Modernist Fiction and Drama

This is Unit Fifteen of American Literature, part one of two: the fiction written by people who no longer trusted the words they had inherited. Unit fourteen closed on poets who stopped explaining themselves. This unit is the fiction of the same years, and its governing idea, which part two pays off, is that the technical innovations follow from a distrust of vocabulary. The war had removed a stable structure of values, and Gertrude Stein supplied the phrase for the young Americans who came out of it. A favourable exchange rate let them live well in Europe on very little, where they absorbed Freudian psychology, some Marxism and a view of the world without God, and small presses printed what commercial houses would not. Out of that come three writers who solve the same problem three ways. Fitzgerald puts the decade's money on the page in a short patterned novel. Hemingway strips the sentence to its nouns and verbs and formulates the principle behind it: omit what you know, and the omission strengthens the story. Faulkner goes the other way entirely, into sentences that accumulate, and invents a county to keep them in. By the end you will be able to say what the lost generation names. To account for Fitzgerald and read his novel's three central images. To state the iceberg principle and read Hemingway's major work. To describe Yoknapatawpha and four narrations. And to place Faulkner's other novels and his best-known story.

Three entries on the condition: the phrase, the woman who applied it, and the cheap living that gathered them in Paris.

A generation named by a friend.

AML 1401 The Lost Generation

The witness records that young Americans of the nineteen twenties were called the lost generation, a phrase Gertrude Stein applied to them. The war had removed a stable structure of values, and the writers who came out of it wrote about people with no inherited framework. The phrase describes a condition rather than a club anyone joined.

A Paris salon, and a label.

AML 1402 Gertrude Stein and the Phrase

Stein, an American writer living in Paris, kept a salon that drew the expatriates, experimented with repetition and broken syntax in her own prose, and supplied the label the decade kept. The witness lists her with Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Pound among the Americans living abroad cheaply. Her own prose is stranger than her reputation suggests.

Cheap living, and willing presses.

AML 1403 Expatriate Paris and the Little Magazines

A favourable exchange rate let American writers live well in Europe on very little, and the witness connects that to the currents they absorbed there: Freudian psychology, some Marxism, and a view of the world without God. Small magazines and small presses printed what commercial houses would not. The expatriates brought the ideas home with them.

Eight entries on Fitzgerald: the man who named the decade, and the short novel that holds its three most quoted images.

The man who named the decade.

AML 1404 F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age

Fitzgerald named the Jazz Age and lived inside it, publishing early, marrying Zelda Sayre, spending faster than he earned, and writing stories for magazines to pay for it. His subject is money: who has it, who has newly got it, and what the difference does to people. His subject is class, told through money.

A mansion, a party, a distance.

AML 1405 *The Great Gatsby*

Published in nineteen twenty-five, the novel puts a mysterious rich neighbour in a Long Island mansion throwing parties for strangers, in order to draw back a woman he loved before the war. It is short, patterned, narrated by an onlooker, and the period's most taught novel. The book failed commercially in his lifetime.

An onlooker who claims honesty.

AML 1406 Nick Carraway as Narrator

Nick is a bond salesman from the Midwest who rents the cottage next door, claims to be one of the few honest people he has known, and both judges and admires Gatsby. Everything reaches the reader through him, including the parts he did not see. His reliability is part of the book's argument rather than a technicality.

Four people, and a class diagram.

AML 1407 Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, Myrtle

Gatsby has made a fortune by unexplained means to win Daisy Buchanan, who is married to Tom, who is having an affair with Myrtle Wilson, who is married to a garage owner. The arrangement is a class diagram, and it kills three people before it ends. Careless people, in the book's own phrase for them.

A green light, and grey ash.

AML 1408 The Green Light and the Valley of Ashes

A green light at the end of Daisy's dock is the thing Gatsby reaches toward across the water, and the valley of ashes is the grey industrial waste between the mansions and the city where the Wilsons live. One image is longing and the other is the cost, and the two divide the novel's world between them.

A billboard, mistaken for God.

AML 1409 The Eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg

Above the valley of ashes an old oculist's billboard shows enormous blue eyes behind yellow spectacles, faded and unrepaired. A grieving character takes them for the eyes of God. The board's sample question describes them as sightless eyes suggesting the vacancy of old orders of belief. The eyes belong to an advertisement nobody maintains.

A rehearsal, and a haircut.

AML 1410 "Winter Dreams" and "Bernice Bobs Her Hair"

"Winter Dreams" follows a boy from a caddie's job to wealth and to the discovery that the girl he wanted has faded, which is the novel in short form. "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" is a lighter social comedy of a girl talked into a haircut and taking her revenge. The magazine stories paid for the novels.

A doctor consumed by his patient.

AML 1411 *Tender Is the Night* and the Later Fitzgerald

*Tender Is the Night* follows a psychiatrist who marries a patient and is consumed by her recovery and by expatriate life on the Riviera. Fitzgerald's own later years were spent in debt, illness and Hollywood screenwriting, and he died at forty-four with a novel unfinished. The late career is a decline he wrote about.

Seven entries on Hemingway: a principle about omission, and four books that demonstrate it.

