Modern: Latin modo, just now.

The etymology of the word points to a break and disruption in the continuity of time: the present ("now") is differentiated from the past, rather than being a natural progression from it. In the same way, what is "modern" is differentiated and separated from what is traditional or historical, instead of being an evolution of it.

One might ask whether the etymology of the word "modern" reveals a mindset particular to modernity, where causality and linearity are no longer possible or tenable in the face of an increasingly complex world. Modernity's break with the past ruptures the linearity of time and opens it up to the fragment, the contingent, or the gap.

This certainly seems to be the case in Auerbach's analyses in Mimesis. From the first "modern" period, the Renaissance (insofar as the Renaissance consciously differentiated itself from the Dark Ages), Auerbach demonstrates how Montaigne's style is heterophonic because Montaigne's essays are motivated by "momentary accidental contingencies" (299) rather than logical progressions.

In what might be considered the second "modern" period in history--the 18th-century Enlightenment, which deliberately separated itself from the religious superstitions of the past--Auerbach draws on Saint Simon's memoirs in "The Interrupted Supper." Saint Simon, like Montaigne, "works with the random unselected material which his life presents to him" (416, italics mine) instead of "harmonizing" (425) his narratives into a causally linked whole. Auerbach writes of Saint Simon: not till the twentieth century would a "similar level of tone" (425) be achieved.

The early twentieth century saw the advent of Modernism, another era that disrupted the linearity of time by disassociating itself from the past--an attitude succinctly summed up by Ezra Pound's "make it new." In Auerbach's analysis of Woolf's To The Lighthouse, he writes that the author "submits, much more than was done in earlier realistic works, to the random contingency of real phenomena" (538, italics mine). As with Montaigne and Saint Simon, what governs the structure of Woolf's To The Lighthouse is not the causal, but the contingent.

What this might suggest is that an attitude of modernity necessarily entails a heightened awareness of the discontinuities in time and the randomness inherent in reality. Any break with tradition declares that the present is no longer a continuation of the past but a rupture from it. To be modern is therefore to be Messianic: it is, to paraphrase Benjamin, to blast oneself out of the continuum of history into an open future.

Janice Ho