The Contemporary English Epic: Lessing

Abstract

‘As society changes, or twists its old knowledge about, its writers — its artists — produce new theoretic forms which in turn require fresh psychologies; and sometimes a new psychology will seem to come from nowhere, or from the ear of Zeus, and be restless and frustrate unless it finds a theoretic form’ — so writes R. P. Blackmur addressing the issue of the nineteenth-century European novel.¹ In doing so, his description of the intellectual milieu for Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina could be applied to the situation in England in the late twentieth century:

To accomplish this art of psychology, this art of the psyche, this driving form and drifting form (as the stars drift) is perhaps the characteristic task of the novel in a society like that of the nineteenth century: a society without a fixed order of belief, without a fixed field of knowledge, without a fixed hierarchy; a society where experience must be explored for its significance as well as its content, and where experience may be created as well as referred. This is the society where all existing orders are held to be corruptions of basic order; or, to put it differently, where, in terms of the confronted and awakened imagination, the creation of order has itself become a great adventure. This is What Anna and Levin have, great personal adventures in the creation of order: an order is the desperate requirement each has for the experience each bodies forth.²

These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies — captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly.

Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted by Henry Miller as the epigraph to Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Born 28 Nov 1757 in London & has died several times since.

From William Blake’s autograph in the Album of William Upcott,

January 16, 1826