Novelty
“New and improved” would be a perfect shibboleth for modern times. Everything had to be new because the machines on which the modern world was based wore out and broke down. They were constantly being re-engineered, replaced, or made obsolete by other machines—alas, the poor carburetor. Everything, according to the tenets of progress, could be improved. The improvements could produce more efficiency—more widgets produced per hour—or subjective—more psyches feeling somehow better. Newness was bottomless, a frontier with no boundaries. If the word new were removed from modern parlance, the air would escape from the remarkable balloon of achievement. Only the miracle of existence would be there.
Turning novelty into a value was a curious endeavor. Typically, usage lent value to whatever was at hand. Whether it was a vase, a house, or a recipe, it meant that people esteemed, trusted, and valued it: “My grandmother used to put daffodils in this vase. That house has stood on that corner for over a century. Your great-aunt made this cake for special occasions like birthdays. This is her handwriting on this index card.” The accretions of time were nothing to trifle with. Whatever slim dignity human beings had, those accretions contributed to. The process of caring, of passing something on showed how people could bridge the frightful chasms of loss.
Over time, human usage consecrates whatever it continually touches and reveres. What matters is that people can hear what mute objects say, whether it be a thimble or the urn that Keats wrote about. The past is so vast and formless that one can settle anywhere, particularly in the past that came before one’s own time. That vastness is bound to temper the expectations and achievements of the present moment—the simple fact that others came before. Societies that worshiped ancestors were not promoting reppression of the present day. They were promoting the precious ties that link the past to the present and that could instruct people how to carry on aptly and honorably.
The shocking desolation of modern times—what else could have produced Nazi Germany or the Khmer Rouge?—was intertwined with the intoxicating and desiccating energy of novelty. New songs, new products, new societies, new machines, new aesthetics: everything became promiscuously connected. Everything was open to change and invention. Everything new was a promise. Whether the promise came to fruition, whether what was promised was worthwhile, whether the promise made sense or what consequences the promise entailed (war and totalitarianism, for instance) was irrelevant. Change deserved to be worshiped in its own right.
Some of this attitude came from commerce. Novelty made money and ensured the flow of money since desire for what was new could be counted on. That desire filled a large void in the human soul, where various primal degrees of reverence, gratitude, awe, and fear once dwelled. As life became more explicable—this germ caused that disease and that piston drove this machine—more room for wanting opened up. For many, the onus of need was left behind. Once confined to princes and financiers, a certain material craving opened up to anyone who amassed a deal of money.
Beyond that craving lay a bright wasteland of empty purpose. Anything new was interesting because it was new. Human days were bound to be similar—sunrise, sunset—but novelty gave those days a captivating expectancy and excitement. Novelty also offered the thrill of immediacy. As life became more mediated—where did the cloth for the shirt or dress come from?—and as people became more thoroughly commercial creatures, which was to say, shoppers for items beyond the evening’s meal, the encounter with this or that new product offered a marked degree of stimulation. Human beings, by definition, were sensory creatures but, whether something was being plugged in or not, modern times increased many-fold the glowing, electrical sense of life.
Newness signaled that electrical quality. In the arts and the criticism that accompanied art, there seemed to be endless movements that coalesced around that magical word new: the New Brutalism, the New Realism, the New Historicism, le Nouveau Roman, New Primitivism, la Nouvelle Vague, the New Criticism, even New Surrealism. This inclination was something more than the comparison between yesterday and today or the contest between the ancients and moderns. The ancients no longer applied. Only the moderns declaring their ultra-newness mattered. Modern times offered the spectacle of a perennial avant-garde, a cutting edge that somehow was always getting sharper; a hipness that must always be one step ahead of whatever accommodations it despised, yet that typically became another set of accommodations. Advertising set the pace, in any case, not art.
To be new was to be most alive. Novelty confirmed vitality, yet there was something desperate there. Why did people need to be more enlivened? The New Soviet Man and Woman, the New Frontier, the Neo-Conservative, the Neo-Liberal, the New-This-Party and New-That-Party: was the world getting old, was tradition inherently unbearable, if not downright senseless? Did novelty somehow trump mortality and offer a form of salvation or at least oblivion? Did the relentless economic engine of modern times isolate individuals so completely that they had no outlook beyond novelty? Was everything with the word new in front of it automatically news? Was the romance with novelty nothing more than the abolition of historical and spiritual perspective, nothing more than an invitation to shallowness?
Modern times had little sense of what might be lost in the rush toward novelty. The past was that which became obsolete and deserved contempt. No one wanted to be caught back there, wherever that might be. The mobility modern times offered—cars, planes, trains, buses—offered new experiences in real time or, at a remove, via electronic media. To stay in one place, to learn what one’s grandparents learned, to devote oneself to a series of constant, earthbound tasks was likely to feel confining. The new provided a continual spark to move somehow forward. Have you seen? Have you bought? Have you decided? Have you gone? Have you heard? Yes, yes, yes, modern times replied. If the face in the mirror looked terribly weary, worn out and unsettled from continual novelty, that was a price that had to be paid.
POSTSCRIPT:
I have six more installments to post in The Exciting Nightmare, though I may do a seventh that would be a reflection on this whole endeavor. Through forty-six installments I have made this a free subscription, but if you are inclined to pledge something, based on what I have done, I will thank you ahead of time. In any case, TEN will remain free to everyone. Thanks to those who already have been moved to pledge.
YES! May we remember to be astonished at what is right at hand.
Thanks for this.