Introduction
Before the British Romantic movement the Augustans accorded much attention to the structural and formal integrity of isolated states of being. In the post-Romantic Victorian era, there was a return to a similarly compartmentalized and regularized treatment of things—one that the Romantics would perhaps have deemed regressive. The Romantic movement proves on several fronts to rupture this predilection in favoring simple discrete states.
As I would argue, I am in agreement to a large extent, insofar as the Romantics tend to foreground complex states and states that exist in a dialectic, but would also hasten to point out that an unambiguous dichotomy of simple and complex states as the quotation suggests is problematic, as the Romantics are also interested in uncovering the complexity contained within seemingly simple states. In this essay I will also endeavor to show how this Romantic preoccupation with complex dialectical states gestures towards a principally humanistic locus in the Romantic ethos, in which the human subject is portrayed as being perpetually engaged in processes of dynamic negotiation.
The Romantic Perception: Seeing the Complex in the Simple
While I am in general agreement especially with regard to the unquestionable Romantic interest in complex states of being, it would be reductive to assert that the Romantics repudiate simple states in favor of complex ones. Instead, the Romantics lean towards the reconfiguration and revision of simple states, through a more expansive mode of perception, into something more complex. The opening lines of William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence" (Blake 403) exemplify the Romantic mode of perception:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour (ll. 1-4)
The Romantic interprets sand not as a "grain of sand" but a "Grain of Sand", not a "wild flower" but a "Wild Flower". It is not only our physical vision but also more importantly, the modulation of this vision by our mind, which becomes the key to unlock access to sand and flowers in their Platonic forms, [1] something otherwise inaccessible. Simple, mundane entities such as sand and flowers are further transfigured into a "World" and a "Heaven" respectively, attesting to the remarkable potential of the mind to extrapolate and synthesize beyond what is perceived by our physical vision—to make far greater and even infinite what was ontologically minute and limited.
One of the early Romantics, Blake was interested in a mode of perception that mobilizes the poetic imagination and transcends mere physical senses. Seeing the complex in the simple entails an imaginative vision that perceives entities differently from what we are ordinarily predisposed to perceive them; in this mode, the familiar has been defamiliarized and the visible made "a little hard to see". [2] The Romantics thus do not entirely disregard simple states, but are in fact interested in how the approach to these simple states can be steered away from one that is only attendant on their familiarity and superficial corporeality, towards one in which they can be reimagined such that the unfamiliarity and complexity within can be appreciated.
The American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing under a tradition that was arguably an efflorescence of European Romanticism, expands on what constitutes the Romantic perception in "Nature":
The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. (Emerson, Nature 35)
The metaphoric vision that enables one to distil "a World" from "a Grain of Sand" in Blake's "Auguries of Innocence"also empowers Emerson to "see" the landscape through a mode of synthetic, accretive perception beyond individual snapshots of particular farms and fields. The Romantic perception is not only able to derive complexity from a single simple state but is also capable of coalescing these simple discrete states. The Romantic poet, through this mode of perception, fuses his individual sensory cross-sections into a virtual whole; his mind is not atomistic but is capable of a complex experience far greater than the arithmetic sum of discrete experiences. Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Brontë's Villette observes Paulina as one who "would not take life, loosely and incoherently, in parts… [but] would retain and add" (Brontë 306), Paulina's attribute being emblematic of the Romantic perception which accrues, synthesizes and amplifies.
