English 211: Fiction
Lecture 6: The American Novel: Early 20th Century, the Modernist Period
Various writers disagree about the origins, the dates, and even the artists of the Modernist period; they also disagree on how to define it. Some date it as beginning as early as 1865; others as late as 1914. Most of the disagreements arise from questions of how to define Modernism, since it covers such a broad range of literary, musical, philosophical, scientific, and artistic movements. And its roots can be traced back as far as the 1600s. But almost critics agree that Modernism came into full flower during the first thirty years of the century, especially in England and the United States.
Modernism was not just an American literary movement: it encompassed England and Europe as well. Even before World War I, there had been a growing disillusionment and distrust for social traditions and institutions. In England, this was in some ways a reaction against the oppressive Victorianism of the 1800s. In the United States, it was a response to the erosion of the optimism of the 1800s and the increasingly brutal ramifications of laissez-faire capitalism.
The most obvious symptoms of this disillusionment occurred in religion: there was no longer a single, unifying religious doctrine which was accepted by all in the culture. Many had begun to question even the existence of God. Darwin's Origin of the Species is most commonly blamed for this by those who lament the passing of organized religion's influence, but Darwin alone was not responsible for the pace of scientific achievement and development and its effect on the culture's belief system: scientific discoveries since the 1600s had weakened the influence of religion, and Darwin's writings (among others) altered the cultural view of the role of human beings on the planet. Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams in 1901; Freud's work (and that of others working in related fields) alerted us to the fact that much of what we "know"--i.e., what we think is real--is imagined or illusory: even our memories can't be completely trusted. Artists and writers began exploring in more depth the ideas that "reality" is based on perspective and emotional need. Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905; by now, scientific development had explained many "miraculous" events and was pushing people to question the basis of their faith. It was demanding that they see the human mind and heart, not as divinely inspired, but as products of their biological and social environment.
Thus, God died.
Well, I don't mean that literally, of course. But logically, the death of a complacent acceptance of any "right" system of religious belief was a natural result. If people are products of their environment and conditioning, they will create a God who meets the needs of that environment and conditioning. Therefore, there is no way to tell which perception of God is the "right" one and which religion is "correct"; in fact, since the need for belief is a psychological one, God may have been an invention in the first place.
By the beginning of the 20th century, these ideas were no longer new. The existentialists of the late 1800s and early 1900s (Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Sarte, and Camus among them) theorized that God is an invention of human beings to help them create meaning for life, since the idea of a life without meaning leads to despair. They argued that, since there is no God, life has no inherent meaning; Sarte wrote that the only meaning life has is the meaning which each individual consciously assigns to it.
In additon, if there is no God, there is no objective "Truth": truth becomes relative to each individual, based on one's own perspective. To give you an example: If I am painting a portrait of a person,and I am standing in front of that person, I will paint the front of him. But what if you are standing beside him? Then your portrait would show his profile. And what if you are standing behind him? Then your portrait would show the back of his head. Which of these would be "true"? All of them, of course.
If there was no God, Truth became subjective: one person's Truth (unless it could be empirically disproven) was just as correct as another's. One person's customs, habits, and values were no longer more "right" than another's. On a practical level, this called into question the validity of all social, political, economic, and ethical forms. They were no longer sacred; they were just arbitrary conventions, and it was allowable to alter or overthrow them.
On a deeper level, though, this idea of a Godless universe created both despair and freedom--despair because, if there is no God, then there is no inherent meaning to life. There is no purpose to one's life, and there is no reward or punishment at the end of it. There is no afterlife. There is just now. This can make the trials and sufferings of everyday life seem pointless, and the thought of one's isolation in the universe unbearable. The freedom that derives from this "pointlessness" is cold comfort: if there is no meaning to life, and no punishment or reward at the end, then anything is permissible and possible--and meaningless.
The devastation and brutality of World War I only heightened these feelings. People who had believed their governments' propaganda that they were fighting "the war to end all wars" came to see that their leaders were cynically pursuing profit at the expense of hundreds of thousands of lives. The imagery of soldiers waist-deep in mud and lice in the trenches, choking to death on their own blood after poison gas attacks, dying by the hundreds of thousands on the Somme, made it easy for many to accept the death of God. What else could explain such suffering?
