MODERNISM and J. Joyce's DUBLINERS

The modern age developed from 1890 to 1930s in countries such as Japan, France, Germany and in the United State. During the period considered the international competition for markets and the control of trade routes made conflict inevitable, indeed in 1914 there was the I World War that is the reason why lots of people lost his faith in liberal democracy (previously discussed by Toynbee) capitalism and the Victorian idea of progress. So, the ideas of Positivism created by Puritanism stopped to be actual.

Moreover in the 1870s and in the 1880s there was an economic depression after a period of economic growth that was the Industrial Revolution. 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. The economic depression led to an agrarian crisis and an industrial one, it caused unemployment among the working class and all that showed the principles of laissez faire had not produced benefits for everyone.

Some people believed that it was the time to realize what Marx had suggested in his Communist Manifesto of 1848 that is to say, to take power from middle classes and established a fully socialist society. An example can be the figure of Lenin who in 1917 took control of the Russian state with the Bolshevik party.

All the previous events caused a crisis of the traditional values, also due to the new scientific discoveries. For example in 1906 A. Einstein elaborated the theory of relativity in which he stated that time and space do not exist as an absolute phaenomena but change according to the point of view of the observer.

In addition Freud introduced in his Interpretation of dreams(1900) the concept of the unconscious that influences our behaviors and after a few years Nietzsche stated that God is dead, so marking the death of metaphysic.

As a consequence, people were afraid to live a life without a meaning and without God. People experienced a sense of isolation and of spiritual vulnerability, in a world which did not seem to obey any divine principle. The only point of reference they had was themselves.

So, all the previous features were transferred in the arts of Modernism, and showed a strong attention to form, to how objects were represented.

Considering what concerns literature, in this period there was an increasing interest of linguistic and of materialist semiotics.

The first is the study of human language, while the second  studies the way sign systems and socioeconomic system influences each other.

The presence of such studies can be explained as an attempt to study what is real, what is concrete. Indeed, after Nietzsche’s statement, metaphysics lost importance and the scientific and humanistic studies focused their attention on what is real, on reality in men’s life. An example can be Valentin Voloshinov, who in his study of language saw signs as the sites where subjects and objects meet, the sign is the place where the social world and the psyche(consciousness and the subjective) intersect.

So, every study focused its own attention on form, and tried to explain how a thing works.

For example in arts, there was the attempt to portray the pure element of color and for example, to portray some landscapes in different moments of the day. (en plain aire)

Returning to literature, the narrator is always there but it is invisible, the characters tell and represent the story. So, the story is self-told. The narrator is hidden or does not appear. Therefore, with the eclipse of the narrator, the novel is permeated by a sense of uncertainty. For example, considering H. James’ novels, the narrator is hidden behind characters in order to show the flux of mental experiences, what Bergson described as “stream of consciousness”.

Another example of modern literature is J.Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) in particular “The Dead”. Indeed, there’s not the presence of a narrator and the story is developed trough Conroy’s insecurities. Along the stories, J.Joyce tries to reveal Conroy’s feelings his mental flux of experience. The whole narrative is self – told, and it seems as if characters made the story. In other words “the Dead” seems an attempt to investigate the story itself, the way the story works.

In conclusion you can say that J. Joyce’s Dubliners is the archetype of Modernism since it focus its attention on form, the way the narrative developed, leaving every form of metaphysics.