Pushkin and Romantic Self-Criticism
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Pushkin and Romantic Self-Criticism Tobin Siebers Department of English Language and Literature University of Michigan Ann Arbor MI 48109 [email protected] I – “What is Man Made of That He May Reproach Himself?” In a crucial episode of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Werther meets someone not unlike himself. He is, of course, horrified, and he loses all self-control.(1) But not in the manner that we might expect a “suicide” to lose control. He reads in the face of Herr Schmidt, the love-lorn suitor of one of Lotte’s friends, an expression of stubbornness and ill humor, not any limitation of the mind, and launches into a diatribe against selfish and self- destructive urges. As Werther puts it, “I simply had to take over the conversation and hold forth against the moodiness of the man” (45). His lecture extols the goodness of life and attacks indolence as a sickness to be cured through pleasure in activity. “Get up and hum a few dance tunes,” Lotte happily adds (46). Herr Schmidt objects that “one is not always in control of oneself, least of all one’s feelings” (46); but Werther retorts that everyone should be thankful to be rid of disagreeable feelings, and calls ill humor a vice: “Anything that does harm to oneself or one’s neighbor deserves to be called a vice” (47). As the debate heats up, Werther grows more and more impassioned. He opposes the doctrine of self-control to the cult of feeling with such intensity and fervor that he breaks down and must leave the company. The episode is complex and controversial for any idea of self-criticism, since Werther is blind to his own lucidity. He does not see the relevance of his remarks about Herr Schmidt to his own personality. Nevertheless, the critique does occur in a Romantic novel, giving us a glimpse of the Romantic tendency to critique Romanticism. Romanticism is the greatest skeptic of Romanticism. Rarely, however, have critics of Romanticism described this skepticism with any kind of clarity. The problem of Romanticism’s critique of itself is most often expressed in the form of personal self-criticism and self-injury–nothing like a critique of the movement from within itself. In the case of Rousseau, for example, critics note that his attempts to achieve self-sufficiency and power illuminate his failures and weaknesses. Indeed, Rousseau’s self-sufficiency seems to derive, paradoxically, from his insufficiency. He sacrifices mastery to master. This effect, however, is usually attributed more to Rousseau’s personality than to the structure of his writings.(2) Similarly, Werther takes an autobiographical form that occults the critical nature of writing in the Romantic novel. Werther writes The Sorrows of Young Werther, it seems, with the help of an editor. But our glimpse of the editor is limited. It is only in the second part and at the conclusion that he surfaces. His dry and critical prose contrasts sharply with Werther’s letter to Lotte and implies a critique of suicide. But what is the effect of this conclusion? Does it strive to salvage an optimistic world view and to condemn suicide as a desperate and insane act? Or is it the mirror image of Werther’s own self-destructiveness? If the latter is true, the novel takes on the double aspect given to Werther’s personality, and Werther, the novel and the man, are both killed by themselves. “What is man made of,” we may ask ourselves with Werther, “that he may reproach himself?” (23). 2 Incidentally, if it sounds as if I am proposing a postmodern reading of the novel’s self- deconstructive nature, let me be clear that I am tracing, rather, the origins of this kind of reading. Postmodern theorists have not developed the anthropology necessary to understand either their own idea of “self-reflexivity” or the human and ethical elements of Romanticism. Instead, they have entrenched their thinking in linguistic theories, in which language often acts as a rather unreliable instrument of illumination. According to the theories of Paul de Man, for example, language serves insight, but as soon as the self tries to reflect on itself in language, the insights dry up. The gap between word and object is just too wide to surmount. Consequently, the novel is doomed to irony, for language represents only its own limitations and never its object. Romanticism is a self-critical movement, but theories of language in isolation cannot account for this phenomenon because it involves social and ethical structures that develop in history. Novels reflect upon other novels and upon the novel form in general as well as upon the weaknesses and strengths of their characters, but they do not do so through the ironic properties of language but through the ironic structure that has come to define the self in its contradictory embrace of center and periphery, of the roles of artist and critic, and of victim and victimizer.