Coda: The Grain and the Heap, or the Afterlife of Habit

Abstract

If the nineteenth-century study of psychology was essentially ‘a study of habit/ as the critic Philip Fisher has declared,² the question of the relative disappearance of the term and the evacuation of its complexity when it does appear in later years becomes crucial to a historically astute and conceptually rigorous understanding of the shift from Victorian to modernist culture, or what we might call the ‘afterlife of habit.’ For Fisher, the modernist rejection of the concept of habit begins with Walter Pater’s famous injunction: ‘To burn always with this hard, gem like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike.’³ Yet Fisher’s assessment relies too heavily on the ‘failure’ of the first half of Pater’s dictum at the expense of the dazzling deconstruction of the second. For Pater, the failure is not in the repeated action itself but inperceiving the repeated action to be always . or ever . the same. By way of conclusion, and to point to the broader implications of the counter-current of reflecting on habit that this book has traced, I would like to suggest that the modernist ‘rejection’ of habit in fact selectively redefines the term for a new age and, in the process, effectively levels a whole tradition of contemplating it, including Pater’s own nuanced understanding.

Grain upon grain, one by one, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap.

Samuel Beckett, Endgame (1957)¹