The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group by Ross Stephen;Ryan Derek;

Author:Ross, Stephen;Ryan, Derek;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

SHAKTI AS BERGSONIAN ÉLAN VITAL

I do not suggest that Anand ‘applies’ Bergsonian philosophy to Hinduism, but rather that he shows how Bergsonian ideas accord with Hinduism. While scholars have addressed the significance of Bergson’s philosophy to modernist ideas and in connection to canonical writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot and Marcel Proust,7 the connections to Bergson in Anand’s work and the affiliations between Bergsonian philosophy and Hinduism that Anand brings to light have been overlooked. Anand’s discussion of Shakti with Woolf in Conversations in Bloomsbury serves as a precursor to the more directly stated Bergsonian connection in Reflections on a White Elephant, where Anand links Shakti to modernist philosophy when one character exclaims: ‘Shakti is like Henri Bergson’s élan vital!’ (100). Anand’s reference to Bergson in this late novel, in turn, illuminates passages in the earlier Untouchable where his aesthetic experiments should be viewed not only in conversation with Joyce or Woolf, as they often are, but also alongside Henri Bergson’s philosophy.

Élan vital is central to Bergson’s revisionist thought, and in Creative Evolution (1907) he presents it as an alternative to explanations of evolution that rely on mechanism or finalism. Like all of Bergson’s ideas – of the image, memory, free will, language, and so forth – his conception of evolution and the élan vital grows from and is thus intricately embedded within his theory of the nature of time (or durée), and all these concepts rely upon the method of intuition. The first chapter of Creative Evolution thus fittingly begins with an explanation of duration. For Bergson, a new understanding of time as despatialized and unordered by the intellect is necessary before a new understanding of evolution is possible. If we think of the future as prescribed by the past, or the present as moving toward a teleological end, we cannot think creative evolution but instead perceive change as already given – fated, determined – because, according to Bergson, we have spatialized the flow of real time, durée. We replace the experience of change with the image of a progression of static states, ending finally at an apex, Homo sapiens, although ‘the line of evolution that ends in man is not the only one’ (xii). As Bergson describes the ‘false evolutionism of [Herbert] Spencer’, such a conception of change ‘consists in cutting up present reality, already evolved, into little bits no less evolved, and then recomposing it with these fragments, thus positing in advance everything that is to be explained’ (xiii–xiv). Such an explanation, however, fails to understand the vital impetus, the creative life force, the élan vital – simply, the nature of life itself. As Paul Douglass explains it, the élan vital is ‘an evolutionary power – protean, self-initiated change – [that] lies at the origin of the universe’ (303). Élan vital is a creative, generative force. As such, it is the power of continual de- and regeneration, a dynamism that also shares congruencies with various strands of modernism.

Given Anand’s investment in

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