August 3

Gary,

You are probably right that a certain dualism manifested itself in Medlin, a dualism of unrestrained, irrational subjectivity and a hyper-objectivity related to abstract reason, but I suspect that I have a somewhat different notion of romanticism than the one you introduce on July 21. Maybe I don’t but it could be worth teasing it out a little so here goes:

I’ve always thought of romanticism in terms of the aristocratic reaction to enlightenment rationalism. Two of the most notable romantics of the 20th century period were Oscar Wilde and Karen Blixen. I’ll give Blixen’s account because she spells it out more discursively than Wilde. The bourgeois tries to discover itself, its subjective identity, through introspection. It’s a futile task. There is nothing to discover except a socially constructed and constrained subject that can never be identical with the ‘I’.

Instead of introspection, one should act. You are who you pretend to be. ‘One should be as artificial as possible,’ said Wilde. You can be a work of art. Potentially, you can be your greatest work of art. After investing everything in a failed idea she had of herself, one of Blixen’s greatest characters exclaimed, ‘I’m never going to be one person again!’ I act and I am the person whom those acts expose.

You are right that this is not an historical argument. Blixen thought that the aristocracy and the proletariat converged in their understanding of tragedy and comedy, which is different from that of the bourgeoisie. But they also diverge, the aristocrat embracing myth where the proletarian embraces history. Proletarian consciousness is historical.

I’m a bit concerned when you say that romanticism ‘infuses the technologically disenchanted world of modernity with meaning and value’. Blixen equates modernity, the bourgeois revolution, with the Fall but she doesn’t offer any blueprint either for solving the problem or giving meaning to it all. She advises merely to act as if your action was a work of art and through art redeem the world.

This is essentially the story of ‘Babette’s Feast’ that so moved Medlin. Two old spinsters belonging to an austere and severe religious community on the Jutland coast take on a cook, as a favour, and eventually she rewards them by preparing a feast for the sisters and other people from the community and from their past. One is a man of the world, who already knows the best food and wine. The people from the community begrudgingly go to the dinner but agree not to mention the food at any point. Thus, the roles are reversed. The man of the world babbles about the food and wine in a novice way while the austere folk apparently take it as unworthy of remark, as if they are the worldly ones. Meanwhile the dinner weaves its magic. At the end the austere folk are able to embrace one-another, to admit past misdemeanours and laugh them away. Art has worked its transformation.

‘Babette’s Feast’ tells the romantic tale, the tale of the artist. Near the very end, Blixen writes, ‘Through all the world there goes one cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost!’ After the guests have gone, one of the sisters says to Babette, ‘“In Paradise you will be the great artist that God meant you to be! Ah!” she added, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Ah, how you will enchant the angels!’”

I agree that romanticism aestheticizes everything but I do not see it as conformist in the way you do. It is about revoking the Fall, and the modern enlightened bourgeois corporate capitalist system is the Fall. Hemingway didn’t understand that this was the reason why Blixen didn’t get the Nobel Prize despite being perhaps the outstanding writer in the world at the time. Her words cannot be readily integrated into the system. They go at least some way towards meeting Benjamin’s goal: to write in such a way that your words are of no use to fascism.

As an individual, I saw Brian Medlin as a kind of concrete dialectic, a person whose ideas were torn between the opposing poles of rationalism and romanticism, but who unswervingly acknowledged that the basic point that Marx made was true – history and exploitation are two sides of the one coin.