In 1918, the British writer Lytton Strachey published Eminent Victorians, a biographical account of four

prominent figures of Victorian England. Strachey came from a prominent literary and political family and was
a close friend of Virginia Woolf, her sister the artist Vanessa Bell, as well as of other members of the
Bloomsbury group. Educator Thomas Arnold, health care administrator Florence Nightingale, military hero
General Chinese Gordon, and Cardinal Manning, head of the Roman Catholic Church in England during its
great expansion in the late nineteenth century, were the personages portrayed in Eminent Victorians.

The book, which became an immediate bestseller, was a humorous and savage prostration of these Victorian
icons. Thomas Arnold appears a snob and a bigot. Florence Nightingale is a busybody and a petty tyrant,
General Gordon, a racist and grotesque incompetent, and Cardinal Manning, a vulgarian hypocrite. With the
possible exception of General Gordon, who seems to have been a psychopath by all accounts, most biographers
today would question Strachey's characterizations. Eminent Victorians was enormously popular, despite its
questionable validity, and represented the reflexive anti-Victorianism which constituted a primary ingredient of
Modernism.

Rebellion against the Victorian world, hostility or contempt or at least a profound lack of sympathy for it,
remained a hallmark throughout the Modernist movement during the first half of the twentieth century. (…)
In addition to this reflexive anti-Victorianism that continued throughout the heyday of Modernism and well into
the 1950s, specific ideas and attitudes characteristic of Modernism manifested themselves in fields ranging
from literature and art to science and philosophy. By identifying these fundamentals, the Modernist mentality
can be reconstructed.

First of all, Modernism was anti-historicist. It did not believe that truth lay in telling an evolutionary story.
Modernism cared little for history; it was in fact hostile to it. Truth-finding became analytical, rather than
historical. As T.S. Eliot, a prime theoretician of Modernism, wrote in 1923, the "narrative method" had been
replaced by the "mythic method." The historical approach, in Eliot's view, was superseded by the very different
program of concentrating on direct, inner, symbolic meaning, that was both completely external to history and
irrelevant to considerations of temporality.

Again in the early 1930's, T.S. Eliot wrote that "All time is unredeemable/ What might have been and what has
been point toward the same end,/Which is always the present." Reality is an ahistorical, unredeemable present.
This negation of temporality was precisely opposed to the Victorian proclivity to place everything in sequential
time.

Another way of stating this concept would be to say that Modernist anti-historicism concentrated upon
immediate understanding, direct analysis, or upon what is later termed "close reading," the intensive
examination of the object removed from historical sequence. It will become apparent that this attitude had
revolutionary consequences in many fields, but particularly in fiction, literary criticism, painting and the social
sciences. The anti-historicism or the analytical, mythic method made a strong comeback in the 1970s, which
removes us twice from nineteenth-century historicism: first through the Modernist rebellion, and again through
the upheaval witnessed in the last ten years, which is sometimes referred to as the Structuralist movement, or
variously as Deconstruction or Postmodernism. Using the terminology of this later structuralism, Modernism
stressed the synchronic rather than the diachronic plane.

The second intellectual characteristic of Modernism was its departure from the macrocosmic, universalist
tendencies of nineteenth-century thought, and instead placed its focus on the microcosmic dimension. As has
been already pointed out, the nineteenth century believed in the superior value of the big picture. Modernist
thought adhered to the notion that the small was more and beautiful. The physics of the time, for example, has
been called "particle physics," for it emphasized the sub-atomic particle, making it the prime subject of interest
and research. Focus on a minute particle-- of human experience or art as well as nature--conditioned all of
Modernist culture.

Throughout Modernist culture it was held that the smallest segment would reveal an entire world when
subjected to microcosmic, microscopic analysis, that it was the most minute conceivable or comprehensible
unit that would establish the connection with reality rather than the investigation on the generalized
macrocosmic level. The latter could yield nothing but empty words.

The emphasis here is upon the precise and exact word, and on the concrete image, which are terms used by
Modernists themselves, along with the "particle" of science, the "data" of social science, and the "microcosmic
world" of the arts. This total shift in the level addressed by the mind--from the big to the small, from the
general to the particular--made much of nineteenth- century thought, its philosophy, science, and social
science, not only wrong, but totally meaningless.

