Q or, Heine's Romanticism.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-SEP-03

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The epithets "Grotesque" and "Arabesque" will be found to indicate with sufficient precision the prevalent tenor of the tales here published.... I may ... have desired to preserve, as far as a certain point, a certain unity of design.... I speak of these things here, because I am led to think it is this prevalence of the "Arabesque" in my serious tales, which has induced one or two critics to tax me, in all friendliness, with what they have been pleased to term "Germanism" and gloom.... Let us admit, for the moment, that the "phantasy pieces" now given are Germanic, or what not. Then Germanism is "the vein" for the time being. To morrow I may be anything but German, as yesterday I was everything else. (1)

IN THIS PASSAGE FROM THE PREFACE TO HIS Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), Edgar Allan Poe makes a number of contradictory claims. While striving for a unity of style, he yet refuses to take on a stable character and will not really identify with the tide of "German." Even if he did, he writes, this would be only a momentary name, and not a truly unifying designation or the proper name of an identity. Interestingly, the qualities that provoke this name, "grotesque" and "arabesque," are French, not German. The French word "grotesque" comes from the Italian word coined in the era of Raphael to name the decorative wall paintings found in Nero's Domus Aurea in Rome. Since the palace had been completely buried, painters descended into what seemed like caves (Italian, grotto) to view and copy the wall paintings there, then called "grotesques." "Arabesque," as is well known, refers to repeating decorative floral patterns found in older mosques, and to the kind of curve characteristic of Arab archways. The words "grotesque" and "arabesque" install a kind of extravagance in Poe's title, the double "q" being not very English, invoking a vague Orientalism as well as the French and Italian traditions. Poe's words are indebted not to German, but more to a Romance tradition, or a vocabulary of the Romance languages. The accusation of "Germanism" can perhaps be translated as a charge of Romanticism. (2)

The charge of Romanticism as Germanism brings out a certain redundancy in German Romanticism, a doubleness that doesn't really say anything yet cannot be reduced to a single term. The letter "q" was introduced into both English and German when the Latin alphabet was adopted for writing. The OED traces its appearance to the Norman invasion. (3) Quoting an older source, Grimm reminds us soundly: "q ist kein teutscher buchstabe," ["q is not a German letter"]. (4) "q," like the term "Romanticism," indicates the presence of something "foreign," the persistence of a dualism springing from the irreducibility of the Germanic and the Romance language groups, in what is called "Romantic" (romantique). This linguistic duality is characteristic of the multiplicity of meanings associated with "Romanticism"; it suggests that it is impossible to reduce Romanticism to a single thing. The critique of identity that the German Fruhromantik leveled at German Idealism is undoubtedly its most serious legacy, left to us in Friedrich Schlegel's many famous fragments, as for example: "It is equally fatal for the spirit to have a system, or not to have one" ["Es ist gleich todlich fur den Geist, ein System zu haben, und keins zu haben"], (5) As Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy argue in The Literary Absolute, this Romanticism opened the field of literature as the place of philosophy, stressing the resilience of writing and its resistence to dialectical sublation. For the Jena Romantic, spirit is actualized in its many-sided linguistic articulations, and not in its return to self in the model of self-consciousness. (6)

Discussions about Romanticism have tended to focus on the question of its relationship to the present. While some see the present as a direct legacy of Romanticism, others are invested in positing a difference and a distance between "now" and "then." (7) But the very critique of identity which Romanticism displays makes it impossible to establish it as some thing, thus as something that can be superceded, surpassed, transcended, critiqued, or demystified. The uncontainability of Romanticism means one can't really get rid of it. (8) It cannot be controlled by the binary opposition of presence and absence. This undecidability, or "equivocity," as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy have named it, causes epistemological anxiety if the goal is to reach a stable concept or some kind of certain understanding. It means that there is no thing behind the name Romanticism that we can grasp or understand. Poe calls this terror. "If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis," he writes in the same preface, "I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul--that I have deduced this terror only from its legitimate sources, and urged it only to its legitimate results" (129). Poe's disengagement from a historical and referential ground is exemplary of the Romantic escapism, or "flight from history," which makes it unattractive to many. But if the soul, like Romanticism, is another mask for the absence of any legitimate ground or source, then terror is a name for the ongoing unmasking that does not reveal anything. While terror may perhaps be a weighty word here, the ongoing process of alteration that yields no source or outcome can surely be allied with a sense of anxiety. Whether in the guise of ghosts or the infinite regress of irony, anxiety is surely connected with German Romanticism.

