The Romanticism described in this essay is merely one version. It has been argued (e.g. Irving Babbitt in his book on Rousseau) and refuted (e.g. Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, R.P. Blackmur). It implicitly criticizes the ambitious and egoistic attempt to actualize visions and ideals, which are always doomed to fail, as Romantic writers from Wordsworth to Austen and Stendhal demonstrate. Call it a literalized version of Romanticism. For example, nationalism, Romanticism's political twin, engendered the emancipatory aims of the French Revolution and the terror of Saint-Just; it engendered Naziism but also anti-colonial movements for independence. Rousseau gives us beauty and horror, Wordsworth and Sade, Woodstock 68 and 99. The version of the will describe is only one version of the Romantic will. It overlooks Rousseau's sentiment of existence; it points to Stephen Daedalus and ignores Bloom; Anna but not Levin; Emma Bovary but not Felicite. Romanticism also exhibits a will at peace, tranquil, that resists egoism (Keats, Austen, Dickens).
What is missing from this account of Romanticism is attention to irony, not the kind that negates, not Schlegel, but irony that protects and preserves. Irony that catalyzes the imagination and tames it at the same time.
Saying Romanticism is a failure simply points (ironically) to its success. The best definition belongs to its best interpreter (Harold Bloom): "Romanticism is a revolt not against orderly creation, but again compulsion, against conditioning, against all unnecessary limitation that presents itself as being necessary. As such, Romanticism is a doomed tradition, yet a perpetually self-renewing one.”
Good to see a discussion of Wyndham Lewis on here. Regarding the character of Kreisler, a couple of other noteworthy points: 1) he's financially dependent on his rich father; 2) as an artist, he's not very good or successful. These factors generate a lot of his resentment. It's interesting that Lewis was creating this character at about the time that another, real-life failed artist was moving in an ideologically extreme and militaristic direction.
I've read this a couple times now, and listened to it twice more in the afternoon while making deliveries, and though I got bogged down in the middle I've come to appreciate, by the end, how Dematagoda's point flowers into something very clear and draws some brilliant analogies. Not that the opening parts don't do that, they just go way over my head.
At the same time, I think this essay embodies the thing it deplores by the end (though I wouldn't use the same terms, "solipsism" and "narcissism" and "compulsory vanity"). Dematagoda talks about the sort of 20th century artist that spirals into the self, explores only their own experience and broods on it and pays no mind to the lived experience of those around them. He says it's very prevalent today and it's regrettable and I kind of agree.
But there's a lot of scholarship in this article. Historical figures and artists and thinkers invoked, off-hand, in a scholarly way. For instance:
"This initial iteration, a counter-revolutionary impulse championed by disillusioned anarcho-syndicalists (Marinetti) and socialists (Mussolini) did not have the distinctly racialist character readily associated with German fascism in the popular imagination, and was, as Roger Griffin noted, itself tethered to a quasi-modernist impulse."
This passage is well-worded and easy to read and the syntax flows really well--but it's hard to argue that this is a passage meant to be appreciated by more than maybe a fraction of a percentile of its readership. I don't see much of a difference between an essay like this--in which the author peruses the inner library they've cultivated over years of study, alluding to names and movements and theories and episodes that the readership mostly won't follow--and a text in which the author peruses their own lived experience, the characters of their own life, as though the reader should understand it and figure it out on their own.
I had to read it twice to understand it, which I kinda resented, but then after reading it twice I (think that I) appreciated its insights and found that I'm (probably) on the same side of the argument as the author. In fact it hit me as a genuinely thought-expanding piece by the end. So I respect it, but I got really frustrated.
I think you make an excellent point...and have, unintentionally, hit a nerve. I had a few people also contact me, saying that they like my essays on Substack, but they don't understand all of the different thinkers/ ideas referred to. I'm always really embarrassed by this. I think the one thing to understand about me, and I'm realising I'm not alone in this, is that through a mixture of indolence and circumstance, I've really spent far too long in universities. But at the same time, I have always baulked at the type of managerial/bureaucratic temperament required to succeed in them since my interests have always been intellectual/abstract. So I think I've absorbed some of the annoying self-referential and self-congratulatory tendencies...but I don't really write in a way that contemporary academia appreciates either. Too florid for them as well. But it's quite difficult to adjust a style once it's been honed in a certain way, but I think I do need to try a bit more.
