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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison,
and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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Here's a dandy on the so-called romantic temperament.
"Sensitive, emotional, preferring colors to form,
the exotic to the familiar, eager for novelty for adventure.
Above all, for the vicarious adventure of fantasy,
reveling in disorder and uncertainty,
insistent on the uniqueness of the individual to the point of making a virtue of eccentricity,
the typical romantic will hold that he cannot be typical
for the very concept of the typical suggests the work of the pigeon-holing
intellect he scores.
Though his contempt for this world of reason and common sense calculation
may push him toward other worldliness,
the romantic is too much of a man of words and sensations to make a good mystic.
He may admire the mystic, especially the exotic mystic from the east,
but he himself is a good Westerner.
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Amazing what you come across sometimes when you're researching the topic for a show as I do,
a week in and a week out when entitled "Epinions is on air."
The venerable commentator I quoted goes on to state,
"However difficult the romantic personality may be to isolate an analysis,
it can be recognized all through Western cultural history.
Your rippities and katalis were surely romantics.
The ode et amo, I hate and I love of katalis,
is a classic assertion of romantic ambivalence.
Vian hablé were romantics, even though they were Frenchmen,
who, as Frenchmen, so 19th century English and German romantuses thought,
should have been incapable of transcending the petty ways of mizzou and la hazel naught."
Crane Brinton, you were a distinguished scholar in your day,
but as John McEnroe once said at Wimbledon, you cannot be serious.
Or maybe it's your aping of romantic bombasses getting in the way of your otherwise perfectly cogent remarks.
I agree with you by the way that there is such a thing as the romantic soul or temperament,
which exists independently of the movement we know as romanticism,
or, quoting Brinton again,
"There are then, in our Western civilization, presumably always, born romantuses and born classicists."
If Brinton's declaration is true, then I suspect I am one of those people who was born a romantic.
The fact that I believe you can be born one thing or another already qualifies me as an essentialist,
and therefore probably also as a romanticist.
That's why it's so important to specify what we mean by romantic.
Yet here's the dilemma.
While I feel that I'm at a heart of romantic, I'm not at all sure what that means exactly,
since I have only an indeterminate, obscurely metaphysical, mostly intuitive understanding of the concept.
To put it crudely, it is primarily because I believe in the existence of the soul,
of an irreducible principle of individuation and animate selfhood that I believe I'm romantic.
Yet while I feel relatively certain that I share with romantics the belief that there is, in living things, a unified core of vitality,
from whose matrix, both organic and aesthetic forms arise,
the nature of that vital core remains opaque and mysterious to me.
So what I'm left with finally is more of a feeling than a reason position,
or better what I'm left with is a strong sympathy,
which is different in nature than intellectual agreement,
with the philosophical and aesthetic intuitions of various individuals whom we identify as romantics.
Individuals like Gertey, Colridge, William Blake, Schlegel, Schiller, Budle, Hambel, to name a few.
It's because I'm in need of some basic clarification of what it means to be a romantic that I'm especially pleased to welcome to entitled opinions,
a guest who has just published a book that goes to the very heart of the issues that interest me the most about romanticism.
Denise Gigante is an associate professor of English here at Stanford,
and the book in question is called Life, Organic Form, and Romanticism,
which came out just a few weeks ago with Yale University Press.
Denise, welcome to the program. I'm glad you could join us today.
Thank you Robert, I'm glad to be here.
It's surprising when you think about it or when I think about it that after more than four years and 70 episodes of entitled opinions,
I still haven't done a show on romanticism, not until today that is.
Since as I mentioned, I feel a real affinity with the romantics,
but in retrospect, I'm glad it turned out this way because your new book Denise deals with something that really is
fascinates me, namely the philosophy of life that informs so much of what I would call romanticism's choreography,
by which I mean things like its championing of the imagination,
spontaneity, intuition, medievalism, infancy, heroic individualism, myth, symbol, revolutionary politics, and so forth.
These are important manifestations of the romantic spirit to be sure, but what appeals to me most about your new book is its effort to reconstruct and probe the philosophical doctrines,
or theories of organic form that underlie and in many ways provide the foundations for that spirit.
Am I representing you correctly when I say that?
Yes, I would make, since this is your first show on romanticism, I hope there will be more,
one qualification though to the definition of romanticism, which you said is as a movement independent from something we might call the romantic soul or temperament.
I would say that romanticism as a movement is not separate from that, but romanticism as a historical period is separate from that.
