UNIT 2: MODERNIST AMERICAN

FICTION
 Background
It is the fiction that is written at the beginning of the 20 th century. Modernist fiction came later
than poetry. The great novels will start in the second half of the 1920s.

 Characteristics of Modernist fiction:

- Stream of consciousness: No punctuation, no logical narrative, ambiguity. The
character is letting that flow of thoughts go out. This is a literary experiment. William
Faulkner used this device.
- Time is not linear. The narrator is jumping forward and backward.
- Shift in the narrator’s voice. E.g. Light in August (William Faulkner).
- The theory of the iceberg: the narrator only tells what is absolutely relevant and leaves
things outside the narrative which the reader will guess. Tightness and mystery (you do
not know what happens) in the story.
- Short fiction does not attempt to narrate everything, but only a moment in a day or
in a life. However, it is lyrically charged.
- Characters are embodiments of moods.
- The Camera Eye: As id the narrator was a camera and looks at reality and transmits it
to the reader without intruding into the narrative. An absolute objectivity of the
narrative. He tries to give the impression that the narrator is not present in the narrative.
E.g. John Dos Pasos.
- Everyday life of ordinary people: Nothing too remarkable or heroic. The simple
situations of average life. E.g. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, etc.
- Dismissal of emotion: Not interested in putting emotions directly into the text. There
are elements in the text that convey an emotion.
- Certain words cannot be used because they have been debased. They tried to renew
the language of prose.
- Use of language: good vs Bad use of language. Language represents reality with
precision.
- American language as a suitable literary language: the simple language of everyday
life.
- Reconciliation of the direct with the subtle.
- Importance of American vernacular language. E.g. Mark Twain.

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 - Characters
o Non-heroic, vulnerable, ordinary people
o Social forces: Socially committed novels. These social forces drive the
character. The character does what is forced to do by society. In these novels,
the determinism is very important.
o Psychological forces: The search for the buried life of the individual.

Literary trends (even though they are many times mixed)

 Modernist trend: Authors made use of the new discoveries in language, philosophy,
etc. The novels are imaginative rendering of sensitively apprehended experience.
The novel is experimental and there is stream of consciousness, free indirect speech
(a character is thinking or speaking but the narrator never introduces their speech. There
is a flow of thoughts that the author can read from the characters’ mind). Representing
reality in a new way, in the way that corresponds to the beginning of the 20 th century.
 Realism: No confusion between narrator and points of view, or chronologic aspects
of the narrative. More attached to traditional values and ideas: socially-committed
novels. It is concern with the representation of society.

Most novels share characteristics of both groups and they are concerned with the same
social developments. The difference is the emphasis that the realism novels put on those
social changes and development.

Differences with European Modernism:

 Some novels are closer to realism, but still they are considered Modernist. E.g.
Hemingway.

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

He is the best writer of the 20th century in America. He
started as a realist and then became a modernist. The
turning point is 1920, before 1929 hi is a sort of a realist
writer, but the publication of The Sound and the Fury
everything. He was born and raised in the South, which
is an isolated society in America. He writes about the south
and about the decay of the South after the Civil War.
In 1929, he published The Sound and The Fury, his first
Modernist novel. It is composed of 4 monologues, 4

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characters (Benjy, Quentin, Jackson, and Maid Servant) tell the same story from different
points of view.
Light in August (5 different narrators telling the same story).
The reader gets the feeling of a Greek tragedy (the idea of fate, that they are doomed). Time
has been suspended in the South. He created an imaginary county in the South
(Yoknapatawpha, of which capital is Jackson). Indeed, he was copied by Gabriel García
Márquez in Cien Años de Soledad.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

He is the author of The Great Gatsby. He also wrote very
sentimental stories, like “Babylon Revisited”. He lived in
the Jazz Age (1920s). Jazz was a very popular type of
music. This age is characterised by
 People having a lot of money.
 A moment of national happiness and prosperity
 They had not suffered the Great War
 The prospects for life were great
 The beginnings of capitalist society
He wrote about this age. His fiction is autobiographical
(until a certain extent). He could expend a whole day typing
because he had to hand in his work to a journal to get money. He had some psychological
problems, and he could not send a lot of novels. His most famous novel is The Great Gatsby,
which follows the pattern of Puritan autobiographies. It is about America, as most of his
writings. He writes about the rise and fall of American expectations in the Jazz Age.
Tender is the Night is autobiographical and probably his best novel. He reflects his life in this
novel. The characters’ life is his life and his wife’s life. The settings are not fiction, but the
events are. It is based on a very large extent in is life and follows its pattern. It is a sentimental
novel.
In his writings, we can see the evolution of American society during the Jazz Age (rise and
fall of this generation represented in a few individuals).

