I've been reading a literary history of American modernism, weaving my way through the key figures and broad strokes of a past time and the culture those generations amassed in response. A response to the horrors of the First World War, that battleground of 'experience' and romantic adventure. And a nation churning its way into a new age, its vast land opened up and symbolically condensed in its network of urban centers, traveled with mechanical speed. A people wrenching in this turn, resistance in the nostalgia and convention of the past, the known and recognized codes and orders. Jubilation in the treasured fleeting Now, and wistful dreams of a new America. An art that wants to turn with a new lens, to show our dreams and fears to us.
The puzzle is getting harder to master, to piece these glimpses of orders and piles of details together into an understanding of the span. That world constructed and reconstructed in words. Those worlds. These novels seeking to recognize the splinters left after the War. wars. Those conflicts abroad and at home, en masse and individual. Henry Adam's multiverse. Freud's unconscious. Zelda's schizophrenia. They are moments of recognition in art of the variety of human experience, of consciousness, of feeling. They seek in their symbolic form to multiple the possibilities, adding new complexities to humanity's record.
