Things Fall Apart; The Centre Cannot Hold

Why are we constantly on the brink of collapse?

Where are we? Why are things constantly on the edge of falling apart? I’ve been diving into the history of modernism, how it became postmodernism, and how that became hypermodernism. I’m interested in shining a light on how we got where we are now—feeling as if the Great Podcasting Creator in the cloud has declared, “I am dead,” and left us with a “Best of Epochal Transformation” YouTube playlist set on ‘repeat.’

A reductive definition: Modernity is the social and cultural breakdown of western civilization that occurred with the advent of the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment (epitomized by the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am”); its challenges to religious authority (epitomized by the Nietzschean “God is dead”); and the rise of industrialization, along with the division of labor (epitomized by the emergence of factory production and class struggle).

Paraphrasing political theorist Roger Griffin: Modernism is the cultural counter to modernity. Modernist writers and artists in the West sought to fill the gap the Christian promise of the divine had left, to provide new inroads to transcendence, a rebirthing of community and “a ‘healthy’ mental, physical, social, or spiritual dimension that endows its inhabitants with a higher, suprapersonal … significance.” (‘Suprapersonal’ is what’s beyond the personal.) Modernism works to critique and correct corruption, decadence, the loss of faith and trusted authority or the loss of religiously and aristocratically sanctioned ethical, social, hierarchical law and order. Modernists expressed angst in uncertainty, a collapse of civilization, along with the individual’s passionate, anxiety-ridden search for alternative ways to transcend loneliness and suffering. They looked for ways to find meaning in the darkness of modern, secular, industrialized life in which the work they did in their everyday lives alienated them from who they were.

In literature, as in any art form, there aren’t hard lines between movements, but overlapping fields of changing perception, later labelled to formally categorize common themes that ascend into dominance to replace the ones before. Hegel might say there aren’t lines at all; there are violent conflicts, a progression of dialectical struggles. The old (thesis) battles the new (antithesis), birthing a kind of fusion of the two in the new (synthesis). In the arts, each generational movement expresses the tenor of its time, often articulating an uncanny prescience of an oncoming epochal change, reflecting on being in the midst of a transformative tumult, or responding to its aftermath. At the dawn of the 20th century, the latter meant grappling with an uncountable dead.

In literatures written in English, the modernists that stand out to me are the Irish poet William Butler Yeats and his otherworldly apocalyptic poetry; the hugely influential American writer Gertrude Stein’s experimental senseless sense; Virginia Woolf’s gorgeous and organic, non-linear, stream-of-consciousness prose; the Irish writer James Joyce’s erudite, wordy meaning-mazes (he called them novels); the American-born British poet T.S. Eliot’s foreboding lines rife with reference; the American writer Zora Neale Hurston’s fiercely individualistic defiance; and the American imagist poets H.D. and Ezra Pound who focused on newness and visual clarity. I’m obviously leaving out a lot of folks, not to mention the thunderous non-Brits and non-Yanks, like Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Kafka, Borges, and on.

In English, Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is a particularly resonant embodiment of modernist poetry.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The poem was written in 1919, following the Great War (or World War I), which shattered previous ideas of meaning, order and ethics. Innocence was, indeed, drowned in a rising blood-dimmed tide. As it turns out, Yeats predicted not just one rough beast, but a parade of them slouching in lockstep across Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain, Korea, and China.

The lyrical foreboding and timeless existential shock of Yeats’s lines would continue to reverberate through time. Perhaps most famously, Chinua Achebe’s novel (the first in a trilogy), Things Fall Apart (1958) uses Yeats’s line to describe the unraveling of Igbo traditions and community in western Africa under British colonialism. And Joan Didion titles what’s arguably her most influential essay both in content and form, “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” in 1967, a truth-telling critique of the counterculture in San Francisco.

Time and again, “The Second Coming” seems to wake with a start from its stony sleep to be cited, as I’m doing here, to warn of, or ask if we’re in the midst of another rough bout of epochal change. Hegel might tell us that whatever the case, humanity will carry on, reinvent itself, as it has done for generations until, in this historical progression, we arrive at some kind of universal realization of consciousness that, firstly, is slightly woo-woo, and, secondly, if that’s what’s happening, we’re not anywhere near it. So, on humanity goes toward the next epochsode. But before we settle in to watch this reality show unfold, history does reveal what factually followed the penning of Yeats’s poem. Are we in for that now? I’m curious to know what happens when we can look in our rearview mirrors and see a repetitive turning and turning of what’s gone before. The epochsodes of human history are as if acquired by one of the streamers. They’ve been dropped online, in toto, and are are now available to binge. If we take advantage of that availability, does the awareness that arises make our age of complexity and anxiety, of repetitive divisive conflict, different from those of the past?

The final lines of the first section of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (written from 1914-1922) strike me as both epitomizing modernist literature from a century ago – and as also deeply familiar. The poet is walking across London Bridge on his way to work:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

Workers cross London Bridge in a procession of living dead. Each fixes their eyes on their feet as we do on our phones. Our noise-cancelling headphones block us from the outside world. We walk along in our individual flow-states, immerse ourselves in these hypercubicles, enclosed within these ever-widening aluminosilicate glass gyres, where we are now. Are we the new generation of rough beasts born to slouch in lockstep, perpetually alienated and wary of the final stroke of time? {∞}