Early in the new millennium, our western culture feels, as Thomas Hardy suggested, like a cemetery of dreams. And the dreams have died at a moment of global environmental crisis, when we need vision to motivate us for change more than ever before.
It wasn’t always so. For centuries Europe saw a ‘dialogue of visions’ as to the nature of life, truth, and meaning. We inherit that debate; but what marks our own time is that the dialogue has ground to a halt – not because it has been resolved, but because we have seemingly run out of ideas. But to understand our postmodern west, we need to understand what we’ve inherited; it’s good to grasp how we got to where we are.
The story that follows isn’t offered as infallible. But isn’t it roughly what happened?
(This is an extended post.)
The Long Road Out
It’s not easy to make sense of history. But the Dutch philosopher Dooyeweerd [1] offers a helpful way of bringing together our understandings of the past.
We can re-express it like this: In each era since we turned away from the Bible’s God, our culture has been shaped by one or more ‘god-substitutes’. These aren’t gods that we actually ‘worship’, but they’re the next thing to it. They’re the things that ‘matter most’ to us, the principles that dominate our lives, determining our sense of what’s important; the sources we look to for truth and meaning, for the understanding of right and wrong. Our culture’s story is, among other things, the history of successive ‘god-substitutes’, and of how well they ‘reign’ as our gods. One after another they hold this role, until their inadequacies become obvious; then we lose faith in them, they are replaced by a different ‘god’, and the story begins again.[2]
It’s a fruitful way of thinking, focusing our attention on what matters most for the hearts, minds and imaginations of an era. It’s one that an atheist or Christian can be equally comfortable with.[3] Let’s give it a try.
Our long ‘succession of gods’ can be illustrated from Britain’s arts and literature. When an artist writes a poem or a novel, she has to decide what to write about. That is, to choose what is worth celebrating: what is most significant in the world, what is most worthy of record.[4] So may we see the story of our art as a series of judgments as to what really matters? That could chart for us the ‘gods’ we’ve used to replace the Father we no longer believe in.
The seventeenth century is a good place to begin: that crucial period when the Bible first became widely available to ordinary people, resulting in a joyous, Europe-wide rediscovery of individual faith. Of course the Reformation was a muddled amalgam of political, economic, and religious factors, with religious banners masking loyalties of many kinds. Yet still it was a crucial historical moment, when the ‘nearness of God’ – God relating directly to us as individuals, rather than via a cumbersome and dubious religious structure – suddenly became vital to Europe’s consciousness. With the liberation of the biblical text, each individual’s response to God was seen to stand at the heart of existence. The individual received a significance that was dramatically new.
Such a change of consciousness had massive repercussions. For example in the growth of democracy: if God reveals his ways to individuals, not just to the authorities, and if the most important thing in the world is our individual response, then that has political implications; our own views have significance just as much as those of the authorities. Of course the Reformation left British politics a long way from universal suffrage; but the strong link between the rise of Protestantism and the rise of parliamentary democracy, championed by the Puritans, is not coincidental. There were implications for art as well. As Dooyeweerd’s fellow-Dutchman Hans Rookmaaker points out, in the painting of this period we see a marked shift in what is thought to be worth depicting. Where earlier painters had chosen to paint the saints or the heroes of Greek legend, now the ordinary individual seemed worth celebrating. Artists in the Protestant culture of Holland like Jan Steen, or indeed Rembrandt[5], become concerned to paint realistic scenes of ordinary people going about their ordinary lives. They were working within a culture that grasped that God was deeply interested in ordinary people, not just in heroes and saints.[6]
And when we look at the literature of this period, don’t we see that same re-valuing of the ordinary person? We find Christian poets like Donne, Herbert or Marvell, writing about love or worship as they feel to ordinary people. It is in the Reformation context, too, that the novel arises – perhaps the branch of literature pre-eminently interested in the development of the ordinary individual. The English novel may be said to emerge with the radical Baptist preacher John Bunyan, then more clearly with Daniel Defoe (also clearly beginning from a Protestant background, eg. in Robinson Crusoe).[7] The clarity of the sense of the biblical God at the heart of the Reformation worldview affected their politics, their painting, their literature; it mattered what God they worshipped.