In the difference, I think lies in how we conceptualize literary history, literary period designations, and part of what I'm trying to do in the book is to make a case for romanticism as a
zeitgeist, a spirit of the age, a collective movement, which is not really the way it's been seen over the past two to three decades.
There's been a change in the academic study of romanticism to categorize it as a historical period, following between certain dates, so if we take the French Revolution, 1789 on the one hand and the reform bill, 1732 on the other,
that's one way of defining the period if we take the publication of lyrical ballads in 1798 and the death of words worth in 1850, that would be another way of defining the period, some critics have preferred a romantic century, which would run from 1750 to 1850 and would allow for a lot of the continuities that I see between the 18th and the 19th centuries.
What gets lost with thinking about romanticism as a historical period is exactly the "guest," the sense that there is a movement and a soul to the collective spirit of the imaginative literature and philosophical thought that was in circulation at the time.
Can I ask why you say that something gets lost with the notion of the period because the "guest" or the spirit is part of the spirit of the age?
No? So it would seem that spirit is connected to age or at least a historical period, or do you understand the zeitgeist differently?
No, it is connected to historical period and I think that if we think about romanticism as its own thing, that in Europe varies from nation to nation, the historical dates by which we define that, different in France, from Germany, from Britain, and yet if we think about it as a movement or a zeitgeist, it pervades really the whole period from the late 18th through the early 19th century.
And transgressive is not only national boundaries, but disciplinary boundaries as well.
So poets at the time, and when we talk about the tradition of British romantic poetry, we're talking about words worth, coal rich, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Ward Byron, those are the big sex.
If we talk about poets at the time, we have to keep in mind that they were also quite seriously philosophical thinkers as well, and scientists, coal rich, experimented with electricity.
Actually, we get to the part that interests me the most in your work is that these were not just poets on the Mediterranean, composing little lyrics at a Byron. They had a extremely reasoned, reflective, philosophical position or commitment to certain doctrines, and above all this doctrine of life.
And if I can read to you some of your own prose from your introduction about how you describe what you're up to in your book, you say that this book seeks to recover the era of vitalism, roughly 1760 through 1830 as a context for making sense of the life contained in the poetry of the time at the level, not only of content, but also of form.
And if you're interested to test the literary critical value of the analogy by juxtaposing artistic expressions of living form with biological ideas and circulation at the time, and offers a pragmatic methodology for reading certain seemingly formless poems and central symbolic figures contained within them as living forms.
Now, we'll speak about what these formless poems are that you deal with later in the book, but first, could you flesh out this connection between the aesthetics of romanticism and these biological ideas that were in circulation at the time, which you actually reconstruct at the beginning of your book? What were the most important biological ideas that the zeitgeist of romanticism was connected with?
Well, let me back up from that and address the question of analogy, which is, I think, extremely important as a conceptual tool for legitimating zeitgeist.
There was an analogy for the romantic poets and philosophers between how nature produces organisms living creatures and how poets and artists of other media produce living form.
So, there was an analogy established between the organism and the organic form of the artwork that was absolutely central to romanticism and vital to what most authors were trying to do.
So, I would say that, I would say that the essence of nature must be mastered. The Natura Naturans, which is distinct from Natura Naturata concept of nature as process versus a concept of nature as an already formed, created mechanism.
He says, "And this presupposes a bond between nature and this higher sense and the soul of man." He says that the artist must imitate that within the thing, active through form and figure as by symbols.
And only in so far as he sees this by vitally imitating it, has he himself created anything truthful.
So, there was a difference between poetry as craft and poetry as living form. And genuine poetry to borrow words, words, phrase from the preface to lyrical, but it's genuine poetry has to be living form.
Poetry as craft is mechanism and it doesn't rise to the level of what most romantic artists I believe were after, which was to capture what William Haslett called gusto or the internal character, the living print.
So, if I understand, Col. Rich correctly, the Natura Naturans is an active internal process of coming into form in trinsic to an organism, which is self-forming in a certain sense. I mean, correct me if I'm getting this wrong, as opposed to another concept of organic form, which would be preformationist, I think is the technical term, where the forms of living form are also
where the forms of living things have their construct outside or superimposed on them usually bevel by God in the Christian context. Aristotle also believe that there were, well, we don't want to get into Aristotle and his teleology is a nature, but nevertheless, for the artist or poet to imitate, which I think already is a bad word, is a non-romantic word, the way I understand romanticism is not part of imitation.
