4 The social cultural Background

Dr. Sruti Ramachandran

The Background: Decadence in Literature

The late nineteenth century was a period of tremendous change as political empires broke up, nationalism arose, the power of the middle class replaced that of the aristocracy, and colonialism flourished.

Literature emerged as the artistic medium that best expressed the social, economic, and philosophical concerns of the day, moving away from the issues and styles associated with Romanticism earlier in the century.

The Decadent movement was a late 19th-century artistic and literary movement of Western Europe that thoroughly reflects the period. It was a cultural attitude manifested in the late nineteenth century, containing two primary features: (1) a belief that certainty in knowledge, science, morality, and society was gone, which demanded a new attitude in life and art to compensate for the loss of certainty, an attitude that privileged sensations, impressions, epiphanies over systematic theorizing; and (2) that art and morality were distinct realms. Art was completely autonomous, free of ethical boundaries.

“Decline is also a form of voluptuousness, just like growth. Autumn is just as sensual as springtime. There is as much greatness in dying as in procreation.” These lines by the French poet, Iwan Goll can be said to lie at the heart of the decadent movement. The word ‘Decadence’, literally means a process of ‘falling away’ or decline. In relation to art and literature, it signalled a set of interlinked qualities. These included the notion of intense refinement; the valuing of artificiality over nature; a position of ennui or boredom rather than of moral earnestness or the valuing of hard work; an interest in perversity and paradox, and in transgressive modes of sexuality.

It alarmed those who valued ‘traditional’ norms and values. It seemed to signify a society and culture threatened to its core with decline and decay. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental. Rejecting these concepts was among many of the cultural forces that drove literary modernism.

The leading figures associated with the Decadent movement were Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Charles Baudelaire. For the most part, they were influenced by the tradition of Gothic novels and by the poetry and fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, and were associated with Symbolism and/or Aestheticism.

One of the most important explicators of decadence was the poet Arthur Symons, whose essay ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ (1893), described decadence as “a new and beautiful and interesting disease”. For Symons – as well as for others who were critical rather than intrigued and entranced – decadence was the literature of a modern society grown over- luxurious and sophisticated.

The experimentalism, creative energy and commitment to thinking against the grain that characterised aestheticism and decadence did much to prepare the ground for the Modernist period, which was beginning to gather its own distinctive powers after the turn of the century.

Being Modern

The term ‘modern’ in literary and literary critical terms relates to, or is characteristic of contemporary styles or schools of art, literature, music, etc, especially those of an experimental kind.

Being Modern

Modernism, in the arts, is a radical break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression. Modernism fostered a period of experimentation in the arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly in the years following World War I. The term modernism is widely used to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts, and styles of literature and the other arts in the early decades of the twentieth century, but especially after World War I. The specific features signified by ‘modernism’ vary with the user, but many critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with some of the traditional bases not only of Western art, but of Western culture in general. T.J. Clark in his book Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism says the social reality of the sign (away from the comforts of narrative and illusionism, was the claim); but equally it dreamed of turning the sign back to a bedrock of World/Nature/Sensation/Subjectivity which the to and fro of capitalism had all but destroyed.” Modernism is a recent period of Western or World Civilization; modernity or modernization is a historical process rather than a period. Modernization or modernity is ongoing since emergence of humanism and modern science in Classical Greece, or at least since the Renaissance.

Modernist is an artist who makes a deliberate break with previous styles. A modernist can be one who is associated with modernism, especially in the arts. In an era characterized by industrialization, rapid social change, and advances in science and the social sciences (e.g., Freudian theory), Modernists felt a growing alienation incompatible with Victorian morality, optimism, and convention. New ideas in psychology, philosophy, and political theory kindled a search for new modes of expression. Literary historians locate the beginning of the modernist revolt as far back as the 1890s, but most agree that what is called high modernism, marked by an unexampled scope and rapidity of change, came after the First World War.

Modernity is a loosely defined concept delineating a number of societal, economic and ideological features that contrast with “pre-modern” times or societies. Like Romanticism, Modernism mixes revolutionary and reactionary elements. Among Modernism’s most controversial legacies is a divorce or schism between high art in perpetual revolution from established forms appealing to an elite audience, and low or popular art appealing to base instincts and non-discriminating tastes. Peter Watson in A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind: A History says “One of the many innovations of modernism was the new demands it placed on the audience. Music, painting, literature, even architecture, would never again be quite so ‘easy’ as they had been.”

