The owl of Minerva; update

I wonder if Winckelmann ever came across such a lovely object in his archaeological work. This tetradrachm was found in Lyon, where excavations probably did not begin before the 19th century. (I am willing to be corrected on this.) It is now in room 19 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon.

UPDATE: Dagmar Riedel (follow her on Twitter; also here) informs me that Winckelmann would likely have seen the Athenian tetradrachm, as such coins circulated widely in antiquity. They can be found, for instance, in early modern Wunderkammern.

In connection with Fritz Strich, especially his practice of Geistesgeschichte, I have been reading about Hegel. It is an odd thing, and perhaps somewhat scandalous to say, but one can learn a lot about Hegel's philosophy by reading what others write about him. I came across Hegel's phrase about Minerva this morning while reading Clive James' marvelous small essay on the philosopher: "The owl of Minerva begins its flight only in the gathering darkness." James is taken with the phrase for its clarity, since after Hegel's death, "his prose became famous for being unyieldingly opaque." James likes such poetic lines plucked from philosophers, and he goes on to cite Kant's dove and Benjamin's "angel of history," while saying that Benjamin is not considered a philosopher. Though he might be when he wrote of the angel of history, flying backward with its hands raised to its face, "appalled by the spectacle of the ruins piling up constantly before its eyes."

I have noticed in my research on Strich that some contemporary German scholars attempt to link Geistesgeschichte to proto-fascist tendencies. As James points out, some of Hegel's thought may have contained lethal tendencies, but, as Hegel's metaphor indicates, "the time had to become lethal before the tendencies became obvious." Hegel thought history was tending in a good direction -- how optimistic was Geistesgeschichte! The problem was that his thought could be highjacked by those heading in a different direction. For instance, Marxism. The Nazis were actually late-comers.

"The social phenomenon called literature"

In my research into the origins of Fritz Strich's work on world literature, I have encountered some very interesting people. The past posts have dwelled on European figures: for instance, the French comparatists Joseph Texte and Fernand Brunetière and the American-German Louis Paul Betz. Despite the importance of France and Germany in inaugurating the academic discipline of comparative literature, it seems that the U.S. was somewhat out in front in establishing a university department, at Harvard. And just as the Europeans were thrashing out the contours of comparative literature as a field of research, in scholarly publications, an American wrote about the subject for The Atlantic Monthly in 1903. This was Charles Mills Gayley, then a professor of English and Classics at the University of California at Berkeley, who was apparently a genial and much-loved teacher. Before coming to Berkeley, he had taught at the University of Michigan, where he also authored Michigan college songs.

The article in The Atlantic Monthly is called "What Is Comparative Literature?" I wondered if something comparable was occurring in French or German publications, those directed not at scholars but at a literate reading public. It seems a very American thing actually. In connection with Strich and world literature, I was struck by a couple of things in the article, indicated by the title of this post.

The handsome Charles Mills Gayley

Gayley quotes Goethe's comments on world literature, in particular the statement about the "progress of the human race," and goes on to say that under "Goethe's prophetic cosmopolitanism of ideal and art" lay a belief in an essential, historical oneness of literature. This ideal, writes Gayley, is

the working premise of the student of comparative literature today: literature as a distinct and integral medium of thought, a common institutional expression of humanity; differentiated, to be sure, by the social conditions of the individual, by racial, historical, cultural, and linguistic influences, opportunities, and restrictions, but, irrespective of age or guise, prompted by the common needs and aspirations of man, sprung from common faculties, psychological and physiological, and obeying common laws of material and mode, of the individual and of social humanity.

It is this idea of a common humanity possessing "common faculties" that leads Gayley to ask whether the "biological principle" applies to literature. At the turn of the 20th century two doctrines seem to have vied for acceptance in comparative literature: evolution or permutation. Regardless of which is truer the facts, it is this "social phenomenon called literature" that is the comparatist's subject. For those of us who take pleasure, as well as wish for edification, in our reading, his exclusion of the purely subjective element  may cause one to blink. The comparatist, however, must regard

the unexpected quantity -- the imaginative -- in the light of historical sequence and scientific cause and effect, physical, biological, psychological, or anthropological, to reduce the apparently unreasonable or magical element, and so to leave continually less to be treated in the old-fashioned inspirational or ecstatic manner. We shall simply cease to confound the science with the art.