A third characteristic of Modernism was the preoccupation with what is called self-referentiality or textuality,
meaning that anything that is examined constitutes a self-enclosed world. To understand it, you take it first of
all, and often in the last analysis too, in terms of itself. The entity refers back to itself; it is self-referential. The
text is simply what it is, and it is this self-enclosure of the text that should be studied. The painting does not
represent something external to itself; the poem does not illustrate a story. Both exist in and for themselves, and
are enclosed in and show a world that al‐ ways refers back to itself. The text is finite rather than illustrative.

The American expatriate in Paris, Gertude Stein, saw with dramatic clarity in the early years of the century that
self-referentiality was at the center of the whole Modernist movement. Words, she said, "were not imitations
either of sounds or colors or emotions," as the Victorians believed. She intended to write "as if the fact of
writing were continually becoming true and completing itself, not as if it were leading to something." Six
decades later the Postmodernist critic Susan Sontag expressed the same idea about the essence of Modernism in
somewhat more elaborate form: "The idea that depths are obfuscating, demagogic, that no human essence stirs
at the bottom of things, and that freedom lies in staying on the surface, the large glass on which desire
circulates--this is the central argument of the modern aesthetic position."

A fourth quality of Modernism was a penchant for the fragmented, the fractured, and the discordant. In
opposition to the Victorians who showed a predilection for the finished and the harmonious, Modernism
foregrounded the disharmonious and the unfinished, the splintered world, the piece that had broken off, the
serendipitous, and pursued this preference to the point of making it an aesthetic principle.

The fifth feature of Modernist culture was lack of predetermined pattern. Modernism favored random access. In
attempting to understand something, one cannot presuppose either a spatial or temporal succession that is
predetermined. A sequence may be ultimately established, but this must be done empirically from within the
object itself. Sequentiality cannot be imposed upon it externally, nor can it be anticipated. There may not be a
sequence involved at all in the object of study, for one may very well be face to face with discontinuity. If there
is in fact a continuity in the object, it is never one that can be presupposed in any predetermined program.

One of the weaknesses of Victorian thought certainly was this predisposition to continuity and to assuming prior
knowledge of exact sequence. Among the problems this led to was to make much of Victorian social science
hopeless or useless. Modernism began by questioning the assumption about continuity, whether it existed, and if
it did, what its precise nature was.

Similarly, a sixth point in Modernism's departure from Victorian thought was its rejection of philosophical
idealism, especially Hegelian theory. The favorite philosophy of the nineteenth century was one that removed
the empirical in order to arrive at the most general proposition, and at the purist concept that could be
imagined by consciousness, or at what Hegel called "the absolute." This notion disappeared rapidly after 1900.
Philosophical idealism was faulted and abandoned on two accounts: it was insufficiently empirical, and
impervious to concrete data; and it only dealt with the realm of the conscious and ignored the unconscious.
Ignorant of the empirical and the unconscious, nineteenth-century philosophy was perceived to be empty, and
therefore invalid.

The seventh intellectual quality of Modernism was functionalism. This term found particular application in the
fields of architecture, where it is still in use (although not always in a laudatory way), and in sociology and
anthropology. Once the object of analysis is understood as microcosmic, self-referential and exterior to
predetermined spatial and temporal sequentiality, what remains to be studied is how the object functions in and
for it‐ self. It can be concluded that functionalism was a product of other main characteristics of Modernism. It
can be viewed in another way, as expressing anti-historicism. External to history, the object exists in terms of
its function.

Time and time again Modernism asks how a thing works, and further, how it works in and for itself. From this
functionalist point of view modern experimental physics was born, as well as field research in the social and
behavioral sciences.

An eighth characteristic of Modernism was its antipathy for, or rejection of, absolute polarities. Victorians
assumed the polarity of male and female, of object and subject, the higher and lower, the early and late, mass and
energy, time and space. They were certain that the world and human life operated in terms of absolute, separable
polarities. Modernism questioned this notion by claiming that these polarities were integrated with one another,
that they were interactive and not absolute. It viewed them as convenient ways of talking about phenomena,
which, when observed closely, revealed themselves to be related to one another, or, in other words, to be
functions of one another.

The weakening or even abandonment of absolute polarities was central to Modernism and had revolutionary
consequences in many area of thought and behavior. The Victorians reflexively separated things; the Modernists
felt compelled to integrate them. The interactive nature of apparent polarities and their possible symbiosis was a
leading characteristic of both Modernist art and science.