Omit what you know; it shows.

AML 1412 Ernest Hemingway and the Iceberg

Hemingway drove an ambulance in Italy, was wounded, reported from Europe, and built a prose of short declarative sentences and concrete nouns. His principle was that a writer may omit what he knows, and the omitted part strengthens the story, like the seven-eighths of an iceberg under water. The theory explains the surface's flatness.

Paris, Pamplona, nothing said directly.

AML 1413 *The Sun Also Rises*

Expatriates drift from Paris cafés to the bullfights at Pamplona, drinking, quarrelling and failing to say what they mean. The novel is the lost generation's own book, and its famous exchange about how a man went bankrupt, gradually and then suddenly, describes a good deal more than money. The emotion is entirely in the omissions.

A wound the book will not name.

AML 1414 Jake Barnes, Brett Ashley, and the Wound

Jake narrates, and a war wound has left him unable to consummate the love between him and Lady Brett Ashley, who moves through other men while both of them know the situation cannot change. The book never states the wound plainly, which is the iceberg principle at work. The central fact is withheld on purpose.

A desertion, an escape, a death.

AML 1415 *A Farewell to Arms*

An American ambulance driver on the Italian front deserts during a retreat and escapes to Switzerland with the nurse he loves, who dies in childbirth. The novel distrusts abstract words like glory and honour, preferring the names of villages and the numbers of roads. That suspicion of abstract words is the book's ethic.

A story in what goes unsaid.

AML 1416 "Hills Like White Elephants"

A man and a girl wait for a train in Spain and argue, almost entirely in dialogue, about an operation neither of them names. The story never states the subject, and a reader assembles it from what the two will not say, which makes it the cleanest demonstration of his method. The subject is never named in the text.

A marlin, and a skeleton.

AML 1417 *The Old Man and the Sea* and the Nobel

An old Cuban fisherman hooks a great marlin, fights it for days, and brings home the skeleton the sharks left him. The short novel restored his reputation and was cited at his Nobel Prize, and its line about a man being destroyed but not defeated became his motto. Destroyed but not defeated, the book says.

Short, concrete, joined by and.

AML 1418 Hemingway's Sentence

The Hemingway sentence is short, declarative, concrete and joined by and rather than by subordination, with few adjectives and almost no abstractions. It was imitated for fifty years and parodied for longer, and it changed the default sound of American prose. The plainness is engineered rather than artless.

Six entries on Faulkner: an invented county, a novel with four narrations, and a story told out of order.

One county, used for a lifetime.

AML 1419 William Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha

Faulkner spent his life in Oxford, Mississippi, and invented a county he called Yoknapatawpha as the setting for most of his fiction, drawing a map of it and reusing families across novels. The South's history, and its refusal to be past, is his continuous subject. The novels cross-reference one another.

Four sections, four narrations.

AML 1420 *The Sound and the Fury*

The novel tells the fall of the Compson family in four sections with four different narrations, the first by a man with severe intellectual disability who has no sense of chronology. Readers meet the events out of order and assemble the story as they go. The first section withholds the ordering entirely.

Sensation, anguish, grievance, endurance.

AML 1421 Benjy, Quentin, Jason, Dilsey

Benjy narrates in sensation without time, Quentin in the anguished stream of a man about to kill himself, Jason in bitter practical complaint, and the last section moves to a third person centred on Dilsey, the Black servant who holds the household together. Each section is a different technical experiment.

A coffin, a flood, fifteen narrators.

AML 1422 *As I Lay Dying*

A poor family carries their mother's coffin across flooded country to bury her in town, and the novel is told in short chapters by fifteen different narrators including the dead woman. The result is comic, grotesque and formally radical at once. One chapter is spoken by the corpse.

Unknown parentage; a reconstructed dynasty.

AML 1423 *Light in August* and *Absalom, Absalom!*

*Light in August* follows a man who does not know whether he is Black or white through a violent Southern summer, and *Absalom, Absalom!* has two students reconstruct a plantation dynasty's collapse from fragments. Both make the South's racial history the machinery of the plot. Both books argue that the past is not finished.

A town telling one woman's life.

AML 1424 "A Rose for Emily"

A town narrates, as a collective we, the life of a reclusive Southern woman, moving out of chronological order until the final scene opens a locked upstairs room. The disordered telling is what makes the ending land, so the chronology is scrambled deliberately rather than carelessly.

That is the generation and its three great novelists. Part two takes the rest of the period and the stage. You can say what the lost generation names, a condition rather than a club, and who supplied the phrase, and explain the exchange rate and the small presses that gathered them in Paris. You can account for Fitzgerald, who named a decade and wrote about class through money, and read his short patterned novel: an onlooker narrator who claims honesty, four people arranged as a class diagram, a green light across the water, a valley of industrial ash, and a faded billboard whose enormous blue eyes a grieving man takes for God, which is what the board's seventh sample question describes. You can state the iceberg principle and follow it through a novel whose central wound is never named and a story whose subject is never spoken. And you can describe an invented Mississippi county, a novel narrated by four people beginning with a man who has no sense of time, another with fifteen narrators including a corpse, and a town telling one woman's life out of order.