Modernism in a Post Modernist's World

This semester, we studied Modernism. As a class we learned how artists and writers alike strove to break away from Realism and Romanticized literature. Authors like Henry James and to an extent Edith Wharton were painted over with the likes of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Ezra Pound. As the twentieth century opened into a sea of extravagance, war soon plagued Americans and left in its wake a new consciousness.

Exile, loss of innocence, greed, violence, movement. These are the ingredients needs to brew a decent Modernist tale. The chef better be an ex-patriot to boot. Maybe have settled down overseas, in a quiet apartment above a Parisian cafe or something of the sort. There needed to be a dissatisfaction with society; a true loss of center. Life was no longer about the pursuit of God. It became about the pursuit of self, explorations on the fringe of what always had been and what was to be.

Well here we are, nearly a century after Modernism first shook up the literary scene. Everyone write like Hemingway now. If there was before a loss of center there is now a loss of right and left as well. There is such motion in today's fiction. Look at Pulitzer Prize winning novels like The Known World and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Both are products of authors raised on modernist literature. Both are products of post-modernism. Both feature a flurry of characters whose lives intertwine like thread on some fated loom. Both search for morality and righteousness, whether it be on a Virginian plantation or a back alley in New Jersey; maybe a sugar cane field in the Dominican Republic.

The point is this: there is no point. Books today struggle to even compose a jacket summary. It is impossible to properly summarize contemporary fiction. The pallets are too large; the worlds too unknown. Sure, John Grisham still grounds us in romantic, structured stories. The loss of innocence, while great, is still abundant and apparent. Wars are commonplace, though. Economic collapses and death and destruction do not shake us up the way we used to. Everyone sounds like Hemingway because emotion has been removed from our perception of action.

That is one reason I love Kurt Vonnegut. He was a postmodern author who injected more feeling into his terse writing style than some might consider possible. He evoked emotion in the cruelty of war. Like Hemingway, he found himself a man without a country. He wrote about his dissatisfaction with war, violence, greed, tyranny, politics, and such. He would have fit right in with Fitzgerald and Stein, except for the fact that Vonnegut did not shy away from expressing the brunt of his emotions. Maybe that is the irony of his collective works, and their labeling as postmodern. He had a problem, and he let the reader know.

So where do we go now? We are already past post modernism, so do we circle back unwillingly into Realism. Do we recycle Henry James and Edith Wharton, Hemingway and Faulkner? Do we rest on our laurels? Or do we shake things up yet again? Do we take our humbling literary past and mold it into something new?

If the aim of modernism is constant motion, then what else is there left to do than move? Act, or be forever stamped as a thing of the past.

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House of the Setting Son

We never got around to reading Native Son by Richard Wright this semester. This truth saddens me. Native Son would have made for a wonderful class discussion. We could have analyzed Richard Wright's past, and how his contributions to the literary world greatly shaped not only the progression of African American literature, but race relations as a product of systematized segregation.

I first read Richard Wright's Native Son when I was fifteen years old. It was the longest novel I had ever read up to that point in time, and the one that had the most effect on me as a reader and human being. Wright introduces the reader to Bigger Thomas, a twenty year old African American living in poverty in Chicago. The novel takes place over the course of three books: Fear, Flight, and Fate. The novel essentially works as a representation of the social injustices facing African Americans, who under the weight and pressure of stereotypes and discrimination succumb to the anticipation of the unforgiving white world. As author Frantz Fanon states in 1952 essay, L'Experience Vecue du Noir, or "The Fact of Blackness","In the end," writes Fanon, "Bigger Thomas acts. To put an end to his tension, he acts, he responds to the world's anticipation."

A novel like Native Son does not fit in with what has historically been described as Modernist literature. The American Modernist movement began roughly in 1914, a few years before the onset of World War I. As David Harvey wrote in his book The Condition of Postmodernity that modernity "can have no respect even for its own past...” it must embrace a meaning collected and defined “within the maelstrom of change”.

Now if there is one motif that Native Son cannot escape; that is cannot run from it is the past. It may not respect its past, and may want nothing more than to break free of its chains, but Native Son is restricted metaphorically by its impossible detachment from all things already done. Bigger is limited in his choices, Wright wants the reader to understand, but it is not due to a lack of ability or initiative, but the free will strangling systematic oppression of the white world.