Modernism: The Painterly Origins

Historian William Everdell opines that Modernism in painting began in 1885–86 with Seurat’s Divisionism, the “dots” used to paint “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”. On the other hand, visual art critic Clement Greenberg wrote, “What can be safely called Modernism emerged in the middle of the last century—and rather locally, in France, with Baudelaire in literature and Manet in painting.” Impressionism, a school of painting developed in France initially focused on work done, not in studios, but outdoors (en plein air). Impressionist paintings demonstrated that human beings do not see objects, but instead see light itself. The school gathered adherents despite internal divisions among its leading practitioners, and became increasingly influential. Initially rejected from the most important commercial show of the time, the government-sponsored Paris Salon the Impressionists organized yearly group exhibitions in commercial venues during the 1870s and 1880s, timing them to coincide with the official Salon. A significant event of 1863 was the Salon des Refusés, created by Emperor Napoleon III to display all of the paintings rejected by the Paris Salon. While most were in standard styles, but by inferior artists, the work of Manet attracted tremendous attention, and opened commercial doors to the movement. In the first decade of the 20th century, young painters such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse shocked the viewers with their rejection of traditional perspective as the means of structuring paintings, though the impressionist Monet had already been innovative in his use of perspective. In 1907, as Picasso was painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Oskar Kokoschka was writing Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderer, Hope of Women), the first Expressionist play (1909), and Arnold Schoenberg was composing his String Quartet No.2 in F-sharp minor (1908), his first composition without a tonal centre.

The Modernism that manifested itself in paintings, later inspired literature. The painting “Starry Night” by Van Gogh (1889) and Anne Sexton’s poem of the same name published in 1961 is one such example. Van Gogh’s painting conveys both a sense of furious motion and an atmosphere of serenity: stars radiate in a turbulent sky, yet the town below, whose existence Sexton negates in the first line, appears calm and empty. Sexton, who committed suicide in 1974, longs for the oblivion of death, as if death were but to disappear “into that rushing beast of night / sucked up by that great green dragon”. The poem is not so much a howl of pain, but rather an urgent expression of an all-consuming desire – the irrepressible desire to be overpowered by a force greater than oneself. Sylvia Plath’s poem The Disquieting Muses (1957) was inspired by De Chirico’s painting (1918). The unsettling mood of De Chirico’s painting is not only matched but heightened in Sylvia Plath’s disturbing poem in which she imagines her childhood self haunted by three faceless muses, who recall the Three Fates of classical mythology, as well as other trios of sinister women from myth and literature. With their terrifying blank faces, they “stand vigil” over her, their strange figures, like de Chirico’s painting, casting their long shadows “in the setting sun / That never brightens or goes down”. X.J Kennedy’s inspiration for Nude Descending a Staircase (1961) was a painting by Duchamp in 1912. Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” was shown at the famous 1913 Armory Show in New York, where it naturally caused a stir. X.J. Kennedy captures the figure’s unthinking, mechanistic movement – “A constant thresh of thigh on thigh.” Another such poem inspired from a painting is Cézanne’s Ports (1950) by Allen Ginsberg. Cézanne painted around 20 views of L’Estaque, a fishing village just west of Marseille. These show the change of seasons and the shifting patterns of light at different times of day. However, the artist strove to achieve a sense of timeless monumentality that he felt was missing from the work of the Impressionists. Allen Ginsberg looks beyond what he believes the painting merely describes and toward a transcendent reality that “doesn’t occur on the canvas”. Beyond the bay, and away from the foreground where we find “time and life / swept in a race”, is, he says “Heaven and Eternity”.

Socio-cultural Backdrop: Twentieth Century Literature

At the onset of the twentieth century, England’s secure imperial structure begins to shatter and decolonization was the result. India’s independence from the British in 1947 was the most obvious sign that the massive imperial structure, at the centre of which it stood, was irreversibly dismantling itself. The processes of decolonization and the events of two great World Wars together created a foggy air on the economic welfare of the nation. The contemporary cultural artefacts mirrored the social events at the time.

The period was completely overshadowed by the two World Wars: the after-effects of the first and the forebodings of the second. The post first war period was an era of depression and of want and unemployment. After the first World War, the League of Nations, an international organisation, was set up with a view to establishing world peace. But the ideals behind this organisation could not materialise. When the second World War broke out, it was far more catastrophic than the first, because in this conflict not only the military forces but the civilian population were intimately involved. By the end of the War in September 1945, England had suffered not only the loss of hundreds of thousands of young men but the devastation of wide areas in London and elsewhere and staggering blows to its economic system and financial resources. Sir Winston Churchill described the great War and its effects on England in the six volumes of The Second World War between 1948-53. A large number of anti-war books were written during and after the two World Wars. C.E Montagu’s Disenchantment (1922) and Fiery Particles (1923) and Rough Justice (1926), Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero (1929), and Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928), and the poems of Wilfred Owen and Sassoon expose the futility and hollowness of war.