It's not even, I'm even not happy with the terminology because it means that two things are happening parallel in similitude rather than participating in the vital essence that is common to both. But nevertheless, Col. Rich is pointing out this hugely important difference between a romantic aesthetic and some other kind of aesthetic.
That's right. The term that you mentioned preformation or what we today think of as creationism is actually a concept of creation opposed to organic form, at least in the time that we're talking about now.
Preformation entails the idea of an external creator, pressing form as one would press a mold onto wax, pressing preformed form onto matter.
The opposite of that, which really started coming to the fore around the 1760s, was the idea of epigenesis and this does go back to Aristotle, and Aristotle's notion of self organizing matter, the idea that forms somehow organizes itself.
I think when the romantic poets were attempting to produce living form, and I believe very consciously a poet like William Blake sets out to create living form, they were intending to play God by capturing the same kind of potential energy in the material forms of their work as they saw happening in nature.
But you could say they're also playing life in so far as life is self forming.
Which is more accurate. So if you take, for example, the critic, MH Abrams concept of natural super naturalism, the idea that God in the 17th century gives way at this time to a spirit of nature, very, very seriously described, a spirit of nature, a pantheistic,
is how some people think of words were thin, cold rages idea of this, but there's also Shelley, who, you know, many people think of Shelley as an atheist, because he publishes a pamphlet called the Necessity of Atheism and gets kicked out of Oxford University for refusing to renounce that pamphlet.
But what Shelley means by Atheism is what he calls a bug-bear to scare children. It's an idea of going against established institutionalized Christianity.
So for Shelley, the soul is, and I'm reading from the book here, "That which makes an organized being to be what it is without which it would not be so."
He says in his letters, "What is man without his soul? He's not a man. What are vegetables without their vegetative power? Stones without their stony."
He says, "Each of these as much constitute the essence of man, stones, etc. as much make it to be what it is as your God does the universe."
And he extends that to mechanical things, and he says, "The soul of a clock is gravity."
So, Coleridge, also in one of his works, speaks of living form as unity and multi-play, what is it?
"Multeity."
What does he mean by that?
So, "Multeity" is a word that pretty much we associate with Coleridge, but he claims he picks up from scholastic tradition, which is a way of saying multiplicity without the idea of multiplicity.
The multi-day is a co-terminus with the idea of organic form in which the many still seen as many become one.
And that's aligned with the idea of the symbol, which as you say is a much more way of accurate or romantic way of understanding zeitgeist than analogy, I think.
And analogy is a little mechanistic compared to symbol.
And when you use a term mechanistic, we understand, let's say, an organism or something, a composite, which is made up of different aggregate parts, no aggregated together, let's say mechanically rather than organically, whereas the organic hole is different from the mechanical hole in so far as, if you believe in the vitalism of the period, which I believe many of these romantics did,
the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts because there is this unity that unifies the multi-day.
Exactly. Exactly.
Yeah, that's sort of driving straight to the heart of the matter. Unity and Multeity is how Coleridge defines life.
He lived with a physician for the last years of his life, and he helped write a theory of life for this physician to present at the Royal College of Surgeons, and in his theory of life, which is a very vitalist document, he defines life as unity and Multeity, elsewhere in his lectures on aesthetics, or what we call the lectures on the principles of genial criticism, genial being genius.
He defines beauty as Multeity in unity.
So life and beauty or vital power and aesthetic power are somehow precisely the same if not an analogy, certainly a symbolic unity that is at the heart, I think, of romanticism.
And I think what's important about this moment for considering organic form is that it is the moment precisely when science collides with aesthetic theory and practice in a way that it perhaps hasn't since.
Most of the great romantic thinkers were polymaths and very interested in the mechanical workings of the empirical world as they were the unifying spirit, which they pretty much all believed in.
Good for them, and good for the college, I like the way you put it.
Last week we had a show, I did a show on the music of Beethoven with Stephen Hinton, and our discussion was a two-part show, a lot of it revolved around the aesthetic of Beethoven as something having an organic quality to it, which would be either outright romantic or proto-romantic, and so far as we went through some examples of his symphonies.
