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Twentieth-century Novel

It should perhaps be added that, although twentieth-century fiction is often divided in

very broad terms into ‘realist , modernist and post¬ modernist’ fiction, this should not be

taken to imply that fiction that is neither modernist nor postmodernist is somehow old-

fashioned and un¬ modern, although it is true that many writers and critics have assumed and

argued that this is the case. Moreover, the survival of realist conventions (a plot based upon

cause-and-effect, well-defined characters, a general assumption that the world is knowable

and susceptible to rational enquiry) in much popular fiction gives food for thought. One can

posit either that the common reader is old-fashioned in his or her tastes and wishes to be

presented with a world that is seen in ways that are familiar and thus undemanding, or

alternatively that those writers and readers who produce and consume modernist fiction have

another view of reality - a different world-view - from the mass of people who read detective

stories, science fiction, and popular romance.

Modernism is a term which has come into more general use only since the Second

World War, although (as with the term ‘postmodernism’) its history predates its general

acceptance by many years. It refers to those art works (or the principles behind their creation)

produced since the end of the nineteenth century which decisively reject the artistic

conventions of the previous age. Foremost among such rejected conventions are those

associated with realism in its more straightforward sense. In particular, modernist works tend

to be self-conscious in ways that vary according to the genre or art-form in question; they

deliberately remind the reader or observer that they are art-works, rather than seeking to serve

as ‘windows on reality’. Whereas one may forget that one is reading a novel when immersed

in, say. War and Peace (1865—68) —responding to characters and events as if they were

‘real’ - this is something of which one is constantly reminded when reading a modernist work

such as Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931). Thus Picasso’s rejection of representational art
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and of the conventions of perspective in his early paintings can be compared with the

rejection of the ‘tyranny of plot’ by novelists such as Joyce, Woolf, and the Frenchman

Marcel Proust. A good example of this shift in attitudes from realism to modernism can be

found in the novels and other writings of Joseph Conrad, who in many ways represents a

transitional stage between realist and modernist conventions. In 1898 Conrad wrote to his

friend Cunninghame Graham, “You must have a plot! If you haven’t, every fool reviewer will

kick you because there can’t be literature without plot.” And four years later, in 1902, he

wrote to Arnold Bennett (one of Woolf’s ‘materialists’ and thus far from what we now call

modernism), “You just stop short of being absolutely real because you are faithful to your

dogmas of realism. Now realism in art will never approach reality.” What we see here is ‘the

tide on the turn’; a writer beginning to question “dogmas of realism” and to search for

alternatives: alternatives to the well-made plot, the rounded and lifelike character, the

knowable world wholly accessible to reasoned and rational enquiry.

The modernist novel typically focuses far greater attention on to the states and

processes inside the consciousness of the main character(s) than on to public events in the

outside world. If the twentieth century is the century of Freud and Marx then we can say that

the modernist novel has much more in common with the former than the latter (which

explains, incidentally, why an orthodox Marxist critic such as Georg Lukacs argued so

bitterly for realism and against modernism during his long life). Modernism has a profound

effect on novelists’ conception of character. Michael Levenson opens his book Modernism

and the Fate of Individuality as follows:

This thing we name the individual, this piece of matter, this length of memory,

this bearer of a proper name, this block in space, this whisper in time, this self-

delighting, self-condemning oddity - what is it? Ours may be the age of

narcissism, but it is also the century in which ego suffered unprecedented attacks

upon its great pretensions, to be self- transparent and self-authorized.

For the great modernist novelists (Levenson pays particular attention to Conrad, James,

Forster, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Lawrence, and Woolf) character can no longer

be taken to be self-transparent - more than one character in a modernist novel asks ‘who am

I?’ without receiving a clear answer. Nor is the self any longer its own source of authority -

which rarely means that any alternative source of authority is readily available.

This focusing upon the problems of the self and of the inner life has encouraged the

development of new methods of fictional expression. If modernism can be defined negatively

in terms of its rejection of realist conventions and assumptions, its positive side can be seen

in its remarkable development often techniques such as stream of consciousness and internal

monologue, its challenging of traditional conceptions of story and plot, its markedly greater

emphasis upon what Joyce calls ‘epiphanies’ and Virginia Woolf ‘moments’ - that is, points

in time when reality seems to stand revealed and to speak itself - and its revolutionary use of

various forms of what we can call ‘poetic expression’ in the novel.

A brief comment should be added concerning the philosophical underpinnings of

modernism. These are very often implicit rather than overt, but frequently we find that

modernist novels are pessimistic in tone, unsure about the sense or logic of the world, and

look on human beings as isolated and alienated. The philosophical corollary of the rejection

of perspective in art, and of an omniscient view of a knowable world obeying certain laws in

fiction, seems to be a view of reality as lacking any unifying logic, to the extent that one

should perhaps talk rather of ‘realities’ than of reality. (Again risking a generalization, we can

say that modernists have a monist view of reality but accept that complete knowledge of this

reality is impossible, while postmodernists adhere to a pluralist view and deny that it makes

any sense to talk of a single reality.) Thus, for the modernist, different perspectives have to be
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combined because although what they reveal may appear contradictory there is no ‘super-

perspective’ by means of which to rank their validity.

With the term postmodernism we move on to other terminological problems. One

perhaps inevitable confusion has arisen from the fact that, although one commentator has

traced this term back to the mid-1930s, it has only really come into more common use in

Europe and the United States in the last decade or so. Thus works which before this time

were categorized as either ‘experimental’ or ‘modernist’ have in some cases received a new,

often disputed, categorization as postmodernist. As Andreas Huyssen puts it, “one critic’s

postmodernism is another critic’s modernism.”