Here is an excerpt from the novel. "The moment a situation became so that it excited something in him, he rebelled. That was the way he lived; he passed his days trying to defeat or gratify powerful impulses in a world he feared". Bigger's fear keeps him in constant motion. It is a fear that is not often found in modernist texts. There is little extravagance, and Wright's writing lends itself towards more of a Realistic style. Some even argue that Wright's works are not a part of the Modernist canon. This debate, though valid, is a superfluous one if the reader is discern the themes of Wright's text.

Works Cited

Fanon, Frantz. "The Fact of Blackness." Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 2008. Print.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990.

Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005. 44. Print.

Jamaican History, Man

Claude McKay was born Festus Claudius McKay in James Hill, Clarendon, Jamaica in September 14, 1889. He was the youngest child in a well-to-do family. When he was seven years old, Claude was sent to live with his older brother, where he received an excellent education due in part to the variety of reading materials his brother had to offer, including British literature and science texts books. By age ten, Claude was an active reader with a vivid imagination, fueled by his studies in philosophy and literature.

In 1906, Claude went to work as the apprentice of a cabinet maker. There he met Walter Jekyll, a man who encouraged McKay to focus on his writing. Jekyll eventually assisted McKay in publishing his first book of poems, entitled Songs of Jamaica, in 1912. It was Jekyll's inspiration that led McKay to publish the verses in his native Caribbean dialect. It was the first published work that employed Patios, an English derived dialect shaped by African structure.

Later that year, McKay published Constab Ballads, based on his experiences as a Jamaican police officer. That was also the year he left Jamaica for the United States, where he began studying at the Tuskegee Institute. It was in the United States, South Carolina specifically, that McKay first experienced what he referred to as a "semi-military, machinelike existence." He was horrified by the school's segregation and racist tendencies. McKay promptly left South Caroline to study at Kansas State University, where he read W.E.B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folks, a book that greatly impacted McKay.

McKay left Kansas and moved to New York City, where in 1919 he got involved with The Liberator, a socialist publication that featured poetry, fiction, and heavy politics. It was in The Liberator that McKay published his most noteworthy and recognizable poem, If We Must Die.

McKay is considered Jamaica's Poet Laureate, due mainly to revolutionary works like "If We Must Die"

McKay was considered one of the preeminent figures of the Harlem Renaissance, a surge of African American artist, political and intellectual expression that began and New York City but affected people all over the world. McKay's works about his Jamaican homeland, words written and love and exile, were considered revolutionary. He advocated civil rights and equality, and his dedication led to the expansion and interest taken in the progression of African Americans.

It was McKay's Jamaican upbringing, stemming from the Caribbean ancestry and continued through his American education all the way to the Harlem Renaissance. McKay paved the way for many other artisans and intellectuals, as well as less capable African Americans to strive for education; to seek progress and equality. He was part of the New Negro Movement, and his contributions should be noted and appreciated.

Sometimes Less is Moore

Marianne Moore was born on November 15, 1887 in Kirkwood, Missouri. Before the onset of World War I, Moore traveled across Europe, adventures that fueled her desire to produce poetry and helped her establish friendships with other literary types, including Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams.

After twenty years of writing and advocating poetry, Moore was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1951 for Collected Poems. Moore was an avid believer in the rhythm and lyrical quality of poetry. She loathed poems that while written correctly, lacked creativity and heartfelt language. Leaning into nearly Surrealist tendencies of expression, Moore compares similarly to William Carlos Williams. Both were members of "The Others," a circle of poets founded by Alfred Kreymborg. This was where Williams, who spent some of this time writing while he visited New York City, was introduced to the Dadaist movement.

In a stance similar to Moore, Williams believed that traditional poetic techniques should be abandoned; that they limited the creativity and newness of a poem and was hindered by classical European idioms. Williams sought to Americanize poetry, and his most recognizable work, "The Red Wheelbarrow" exemplifies that raw Americana that he sought to produce.

Moore's work hints at a similar aim, as can be seen in an excerpt from "Poetry":

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads

in them, shall we have

it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand,

in defiance of their opinion –

the raw material of poetry in

all its rawness, and

that which is on the other hand,

genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

"Poetry" was originally published in Others: A Magazine of the New Verse, and actually appeared as the first poem in the final issue published. Other modernist poets, Williams included, participated in the magazine.

