Literary Analysis

If history is a night from which Stephen Dedalus is trying to awake, writing could be said to be a dream into which James Joyce awakened, his pen a machine to turn bad dreams into good…[1].

From the illustration copy of Ulysses drawn by Italian artist Mimmo Paladino.

From the illustrated copy of Ulysses drawn by Italian artist Mimmo Paladino.

In Ulysses, James Joyce plays with language and non-linear narration, disrupting our sense of time while also using the text as a demonstration of him becoming an artist. It is thus written in light of the inevitable event – the creation of Ulysses as a text, and the fulfillment of history as Joyce perceives it [2]. Ulysses relies on history and its direction to make its central argument; it transforms the past to work towards this end by using mythology, national history, and even syntax. If it is as Stephen famously said, “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” then Ulysses is Joyce’s nightmare made into a dream.

Ulysses is able to play with categories – history, fiction, mythology, etc. – to create a narrative that is a radical break from prior forms. Its end goal is one of salvation: just as Odysseus in the ancient Greek classic Odyssey comes back to reclaim Ithaca and bring it peace, Ulysses is a prescription for the Irish nation, for the next artistic epoch, and for the modern age more generally. This essay seeks to historicize the text by tracing Joyce’s views on history and its direction, while also using Ulysses as a means with which to understand history conceptually.

I. Joyce’s Theory of History

Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico in The New Science and his other works theorized on a concept he called “corsi e ricorsi” or a cyclical theory of history. He posited that “man [creates the human world, [and] creates it by transforming himself into the facts of society” [3]. Thus, the individual is a creation of the world or, to put it alternatively, “society is a book in which to read the soul” [4]. History, according to Vico, runs in three stages – theocratic, aristocratic, and democratic or the divine, the heroic, and the human [5]. Eventually, there is a break (ricorso) and then a return to the divine, after which the cycle repeats itself indefinitely. Joyce was so moved by these theories that he himself remarked that they “forced themselves upon him through the circumstances of his own life” [6]. He also possibly saw the stages Vico described manifest in his own progression – starting from his early fear of God, to his then newfound love of his family, to his final dispossessed, ordinary state [7]. It is also likely Joyce saw in Vico’s search for a scientific form of history an analogy to his own struggle for new art or literature [8]. Both Vico and Joyce can be said to be pushing back against the authoritative traditions that have kept narratives and histories tightly sealed, and both are interested in mapping “counter-histories.” Altogether, Joyce and Vico find their answer in mythology, transforming fiction and using it to make history anew [9]. Although these might seem to be contradictory — history and fiction — they form a special relationship in Ulysses and every telling of history more generally.

In the second chapter of Ulysses, Stephen has ironic contempt for history as an authoritative subject [10]. For the students he is teaching, and also for himself, “history was a tale like any other too often heard” [11]. His students do not want to hear positivist interpretations of history as fact, irrelevant to the lived experiences of its people – his pupils simply want “a ghoststory” [12]. They turn instead to poetry and fiction by reading Lycidas by John Milton. Later in the chapter, Stephen denounces Mr. Deasy’s claims on history and his argument that its direction is “towards one great goal, the manifestation of God” [13]. Stephen so strongly disputes this because he sees it as history being destructively taken away from humanity; it obscures history as the real force it is, placing it outside of the human realm from which it was created. We see this “reclaiming” of history in another crucial passage in the text, from Scylla and Charybdis, where speaking of Shakespeare, Joyce writes: “He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible” [14]. For Joyce, Shakespeare was great because he embraced in his artistic vision the “all in all in all of us” [15]. The details of everyday life were part of his subjects. And what made him a great artist was his relationship to this World, and that he was “able to go beyond the limitations of his own ego in order to achieve the impersonality and objectivity that is necessary for dramatic art” [16]. As Vico theorized that man creates history, then is it within the artist’s power to do more than reproduce the known World; he can create it himself, and from cultural and personal fragments he can create it anew. To harken back to Mr. Deasy’s claim – it is therefore not history that tends to God towards the manifestation of His will. Instead, “it is the artist that creates the world, rather than God” [17]. And history being circular rather than linear, the artist therefore “goes forth, but returns to the same place” [18]. It is then through this intersection between history and art, as Joyce derives from Vico, that we can read the soul like a book. History is thus art’s necessary impetus. “In apprehending his soul, Stephen sees what is possible for him” [19] and, in doing so, also sees what is possible for history – be it Irish or otherwise – because the world cannot be divorced from the soul. If anything, according to Joyce, it must be viewed through it. It is through our imagination that our past becomes incorporated into our present.

II. Meta-history and Mythology

Even though Stephen teaches history in Nestor, it makes little sense to him. Watching the schoolchildren play, he laments:

I am among them, among their battling bodies in the medley, the joust of life… Time shocked rebounds, shock by shock. Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of the slain, a shout of spearspikes baited with men’s bloodied guts [20].

This is undoubtedly the nightmare of history; it is chaotic, bloody, and harsh. It is senseless, a “meaningless progression of names, dates, and places.” History is like a specter haunting the living [21]. A string of brutality, it reminds Stephen of Rome, asking Bloom in Eumaues to “oblige me by taking that knife away. I can’t look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history” [22]. In Eumaues, for example, the cabman’s shelter is filled with historical insight, oftentimes nonsensical. The Phoenix Park murders, the Irish nation, Roman history, Judaism and Christ, the Evening Telegraph – “all are points on an indiscernible compass” [23]. History’s presence is totalizing, almost as a thing outside of ourselves, as Haines remarks in the beginning of the novel: “we feel in England that we have treated you [the Irish] unfairly. It seems history is to blame” [24]. And too, for the Irish, “history was like a tale too often heard, their land a pawnshop” [25]. Stephen is thus trapped in its spell and Joyce, also, is under its boot for he, too, is forced to confront it to create his Irish epic.

Unlike Stephen, Bloom is able to humanize history. For it is true, “persecution… all the history of the world is full of it. Perpetuating national hatred among nations,” [26] but Bloom retorts this remark brilliantly: “Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life” [27]. That which is really life, to Bloom, is “love” [28]. While history is a nightmare to some, it is altogether “rendered more beautiful still by the waters of sorrow which have passed over them and by the rich incursion of time” [29]. Therefore, history gives life depth – it exists in sorrow, but it also brings love and community based on shared precedent. History is also familiar, and unlike Stephen, Bloom is able to act with it. And it is familiar because it is cyclical for “history repeats itself… so it returns. Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way around is the shortest way home” [30]. Bloom thus unifies two ways of looking at experience to produce a meta-history incorporating fiction to “produce a kind of reality that… is more clearly enunciated and immediate than anything which might have occurred in documented history” [31].

It is through literature and art that Joyce is able to make the nightmare into a dream. Although history is cyclical, it is “repeating itself with a difference” [32]. This gap or difference allows for the dream. If it was a “matter of strict history,” it would not be explanatory of anything besides fact. Thus, art and history intersect on some level if we consider that narratives repeat themselves with difference, as does art and life [33]. It is all a matter of perspective. We are exposed to history in Ulysses through varying perspectives: Stephen’s, Molly’s, and Bloom’s, all of whom are no less valid in some sense than the other, along with other minor perspectives. They cycle through each other and what better way to demonstrate history as being precisely that, the cycling of perspectives. This constant shift was commented on by those who spoke to Joyce himself. After Joyce asked his friend Frank Budgen about if “[Cyclops] strikes [him] as futuristic,” Budgen responds in a fashion that (appropriately) might as well had been Joyce:

Rather cubist than futurist, I said. Every event is a many sided object. You first state one view of it and then you draw it from another angle on another scale, and both aspects lie side by side in the same picture [34].

Mythology and fiction then, on some level, are necessary to account for the gap, the difference, in history. And Ulysses is a textual embodiment of this necessity, and how myth – the mystical, fictitious, etc. – is required to make sense of history in some relevant way. A bare example would be the format of Ulysses as a text. Being based on the Odyssey, the entire novel is dotted with references to the Homeric epic poem. This mythology frames the novel beyond what could have just been a mundane, boring day. In one such instance, in Cyclops, the entire framing of Bloom and the Citizen as analogous to the battle between Odysseus and the Cyclops is a mythologized rendering of a relatively common, non-event in Irish public life. Yet, this myth gives it life for it is through fiction that we understand what is actually at play.

Mythologies are found throughout the text – from the relationship between the Holy Trinity and Bloom and Stephen [35], to even comparisons between Ulysses and Hamlet or Ulysses and Divine Comedy. These tie the connection between facticity and fiction, history and art, making both intelligible. In harkening back to previous great literature to create his own Irish epic, Joyce demonstrates what made Shakespeare so great: he was able to “actualize the real world” because he “[drew] the political reality of history out of his own ‘long pocket’ because he and the history of his nation inhere within one another” [36]. Bloom represents this actualization because for him, although history is brutal, nightmarish even, it can be redeemed. Bloom tries to convince Stephen of this ultimately and holds the key to his nightmare. He hints at this in Ithaca where Bloom discloses his meditations to “his companion” (i.e. Stephen), first talking about the vast expanse of the universe to place it all in perspective and then remarking:

… of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity [37].

Given that Ithaca relies on Divine Comedy for some degree of inspiration, the closing line of Dante Alighieri’s text is alluded to in just the few lines before Bloom’s remark to his companion. I think it is appropriate since it illustrates what the “key” to Stephen’s nightmare would bring, quite beautifully said:

[Virgil] and I entered by that hidden road to return into the bright world; and without caring for any rest, we mounted up, he first and I second, so far that I distinguished through a round opening the beauteous things which Heaven bears; and then we issued out, again to see the Stars [38].

Bloom is responsible for Stephen’s self-actualization, not just in his view of history, but in art, and in life. History is far from being alien, nightmarish, or a material force outside of us; it is rooted, if anything, in the opposite of all of this, just as Bloom exclaimed: it is rooted in “love,” the particulars that become overshadowed by history’s ghastly scope, and the interminable camaraderie that must exist for history to press onward despite the “waters of sorrow” passing over it.

III. Conclusion

As Ulysses demonstrates, history is a spectral force. It possesses an overbearing weight, one that is felt on all levels of the human psyche. Yet, it is not rooted in anything beyond that which is human – and it is not tailored towards an end beyond us alone. Because it is rooted firmly in our own doing, it must be humanized or else it is haunting. In Irish history, or even just Dublin, Joyce hoped to find something greater than just historical particulars. Just as the Odyssey, Hamlet, the Bible, and others defined their respective epoch(s) by transcending them, Joyce hoped to do the same. Through particulars, he hoped to find the universal — that which binds all history together, and one that would represent his respective epoch.

For Joyce, history returns and comes in cycles; it is a recurring movement and a melody of ever-changing ebbs and flows. However, with each returning wave, history comes back with difference. And Joyce brought this difference to light. History alone can not do this because calculated fact-based narratives place us underneath it. Instead, Ulysses hoped to bring history closer to us. It demonstrates how a telling of history cannot distance itself from humanism. For the nightmare of history to be overcome, we must be put squarely in its reigns, to make it anew once again into the dream that it is meant to drive. We should take Ulysses to be this metamorphosis, of a nightmare to a dream.

***

[1] Christine Froula, “History’s Nightmare, Fiction’s Dream: Joyce and the Psychohistory of “Ulysses,” James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 4, Papers from the Joyce and History Conference at Yale, October 1990 (Summer, 1991), 857.
[2] This fulfillment is the creation of a new text for the era to fulfill the cyclical history that other great texts have done for their time.
[3] Richard Ellman, Ulysses on the Liffey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 141.
[4] Ibid., 142.
[5] Ibid., 52.
[6] Donald Phillip Verere, Vico and Joyce (New York: State University of New York Press, 1^st Edition, 1987), 32.
[7] Richard Ellman, Ulysses on the Liffey, 52.
[8] Donald Phillip Verere, Vico and Joyce, 32.
[9] Ibid., 33.
[10] Stephen’s irony is appropriate given that Vico characterized the “human” or “democratic” epoch as one of irony.
[11] James Joyce, Ulysses: The Gabler Edition (New York: Random House, Inc., 1986), 21 (II, 46–47).
[12] Ibid., 21 (II, 55).
[13] Ibid., 28 (II, 381).
[14] Ibid., 175 (IX, 1041–1042).
[15] Ibid., 175 (IX, 1049–1050).
[16] Daniel R. Schwarz, Reading the Modern British and Irish Novel 1890-1930 (Wiley-Blackwell, 1^st Edition, 2004), 17.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Alistair Cormack, Yeats and Joyce: Cyclical History and Reprobate Tradition (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2008), 102.
[19] Frederick Lang, Ulysses and the Irish God, (Bucknell Univ Press, 1^st edition, 1993), 84.
[20] James Joyce, Ulysses: The Gabler Edition, 27 (II, 314–318).
[21] Robert D. Newman, Weldon Thornton, Joyce’s Ulysses: The Larger Perspective (Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1987), 239.
[22] James Joyce, Ulysses: The Gabler Edition, 519 (XVI, 815–816).
[23] Robert D. Newman, Joyce’s Ulysses: The Larger Perspective, 239.
[24] James Joyce, Ulysses: The Gabler Edition, 17 (I, 648–649).
[25] Ibid., 21 (II, 46–47).
[26] Ibid., 271 (XII, 1417–1418).
[27] Ibid., 273 (XII, 1481–1483).
[28] As Joyce writes, “love loves to love love” (XII, 1493).
[29] James Joyce, Ulysses: The Gabler Edition, 272 (XII, 1462–1465).
[30] Ibid., 308–309 (XIII, 1093–1111).
[31] Robert D. Newman, Joyce’s Ulysses: The Larger Perspective, 242.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Ibid., 243.
[34] Corinna del Greco Lobner, “James Joyce and Italian Futurism,” Irish University Review, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Spring, 1985), 73.
[35] Frederick Lang, Ulysses and the Irish God, 84.
[36] Alistair Cormack, Yeats and Joyce: Cyclical History and Reprobate Tradition, 102.
[37] James Joyce, Ulysses: The Gabler Edition, 573 (XVII, 1051–1056).
[38] Don Gifford, Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated (USA: University of California Press, 2008), 581.

Bosnia through the Western Travelogue

July 5, 2015

Academic Papers, History, Literary Analysis, Theory of History

2 Comments

The development of orientalist discourse on Bosnia can most concretely be traced through the eyes of Western tourists that wrote of their experiences in the region. Through travelogues, these adventurists documented their perceptions of the Balkan periphery, and their observations permeated throughout their respective societies and provided a discursive basis for viewing the Bosnian “Other.” The first instances of Western travel interest in the troubled region began in the late 16^th century, mostly among the British upper-class [1]. However, to explore Bosnia was not their immediate goal – for Bosnia was intimately linked to the Ottoman, and it was merely seen as a passage towards Istanbul [2]. The goal of these early travelers was to understand the “Ottoman peril” during a time when the empire was cutting deep into Europe, threatening the very existence of European trade on the Italian peninsula. Therefore, their observations proved to be meager, totalizing, and nebulous; interest in Bosnia was secondary to actually exploring the Ottoman East. As the 17^th century unfolded, Westerner travelers abruptly changed their routes and began to altogether ignore the southeastern passage [3]. Passing through Vienna and Budapest proved to be much more fascinating, and perhaps familiar, to these tourists in their travels towards Istanbul and it was not until the mid-19^th century that Bosnian travel literature began to reappear in Western literary discourse yet again. During this time, political conditions had changed and Western policy towards the region began to reorient itself with new material realities. If British foreign policy is to be taken as an indicator of this development, Britain changed its viewpoints because of the changing times – the Crimean War (1854 – 1856), the 1856 Treaty of Paris, and the resurgence of the “Eastern Question” put Bosnia, and southeast Europe, once again on the Western map [4]. Interest only intensified after the Bosnian peasant revolts of 1875 and its occupation by Austria-Hungary, which put a friendlier, more accessible face to the Bosnian Orient.

During the height of these peasant revolts in 1875, archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans traveled to Bosnia to record the insurrection that was unfolding and recorded his experiences in his text Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot During the Insurrection, August and September 1875. The first part of his text is an immediate account of the troubles, captured through short phrases spaced by abrupt dashes. Violence by the Turkish Orient against Christians is highlighted as a particular problem. He writes of a “murder of a young Christian by two armed Turks,” the “dangerous spirit of the Mahomentan population,” an “outbreak of Moslem fanaticism,” “farmers… being tortured by Turks,” “panic amongst Christians,” and describes the insurrection as a “Mahometan counter-revolution” [5]. His imagination of the Bosnian woman shows a gendered orientalist discourse, as he recounts his experiences with the feminine Other. He speaks of them as covered in glittering jewelry and tunics; and compares them to “exotic insects… with the forewings of dazzling gauzy white and underwings of scarlet” [6]. In his text, he recounts a brief history of Bosnia, stressing its Slavonic origins, and how the Islamization of the region was the elevating of Islam to a “national character… of a fanatical hue” [7]. He further writes:

… Even Englishmen may be inclined to accept the conclusion that the present connection between Bosnia and the hated government of the [Ottoman] must be severed; the more so as the geographical configuration and position of Bosnia—a peninsula connected only with the rest of Turkey by a narrow neck—make it almost impossible to hold out against a serious invasion, and put it always at the mercy of foreign agitators.

Such a revolution may seem a Utopian dream… For the moment, however, the ultimate form of Bosnian government is a question of secondary importance to the paramount necessity of re-establishing order in that unhappy land [8].

In the spirit of a kind of Christian “cleansing,” he thus recommends “reconciling the Mahometan population of Bosnia to the new order of things… by sacrificing the [Ottoman]” [9].

1875 Illustrations by Sir Arthur Evans

The tropes of Western orientalist discourse are seen here in full view, to the point where one can easily list them as Edward Said characterized them [10] – such as (1) traveling to an exotic land and the exoticization and fetishizing of its people, (2) assuming fictional, unchanging essences of the land’s people, and (3) a claim to know more than the Orient which is apparent in his diagnosis for the necessity of an anti-Mohometan revolution. However, all of these are fictitious projections by Sir Arthur Evans and speak more of the orientation of Western discourse towards Bosnia than Bosnia itself. As he traverses the violent landscape, Evans illustrates history through his writing, reducing centuries of Bosnian experiences to the perceived, unchanging Orient essence. Through the travelogue, he is not merely documenting his experiences – he is directly involved in the production of history, and of narratives, using the people he encounters to pass his own judgements, and his own politics.

Still, other Western tourists followed in these same footsteps. James Creagh in his 1875 text Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah: A Journey through Hungary, Slavonia, Servia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Dalmatia, and Montenegro, to the North writes of his experiences in Bosnia during the same time Sir Arthur Evans was present. Particularly, he draws a sharp contrast between the Germanized Slavonski Brod of Croatia with that of deeper, Turkish Bosnia with the former being “modern” and the latter as “decadent” and of the East [11]. Belgian author and traveler Emile de Laveleye in his 1887 text The Balkan Peninsula also places a geographical boundary as being the Sava River. He writes,

I have never seen the difference between West and East so strongly marked. Two civilizations, two religions, two entirely different modes of life and thought, are here face to face, separated by a river… this river has really divided Europe and Asia [12].

However, he would go on to argue that this division, although existing for hundreds of years, would be corrected through Austrian influence during which “the Mussulmen character would rapidly disappear” [13]. British aristocrats Pauline Irby and Humphry Sandwith during the same period likened Bosnia to the “wilds of Asia,” which felt more like the Orient than their actual travels into Turkey and Mesopotamia [14]. It is in this sense that Bosnia to these Western travelers was more “East” than the Orient itself; exotic and different, it was akin to stepping into another world, and the geographic proximity of this other world within Europe was seemingly magical. It was magical insofar in that it was a European anomaly, and they firmly believed that stepping into it would give them insight into the East more than the actual East ever could. It was through this crude mythologized narrative that Bosnia’s suffering became the Western traveler’s entertainment, pleasure, and interest – and, to them, it was a clever, accessible way to access the Orient without actually stepping outside of continental Europe.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West deviates from this standard orientalist discourse, but only towards the Serbs; Bosniaks are excluded from West’s focus altogether. Much can be said about the over 1,100 pages of detailed text, which are filled with historical weight that is delicately put alongside West’s travels in the Balkans. She thus re-imagines the landscape with what came before it. However, she falls into a different kind of orientalism, perhaps even inverting the entire discourse – whereas previous writers had seen this Other as contradictory to themselves, West instead fetishizes them. She illustrates them to be somehow “more European” than Europe itself, possessing almost magical qualities that she has now rediscovered. This has much to do with her opinion of the Serbs, towards whom she holds the highest, almost fanatical, regard for. That being said, she maintains the same discourse as previous travelers of the Bosniaks, except it stems from a different source: she looks negatively on Bosnias because she is a Serbian nationalist, and thus views them as unfortunate “Muslim Serbs.” West reproduces the orientalist discourse through her Serbian nationalism, and thus maintains the “bulwark myth” [15] as a central component of Balkan identity which rests on being exclusionary towards Muslims. Her work absolves the Serbs of their wretched history in Western narratives, very prolifically and poetically even — but for the rest of the peoples living there, especially the Bosniaks, the same orientalist narrative is peddled with no regard.

Rebecca West. Year Unknown.

She writes of the Slavs as having an “infinite capacity for inquiry and speculation,” as opposed to the Turks who “have no word in their language to express the idea of being interested in anything” [16]. Interestingly enough, oftentimes orientalist discourse does not come from West’s words, but rather, is re-imagined through the people she encounters. In one such encounter, a Jewish man remarks that “I used to feel ashamed because the Germans took me as an equal, and here in my house I was treated as an inferior to men with fezes on their heads.”[17] In yet another heated encounter, a Bosniak man steps into their conversation, seemingly as a discursive intervention against orientalism: “then perhaps you can explain why your Belgrade gangster politicians have devised this method of insulting us Bosnians… [And] we have seen them insulting our brothers the Croats” [18]. Despite having little to no prior knowledge of the Balkans, West makes very firm statements on the nature of its people, and her diagnosis of its problems, and what should be done in the spirit of all Western travelers who came before her. She describes Bosnian women as not “[looking] in the least oppressed… they are handsome and sinewy like their men” and, in fact, they resemble the men in that “[they] look like heroes rather than heroines.”[19] In one absurd observation, she remarks “always, in this part of the world, where there is running water, there is an elderly Moslem contemplating it” [20]. Her solution to the region is, most concretely, Serbian nationalism. Her curiosity of Bosniaks stemmed from how little she knew of Islam; a “population of Islamicized Europeans” struck her as “antithetical to Europe” [21]. The Turks, she felt, “deserved destruction collectively” and that they had left the Bosniaks as a kind of “walking dead,” as the damned, with the Serbs being their opposite, as the saved [22]. According to West, however, the Bosniaks were not directly guilty of their misdirection. Their supposed “Turkishness” could not uprooted through the forces of any other group, she believed, Serb or otherwise. If we accept her words that nationalism “had come to a stage where fantasy becomes a compulsion to suicide,” then perhaps the solution for West would be symbolic suicide, one of culture, and one where Bosniaks retracted their history to embrace the fantasy, the one she took as valid, i.e. bellicose Serbian nationalism. It is in this sense that she might have agreed with Sir Arthur Evans, albeit for different reasons: in order to redeem Bosnia, its people must begin “by sacrificing the [Ottoman]” [23].

Regardless of the lucidity of the text, and the sheer brilliance of its prose, West’s text (and all of these travelogues) leaves me asking a question that may be unanswerable: can the Western traveling author ever escape the orientalist discourse? – and, even further, can any author documenting regional history ever escape the trap of essentializing, of generalizing a peoples into a pathology in an effort to describe them? The travelogue falls into these traps, for it is immensely difficult, if not impossible, to discuss Bosnia without illustrating an image of the “common person” [24]. In some sense, West’s account is “more true” than previous travelogues of Bosnia because it gives historical weight to every encounter, however I question whether even phrasing it in this fashion lends itself to being more accurate. For it is not necessarily that an account is actually “more true,” because all accounts are steeped in projections and speculations; that much is inescapable. However, it could be said that West’s account is more “vivid” if anything, because of its historical narrative and detail, but this does not necessarily make it an accurate, true representation of Bosnia. This is arguably impossible to capture in literary form. All travelogues fall victim to deferring their comparisons relative to their author’s origins; one cannot escape these biases and, in some sense, should sometimes be welcomed as a means of legitimate comparisons (within reason, of course). All of these travelling accounts attempt to get to the “real” Bosnia, oftentimes portrayed as one before Turkish influence, but locating this precise origin is impossible – this is because it does not exist. There is no derivation with which to judge Bosnia on, no historical “essence” which was lost, and no glimpse into a bright future inscribed in the land. All of these are an author’s constructions, conscious or not, and are engraved in the literary form as such. Looking at these with a critical eye, all we have left is no form, just our description of it, and perhaps that is enough to make it “true.” As it was said by photographer Michael Ackerman, “places do not exist, a place is just my idea of it” [25] – and, given that there is no historically fixed point, perhaps that is all we can actually argue at its most basic level.

***

[1] Berber, Neval. Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in British Travel Literature (Spirit of Bosnia, Vol. 5 No. 4., 2010).
< http://www.spiritofbosnia.org/volume-5-no-4-2010-october/unveiling-bosnia-herzegovina-in-british-travel-literature-1844-1912/
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Evans, Arthur, Sir. Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot During the Insurrection, August and September 1875 (University of California Libraries, 1877).
[6] Ibid., Ch.1: “The Dress of the Woman”
[7] Ibid., XCVI “Historical Review of Bosnia”
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Bullock, Allan. Trombley, Stephen. The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (Harper Collins Publishers, 1993), pp. 617.
[11] Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in British Travel Literature (Spirit of Bosnia, Vol. 5 No. 4., 2010).
[12] De Laveleye, Emile. The Balkan Peninsula (Bibliolife, 2008), pp. 72.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in British Travel Literature (Spirit of Bosnia, Vol. 5, No. 4).
[15] A core component of Serbian nationalism is seeing themselves as the honorable bulwarks against Ottoman invasion.
[16] West, Rebecca. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (Penguin Classics, 2007), pp. 302.
[17] Ibid., 313.
[18] Ibid., 311.
[19] Ibid., 327.
[20] Ibid., 396.
[21] Hall, Brian. Rebecca West’s War (New Yorker Magazine, 1996), pp. 80.
[22] Ibid., pp. 82.
[23] Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot During the Insurrection, August and September 1875 (University of California Libraries, 1877).
[24] A central problem in deconstruction literary theory: an image produced by any text is never stable.
[25] Dyer, Geoff. Journeys into History (The Guardian, 2006). Accessed May, 2015. <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/aug/05/featuresreviews.guardianreview2/

What “Into the Rose Garden” Means

May 23, 2015

Literary Analysis, Philosophy

The Romantic Philosophy of Novalis

December 20, 2013

Literary Analysis, Philosophy

4 Comments

Novalis (1799) by Franz Gareis

I. Introduction

The Latinized “de Novali,” the pen name of romantic poet and author Georg Phillip Friedrich Hardenberg, means “the one who clears new ground.” He adopted it in 1798, only three years before his death at age 28, and it was a fitting one. It was a statement of the times; the American colonies had declared their independence just a few decades prior, the French revolution descended into chaotic violence, the Haitian slaves were fighting to liberate themselves from colonial rule – much of the world was, indeed, “clearing new ground.”

