The Problem of Literary Generations:
2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/complitstudies.50.4.0567
ISSN1528-4212
Autores Tópico(s)Contemporary Literature and Criticism
ResumoThe first recorded criticism of Henri Peyre's Les générations littéraires (1948) came from its typist: in a lifetime of work, she said, no manuscript had been more boring.1 Peyre must have hoped that scholars would look more kindly on his idea that literary history “would gain immensely by coming back to the idea of generations.”2 Yet his book, which in too many chapters reviews the various meanings of “generation” and in too few pages recasts the history of various national literatures into successive generations, has been largely forgotten. While French, Spanish, German, and Hispano-American literary scholars have worked and continue to use the concept, the generation has not found a comfortable home in American or British scholarship despite the efforts of Robert Wohl and Samuel Hynes to give it greater prominence.3 Like the concept itself, the generation in literary scholarship has had a cyclical history: important in the aftermath of World War II, silent until the late 1960s and early 1970s, only for a tomb-like silence to reign afterward. Now, though, the next spurt of generational thinking has cropped up with the nascent study of “9/11 literature,” much of whose analysis falls back on generational concepts and terminology. This generational impulse will only grow stronger as the twenty-somethings whose formative years were marked by 9/11 and the subsequent American military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq grow into maturity.Indifferent to this oscillation in academia, literary journalism and publishing have been powerfully affected by generational language.4 Obituaries invariably tie an author to a literary generation, enacting a symbolic return into the bosom of the nurturing family from which he or she emerged.5 Commercially, the generation sells: the Granta list of young authors is touted as “a snapshot of a literary generation” (and so the 1983 list is the “1983 generation”). Then there are the Lost Generation, the Bright Young People, the Auden Generation, the Angry Young Men, the Beats, '68ers, Generation X, the New Generation poets, and so on. For Stephen Spender, “In this century, generation succeeds generation with a rapidity which parallels the development of events.”6This is an apposite remark for Robert Wohl, who argues in Generation of 1914 that “historical generations are not born; they are made.”7 While Wohl means that events create generations, I contend that discourse has been even more important in their construction. As Harold Rosenberg puts it, “One may, especially today, call any age-group he chooses a ‘generation’—among ensigns or ballet dancers a generation is replaced every three or four years.”8 The list can be updated to include computer processors, tennis racquets, and athletic sneakers, but authors are no less exempt from generational self-fashioning. Gertrude Stein alluded to the term's malleability by stating that “any two years can make a generation.”9 A little tongue-in-cheek, but Stein got it right when implicitly suggesting the generation's connection to discourse—connected to discourse, created by it, yet also refusing to be pinned down, for the generation does not have an invariable, agreed-on meaning. Sociologist David Kertzer notes that “the term's multivocality, a virtue in popular discourse, becomes a liability in science.”10 In 1979 Stephen Graubard observed that “there are few terms that have been as frequently invoked—but as little studied—over the last twenty years as the term ‘generations.’ In the scholarly world, in the social policy professions, and in the press, the concept of generations has become one of the most adaptable themes of contemporary discourse.”11By 2002 little had changed. “Despite the importance of the notion of generations in common sense or lay understanding of cultural change, the study of generations has not played a large part in the development of sociological theory.”12 In literary studies, the word “generation” is employed casually, as it seems like we already know what we mean when using it. But even when used heuristically, the term retains the gloss of science because of its biological origins and its demarcation of objects (one generation is different and distinct from another). This often means that, unwittingly, the generation periodizes even though it is employed to avoid monolithic periodization.I begin by looking at the evolution of the term. Although intellectual histories exist, they are characterized by a dissertation-like movement from thinker to thinker, lacking any broader synthesis. This fault is apparent in even the best historical survey, by Hans Jaeger, who reviews the term's evolution but never addresses why, how, and when these changes took place.13 I argue that the generation emerged as a sociological concept in the early nineteenth century for