Abstract to follow
The Romantic artist, whether actor or witness, was a man of many revolutions. This indeed applies remarkably to the poet William Wordsworth. Initially won over, then terrified by the French Revolution, the native of Cockermouth, Cumbria, was also deeply affected by the alterations undergone by his dear Lake District in the bloom of the Industrial Revolution. The wane of the Old North in Wordsworth’s writings manifests itself mostly through a proto-ecological and socio-economical nostalgia rooted in an all-Romantic concern, that is the fading of traditions. This, partly explains how Wordsworth earned his place of honour in the British Romantic canon.
Palingenesis, or regeneration from decay, is variously invoked by eighteenth to early-nineteenth century natural philosophy, psychology, mythography, and other discourses. Its currency derives from the Swiss-French scientist Charles Bonnet’s Palingénésie philosophique (1769), which conceives of natural history as a preformationist evolution, repeated renewal after epochal catastrophes of an animated world approaching to spiritual perfection. Herder’s Ûber die seelenwanderung (1782) develops an idea of ‘natural palingenesis’ as the repeated internal ‘rebirth’ of selfhood within memory despite physiological decay. The East India Company mythographer, G. S. Faber, compared Christian palingenesis with Hindu doctrines of avatars. Pierre-Simon Ballanche’s fragmentary magnus opus Essais de palingénésie sociale (c.1827), meanwhile, turned to political upheaval, locating the French Revolution within a process by which expiatory suffering gives birth to a new social order. Other writers looked back to a series of alchemical experiments in which, as William Tighe puts it in The Plants (1808), ‘the apparition of a perfect plant ris[es] from the midst of its ashes’. Robert Southey reviewed these experiments in Omniana (1812) under the heading, ‘Spectral Flowers’, and other writers explored the palingenetic properties of resurrected bodies and ghosts.
In the context of this not altogether unified discourse of Romantic palingenesis, this paper will consider the more sceptical strain within British romantic writing, where the beautiful idealisms of progressivist transformation stumble against the fact of death, decay, degeneration, and loss. Shelley’s Alastor (1815), in particular, may be seen in this context as a post-revolutionary palingenetic poem, conscious of the ruins of civilisation, the ruins of the human body, the potential ruin of memory, identity, and meaning: ‘Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things, / Birth and the grave . . . are not as they were’.
From a certain standpoint, History does not properly progress, does not advance – rather, it compresses. Different times become somehow coexistent.
Coexistence of history may be observed as it is displayed over geography. In a single country, modern China, you may find all levels of civilization, all periods of history: there are people living under palaeolithic conditions while other fellow country people enjoy postmodern facilities. Width is depth: travelling through the country you may also come across, as in a huge archaelogical site, any of the other historical layers in between. Historical mélange forms the real present.
This idea, almost natural for a classicist, could also justify a certain vision of the world: ages are interconnected, globalization is not just a matter of geographical spaces, but also of historical times.
This is particularly true of discourse. There are no two identical situations in history, but human resources for comprehension and explanation are not unlimited: arguments, descriptions, narratives or metaphors re-appear at different times whenever similar situations occur. As a matter of fact, it is the coincidence of these rhetorical items that allows us to consider those historical situations as ‘similar’. Historical compression is then at work, and unexpected inter-epochal solidarities may come on show.
Literature about ‘crisis’ is here at stake. We shall see some samples for comparison between Roman texts about the ‘Crisis of the Republic’ and contemporary documents from the USA
One of the consequences of the development of nineteenth-century biology and its application, through the channel commonly referred to as Social Darwinism, to human communities, was a renewed and purportedly scientific interest in the longstanding connection between ‘genius’ and mental instability. The Theory of Degeneration provided the conceptual platform from which this connection was elaborated. Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso’s L’uomo di genio (1888) (L’Homme de génie, 1889; The Man of Genius, 1891) in which the genius-insanity connection was reviewed across history and in many areas of human endeavour, served as a catalyst to a number of studies, notably Max Nordau’s Entartung (1892-93) (‘Degeneration’), that applied Degeneration Theory to the study of contemporary literature and art. For theorists such as Nordau, literature had become an alarmingly effective channel through which degenerate subjects could spread their pathology throughout society, and measures designed to contain or eliminate were necessary to check the spread of this contagion. Rafael de Zamora’s ‘Máquina cerebral’ (‘Brain Machine’), an elaborated version of a ‘spoof’ commercial prospectus published in the Madrid and Barcelona press in 1892, parodies not only these anti-degeneration therapies, but also the exalted scientific positivism whence they derived and the evolutionary potential turned commercial acumen of the so-called ‘superior’ Anglo-Saxon race, in a grotesquely hyperbolic evocation of an artificial brain that can produce only healthy ‘scientific’ literature and should therefore replace degenerate and flaw-ridden human writers.
