The Turn to Modernism: Literature and Music

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The Turn to Modernism: Literature and Music

Modernist Literature. Modernist literature came to maturity in the 1920s, but its dominant themes and concerns were already becoming evident in novels, poems, and plays of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Growing social unrest, which was signaled by unprecedented strikes among industrial workers and the spread of political anarchism, evoked moods of decadence, pessimism, and nostalgia for a more unified and meaningful past. Moreover, in the literature of the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century, one can sense an apocalyptic tone and a foreboding that civilization is coming to an end. Du Côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way, 1913) by Marcel Proust (1871–1922) is the first part of the tellingly titled family saga A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913-1927), first translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past (1922–1932). In Swann s Way, the only novel in the series published before the war, readers could not miss the nostalgia of Proust, who through his narrator recalls a childhood lost in the mists of time. Through that memory emerges a longing for a unity of life that, on the eve of World War I, seems irretrievably lost and so at odds with the dislocated world around him. Pessimism often joins nostalgia in early Modernist literature. The British literary critic, essayist, and poet Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), who may be seen as a transitional figure between Victorian and Modernist sensibilities, wrote in Culture and Anarchy (1869) that industrial society had departed from the laudable trajectory toward perfection that the Enlightenment had charted. The ship of progress and harmony (embodied in an organic “culture”) had, he believed, foundered on the shoals of the disunity engendered by capitalist industrialism. This result, the “anarchy” of Arnold’s title, is reflected in a class society marked by extremes of wealth and comfort at one end and of poverty and suffering at the other. Although many of Matthew Arnold’s essays seem to hold out hope that a new world could be salvaged from the wreckage of the nineteenth century, his poem “Dover Beach” (1867) is filled with pessimism and horror at destruction bred of ignorance. As the speaker looks out over the English Channel at night, he listens to

the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand[.]

In them he hears “The eternal note of sadness” that long ago reminded Sophocles of “the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery.” The speaker’s thoughts then turn to the contemporary loss of conviction about the Enlightenment sense of perfectibility:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I can only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
   And naked shingles of the world.

Then he turns to the woman who is with him and expresses the sort of disillusionment and pessimism that underlies the writings of the great Modernists:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN

The idea that Europeans had a moral duty to impose their civilization, religion, and value system on people of other cultures, often with no consideration for their own religious and moral beliefs, is perhaps best expressed in “The White Man’s Burden’ (1899), a popular poem by Rudyard Kipling:

Take up the White Man’s burden—
  Send forth the best ye breed—
Go, bind your sons to exile
  To serve your captives’ need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
  On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
  Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man’s burden—
  In patience to abide,
 To veil the threat of terror
  And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
  An hundred times made plain, 
To seek another’s profit
  And work another’s gain.

Take up the White Man’s burden
  The savage wars of peace—
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
  And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
  (The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
  Bring all your hope to nought.

Take up the White Man’s burden—
  No iron rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper—
  The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
  The roads ye shall not tread,
Go, make them with your living
  And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man’s burden,
  And reap his old reward—
The blame of those ye better
  The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
  (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—
“Why brought ye us from bondage,
  Our loved Egyptian night?”

Take up the White Man’s burden—
  Ye dare not stoop to less—
Nor call too loud on Freedom
  To cloak your weariness.
By all ye will or whisper,
  By all ye leave or do,
The silent sullen peoples
  Shall weigh your God and you.

Take up the White Man’s burden!
  Have done with childish days—
The lightly-proffered laurel,
  The easy ungrudged praise:
Comes now, to search your manhood
  Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
  The judgment of your peers.

Source: McClure’s Magazine (February 1899).

The same moods of pessimism and pointlessness—so common to Modernist literature—may also be found in the plays of the Russian writer Anton Chekhov (1860–1904). In Tri sestry (Three Sisters, 1901) and Vishnevyi sad (The Cherry Orchard, 1904) Chekhov portrays families dominated by their memories of an unrecoverable glorious past and mired in the present, the forces of which they only dimly under-stand. The title characters in Three Sisters exist in a “rot of boredom” and see no hope in the future, while the aristocratic family of The Cherry Orchard feel only an “oppressive sense of emptiness” and fatalism as they lose the family estate to a businessman embodying the new capitalistic spirit of economic development.

