Originality in Modernism and Postmodernism - Essay Example

[Teacher 14 March Originality in Modernism and Postmodernism: Creative or Incomprehensible? Most artists struggle with the problem of originality. Often it seems that everything one can do in any art form has already been done, and every story has already been told in one form or another. Some artists go further and further afield in their quests for originality and uniqueness, and sometimes the results of these attempts are not great art, but utter nonsense. This is as true of modernist and postmodernist literature as any other form of art. Often, attempting to be original in these schools of literature just results in a sacrifice in meaning and coherence, and ultimately comes at the expense of the reader. In this essay I wish to argue that originality is simply another literary convention which modern writers have now become fixated with. In attempts to produce the most unanticipated and rare piece of work, meaning and coherence become compromised. To show this I will look at T.S. Eliots The Waste Land, John Barths Lost in the Funhouse, and John Bergers G: A Novel. In the modernist poem The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot attempts to break every possible rule of poetic structure, by alternately mixing multiple types of structures and abandoning any type of structure at all. He adds in near-random quotes from various religious texts and literary sources and switches into German and a few other languages at certain points in the text. The five sections tell seemingly unrelated stories about characters who have nothing to do with one another. The reader is supposed to get the overall sense of futility in modern life. As Vicki Mahaffey puts it, it “takes place in a shared cultural nightmare” (135), a devastated Europe in the wake of the First World War. If the point of the poem is simply to convey a feeling of futility and nihilism, it does that very well. However, any larger plot is lost on readers. For the most part, the work comes off as being nonsensical. Many scholars would argue that great art is not necessarily the same as art that is accessible to the masses. In fact, these same critics might argue that literature with popular appeal is rarely great art (Gans 35). These critics may not necessarily be wrong, but there is a difference between a writer avoiding dumbing down his work just to make it marketable, and making it so incomprehensible that almost no one can understand or enjoy it. Eliot’s experimental format in this poem is a form of elitism so pure that the work is only truly accessible to the author. The Waste Land is heavily laden with symbolism, as if the author would rather communicate his meaning in images than in words, but being a writer, had only words available to him. Each individual event in the work is not part of any real plot, but rather a symbol for something else. The Waste Land has no plot to speak of, but only a series of disjointed images and mythological and literary references. Absolutely nothing can be taken at face value, and everything must be analyzed as having a deeper meaning. While symbolism and layered meanings are not a bad thing in literature, writing a work that forces the reader to plow through line after line of nothing but hidden meanings with little payoff seems like an exercise in intellectual self-gratification. It’s almost as if the work was deliberately designed not to be enjoyable, as if the audience must suffer in order to gain understanding of the themes Eliot was trying to convey. According to Mahaffey, “high” modernist literature is supposed to give the reader a transcendent experience through pure sensory information, rather than limiting the reader through the use of such tyrannical devices as narrative and plot. “What used to be dismissed as insignificant details emerged—through synecdoche—as essential indices to the richness of a complex, dynamic, sensual whole, as art attempted to offer a more comprehensive experience than a mere narrative slice” (Mahaffey 5). In this, many of the most experimental works of modernist literature have failed, as they give the reader only some vague feelings, while that “mere narrative slice,” if skillfully written, tells a whole story, complete with a plot as well as emotion, symbolism, and sensory detail. Not only do such attempts at complete originality ultimately confound and alienate the reader; after a certain number of attempts, subsequent modernist and postmodernist works cease to be original. By the time John Barth wrote Lost in the Funhouse, he was retreading old ground already mapped by Eliot. Instead of a poem, Lost in the Funhouse takes the form of a collection of short stories that are ostensibly linked, and that are intended to give deep insights into the process of writing and the meaning of character, author, and reader. While The Waste Land is a modernist work, and Lost in the Funhouse is firmly categorized as a postmodernist work, both works follow the same literary tradition. Despite the fact that the postmodernists intended to react against modernism and everything it stood for, many of the same literary devices, such as disjointed imagery, lack of a discernable plot, and heavy-handed symbolism, are employed by the authors. Both Barth and Eliot eschew traditional narrative structure in favor of “experimental” forms. However, by the mid-to-late twentieth century, the form is no longer really all that experimental. By the time of Barth’s writing, the far-reaching attempt at originality has become a literary convention in itself. Barth, like Eliot, seems dissatisfied with words alone as a means of communicating his point. He includes instructions for the activity of cutting out part of the book and creating a mobius strip, a surface which goes on continuously with no end and no beginning. He also uses italic typeface very liberally to show how a passage should sound when read aloud, and discusses this choice at the beginning of the first story. This has the effect of interrupting the reader’s train of thought and the flow of the text by artificially over-emphasizing words at least once a paragraph, therefore further alienating the audience. The text begins this way: For whom is the funhouse fun? Perhaps for lovers. For Ambrose it is a place of fear and confusion. He has come to the seashore with his family for the holiday, the occasion of their visit is Independence Day, the most important secular holiday of the United States of America. (Barth 1) Barth then goes on, without a break in the text, on an odd tangent about italics: A single straight underline is the manuscript mark for italic type, which in turn is the printed equivalent to oral emphasis of words and phrases as well as the customary type for titles of complete works, not to mention. Italics are also employed, in fiction stories especially, for “outside,” intrusive, or artificial voices, such as radio announcements, the texts of telegrams and newspaper articles, et cetera. They should be used sparingly. If passages originally in roman type are italicized by someone repeating them, it’s customary to