Anon is Dead (1926)
I’m not sure if it’s uplifting or depressing to discover that people in the 1920s were concerned about the same things you are. It could mean that this is an eternal problem, which is sad, because presumably it’s hard if not impossible to solve a problem where generations have failed; alternatively, it could mean that someone worked out the solutions to these problems before, and we just need to dig them up, tweak them slightly and apply them to ourselves and we’ll be out of the hole we’re in presto.
Henry Seidel Canby declared that Anon was dead in 1926. Anon is equally dead in 2009. (No, a bunch of people wearing masks they bought in a store briefly gathering to be part of something that will be posted on the internet for millions to see and thereby gaining a piece of an infamous group identity does not count as “Anon”, even if said group identity totes that name.) Canby notes that many of the greatest works in the history of literature were composed or published anonymously, and “the raciest writing was often over his” — Anon’s — “signature, and if the great ones of the social or political world condescended to literature, he was their representative.” But now, “Anon, alas, is dead.” He remains dead today.
Canby sees the death of Anon as a symptom of the loneliness and anonymity of contemporary life. We crave to be seen, to be recognized, but modern life does not provide us with the identity and recognition we need. Hence the ego, a symptom of unsatisfied craving for recognition: we long to see our names in print as writers, as readers we long to hear a personalized voice talk to us, and as consumers we long to see a famous name recommend a product to us personally. “Watch the girl swaying at the strap in the subway crowd, a mere fibre of the impersonal mass, and see how eagerly she sinks herself in the blazing personalities of the paper she holds, in which everything from the fashions in stockings to international news is told by a Tom, Dick, Harry or Ann speaking intimately, familarly to her.”
Canby doesn’t see people as more vain or immoral than before. Rather, we are simply humans acting like we’ve always done and with the same needs and desires as we’ve always had, it’s just that modern society is structured in such a way as to deprive us of the satisfaction our egos got from the closer-knit communities of yore. This sends us desperately scrambling to somehow gain this recognition elsewhere, resulting in a vulgar “look at me” society:
It may be vulgar, but this glorification of the capital I is not explained by calling it vulgarity. What we are encountering is a panicky, an almost hysterical, attempt to escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life, and the prime cause is not the vanity of our writers but the craving—I had almost said the terror—of the general man who feels his personality sinking lower and lower into a whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in a mass civilization.
Indeed the language we use to structure our understanding of reality seems itself lonely:
Furthermore, this rush of the anonymous ego to take refuge in rich, glaring personalities that write of the world as if it were still intimate, is an escape from science which has pervaded education with a consciousness of abstract, immutable physical laws that take no account whatever of wish and ignore individuality completely. How lonely is the very sound of words like force, atom, ion, degeneration, subconsciousness, behaviorism! No wonder that we who live in a civilization made by science should desire its opposite.
Not only is Anon dead outside the text, as the Author whose name is on the byline, but within the text he’s nowhere to be found, either. Fiction has become autobiograhy, and much new fiction is autobiographical to such an extent that it’s not really fiction, it’s just material for fiction dressed up as fiction.
“Know me”, says the critic, “hear what I think, see how I am moved, and you will become inevitably a person of taste.”
Anon had to give his reasons, for otherwise no one would believe him. His opinions were no good unless he could back them up. Now that he is dead, emotion does seem to be taking the place of reason, opinion is driving out principle, and impressionism has made off with the art and science of criticism, taking the garage with the car. It is all very jolly and very good for the lonely atoms that were beginning to believe that there was nothing intimate left for them outside their own ego, but must we all be given a celebrity’s private emotions every time we ask for criticial nourishment?
The passion for nonanonymity is not likely to descrease. As clothes, food, transportation, language and emotion become increasingly standardized, inhibitions begin to enfeeble the ego. It becomes actually more difficult to think and feel personally, to be a husband, a citizen, a servant, a soul in an individual sense. Formulas exist for everything, even for an expression of gratitude, a laugh, a scream, a faint. We live in such formulas. Eccentricity is notably decling, especially in America, and eccentricity is one of the indices of personality. All the more will the colorless seek color, the conventionalized mind crave spontaneity, the anonymous and impersonal desire a vicarious indulgence in egoism. Novels are already biography to an extent never reached before. Novels have always been made up very largely from the personal experience of the writer transmuted into typical adventure, but the modern novel of the familiar kind depends to a dangerous extent upon trivial happenings which gain their only significance from the ordinary but very personal individual who experiences them. Taking a bath, hugging a sweetheart, dictating to a stenographer, getting drunk—all these things are described with what the author thinks is realism, but which actually provides only the same satisfaction of egoism as may be had from looking at the pictures of familiar individuals in the rotogravure sections of the Sunday supplements.
The art of fiction may have gained access to the inner recesses of the personality hitherto kept private, but it has lost its detachment and its sense of the really significant. As Henry James said of the disease in the mild form which he studied, in his notes on the modern novel, what we have in many new novelists is more often material for fiction than fiction itself.
All of which I agree with. The essay ends with the following:
Personality is now at a premium and the personal touch is a necessity for crowd-weary men. There is no need to resurrect Anon, but Ego should take some reducing exercises before we weary of his grossness.
