Back and Forth: the Grotesque in the Play of Romantic Irony

Back and Forth: The Grotesque in the Play of Romantic Irony Siddhartha Bose A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of London 2009 Department of English at the School of English and Drama Queen Mary, University of London Declaration I hereby declare that, except where explicit attribution is made, the work presented in this thesis is entirely my own. Word count: 99, 268 Signed: __Siddhartha Bose______________________________ 2 Abstract This thesis examines the dramatic implications of the grotesque in Romantic aesthetics, particularly in relation to its poetics of plurality. There have been few studies exploring the drama of the Romantic grotesque, a category that accentuates the multiplicity of the self, while permitting diverse ways of seeing. The post-Kantian philosophy backing Friedrich Schlegel’s Romantic irony provides the most decisive rationalisation of this plurality of identity and aesthetic expression through theatrical play, and forms the theoretical framework for my study. Poetry and philosophy are merged in Schlegel’s attempt to create Romantic modernity out of this self-conscious blurring of inherited perspectives and genres—a mixing and transgressing of past demarcations that simultaneously create the condition of the Romantic grotesque. The other writers examined in this thesis include A. W. Schlegel, Stendhal, Victor Hugo, and Charles Baudelaire. The primary research question that this thesis investigates is: how is the grotesque used to re-evaluate notions of aesthetic beauty? And my answer emerges from a study of those thinkers in Schlegel’s tradition who evolve a modern, ironic regard for conventional literary proprieties. Furthermore, how does the grotesque rewrite ideas of poetic subjectivity and expression? Here, my answer foregrounds the enormous importance of Shakespeare as the literary example supporting the new theories. Shakespearean drama legitimises the grotesque as ontology and literary mode. Consequently, in reviewing unique, critically hybrid texts like the Schlegelian fragments, Stendhal’s Racine et Shakespeare (Racine and Shakespeare ), Hugo’s Préface de Cromwell (Preface to Cromwell ), and Baudelaire’s De L’Essence du Rire (On the Essence of Laughter ), this thesis will use theories of continental Romanticism to reposition the significance of an English aesthetic. Through this, I claim that the Romantic revisioning of the Shakespearean grotesque helps create the ideas of post-Revolutionary modernity that are crucial to the larger projects of European Romanticism, and the ideas of modernity emerging from them. 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 6 Dedication 7 Introduction 8 I—Grotesque Symptoms: Poetics of the Self in Romantic Theory 8 II—The Self as Dramatic Act: Multiplying Identity 14 III—The Grotesque as Hybridity and Mourning 21 IV—Defining the Grotesque 27 V—Outlining the Grotesque 34 Chapter I—Exposing the Protagonist: The Theory of Romantic Irony 38 I—Irony and the Philosophy of Art 38 II—‘Intellectual Intuition’: Transcending the Fichtean ‘subject-object’ 52 III—The Ironic Drama of Selves: Schlegelian Plurality as Ontology 67 IV—The Play of Romantic Irony 74 V—Towards the Grotesque 96 Chapter II—The Antagonist Speaks: ‘Edgar I nothing am’: Romantic Shakespeare/ Grotesque Irony 101 I—Romantic Shakespeare 101 II—Shakespearean drama as Romantic irony 105 III—‘A drunk savage’—Neoclassical Shakespeare 128 IV—A. W. Schlegel and William Hazlitt: Romanticising Shakespeare 144 V—Thinking-in-action: the Shakespearean Grotesque 162 Chapter III—Revolutionary Catharsis: Shakespearean Negotiations in A. W. Schlegel, Stendhal, and Hugo 166 I—‘Foreign Shakespeare’ and the French Romantics 166 II—A. W. Schlegel’s Comparaison and the Negation of Neoclassicism 176 III—Stendhal’s Racine et Shakespeare : Dramatising Romantic Democracy 196 IV—Hugo’s Préface de Cromwell : The Shakespearean Grotesque 212 V—‘Pierrot le Fou’ : Deburau’s Shakespeare 224 Chapter IV—‘Abnormal Specimens’: The Shakespearean Grotesque in Baudelaire 230 I—Grotesque Symptoms: The Artist as Critic 230 II—The Grotesque as Modernity 235 III—‘Spleen et Idéal’ : the Grotesque as Shock 249 IV—‘Abnormal Specimens’: Baudelaire as Hamlet in Les Fleurs du Mal 275 V—Performing the Grotesque 299 4 Conclusion: The Fates of the Grotesque 301 Bibliography 307 5 Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank the Overseas Research Students Awards Scheme (ORSAS) and Universities UK for an ORS scholarship, as well as Queen Mary for a research studentship, which helped me conduct the research for this study. I am deeply indebted to Professor Paul Hamilton for his encouragement and support. He introduced me to the Romantic ironists, and has inspired me to take risks. His calm generosity of spirit and his knowledge have