A cultural period is a span of years during which the themes and forms of expression are similar and, in fact, unique, and so a cultural period can be said to exhibit the spirit of its age, which is certainly the way that William Hazlitt, that wonderful English Romantic critic, looked at the matter. Alterations in themes and genres provide a definition for a period, and so the long Elizabethan Age, which lasts from the Silver Poets of the 1570’s through John Donne, who died in 1631, is unified by its emphasis on drama and on the idea of the conceit, an image exploited for its various meanings. Any of the periods since the time of Chaucer and before and right up to the present can be considered in this light.
Consider, for example, The Age of Anxiety, the period that precedes the one we presently occupy. It is generally but wrongly thought to be part of the Modern. (My title for the period it an adoption of the usages of Auden and Bernstein.) The Age of Anxiety has an aesthetic of its own. The Modernist search for meaningful and universal myths expressed in highly psychological and original forms (Mann, Kafka, Freud) is replaced by a search for apperceptions of the bedrock on which customary life is based. It can be said to begin with Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, published in 1938, which puts aside conventional and Kantian morality and replaces it with the fact of choice rather than the obligation of choice. Sartre’s novel The Age of Reason, published in 1945, carries out this theme by having its readers gaze at a gnarled tree branch in its pre-Kantian state, and so like a person: ever strange and singular. The Second World War did not bring on this perception in that the War was anything but one without meaning, filled with morals and collective human feeling and ambitious hopes for the future of mankind once the violence came to a stop. But Sartre stops history even if he returns in his own fashion to it in his later works.
The Age of Anxiety is characterized by philosophical novels, such as those of Bellow and the later Mann, and by what was known at the time as “action painting” but which came to be known as Abstract Expressionism, which treated shapes and colors as the bedrock of human experience, analytically prior to rather than more primitive than life as it is conventionally experience, the “primitive” being a Modernist conceit. There was a lot of talk about the human condition during the Age of Anxiety, both in literature (Albert Camus) and social analysis (as in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition).
The philosophical themes of the period, having been set by the popularized Existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre, yielded, in the Seventies, to the cultivation of pop culture by Andy Warhol. Walter Benjamin and Edwin Auerbach are replaced by McLuhan’s slogan, “The medium is the message” and by Susan Sontag’s appreciation of camp. Also to be referenced is Claude Levi-Strauss, who writes Tristes Tropiques in 1938 and insists on deep and alternative logics that seem to act independently of the social structures the previous generation of anthropologists had invoked as explanations for human behavior. Such mundane matters as whether people eat cooked or raw foods becomes a structure for understanding a society.
Post-Modernism is a name for the literature and philosophy produced since the Age of Anxiety. The term was coined to deal with architecture and the fine arts that developed after the end of the hegemony of Abstract Expressionism. Suddenly the despised architecture of vacation resorts and the Warhol lithographs of soup cans came to be seen as beautiful and meaningful rather than as grotesque or jokes. The term can be extended to apply to literature as well. It is the literature that came after the realistic and comic novelists of the Age of Anxiety, such as Bellow, Malamud and Updike.
Post-Modernism (or what has come to be called “Contemporary Art”, as if it too would not end as a period) replaces the anti-historic themes of both Modernism and the Age of Anxiety with a penchant to examine even the most popular and banal forms of culture for their structural significance. Everything is turned to art by the contemplation of it as such, while Modernism was about quality because it found some universal substrate that all art attested to and the Age of Anxiety also postulated an existential substratum, whether in art or in the sociological idea that society was also subject to a set of interconnected and therefore stable functions. While art was of high quality, for a Modernist, because it was full of insight, Post-Modernism has merit because it is a play on turning the world into art. The meaning of language is reduced by Chomsky to the parsing of sentences and the originality of the AT&T Building lies in its design quoting from the company’s own advertisements for itself, just as Norman Mailer does. The idea of the real is replaced by the idea of the apparent.
The inventor of literary Postmodernism is the Americanized Vladimir Nabokov, who recognizes the vacuity of a love story by suggesting that even a man of poetic tastes can fall in love with so shallow a creature as Lolita. Only novelization can make anyone take Shadd’s poems in Pale Fire seriously in that the poems are not the core of a mystery but suggest a kind of life that has no mystery at its core. The Postmodernist mentality goes beyond interpretation, to use Susan Sontag’s phrase, and thinks it has been true when it renders the world of conventional consciousness undisguised. Literature does not merely use convention but is no more than its conventions, the wisdom of the world a matter of cliches.
There are a number of generalizations that can be made about cultural periods. Many of these are so obvious that it is embarrassing to state them because they seem so trivial that they could not possibly be of any moment. Yet one of the things sociology has taught us is to be willing to state the obvious, even while knowing that people who never thought of the idea will come to say, once they learn to speak its name, that it is so obvious that it has always been known. So “alienation” and “bureaucracy” have become part of the common argot and we forget that the term were at one point invented. Here are some obvious and so, supposedly, “trivial” generalizations about periods.
