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IDENTITY BECOMES AN ISSUE: EUROPEAN LITERATURE IN THE 1920S*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2008

GERALD IZENBERG
GERALD IZENBERG*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Washington University in St Louis
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Abstract

The meaning of “identity” in its contemporary sense of “who—or what—I am” is of relatively recent vintage. It became current as a concept of individual and group psychology only through Erik Erikson's work in the 1950s and its extension to collectivities in the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. But an important strand of European literature began calling the possibility of fixed self-definition into question in the 1920s, occasionally even deploying the word “identity” explicitly. In the work of Hermann Hesse, Virginia Woolf, Luigi Pirandello, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch and Franz Kafka, the dualistic representation of selfhood prevalent in much of prewar modernism gave way to the image of an infinitely fragmented and ontologically unfounded self not exhausted by any, or even the sum, of its many possible designations. For these authors, the events and aftermath of World War One desacralized a whole range of abstract collective identities—national or imperial citizen, cultured European, gebildete bourgeois, manly male, the spiritual “eternal feminine”—which had furnished the most deeply rooted and honored individual identities of prewar Europe. As a consequence, identity itself was undermined. The paradox of the birth of identity is that it was discovered in the negation of its very possibility.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , August 2008 , pp. 279 - 307
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

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2 Citing examples from the Oxford English Dictionary, Phillip Gleason argues that while the word was used earlier to refer to continuity of personality in a casual, “vernacular” sense, it was not a theorized analytic category until the 1950s. See Gleason, Phillip, “Identifying Identity: A Semantic History,” Journal of American History 69/4 (March 1983), 912CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In any case, he relates these usages to Locke's definition of personal identity as continuity of the self through memory.

3 Earlier in the novel, Woolf challenged identity even more dramatically by abruptly transforming Orlando from a man into a woman. That sex change, however, “did nothing whatever to alter their [sic] identity.” Here Woolf was also using identity in the Lockean sense: “His memory . . . [now we must say] her memory . . . went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle” (124).

4 The literature is vast. Among the most prominent contributors are Derek Parfit, John Perry and Terence Penelhum.

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41 See my Impossible Individuality (Princeton, 1992), 245–8, 285–6, 303–4.