therefore, is a safe harbor indeed, especially in the Anglo-
American tradition where few waves have made it past the
breakwater of logical continuity.

When critical standards do come under attack, however,
the resulting statements take on millenial proportion. "In or
about December, 1910, human character changed" -- writ-
ing in 1924, with the modern age just established, Virginia
Woolf could choose a pivot for the transformative energy
ranging from relativity through Verdun to The Waste Land
and be believed, even though her statement was self-
consciously outrageous. Did it really all come down to the
postimpressionist show hitting London, as she said? As a
flashy metaphor, why not? By 1924, as Bloomsbury flour-
ished and the American 1920's roared, people knew some-
thing in the age's standards had changed and the brighter
folks wanted to celebrate it. For such a sweeping transforma-
tion, one representative shift was as good as another, since to
an artist it all meant generally the same thing.

As a forty-year-old Midwestern American writing in 1984,
I have the sense that again something big has changed -- that
with the last two decades behind us we are now as distant
from the postimpressionists' 1910 as they were from the aca-
demic masters of the early nineteenth century. But how to pin
it down? With infantile prattle about Bob Dylan or The Bea-
tles, dynamite dope, and the sexual revolution? Revolution-
ary feminism? New Politics? The rise and fall of Lyndon
Baines Johnson, Long Binh Jail, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,
Jimi Hendrix, and the American Football League? These
wide ranging examples from the culture were symptoms of a
radical change in day-to-day existence indicative of a vaguely
antiauthoritarian discarding of conventions which once had
been considered absolutes, but none is useful as a pivot. Try
to explicate postmodernism with any one of them and you'll

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