The Internal Dialectic: Reconciling Dissonance
The Romantic effort to synthesize discrete elements into a whole is not limited to contiguous states but extends to reconciling incompatible and even diametrically opposed states, thereby attenuating the boundaries between discrete entities or qualities. The invasion of the familiar by the unfamiliar, and the bleeding of the uncanny into the secure—both key tropes of Gothic novels produced in the Romantic period—are among the markers of Romantic writing that demonstrate this. The porosity of boundaries between traditionally disparate states can be gleaned from the first stanza of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" (Coleridge 182):
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. (ll. 1-11)
In "Kubla Khan" there is a stark juxtaposition of signs of mankind in the "walls and towers" with pristine natural features such as the "river", the "sea", and "forests ancient as the hills"; caverns that are "measureless to man" are compared with precisely measured "twice five miles of fertile ground"; the "sunless sea" with "sunny spots of greenery". The dreamlike, patchwork quality of "Kubla Khan" is a consequence of the complex interaction between dissonant states: artifice with nature, the quantifiable with the unquantifiable, and the real with the unreal. Also notable about "Kubla Khan" is what Coleridge claims, in the preface, to be lines he had composed in a state of sleep (Coleridge 180), possibly under the effect of his opium-induced mind (Sisman 417). This metanarrative of Coleridge's liminal state between the lucid and unconscious overlays the actual poem, accentuating its surreal quality and borderlessness. The poem thus serves as a clear example of the attenuation of boundaries between discrete entities or qualities, forming a synthesized whole through their dialectic.
Consequently, symbols in the poem neither function self-sufficiently nor do they proffer self-contained meaning, but work like symbols in a Freudian dream-work, where they are displaced onto other symbols or are in themselves such displacements (Freud 201) [3] and cannot be decoded in isolation from the unified symbolic fabric. Xanadu in "Kubla Khan" lends itself equally to artifice and nature, to the real and the unreal. The way in which discrete states are brought together into a complex aggregate where individual elements (such as the "artifice" or the "natural") become difficult to pin down incontestably, and in which our hermeneutic engagement with a discrete state in isolation from the whole is problematized and made untenable, constitutes an important facet of the Romantic mode.
Coleridge believes such an ability to conflate seemingly incongruous elements is an affirmation of the imagination's potential: "This power [of the imagination]… reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities" (qtd. in Abrams 118). Extrapolating from this idea, it can be argued that the human subject itself can be perceived as a complex unification of discordant qualities.
Lucy Snowe in Villette is such a character, firmly attempting to reconcile her inner tensions, even as she represents Charlotte Brontë's attempt to embody in a human subject the complex aggregate of seemingly discrete qualities. We learn that Lucy, when dressed in gray, feels "at home and at ease; an advantage [she] should not have enjoyed in anything more brilliant or striking" (Brontë 145). An inner Romantic whose impulses are subject to Victorian repression from her immediate social and cultural environment, she prefers to distance herself from either extreme and reconciles the two to hold a middle ground, one that is symbolized by her neutral, inoffensive "grayness". Yet, her efforts at maintaining this "grayness" are challenged each time Lucy encounters the Nun, whom she describes as "a figure all black and white; the skirts straight, narrow, black; the head bandaged, veiled, white." (Brontë 273) It is interesting to note that Brontë's description of the Nun in Villette as a figure of "black and white" is one that recurs every encounter without fail.
Despite being startled by the Nun at first, by their second encounter Lucy no longer flees but is emboldened by the Nun's uncanny familiarity to the extent that Lucy even attempts to confront her (Brontë 330). I would suggest that the Nun inVillette can be understood, to the reader, as a deconstructed psychological projection of Lucy Snowe, i.e. Lucy not in her forcibly reconciled state but one in which her inner tensions are laid bare. In other words, just as a prism disperses white light into its constituent wavelengths and simple colors, the Nun lays bare Lucy's apparent "grayness" as a deeper argument between sense and sensibility, logical reasoning and emotional impulse: Lucy's very own "blackness" and "whiteness" that she is all too familiar with. In Lucy we observe not only discrete states coalescing into a complex state of being, but also an active element of dialectical negotiation that emerges within her between these constituent states, manifesting in her perception of the Nun.
