The Anxiety of Obsolescence: Pessimistic Depictions of the Artist in the Modern American Novels of Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, and Nathanael West

Abstract

This study will present the existence of a strand of artistic despair running through modernist American fiction. The consistent failure to positively present the high modem ideal comes about as a result of what I call "the anxiety of obsolescence". The anxiety of obsolescence is the result of recognition on the part of the artist of the ultimate fate of any created work, of art or otherwise, in replacement to the point of oblivion. This provides particular anxiety for the modernist due to, as I will establish, the central position for that figure of the self. Simultaneously, the "modernist artist" functions in a period of history marked by an increasingly obvious and rapid action of the system of replacement, the period of the establishment of technological modernity. As the rate and efficiency of replacement increases, the artist's awareness of, and resultant anxiety toward, the impending state of obsolescence commensurately increases. In formulating this theory I have drawn on Harold Bloom's exploration of artistic influence and the aesthetic ideal of literary modernism and on Philip Fisher's examination of the idea of "democratic social space" and the ideology of creative destruction, the permanent new, within American literary history. These theorists are tied together by their common exploration of the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson. [From Introduction]