Today, postmodernity has subverted much of this. We’ve seen in other posts in this section how our loss of the Reformation confidence in individuality has implications for democracy; and how our loss of confidence in any direction or ‘shape’ to individual life has (among other things) eroded the feasibility of the novel. To be westerners is to be great-grandchildren of the God-centred Reformers; but it is also to be heirs to the dialogue that has happened since.
For in the late seventeenth century, the Reformation worldview was replaced by other ways of thinking. Why? Was it because of fatal contradictions in the thinking of too many ‘Christians’? – for example in their failure to take seriously Christ’s apparent outlawing of force?[8] They taught, indeed, that personal faith was all-important, and this emphasis on individual choice implied diversity; yet many sought to impose a state church into which all were coerced by law, and were even willing to use the sword to further their religion. Too often, the Reformation was simply incomplete. It was a paradox as brutal as an Ulster ‘Protestant’ carrying a Bible saying ‘Love your enemy’ yet hating his ‘Fenian’ neighbour; and it could lead only to conflict worsened by passionate conviction. It is true that the bloody Civil War in England and the Thirty Years’ War on the continent were at least as much about new political forces and nation-states consolidating their power as about doctrinal disagreements.[9] But did the long years of conflict under religious banners leave a climate of weariness with anything approaching a clear religious stance? At any rate, by around 1680 there came a reaction against much that the Reformation had stood for, with the period we call the Enlightenment.
This, we might say, was the West’s first major attempt at a ‘god-substitute’, centring its culture on faith in ‘natural’ human reason, rather than faith in divine revelation.[10] Christians insisted that unaided human reason, being part of a broken world, has a fundamental problem in perceiving ultimate truth. Enlightenment thinkers tended to deny the problem[11]; natural human rationality, for them, took the place of a ‘nearby’ God, and was thoroughly trustworthy as the pointer towards a new dawn of civilisation.[12] (‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’, the starting-point of the American Declaration of Independence, is a quintessentially Enlightenment statement.[13]) We see this optimism in much of the work of Pope, perhaps the most important English poet of the early eighteenth century; a similar easy confidence marks a novelist like Fielding.[14]
But soon there began to be bad dreams as to whether this was enough to live by. At the end even of Pope’s Dunciad, a nightmare of chaos overwhelms human society, and the closing words are ‘universal darkness buries all’: instead of the clarity of human rationality, the night of Dulness falls on humanity. The terrible final book of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels offers a parallel nightmare: human beings, devoid of true reason, are merely animals wallowing in the mud. In both these masterpieces we sense a shared fear: what if reason is not enough? What if humanity will not be governed by it? The anarchic brutality of the world depicted by Hogarth, or by Smollett, undermined Pope’s easy confidence that ‘Whatever is, is right’.[15] And as the century continues we find writers sensing that rationality isn’t enough (see Tristram Shandy), and looking elsewhere for different principles or values around which to orient what they depict: the ‘sentimental movement’, rediscovering the value of feeling (Mackenzie or Sterne; or, from a different angle, Hume); primitivism (Macpherson’s Ossian, looking back to the world of Celtic myth, and even, in a sense, Walter Scott); or the dark side of the psyche, in Gothicism. The rationalistic ‘god-substitute’ had proved insufficient; Enlightenment simply didn’t satisfy the intuitions which insisted that, somewhere, there must be more. But this breakdown – first, of the old consensus that God’s revelation held the key to truth; then, of the replacement faith that human reason is an infallible guide – triggered the search for alternatives that has characterised our history.
So at the end of the eighteenth century[16] comes the emergence of themes we associate with Romanticism, in poets such as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats; writers marked by a rejection of what Blake calls the ‘mind-forged manacles’ of the Enlightenment, and the rules of neo-classical poetics (as subverted by Wordsworth and Coleridge) and conventional behaviour (see Byron and Shelley) that went with them. The result might have been a whole ‘rediscovery of God’, and indeed that did take place to a certain extent.[17] But in general the ‘marginalizing of God’ that began in the Enlightenment continues in the mainstream of Romanticism.[18] As American postmodernist Rorty rightly argues, Romanticism attempts to salvage the spirituality of Christianity by placing it in a de-supernaturalized context – by giving it, in effect, other ‘gods’.
