Modern Age: The poetry and the technique

Materie:	Appunti
Categoria:	Letteratura Inglese
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Data:	24.05.2005
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Introduction
It’s possible to consider “disillusionment” and “anguish” as the key-words of the first half of the twentieth century. New and faster transportation and communication ways, the two atrocious World Wars with the final launch of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, together with the growing role of psychology, wiped away all the old Victorian certainties, that were replaced by a general and widely spread anxiety feeling. The old system of Victorian values and the unconditioned faith in progress due to the positivistic theories, at least had kept a sort of general optimism, which totally disappeared in the new century. A seemingly stable world order suddenly revealed itself to be exceedingly instable. Victorian “progress” in all fields, it now appeared, had been progress only in the direction of destruction of all those human values which it strongly promoted. A million British soldiers lost their lives in the World War I, and the old generation, which was supposed to have encouraged the war, started to be accused and considered guilty for the waste of thousands young British boy’s lives. This event put an end definitively to the long period of the Victorian complacency. The world seemed to have turned upside down. Above all, the War revealed a state of spiritual bankruptcy which for long had been latent, but which only after 1918 was exposed in all its nakedness. The old moral values (patriotism, courage) were dead, and there were no new ones to take their place. A whole civilization, and with it the ideals which that civilization had created, seemed to have been swept away by an inhuman world conflict.
Even science couldn’t help the population any more: it has provided certainties so far, but now, with the new and destabilizing theories by Sigmund Freud, the thought there could be something men can’t govern and dominate, as dreams, totally scared scientists and public panel. His theories deeply affected any kind of relationships, from the parents-children relation to the women-men one, even if women sustaining movement had started some years before. Moreover, Freud’s thought about the concept of “free associations” gave important hints to writer as James Joyce, who widely used this technique through works as “Ulysses” and “Dubliners”.
Even a theory which could be considered merely scientific, as Albert Einstein’s relativity theory, changed the idea of time and space as objective sizes: and together with the Quantum Mechanics and the new theories of language postulated by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein totally upset the whole scientific thought of the age. This scientific revolution brought to a general thought revolution, which expressed itself in art and literature as well, the former with the abolition of the phenomenal reproductions, the latter with the rediscovery and the exploration of memory.
Another important presence in the philosophic panorama is represented by Henri Bergson, whose distinction between the external, liner and measured in terms of the spatial distance travelled by a pendulum, historical time, and the internal, subjective, and measured by the relative emotional intensity of a moment, psychological time.

Historical situation
The social and political situation, after the death of the Queen Victoria, in 1901, is generally very complex. That’s to say, that the optimistic view was still an address for a whole country. The short reign of King Edward VII, lasted until 1910, at least pretended to be the continuation of the Victorian period. Even though it’s short, during this period many important events happened. Workers associated themselves in labor unions, as well as women did for the demand of vote right. In 1903, Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel established the Women’s Social and Political Union, claiming for the vote right. Several “suffragettes” (as they were called), chained themselves to railways, and strongly demanded for their rights. This movement spread itself worldwide, and the first country which gave the vote to women was Australia in 1903, followed by USA in 1920. In Great Britain women gained the vote right for all the 21 years over women in 1928, quite later than others, but quite before Italy.
Another important and dangerous for the political balance issue was the Irish Question. Ireland was totally part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, but the majority of its population was Catholic, and didn’t fit the English official religion, Anglicanism. Of course the Anglican side of Ireland wanted to rest part of The Kingdom, but Catholics asked for independence, and together with the World War I broke out a civil war as well.
During the World War I, England was part of the Triple Entente, together with France, Russia and the USA. It was the first war after Napoleon, and the country was not prepared to stand a so long lasting and atrocious war. Over a million British died, and in 1918 the Peace Treaty was signed by all the countries, including England and Italy.
The first Irish rebellion started on Easter Monday 1916, and ended with the proclamation of an Irish Republic. After the crushing of the rebellion, in 1918 the “Sinn Fein” party won the elections, conquering nearly all the seats in the Parliament, except in Ulster. The volunteers proclaimed another Irish Republic, then organized themselves in the IRA (Irish Republican Army), and started to get ready for the civil war, which, unavoidable, begun during Easter 1920. One year later, in 1921, the war ended with establishment of the Irish free state, as a dominion of the Empire, with a Parliament in Dublin, while the Ulster joined the United Kingdom with their own Parliament in Belfast. This separation caused many tragic events, as in 1970s and in 1980s. The official Irish Republic was proclaimed in 1949.
