WWii Trench Art

An Introduction To Twentieth Century Literature: Woolf, Joyce And Faulkner

1. Professor Arnold Weinstein's Introduction to Twentieth Century Literature

1.1. War and the Century's Offspring

 

Professor Weinstein begins with the literary movement that started with the twentieth century, and the long-held traditions, both rational and spiritual, that have followed man since ancient Greece, and that were, at that moment, either dead, bankrupt or under-fire. Professor Weinstein claims that the literature produced at that period gives us, readers of today, a story of crisis, of paradoxically opposing forces.

This idea, in my opinion, strongly reinforces the timelessness of the opening lines of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. Though they were written in the nineteenth century and meant for the eighteenth, "It was the best of times and the worst of times" seems to apply to Professor Weinstein's context soundingly.

For literature, that century began with a dichotomy. On one side we see texts that show an exquisite awareness of man's triumph. On the other we see texts that represent man's visions gone askew and man's doings gone amok. In Conrad's Heart of Darkness we see both at the same time. Amid this paradoxical milieu the century is greeted with the greatest of examples of human collapse, a world war, which lasts four years, from 1914 to 1918. The influence of this conflict in the lives of people in general and artists and writers in specific is simply not to be taken lightly.

Modernist writers of the time were, therefore, responding to the horrors of that war that deeply marked their imaginations and creativity, whether they were Europeans - continental or insular - or Americans. WWI heralded the arrival of chaos, butchery and brutality; the experience of the trenches, the nerve gas, shell shock, and the endless carnage deprived of any meaningful resolve, inevitably changed art and literature forever.  

The early works of Hemingway and of Eliot often show a war-torn world, making sterility the dominant thread of works such as The Sun Also Rises (1926) and The Wasteland (1922). In them we see man's impotence, symbolical and/or real, in the characters of Jake Barnes, from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Joe Christmas, from Light In August (1932) and Benjy Compson from The Sound and the Fury (1929), both by William Faulkner.

We also see the loss of vision, and of hope, and of order in The Wasteland. In it, Eliot returns to the middle ages, allusively referencing Arthurian legends, in specific that of the Holy Grail, in order to poetically show what had been lost and what could be poetically re-found. This appearance of order and of elegance present in the Classical tradition greatly appealed for Modernist writers. In the next sections we should understand better why.

It is not surprising, then, that critics saw in the works of Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Faulkner, a respectful reverence for the past. They also saw in their religious and ideological visions the troubling ingredients that may as well have led to events such as the rise of Fascism, and ultimately to the second major catastrophe of the twentieth century, WWII.

Ergo, it is no accident that so many Modernist writers sought refuge in the comfort of old myths. This seems to be and is an ideological argument for the nostalgia for earlier long-gone order. Modernists were living tête-à-tête with great chaos, with the coarseness and brutality of modern life. This very social condition was the propeller of political movements such as Marxism and even Communism.

Related to this seems to be the explanation for the experimental formalism of some modernists and the potentially fascist implications of it. Even if there is some truth in these ideological arguments they must, nevertheless, not distort the plenitude and the beauty of the works of art produced in this period, for they contained the richness and the beauty of human illusion, and they show that our desires and our dreams are real, even though life may routinely puncture or discredit them. F. Scott Fitzgerald was perhaps the greatest columnist of lost illusions.

Art was, in fact, a home for their illusions. Their artistic creation was constantly hindered by the noises of outer reality. Their real legacy, and our inheritance, is ultimately their search for inner life – the life that even today few of us ever come adequately in possession of. The modernist's journey into the self is not so unlike the Homeric Odyssey, for it is just as charged with danger and difficulty.

If the inner search is the mandate territory of literary Modernism, then, its most striking feature is the difficulty of access it provides. It is somewhat easy to pick up a story of Dickens or Conan Doyle and read it. We can follow the prose, linear and clear, with much description, with language behaving the way it is supposed to, the way we are taught in schools or colleges. Now, if we pick up Ulysses, or To the Lighthouse, or The Sound and the Fury - to name a few - it is a whole different kettle of fish.

We see Realism, as we know it, dying in these texts. Although we might mourn the dead, we should ask ourselves why this is happening. Firstly, Realism was not really dying. Realist books and even best-sellers are being produced as I write these lines and as you read them. What is interesting is the reason or reasons why this kind of straight and linear prose was rejected by the likes of Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner.

