Abstract
The chief problem of modernity was an absence of meaning. That was W.H. Auden’s conclusion as he reflected on the challenges of modern life in 1948. He explained that inhabitants of the twentieth century were
faced with the modern problem, i.e., of living in a society in which men are no longer supported by tradition without being aware of it, and in which, therefore, every individual who wishes to bring order and coherence into the stream of sensations, emotions, and ideas entering his consciousness, from without and within, is forced to do deliberately for himself what in previous ages has been done for him by family, custom, church, and state, namely the choice of the principles and presuppositions in terms of which he can make sense of his experience.1
Auden’s assessment was correct: there was a “modern problem”—or at least many of Auden’s contemporaries were convinced that there was. Cultural observers of the time in Britain noted a disorienting absence of given meaning-creating structures, a situation that had ushered in a host of distinctly modern ills.
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Notes
W.H. Auden, “Yeats as an Example,” Kenyon Review 10, no. 2 (1948): 191–92.
On attempts to create a common culture during the interwar period, see Dan LeMahieu, A Cuture for Democracy: Mass Culture and the Cultivated Mind in Britain Between the Wars ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1988 ).
W.H. Auden, “A Contemporary Epic,” Encounter 2, no. 2 (February 1954): 69
T.S. Eliot, “The Romantic Englishman, the Comic Spirit, and the Function of Criticism,” in idem, TheAnnotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, ed. Lawrence Rainey ( New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005 ), 141.
See Philip Rahv, “The Myth and the Powerhouse,” Partisan Review 20 (November–December 1953): 635–48.
Frank Kermode, “The Myth-Kitty,” Spectator, 11 September 1959, 339.
Elizabeth M. Baeten, The Magic Mirror: Myth’s Abiding Power (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996 ).
C.S. Lewis, Collected Letters: Volume I, Family Letters 1905–1931, ed. Walter Hooper ( London: HarperCollins, 2000 ), 976.
See H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 ( New York: Vintage Books, 1958 ).
J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Essays Presented to Charles Williams ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947 ), 72.
For some recent examples see Michael Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 )
Roslyn Reso Foy, Ritual, Myth, and Mysticism in the Work of Mary Butts: Between Feminism and Modernism ( Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2000 )
Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction: An Introduction ( Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1992 )
Jewel Spears Brooker, Mastery and Escape: T.S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism ( Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994 )
Milton Scarborough, Myth and Modernity: Postcritical Reflections ( Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994 )
Laurence Coupe, Myth ( London: Routledge, 1997 ).
Examples included John B. Vickery, The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973 )
Robert Fraser, ed., Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination ( New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990 )
Brian R. Clack, Wittgenstein, Frazer, and Religion ( New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999 ).
Martha Celeste Carpentier, Ritual, Myth, and the Modernist Text: the Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998) is a work in the same vein, though it traces Jane Harrison’s influence rather than Frazer’s.
Margaret Hiley’s recent The Loss and the Silence: Aspects of Modernism in the Works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams (Zollikofen, Switzerland: Waking Tree Publishers, 2011) is perhaps an indication that scholars are beginning to take an interest in how seemingly disparate instances of mythic thinking might, in fact, be part of the same broader pattern.
Francis Mulhern, The Moment of “Scrutiny,” ( London: New Left Books, 1979 ).
Ian MacKillop, F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism ( New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995 )
Stefan Collini, “Cambridge and the Study of English,” in Cambridge Contributions, ed. Sarah J. Omrod ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 ), 42–64.
Michael Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 694.
Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1958 ): 129–156.
Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001 ).
Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain ( Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998 )
Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture ( New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000 )
Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern ( Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004 )
Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012 ). Though not limited to the British context
Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, eds., The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age ( Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009 ).
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© 2013 Matthew Sterenberg
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Sterenberg, M. (2013). Myth and the Modern Problem. In: Mythic Thinking in Twentieth-Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137354976_1
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