Culture and Modernism

What I find interesting about the Benedict and the modernist authors we've read so far this term is their willingness to understand, and resist, the premise that identity, both cultural and personal, are constructs of society. The opening lines of Benedict's book say, "Anthropology is the study of human beings as creatures of society. It fastens its attention upon those physical characteristics and industrial techniques, those conventions and values, which distinguish one community from all others that belong to a different tradition" (1). The modernists seem to have understood this anthropological truth. What makes their stories interesting to us as readers is that they resist this truth; they fight against it in their texts. In each of the texts we've read so far the characters have been products of their culture, but the interesting ones--the protagonists like Silindu, George Willard, and Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus Smith--were all at odds with the communities they lived in. The "Patterns of Culture" that formed each of these protagonists were deeply ingrained, whether it be in the lonely atmosphere of Winesburg, Ohio, the threatening Jungles of Sri Lanka, or the busy streets of London; but, the link, to make a tired point, is their resistance to the cultural conditions that created them.

The necessity of that resistance was no more apparent at any time in Western history than in the early 20th Century and especially in the post-WWI period. Patterns of Culture was written at a time when nationalism and cultural imperialism were simultaneously exalted and endangered. Benedict argues that "There has never been a time when civilization stood more in need of individuals who [like herself] are genuinely culture-conscious, who can see objectively the socially conditioned behaviour of other peoples without fear of recrimination" (11). She was right, and the modernists, it would seem, were exactly the types of people she was looking for. The modernists, who were obsessed with personal identity in relation to culture, were doing exactly what Benedict proposed and demonstrated, but on a different scale. By focusing on the identity of the individual, as opposed to the culture of a society, the modernists created characters whose humanity was found in their will, not their national or cultural identity. Culture, then, became secondary to choice, and an influence, instead of determining factor, on identity. By examining the individual the modernists embraced cultural influence as a truth, but rejected the finality of its formulation on the psyche. In this way the modernists fought against fascism, nationalism, socialism, and any other -ism that restricted the identity of the individual, and rested firmly on the premise that culture, when it is both understood an resisted, can breed understanding and not discord.