A Conference in Graz, feelings of protest, & a cursory look at some of the original Late Romantics

Last week at the Creative Bodies, Creative Minds conference at the University of Graz (virtual attendance from me) I got to participate in a pan-disciplinary, cross-country conference that, whilst only tangentially related to my research and academic identity, was a valuable opportunity for me to learn from people that I wouldn’t normally encounter. My favourite talk was by Zorica Siročić, who spoke about the role of festivals in activism. Siročić comes from a political science background, so her presentation was based on history and sociology, but as a literature major I couldn’t help but turn her talk around in my head for its relevance to my work on Romanticism. One of the best books I have ever read is Notre Dame de Paris*, which deliberately uses a festival atmosphere to foster an activist perspective in its readers, setting its narrative squarely in a festival and feast environment and creating a parallel between the social justice enacted in the book and the justice Hugo sought to foster in the real world.

Hugo begins the story during a festival and ends it during a riot, and utilises both narrative and structural devices to draw a connection between the two events in the reader’s mind. He uses an epic storytelling format, rather than a saga (by which I simply mean he details what happens to a lot of characters in a set period rather than following a smaller amount of characters over a longer period), which naturally makes the story feel cyclical. In this way, Hugo’s novel is the perfect example of what Siročić was talking about in regards to her research: protest is not a flat event, sparked only by anger. We have to read them as a partial celebration, whether of identity or shared experiences or pride in opposing people or policies. Whilst Hugo’s Feast of Fools is (naturally) medieval in its outlook, anybody who has attended a protest in the modern world will recognise the scenes he depicts: you may have chatted to your neighbours on the march, shared sandwiches or ciders with new friends, taken selfies in the sun to share or commemorate your presence at the demonstration. You may have chosen to ignore dull speakers in favour of chanting your demands or blasting your favourite new protest song. Our identity when we are activists is not divergent from our identities as humans, and Siročić is doing the valuable work of exploring how and why people choose to mobilize and she drew attention, for me, to the power our positive emotions have. It made me look at Hugo’s work with fresh eyes and appreciate a new aspect of his craft.

In Heinrich Heine’s treatise ‘The Romantic School’ he outlays a philosophy of Romanticism that surely influenced Hugo: that Romanticism must be political. This flies in the face of previous Romantic criticism, which tells us that poets should run into the woods and populate their verse with pastoral imagery. If this is the case, why do we not consider Walden the ur-Romantic text? Heine draws attention to the ultimately futile attempts for poets to imagine themselves farmers like Marie Antoinette. He agrees with Siročić that the common man’s existence is inherently political, and that celebrating is not at odds with a political stance – in fact, he suggests, in order to truly self-reflect (as Romanticism aims to), we must commune with all emotions and political issues. Hugo and Heine, both coming late in the pantheon of Romanticists, build on the foundation of celebration, politics, and identity to create works of art that are complex, moving, and not so shallow as the earlier Romantics. The connection between their political causes and their selfhood made their art stronger, but it also connected their work to the wider discourse of how identity should be presented or read.

The British romanticists did not, for the most part, get to read Heine’s treatise, but we see a dialogue between his work and Mary Shelley’s. Shelley understood instinctually the power that politics could add to her work. Frankenstein is, perhaps, the first text to engage with and also go beyond Romanticism by using a political perspective as the crux of her questions about god, society, and revenge. This, not Walden, is the ultimate Romantic text, engaging its reader with both pastoral, homely imagery and wild, Sublime passion, and using identity to connect its reader with all of the ideas it contains. Frankenstein is a powerful novel of Romantic selfhood – but the selfhood within the novel is inherently political.

It is impossible to say whether Heine read Frankenstein** and whether it influenced his perspective on the place of politics in Romanticism, but in a world post-Hugo, post-Heine, and post-Shelley, we can use political theory – like Siročić’s theory of festivals – to elucidate our views on Romanticism, and, consequently, turn that investigation inwards to discover more about our emotional response to political issues. For me, as for Heine, the study of Romanticism is nothing without a relationship with the real world.

*I use the original French title for a number of reasons: I don’t want to go around using the word ‘hunchback’ freely; the book isn’t really about Quasimodo and he is not the main character; Hugo’s original focus for the novel was on the cathedral itself so it seems more true to the book

** I spent several weeks last year attempting to find out when it was first translated into German and couldn’t even discover that. Heine did read English and travelled widely, so I think it probable he read the text, and I would suspect that it was translated early enough that he could have read it in German, but these are merely educated guesses at present and it would take a lot of archival work to say for sure how far Heine was influenced by Shelley or vice versa.

To-Do:

• Pack. I mean, I am packed, it just doesn’t all fit in the suitcase… so, pack. Sigh.
• Sell bike.
• Add anti-histamine to cocktail of vitamins and pills I take in the mornings.

Today’s Culture:

• Clinique factor 30 face-suitable anti-aging suncream. It is non-greasy, even if I am not.
• Writing in response to CFPs far and wide. 2022 conference circuit, come get ya girl.
• Mahler. I was expecting his music to be very different, because in The Princess Diaries they lock Boris in the broom closet every time he plays some, but it’s mainly just Dark Academia meets Swan Lake vibes.