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Complete notes on North American literature III
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Complete notes divided by subjects of North American literature III
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UNIT 5: MODERNIST FICTION ANDSOUTHERN INSIGHT: LITERATURE,
NATURALISM, AND
ANTHROPOLOGY
WILLIAM FAULKNER’S
EXPERIMENTAL WORLD
We are talking about the fiction which flourished in the modernist period . If modernist
poetry is, to a large extent, metaphysical, the novel – although also experimental — is
still preoccupied with more earthly matters. Like James’s “The Art of Fiction” and the
new psychological novel, we can also see in Faulkner a combination of a heterodiegetic
narrator with a sustained internal focalizer. Also the representation guided by the
mind and conscience of a character.
Many American modernist poets showed an early concern about the ways to
understand a chaotic and quickly changing world. They were the vanguard of
Modernism. Meanwhile, American modernist fiction writers are more preoccupied
with daily matters and problems, frequently mixing new techniques to represent life
from the single perspective of the narrator or the main character (psychological
realism, remember James). In addition, their fictional representations of life were often
influenced by a naturalist approach.
Language is a tricky thing which cannot tell the truth about life, meaning is lost. A
modernist obsession with epistemological issue (perception and language).
THEMES:
- Dislocation and victimization: this was the most powerful force shaping the novel of
this period. Some of the most important figures were in the 1st World War.
- Persistence of discrimination: not only of black people but of leftist people (with
social ideas, connected with Marxism).
- Fascination with the past and primitive models: sociology, anthropology …
- Attitude towards women in society: during the War most of the men were far away
fighting, and women had a prominent public role as they had a space of them outside
the home. After the war is over, the women are pushed back to the domestic row as
men are back. A period of backlash for women, feminist movement, breakdown of
,women roles in the family, negative treatment of women (because women as a whole
were leaving up the expectations from the past).
- Repressive atmosphere about sexuality: some writers will dare to deal with sex in
their works (e.g. Faulkner). This is because of the Freudian impact and his ideas about
sexual repression and sexual artistry.
- Autobiographical tendency of the American novel: the character is the focus.
- Popular culture: everything starts to perpetuate, culture has not any walls,
connection between high and low culture.. the distinction of both will be dismantled in
Postmodernism.
- Alienation: a sense of isolation, being. Separated from everything. Basically because
of industrialization, and also the sense of dehumanization.
TRENDS (1920S AND 1930S)
1) THE VERY YOUNG AND VANITY FAIR: concerns little expenders, Great Gatsby. A
generation of writers of the 20s, very young and precautious, knowledge (they have
general access to education) and cynicism. They have not experienced the 1stWW.
They are interested in living in the oppressing, pedantic, interested in culture. Vanity
Fair, talked about topics of interests for the writers (evangelism, censorship, vulgarity
of the US spenders …) mostly criticizing them.
“We studied Freud, argued Jung, checked our dreams by Havelock Ellis, and toyed
lightly with Adler. And all these authorities warned us of the danger in repressing our
normal instincts and desires... Nature, and war, and prohibition, and feminism, and
psychoanalysis and new fashions in dress; a tottering religion, imitation of our elders,
automobiles, radios, and free money, the industrial era and a new physical education
– these forces have had their hand in baking the pie out of which ... has sprung the
younger generation of today.”
The most famous writers to analyze and write about this generation was Scott
Fitzgerald. (The Great Gatsby, 1925). Criticism of money and the American Dream,
superficiality and cynicism of its members...
2) FORMS OF TRADITIONALISM – THE NEW HUMANISTS AND THE AGRARIANS: There
have become new imperialist ways, the present was very important. The persistence of
the past, especially for the motive of the Golden Age (it has already passed but it has
to be remembered). Tradition meant different things for different people, for some
people it was synonym of Puritanism (rejected). For some people science and
technology were good as they improved lives but for others were evil as they
destroyed the good morals and everything. There was a debate between
AGRARIANISM (land, stability, past) and INDUSTRIALISM (future, progress, change).
,The new humanists and the agrarians were artists and intellectuals which had one
thing in common, searched in the past answers for the present questions in order to
solve them.
