Modernist Features in Lyrical, Narrative and Dramatic Form

Abstract

The crisis of consciousness as the background of establishing modernist literary phenomena enables the approach to the features of the lyrical, narrative and dramatic genres and their basic logic of inconclusiveness through Husserlian comments on the issue. Following his views on the problem going back to the turn of the century, the discussion of the complex and contradictory reality in modernist forms and of their fundamental strategy of self-reflexivity can consider not only the formal level of the subject of investigation but also assign a meaning to it from a very different angle. Self-reflexivity of form can be identified as a serious response of modernist literature to the essential historical encounter with existence so far being a thwarted question of the Western mind. The view actually points out the proposition about the implicitly engaged nature of the modernist art forms. In Husserlian viewpoint modernist forms can be recognized as a “heroic” reengagement with “genuine rationality” – hence their cerebral dimension – and in addition his explanations make it evident why the topic of existence and its authenticity is the key theme of the period. Modernism as self-consciousness of style, as a movement of movements concentrating on the possibilities of art and through its complexity of poetics self-questioning their creative potentialities, is a period bringing into focus the very being and its ever-elusive quality. The significance of modernist art dwells on its “responsibility of form”. Reexamining existence in itself modernist forms can open up their own creative process, grasp their form in its unconcluded status and communicate their logic of inconclusiveness. Confronting the consciousness of never-ending contradictions of reality and truth about it, modernism with its Baudelairian sense of immediacy of life, of its fleeting instant, of the present in its presentness, in its purely instantaneous quality, i.e. quality of contingency, demonstrates through the features of fortuitousness and fragmentariness in Imagist, Futurist, Expressionist, Constructivist, Dadaist or Surrealist forms its unique ability to grasp the openness and uncertainty in the process of producing. Laying open to view its only available immediacy, art of modernism unfolds its own truth of becoming. The fragmentary method of collage and abstraction in poetry or interior monologue, stream of consciousness and the acte gratuit of the “hero” in the modem narrative or the A-effect (in German Verfremdungseffekt) in Brechtian epic theater conceptualize one of key dimensions modernist innovative literature opened as its central topic, i.e. groundlessness of ground or “the incertitude of the void” (Joyce). Exhibiting through its intervention into form the very moment of forming, modernist art is in essence conceptual. Modernist forms disclose the action of conceiving. Hence the modernist distinctive constructive qualities, its stress on the predicament of inferential, its quality of suggestive meaning and of an open-ended interpretation.