JOE FYFE
Isaiah Berlin said
that all the problems of our age could be traced back to Romanticism.
Anita Brookner heard him lecture on the subject and decided to teach
it herself. This took place at the Courtauld Institute where she was
an authority on eighteenth century painting. She has written monographs
on Greuze, Jacques-Louis David and Watteau as well as a study of 19th
century art criticism, The Genius of the Future [Phaidon, 1971]. Brookner
writes with a candor that leaps unexpectedly out of lapidary prose.
Her earlier, scholarly career has been eclipsed by her nineteen novels,
one of which, Hotel du Lac, won the Booker prize. But during this
time Brookner kept her academic credentials intact by continuing to
teach and lecture and by publishing occaisional literary and art historical
essays (collected as Soundings, Harvill Press, 1997).
Nonetheless,
the appearance of Romanticism and its Discontents, a study of French
Romanticism, comes as something of a surprise. Brookner has stated
there is no going back once you leave academia, which she eventually
did. What is happening is Brookner has returned to what now appear
to be her models--some of the chief Romantic figures--and her subject,
Romanticism, after examining it imaginatively in her fiction for twenty
years. This was done most directly in Providence, [E P Dutton, 1985]
maybe her best novel, features a university course entitled "The
Romantic Tradition":
Larter took off his glasses,
rubbed his eyes, and for fifteen minutes gave them an almost seamless
account of the Romantic dilemma. This according to Larter, but in
fact according to Chateaubriand, was due to the collapse of moral
standards in the Revolution, to the repudiation of the supernatural,
to the deconsecration of the churches and the exiling of the priests,
to the attempt to live according to the humanitarian rules of the
eighteenth century, to live without piety and belief and consolation.
But God, having been lost, was difficult to find again. Romantic man,
man without God, had to behave existentially, and experienced isolation.
In Brookner's novels, her characters,
usually women, occupy a constricted psychological space; they feel
unable to ask for what they want, to garner attention. Thoughts can
never be uttered and their deep emotion is only alluded to. There
is much articulation of solitary days, of muffled ruminations, of
time-filling tasks. Her work has affinities with Morandi in its dusty
grey spacelessness and with Graham Greene, who also wrote in tones
rather than colors and about internal pain.
In her earlier critical work, The
Genius of the Future, Brookner seems to reference herself and her
future novels when she describes Baudelaire as an "emotional
temperature taker". They also share a similar imagination, one
which concocts routes of escape into places of disappointment-the
persistent trope in her fiction. Her characters don't understand why
they have not achieved romantic fulfillment. Brookner has been misunderstood
for her boring, pitiful characters. In a sense, she is depicting 19th
century women in the 20th century, that is, women whose world remains,
if not a private domestic space, a relatively minor public one. Her
main characters tend toward librarians, scholars or widows. These
obscure contemporary women live in a world where women progressively
occupy a public urban space, one that was exclusively male in the
19th century. In this aspect, Brookner articulates the same space
that Griselda Pollock (who was a student of Brookner's at the Courtauld)
writes about in her book on Mary Cassatt, where she challenges the
preeminence of public (male) spaces in the 19th century depiction
of urban modernity, and posits a continuum with the private (female)
domestic space. Brookner updates
this situation in her own fiction. Her depiction of women living with
unfulfillment and absence is Romantic; she transforms the isolation
of the traditional romantic hero into her characters in such a way
that their failure, hesitancy and inaction have their own existential
legitimacy.
In Romanticism and its Discontents,
Brookner begins by distinguishing between Romanticism and the Romantic
movement. A conventional history of the latter might go from Wordsworth's
Lyrical Ballads in 1798 to Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People
in 1830. From Brookner's point of view this would simply be where
the cluster of romantic subject matter resides. She has a low opinion
of it's nationalistic form in Germany and it's pastoral form in England,
and if it attaches itself to any infantile sense of divine redemption--as
in the case, for example, of William Blake--she dismisses it. For
Brookner, Romanticism is a "peculiar existential mode".
French Romanticism, she claims, recedes further into the Eighteenth
Century, back to Rousseau, who demanded a rigorous program of personal
questioning. And it all but completely covers the Nineteenth, dominated,
in France especially, by Napoleon's "legacy of aspiration and
regret" (p20). After an introduction to this political and spiritual
phenomenon, Romanticism and its Discontents is structured in chapters
on the painter Gros, Alfred de Musset, Baudelaire, Delacroix, Ingres,
the Brothers Goncourt, Zola, and Huysmans.
Throughout the book Romanticism's
ethos of the personal, its risk-taking and its manipulation of the
spectator is equated with Modernism. Her purpose is gently to nudge
it against the present: "The Romantic movement has left its own
legacy. Heroes are no longer taken on trust, and the inevitable outcome
is a disappointment that is both different and strangely familiar."(p.
