Today, modern society is experience more and more of a disconnect from the real world as we connect more and more to the online world. People send text messages more than they call, and friends across the world can interact in a matter of seconds, if not instantly. As society continues to modernize, we experience the same sort of falling out with the natural order of things that authors near the turn of the century felt as their culture changed. T.S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and D.H. Lawrence are only three such authors to put pen to paper to explore this deracination. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Lawrence’s “The Rocking Horse Winner” explore the idea that modern life and society negatively affects those who succumb to its rhythms.
In the first section of The Waste Land, “The Burial of the Dead,” Eliot offers a criticism of London, a center of modern life, and its people. He describes London as an “Unreal City” which suffers “[u]nder the brown fog of a winter dawn” (7), which suggests that London is dirty, cold, and uninviting. The people, too, are unhappy and discontent, as many sigh frequently and keep their eyes “fixed” on their feet (7). That each person is focused on his own space suggests that each person is isolated, despite being surrounded by a crowd. Eliot also writes of the crowd, “I had not thought death had undone so many…There I saw one I knew, and stopped him” (7); these references to Dante’s journey through hell in the Inferno link the people in the crowd to the dead and London to hell. The imagery and wording that Eliot uses present the reader with the overwhelming sense that London is a place of depressing and dirty isolation.
In “The Fire Sermon,” Eliot describes the debris that is a r...
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...rbanization are common themes throughout literature, including Eliot, Conrad, and Lawrence’s work, perhaps because how universal such effects are. These authors felt directly such changes in the natural order of the world, and modern readers today have firsthand experience of similar patterns. Most likely, deracination will continue as a common theme throughout society and literature, as human nature and therefore the world is never stagnant.
Works Cited
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. Ed. Paul B. Armstrong. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. Print.
Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. Ed. Michael North. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Print.
Lawrence, D.H. "The Rocking-Horse Winner." The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Ed. R. V. Cassill. New York: Norton, n.d. 299-308. Print.
About half-way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes---a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars cr...
It is funny and yet tragic to see that no matter where an individual’s geographical location is or for the most part when in history the duration of their lifetime occurred, that they still can share with other tormented individuals the same pain, as a result of the same malignancies plaguing humanity for what seems to have been from the beginning. Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” all exhibit disgust for their societies, what is particularly interesting however, is that the subject of their complaints are almost identical in nature. This demonstrates how literature really does reflect the attitudes and tribulations the society and or culture endures from which it was written. The grievances that they feel to be of such importance as to base their literary works on are that of traditionalism and, the carnivorous nature of society. Different societies will inevitably produce different restrictive and consuming faces to these problems.
Abcarian, Richard, Marvin Klotz, and Samuel Cohen. Literature: the Human Experience. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins, 2010. Print.
Eliot, T. S., and Michael North. The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Print.
Conrad, Joseph. "Heart of Darkness." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M.H. Abrams et al. 6th ed. vol. 2. New York: Norton, 1993. 1759-1817.
In the beginning of the twentieth century, literature changed and focused on breaking away from the typical and predicate patterns of normal literature. Poets at this time took full advantage and stretched the idea of the mind’s conscience on how the world, mind, and language interact and contradict. Many authors, such as Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and Twain, used the pain and anguish in first hand experiences to create and depict a new type of literature, modernism. In this time era, literature and art became a larger part of society and impacted more American lives than ever before. During the American modernism period of literature, authors, artists, and poets strived to create pieces of literature and art that challenged American traditions and tried to reinvent it, used new ways of communication, such as the telephone and cinema, to demonstrate the new modern social norms, and express the pain and suffering of the First World War.
Conrad, Joseph, and Paul B. Armstrong. Heart of Darkness: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2006.
One attribute of Modernist writing is Experimentation. This called for using new techniques and disregarding the old. Previous writing was often even considered "stereotyped and inadequate" (Holcombe and Torres). Modern writers thrived on originality and honesty to themselves and their tenets. They wrote of things that had never been advanced before and their subjects were far from those of the past eras. It could be observed that the Modernist writing completely contradicted its predecessors. The past was rejected with vigor and...
Watts, Cedric. 'Heart of Darkness.' The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Ed. J.H. Stape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 45-62.
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism , ed. Ross C. Murfin. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and Other Tales. Ed. Cedric Watts. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a great example of a Modernist novel because of its general obscurity. The language is thick and opaque. The novel is littered with words such as: inconceivable, inscrutable, gloom. Rather than defining characters in black and white terms, like good and bad, they entire novel is in different shades of gray. The unfolding of events takes the reader between many a foggy bank; the action in the book and not just the language echoes tones of gray.
* Conrad, Joseph. “Heart of Darkness” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, M.H. Abrams, general editor. (London: W.W. Norton, 1962, 2000)
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness 3rd Ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton Critical, 1988.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton Critical, 1988.