THE MODERN AGE 1890 - 1930

In the early 20th century many Victorian doubts and fears about society and man's place in the Universe were confirmed and many optimistic hopes were disappointed.

By 1890 modernization had been so successful in countries such as France, Germany, Japan and the United States that international competition for raw material markets and the control of trade routes made conflicts seem inevitable sooner or later. An atmosphere of tension which had not existed in the earlier days of British supremacy was visible and obliged the different European nations to make defensive alliances for when decisive moment finally came. It came in 1914 with the First World War: a turning point in the history of the world. It shocked a whole generation, making many lose their faith in liberal democracy, capitalism and the Victorian idea of progress. Science and industry had not produced a better world, they had only brutalized men and made their powers of deconstruction greater. The war seemed to destroy European self-confidence. It marked the beginning of the end of European domination of the world: after 1920 the U.S.A and Russia replaced France and Britain as the two great powers and American capital began to replace British capital as the dominant force in many developing countries.

Economic depression in the 1870's and 1880's had caused serious unemployment among the working class and shown that "laissez-fair" would not necessarily produce benefits for everyone or serve the public good. As a result of this and the consequent pressure for changes of the working class, governments accepted that state must exercise some control of the economy and accept some responsibilities in  looking after its poorer citizens. This policy laid the basis of the modern Welfare State by introducing national insurance for old-age pensions, unemployment pay and medical treatment.

Some elements in the working class parties of Europe believed that it was time to take advantage of the crisis which capitalism was experiencing and do what Marx had suggested in The Communist Manifesto of 1848: to take power away from the middle classes by revolution and establish a fully socialist society. An example came in 1917 when Lenin and the Bolshevik party took control of the Russian state in the name of the Russian working class and invited the working classes of the other countries to follow their lead. Bolshevik influence was great in Germany and France and somehow also in Britain. Moreover Marxism offered an optimistic secure view of the future to a generation which had lost faith I the traditional virtues of liberalism and democracy.

The most profound fear that had afflicted the Victorians, however, was neither political nor social in nature; it was religious. They were afraid that man was only a superior animal, isolated in an indifferent mechanical universe, living a life without a meaning and without God.

People living at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, even those who considered themselves Christian , experienced this sense of man's isolation, of his spiritual vulnerability in a world which did not seem to obey any divine principles or to be part of any divine plan. For this reason many felt that the system of belief and morality which were associated with traditional religion could no longer be valid either. The only sure point of reference that any individual had was himself, either in a limited personal relationship with God or alone. It was for him to decide what was right and and wrong and to act accordingly.

This doubt and insecurity, this sense of isolation, is clear in the works of writers of the period, but it produced different responses in different cases. T. Hardy and J. Conrad for example, were both pessimists. They believed in cultivating a stoical dignity and accepting what heppened in one's life as well as possible. It was precisely this attitude, Conrad found, that a ship's captain needed to make his command affective. V. Woolf, D. H. Lowrence and E. M. Forster, on the other end found in personal relation ship and human core a substitute for the divine love which man had lost. Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton and T. S. Eliot decided to ignore their rational doubts and became Christians. G. B. Show and H. G. Wells found purpose and direction in trying to improve society and dedicated themselves to social reform.

There was no set of values, either social or personal to qhich writers could confidently refer to and sure they were valid for everyone, consequently they left their characters to speak for themselves, to present their own version of reality, without interviewing to offer the reader an alternative point of view. In effect, the 20ieth century novelist disappeared from his own work. Moral criticism and humanous observation on the part of the another, are completely absent in the novels of Joyce, V. Woolf and D. H. Lawrence.

It was not only morality and social philosophy, however, which had become relative. Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics - the very basis of traditional science - were shown to rest on false assumptions.

In 1906 Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity said that space and time did not exist as separate, absolute phenomena, but changed according to the point of view of the observer. The French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941) and the American philosopher William James (1842 - 1910) also rejected conventional ideas of time. They argued that it is an illusion to think of time as an independent medium which contains events in a certain sequence.

Past and future (as a memory and anticipation) exist together with the present in people's mind. People, in fact, are simply a sum of their past experiences and future expectations. Their past and future fuse together, run into one another in what Bergson described as a "stream of consciousness". This stream is what constitutes a person 's mind and determines his thinking. Although the national part of the mind tries organize and discipline this stream, the stream itself is not rational; it flours at a semiconscious level, with far greater speed and subtley than the rational part of the mind is capable of the importance of the irrational indetermining people's actions was understood the Viennese psychologist Sigmud Freud (1856-1939). In the interpretation of Dreams (1900), he argued that people's behaviour defends very largely on the unconscious part of their minds: they are motivated by their instincts and controlled by their social condition (the Super-Ego). This leaves little place for the conscious "Ego" and, consequently, for man's power of reason.

