stop, hey, what's that sound?

 

When the Introduction to Exile's Return talks about "a young generation's ability to cast off the baggage of its forebears and forge its own identity," it makes me think of the 1960s.

In the Sixties, there was a sense of things changing, things that needed to change, and things that might not change as fast as some people wanted but they were very certainly going to work hard to effect the change, or get as close to the ideal as possible.

---------------------- [excerpt from Bob Dylan's Chronicles] ------------------ Sometimes you know things have to change, are going to change, but you can only feel it--like in that song of Sam Cooke's, "Change Is Gonna Come"--but you don't know it in a purposeful way.  Little things foreshadow what's coming, but you may not recognize them.  But then something immediate happens and you're in another world, you jump into the unknown, have an instinctive understanding of it--you're set free.  You don't need to ask questions and you already know the score.... ------------------------------------------ [end / excerpt]

        Part of the efforts toward change in the 1960s was the need to make American life better, and part of it was rebellion against earlier customs and beliefs that seemed set--for example, people referred to "the generation gap."

        I became really interested in the 1920s when I was in junior high:  I would ask my parents questions, and they would say the 1920s were like the 1960s, in some ways.  

        (My mom and dad weren't old enough to remember the 1920s clearly from personal experience, but it was the time right before them and so people learn what it was, from art and culture and remembrances of older family members.  It's like if you're born in 1981, you know things about the Seventies even though you weren't there....)

----------------------- [excerpt from Donald W. Faulkner's Introduction to Exile's Return] --------------------- Much later in his life...Cowley wrote of the preconditions he saw for both generational self-identification and generational revolt.  First among them, he said, is "a sense of life, something that might be defined as an intricate web of perceptions, judgments, feelings, and aspirations shared by its members."  

Next is the generation's "thoroughness and even violence in setting aside parental or merely prevailing notions."  Then each generation needs to acknowledge its precursors--"madmen and outlaws," as Cowley called them (borrowing F. Scott Fitzgerald's phrase), who "give an intellectual structure to [the generation's] own rebellion"--and must also witness or participate in "historic events," which "furnish its members with a common fund of experience."  

Finally, Cowley stipulated (once more echoing F. Scott Fitzgerald), the generation needs "its own leaders and spokesmen."  I hasten to add another element that Cowley perhaps took as a given:  the group must feel in some fashion betrayed by both prevailing notions and historic events, in order, if only through alienation, to generate both the intricate web and the common fund of experience.

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