While not ignoring the achievements of genius, this new science avails itself "of the results, and so far as possible of the methods, of the sciences that most directly contribute to the comprehension of man the producer."

What is interesting to me in this exclusion of non-material factors is Gayley's assertion that the "new science" of comparative literature "will prove an index to the evolution of soul in the individual and in society." According to the biography of Gayley on Wikipedia, he was a most orthodox Christian, being born the son of a missionary in China and having married the daughter of the second Protestant Episcopal bishop in Michigan. I suspect he does not mean here "soul" in the Christian sense of that term. Fritz Strich uses "Geist" continuously, which is often translated as soul. The evolutionary theory of society, as with the biological, presumes a law governing the development of phenomena; so, too, the comparatists seek to align their discipline in according with the scientific method.

At the same time I am reminded of the 18th-century philosophes. No one specifically asserted that the accumulation of scientific knowledge would produce a change in human consciousness, but it was implicit in their predictions of the progress of society under the enlightened rule of "science." How else can one interpret the contemporary attacks on the past and on tradition ("dead white males") if not to assume that we have inherited the conviction that we have morally progressed? More on this later.

Picture credit: Permanent Cultures

"The cosmopolitan spirit in literature"

The title of this post refers back to my previous post and to the book of that name by Joseph Texte, the late-19th-century French comparatist. As I wrote in the post, Texte used the concept of the "cosmopolitan spirit in literature" in the sense in which Fritz Strich would later speak of the "supranational" development of a "European spirit" in literature. As Strich wrote, literary commerce  between and among  the various nations of the continent played a leading role in this development. He cited the same cultural manifestations in European cultural history. For instance, Gothic architecture can be found in Germany, France, Italy, England, Spain, and Prague. Similarly Baroque art. Yet, this manifestation began in one place before it was borrowed and transformed by another country. Thus, there is a temporal difference in the appearance of Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Classicism, Romanticism, and so on.

For Strich each nation had a specific mission in the development of this "spirit" of Europe, and its contribution "reveal[ed] its own innermost character." E.g., France bequeathed to Europe the rule of reason, "transcending any place, any time," yet "this rational spirit of French literature [was] also a very national spirit." The French classical spirit dominated the arts until Germany found its moment and, with Romanticism, carried other nations before it in breaking the bonds imposed by the regimentation of classicism.

Strich modifies somewhat the "ethnological" aspect of Texte's account of cosmopolitanism, and, in the article from which I have quoted him above, published in 1930, he also problematizes what is exactly meant by "European."

Leslie Stephen, ca. 1860,
before he was Virginia Woolf's father

Leslie Stephen, in his lengthy review of Texte's book in volume 4 (1909) of Studies of a Biographer, questions the notion of a "spirit," cosmopolitan or otherwise. He agrees that there has been, since the 17th century, a "tacit freemasonry between the higher classes" and that the "cosmopolitan spirit was the product of the innumerable causes which were bringing nations into closer intercourse at their higher levels." He argues, however, that it was not Rousseau, but Voltaire, who proclaimed the new alliance between the French and English "mind." His achievement was to acquaint the French with the philosophy and science of the Englishmen Locke and Newton. But philosophy and mathematics, as Stephen writes, are not especially English. Nevertheless, Voltaire concluded that Britons were philosophers because they were "free" men, resolved "to think as they pleased and to say what they thought." But freedom is not necessarily in the particular "character" of any nation, even the English. In fact, only a generation earlier the French had considered the English more savage "than its own mastiffs" for killing its king.

In the end, Voltaire remained true to his French roots and to the Academy. The classical rules in art, according to Stephen, did not allow literary expression of the deepest subjects; that was the realm of religion. What Rousseau got from Richardson was the legitimacy for expressing sentiments directly. By introducing "enthusiasm" into French letters, however, Rousseau was engaging in genuine revolt against the established order, unlike Richardson, whose "frank utterance of common sentiments and freedom in dealing with common subjects" was not revolutionary in a country that had never possessed an Academy in the true sense.

