The Modernist Novel: An Overview

The word ‘Modern' derives from the Latin ‘modo' meaning ‘current' ‘new' ‘contemporary'. With its emphasis on the new, the movement of Modernism encompasses radical ideas and emergent intellectual and pathbreaking ideas of Henri Bergson, Darwin, Freud, Marx, Nietzsche and Einstein from the end of the Nineteenth century until the Second World War. In keeping with the exhortation of its literary guru, Ezra Pound, to ‘make it new', it set about to establish ‘the tradition of the new', as articulated by the Art critic, Harold Rosenburg, producing art works which went against the grain of established traditions and conventions. The beginning of the Twentieth century was witness to a diverse variety of aesthetic representation in response to the machine age, to transformational technologies, rapid urbanization, migration to cities, to a world where traditional certainties had departed and the belief in the notion of history and civilization as inherently progressive was shaken to the core. ‘Modernity' was described by Baudelaire in The Painter of Modern Life (1863) as the fashionable, transient, fleeting and contingent and as opposed to the eternal and the immutable. Literary Modernism is a literature of change and crisis, yet with an insistence on the power of Art to give shape to a world which has lost all stability and order. Yet from this nightmare of history, as depicted by Walter Benjamin, and a sense of fracture and dislocation, from the debris of the traditional world, rises the Eiffel Tower as a symbol of aspiration, a marvellous alloy of modern technology of metallurgy and human creativity.