Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy 1790–1840 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy 1790–1840 Peter Höyng Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy 1790–1840. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005. 572 pp. To praise Thomas Pfau’s book as an impressive scholarly work is not a stretch considering it shares Pfau’s shrewd reading skills of German and English Romantic literature through the lens of such diverse theoretical figures as Freud, Lacan, Heidegger, Benjamin, and Adorno. The manuscript’s tripartite structure of paranoia, trauma, and melancholia attempts to provide a “psychohistorical narrative” of romanticism along the chronological axis of the French Revolution (1789–99), the Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815), and post-Napoleonic repression (1815–40) without succumbing to a traditional, linear narrative. Instead, Pfau continues to practice eloquent dialectical twists and turns when and wherever a linear argument might settle in for an all too comfortable resting point. Last but not least, the book deserves commendation if for no other reason than Pfau’s writing style that is as articulate as it is methodologically transparent. Only against new historicism does Pfau employ a polemical tone in order to ensure that his own interpretation skills shine all the more vis-à-vis “the garden-variety methods of associative or contextual rumination” (24), i.e., the alleged historicist’s inferior epistemological framework (193). Pfau’s point of departure is that emotion, and its more manifest configuration of mood, cannot and should not be reduced to an irrational expression or passion that lacks cognitive verification. Rather, he sees mood as “the deep-structural situatedness of individuals within history” (7). While Pfau concedes that mood [End Page 267] remains ontologically outside the realm of representative knowledge, a post-Freudian psychoanalysis nevertheless gives access to deem emotions and mood symptoms that simultaneously reveal and conceal historical communities. (10). In short, Pfau treats emotions as quasi-intentional and quasi-cognitive so that they “constitute a latent evaluative grid for all possible experience, as well as for discursive and expressive behavior.” (13) According to Pfau, it is aesthetic works, and more specifically, literature, that mediate “the holistic perception that announces itself as the enigma of emotion” (30). However, literature “does not simply imagine some dreamworld” (25) but looks for aesthetic expressions of the “real”/“history” while being self-conscious of being unable to deliver its ambitions, thus shattering the promise of traditional concepts of mimesis. Pfau lays the foundation of the book by looking for “a structural nexus between romantic ‘interiority’ and the aesthetics,” and “the dynamic between reflection and feeling” (30). He does so by extensively treating Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft as the key text, and in particular using sections on the sublime, as Pfau “aims to configure the punctum of empirical sensation with the durée of an interior ‘feeling’” (39). To this extent, he interprets Kant’s notion of the sublime as the traumatic birth of reason that mediates a negative pleasure (vs. a positive pleasure as a feeling of the beautiful), a reconsideration that has in common with an aesthetic idea the expression of something that “lies beyond the bounds of experience and concepts of reason” (44). This configuration, in which aesthetics simulates an experience it did not have and thus cannot express, becomes for Pfau the foundation for the Jena romantics in that their literature is “looking upon emotional life as accessible solely if and when transposed into aesthetic forms that continually reaffirm” the textual difference between the real and the ideal (62). The fact that literature rises to the status of mediating emotions in a discursive mode transforms a mere subjective feeling into a “mood” that shapes and is part of a social life. Thus, the interpretation of Kant’s notion of the sublime functions as a segue to juxtapose the philosopher with the poet—primarily Novalis. While one may wonder why Pfau ignores Schiller’s extensive wrestling with Kant’s ideas of the sublime altogether, he provides an emphatic and rehabilitating reading of Novalis’s Fichte-Studien, and the young poet’s ability to reflect on feelings as the primordial philosophical ground that in the end always remains inaccessible. Pfau finishes the first chapter by tracing mood as a dialectical figure of...