In conclusion, Stephen criticizes what he calls this "scientific" approach to literature, the search for causes in the development of literary and artistic phenomena. Critics are always trying to trace origins, for instance, of "romanticism" and so on, and then speak

as though its first representative had made a discovery of a new product as a chemist discovers a gas which nobody had ever before perceived. Rousseau, or somebody else, has then the credit of all the subsequent developments, as Watt gets the credit of the steam engine. Each new critic pushes the origin a little further back, because in reality there is no origin but only a gradual change of form.

Picture credit: Science and Literature Reading Group

Victor Klemperer on world literature

In off moments I liked to dip into a wonderful volume of essays by Clive James. An Australian by birth, he has lived in England since the 1960s. The volume is Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. James' cultural reach is extensive, and the volume includes essays on quite a few German writers. This morning I read the one on Ernst Jünger, who, as James writes, "was incomparably the most gifted writer to remain on the scene," meaning in Germany, during the course of World War II. The Nazi impact on German society was in every way disastrous, no more or less so than on the learned professions. Those who could got out, including Erich Auerbach who secured a post at a university in Ankara.

James writes that had Victor Klemperer, professor of Romance languages in Dresden, secured such a post, rather than being forced to remain in Dresden, where, as a Jew, he was denied access to pen, paper, newspapers, and radio broadcasts, it was unlikely that he would have produced Mimesis. "Fated to stay where he was," writes James, "he was granted the dubious reward of experiencing from close up what the Nazis did to the German language." James is referring here to Klemperer's book LTI, or Lingua tertii imperii, which documents the "officialese of slaughter." For those who can, I recommend reading it in German, but here is a link to selections from it in English. (Of late, Klemperer belatedly became known for the diaries he managed to keep during World War II.)

Actually Klemperer might have written an important study of world literature had he not been denied access to libraries during the Nazi era. In my research on the "prehistory" of Fritz Strich's groundbreaking Goethe und die Weltliteratur, I have come across an article written by Klemperer on this subject from 1929, during the very decade when Strich was first grappling with Goethe's concept. Unlike Strich, who is notorious for not footnoting, Klemperer does indicate the sources of his thinking on the concept of world literature.

As a note to James's essay and the posting of Auerbach to Ankara, several years ago -- at a conference at the Graduate Center on Erich Auerbach -- Jane O. Newman gave me a small article she had written concerning Fritz Strich's March 26, 1928, letter to the chancellor of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem on behalf of Walter Benjamin, who was hoping for a posting there. Strich was the author of an essay in 1917 on German Baroque poetry, which Benjamin had cited repeatedly (according to Professor Newman) in his own study of German Baroque theater.

So many connections.

Picture credits: Sigmar Polke; Maira Kalman

Goethe and world literature

I have not stopped blogging, but matters close to home have kept me otherwise occupied. God willing and the creeks not rising, however, I will travel to Chicago this coming Thursday to attend the triennual conference of the Goethe Society of North America, where I will be chairing a panel on the above subject. My thoughts are also turning to my long-delayed essay on Fritz Strich and the "prehistory" of his study of world literature. For today, let me note two things concerning this prehistory.

First, though Strich's study (Goethe und die Weltliteratur) appeared in 1946, he had begun reflecting on the subject much earlier, as can be seen in an essay that appeared in 1927. The essay emerged from a lecture he gave in London in 1926, in which he addressed Germany's place among the nations. Many of us are familiar with the voices after World War II who sought the answer to this question: how did the nation that produced Bach, Goethe, and Beethoven unleash such barbarism on the world? (One might consider that those eminent figures were produced when Germany was not yet a nation and that a "qualification" for serious nationhood used to be an imperial war. But that is another matter.) Fritz Strich had already sought an answer to this question after World War I. Simply expressed, his answer was that the world had not yet taken cognizance of the healing message of conciliation and toleration among the nations as expressed in Goethe's concept of world literature.

