Questions of Perfectibility

Abstract

My previous chapter focused on the connections between late nineteenth-century meliorism and the ‘split’ between Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells in order, first of all, to demonstrate that the politics of early modernism might be understood as following a division between a refusal of meaningful social improvement and a questioning acceptance of melioristic principles. That this approach can only work as a rule of thumb is an important caveat to be entered here, but it holds well enough for us to begin to see that early modernist accounts of socio-political betterment were marked by a diverse questioning of melioristic vocabularies, even if the specific texts and essays of the meliorists discussed above were not invoked, to the best of my knowledge, by early modernist writers themselves.1 That this appears to be the case does not prevent us from seeing that the writings of early modernism reacted to the discourse of meliorism itself, even if that discourse only indirectly makes its presence known in early modernist socio-political commentary. The fact that Wells’s writing adopts an impressionistic method to provide such commentary on the one hand signals a ‘modernism’ in his work that is only seldom recognized, and on the other indicates the point that early modernist utopianisms were linked in complex ways to the advances of literary experiment. An absence here, though, is the question of perfectibility, an issue with which Conrad and Wells engaged in ways which can help us understand how such concerns took shape in subsequent early modernist inscriptions.KeywordsEarly ModernismSecret AgentRepetition CompulsionProse PoemBelligerent PartyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.