The Extinct
What was the late Modernism?
Substantially a historical moment perceived as a suspended time. Suspended time because of the uncertainty of the moment; suspended time because it could not permit to imagining anything good for the close future, putting at the same time in constant emotional fear, people.
That was why, maybe, that "late Modernists" focused particularly, in their
writings, in the daily activities of people: the only certainty
that there was, was that one: reality seen, reality experienced; at least, the wanted and searched reality, in opposition to the irrationality of the world.
Not only: the existence of individuals started to be perceived always more as a mutant attribute of a situation still too precarious.
Modernists experienced the First World War and the Spanish Pandemic Flu. Once recovered from these two big traumas, the arrival of a lot of dictators in the entire Old Continent. Italy knew Mussolini, Spain lived a Civil War; Germany knew Hitler; then the Second World War.
History failed to be a rational place where to cuddle mind, body and expectations. It is correct to write that reality and everyday existence meant suspicion and anxiety. .
Reality was so ugly that painters, writers tried to sublimate in a way or in another; the current of surrealism put on canvas abnormality of the reality, while literature tried to give different answers.
Isherwood and Woolf tried their best for representing the present.
In particular Isherwood in a line described his modality of working: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking."
Not thinking: thinking became too devastating. Passivity helped to going on.
The description offered in his book Goodbye to Berlin the one of a decadent Germany, the Germany of Weimar affected by heavy economical problems.
Modernists tried to capture the instant in all intensity and so these fragmentations in their modernists way of writing mean and pretend a re-reading for trying to understand space, time and for
establishing a more complete connection with every single moment described by the authors.
The big collapsed certainties for these writers were two: first of all the decline of a british centered world where rotated the rest of the universe; it created a crisis of historical consciousness and the end as also said before of history as previously known: a rational, but more than rational I would add reassuring part of the existence: normality.
The second: Capitalism. It had brought to most people wealth but at the moment, present and future appeared uncertain; and not only: the past was seen like a wonderful dream disappeared too soon. In this mental condition, plenty of melancholy for the past, fear and panic for the present and future these writers told every aspect of the daily existence of the protagonists of their books: houses, but also interior spaces like hobbies, sport, dance and other happy activities.
In one of her books Woolf will portray in the character of Rose,
interior sickness.
Just this portion of the book says a lot to my point of view about feelings and sensations felt by the same author and a way of escapism after all. It was a sick world and that world lived in a systemic disorder;
itellectuals understood it.
Because of it, and for giving voice opening a discussion more frank to the best genial and beautiful minds, Henry Bergson created in 1922 the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation.
Participants were big international names like Paul Valery, Madame Marie Curie, Sigmund Freud, Tagore, Aldous Huxley, H.G.Wells.
Particularly important was the correspondence of Albert Einstein with Sigmund Freud On War in 1932.
Henry Moore was Mr. Gothic Sketches. Grown up in a gothic world after all he has been the main exponent of this current; one of his sketch is the cover of this book.
Gothic sketches created during the Second World War. Elizabeth Bowen synthetized that historical moment as "Lucid abnormality of everyday life in a wartime city".
The arrival of Gothic, in a time so uncertain and terrifying under many ways was more precious and comforting, after all because permitted to put in sketches, words, etc, the horror, that, in opposite case would have remained repressed and confined in the most hidden part of the existence of people.
Gothic means the research in the soul, mind of people of pulsions, fears, dissatisfactions; the Gothic enter in the most intimate fears of
men, women passing through scaring new characters born by the fantasies of various authors and irrational worlds that these artists experienced, lived and had close to them. Gothic in fact is inspired by reality, feelings of the moment: Gothic is unintersted at the past or at the future. Gothic lives the moment, suck the moment and elaborate the moment with its hallucinations, contortions and horrors.
So, if in the past Gothic tried to give voice to dead people still speaking and active in our world, the chaos created by the advent of the Second World War captured the daily existence of people with bombs
that destroyed palaces, animals, men giving an idea of a mass grave.
There was in Moore a recurrent theme: the one of the fear of being buried when a person still alive. And it happened!
A comment in the Spectator regarding Moore said that he looked as
"if he has been excavating in early tombs."
What did Moore was not to separate death and life but reading these states putting them in connection using an invisible wire that kept
the two conditions less identifiable.
Our time after all is similar to the Modernist one and that's also why I warmly suggest to all of this reading.
I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.
Anna Maria Polidori
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