I’m reading Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy at the moment - in it, there is a melancholy and morbid child, who is described as an example of a growing trend towards a general wish for death - here’s a link to the passage in question:
Is this ‘belief in a coming universal wish not to live’ something Hardy just made up, or was this a belief that people really once held?
Nietzsche was on about this quite a bit, railing against the nihilism he figured would sweep the continent as religion lost its power; even purely secular philosophy was, in his opinion, obviously unjustifiable in any objective sense and therefore will fade away pretty fast once you remove the psychological underpinnings of an idealistic approach that at least pays lip service to Judeo-Christian way.
(I mean, if you’re suffering because it’s All Part Of God’s Plan and you can look forward to Treasures In Heaven, then, sure, you can be a highly motivated guy who disdains the worldly possessions that other folks have way more of: there’s an objective right and wrong out there, there is a Meaning Of Life, and it’s about Doing God’s Will with enthusiasm and purpose. But if you’re suffering for no reason, and no consequences await you in the afterlife, and there’s no such thing as “right” or “wrong” in a meaningless existence, then why bother suffering when nothingness awaits?)
I’d speculate that Hardy was confusing his personal mid-life crisis for some universal condition.
Jude the Obscure was published in 1895, a period when most people were feeling pretty confident and upbeat about the future.
There was a fad for depression and suicide coincident with “The Sorrows of the Young Werther” (Goethe). I think he was referring to that as a trend.
The Sorrows of the Young Werther had been published one hundred and twenty-one years earlier. It was hardly a current trendsetter in Hardy’s time.
Nobody’s claiming that the youth of 2010 are overly influenced by Jude the Obscure and that was published only a hundred and fifteen years ago.
Nemo, “Werther” was extremely influential on the Romantic movement. Yes, it was written very early in that period, but its spirit certainly influenced Hardy and his peers. See link: Romanticism
Interest in “Werther” was in fact revived at the end of the nineteenth century by Massenet’s 1892 opera, Werther.
There were certain cultural trends that espoused the kind of morbid proclivities that Hardy describes, although they were never really one coherent movement. You find it with the so-called Symbolist writers and artists in particular. It was widespread enough that the phrase “fin de siècle” became prominently associated with Symbolism. Philosophers like Nietzsche and especially Schopenhauer contributed to this cultural milieu as well.
The Symbolist artists were certainly a minority in their day, and even among them, it’s difficult to identify individuals who consistently advocated morbid sentiments–though with certain artists (e.g., Edvard Munch, Joris-Karl Huysmans), dark themes dominate their most famous works. In popular culture, Symbolism became widely identified with pessimistic and morbid moods, and was parodied for that association. Kind of like The Cure in popular music today (people forget how many pop songs they’ve done, and tend to remember them for their few dark, Goth-y albums).
Hardy wasn’t inventing the “universal wish not to live” out of whole cloth, but the phrase sounds to me more like the parodies of fin de siècle literature than a particular writer’s creed. I’d speculate that he’s making fun of the popular perception of Symbolism rather than accurately describing the movement’s themes. I’d further speculate that Hardy’s characterization is symptomatic of Naturalist writers’ reacting against Symbolist literature (which itself was largely a reaction against mid-century realism in art and literature). It’s been a looong time since I’ve read Hardy, though.
Okay, I’ll concede that The Sorrows of the Young Werther may have still had some life in it in 1895. But overall, I’d still hold that the romantics had given way to the realists. People in the 1890’s were conquering empires and electrifying cities not moping in garrets.
[quote=“Little_Nemo, post:8, topic:548386”]
Oh right!:rolleyes:
There was indeed an onset of universal wish to not live, in The Happening. Unfortunately, it happened with more intensity amongst the audience than those on screen.
You raise an interesting point. I’ll have to rethink my views in light of the information you’ve presented.
You’re right that the Romantic movement of the early 19th-century gave way to the Realists–but the Realists came to the fore during the mid-19th-century. By the end of the century, the Symbolists came about as a reaction against the Realists–in some sense, a revival of the old Romantic spirit (particularly with their stress on supernatural as opposed to materialistic explanations of the universe), but it was also a distinctly different movement with a stronger sense of world weariness (and also much more urban in orientation than the nature-loving Romantics).
Culturally speaking, the fin de siècle of the 19th century was very diverse–the Naturalist genre was still going strong, at the same time that the Symbolists got started. You’re right that much of the general population anticipated the modern era with a great deal of optimism, and scorned those artists who (in popular opinion) just affected their morbid and pessimistic views. But this is also the era in which you start to see a real cultural division opening up between the art community and society in general–the whole idea of artists as representing an “avant-garde” really began with the Aesthetic Movement and its “art for art’s sake” ideology, and much of the ensuing history of 20th-century art was a story of increasingly hermetic artistic experiments greeted by a baffled and uncomprehending popular audience.
However, on re-reading the selection from Hardy, it sounds like Hardy is really over-stating the prevalence of Symbolist/fin de siècle/Schopenhauerean/whatever-you-want-to-call-it ideas. I seriously doubt that a doctor would diagnose a suicidal kid like that as representing an entire generation’s endorsement of such beliefs. Sounds like artistic license on Hardy’s part. 