In Thomas Wolfe’s posthumously published novel You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), protagonist George Webber finds himself in Germany amid the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and “face to face with something old and genuinely evil in the spirit of man.” Upon his return to America, Webber acknowledges that the darkness he has witnessed is not confined to Germany but is everywhere around him, a realization that “shook his inner world to its foundations.” Disillusioned, Webber reflects on the inability to return to a previous worldview, a previous self, or a previous innocence, though his realization remains tinged with longing:Article continues after advertisement
You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing’s sake, back home to aestheticism, to one’s youthful idea of “the artist” and the all-sufficiency of “art” and “beauty” and “love” . . . away from all the strife and conflict of the world . . . back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.
