Modernism and Heart of Darkness

John Barth, “The Literature of Replenishment” the radical disruption of linear flow of narrative; the frustration of conventional expectations concerning unity and coherence of plot and character and the cause and effect development thereof; the deployment of ironic and ambiguous juxtapositions to call into question the moral and philosophical meaning of literary action; the adoption of a tone of epistemological self-mockery aimed at naive pretensions of bourgeois rationality; the opposition of inward consciousness to rational, public, objective discourse; and an inclination to subjective distortion to point up the evanescence of the social world of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie.

Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire "the modern tradition" is a peculiar one [expression]. The phrase implies more than a logical and linguistic contradiction: it expresses that dramatic condition of our civilization which seeks its foundation not in the past or in some immovable principle, but in change. ... Modern literature is an impassioned rejection of the modern age. ... Opposition of the modern age works within the age. ... Its criticism unfolded in two contradictory directions: it rejected the linear time of the modern age and it rejected itself. By the first it denied modernity; by the second affirmed it. ... Today we witness another mutuation: modern art is beginning to lose its powers of negation. ... Negation is no longer creative. I am not saying that we are living at the end of art: we are living at the end of the idea of modern art. ... The decline of the tradition against itself manifests the general crisis of the modern era. ...

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming (1919) Turning and turning in the widening gyre    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;  The best lack all conviction, while the worst    Are full of passionate intensity. 

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming (1919) Surely some revelation is at hand;  Surely the Second Coming is at hand.    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi  Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it    Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.    The darkness drops again; but now I know    That twenty centuries of stony sleep  Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 

Malcolm Bradbury, James McFarlane, Modernism (1976) Four major concerns of modernist writers: Concern with the complexities of form Concern with the representation of inward states of consciousness Concern with a sense of the nihilistic disorder behind the ordered surface of life Concern with the freedom of the narrative art

Stream of Conciousness William James, The principles of Psychology “… it is nothing joined; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ is the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let’s call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life.”

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) Chapter 3 “What a lark! What a plunge! For so it always seemed to me when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which I can hear now, I burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as I then was) solemn, feeling as I did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen …”

Kirsty Martin, Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy Woolf’s contemporaries recognized her as a ‘stream-f-consciousness’ novelist. The description captures something of the mysterious flow of sensations in Woolf’s writing, and in studies of stream-of-consciousness as a literary technique Woolf has been seen as a representative writer… However, the term poses problems. Understanding an individual writer’s use of stream-of-consciousness means thinking about how they conceive conciousness, and how they move bewteen the levels of conciousness.

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) ...and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”