Especially the fifth, where there are all these parts, it's made up of different maltletes, there's no doubt that in the four movements are, and yet through the variation of the themes and the motifs and so forth, you get a unity of the whole, which is far greater than the sum of all those parts, so that the part, no part can really be intrinsically divorced from the whole, which amounts to an aesthetic,
when theorized, might become romantic. Perhaps it's an aesthetic principle which applies to all different kinds of aesthetic styles, not necessarily only romantic, but it's the romantic movements theorization of organic form, I think that makes romanticism so distinctive and exciting.
Right, and I think what's also important is the fact that not only did the romantic poets feature the question, "What is life?" thematically in their greatest poetry, and I think we can include their words worth's prelude, "Shullies Triumph of Life," and so forth and so on, "Kites's Fall of Hyperion." Not only did they thematically hammer away at the question of what is life,
especially when life is considered as a power but formally, and this is the idea of attempting
to produce living form. It wasn't enough to analyze allegorically the quest for the
principle of life. It was enacted in poetry, and this is where there's a difference in the
romantic period between narrative and poetry. So, for example, Frankenstein, which haunts
the entire period, I think, is in the dialogue between Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley considered
a sort of mechanistic, allegorical way of telling the story about the quest for the principle
of life, and in her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley says
that her husband was not up to inventing the machinery of a story. So, instead, a lot of us
find a virial kind of poetry that Shelley produced is an attempt to embody that power rather
than to narrate allegorically. And my discussion of his poetry focuses on the use of symbol,
which is very important, and I think probably a way of understanding character in general
in the romantic period.
Yeah, let's talk about that in a moment, but first about Frankenstein, because I'm very curious
the role that that novel plays in this larger framework. Did I understand you to be saying
that Mary Shelley understood it as a kind of allegory of a mechanistic form of production? Not
only is the monster kind of mechanically produced, but that she wrote the book on aesthetic
principles which were somehow imitating the same mechanistic process?
Yeah, I think she accepted Percy Shelley's idea that that was the case, that there was
a fundamental distinction between narrative and poetry, and that poets sort of somehow
rose above, and Shelley puts narrative in the category of history, whereas he puts poetry
in the category of philosophy. And the difference there is that something historical events
happen as they occur accidentally, whereas philosophically events must happen. Let me just read
from the book what Shelley says about this might be more clear.
The poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference
between a story and a poem that a story is a catalog of detached facts which have no other
bond of connection than time, place, circumstance, cause, and effect. The other is the creation
of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature as existing in the mind
of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. The one is partial and applies
only to a definite period of time and a certain combination of events which can never again
recur the other is universal, and contains within itself the germ of a relation to whatever
motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature. So a poem is
full of softball and so far as it's universal, and that idea that it contains the germ of
all possible relations means that every time we read it, it enacts itself anew. It
sort of wakes itself up in the reading. And that's not the same thing as a story in which
parts are pre-arranged. Frankenstein's monster is a monster precisely because his parts don't
cohere. Frankenstein's effort, Victor Frankenstein's effort, is to put together the most beautiful
parts that he can find into the most beautiful human form that he can imagine and animate it.
And that would be like that's the version of playing God allegorically. The monster comes to life,
but he doesn't cohere. There's no unity in multi-ity, evidence in the creature. Frankenstein's
creature. And for that reason, he causes disgust and horror in anybody who encounters him, and
that's as much an aesthetic response as it is anything else.
So I think that passage you read from Shelley was very interesting. I think it derives from Aristotle's
distinction in the poetics between, let's say, the empiricism of history versus the
universality of poetry, is the poet then does his participation in the vital force, the vital power of life,
take place through the agency of intuition, of imagination, some trans-rational or super-rational
faculty, or is there a better term for it? Well, I think imagination, which was actually
taboo for many years in critical discussion, was very much considered to be a power,
soulish power, if you will, akin to an insipathy with the kind of vital power that was seen to
animate the world. So, for Coleridge, the soul is everywhere, and in each, informs all into one
graceful and intelligent whole. That's the same definition that he uses for the imagination,
and he borrows the German term, "I'm building's craft for imagination, craft power,
building formation, and ions into one, the formation through a power into one kind of unity, unity,
and volatility." And there are political implications to this too, which I might just mention here
before I forget. Okay, so I think it's probably best laid out by Schiller and his letters on
the aesthetic education of man, where he talks about the polypoid character or the sort of
epigenetic or self-forming character of a state that's not a state of compulsion, but a state of
freedom. And when parts are to cohere on their own, when parts are to self-organize, and we consider
this social parts, you know, each individual must have the capacity to grow into the whole.
