English Literature of the Twentieth Century: Trends, Challenges and Achievements

IJES, Volume LIV, 2017 English Literature of the Twentieth Century: Trends, Challenges and Achievements * A.A. Mutalik Desai As I stand before this learned audience of the English- teaching fraternity, I must remember with reverence my distinguished predecessors who have over the decades addressed similar audiences from all over the country: V.K. Gokak, M.K. Naik, S.K. Desai, C.D. Narasimhaiah and several others. I feel humble. I feel painfully conscious of my own inadequacies in sharp contrast with their eminence and memorable and enduring contribution to the English language and literary studies from which we have all immensely gained. I am grateful to the Executive Committee of the AESI for inviting me to preside over this annual event. I hope that in the deliberations of these three days I will not say or do anything that will make them question the trust they have reposed in me. The subject of my presentation is “English Literature of the Twentieth Century: Trends, Challenges and Achievements.” I will consider significant literary trends, accomplishments across poetry, drama and the novel in their separate milieu. Traversing beyond literature, I will look at history, political events and ideologies, financial crises (like the one between 1929-1934) and wars and other disasters, which have shaped modern times. It will be a formidable undertaking; I will try. The twentieth century has witnessed numerous phenomenal changes. Two World Wars and many smaller * Dr. A. A. Mutalik Desai, Formerly Professor of English, IIT Mumbai, Maharashtra. 2 The Indian Journal of English Studies ones, yet devastating in themselves, an economic crisis with implications far and wide, the rise and fall of an ideological empire, the end of European colonial empires and the consequent ushering in of freedom in vast areas of Africa and Asia, the nuclear threshold, the problems of a post- industrial society, the arrival of political and religious extremism and fanaticism (witness the unbridled nationalism and racism leading to the Nazi era in Germany), Ayatollahs everywhere, the so-called Moral Majority (what an absurdity!) in the Unites States and, not to be ignored, are our own over- zealous, sectarian, dogmatic, communalized pockets, unprecedented developments in science and technology, the rise of the Mass Man and the general existential angst and ennui felt in the face of intractable problems on this planet turned wretched by utter human mendacity. The twentieth century, too, is the site of equally profound changes whose effect is felt in the literatures in other languages often divided by culture, the long shadows of history, ethnic roots and nationality. Let me turn to the social, cultural, political and even the economic background, although it might appear at first that I am stepping into alien lands unconnected with the literary field. On closer scrutiny, however, it should become clear that the literary and other concerns are not so unrelated. With similar thoughts on their minds, the English critic Vivian de Sola Pinto and the historian, C. F. G. Masterman, have spoken about a writer’s “two voyages” in those troubled times and the divided loyalties of the twentieth century. While there have been revolutionary changes since the 1880s removing forever the certainties of the bygone age, the crux of what Masterman has pleaded is creative writers combine the inner with the outer, writer’s inner being, the smithy of his imaginative, intellectual, moral and spiritual being with the realities of life around. Without belabouring this point I wish to emphasize that a writer often steps out of his ivory tower (if one ever existed) making forays into the market place where chaos is the order. Even the Lady of Shalott could not remain in her tower for too long. English Literature of the Twentieth Century... 3 When did the Twentieth Century English Literature begin? 1) With Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) in which Tess’s powerful portrait haunts the reader. In it Hardy defies Victorian values and mores holding up Tess as “A Pure Woman;” 2) with Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); 3) with the death in 1892 of Tennyson (an iconic presence in his age); 4) with the outbreak of the First World War (1914); 5) with the emergence of the Trench Poets. (As the First World War ended, the seeds of the Second World War were effectively sown at the infamous Treaty at Versailles.) If the First World War deeply affected writers on both sides of the Atlantic (e.g., T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and Ernest Hemingway), the Second World War had an even deeper impact on writers as diverse as W. H. Auden, William Golding, Graham Greene, George Orwell, John Osborne, C. P. Snow, Stephen Spender, John Wain, Evelyn Waugh and Arnold Wesker. None has expressed a sense of shock and dismay more powerfully than Auden in his poem “September 1, 1939.” The first few decades of the twentieth century were also bedevilled by fiscal dilemmas along with the political. At a time when India was reeling under England’s colonial economic policies, West European and North American economies felt the harshness of it owing to the Great Depression and the worldwide slump, spiralling prices and rising unemployment. While this was a largely man-made tragedy, a phenomenon from the spheres of stock markets, trade and commerce, nature too had a hand in adding to human misery: see the American Nobel laureate John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939). England’s economic woes were endemic as her war losses were severe, and her political instability did not help matters. Germany’s economic adversity turned most acute by her horrendous inflation as to make her currency useless. Such unprecedented fate, England and Germany bearing the brunt, came to an end only with the post-World War Two reconstruction also on an unprecedented scale. 4 The Indian Journal of English Studies Marx, Engels and Lenin, Hegel, Freud and Jung were the new gods or at least the new prophets. They found inspiration from the Western milieu of the day. Despite revisionism and the inherent unresolved contradictions, the thoughts of these six became an enduring legacy for the century, and beyond. The intellectual content of these six appealed, for decades at least, to writers and thinkers as diverse as Auden, Spender, Louis MacNeice, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone and Andre Gide. Their disillusionment with the Marxist-inspired Communism that their god—even an ersatz god—had failed, which Richard Crossman has chronicled in his The God That Failed, (1949). In the intellectual tide of the time, Fabianism, played a part displaying its idealism, eclecticism, egalitarianism and, above all, moderation at a time when there was a cacophony of extremism. For its basic decency and compassion, history will always remember Fabians, even if only in a footnote. Above all, there was in the air a miasma that post-First World War Europe had become a graveyard of not only countless European youths, but also of every myth, faith, idealism and dreams which had sustained the continent for so long. In his novel Antic Hay (1923), Huxley has one of the characters say enquiringly, derisively: “Dreams in nineteen Twenty-two[?]” to which another adds sarcastically that if society has swallowed the First World War and even the Russian famine, then dreams and idealism were passé. Did dreams end with the nineteenth-century French novelist Edmond Rostand’s era? Adding to this symposium another character wonders if the English society of the time had come to think, “No dream, no religion, no morality.” That was decadence. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) portrayed a civilization devastated. With such decay and degeneration all around, it is amazing that there was not even a hint of hope or regeneration. A much earlier poet, Matthew Arnold, had prophesied (in his “The Grand Chartreuse,” 1855): But as on some far northern strand, Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek English Literature of the Twentieth Century... 5 In pity and mournful awe might stand Before some fallen Runic stone— For both were faiths, and both are gone. Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born… What Eliot and Auden were faced with was a dilemma caused by a combination of political, economic, ideological and philosophic crises resulting in the modern man unsure and unsteady of where he stood and where he might go. It is glib these days to talk about man’s loss of faith: but men and women, as the Second World War crept to its apocalyptic end, were indeed rudderless. No metaphor or set of philosophic principles could really explain their situation; they seemed unable to wade through the troubled waters of their days. Modern science, another new god, new orthodoxy, could not help either. Renaissance optimism was met with cynicism, nihilism and as mere sophistry. While the achievements of science are formidable then as now, tools made possible by science were already being misused. In as early as 1932 Huxley had warned with words from “St. Mark,” “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for Sabbath” with the obvious inference that science is for man, and not man for science. Huxley’s timely and wise words were ignored then as now. Not he alone: Lawrence, Bertrand Russell and C. P. Snow have also dared to question science. Between Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader (1925 and 1932) the world became unrecognizably different to writers and readers alike. By 1918, thanks to the Suffragette movement, women had won the right to vote.

Load more