What then replaces God, for the Romantics, as source of the ultimately significant? Perhaps childhood, considered as something pure (‘trailing clouds of glory’) before it is ruined by society (Blake’s Songs of Innocence, Wordsworth’s Prelude); the natural world, considered now as something untamed, supra-rational, beyond humanity, but also unfallen (Wordsworth again);[19] visionary experience attained through drugs (Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, supposedly); the individual consciousness,[20] embodied particularly in the Imagination (Keats, Coleridge).[21] In various ways Romanticism offers to find what is truly significant and worthy of celebration beyond the world of everyday reason, but with God continuing to be marginal. (Can we see a parallel with what happens in Kant’s philosophy, where the things that really matter – freedom and ethics, for example – likewise belong to a realm ‘independent of the whole world of sense’?)
But it didn’t last. As a thought-experiment it would be worth reflecting how the elevation of these qualities to ‘god-substitutes’ ultimately distorted or destroyed each of them. We could consider how idolization of childhood led to the sentimentalizing of children in Dickens, perhaps a prime factor making him unreadable today; or, how treating nature (divorced from God) as the source of life turned into its becoming the unfeeling source of death in later authors like Zola; or again, how the emphasis on feeling over thought led to the utter degradation of feeling in de Sade. But a deeper and tragic question lurked beneath the Romantic vision: do we really find a higher truth as we look beyond the rational to the Imagination; or are we just ‘imagining’ it, wandering in our own daydreams?
The question is put powerfully by Keats, at the close of Ode to a Nightingale.[22] Keats listens to and celebrates the beauty of a bird’s song. But at the end of the poem the bird is gone, and Keats asks, ‘Was it a vision, or a waking dream?’ Was it a truly significant glimpse of ultimate beauty, or just the kind of fantasy that comes between sleep and waking?[23] As the nineteenth century continues, the issue becomes more urgent. In Tennyson, guru-bard to the Victorians, we often sense the despair of a man who hardly dares hope that the things he most cares about have ultimate reality. In Browning, too, isn’t there a deep sense of loss, of seeking to forget the big questions in the rush into action – everything is lost, but anyway keep riding?
For at the heart of the apparent confidence of nineteenth century Britain was a violent collapse of certainty. Up till now the Christian framework had underpinned the dominant values, even though in many ways the culture had moved far from commitment to the biblical God. But now came the first really major intellectual assault on Christianity, from German biblical criticism and from Darwin’s theory of evolution.[24] It was the age of the ‘loss of faith’: just when the Romantic dream was seeming a fantasy[25] and dwindling into sentimentalism, so too the Christian framework appeared to be collapsing. Don’t we see in many Victorian writers – in Tennyson’s In Memoriam, in Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ (quoted in chapter 5) – a profound sense of loss and doubt as to whether any foundation is left for significance? And is there not doubt, too, as to whether goodness is something with any real basis or source or power? (That is, is there really any ‘god’?) Dickens’ villains, for example, have tremendous vitality, but his good characters seem pale by comparison (eg. in Oliver Twist); it is very hard to understand why in the end they triumph.[26] The reason, one suspects, is that Dickens himself didn’t know. (Dostoevski’s The Idiot poses a similar problem.)
So doesn’t much of the major literature of the last 150 years reflect a quest for new ‘god-substitutes’, for alternative bases for values and significance? We see the Pre-Raphaelites – William Morris, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti – looking back to the Middle Ages. George Eliot is almost an early liberal-humanist: for her God is ‘inconceivable’, immortality ‘unbelievable’, yet still there remains duty, ‘peremptory and absolute’. Others look to science as the key: but the French Naturalists such as Zola reveal the scientific universe as a machine pursuing its impersonal, deterministic purposes, with no care for the human beings trapped in the process. (At the end of L’Assommoir, for example, the heroine is found dead and ‘turning green already’.) And none of this quite suffices; towards the end of the century a different alternative appears, with the swing away from visible reality among the first precursors of the modernist movement. Even if there is nothing to live by in the mundane world, they seem to say, at least we can look for something meaningful and significant in the separate universe of art and in the personal aesthetic consciousness; in France with the Symbolist poets, in Britain somewhat differently with the Aesthetic movement – ‘art for art’s sake’, that being all there is to truly celebrate.