By 1910 Freud's views had become widely accepted and they made it difficult to see man in the traditional way, as a responsible creature taking decisious for himself with free will.

The importance of a primitive element in human psycology was also apparent in the work of another psychologist, Carl Jung (1875-1961). In the Psychologist of the Unconscious (1916), Jung argued that a basic element of man's unconscious mind was formed by his racial memory, that is the primitive memory preserved by each individual of the experience of his race during its evolution.

It operated on a symbolic level, which meant that certain figures or objects in the ordinary world had great symbolic power and that people responded to them without realieing it. Only the psychologist, or perhaps the poet, discover these hidden, symbolic meanings and understand their importance. This is what the French Symbolist poets, particularly Mallarmé, writing at the end of the 19th century, had tried to do giving mystical significance to their impressions of the assewed world, the world of the senses and using language which spoke to the irrational  mother than the rational in the reader. It was the aim of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats too, not only in his poetry but also in the elaborate prose work.

A Vision in which he formulated a complete symbolical system.

The Symbolist poets influenced the writers of the Aesthatic Movement. Their influence is also apparent in the work of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, two American poets who came to England, in 1907 and 1914 rispectively, and there produced poetry which broke completely with the Victorian tradiotion. English poetry at the end of the 19th century was still under the shadow of Tennyson and the earlier Romantics. It was sentimental, elegiac and often pastoral, as the poems of Thomas Hardy show. This did not mean that poets simply copied those who had come before them. Indeed, in the years before the First World War (called the Georgian Period after George V, who became king in 1910), the poet Edward Thomas (1878-1917), Walter De La Mavre (1873-1956) and A. E. Haussmann (1859-1936) all produced original verse. But this verse like that of the Aesteies before them, made no serious attempt to come to terms with the spiritual anguish of the moderne world. It expressed instead a regut for a world which would not return. Infact the lyrical tradition these poets represented, with its concentration on the sentiments and impressions of the poet, and it rejection of critical reason, had not got the means to meet this difficult challenge. A new poetry was necessary and it was T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and in a different way W. B. Yeats, who produced it. This development began in England with the critical writings of T. E. Hulme. In his essay, which appeared between 1909 and 1915, Hulme condemned the Romantic idea that art was only a matter of self-expression on the part of the artist: he believed it should be impersonal in the way that Neo-Classicism had been. He wanted writers to return to a Pre - Romantic idea of man, the one of Pope's Essay on Man (1733). This recognised man's limitations and did not exaggerate him importance; in a similar way Neo - Classical verse was always controlled, with emotion dominated by critical reason. Hulme summarized many of his ideas in Romanticism and Classicism , written in 1919 but not published until 1927.

Hulme's theories had great effect on a whole generation of poets, but it is in the work of T. S. Eliot that they find their most important expression. Eliot was also influenced by Pound, who had been in England for several years before Eliot arrived and who had helped found the Imaginist Movement. The Imaginists wanted poetic language to be dry and hard, with clear and precise images. They rejected the soft, pastoral nature of Georgian verse, which they considered escapist, and tried to produce poetry which reflected the cold, mechanical reality of the modern world.

Both Eliot and Pound had little sympathy for (pag. 8) popular taste. What they wrote was not intelligible or attractive for the majority of people; it was indeed deliberately difficult and obscure, being full of literary references beyond the education of most readers. Pound, in particular, considered contemporary society and its art degenerate, and he was not prepared to compromise his own ideas to suit other people. He was not alone in all this, both W. B. Yeats and D. H. Hulme were desperately looking for a new order that they felt Western society so desperately needed.

New Dramatic Novel

Here, such as in drama, the author is always there, but he is invisible, characters tell and represents the story. The story is self-told. The scene substitutes the old novel. The author is hidden or doesn't appear. The analysis is transferred  from the novel to the reader. The reader has the task  to discover the meaning the judgment is left to him. With the author escaping from the novel, of his absence of comments, judgments and interference, ambiguity and uncertainty permeate the novel. The new novel, as a consequence, does not bring about moral  convictions or security of his predecessors. Aesthetic values hose  taken the place of moral values in modern novelists. (James - Conrad).

