Q or, Heine's Romanticism

Abstract

The epithets and will be found to indicate with sufficient precision prevalent tenor of tales here published.... I may ... have desired to preserve, as far as a certain point, a certain unity of design.... I speak of these things here, because I am led to think it is this prevalence of in my serious tales, which has induced or two critics to tax me, in all friendliness, with what they have been pleased to term and gloom.... Let us admit, for moment, that phantasy pieces given are Germanic, or what not. Then Germanism is the vein for time being. To morrow I may be anything but German, as yesterday I was everything else. (1) IN THIS PASSAGE FROM THE PREFACE TO HIS Tales of Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), Edgar Allan Poe makes a number of contradictory claims. While striving for a unity of style, he yet refuses to take on a stable character and will not really identify with tide of Even if he did, he writes, this would be only a momentary name, and not a truly unifying designation or proper name of an identity. Interestingly, qualities that provoke this name, grotesque and arabesque, are French, not German. The French word grotesque comes from Italian word coined in era of Raphael to name decorative wall paintings found in Nero's Domus Aurea in Rome. Since palace had been completely buried, painters descended into what seemed like caves (Italian, grotto) to view and copy wall paintings there, then called grotesques. Arabesque, as is well known, refers to repeating decorative floral patterns found in older mosques, and to kind of curve characteristic of Arab archways. The words grotesque and arabesque install a kind of extravagance in Poe's title, double being not very English, invoking a vague Orientalism as well as French and Italian traditions. Poe's words are indebted not to German, but more to a Romance tradition, or a vocabulary of Romance languages. The accusation of can perhaps be translated as a charge of Romanticism. (2) The charge of Romanticism as Germanism brings out a certain redundancy in German a doubleness that doesn't really say anything yet cannot be reduced to a single term. The letter was introduced into both English and German when Latin alphabet was adopted for writing. The OED traces its appearance to Norman invasion. (3) Quoting an older source, Grimm reminds us soundly: q ist kein teutscher buchstabe, [q is not a German letter]. (4) q, like term Romanticism, indicates presence of something foreign, persistence of a dualism springing from irreducibility of Germanic and Romance language groups, in what is called Romantic (romantique). This linguistic duality is characteristic of multiplicity of meanings associated with Romanticism; it suggests that it is impossible to reduce Romanticism to a single thing. The critique of identity that German Fruhromantik leveled at German Idealism is undoubtedly its most serious legacy, left to us in Friedrich Schlegel's many famous fragments, as for example: It is equally fatal for spirit to have a system, or not to have one [Es ist gleich todlich fur den Geist, ein System zu haben, und keins zu haben], (5) As Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy argue in The Literary Absolute, this Romanticism opened field of literature as place of philosophy, stressing resilience of writing and its resistence to dialectical sublation. For Jena Romantic, spirit is actualized in its many-sided linguistic articulations, and not in its return to self in model of self-consciousness. (6) Discussions about Romanticism have tended to focus on question of its relationship to present. While some see present as a direct legacy of others are invested in positing a difference and a distance between now and then. …