Twentieth-century literature offers a vast proliferation of ‘god-substitutes’, responding to the issue of what is worth living for.[28] (‘God is silent and that I cannot possibly deny – everything in me calls for God and that I cannot forget`, wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, … As a matter of fact, this experience can be found in one form or another in most contemporary authors; it is the torment in Jaspers, death in Malraux, destitution in Heidegger, the reprieved-being in Kafka, the insane and futile labour of Sisyphus in Camus.’[27]) But don’t we find many of modernism’s greatest literary achievements building on the ‘aesthetic god’? In different ways Joyce, Yeats, Woolf and Pound seek an autonomous aesthetic construct that will somehow make sense of this meaningless world, or contain an order and meaningfulness that this one lacks. The influential philosopher G.E. Moore pointed to two spheres as containing that which was truly worthwhile: art and relationship. E.M. Forster gave expression to the latter in his famous remark that, faced with the choice of betraying his country or his friend, he hoped he would betray his country. (Perhaps these two remain the central ‘god-substitutes’ for modernity: Posterski and Bibbey’s surveys of Canadian youth values likewise highlighted music and friendship as the things that really matter.)
But these two ‘god-substitutes’, like their predecessors, had their problems. So many of the best novels of this period struggle with the inadequacy of human relationships (the devouring relationships in Lawrence, Conrad’s themes of betrayal and isolation, or the sense of failure in the close of Forster’s Passage to India). And art:[29] what is art? In the autonomous universe of art, how do we know what is significant and worthy of record? When we believed in God we could go back to the beginning of the Bible, and see a Creator who makes things and declares that they are very good; beauty had real meaning because it came from God. But now that God is dead, what is beauty? Is it purely subjective? Is there any difference between the sound of a Beethoven concerto and of a concrete mixer? What (if anything) is of value? What is genuinely worth the artist’s celebrating?
The last fifty years have crystallised this problem with the shift to postmodernism. Postmodernism is a complex phenomenon, but isn’t one of its characteristics precisely this doubt? Andy Warhol produces a sculpture that is an exact replica of a box of Brillo pads. And why not? In the past we made sculptures of human beings. But what is so special about them? In a chance universe they are no more significant, no more worthy of celebration, than anything else. Jeff Koons made a name for himself with (among other things) a giant stainless steel rabbit. Earlier in the last century, Marcel Duchamp presented a toilet as a work of art; in the 1960s, Piero Manzoni tinned and sold his own excrement. (‘Of course it’s art’, says Damien Hirst, famous for his dead shark in formaldehyde and his cow’s head being eaten by maggots, ‘it’s in an art gallery.’)
The music of John Cage posed a similar question. Beethoven might write symphonies for violins, clarinets, flutes; but why are these sounds more ‘privileged’, more significant, than anything else? In Cage’s famous piano piece 4’33”; he does not even play the piano. Why, after all, should we give the term ‘music’ to pieces of wood striking pieces of wire? The sounds of people laughing or jeering, arguing or demanding their money back, would be as much an expression of music as the wood and wire. The reasoning is logical enough. Cage once wrote, ‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry.’ All that is left at that point is the act of speaking, of words without meaning. It is the last extremity of formalism: the medium is the message because there is nothing else. Many of Beckett’s writings present only a voice speaking in the dark (surprisingly often in hell), with nothing worth saying, wanting indeed to stop but unable to do so, therefore going on, meaninglessly, hopelessly, for page after page after page. That end-point is all there is left to be said. And we have to ask: if there is no God, what else is there to celebrate and believe in as a source of significance? Have we any logical alternative to postmodernism?
Early in the new millennium, then, we are heirs to an extended but failed dialogue: from the excitement of the Reformation, with the rediscovery of the individual’s enormous significance before God; through the Enlightenment’s turning away from God’s revelation in the name of autonomous human reason, then the swing in turn from the inadequacies of that ‘reason’, to non-rational sources of significance; then on through the searchings of the nineteenth century, through the modernist era often seeking meaningfulness or order in separate universes of art; and now postmodernity, when those myths too have lost their meaning. Today, all the syntheses and ‘god-substitutes’ have broken down; we are ‘incredulous towards meta-narratives’; we have little left to build upon, celebrate or rejoice over, little to say except to go on saying very little. In such a world, art may become increasingly difficult; so, too, may life. We live in the ‘twilight of the gods’, as heirs to three centuries of failed ‘god-substitutes’.
But perhaps youth culture has taken up the search where its elders failed. In our next post we’ll explore the story again, starting this time in the ’50s. Once again, we can guess at the ‘god-replacements’ that briefly flavoured our world before giving way in inadequacy to their successors. Once again, what follows is hypothetical. But we’re asking the question, isn’t this roughly what happened? Might this story explain where we are?