Strich was drawing here on some of Goethe's pronouncements, which suggested that the nations of the world -- more specifically, of Europe -- were getting to know each other in a new way. Literary criticism, periodicals, travel, and so one were making us more familiar with the cultural products of other lands and, what was more, revealing a new appreciation for these products.

Second, the foundation of Strich's views on world literature rests on something that is the case: from the time they began writing in the vernacular (which coincides to a great extent with developing national consciousness) the countries of western Europe were constantly engaged in intellectual and artistic exchange, during which one country or the other originated a cultural product that was then assimilated by the others. For instance, the sonnet began in Italy but rapidly made its way through all the lands of western Europe. While such receptivity indicates a universal human tendency (according to Strich), the expression of what is borrowed is specific to each country. Thus, the Petrarchan sonnet is not that of Shakespeare, and the French Gothic is different from the Flemish and so on.

The differences are what interested Goethe. In a letter to his friend Zelter (May 1828), for instance, he mentions different performances of "Helena," in Edinburgh, Paris, and Moscow. (Apparently the episode from act 3 of Faust II, published in 1826 as "Phantasmagorie," had been staged in these three cities.) It is, Goethe writes, "very instructive in this way to get to know three different ways of thinking" (drey verschiedene Denkweisen).

World Literature

David Cornwall, aka John le Carré, has just been awarded the Goethe-Medaille 2011, along with the Polish writer Adam Michnik (both pictured above) and the French avant garde theater director Ariane Mnochkine. The ceremony took place in the "Residenzschloss" in Weimar. They were distinguished for their contributions to German letters as well as in connection with the focus of this year's awards, namely, "the cultural future of Europe."

According to the account in the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, Michnik is optimistic about such a future, while Le Carré is more skeptical, sounding a note that I often invoke. He is quoted as saying that a united Europe remains a project of elites, its institutions far removed from the concerns of citizens and dominated by economics: "What is needed is a peaceful revolution of the middle classes."

I think it was the advent of a "united Europe" in Goethe's time, which was not so much cultural as economic, that determined Goethe's own thinking about the prospects of what he called world literature. Goethe didn't imagine that the nations of Europe would give up their individual destinies or particular character; he hoped, as he wrote, that they would simply learn to get along, which he thought would be helped by acquaintance with the various literary products of the nations. Franco Venturi, in the book on which I posted yesterday, writes that a characteristic of the surviving republics in pre-revolutionary Europe -- e.g., Holland, Venice, Genoa -- was the desire for for peace and harmony. Though he mentions the commercial nature of these republics, he does not stress the connection between a "spiritual ideal" -- harmony, tolerance, etc. -- and the material conditions -- economic prosperity -- that make this ideal possible. Thus, though I would agree with Le Carré concerning the elite nature of the project of united Europe and its appalling "democracy deficit," I think he underrates how much affluence and prosperity make Western ideals possible. Well, as far as I can discern he remains an unreconstructed Leftist.

A year ago, while doing research on my world literature project, I discovered that Le Carré had become acquainted while a student in Berne with Fritz Strich, the "father" of modern studies on this subject. Until Strich's 1946 work Goethe und die Weltliteratur, this aspect of Goethe's oeuvre was practically neglected; starting in the early 1950s, however, that work begat an industry in world literature. As I posted earlier, our understanding of world literature would be assisted by studying the background of how Strich came to his subject. Thus, I was interested in whether Le Carré had any particular memories of Strich and wrote to him. His response, which I am paraphrasing, was as follows:

While he was pleased to learn that the work of Strich was of interest to Germanists, he could not help me in any meaningful way. He was barely seventeen when he attended Strich's seminars, and his German was "indifferent," and much of what was said "went over" his head. However, Strich had "the humanity to notice this" and allowed him to stay behind at the end of his seminar for a few minutes, instructing him in the groundwork of German literature that might enable him to rise to Strich's own level. Le Carré followed his instruction, and by the time he left Bern was equipped with the tools with which he could one day appreciate Strich's eminence. In his note to me, Le Carré confessed that he was a "broken reed" when it came to "the finer points of his [Strich's] theses, or indeed the substance of them" -- meaning world literature. His lasting impression was of "an elderly, distinguished gentleman who had spotted a student who was completely out of his depth" and to whom Le Carré found himself greatly indebted when he returned to German literature.