The Moderns, then, reject the traditions (literary, religious, and social) of the 1800s, and elect to create new forms and methods. They reject the idea that they are creating a new "tradition," since that word implies permanence, and the only thing permanent about life in the 20th century is constant change. Thus, in England, D. H. Lawrence portrays relationships between men and women, not in their social context, but in their sexual and unconscious motivations. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf use stream of consciousness to reveal the internal and subjective nature of contemporary lives. W. B. Yeats and, especially, T. S. Eliot directly address the issues of isolation and fragmentation they perceive to be the governing characteristics of life in the 20th century.
In the United States, Wallace Stevens and Williams Carlos Williams create vivid, isolated images of life, exploring the ideas of perspective and the immediacy of experience. Ernest Hemingway creates characters who are trying desperately to maintain dignity and integrity in the midst of chaos. William Faulkner shows us the Old and New South, where tradition is both smothering and disintegrating, and reality and fiction merge indistinguishably.
The most important literary work of the early 20th century was T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland. In it, Eliot presents the images and techniques which came to dominate the Modernist style and which influenced nearly every important writer of the century. The author gives the reader a series of fragmented but interrelated images, and leaves it up to the reader to make the connections between them and determine their significance. We hear snatches of conversation, but the people speaking, even when they are in the same place, never seem to hear or respond to each other. The imagery evokes deserts and wastelands, especially in the cities. London is presented as a region of Hell. Numerous allusions to mythic and literary traditions evoke emotional and intellectual associations which the reader must decipher; those allusions also draw a contrast between the spiritually rich past and the emotionally and spiritually arid present--although Eliot questions even the richness and depth of the past, implying that we all live by illusion, and that maybe the only difference between the past and the present was its ability to cherish its illusions.
In the United States, the post-World War I experience was different than that of Europe. While Europe fell into economic depression, the 1920s in the United States were a boom economic period: the "Jazz Age," the "Roaring 20s." We tend to think of that time as fun: one endless round of parties, flappers, and crazy dances. But all of that was a reaction to the uncertainty and change of the time. The politicians who had promised "the war to end all wars" turned out to have been greedy, profiteering liars. Postwar politics seemed futile, corrupt, and cynical. People doubted the institutions they'd once accepted--including the churches--and the values and behaviors that had been based on them: family structures, sexual mores, economic goals. The conflict was heightened by increasing racial violence, labor union agitation, and the Socialist movement. There was open defiance of Prohibition laws; organized crime grew and gang warfare broke out in many cities.
Then, in 1929, the stock market crash marked the beginning of the Depression in the United States. The rise of Fascism, the worldwide Depression, violent labor disputes: all confirmed the disillusionment of Modernism.
During the 1920s, many American writers chose to live in Europe, among them Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. They were known as the "expatriate" writers; many of them lived or spent significant time in Paris, while others lived in England. This was an unbelievably fruitful and prolific time: many of the major American and European artists, musicians, and writers knew and influenced each other, and they inspired each other to greater accomplishments. Gertrude Stein's home in Paris served as a salon for many of them: Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, among others. They were reinventing the world in a terrible time, and they were bound together by their creativity and their despair.
In the United States, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens called for experimentation with specifically American settings, speech patterns, environments, and traditions. There were new developments in theatre, with plays by Edna St. Vincent Millay, e. e. cummings, Sherwood Anderson, and especially Eugene O'Neill, who experimented with masks and symbolic forms to express subjective experience.
The Modern novel begins with the assumption that God is dead and the old traditions are therefore useless; that all truths must be called into question and examined; and that a whole new way of living and thinking about the world must be found. The way language is used must reflect this, in fiction as well as in poetry.
Although Edgar Allan Poe lived 60 years earlier, he had a profound influence on the style of Modern fiction. He insisted that images in stories must be compressed, complex, and above all intense. The English writer Walter Pater also valued intensity: "to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame." A work of literature, he said, should contain a moment of epiphany, or stunning realization. No generalizations are valid, because no two situations are alike. One can only express moments of experience. Stephane Mallarme also influenced the Modern novelists, when he argued passionately that literature must evoke rather than express directly.
The European tradition had a great influence on Modern fiction. Most of the Americans who became the leading novelists of the early 20th century had to go to Europe to get their tools. The United States was groping toward an American tradition in literature, but one didn't really yet exist; the country was too new, and too mercantile. In the words of James Gibbons Huneker, the U.S. was a land of bathtubs, not bohemia.
Modernism came more quickly to Europe, and many expatriate American writers were there to help shape it in the years before World War I: Ezra Pound in poetry and Gertrude Stein in fiction, in particular. In the United States, though, naturalism still held sway, with writers like Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair coming to terms with the fact that the Utopian vision of the 1800s, the American Dream, had deteriorated into brutal materialism. This disillusionment paved the way for the Modernist literature that would come to full bloom in the United States in the 1920s.
