, inclusive – because his works seemed to include all the human
history. These novels still are the stories & novels about life in general.
He started to attend an expensive private boarding school but his father
became bankrupt & he continued his education at home. Then he attended
“University College” in Dublin. He read very much & began to write
seriously. He produced critical articles, essays but also poems & notebooks
of epiphanies (theological term – an intense moment in a human life when