1. Periods do not repeat themselves; once over, there may be another period, not necessarily immediately following or the one after that, that may use some of the motifs of an earlier period, but there is no alternation or cycle of periods. Neo-Classicism is not the same as Classicism at the least in that the Georgians were self conscious about their engagement with the idea of empire while the Romans just reveled in it. That is different from the hypothesis that periods which are somehow classical are replaced by periods somewhat romantic and then the pendulum swings back again. The classical elements in Stravinsky and Picasso were set in a context with different preoccupations as to form and subject matter. It is obvious that it is necessary to “uncover” the classical in Picasso, as Steinberg does, and that is no easy task, Picasso otherwise seeming either something entirely fresh or a mess.
2. The transition between periods is sharp even if a period may linger on as an independent stream, as does the Late Victorian in the mystery story, for quite some time. But the major change is swift. Within the course of a year or two, what seemed the natural way to do art and literature seems dated to the mainstream or no longer the easiest way to interest people and to express oneself. Something very different is created by no longer abiding by what seemed the obvious rules of aesthetics that had prevailed before. It is different from thinking that what happens when one period changes to another is just that the old rules are exhausted or newly found to be boring or just no longer salient to the now prevailing social conditions. What is necessary is that the previous dispensation is violated. That obviously happens in Postmodernism, where the ugliness of Miami Beach architecture is suddenly recognized as something fresh and Warhol lithographs of popular images are suddenly recognized as something original rather than a cheap trick to turn the derivative into art. Who would have guessed? Only a sociologist of culture who knows that everything that is bad art becomes good art and visa versa. Pre-Raphaelite women are boring fifty years later, good only for magazine illustrations. This idea is parallel to the one that holds about political life: No matter how evil, how bad a dream, an idea is, it will happen. Trotsky escaped from a Siberia that would become a gulag for a vastly expanded roster of political dissidents.
Victorian literature, for example, gave rise to Edwardian but not in direct descent, as if the Edwardians were just a bit more open about sex than the Victorians were, or that E. M. Forster was just more abbreviated and more psychological than George Eliot. Rather, there is a change in something that is not seen as important until after it has taken place. The texture of relations, relations as themselves phenomena, hotbeds of emotions and meanings, replaces seeing relationships as the intersection of class, circumstance and personality.
We can see that in the transitional figures who devote so much of their energy to developing the new forms and yet do not manage to fill it with the content, much less the new content, that makes for great art, that job left for someone else. Pinero is a transitional figure. He pioneers the Ibsenite well made play whose drama is in a psychological revelation while Victorian drama still thought of action as the thing that changed and resolved a plot. Poetry and action depicted on a stage, the arts of drama since Shakespeare, are displaced by rumination that can be ever so gently about sexual matters. Wilde is the genius of this new form because words do the sparkling not by moving on the action but by focusing the mind of the viewer, not so much as depictions of character, as in Dickens, but as engaging an effort to keep up with the conceits, which is certainly true of both Shakespeare and Shaw. Drama is reinvented yet another time so as to serve its own newly defined purpose.
3. Another generalization to be made is that literary periods last about thirty-five to fifty years. That is just the sort of statement that is much too certain to be made by a literary critic and so is properly made, as it is here, by a sociologist of culture. Hazlitt did not weigh in on the question. To the contrary, most literary critics treat the length of a period as simply a heuristic device that allows the critic to tie together works and themes that interest them. The period isn’t real even if the cultural sentiments which animate it are.
This proposition does not hold for other social and cultural structures. The old kingdom nations of Europe have existed for a thousand years, but others have come and gone. Burgundy is no longer with us, nor is Czechoslovakia. China and Egypt have been there for four thousand years and the Palestinians have been a nation rather than Arabs with a particular location for fifty years. The rule there seems to be that there is a take off point whereby a nation, once it establishes itself, just remains, unless it is incorporated into another nation, as nearly happened when the United States attempted to conquer Canada in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, and so any long term consolidation of the two is likely to be difficult and based on gradual economic integration, as Europe has found out. Social organizations, for their part, are short lived. Most small businesses fail within five years and long lasting corporations split off from one another, as the various descendants of Ma Bell and Standard Oil did, or are founded by other large corporations, which was true of RCA, which received its initial funding from Bell Telephone. There are few DuPont Corporations, which is over two hundred years old and still on its own.
Cultural forms have various degrees of longevity. The novel as a form is at least four hundred years old-- which is to say, not the same thing as the ancient novel-- but lyric poetry and the drama and vaudeville seem to go on forever, sometimes more in favor than at other times, all at a low at the moment, but performance art is a generation or two old, and does anyone think that will go on much longer? And the epic, which has been around since the beginning of literary productions, seems finally to have lost its panache, however many are the science fiction sagas produced by Hollywood, none of which have the formal unities to be found in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, which has a beginning, a middle, key incidents any of which can be developed into a gripping drama, as well as an ending that allows further unfolding into distant vistas. Now, Modernism was filled with epics: Kafka, Mann, Joyce and Faulkner all quickly come to mind. And so perhaps like cities, epics are a cultural form which once established can re-emerge, such are its riches, in a different form. But it is worth noting that the Godfather trilogy is a saga about how families change given the circumstances of ethnicity and the surrounding culture, not how the circumstances forge heroes whose presence endures beyond their setting. Don Corleone is, as he says himself, a man of his time, while Achilles and Leonard Bloom, for all their foibles, are men of all times.
