The Cubists Won't Let Me Sit With Them

I have run myself into a bit of a conundrum.

I have been taking a literature class on British Modernism, which thus far I have been wholly and completely in love with. This idea of taking literature in new directions, of placing more importance on the beauty of the words than on the rhetoric of the ideas, of evoking emotions through images rather than describing them-- it fascinates me. The articles I read for class by the French fathers of this movement (specifically Baudelaire and Mallarme) brought me to a state of emotional rhapsody, and the manifesto on Futurism by Marinetti was exhilarating. I find myself wanting to embrace their ideals, or at least incorporate some of them into my own writing. I find myself wishing I could have been alive at this time, to be swept up in these changes and perhaps even add to them.

I find it interesting that this movement was not exclusive to literature, but permeated the art world as a whole. In particular, Cubism was a part of this movement. The idea was to get at the essence of a thing by looking at it from multiple perspectives... much like the juxtaposition of ideas in Modernist poetry.

One of the foremost arguments made in favour of Modernism was this: that the kind of writing used in the Victorian era was all very well and good to express the ways of living and thinking during that period, but it was no longer sufficient to express life and thought in the "modern" era. It is fruitless to look to our forefathers to learn the best way to say things that they never would have said. In order to do justice to new ideas, we need to find new ways of communicating those ideas. It is very similar to Howard Roarke's argument in the beginning of The Fountainhead. He reasoned that Ancient Greek  architecture was well suited to the materials available to the Ancient Greeks, but architects no longer used those materials, and should attempts to design buildings more suited to modern materials.

You see my predicament. I want to write like the Modernists, but were I to do so, I would be violating the idea that forms the driving force behind the whole movement: that writers must express themselves in ways relevant to their times, and not look to the past for answers.