American Modernism, Narrative Voice, and the Antihero

Defining Modernism and Three Examples

Creating a true and solid definition of modernism is exceptionally difficult. Even most scholarly critical accounts of the so-called modernist movement tend to divide the category into roughly two distinct movements: "high modernism," which reflected the erudition and scholarly experimentalism of Eliot, Joyce, and Pound, and the "low modernism" of later American practitioners such as William Carlos Williams. Nonetheless, despite the difficulties involved with such a task, the following attempts to identify at least some defining traits of modernism, as drawn from the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics:

First, [in modernism] "realization" had to replace description, so that instead of copying the external world the work could render it in an image insisting on its own forms of reality… [and] Second, the poets develop collage techniques for intensifying the sense of productive immediacy. (Preminger and Brogan 793)

Thus, the two substantively important aspects of modernism are an attempt to deal with psychological realization over mimetic representation, and a general interest in the use of collage as a technique.

Under this definition, although it is often not thought of in exactly these terms, Willa Cather's novel My Ántonia is indubitably a modern novel. It not only tends to employ image and representation in favor of mimetic description, but it also presents a collagistic order of things rather than a purely chronological one. Cather's resistance to mimetic representation is implicit from the novel's first pages, when Jim Burden states early on that no one could really understand life on the plains without having actually lived there. This sense of the ineffable permeates the entire book, culminating in poetic descriptions and images rather than mimetic representation. Additionally, although there is an overarching narrative of sorts, the novel is largely composed of vignettes offered as memories of the narrator himself. In this fashion, the narrative structure is largely collagistic and grounded in the function of memory rather than in traditional chronological linearity.

William Faulkner's Light in August is similarly an example of the work we would expect from an author successfully defined as being under the sway of modernism. His use of stream of consciousness throughout the novel both suggests an avoidance of the mimetic and an interest in collage. Since everything is explained through stream of consciousness and rendered psychologically, the prose is imagistic and representational rather than mimetic in nature. Moreover, since stream of consciousness is subject to the rules of metonymy — which is surely as collagistic a principle as any — it fulfills the second criterion as well. This focus on metonymy over mimesis is primarily what qualifies Faulkner's work as modernist.

Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises can also be said to fall legitimately within the modernist vein. While it does not employ the sort of verbal maximalism found in Faulkner's stream of consciousness technique, it still uses metonymic and collagistic framing that defines it as modernist. Similarly, its focus on the psychological states of its characters — such as the narrator's impotence, which appears to be both a metaphorical and a literal condition — makes it representational rather than mimetic in emphasis.

Thus, two main characteristics of modernism are the tendency to pursue psychological representation over mimetic representation, and the use of techniques like collage and related metonymic principles in place of a strictly mimetic mode. Since the three works discussed above all fulfill those criteria, albeit in distinct ways, they can reliably be considered modernist.

Strategies of Narrative Point-of-View

Perhaps no line more immediately defines a narrative point-of-view than Herman Melville's opening to Moby Dick, in which the narrator speaks directly to the reader: "Call me Ishmael." In so doing, Melville establishes an immediate contact between narrator and reader that is at once intriguing and exceptionally human. He creates this effect by having his narrator introduce himself just as any person we might meet would, making Ishmael instantly accessible and relatable.

In his novella The Turn of the Screw, Henry James employs the opposite approach, using a narrator who is hearing a story derived from the notes and journals of another person. By also having the teller of that story initially refuse to deliver it to the assembled guests, James creates an air of enigma and suspense. His story's point-of-view therefore feels quite different from the amiable, immediately engaging character of Ishmael. The distance between the narrator and the story makes the tale itself seem stranger and more alien — which is, of course, entirely appropriate for a ghost story.

In My Ántonia, Willa Cather employs a first-person narrator in a fashion that recalls both James and Melville, but she places her narrative framing within the person of someone who has just met the primary narrator, Jim Burden, on a train. Like Burden, this framing narrator also grew up on the plains and knew Antonia. There are several reasons for this choice: having this additional character appear similarly preoccupied with Antonia suggests that Burden's fascination transcends mere obsession. Antonia becomes a kind of free-floating signifier that somehow encompasses the entirety of the plains region itself, while also serving as an individual index of Jim Burden's life and times.

The narrator in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is similarly a bystander in the action of the story. Although Nick meets the principal characters, he manages to remain effectively removed from the main action and is therefore uninvolved in the great tragedy at the novel's end. Nick's role remains ambiguous, as does the nature of some of the romantic difficulties he describes at the novel's opening. The authorial strategy behind this is twofold. First, by employing this technique, Fitzgerald is able to underscore the alienation his characters experience by similarly alienating the reader from the narrator, who is distant and mysterious — largely unlike the overtly friendly and considerably more amiable Ishmael who narrates Moby Dick.

In a manner that is quite different from all of these, Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter narrates everything through an exceptionally flowery and verbose third-person narrator. The reasoning behind this choice may be to distance himself slightly from his title character, Hester Prynne. There is an intelligent purpose behind this strategy: since Hester would have been objectionable to most readers of Hawthorne's day, employing a third-person narrator makes the revelation that Hester is in fact a good person seem more objective and real. The moral transformation appears to take place within the consciousness of the reader, rather than being imposed by an authoritative first-person voice.

Bibliography

Preminger, Alex, and T.V.F. Brogan. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993.