Subtitled significantly as ‘When art mattered’, this is claimed to have been a time when art and literature – including especially poetry – had greater importance than today, and were acknowledged as being secular substitutes in a post-Nietzschean godless culture.
Part one is on the period before the Great War. Peter Watson has organised his material in three parts, each consisting of eight chapters, with each of these subdivided into a number of headed sections and the whole follows a roughly chronological order. It is also bang up to date, with references to recent books and films, and up-to-the-minute articles from both sides of the Atlantic. So to be clear from the outset, the author has previously worked as a journalist and editor, as well as an intellectual and cultural historian (his encyclopaedic A Terrible Beauty, was published in 2000), and he has in my view achieved a quite remarkable synthesis, in a book that is not only informative and instructive, but also interesting, entertaining, and highly readable. Since Nietzsche’s time we have continued to live in the shadow – or the light – of that announcement and it is the reactions to it – reactions from philosophers, artists, novelists, dramatists, poets, scientists, psychologists – that Peter Watson has set about surveying here and synthesising in his own ‘master narrative’.Ĭlearly that is a hugely ambitious aim, embracing as it must diverse material from a range of disciplinary areas – each of which is no doubt carefully defended by specialist interests. People at the time may not yet have been aware of it, but they were henceforth cast adrift in a meaningless universe, deprived of any sense of direction or of any foundations for morality – and they had brought this calamity upon themselves it was they who had murdered God, and they who now needed somehow to replace him, effectively themselves becoming gods.
When in 1882 Nietzsche had his mad messenger announce the death of God, he was well aware that he was reporting something of more than merely theological significance.
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