Thread by @mykola

A hundred years ago the modernist era in literature was thriving.

The entire social order of western civilization had just been burned away in a senseless war. Identity had to be created from scratch. You couldn’t just go on being the person you’d been, the world had ended!

Writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and Ford Madox Ford took as their themes this deep into identity, but crucially into identity as defined in opposition or contrast to society at large.

Put bluntly: these people wrote about ND experiences suddenly being valid.

Here in 2021 we are in a similar cultural moment. The old world, where media decides truth, is over. We’re in a post-truth postmodern future, and we are once again in a place where identity itself is broken.

Who or what should we define ourselves against? Ideology is a gaunt, furtive soldier; religion has long since been relegated to Godot. What groups us together? What do we have in common? How ought we think about the self in the absence of an external order?

This is why we read the modernists. Pick up a copy of To the Lighthouse and marvel at the construction of it; read Portrait of the Artist as an ND person in particular and you’ll understand the desire to “forge a new identity”.

I think the theme I’m sort of building to in a clunky way is that modernist literature is the literature of building an individual out of constituent parts, without allowing society to impose as many “oughts” and “shoulds” as it would otherwise like.

The results can be clunky and they can be beautiful. They’re for sure worth reading as we enter, a century later, a new dark night of the soul for our civilization at large.

Who are the metamodernist authors I should be reading? Where are the neurodivergent weirdos penning new ways of being? Is that all just in the sci-fi section now? Is Serious Literature still about middle aged professors fucking their students?