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The Year of Wonders—1900
| Article
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13817 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1988 |
7,066 Words |
| Author
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Frederick R. Karl
Frederick R. Karl, professor at New York University, is author
of Joseph Conrad: The Three Faces; Modern and Modernism: The
Sovereignty of the Artist, 1885-1915; and the forthcoming
William Faulkner: American Writer. A Biography. |
In 1899, Alfred Russell Wallace, whose work on evolution paralleled Darwin's, looked back and called it "the wonderful century." As a scientist, Wallace was concerned not with humanistic studies or the creative avant-garde in the arts, but with the avant-garde of a different kind: the cutting edge in science and technology, what it had meant and what it would mean for mankind. Although Wallace's listings of accomplishments are also accompanied by warnings about greed, militarism, unhealthy types of work, and imperialistic plunderings of the earth, his assessment nevertheless acts as the counterpoint to French sociologist Emile Durkheim's analysis of suicide, with anomie and depression, with the individual succumbing to uncontrollable elements. Wallace was a humanist, but he was also carried away by the magnitude of scientific discovery.
Some of the practical effects of scientific discovery made a huge difference in the quality of nineteenth-century life—for example, the use of anesthetics and antisepsis. These and other gains, whether medical or otherwise, would lead to further advances that would seem to justify Wallace's claims for a "wonderful century." These efforts to understand man and his physical background are paralleled by a radical redefinition of the arts emerging toward the end of the century. The year 1900, Annus Mirabilis in both science and the creative arts, is an excellent time to stop and take stock. For not only do we have an array of great inventive scientists, along with Freud, Einstein, Durkheim, and Weber, but we also have Yeats, Kandinsky, Schönberg, Proust, Gide, Mann, Conrad, Cezanne, Rilke, Musil. Yet the overriding point, from the artists' point of view, was that the above group of scientific miracle workers had failed society miserably: For all the advances of science, life was not intrinsically improved. Man's greed and desire for power still superseded man's humanism; thus, art and literature were on an inevitable collision course with science and technology.
Despite his pessimism about amelioration, Joseph Conrad did offer art as an adversary to Scientifism. And like Henry James and Walter Pater before him, Conrad saw forms of beauty as ways of holding off the onslaughts of a scientific ideology.
By 1900, the avant-grade in the arts had set itself against everything Wallace's "wonderful century" stood for. Music, painting, poetry, fiction, and drama, together with nearly every aspect of progressive social thought, found themselves in an adversarial position. Durkheim's "suicide," Freud's "unconscious" and "dreams," Weber's "charisma," Bergson's "memory," Nordau's "degeneration,"
...
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