Selected Essays

The Nineteenth Century

Baudelaire’s words about the albatross apply to the nineteenth century: “By the spread of his great wings, he is fastened to the earth.”¹

The beginning of the century still tried to struggle with the traction of earth, with convulsive hops, awkward and weighted half-flights; the end of the century already rests motionlessly, covered by the immense marquee of the outsize wings. The calm of despair. Its wings weigh it down, contrary to their natural function.

The great wings of the nineteenth century: its cognitive powers. The cognitive capacities of the nineteenth century had no correspondence with its will, its character, its moral growth. Like an immense cyclopean eye, the cognitive capacity of the nineteenth century turned to the past and the future. Nothing except sight, empty and rapacious, with a singular passion for devouring any object, any epoch.

Derzhavin on the threshold of the nineteenth century scratched on his slate board a few verses which could serve as the leitmotif of the whole oncoming century:

The river of time in its flowing

Bears off all works of men

And drops into the abyss of oblivion

Peoples, kingdoms, kings.

And if something should yet remain

Through sound of lyre and trumpet

It will be devoured by Eternity’s maw,

And it won’t escape the common fate.

Here, in the rusty language of the withered century, with all power and penetration, is expressed the hidden thought of the oncoming—the exalted lesson abstracted from it, its foundation given. The lesson—relativism, relativity: and if something should yet remain . . .

The essence of the cognitive activity of the nineteenth century is projection. The century that has passed did not like to speak of itself in the first person but loved to project itself on the screen of strange epochs, and its life consisted of that, that was its movement. With its dreamless thought, as with an immense mad projector, it cast histories out over the dark sky; with gigantic illuminated tentacles it rummaged in the wastes of time; it plucked out of the darkness this or that chunk, burned it up with the blinding glitter of its historical laws, and indifferently allowed it once again to drop into nothingness as if nothing had happened.

It was not merely a single projector that fumbled along this terrible sky: all the sciences were turned into their own abstract and monstrous methodologies (with the exception of mathematics). The triumph of naked method over knowledge was essentially complete and exclusive—all the sciences spoke of their own method more openly, more eagerly, more animatedly than of their direct activity. Method determines science: as many methodologies as there are sciences. Most typical was philosophy: through the whole stretch of the century it preferred to limit itself to “Introductions to Philosophy,” kept introducing without end, led you out somewhere or other, and then abandoned you. And all the sciences together fumbled along the starless sky (and this century’s sky was amazingly starless) with their methodological tentacles, meeting no opposition in that soft, abstract emptiness.

I’m constantly drawn to citations from the naive and clever eighteenth century, and now I am reminded of the lines from the famous Lomonosov missive:

They think incorrectly about things, Shuvalov,

Who consider glass lower than minerals.

From where does this enthusiasm come, this high-flown utilitarian enthusiasm, from where such an inner warmth that positively sets aglow this poeticizing about the fate of the industrial crafts? What a striking contrast to the brilliant, cold impersonality of the scientific thought of the nineteenth century!

The eighteenth century was an age of secularization, that is, of the rendering worldly of human thought and activity. Hatred for the priesthood, for hieratic cult, hatred for the liturgy, is deep in its blood. Not having been primarily an age of social struggle, it was nevertheless an interval of time when society was painfully aware of caste. The determinism inherited from the Middle Ages, weighed upon philosophy and enlightenment and upon its political experiments, all the way to the tiers état. The caste of priests, the caste of warriors, the caste of agriculturists—these were the concepts with which “enlightened minds” operated. These were not at all classes: all the enumerated elements were thought to be necessary in the sacred architectonics of any society. The immense, accumulated energy of social conflict sought to find a way out. The whole aggressive demand of the age, the whole force of its principled indignation, pounced upon the priestly caste. It seemed that the whole anvil of Great Principles served only to forge the hammer with which it would be possible to smash the hateful priests. There was not a century more sensitive to everything that smelled of priesthood—the smoke of incense scorched its nostrils and stiffened the backbone of a beast of prey.