To engage this anxiety by allowing undecidability to persist allows a certain return of Romanticism. If its identity boundaries are not stable, Romanticism cannot be said to reside entirely elsewhere or in the past. To claim that we are "beyond" Romanticism, one would need to posit a "Romanticism" as origin or object. Recent historical approaches to Romanticism have been especially interested in differentiating themselves from the Romanticism which is their object of study. Jerome McGann's definition of a "Romantic Ideology," for example, identifies Romanticism with a set of beliefs and terms that are finite and identifiable. Romanticism, for McGann, is backward-looking and Idealist:

The Romantic tradition (or German Ideology, characterized originally by a powerful historicism and an orientation toward the past as the locus of the secrets of historical practice) ... is principally a synthetic program whose center has been shifted from rational inquiry to imaginative pursuit (so-called "Speculative Philosophy").... One of the basic illusions of Romantic Ideology is that only a poet and his works can transcend a corrupting appropriation by 'the world' of politics and money. Romantic poetry 'argues' this (and other) illusions repeatedly, and in the process it 'suffers' the contradictions of its own illusions and the arguments it makes for them. (9)

Romanticism presents illusions; critical reading, for which McGann relies on the writing of Heinrich Heine as a model, distances and frees us from these illusions. But this argument cannot hold up to the work of Friedrich Schlegel, for one. The movement between illusion and disillusionment is actually already inscribed in what is usually called "Romantic Irony" in the sense of a progressive self-commentary, for example in Schlegel's Athaeneum Fragment 116. (10) In this sense, Romantic Irony is not really "Romantic"; or, Romanticism already includes and prescribes its own reading as a kind of self-excess. The movement of self-excess recalls Schlegel's definition of irony as a "permanent parabasis." (11) The reading that focuses on Romantic critical practice reiterates a movement of differentiation that cannot be said to be "proper" to Romanticism, since it erodes the boundaries of proper identity in general. In other words, this would mean that Romanticism is not Romanticism. For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, in The Literary Absolute, the question may be one of differentiating between repetition compulsion, on the one hand, and an articulation of repetition on the other (16-17). Repetition compulsion sets up the illusion of an independent originary moment; explication of repetition points to the difference between the figure and its frame, or shows how the position of origin is animated by the present which defines it and looks back towards it. The fictionally reanimated origin belongs to the text of the present as much as to the past.

McGann's reading of Heine clearly locates the end of Heine's Romanticism in his essay, Die Romantische Schule [The Romantic School. Others have settled the problem in a similar way. Robert Holub, for example, wants to correct the distorted image of Heine as a Romantic poet: "From these early poems, we get only one dimension of Heine.... We see Heine ... in the tradition of Romantic poetry.... By the time Heine was thirty, however, he considered this period of his life to be a completed episode." (12) As for McGann, the difference between the Romantic and the (non)Romantic Heine relies on the completion of a historical epoch in Heine's life. Once again, though, the question arises of whether it is possible to draw such an epochal distinction with finality. This decision about the early demise of Heine's Romanticism identifies it with an ideology or illusion seen through by the later Heine. But this reading ignores both the ironic self-commentary of Heine's early writings as well as the title of one of his last collections of poetry, "Romanzero," which clearly names its Romantic affiliation; the unconventional form of this title calls especially upon the Romance tradition and romanic orthography. (13)

The question of Heine's Romanticism, like the question of Romanticism in general, is undecidable. The acceptance or...

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