Introduction: Kandel's contamination of modernism with biology

In the quotation above, Eric R. Kandel locates the beginning of modernism in the middle of the nineteenth century. At that time the dark side of the Industrial Revolution had already become apparent, and with it the ambiguity of modernity's – or, in other words, the enlightenment's – claim that reason's controlling position over the body and the emotions guarantees unambiguous progress: ‘The modernist reaction to the Enlightenment came in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, whose brutalizing effects revealed that modern life had not become as mathematically perfect, or as certain, rational, or enlightened, as advances in the eighteenth century had led people to expect’ (Kandel 2012: 12). Kandel further substantiates his claim that modernism begins not at the end but at the middle of the nineteenth century by pinpointing the then emerging rise of biology as a radical break with modernity's/the Enlightenment's intellectual anchorage in physics and astronomy: ‘As astronomy and physics inspired the Enlightenment, so biology inspired modernism. Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species introduced the idea that human beings are not created uniquely by an all-powerful God but are biological creatures that evolved from simpler animal ancestors’ (Kandel 2012: 12). Far from claiming (see the concluding section to this chapter) that mid-nineteenth-century works such as Büchner's Danton's Death, Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter or Melville's Moby Dick are classic modernist works of literature avant là lettre, the following chapter nevertheless argues that in their concern with the potential modern loss of worldliness and diversity these texts are less about their historical subject matter than about the fears for a future where subjectivity has been subjected to bio-political visibility and measurability.