Annihilating Romanticism

Thoughts occasioned by John Pistelli

In September 1836 a letter appeared in the Parisian journal La Revue des Deux Mondes recounting the story of two men, Dupuis and Cotonet, who set out one day to discover the meaning of ‘romanticism’, a word that had gained sudden popularity in their little corner of the Île-de-France. Determined to ‘sift the question to its bottom’ they spent a decade cataloguing the different uses of ‘romantic’ in books and local gossip, but could find no way to combine them into a simple and stable definition. After much frustration and with a hint of incipient madness, Cotonet presents their final verdict: romanticism is a style of writing that uses ‘many adjectives’, and nothing more. Only a reader as hard-headed as the heroes of the letter would fail to detect they were, in fact, the instruments of a satire, one that had as its target the popular advocates of romanticism in French literature at the time. That meant, above all others, Victor Hugo and the members of his coterie, the Cénacle. So there was some surprise, if not scandal, when it was revealed that Dupuis and Cotonet were the double pseudonym of Alfred de Musset, a Cénacle member himself, and that the letter represented his public dissent from the romantic movement.

Roughly a century later, the philosopher A O Lovejoy made his own attempt to ‘sift’the concept of romanticism at a meeting of the Modern Language Association of America in 1923. What he found was a confusion of ideas so bewildering that, by comparison, Dupuis and Cotonet were ‘pure lucidity’. Over the intervening years the word had apparently picked up so many new meanings that it had finally ‘ceased to perform the function of a verbal sign’. For anyone suffering from the ‘morbid solicitude to know precisely what they are talking about,’ this made it a peculiarly lively source of error. As a remedy Lovejoy proposed a mutual pact among scholars to forgo the singular noun form, replacing it with the pluralised ‘romanticisms’. Each romanticism would represent a particular ‘thought-complex’ that could be grounded in indisputable historical fact. The damage done to the language by this ugly neologism would, he argued, be more than compensated for by re-establishing the conditions for clear thought.

I had assumed that, between them, Musset and Lovejoy had effectively exhausted the field of possible romanticisms. That is until I read an article by John Pistelli in Romanticon, a new substack vehicle for what its editors call a ‘revival in romantic letters’. That phrase alone is enough to conjure the ghost of old Lovejoy, crying out from the grave ‘but which romanticism do you mean to revive?’ According to Pistelli, submitting romanticism to ‘the tyranny of history’ by pinning it to a time and a place in the way that Lovejoy recommends is to have already betrayed its spirit. Instead, we should think of romanticism as a mode of ‘sensibility’, one that becomes more or less ‘salient’ under different conditions and can be defined by contrast with two other such modes, the classical and the realist:

Unlike the Classicists, for whom man is the measure of all things, or the Realist, for whom man is the measurer, Romanticism looks toward a future so humanized—that is, so transformed by human imagination—that it isn’t human at all.

It is not immediately clear, at least to my mind, how something can be humanised so comprehensively that it ceases to be human. Pistelli’s examples are taken from the narco-philosopher Nick Land, who is enjoying a revival himself as the world comes to resemble the grotesque machine parousia he prophesied in the 1990s, and Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon (1977). Both, we are told, are involved in the same effort to ‘transfer the autonomous imagination from within the human being’ to an ideal world ‘conjured out of the substance of its dreams’, with Land projecting out into a future of unrestrained technological acceleration and Morrison turning back to the deep past where consciousness flows away into primordial nescience. All of which reminds me of a letter Simone Weil wrote but never sent to her brother, explaining her reluctance to read Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Could there be anything more absurd, as she put it, than ‘looking to Wagner’ to learn about the nature of the Greek mind? Is it any less absurd to look for the essence of the romantic mind in Land’s accelerationist gibberish or the atavisms of Morrison?

Thankfully, Land and Morrison do finally give way to the more canonical figure of William Blake, who of all poets exemplifies Pistelli’s romantic poetics of self-annihilation :

In the name of the machine or the animal, the future or the past, the Romantic is prepared to abolish even the human itself lest the human be reduced to a dogma or formula. Blake’s Milton returns to earth to “wash off the Not Human,” a category in which he includes his “false Body: an Incrustation over my Immortal / Spirit.” He continues: “I come in Self-annhilation.” The Romantic finally promises to obliterate what is in the name of what was and what will be.