a number of local, specific reasons, as it was mainly in France that the term broke ground. I then consider the modifications and usage of the concept in a critical moment, the 1920s. I discuss the Generation of 1898 in Spain, which was defined retrospectively in the twenties, and in so doing I cast doubt on some of the means by which literary generations are defined. I also compare Henry Green and H. E. Bates, two authors whose dates of birth, literary debuts and deaths are almost exact matches: despite this exact generational fit, their works could not be further apart. I conclude by considering the basic law developed for literary generations, the idea that new generations arise and displace preceding ones, a concretized version of the “anxiety of influence” theory.14 Scholars wanting to transform literary history into a science once subscribed to this theory; nowadays, it is mainly found in literary journalism.15 Passing the generational baton is expected to breed conflict, so when W. H. Smith introduced the “20 Best Young British Novelists, 1993” list, the Times announced that “a confrontation between literary generations is in prospect after well-known writers, including Martin Amis and William Boyd, the angry young men of the 1980s, … denounced a publicity campaign to promote young novelists.”16 I raise a number of objections to conceptualizing literary history in such a manner, objections that undercut the validity of generational terminology in toto.The sociological meaning of “generation” is a post-Enlightenment development. The change from a primarily naturalistic to a sociological view of “generation” has never been explained; scholars have mainly recorded changes in usage but have not attempted to hypothesize the reason for them. After reviewing the term's evolution, I single out three factors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that contributed to this shift from viewing the concept naturalistically to viewing it sociologically: widespread democratization, growing centralization, and technological progress.The Enlightenment obsession with generation can be traced to Descartes's search for “sure foundations” and Hobbes's definition of philosophy in Leviathan: “BY PHILOSOPHY, is understood the knowledge acquired by reasoning, from the manner of the generation of any thing, to the properties: or from the properties, to some possible way of generation of the same; to the end to be able to produce, as far as matter, and human force permit, such effects, as human life requireth.”17 For these thinkers generation was an event in nature. The Encyclopédie, for instance, contains two articles on “génération,” one on its biological meaning and another by d'Alembert on its physical meaning. This focus was partly due to the influence of Aristotle's De generatione but was also an effort to better understand the mechanism of reproduction (physical generation), ignorance of which one German writer in the late eighteenth century called a “humiliating reproach” to humankind.18 Johnson's Dictionary defines “generation” as “offspring, progenus.” Rousseau speaks of his life containing “two generations so different”: a time before the First Discourse, when he did not write, and the time after, when he did nothing but write—yet this usage is also biological, in the sense of the generation of a butterfly from a caterpillar.19The only sociological definition of “generation” in the Encyclopédie is the following: “a synonym of people, race, nation, especially in the literal translation of the Holy Book, in which one finds everywhere the word generation.”20 In Puritan Boston, for example, Andrew Eliot called Jews “an evil Generation[,] … a base and spurious Race.”21 With respect to historical time, the Encyclopédie notes that Herodotus's view (2.142) that a century contains three generations is “according to modern authors of political arithmetic … relatively correct.”22 Voltaire used this classical definition to frame his Siècle de Louis XIV: “I have called this century that of Louis XIV because this monarch saw renewed three times all the generations of princes in Europe.”23The largely positivist and naturalistic cast to the understanding of generation was displaced in the early nineteenth century. The 1762 Académie Française dictionary relied on the Encyclopédie, but less than half a century later, the fifth edition (1798) states that thirty years for a generation is an “arbitrary” marking.24 By the sixth edition (1832–1835), a generation is “the collection of all the men of the same age, or close to the same age, who live at the same time,” a definition that is very close to the modern one.25 Rather than continuing to be understood as simply a slice of time or a physical event, the generation came to be regarded as a continuum of shared historical experience. The nonbiological meaning of “génération” in Littré (1872–1877) cites Ségur's Histoire de Napoléon et de la Grande-armée pendant l'année 1812 as well as Alphonse de Lamartine, whom Sainte-Beuve