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

- Characters:

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On the one hand, Romantic heroism, a man who likes adventures. On the other hand,
existentialists, who wonder how to live and who have a sort of alienation because they are
exiles. They do not know how to live, and that is their problem. In Our Times, For Whom The
Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises.

- Style of Hemingway’s stories:

o Condensed and exact sentences, because he worked as a journalist (he had a
limit of words).
o He writes facts.
He was also interested in creative non-fiction. His novels and short stories are fiction. He
mixed those kinds of writings. He used strategies that came from journalism and from creative
non-fiction, because he wanted to investigate about the nature of reality.
Style:
- Free indirect speech (“Cat in the Rain”, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”)
- Some of his characters go to war and other are existentialists. In The Snows of
Kilimanjaro, there is an anti-heroic figure: pathic character.
- Theory of the iceberg

A Cat in the Rain:

There are central elements of Hemingway in connection with modernism, he centralized in
images.. Peculiar of his style is that he uses narrators as cameras. Representing things, but not
commenting. (Objectivity).
- He also uses the juxtaposition, as a means of connecting separated parts and separated
ideas. Juxtaposition comes the central element of the narrative development.
- Meaning is not directly visible in the story, the reader has to create it. If you’re not an
active reader, you will not get the story, you only get the superficial theory. Hemingway
you see only the tip. Theory of the iceberg
First paragraph: when we create a sentences, you work trough the syntagmatic to create a
sentence. Combination and substitution, syntagmatic and paragdigmatic. You have a word but
you can put another word. In the metonymic access, the combination is through continuity. In
the vertical access it is according to substitution.
In Romantic writing you have metaphorical, but the realism modernist is seems to not be
metaphorical. Hemingway is the kind of objective metonymical writer. Everything is connect to
continuity, the metonymical element is emphasized. The reading of the story depends on how
we consider the story (metonymical-metaphorical)

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 - The cat is those material things that she can’t have. Sort of identification between the
woman and the cat. The wife is feeling like the cat, the cat is maybe the representation
of the failure of the marriage.
- There is in the husband nothing connected him to others.
- The padroni is fulfil the role that the husband doesn’t have.
- The cat could be her need to have a baby. The idea of fertility represented in the wife’s
need.
There is no way to know if it is the same cat. Open-ended story. We don’t know if it is a cat or
the cat.

The Lost generation

- Born around 1900
- Similar experiences, similar attitudes
- Regional traditions were dying out
- Middle-class families: illusion of belonging to a great classless society
- Students in public schools. International learning at college
- Lived in Greenwich Village and in France.
Group of authors who had very few things in common. Middle class origin. Not born in the
eastern coast. They went to public schools. They lived in France because it was cheaper than
living in America.
Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Upton
Sinclair, Thornton Wilder, Thomas Wolfe belonged to a period of transition from fixed
values to the values they created.
They were not a unified group: several hostile groups plus individuals who did not fit in any
group.

REALIST WRITING IN AMERICAN MODERNISM

Characteristics of Epic Fiction:
- Impersonality
- Bad conditions for the working classes
- No nature
- Urban life
- Industrialization
- Determinism: life is conditioned by destiny (forces that are beyond us, which we can
control)

John Dos Passos (1896-1970)

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  Everyday language
 No feelings (the narrator does not intrude into the text)
 Concerned with society and social issues: epic
novels about family, society and social determinism:
problems about living in big cities, anonymity,
corruption…
 He uses the camera eye
 Literary strategies to create epic panorama of the
Americans. The Americans living in the modern cities
with all these sensations that people that have in these
big cities.
He started writing about the American experience in a big
city. Epic fiction about people living in Manhattan. There is not a hero, but a group of people
who are representatives of the average American. He created Modern Urban Epic in America.
His fiction is rather pessimistic, as determinism plays an important role. Pessimism is
emphasized by the narrator’s objectivity. His fiction is extremely cold and unpassionate.
John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
He lived in California and he also writes epic fiction, but it
is quite different from Dos Passos’ one. Steinbeck shows
sympathy towards the characters of his novels. He writes
about life in the country, and people who live there, farmers
and the hardships of their lives in farms.
Some of his works:
 The Grapes of Wrath
 Route 66
 Tom Joad
 Nebraska
Most of his stories are about the working class. He is closely concerned with Local Colour
Realism.

Willa Cather (1873-1947)

Her novels and short fiction are more appealing than the ones
from the authors above. She is a local colour realist (regionalist
writer). Her novels are set in Nebraska.
 Pioneers
 My Antonia

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She wrote epic fiction, but she is concerned with the past or with the shift from the past to the
present. She is also concerned with spiritual life (inner life of her characters). There is
psychological action in her writings. She is not interested in social or political issues and
wrote an essay about that.