Where All the Ladders Start

How did we get here?

This seems like an apt question to ask when beginning a course on 20th c literature and film. How did we get here? How is our individual experience here and now “the same as it ever was”? How is it different? And what is the connection between events and experiences in the late 19th century and events and experiences now, in the early 21st century? What is it we want to say about the Twentieth century? What might others say centuries hence? What makes it different from any other century? What issues from former centuries are still present, either as a difficult legacy, a promise unfulfilled, or a nightmare as yet forestalled but still an ominous possibility? And, given these questions, what is the role of art, literature and film that is also unique to the twentieth century?

A preliminary answer to these questions might be posed as follows: Because “answers” have less and less credibility in a more and more subjective world view, art in the Twentieth Century develops more and more sophisticated ways to ask more subtle and more challenging questions.

How do writers convey the experience of subjects who are no longer stably moored by their religious community and social system? What kinds of subjects do we get instead? One difference we see is a shift from all-seeing, third person objective narrators, to shifting and unreliable narrators who are hard to pinpoint. This unreliability is obvious when characters are lying, but even when they are telling their truth it might appear to us to be the result of self-delusion. Noticing this may make us wonder about our own “truths”. What about when this instability and mobility increases exponentially with the moving image of cinema, which erupted at the end of the 19th century, when the Lumiere brothers showed their first films in 1895: each, one-minute, single shot films, including Train Arriving At Station and Workers Leaving the Factory? People gather and disperse—in train stations, factories, etc. What do they all have in common? The Twentieth century shows the rise of individualism above community. Overarching beliefs are replaced by personal creeds.

The Twentieth century finds itself with an excess of answers, but not very revealing questions, at least when it comes to thinking about life and living. The Twentieth Century has been called both “The Age of Anxiety” and “The Age of Science” and the two things are related. Science provides incredible insight into matter and various mechanical dynamics but it does not, nor does it wish to, provide insight into feelings or what is often referred to as the “soul”—that ineffable part of us that represents “spirit”. Soul, of course, is a religious term, but Religion, in general, has given way before the relentless logic and rationality of Science. But a diminishment in what Matthew Arnold calls “the sea of faith” which has “shrunk” does not remove the importance of spirit to the experience of being human. To borrow a phrase that has become one of the dominant clichés of our time: is anything sacred? What do we hold dear, above and beyond all else? In a world where a new Iphone is released every few months, promising, yet again, to save us, and, presumably, replacing, for all time, the one before it-- what is it in our time that endures for all time? What is immune to the march of time? With all nature reduced to scientific principle, how are we to quantify our own Humanity? Science helps us understand how matter reacts to matter, but how should people treat each other? Why be good? We are anxious because morals and ethics are not quantifiable. Is it true “nice guys finish last”? Are the rewards for taking, anyway we can, as much as we can, greater than “doing the right thing”? More often than not, the answer seems “yes”. This is why the poet Yeats laments that, in our time, “the worst are filled with passionate intensity” and “the best lack all conviction”.