WE LOVE LITERATURE

1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899/1902) - An early example of linguistic ambiguity and indeterminacy, Conrad’s tale of the corrupt imperialism that upholds “civilized” culture is constructed through a nested, layered narrative and features some of the most cryptic language ever written (e.g., "It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention"). Things become increasingly surreal as Marlow approaches the mysterious Kurtz. If you think Marlon Brando’s “The horror! The horror!” is chilling, wait until you reach the one-two punch of Conrad’s conclusion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex (1914 and 1915) - Vorticism was Britain’s answer to avant-garde movements like surrealism, dada, and futurism. Its journal, Blast, only appeared twice before the Great War put an end to it. Full of bluster and bravado, Blast includes poetry by T. S. Eliot, Pound, and the lesser known Wyndham Lewis, along with manifestos and cubist-futurist art by the likes of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The macho tone is tempered a bit by a short story by the feminist journalist Rebecca West.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922) - The primer of poetic modernism and the quintessential statement of post-war despondency. Eliot barrages his reader with seemingly disconnected images and snippets ranging from Ovid, Shakespeare, and Sanskrit chants to jazz tunes and a bored couple’s post-coital thoughts. When read carefully, repeating themes and evocative, lyrical passages cohere around a desire: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Even at this moment of sweeping disillusionment, language offers a glimmer of hope.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) - At its heart, Ulysses is a simple story about an estranged couple and a disheartened young man in Dublin on June 16, 1904 (“Bloomsday”). True, the narrative constantly migrates from the present to the past, and from one character’s mind to another’s, and its network of literary, philosophical, and historical references proclaims that this novel is smarter than you are. But Ulysses is also hilarious, playful, bawdy, and at times downright moving. By the time you finish, you will know the main characters better than your closest friends, thanks to Joyce’s stunning stream of consciousness. And you’ll know every narrative trick there is, as Joyce anticipates the literary pyrotechnics of Nabokov, Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and everyone else who followed him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5. Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (1927) - A novel about time, perception, aesthetics, gender roles, and death, but grounded in compelling, idiosyncratic characters like the patriarchal yet helpless Mr. Ramsay and his quietly powerful wife. Lyrical, puzzling, and shocking by turns (note how Woolf puts the violence of war and major deaths in brackets), few novels rival this one for formal invention and sheer beauty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930) - Southern Gothic at its most terrible and comic. Fifteen different characters think about a matriarch on her deathbed. Faulkner doesn’t throw any Thomas Aquinas or Sanskrit at you, à la Joyce or Eliot, but the shifting points of view can be just as disorienting. Focus on each character’s eccentricities and how the various voices are arranged. “My mother is a fish”: Discuss.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

7. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936) - A cross-dressing doctor, a tattooed circus performer, and a pair of tortured lesbian lovers playing cat and mouse through the Parisian night: Barnes’s novel is truly rich and strange. In prose that reads like poetry, Nightwood is a hypnotic panorama of misfits, doomed desire, and convoluted identity. And what exactly is happening in that last scene with the woman and the dog…?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8. Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (1939) - Rhys, who was born in Dominica, specializes in writing about women down and out in Paris and London, drifting from one drink to the next. Her stream of consciousness, punctuated by ellipses and slipping from one time frame from to another, is animated by black humor and lively observations about popular music, fashion, cinema, and what it means to be an outsider. Rhys is modernism’s Amy Winehouse, and I mean that as a compliment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

9. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952) - A late reflection on modernism, Invisible Man channels Kafka and Dostoyevsky in its fierce commentary on race and politics in America. Alternately surreal, symbolic, and naturalistic, the novel has the quality of a waking nightmare. The ugliness of the “Battle Royal” episode equals anything in Dante’s Inferno.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1953) - “Well, shall we go?” “Yes, let's go.” (They do not move.) That exchange pretty much sums up Beckett’s “tragicomedy.” Estragon and Vladimir wait for someone named Godot. They talk, exchange hats, and meet some other peculiar characters. Funny, tedious, repetitive (as one critic brilliantly put it, “Nothing happens. Twice”), and tantalizingly ambiguous, this absurdist play embodies the ethos of modernism. Although the world seems to be, as Eliot put it, an “immense panorama of futility and anarchy,” there’s an enduring faith in the power of the word. Modernism remains as relevant as ever.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Frost, 2013)