Anthony Powell’s Archetypal Characters

Abstract

Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, his twelve-volume period portrait, was written between 1951 and 1975, but thematically it is a novel of the 1930s. Not only is it about the generation born for the most part in the first decade of this century, which came to maturity in the 1930s, but it is heavily influenced by the ideas and attitudes of that tumultuous decade. For instance, the relation of public to private life, of the social world to the imaginative, is a major theme, and as Samuel Hynes has said, one of the central literary problems of the period was “the relation between public and private experience.”¹ During the 1930s men and women, especially intellectuals, struggled to separate their private worlds from the chaos of public life. W. H. Auden put it well when he remarked that “It was extremely difficult to be a writer...because there was always conflict between what one was really interested in and a mixture of social conscience about what was going on.”² Ideally, periods of great historical drama encourage a sense of belonging and of commitment, but by the end of the 1930s most intellectuals felt not only powerless but isolated by their own sensibilities. Dance is about this group; coming to maturity in the late 1920s and 1930s, they were to experience two world wars and massive social and political change.