These quotations are ordered in such a way to give a Blakean feel to a fundamentally un-Blakean idea. ‘Machine’ and ‘Nature’ are two words typically associated in Blake’s mythology with the figure of the ‘spectre’, one of the creatures of deadly abstract reason. Pistelli provides an almost word-perfect description of ‘spectre’ when he talks about the transfer of autonomous imagination outside of itself, only for Blake this is a form of torture and disintegration, the original sin that man has to overturn before he can come into full possession of his divine freedom. I have said that romanticism so construed is un-Blakean, but it has an eerie resemblance to the motives Blake imputes to hoary Urizen in the Four Zoas:

And Urizen gave life & sense by his immortal power
To all his Engines of deceit that linked chains might run
Thro ranks of war spontaneous & that hooks & boring screws
Might act according to their forms by innate cruelty
He formed also harsh instruments of sound
To grate the soul into destruction or to inflame with fury
The spirits of life to pervert all the faculties of sense
Into their own destruction if perhaps he might avert
His own despair even at the cost of every thing that breathes

If we return to Pistelli’s three modes of sensibility - the classical, the realist and the romantic - it can be argued that Blake is the most classical of all artists. He is certainly the only one to take Protagoras’s dictum that man is the measure of all things seriously. Indeed, he considers it to be literally true. This is the import of the beautiful verse-letter he sent to his friend Thomas Butts in October 1800, describing his first visionary experiences where in ‘jewels of light’ he perceived everything around him as ‘men seen afar’ all converging at their zenith to represent the ‘One man’ that is the divine intellect or imagination.

Blake also shares the classical preference for clearly delineated form as well as the corresponding classical distaste for ‘dispersion’, the word that Pistelli most often uses to pinpoint what is romantic in Land and Morrison. Thus of Land it is said that he would have the human ‘dispersed’ in the ‘very machine networks the human built to serve itself’, while Morrison’s vision of primal rightness leads finally to man being dispersed ‘into the very matrix of nature’. Contrast this with Blake’s commentary on The Book of Ruth where we learn that the golden rule of all art is that the ‘distinct, sharp, and wirey…bounding line’ should always be preferred to the ‘less keen and sharp’, the latter being evidence of ‘weak imitation, plagiarism and bungling’. This is as true of writing as it is of painting and engraving. Northrop Frye once described Blake as the finest ‘gnomic artist in English literature’, something he puts down to his ‘genius for crystallisation’, which is to say his ability to so control language that it becomes distinct and sharp.

Another canonical romantic figure mentioned in the essay, William Wordsworth, who is incidentally the other great Miltonic poet in the English verse tradition alongside Blake, is even harder to square with all this dispersing and annihilating. Wordsworth is situated on Morrison’s end of the fundamental romantic antithesis, as it has been constructed by Pistelli, looking to return to the ‘womb of nature’ and have the human there ‘rejoin what it emerged from’ . I can sift Wordsworth to find much in his poetry that answers to this description. Take for example the first fourteen lines of Animal Tranquility and Decay:

The little hedgerow birds,
That peck along the road, regard him not.
He travels on, and in his face, his step,
His gait, is one expression; every limb,
His look and bending figure, all bespeak
A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought---He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten, one to whom
Long patience has such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the old man hardly feels.

This man is not a stranger on the earth but a part of it, an outgrowth from the same nature that brought forth the little birds who cannot distinguish him now from the hedgerows they make their nests in. His ‘peace’, we cannot help but feel, is not that which Christ said he left to his disciples in the Gospel of St John, but rather one bought at the price of some degree of his humanity, which had to be ‘insensibly subdued’ before nature could lead him. And then, when we have been settled down into a similar quiet by the careful and deliberate unfurling of Wordsworth clauses we read:

I asked him whither he was bound, and what
The object of his journey; he replied
That he was going many miles to take
A last leave of his son, a mariner,
Who from a sea-fight had been brought to Falmouth,
And there was dying in a hospital.

