All that is solid melts into air

The desire of Western societies to begin organizing themselves more efficiently gave rise to curious clusterings of peoples and structures that became centers of commerce, culture, and government. These were intersections of social institutions, capitalist enterprises, and political ideologues that produced a whole host of coexisting and unreconcilable contradictions—a key hallmark of modernity. The modern urban environment was a convergence point of elements of both ephemera and permanence—newspapers, street propaganda, commercial advertisements set against a patchwork backdrop of landmarks and events of historical significance—unlike any in the history of civilization, so it is little wonder that these metropolises were examined closely by modernist writers at the beginning of the twentieth century. For many, urbia represented a nightmare defined by a constant state of anxiety and alienation, an irony considering the sheer number of humans cohabitating in a such minute urban areas. This was in part due to life’s sudden acceleration to a fever pitch, with expanding volumes of irrelevant and contradictory information entering the daily consciousness on a daily basis. Everyday experience became increasingly fragmented into smaller, more specialized categories and contexts. In literature, this confusing disintegration was reflected in the deconstruction of linear narratives, showing the unbalance and variance of everyday experience through disjointed chronologies skipping over major plot points, as in Conrad’s Secret Agent or Isherwood’s disorganized, fictionalized memoir. Not only was temporality muddled, but also political ideologies. These were decades of both upheaval, like the anarchist movement in England or the fascists in Berlin, and ineffectual resistance nonstarters, like the paralyzed and subdued masses of Dublin, all with their epicenters in national capital cities. The modernists’ urban fixation was due to its foundational significance in the twentieth-century psyche, and the metropolis’s unique convergence of temporality and ideology created the petri dish of modernity that authors like Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Christopher Isherwood were itching to explore.

At the forefront of their exposés were the political climates of their respective environments, typically involving degrees of radicalism and fringe political elements. The polarized sides were best satirized in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, whose character Verloc, despite being a revolutionary anarchist activist and the titular secret agent, was “throughly domesticated” and “cultivated his domestic virtues” (12).¹ In this way, the novel’s central character was himself a hybrid, much like the city wherein he both made his living and his violent political statements, caught between two contradictory and diametrically opposed polar opposites. Conrad’s work depicts overlapping facets of modern society, common in cities even today—police detectives, renegade activists—interacting in often humorous exchanges concerning a rather dire attempted terrorist attack. The meshing and overlapping of starkly opposed agendas and ideologies is symptomatic of the complicated city environment to which Conrad aimed to pay homage. These oppositional urban political elements served as model for the author’s disconnected tale of subterfuge, a narrative with a rather prominent thread of politically-savvy ironies rooted in the inherent juxtapositions of London’s modern political climate. The character of the Professor, while representing a serious threat to the unsuspecting city-dwelling citizen with his persistent explosives, is nonetheless presented as something of a caricature of English anarchists.

But not every modernist author was as lighthearted in his estimation of Isle politics. In Joyce’s Dubliners, we are constantly confronted with reminders of imperialism and its detrimental aftereffects wrought on the Irish people. In “Two Gallants,” the civic engineering of Dublin plays a pivotal role in the story’s central allegory, as two men take advantage of and extort a working-class Irishwoman whilst navigating landmark structures and institutions of British imperialism. Here the national plight of Ireland is allegorically played out among the physical representations of its defeats, and the fragmented, overlapping political nature of Dublin takes center stage. For Joyce’s work, of course, the only consistent plot element across all the stories is the city itself, lending both Dublin and the modernist perception of urban environments a renewed import. This blending of real-world Irish history—as well as, prominently in other works like Ulysses, actual people—into his fictional narrative also had the effect of convoluting reality and invention, further complicating his representations of the city and offering some degree of historical interest to his renderings.

Similarly, Christopher Isherwood deployed his actual life experiences in a fictionalized form to portray the gradual rise of Nazi power in Goodbye to Berlin. Isherwood’s own attachment to the tales included in his novels—really, more like the scaffolding for an intended epic—was such that he reports in his 1954 introduction to the text, “I am no longer an individual […] I am the public domain” (xvi).² His is a divided capital, suspended between the death throes of Weimar Germany and its perverse swan song of radical fascism, on the edge of an ideological precipice: an early-30s haven for homosexuals like Isherwood and his friend W.H. Auden which will, within months, deem them enemies of the state. This sense of liminality and anxiety over the future permeated the Berlin that Isherwood endeavored to photograph, and is again indicative of the chaotic modern condition in these cosmopolitan European cities. Curiously, however, while much of Goodbye to Berlin reads like an historical memoir, its passages are presented out of order, jumping forwards and backwards chronologically between two diaries dated autumn 1930 and winter 1933. This discontinuity is common in modernist literature, cropping up again in The Secret Agent, where only the events preceding and following an unseen cataclysmic central plot point are retold as though they orbit its central axis. Additionally, a conversation between Chief Inspector Heat and The Professor contains only six lines of dialogue but carries on over three pages, having been interspersed with exposition and lengthy insights into the characters’ thoughts. Even in Dubliners we see a disjointed narrative, as Joyce jumps between multiple characters at different stages of their respective lives to form a multifaceted bildungsroman for the city of Dublin through the vehicle of its paralyzed populace. This rearrangement of chronology in the interest of either pacing or narrative clarity is reminiscent of the city’s convergence of time, its role as the place where ephemera coexists with history.³

Central to each of these works is the influence of modernity in the city, the form- and context-annihilating chaos of the metropolis which presents every scrap of information and event in time simultaneously, as equally pertinent and meaningless. At this point in both artistic and cultural history, the dual advents of technology and population came together like nothing before them to dissolve previous understandings of society, politics, and culture and replace it with something fresh moulded from its ashes. In so doing, it inevitably encounters unresolvable paradoxes and inconsistencies which, when approached by such modernist authors as these, help to color the contemporary zeitgeist. These abstractions and contradictions are represented in the modernist literature of the age; the idea of the modern city serving as muse to the authors inspired by this accidental disintegration of cultural constructions, of political ideologies, of time. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Dubliners and Goodbye to Berlin are named for their settings—for the cities indeed the fundamental informants of modernity, windows into the modern condition of man.