Literature in Ruins: How Modernism Exposes the Collapse of Representability

This is composed as a course essay for my English Literature Appreciation, however, I’d still like to share this post here.

Literature in Ruins: How Modernism Exposes the Collapse of Representability

“There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.” once claimed Theodor W. Adorno, a remark often misunderstood as a denial of literature itself (Rothberg)¹. Rather than announcing the end of literary creation, the statement can be better read as marking a decisive transformation: as this essay argues, established modes of representing experience can no longer remain unquestioned, especially in the aftermath of total war and mass destruction. What is involved in this transformation is not simply a loss of interpretive certainty, but a crisis in the representability of experience itself. When historical events overwhelm inherited narrative frameworks, experience can no longer be reliably shaped into meaningful resolution; as a result, literature confronts a situation in which the traditional means of rendering suffering intelligible begin to falter. This essay therefore argues that modernist literature responds to this breakdown not by achieving a more realistic representation, but by formally exposing the limits of representation itself.

In order to clarify the historical specificity of this crisis, it is useful to recall an earlier literary model in which crises of meaning and suffering were not denied, but formally represented and bounded within a coherent narrative structure. Shakespearean tragedy provides a clear example: Romeo’s impulsive suicide brings the lovers’ lives to an end, and Hamlet’s indecisive inaction delays the resolution of the Danish court, yet a stable aesthetic distance is nonetheless guaranteed. It is precisely the distance from which audiences could witness disaster without experiencing it as their own; as Peter Brooks suggests, narrative art imposes order on disruptive experience through plot, enabling readers to grasp emotional stakes while preserving reflective understanding (Brooks)².

In this sense, classical tragedy exemplifies a mode of representation in which meaning remains narratively intelligible. By contrast, the literature that emerges from the historical experience of the world wars confronts a situation in which such a formal mode of representation can no longer be assumed.

This historical rupture is further clarified through Walter Benjamin’s account of the decline of storytelling in The Storyteller. He observes that modern warfare fundamentally disrupted the conditions for experience to be transmitted as shared, meaningful narrative: experience “has been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by political power,” and hence, a generation “poorer in communicable experience” (Benjamin)³.

What is lost is not merely content, but the very form through which experience had once been rendered intelligible, marking the modernist crisis of representation: when experience can no longer be told, literary form itself must confront the limits of narration.

In the wake of this representational crisis, The Waste Land registers a failure in narrative perspective through which experience might be organized. The poem offers no stable speaking subject capable of integrating perception, memory, or emotion into a coherent account. Instead, it unfolds through a succession of disembodied voices, whose paratactic juxtaposition lacks causal linkage, and whose origins and relations remain uncertain.

Moments such as the abrupt declaration, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,”(Eliot)⁴ are immediately followed by a shift into an impersonal, crowd-based vision — “I had not thought death had undone so many”(Eliot)⁴ — in which experience circulates without being anchored to a consistent consciousness. Similar shifts recur throughout the poem, where voices emerge only to dissolve without narrative continuity. In abandoning a central narrative voice, The Waste Land exposes the inability of inherited poetic forms to provide a subject position from which modern historical experience can be rendered coherent.

Later modernist fiction confronts the same crisis by turning inward and seeking coherence in individual consciousness, yet this shift does not resolve the problem; meaning remains the burden of a solitary mind, incapable of translating private perception into shared form. As in Mrs Dalloway, through free indirect discourse and stream-of-consciousness narration, Woolf renders perception, memory, and sensation with great immediacy, often fragmenting sentences through parentheses and dashes to mimic cognitive overload, yet this inward turn does not restore narrative coherence or shared meaning. Instead, it exposes a different failure: what is most intensely experienced cannot be made publicly intelligible.

Septimus Smith’s trauma is fully rendered within his consciousness, as he experiences the world as an overwhelming and threatening force, one in which “the world has raised its whip” and “where it will descend” is unknown (Woolf)⁵, yet this intensity remains incomprehensible, and ultimately intolerable, to the surrounding social world. Clarissa Dalloway, by contrast, moves fluently within public rituals and social forms, even as she experiences herself as “invisible; unseen; unknown” (Woolf)⁵, a condition that resists public articulation. Narrative perspective thus reveals a structural divide between what can be felt and what can be narrated.

Following the inward turn of modernist fiction, Waiting for Godot represents a further stage in the crisis of representation. Where earlier works had sought coherence within individual consciousness, Beckett’s play abandons interiority altogether. It stages a world in which experience persists without progression, memory without accumulation, and language without stable reference. The crisis is no longer localized in character or perspective, but inscribed in the very structure of time, dialogue, and dramatic form, reflecting a postwar literature in which inherited modes of organizing experience have become untenable.

The two acts mirror one another with minimal variation; events occur, but do not advance. Vladimir and Estragon wait, converse, quarrel, and reconcile, yet nothing is altered by what has transpired. Time passes without consequence, and memory proves unreliable. As Estragon remarks, “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes” (Beckett)⁶. Language itself participates in this structural failure. Through a severely depleted, monosyllabic vocabulary, dialogue no longer functions to communicate intention or understanding, but circulates as repetition and contradiction, sustaining the act of waiting without producing meaning, and even interior experience has thinned out. Meaning is neither absent nor privatized, but indefinitely deferred.

Taken together, the works discussed here register not simply a shift in literary themes, but a transformation in the conditions of representation itself. After the world wars, inherited ways of organizing experience - through coherent plot, stable perspective, and meaningful resolution - have demonstrably failed. This historical shift is also widely noted, as Paul Fussell observes that modern warfare reshaped narrative conventions, fragmented perspectives and experimental techniques in postwar literature (Fussell)⁷. Confronted with these historical catastrophes, literature must now operate without the formal structures that once rendered suffering intelligible.

The significance of this transformation lies not in these works providing solutions, but in their refusing to. Rather than restoring coherence, modern literature marks the moment when aesthetic form itself enters ruin, no longer able to maintain distance from instability, and when the crisis of meaning becomes inseparable from the act of representation itself. This moment marks a pivotal shift in literary history, signaling the move from structured, coherent storytelling toward experimental, formally self-conscious modes that reflect the uncertainties of the modern world.