Romantic Interventions

ABSTRACT

The essay provides a brief introduction to the concept of intervention and its potential usage in Romantic Studies. The authors set out from an understanding of intervention as it has been developed in cultural studies, predominantly in connection with the method of conjunctural analysis. In turn, conjunctural analysis seeks to investigate how a specific historical moment is shaped by the complex interplay of a variety of spatial, temporal and discursive factors, i.e. factors that shape the contingent power/knowledge nexus that characterizes the conjuncture. Different, yet interconnected, understandings of intervention are then traced by way of a brief consideration of some passages in William Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude.

It is most likely the case that the term “intervention” is more frequently used in cultural studies than in literary studies. In Paul Bowman’s words: “intervention is a fundamental raison d’être of cultural studies … . It is the most important thing to be theorized” (xiv). However, to date and to the best of our knowledge, no comprehensive theorization has been undertaken. Even Stuart Hall, who “used the term intervention regularly … never explicitly theorized it” (Sterne 5; original emphasis). Nonetheless, on the basis of Hall’s usages of the concept, Jonathan Sterne has proposed a very helpful working definition:

An intervention is simultaneously a political and intellectual act. It can be individual or collective. It is undertaken with intent, with consciousness of context and possible outcomes, and from a specific institutional and cultural position. It is itself theorized though it may not appear to be. Interventions have expiration dates, and while they can move from place to place, they are never universally applicable. They are conjunctural. Interventions do not come with guarantees. (6)

When Sterne claims that interventions are conjunctural, he refers to what is called “conjunctural analysis” in cultural studies, which designates a method of investigating a specific historical moment, particularly a moment of crisis, by taking into account the complex interplay of contributing factors with a view not least to how hegemonic power relationships are upheld and contested. Lawrence Grossberg defines “conjuncture” as follows:

A conjuncture is not defined a priori by a location, territory, or diagram. It is constituted by specific articulations of these different modalities of contextuality. But more specifically, it is characterized by an articulation, accumulation, and condensation of contradictions, a fusion of different currents and circumstances. A conjuncture is a description of a social formation as fractured and conflictual, along multiple axes, planes, and scales, constantly in search of temporary balances or structural stabilities through a variety of practices and processes of struggle and negotiation. It is the complex product of multiple lines of force, determination, and resistance, with different temporalities and spatialities. Yet a conjuncture has to be constructed, narrated, fabricated. (Future Tense 41)

This latter feature, namely that every conjuncture is “constructed, narrated, fabricated,” indicates why literary and cultural studies have an important function in analyzing any historical constellation. Not only literary and other cultural texts actively participate in the construction of the conjuncture though. Contributions by other formative contemporary discourses, such as historiographical accounts, proto-psychiatric case studies, political speeches and treatises, etc., equally use fabricating strategies, many of which work with tools akin to those employed in literature; for instance, narrative strategies. Importantly, conjunctural analysis does not only describe an a-posteriori activity, one that is carried out by “objective” scholars at a more or less considerable temporal (and often spatial) distance from the conjuncture. Rather, it is an activity that is always already done from within one’s own conjuncture, both by the cultural, political and other agents in the period under scrutiny and by the scholars who retrospectively engage with it, since the latter of course write and do research from within their very own conjunctural position. This situatedness in-between is not necessarily a shortcoming but actually constitutes the basis for any kind of intervention. As Grossberg writes elsewhere: “Conjunctures define an effective site—perhaps the most effective site—for political intervention aimed at redirecting the tides of social change, and perhaps the most propitious level at which intellectual and political analysis converge” (“Search” 42; see also Farred 130–32). In order to gain an understanding of what results a consideration of the concept of intervention may yield regarding the Romantic conjuncture, we would like to take a brief look at William Wordsworth’s Prelude.

In one of his most notable childhood memories, the speaker-narrator of the 1805 version of Wordsworth’s The Prelude recalls an incident when, as a schoolboy on holiday, he once took a boat and rowed out alone on lake Ullswater in the Lake District. At one point while moving away from the shore, which is lined by a steep ridge, the boy’s line of sight changes so as to allow him to perceive the outlines of a “huge Cliff” (Wordsworth 177, 1.409) behind the bankside. Since night has already fallen and the cliff is illuminated only by the moon, its silhouette appears as if it were a huge monstrous creature that suddenly “Upreared its head” (1.411). Panicking, the boy tries to row away, yet due to the parallax effect this act of distancing creates, the creature seems to actually grow and pursue him: it “Rose up between me and the stars, and still, / With measured motion, like a living thing, / Strode after me” (1.413–15). According to the speaker, the event in hindsight serves as an illustration of how “Nature” (1.366) has a formative influence on human development from early on. While such influence is commonly exerted through the “gentlest visitation,” Nature sometimes employs “Severer interventions” (1.373), as is the case here.

