Cultural Pessimism and Anthropological Anxiety

Abstract

This chapter considers narratives of cultural decline and degeneration, narratives culminating in the destruction of civilisation as we know it. However, I will begin with the apparent opposite of such catastrophic writings: with fantasies about the beginnings of mankind. Stories about the rise of man from early hominid to ‘true human’, about the original transition from animality to humanity, seem to reflect Huxley’s dictum about the splendour of man’s capacities that allow him to leave his animal heritage behind and to rise to a position ‘as on a mountain top, far above the level of his humble fellows’ (MPN 112). The notion implied in Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature that man’s ‘rise’ was, not contingent, as Darwin had claimed, but rather a necessary result of ‘natural’, linear progress, is reflected in prehistoric fiction.³ But these, mankind’s success stories, also contain the seed of the destruction that will, one day, inevitably follow: a primary guilt on which the act of instituting civilisation is built – the first murder, the first war, the first oppression accompanying the invention of tools, the establishment of a community, the emergence of rudimentary laws. Civilisation itself is thus equalled with a ‘fall’ from a state of nature, with the loss of freedom and innocence, although this assessment is seldom made explicit. Stories set in the Stone Age accordingly serve as a foil for the apocalyptic fantasies about the fall of the British Empire and the end of civilisation, and even the end of humankind, written in the same period.⁴

The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one’s soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm. When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but, on the other hand, you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of the prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples. As you look at their gray stone huts against the scarred hillsides you leave your own age behind you, and if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door, fitting a flinttipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would feel that his presence there was more natural than your own.

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901)¹

There is the old brute too, the savage, the hairy man who dabbles his fingers in ropes of entrails; and gobbles and belches; whose speech is guttural, visceral – well, he is here. He squats in me. To-night he has been feasted on quails, salad, and sweetbread. He now holds a glass of fine old brandy in his paw. He brindles, purrs and shoots warm thrills all down my spine as I sip. It is true, he washes his hands before dinner, but they are still hairy. He buttons on trousers and waistcoats, but they contain the same organs.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)²