Organicist Time

Abstract

This chapter traces how an organicist version of time was developed during the interwar period, how it reached its philosophical apogee in the work of Martin Heidegger and was treated sympathetically by American novelist Thomas Wolfe. However, this organicist impulse was kept at a distance by the writing of Theodor Adorno, Thomas Mann, and H. G. Wells, all of whom engage in dialectics with fascism. This chapter also considers how organicist models of temporal sequence inform the fixation on time in William Faulkner’s fiction, and how Sartre’s existentialism attempted to disavow what he saw as Faulkner’s backward-looking nostalgia. This kind of organicist imagination continued to resonate widely even after 1945, as we see from Anthony Powell’s sequence of novels A Dance to the Music of Time, and organicist time formed an integral backbone to many dimensions of modernist culture, even if its visibility became partially suppressed after World War II.