identified as the author of his generation.This shift can be seen—in inchoate form—in Britain. In The Prelude (1799) Wordsworth speaks of “generations of illustrious men” and “generations of mankind”, but The Excursion (1814) apostrophizes “vainglorious Generation! what new powers/On you have been conferred?”26 What has been added to the latter work is a historical sense, a focus on a particular generation, the one Wordsworth belongs to and from within which he must justify his poetic output. The objectless generations defined by swathes of time in The Prelude give way to a subjective belonging to a time separate from others and with its own reality—the difficulty of poetry in a time that is “one busy day” (Excursion 4.283). Yet Wordsworth's usage is imprecise, reflecting the term's limited reach in Britain. The chapter on generational relations in Scott Krawczyk's Romantic Literary Families fails to show the presence of a strong generational consciousness among British poets.27 Indeed, while Wordsworth and Coleridge were born at roughly the same time and experienced what later generation theorists call a formative event in the outbreak of the French Revolution at the age of twenty, the poets surrounding Wordsworth were defined geographically as the “Lake poets.”Crossing the channel one can note a difference. In 1820 France a “glorious generation” was identified; its authors—Balzac, Comte, Cournot, de Vigny, Hugo, and Michelet—were all children of the Revolution, born from 1795 on.28 A literary review, the Globe, styled itself a venue for “those generations brought up since the Restoration.”29 In a move that would come to be the defining literary-historical dialectic of generational change, Chateaubriand identified this younger group as a threat: “A generation is rising up behind us resentful of all discipline, hostile to every king, dreaming of the republic but constitutionally incapable of republican virtues. It advances, presses on us, elbows us aside. Soon it will take our place.”30 The greatest champion of the generation as a critical tool in literary history also appeared at this time, Sainte-Beuve.31 He drew attention to the generational unity of men born in the last years of the eighteenth century, whose members “fought with virtual unanimity under the Restoration against the political and religious ancien régime.”32 His essay on La Bruyère identifies three distinct generations under Louis XIV, based on birth years, while in a piece on Chateaubriand, he calls generational consciousness “a natural and almost spontaneous association of young minds and talents, not exactly alike and of the same family, but of the same flight and of the same springtime, hatched under the same star, and who feel themselves born … for a common work [oeuvre commune].”33 In the realm of social thought, Comte identified the generation as a key factor in the “basic speed of human development”: “In principle, we should not hide the fact that our social progress rests essentially upon death; which is to say that the successive steps of humanity necessarily require a continuous renovation … from one generation to the next.”34It is striking that the term “generation” acquired a sociological dimension in the nineteenth century and that this change in meaning occurred so quickly and across a number of fields, including history, literature, and politics. While a number of intellectual histories of the generation exist, none provides a convincing hypothesis as to why the term radically changes meaning at this particular moment and what this might imply for the applicability of “generational thinking” to literature. Jaeger notes in passing the primacy of the nineteenth century to the emergence of this new sense but does not provide any coherent analysis as to what might have given rise to it.35 I suggest three factors that contributed to this: democratization, centralization, and technology.The nineteenth century was the period of democratization's greatest gains, as evidenced in the rebuilding after the tyrannies of the French Revolution, the Reform Laws in Great Britain, the national liberation of South American colonies, and the dismantling of slavery in the United States. As Tocqueville put it, the impetus for widespread democratization “cannot be suspended by the efforts of a generation.”36 By no longer limiting political power to a defined group but rather encouraging political participation across social strata, democracy eased youth into public life in a way other regimes had proven incapable of doing. At the same time, democratization paradoxically created generational categories. With aristocratic privileges abolished and republican duties diminished, the generation provided a fallback for social belonging: not everyone can belong to my generation, so the vestigial desire for distinction is satisfied, but at the same time, no one remains without a generation, so the democratic impulse toward equality is met. The generation also provided a framework of controlled