The meaning of the term “intervention” in this example is multi-layered. Of the three semantic categories according to which the Oxford English Dictionary delimits the definition of “intervention,” the third refers to “[t]he fact of coming or being situated between in place, time, or order” (3.a). When it comes to Nature’s “Severer interventions,” the conjunction “or” in the definition has to be replaced by “and,” as the Ullswater event signifies an intervention in place, time, and order. Concerning place, the cliff is “coming … between” (“intervention” 3.a) the boy and “The bound of the horizon” (Wordsworth 177, 1.402). Its sudden appearance and its “striding after” him, however, do certainly not only mark a spatial type of intervention. Rather, in a reversal of the dreadful effect of the parallax created by the boy’s own movement in space, the mature speaker’s temporal distance from the event—a temporal version of parallax, so to speak—allows him to interpret it retrospectively as one of those “spots of time” (353, 11.258) that have had a “severe” impact on him in the course of his life and hence on his understanding of the order of things. After all, as the speaker recalls, in the days immediately after having witnessed this “spectacle,” his “brain / Worked with a dim and undetermined sense / Of unknown modes of being” (177, 1.421–23). The event brings to the boy’s still instinctual knowledge a sense of the unbounded sublimity of Nature. Its “huge and mighty Forms” (1.428) hit home an understanding of his own existential smallness in contrast to the enormous power animating the universe. The primary meaning of “intervention” as per the OED, whose first appearance is verified for circa 1425, is described as “[t]he action of intervening, ‘stepping in’, or interfering in any affair, so as to affect its course or issue” (1.a). The intervention depicted in the “Shepherd’s Boat” episode must be apprehended in this sense as well, precisely because it undoubtedly depicts one such course-altering incident with respect to the growth of the poet-speaker’s mind. Significantly, his childhood self perceives the “action of intervening” to be fully on the side of Nature, which the personification of the cliff clarifies. Just as the speaker’s youthful self in “Tintern Abbey,” described as being “more like a man / Flying from something that he dreads, than one / who sought the thing he loved” (Wordsworth 67, lines 71–73), the boy in The Prelude does not yet understand that it is also due to his actions, both the physical one of rowing and the intellectual one of imagining, that the “monster” is created in the first place. In fact, it is a joint creation of Nature and the self: as the speaker of “Tintern Abbey” puts it, “eye and ear … both … half-create … / And … perceive” the world (107–08). Ultimately, then, The Prelude sketches how the speaker-as-poet gradually becomes aware that he himself—and this accords with the second meaning of “intervention” as offered by the OED—has “[i]ntermediate agency” (“intervention” 2). He comes to the conclusion that while “Imagination” and “intellectual love” are two sides of the same coin and hence “cannot stand / Dividually” (Wordsworth 370–71, 13.185–88), any human, and especially the poet, must cultivate their potential from a sense of individual wholeness, and it is at this point that “intervention” reappears as a crucial concept: “No other can divide with thee this work, / No secondary hand can intervene” (371, 13.191–92). The process of intellectual maturation has led to a point at which the individual recognizes that they are not passively subjected to a power beyond their control, but that, as a poet, they can actively fashion not only their own life, but also their poetry in a sense that will turn it into an “intervening thing [or] event” (“intervention” 3.b) itself.

The preface Wordsworth added to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads is motivated by an urge to explain that his and S. T. Coleridge’s collection itself is to be understood as an act of intervention in its own right. As he states, he felt “that there would be some impropriety in abruptly obtruding upon the Public, without a few words of introduction, Poems so materially different from those, upon which general appropriation is at present bestowed” (77). The “material difference” Wordsworth suggests for the poems here is one that pertains to both their subject matter and their form. As Caroline Levine has pointed out, of those critics who have recently begun to once again direct attention to the importance of literary forms, “[s]ome have read [them] as legible reflections of social structures,” whereas “[a] second group casts literary form less as a reflection of a specific social context than as a deliberate intervention” (12, original emphasis). One who belongs to the latter group, for example, is Susan Wolfson, who has argued that the Romantics, as Levine summarizes, “were fully aware of the constructedness of literary unities and purposefully deployed formal strategies to investigate problems of ideology, subjectivity, and social conditions” (12). Without having the space to elaborate on Levine’s critique of these positions, it seems obvious that the Romantic writers, by seeking to “organically” combine content and form, did not intend to merely reflect and comment upon the specific social and political conjuncture of the historical moment in which they wrote and published, but understood their work as interventionist. As Wordsworth emphasizes, the poems included in Lyrical Ballads are responses to “a multitude of causes unknown to former times,” such as “the great national events which are daily taking place,” i.e. Britain’s war against revolutionary France, “and the accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies” (80–81). Warfare, urbanization, the introduction of monotonous working routines brought about by industrialization and the demands of a modern consumer society, as well as the increasing compression of time and space through the expansion of transport and hence communication infrastructure, signify fundamental shifts in the power/knowledge nexus that had far-reaching ideological and material consequences for society. The poems in Lyrical Ballads are not meant to be read as nothing but effects “mechanically” responding to the “multitude of causes” Wordsworth lists, just as the poets are not unaltered versions of their younger selves that merely react in dread to the imposing phenomena of their time. On the contrary, the poems are meant to be instances of agency; they are interventions that have the potential to “interfer[e] in any affair, so as to affect its course or issue” (“intervention” 1.a).

In a similar manner, to name just two more examples, Mary Wollstonecraft, with a proto-intersectional impetus, intended her novel The Wrongs of Woman, as well as her other works, particularly of course A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, to delineate and bring to attention “the wrongs of different classes of women, equally oppressive, though, from the difference of education, necessarily various” (159). In the anonymously written The Woman of Colour, the mixed-race protagonist Olivia, daughter to a black slave woman and her white master, travels to England in order to marry her first cousin, and hence literally intervenes, as the living “product” of an exploitative system, in the order and hence the value system of the white hegemonic group. As Lyndon J. Dominique writes in her introduction to the novel: “The Woman of Colour is a protest novel that does a skillful job of critiquing British prejudices without alienating British readers” (38). Indeed, Dominique’s judgement may surely be transferred to much of British Romantic political interventionism in general. After all, most Romantic interventions were cleverly constructed in such a manner as to allow contending ways of reading. The works of most writers remained popular and “acceptable” with the British reading public despite the youthful political radicalism most of them evinced. Exceptions prove the rule, of course, as was the case with Wollstonecraft after the publication of William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman.

Despite their often ambiguous oscillation between “conservative” and “progressive” tendencies, the Romantics continue to exert fascination also on many of today’s writers, thinkers, and activists, whose work is directed at changing oppressive forms of domination. The social theorist and political activist AK Thompson, for instance, characterized the ambiguity of the Romantics’ combination of aesthetic and political strategies of intervention in a recent interview in the following terms:

In my view, Romanticism arose as a response to the unresolved character of the bourgeois revolution and to the epistemological antinomies that sprung up in the breach. It developed as an anti-capitalist critique that sided with the waning subjective idealism of bourgeois consciousness so that it might go to war with the ascendant objective empiricism that was leading to a disenchantment of the world. Siding with the antithetical term, however, is not a reliable strategy for overcoming contradictions. Indeed, it can even lead to their perpetuation by serving as a kind of stabilizing ballast.

Despite this, I think radicals should bolster Romantic tendencies wherever they struggle to find expression even as we subject them to ruthless criticism wherever they prevail. (Cord 107–08)

And surely, the above-quoted sections from Book thirteen of The Prelude may be read as expressing a regrettable withdrawal into a form of subjectivist solipsism that, instead of activating them, actually abandons the earlier interventionist strategies that were meant to facilitate a “stepping into” the “breach” opened up by the “unresolved” crises of the conjuncture at the turn of the nineteenth century. To rephrase, in the wake of the French Revolution, arguably the decisive historical moment of the Romantic era, a specific “structure of feeling” (Williams, Revolution 69, original emphasis) emerged in liberal and revolutionary circles on the European continent that encouraged the development of interventionist strategies in the political, social, philosophical, economic, and, last but not least, cultural/aesthetic domains. In “interlocking interests,” as Raymond Williams claimed in his classic Culture and Society, “a conclusion about personal feeling became a conclusion about society, and an observation of natural beauty carried a necessary moral reference to the whole and unified life of man” (30). “Romantic intervention,” as the current issue of ERR explores, is a term that refers to all sorts of negotiations of those “interlocking interests” that seek both to analyze the contemporary conjuncture and actively seek to change it, whatever that means in each individual case. An investigation of Romantic interventions hence needs to also look beyond the traditional domain of “high culture,” to move beyond Wordsworth, Coleridge and their ilk. Fruitfully and mutually intersecting with the individual and individualized endeavors of poets, philosophers, scientists, politicians and entrepreneurs, elements of (popular) culture in a more general sense, such as consumer resistance, political cartoons, visual arts, or everyday cultural rituals, must also be taken into account to define the emerging formations of the time. Of course, the present issue of ERR cannot fully come up to all of these demands. Rather, the articles gathered in it provide a starting point in order to probe whether the concept of “intervention” can offer a viable new perspective via which to evaluate the lasting legacy of Romantic literature and culture.