An important country in the Commonwealth, India, under the push of the non-violent movement lead by Ghandi, gained its independence in 1947.
The Great Depression made easier the growth of Nazis and Fascist political movements, and the natural conclusion of this taut period exploded in 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. The World War II had started. After the invasion of Denmark and Norway, English King appointed Prime Minister the conservative Winston Churchill, who let English resistance fight the enemies. Many events followed to each other: the attack on Pearl Harbour, the advance of Montgomery’s army in North Africa, the disastrous Russia campaign brought to “the end of the beginning” (Churchill’s own words), which paved the way to the final victory. In Europe the war ended with Hitler’s suicide, in the world with the launch of the atomic bomb on Japan.
The period between the two wars saw radical changes of the society: thanks to the birth control practise, families become smaller and women more independent.
Suburbs become more used as places to live: many workers left the “city”, the centre of the town to live and sleep in new council housing estates on the edge of towns. The industrial revolution, and the better life conditions, for employed people made necessary needs such as newspapers: there was a boom of the sales for any kind of newspapers: from the serious one, “The Daily Telegraph”, “The Times”, and new popular newspapers:” Daily News”, “Daily Chronicle” , “Daily Express” , “Daily Herald”. Also radio broadcasting developed itself between the two wars: in 1926 the British Broadcasting Company, better known as BBC, was established. An important role is represented by cars: a faster transportation way totally upset the relation space/time. But the train kept its supremacy on long journeys: British roads were totally inadequate.
The Twenties in America, the so called “Jazz Age”, were pretty good times. The USA went through a period of prosperity, the factories brought out goods as cars, refrigerators, stoves. The government encouraged private enterprises in business, but large areas in Midwest and in the South remained unspoilt by progress. This widely spread feeling of progress, brought to the segregation of ethnic minorities into city slums, such as Harlem in NY. Poverty is often strongly linked to alcoholism: to avoid this plague, the government introduced the politics of Prohibitionism, forbidding the production, manufacturing and use of alcohol. It was just too good to be true. Suddenly, on Thursday the 24th October 1929, the collapse of the American Stock Market came. It was the end of American prosperities, just the beginning of the Great Depression. It’s easy to imagine the consequences: thousands people ruined, closed factories, crashed banks. The just elected president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, promised to help the population with the so known “New Deal”, that wasn’t enough to bring USA back to its previous status. The World War II was necessary to give American factories a new and fresh impulse.
The “Jazz Age” deeply affected people’s behaviour , and created a new generation of writers, whose stories and style mirrored the transformations of the age.
The poetry
Even if the modern currents of thought in literature started many years before the World War I, this period is usually regarded as the starting line for the modern poetry. Even in Victorian Age a sort of sense of doubt was strongly present in anti-Victorian attitude, and this sense developed itself in a spirit of revolt and experimentation in all artistic fields. Main theme of literature became the alienation of modern man. The past was remoulded in an original way by writers and poets: the main writers of this age are W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot. and Ezra Pound, who invented a new movement, called “Imaginism”, in 1912, which let modern poetry official begin. New poetry had been also influenced by Baudleaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mal”, because many years before Freud, the symbolists explored the and sustained the importance of unconsciousness. But only in 1917 the new poetic theory had been definitely explained in the essay “Tradition and the individual talent”, where the author, T.S.Eliot, states that poetry should not be an expression of subjective emotions but an escape from it. Experience should be explored only by the poet, who reports his impressions on the paper with a language so rich and complex to create patterns of meaning not so easy to understand by a superficial reader, but which need a closer and more accurate analysis.
Another important side of modern poetry is represented by the novel: it’s about a genre which reflected the moral and psychological uncertainty of the age. The new role played by novelists consisted in mediating between the solid and unquestioned values of the past and confused present. Their attention, thanks to the new theories about space and time, was now directed to man, by their opinion a dramatically limited creature, whose moral progress was lower than his technological one.
To build a structure in novels, the author didn’t follow traditional patterns: they invented new ones, concerning to the new psychological theories, thus the structure has often no chronological order, because the dimensions of both present and past are meaningless in psychological terms. Of course the omniscient narrator is strongly rejected, because the point of view is located inside the character, who lets us understand him through an unstopped flow of thoughts, emotions, expressed by the new technique of the interior monologue, which mirrored quite exactly the mind’s activity. Favourite themes for this period were the relationship between love and loneliness, the quite total absence of communication among human beings . The most important writer of this period were Joseph Henry James, David Herbert Lawrence, Edward Morgan Foster and Francis Scott Fitzgerald.
