20 Questions, 20 Answers

How, on earth, could one encapsulate the Modernist movement within the word count necessary for this blog post? Perhaps, in keeping with the writings of Monroe K. Spears, Christopher Reed, and even Bonnie Kime Scott, I should conceptualize the period in certain binaries -- Futurist fascism vs. Bloomsbury bohemianism, revolt from the past vs. repugnance of the future, or even time vs. space! My usual envisioning of the Modernist prior to this week's reading material involved a hazy conjuring of Metropolis's skyscrapers and social upheavals, at once radically forward-looking and highly dated. This paradox arises from what all of the aforementioned scholars touch upon as this era's self-consciousness, a certain navel-gazing aesthetic as writers, artists, and scientists attempted to define their times. However, the most accurate picture of Modernism is one that supersedes such categories, and such postmodern cultural chauvinism, in favor of noting the era's enduring intersections and complexities in "spacetime" as a single unit: itself an inherently modernist paradigm.

It is difficult to completely dissociate Modernist concerns from that of their target of rebellion, the Victorians. Like their ideological parents, they too debated and grappled over issues such as "God's" or religion's death, its loss of centrality in the social sphere, evidenced by T.S. Eliot's apocalyptic poetry. Science and technology, glorified or villified, gave the Moderns a sense of what Spears dubs a "disconnect" and disorientation from traditional ways of the past. However, such traditional concepts of Modernist issues should not distract from concurrent concerns such as colonialism, women's roles, and domesticity usually placed in the context of much later "cultural criticism."

Indeed, while Modernism certainly occupies the earlier half of the twentieth century, it tends to blur at the boundaries, with Scott including the era of "decadence" from 1870-90 and with New Criticism occupying a privileged space in academic circles far beyond the mid-century mark. Certainly, the "War to End All Wars" and the Second World War that followed it were watersheds, the former heavily influencing Modernism and the latter ushering in its direct descendant, Postmodernity. The literature of the "Lost Generation" and simultaneous reactions to experimental political movements from Communism to Fascism exemplifies the era. In Britain itself, these sociopolitical upheavals combined with a self-image of the colonial, industrial power resulted in a multiplicity of literary forms and values, from individualistic stream-of consciousness writing in Virginia Woolf to masculinist emphases on the neoclassical and the abstract.

Therefore, it may be said that Modernism was characterized by an atmosphere ultimately not very different from our own: that of "culture war". While its right-wing Futurists, which favored social and domestic hierarchy, might have voted Republican prior to the Christian coalition, the GOP's current rejection of scientific and technological progress at the cost of traditional moral concerns (i.e., stem cell research or evolution) may have been anathema to them. Perhaps a tough-talking social liberal such as Guiliani may have carried some appeal. Obviously, it is tempting to perceive the feminist Woolf and her fellow Bloomsbury comrades as dead-ringers for Hillary (or even Kucinich!), yet much of their work, while not anti-ideological, can interestingly be characterized as anti-government. Reed depicts their work as the "celebration of the individual" instead of a "hierarchy of values," promoting "radical democracy," so it is possible that some members may have found a certain cache to Ron Paul.

Campaign fever nonwithstanding, this post has hopefully removed the stereotype of Modernism's "phallic verticality" (Thacker), the image of the linear, stark skyscraper as fully representative of the era, in my mind and others'. Yet, its juxtaposition with, say, a bohemian home and garden may give a general picture, or shall I say spatial incarnation, of Modernism's differing views of its own progress, goals, and potential.