IMPRESSIONISM AND THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The term MODERNISM, in its present acception, describes an ample movement starting around 1910 (in some cases earlier) in which arts have gradually dissociated themselves from the 19th century social and aesthetic assumptions, in an effort to discover new forms and new ways of understanding realities. The term modernism was chosen despite its ambiguities and temporal limitations to cover a great number of trends with a variety of forms in individual countries: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Symbolism, Imagism, Dadaism, Surrealism, etc. The extension in time of this movement is also liable to discussion. Most would agree that it spans the first three or four decades of the 20 th century, but with its roots going back into the previous century. The periodization varies in different countries: to French critics modernism naturally began in France, with Baudelaire and Flaubert; to others it was signaled by Russian, German or Scandinavian writers at the end of the previous century; one could also speak of the contribution of the American writers of the same period to later modernism: Poe, Melville, Whitman, H. James. Allan Bullock advances the theory of a two-generation or a two-wave movement, the first comprising, in the 1890s, the work of Ibsen, Chekhov, James, Tolstoy, Cezanne and others. Nevertheless, for historical reasons, it is safer to associate modernism with the period 1910-1930: the two decades constituted, from all points of view, a rather unitary period, with marked social and cultural characteristics, reflected also in literature. Inside this period the peak year was probably 1922 when Joyces Ulysses, Eliots Waste Land, Lawrences Aarons Rod, Virginia Woolfs Jacobs Room, Prousts Sadome and Gomorrhe were all published. After 1930 modernism lost its impetus: Lawrence died in 1930, Forster published no more novels, the fiction of Virginia Woolf decreased in quality; and though modernism did not die out, it was actually assimilated in other modes of writing, with an increased social and political consciousness, due to the changing economic and cultural conditions of the thirties. Modernism appeared in a period of intense economic development, technical advancement and urbanization. At the beginning of the century London was the richest city of the world with a population of five million, a true imperial capital that attracted artists from many parts of the world. In the last decade of the century James, Conrad, Stephen Crane, Wilde, Yeats and Shaw had settled there. They were followed later by Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, all contributing to the Renaissance of the English letters. In 1910 the British capital sheltered a famous and influential exhibition of PostImpressionistic art. London offered a varied, mobile and active environment that stimulated free thinking and the arts. But at the same time it betrayed great contradictions, filth, promiscuity, the misery of the slums, as reflected in Jamess travel notes, in Conrads Heart of Darkness, in Eliots Waste Land. After the war, much of the attraction of London for artists was gone. D.H. Lawrence, Henry James or Pound left London for the continent. The First World War brought a sense of disillusionment and physical shock. But in the following period of

irresponsibility, also a period of brutal awakening and social revolutions, artists often concentrated on aesthetic experiment as a reaction to the historical confusion. Therefore modernism is sometimes considered as a mere stylistic revolution, an overstylization of the arts, the distortion of the familiar surfaces of oserved reality according to the logic of story or history. But modernism did not simply mean a turn away from realism towards style, technique and structural sophistication; it rather aimed at discovering new and more adequate forms of rendering reality, seen as discontinuous and proteic. The modernists believed in life as multiple and perception as plural, they had an almost tragic awareness of the confusion of modern experience , trying to tame reality through art. Thus on one hand they stressed the elements of discontinuity, disintegration, alienation by using ellipsis, fragmented narrative, discontinuity, of time and space, disrupted grammar. On the other hand, however, especially in England, the modernists opposed anti-art, the total demolition of traditional forms.