Even if in the period between 1890 and 1920 British theatre was dominated by Shaw’s plays, a quite strong influence on it was represented by the Celtic revival, a movement strongly linked with the Irish Independent movement, which wonted to bring back to people’s attention Irish tradition, history and language. The main author of this movement is William Butler Yeats, who founded The Irish Literary Theatre In Dublin, settled in the Abbey Theatre, the most important playhouse downtown.
The technique
Of course such a huge complexity of emotion discovered and brought at light by Freud’s theory couldn’t be expressed by regular and traditional technique, and thus authors invented a new way to extern character’s feelings, emotions and thoughts. The main user of this technique was James Joyce, who widely exploited it in novels such as “Ulysses” and “Dubliners”. Interior monologue is a brand new technique, which couldn’t be compared to dramatic monologue and soliloquy: both these techniques respect a correct syntax and a regular form. The interior monologue, instead, follows only the storm of thoughts and feelings, representing quite exactly the situation of an active mind.
However, it’s necessary to distinguish four different kinds of interior monologue:
THE INDIRECT INTERIOR MONOLOGUE: the narrator keep a sort of control over character’s thoughts, and never let them explode, always maintaining a regular syntax, logical and grammatical organization.
THE INTERIOR MONOLOGUE: it’s characterized by two different levels of narration: one external to character’s mind, another internal.
THE FREE INTERIOR MONOLOGUE: character’s though flows totally free, without any external interruption.
THE EXTREME INTERIOR MONOLOGUE: it only follows character’s mind and thoughts, and often words are fused to each other to create new expressions.
AUTHORS
FRANCIS SCOTT FITZGERALD
Francis Scott Fitzgerald is the author of some novels and short stories which photographed an age, called the “Jazz Age”. He was born in 1886 in Minnesota, and graduated at the Princeton University, where he met and become friend with Edmund Wilson, who strongly influenced his thought. In 1917, during the World War I, he joined the army, and during a camp in Alabama he met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre , who was only eighteen. She is definitely the opposite of the emancipated and autonomous model of woman he often inserted in his works. During the war he started writing his first novel, which would have been published in 1920, The side of paradise. This novel made Fitzgerald as rich as famous, and he got married with Zelda in 1921. This autobiographic novel mirrored all the broken dreams of the Lost Generation. He settled in NY with his wife, and there they made such a glamorous life, spending lot of money for parties, alcohol and any kind of drugs. The beautiful and the damned (1922), his successive work, describes the anxiety and the dissolute life of a rich couple. Meanwhile, he become famous thanks to some short stories, which were collected in some volumes, among them Tales from the jazz age. In 1924 the Fitzgeralds moved to the French Riviera, and one year later Francis published the book now considered his best work: The Great Gatsby, whose leitmotiv is the obsessive search for success and the break of the American dream. This work hadn’t had a warm welcome, and the lack of money contributed to increase author’s decline. He got back to the USA in 1931. Become an alcholist, due to the mental suffering of his wife, he published the novel Tender is the night (1934)such a confession of his life with Zelda, which was coolly received, probably because the Grate Depression had changed public’s taste. He went to Hollywood to work as a writer of scripts for films; here he died in 1941, depressed, thinking him a failure, for a heart attack.
In his main work , The Great Gatsby, he inserts many insights into criticism of American life in the Jazz Age. The main character, Jay Gatsby, is a mysterious, immensely rich man, a person without a face, without a background, without a history. He has created himself out of nothing, in order to win back Daisy, a girl he had formerly loved who had left him to marry a rich man. He is killed after a tragic accident. For what it concern the narration, a character, Nick Carraway, is at the same time observer and part of the story. He tells the story without a chronological order, looking back at the past with a better understanding. Thus, Gatsby’s personality is told trough the footsteps of Nick’s own experience. The whole story is represented through brilliant colours, smells and sights, with a frequent appeals to the senses, joined to poetical devices such as repetition, smile and metaphor. Even if Gatsby’s personality is not explicit described, a strong symbolism and realism concern the whole language. The description of the Jazz Age is so detailed that lets the reader imagine exactly the setting, but only dream about the characters. Gatsby’s house is very well descry-bed, and is such a big villa to celebrate his success when is full of peo-ple for one of his lavish party, but also to symbolize his loneliness and solitude when empty.
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