The substance of this response has been reported in other newspapers and reports in Europe in recent years, including here, on the occasion of the speech Le Carré gave in 2009 at the celebration of the 175th anniversary of the University of Berne. In it he again gives due credit to Fritz Strich.

What particularly touched me about Le Carré's response was its similarity to mine at the age of seventeen, when I too went off the university. I come from a really white-bread American background. For instance, before college the only plays I had ever seen performed live were high school productions (though back in my day they were quite professional), and I had never been to a museum. My decision to study German in college was solely determined by my fondness for a history teacher in my last year of high school, who had the intriguing last name of "Braeutigam." I started making up for my intellectual deficits in college, but probably the most formative experience was the year I spent studying in Marburg as a junior in college. Though I didn't study with anyone as eminent as Strich, I had the same experience, not only with professors but also with German students, who went out of their way to assist me in the fine points of the German language and its history. And, of course, they took me into their homes and their activities. For instance, I learned to drink beer and wine!

Photo credit: Breitbart; Modern Alliance; Trübe-Linse

Fritz Strich and Goethe's concept of world literature

Because of my editorial duties in connection with the book on the history of freedom of speech -- the title, by the way, will be Freedom of Speech: The History of an Idea -- I have not been able to get to my real area of scholarly interest for some time, namely, Goethe and world literature. I have also been detoured by another topic, this time at least on a Goethe subject, the sublime. I first began working on the latter when writing on Goethe's geology; the result was an article in the Goethe Yearbook a few years back. And because of that article, I was asked to participate in a panel at the recent German Studies Association conference on the pre-Kantian sublime, which, in turn, took me further away from world literature. Still, as I gradually put the free speech volume and an article on the sublime behind me, I look forward to getting back to world literature in the New Year.

In this connection, I was recently reminded of Fritz Strich, who was the scholar who put world literature on the academic map. A strange aspect of world literature, which Goethe began to speak and write about in the 1820s, was that the idea lay fallow for another half-century. True, since Goethe had utter the oracular words, there was some attention to the concept in the late 19th century, but it wasn't until the discipline of comparative literature began to be established that world literature was drafted to talk about the scope of the new discipline. Still, everyone got it wrong, speaking of world lit as if it stretched back in time, back to Homer or Gilgamesh, or extended to other parts of the world, encompassing, for instance, Chinese or Indian literature. Goethe was speaking of a future phenomenon. More about that at another time.

Before World War II, there were a couple important articles on world literature, but the first major publication on the subject appeared in 1946, with the first edition of Goethe und die Weltliteratur, by Fritz Strich. An academic growth subject was born, and by the 1950s the industry began. The concept of world literature seems to fill a conceptual need, much as did "the sublime" in the 18th century, when that term was drafted to express the new aesthetic consciousness. After all, Longinus's treatise on the sublime (written in ca. 80 A.D.) had been around in Europe since the first editions in the 16th century. It was not until the beginning of the 18th century, however, especially with Joseph Addison's essays on the imagination, that the concept really took off and dominated theoretical discussions through the century, culminating in the works of Schiller and Kant.

A few years ago I placed an inquiry in the Times Literary Supplement concerning Fritz Strich, asking for personal reminiscences of Strich. From a scholarly and an intellectual point of view, Strich has certainly been as important as, say, Erich Auerbach or Ernst Robert Curtius, whose works are familiar to many outside of Germany. Besides his study of world literature, Strich is almost single-handedly responsible for the rediscovery of German Baroque literature, with an essay on that subject in 1916. Nevertheless, aside from a small Festschrift honoring Strich, there has been no work on him as a person. At the time of my TLS inquiry, however, I received no responses.