The Age of Interrogation and Anxiety

The twentieth century can be called the age of Interrogation and Anxiety because the scientific revolution and changing social, moral, political and economic conditions shook man’s faith in the authority of religion and church and the established order. He did not accept anything unless it is tested on the touchstone of reason. The persistent mood of interrogation and reason increased disproportionately in want of a new set of values. With faith shaken, modern man was without the structure that solaced him for so long in his journey in the civilized world. The challenge to faith is one of the key characteristics in modern literature. One critical aspect of modern literature in English is that it is characterized by a process of cross-fertilization of ideas, images, symbols and experiences. Individuality and the narration of subjectivity constitute for the modern writer a major preoccupation.

The modern condition also drew on the experiences of ideologies that were organized as responses to the changing times. The Symbolist attitude or the philosophic inclinations of Nietzsche, for instance, were the new modes now available to the writers. It is in such a context that the ‘modern’ acquired a tradition of its own – it was part of an ethos that owed to conventions and practices of the past, some of which were radicalized to conform to the innovative worldviews of the modern artists. New psychological researches influenced literature. Freud put great emphasis on the power of the unconscious to affect conduct. Intellectual convictions appeared to be rationalizations of emotional needs. The new theories of psychology and sex gave rise to the stream of consciousness novel. D.H Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and many others were influenced by new researches in these fields.

Human life in the 20th century differed markedly from that of 19th century as a result of revolutions in industry, science and technology. As a result, literature sought new ways of expressions and style. The Modern movement, almost seen as being synonymous with the advent of the twentieth century actually goes back to the last decades of the nineteenth century when the foundations of high Victorian culture were facing serious threats from various agencies. As a cultural phenomenon, Modernism saw the departure from pre- existing modes of aesthetic engagement for reasons that were not just confined to the sphere of art. The twentieth century saw a host of material benefits available to man – luxury items, proto mass culture, popular culture like cinema, and unprecedented comfort in basic living conditions. Technological advancements made it possible for man to experience modernity, an experience that further contested the foundations of faith already battered by the onslaught of Darwinism. Technological changes improved labour productivity, wages and also life expectancy. The advance of technology was directly underpinned by factors such as the expansion of higher education, the spread of Research and the advancement in scientific knowledge .

The rapid industrial expansion during the later years of the nineteenth century led to the final disintegration of a pre-industrial way of life and economy and agricultural depression. The landed aristocracy and agricultural labourer were in great trouble. Young villagers began to migrate to industrial towns and there was complete breakup of rural way of life. The disintegration of the village community and its profound human implications have been expressed in the writings of Hardy, Jefferies, Edward Thomas and others. Literature became urbane. Marxism was the most powerful influence. Various manifestations of socialism- Fabian socialism, Christian socialism, Marxist materialism, etc came into existence and influenced the authors of this period.

The first two decades of the twentieth century were indeed great years for art. The change of outlook in the beginning of the twentieth century was due to the growth of a restless desire to probe and question. The changes in the cultural matrices also formed an important part of the modern experience. The modern experience was thus a combined coming of responses to the ‘new’ – in culture, society, science and technology.

James McFarlane analyses the situation of the period thus:

Appreciably, the dimensions of time and space had begun to alter. As communications improved, distances shrank. As the more hectic rhythms of urban living imposed themselves over wider areas of society, events moved faster and the whole tempo of life quickened. The chance of casual international encounter (like colliding atoms in conditions of rising temperature) was greatly increased, and with it the rapidity with which ideas and opinions were exchanged across national frontiers. (Bradbury and McFarlane 78).

The intellectual world was being redefined by the new theories in humanities, especially in philosophy, many of them finding in literature wonderful sites for orientation. William James’ ideas about the movement of time (enumerated in his Principles of Psychology, 1890) were adapted to re-programme the format of fiction and ‘stream of consciousness’ novel became a novelty that played with structural possibilities of the genre, and it took the cue from the experience of epiphany that fixated moments in an otherwise rapidly moving modern world. Time, instead of being just a mode of thematic traffic in narratives, came to constitute a concern for the modern writer by itself. The modern writer’s experiments with the stable ideas of the nineteenth century continued with the toying around with the forms of creation they dabbled in – fragmentation and dissolution of the fixed entities became common. The fragmentation could be manifested in different ways; it could be the Cubist response to the routines of verisimilitude or the chaotic reorganization of the material evident in surrealism. Ideologies were announced and in fact there was a celebration in the departures that each movement made, whether it was the short-lived Imagism in poetry or the reorientation of speed and modern technology in the manifesto of Futurism. Dadaism and Surrealism were denials of the conventional idea of civilizational progress.