And that's Blake's version of what he calls the minute particular. The moment the single entity,
whether it's a person or an idea, which has the capacity to remake the whole in its image,
that's opposed to mechanic form, such as, for example, you know, more autocratic
the system in which power is exposed, imposed from without. As usual, I think the most compelling,
interesting philosophical doctrines are the ones that have the most profound fault lines,
and perhaps even contradictions in them. And in this case of romanticism, the one thing I've,
it's either a limitation of my own understanding of it, or it is a true fault line,
where there's so much insistence on organic wholeness and organic unity or multi-plated,
multi-plated, so forth. Multated. Multated. That you would think that a doctrine of that sort
would be naturally sympathetic to the principle of monarchy, for example, which was traditionally
understood as the king being the body of the body politic as a whole, that everything was
summarized in, you know, the body of the king and in the kingdom, all parts were organically
and holistically related, you know, to the greater transcendent principle of the monarch.
I think Burke, in his critique of the French Revolution, was holistic in this way.
But of course, we associate the romantics, especially the British romantics with being on the side
of a radically republican politics in which there's kind of supremacy of the individual citizen
and an insistence on the individual's autonomy from, you know, the larger kind of societal
network of political organization. Is that a fault line or is it just the fact that my understanding
of it is merely partial? Well, I would say that the understanding of monarchy as the political body
or the body of the state being one with the monarch isn't exactly as you describe it. So,
if you think, for example, of the frontispiece to Hobbes, Leviathan, in 1651, which has an image
of the Leviathan or the state, the monarch, with a very sort of a steward kind of head atop the body,
and the body contains, inside a tiny, tiny, tiny little images of citizens all facing and looking
up toward the head. So, it's not exactly that the monarch is the body of the state, the monarch
sits atop the body of the state. He's the head running the mechanism of the body,
and I think that's fundamentally different than the idea of a state as self-organizing,
you know, which comes along with the liberal politics of the 18th century and so forth,
in which parts sort of from underneath, in theory, are supposed to organize themselves
into the kind of a hole which only exists and only has logic, and so far as it exists for the
sake of the parts. Yeah, I guess you're right, but for me, I just cannot get beyond the image
of decapitation as the precondition for a Republican politics, namely a severing of the unity of a
body by, in fact, chopping off the head of the king as a symbolic figure for maybe the liberation
of a new possibility of unity, but that severance, I've always had trouble conjugating, that
the severance of the king's body from a romantic concept of organic holistic form, that's all.
Yeah. Now, Denise, your book deals with the biology of the time, the vitalism, and then it
has a particular fascination with the monstrosity. We've talked about Frankenstein, although
it's Frankenstein's not one of the main works that you analyze, but you do have chapters on
Christopher's Smart, and on Shelley, as you mentioned, you also have a chapter on William Blake.
So the works that you're dealing with are works that have traditionally been understood to defy,
again, paradoxically defy the whole notion of an aesthetic unity. So in the case of smart,
it is jubilato ano, jubilato ano, and in Blake's, it's the Jerusalem, and Shelley's
vitalist witch is your third chapter, and then finally Keats Lamia. So why did you choose to deal with
these works which have been traditionally or conventionally understood as monstrosities?
Okay, so I think one of the things that I'm arguing in the book is that organic form,
as it's talked about today and derived from romantic philosophy and poetics, is simplistic. It is
something that Coleridge, for the most part,
unity which displaces differentiation or multiplicity is not the kind of unity that's involved here.
And the book is trying to look at long, seemingly formless forms that I believe also in
the same way that we understand that. So smart's poem is a wacky, seven folio-page manuscript poem
composed while he was in the madhouse four years running, two or three lines a day. And critics
look at that poem and debate whether or not it's a poem. I read that poem as an instantiation of
organic form and very self-consciously so, so that it's formerly as well as in content,
looking at science and suggesting other ways of understanding organization and power.
Shelley and Keats both have poems which are traditionally read as allegories,
and yet they don't work that way. And so I'm trying to get inside the poems and read them
from their symbolic centers or as in the case of smart and Blake. And I think it's very useful
to understand smart as an influence on Blake. Blake certainly had access to the manuscript of
Juba Latayagna when he was working out his really fetching, his illuminated printing style
as we see it in all of his works from the songs of innocence and experience through Jerusalem.
So there's a concept of organic form here that defeats, if you want to say,
telos often. The vitality could be so excessive that it overflows the possibilities of
containment by traditional forms. So const definition of monstrosity can I give you
const? Because this is what I'm reading as underlying a romantic redefinition of monstrosity.
