Abstract
“The essence of solitude … is a sense of choice and control…. You choose to leave and return.”1 That is, if you can choose, and involuntary confinement (e.g., prisons) is not the only alternative of choice; nor, as is clear from the previous chapters, is it the only state of involuntary solitude. As some of the works demonstrate, our inhibitions of choice are many, and are often psychogenically involuntary. At times, “return” is nearly impossible, and we are irretrievably beyond it, although no external force holds us prisoner.
Privacy is freedom from social contact and observation when these are not desired; and Solitude is the lack of desired contact.
—Paul Halmos, Solitude and Privacy (1952)
Our attitude to solitude … is extremely paradoxical. We need it; we suffer from it; and we flee from it. Potentially positive, solitude is often painful …
—Joanne Wieland-Burston, Contemporary Solitude: The Joy and Pain of Being Alone (1996)
[T]oo much solitude makes of one an animal.
—J. M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country
[T]he word “I” is as hollow as the word “death.”
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (1989)
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Notes
Janna Malamud Smith, Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1997), 37.
Samuel Beckett, The Lost Ones (New York: Grove Press, 1972).
Erwin Möde, Die Neue Einsamkeit der Postmoderne (Munchen: Edition Psychosymbolik, 1995), 80, 13, 113.
On the transition from Modernism to Postmodernism see Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, tr. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1988);
Philip Solomon, Modernism/Postmodernism, ed. Peter Brooker (London: Longman Group UK, 1992);
James Brusseau, Isolated Experiences: Gilles Deleuze and the Solitudes of Reversed Platonism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 176–177.
Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 65.
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 29.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Solitude of Self” (1892) in The Search for Self-Sovereignty: The Oratory of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, ed. Beth M. Waggenspack (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 159–167.
Amy M. Spindler, “Tracing the Look of Alienation,” New York Times (March 24, 1998), D28.
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© 2001 Edward Engelberg
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Engelberg, E. (2001). Conclusion. In: Solitude and Its Ambiguities in Modernist Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10598-1_9
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