rebellion that would not erupt into revolution: youth could rebel because it was natural for them to do so, but their integration into the social order was equally natural. This controlled conflict, Tocqueville argued, meant that new generations prevented democracy from ever aging and thus preserved its youth and vigor.37 This process of youthful rebellion and eventual integration has a literary parallel: Franco Moretti sees it as the resounding trope of the bildungsroman, which emerged in the late eighteenth century, around the time that the generation began to take on a sociological meaning.38 Wilhelm Meister and other bildungsroman heroes are initially cast as isolated figures in rebellion against society's “false” values; but their integration into the social fold occurs after they join forces with individuals of their own age group—a process, in other words, that depends upon a generational attachment (which in Rousseau's Émile corresponds to marriage, but in later bildungsromans generational attachment concerns historical and spiritual values, not physical or natural ties).Centralization also favored the sociological turn of the generation. One aspect stands out: the spectacular rise of the bureaucratic state and its disciplinary instruments of control and categorization. From the levée en masse to the baccalaureate, the French state institutionalized communal experiences. Littré's 1863 definition makes the term synonymous with a “cohort” (those who passed the same test in the same year).39 The universality of school is the point of departure for Maurice Barrès's Les déracinés (1897), which concerns a group of philosophy students in a Nancy lycée given “the most vigorous of stimulants, the ideas of their time!”40 Centralization also entailed the development of a mass public, the diffusion of national goods and services, and the cultural dominance of capital cities (the Generation of 1898 is considered inseparable from the “urgent call of Madrid”).41 The final centralizing force emerged within the cultural marketplace. With critics no longer able to transmit rules for art, the patronage system losing its dominance upon the art field, and artists setting up the Salon of Independents, the market assumed a preponderant role in defining artistic value.42 This created a need for differentiation: one did not simply write a novel; one wrote a particular type of novel and from a particular perspective, with the generational grouping allowing the author to incorporate a larger identity. As national culture began to assume greater commercial value (there was frequent talk of national culture being under threat, and biological notions of growth and decay began to be applied to culture), it became a duty to support the younger generation, whose vitality was essential to continued cultural growth and expansion. This process was accelerated in the latter part of the century as young artists joined forces against the academy: a style could become a generational signature, a physical manifestation of separation and difference that was inscribed onto the body of both the artist and the art object. Since these revolts against tradition invariably contained programs for positive renewal, however, there was no overarching critique of national culture but rather an effort to “rejuvenate” it, to make it more relevant to the present.Another factor leading to the emergence of generational thinking was technology, in the broad sense of the technological social apparatus. Margaret Mead argues that one of the defining wedges in exacerbating generational consciousness and division is technological change.43 As technology advanced ever more quickly in the nineteenth century, differentiation based on age became even more important: the young had at their disposal tools their elders did not. The concentration of rapid technological change in urban centers led to youth gaining economic and social advantages at the same time that the transmission of accumulated knowledge and experience from elders lost its relevance for changing industries. In Disraeli's Sybil (1845), Widow Carey thinks that the world is turned “upside downwards in these parts” because “fathers and mothers goes for nothing[;] … 'tis the children gets the wages.”44 Growing economic independence for youth—in some factories, nearly half of the employees were children—was brought about by their quicker adaptation and integration into urban, industrialized life. The generation also overcame the divestment of identity through labor when homo faber became a factory hand: the generation was an inclusive mode of belonging that could provide a specific identity, something an increasingly economically fragmented society could no longer provide.In summary, the emergence of the generation as a sociological concept in the nineteenth century was due to a discrete set of circumstances. Rather than being a transcendental and transhistorical concept, as later theorists would argue, the generation was conditioned by unique historical