Henri Bergson and British Modernism

Hugh Oliver is the former editor-in-chief of the OISE Press.

The past decade or so has witnessed a revival of interest in the ideas
of philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941). Mary Ann Gillies examines
Bergson’s impact on modern British writers—in particular, Wyndham
Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Joseph Conrad—with
an account of the philosopher’s concept of time (internal time and
measured time), the élan vital, memory, and the flux of experience, as
well as his philosophical method of mediating between two apparently
contradictory views and thereby arriving at a third view. The author
goes on to discuss how the writers became acquainted with Bergson’s
ideas and how those ideas are reflected in their writings. While the
evidence for the former topic is at times a bit thin, Gillies makes an
articulate and convincing case for Bergson’s influence on leading
British writers of the first half of this century.