The External Dialectic: The Self and The Other
As shown above, the Romantics are more interested in states that exist and participate in a dialogue over those which exist discretely and independently. The dialectical tenor of one's existence—how an individual exists in external dialogue with others—is recounted in Villette when Lucy Snowe, pressed by Paulina to affirm Dr John's "goodness", finds herself describing him variously as "a fine-hearted son; his mother's comfort and hope", someone who "would have benignity for the lowest savage, or the worst criminal" as well as one who would be readily welcomed by his "poor patients at the hospitals" (Brontë 412). Lucy struggles to describe Dr John's innate goodness in and of itself, but is only able to elucidate his goodness through his relationships and interactions with others, these others being, as she raises: Mrs Bretton, marginalized 'defects' of society, and his patients. Lucy acknowledges that Dr John is a good gentleman as she is able to discern his goodness through his dialogues, verbal and non-verbal, with other individuals in the social network. His qualities only exist insofar as they are affirmed by the reception of others, reinstating that self only has meaning in relation to others, thus demonstrating the dialectical focus of the Romantics with regard to the human subject.
Apart from threading together entities or agents in a network, the external dialectic can be raised to an even higher dimension in Romantic writing, where its constituent elements not only mutually modify each other but are also, to a large extent, predicated and dependent on each other. An example of such dialectic, of a Hegelian nature, [4] can be adduced from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In Frankenstein, there is a shattering of boundaries between Frankenstein and the Creature and they no longer exist as discrete individuals. The Creature, despite owing his existence to Frankenstein, declares to his creator, "You are my creator, but I am your master; obey!" (Shelley 437). This inversion of hierarchy liberates the Creature from his subjugated position as he attempts to assume Frankenstein's role. Throughout the narrative Frankenstein repeatedly rejects the Creature by referring to him as a "daemon" but has unknowingly also become a similar "creature" himself, a state facilitated by the Creature's actions. The reader detects, throughout the narrative, not only a percolation of Frankenstein and the Creature into each other, but also the sense that the two have been ensnared in a twisted dialectic where each requires the other to sustain himself. In Frankenstein's most miserable moments, the Creature's exhorts Frankenstein to "live" so that he (the Creature) may be "satisfied" (Shelley 475). After Frankenstein's death, the Creature's final words to Walton also bear witness to the nature of his raison d’être:
I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish. (Shelley 496)
Frankenstein and the Creature have become shadows of each other; they do not exist discretely but are locked into a composite comprising two beings who have surrendered their individual autonomy and whose existences are dictated by and predicated on each other. Frankenstein and the Creature therefore constitute an extreme form of the Romantic dialectic where neither element can be isolated without destroying them both, where self can only exist in relation to other.
The Human Subject and the Extraneous
It can be seen from the above analyses of Romantic writing that the Romantic dialectic engages heavily with the negotiation between the internal and external, and in particular, the negotiation between the human subject (and his subjective positions) and that which is outside the self. The Romantic preoccupation with complex and dialectical states can be understood as a strategy to reconsider the human subject's status as an entity that is constrained and molded by his external environment. Rather, the human subject is a complex being who consciously engages in a dialogue with the external world, connoting that influence is two-way and not strictly from the environment onto the individual.
The above idea is represented by the following passage from Henry James'sThe Ambassadors:
The affair—I mean the affair of life—couldn't, no doubt, have been
different for me; for it's at the best a tin mould, either fluted
and embossed, with ornamental excrescences, or else smooth
and dreadfully plain, into which, a helpless jelly, one's consciousness
is poured—so that one 'takes' form, as the great cook
says, and is more or less compactly held by it… (James 153)
The Romantics stridently reject such an idea that the external unilaterally imposes itself on human consciousness, embracing instead how the human subject in fact also possesses an individual agency to condition and engineer the world around him, as Emerson reminds us in "The Transcendentalist":
I—this thought which is called I,—is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax. The mould is invisible, but the world
betrays the shape of the mould. You call it the power of circumstance,
but it is the power of me. (Emerson, The Transcendentalist 110-111)
Simply put, Emerson has reinstated the human subject as the sole arbiter of the external. It does not matter to the Romantic whether a grain of sand exists in reality as a simple object; it is of greater consequence what the grain of sand appears to him, i.e. the ways in which his imagination engages with it and imbues it with value by aggrandizing it into "a World". In the absence of such dialectical negotiations, an insurmountable barrier is raised between the human subject and the external. Meaning is not only limited, but also rendered completely unattainable where there is lack of dialectic, as even the most basic of information exchanges cannot occur. The separation of performer and audience is one such situation where dialogue is absent. This can be observed in Villette when Lucy speaks to M. Paul on her performance during Madame Beck's fête:
I had not the slightest sympathy with the audience below the stage.