With H. James the main characteristics of modern prose is evident: the author turns inside people's consciences to explore the flus of his mental experience: the  - called stream of consciousness. The interior monologue appears  where there is no perception for logical connection, deep thoughts, the one nearest to the unconscious and expressed sensations take the place of thoughts and what the author is looking for is the possibility to render them vividly leaving aside his comments. The reader, instead of studying the characters from a high position invited to listen to one of them, to identify with him. The reader must not only reconstruct the characters, but discover his identity , too.

Old and New Novel

It is commonly accepted by now to distinguish between old novel and new novel whereas the structure former was essentially narrative and the one of the latter essentially dramatic.

Old novel:

It's mostly a narrative structure. The narrator is omniscient and alternates summaries of previous events, personal commentaries, scenes, characters' description, conversation, reported conversations, conclusions and précis. The proportion in which the author conlims all the elements determines the time, the pace around which the whole novel is organized. The summary is quick the scene has a normal lasting, the comment creates a stay in a movement. If we had to compare it to the world of cinema we could create this sort of analogy: summary = panoramic vision, description = close up (1° piano); scene= sonorous (close up).

In the old novel (Fielding), J. Austen, W. Scott, C. Bronte, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope )                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    the story is told  by an omniscient narrator, always present and visible both in 3rd person and in 1st person narrations and where most of the times the protagonist speaks with the same voice of the author. ( De  Foe  à Mall Flanders )

Eliot's mythical method

Eliot sees myth and ritual (the use of anthropological material) as a potential means of ordering and transforming into significance contemporary experience. Their technical function seems to have been even more important do him than their symbolic meaning .

By November  1923, after The Waste Land's publication Eliot is ever more explicit about this problem. The very title of his review in "The Dial" of Joyce's Ulysses make the point - Ulysses, Order and Myth. He sets out to answer the challenge of readers who, in terms used by many early readers of The Waste Land, saw Ulysses as "an imitation to chaos; an expression of feelings which are perverse, partial and a distortion of reality". Eliot, in answer to this, calls the work classical and complains that that people have underestimated the importance of the Odyssey parallel as a structural device "In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him".

Then comes the famous remark which sounds so like a comment on his own The Waste Land:

"It is simply a way of controlling and ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history".

Eliot's own technique for presenting, the "immense panorama" is different from Joyce's . by compression and allusion he condenses it where Joyce expands the moment almost to infinitude, but both resort to a black-cloth of mythology to hold their material in share.

Eliot's objective correlative 

A now famous Term used by T. S. Eliot in an essay on Hamlet (1919). The relevant passage is: "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked". Eliot goes on to suggest that in Lady Macbeth's sleep walking speech and in the speech that Macbeth makes when he hears of his wife's death, the words are completely adequate to the state of mind; whereas in Hamlet the prince is "dominated by a state of mind which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear". These observations have provoked a good deal of debate.

In other terms a successful artistic creation requires an exquisite balance between, and coalescence of form and matter. If the matter (thought, feeling, action) is "too much", ("in excess of") the form (in this case words) we have a discrepancy, strain, a lack of unity (that is insufficient correlation; they don't "fadge"). Vice versa, another kind of discrepancy and strain: the experience is overwhelmed by the words. Colloquially we say "I was speechless", "it was indescribable". In other words we have not found the "formula". In reverse, lacking the "formula" again we over-describe, say too much.

Anthropology

J. Fraser's The Golden Bough: an anthropological research.

The book entitled The Golden Bough by J. G Fraser (1854-1941), the first edition of which appeared in 1890, was indicative of the new interest in mythology and pre-history which arose, in one way, out of the symbolist movement, and in another, from the theories of Darwin. If art were an instinctual thing, if, that is to say, the sources of art lay in the "unconscious", which can be a collective unconscious as well as a personal one, then it followed that in writing or painting we follow a set patterns of behavior and use ancient symbols without being aware consciously of what we are doing or why we are doing it. Fraser discussed in his work the ancient myth of the Grail, which had such an important part in the Athenian cycle - well - known to the Victorian public from Tennyson's Idylls of the King; he also discussed primeval customs, fertility rites, etc. Fraser was above all interested in the man beneath the surface of so - called "civilization"; he wrote that he wished to investigate the "solid layer of savageny beneath the crust of society" and that "we seem to more on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below".

Jesse L. Weston ‘s Throw Ritual to Romance

She posits a complex synthesis both historical and geographical behind the 12th century - medieval Grail legends. Her mayor claimis that "in the Grail King we have a romantic literary version of that abrange mysterious figure whose presence hovers in the shadowy background of the history of our Aryan races the figure of a divine or semi- divine ruler at one God and King, upon whose life, and unimpaired vitality, the existence of his lard and people directly depend."