Novalis was born in 1772 to a low German noble family in modern-day Arnstein, Germany. He spent much of his childhood on the family estate and was particularly fascinated with nature. He began his education through private tutors and then attended a Lutheran grammar school in Eiseleben where he became educated in standard rhetoric and the classical Western canon. He went on to pursue law at multiple locations, passing his exams with honors, and befriending many poets and philosophers who later influence German Romanticism. It was after these studies that he fell in love with Sophie von Kuhn in November of 1794, who was twelve years old at the time. Although their “relationship” was elevated to mythical heights by later German Romantics, it was largely uneventful and short. They became engaged when she was thirteen, a few months after which she became deathly ill. She passed away in 1797 at only 15 years old. This tragedy had a huge impact on Novalis and further radicalized his conceptions of beauty, freedom, and religion. To him, Sophie represented a romanticized ideal. This ideal, mixed with grief, would become the basis of his poetic work Hymns to the Night, published in 1800.

II. The Realm of the “Infinite”

Novalis’s work vividly intersects with individualism through his romantic imagery. Part of his “revolutionary” ethic was his adoption of a new identity to represent his romanticist prose. Dennis F. Mahoney writes in his book review of Novalis: Signs of Revolution by William Arctander O’Brien, “Novalis and his unique blending of literature, philosophy, politics, religion, and science are ‘Signs of Revolution’ in that they simultaneously hearken back to the past while announcing a new beginning” (Dennis, 313). The creation of the “new beginning” is what separates the character of “Novalis” from the man, Georg Phillip Friedrich Hardenberg. And moreover, the cause of his shift is explained through his love for Sophie, who fuels his work more so after her death as a myth.

Much of Novalis’ philosophy can be explained through the distinction of “infinite” and “finite,” a radicalization of his Christian Protestant upbringing. He writes in Pollen (Blüthenstaub), “we seek everywhere the unconditioned and we always find only things” (Versulius). Leonard P. Wessell, Jr. argues in Novalis’ Revolutionary Religion of Death that the quote fully encapsulates “the whole of [his] religious thinking” in that it captures Novalis’ repeated desire for “the infinite” but being held down by the “limited and transitory things.” (Wessell, 425). For Novalis, the problem of finiteness brings about grief, pain, and suffering. And it through his interactions with “things” that he discovers its ultimate destruction – the death of Sophie. Wessell, Jr. writes:

Novalis had sought to transcend to solitude of his own finiteness (i.e. his own ‘thing-ness’) by reaching out and touching, in an act of love, the finite solitude of Sophie and then had lost her. Sophie’s death – the destruction of a “thing” – threatened to cast Novalis into a vortex of despair (Wessell, 426).

Thereby, Sophie’s death represents the ultimate end of meaning in the “finite” for Novalis. He writes in Hymns to the Night:

I shed bitter tears… dissolved in pain, my hope dissipated and I stood alone by the [grave of Sophie], which hid the form of life in a narrow dark room – alone as ever a person was alone, drive by unspeakable fear – powerless, only a thought of misery (Wessell, 426).

More broadly, the “finite” is symbolic of everything beyond Novalis’ self. It is here that Novalis’ romanticism finds solace in 20th century existentialism. To Novalis and everyone else, Sophie is an object; she is finite. Although he wishes to fully understand her, the only reality he knows is his own. The irony for Novalis is that it is only through the Other (i.e. Sophie) that he is able to actually achieve his conception of being “infinite.” He is dependent on Sophie to reach the ideal, but will tragically never comprehend her completely.

It is through Sophie’s passing that Novalis views death as a “specter haunting man’s entire history, his highest cultural achievements.” For Novalis, death is the ultimate apocalypse (i.e. the end of our “finiteness”). It is the end of the only reality which we know. Therefore, while under the shadow of death, man is left frustrated and meaningless. Novalis furthers this idea by connecting time and displeasure as complicit in life’s end.

Time originates with displeasure. Thus, all displeasures [are] so long and all joy so short… displeasures are finite like time. Everything finite originates out of displeasure (Wessell, 427).

