The Poetics of the Kunstlerinroman and the Aesthetics of the Sublime

Evy Varsamopoulou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138741331
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351726542
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2002: This study of the poetics of the Romantic K nstlerinroman (female artist novel) brings to the foreground its salient metafictional discourse on the aesthetics of the sublime, ever since its beginnings in Madame de Sta l's "Corinne ou L'Italie". The book presents detailed readings of H.D.'s "Palimpsest", Christa Wolf's "Nachdenken ber Christa T." and Marguerite Duras' "L'Amant" in a dialogue with Kant, Freud, Lacan, Cixous, Derrida and other philosophers, theorists, literary critics and writers. Each novel is explored in terms of its generic affiliations, its reflections on the role of literature and the writer in society and its aesthetic discourse on the sublime. The book stages an inquiry into the relation between genre, the sublime, gender and literary history from which emerge insights into the conditions of subjectivity underlying the experience and communication of the sublime.

Chapter 1
The Sublime Subject of Corinne ou L'Italie

Corinne, the female genius protagonist of Madame de Staël's Künstlerinroman, Corinne ou L'ltalie (1807) is asked early in the novel which of her poetry she prefers: 'those which are the work of reflection or of instantaneous inspiration?'¹ The language which Corinne makes recourse to in her response is precisely the modern language of the aesthetic discourse of her age.² Here we have an Italian-English heroine in a book written in French, promulgating German philosophical aesthetics for the understanding and appreciation of the arts. The occasion for her reflections is an informal 'interview' by her friends and admirers during a social soirée at her house, which in the novel is a meeting place for enthusiasts of the arts and for Italian patriots. These digressions where Corinne engages in short speeches and discussions on art, aesthetics, poetics, culture and politics are indeed the rule informing the novel. Corinne concludes her lengthy consideration with the following observation:

Enfin je me sens poëte, non pas seulement quand un heureux choix de rimes ou de syllabes harmonieuses, quand une heureuse réunion d'images éblouit des auditeurs, mais quand mon âme s'élève, quand elle dédaigne de plus haut l'egoïsme et la bassesse, enfin quand une belle action me serait plus facile: c'est alors que mes vers sont meilleurs. Je suis poëte lorsque j'admire, lorsque je méprise, lorsque je hais, non par des sentiments personnels, non pour ma propre cause, mais pour la dignité de l'espèce humaine et la gloire du monde.³
[Finally, I feel I am a poet, not only when a felicitous choice of harmonious rhymes or syllables, when a felicitous reunion of images dazzles the listeners, but when my soul is uplifted, when it disdains from the highest point egoism and lowness, briefly, when a beautiful act would be more effortless: that is when my verses are best. I am a poet when I admire, when I feel contempt, when I hate, not out of my own personal sentiments, not for my own self, but for the dignity of humankind and the glory of the world.]

In effect, Corinne's answer has transposed the terms of the question from which poems are better to what attitude of mind corresponds to her sense of 'being' a poet. This sense creates a temporary identification of herself as poet which although clearly not grounded on the mere production of beautiful poems is validated by poetic writing of the highest order.

Corinne was written after Madame de Staël's sojourn in Weimar, where she sought out and learned from the eminent German writers and philosophers of the time. Thus, Corinne ou L'Italie has its roots in both French Enlightenment, of which Madame Germaine Necker de Staël was a genuine product, and its supercession in Rousseau. Rousseau's work exerted a great influence on the young Germaine. Her first published work was Lettres sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1788. Considering how German Romanticism was first to take up and develop Rousseau's Romanticism, it is not surprising that she looked there instead for the most exciting and important European aesthetic activity of the time.