What I think ties Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams together is that while successful poets, both were something else. Poetry almost seemed like their natural expression to a deeper passion. It was to see the world, almost like an artist. As Bonnie Costello wrote for the Boston Review, "While T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were reading the classics, William Carlos Williams was looking at pictures. He was first a modernist, second a poet."

I would argue the same for Moore. As a reader you have to look at her poetry almost as though it is a work of art. The images come alive, and you are so engulfed in the emotion and expression of the piece. You don't just read what she or Williams write. You see it. You feel it.

Works Cited

Costello, Bonnie. "William Carlos Williams in a World of Painters." Boston Review June-July 1979. Web.

Moore, Marianne, and Grace Schulman. The Poems of Marianne Moore. New York: Penguin, 2005. Print.

Methods to Madness and Methods of Madness

Reading Gertrude Stein as a first time reader of her work made me feel nauseous. Not necessarily because her writing put a bad taste in my mouth; it was more so due to its simple complexity. Even now, days later I struggle to grasp exactly which straw Stein is describing.

Stein's influence is imprinted all over the modernist movement, and includes brushes (no pun intended) in art as well as literature. She opened a private art gallery with her brother, Leo Stein, that gained a huge following and even grander reputation. From 1903 to 1914, Stein featured many modernist art pieces. Through her efforts to be published, Stein met a woman named Mabel Dodge Luhan. She helped plan Stein's 1913 Avant Garde Art Exhibit, and was also a catalyst behind the publication of Stein's earlier works. In her book "Speculations, or Post-Impressionists in Prose", Luhan described Stein's work in far better fashion than I could nearly a century later.

"In Gertrude Stein's writing every word lives and, apart from concept, it is so exquisitely rhythmical and cadenced that if we read it aloud and receive it as pure sound, it is like a kind of sensuous music. Just as one may stop, for once, in a way, before a canvas of Picasso, and, letting one's reason sleep for an instant, may exclaim: "It is a fine pattern!" so, listening to Gertrude Steins' words and forgetting to try to understand what they mean, one submits to their gradual charm."

Stein also knew Picasso. Before he delved into Cubism, Picasso drew a portrait of Stein, whose Paris based salon housed some of the artist's early works and helped established the modernist art movement.

Stein even recounts the occasion in her work, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. She said, "Picasso had never had anybody pose for him since he was sixteen years old. He was then twenty-four and Gertrude had never thought of having her portrait painted, and they do not know either of them how it came about."

Published in 1914, Tender Buttons does much to solidify and advance the modernist movement in literature. It features the categories Objects, Food, and Room. Each is a decisively and deceivingly layered description in motion. It reads more like poetry, or song lyrics. Something intended for the ears but not necessarily the eyes. In the first section, Stein writes, "All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading." I for one have no idea what that means, but it is deep and far removed from the center; something I'm sure Stein desired to the extent that her work isolates the reader. It did to me, anyway.

Stein accomplished a lot as a an author and activist in the modernist movement. While Tender Buttons may not be every reader's cup of tea, her influence and style are still important

Works Cited

Luhan, Mabel. "Speculations, or Post-Impressionists in Prose." Arts and Decorations Mar. 1913. Web.

Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. London: Penguin, 2001. Print.

Stein, Gertrude. "Objects." Tender Buttons. S.l.]: Dodo, 2006. Print.

Do the White Thing

Sensory details are essential tools for any author hoping to effectively impact the reader. Blue can represent a sense of melancholy; green the greed of snide businessmen; red evokes passion or anger. Then there is white. The simplest color, I suppose, white is used primarily by authors to mark a sense of innocence, untainted. As such, color accounts for some of the richest description in Fitzgerald's work. This is especially true of The Great Gatsby, where the colors green, yellow, and white are constant reminders of the author's motive. Fitzgerald employed an array of colors that would both capture and ostracize the characters within their setting, creating a dramatic irony that is partially the reason The Great Gatsby is so highly regarded in the literary world.

Of all the colors in Fitzgerald's arsenal, white plays such a peculiar role. Its importance to understanding the symbolism and themes of the novel cannot be disregarded. Fitzgerald uses white as early as page thirteen, in describing Nick's first encounter with Jordan and Daisy. "They were both in white." It can be seen that Fitzgerald is trying to connect the color white to upper class socialites surrounding Nick on his trip to New York. White is especially close to the central characters of Nick, Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, the latter being Nick's second cousin and the apple of the Jay's eye.

