Beyond Fiction

This blog entry probably will turn into anything but standard, starting by the fact I will start it by talking about some topics covered in our Christian Antropology course. Those of you who already took that class, do you remember the three axes that --according to what we studied there--  were the key elements of human life, namely: life, death, and human relationships? The point I will try to make in this entry has to do with the fact that, although many of the modernist authors we have studied during this course do not exactly sympathise nor share the typical christian ethos, the questions they try to answer through  literature actually are quite similar to the ones religion has tried to answer --probably-- since the beggining of times.

First of all, I consider the idea of life to be brilliantly depicted in works such as T.S Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", where we can see a Prufrock who has somehow been "wasting" his entire life trying to be what others wanted him to be instead of being who he wanted to be. Another example of the depths of life depicted in modernist writers' fiction can be found in William Faulkner's "Barn Burning", where Colonel Sartoris has to struggle at a young age between following his own moral compass and the ill morality his father was trying to force on him. Modernists actually never seem to fall short when it comes to tackling the different aspects of life, as Faulkner also outlines a different one, which has to do with the ability (or inability) to let go of the past, a topic brilliantly depicted in "A Rose for Emily".

Death is also an extremely relevant topic in modernist literature. For starters, in the same story (A Rose for Emily), the main character issues with the past actually involve death in both cases (with her father and her lover) and also show her inability to accept and understand death on itself as well. A really different reaction to death is shown in Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises", where the main characters almost stay unaffected after knowing that someone had died because of a bull rampage, though this could also be a reflection of the "spirit of the era" that had been somehow recently broken by World War I.

Human relations are also an important component in modern literature. A clear example of this can also be seen in Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises", when even during the first pages of the novel Jake Barnes states that the people he spends most of his time with are actually people he knows nothing of. In Faulkner's writing, the topic of human interactions is taken even further (mainly because of the strong context of racism in the South of the US that inspired him).

To sum up, independently from their religious approach, life, death and interaction can be considered critical topics in many modernist writers' work. I consider it to be quite relevant taking into account how eager the people of this era were for trascendental answers, answers that could not be answered by religion during those times, answers that had to be obtained for the sake of humanity itself, answers that we have always been looking for and probably always will.

The examples used to illustrate these points are just a few out of many within modernist literature, as these authors provide us lots of situations where extremely relevant and trascendental questions are constantly tacked on their "fictional" worlds.

Are there other examples that you would use to illustrate the forementioned topics? What do you think of this possibility of considering literature as a potential solution for the biggest inquiries of life itself?  Please feel free to answer.