The following is a little potted something that I give to my students when we are trying to puzzle out what it means to be ‘modern’, to work towards an understanding of what historical continuity connects  Hamlet to L20C works like The Unbearable Lightness of Being or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

I include it here as an addendum to my previous post: before you go emailing me about how historically vulgar and Olympian it is, I’d just like to say that it is a bit, yes, vulgar and  Olympian, a bit of a caricature of intellectual history. But young students need to see history in such broad bush strokes to care about it at all, to feel it is relevant to their experience of the world as it feels like it stands now. I reproduce it here because, increasingly, I feel, a lot of contemporary literature has abandoned even this vestigial inkling of historical awareness.

So many writers today feel as if they can safely ignore the efforts of those who have written before us, those modernists hose who have wrestled with one or another version of this narrative: Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, Brecht, Borges, & etc, are now safely consigned to the dustbin of literary history, so easily forgotten in the search for the next Booker short list nominees. Writers today are free to write in any mode they choose, to write, even, as if 19C realism is in no way compromised or problematic. And yet questions of form and of form’s relation to ‘reality’ were obsessively debated by our forerunners –why are they not now?

     I have no answer to that last question, but it is by no means rhetorical.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is in part an inquiry into what it means to be human in a world which is making the transition from the stable certainties of medieval Christendom to the dynamism of modernity. Hamlet feels personally bound to those Feudal ties of belonging, which unite peasant, yeoman and aristocrat into one mutually supportive, but static “Great Chain of Being”, ties which also demand that he be the agent of vengeance when he sees those supposedly eternal, natural laws being trampled upon by his uncle and mother: at times, the ideological certainties (such as the Divine Right of Kings) that derive from Ptolemy’s geocentric universe seem to provoke in him both religious and filial fervour, for to avenge the memory of his father would be to strike a blow for an equally threatened cosmology, an understanding of the cosmos that has placed Mankind at its very centre, and that is shot through – from the greatest of men to the smallest of flowers – with meaning.

Yet, if Hamlet keenly feels the pull of such “ghosts” of the pre-modern past he is no less haunted by the uncertainties unleashed by the modernity in which he has been schooled, as he spends much of the play doubting the meaning of the very presuppositions which would guide his actions (if ever he could only bring himself to stop questioning and, finally, act). For Hamlet’s melancholy, while perhaps partly due to his constitution, is a by-product of modern life: if Descartes helped usher in scientific modernity by instructing us that the only way to sweep away the cobwebs of myth and tradition was to methodically doubt what we think we “know” until we arrive at that which is indubitable, he also failed to find that final primary thing that could not itself be doubted. Science itself, while building on Descartes’ method, has taught us to distrust what “seems” true, and like Horatio, require sensory proof before we believe. And though micro- and telescopes have enabled our “insight” into the “true”, physical nature of the world to straddle vast distances of space and squeeze into the tiny spaces between atoms, such intellectual tools tell us nothing about what remains about the “meaning” of modern life.

The answer most moderns usually give is that “life in the abstract may no longer have meaning, but my life has meaning for me”. We feel this way because modernity has created us as individuals, something unheard of in feudal Europe (or any other world historical culture). The very forces that gave birth to early modern science also unleashed capitalism, such that humans increasingly began to discover their identities and their lives’ meaning not in the communal relationships of village life, but in the socio-economic exchanges characterized by life in the modern city: according to the economists of the Industrial Revolution (L18C, roughly contemporaneous with the political revolutions in America and France) we are “utility-maximizing rational individuals” – Homo Economicus – calculating, solitary creatures whose primary aim in life is to increase our pleasures and minimize our pains, or, as the more stirring words of the American Declaration of Independence puts it, our primary rights and duties centre chiefly around around “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

Such happiness remained elusive, however, as 19C and early 20C thinkers proceeded to undermine the vestiges of medievalism to which many human beings stubbornly continued to cling. Before Nietzsche declared that God was dead, and that we moderns were his murderers, Karl Marx called religion “the opium of the people”, not in the sense that it stupefies or keeps one from thinking straight, but in the sense that it helps reduce the very real pain that alienating modern capitalism produces for the vast majority of mankind: not only can there be no wealth without poverty (no cheap consumer goods produced without access to low wage labour), no longer do most humans feel fully connected to the work that puts food on their table. For “doing” – creatively expressing ourselves through meaningful labour – is as central to human life as “thinking”, and the majority of moderns, locked into feeding the demands of the Industrial machine, no longer had access to anything resembling meaningful, creative action. Industrial capitalism reduces us to creatures who merely compete, merely consume, and creates a condition of life which, as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes observed at the birth of modernity, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”, a kind of “war of all against all”. The modern era is also characterized by unceasing change, brought on by the birth of a productive force, capitalism, that is so dynamic that to many 19C observers it seems more alive than the disembodied  “hands” that toil in its factories. As Marx notes:

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones … All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Romanticism was one reaction to this predicament. If modern city life in industrial Europe was a dehumanizing proposition, at least the individual could commune with nature out in the countryside, where one  could put aside thinking and feel benevolent nature speaking loud and clear to one’s unique, individual soul.  Here, “my individual life is meaningful to me” becomes “my individual life is connecting to the oneness that is nature” and thereby the individual is at least momentarily restored, given a fleeting but powerful sense of wholeness, through the appreciation of the sublime – the vast, electric, living eternity that is nature, and nature itself becomes (à la GM Hopkins) the “grandeur of God”.  And poets, musicians and painters became the priests of this new religion, attempting to reproduce in the audience the same “spontaneous emotion” that inspired their composition. Rather than art as the classical/Apollonian “holding the mirror up to nature” as Hamlet urged, art becomes the Romantic expression of the unique feelings of the soul of the individual “genius”, the artist who will act as shepherd for an alienated, toiling industrial humanity. In this vision, it is not humanity itself that is fallen, but society (read: industrial capitalism). Society has corrupted us, lured us away from our natural roots, and art’s function is to return us, however briefly, to where we belong. “We are stardust,” Joni Mitchell sings in her wonderful “Woodstock”, a typically 1960s yearning for the ideals of an earlier Romanticism, “we are Golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden.”

It is essentially a yearning for an escape back to the medieval world where everything and everyone was connected in a vast web of meaning. Many novels of the Victorian age urged a return to simpler times, or at least a return to the sovereignty of the (natural) heart over the (now merely calculating) head. Nature could save us (if we would or could not save ourselves) from ourselves, from alienation, and bring us back into communion with each other, into communion with the One.  But Marx and Nietzsche are only two of the four thinkers who loomed like giants over the coming 20C, and two more remained to block any such easy access to utopia: Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud.

Darwin, though a believer, unwittingly replaced the nature of England’s “green and pleasant land” with a much darker vision, a blind, chaotic nature that produces life merely through the operations of chance, a purposeless competition for scarce resources, a “nature red in tooth and claw”.  Romanticism was thereby revealed, in the eyes of many, as a medieval fairy tale. And it fell to Freud to deal the final death blow to meaning: the unique whole individual soul that so resonated with Romanticism’s Nature was now revealed as a chaotic, teeming morass of conflicting drives, all created, not by capital-N Nature, but by early childhood experiences, by social forces, by, in the work of Freud’s “post-modern” followers, linguistic vectors or “discourses” – by ideologies that predate us, that will pass through us and that will outlive us. Rather than we free individuals using language to seek “life, liberty and happiness”, we are largely determined creatures, programmed perhaps by our DNA, but even more forcefully “trained” by society, not only by the habits that we have come to feel as “normal” or “natural”, habits induced by behaviourist techniques early in childhood (as in Brave New World), but also by language itself.

We don’t speak language, language speaks us.  Unconscious, unexamined ideologies come out of our mouths and we feel as if we have freely uttered them, but we did not create them, they have created us. They represent invisible social forces few of us care to uncover, and it feels far more pleasant to heed their call rather than to inquire where they came from, what they mean, and why they speak us. Aldous Huxley’s chief behaviourist Mustapha Mond would have us not worry about such unpleasant things  –human kind cannot bear too much reality, after all, and we all risk being metaphorically sent to Iceland if we disobey and insist upon questioning the aims of this Brave new World of ours.

So why do writers like Milan Kundera and Tom Stoppard choose exactly that unpleasant path? Do they merely wish to interrupt all the fun, fun fun (till daddy takes the T-bird away) of innocence?  If all of our maps through life are revealed as defective, and so-called “post-modern” life thereby “unbearably light” the question of what we are left with is a valid one.  Kundera himself implicitly asks it himself when he states that his characters explore the boundaries that lie beyond his own personality “in the trap that the world has become”. One suspects that his novel marks at least one attempt to answer the preceding question, to deal with that trap.