These modernist writers have made us realize that the subjective world, that of desire, of fear, of fantasy and of thought, had been outside the precincts of the narrative form of traditional prose. These realms, then, constitute the modernist literature's great "undiscovered country" - to quote Shakespeare – and the modernist writers are its gospels.

Woolf's work might just be one of the most representative of these modernist experimental/formalist performances. Her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse is a narrative formally outfitted with a new kind of moral generosity. Let us see now some of its entrails.

 

1.2. To the Lighthouse – An Experience with Form and Art

 

I will now briefly allude to some of the novel's representative aspects concerning the use of form to display emotion, rhythm and humanity. To the Lighthouse is the account of a family - generally thought of as Woolf's real mother and father - and it is told in such a way that the nimbus of feeling shapes all that emerges in the narrative.

For this novel, Woolf invented a splendidly capacious syntax that contained spoken and unspoken words that revealed the depths which underlay every sensation. As a consequence, the most mundane topics became magic. What was to be an informal gathering of friends at a summer house, just sitting at a table, eating, becomes an event, as rich and as traumatic and as tempestuous as any Shakespearean tragedy – making it possible to assume that it is as much about life and death as King Lear is.

To the Lighthouse is particularly poignant as a Modernist rendition of war, more specifically the trauma of WWI, which eventually claims the lives of several of its characters; the Ramsay children. There is, nevertheless, another war being fought in the novel; that against death - the unwinnable one – that, notwithstanding, sweeps away Woolf's beautiful heroine, the beguiling Mrs. Ramsay, shockingly early in the text.

Woolf does not only ask what lives and what dies, but also gives a compelling answer, that claims that memory resurrects, memory brings back to life the dead mother, who then lives a strange half-life in the memories of those who remained.

The plot thickens most sharply with the novel's second female figure, the plain Lily Briscoe, a spinsterish frustrated painter without genius - who is regarded as a harsh self-portrait of Woolf herself. Lily must come to terms not only with the real death of this woman whom she loves, Mrs. Ramsay, but also with Mrs. Ramsay's after-life in her memory and still with Mrs. Ramsay's vision of the role of a woman as mother and wife, and specially as an artist.

Ultimately Woolf not only resolves her proto feminist quandary but she also demonstrates the richness and the value of the interior monologue form, showing through the composition of her text, the way in which we move through life and into one another by dent of memory and of desire. Not all writers, however, used the Modernist form to such noble and moving ends.

 

1.3. The Thoughts of Ulysses

 

James Joyce, for example, seemed to be interested also in the comedy that such an approach to form makes possible. We can see this when we are pitched inside the interior monologues of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom.

As he reconfigures the Homeric story of a fractured family and a heroic homecoming, Joyce thrusts onto the page the jumbled rich prose and poetry that constitutes the thoughts of his trio, the young artist, the Jewish salesman and the adulterous wife. Joyce rejoices in high flown rhetoric.

Bloom is, perhaps, his most unforgettable creation; a man at home in his body, curious about life, spinning his day, coping with stresses and savoring the small pleasures that life offers. We learn all that via his text form. In a way few other texts can match, Joyce shows himself willing to fracture all possible existing linguistic forms and units, and then, to make up new ones. He translates noises into text and the environment into language.

It may seem exaggerated but as far back as Sterne's Tristam Shandy the world hasn't seen that much formal experiment coexisting within a novel. Joyce creates a strange world in which soap bars, advertisements, memories, facts, fears and desires, all speak together in a rich cacophony, in a kind of mix of tongues.

Nobody has proven the words of the French symbolist poet from the late nineteenth century, Stéphane Mallarmé, so vividly. He once wrote in an interview for Jules Huret: "Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre". Joyce was the man who carried out this job ipsis litteris.  Joyce's literary ambitions were to be seen as the last literary frontier, in his vertiginous effort to take the entire world and convert it into language. Overseas, William Faulkner is seen, by some, as the man who tries to carry that torch further still.