For parts of the novel, white represents a sort of innocence and honesty. Nick considers himself to be the only honest person he knows, and is often seen wearing white, including the first part of Gatsby's which he attends. Daisy had a "white girlhood" and the windows to her house are white. Gatsby wears a white flannel suit in his first meeting with Daisy after five years of being apart. All of the characters are aware of the pure and honest vibe that the color white gives off, and so is Fitzgerald.

This is how color adds such depth to The Great Gatsby. The individuals wearing white (Gatsby, Jordan, Daisy) are all morally corrupt characters at times. Jordan cheats in the golf tournament; Daisy is having an affair; Gatsby has gained his extraordinary wealth through illegal means. So what the reader ends up with is the juxtaposition of who these characters are and who they are portraying. This plays very heavily into the world Fitzgerald is creating. It is a day and age where perception and image are worth more than actual character. White is acting like a barrier between the purity these characters seek to show others and the impurities of their lives.

It is not a particularly difficult way to add depth to a novel, but the benefits of using color in The Great Gatsby speak to the importance of sensory details. We see colors; we see characters. With first impressions we are only given the surface, and from its swirls of color must determine who a person is. To see Fitzgerald's morally bankrupt characters (with the rare exception of Nick) parading around is white speaks to the old adage that pictures really do speak a thousand words.

Works Cited

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, and Matthew J. Bruccoli. The Great Gatsby. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print.

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Verses of the Anti-poet

To be completely honest, I am struggling to decipher exactly what William Carlos Williams is struggling with as a writer. It seems the difficulty of his predicament is precisely because he is a poet not a writer—at least not according to Williams himself.

Williams takes on his literary critics in the first section of Spring and All, and how they consider his work to be “antipoetry.” “Is this what you call poetry? It is the very antithesis of poetry” (88). They believe that Williams has not suffered enough—a fitting answer to correlate with his lack of faith. “Jesus, how I love him…but he does not exist” (89). There is such a bravado, a confidence to William’s prose (if it can be called that; I’d opt to call it “prosetry”), especially in the first few pages of the handout that I cannot immediately recognize if Williams’ struggles are with poetry critics, his own demons, the world. He mentions being always on the search for “the beautiful illusion. Williams makes no illusions about how un-beautiful the world is today, going into our evolutionary tendencies to build and destroy. In those moments I cannot help but attribute some of that angst to the pure gloom and doom of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. Granted, Williams approaches the subject a little more tongue-in-cheek. “The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions, rises to drunken heights to destroy the world. Let it rage, let it kill” (90-91). This personification of imagination seems to be at the heart of William’s message, its inability to be deceived his claim to immortality.

Published in 1922, Spring and All marked Williams’ breakthrough as a writer. According to Neil Myers, “the book makes particularly explicit Williams’ fascination with forms of violence—age, inarticulate pain, frustration, exploitation, urban disintegration, death” (285). I think those sum up some of what Williams’ struggles with as a writer. He seems at once fascinated and terrified of the “terrific confusion” created by our cyclic existence. “Has life its tail in its mouth or its mouth in its tail?” (97). Williams’ takes solace in the imagination, finds hope in its freedom. Again, the parallels to Eliot are apparent and seemingly convincing, yet in Williams’ find somewhat of an optimist. Cynical and satirical as his prose may be at times, his trust in the imagination does not falter. It rings through; it screams from inside the delicate phrasings of his poetry—the towers of Williams’ soul that must be conquered if not succumbed to.

I believe that Williams’ battles the vagueness of high modernism with the structure of his poetry. As Myers’ attests, “it consists of consciously formal, almost geometrical arrangements of hard-edged things, but it is also full of powerful inward tension, of strongly contrasting elements put together in coherent, graceful patterns under great stress” (285). Williams’ was a product of his generation, and disenchantment with society seemed only natural, but Williams retains focus and a sharp mind, allowing his work to ascend the framework of any movement and carry forth infinitely.

Works Cited

Williams, William Carlos. Imaginations (A New Directions Paperbook). Grand Rapids: New Directions Corporation, 1970. pp. 80-100. Print.

Myers, Neil. William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All. Modern Language Quarterly. Duke University Press, 1965. pp. 285. http://mlq.dukejournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/26/2/285