ABSTRACT
The post-Romantic and modernist interest in the secrets of the mind can be traced throughout early twentieth-century European culture. By the turn of the century neo-Darwinian thought was providing the dominant model of human origins, but modernists challenged behaviourism and rationalism for their tendency to overlook creative impulses that seem to derive from unknown regions of the self. For example, Freud claimed that the unconscious was a kind of negative space that can be likened to a child’s rebus, and the Russian Formalists recommended that artists should defamiliarize common objects in order to refocus the mind and ‘to increase the difficulty and length of perception’.1 These theoretical challenges to scientific orthodoxy coincided with a widespread modernist assault on accepted values: from the provocative babble of dadaist performances in the 1910s, to the Surrealist interest in the transforming power of dreams, to Symbolist experimentation that began as early as the 1850s in France with Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal, 1857) and found one of its high modernist expressions in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien, 1923).2 A growing interest in the power of automatic writing and irrational art to bypass conscious control fuelled explorations into phenomena existing outside the realm of language, particularly visions and extreme psychological states that cannot easily be rendered into art. In order to tap into the deeper recesses of human experience, writers often devised characters that could embody the liminal zone between sanity and madness, between reality and fantasy, and between conformity and rebellion. In T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), for example, Tiresias, the blind male seer of Greek mythology, ‘throbs between two lives’, linking the wisdom of the ancient past to the degradation of the ‘rat’s alley’ of the present, and in the poetic novel Nadja (1928) André Breton becomes obsessed with a French courtesan who is simultaneously both real and illusory. If, on the one hand, modernism was geared towards charting the experience of rapid social change, on the other hand, as we
have seen with The Secret Agent, it also delved into primitive currents that prevailed in the midst of modernity.
