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BauDebord/03: Romance&Anarchie!


2. What is Romanticism?

Before we go further I shall briefly define the word 'Romanticism', based upon my notes to the Blake lecture last year:

In contemporary popular publishing and cinema, the word 'Romance' applies to a genre characterized by an idealized approach to mating rituals. This usage of the word is perfectly valid, but does not apply to our discussion tonight so we shall put it aside.

The word 'Romanticism' has two similar definitions, one general and one specific:

The general definition describes a world-view which fits into a yin-yang duality with 'Classicism', dating from the Hellenic distinction between Dionysius and Apollo: The Romantic is youthful, intuitive, emotional, expansive, and volatile; The Classic is rational, logical, scientific, cerebral, and conservative.

In Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience we see this dichotomy mainfested as a contrast between Youth and Age: the Romantic Youthful spirit is an uncorrupt child full of energy and creation, yet suffering from the youthful weaknesses of petulance and narcisscism, and extremely vulnerable to degeneration into cynical nihilism and destructiveness.

In a description of Dionysius, Edith Hamilton said that he was the most generous of the pantheon of Greek Gods on Olympus because he always quickly answered the prayer of any mortal who invoked him: by partaking of the fruit of the vine, the mortal becomes infused with enthusiasm, and manifested a sense of godlike power. However, Hamilton went on to mention that the God's gift came at a risk of great peril: this most cheerful God could, without warning, suddenly turn to wrath and strike those who recklessly accepted his gifts with disorientation and madness. This comment evokes an interesting metaphor for the light and dark aspects of the Romantic temperment.

The idea of intoxication as a shortcut to the sublime was a secondary aspect in the composition of a portrait of the archetypal 'Romantic Sensibility'; the primary dual focal points were Eros and Thanatos, Sex & Death. These aspects, one joyful and generative, the other melancholic and destructive, orbit about each other on an axis whose implied fusion revealed the inherent contradiction pulsating deep within the heart of the Romantic soul. This paradox is rendered evident when filtered through the well of emotional resonance which permeates these reconciled opposites.

The specific definition of Romanticism describes a 19th century European cultural phenomenon in art and literature which exalted an individualized rebellion against conformity in the newly industrialized societies of the time. 'Western Romanticism' as a specific trend was started by the German intellectual star J.W. Goethe in the year 1774, when he published The Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel which portrayed the psychological torments of an alienated, sensitive young poet. It was a big hit, everyone took notice, and the genre was soon rolling. A variation of this story is recounted in the hypnotic program notes of the 1830 work of French composer Hector Berlioz, who stunned musical audiences with the erotic-death-trip of his Symphonie Fantastique. (A digression: the real life story behind this work displays a fascinating bit of tragic irony: Berlioz wrote this piece in the throes of an unrequited passion for the young actress Harriet Smithson; his success helped bring about a change in her sympathy and their marriage; eventually he left her and she died in despair).

A penultimate expression of French Romanticism occured as a delightfully satirical little children's book written by Alfred de Musset, The White Blackbird, a parody so deft that it almost defies comprehension. In this story, the alienated avian protagonist, isolated by his non-conformist plumage, is rejected by his family and society; he then writes a massive and painfully protracted novel, becomes a star and the toast of Europe, but suffers from personal and philosophic heartbreak. The charm of this document is augmented by the superb illustrations of the genius designer and editorial cartoonist Granville, a popular visual artist whose jokes and experiments sometimes predicted elements of Surrealism.

One secondary aspect of Western Romanticism is an idealization of the wild natural landscape as a metaphor for the garden of Eden, an idea influenced by the social theorist J.J.Rousseau. The perfect expression of this conceit occurs in a painting by Kaspar David Friedrich of a young artist/mountain climber (Wanderer among the Mists, 1817), perched upon the crest of a lofty outcrop, posed gazing profoundly into the distance. I might presume that this suggests the manifestation of individuality separate from society simply through solitude, physical separation from other human beings. (For more on this perspective, I could recommend the book Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama (1995)).

The emphasis on individuality is significant: traditionally, social conformity in past generations had been enforced by the power of the Catholic Church; the Age of Reason and the rise of science and Capitalism broke the Church's monopoly on behavioral control, and with the rise of the new middle class, the evolution of bourgeois attitudes appeared to spawn a new version of a self-enforced tendency towards conformity, a moral self-censorship. Romanticism seemed to squeeze up between these trends, but before falling too easily into this simplistic conclusion, at this point I am compelled to refer to the excellent book, Bohemian Paris...1830-1930 by Jerrold Seigel (1987), who makes the surprising but persuasive argument that the frequently mentioned class antagonism between the freewheeling Bohemians and the stuffy Bourgeoisie in actual practice functioned as a subtle form of symbiosis. This and other insights from his book provided much of the inspiration for this essay.

In England, Blake was the somewhat loosely (and perhaps improperly) applied prototype for a generation of poets who followed him, specifically the five early 19th-century poets who embodied the 'English Romantic Poetry Movement': Wordsworth, Cooleridge, Keats, Shelley & Byron.

Now if we were to compare England and France in the 19th century, we could note that aside from the growing pains of an expanding world empire and the occasional economic glitch resulting, England enjoyed a century of relative political stability during the Pax Victoriana Era. By comparison, France suffered from continual political upheavals and aftershocks for almost every generation throughout that century, after the failure of the socialist experiment of the late 18th century 'Reign of Terror', and the disastrous 'Waterloo' of the short-lived Napoleonic Empire which followed.

What the Romantic poets and artists of both countries shared was a sense that the Romantic individual spirit was either detached from society, or in open rebellion against it. Shelley and Byron were virtually exiled from England for their political views. In France, the provocative young mathematician Evariste Galois was killed in a convoluted political/love-affair duel in 1833. We could note from this story, as well as Mary Shelley's influential novel Frankenstein, that at the time the popular image of the young scientist was that of a sensitive artist/rebel, an outgrowth of science as an act of rebellion during the close of the superstitious age of religious faith. It was only with the subsequent generations leading to our modern age that the popular figure of the scientist would transmutate into that of the cold unemotional rationalist.

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