THE MODERN AGE. THE AGE OF ANXIETY

New view of man and the universe The first half of the twentieth century was an age of extraordinary and irreversible transformations. It was marked by two atrocious wars, witnessed the launch of the atomic bomb, new and faster means of transport and communication were discovered, psychology assumed a scientific status. All this wiped out the old certainties and cast man into the depths of anguish and disillusionment. New concepts of rootlessness, alienation and insecurity characterise this period of life

Crisis for culture and values A profound cultural crisis had been growing since the last two decades of the nineteenth century and led to the end of the system of Victorian values. The pervasive feeling was that material gain implied spiritual loss. The private morality of the Victorians had been strict and taboo-ridden, decency should been maintained, whatever went on under the surface; the positivistic faith in progress and science had led people to believe that all human misery would be swept away.

World War I Yet the First World War, in which almost a million British soldiers died, left the country in a disillusioned and cynical mood: stability and prosperity proved to belong only to a privileged class, consciences were haunted by the atrocities of the war. The gap between the generation of the young and the older one, regarded as responsible for the waste of lives during the war, grew wider and wider. An increasing feeling of frustration led to a remarkable transformation of the notions of Imperial hegemony and white superiority as a result of the slow dissolution of the Empire into a free associations of states, the Commonwealth.

Discomfort for everybody Nothing seemed to be right or certain; even science and religion seemed to offer little comfort or security. Scientists and philosophers destroyed the old, predictable universe which had sustained the Victorians in their optimistic outlook, and new views of man and the universe emerged.

Sigmund Freud The first set of new ideas was introduced by Sigmund Freud in his essay The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Freud explained that the development of the human psyche is deeply affected by the unconscious; the discovery that man's action could be motivated by irrational forces of which he might know nothing was very disturbing. Freud's theory also maintained that the super-ego, that is to say the constraints imposed on the individual by society, education, and moral laws, can profoundly distort man's behaviour. The effects in the sphere of family life were deep: the relationship between parents and children was altered; the Freudian concept of infantile sexuality focused attention on the importance of early developments and childhood regained a status it had previously had only in the pages of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; the conventional models of relationship between the sexes were readjusted, also thanks to the struggles of the movement for women's suffrage. Freud's new method of investigation of the human mind through the analysis of dreams and the concepts of "free association" influenced the writers of the modern age.

Science evolves too In the field of science the old certainties were discarded by the introduction of the concept of relativity of Albert Einstein ( ), whose theory conceived time and space as subjective dimensions. Even Quantum Mechanics and the new theories of language postulated by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein ( ) shook the old stable foundations of scientific thought. As a consequence the world view lost its solidity and the scientific revolution was complemented by the verbal experimentation and the exploration of memory in literature, the rebellion against perspective and against phenomenal representation in art, or the revolution of tone, rhythm and harmony in music.

A new idea of Time: Bergson The idea of "time" was questioned also by the American associationist philosopher William James ( ) and the Freud philosopher Henry Bergson ( ). James, in his Principles of Psychology (1890), held that our mind records every single experience as a continuous flow of "the already" into "the not yet". Bergson made a distinction between historical time, which is external, linear, and measured in terms of the spatial distance travelled by a pendulum or the hands of a clock, and psychological time, which is internal, subjective, and measured by the relative emotional intensity of a moment. Bergson also gave guidance to writers seeking to capture the effects of emotional relativity, since he suggested that a thought of feeling could be measured in terms of the number of perceptions, memories, and associations attached to it.

In the cultural crisis that affected society, a need for new values emerged and literature, along with all forms of art, played a fundamental role in the process. The creative writer and the literary critic reasserted the centrality of literature as a guide to the perplexities of an age whose key-words were isolations, and, to quote the title of a poem by W. H. Auden, anxiety. Through elaborate structuring, through allusion and literary references, through images and through myths, the modern writer expressed the impossibility to master the chaotic universe.