Having said that, I grew up in a working-class environment, and it wasn't by and large an atmosphere where books and 'high' culture were around or discussed. But the guys I grew up with were capable of very nuanced, abstract and sophisticated ways of thinking and intellectualising towards the things they knew about. And they were also extremely sensitive to any hint of condescension towards them - and that's one of the things I fear the most and try to avoid. I always read a lot of things I didn't understand growing up, and it frustrated me enough to try to understand at least some of the references and context. Actually, I still read a lot of things which I don't understand. At this very moment, I'm trying to re-read Gilles Deleuze on Nietzsche and Philosophy and as usual, I have to read extremely slowly and go back over sentences several times before I can comprehend what's going on. I think we make the mistake that, since most people are literate in the sense of being able to read, all types of reading ought to be the same...but some are intensely difficult, and have an irreducible baseline level of complexity to them. But most people have the tools to understand some of this complexity with a bit of effort, and that effort is, for me at least, why reading is 'improving' in the best sense. So...with some reservations, I think I'd rather risk being viewed as elitist (which I'm definitely not) than being condescending.
Well I appreciate the gracious note there, I spent a day wondering if it was worth trying to point this out in a way that wouldn't come off hostile or judgemental.
The first time through the essay, I only understood (and really appreciated) the second half--and I was convinced the first half was a complete flex; so when I read through it again, going slowly over the first half, I didn't know who these figures were (probably a point of obduracy that I wasn't going to Google them either) but I had a better sense, thanks to the bits about Kafka and the closing note, what you were getting at; then, listening to it through the drive, I could see that the opening paragraphs were a legitimate superstructure for the points you were getting at. That it wasn't all a flex.
So I appreciated the sincerity--but then felt irked that I had to read it several times to get the point--and, having spent a few years in academia as well, half-suspected that, if I voiced this frustration, I'd be told that, well, it's unfortunate I'm not well-enough educated, seems the essay's not for me, etc...
So hey, look at us, bringing out grievances and biases to the table. I'm glad we can call out across the chasm without offense. And I can sympathize with what you're saying, that you've already honed a writing voice and can't break out of it; however, I think the latter half of this essay is terrific: lyrical, accessible, and it stands on its own. The argument might lose a little bone marrow if some of the earlier abstruse bits were lost, but I don't think it would crumble.
Takeaway being: great piece, introduced some great ideas and it's probably the most interesting assessment of Kafka I've read in a long time, and maybe another testament to the strength of the thing is it exposed our nerves and brought our knives out.
I would add that this piece is an impressive example of impassioned academic prose. If only more academics wrote like this! Maybe the academic study of literature would be in better shape. It would certainly be more interesting and existentially relevant.
A very interesting take, thank you. I’m always happy to see analysis of modernist thought that shows how these ideas live on and continue to shape contemporary cultural forms.
Are you calling, in the final paragraph, for a renewed modernism - a clean break with decadent romanticism in its 21st century guise (narcissism/introspection)? I’ve always thought of the palingenetic modernisms described by Roger Griffin as so many versions of romanticism. A desire to break through into some new realm of health and authenticity—what could be more romantic than that? As such, the classicists of the modernist period were romantics of a kind themselves. To paraphrase Lewis in Men Without Art, we’re all romantics today.
I think I am, but I agree with Griffin mostly. This idea of the 'Dear Purchase', is what Stern links to Kafka and other German modernist writers: an advanced state of romanticism that is wholly concerned with a secular moral strenuousness and fixated on a form of salvation *usually related to art) that can only be attained at the highest price one can pay, at the greatest cost to oneself. The danger of such thinking is that it often leads to self-annihilating solipsism and - much like the Hunger Artist - this supreme effort can also be viewed as no effort at all, as meaningless outside of itself....we're in a much more advanced, much more decadent state of that predicament now. But there are signs of change, something is indeed in the air...a cause for cautious optimism, perhaps.
Thanks, I’ll track down the Stern piece. Your point about finding “a common and shared human experience” is interesting in relation to the modernist critique of romanticist solipsism. Socially, Eliot found that shared experience in the Church; aesthetically, he found it in the objective correlative and the relation between individual artworks and tradition. Politically, we know where Pound found it. At the end of Inferior Religions, Lewis says we should probably live in small communities, each with its own ideal of beauty. Substack sometimes feels like a version of that, even if it’s a highly imperfect version.
Creating vital institutional structures to house that shared experience seems like a problem modernity still hasn’t solved. Glad to hear you see signs of change, though.