acknowledge the fact. Italics mine. (Barth 1) This interruption is quite distracting for the reader. The author then further interrupts his own stories to tell the audience about his role as an author and our role as readers. While these philosophical questions are interesting for scholars to ponder, these insights once again come at the expense of the reader. According to Marjorie Worthington, the work “forces the reader to construct a meaning for the text and thereby to participate in the construction of the work itself” (115). This act of construction puts an undue burden on the reader that makes reading the text into a laborious activity, and takes away a great deal of possible enjoyment and understanding. Another postmodernist text, John Berger’s G: A Novel, once again retreads the paths cut by works like The Waste Land and Lost in the Funhouse. G is another experimental text that eschews plot and payoff in favor of interruptions and meandering prose. This work is intercut with historical accounts of events that happened at the time the events in the text take place. It gives a sense of sprawling pointlessness, which is fully what the author intended as a commentary on life in the post-industrial world, but it doesn’t afford much of a sense of satisfaction in the reader. The text openly refers to the title character as “the principle protagonist” (Berger 1), so that the reader has the experience of reading a scholarly text about the book, rather than reading a novel. In fact, although the subtitle proclaims that the text is a novel, that description is somewhat dubious, as the text weaves in and out of any kind of structure resembling that of a novel. Once again, the author sacrifices a coherent story for the sake of creating some kind of unique and original reading experience. Yet the “uniqueness” of the text falls in line with the conventions of high modernism and postmodernism, and the reader is left to try to make some sense out of the little bits of a story the author has provided. Berger tries to communicate an idea as a fiction writer without dealing with that pesky chore of telling a complete story. Jacques Derrida, one of the founders of postmodernism, argues that a text is nothing but a series of symbols that have no connection to reality. He claims that all texts inherently undermine themselves and that there is no possibility of structure or meaning without contradiction. He puts forth the theory that words essentially have no meaning, and paradoxically, that their meanings are constantly shifting. To Derrida, this is not a theory or hypothesis but a deep revelation of truth, so far as he claims truth can be known (Grammatology 1-145, Postmodern 220-225). In light of this, it can be said that some postmodernists are essentially producing texts without meaning, or at least with utterly contradictory meanings, without any attempt at reconciliation. While Natoli claims that there is “more rupture than continuity between the modernist and the postmodernist” (Natloli 1), these authors share this tendency in common with Eliot and the most experimental of the modernists. In fact, author Linda Hutcheon explains that these authors are not postmodernists at all, but rather writing in “an extreme of modernist autotelic self-reflection in contemporary metafiction.” She asserts that “theorists of metafiction themselves argue that this fiction no longer attempts to mirror reality or tell any truth about it” (Hutcheon 40). This is not to say that experimental works of modernist and postmodernist fiction are utterly without value. There is an intricacy to their looping, reflexive construction that shows a certain level of genius on the part of the authors. However, this brilliant construction is mostly an act of self-indulgence, done more for the pleasure of the author than the reader. For all the intricacy and paradox, the long passages of redundant prose, all the mythological references and the carefully constructed metaphors, the actual thoughts communicated by these works tend toward the simplistic and trite; ideas that could have been much more easily communicated in a simply and cleanly constructed paragraph. The most experimental writers of modernist and postmodernist fiction seem to find words to be utterly inadequate to express what they want to convey. They attempt to reach beyond the scope of language and delve into pure symbolism. Yet symbolism is by its very nature a far more simplistic form of communication. It can only go so far to communicate meaning. In this way, these authors manage to use an excess of words to convey less meaning than they could with more precise and clear language. In addition to this, the symbolism used by each of the three authors does not correspond to any universally understood language. The intended effect is that of the reader making his or her own meaning out of the text, and thereby participating in the creation of the text, but the actual effect is a loss of depth and meaning for most readers. The nature of the symbolism dictates that readers will not necessarily interpret it differently, but rather that they will be likely to miss it entirely, not knowing what symbols they were meant to pick out and interpret. These works make a noble attempt at originality, but end up following the same conventions laid out by the first authors to rebel against the idea of narrative structure. These attempts to make the texts more and more unstructured force the reader to try to interpret texts that work outside the normal function of the human brain. These attempts run so far afield of ordinary means of communication that the meaning of the works becomes compromised. Rather than creating a totally new way of writing fiction, the metafictive modernists and postmodernists have merely created a new literary convention. Rather than communicating meaning in a new way, they have lessened their ability to communicate meaning at all. While experimental fiction can be fascinating to study and to write, for the most part it is likely to remain as merely an experiment in the history of literature. Works Cited Barth, John. Lost in the Funhouse. 1969. Google Scholar. Web. 14 March 2011. Berger, John. G: A Novel. London: Routledge, 1972. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Print. Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences.” A Postmodern Reader. Ed. Joseph P. Natoli and Linda Hutcheon. New York: New York State University Press, 1988. Print. Elliot, T. S. The Waste Land. New York: Classics Unbound, 1922. Digital. Gans, Herbert J. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Print. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988. Print. Mahaffey, Vicki. Modernist Literature: Challenging Fictions. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Print. Natoli, Joseph P. “Modern/Postmodern.” A Postmodern Reader. Ed. Joseph P. Natoli and Linda Hutcheon. New York: New York State University Press, 1988. Print. Worthington, Marjorie. “Done with Mirrors: Restoring the Authority Lost in John Barth’s Funhouse.” Twentieth Century Literature. Vol 47 No. 1 Spring 2001. JSTOR. Web. 14 March 2011. Read More