Much to my surprise I recently received a letter from Switzerland, from Heinz Günter, an English translator who works in Berne. Mr. Günter, who had saved my TLS inquiry, now sent me a speech given by the novelist John Le Carré on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of the University of Berne. Le Carré, it turns out, had as a young Englishman (his name is actually David Cornwell) studied in Berne and had some very kind words to say about Fritz Strich, especially about Strich's encouragement of him. Indeed, Le Carre's tribute to the university and to Strich reminded me very much of my own experience as a student in Germany in the late 1960s. Though I was not so fortunate to have a professor like Fritz Strich take an interest in me, I did have many German friends who initiated me into German ways and also helped me to become a capable speaker of German. Unfortunately, after three-quarters of a century, Le Carré was unable to provide any specific details about the lectures he attended. The impression remains, however, of the kind, polite nature of Fritz Strich. (Here is a link to an article in English, which makes many of the same points as in Le Carré's Berne talk.) I am still hoping for reminiscences from others, though I suspect I may one day have to go to Berne and do some research in the archives that contain Strich's papers.

The Spirit of Our Age

I first became aware of the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) about 20 years ago. A friend of mine, an artist, spoke highly of his work, but the reproductions I saw back then, all still lifes with a few objects, usually bottles or vases on a table top, did not grab me.

Enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is now featuring a large exhibition of the Morandi's works and, thus, an opportunity to judge an artist who, according to the Met's website, was by the early 1930s recognized as "perhaps the greatest living painter in his country."

At the Met show I did like some of Morandi's earliest works on view (from, say, 1914), in which the colors (particular in the terracotta range) and the compositions related them to earlier traditions of paintings.

Overall, however, my first opinion of Morandi still holds: I don't see why he is so important. The late works, in which the arrangement of objects has been pared down to a minimum, are repetitive to my eye and offer me little intellectual interest, despite the information on the labels, concerning Morandi's neoclassicism and paintings "composed with the intellectual rigor of a classicist." Charming, yes, but I find that Paul Klee, who also works in a minor key, is more interesting.

When you have to read labels to understand what the painter was up to (the same goes for poets or writers who explain their work to an audience that has come to hear them), then the work, in my opinion, is not successful.

(I was struck by the way Morandi resembles both James Joyce and Bertolt Brecht.)

Despite my lack of enthusiasm for his paintings, I was intrigued that Morandi stuck with one subject throughout his life, investigating the possibilities with, indeed, "rigor." Something similar can be seen in the scholar whose works I have been studying recently, Fritz Strich, who wrote the first important book on Goethe and world literature, in 1946. From the 1920s until his death in 1963, he had one subject, "spirit" -- "Geist" in German.

Strich wrote in a way that is at odds with our postmodernist age: he spoke, for instance, of the Renaissance or of the Baroque period or of Romanticism as if there was a "spirit" that dominated the age and that was responsible for the way art and literature was expressed. Renaissance art, for instance, with its clarity of construction, its sense of proportion, and mostly with its central subject of "man," expressed the ideal that man, God, and the world existed in harmony. 

Baroque art, in contrast, with its restless, often colossal forms, spoke to an age that had discovered the immensity of the universe within which humans, reduced in stature, sought to break from the restrictive forms imposed by Renaissance harmony.

For Strich, the human spirit was polarized by two desires: one for the limits imposed by form; the other the desire to break free of limits. Cultural history, both art and literature, thus represented a succession of styles that expressed one of these two. Classicism, for instance, shows an age desiring the spirit of restraint, while Romanticism shows the same spirit suffering under restraint.

What is the spirit of our  age? I would say it is one of incoherence, which is reflected in our art and our literature. Other signs of our incoherence: we live in the most affluent time in history, yet we in the West are stressed out, feel a lack of control over our lives, think the government should save us if we get into debt, believe the metals in our cooking pans poison our food. Without coherence, without a firm anchor, we take seriously apocalyptic warnings from those whose mission it is to spread hysteria, whether it be about our planet, our financial system, our food. Please, won't someone take care of us, so that we don't have to take responsibility for ourselves!