So the new semester has begun, and I find I'm teaching the
Romantic poets again. I'm always
struck by the strange contradictions of the group: reactionary yet
revolutionary, nature-loving but with a strong contingent of city-bound
cockneys, obsessed with the past yet driven to invent new forms and new ways of
living. One of the more striking
of these contradictions comes in the confluence of individualism and
mysticism. It makes for a strange
pairing because it involves both an emphasis on the self and a drive to lose
the self in something larger. We
see it in many places. It's there, for example, in William Blake. He was such an insistent individualist
that he felt he must create his own system of religion, lest he be
"enslaved" by that of another man. But he also wrote, in The
Book of Thel, of how clinging to our little, temporary selfhood was a kind
of failure, and that we should embrace the way we dissolve into the living
universe after we cease to be. The
combination of an intense preoccupation with individuality and an emphasis on a
mystical loss of identity lies at the core of Wordsworth's sensibility,
too. The Prelude sets out to rival the great epics of the past, but
instead of dealing with the fate of civilizations (think The Iliad) or with the scheme of the cosmos (think The Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost), it will be a record of
"the growth of the poet's mind" in all its individual
particularity. At the same time,
though, it's also a poem about the dissolving boundary between the self and the
natural world, and its most powerful moments depict the loss of self-identity
in a sublime and pulsating fusion of spirit and nature.
Maybe
I shouldn't be surprised at the combination of individualism and mystical
self-loss. They might just have
something to do with one another.
One certainly gets that sense when reading that greatest of
proto-Romantics, Rousseau.
Rousseau was certainly a believer in the individual. Although he never actually wrote of the
"noble savage," he did argue, in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, that humanity in the state
of nature was solitary; and his Confessions
constituted a tremendous innovation in literature because of their candor and
specificity in giving the details, including the unflattering and trivial details,
of a life. What is more, his
famous Of the Social Contract argues
that the individual precedes society: collective life doesn't precede the
individual and form him, but comes about when individuals agree a collective
interest and a social formation.
The pioneering sociologist Émile Durkheim takes issue with this kind
of thinking (as embodied in the Utilitarian philosophers who emerged in the
wake of Rousseau) when, in The Division
of Labor in Society, he objects to “deducing society from the individual”
because, in his view, “collective life is not born from individual life, but it is, on the
contrary, the second which is born from the first. It is on this condition
alone that one can explain how the personal individuality of social units has
been able to be formed and enlarged.” It is wrong, writes Durkheim, to suppose that there ever were
" “isolated and independent individuals who… could enter into
relationships with one another in order to co-operate, for they had no other
reason to bridge the empty gas surrounding them, and to associate together…
this theory, which is so widely held, postulates a veritable creation ex nihilo. But this is the voice of the systems-obsessed late
nineteenth century objecting to the Romantic individualism that came
before. Rousseau is the
full-throated prophet of that Romantic individualism.
With that individualism, though, there comes a certain melancholy
loneliness. Consider the following
passage, from Rousseau's posthumously published Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Rousseau has been wandering in the hills after harvest
season has passed, gathering botanical samples. The fields, once crowded with peasants taking in the crops and
reveling townsfolk, has emptied out:
The country was still green and
pleasant, but it was deserted and many of the leaves had fallen; everything
gave an impression of solitude and impending winter. This picture evoked mixed feelings of gentle sadness that
were too closely akin to my age and experience for me not to make the comparison. I saw myself at the close of an
innocent and unhappy life, with a soul still full of intense feelings and a
mind still adorned with a few flowers, even if they were already blighted by
sadness and withered by care.
Alone and neglected, I could feel the approach of the first frosts and
my failing imagination no longer filled my solitude with beings formed after
the desires of my heart. Sighing I
said to myself: What have I done in this world? I was created to live, and I am dying without having lived. At least I am not to blame; even if I
cannot offer up to my maker the good works which I was prevented from
accomplishing, I can at least pay him my tribute of frustrated good intentions,
of sound sentiments that were rendered ineffectual, and of a patience which was
proof against the scorn of mankind.
Touched by these thoughts, I retraced the history of my soul from youth
to the years of maturity and then during the long period in which I have lived
cut off from the society of men, the solitude in which I shall no doubt end my
days. I looked back fondly on all
the affections of my heart, its loving yet blind attachments, and on the ideas
which had nourished my mind for the last few years...
The lonely, dying scene seems to Rousseau like a parallel to his own
wandering life as it comes to its final years—and this is important. He looks at the world and sees
himself. Indeed, he's unlike most
thinkers who came before him in the degree to which he obsesses over himself:
he plays a kind of symphony of his own soul's journey, with that individual
soul's desires and regrets and self-pity, its sense of solitude, and its
consolations. This is a huge
affirmation of the importance of the individual life and its little journey,
and even presents a fall and redemption story of sorts: he failed to live as he
ought, but discovered that this was inevitable, and came in the end to a kind
of mild wisdom and gratitude. But
this story doesn't start in Eden, at the dawn of history, with Adam and Eve,
and end with the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ: it takes place in the
individual life. We, as
individuals, are where all the real action takes place. This kind of thinking makes each of us
very important, but it also traps us in our own little stories, rather than uniting
us in a larger story and set of symbols relevant to a whole community of faith.
Along with this deep investment in individuality, though,
Rousseau tells us about a release from that individuality, one bordering upon a
kind of mystical experience. After
making his way back into town, he sees a Great Dane loping towards him,
followed by a carriage careering around, dangerously out of control. He braces himself to leap to safety,
but too late: he is struck, and lies unconscious for a time. When he wakes in the arms of townsmen,
he describes the following experience:
Night was coming on. I saw the sky, , some stars, and a few
leaves. This sensation was a
moment of delight. I was conscious
of nothing else. In this instant I
was being born again, and it seemed as if all I perceived was filled with my
frail existence. Entirely taken up
by the present, I could remember nothing; I had no distinct notion of myself as
a person, nor had I the least idea of what had just happened to me. I did not know who I was, nor where I
was; I felt neither pain, fear, nor anxiety. I watched my blood flowing as I might have watched a stream,
without even thinking that the blood had anything to do with me. I felt throughout my whole being such a
wonderful calm, that whenever I recall this feeling I can find nothing to
compare with it in all the pleasures that stir our lives.
I'm sure neuroscientists could describe what happened to Rousseau's
brain after the impact, and explain his perceptions in terms of the effects of
physical trauma on brain function.
But what's important isn't the physiognomy, but Rousseau's experience,
and his depiction of that experience.
The very thing into which he'd been drawn by his reflections on nature—his
selfhood, his identity—has vanished.
He is born anew, without any of the particulars of the long journey of
the soul he'd been recounting. For
this one brief moment he has no past, and no sense of belonging to his own
body: the blood could be anyone's, and is of no concern to him. He's been released from the burdens of
selfhood and sees the world as if he were no one at all, as if it flowed
through him without the filtering resistance of identity. It's much like the state of religious
bliss and selflessness achieved by many religious mystics. But it is intimately linked to the idea
of individualism, because the pleasure Rousseau feels is the bliss of release
from the burdens of his lonely self.
The solitary Romantic implies the mystic Romantic the way a wound
implies a cure.
Yes, it's too hard to be absolutely alone.
ReplyDelete