factors. The ideological attachment to generational thinking under democratic politics or the novelty of state centralization distinctly color the term's analytic utility, making it problematic to speak innocently of generations without considering the factors involved in the term's emergence.During the 1920s, the “younger generation” became a trope, a catchword, not unlike “the proletariat” or “the public.”45 The idea of a generation gap existed before the war, most famously given expression to in Randolph Bourne's Atlantic Monthly essay “The Two Generations” (May 1911), Ellen Key's The Younger Generation (1914) and Les jeunes gens d'aujourd'hui (1913), which contrasted “the futility of action, the distaste of life” in the older generation to the pronounced “taste of action” among youth.46 But it was the First World War that “dug a chasm between generations.”47 Charles Adam, the rector of the Nancy Academy, told his students at the rentrée in October 1914 that “you are, in effect, our principal reason to live. But I have never understood as well as now that it is for your sake that people are dying.”48 The 1915 Times editorial “The Next Generation” demanded reforms to better the health and education of British children because they were the ones who would inherit the nation after the war.49 A 1916 pamphlet for the French schools observed that “for the first time in history … [there is] the sacrifice of one generation for the coming one.”50 After the war, Richard Aldington wrote Death of a Hero (1929) as a “memorial … to a generation” that had died on the Western front.51 Popular fiction presented The Rebel Generation, The Education of Peter: A Novel of the Younger Generation, and This Evil Generation.52 Even the elderly caught the drift: the president emeritus of Dartmouth, aged eighty, called his 1919 memoir My Generation: An Autobiographical Interpretation, a title that could just as well have been given to Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise (1938) or Christopher Isherwood's Lions and Shadows (1938), two influential memoirs that cast their authors as representative products of their generation.The 1920s were also a high-water mark for generational theory, with works such as François Mentré's Les générations sociales (1920), José Ortega y Gasset's El tema de nuestro tiempo (1923), Karl Mannheim's “The Problem of Generations” (1928), and Julius Petersen's Die literarischen Generationen (1930).53 The Second International Congress on Literary History, hosted in Amsterdam in 1935, was devoted to the subject of whether generations are “at the root of changing social life.”54This Generation, a two-volume history of England spanning the years 1900 to 1926, was published by Chatto and Windus in 1927. The same title proved good for a 1939 American literary anthology that promised “to show the dominant moods, manners, and content of British and American literature from 1914 to the present.”55François Mentré's 1920 Sorbonne dissertation, read by Durkheim and dedicated to “la jeunesse nouvelle,” argued that the generation as a social fact had existed since antiquity but only the theory of it was new. Mentré dismissed any quantitative precision in defining a generation (“events seem to be rebels against mathematical frames”) while insisting on the brute reality of generational life (“the generation is a reality for every single individual”).56 This dismissal of what Mannheim called the “chronological table” of nineteenth-century positivist generational thought was widespread among 1920s generational theorists.57 A generation can only be defined, Mentré argued, through “beliefs and desires,” as a generation is an “état d'âme collectif,” a notion similar to Ortega y Gasset's idea of it is “an integrated manner of existence.”58 In his application of generational thinking to literature and art, Mentré insisted that “spiritual generations succeed each other through opposition.”59 Not only did this provide a framework for understanding literary change, but through this change generations could be defined.60 That the dependent and the independent variable are the same did not worry Mentré.This problem of circularity does not apply to Julius Petersen, who distills the essence of a literary generation into six factors. Members (1) are contemporaries, (2) have similarity of education, (3) have personal contact among themselves, (4) are defined by a “generational event” that typically occurs at a formative age and that leaves its psychological stamp on them, (5) have a strong sense of leadership manifested in leading lights, and (6) speak and write a common language.61 In an effort to integrate extant generational theories, Petersen combined a number of factors in his formulation. The problem with his definition is that it does not distinguish the generation from a literary movement or group. While Mentré, Mannheim, and Ortegay Gasset pointed to the importance of elites within generations, they saw a generational consciousness extending beyond a small