The 20th century

When the 20th century began, social and cultural conditions that prevailed in Europe and America were not too different from those of the middle and late 19th century. Continuity could be seen, for example, in the work of four novelists writing in English at the turn of the century and after. Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and D.H. Lawrence all demonstrated in the progress of their work the transition from a relatively stable world at the end of the 19th century to a new age that began with World War I. The awakening of a new consciousness in literature was also to be traced in such works of fiction as the first volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (Swann’s Way, 1913), André Gide’s Vatican Cellars (1914), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Franz Kafka’s Trial (published posthumously in 1925), and Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (1924).

Various influences that characterized much of the writing from the 1920s were at work in these writers. An interest in the unconscious and the irrational was reflected in their work and that of others of about this time. Two important sources of this influence were Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher to whom both Gide and Mann, for example, were much indebted, and Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalytical works, by the 1920s, had had a telling influence on Western intellectuals. A shift away from 19th-century assumptions and styles was not limited to writers of fiction. André Breton’s first Manifeste du surréalisme (1924; “Manifesto of Surrealism”) was the first formal statement of a movement that called for spontaneity and a complete rupture with tradition. Surrealism showed the influence of Freud in its emphasis on dreams, automatic writing, and other antilogical methods and, although short-lived as a formal movement, had a lasting effect on much 20th-century art and poetry. The uncertainty of the new age and the variety of attempts to deal with it and give it some artistic coherence can be seen also in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus (1923); in T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land (1922); and in Luigi Pirandello’s play about the instability of identity, Henry IV (1922).

The international and experimental period of Western literature in the 1910s and 1920s was important not only for the great works it produced but also because it set a pattern for the future. What was clearly revealed in the major works of the period was an increasing sense of crisis and urgency, doubts as to the 19th century’s faith in the psychological stability of the individual personality, and a deep questioning of all philosophical or religious solutions to human problems. In the 1930s these qualities of 20th-century thought were not abandoned but, rather, were expanded into a political context, as writers divided into those supporting political commitment in their writing and those reacting conservatively against such a domination of art by politics. Nor did World War II resolve the debate concerning political commitment—issues similar to those that exercised major creative imaginations of the 1930s were still very much alive during the last quarter of the century.

It would be tempting to explain what seemed to be a relative scarcity of great writers in the period after World War II as an inevitable result of the cumulative pressure of disturbing social and technological developments accelerated by that war. Under such fluctuating and doubtful circumstances, it would not seem altogether strange if writing and reading, as traditionally understood, should cease. Indeed, in certain technologically highly developed countries, such as the United States, the printed word itself seemed to some critics to have lost its central position, having been displaced in the popular mind by a visual and aural electronic culture that did not need the active intellectual participation of its audience. Thus the communications media that helped to create something resembling an international popular culture in many Western countries did nothing to make the question of literary value easier to answer. Given the extraordinary conditions in which a modern writer works, it was not surprising that reputations were difficult to judge, that radical experimentation characterized many fields of literature, and that traditional forms of writing were losing their definition and were tending to dissolve into one another. Novels might acquire many features of poetry or be transformed into a kind of heightened nonfictional reportage, while experimentation with typography gave poems an appearance of verbal paintings, and dramatic works, shorn of anything resembling a traditional plot, became a series of carefully orchestrated gestures or events. But formal experimentation was only part of the picture, and to say that modern writing since World War II has been primarily experimental would be to ignore other characteristics that writing acquired earlier in the century and that still continued to be issues. Most good critics felt that there was no lack of good literature being written, despite the lack of major reputations and despite the possibly transitional nature of much of the period’s work in its variety of styles and subjects.