Modernism

The reaction against symbolism began early, and even as its influence was passing to other national cultures, it attracted stringent critique. In the 1890s symbolism often became identified with decadence, in which the austere experiments of Mallarmé gave way to easier rhythms of yearning and escape. The tableau of the weary poet cultivating the sensations of dream became a European-wide image, vulnerable to caricature and dismissal. J. K. Huysmans's À Rebours (1884) helped to inspire Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which dramatized but also ironized the languid life of decadence, the vocation of the senses. Wilde is a decisive figure, one who in his life and work carried Decadence into the public world and who detached himself from it through wit, irony, and paradox. When Wilde went to trial in 1895, the encounter between oppositional culture and the canons of respectability became vivid and painful. His conviction, imprisonment, and early death revealed the entanglements of modernism within the social world it refused.

The turn of the century brought a perceptible change in artistic and literary movements. The symbolist poet, committed to ritual incantations of the suggestive word, gave way to the young, assertive artist, eager to contend with aesthetic convention and social orthodoxy. When Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) painted a brothel tableau in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), with its harsh forms, its sexual brazenness, its direct encounter with the eyes of the viewer, he enacted the turn from weariness to confrontation. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus sets himself as the antagonist of a sluggish culture, daring to echo Satan's "Non Serviam." Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire (1912) conveyed the shock of atonality to Western music, attracting tones of outrage to match its experiment in dissonance. In his first Futurist manifesto (1909) Filippo Tommaso Marinetti asserted, "No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece" (p. 41). He toured Europe, celebrating an escape from the exhausted past into the speed and violence of modern technology.

There had been precursors of this emphatic confrontalism too. Rimbaud had made scorn for mediocrity a founding principle of his verse. Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) released the intensity of color to create intensities of affective assault. But the context that prepared for high modernism was wider than literature and the arts. The unsettled life at the end of the nineteenth century was not simply the background of high modernism; it became an ongoing concern for an intellectually self-conscious movement intent to reengage the world. Major influences included the revolutionary theory of Karl Marx transmitted through post-Marxist theorists in Europe; Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of Christianity in favor of the "overman" and the will to power; Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic exposition of the unconscious, dreams, bisexuality, and neurosis; James George Frazer's comparison of pagan rituals and modern life in The Golden Bough; and Henri Bergson's arguments for an experience of pure duration available only to the deep self. These ambitious theories conflicted on many points: Marx's social vision against Freud's pessimistic view of instinctual conflict and Bergson's strictly philosophic approach, Frazer's scholarly assimilation of primitive and modern attitudes in contrast to Nietzsche's tense demand for a transvaluation of all values. What they shared was a sense of radical transformation. High modernism participated in this active theoretical milieu, in which it seemed that every basis for human self-understanding was under reconsideration. Intellectual life was often an essential element in the art, and the centrality of manifestos in high modernism is another register of the intellectual character of the movement. New artifacts did not appear as isolated provocations; they arrived within a dense context of essays, reviews, and manifestos that connected the making of modernist artifacts to the unfolding of modern theory.

Outside the realm of theoretical writing stood the power of social events. The development of a large reading public and mass democracy incited a modernist anxiety over popular culture recurrent through the period. The conflict between the sexes, including the image of the New Woman and the militant demand for female suffrage, challenged the representation of sexuality in the visual arts, the structure of the marriage plot, and poetic lyricism. This was also the new age of European imperialism, and whether empire became part of the focal subject matter, as with Joseph Conrad and E. M. Forster, or remained unacknowledged, it formed an inescapable cultural context. The political environment sometimes inspired arts to social engagement, as in the feminist writings of Virginia Woolf or in the political theater of Vsevolod Meyerhold and Bertolt Brecht; just as often it created styles of resistance or right-wing reaction, as in the later works of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, or Wyndham Lewis. In either case, the success of left-wing parties, the threat of revolution in Germany, and its success in Russia meant that experimental artists worked within a milieu of political hopes and fears.