9/25/08

I am still making my through the book 'The Modern Mind' by Peter Watson. The book reads chronologically, and I am currently in the 1920s. However, I may have to abridge my studies on Modernism. The other part of my study is to examine postmodernism, and the society we live in today, which could take a long while. I am disappointed that I have not arrived at any defnitive 'Zeitgeist' for the period of Modernism, but, then again, this merely confirms a suspicion I held since undertaking this project: that a period as broad and far-reaching as Modernism is impossible to define in a single phrase. There were numerous movements, across both sides of the Atlantic, throughout every discipline imaginable.

However, I can make some conclusions: Modernism, from 1890-1914, at least, was characterized by a very optimistic sense of Progress. This belief in advancement was born, embryonically, from the increased communication and connectivity of the 1800s, which, although nowhere near the connectedness we feel today, was still unprecedented for its time. The 'world community,' still in its infant stages, gave way to, among other things, a link among scientists. Science had, until this point, been very superstitious and disorganized. But as connections between nations grew stronger, the practice of Science, now with a capital S, began to develop.

Science both united and divided. It indicated truths that were seemingly indisputable, rooted in observation and experimentation. Now, questions were being answered that had remained mysteries for millenia. This instilled in people the sense of progress and evolution that so characterized the early period of Modernism.

In my interview with Mr. Marcus Patton he explained how, in some ways, American history follows a cycle of progressivism followed by wariness, and I think we can observe this trend on a global level during Modernism. "Progress" was smashed in a head-on collision with the atavistic World War 1, which created a an incontrovertible rift between the dates 1913 and 1920, only a mere seven years apart, but dimensionally different in their respective prevailing moods.

1920 saw the beginnings of a disillusionment with progress that eventually gave way to Postmodernism. Or at least that is my conjecture. Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Salvador Dali, the American expatriates, and the Surrealists all embodied this. I think that, in the 1920s and onward, people began to lose faith in the sciences to cure all human problems. This period also saw the beginning of the divide between "low culture" and "high culture." In the early 1900s, it was generally excepted that the avant garde was merely a few steps ahead of the general populace. For example, the art of the Cubists – Picasso, Cezanne, and others – was at first regarded as heresy in the art community. But, soon enough, that art was being displayed in all major galleries–the avant garde had now become the norm.

But, starting in the '20s, there appeared a break between the avant garde and the norm. Suddenly, it was possible that the two might never intersect. The advent of radio and film was the herald of low culture. It seemed the general populace was rejecting the convoluted and mystical, replacing them with the straight-forward and easily-consumable. It was during this time that Lewis Sinclair's 'Babbit' was written, a critical novel that suggested success in America required conformity. This time also saw T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland,' a scathing indictment against the materialistic culture that Eliot observed. Social criticism in novels and poems had always existed, but not at the level it did beginning in the 1920s.

It is my conjecture that the disillusionment caused in part by World War 1 planted, throughout the 1920s, the seeds that would yield Postmodernism. That's all for now.