"To Touch Without Self-Appropriation"

In Judge Holden, from Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian, we encounter the anti-thesis of this Bloomian Romantic trope:

… Toadvine sat watching him as he made his notations in the ledger, holding the book toward the fire for the light, and he asked him what was his purpose in all this.
The judge’s quill ceased its scratching. He looked at Toadvine. Then he continued to write again.
Toadvine spat into the fire.
The judge wrote on and then he folded the ledger shut and laid it to one side and pressed his hands together and passed them down over his nose and mouth and placed them palm down on his knees.
Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he’d collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men’s knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.
What’s a suzerain?
A keeper. A keeper or overlord.
Why not say keeper then?
Because he’s a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules even when there are other rulers. His authority countermands local judgments.
Toadvine spat.
The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.
Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can acquaint himself with everything on this earth, he said.
The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
I don’t see what that has to do with catchin birds.
The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos.
That would be a hell of a zoo.
The judge smiled. Yes, he said. Even so.


As I have pledged to avoid drawing political implications in this blog, I will leave it at that.

A Bloomian Definition of Romanticism

Harold Bloom, an intellectual heir to Walter Pater, offered the following definition of Romanticism (from Figures of Capable Imagination, published back in the mid-1970's):

Romanticism, even in its most remorseless protagonists, is centrally a humanism, which seeks our renewal as makers, which hopes to give us the immodest hope that we--even we--coming so late in time's injustices can still sing a song of ourselves. Despite all its studying of the nostalgias, the high song that is Romanticism persists in saying: 'Nothing need be lost--nothing is lost--if we will learn to listen again, and with the ear of the mind too, to see into the life of things and to see with the eye of the mind, to touch without self-appropriation.'

In his ever-so-idiosyncratic manner, Professor Bloom here put his finger on three important aspects of Romanticism as a perennial human tendency:

(1) It is a humanism, which is to say that its central concern is the creature who occupies time while longing for the eternal (or the not-time);

(2) It is a humanism which translates creaturely desire into visionary saying and hearing;

(3) It is a visionary humanism which attempts to "touch" with the eye of the mind that which lies outside the mind: the world. The world's body: like Leonard Cohen's Suzanne who has "touched your perfect body with her mind."

The refusal of solipsism, as well as the struggle or agon with time, are distinguishing marks of the Romantic impulse; an impulse we neglect at our peril.

The (Re-)Turn to Friedrich Schlegel

To my way of thinking, one of the most interesting developments in recent American intellectual life has been the rediscovery of, and a renewed appreciation for, the neglected figure of Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829). I suspect--but question whether it is worth taking the time to prove--that the Schlegel revival is in some way connected with Richard Rorty's late attempt to give academic philosophy a decent burial.

I have noticed that recent treatments of Schlegel's legacy (beginning at least as far back as Adam Carter's article in parallax, vol. 4, no. 4 (1998) "'Self-Creation and Self-Destruction': Irony, Ideology, and Politics in Richard Rorty and Friedrich Schlegel") have attempted to offer Schlegel as something of a palliative for those who recognize the significance of Rorty's call for a Pragmatic and Romantic and ultimately post-philosophical approach to life but who--for a variety of reasons--cannot bring themselves to let go of philosophy's lure.

Carter has genuine disagreements with Rorty's politics (which he finds insufficiently left-leaning-radical) and questions the consistency with which the late philosopher presented his views; others, like DePaul University's Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert, author of Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy (SUNY 2007), argue that Romantic philosophy in the wake of Schlegel is an attempt to reform the philosophical inheritance bequeathed by Kant and Fichte rather than an attempt to abandon it.

In any case, F. Schlegel emerges from these studies as a formidable intellect whose interests and literary output enrich and deepen our understanding of what Romanticism has to offer us after what Walter Pater termed the "long ennui" induced by the Kantian and post-Kantian attempts to marry philosophy to the model of the natural sciences.

I shall be returning to Pater and Schlegel (among many others) again and again as I attempt to chart New Romantic approaches to life, religion, and literature in subsequent posts.

Not Another Blog!

Oh yes. Another one. Though not intended to replace its sibloglings (The Mazeppist and Ghaffar Khan Society--see below), An American Athenaeum will serve as a repository of material that reflects (in a more academic vein than my other blogs) my three inter-related intellectual projects:

(1) “Islam in the American Grain,” a study of the phenomenon of Romantic Orientalism in American literature and intellectual life since the 18th century; included in this research is my investigation into Norman O. Brown’s late-life turn to Islamic studies.

(2) “The Romantic Roots of Religious Studies,” a re-description of the modern study of religion as inquiry into the religious imagination and, hence, a specific moment in the development of a more general theory of human creativity.

(3) Further development of Modern Qur’anic Hermeneutics, an approach to Qur’anic study which emerged from the early 20th century Egyptian Literary Renaissance (itself a product of Egyptian engagement with British and French Romanticism). I continue to apply the techniques of recent allusion theory and other literary critical and rhetorical tools to unpack Qur’anic meanings.

Some of this material has found its way (and will no doubt continue to do so) into the posts of the Ghaffar Khan Society and The Mazeppist with the provocativeness (even contentiousness) of the mode of Romantic irony that I have termed "Pantagruelism."

I cannot promise that I will not wear my lacerated Swiftian heart on my blogging sleeve when posting to An American Athenaeum, but I shall attempt to tone down the indignation a bit in the interests of minimizing distractions. Commentary upon subjects that beg for satire will continue to be posted at this blog's sibloglings--and, yes, as far as I know, I have this day coined that term.