This particular truth about periods is clearly empirical: periods do, in fact, last about forty years or so. Why this is the case is mostly to engage in an exercise in metaphor. It can be said that periods use up their “resources”, their new way of imagining literature and art and philosophy and so life. The well goes dry and there is no more ore left in the mine. But if that were the case, then one would expect periods to be of different lengths, since the resources of some period do seem richer than the resources of another. To my mind, the Age of Defoe would have been shorter and the English Renaissance longer. But that is a very subjective judgment, far harder to make than what such a judgment would explain, which is the length of cultural periods. Similarly, to say that the public or the consumers of culture have a limited span of attention has the same two drawbacks: it provides no mechanisms and the explanation is much too complicated and it also begs the question of why people get tired of amusements. People still watch football and baseball, both of which have been around since the time of the American Civil War. What is it about these amusements that sustains interest? That critical question cannot be avoided, nor what it is about a cultural period that gives it its interest in the first place.
4. Another proposition about the list of periods is that they are international. That seems very obvious but it did not have to be that way. German and French and Spanish literature go through the same sequence of periods, share the same emotions and forms and themes, even if there are different names for them in different countries. The list provided above of the periods of English literature treats the period of the English Civil War and the Restoration as the same period even though the themes of the Restoration are decidedly anti-Puritan and because the theatre has been revived as a central artistic medium. But that is because the English Civil War was such a decisive break in English culture, the monarchy restored to a world still violent but where constitutional government arose, Parliament stronger than in any other Western European nation, and that happening within a state devoted to its commercial interests.
(It therefore makes sense to relabel the combined two periods as the English Baroque because that is the name for the period in Continental Europe, where similar themes are pursued through similar formal innovations.)
We say of countries on the periphery of Europe that they are only uncertainly part of the Western tradition. Russia did not go through the Renaissance and the Reformation though by the nineteenth century its elites had “caught up” in the sense that its cultural periods were synchronized with those of the rest of Europe. It is only fancifully that one speaks of medieval Japan or China. What is meant is the social structural statement that feudal regimes are likely to be similar to one another wherever they occur, and that they might therefore have a preoccupation with a culture of aristocratic courtesy and valor supported by an economy that uses peasant labor and has a feudal form of social organization. So the idea of a social class culture works across great distances, but the idea of a cultural period does not, in that medieval Europe is a construction of Christendom and lives in the shadow of the fallen Roman Empire. Indeed, European civilization always was international, in that Einwald was an Englishman and St. Anselm was also an Englishman who took up residence in Normandy and that the Renaissance was imported rather quickly over the Alps. Europe is not a place where geographical barriers make for strong cultural barriers.
The internationalism of European culture goes back to the origins of Europe. It was an inland continent dominated by Christianity, however much the rift between Arians and Catholics took a while to resolve. It was not that set of settlements and political entities on the shores of the Mediterranean that had become dominated by Rome and which had never been able to successfully penetrate north of the Rhine. Christianity supplied the unifying ideology, practice, and institutions and experiences that bound Europeans all to one another regardless of where in Europe they lived. They do not travel so elsewhere.
5. Another feature of cultural periods is that the characteristics of a particular period apply to all of the arts, literary, visual, dramatic, and so on. The themes and methods available in one are found as well in the others because the definition applies to whatever is produced for contemplation, and so to be seen as art, rather than something that emerges in one art form rather than another. A period is in the nature of culture rather than in one or another art form. Otherwise, one could not find an equivalence between developments in the history of art and the history of literature. Late Victorian artists devote part of their output to stylized paintings that flattened surfaces and elongated figures so that they were known as Pre-Raphaelites, their subject matter a fairy world of legends and an imagined chivalric regime attributed to the medieval world. Pre-Raphaelite art is about ornamentation and posing that represents a decadence, a falling off into a sentimentality concerning the past, just as does Edward Morris and Bulwar Layton. Victorian furniture is also as overly ornamented and oversized as is Victorian poetry and prose.
The same is true in other periods. During the French Baroque, Poussin presents majestic portraits of buildings and philosopher and gods rumbling through the foliage as well as serene scenes of sacramental occasions as well as symbolic renderings of the course of a person on the path of life. The themes are as weighty as those in Racine and an interest in metaphysical issues having to do with free will also available in the Baroque philosophers. Similarly, De La Tour invokes a spirituality as deep as that of Pascal.
So there you have my take on the characteristics of cultural periods. There may be more. Sociology, and certainly the sociology of culture, is a lot like astronomy. It does not so much conduct experiments to see how a crucial element alters the outcome by being present or not; rather, it examines and reexamines the established data to see what else can be teased out from, let us say, variations in an orbit or the subtleties of a period. Sociologists of culture have before them the entire list of periods which they can analyze and reanalyze to see not only how each of them tick but also how they are different from one another. And what is always there, which is that every period moves from its beginning to its end, to be replaced by something quite though not altogether different. I wonder what the post-Post-Modernism Age will be all about.