—
[1] Cf. In the Twilight of Western Thought (Nutley, 1960), pp.35-36. I am not following Dooyeweerd’s historical analysis here.
[2] According to Dooyeweerd, ‘Every idol gives rise to a counter-idol’ (p.166). We may restate that part of his argument like this: The principle that is absolutized or ‘deified’ is not broad enough to hold together all the other particulars; consequently it inevitably ‘calls forth’ its opposites, those other aspects or particulars that have been marginalized, which in turn then ‘begin to claim an absoluteness opposite to that of the deified ones’ (p.36). Thus one ‘god-substitute’ succeeds another; ultimately, nothing but God is big enough to be God.
[3] Obviously our history is an interplay of many types of processes – economic history, with the development of capitalism; political history, with the rise and fall of competing nation-states and political parties; and numerous others. But this approach has the merit of focusing on the things by which we ultimately live; and in practice it certainly offers a less soulless way of thinking about the past than, say, Marx’s insistence that the key factor dominating any era is its ‘means of production’.
[4] There are constraints on this: what the artist perceives as acceptable or possible, and what patrons or audiences will tolerate or pay for. Also, to some extent what the artist is choosing to ‘celebrate’ is the act of artistic creation itself. But usually that is not all. (Or, if it is all – as has happened increasingly in modernity – then that itself becomes a statement about what (how little) is worth celebrating outside the work of art.)
[5] Kenneth Clark observes that Rembrandt’s mind ‘was steeped in the Bible – he knew every story down to the minutest detail… [His art] is an emotional response based on the truth of revealed religion.’ (Civilisation (1982 edition), pp.143-44.)
[6] Cf. H.R. Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (1970), chapter 1.
[7] Cf. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957).
[8] See the Sermon on the Mount (eg. Matthew 5:38-48.)
[9] Vinoth Ramachandra argues this point cogently in Faiths in Conflict? (1999), pp.149-51, which draws on William T. Cavanaugh, ‘”A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House”: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State’, Modern Theology 11.4 (1995).
[10] There is still a God in the Enlightenment picture, but he tends to be pushed to the periphery – a distant divinity who created a perfect nature and perfect human reason, and then conveniently retired. Most expressions of Enlightenment thought tend towards deism.
[11] An over-confidence that has been challenged by late-modernist thinkers. Docherty summarizes the position of Adorno and Horkheimer thus: ‘Enlightenment itself is not the great demystifying force which will reveal and unmask ideology; rather, it is precisely the locus of ideology, thoroughly contaminated internally by the assumption that the world can match – indeed, can be encompassed by – our reasoning about it.’ (Introduction to Postmodernism: a Reader (1993), p.8.)
[12] The result was that ‘progress’ became central to the Enlightenment’s ideology (or mythology). At the same time, the Enlightenment looked back to the earlier triumphs of reason; there is a strong emphasis on the neo-classical in this period, often displacing the more relational, less abstract Judaeo-Christian vision.
[13] As Karl Barth comments, in Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (1972), pp.49-50.
[14] At least until his more Christian Amelia.
[15] In politics, too, perceptive observers recognized that ‘Whatever is, is right’ was not the whole story, that the apparently ‘natural’ political order was not the embodiment of reasonable perfection – insights leading in time to the French revolution and, in England, the great Reform Bills of the following century.
[16] Of course there is no clean division between such periods as the ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Romanticism’; and any particular work contains a mixture of ‘gods’ that may or may not fit well together. Rousseau, for example, puts his faith in reason as he thinks about religion in a way that makes him clearly an Enlightenment figure, and is applauded as such by Kant. Yet in his championing of the unsullied child and of the individual over against the corruption of society, he is the first prophet of the gods of the Romantics. Thus to speak of, say, the Enlightenment, is to speak of the dominance of a particular synthesis of ‘god-substitutes’ that gradually gave way in influence, among more and more key figures, to a different synthesis.
[17] Indeed, Edmund Burke remarked in 1790 that ‘atheists and infidels’ had now slipped into ‘lasting oblivion’ (‘Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through?’); while at the popular level, the blossoming of the Evangelical wing of the church led to a considerable re-Christianizing of a great deal of British culture (and the abolition of slavery). Nineteenth-century Evangelicalism owed a good deal to Romanticism, as is obvious from the passionate style of a C.T. Studd (see, for example, Fool and Fanatic, ed. Jean Walker (1980)); or, more destructively, in the attitude represented by Shaftesbury’s bizarre comment that ‘Satan reigns in the intellect, God in the heart of man.’