been invaluable. My thanks to Professor Cora Kaplan for reading through and providing vital suggestions for Chapter II and Chapter III of this thesis. Dr. Uttara Natarajan’s comments on Chapter II were also helpful. Special thanks to Arnab Banerjee for looking over and providing excellent suggestions for the translations from French to English in Chapters III and IV. Special thanks to my French teachers from my childhood, Madame Liliane Bose Demarets and Mr. Ghosh. I am indebted to Professor David G. Riede at The Ohio State University for helping me articulate my interest in the grotesque in relation to Baudelaire (and Swinburne) many years ago. The groundwork for Chapter IV of this thesis owes much to my conversations with David. The conversations on Shakespearean drama with Professor Richard Dutton and Professor John Lyon many years ago have also been of immense importance. The postgraduate research culture at Queen Mary has been immensely invigorating. Thanks to Simon Mills and Olivia Smith for their intellectual support. Special thanks to Anurag Jain for all the ‘foreign Shakespeare’ productions seen at the Barbican, and for being a sounding-board for some of the ideas in this study. Many thanks to my acting and drama teachers over the years, particularly Phyllis Bose and Dale Shields, for helping me see. Special thanks to Rustom Bharucha for his advice and his example as a cultural critic. I owe a lot to my friends past and present, particularly Jacqueline Bose, Shatadru Sarkar, and Atish and Sumedha Ghosh. My mother, Sushmita Bose, has always been a source of comfort and support. My interest in the grotesque goes back fifteen years to my father telling me about G. Wilson Knight’s essay, ‘King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque’. This study is dedicated to the memory of that, and many other conversations. 6 For Shyamal Kumar Bose (1950—2008) 7 Introduction It is not I whom I depict. I am the canvass, a hidden hand colours somebody on me. 1 — Fernando Pessoa, from Stations of the Cross , XI (1914-16) The great fault of a modern school of poetry is, that it is an experiment to reduce poetry to a mere effusion of natural sensibility; or what is worse, to divest it both of imaginary splendour and human passion, to surround the meanest objects with morbid feelings and devouring egotism of the writers’ own minds. 2 — William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets (1818) I—Grotesque Symptoms: Poetics of the Self in Romantic Theory The above quotations, one from a major modernist poet known for his cultivation of myriad poetic personae, the other from a primary essayist of English Romanticism, encapsulate a recurring theme in Romantic and post-Romantic aesthetics that this study will examine: the essentially dramatic tension between selfhood and the dissolution of self in the act of making a poem. In Pessoa’s case, the disjunction between author and persona comes to the forefront, a trope that appears in the work of a range of Romantic and late-Romantic writers including Keats, Byron, and Baudelaire. In contrast, Hazlitt bemoans the ‘devouring egotism’ of his contemporary nineteenth-century poets, a position that he expands upon in his review of Wordsworth’s The Excursion : An intense intellectual egotism swallows up every thing…But the evident scope and tendency of Mr. Wordsworth’s mind is the reverse of the dramatic. It resists all change of character, all variety of scenery, all the bustle, machinery, and pantomime of the stage, or of real life…The power 1 Fernando Pessoa, The Surprise of Being , trans. James Greene et al (London: Angel Books, 1986), p. 19. 2 William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets in The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt , Vol. 2, ed. Duncan Wu (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), pp. 163-321 (p. 213). 8 of his mind preys upon itself. It is as if there were nothing but himself and the universe. 3 Hazlitt’s words repeatedly reference theatre, performance, and the dramatic in poetry as oppositions to Wordsworth’s obsession with the self. He sets up the dialectic of dramatic poetry, which depends on the fragmentation of the individual self into many minds and personae, and the poetics of an intensely aware personal subjectivity that he sees in Wordsworth, the primary poet of English Romanticism. In Hazlitt’s case, it is obvious that he is sceptical about the scope and effects of a poetry that smacks of an intense solipsism. In contrast, as we shall see, his Shakespearean hermeneutics celebrate the multiple visions that characterise drama. During the course of this analysis, I will interrogate the oscillation between the poles of such extreme egotism and its rejection by some major poets and theorists of the post-Romantic condition.

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