Channel Firing

The turn of the 20th century was defined by a new, fast-paced way of life and a constant state of flux. With massive innovations in technology during this period, life was becoming more convenient than ever. However, the growing pervasiveness of new technologies accompanied by increasing urban sprawl and multiple successive wars left many writers and artists during this period feeling isolated, disjointed, and out of place. The literary movement that emerged during this time is known as Modernism, which found its manifestation in the disjointed, confrontational, confused, and cynical attitudes of writers like Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and T.S. Eliot. For many modernists, values and ideals that were previously concrete and that were lauded as worthy of preservation were now toothless in the face of death and destruction. Belief systems that included classical art, religion, and philosophy crumbled from postwar anxiety because they no longer offered compelling answers for humankind’s plight. The modernists’ anxious querying of moral and ethical pitfalls resembles the dead querying the fate of humankind in “Channel Firing.” From Eliot’s “The Waste Land” to Ezra Pound’s search for an earthly paradise, the modernists assessed the surrounding destruction and asked “why” and “what now” through the written word: Unlike the dead in “Channel Firing,” however, many didn’t even find a God, let alone a lackluster one, that was capable of providing answers.