In her book on Madame de Staël, Renée Winegarten states that 'Corinne remains one of the greatest myth-making books of all time'.⁴ The myth alluded to is that of the female 'genius', who is at the same time a belle souffrante, for the novel could not otherwise accomplish the mythic union of genius and femininity. Corinne dazzles her lover Oswald, the Scottish gentleman, with her poetic genius and erudition, but despite her acclaimed womanly charms and his coming from the land of Ossian, she must lose him to her foil, Lucile, Corinne's younger sister. Lucile has understanding and intelligence without troublesome independence and keen judgement. She is beautiful but innocent and, most of all, her husband would be the centre of her universe. The poetic genius Corinne, on the other hand, requires the public sphere as a platform and stage to speak and act.⁵

Is this need for a public mere narcissistic exhibitionism, as Ellen Moers suggests, or a realistic condition for 'genius'?⁶ Christine Battersby puts forward what can perhaps be an unbiased, pragmatic notion of genius which, if one must employ the term, would not exclude women: 'A person's cultural achievement is evaluated and assessed against an appropriate background of artistic genres and traditions. The genius is the person whose work (a) marks the boundary between old ways and the new within the tradition, and (b) has lasting value and significance'.⁷ Of course, Battersby recognizes that there are practical conditions for even this being possible. Who will be making these evaluations and with what models from tradition? How and by whom will 'lasting significance' be measured? Issues of creativity bound up with the descriptive (or essentialist) meanings rather than the performative (or pragmatic) attached to the term 'genius' are abandoned by Battersby as too fraught. In Corinne, the portrait of genius contains both romantic glamour and the Romantic defence against social marginalization of the non-conformist individual. Her poetic genius is also corroborated in a performative sense: she has great learning and appreciation of the arts; she has made a plethora of creative contributions to the literary arts and this work is highly esteemed by the Italian people and professional critics. The degree to which genius is evaluated by performative criteria is first of all evident in the scene in which Corinne is first seen by Oswald: her glorious crowning at the Capitol (Book II). This is given truly phantasmagoric, mythic dimensions in the novel and is no less than a neo-pagan stately ritual. But if its set-up of Corinne as female genius (of a noble Italy) occasions her becoming the female beloved of a nobleman, it is equally a set-up which will determine their fateful separation. As Nancy Miller is quick to point out, Corinne receives this acclaim for her performance as artist; it is her performance as female subject which fails to elicit lasting support in the specific context of the heterosexual plot/relation. Inexorably, the clash of these two contexts or roles, literally kills Corinne by a kind of mysterious implosion.⁸

Thus, Corinne has been criticized for its lack of 'realism' and the obvious romantic delusion of its project in creating a female protagonist who not only was a genius, but especially was accepted and admired as such. As Battersby notes, Corinne 'leaves an overwhelming impression of dishonesty, and fails to engage the sympathies of even the most sensitive of modern feminist critics'.⁹ This kind of criticism most obviously carries a certain notion of the 'novel' that demands a satisfactory degree of realistic correspondance with the facts of contemporary society, or at least a demonstrable interest in such a mimetic relation. What it does not cater for is an awareness of the much older (and important in the Eighteenth Century) tradition of romance. However, Corinne ou L'Italie - a French roman directly influenced by the German Romantics' theories of the romance tradition as a true model of emulation and development for the modern Romantic German Roman — comes very much from this side of Continental literary thinking. The (German) Romantic novel is meant to create an enabling, transformative fiction.¹⁰

It would be a more useful critical exercise to take a closer look at Corinne the Künstlerinroman, which invents itself as a genre with such success and exerted such an amazing degree of influence over women and men of the age. The importance of identifying genre, especially in cases such as the Künstlerinroman, is a priority for feminist criticism. In the words of Rita Felski: 'Genre [...] provides the cultural matrix against which the significance of the individual text can be measured'.¹¹ For women writers, it sets a precious precedent of undoubtedly hard to reach legendary proportions. Most notably, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh was written in direct response to Corinne; it attempted a critical rewriting of its heroine and changed the tragic ending so that the heroine would get her glory and her man as well.¹²

Beyond the impact of its influence in creating a space for a female tradition, which I will return to later, Corinne's feminist project is too hastily dismissed by the modern feminist scholarship Battersby refers to. For this project is not primarily located in the degree of its viability or plausibility as a prototype for women writers and artists of all kinds. Instead, it is firstly lodged in the very daring act of its writing, the success of its influence and, on the narrative level, the project constitutes the main theme of Corinne's speech to Oswald in the story of their romance.