So classically, traditionally, all the way through ancient times, monstrosities seen as an
ill assemblage or misconstrued conjunction of parts, parts that don't add up to a harmonies whole,
deformities, abnormalities. Whereas in the romantic period, once life is not seen as structure
anymore, but is seen as power, monstrosity becomes identified with an excess of power that potentially
can defeat form. So, Kant says that an object is monstrous if by its magnitude it nullifies the purpose
that constitutes its concept. What does that mean? It's monstrous if it's magnitude nullifies the
purpose that constitutes its concept. The idea that forms of nature as well as aesthetic forms
are purpose of is a very romantic idea. There is a teleology inherent in all things according to
which they realize their own innate form and the possibility that there's too much power,
a power that goes beyond the sublime into monstrosity is I think what comes out in these works also.
Sure, excess is the path to the palace of wisdom. It's a bit of a road of excess leads to the
palace of wisdom. There you go. I'm fascinated by some in your chapter on smart. I mean, this poem
is totally amazing and he speaks about this ocular harpsichord that's designed to play colors instead
of musical notes. This might be old hat to people in English departments, but for some
outside of the English canon as an Italianist, I just found this totally fascinating.
I'm reading here from the poem where he declared outright that Newton's notion of colors is
alogos. Unful of softball for the colors are spiritual. It's very much like what
Hambod does with vowels when he gives them a particular color. He gave in response his own
revitalized rainbow. So, quote, "for white is the first and the best. For there are many intermediate
colors before you come to silver. For the next color is a lively gray. For the next color is blue.
For the next is green of which there are 10,000 distinct sorts. For the next is yellow,
which is more excellent than red, though Newton makes the red the prime. God be gracious to John
Delap for red is the next working round the orange. For red is a sundry sorts till it deepens
to black. For black blooms and it is purple. For purple works off to brown, which is of 10,000
acceptable shades. For the next is pale. God be gracious to William Whitehead. For
pale works out about to white again. Now that color is spiritual appears in as much as the
blessing of God upon all things descends in color." You read something like that, you say,
"I could live with romances and for them. I don't have to go in any color."
It's gorgeous, isn't it? Yeah, and it's evidence, I think, of smart writing in the 1760s as a
romantic, which again is another one of the implicit arguments here. But the response to
Newton's rainbow throughout the 18th century and into romanticism was complex. It was immense.
It was intense. There have been books written about it. But this would be a good way to talk about
Keats in a nutshell. At a dinner party held by Benjamin Hayden, the romantic painter,
the romantic essayist Charles Lamb, and Hazlet and others toasted to the dissolution of
Newton's rainbow. Newton's rainbow represented a mechanization of the wonder of nature. If we can
analytically break the rainbow down into its quantifiable parts, and those are very
calculable through the mechanism of the prism, we have we have wonder reduced to science.
I believe what Keats was up to in his poem, "Lamia," his narrative poem, "Lamia," that again,
I read more symbolically than anything else, is bringing back the power, the vital power of the
rainbow, and the beauty of the rainbow through this monstrous female monster who embodies life.
And she's too big for the story. She's too big for the poem. She's too big for her lover.
And she's a monstrous in her too muchness. And that's Keats's response to Newton's rainbow, I think,
that there is power which we don't understand, which is not calculable in the way that
physical force is calculable. And I would say one thing here, which is that Newton
left the origin of his understanding of physical force out of his scientific system.
It was not something that he was capable of understanding in his belief. And scientists,
life scientists use that as an excuse, if you will, to say, well, there is such a thing as vital
power, the human organism or the living creatures contain a kind of power that's bigger than
physical force. And just as Newton said, the origin of gravity is out of our realm of knowledge,
we don't have to explain the source of vital power. But we know it's there. The difference being,
you can't calculate vital power or quantify it the way you can't physical force. It doesn't
reduce to a formula, just like the rainbow doesn't reduce to a spectrum of light waves.