THE NEW HUMANIST: were concerned with the American culture in its past. They felt
that industrial change was the cause of contemporary chaos and they longed for the
past Golden Age which was pre-industrial. They argued that Puritanism denied
everything for men and women, and criticized it as it was connected with capitalism (if
you are rich and successful is because you are the chosen one). The new humanists did
not like those view, they appreciated the revaluation of the classical values, and the
main center was the man, a humanist ideal of cultural and political decorum. For them,
the humanist personality was a complete human being, someone that valued the
moral values and standards. The main representative of the trend was Irving Babbitt
(but also Pound and Eliot).
THE AGRARIANS AND THE SOUTHERN PAST : a group of intellectual writers (not many),
and they believed in the union of the economic and the moral. They rebelled against
the ideology of the Northern states, and they were concerned with the situation of the
South. They give importance on the myth, tradition and the land. So they rejected
industrialism, were there was only war and destruction. All the negative things of the
land are caused by industrialism. Land is a property which has to pass from generation
to generation, a process. In short, there is a dichotomy between the North and South.
In the North they focused on people and in the South they focused on the land. They
founded the group in 1922 in Tennessee. They wrote an Agrarian Manifesto in 1923.
They were self-convicted experimentalists.
“The writing of the Agrarians was almost entirely retrospective, though at times ... it
became vindictive and argumentative. The past as an ideal, and idealized, unit of
experience both remembered and imagined was the primary image it contributed to
traditionalism in the 1920s. Like the Humanist past it was contrasted once and again
with the ugly ‘present.’ Unlike the Humanist past, it was composed of objects rather
than texts, myths rather than philosophical disquisition, specific metaphors rather
than reiterated generalizations.” (p. 181)
3) EXPERIMENTAL FICTION. : Following and mixing previous poetic and critical trends
the new writers of fiction become open experimentalists. Persistent influence of
Naturalism. Influence of William James, Henri Bergson, psychoanalysis, relativity
theory, T. S. Eliot. William James end this notion of the time by the stream of
consciousness (the imaginative thoughts do not have commas or dots, there is no
order in the mind), the technique to represent it, is interior monologue (a technique
very important in modernist fiction).
, Henri Bergson, he put the idea that there is external time (clock-time) but there is also
an internal time (has to do with the individual sense of the passing of time).
Appreciation of time by the individual. It influences the way time is represented in
works.
Psychoanalysis: interpretation of dreams, symbolism. Influence of Freud, Jung and
other psychologists in the interpretation of dreams and human reiterative symbols,
notions of the Oedipus Complex, the Electra Complex, obsessive symbols, etc.
Relativity theory: it is about an individual act of observation is going to be different
from another act of observation. It has to do with light; you can only see things in a
way, not in two ways. All about subjectivity, there is no objectivity.
The influence of The Waste Land is already obvious in modernist fiction, as you saw in
The Great Gatsby and can easily trace in The Sound and The Fury.
Persistent influence of Naturalism. It offers a pessimistic determinist perspective.
Determinism is the other of free-will (we think we are free but in fact not). Social
forces whose result is not leaving individuals to behave in a personal way. The power
of the environment and the social forces.
Some formal strategies that gain a lot of importance in this period are: 1) narrative
voice: in experimental fiction perception is incoherent, fragmentary. Narrators are
limited, fallible and unreliable, it all depends on the eyes of the person, subjectivity
(there is no objective way of thinking), events are significant as they are filtered
through the voice of the narrator, what is important is how the characters perceive
and experience those events, information is always filtered by the voice of the
narrator. Another feature is that interior monologue is very much seen; it is a
technique to represent in writing the stream of consciousness and explore the
unconscious part of the mind. There are multiple narrators who see the action; 2)
focalization: the focalizer is subjective, we often find shifts of focalization where we
can get lost as the focalizer change rapidly from one character to the next (different
focal characters);
3) Time: the notion of time as a linear continuum, as a continuation of an event after
another is completely disregarded. Time is understood as relative and subjective. It
involves personal perception; 4) plot: many fiction texts of the period lack openings
and endings, there is lack of closure (at the end of the story, the questions that the
reader has are answered, but it does not happen). There is fragmentation and
disorganization; 5) techniques: events are positioned in different points by means of
juxtaposition or synchronicity.
Other aspects of US modernist experimental fiction:
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