Phenomenology and Literary Impressionism: The Prismatic Sensibility

Abstract

Henry Adams saw and understood better than most men of letters the special quality of change and upheaval that was taking place between the years 1870 and 1920. He faced squarely the issues of a fragmented, relativistic, unknowable, accidental, subjective, and accelerating world, while realizing how ill-prepared he was to absorb and adapt to such a world. His autobiography can in many ways be viewed as an historian’s analogue to literary impressionism.

As far as one ventured to interpret actual science, the mind had thus far adjusted itself by an infinite series of infinitely delicate adjustments forced on it by the infinite motion of an infinite chaos of motion; dragged at one moment into the unknowable and unthinkable, then trying to scramble back within its senses and to bar the chaos out, but always assimilating bits of it, until at last, in 1900, a new avalanche of unknown forces had fallen on it, which required new mental powers to control. If this view was correct, the mind could gain nothing by flight or by fight; it must merge in its supersensual multiverse, or succumb to it. (Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams)