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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 391-395 Harold Mah, Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural identity in France and Germany 1750-1914. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2003; xi+227 pp.; ISBN: 0801441447; LC call no.: B1925.E5 M34; $39.95 This book lives up to its ambitious title by following the lives and works of important artists and thinkers as case histories (Herder, Winckelmann, Diderot, Goethe, David, Staël, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Mann make up the chapter headings), and by spinning threads back and forth between them and the bigger story of two great cultures. In turning "phantasy," a concept so worrisome to the Enlightenment, upon various German and French construers of cultural identity from that time down to World War I, Harold Mah postpones — until the very final page — consideration of whether "our" own European and Euro-American contemporary habits in employing this kind of critique (e.g., Habermasian, neo-Marxian, Foucauldian, etc.) should not themselves be interrogated for their suspicious presumptions. Effectively missing from the discussion of relevant developmental strands in the long passage from 1750 to 1914 is European Romanticism and its profound longer-term impact on our views of personal and group identity and of history. There is a hermeneutic circularity involved when we contest today older views of a supposedly unitary or fixed identity, by showing that percipient minds before us were searching for models, often perplexed by the task, and (unsurprisingly) evidencing an "instability" in their attachments. This circularity would be more evident if Mah's book stipulated upfront that, inter alia, Romanticism openly bequeathed to us a rich discourse on multiplicity and instability of identity, a huge revolution in psychology and myth studies, and a self-critical ironic mode. Interest in exposing the foibles of German participants proves here to be proportionately stronger than interest in sorting out such matters as why rapid slippage into mass psychosis occurred during the French Revolution, why a Napoleon emerged as forerunner of the modern totalitarian dictators, and so forth. Readers in the English-speaking world who think outside the usual box of German studies will regret that our excellent guide Mah, by programmatic decision, excludes more than occasional references to that enormous third cultural system that offered itself in the Enlightenment: the internally variegated British and American complex, with its own revolutionary tradition in the 17th and 18th centuries, a tradition which, one can argue, contrasts favorably with the French and its continental successors. But if the Anglo-American realm and if Romantic phenomena are only brought in on the margins because of a quite legitimate economy of focus, Mah offers substantial compensations as he follows — in crystal-clear presentations — the fortunes of rival ideals of individual engagement and social order as these intertwine around European notions of classicism and rationality. [end page 391] Herder provides the very apt initial case study. Mah rapidly situates this gifted northern Protestant in his successive working milieu and outlines the blending, the contradictions and shifts taking place as he was pulled by the competing claims of modern "commercial" and revived ancient "civic" republicanism, worried over the sustainability of values and the threat of decadence, and turned variously outward, drawn by cosmopolitan impulses, and inward, attracted by cultural nationalism. Mah mines Herder's account of his journey of 1769, when, being propelled into the newer kind of "public sphere," he left behind the "ideal" Hanseatic city of Riga and sought to experience the essence of Gallic sociability and the role of the philosophe in situ in France. In the process, Herder gained countervailing insights, perceiving Frederick the Great's cultural politics of imitating French ways as inherently flawed, French classicism as lacking "originality," the epigonic nature of the Encyclopédie, even the ineffectiveness of Rousseau's critique of French development because it was couched in the Gallic mode. Mah holds that the deeper contradictions in Herder's plumbing of dissatisfactions were not resolved by his meeting with the young Storm-and-Stress Goethe in Strasbourg and the resultant burst of German poetic self-consciousness. An example of persisting inner conflict would be Herder's denial of the possibility of writing Enlightenment universal histories according to a single rational standard in Also a Philosophy of History and his attempt to set up his own model of progress for all humanity in Ideas for a Philosophy of History. Chapter two adroitly bundles two major clusters of topics: on the one hand, the anxiety of possible failure through cultural over-development and, on the other, the argumentation about the nature of language and the particular virtues of French and German. Arguments asserting the capacity of the modern French tongue to serve as a transparent medium of "reason" were shadowed by the concern that its aesthetic-imaginative elements, essential sensuous aspects of civility, introduced instability, the danger of falsification that would break the link between virtue and manners. Rousseau's famous Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences (1750) is adduced as a major statement tying together the problematics of this double register of language and culture. Mah shows how German thinkers like Herder exploited the French debate in order to establish their own cult of the German language as more authentic, deeply connected to life. Contrasting two kinds of consciousness reflected in language — mere "Verstand" or abstract reasoning (superficial French) versus "Vernunft" or higher reason (profound German) — provided a legitimation for the hitherto subordinate culture that took firm hold in the Napoleonic period and was endorsed by the Idealists (e.g., Fichte and Hegel). But Mah's more daring thesis is that Nietzsche converted this French/German dichotomy, ultimately [end page 392] sensed also as a Classical/Romantic polarity, into his own categories of the Apollonian and Dionysian, yet went on to engage in a vigorous critique of German identity and culture because of its privileging of interiority. Mah concludes that, in breaking with Wagner, Nietzsche leaves "late German Romanticism" behind for "a thoroughgoing, ironic, deconstructive strategy of thinking" (70). This (in the reviewer's judgment) oversimplifies the history of Romanticism