20) Though Romanticism can be characterized as "infinite longing,"
(p3) it was mostly a historical phenomenon that tended to destroy
more rules than it established. An introduction fleshes out the fictional
Larter's synopsis: a slow breakdown of the commonly held values of
the ancien régime, with its open-mindedness, faith in reason,
and the gradual irrelevancy of religion, the French Revolution, the
bankruptcy of the belief in the perfectibility of the human species,
then Napoleon's fall, all resulting in "the necessity of improvising
alternative belief systems."(p 2). Stendhal is emblematic, for
Brookner, in the way he describes the grandeur of Napoleon's rise
to Emperor, the cavalry officer who danced all night at a glittering
ball and then died on the battlefield the following morning. Alfred
de Musset, the only lightweight in this portrait gallery, recalls
the era two decades later: "Death was so splendid in those days,
so great, so magnificent with its smoking crimson." (p. 45)
Romantic doubt seems to manifest
itself, unbidden, as a historical inevitability. With the painter
Gros, Brookner portrays this doubt as a fever, with Gros a victim
of his own subjectivity. He fills his work with shadowy painterliness,
and is horrified when he discovers that this is read as defiance by
his teacher David, whose Neo-classicism, with its light, clarity and
composure, served social consensus as a guide to moral behavior, .
"[Gros] had, almost unknowingly, introduced personal comment
into accepted versions of the truth."(p22) Gros becomes a major
documentarian of Napoleonic battles, and in the huge Plague Hospital
at Jaffa, manages to aggrandize the image of Napoleon. As a result,
the painter became Napoleon's chief propagandist. One can march through
the longest rooms in Versailles and see dozens of these huge paintings
commemorating each of the Emperor's battles. Simultaneously, through
the moody atmospheres of his own sensibility, he created a template
of ambiguous modernity that would inspire Delacroix's Massacre at
Chios. Gros, unable to stabilize himself in his contradictions, emotionally
undone by his helplessly powerful imagination, walks out of Paris,
stricken, and drowns himself.
Romanticism, in a sense, is a progressive
cult of moi, a religion of the imagination and a reflection
of contemporary life. Brookner rightly places the symbiotic Baudelaire
and Delacroix, the two pivotal figures of Romanticism, "two great
pessimists in the age of progress" (97) in adjacent chapters
at the
heart of the book. Baudelaire's morbidity cultivated "an inner
life so intense that the outer world could only be percieved indirectly"
(p78) One can imagine Baudelaire path crossing that of a group of
stockbrokers, all dressed in black. They have just made a killing
at the Bourse and are on their way to a brothel. In his reading of
"modern life," Baudelaire transforms them into undertakers:
"we are each of us attending some funeral or other" (p60).
Delacroix was aloof. He "accepted...the need for a correct non-commital
persona as a necessary component of an oceanic imagination" (p98)
Baudelaire pursued Delacroix as a fellow spirit, as the great painter
of the era, as well as his personal analysand. This was one of the
saddest, comically unfulfilled artistic collaborations in history.
Delacroix's grand machine, The Death of Sardanapalus, (a painting
that had a disastrous reception which Brookner never explains), depicts
an impassive Sultan watching his harem girls gutted like fish before
his eyes. In Baudelaire's interpretation, typically food for his own
out-sized imagination, cast the painting as a vehicle for the expression
of impotence, ennui, an inability to feel no matter how powerful the
stimulus. The fastidious Delacroix could but be repelled. His inner
life remained his alone. Brookner portrays the relationship dryly:
"he (Baudelaire) goes on to analyse Ingre's tastes and methods
with far greater accuracy than he normally devotes to Delacroix, whom
he is content to define in metaphors that feed into his poetry ("Delacroix,
lac de sang hante de mauvais anges"). Being identified as a lake
of blood haunted by malevolent angels was precisely the sort of comparison
to which Delacroix was justified in taking exception." (70)
When Brookner discusses Baudelaire's
seminal essay, The Painter of Modern Life, she credits him with inspiring
Manet (to whose discipleship Baudelaire probably remained oblivious),
the Impressionists, the Goncourts' urban studies, the epic quality
of modern life in Zola's novels and their sense of immersion in the
flow of humanity, as well as Prousts' choosing to write from the convalescent
point of view, all anticipating 20th century Modernism.
As the arc descends, life itself
is seen as so disappointing that vitality can only be salvaged through
the consolations of the practice of art and literature. The Goncourts
and Huysmans carry on the Romantic sickness of Baudelaire, while Ingres,
embodies Romanticism as energy--which is confusing, unless we take
the extroversion and robustness of this figure as anticipating the
20th century's relentless optimism and self-seeking heartlessness.
Brookner quotes an art critic, Thore : " who stated in 1846 categorically,
'...M. Ingres is the most Romantic artist of the nineteenth century,
if Romanticism is an exclusive love of form, an absolute indifference
to all the mysteries of human life, a scepticism in philosophy and
politics, an egotistical detachment from all common and shared feelings.
The doctrine of art for arts sake is, in effect, a sort of materialistic
Brahmanism...'"(p118-119)
Zola comes off as a gentle beast,
a hard worker who, after championing the Impressionists, becomes disillusioned
by their apparent facility. Their paintings, unlike the vast canvases
of his novels, arrive at completion much too quickly. Her explanation
of the well-known case of L'Oeuvre, Zola's novel of a failed painter
who hangs himself, and whose publication ended his lifelong friendship
with Cézanne, is that Zola, who finally in middle age had achieved
financial stability, felt threatened by Cézanne's failure at
achieving recognition for his work. This doesn't make sense. By the
time of their break, Zola's reputation was secure and Cezanne had
always had a private income. Still, when Brookner's moving narration
of Zola's death arrives the reader becomes aware of her great empathy
(a Romantic value) for these figures, and is persuaded of their heroism,
too.
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