cluster of individuals and affecting an entire society.Just as the sociological conception of the generation emerged in the nineteenth century due to a unique set of factors, so too the most robust theoretical interventions occurred at a particular moment. Defined by the war, these writers in the 1920s developed their theories largely through the prism of postwar society, which seemed cut off at the root and aimless. The binding quality of generational theory—everyone has a generation—served as a palliative for drifting societies and, as the sixth component of Petersen's definition emphasizes, also gave a national reality to this sense of belonging.The main authors of the Generation of 1898 are Azorín, Baroja, Benavente, Ganivet, Antonio Machado, Maeztu, Unamuno, and Valle-Inclán. All born between 1864 and 1875, they experienced a “generational event” in el desastre, Spain's loss of colonies in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam.62 Beyond the cost in blood and treasure (over sixty thousand casualties and an outlay of 1.5 billion pesetas), this “national humiliation” ushered in a profound crisis over what it meant to be Spanish.63 Their early works as novelists, poets, and social commentators were self-published, but in the early years of the twentieth century these authors began to dominate Spanish letters under the collective title the Generation of 1898. According to Donald Shaw, the Generation of 1898 is characterized by a concern with the regeneration of Spain and a belief in the efficacy of creative writing as social critique.64 Julián Marías, a disciple of Ortega y Gasset and himself the author of a judicious survey of generational thought, observes that “the Generation of 1898, it has been said many times and it has been truthfully said, is a generation of writers, all of whom were great writers.”65Yet this thundering tautology should alert us to a concealed doubt about the self-evident validity of the term. The Generation of 1898 was defined after the fact, gaining prominence after Azorín used the phrase in a 1913 essay. Literary critic Pedro Salinas notes that Azorín “launched … this denomination and it was he who first intended to ground it, attributing to it certain common characteristics, not only in its origins but also in the works.”66 Similarly, Oxford lecturer Salvador de Madariaga, in a 1923 survey of Spanish literature (which enjoyed some prominence in England because of best-selling authors like Blasco Ibañez), speaks of the Spanish Generation of 1898.67 But the concept was institutionally solidified only after Hans Jeschke's Die Generationen von 1898 in Spanien (1934). A long line of scholars has since followed Jeschke in defining, refining, and justifying the concept and in so doing has made it an institutional creation, as John Butt argues: “So much has been written about the subject that the ‘Generation of 1898’ has acquired the status of a literary movement similar in significance to other well-known movements like symbolism, surrealism, Gongorism or Dadaism.”68While the Generation of 1898 continues to dominate the teaching of Spanish literary history (alongside the generations of 1914 and 1927), its institutionalization serves the interests of authors and academics and does not clarify what was actually happening in Spanish letters at the time.69 Historians now see el desastre as the culmination of a series of historical processes and not an isolated, transcendental event; after all, the revolt in Cuba, led by José Martí, began in 1895, and the uprising in the Philippines began in 1896.70 Azorín later insisted that nothing could be more “erroneous” than to think that the generation's works were self-contained; rather, he maintained, they were “a logical continuation” of preexisting tendencies.71 In his study, Shaw oscillates between referring to the “Generation of 1898” and the “group,” a problem identified by John Butt, who observes that Jeschke's definition of a generation (“a small circle of creative individuals”) similarly conflates the two.72 Salinas also wavers between the terms “generation,” “group,” and “literary school,” mixing in “epoch” every so often.73 But it may even be tenuous to define the select writers as a “group.” Ganivet did not feel the “urgent call of Madrid,” as he was out of Spain for most of the 1890s, working in consular offices in Antwerp, Helsinki, and finally Riga, where he committed suicide in 1899; his major novel, La conquista del reino de Maya por el ultimo conquistador español Pío Cid, was written in 1893 (and self-published in 1897).74 Pío Baroja and Ramiro de Maetzu both denied any validity to the generational concept, claiming that they approached problems in an individual fashion.75 Although many of the authors of the Generation of 1898 were concerned with the “regeneration” of Spain, Azorín, Baroja, and Machado were in favor of Europeanizing Spanish culture, while others favored a more national conception of literature. 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