In his essay on “Classical Interventions: Hegel, Klenze and the Aesthetics of Purity,” William Davis investigates how the architect Leo von Klenze’s renovation of the Athenian Acropolis inscribed core principles of Hegelian aesthetics onto material culture in a decidedly ideological gesture. Just as for Hegel, Geist ultimately materializes itself in the phenomenal world, and most flawlessly in classical art (with marble being the perfect material through which spirit finds a form identical with itself), von Klenze’s project sought to actually refashion the Acropolis in such a way as to correspond with the fantasy of classical purity. By purging it of the material traces of all “non-classical” and allegedly “barbarous” cultures that had accrued at the Acropolis since the time of Pericles, particularly those left during the Ottoman period, his intervention, fueled by an insensitive Orientalism, was aimed at “overcoming” the multi-cultural Otherness that had shaped and enriched the site during more than two millennia and hence at propagating and universalizing a narrow Western notion of culture.

Frederike Middelhoff’s “Intervention at Home: Representing Migrants in German Romanticism” considers how German Romantic writers intervened in contemporary discourses about the plight of French migrants and refugees in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Her contribution gives insight into the representation of migrants, the divergent meanings of migration and the connections to Romantic notions of “home”/Heimat in German-speaking countries around 1800. By considering fictional migrants in Ludwig Tieck’s Hanswurst als Emigrant (1797), Clemens Brentano’s Godwi (1800/1801), and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Der Refugie oder Heimath und Fremde (1824), she argues that the German Romantics were participating in an “intervention at home:” staying put, they contributed to discourses about migration via stories and characters as a means of evoking empathy with or aversion to migrants, thereby offering specific ideas about the intricate relationship and tension between migration and Heimat.

Paul Hamann-Rose reframes Wordsworth’s attempts to intervene in the publishing market and guard his poetry by way of copyright laws in a time characterized by radical transformations of print and media ecologies. “Mediating Authorship: Wordsworth, Copyright and Media History” argues that the sharp increase in volume and variety of print products at the time challenged traditional modes of mediation between authors and the reading public. Wordsworth’s attempts to extend legal copyright protection is shown to be only partly fueled by cultural controversies around artistic and economic validation, but also strongly driven by his anxiety about the fate of his work in the age of a new regime of mediation. His advocacy for extending the legal protection of an author’s claim on their own work constitutes an intervention into the new modes of print communication emerging around 1800, which in turn highlights how private and public spheres intersect in the aesthetic, legal and political context of Romantic media landscapes.

In “The March of Mind: Knowledge Mobilization in the 1820s,” Angela Esterhammer discusses how the phrases “march of mind” and “march of intellect” proliferated as a consequence of the rapid mobilization of knowledge during the late-Romantic period, particularly in connection with endeavors to strengthen public education. The foundation of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1826, with Henry Brougham and Charles Knight as its driving forces, was paradigmatic for such an intervention in the prevailing discourse of education in that it aimed at granting access to knowledge and learning for all classes of society. By resorting to a combination of cultural studies, book history, and mobility studies, the essay explores creative and entertaining responses to the “march,” which, unsurprisingly, were often of a conservative and satirical nature, yet, in their different ways, productively negotiated the cultural, social, economic, and political implications and consequences of the accelerating spread of information.

Ralf Haekel investigates Thomas Carlyle’s early essay “Signs of the Times” and his novel Sartor Resartus as forms of conservative intervention in their fierce critique of knowledge production that anticipates twentieth-century discussions of mass culture. Contributing to an important turn in the rise of modern historicism that extended periodization beyond political developments to include cultural ones and hence marked the inception of literary history, Carlyle’s early writings played an influential role in defining and demarcating what would later be referred to as (British) Romanticism. In that he positioned himself against what he condescendingly called “the mechanical age,” his notion of literature suppressed the revolutionary energy of previous decades, particularly that of 1790s’ radicalism, and instead conceptualized an a-political, anti-materialist, and decidedly male form of Romanticism that presaged Victorian conservatism. At the same time, however, Sartor Resartus, as a complex meta-reflexive parody that paradoxically insisted not least on the materiality of literature and any system of meaning, undermined Carlyle’s own Idealist stance as much as it propagated it.