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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