The bow rings, the arrow trembles,

And, spiraling, Pithon died . . .

The liturgy was a thorn in the side of the eighteenth century. It saw nothing around itself that one way or another was not connected with the liturgy, that did not issue from it. Architecture, music, painting—all radiated from a single center, and this center was destined for destruction. In the composition of painting there is a certain question which conditions the movement and balance of colors: where is the source of light? Thus, the eighteenth century, which had rejected the source of light it had historically inherited, was obliged to resolve this problem all over again for itself. And it resolved it in an original way, having broken a window through to a paganism invented by itself, to a sham antiquity, inauthentic and by no means based on philology, but helpful, utilitarian, composed to satisfy a ripened historical need.

The rationalistic moments of mythology met this need of the time as well as anything could, permitting it to settle the waste sky with human images, pliant and obedient to the capricious vanity of the age. As for Deism, it tolerated anything; Deism was ready to tolerate everything as long as the modest significance of the underpainting was retained, as long as what was painted was not an empty canvas.

As the great French Revolution approached, the pseudoantique theatricalization of life and politics made greater and greater headway, and by the time of the Revolution itself, the practical participants were already moving and struggling in a thick crowd of personifications and allegories, in the narrow space of actual theatrical wings, on the boards of a staged antique drama. When real furies of ancient rage gathered within this pathetic cardboard theater, when they walked into the pompous gabble of civic holidays and municipal choruses, it was hard to believe at first; and only Chenier’s poetry, a poetry of authentic antique rage, clearly showed that a union of intellect and the furies does indeed exist, that the ancient iambic spirit which had once inspired Archilochus to produce the first iambs still lived in the rebellious European soul.

The spirit of antique rage, with its festive luxury and dark majesty, made its appearance in the French Revolution. Isn’t this what flung the Gironde at the Mountain and the Mountain at the Gironde? Wasn’t this what broke out in the tongues of fire of the Phrygian cap and in the unprecedented thirst for mutual extermination that ripped open the womb of the Convention? Freedom, equality, and brotherhood—this triad left no place for the furies of authentic raging antiquity. They had not invited her to the feast, she came herself; they had not called her, she appeared unasked; they spoke with her in the language of intellect, but little by little she converted her most outspoken opponents into her followers.

The French Revolution ended when the spirit of antique rage departed; it had burned the priesthood, killed social determinism, completed the secularization of Europe. And then, there splashed out onto the shore of the nineteenth century, already misunderstood—not the head of the Gorgon, but a fascicle of seaweed. Out of the union of mind and the furies there was born a mongrel cur, equally strange to the high rationalism of the Encyclopedia and the antique madness of the revolutionary storm—Romanticism.

But, as it unfolded, the nineteenth century left the past a lot further behind than Romanticism had.

The nineteenth century was the carrier of Buddhist influence in European culture.² It was the bearer of an alien, hostile, and powerful principle with which all our history has struggled—an active, pragmatic, thoroughly dialectical and vital conflict of forces which had brought each other to fruition. The nineteenth century was the cradle of a Nirvana which did not allow a single ray of active knowledge to shine through.

In an empty cave

I am the rocking of a cradle

Under somebody’s hand,

Silence, silence.

Latent Buddhism, an inclination inward, a wormhole. The age did not preach Buddhism but bore it within, like an inner night, like a blindness of the blood, like a secret terror and a head-spinning weakness. Buddhism in science under the thin mask of a bustling positivism; Buddhism in art in the analytical novel of the Goncourts and Flaubert; Buddhism in religion peeking out from all the holes in the theory of progress, preparing the triumph of the newest theosophy, which is nothing other than the bourgeois religion of progress, the religion of the apothecary Monsieur Homais, in preparation for further sailing rigged with metaphysical gear.

