The writing I did today was rather interesting to me, and it kind of exposed the difference between 19th and 20th Century literature, or at least until you get to Wallace Stevens and Carlos Williams. It may be difficult to explain this. It seems to me that literature in the 19th Century was full of the great code of the Bible and Christian good and evil; but in the next century, it was possible to divorce nature and reality from the Bible, so that reality became gray and amoral. The breakthrough probably was the thinking of Nietzsche. His concept of nature was a place where there are no stepping stones, no ladders for finger and toeholds, nothing for human convenience: nothing human at all.
I think maybe Thoreau wrote attitudes similar to this in Cape Cod, though whether before or after Nietzsche I don’t know. And then of course there was Stephen Crane’s story of “The Open Boat” that describes nature’s indifference to human beings. “None of them knew the color of the sky… All of them knew the color of the sea.”
Before the 20th Century, Melville showed us a cosmos that was unfriendly, but he characterized it as wicked, as if a joker like the devil were behind it all. He couldn’t help projecting biblical ideas onto the world. This was during the 1850s and later. It was difficult for him to strip nature of human concepts. But Wallace Stevens was quite adept at the distinction of imagination and reality. It took a while, however.
I love his poem called “The Snow Man.” The closing lines go,
And, nothing himself,
Sees nothing that is not there
And the nothing that is.
Is this an expression of nihilism? What do you think?
I just think that common sense can be very calming and pacifying, and the grayness isn’t disturbing at all. Reality is simply there and doesn’t yield to our fictions and what we impose on it. It’s a very long road from Shakespeare to a poet like Wallace Stevens: 400 years in the making; and even then, something like the Millennium could bollix up all our progress as far as epistemology and science, seeing reality as it really is.
robgradens 