
THE MODERNIST NOVEL IN THE USA. Francis Scott Fitzgerald Ernest Hemingway Djuna Barnes. Characteristics of the Modernist Novel. Experimental and innovatory in form Concerned with consciousness: introspection, analysis, reflection, reverie
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The modernist novelists in the USA unlike the novelists from the mid-nineteenth century inherited the rich legacy of writers such as N. Hawthorne, M. Twain and Henry James. Due to the firmly established position of literature as an occupation which was socially valued as any other kind of business and the emergence of the writer out of the “solitude” of a life hidden from the public denouncing the life of a “recluse”, images established in the popular imagination both by N. Hawthorne and Emily Dickinson, the writers from the 1920s broke onto a cultural scene much changed by possibilities that seemed infinite. Moreover, the writers from the “Lost Generation” of the 1920s had the example and the support of such prominent figures from the beginning of the century as GertrudeStein. Thus they were able to continue the development of certain specific writing techniques which would create a new type of a novel, the modernist one. Together with their European counterparts, both the expatriate American writers and the ones who chose to remain in America laid down the foundations of a modernist prose writing, which would rely on the power of the use of different “points of view”, of different centers of consciousness. They would explore to the full the possibilities for achieving multiple levels of representation, of endowing the plots and the characters with symbolic meanings that could open new ways of interpretation.
American Modernist NovelistsIn this novel he managed also to re-work the many literary models he had absorbed in writing that was both technically and thematically revolutionary. It was on a minor scale one of those literary works that reveals an age to itself, that has a visionary quality, that becomes more significant in its repercussions than it may be in itself. The stir that the book created had to do with Hemingway's conception of his world-weary expatriates as redefining heroism. To middle-class American readers, the book seemed shocking, its characters almost entirely 'lost'. It is one of the most visible modern novels and a testimony to several of the difficulties of modern literature, including its implicit elitism. It became a set piece of modernist art because it constitutes an almost perfect example of craft driving fragmentary scenes and provocative characters before it. Although it discloses the many ways in which the traditional principles of order and honour have disappeared from postwar life, and although it forces readers to confront disarray and ugliness, it also holds fast to the desire, the need, and the possibility of honour.
Hemingway’s BooksOne of her six watercolors illustrating chapters in Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
- Trimalchio or Trimalchio in West Egg
- On the Road to West Egg
- Gold-Hatted Gatsby
- The High-Bouncing Lover
- Dan Cody is a blend of Daniel Boone and William Cody (Buffalo Bill)
- Hopalong Cassidy
- James J. Hill
- Horatio Alger and Benjamin Franklin
- the opposition between East and West, between East Egg and West Egg
- the Valley of Ashes
Thus we can claim that in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald showed a certain cultural materialism (embodied in Tom Buchanan) exhausting a romantic energy (embodied in Gatsby) leaving us a physical residue (embodied by George and Myrtle Wilson and the Valley of Ashes). He also brilliantly showed how romantic expectation was connected with historical ideals always located in the past. With the ending Fitzgerald gives to his novel, he in fact makes it clearly question its own moral center by showing the mechanics of power at work exploiting the vacuum of an exhausted past. This is a political kind of representation that locates the novel itself squarely in history and allows insights into both the text and into American history. These are cultural insights from which we are deprived when the text is frozen at the level of rhetorical and tropological play.
Тhe Great Gatsby 1925- his fascination with the very rich as another aspect of the cultural materialism
- a poignant and devastating judgement of the irresponsibility and careless extravagance of the 1920s
The novel was rejected by American publishers, but finally accepted by Faber & Faber after T. S. Eliot’s recommendations. T. S. Eliot wrote about the book that it possessed "the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation, and a duality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.” The novel was admired by Joyce, and is seen by many of the critics as as important to the history of the 20th century novel as Finnegans Wake .", being at the same time much more readable.
Nightwood (1936)The criss-crossing of race and genderis very well exemplified in one of the stories Matthew O'Connor tells in order to entertain his audience. It is about Nikka the Nigger, the bear wrestler at the Cirque de Paris. O'Connor’s description of Nikka as being tattooed from head to the knees represents in fact the history of the racial construction performed by society. As Laura Winkiel has observed in her article “Circuses and Spectacles: Public Culture in Nightwood” (Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 21, Number 1):“The tattoos drive his audience to the realization of an entire set of cultural narratives that, taken one at a time, have been used to stereotype black men. The essentialized and condensed knowledge of race thereby opens into a multi-layered and contradictory range of meanings that anchors modern narratives of progress from primitive savage to civilized white man. “
When Nikka tattoos his penis "Desdemona," he makes ironic that process by which black men are categorized as primitive and excessively sexual. Nikka's tattoos combine pre-modern African culture with Western culture's myths about Africans so as to create a contradictory, hybrid subject. Nikka makes the two most prominent stereotypes about black men evident at once - his threatening sexuality and his docile servitude. Thus, he contradicts his assigned position as bearer, not maker, of meaning. His multi-layered, ironic use of history inserts ambivalence and uneasiness into the circus performance. This alternative history, as L. Winkiel argues, checks an easy optimism in modern progress which depends on positioning black peoples as primitive, ahistorical "others" against which to measure modern Western culture.
Nightwood (1936)