It seems to me not accidental, the inclination of the Goncourts and those who thought like them, the first French Impressionists, to Japanese art, to the print of Hokusai, to the form of the tanka³ in all its aspects; to a composition, that is, entirely immobile and self-enclosed. All of Madame Bovary is written according to the system of the tanka. The reason Flaubert wrote it so slowly and so painfully is that after every five words he had to begin all over again.

The tanka is the favored form of molecular art. It is not a miniature, and it would be a gross mistake to confuse it with a miniature because of its brevity. It has no scale because there is no action in it. It doesn’t relate to the world in any way, because it is itself a world. It is the constant vortical movement inward of molecules.

The cherry branch and the snowy peak of a favorite mountain, the patronesses of Japanese engravers, are reflected in the shining lacquer of each phrase of the polished Flaubertian novel. Here everything is covered with the lacquer of pure contemplation, and, like the surface of the rosewood tree, the style of the novel is capable of reflecting any object. If such works did not frighten contemporaries, this would be attributed to their striking insensitivity and lack of artistic perceptiveness. Of all Flaubert’s critics perhaps the most penetrating was the royal prosecuting attorney, who sensed a certain danger in the novel. Unfortunately, however, he did not seek it where it was hidden.

The nineteenth century at its extreme simply had to arrive at the form of the tanka—a poetry of nonbeing and Buddhism in art.

Essentially Japan and China are not at all the East, but rather the extreme West: they are more Western than London or Paris. Our past century really kept moving deeper into the West, and not the East, but it merged with the Far East in its striving for the outer limit.

Looking at the analytical French novel as the peak of nineteenth-century Western Buddhism, we become convinced of its total literary sterility. It has had no heirs, nor could it really have any—only naïve epigones, of which a large number still remain. Tolstoy’s novels are pure epic and an entirely healthy European form of art. The synthetic novel of Romain Rolland broke sharply with the tradition of the French analytical novel and was related to the synthetic novel of the eighteenth century, mainly to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, with which its basic artistic technique links it.

There exists a special kind of synthetic blindness to manifestations of the individual. Goethe and Romain Rolland depict psychological landscapes, landscapes of characters and spiritual conditions; but the form of the Japano-Flaubertian analytical tanka is alien to them. In the veins of every century there flows a foreign blood, not its own, and the stronger, the more intensive historically the age, the more heavily this foreign blood weighs.

After the eighteenth century, which understood nothing, possessed not the least feeling for the comparative-historical method, like a blind kitten in a basket, left abandoned amidst worlds incomprehensible to it, there arrived the century of omnicomprehension—the century of relativism with its monstrous capacity for reincarnating past ages—the nineteenth. Yet this taste for historical reincarnations and omnicomprehension proved to be not steady but transient, and our own century has begun under the sign of a sublime intolerance, exclusively, and the conscious noncomprehension of other worlds. In the veins of our century there flows the heavy blood of extremely distant monumental cultures, perhaps the Egyptian and Assyrian.

The wind brought us comfort,

And in the azure we sensed

The Assyrian wings of the dragonflies,

Partitions of elbow-jointed darkness.⁴

In relation to this new age, turned cruel and immense, we appear as colonizers. To Europeanize and humanize the twentieth century, to make it glow with a theological warmth—that is the task facing the survivors of the collapse of the nineteenth century, those who have been cast ashore by the will of the fates on a new historical continent.

And in this work it is easier to find support in the more remote rather than in the more immediate past. The elementary formulas, the general conceptions of the eighteenth century may once again come in handy. “The skeptical assessment of the Encyclopedia,” the legal spirit of the social contract, naive materialism once so arrogantly mocked, schematic intellect, the spirit of expediency may yet serve mankind. Now is not the time to fear rationalism. The irrational root of the oncoming epoch, the gigantic inextirpable double-stranded root, like the stone temple of an alien god, casts its shadow upon us. In days like these, the intellect of the Encyclopedists is the sacred fire of Prometheus.

Note

Note: This translation was originally published in New Literary History 1 (1974–1975): 641–646.