Modernism: When the Centre Cannot Hold

In "The Tables Turned" Wordsworth's evening sun spreads "His first sweet evening yellow" over green fields. In 1915 a young American poet living in London, T. S. Eliot, began a poem with a very different evening:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), lines 1–12

A sunset compared to an unconscious body on an operating table: that simile announces a new movement. Modernism set out to find forms for a world that seemed to have lost its centre.

1Close reading of "Prufrock"

• The invitation that goes nowhere. "Let us go" sounds confident, but the speaker never says where or why, and he silences the question: "Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'" The "overwhelming question" is never asked in the whole poem. Prufrock is a man who cannot act.
• The city as a sick body. The evening is "etherized", the streets "half-deserted", the hotels "cheap" and the nights "restless". Even the streets are compared to "a tedious argument / Of insidious intent". The modern city is shown as numb, shabby and faintly menacing.
• Irregular form. The lines vary in length; rhymes appear ("I/sky", "streets/retreats") but irregularly, and a long sentence trails off in an ellipsis. The form wanders as the speaker wanders.
• The title's irony. It is called a "Love Song", but there is no love scene and no song. The gap between title and poem is typical Modernist irony.

2A world without a centre

Why did writers feel that the old forms no longer worked? Some reasons:

• The First World War (1914–1918) killed millions and destroyed faith in progress, in leaders and in heroic language.
• New ideas about the mind. Sigmund Freud argued that much of our mental life is unconscious; the philosopher William James described thought as a "stream". If the mind is not orderly, why should a novel be?
• New science and technology. Einstein's relativity, the motor car, cinema and the telephone changed how people experienced time and space.
• Loss of shared belief. Religious certainty and the confidence of empire were both weakening.

The Irish poet W. B. Yeats caught this mood in "The Second Coming", written in 1919:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

W. B. Yeats, "The Second Coming" (1920), lines 1–8

The falcon circles further and further from its handler until it can no longer hear him: control is lost. Thirty-eight years later Chinua Achebe took the words "Things Fall Apart" as the title of his novel and placed this poem at its front as an epigraph. The borrowing turns Yeats's European crisis into an African one: in Achebe's novel it is the Igbo world whose centre cannot hold when colonial rule arrives.

3Modernism in the novel

The novelist Virginia Woolf argued that the realist novel, with its careful plot and solid detail, missed what life actually feels like. In her essay "Modern Fiction" (1925) she wrote:

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

"Gig lamps" were the paired lamps on a horse-drawn carriage: neat, evenly spaced, one after another, like the events of a well-made plot. Woolf replaces that image with a glowing "halo" that surrounds us: experience is continuous, blurred and inward. Modernist novelists such as Woolf, James Joyce (Ulysses, 1922) and William Faulkner followed the flow of characters' thoughts, broke up chronology and left endings open. You will study their main technique, stream of consciousness, in Unit 2.

Africa in Modernism, and Modernism in Africa. The traffic went both ways. European modernist painters, Picasso among them, took ideas from West and Central African sculpture and masks. Later, African poets such as Christopher Okigbo of Nigeria wrote dense, allusive, modernist poetry that blended Igbo ritual with European models.