Modernism Literature; From Stein’s ‘Difficulty in Writing’ to Today’s New Questions
Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and their contemporaries each went their own way, but they shared one thing: the belief that literature must cut its rope from the past. In the view of that generation, ‘difficulty in writing’ was not a choice; it was part of the game. And it is this choice that still casts a shadow on our reading of modernism today.
It’s enough to put two classic examples of that era side by side: James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Both are attempts to condense a life into a single day; an hour-by-hour and even thought-by-thought experience, where the term “stream of consciousness” finds its meaning. Just as Cubism creates multiple views of a single face, these novels present several simultaneous images from the characters’ minds. Naturally, early readers were confused. The famous anecdote recounts that Stein, upon seeing her portrait by Picasso, said, “I don’t look like that,” and received the reply, “You will.” Woolf, too, when she heard her readers protest, “This doesn’t make sense,” could only promise, “It will make sense.”
Stein and Woolf met only once; a sarcastic encounter that Woolf later recorded in a letter to her sister. She wrote that Stein “insisted she was the most beloved living writer.” A phrase that might bring a smile today, but for a writer who herself was a symbol of “incomprehensibility,” it’s a natural misunderstanding. Stein, contrary to her current standing, had serious trouble finding a serious publisher in her time.
One of the prominent examples of her works is the lengthy novel The Making of Americans; a book of over six hundred pages relying on conscious repetitions. A small publisher in Paris released a limited edition of it, but Stein hoped the Woolfs at Hogarth Press would accept it. The result, however, was a blunt rejection, recorded with humor by Woolf in her diary.
A century after these events, the status of Stein, Woolf, and Joyce is solidified; figures whom every generation revisits to uncover new codes of that “pleasant difficulty.” This legacy is not limited to these three; Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, H.D., and William Carlos Williams also played a decisive role in shaping the intellectual horizon of modernism. Francesca Wade, in her new biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, narrates this world from the perspective of Stein’s first meeting with Picasso; a scene that aptly demonstrates the complexity of understanding modernism.
Stein had a strange approach to the literary figures of her time. She disliked Joyce and saw him as a rival; when she heard the news of Ulysses‘ publication, instead of ordering the book, she canceled her membership from its publisher’s library. According to biographers, Joyce’s success was “intolerable” for her.
Unlike movements such as Surrealism or Futurism, modernism did not have a specific manifesto; it was more of a “mental climate,” as Janet Malcolm writes in Two Lives. Pound, one of the few who saw from a distance, shortened the original version of The Waste Land with scissors and transformed it into a modern work; he also advanced the serial publication of Ulysses. His famous slogan “Make It New” later became the title of one of his books and is still repeated in discussions of modernism.
This spirit of novelty led Woolf’s reading of Joyce to be simultaneously admiring and vexed. In her diary, she wrote about Ulysses: “It’s a claim. It’s superficial.” But the reality is that Mrs Dalloway, three years after Ulysses, clearly emerged from the same narrative family. Both novels follow a single day in a tense capital and both progress with symbols and recurring images: from Bloom’s edibles to Clarissa’s flowers. The endings of these two are also a kind of emotional mirroring; Molly Bloom’s “Yes” in Ulysses and Peter Walsh’s excitement in the last lines of Mrs Dalloway.
The question, however, is: what is the alternative to modernism today? Terry Eagleton, in his book Modernism: A Literature in Crisis, reminds us that “newness” is not always an independent virtue; we see its bitter examples in everyday life. He ironically says, “Originality is the old thing,” and this irony gains meaning within a larger discussion about art today.
The world of literature and art is now under the influence of an increased presence of women artists and non-white writers; a significant transformation that has both enriched and blown a fresh wind towards “correct affirmations”; a wind that sometimes distances critics from old criteria of “taste refinement.” Will these changes bring forth works equivalent to The Waste Land, Ulysses, or Mrs Dalloway? Perhaps, and as Hemingway said: what a lovely thought.
