The Alienation of the Modernist Man

Sticking it to The Man. Student riots at Millbank recently.

Following months of recession, with promises from ministers that it will get worse later in the year, figures suggesting that up to half of the under-twenty-fives are either working part time or flat out unemployed, is it any wonder that there is despair and apathy among young people in Britain today? Despite educations (with all their overshadowing debts and subsequent public displays of catharsis) that seemed to promise us something more than positions at checkouts or dole queues, putting our faith in a system we could not fully comprehend, hoping for that outcome that we dreamed of, that we worked for for free, that seemed so tantalisingly close, yet remains illusive, despite all this, half of us can only afford to leave the house to stand in line at the Post Office.

Of course, it is easy to become bitter about this (as well as to generalize!), about the bankers and the politicians and all the fiscal complications that mean a select few still receive Christmas bonuses bigger than the entire collected revenue from our life’s employment, or, as I have chosen to do here, we could turn to some great ideas on the subject to find some small sense of solace. As I too am only working part time at the moment, I have a lot of time to read, somewhat irrevocably being drawn to novels, essays and poems that predominantly feature young men in unfair situations or else feel they are on a precipice, deciding whether or not to jump, perhaps just wandering back to their flat or office to carry on as before. These have quickly become my favorite pieces of writing. Most of them, as I’m sure you are anticipating from the title of this post, are writers who, when clustered together in the retrospect of history, could be described as the Modernists.

These are the writers and thinkers of the early part of the twentieth century, the ones who, without knowing it, we quote and reference continually, as well as following their lines of thought. Freud, for example, and his psychoanalytical neologisms, like Oral Fixation and Anal Retentiveness, are referenced in everything from high brow art right through to jovial conversation and pop culture.

For more great Penguin covers of
Kafka books, check out this.

But, no one else so ostentatiously felt this alienation, this detachment from society, as writers such as Sartre, Camus, Kafka and Nietzsche. The latter, in my opinion, was clearly a depressive who resented human life to the point where he is even credited with the invention of the word Nihilistic. Albert Camus and Franz Kafka, on the other hand, I believe, not only understood the ubiquitous sensations of alienation, of disappointment, of feeling lost inside the vast and unknowable system, but were able to render it in a fable-like way that makes them just as applicable now as when they were written. (I know we hear this all the time, ‘the vivid quality of the prose is just as relevant to the modern reader as it was when first published.’ But in this case, true – so indulge me.).

Albert Camus’ The Outsider (also translated as The Stranger), winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, chronicles the fall of Meursault, a young clerk who refuses to pretend he feels emotions (specifically, sympathy and empathy) when he does not, ending up in prison and – we are lead to believe, his narration finishing just before we discover completely – being put to death for not conforming to the expected aesthetic morals of the time. Although, as I just mentioned, these are also the morals of our time.

Likewise, K. in Kafka’s The Castle, searches unrelentingly through a labyrinthine bureaucratic system to find justification for his supposed position as the Castle’s land surveyor. Kafka died before completing it, but from notes we are lead to believe that K. (also) dies and is buried, his wife receiving on the day of the funeral a note from the Castle that finally explains his confusing term of ambiguous employment with them. Only in death, it seems, does the tale’s protagonist discover resolution. This is the same fable adapted by Kafka in The Trial, where Josef K. actively seeks the crime he had allegedly committed, yet, is never told by the court what the offense actually is. Thus, he has guilt thrust upon him and, failing to find a logical conclusion, analyses his life in search of the crime. This kind of paranoia was to become terrifyingly real with the rise of Nazism and Fascism in Europe, but, in a not too dissimilar if less-extreme, less-political, more-metaphysical (and economic) way, we might find ourselves experiencing something akin to Josef K.’s unfortunate predicament.

Great first edition cover of The Trial.
Great. Love it.

While failing to get any job, one automatically assumes fault lies with himself; he is not qualified enough, he is not experienced or articulate enough. Yet, the fault lies truly with the imperfect economic situation, rather than with specific employer or prospective employee (unless you are a lazy bum, in which case the fault does indeed lie with you). In this way a great number of us are lost in the labyrinthine system, stuck between dole queue and unrelenting shifts in jobs we despise.