It is through this lens that Novalis places the death of Sophie in perspective; the absolute joy he experienced while with her negated the despair which time brings upon anybody. For Novalis, this is the cure for existential crisis – the reflective ability to escape one’s finiteness by achieving “absolute joy” that is profoundly “eternal – outside all time.” He saw the existentialist solution as one of turning “displeasure into joy, and with it time into eternity.”

III. Defining the “Self”

The struggle, then, is realizing how to live within the finite and with the specter of death constantly looming.

Novalis makes it a point in his writing to define individualism. His definition of the “self” has its influences from the work of philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte. The concept of “self” can be divided into two parts. On the one hand, there is just mere consciousness. This is what Novalis calls the “pure I” in that it is universal, regardless of the conditions that surround us. The other, more crucial, aspect of the self is that which we are not. Novais calls this the “empirical I.” He writes, “for the ‘I’ to be able to establish itself, there must be a ‘non-I’” (Gasparov, 13). Therefore, one’s sense of self is a reflection of all the things one is not. Each individual is dependent on social forces to develop as an “I.” For Novalis, the simple Cartesian equation of “I am I” is a tautology since we are all creations of society. Therefore, the statement does not reveal the essence of identity; it only rhetorically proves our mind exists.

The two aspects of the “self” – the pure “I” and the empirical “I.” Both are equally crucial, but second category is of particular interest to the young poet. Since identity is a construction of conditions around oneself, is not language also a similar creation? Novalis viewed language, to put it most simply, as “a multitude of fragments involved in never-ceasing commotion” (Gasparov, 13). Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin had the same idea over 100 years later. Called “dialogics,” Bakhtin also viewed language as an endless process of re-describing the world, building off others, and a constant flurry of change. Novalis was keen to recognize this fact in the late 18th century and was able to go beyond constant dialectics to a more understanding, democratic method of engaging others through dialogical discourse.

By universalizing this mode of analysis, Novalis establishes the precursor to Hegelian dialectics. Wessell, Jr. writes of his ideas:

Dialectical thinking… denies that any determinate category can exist in isolation, rather it [requires] its opposite. For instance, small is only meaningful placed in the context of large. Affirmation is only possible because of negation. Indeed, the very mean of any A entails the meaning of non-A as part of its essence (Wessell, 430).

Furthermore, each of these descriptors is found in a greater totality. To give one example, “small” and “large” are both located in the context of “size,” which unites these two contrary terms.

Thus, any conception of “freedom” must be viewed as being either a totality in and of itself, or as an opposite to another category. Making the distinction, Novalis writes, “the opposite of all determinateness is freedom” (Wessell, 430). Thus, the concept of freedom cannot be conceived without its opposite, one’s life being determined for them (i.e. oppression). Both of these concepts, freedom and oppression, exist in a greater totality – in contemporary society, this totality is our socio-economic reality: capitalism. However, the point that can be derived from Novalis is that this contradiction is not constant and unchanging. Rather, it is held together the socio-economic reality. The point is, therefore, to break this contradiction – the point is to reach an existence where these words lose their meaning, where freedom is not described, it simply is. In order for true freedom to exist, it must be a totality all by itself.

Novalis’ descriptions of the “infinite” are poetic interpretations of absolute freedom. All of his philosophy – discussions on self, dialectics, language, death – is merely reflections of his desire to transcend the bounds of the physical world. Novalis worked to universalize meaning; he wished to find the means to create individual essence while living life in the specter of death. Thus, he could be called one of the first existentialists, although a romantic poet at heart. He writes:

To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite (Rorty, 294).

Novalis romanticized his environment and found solace by doing so. Just with the imagery alone, he is able to capture authentic individualism in poetic form. He describes it as something “infinite” and “extraordinary,” which fully encapsulates the beauty of liberty in every sense of the word. Perhaps, more importantly are the implications of Novalis’ idealism and how it should induce us to act.

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– Mahoney, F. Dennis. “Novalis: Signs of a Revolution Review.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 96, No. 2. 1997.

– Versulius, Arthus. Novalis. “Pollen and Fragments.” Phanes Press. 1989.

– Wessell Jr., Leonard P. “Novalis’ Revolutionary Religion of Death.” Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 14, No. 4. 1975. pp. 425.

– Higgins, Dick. Novalis. “Hymns to the Night.” McPherson. 3rd Edition. 1988

– Gasparov, Boris. “Speech, Memory, and Meaning.” De Gruyter Mouton, 2010 pp. 13

– Rorty, Amelie. Novalis. “Philosophers on Education: New Historical Perspectives.” Routledge. 1998