Modern Literature

Modern literature of often reflects or represents the alienation and despair of the so called "modern condition".

Its other qualities are, with some relevant adaptations, also continuations of Enlightenment and Romantic trends:

Realism

The empirical element of the Enlightenment tells us to observe, and this focus on the actualities of our surroundings finds its artistic expression in Realism.  In its simplest terms, Realism attempts to paint an unflinchingly objective, un-romanticized portrayal of people, places and occurrences: real people, as they are, with all their faults fully presented, regardless of the author or culture’s subjective, moral biases.  Things as described as they are, not as they should be.

In Realism, characters are also drawn directly from common life, rather than nobility or from Classical mythology etc. 

This focus has its roots in Romanticism, starting with Rousseau’s Confessions and clearly outlined in Wordsworth’s Preface To Lyrical Ballads.  However, Realism is also a reaction against the excesses of Romanticism:  while Romanticism celebrates its emotional/spiritual agenda or perspective, realism avoids exaggeration and attempts to create art as a mirror.  Noble and heroic abstractions are replaced with ordinary people living real, common lives.

However, the effects of Freudian psychology on Modern philosophy complicate this "one-to-one" representation of reality nearly as quickly as it became popular.

Psychology

Once again, we find Locke's tabula rasa shaping philosophy and art.  Locke posits that all understanding comes from Experience and Reflection, and so the Realists are keen to show how both taint understanding and how this tainted understanding leads us toward our destinies. The Modern, Realist landscape is as concerned with the psychological realities of the human experience as with the temporal ones; what people think and feel is as interesting, or often more interesting, than what they actually do, and, of course, what we do is based on what we believe…yet our beliefs are constantly shaped as much by our fears and hopes and desires as by some Empirical grasp of reality.

Anna Karenina is destroyed as much by her own irrational fears and jealousies as by corrupt social forces…like Hamlet, we see her march toward a tragic destiny formed on the inside of her mind, rather than simply from her actual environment or life.

This psychological trend in modern literature shares many qualities with Impressionism, as both attempt to represent human perception.

Locke's tabula rasa will also fee through the rest of the semester in the shape of Marxist conceptions of Ideology, which in turn shape Nietzsche-an Post Modern attitudes towards knowledge and understanding itself.

Symbolism

While much Modern literature attempts to simply portray events as they really are, in a journalistic, quasi-scientific, Empirical fashion, Freud’s dream-scape impinges on much literature and offers another lens through which events and characters may be interpreted. See: Freud and Dreams

Conrad’s Thames and Congo are not “hazy” due to geo-thermal events alone; haze, fog, gloom all resonate with thematic meaning so that the color of the sky and water themselves symbolize the novella’s meaning.  See Conrad's notes under his quotes page.

Early in Anna Karenina, Vronsky woos Anna after a man falls beneath a train’s wheels (he donates money to the man's family to impress Anna), then, later in the novel he accidentally breaks his horse’s, Frou-Frou’s, back trying to prove his manhood during a steeple chase, and later Anna will throw herself beneath a similar fate.

In these ways Realism remains artifice – a manmade means of making sense of the world and human experience rather than an objective record of events.

Humanism    “I have divested myself of everything but pity.” – Conrad, on writing Heart Of Darkness

This attention to the real lives of real people, often devoid to a large degree from moral judgment, traces its roots back to Neo-Classical, Renaissance Humanism.  When Michelangelo paints the Holy Family he looks to the beauty of mankind, not to idealized forms.  When Shakespeare describes the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, he does so because the folly of human love is itself beautiful and worthy of our attention, not because he wants us to learn a moral lesson.

This humanist thread is implicit throughout Realism.  As Conrad writes of Heart of Darkness:

“One thing I am certain of, is that I have approached the object of my task, things human, in a spirit of piety. The earth is a temple where there is going on a mystery play childish and poignant, ridiculous and awful enough in al conscience. Once in I’ve tried to behave decently. …I’ve neither grinned nor gnashed my teeth. In other words I’ve tried to write with dignity, not only out of regard of myself, but for the sake of the spectacle, the play with an obscure beginning and an unfathomable denoument.”

-- Conrad, letter to Arthur Symons, 1907

Tolstoy’s first conception and drafts of Anna Karenina paint Anna a repulsive, selfish cow, deserving of her tragic fate, yet the character of a beautiful, sympathetic woman asserts itself on the manuscript until it is clear that the author not only loves the character but understands and feels the emotions that destroy her. It is this empathy, this understanding, that best defines the Humanist thread in modern literature; stripped of everything else, what’s most important is that the author and reader alike grasp the characters’ conditions, and this understanding must transcend judgement.

This humanist thread  is often tempered with strong elements of Romanticism. Dickens does not want Scrooge to save Tiny Tim for simply rational, objective reasons; Scrooge must learn to love. Anna’s death is tragic, and therefore beautiful, because it is predicated on love, but the characters who cannot love at all face a greater, living-death in which life itself is still born.