I'm curious when you say that we cannot understand the force of gravity or the force of vital power,
whether the same injunction could apply to a poem like Laumia, where when I hear about this
monstrously big woman who's too big for her lovers too big for the world in a certain sense,
the first temptation of the reader is conventionally to allegorize such a figure. But allegorization is
a mode, is an attempt at explanation and understanding. And so I guess I have two questions for you
in this regard. First, you definitely do not allegorize that figure in your reading. And the second
question would be would not the same apply to Moby Dick in Melville? I mean, I know that you're
an Americanist, but nevertheless, the typical kind of spontaneous desire on the part of readers is
to allegorize the whale as this, that or the other, and somehow stabilize its signification
in a conceptual framework. Whereas in my reading of Moby Dick, it's so transcends any possibility of
containment through an allegorical imposition that I would see it very much in those terms.
Absolutely. And so far as Melville was a romantic, these figures that are greater than life,
these mythical creatures who burst out of this period such as Moby Dick or the vampire, who then gets
co-opted later in the 19th century into narrative and Dracula, the vampire comes out of the
romantic moment as a force again of excess life. Blood was seen as one of the places in which
the supervania and vital power might live. And the romantic vampire is a creature that sort of
explodes out of narrative, just as Frankenstein, I think explodes out of ultimately the story,
can't be captured. He's figural, he's symbolic. And I think Moby Dick absolutely
falls into the category of that which really can't be analyzed. Let me just, I found the passage
from a Keats' Lamiya where he talks about the loss that comes about with the rainbow, okay. So he says
in Lamiya, there was an awful rainbow once in heaven. We know her woof, her texture, she is given
in the dull catalog of common things. Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, conquer all mysteries
by rule and line, empty the haunted air and nomad mine, unwave a rainbow. So the implication is that
the awful rainbow, the sublimity that was once accessible in nature has been reduced to a catalog
in taxonomy. It was very much part of this of common things.
You know, is another distinction I think between, for example, natural history and natural
philosophy, which is a way this period is separating itself to natural history, was all about
examining the pieces of God's world and like a mosaic figuring out how they went together through
empirical investigation without worrying too much about causes because God was the cause
where his natural philosophy becomes the concern of romantic poets which does search for causes.
And the pieces are supposed to be infused with this unifying power in a way that
natural historians didn't worry about. Historians get put together the parts as a kind of aggregate
and that would add up to God's nature whereas natural philosophers, the end of the 18th century
without that external creator sought to understand how nature through a kind of power analogous to
the imagination pulls itself together, fills in its own cracks.
Do you want to say a word about Blake?
Okay. Yes. One of the most fascinating figures. Why don't we also
agree that we'll do a show on Blake in the future? Okay.
The vote to Blake, but at least a few words about him.
Okay. I would love to say a few words about Blake. So Blake, you know, intentionally set out to
produce what he calls living form and in his words, living form is eternal existence.
I would say that Blake was very much like Shelley and attempting to deconstruct his own
system ofization. You know, I do not set out, you know, he purchases his artistic hero,
loss, striving with systems to deliver individuals from those systems.
So Blake really didn't set out to give a preformed system in his poetry,
but what he did do in the attempt to produce living form was invent and entirely new. He worked against
the mechanistic production of art in the late 18th century, which would take
text to a type setter. It would take a visual design to an illustrator. It would take the
illustration to an engraver. It would take the whole product to a buck producer who would put
the pieces together and that would add up. And Blake opted out really of the commercial
print system by producing artwork and what he called relief etching style or illuminated
printing style in which he maintains autonomy over all processes of production. And each of his
artworks, each of his poems, is an original. You know, there's no way to reproduce Blake unless we do
it now on the internet, which is, you know, probably subject for a later show.
But it's very much bound up with this idea that Blake was attempting to melt a parent's surfaces
away or structures to reveal the infinite which was hid. And this is his way he describes it
in the marriage of heaven and hell. To melt a parent surfaces away to reveal the infinite which was
hid. And do you want me to explain? Yes, I do. Okay. That's my favorite part of how Blake
is. Okay. All right. So if we, so Blake says that this style of illuminated printing, the
technique for it came to him in a vision from his brother Robert who had passed away and was
Blake's favorite brother. Robert came to him in a vision shortly after his death and said,
"Here's how you are to produce your work." And it was the exact opposite of how
the reproduction of illustrations were traditionally done. And Taglio etching involved
covering a copper plate. There was no photography, right? So covering a copper plate with wax
and taking a buren or kind of stylus and etching away at that wax image. So that when you
got done, you took the design and what was printed on paper was the background for the design that
would have been etched into the copper. Blake did the opposite. He took a brush, dipped it in an acid
resistant wax, drew all of his plates by hand backwards, keeping in mind the script has to go on
to the paper backwards. So he drew these elaborate visuals backwards. And then burned away the
excess with an acid so that the infinite which was hid, which was his own design, would come
out of the copper. Almost like one of Michelangelo's sculptures coming out of the rock.
