Luke Morris

12/12/2002

Modernity and the Crisis of Truth

In the early twentieth century, and particularly after World War I, America as a culture began to feel a collective loss of meaning. It seemed that truth had lost its center, and that the locus of virtue that men had historically tied to God and to time-honored social values now revealed an open void. Metaphorically speaking, the hub of the wheel of civil existence had shattered, as man had lain bare his cherished ideals and found nothing at their core, no solid foundation upon which he could rest his beliefs. Still, though the writers of the time lamented this loss of an absolute and expressed their fear and uncertainty about the future, this skeptical attitude regarding man’s place in the universe did not begin with them; it grew, rather, from far earlier writings, and particularly from the Realist and Naturalist works of the late nineteenth century. The reclusive Emily Dickinson, in fact, created poetry that heralded the dawn of the Modern literary period through its illustration of personal emotional upheaval and the search for higher meaning. This tragedy of the loss of truth in the lives of individuals then found voice in the 1920s through F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and later Ralph Ellison restated such a search for identity in his Invisible Man. The social sense of emptiness and longing that Modernity engendered, though, probably attained its best articulation in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”. Dickinson, for one, used poetry as her only outlet to the world, her way of communicating the loneliness and pain of existence, along with her belief in the coldness of God. Fitzgerald’s character Jay Gatsby likewise suffers a sense of meaninglessness, as he begins to realize that he has based his life upon a lie, and that the man at the core of his being no longer exists. The narrator in Ellison’s novel also possesses such an awareness that something is missing from his life, in that he lacks a focal point, or a steady foundation upon which he can build his life’s purpose. Eliot then gives this feeling of emptiness its greatest manifestation, as he gives voice to the universal sensation of instability, or the sense that the world has lost the truth that held it together and has now left man to live upon fragments of dreams.

Emily Dickinson presaged the Modern era with her poetic expression of loneliness and isolation, of the primacy of pain as the only truth, and of her own loss of faith in God. She gives voice to her solitude as she writes,

This is my letter to the World

That never wrote to Me – (Dickinson 441)

As Modernity develops as a sense of separation from a moral core, so Dickinson distances herself from the world, indulging in an examination of her own mind and her limited environment in order to glean some degree of truth for her life. Unfortunately, she finds little truth to fix her beliefs upon except for the overwhelming reality of pain. Pain thus becomes her only anchor to the world, about which she states,

I like a look of Agony,

Because I know it’s true –

Men do not sham Convulsion,

Nor simulate, a Throe – (241).

In other words, the falsehoods upon which men base their lives, the ‘shams’ in which they pretend to believe, reveal themselves as nothing when pain takes over. Life presents man with little meaning outside of pain, to which even God becomes subordinate. Though Dickinson certainly believes in the existence of God, she sees Him as too distant and impersonal to truly be a rock upon which she can base her faith. One of the greatest existentialist fears of the Modern age, after all, is not the God might not exist, but that He does exist, but He does not care about his creations. Dickinson illustrates this anxiety when she writes,

I know that He exists.

Somewhere – in Silence –

He has hid his rare life

From our gross eyes. (338)

Dickinson feels that God is too aloof for her to trust as a moral center, and therefore life presents an almost hopeless search to find something else to serve this purpose.

Half a century after Emily Dickinson wrote her poems, F. Scott Fitzgerald incorporated a similar sense of emptiness into his novel The Great Gatsby, as he shows the man James Gatz become Jay Gatsby, a false figure with no foundation, and therefore no value upon which he may base his existence. Gatsby, in fact, “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself” (Fitzgerald 104). In essence, James Gatz invents a new life, as he does not wish to face reality as it is because he fears that it offers him nothing. Unfortunately, this leaves him with no truth at the center of his own life. He thus transforms himself into nothing but a conglomeration of fantasies, a man who puts his faith in “the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing” (105). Through the eyes of the narrator, Fitzgerald draws the reader a picture of a man by juxtaposing many pieces of information, but one only sees a great deal of shadow without substance, the author and the narrator offer nothing to form the complete whole of the character. Gatsby still feels the need to define his self, though, and this is where his problem arises, as he begins to come to the realization that he misses something from his life, something that he connects with the past. As the narrator describes it, “he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps . . . his life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was . . .” (117). Gatsby has a problem, in that if he does take the time to make this examination, he will find nothing at the center of his life to recover. He senses something missing, but he does not realize that it is his ego, his true self, the man who became Jay Gatsby, that no longer exists in his life. At one point in the novel, the narrator discovers that, though Gatsby owns a library full of real books, he “didn’t cut the pages” (50). He has not read the books, as they are only a façade, like everything that serves to make up his fantasy character. Gatsby has, in short, developed himself into the ultimate Modern man. Living his life on a huge lie, he becomes an empty shell who has lost “the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream,” and at the end discovers “a new world, material without being real” (169).

