MODERNISM AIM

Modernism s a cultural movement that developed during the first three decades of the twentieth century. It makes a cultural revolution aimed at subverting the traditional assumptions about human life and the universe. People lost all the traditional points of reference collapsed as a result of the studies of scholars like: Friedrick Nietzche whose famous metaphore “God is dead” very well synthesizes the absurdity of any metaphysical principle on which traditional western culture have based its reason of being. In addition Sigmund Freud in his Interpretation of Dreams showed how most of people behavious is determined not by his rational control but rather by his instincts that is the unconscious part of the mind over which human beings have no control. What’s more Carl Gustav Young also contributed studies about the way human unconscious works adding to Freud’s discovering a reflection on our racial memory, and it is exactly according to our rational memory that it respond to the different signs and situations existence brings us to face.

In 1910 A. Einstein in his theory of relativity demonstrates that space and time are no longer to be conceive  of a separate phenomena but the change according to the position of the viewer thus making the vision of reality relative, not definitely define. Besides all this implies there are as many realities as the number of viewers on it. It follows that the position of the human being must necessarily become the centered and the human being what so ever is and feels dis-placed and dis-located. Therefore it desperately needs to grasp to somebody or something which may compensate at least partly to the sense of void left by the collapse of certainties on which all traditional western culture was rooted.

Not even time could be conceived and perceived of according to traditional standards: in a linear way which implies conceiving of one’s life as a sequencing of events. Time is now a quasi-philosophical if not psychological concept disrupting linearity standards in favor of a simultaneous concept of time embodying all chronological times.  Now past and future are included in the present in one’s steam of consciousness. In a few words, according to Berson’s theory of time, the present results from our memories of the past and our future expectations,

All the considered one can easily understand the reason why QUEST is the key-word of Modernism.

Quest means a search for a meaning in existence. At the same time implying that Modernist thoughts steal looks forward some forms of meanings a possible order on which to organize one’s existence. No surprise than that even any kind of artistic production coincides with formal research.

And this explains also why Modernist art besides displaying its meta-artistic nature, is and has always been considered high and elitarian, addressed to a culture of few people thus creating a somehow cultural divide between popular culture and culture, that is high culture.

In literature this means Modernist production is really demanding for the reader: he is asked for a never ending cooperation with the text in order for the text to make sense. Modernism, better than any time, displays its intertextual nature seems writers, novelists, poets and play writers all the same were aware of the workings of intertextuality and of its potential.

In 1925 in an essay called “The Narrow Bridge of Modern Art”, Virginia Woolf have defined the novel “that cannibal, the novel, that will devour all other genres”: in her personal case, the genre to be mainly devour was poetry in that her fiction creates the same facts of poetry: it has got a rhythm its own.

Modernist fiction:

• Reduced plot to the minimal (storyline generally covers one day)
• Uses a third person omniscient narrator who even if apparently eclipsed, adopts the point of view of one or more characters in what goes under the name of shift of point of view.