Historicism
"On or about December 1910 human nature changed" (Woolf, Modernism 33)
"one of the features of the age we are talking about is that it is remarkably historicist, disposed to apocalyptic, crisis-centred views of history" (Modernism 20)
In the course of centuries the naive self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the centre of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness. This is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, though something similar had already been asserted by Alexandrian science. The second blow fell when biological research destroyed man's supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature. This revaluation has been accomplished in our own days by Darwin, Wallace and their predecessors, though not without the most violent contemporary opposition. But human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind. We psycho-analysts were not the first and not the only ones to utter this call to introspection; but it seems to be our fate to give it its most forcible expression and to support it with empirical material which affects every individual. (Freud, Introductory Lectures, Standard Edition, Vol. XVI, 284-5)
Consciousness
The plotless story seems to arise naturally from the intellectual climate of its time. In a world where, as the German philosopher Nietzsche declared, God was dead, and evolutionary theory had produced a sharp sense of man's insignificance in a changing universe, the only alternative seemed to be the retreat within, to the compensating powers of the imagination. With such a retreat came the stress on the significant moment, which would be called 'vision' or 'epiphany' by later writers such as James Joyce -- the moment of insight which is outside space and time, vouchsafed only fleetingly to the imagination, but redeeming man's existence in time. (Gurr and Hanson 286).
Modernism: not realism (19th C) but psychological realism (early 20th C). (Geddes 395)
Within this pervasive shift in the modern Weltbild, the dream came to enjoy a novel and special status. [Freud's Interpretation of Dreams is 1899] . . . The apparent incongruence and incoherence of the dream was . . . recognized as the mind's way of communicating the most complex and subtle things, often with a most admirable economy and elegance -- things which the mind had perhaps never consciously or supraliminally perceived. (Modernism 85)
Conrad, Heart of Darkness: "Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream -- making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment . . . " (Geddes 98)
-- "the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze" (Geddes 80)
Woolf: "Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end." (Geddes 324)
References
Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane. Modernism. Penguin, 1976.
Gurr, Andrew, and Clare Hanson. In Short Story Criticism, Vol. 9. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992.
Document prepared September 29th 2002