• Over the past 100 years or so, our society has been changing in many drastic and also in many subtle and complicated ways. Modern writers may be said to be those writers who display an imaginative awareness of the stress of social change. Two basic themes of modern literature have been those of ‘isolation’ and of ‘relationship’ within what has been considered a decaying moral order.
• Thinking about the life and literature of even the fairly recent past helps us to find our bearings in the present. The later years of the nineteenth century saw the almost final breakdown, in the limited areas in which it still survived, of a pre-industrial way of life and economy. The resulting ethic of competition reduced man to the level of economic man, one whose community relationships were at the mercy of the cash-nexus, and whose psychological motivations were thought of mostly in terms of self-interest (Marxist philosophy).
• What we call modernity in literature has common characteristics in all countries. Paradoxically enough one of the main marks of a ‘modernism’ in literature is often a lively imaginative interest in the past for its own sake, a new romantic interest in history. Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott is on the surface a fairy-tale with an Arthurian setting; more deeply, it is a parable about the thwarting and killing effect of the indirect relationship of the artist to reality.
• The 17th-century Italian scholar Vico thought that God made nature, but man made history, and history was therefore the more proper human study. He fascinated Yeats and Joyce because of his insistence that the earliest and most primitive force in history is the imagination; the language of poetry, of myth, is much older than the language of law and reason and debate. He fascinated them also because, like Nietzsche much nearer their own time, he saw history as a cycle. It was in the nature of human society to go through a certain number of definite stages, and then to collapse, and start again at its beginnings in primitive awe; so in Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake the opening page begins in the middle of a sentence and the beginning of the sentence is the last thing in the book. One could turn back from the beginning to the end, and go on forever, which is what history does. A cyclical theory of history is, obviously, accepted largely for emotional reasons; because it seems to promise earthly immortality, and because it offers an escape from complete moral relativism.
• Perhaps the modern poet who has thought most deeply about history, and yet who has not been contented either with a cyclical theory or a theory of immanentistic optimism—a divine spirit, or reason, working irresistibly forward in history—is T. S. Eliot. For Eliot, there is a huge gap between the High God and His world. The world is a fallen world, man is a fallen creature. Most change is of the nature of decay. Eliot likes to think of time timelessly; and for him the meaning of history is to be found not in history, but outside it, in man’s relation to God, and God’s relation to man.
• The early 19th-century Danish philosopher, Kierkegaard, insisted that ours is not a world of tendencies and ideas, but of men, each of whom is a mystery both in and to himself. Hence Kierkegaard is thought of as the first existentialist. For him the most important thing in life was man’s relationship to God. Reason could not prove either God’s existence or his goodness. Faith was a leap in the dark to which men were driven by awe and dread and anxiety. History is in a sense irrelevant. Some of Kierkegaard’s later successors, for instance the French philosopher, novelist and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre, are not men of religious belief but atheists; but the dread, awe, and anxiety with which they regard what appears to be the unnecessary and arbitrary intrusion of human consciousness into the world—man, ‘a useless passion’—makes them as eager as Kierkegaard to insist on the unique significance of every individual human life. For them, if there is no God, it is man who must choose; and in each choice I make I stand for mankind. And this is a heavy burden.
• The reaction of the post-WWI world was to suspect too easily all manifestations of authority. The twenties was the era of ‘revolt’ against signs of the assertive will. The temper of the age was anti-heroic. There is an increasing tendency, in the inter-war years, for the hero in novels to be a person to whom things happen, rather than someone who to any extent imposes his will on life.
• Thus, the sense of history in modern literature has a wide
diversity
of forms, it has produced both its own mystique and a reaction against
that mystique: but it is a vital element, and can be a source of
moral strength.