The ninth aspect of Modernism, a particularly difficult and controversial one, was that in contrast to nineteenth-
century culture which strongly tended to vulgarization and popularization, it was elitist. Nineteenth-century
scholars and writers believed that social science, philosophy and, above all, literature and art could be expressed
in a way that was readily accessible by at least anyone with high school education. Modernism, to the contrary,
believed in complexity and difficulty. It addressed a narrow, highly selective, learned and professional audience.
Its audience was the vanguard.

This is a feature that runs through Modernist culture in a fundamental way. From science to literature and art,
Modernism was a culture of the elite. It required sophistication, learning, intense application. In any given area,
Modernism was not accessible to the naive and unprepared person, to the common man. Whether in art,
philosophy, or science, Modernist culture was only open to the specially prepared and specifically cultivated
mind.

This particular quality of elitism presented important problems for Modernism and constituted one of its
fundamental tensions for the many Modernists who also belonged to the political left. They naturally had
difficulty reconciling their elitism with their political democracy. This issue still churns away in the leftist
weeklies and quarterlies.
A tenth characteristic of Modernism was greater openness with regard to sexuality. There has been much re‐
search done recently about what the Victorians did in bed or around--or on--the kitchen table. Whether their
practices differed greatly from our own we still do not know (the data is too anecdotal and fragmentary), but
their way of talking about it was certainly different. Modernism produced a new frankness in the exchange
about sexual relationships, and indeed had a tendency toward the scatalogical, to what the Victorians would
have regarded as "vulgar"' and "dirty talk." At first the Modernists were very self-conscious about this new
sexual frankness. Virginia Woolf makes the use of the dread word "semen" at one of her early Bloomsbury
parties an earth-shattering event. By the twenties, intellectuals talked about sex as familiarly as Victorians
conversed about God. (…)

Modernism also was sympathetic toward feminism and homosexuality and expressed an interest in the
androgynous and the bisexual, another manifestation of the Modernist tendency to break down polarities.
Modernism was not committed to the separation of the male and the female on moral, biological, or
psychological grounds as the Victorians had been.

An eleventh quality of Modernism was its attention to the outcomes of a technological culture. Modernism can
be looked upon as an effort to address the cultural consequences of a new technological world and of a mass
culture. The recognition that culture had changed as a result of the application of science to the needs of every‐
day life and particularly the revolution in transportation and communication systems, and the emergence of
widespread, near universal literacy, marks Modernism. Dealing with the implications of such transformations is
something we are still very much engaged in. How the artist and philosopher should respond to a situation in
which mechanization takes command and a revolutionary scientific paradigm has been attained is a continuing
Modernist concern.

On the one side Modernism was a product of the age of railroad and steamship and was fashioned by the rapid
and easy means of transportation and commitment to the urban culture and the trans-Atlantic metropolitan
centers. On the other side Modernism was concerned with preservation of rationality, art and learned
intelligence in the age of mechanical reproduction and mass culture. The latter concern is reflected in the elitist
quality of Modernism.

A twelfth characteristic of Modernism can be located in the area of ethics. Although not shared by all
Modernists, there was a tendency in the movement towards moral relativism and departure from a normative
code of ethics. It is conventional to say that Modernism represented a relativistic rebellion against the
puritanical normative ethics of the nineteenth century.

The issue, however, might be stated somewhat differently. Nineteenth- century ethics focused on the nuclear
family and its value to society. Its entire ethical system was designed to maintain the nuclear family as the social
norm. Modernism weakened this Victorian conception. On the one hand it gave a new authenticity to
individualism and to individual search for values, and on the other, it valorized a unit larger than the family,
namely, culture as a whole. It sought for a moral theory and system that stemmed from the entire culture. While
emphasizing the authenticity of individual ethics, it also stressed extended cultural solidarity.

Along with a deep but not universal tendency toward relativism, this perception undermined severely an ethic
focused on the preservation of the family. The decline of the nuclear family began around 1900, owing to
complex reasons, of which the emergence of Modernism was probably the most critical.