Most of the great Jewish artists (Stooges, Marx, Seinfeld) are language-artists, because we've got a sixth-sense of humor, we expect to find God laughing
The Romanticism described in this essay is merely one version. It has been argued (e.g. Irving Babbitt in his book on Rousseau) and refuted (e.g. Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, R.P. Blackmur). It implicitly criticizes the ambitious and egoistic attempt to actualize visions and ideals, which are always doomed to fail, as Romantic writers from Wordsworth to Austen and Stendhal demonstrate. Call it a literalized version of Romanticism. For example, nationalism, Romanticism's political twin, engendered the emancipatory aims of the French Revolution and the terror of Saint-Just; it engendered Naziism but also anti-colonial movements for independence. Rousseau gives us beauty and horror, Wordsworth and Sade, Woodstock 68 and 99. The version of the will describe is only one version of the Romantic will. It overlooks Rousseau's sentiment of existence; it points to Stephen Daedalus and ignores Bloom; Anna but not Levin; Emma Bovary but not Felicite. Romanticism also exhibits a will at peace, tranquil, that resists egoism (Keats, Austen, Dickens).
What is missing from this account of Romanticism is attention to irony, not the kind that negates, not Schlegel, but irony that protects and preserves. Irony that catalyzes the imagination and tames it at the same time.
Saying Romanticism is a failure simply points (ironically) to its success. The best definition belongs to its best interpreter (Harold Bloom): "Romanticism is a revolt not against orderly creation, but again compulsion, against conditioning, against all unnecessary limitation that presents itself as being necessary. As such, Romanticism is a doomed tradition, yet a perpetually self-renewing one.”
Good to see a discussion of Wyndham Lewis on here. Regarding the character of Kreisler, a couple of other noteworthy points: 1) he's financially dependent on his rich father; 2) as an artist, he's not very good or successful. These factors generate a lot of his resentment. It's interesting that Lewis was creating this character at about the time that another, real-life failed artist was moving in an ideologically extreme and militaristic direction.
I've read this a couple times now, and listened to it twice more in the afternoon while making deliveries, and though I got bogged down in the middle I've come to appreciate, by the end, how Dematagoda's point flowers into something very clear and draws some brilliant analogies. Not that the opening parts don't do that, they just go way over my head.
At the same time, I think this essay embodies the thing it deplores by the end (though I wouldn't use the same terms, "solipsism" and "narcissism" and "compulsory vanity"). Dematagoda talks about the sort of 20th century artist that spirals into the self, explores only their own experience and broods on it and pays no mind to the lived experience of those around them. He says it's very prevalent today and it's regrettable and I kind of agree.
But there's a lot of scholarship in this article. Historical figures and artists and thinkers invoked, off-hand, in a scholarly way. For instance:
"This initial iteration, a counter-revolutionary impulse championed by disillusioned anarcho-syndicalists (Marinetti) and socialists (Mussolini) did not have the distinctly racialist character readily associated with German fascism in the popular imagination, and was, as Roger Griffin noted, itself tethered to a quasi-modernist impulse."
This passage is well-worded and easy to read and the syntax flows really well--but it's hard to argue that this is a passage meant to be appreciated by more than maybe a fraction of a percentile of its readership. I don't see much of a difference between an essay like this--in which the author peruses the inner library they've cultivated over years of study, alluding to names and movements and theories and episodes that the readership mostly won't follow--and a text in which the author peruses their own lived experience, the characters of their own life, as though the reader should understand it and figure it out on their own.
I had to read it twice to understand it, which I kinda resented, but then after reading it twice I (think that I) appreciated its insights and found that I'm (probably) on the same side of the argument as the author. In fact it hit me as a genuinely thought-expanding piece by the end. So I respect it, but I got really frustrated.
I think you make an excellent point...and have, unintentionally, hit a nerve. I had a few people also contact me, saying that they like my essays on Substack, but they don't understand all of the different thinkers/ ideas referred to. I'm always really embarrassed by this. I think the one thing to understand about me, and I'm realising I'm not alone in this, is that through a mixture of indolence and circumstance, I've really spent far too long in universities. But at the same time, I have always baulked at the type of managerial/bureaucratic temperament required to succeed in them since my interests have always been intellectual/abstract. So I think I've absorbed some of the annoying self-referential and self-congratulatory tendencies...but I don't really write in a way that contemporary academia appreciates either. Too florid for them as well. But it's quite difficult to adjust a style once it's been honed in a certain way, but I think I do need to try a bit more.