Gertrude Stein's influence in this change cannot be underestimated. Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, the youngest of five children, on February 3, 1874. Her family moved to Vienna when she was 3, and then on to Paris. When they returned to the United States, they moved to Oakland, California. Stein began reading at the age of 8, starting with Shakespeare and natural history, and became fascinated with sentence structure and the way words were used. Her family moved to San Francisco, and then she went to Boston to live; in 1893, she entered Harvard Annex (now Radcliffe College).
Here she learned, from William James and others, that in the 1890s a new climate was emerging and that the evolutionary, deterministic neo-Darwinian view of nature and the individual was giving way to a freer, more complex vision. Along with Peirce, Royce, and Dewey, James was emphasizing that the relationship between mind and object can never be static but must be understood as part of developing flux. Conclusions can never be fixed once and for all but are constantly under "pragmatic" test; consciousness manifests our transitivity of being and is best seen as a Heraclitan "river or stream"--with this he substantiated one of the most fundamental Modernist epistemological metaphors (Ruland & Bradbury 250).
Stein went from Harvard to Johns Hopkins, where she studied medicine, and then travelled in Europe. She eventually settled with her brother Leo in Paris in 1903, at 27 Rue de Fleurus. She remained there for the next 30 years, becoming one of the most important influences on Modernist art, poetry, and fiction. Her brother Leo was an art collector, and their home became a gathering place for postimpressionist and cubist painters such as Matisse and Picasso, and writers such as Pound, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and many others. There, they all discussed the ideas of the day and influenced each other, creating a fertile ground for the explosion of art and ideas that came from that time. (For more information about Stein and this amazing time and group of people, read The Charmed Circle, by James R. Mellow.).
Stein intended, with her own fiction, to create a new way of using language to reflect the new ideas: "I was there to kill what was not dead, the Nineteenth Century which was so sure of evolution and prayers." Her first novel, Three Lives, experiments with what Stein called "the continuous present," in which the characters' thoughts and associations are recorded as they are happening; there is a great deal of repetition and association, rather than a continuous narrative line. Her next novel, Tender Buttons, is a collage of word association, rejecting traditional narrative, plot, and dialogue.
Stein always thought of herself as American, but couldn't find the aesthetics she needed in America; she needed the artistic movements and experimental climate of Europe. Other American writers recognized this, too, as she said: "Of course they all came to France a great many to paint pictures and naturally they could not do that at home, or write they could not do that at home either, they could be dentists at home." Hemingway was one of those who came, and after reading his work, Stein said to him, "Begin over again--and concentrate." Hemingway did, creating his signature style--the spare, hard sentence--that was to be such an influence on other writers. Sherwood Anderson, too, was influenced, particularly by Tender Buttons, which focused him on the possibilites of rhythmic prose and the importance of language in its own right, rather than just a tool to move forward the plot.
And then, in 1913, there was the Armory Show.
From February 17th to March 15th, 1913, New York's 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue hosted a display of approximately 1250 paintings, sculptures, and decorative works by over 300 European and American artists such as Delacroix, Degas, Cezanne, Monet, Surat, Duchamps, Pryde, Sickert, Matisse, Myers, Stella, Hassam, Kandinsky, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cassatt, Manet, Whistler, Henri, Bellows, Redon, Munch, and Gaugin. Oscar Bluemner, an architect and artist, said, "The exhibition of the new art from Europe dropped like a bomb." Some loved it, while others abhorred it. Changes in art had been happening for some time, of course, but gathering together in one place such a large representation of the varying responses to Modern thought created a break in artistic and literary tradition. Matisse was particularly reviled for his "misrepresentation" and "distortion" of the human figure, and the Gallery where Duchamps' "Nude Descending a Staircase" was exhibited became known as the "Chamber of Horrors." The show represented a radical change in the ideas and methods that would influence American Art. For more information on the Armory Show, and a gallery of some of the works exhibited, see 1913 Armory Show, a website hosted by the University of Virginia.
The Armory Show marked a turning point in the American arts, incluing literature. But a darker event also influenced the arts worldwide: World War I, which began in 1914 and lasted for 4 long, bloody years. The extent of its savagery and destruction disillusioned a world which was already flirting with meaninglessness. Some of the artists who had shown such promise were killed in the war. Those who survived found themselves in a much darker world: Europe lay in ruins, and in the United States, people were dancing as fast as they could to ward off the darkness gathering around them as well.
