Understanding Modernism in Literature and the Novel

Modern Literature and the Rise of Modernism

Modernism is a complex movement which started sometime after 1910 and flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, involving all forms of art, from literature and music to the visual arts and cinema. One thing all the aspects of Modernism have in common is the desire to make a clean break with the traditions which came before them, through experimentation with form and style. Traditional forms of narration and representation are often rejected in favor of a direct attempt to represent the workings of the mind and of the unconscious. Modernist work is typically fragmentary and relative, favoring subjective perceptions of reality. The idea that there is only one truth or explanation of events is often rejected.

Modernism and the Novel

World War I marks a fundamental break between the old world and the new. For many people, the experience of the war, in which hundreds of thousands had been killed, shattered their faith in society and its institutions. The Modernists, horrified by the effects of war and mechanized society in general, were interested in recovering the unique experience of the individual by exploring and recreating their inner world. The Modernist novel was to shatter most of the conventions which had typified Victorian fiction. The coordinates of the Victorian moral universe, which corresponded to a precise idea of how society should be, collapsed and were replaced by a climate of moral ambiguity or even by a sense of emptiness which signaled an absence of values. All this was reflected in the themes of most Modernist novels.

Stylistic Innovations in Modernist Fiction

From a stylistic point of view, Modernist novels broke new ground in two particular aspects:

• The disappearance of the omniscient narrator: The narrator as a moral and spiritual guide disappeared and was replaced by the direct or indirect presentation of characters' thoughts, feelings, and memories.
• Non-linear plot structures: Many Modernist novels no longer followed a linear plot or a chronological sequence of events. The idea of progress which lay behind the novel’s linear plot structure gave way to the idea of duration, of freezing and examining what Virginia Woolf called "moments of being."

Consequently, a novel can be set in one single day, while the analysis of a single moment can tell us more about a character than a traditional narrative life-story.