The Celestial Omnibus

Modernism was a literary movement that began in the early 1900s and extended to the early 1940s. The turn of the 20th century saw acceleration of an already changing world. Increasing industrialization, advances in science and medicine, and large-scale political turmoil eroded the conventions of previous eras. Free to abandon traditional techniques, Modernist writers strove for a purer artistic ideal. They critiqued convention as detrimental to the creative process, and instead embraced experimental narrative styles that reflected a fluid world. For example, stream of consciousness, a writing technique popularized in the Modernist era, helped writers compose almost instinctively. 

Many Modernists were students of the classics, and their works are rich with allusions. However, they approached the classics from a contemporary perspective, often applying them to larger ruminations on cultural change. For example, T. S. Eliot’s longform poem The Waste Land (1922) employs disjointed literary references to examine the Modernist era’s tumultuous changes. Similarly, James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1920), modeled after Homer’s Odyssey, incorporates stream of consciousness and nonlinear plotlines to acclimate Homer’s classic to a reinvented world. 

With his first novel Where Angels Fear to Tread published in 1905, E. M. Forster is considered a Modernist writer. His works often reflect Modernism’s distrust of class, convention, and other previous standards. For example, Forster’s novel A Room with a View, published in 1908, criticizes the British class system as destructive to meaningful relationships. The novel’s protagonist, Lucy Honeychurch, is torn between two suitors: Cecil Vyse, a pretentious aristocrat, and George Emerson, a middle-class man with passion. Lucy nearly squanders true happiness (George) in the interest of social advantage (Cecil). This incompatibility between pretension and fulfillment also shapes Forster’s “The Celestial Omnibus.”