 

1.4. Faulkner and the Recoup of the Human Heart and Mind

 

Faulkner's ideas were not as encyclopedic or cosmographic as Joyce's, but his ability to let rest into language what is dark or dead, is considered by many unmatched in Western literature. Faulkner uses the resource of interior monologue to brings into light what is hidden deep inside our body and soul. Literally, the sound and the fury of the human heart and of the human mind are revealed by Faulkner and all-too-often are not only surprisingly coherent, but also lethal.

Faulkner's works mainly focus in the doomed life of American Southerners who are eclipsed by their own history. He found the language to express human loss, at times a multilayered loss, as is the case of the fool's tale of Benjy Compson, who loses his sister, his pasture and his genitals.

Faulkner dives in the Bildungsroman formula and creates the sort of character who is a young person, struggling for control of his or her inner life, searching for identity and adaptation, coming to terms with social and psychic stresses and eventually developing into a responsible and aware citizen, much in the tradition of similar formulaic novels since Moll Flanders. The growth the characters experience is not without pathos, whether is Quentin Compson or Darl Bundren or Joe Christmas, the Faulknerian hero experience the erosion and the corrosive of the self-questioning as  typified by Hamlet. Faulkner does it, however, with unprecedented narrative power, making readers not only witnesses for the prosecution but indeed witnesses to the execution.

The conflict reaches a peak in Absalom, Absalom! where he unpacks the individual private dramas of his characters against the historical collective death dealing pageantry of the great southern holocaust, i.e., the civil war. America's founding trauma. Reading The Sound and the Fury and reading Absalom, Absalom! is taking a plunge in some viscous verbal media. Many readers will not sign on. All that appeared stable and reliable in his earlier fictions, like names, dates, or the clarity of the story, or the contours of human relations, in Absalom, Absalom! And in his later fiction, appears different, conjectural, produced, fictive, never-achieved and never-forgotten.

As a southerner himself, haunted by his lost old south, Faulkner imbues his work with a sense of doom, of failure, of being condemned to live as a ghost and of being inhabited by ghosts.

All of this distinctively happens against the backdrop of American optimism, of upward mobility. There is, in fact, mobility in Faulkner but it is terrible, corrosive, uncontrollable, and sweeps the reader into areas of the self that he or she do not reckon with, and takes the reader into places that he or she cannot escape from.

Faulkner feels that for the hidden inner story to be told, in his profound sense of the private and the public, there must be a new telling, a new view of narrative. For him, memory, subjectivity, and desire, constitute the new realms of fiction. His readers cherish in just that, and thank for the access to these inner realms, for they can now discover just how capacious the subjective world is. Faulkner knows we cannot see into each other's hearts and minds and inner recesses, that we cannot reach one another's pasts, that we are doomed to the surface, to being on the outside, to being locked out, and he exposes life to us, readers. His modernist narrative allows us access. There is exhilaration in reading his books, a pleasure that comes with recouping the plenitude, even if, of fictional life.

This theme may be viewed as rather depressing. A very fine modern theorist once said that narrative is the discourse of mortality. When we speak or when we write, with every story we tell, we are shaping, preserving, and in some sense, recapturing what experientially has already gone. We read books for these reasons, because we are having a life again, the shape of a life, the fullness of a life in time, a life we do not have with our own experience.

Because of this we can assert that Modern literature is, more than most, a form of archeology. Modernist texts contain the buried past, even if this past is full of horrors, its recovery is a miraculous form of enrichment.

Memory - The human real State – what is left, what is unarguably ours. Many psychiatrists and many linguists would argue that memory itself is a construct, it is not retrievable, that we invent our memories and not actually recover them and that we have no discernable connection with a real lived past.

Memory is the privileged realm in Modernist literature. Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner help us repossess what we have lost.

REFERENCES

FAULKNER, William. Absalom, Absalom!. New York: Random House, 1990.

JOYCE, James. Ulyssess. London: Penguin Books, 2000.

WEINSTEIN, Arnold. Lecture 69. Introduction to Twentieth Century Literature. In: Great authors of the Western literary tradition. The Teaching Company. Available at: <http://www.teach12.com/teach12.aspx>. Accessed on: 16 jan 2010

WOOLF, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. London: Penguin Books, 1996.

About the Author

Doutorando do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul na especialidade Literaturas de Língua Inglesa.

My WWII Australian trench art artillery shell mug