[18] Although Wordsworth and Coleridge both moved back to Christian commitment in later life.
[19] An example of how the change of ‘god-substitutes’ is embodied in general culture would be their effect on landscape gardening; from the rational, wide-open, geometrical arrangements of neo-classicism to the more unpredictable ‘Romantic’ arrangements popular a few decades later. Jane Austen (whose novels struggle with the advent of the Romantic mindset – see Sense and Sensibility in particular) presents attitude to garden design as a key mark of personality in Mansfield Park.
[20] The Romantic idolizing of the individual consciousness, as set over against society, is a key area in which it reacts against the Enlightenment synthesis. (This is a logical move onward from Kant’s absolutizing of human autonomy: the Ego as God.) The figure of the Romantic Ego became embodied particularly in Napoleon. Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment questions how far this ‘god-substitute’ of the Napoleonic individual, free from all external constraints, can ‘work’, and how far it destroys those who put their trust in it.
[21] There was also the ‘satanist’ end of Romanticism: Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Byron’s Lara, de Sade, the teenage Marx’s Oulanem.
[22] And at greater length in the Fall of Hyperion, where Keats agonizes over the value of what the poet does as against those who make a tangible improvement to human existence – the choice he made in real life, as a former medical student. Imagination alone was not enough; what Keats lacked, compared to his Reformation predecessors, was a framework that could have underpinned the value of both, and a relationship with a ‘nearby God’ that could have made clear which of the two was his personal ‘calling’.
[23] Politically, the daydream-question arose with the disillusionment at the French Revolution (and its bloody aftermath), originally hymned with enthusiasm by Schiller, Beethoven (the Eroica Symphony dedicated originally to Napoleon), and Wordsworth.
[24] Interestingly, this had far less impact in the USA, where many Christian thinkers adopted evolutionary theory into their worldview without obvious discomfort. B.B. Warfield would be an obvious example. But it is also clear that the broader worldview of evolutionism was a picture whose time had come. The Christian view of humanity as created perfect, then desperately marred, was already being challenged by a picture of our moving from primitive barbarism to ever-higher development. Lewis notes tellingly that the two key artistic embodiments of evolutionism (in Keats and Wagner) came before, not after, Darwin. Europe wanted to believe that we were automatically getting better and better, rather than needing supernatural redemption; now the scientific theory seemed to give an excuse. (Christian Reflections (1981 edition), pp.111-12.)
[25] Darwin was bad for the ‘gods’ of Romanticism too. The Nature that was so inspirational to Wordsworth becomes, for Tennyson, savage – ‘red in tooth and claw’.
[26] In Dickens’ later work, his early optimism about the generosity of the human spirit slips into a far bleaker vision. Impersonal, dehumanizing forces are at work (reflecting the ongoing industrial revolution) against which Dickens’ small ‘alternative communities’ (see for example Dombey and Son) seem nonplussed, eccentric and powerless.
[27] Quoted in Charles I. Glicksberg, Literature and Religion (Dallas, 1960), pp.221-22.
[28] The great turn-of-the-century novelists James and Conrad can be read especially fruitfully in the light of this question; as Conrad puts it, ‘how to be’. James (like Scott Fitzgerald) is very interested in what you can do with life if everything is possible; hence his interest in what the rich do (eg. the wonderful Portrait of a Lady).
[29] Space doesn’t permit adequate exploration of where the aesthetic ‘god’ failed, but we may point to some further questions: the pervasive elitism, even hatred, directed against those who couldn’t share the artist’s intuitive values (extending often into crypto-fascism; see John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses (1996)); the egoism implicit in the wilful obscurity of the ‘separate artistic universes’ of, say, Pound’s Cantos or Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake; the sense of dilettantism, of failure to engage with the issues of the real world (if the 1920s saw the triumph of modernism, the ’30s saw a reaction back to political (communist, Stalinist) commitment in writers like Auden); and the deep sense of horror and futility that recurs throughout much modernist writing – eg. in most of early Eliot (before he became a Christian), or in Yeats’ ‘Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?’ or his end-point in the ‘foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’ in ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’.
(This is a slightly revised version of a section from A Long Way East of Eden, published in 2001.)