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on July, 21, 1899. His father was a doctor who taught him to hunt and fish; his mother was a singer who taught him about music. In high school, he played football and boxed and wrote a weekly column for the high school newspaper. He also contributed poems and essays to the literary journal, Tabula. After graduation, he went to work for the Kansas City Star as a reporter. He tried to enlist in the army during World War I, but was rejected for poor vision, so instead he volunteered as a driver for the Red Cross ambulance service in France. He was then transferred to Italy, where he was seriously injured by a mortar explosion. He reurned to the United States after several months in a hospital in Milan, eager to make a career for himself as a writer. He worked as a journalist in Chicago, where he met Sherwood Anderson. Anderson urged him to go to Paris. Following his advice, Hemingway managed to get himself a job as the foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, and with his new wife, Hadley Richardson, sailed for France on September 1921.
There he met Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and other giants of the time; Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, especially, helped him to hone his style by encouraging him to strip his sentences bare. Of Ezra Pound, he wrote, "He's teaching me to write, and I'm teaching him to box." Along with them, he helped to create a literary revolution. He developed a tight, bare, simple sentence structure, with few adjectives and an impersonal tone, aiming for "the perfect sentence" which would say everything. His first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published in 1923, followed by In Our Time (1925), a collection of stories featuring a character named Nick Adams. His novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published in 1926, and with it, Hemingway became the leading writer of what Gertrude Stein called "The Lost Generation."
In 1926, Hemingway left Hadley and their young son and went to live with Pauline Pfeifer, a fashion reporter. They married in 1927, left Paris, and settled in Key West, Florida. In 1929, while working on his novel, A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway learned that his father had committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. He made himself work through the personal turmoil, and the novel was published later that year.
In 1934, he went on his first safari to Africa; a number of his most powerful stories are set there. In 1937, while researching To Have and Have Not, he became deeply involved in the Spanish Civil War and helped write a propaganda film in support of the republican cause, The Spanish Earth. He was deeply critical of the United States' refusal to become involved, and some accused him of communism because of his anti-facism. But his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) exposed the atrocities committed by both sides in the war. That novel was a bestseller, and was sold to Paramount Pictures for $100,000, the highest price that had ever been paid for film rights to a book.
That same year, Hemingway was divorced from Pauline and married Martha Gellhorn, a journalist and writer. He worked as a war correspondent during World War II, covering D-Day and the liberation of Paris.
In 1945, he and Gellhorn were divorced and he married an American journalist, Mary Welsh. They divided their time between Hemingway's homes in Cuba and Ketchum, Idaho.
In 1952, he wrote The Old Man and the Sea. It was published first in Life magazine and sold over 5 million copies in 2 days. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize the following year.
In 1954, Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was unable to attend the awards dinner in Stockholm, however, since he was recovering from innjuries he'd suffered in a plane crash in Africa.
In November 1960, with Cuba no longer safe after the Cuban Revolution, he left his estate there and moved to Ketchum, Idaho. (Accounts of this incident vary, with the Cuban government claiming he left it to them to be made into a museum. The museum is now open daily, although visitors are not allowed inside the house.)
Hemingway's last few months were marred by illness and depression. He worked on a memoir which was published after his death as A Moveable Feast, but working was becoming more and more difficult. He was given electric shock treatments for his depression, and they made it difficult for him to remember things.
On the morning of July 2, 1961, he committed suicide.
Hemingway's ideas are as uncompromising as his style: life is inherently meaningless; all causes are lost, all love ends badly or in death. But there is a possibility of "redemption" in living life with grace, courage and dignity. War is a recurring theme in Hemingway's work, because it is in war that the limits of individual character are most clearly tested. Hemingway's characters live by this "code"; in The Sun Also Rises, Lady Brett says, "It's sort of what we have instead of God." In the same novel, we meet Jake Barnes, whose sterility, caused by his war wounds, is symbolic of the sterility and chaos of the modern world. It would be "pretty to think" that he could find a woman and fall in love, but romantic notions cannot sustain themselves in the modern world. All that is left is to decide what to make of such a world: "I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it," Jake says. In all of his fiction, Hemingway gives us a character's "moment of truth." In almost every case, the character is defeated by circumstances (war, nature, death), but maintains to the end his integrity and strength of character. As the fisherman says in The Old Man and the Sea, "But man is not made for defeat...A man can be destroyed but not defeated."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 26, 1896. He was descended from Francis Scott Key, who wrote "The Star-Spangled Banner"; his family was not wealthy, but he went to prep school and then on to Princeton with the financial help of relatives. He was more interested in theater than in academic work, though, and devoted most of his time to the Triangle Club at Princeton, where he collaborated on plays and musicals with his friend Edmund Wilson (who would later become one of the more important critics of his time). In 1917, he left college when his grades fell so far that he was no longer allowed to be part of the Triangle Club. He enlisted in the army and was posted to Alabama. World War I ended before he could be sent abroad, and he was discharged. In Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a classic southern belle, with whom he fell madly in love. She refused to consider marrying him, though, because he had no money. He made his way to New York, where he wrote advertising copy and stories for magazines. He was desperate to accumulate enough money to marry Zelda, and that drove him to work frantically on his novel. It was published in 1920 and was an immediate commercial success. He married Zelda a week later. They had a daughter, Frances Scott--she was always called "Scottie"--in 1921.