Having said that, I grew up in a working-class environment, and it wasn't by and large an atmosphere where books and 'high' culture were around or discussed. But the guys I grew up with were capable of very nuanced, abstract and sophisticated ways of thinking and intellectualising towards the things they knew about. And they were also extremely sensitive to any hint of condescension towards them - and that's one of the things I fear the most and try to avoid. I always read a lot of things I didn't understand growing up, and it frustrated me enough to try to understand at least some of the references and context. Actually, I still read a lot of things which I don't understand. At this very moment, I'm trying to re-read Gilles Deleuze on Nietzsche and Philosophy and as usual, I have to read extremely slowly and go back over sentences several times before I can comprehend what's going on. I think we make the mistake that, since most people are literate in the sense of being able to read, all types of reading ought to be the same...but some are intensely difficult, and have an irreducible baseline level of complexity to them. But most people have the tools to understand some of this complexity with a bit of effort, and that effort is, for me at least, why reading is 'improving' in the best sense. So...with some reservations, I think I'd rather risk being viewed as elitist (which I'm definitely not) than being condescending.
Well I appreciate the gracious note there, I spent a day wondering if it was worth trying to point this out in a way that wouldn't come off hostile or judgemental.
The first time through the essay, I only understood (and really appreciated) the second half--and I was convinced the first half was a complete flex; so when I read through it again, going slowly over the first half, I didn't know who these figures were (probably a point of obduracy that I wasn't going to Google them either) but I had a better sense, thanks to the bits about Kafka and the closing note, what you were getting at; then, listening to it through the drive, I could see that the opening paragraphs were a legitimate superstructure for the points you were getting at. That it wasn't all a flex.
So I appreciated the sincerity--but then felt irked that I had to read it several times to get the point--and, having spent a few years in academia as well, half-suspected that, if I voiced this frustration, I'd be told that, well, it's unfortunate I'm not well-enough educated, seems the essay's not for me, etc...
So hey, look at us, bringing out grievances and biases to the table. I'm glad we can call out across the chasm without offense. And I can sympathize with what you're saying, that you've already honed a writing voice and can't break out of it; however, I think the latter half of this essay is terrific: lyrical, accessible, and it stands on its own. The argument might lose a little bone marrow if some of the earlier abstruse bits were lost, but I don't think it would crumble.
Takeaway being: great piece, introduced some great ideas and it's probably the most interesting assessment of Kafka I've read in a long time, and maybe another testament to the strength of the thing is it exposed our nerves and brought our knives out.
I would add that this piece is an impressive example of impassioned academic prose. If only more academics wrote like this! Maybe the academic study of literature would be in better shape. It would certainly be more interesting and existentially relevant.
A very interesting take, thank you. I’m always happy to see analysis of modernist thought that shows how these ideas live on and continue to shape contemporary cultural forms.
Are you calling, in the final paragraph, for a renewed modernism - a clean break with decadent romanticism in its 21st century guise (narcissism/introspection)? I’ve always thought of the palingenetic modernisms described by Roger Griffin as so many versions of romanticism. A desire to break through into some new realm of health and authenticity—what could be more romantic than that? As such, the classicists of the modernist period were romantics of a kind themselves. To paraphrase Lewis in Men Without Art, we’re all romantics today.
I think I am, but I agree with Griffin mostly. This idea of the 'Dear Purchase', is what Stern links to Kafka and other German modernist writers: an advanced state of romanticism that is wholly concerned with a secular moral strenuousness and fixated on a form of salvation *usually related to art) that can only be attained at the highest price one can pay, at the greatest cost to oneself. The danger of such thinking is that it often leads to self-annihilating solipsism and - much like the Hunger Artist - this supreme effort can also be viewed as no effort at all, as meaningless outside of itself....we're in a much more advanced, much more decadent state of that predicament now. But there are signs of change, something is indeed in the air...a cause for cautious optimism, perhaps.
Thanks, I’ll track down the Stern piece. Your point about finding “a common and shared human experience” is interesting in relation to the modernist critique of romanticist solipsism. Socially, Eliot found that shared experience in the Church; aesthetically, he found it in the objective correlative and the relation between individual artworks and tradition. Politically, we know where Pound found it. At the end of Inferior Religions, Lewis says we should probably live in small communities, each with its own ideal of beauty. Substack sometimes feels like a version of that, even if it’s a highly imperfect version.
Creating vital institutional structures to house that shared experience seems like a problem modernity still hasn’t solved. Glad to hear you see signs of change, though.
Who, what, where are the impresarios today?
Died from Mal nutrition...
Most of the great Jewish artists (Stooges, Marx, Seinfeld) are language-artists, because we've got a sixth-sense of humor, we expect to find God laughing
Beautifully argued and articulated... only to arrive at Kafka... Beckett says hold my beer...