Subjectivism and Consciousness. Ever since Romanticism, artists and writers had probed the inner self in search of inspiration, beauty, and truth. This subjectivism became a hallmark of nearly all nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century art. Toward the end of this period, subjectivism received two powerful added stimuli from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and the early psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Both of these thinkers pointed toward the existence of an inner self that was stirred by nonrational urges toward chaos and pleasure. These psychic forces could drive the individual toward a pleasure-seeking hedonism that might carry with it the seeds of evil and destruction. Freud called these forces the id and posited that in the mature individual the ego, or sense of self, is compelled by the urge for self-preservation, to mediate between the id and the superego, or sense of morality and ethics. The Irish poet, essayist, and novelist Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) illustrated such destructive hedonism metaphorically in The Picture of Dorian Gray

(1891). Although Wilde, like the French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891), elsewhere seems to extol the “new hedonism” of the latter part of the nineteenth century, which gloried in the youthful human body as a temple of pleasure, in The Picture of Dorian Gray he pessimistically conveyed the notion that youth is lost forever. Like the title character, the individual cannot arrest, even with the help of magic, the inevitable decay that awaits everyone in the future. Equally popular at the time was The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894). Within the psyche of the rational and orderly Dr. Jekyll lurks the evil, irrational, and chaotic Mr. Hyde. These characters are excellent literary examples of the Freudian conflict between the superego (Jekyll) and the id (the murderous Mr. Hyde), which Freud described in his Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einfuhrung in die Psychoanalyse (New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1933) as “that cauldron full of seething excitations... filled with energy reaching it from the instincts.” Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) situated the Freudian conflict of superego and id in the Belgian Congo in his well-known story “Heart of Darkness” (1902), in which he linked this psychic battle to a withering critique of European imperialism, whose proponents argued that they were extending progress and morality to uncivilized peoples. Instead of carrying this “white man’s burden” to people supposedly in need of Europeanizing and progress, Conrad’s Kurtz, the station manager for a European company of ivory traders, has become overwhelmed by the wilderness into which he has been thrust, and to assert his power over the natives, he has surrounded his house with posts bearing human heads. Kurtz has abandoned European notions of decency and civility (the Freudian superego) and surrendered himself to “brutal instincts... and monstrous passions.” The story is simultaneously about the fragility of the superego in comparison to the id and the moral bankruptcy, and ultimate futility, of the civilizing mission of European imperialism.

Modern Music: Discordance and Dissonance. More than in any other field of art, Romanticism held sway in music to the end of the nineteenth century. As late as 1906 Richard Strauss (1864–1949) composed an opera that was fully within the Wagnerian tradition and its enormous orchestral scale. Indeed, even the Modernist composers’ spirit of innovation follows a logical trajectory from nineteenth-century music, which focused on the creative genius. Whereas much Romantic music had been written for the virtuoso performer, much modern music can be thought of as the work of a virtuoso composer. Much as the Impressionist painters became more concerned with showing the act of representation than with depicting a subject, so too in music composers began to focus more on the act of composition than on conveying a theme. Still, the forces of fundamental change and fragmentation can be glimpsed in the works of several turn-of-the-century composers, who were on the threshold of change as revolutionary as that which occurred in painting with Impressionism, Symbolism, Expressionism, and Cubism. The Expressionist composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), for example, introduced atonality (the twelve-tone scale), a fundamental challenge to the definition of Western music that had stood for centuries. Notes in his compositions were deliberately dissociated from melodic harmonies and, moreover, were completely meaningless. Sometimes he radically reduced the length of a composition. For example, three of his Sechs kleine klavierstucke (Six Little Piano Pieces, 1911) are only nine bars each. Schoenberg’s scores were also written for a sharply reduced orchestra, marking an abrupt departure from the enormous ensemble of musicians that was typically required to play a Romantic symphony. For his first Chamber Symphony (1906), for example, Schoenberg remarked that he had written his composition for “fifteen solo instruments,” clear testimony to the individualism and sense of disunity that had become a cultural trait. Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) echoed these notions in his work L’Histoire du soldat (The Soldier’s Tale, 1918), which called for a much smaller orchestra than required for nineteenth-century Romantic music and even his own score for the ballet Rite of Spring (1913).

Serious versus Light Music. The dissonance, discord, and atonality that marked much of the emergent Modernist music did not appeal to mass audiences. Indeed, when Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was first performed, the audience was so upset that it bombarded the musicians with catcalls and jeers so intense that they were forced to interrupt the performance and quit the stage. The seeds of such popular dissatisfaction had been planted many years before. Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) was upset that audiences preferred his operas II Trovatore (1853) or La Traviatta (1853), which treated them to simple cascades of melodies, to his more musically complex and demanding works, such as Simon Eoccanegra (1857). As orchestras grew in the nineteenth century and compositions became more complex, audiences began to separate into groups who, on the one hand, were “sophisticated” enough to appreciate the demanding music and, on the other, were mainly interested in being entertained. The “Great Schism” that still exists in music had arrived. There were enough music consumers in this “Age of the Masses” to make both serious and popular music commercially profitable. Late in the nineteenth century many great, elaborate concert halls were constructed for performances of “serious” music by the increasingly professional and prestigious orchestras. At the same time, many working-class neighborhoods had music halls for the performance of “popular” music. This growing separation correlated to the class divisions that had taken hold in nineteenth-century industrial society. Increasingly, the educated upper classes embraced “serious” opera and orchestral music, while the middle and working classes preferred the light operas of William Gilbert (1836–1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900), the Viennese waltzes of Johann Strauss (1825–1899), or the ragtime and vaudeville of the music halls.