Romania and the Widening Gyre

Abstract

tain a true picture of the course of modern literature, wrote Ernst Robert Curtius in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.' For Curtius, is a core concept in the study of European literature as a whole, as a manifold organism whose parts grow out from one another through time and space. Curtius, whose whole book is a plea for an erudite and painstaking philology, stands of course as one of the greatest representatives of the German tradition of Romance Philology in its richest, most all-embracing development. This tradition can, I think, be looked on as part of a larger search for origins which arises in the course of the eighteenth century, and belongs essentially to the Romantic movement. The first volume of Fredrich Diez's work, the cornerstone of Romance Philology, dates from 1836, and it develops from ideas and inquiries pursued earlier by A. W. Schlegel. Like the studies of Jacob Grimm and others, these searchings into a linguistic past are a product of the national and historical consciousness of Romanticism, the desire to uncover indigenous roots, which means an attention to the morphology and filiation of languages, genres, races, myths, civilizations. This consciousness reacts to the need to know what we are with the desire to know where we are, and how we got there. The concept of is hence in the nature of a myth of origins: the place, and also the process, where the modern vernacular literatures rose from the seedbed of vulgar Latin. Like the Grimm brothers' concept of folklore, it reaches back to a common ground, a trunk out of which one can discern the complex ramifications of the modern branches and foliage. For Curtius, and the methodology of Romance Philology alone permit a true comparative literature, because such a study must be rooted in origins, derivational, connective of cause and effect. I will return shortly to these methodological implications. First, it is worth entertaining the idea that if Romanticism invented as a context of study, it also destroyed it as a context of future literary creation. For all the confusions of Mme de Stael's celebrated distinction between the litterature du nord and the litterature du midi-a distinction between the indigenous, Christian romance traditions and imitation of Antiquity-it is clear that we have entered an age of complex literary cosmopolitanism, with new and intricate patterns of cross-cultural borrowing, and the feeling of any cohesion around Latinity is gone. She announces, and in some measure precipitates, the introduction of Germanomania and Shakespearophilia into the Romanic sphere, with the result that no morphology of the modern traditions of literature can be established within the sole context of Romania. I am not convinced that is in fact the most viable context for the study of the Renaissance or Neoclassicism; but certainly from Romanticism on through Realism, Symbolism, modernism and post-modernism, the context and the myth of origins, if not untrue, are no longer adequate. So the first sense of my title, Romania and the Widening Gyre, is simply this: that within the cycles of modern history from the late eighteenth century onward the center of will not hold. It may still be a distant root and trunk, but the student of genres, movements, and significant literary moments needs contexts other than Romania. Persistence in seeing the world in terms of will usually mean inadequate contextualization of the important modern moments and movements: the frame of Germany, England, and France, say, for Romanticism; the context of France, England, and Russia for the Realist novel; the total European context of Symbolism, the virtually global context of modernism. One effect of the link between Romantic nationalism, with its accompanying linguistic nationalism, and the rise of historical literary studies has been, as Rene Wellek and Austin Warren point out, too close a tie between the study of languages and the study of literatures, with a consequent overem-