Fitzgerald's first novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, is a portrayal of the Jazz Age, with its "flaming youth," wild parties, and nonstop drinking. Scott and Zelda lived the same life. They danced on table in speakeasies and fell into public fountains in the small hours of the night and drank. Life was one long party whether they were in New York or Paris or on the French Riviera. Fitzgerald manged to write during all of this--indeed, he needed to. They lived extravagantly and were always strapped for money. He wrote to make more money: another novel, a collection of short stories, a play, and dozens of magazine stories. There was never enough money.
Scott and Zelda partied like they meant it, and they did. But Fitzgerald also knew there was a dark side to their lives, and that awareness appears in his novels, most notably The Great Gatsby, which was published in 1925. The book was praised by the critics but was a commercial failure.
In 1927, desperate for money, Fitzgerald went to Hollywood. He didn't much like the work, but it paid the bills, and there were plenty of those. Scottie was sent to good schools. And in 1930, Zelda suffered the first of many breakdowns; she was in and out of mental hospitals for the rest of her life, until she died in a fire at Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1948.
In 1934, Fitzgerald published a new novel, Tender is the Night, but it was neither a critical nor a commercial success. Battered by the problems of his wife, his professional failures, and his own alcoholism, he spent most of his time in Hollywood, writing for the movies when he could get work. He lived for a time in The Garden of Allah, where he met the columnist Sheila Graham. She helped him stop drinking (although he had lapses), and they were happy for a few years. He began working on a new novel, this one about Hollywood, called The Last Tycoon. But he never got the chance to finish it: in 1940, he suffered a series of heart attacks, and died on December 21, 1940, at the age of 44.
At the time when he died, he was considered washed up, a writer who had wasted his talent. But after his death, his literary reputation began to rise again. Now, more copies of his books are sold in one year than were sold during his entire lifetime. The Great Gatsby is recognized as a masterpiece of American literature, and even in its incomplete form, his last novel, The Last Tycoon, is brilliant.
The Great Gatsby (1925) depicts the extravagant, exciting, glamorous life of the wealthy during the Roaring Twenties. Jay Gatsby is a self-made millionaire whose dream is to win the heart and hand of Daisy, a woman married to another man. The story is told by Nick Carraway, who is an outsider--he lives in the guest house of an estate, but is not himself rich, although Gatsby takes a liking to him and invites him into their world. He is fascinated by their lives, but not a believer: he sees their flaws too. The facade is beautiful, but underneath, there is sterility. Fitzgerald, in Gatsby, is presenting a fictional version of the world we first met in The Wasteland: it looks beautiful, but is a spiritual and emotional wasteland, inhabited by "careless" people. But Fitzgerald is not just reproducing a fictional version of Eliot's work: he has given a particularly American voice to these ideas: Jay Gatsby doesn't love his wealth for itself--he loves it because he believes it will allow him to leave behind his past and become someone new, a man who is worthy of the perfect Daisy, of the perfect, beautiful life--his American Dream. But his dream is an illusion, and his wealth can't buy it for him because it doesn't exist. The past cannot be erased, and the false cannot become real. The voice of Whitman echoes through the novel, too, reminding us sadly of what America has squandered in its carelessness and greed.
If you'd like more information on any of the topics covered in this lecture, go to the Links page. Enjoy!
Some of the information in this lecture derives from:
1. Eds. George and Barbara Perkins. The American Tradition in Literature. 11th ed., Vol. 2. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007.
2. Eds. Susan Belasco and Linck Johnson. The Bedford Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 2. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008.
3. Eds. George McMichael, et al. Anthology of American Literature, 9th ed., Vol. 2. New Jersey: Pearson, 2007.
4. Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury. From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature. New York: Penguin, 1991.