In the nineteenth century, in the context of urbanization and salaried employment outside the home in an
industrial economy, the family had become less of an economic agency, and more of an affective, reproductive,
and educational unit. The Victorian increase of sentiment in family relationships combined with the family
ideology to bring the nuclear family to its zenith. By attacking patriarchal authority and questioning sexual
repression that the Victorian family fostered, as well as by stressing individualism and the demands of a
cultural solidarity beyond the family, by a relativist frame of mind that eroded legitimacy that had
conventionally come to adhere to the nuclear family, Modernism precipitated a social and ethical revolution
which is still unwinding, for better or worse, in our own day.

A thirteenth characteristic of Modernism, which has had consequences for social policy as well as for aesthetics,
was the conviction that humanity is in its most authentic, truly human condition, when it is involved with art,
whether literary, visual, or performing in kind. In spite of monumental artistic achievements in the arts in the
nineteenth century, the Victorians retained the Christian Augustinian conviction that humanity achieves its
highest and purest nature in moral action. The Modernists replaced the superiority of the ethical dimension with
the primacy of not only artistic creation but also common entitlement to participation in and consumption of art.
This meant that the positive purpose of government and social institutions was not the fostering of a moral code
but the provision of opportunities for realization of entitlement to art.

Finally, Modernism displayed a tendency towards cultural despair. Victorianism was by and large optimistic, or
at least transcendental. It either believed that things were improving or, when this did not seem credible, it held
that matters would improve eventually. Even Nietzsche, who found little to approve in his own times, felt
certain about a stepped-up future betterment. Modernism, however, tends towards pessimism and despair. The
world in Modernist imagery is often a bleak, devastated urban landscape. The world as a hospital, not a very
hopeful one, where people are dying of terminal illness, or as a downscale tavern, or a brothel, or a cruel law
court where there is no justice, are among its favorite social images and metaphors. Elias Canetti, the Viennese
novelist and social philosopher, succinctly expressed Modernism's harshly realistic and sad view of human
nature: "Human beings . . . accuse themselves by representing themselves as they are, and this is self-
indictment, it does not come from someone else."

While Victorians were comforted by history, the Modernists pessimistically considered it a nightmare from
which we are trying to awake, in James Joyce's phrase, and not successfully. "Force, hatred, history, all that,"
says Joyce's spokesman Leopold Bloom. "That's not life for men and women." Similarly, Marcel Proust advises
us that the only paradise is the one we have lost.

It should be noted that this formulation of a model of Modernism as integral to the culture of the early decades
of the century is controversial. Some historians and critics believe in some such model, some do not. The skep‐
tics, speaking in 1986 through the Irish critic Denis Donoghue, claim that "a motive supposedly held in com‐
mon" by the writers, artists, and composers of the period 1910-1925 "would have to be described in such
general and abstract terms as to be virtually meaningless. We could designate it as modernism only if we were
willing to ignore differences and to preserve at any cost a semblance of common purpose." This view we have
shown to be mistaken, because a general model of Modernist culture embraces specific ideas, motifs, and
attitudes. Donoghue's skeptical view of Modernism is itself inspired by a neo-Victorian mindset that by denying
that the writers and artists of the first thirty years of the century belong to a cohesive cultural movement seeks to
postulate an unbroken continuity with Victorianism and late Romanticism.

The fourteen characteristics of Modernism that we have specified achieve validity not only as a general model
that provides a persuasive order to complex phenomena. It also is a heuristic device for exploring particular
aspects of literature, the arts and sciences. It teaches us what to look for. At the same time, the discovery of
Modernist qualities in many diverse areas of culture inductively and empirically leads us back to confirmation
of the model.

Of course, Donoghue and his followers have the option not to think along general lines, not to seek cultural pat‐
terns and not to develop a historical model, but in a skeptical, nominalist way to list endless names of writers,
artists, and composers without "a semblance of common purpose." This nominalist method precludes historical
understanding and cultural analysis. The Donoghue approach prevents us from confronting the meaning of the
complex intellectual, artistic, and scientific developments of the first four decades of the century, which are
conditioned by a common mentality.

On the basis of the general model of Modernism, particular manifestations of it can be examined in a variety of
areas, in order to see how these characteristics were expressed. Modernism affected nearly every area of culture,
and for us today, it is memorialized most dramatically in the novel and poem, architecture, in painting,
philosophy, physics and anthropology.

Cantor, Norman. 1988. Twentieth-Century Culture: Modernism to Deconstruction. New York, Berne, Frankfurt
am Mein, Paris: Peter Lang, pp. 35-41