Geoffrey Hill has said that the ‘anacoluthon’ in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean fire’ - when the poet’s soul leaps out of its despair, dragging his mind with it, and declares ‘Enough, the Resurrection!’ - is one of the greatest ‘grammatical moments’ in English poetry. This is not a strict anacoluthon in the sense that the grammar runs straight without a break. But a break does occur at the rhetorical and even the formal level on which the whole effect of the poem depends. And it is an effect as powerful as that achieved by Hopkins, the awful reality of the old man suddenly revealed, and with it the inadequacy of the poet’s moral vision. Again, Pistelli provides the precise words; this sudden moral apprehension is achieved at the exact moment when Wordsworth tears down ‘the world conjured out of the substance of his dreams’. Wordsworth is full of moments like this; the one my mind always returns to is the blind beggar from book VII of The Prelude:

Amid the moving pageant, ’twas my chance
Abruptly to be smitten with the view
Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face,
Stood propp’d against a Wall, upon his Chest
Wearing a written paper, to explain
The story of the Man, and who he was.
My mind did at this spectacle turn round
As with the might of waters, and it seem’d
To me that in this Label was a type,
Or emblem, of the utmost that we know,
Both of ourselves and of the universe;
And, on the shape of the unmoving man,
His fixed face and sightless eyes, I look’d
As if admonish’d from another world.

If there is a Platonic element in Wordsworth’s poetics, as has sometimes been claimed, it can be found most clearly in these moral epiphanies, where justice appears to shine through the humdrum reality of everyday life as though it were a light from ‘another world’.

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The Letters of Dupuis and Cotonet is one of those rare minor works that has exercised an influence on the history of literature out of all proportion to its intrinsic artistic merits. With it Musset effectively created a new genre from scratch, the scholarly quest-farce, which would later include Flaubert’s unfinished novel Bouvard and Pecuchet. But it does have its memorable moments, such as when Cotonet goes to speak to the village clerk who is considered by the locals in Ferté-sous-Jouarre to be an authority on romantic literature. Cotonet presents him with his working list of definitions only to have them dismissed one by one as so many trivialities. The exchange ends when the Clerk, grown frustrated by Cotonet’s obsessive line of questioning, finally hazards his own description of romanticism:

‘No, my dear sir, certainly romanticism consists neither in discarding the unities nor in joining the comic with the tragic, nor in anything you say; you may try in vain to seize the butterfly’s wing; the dust that colours it will be all you can hold in your fingers. Romanticism is the weeping star; it is the sighing wind, the chilly night, the bird in its flight, and the sweet-scented flower; it is the refreshing stream, the greatest ecstasy, that well by the palm-trees…’

As with Flaubert in Bouvard and Pecuchet it is not always obvious where Musset is directing his satire. We are equally entitled to laugh at the pretentiousness of the Clerk as we are at the pedantic literalism of Cotonet. Such is the effect of ‘romanticism’, Musset seems to tell us, that even in the argument over its meaning we are compelled to make fools of ourselves. But for all the manifest absurdity of the Clerk, perhaps we are mistaken in assuming, with Lovejoy and Cotonet, that words ‘cease to perform the function of a verbal sign’ when we cannot state exactly what they mean. To paraphrase A N Whitehead, sometimes insisting on clarity is a retreat from thinking into a form of sentimentality. Cotonet is all sentimentality and it is for this reason that I doubt Musset wants us to identify with him completely. As for the ‘function’ of romanticism as a verbal symbol, it may be like a residual in mathematics, an index of what escapes our categories and theories, the things we have not and may never explain, the weeping star.

There are more than enough Bouvards and Cotonets rambling about on substack. However, a neo-romantic revival, if it has any chance of getting off the ground, will need to find somewhere a new Coleridge, or Wordsworth, or Rimbaud, which is to say a poet who can write with precision and power about this margin of unassimilated reality. You will forgive me if, at least for now, I remain skeptical.