The Asocial Writer

Abstract

By confirming the Newtonian picture of a mechanical universe determined in all its parts and operations, the Darwinian revolution made necessary a drastic revision of man’s conception of the self and its relation to Nature and society. Hardy, whose novels sharply criticized the repressive conventions of Victorian society, also focused attention on cosmic alienation. Many writers in the twentieth century delineate the character of man as conditioned by his social environment but at the same time voice their awareness of the hopelessness and absurdity of the human condition. Dreiser who in An American Tragedy brought capitalism before the bar of justice and held it guilty of “the crime” that Clyde Griffiths committed and for which he was sentenced to death, formulated a stark mechanistic fatalism in his early fiction. Joyce, though his epiphanies capture intimations of something behind the veil, essentially “religious,” if negative, glimpses of the numinous, is grimly naturalistic in his portrayal of the human quest for ultimate meaning. Lawrence, too, perceived the truth — and the danger — of the nihilistic Weltanschauung and tried to counter it by sounding his hope for instituting a better, less acquisitive society.