Literary Modernism and Art for Art’s Sake

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we

started and know the place for the first time.”

— T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

One acquainted with the history of art and literature will surely be familiar with the movement

loosely described as ‘modernism,’ the precursor to ‘post-modernism’. This movement (distinct from the heresy that my Catholic readership associates with the term), replaced much of what preceded it in the latter 19th century; the Victorian era of Dickens, Hardy, and Brontë to name a few. Modernism came about as a more experimental avenue in form and style, breaking with long-held tradition. Fueled by rapid industrialization, the loss of empire, and the scars of World War I, Modernism could also be characterized by its underlying sense of disillusionment. Think Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, or T.S. Elliot’s The Hollow Men.

In many instances of modernist literature, one can find present an emphasis on individuality and subjectivity, manifest in such forms as “stream of consciousness” writing, and fragmented narratives. Many works explored loss of faith, or of an older world’s idealism. Narrative rigidity—though perhaps not expressly identified as such—was associated anachronistically with superstition, and injustice.

Among the authors of the modernist period was a newly-converted Graham Greene,

author of such famous works as The Heart of the Matter and The Power and the Glory. Greene,

Though hardly a practicing Catholic during many later points in his life, still recognized that something was missing in the way of an ultimate meaning in modernist art. The role of a story, he believed, was to convey—in narrative—a kind of transcendent truth. A relative of the late Robert Louis Stevenson, Greene aligned himself against the formal innovations of high modernism, which he associated with writers like Virginia Woolf, calling her work “cerebral” and “paper-thin,” a critique that was based in part on Greene’s own insistence that art needed to represent something greater than itself on a page. For him, the Deus-Absconditus—the“hidden God” theme present in the likes of Shusaku Endo (the author of Silence) and other contemporaries was the ultimate literary pursuit. In this way Greene was, perhaps unknowingly, a Thomist in literary practice, believing that art was not simply a matter of pure self-expression, but rather a search for perfection or truth in the work itself, the appreciation of which leading to a deeper desire for the divine. He leaves his characters in the wilderness, often times the cause of their own affliction; an approach which makes the Catholic reader uneasy at times, but we are mistaken if we do not recognize a divine force acting in and around Greene’s characters.

What sorts of implications arise for a contemporary “Catholic writer” then?

In today’s culture, this question is more pressing than ever. The modernist experiment, once confined to literature and painting, now permeates our digital and visual landscapes. Algorithms reward novelty or gratuity over substance, irony over meaning—transience over transcendence. 

Much of contemporary art and media, whether intentionally or not, continues the modern (or post-modern) assumption that the individual’s perception alone constitutes reality. The ultimate end to this deconstructionist experiment is one that, as we have seen, destroys the very essence of the human person. And yet, within this noisy digital ecosystem, one can still hear the quiet whispers of despair. Younger generations, disenchanted with the chaos they have inherited, are turning again toward tradition—seeking coherence, belonging, and meaning. What foundation, after all, does the recognition of chaos provide? 

It is here that we must ask: what was it that Greene, unlike many of his modernist contemporaries, was able to identify within the “broken story”?

Perhaps in order to answer this question, one might draw a parallel to Saint John Henry Newman, a man who very much believed that engaging with the Protestants of his time involved a careful consideration of the protestant perception—its cynical view of Catholic history and disillusionment of monastic tradition. In his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, addressed to the Brothers of the Oratory, Newman uses examples of protestant scholars who give the Catholic position a greater respect and nuance than the ordinary Protestant is accustomed to. In this way, Newman demonstrates that it is possible to draw from the world of the Protestant familiar, of the unaligned in some sense, and still retain the dignity of the truth itself, such that even one who is alien to the Catholic faith can know a part of its richness beyond the shouts of its detractors. What greater example of its efficacy than upon Newman himself?

The Catholic artist should not therefore outright reject the insights of modernism—its awareness of fragmentation, war, alienation, and doubt—but rather redeem them. He does so by pointing them toward reconciliation: the recognition that every aesthetic longing for wholeness is, at its essence, a longing for God. For, we cannot deny that, in our fallen state, such is our lot in life: an ebb and flow until we “finish the race”. It is our duty, in the pursuit of evangelization then, to bear this in mind ourselves, while proclaiming to our suffering brothers and sisters the divine hidden in our midst.