While the economy may persist like this for a while, it means that we must raise our game, think laterally, try to outwit the system that wants us to be found guilty. Perhaps, in some strange way, these Modernist novels tell us not of Failure but of Understanding. If Meursault had been questioned by Freud rather than a priest and a judge, then he might not have been put to death, but might have performed penance for his crime (maybe even counseling??), and been rehabilitated through the act of understanding himself better. Like these modern fables, perhaps this is how we should view our cultural situation now – not through the jaded eyes of disenfranchised teens and graduates, but through those still willing to see another point of view, another way to find the potential conclusion.

However, if you have to pay the bills tomorrow, this might not be how you’re thinking today. Yet, in between shifts or filling out endless identical details in application forms, why not stop by the library (it is free after all!) and rent a copy of one of the books I have filed into a list that might make you believe we are not alone in the cold, hopeless maze of history. Some of them might even make you smile.

Only marginally relevant picture of
Marlon Brando on a bike. Just because.

Rebel Without A Job – A list of Outsiders

1. The Outsider – Albert Camus

2. The Castle – Franz Kafka

3. The Trial – Franz Kafka

4. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger

5. Bonjour Tristesse – Francoise Sagan

6. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

7. Down and Out in Paris and London – George Orwell

8. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf

9. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

10. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera


If you have any additions or amendments to the List, please comment below! I love to chat books.

If you like THIS you'll LOVE THIS

While I can't admit to genuinely liking Milan Kundera's work, I do certainly find it interesting. What is great about this collection published by Faber and Faber is that they all have covers designed by the writer, linking them together as a set visually and giving you a fairly direct impression of the author before you even read the first sentence. His lesser known works, Slowness, Identity, Ignorance and The Farewell Waltz seem to have been omitted from the collection, perhaps for that exact reason, while his essay on the genre of literature, The Art of the Novel, and collection of seven short stories, Laughable Loves, are included. I have just bought The Art of, hoping that it will have something great and profound to say (much like a certain moment of poetic revelation in everyone's favorite Shakespeare adaptation), and will get back to you with a full Kundera post soon (and that Bell Jar one I've been banging on about for months!).

Like the weeks I spent ploughing through Immortality, hiding the embarrassingly 'I'm so freaking existential!' title whenever on public transport, I hope to find a little Aladdin-style Diamond in the Rough amongst so much analytical, self-aware, post-war opinions that really ddoooo ddrrrrraaaggggg onnn fooorreeevvverrrrr (for Immortality?). An example of such Rough Diamonds you might come across is this little pearl (why stop with diamonds??) of wisdom: "A single metphor can give birth to love." See what I mean??! Plus, I did enjoy looking at the cover when in private, like you can now do (as long as you're not reading this on an iphone - quick the guy next to you is craning his neck and frowning! NEW TAB! NEW TAB!!).

A play on words and narrative illusions

The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton

When published last year, the debut from 22 year-old Eleanor Catton strongly divided opinions. After finishing it it is not hard to see why. The novel is split into two narratives, both completely (and perhaps unnecessarily) non-linear. One following the fallout of a teacher-student sex scandal at a girls’ school, half gleaned through lessons with a somewhat anomalous saxophone teacher. The other following the awkwardness and trepidations of a group of first years at a nearby drama institute who decide to put on a dramatisation of the highly publicised scandal. The novel culminates at the girls’ school’s end of year band recital and the performance of the drama school’s showcase, which we flit between.

It is evident, even to the readers that loathed this book that Catton’s scope and concept is certainly impressive for a first novel. It opens its pages out to themselves in a truly post modern ‘show what you are showing’ Brectian analysis of truth, performance and story telling. We never forget that the characters are merely words cloaking ideas about adolescence and yearning, as they speak in a mixture of heightened poetic soliloquies, teen-speak and true-to-life dialogue, often all jumbled up together in the same scene.

Sick cover though, no??