Bram Stoker’s most overtly political novel will be read within a context comprising a variety of other texts, ranging from travel narratives to political pamphlets and newspaper articles, produced from the 1860s to the 1900s. Special attention will be paid to ideas of (Western) degeneration, images of the British Empire, its imperial rivals and its (semi-)Celtic peripheries, and some of the political problems of the successor states of the Ottoman Empire in South Eastern Europe. The Lady of the Shroud presents a utopian fantasy of a small Balkan country, untouched by the ‘evils’ of Western civilization, which comes to be ruled by Rupert Sent Leger, a world famous explorer and a paragon of ‘Nordic’ manhood, who has strong emotional affinity with the country’s handjar-wielding warriors. Rupert marries the local Voivodin Teuta, whose superior physical strength makes her his match, and they thus form a eugenically impeccable family away from the degenerate West. The novel ends with a journalistic account of a military parade organized to mark the foundation of a Balkan federation, appropriately named Balka, in the course of which ‘native’ warriors demonstrate their skill in using advanced military technology, manufactured in the West.The paper will assess the political value of utopia in the changing world of the early twentieth century as well as some of the key contradictions implicit in Stoker’s utopian dream
Good, bad and worse are perhaps the different stages that enact the part of temporality in a great part of Philip Larkin’s poetry; these stages correspond to the traditional time divisions of past, present and future. If the past was occasionally good, or even very good, as in ‘MCMXIV’, something that should be contrasted with not so good forms of the past, as in ‘This be the Verse’ or in ‘Annus Mirabilis’, the present is the place of surrender, it is as well the moment in which historians collect evidence that will prove how far things have decayed, as in ‘Church Going’ or in ‘Naturally the Foundation will Bear your Expenses’. The worst fears are perhaps those which can placed in the future, the moment in which all kind of confusions will take place, as in a personal way is represented in ‘Posterity’ or in a more general way is represented through the upsetting dystopia of ‘Going, Going’. Interestingly enough, Philip Larkin’s poetry departs occasionally from this analysis of the temporality of decay, and then his poetry enters into a sort of conflict between an idealized form of a vanished Empire and his strictly held middle class values of decorum. This can be exemplified in such poems as ‘Homage to a Government’ or in ‘When the Russian Tanks roll Westward’.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Enlightenment belief in unlimited progress began to lose its force. Commentators increasingly conceived of modernity not only as decadent, but as a pathological condition. The notion of degeneration began to play a key role in biological, sexological and literary discourse. Not only was modernity increasingly conceived of as the ‘perversion’ of a better, healthier state, but scientists also developed an obsession with what they took to be ‘perverse’ sexualities. This paper explores the ways in which the modern perversions were constructed in sexological discourse as symptoms of a society ‘on the wane’. However, whilst many sexologists were amongst the engineers of cultural pessimism, they also suggested pathways to a ‘healthier’ future through the conceptual isolation of the perversions as one of the major causes of perceived cultural decline, and through the theorization of how they might be contained. Nineteenth-century sexology, then, may be viewed both as a form of cultural pessimism and as a form of utopianism in its attempt to counter the problems of a ‘degenerate’ modernity on the terrains of biology, psychiatry and psychology.
In considering narratives of decline and degeneration, I turn immediately to Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (1742). Indeed, the triumph at the end of the poem of “Universal Darkness” seems decisive. Pope offers a clear verdict. He condemns the turn the world has taken. That turn has been a bad one, away from wit and temperate wisdom, political and financial moderation and good taste, toward stupidity and viciousness, a vacuous, ungrounded sense of one’s own self-worth, excess in politics, in the consumption and display of material goods, immorality and unskillful writing.