What the Thunder Said

What the Thunder Said is the final section of the Waste Land. The feeling of desperate searching rises to fever-pitch, and the total absence of punctuation, with the repetitiveness, contributes to the sense of lurching hopelessly forward in a waterless waste. A calm descends with the appearance of the headed, sexless figure, who mysteriously changes position, however. Sometimes he is walking with them, and sometimes he is ahead of them, he may be companion, guide or menace. In the greater quiet of the rhythm, there is, nevertheless, a tense hate of hidden tenor, conveyed by the repetition of the question. The seekers are now approaching the Chapel Perilious, the place where the Holy Grail was housed. They enter a nightmare world of horrors and dangers which they must surmount to achieve their aim. Again, in Eliot's symbolism, these falling cities and dangers and visions represent the devastated, nightmare-haunted spirit of man, as arid and empty as the "empty cisterns and exhausted wells".

The Chapel is mined and empty, signifying that the quest has been in vain; man has not found what he needs to make his life whole and save again. A cock crows on the roof of the Chapel, perhaps signifying daybreak when evil spirits traditionally have to return to hell, perhaps a reference to Peter's betrayal of Christ in the Gospels. Although lightening flashes and the wind is damp, the longed-for rain does not come. It will come, says the thunder, when man has learnt "Datta", that is "live" and "Dayadhiam", that is "sympathise": man must come out of the prison of his egoism and treat his fellows with compassion.

The third message "Damyata" means "control": man must act with "control" and must accept authority. Then, as the boat responds to "the hand expert", the heart will be obedient and gay in its responses. The end of the poem adds to these Sanskrit words a series of allusions and quotations taken from different languages, symbolizing the essential unity of mankind. The final Sanskrit words foretell that if man can obey what the thunder says, "Peace which passeth understanding", the world will be saved.

Eliot said that three themes have been used on the 1st part of this section: the journey to Emmaus of two disciples to whom the resurrected Christ adds without being recognized by them. (Luke, 24, 13-31), the approaching to the Chapel Perilious, final part of the Holy Grail search and Eastern Europe's decadence. à Impersonality in Art

Eliot shared with Joyce the view that the poet should be detached; indeed his central purpose can be described as a search for "impersonality" as he himself called it in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919). Detachment is the counterpoise to his deep sense of unreality, or equivocal reality, in personal emotions. In the essay he maintains the idea that an order constituted by all past works of art, the tradition, creates the total meaning of a modern work of art. The new work of art, however, modifies the tradition from which it derives its meaning.

What the Thunder said (331 - 355)

1.Read the extract and mark the point where the poet starts imagining a possible alternative to the desolate land he has in front of his eyes.

Line 346

2.What aspects of the landscape are described between lines 331-345 and how many times are they repeated?

Water:it is repeated five times and it is always preceded by a negative (no,without);

rock: it is repeated five times (twice at the end of a line, once at the beginning);

road: it is repeated twice;

mountains: it is repeated five times.

3.What is the meaning of the water symbolism in the extract?

Water is repeated four times with the positive connotation of a life - giving presence.

Rock is repeated four times and it is either preceded by a negative or put close to water.

(spring, pool, sound of water, hersut thrush, pine - trees).

4.Compare the aspects of the two landscapes.

The two elements that appear both in the first and in the second landscape are rock and water.

5.Comment on the sound quality of the words "?"

rock: it is a monosyllabic word which has a somewhat harsh and abbrupt sound. The sound K has a hard quality which echoes the theme of barreness the craggy up and down of the gound.

Wo: to: it has a more melodian sound. The sound "w" is mellifluous. The smooth sound of the word echoes the sweetness of the imagined landscape.

6.Note down the denotation and the connotation of water.

Denotation: water (the meaning you can find on a dictionary)

Connotations: - Biblical connotations: the Lord brought water out of the rock of flint (=pietra,roccia) during the journey to the Promised Land, baptism, purification

• - Pural connotations: fertility, green pastures, etc.

7.What is the meaning of the water symbolism in the extract.

The water symbolism is centred around the concept of what saves and rescues, gives life, purifies.

8.Consider the language. Which words in the text would have regarded as conventionally unpoetic?

Sweat, carious, spit, sneer, snail.

9.Look at the metre and rhythm of the extract. Is it written in regular metre?

There is no regular metre but the iambic pentameter is lunking in the background.

Can it be split into egular stanzas? No,it cannot.

How do the rhythm and the layout suit the images presented? The rhythm is monotonous and weary in the first part while it is more lively and melodious in the second part.