I believe that there are some people in our midst and in our past that were extra terrestrial.
And that Blake was one of the... In fact, I began the show in the model quoting the
Sky Crane, Brinton. And I kind of poked a little fun at him. But some of his statements are
actually, you know, maybe on the market. But let me get your opinion about what I quoted there when
he speaks about the romantic that though his contempt for this world of reason and common sense
calculation may push him toward other worldliness, the romantic is too much of a man of words and
sensations to make a good mystic. He may admire the mystic, especially the exotic mystic from the
East, but he himself is a good Westerner. Can one say that of Blake? Yeah, I think.
Was Blake not a true mystic in... I think the biggest mistake in reading Blake is to read
him as a mystic. Blake had this concept of what he calls abstraction and his concept of abstraction
is very close to what the romantics mean by allegory, which is an abstraction from sensory experience.
And the idea, presumably of mysticism as getting out of nature and out of material, really,
I think was antithetical to Blake. Blake was very much, you know, Blake knew that change had to
come about through material means. And he was a realist, you know, even as a visionary,
I think he used, well, put it this way, whatever was going on in Blake's mind, we don't understand,
right? And it's entirely possible. There was a physiology there that produced
synesthetic experience, for example. You know, I have a student in one of my Blake classes who
has synesthesia and she sees, when she sees words, she sees color. And it's entirely possible,
something like that was happening. Blake and he made the most of it, but he was not somebody who
wanted to escape into a visionary world. He wanted to transform world through his, he carried the
manuscript of Jerusalem around under his arm, you know. So, so Brinton gets to the last word here,
I think so. That's great. To conclude our show, Denise, you brought along actually a very interesting
piece of music that we're going to get to. And, you know, we've been talking around this whole issue
in a certain sense of, you know, symbol and allegory. And in a very conventional way, kind of
championing symbolism, he have properly understood over allegory or mechanism. And thank God,
there's no more demonian fascism around to police or discourse that's sympathetic towards the symbolic.
But would you like to say a word about symbol and allegory before we pass on to this very interesting
piece of musical you brought to end with? Yeah. So, the basic background between symbol and allegory
is that courage defines symbol as something that always partakes of the reality, which it renders
intelligible. And while it enunciates the whole abides itself as a living part in that unity
of which it is the representative. And that is contrasted with allegory, which is nothing but an
abstraction from objects of the senses according to Coleridge. And, you know, there was a movement
when deconstruction was very popular in literary criticism to say, well, allegory actually
gets closer to the truth. And so far, it doesn't pretend an ideological unity. It recognizes
parts as parts and it just respects the disjunction between those parts and doesn't attempt to sort
aesthetic ideology as it were. And so it is true that going back to a discussion of symbol
as organic form is going back to a romantic conception of organic form. But I think that's
play in Smart's poem. So, the passage that you're speaking about is what I call Smart's instruments.
It's a passage from his poem, which sort of takes on a life of its own as a part within the poem.
And in that sense, his epigenetic or self organizing, self developing and can rise into
the whole, as it were. The most typically known part of the poem is
my cat, Jeffrey. It's a section in which he describes the morning antics of his cat. But there are
a lot of other passages including the rainbow that you just read that we can see as parts of the poem
that sort of emerge from the organic mass of the poem and sort of rise into, as it were,
a thing of their own. And so the Smart's instruments is set to music by Benjamin Britain.
And that's what I mean. Yeah. So we'll just leave it at that, I guess. And
well, let's speak for itself. Did you want to, I think maybe some of the lyrics do you want to?
For the instruments are by their rhymes. For the Sean rhymes are long,
thaw and moon, moon and the like. For the harp rhymes are sing, ring, string and the like.
For the symbol rhymes are bell, well, toll, soul and the like. For the flute rhymes are tooth,
youth, stute, mute and the like. For the bassoon rhymes are past, class and the like.
And it goes on in this vein. So I think we'll leave our listeners with that. Thanks again for
coming on. We've been speaking with Denise Gigante, Professor of English here at Sanford
for entitled opinions. My name is Robert Harrison. Thanks again to here in Harris Fine Sodd,
production manager. And we will be with you again next week. Bye bye. Thanks for coming on, Denise.
Thank you.
[music]
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