The Dunciad offers a vision of a momentous decline of British literary culture and polite society in the mid-eighteenth century, shaped by a satiric, poetic voice and perspective. I would like to return to the Dunciad at the end, first taking a close look at a number of poems thematically concerned with decline, degeneration, loss and defeat, but less pointedly caught up in a generic form that demands an apocalypse as conclusion. The Epistles to Bathurst and Burlington, and Dialogues I and II (Epilogue to the Satires) are also about the decline of a literary and social world. A story of decline underlies the poems and provides an organizing, satiric perspective within each. Each poem approaches specific aspects of that decline, but all, as satires, contrast a difficult, degenerate and corrupt present with a better past and, more sharply, with deviation from an ideal of the good.
In exploring these poems, I will invoke excerpts from John Gray’s Enlightenment’s Wake and other, more recent, works to consider through a contemporary lens the early modern context within which Pope wrote. I am interested in the transportability of his satire within the context of a critique of some aspects of Enlightenment universalism and market liberalism. There is continuity between the critique Pope offers upon the social world within his poetry (and the historical world gestured toward through the poetry) and the reflections upon the failure of the Enlightenment liberalism Gray explores in philosophical (and satiric) terms.
In the end I am interested in the ways in which narratives of decline provides occasion for the poet’s and the philosopher’s performance. Where would the satirist be without decline to lament? Despite descriptions of impending silence, the poet writes. In the face of an increasingly chaotic world, in which – in his view – enlightenment liberalism has all but erased the possibility of a return, in the West, to genuine community and the particularities of place, people, histories and common cultures, the philosopher produces exciting and provocative works.
Perception of decline, of loss and degeneration, enable the productivity of critical response. Pope’s voice in the Dunciad and the Dialogues, especially, strikingly performs despair even as it offers a countercurrent to the overt satiric posture in its very existence.
This paper will explore how decay and destruction are configured in some of Saint-Exupéry’s articulations of domesticity. The dilapidated Paraguayan house in Terre des hommes, Bernis’s childhood home with cracks in the roof in Courrier sud and the Little Prince’s planet infested with pernicious baobab seeds are variations on the old crumbling house which is a biographically defined recurrent topos in Saint-Exupéry’s fiction. A parallel will be drawn between the crumbling house and the desert as sources of mystery and adventure that keep their inhabitants constantly involved in ordering and home-making. Apart from being invaded by disorder (which is benevolently admitted to prevent the domestic space from hardening into stagnation and routine practices), the domestic world is configured by images of the past, childhood, and beginning. Its inhabitants are mostly children – two girls in Terre des hommes, little Bernis in Courrier sud, the Little Prince who is a child. Such retrospective identification of the domestic points to Saint-Exupéry’s nostalgic experience of homelessness as a retreat from childhood and testifies to his construction of home as an inaccessible place, an ideal that serves to sustain the home-making efforts of the homeless subject.
The aim of this paper will be to analyse the degenerative nature of the travelling individual as a type of social outcast in Elizabethan England in the late 1590s. The main focus will be on the confrontation of the roguishness of his isolated itinerant self to the hostile social environment he transgresses. For the purpose I will examine the self of the rogue as split between moral integrity and survival. Special attention will be paid to the discrepancy between Christian values and the type of vagrancy associated with the growing labourers’ class during the economic crisis of the 1590s. Thus, considering the social turbulences of the period, this paper will draw attention to the delinquent nature of Nashe’s central character Jack Wilton who is represented as a trickster intent upon survival. His manipulative wit for mishandling the truth together with his amoral behaviour will then be placed in the foreground to illustrate the overall anti-heroic nature of the pίcaro. The pίcaro’s qualities will then be used to outline how roguery successfully confronted the falsely idealised image of security and stability in the late 16th century. With this I hope to shed light over the early modern context of the development of a socio-literary tradition as well as to delineate the roguish paradigm within English picaresque fiction of the period in question.