(3) First, the intense desire for originality and uniqueness characteristic of the Romantic attitude creates an atmosphere of rivalry, in which individual writers criticize others for inventions that they themselves would have prized had they been so fortunate as to discover them, and in which the failure to achieve uniqueness in art often drives artists to seek it by occupying extreme and self-destructive positions in society. Second and more important, the ironic structure of the Romantic novel derives from an ethical and political impulse. The Romantic novel is the creation of the heirs of Rousseau, and it strives to attack the beliefs and understanding of readers, thereby inviting them to participate in a view critical of their own society.(4) Thus, on two counts, such novels manifest ironic human attitudes that have nothing to do with recent theories of language. Indeed, it is only when the self-critical nature of the Romantic character wins out completely over the human and drives it underground that textuality acquires, in anthropomorphic guise, the property of self-destructiveness or self-deconstructiveness–another metaphor for suicide, here textual suicide. The Romantic character discovers itself in the representation of victims and marginals, and these positions, due to their critical relation to social organization, force the novel of the period to reflect upon both its status as a literary genre and as an ethical position. Herein lies the value of the Romantic contribution to historical and ethical consciousness as well as its gift to literature. Rousseau and his followers examine the relation between the individual and society, and grant more worth to the one by recording his or her suffering at the hands of the many. Romantic novelists criticize the tendency in society to undervalue, limit, and persecute individual desire, but they try to record their own stake in the same tendencies. This is why we can say that Romanticism is a critical and self-critical movement. Yet the term “self-critical” may raise some problems, unless we understand that it embraces a wide spectrum of activities. The Romantics conceive of criticism as a form of philosophical thought, thanks to Kant, but they also lend to criticism the plainer sense of an attack. The emphasis on the suffering of the individual, peculiar to Romanticism, translates the idea of criticism into a much more aggressive attitude, and for the individual schooled in the paranoia of Rousseau, the most abstract of criticisms may offer a personal affront. Similarly, the idea of self-criticism takes on an ominous meaning akin to Werther’s self-reproach. Romanticism begins as a critical and self-critical movement but often turns to self-cutting observations. The blood spilled from its self-inflicted wounds becomes the substance of a sacred baptism, a “blessing,” for “to bless” means “to bloody” and “to make holy.” The Romantic character actively exposes its own weaknesses, a process that gives it an air of ethical superiority; but this process may also begin to resemble the egoism of an old war horse who exhibits an ulcerated limb as a medal of heroism. 3 II – “The Poet’s Only Theme is ‘I'” By 1821, Pushkin had overtly associated himself with Romanticism, calling his Prisoner of the Caucasus “Romantic.” The later and celebrated novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, shows Pushkin to be a more mature student of Romanticism, and consequently to possess the understanding necessary to put the idea of self-criticism into relief.(5) The overt narrative structure of Onegin encourages criticism of its hero by the narrator, and the plot includes a sufficient number of Romantic types to formulate some idea of how Romantics relate to Romanticism. The narrator, for example, loves to mock Onegin’s belated Romanticism and to sing how he has become blasé and unoriginal, asserting, paradoxically, the Romantic doctrine of originality. The most radical reading of the novel therefore relies on the most unlikely of tendencies, given the current climate in literary theory. To understand Pushkin’s use of self-criticism, we have to decide to read not for plot, philosophical issues, or formal devices but for characters. Indeed, it is only by describing their society that we will realize how the influence of criticism and competition works to diversify the meanings of Romanticism.(6) The society of the novel is a highly charged world of desire, snobbery, insult, and self- criticism. For a “love story,” Onegin dwells with surprising consistency on betrayal, back- stabbing, and rivalry. The principal characters–Onegin, Lensky, Tatyana, and the narrator–are in some way all versions of one another, and yet their criticism of each other strikes one as sufficiently valid to establish some difference among them.