They are good people, doubtless, but do I know them?
Are they anything to me? (Brontë 171)
We recall that Lucy affirms the goodness of John Graham not in isolation but through the ways in which that goodness of him impinges on others around him. In a similar vein, the goodness of her audience means nothing to her precisely because no dialogue can be established between the two parties. Lucy's performance on the stage is a unilateral act that speaks to the audience, but these presumably "good" people cannot speak to her and their goodness remains obscured and unintelligible to her.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the Romantic tradition can be couched in terms of a humanistic project that is intensely skeptical towards the cartography of independent and discrete states. Instead, it gravitates towards complex states and beings that are always dialectically engaged. The Romantics foreground the human subject as one who is not only able to render a simple state complex through his perception (as in "Auguries of Innocence"), but is himself a complex being: one who can embody an internal dialectic (Lucy Snowe's reconciliation of her inner tensions in Villette), facilitate an external dialectic (as in "Kubla Khan"), and be engaged in an external dialectic (Frankenstein and the Creature in Frankenstein).
The preoccupation with dialectics on multiple levels gestures towards the Romantics' belief that an individual does not exist in a vacuum but is brought out of stasis and into being through his engagement with others; his existence is not independent of all else but is energized by, and in resonance with the existence of others. The human subject, through perpetual negotiation on these various levels, is therefore a being in constant motion—a condition perhaps best articulated in Tennyson's "Ulysses" (Tennyson 81): "How dull it is to pause, to make an end,/To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!" (ll. 22-23)
Vincent Gan is an NUS undergraduate reading degrees from both Science and Arts. For better or worse, he has a more than passing interest in a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from quantum mechanics to political philosophy and 20th-century literature. He treasures everything he has gained from formal education, but believes that the best thing school has done is to have taught him how to teach himself.
[1] Plato believes that the every entity in reality is an imperfect replica of a perfect form that exists in a higher realm. (Plato)
[2] From Wallace Stevens' poem "The Creations of Sound" in The Collected Poems(Stevens 311): "His poems are not the second part of life./They do not make the visible a little hard/To see nor, reverberating, eke out the mind" (ll. 20-22)
[3] See Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams: "If in the course of a single day we have two or more experiences suitable for provoking a dream, the dream will make a combined reference to them as a single whole; it is under a necessity to combine them into a unity" (p.201, author's emphases).
[4] The Hegelian dialectic comprises two contradictory elements, the thesis and the antithesis, that are eventually resolved by a synthesis of the two on a higher level. (Kaufmann)
Works Cited
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Blake, William. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 2008. Print. Brontë, Charlotte. Villette.
1853. London: Penguin, 2004. Print.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose. New York: Norton, 2004. Print.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Nature." 1836. The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings. New York:
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———. "The Transcendentalist."1841. The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings. New York:
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Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James Strachey. 1899. New York: Basic Books, 2010.
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James, Henry. The Ambassadors. 1903. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.
Kaufmann, Walter. Hegel: An Reinterpretation. New York: Anchor Books, 1966. Print.
Plato. The Republic. Trans. G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992. Print.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1831. Three Gothic Novels. London: Penguin, 1986. Print.
Sisman, Adam. The Friendship. New York: Viking, 2006. Print.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.
Tennyson, Alfred. "Ulysses." 1842. The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 81-82. Print.
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