The sense of community that so evocatively defined the sense of the worlds of Thomas Hardy or Charles Dickens was no longer part of the modern writer’s repertoire of dominant themes. With the changes in living standards and the transformation of everyday life, there was also a corresponding change in the way the artists responded to them; in many cases, the manifestation was structured in the manner of an angst and a violation of orderly conduct. Instead being a reflection of a universal tendency or pattern, the modern artist’s exploration of the experience of modernity became an extremely individual and isolated experience.

With new theories of human existence arriving one after another, it became very difficult for the modern individual to ignore stress and anxiety, which were defining features in the work of many modern writers. Since the influences from various quarters and agencies were confronting man with such rapidity, it was inevitable that the responses to such stimuli were not coordinated to present a unified face. The multiplicity of movements and the variety of individual responses testify this characteristic of modern literature. The avant–garde became one of the norms in a culture where it was impossible to accept the tradition of the past in its received forms. Within a very short period, the modern condition came to present a tradition of its own, which in spite of being eclectic and multifarious, seemed to celebrate such diversity as an inevitable necessity.

Avant- Garde

The avant-garde is a search for a style, a mode of enquiry that seeks to engage alternative structures in lieu of the ones available that is why the modern artist is always in search of a paradigm that would refer to the experience of modernity – the process of such an engagement, however, is not easily accessible as it is a process that reworks the resources without referring to an already existing framework. The innovative features of many of the modern movements thus owe this tendency to the acknowledgement that all experiences cannot conform to familiar structures. One way of approaching the innovations attempted in the modern age is to see the age as one of crisis, for the newness that is so often associated with the modern is also a sign of insecurity. However, the modern tradition of the early twentieth century was, thus not universalized as some kind of a credo, but amalgamated to demonstrate the functioning of the complexities of the modern condition.

It may be argued that the modern moment in English fiction was brought about by the writings of Joseph Conrad, especially his Lord Jim (1900) and Heart of Darkness (1902). The possibilities suggested by Conrad were taken further by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Joyce’s novel has become a cult text of modern literature. All the writers of fiction in the modern age did not necessarily offer radical revisions of the narrative mode. D. H. Lawrence relied more on the thematic evocation of the modern experience rather than narrative jugglery to further his thesis of modernity.

The advent of the twentieth century saw interesting explorations in the field of poetry, which were further quickened by developments in the contemporary world. The first major change came in the writing of the group known as the War poets, whose compositions reflect their responses to the experiences of war. The First World War was a major political as well as a cultural event that demanded immediate responses from the poets. These war poets used the experience of battle to situate and depict conditions of reality. They include Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen. Eliot developed the urbane culture, which forms such an integral part of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ further in his classic The Waste Land where he presents the angst, corruption, and materialism of modernist society within the frame of a quest that draws on various cultural structures. The Thirties’ Poets which include W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis swerved towards political ideologies. This group is placed midway between the new voices of the post-War literary scene and the Eliot led brand of high Modernist poetics.

As far as drama is concerned, Henrik Ibsen is often regarded as the first modernist in the history of European theatre, which is conflated with his placement as a pioneer in terms of the development of realist theatre also. G. B. Shaw inherited the Ibsenite model and exploited the resources of such theatrical conditioning in his dramatic experiments. Modern British drama was characterized by the appearance of certain movements that attended to demands of specific cultural structures, the two most remarkable examples of such forays being the developments in the Irish theatre and the revival of poetic drama. The notable trend that arrived dramatically on the English theatrical scene after the Second World War was the absurdist experiment initiated by Samuel Beckett.

Beyond the traditional cultural artefacts like poetry, drama and fiction, pop music emerged as a major cultural medium in the twentieth century. The Beatles, a popular album released in 1968 is associated with ‘youth culture’ and in many ways their work represented the changing climate and the mood of the period. British cinema and television also vividly mirrored the contemporary events. Radio brought literature into the home in the form of broadcast stories, plays and literary discussions. Also, film techniques were the basis of a number of experiments in the novel.

The growth and development of literature is inevitably influenced and conditioned by the mental and moral climate of the period in which it is produced. The invention of locomotive and telegraph, rapid and cheap intercommunication resulted in an intellectual revolution. Printing was multiplied and cheapened. Literacy was no more confined to a cultured minority. As a result of better printing facilities, cheap editions of both classics and modern books were easily available. The improved organization of public libraries, circulating libraries and book clubs made literature accessible to the common public. In short the World Wars, mass commercial leisure, democracy, the welfare state, the economic depression of the 1930s, the post war economic boom, decolonization, women’s rights, sexual freedom and consumerism all together formed the cultural and social background of the 20th century.

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Reference

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Mathew, Abraham. Movements in English Literature. New Delhi: Cyber Tech, 2011. Print. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty Four. New Delhi: Penguin, 2004. Print.
Poplawski, Paul. Ed. English Literature in Context. New Delhi: CUP, 2008. Print.