Abstract
Derived from the Latin solitudo, the English “solitude” has always conveyed a state of “deprivation”; but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was a word not commonly used until the seven-teenth century. Its current meaning as “living alone, loneliness, seclusion” assumed general coinage in the eighteenth century. The celebratory connotation of solitude belongs to those who have sought solitude in the higher, nonworldly venues of the spiritual realm, or to those who see solitude as personal space for pleasure and creative self-indulgence. The former reigns in the Middle Ages; the latter takes root in the Renaissance. However, Petrarch writes a secular celebration of solitude, and solitude as a spiritual experience never really loses its relevance. In any case, for most solitude is a hard choice: even Thomas Merton writes in No Man is an Island that “One has to be very strong and very solid to live in solitude.”
The capacity to be alone was adumbrated as a valuable resource, which facilitated learning, thinking, innovation, coming to terms with change, and the maintenance of contact with the inner world of the imagination.
—Anthony Stott, Solitude: A Return to the Self
All our forces strive to abolish our solitude.
—Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude
I live … alone, entirely alone… But I remained close to people, on the surface of solitude, quite determined, in case of emergency, to take refuge in their midst…
—Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
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Notes
Ursula Lord, Solitude Versus Solidarity in the Novels ofJoseph Conrad: Political and Epistemological Implications of Narrative Innovation (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997), 3.
For a mid-century critique of “desocialisation” see Paul Halmos, Solitude and Privacy: Study of Social Isolation: Its Causes and Therapy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), chapters II and III.
Nietzsche, The joyful Wisdom in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche ed. Oscar Levy, VII, Part II tr. Thomas Common (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 328.
Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self (New York: Free Press, 1988), 11, 13, 21.
For a brief survey of attitudes toward solitude from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, see Möhrmann, Der V reinsamte Mensch: Studien zum Wandel des Einsamkeitsmotivs im Roman von Raabe bis Musil (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1974), 7–27.
Frederick Garber, The Autonomy of the Self from Richardson to Huysmans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), ix, xi.
Two early collections of interesting essays on the Self are Eugene Goodheart’s The Cult of the Ego: The Self in Modern Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968)
Wylie Sypher, The Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1962).
Also Enrico Garzilli’s Circles Without Center: Paths to the Discovery and Creation of the Modern Self in Modern Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972)
For a “history of ideas” approach, see Gerald N. Izenberg, Impossible Individuality: Romanticism, Revolution, and the Origins of Modern Selfhood, 1787–1802 (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1992.
A more philosophical analysis is Charles Taylor’s, Sources of the Self The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Dennis Brown focuses on the twentieth century in England in The Modernist Self in Twentieth-Century English Literature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989).
See Lorna Martens, The Diary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
For a perceptive analysis of the monologist narrator, including some remarks on Beckett’s trilogy, see Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
W. H. Auden, The Enchaf’d Flood (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 17.
Octavio Paz, “The Dialectic of Solitude,” in The Labyrinth of Solitude, tr. Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos, and Rachel Phillips Belash (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 195.
Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. I, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, tr. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 275.
Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea, tr. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), 222–223.
Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski, and the Habsburg Dilemma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 5.
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© 2001 Edward Engelberg
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Engelberg, E. (2001). Introduction. In: Solitude and Its Ambiguities in Modernist Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10598-1_2
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