Yet other commentators have refused to accept that the term is worth its salt, arguing

that it does not really isolate any significant characteristics (in art, literature, or culture) that

cannot be covered by the term ‘modernism’. Such individuals frequently make what amounts

to a political gesture by pointedly referring to ‘late modernism’ rather than ‘postmodernism’:

behind the debate is the issue of whether we now inhabit a new sort of reality - the

‘postmodern world’ - which is fundamentally different from the world, or social systems, that

produced the great modernist art. This political edge to the debate is worth noting, as the term

postmodernism is typically used in a rather wider sense than is modernism, referring to a

general human condition, or society at large, as much as to art or culture (a usage which was

encouraged by Jean- Francois Lyotard’s book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on

Knowledge [English translation, 1984]). Not surprisingly, traditional Marxists, who believe

we live within the same old capitalist system, are suspicious of the implications of the term

‘postmodernism’. Postmodernism, then, can be used today in a number of different ways: (i)

to refer to the non-realist and non-traditional literature and art of the post-Second World War

period; (ii) to refer to literature and art which takes certain modernist characteristics to an

extreme stage; and (iii) to refer to aspects of a more general human condition in what is
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tendentiously referred to as the ‘late capitalist’ world of the post-1950s which have an all-

embracing effect on life, culture, ideology and art, as well as (in some but not all usages) to a

generally welcoming, celebrative attitude towards these aspects.

Those modernist characteristics which may produce postmodernism when taken to their

most extreme forms include the rejection of representation in favour of self-reference -

especially of a ‘playful’ and non- serious, non-constructive sort; the willing, even relieved,

rejection of artistic aura (sense of ‘holiness’) and of a view of the work of art as organic

whole; the substitution of confrontation and teasing of the reader for collaboration with him

or her; the rejection of ‘character and plot as meaningful or artistically defensible concepts or

conventions, even the rejection of meaning itself along with the belief that it is worth trying

to understand the world (or that there is a world to understand).

As Christopher Butler has suggested, many postmodern texts are baffling to those who

(like critics!) wish to find coherence in, or impose it on, them by means of ‘coherence-

conferring strategies’. He continues:

In reading a story like Donald Barthelme’s ‘The Indian Uprising’, we cannot say

‘who’ the Indians are, what they ‘symbolize’, why the narrator makes tables out

of hollow-cored doors while living with various women, why Jane is beaten up by

a dwarf in a bar in Tenerife, as notified to the narrator by International Distress

Coupon, and so on. And even if we could explain these elements separately in

symbolic terms, there seems little chance that such explanations would be

compatible with one another.

Postmodernism takes the subjective idealism of modernism to the point of solipsism, but

rejects the tragic and pessimistic elements in modernism in the apparent conclusion that if

one cannot prevent Rome burning then one might as well enjoy the fiddling that is left open

to one. A list of characteristics such as this has led some commentators to claim that certain
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much earlier works are postmodernist: the fiction of Franz Kafka, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger,

even Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. I should however say that I am unhappy with such

claims, as they obscure what I see as crucial differences between modernism and

postmodernism. It is also possible to argue that there are postmodernist elements in the work

of various post-structuralist and deconstructive critics such as Jacques Derrida, Michel

Foucault, and Jacques Lacan.

Postmodernism is characterized in many accounts by a more welcoming, celebrative

attitude towards the modern world. That this world is one of increasing fragmentation, of the

dominance of commercial pressures, and of human powerlessness in the face of a blind

technology, is not a point of dispute with modernism. But, whereas the major modernists

reacted with horror or despair to their perception of these facts, in one view of the issue it is

typical of postmodernism to react in a far more accepting manner. The extent to which

postmodernism is mimetic of recent and new social, economic, and political practices in the

societies in which it appears is a matter of som.e debate. Some have argued that the different

but uncommunicating worlds with which many a postmodern novel faces the reader, reflect

the fact that more and more people in the modern world live in self-contained ghettoes about

which outsiders know little or nothing.“ Others have suggested that perhaps they are

reflective only of the contemporary isolation of certain artists and intellectuals, who then

generalize their experiences and try to impose them on the rest of the world in their art.

In our third possible usage of the term there is also a perception that the world has

changed since the early years of this century. In the developed (‘late capitalist’) countries the

advances of the communications and electronics industries have (it is argued) revolutionized

human society. Instead of reacting to these changes in what is characterized as a Luddite

manner, the postmodernist may instead counsel celebration of the present: enjoyment of that

loss of artistic aura or ‘holiness’ which follows what Walter Benjamin (one of the most
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important theorists of modernism and to a certain extent also a prophet of postmodernism)

called ‘mechanical reproduction’. In common with some much earlier avant-gardists, many

postmodernists are fascinated with rather than repelled by technology, do not reject ‘the

popular’ or the commercial as beneath them, and are very much concerned with the

immediate effect of their works: publication is for them (allegedly) more a strategic act than a

bid for immortality.

The following writers and their works have been categorized as post¬ modernist: John

Barth, Richard Brautigan, Angela Carter, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, William

Burroughs, Walter Abish, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Salman Rushdie, Ronald Sukenick, and Jorge

Luis Borges. Finally, just to complicate matters even further, the term magic realism should

be recalled.