as it flows over into Modernism. Nietzsche's role in revising Schopenhauer's influential concept of the "will" and of music as its virtual "copy" goes unmentioned at this key point; so too, nothing is said here about the Romantic discovery of the "unconscious" which travels over multiple pathways, including Schopenhauer. Chapter three revisits the tyranny of classicism over Germany and France (again, Britain and America in the revolutionary age would have provided a good contrastive foil). Mah distinguishes the emphasis on political issues and a recouping of "aristocratic sociability" in France from the emphasis on aesthetic issues and interiority in Germany. The territory is familiar — the Germans start to turn against rococo style as too superficial and sensual, and a series of major figures, among whom Schiller occupies a preeminent position, wrestle with the problem of reconciling moral purpose and the pleasure principle in art. As a new kind of "classicist rational subjectivity" is established in Germany (82), the desire for spiritual "mastery" finds its expression in Winckelmann's idealization of the ancient Greeks and privileging of masculinity. Even Goethe respected Winckelmann's quasi martyrdom on behalf of his aesthetic vision. Mah identifies innumerable slippages of subjectivity and ambiguities in Winckelmann's writings, perhaps most notably the often actual "uncertainty of gender in ideal beauty" (92). In examining the issues raised by the young Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, Mah oddly glosses over the term, "principium individuationis" (100), borrowed directly from Schopenhauer, but not mentioning that individuation itself already pertains to the phenomenal realm of illusion in the Romantic philosopher so that Nietzsche's "beautiful veil" is not his own invention. Clearer is Mah's argument that Nietzsche sometimes blurs the distinction between the Apollonian and Dionysian and slips toward a rhetoric of form and visuality. After working far too hard to assimilate Nietzsche to Winckelmann (and thus maintaining the primacy of classicism as the incubus sitting on the German mind), Mah finally comes round to seeing the distinction between "Nietzsche's and Winckelmann's displays of the disturbed vision of classicism" as that "between two different construals of the unconscious" (105). The hitch here is that, whereas Winckelmann never created or drew on any formulation of the concept of the unconscious, Nietzsche knowingly did, thanks to the Romantics; and that fact radically separates him from the earlier classicist groping to understand "otherness." [end page 393] Mah accomplishes nonetheless something highly valuable in his extended analysis of Mann's Death in Venice. While acknowledging the importance of the Nietzschean elements used to frame Aschenbach's story, Mah's core interest is in Mann's serious engagement with Wickelmann and the strangeness of the classical fixation in the cultural heritage. We do not hear how Mann's own "rivalry" with Goethe, the heterosexual champion of Klassik and major Winckelmann admirer, may fit in, but we are treated to a very fine, most thorough appreciation, a fresh reading that any Mann fan will find gripping. All the chapters are lively, but chapter four, on "Classicism and Gender Transformation," may have an edge in vivacity. Starting out from the instantaneously famous 1784 painting, The Oath of the Horatii by David, one of the nimblest opportunists and survivors of the period, Mah demonstrates how pronounced was the Revolution's privileging of masculine heroism and, concomitantly, how the role of public women, so prominent in the 18th century, was rejected. Once again, Rousseau (who originated in puritanical Geneva) is shown leading the way in criticizing the decadence of a feminized old regime. Careful attention is paid to Goethe's condemnation of masculine posturing and efforts to recuperate qualities of old-regime civility and the feminine voice and principle (e.g. in Iphigenia, Hermann and Dorothea, Conversations of the German Refugees, The Natural Daughter). Equal space is devoted to Madame de Staël, the epitome of the public woman doomed to exile by the ruling forces of her times, and a crucial disseminator to Europe (and we should add, to the New World) of "the image of Germany as a nation of poets and thinkers" (143). Having cut her teeth on the mellower, sentimental Rousseau of La Nouvelle Héloïse and having critiqued the ethos of French aristocratic society, Staël posited a virtuous Romantic culture across the Rhine as counterweight in On Germany, yet she could not really abandon her attraction to gracious civility. Mah explicates to great advantage the almost diagrammatic juxtapositions of cultural attributes in Staël's 1807 novel Corinne, or Italy. But in all candors, the reviewer wonders whether there is any valid purpose in pejoratively labeling Staël's quite deliberate four-cornered cultural "mapping" of Europe (England, Italy, Germany, France), which subsumes a host of oppositions, "a complex structuralist phantasy" (149). If we, too, perceive the wonderful assemblage of details which Mah cites, as the novel enacts "the terms of cultural conflict" (154), is not Corinne just as worthy as later mappings in this broad genre such as Mann's The Magic Mountain? Why should any simple "realistic" as against her putatively "ingenious" but "phantasmatic solution" (Mah's term, 156) been possible? [end page 394] The book is capped by a chapter on the problem of time and all those thorny questions of progress and modernity, which became all the more acute when the Revolution seemed to tear the very fabric of history. Mah's survey of the clashing views on societal and political processes is an impressive tour de force. Of the figures reflecting on the fate of German culture to whom Mah pays more extended attention, the later Heine is the most interesting for his honesty in feeling finally baffled by the course of events. While it is understandable that Mah concentrates on Marx's measuring of German development against the French, here is another instance when even a brief triangulation — mention of Marx's views on British and American prospects — would be useful. Marx's crypto-religious belief in ultimate things is a suitable point for closing of this examination of the Revolution as a colossal trauma inspiring the sense that a new epoch had dawned. This is a splendid book, exhibiting a keen intelligence and marshalling an impressive variety of evidence. Both students of literature and students of intellectual history will find it stimulating.
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