SYNTHESIS OF MODERNISM (II)

[Lesson of the 17.11.2009]

Modernism is a cultural movement spread in Europe into the three first decades of the XX Century.

It rejected the Victorian idea of art, that in such period should be useful and teach morality, because modern art should focused its attention only on form.

Writers and artists tried to produce something stylistically perfect because man was living a period of crisis in which he was alone and himself is the only, sure point of reference in his life.

In the Victorian Age the society was based on a religious code of values in which humankind was the best representation of God's perfect creation.

Darwin's theory of the natural selection (1890) changed the rule of man and his position in the universe. The consequence of this theory, stating that man is the monkey's evolution and that there is nothing of religious in the world creation, was the crumble of western society.

Considering also Nice's motto "God is dead", It's easy to argue that man had no faith in God.

The idea of space and time changed because of Einstein's Theory of Relativity (1906) and Henri Bergson consideration of time.

Einstein proved that space and time are not separate and that they change according with the point of view of the observer. Bergson believed that past and future (as memory and anticipation) exist together with the present in people's mind.

In addition to the social, philosophical and scientific reasons of the crisis there are also economical and political ones. By an economical point of view, modernism is the result of industrialization; it produced richness without progress: people was exploited as workers into factories and their life didn't become better.

As a regard the European situation, Great Britain and France, far-back the world powers, was substituted by U.S.A and Russia.

The consequences of all this changes are visible in Literature. As a matter of fact writers use the narrative techniques of the shift of the point of view or the stream of consciousness and they set their story in a day, a week or few days, without giving judgements.

The shift of the point of view involved the characters monologue: the author enters into the characters mind and tells all their thoughts. The stream of consciousness is the same but there is no author, only the ideas without connections.

To enter into the characters mind is the way by which is possible to tell all his life in a day: because in his mind there are present, past and future.

Moreover, the reason why there is no author in text is the consequence of the reference system's lack. Man was disorientated, so it's not present in his works because he was unsure.