Literary Periods and Man’s Changing Image of Himself
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
In Medieval times, in common belief, the seasons changed, and people grew up and aged, but human nature and the nature of the universe were immutable. Man, heaven, and earth were all connected to one another and to God. And every man derived meaning from that order. (Dante, Chaucer, Aquinas)
In the Renaissance, as advances in science revealed mechanical laws governing the physical world, the spotlight shifted to man himself. God didn’t go away. Rather, God was put in parenthesis. Man’s physical body and his reasoning ability became the focus of learned attention, the source of man’s dignity and meaning. (Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Descartes)
As greater attention led to greater understanding of the workings of the human body and mind, the spotlight then shifted, in the Romantic period, to the realm of non-rational thinking — intuition, emotion, poetic sensitivity to Nature. (Wordsworth, Coleridge.)
Advances in science then made Nature seem less mystical, less fraught with meaning, and the spotlight of great literature, philosophy, and science moved to the unconscious, the irrational. (Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Freud)
As psychology revealed that the unconscious was governed by mechanical rules, the focus shifted away from man as an individual, to entire cultures and to the collective consciousness. (Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Frazer, Jung, Faulkner)
As science and philosophy concluded that the viewer is part of the physical system, and that there are limits to what human consciousness can understand, the spotlight moved again. Literary works celebrated characters who willfully and heroically distorted their own perception. (Beckett, Sartre in Nausee, Camus in L’Etranger, Kesey in Cuckoo’s Nest, Ginsberg in Sunflower Sutra.)
That period abruptly came to an end as it became clear that drugs could mechanically produce the same effects. And over the last sixty years, we’ve seen numerous serious works that hint at a realm of order and understanding lurking behind the everyday mechanical world. Sometimes that echoes the perspective of the medieval period, suggesting that there really is a cosmic order that connects everyone and everything, but that is beyond our understanding. (Pynchon, Eco, Borges, Lem, Stoppard, Neal Stephenson.)