Oswald fulfils the function of Corinne's 'ideal reader': because he loves her, he is willing to listen to her sympathetically. Although he is a man from a culture which specifically limits a woman's role to the home and is a strong upholder of social codes and propriety, he is still open-minded enough to be persuaded by her. He offers arguments to counter her own convictions and is the voice of prudence in contrast to her Romantic manifestos; nevertheless, he does allow her transgressive speech and is even convinced by it for a while. Oswald also subscribes to the Romantic idea of genius for which the established rules and norms cease to apply. To Corinne's fear of being frowned upon for 'hardly resembling those [women] of which they approve in your country', which she cannot quell throughout the narrative, Oswald responds: 'Who could resemble you? [...] and could one make laws for a unique person?—'.¹³ Such is the suspension of disbelief and disapproval necessary for an intransigent realist to take interest in the debates represented in the novel.

In this spirit, a closer look at the initial quotation from Corinne reveals both an extension and a difference from the Romantic notions of genius and the sublime as they are treated in Immanuel Kant's crucial work on aesthetics, The Critique of Judgement (1790).¹⁴ Ernst Behler's investigation of the influence of German Romantic thought on Madame de Staël situates Kant's Critique of Judgement, with its 'notion of an autonomy of art and independence of the aesthetic realm', as the most important work to influence Madame de Staël's championing of German aesthetic thought.¹⁵ What was achieved by de Staël's fiction and literary criticism after her study of the philosophical, and especially, aesthetic writings of Kant, Schelling, Fichte and the Schlegel brothers was not only 'their practical application', but also 'considerable modifications, reformulations, and expansions of the theory' of the more philosophical speculations in the concrete dynamics of specific literary texts.¹⁶

Corinne's first statement defining the conscious experience of being a poet proceeds by negative declaration: she is not a poet when she has produced poems judged as 'beautiful' by her audience. The aesthetic judgement for beautiful poetry is given as that which has harmonious sounds and images and produces an instantaneous effect of bedazzlement on the listener. As with Kant, the emphasis is on form, which gives immediate pleasure, that is, without any reference to a concept: 'For, whether we are dealing with beauty of nature or beauty of art, we may make the universal statement: that is beautiful which pleases in the mere estimate of it (not in sensation or by means of a concept)'.¹⁷

Now, Kant also says that beauty in art 'requires genius for its possibility'.¹⁸ However, when analysing the 'faculties of the mind which constitute genius',¹⁹ Kant makes no reference to the kind of virtuous elevation of soul Corinne ascribes to her moment of identity as a poet in the act of creating the most beautiful of her poems. This state of noble elevation would appear instead to draw on the Longinian aphorism: 'Sublimity is the true ring of a noble mind'.²⁰ This is also echoed by the popular Romantic idea according to which only that poetry can be sublime which is the reflection of the personality of genius. However, such a quick interpretation of Corinne's definition would disregard the context of the previous part of her answer and, equally, the intertextual dialogue with the Kantian text. In effect, there is a direct link between what Corinne is saying and a rather strange di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editors' Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction: The Genre of Genre Criticism of the Künstlerinroman
• 1 The Sublime Subject of Corinne ou L'Italie
• 2 The Subject of the Sublime in Aesthetics: Problems and Possibilities
• 3 Subjectivity and Writing as Palimpsest: H.D.'s Modernist Künstlerinroman
• 4 The Conundrum of Authorization: Christa Wolf's Nachdenken über Christa T.
• 5 Eros, Thanatos, I: The Sublimity of Writing the Family Romance in Marguerite Duras' L'Amant
• Conclusion: The Aesthetics of a Literary Account
• Bibliography
• Index