The author is certainly clever, but is this the work’s undoing? Too many ideas and not enough, well, novel? I have read lots of reviews that suggest that it is ‘all head and no heart.’ Anyone who has read it and experienced the uncomfortable, ill-fitting lives of adolescents’ can only disagree. A heart certainly beats within the main characters of Isolde, the younger sister of the girl involved in the sex scandal, and Stanley, the newcomer to the drama institute who we follow on and off the stage. I know these feelings, as, evidently so does Catton. However, for me, this is where the confusion lies. I can understand and feel a story about thwarted sexual desires, teenage angst and lust, uncertainty, guilt and alienation. Likewise, I can comprehend a work of literature that seeks to show me the clear nature of the medium – I can comprehend the ideas that the characters are not really real and I know the author knows and through knowing this I question the authenticity of performance, and storytelling and the contrived aspects of human social behaviour. Don’t worry, I get it. But when it all comes together in this blur, like (to use one of Catton’s metaphors) a mosaic of pieces, cut up and then slotted in next to each other regardless of the coherence of the final picture, I can only think; really? Is this what you were going for? Confusing your audience so much that the ideas whirl around in a series of tableaux that bear no relation to each other but vaguely recollect some kind of artistic existential awareness?

Perhaps it is. After getting used to the style, (which I must admit took me nearly half the book), I enjoyed it and found it driving and interesting to read. But after finishing it I feel tricked. As with many works of art designed to show up a mirror to itself (I am thinking specifically of the works of Milan Kundera, expect a post about his books next) one inevitably finds oneself stepping back from the characters and their situations, not wanting to be duped into feeling anything for something that the author clearly regards as no more than a metaphor or an experiment. I felt this periodically with a wry ‘I know what your up to’ grimace in my head and then a ‘oh god, I know exactly how he feels!’ But the problem I found here was that they just jarred too much. There was no artifice to be ripped away in the closing paragraphs. No rug pulled out from under me to make me really feel duped. But instead, continually I was nudged in different directions, spilling out across the shards of mosaic, each with their own voice and idea behind the voice – and worse, mirror to reflect the idea of the voice. OH GOD!!!!

Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick - the Children of Post Modernism

I certainly admire it and (I hope) understand the ideas that thread through it in the poetics of fumbling in the auditorium or the probing intimacy of a saxophone teacher. Unlike some reviewers (COUGH! AND THEIR SIMPLISTIC, TWO-DIMENSIONAL CRITIQUES) I am excited and interested by Catton’s passionate literary intellectualism. But, for me, it strikes me as an idea that might already have been done. Most memorably by someone as far flung as Andy Warhol, keeping the microphones in shot in Blow Job or Poor Little Rich Girl to let us know that Edie Sedgwick is not an actress, that she is real, that her tears and running eyeliner are real and unplanned and smack of the authenticity of the Human Reproduced. It certainly tackles the subject of the medium a thousand times better than the infinitely dull and obvious Life of Pi, which to my mind at least must have slipped past the Man Booker judges by some hideous mistake. Perhaps it lulled them into acquiescence with its total lack of interest, falling into the Winner pile as they dosed off on the tenth page.

The all-too obvious parable of Life of Pi - yawn!

As you might have guessed, I cannot make up my mind, and perhaps that is enough. The lurid prose and setups of fracturing characters lit up against a dark theatrical background will certainly stay in my head, full of light and dark like a Caravaggio painting. But I can’t say that I really enjoyed it. I admire it in a way, but I also hate it for its pretence and its jumbled nature, which I really think added nothing other than to disguise the lack of plot. But that can be fine. There doesn’t have to be a plot, or real characters, or a narrative structure at all necessarily. But I feel that you can’t have bits of all these things along with a fairly overriding concept on realism and falsehood. They just make a mess of good bits that ultimately make something not quite as good as the individual components. It’s kind of like when you put in a really great scarlet, a sublime azure blue, and brilliant white, and a deep emerald green – you invariably arrive at brown, through which tiny glimmers of the former colours can just about be spotted, but only just.

To summarise this (which is now nearly as long as the book itself – see, I can do it too! I know that I am writing this and I know that you know. But you don’t know that I know that you know that I know you know….) it is an interesting debut with an original style of prose. Every other review says the work itself is original, but I think in concept the idea is about as worn out artistically as Duchamp’s urinal is in art school studios across the Western World. It's kind of like saying Lady Gaga is original, when really she is just a louder combination of already provoking or mind-boggling ideas. There is no integral reason to the coalescence - but then, maybe this is all originality can be? It does, however, come from an interesting author who is sure to produce something else very startling.

So yeah, basically, what’s next?

Marcel Duchamp's Fountain. Seen it all before. Already peed in it.

If you’ve made it to the end of this review and have read The Rehearsal, please comment about it. I AM DYING TO HEAR WHAT ANYONE ELSE HAS TO THINK!