Putting the "Mod" in Modern: Modernist Authors

Ezra Pound summed up modernism in three short words: “Make it new.” It is an imperative that his fellow writers applied to their own works, severing with the realists, whose concepts of narrative were less radical and more reader-friendly. Whether consciously or not, writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf applied Pound’s dictate by breaking with convention and applying a variety of innovative techniques. Two of the most telling methods are among those described by postmodernist writer John Barth, who noted “the radical disruption of linear flow of narrative” and “the frustration of conventional expectations concerning unity and coherence of plot and character” (278). Both of Barth’s descriptions apply to Joyce’s Ulysses and stories from Dubliners and to Woolf’s “Mark on the Wall” from her Monday or Tuesday collection.

Radical disruptions to chronological time are amply evidenced throughout the famous — and famously frustrating — Ulysses, but nowhere more than in episode 18, a long stream-of-consciousness piece from the perspective of Molly Bloom. Almost any excerpt from the section suffices to demonstrate Bloom’s observation about modernists, as Molly’s thoughts jump radically from topics as disparate as cooking, sex, and religion in a long diatribe marked by only eight sentence breaks in forty-two pages. Barth’s point is proven by these closing lines from the novel:

… he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes....

... middle of paper ...

...They also conform to Pound’s dictates to “make it new.” However, writer Michael North notes that the Pound’s famous summation, ironically, is not itself new, but rather dates back to ancient Chinese philosophy, a topic that interested Pound considerably. The phrase, then, is like modernism itself — difficult to pigeonhole and reduced overmuch by simplistic summary.

Works Cited

Barth, John. “The Literature of Replenishment.” Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Ed.

Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

273-285. Print.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Dover Publications, 1991. Print.

---. Ulysses. London: Wordsworth Classics, 2010. Print.

North, Michael. “The Making of ‘Making It New.’” Guernica. 15 Aug. 2013. Web. 5 Aug.

2014.

Woolf, Virginia. Monday or Tuesday: Eight Stories. New York: Dover Publications, 1997.

Print.