While Fitzgerald’s theme is Jay Gatsby’s search for a non-existent identity within his own invented reality, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man attempts to establish an identity for himself in the real world. He uses the first chapter of the novel as a parable for the rest of the story, introducing a character that must come to terms with himself and with the falsehood of his own existence in human civilization. As the narrator describes his mission at the beginning,

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. (Ellison 1435)

In other words, he had placed his faith in others, and in society in general, to give him an answer to his question of identity, not realizing that the outside world was an empty shell, devoid of any core truth that it might impart to him. As the narrator remembers his youth, he relates his feeling that his grandfather had cursed him by implying that living a respectable life in order to please white men was really the way to fight against white men. Though he did not believe his grandfather’s words at the time, “It became a constant puzzle which lay unanswered in the back of my mind,” and he felt a vague uneasiness about his actions early in life, as he worried that he might actually be “carrying out his advice in spite of myself” (1436). As the disillusioned narrator, some twenty years later, looks back on this period of his life, he imparts a sardonic awe as he exclaims, “What powers of endurance I had during those days! What enthusiasm! What a belief in the rightness of things!” (1443). He then describes a dream in which his grandfather has him open a great number of empty envelopes, representing wasted future years, demonstrating the futility of trying to find meaning in his life as it stood then. The young man could not find a locus of truth for his life because he continually looked for the answer in the wrong place, in a broken, disordered world that other men had created.

Whereas Dickinson, Fitzgerald, and Ellison write from a personal perspective to lament the absence of a core truth in life, T.S. Eliot gives instead a rather disjointed, all-encompassing narrative poem as a description and metaphor of the entire shattered world. He begins his poem “The Waste Land” with the statement, “April is the cruelest month” (Eliot 1), signifying the cruelty of spring bringing new life into a dead, wasted world, a world in which the living must suffer and die for nothing. He then presents a collage of fragmented images, with nothing to tie them together and give the world a complete, unified existence. This is the way Eliot views man’s search for meaning, as he asserts,

. . . Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images . . . (20-22)

This said, Eliot gives humankind the only thing upon which it can depend, promising that “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (30). This fear is all that men can hope for. God, and whatever other concept of truth that man has tied to the center of his existence, has proven itself hollow, and no locus of meaning remains for the world. He reiterates the existentialist fear of an uncaring God as he notes the absence of Christ in the path of life (366), and asks, “Who is the third, who walks always beside you?” (360), meaning that he cannot see God truly acting in human lives. Eliot’s disjointed poetry here reflects his belief that even language had no sense of stability at its center, since we can only know the definition of a word by its opposition. This crisis of truth enters into private lives as he illustrates an episode of two lovers who have a sexual moment without any meaning, desire, or even reality to it, as afterward the woman

. . . turns and looks a moment in the glass,

Hardly aware of her departed lover. (215-56)

Since the world no longer has any kernel of truth at its center to give love meaning, love becomes a fruitless endeavor. The desolate emptiness of existence manifests itself clearly as,

. . . The wind

Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. (174-75)

This creates a visual image of a land without hope. Then, in closing the poem, Eliot gives his final verdict on the dead world he sees, saying, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” (431). One finds salvation in life when he finds its meaning and stability, but all that man has left to dig through is a pile of garbage, the shattered remains that remind him of what civilization once was.

Critics define Modernity in literature as a representation of the crisis of meaning, or the feeling of a loss of the foundation of truth in man’s existence. When digging down to the center in their search for meaning, writers of the Modern period discover that there is no true meaning there – they uncover no answer to the questions they ask. Emily Dickinson expressed this viewpoint years before the Modern era, though, as her poetry revealed her loneliness, her reliance on pain as the one absolute, and her distrust in God as a loving father. F. Scott Fitzgerald later gave these qualities to his character of Jay Gatsby, a man with no past whose entire life becomes a great fiction, with no truth at its core to hold it together. The Invisible Man of Ralph Ellison’s novel suffers a similar crisis of meaning, but instead of trying, as Gatsby does, to find an identity that does not exist, Ellison’s narrator must try to establish one for himself. T.S. Eliot then ties all of these elements together by breaking them apart, as through his fragmented poem he demonstrates the ruin of the foundations of truth, and the resultant disintegration of reality.