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COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University
THE MAIN DIFFICULTY IN COMING TO TERMS WITH THE POLITICS OF ROmanticism has thus far been seen to lie in the discrepancy that opens between the manifest political claims of many of the romantics and the social and political implications of that part of their writings that does not overtly address political issues (most prominently, their poetry). These implications, often murky and contradictory, maintain an uneasy relationship with the manifest political claims, an unease that critics have found difficult to tolerate; thus they have either pressed explicit and implicit claims into harmony, or, in more recent practice, insisted on their disharmony: we are shown how well-meaning political views are belied by a sinister aesthetic ideology that shows its true face in poetic practice, or--vice-versa--how sinister views are upended by a euphoric social model encoded in the poetry.
Both of these strategies overlook the possibility that the link between artistic practice and political ideology may be weak or entirely absent; both strategies therefore find themselves unable either to consider or to test the hypothesis that one of the crucial accomplishments of romanticism may lie precisely in the weakening or breaking of this link. This is not to suggest that the romantics did not hold political views, nor that their poetic works do not engage important political questions. It does suggest that their most radical innovations in poetic practice and aesthetic theory can only be recognized and absorbed by later writers if those innovations are not constrained by the demands placed upon a political theory or social model. The line of reasoning I propose assumes that romanticism, far from furthering a mutual implication of art and politics (or art and religion, or art and philosophy), promotes their differentiation. With romanticism, art (and not politics, religion, or philosophy) increasingly decides what art should be.
In what follows, I attempt to describe the complex process of differentiation not from the vantage point of sociology (though I borrow the term from that discipline (1)) but rather by means of textual analysis. A close examination of intra-literary structures reveals to what an extent the literariness of literature forestalls an allegorical or metaphorical transfer of its terms to historical practices. I shall focus on an analysis of the writings of one member of the so-called Romantic School, Friedrich Schlegel. His case promises to repay close scrutiny not only because he is, in Isaiah Berlin's excited words, "the greatest harbinger, the greatest herald and prophet of romanticism that ever lived," (2) nor because of the impressive political somersault he performed in his lifetime (from fervent supporter of the French Revolution to Metternich's amanuensis, in less than two decades), but because his poetic and aesthetic writings do not shy away from establishing analogies with social theory. Yet I will argue that these analogies, followed with some rigor, threaten the very integrity of the political toward which they appear to point, for just those features that make the poetic theory rich and innovative would, if pursued to their end, provoke a complete social breakdown.
I
"It would hardly be hyperbolic to say ... " Paul de Man has claimed, "that the whole discipline of Germanistik has developed for the single reason of dodging Friedrich Schlegel." (3) Though less sweeping in tone, Ernst Robert Curtius (like de Man not a Germanist) comes to a similar conclusion in an essay from 1932. He traces the deep and persistent suspicion with which Schlegel's life and work have been received by academic literary criticism to the awkward intersection of biography, poetics, and political program that I noted earlier:
If one examines the reproaches directed at Friedrich Schlegel in the usual literary histories, one ends up with a strange collection. First of all, he is reproached for being lazy; second, for being impudent, because he defended laziness in writing and had written in praise of idleness.... Furthermore, Friedrich Schlegel was immoral. The combination of idleness and insolence alone would have been sufficient proof of this. Now, however, the same author had also presumed to write a novel celebrating the joys of love. For this the agencies supervising German literature took him severely to task. But it gets worse. Friedrich Schlegel was quite simply an epicure. He liked to eat and drink and in so doing acquired a comfortable corpulence. This fact, too, is held against him.... Strangest of all, many critics associate with this reproach the other one, that Friedrich Schlegel, together with his wife, was converted to Catholicism at the age of thirty-four. The same people for whom Schlegel is too immoral and insolent are not pleased when he becomes respectable and pious. (4)
It is not only dim critics who conflate the personal, the poetic, and the political: the astute Maurice Blanchot celebrates the young "atheist, radical, individualistic" Schlegel and complains that the older Schlegel, "converted to Catholicism, a diplomat and journalist in the service of Metternich ... is no longer anything but a fat philistine of unctuous speech, his mind on food, lazy, and empty." (5)
But Schlegel's girth, his growing piousness, and his gluttony are merely the magnets for a far more serious critique, namely the persistent and politically consequential charge of irrationalism. It depends for its efficacy on folding his work into a corporate entity called "early romanticism" (at times plain "romanticism"), with whom his fortunes are then permitted to wax and wane. Hegel's judgment holding Schlegel to be unfit for "speculative thought" (6) is an early instance of the way in which nineteenth-century critics, literary historians, and philosophers--with the important exceptions of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche--denigrate the so-called Romantic School. A long line of nineteenth-century writers--among them figures such as Heinrich Heine, the literary historian Georg Gottfried Gervinus, and Rudolf Haym, author of the influential study Die romantische Schule [The Romantic School, 1870]--dismiss with varying degrees of intensity the most innovative elements in Schlegel's poetological (7) writings in favor of a broad critique of his mysticism and piousness, thus projecting his conversion to Cathohcism in 1808 back onto his work of a decade earlier. (8) Such denigration continues in philosophical and critical traditions through the twentieth century.
After World War II, the charge of irrationalism, by then firmly entrenched, is conflated--even made responsible for--the paroxysm of irrationality and barbarity that had washed over Germany. Thomas Mann and Georg Lukacs, who otherwise agree on little, both take "romanticism" (an amorphous entity that dispenses with making a distinction between Schlegel and other romantics, let alone between the early and late Schlegel) to be the biotope in which Nazism could thrive. (9) Their thesis shows little sign of losing acceptance. Thus Jurgen Habermas criticizes romanticism for what he takes to be its messianic devotion to Dionysian mythology. (10) More recently, the eminent historian of Germany Gordon Craig has identified "that peculiarly German sense of inwardness, or remoteness from reality" (that, in his view, typifies romanticism) as "the malaise allemand," holding it responsible for engendering "forces of terror and violence and death." (11) By these he means not only Hitler (12) but also violent extremism in postwar Germany, notably the terrorism of the Red Army Faction (210). In all these cases, the motivation to speak, as Craig does, of a "familiar Romantic antagonism ... to rationalism and progress" (206) may lie in part in the...
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