Creativity is revolutionary. The act of creation is disruptive, since it requires the breaking of a pattern; the disturbance of stasis; the deviation from a stable state. In contrast, scholarship attempts to maintain knowledge; to preserve the memory of what remains of the past. The former forges a new road ahead, producing new representations and interpretations of reality; whilst the latter surveys ground already covered, and tries to describe the various forces leading to, and the consequences leading from, the uniquely human act of creation. The definition of historical movements is made all the easier if what one studies has been objectified. Ironically, movements can only be labelled once there is no longer any movement – when they are inert, dead. In this sense, scholarship is always counter-revolutionary.
What first attracted my interest to the three revolutionary movements briefly surveyed in this essay is that they all have embedded within the ethos of the systems they perpetuate the notion of rebellion as laudable. All three develop their own unique type of protest and demand changes which they regard as necessary and beneficial. In order for each to maintain its historical, academic status as a definitive group each has, at times, been forced into – and been constrained by – fairly static categories. They are always in danger of being imprisoned by capsule definitions. This act of cataloguing, involving the restrictions required by definition, seems antithetical to the impetus behind the spirit of rebellion which revolutionary movements foment when they agitate for change. Paradoxically, then, the very elements which make these movements vital are sublimated and neutralised by attempts made to study them. The act of rebellion is an effort against constraints, against boundaries, which is why it is often tied to notions of subversion and excess, in sharp contrast to the ideals of traditions which require re-enactments of ritualistic repetition.
But why are some defiant, when others remain compliant? Why are some subservient to tradition, whereas others demand transformation? What brings about change? Why, for example, have the San of Southern Africa; the Ainu of Japan; and the Aborigines of Australia remained relatively unchanged for as much as twenty-thousand years, whereas in contemporary consumer society the distance between parents and their very own children has become so vast, and is so commonplace, that the cliché of the “generation gap” is readily accepted as a means of describing it? Why do things change?
What is rebellion? The dual aspects of destruction and creation housed within the term highlight the moment of refusal necessary for revolution, the spark, which rejects what has gone before. This refusal must be directed towards an authority, since one cannot rebel against those one perceives as having less power than one has. (An exercise of force on those less powerful than oneself is tyranny, not rebellion.) So, in order for rebellion to be possible, one must undermine that which claims to have power over one, which one, indeed, recognises as powerful in the very act of speaking out against it. Each act of rebellion, then, requires at least one particular premise, or command, which it refuses to validate. For rebellion, one does not of necessity require principles, only discontent. One need not have formulated a particular policy, but one must know one’s enemy.
A problem arises in that truly revolutionary movements cannot indefinitely sustain their revolutionary principles. These movements must either conform to an internal organisational order and form a tradition – as each of these three movements under investigation have done in varying ways – or they must burn themselves out, which is what the Futurists, the Dadaists and the Punks achieved so effectively. But the three revolutionary movements with which this paper is particularly concerned, namely Romanticism, Marxism and Surrealism, did not burn out, and still today claim adherents and disciples. Can they still be defined, then, as revolutionary movements? I would like to consider the basis of their appeal to revolution.
Perhaps the naming of these movements might provide a clue as to the impetus behind the spirit of revolution they prescribe. And yet, the types of names given to these movements also indicates the arbitrariness of the processes of periodization. Indeed, there appear to be no comprehensive and consistent criteria for what determines the naming of an era, a period, or a movement. Romanticism is perhaps the most loosely coined of the three terms, and indicates a set of ideas, or a spirit which implicates many European countries, specifically Germany, France and England, at more or less the same time. Despite its apparent urging of individuality, Romanticism does not seem to spring from any one particular individual, but rather hopes to summarise a Zeitgeist, an overall mood, which, it is sometimes proclaimed, still prevails in certain quarters to this day. As Morse Peckham writes, Romanticism refers to both “a specific historical movement” and “a certain “characteristic of mind, art and personality found in all periods and in all cultures” (1970: 231).
This notion of a “characteristic of mind” seems to be something to which each of these movements refers. In other words, each invokes a style of thinking, a way of perceiving and evaluating the world. In the description of so many revolutionary movements, one frequently encounters the endorsement to individuality. In 1877, in one of the earliest definitions given to the movement by Albert Hancock, he considers this the single defining characteristic of the English Romantic poets. (And poetry is what one generally associates with English Romanticism, specifically the big six – Shelley, Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats). Here is Albert Hancock:
The Romantic Movement then means the revolt of a group of contemporary poets who wrote, not according to common or doctrinaire standards, but as they
individually pleased…there are no principles comprehensive and common to all except
those of individualism and revolt.
(in Rieder, John. Wordsworth and Romanticism in the Academy, In Favret, Mary, 1994:29)
So, what did the Romantics, as individuals, purportedly rebel against? According to The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature (1990), Romanticism is identifiable in its representing “an unending revolt against classical forms, conservative morality, and human moderation” (484). C.E. Vaughan defined in the Romantic rebellion the “revolt from the purely intellectual view of men’s nature, that recognition of the rights of the emotions, the instincts, the passions…” (in Rieder, John, In Favret, 1994:29).
So here we have what the Romantics were ostensibly against – the classical, the conservative, and the intellectual. Let us turn to a few other hallmarks of the Romantic era. Its leading spokesman in England, William Wordsworth, set the trend with his The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800), in which his rallying cry concerns the rediscovery of the truth of feeling over thinking, and imagination over reason. Primarily, in order to facilitate this move, he favours the individual above the group, the “Romantic genius”. Keats praises the “egotistical sublime” which enables the Romantic poet to fuse self with text.
This notion of individuality ties the Romantics to the Surrealists, whose theoretical ground rules were laid by Andre Breton. Breton writes in the tract Revolution Now and Forever (1925), that “the idea of revolution is the best and most effective safeguard of the individual” (1978: 320). Breton and the Surrealists rebelled not only against a specific group, but also against the very notion of grouping. According to one of the few card carrying English Surrealists, David Gascoyne, they vehemently opposed, “bourgeois society…religion, patriotism and the idea of the family” (1935:135). Breton even goes as far as to declaim that they “are disgusted by the idea of belonging to a country at all” (1978: 318). In this statement, their rebellion is stated in its purest form, and borders on outright anarchism.
Andre Breton’s revolution is similar to that proposed by Wordsworth, in that he too rebels against the notion of rational judgement. Breton also maintains a version of the “negative capability” Keats ascribes to Wordsworth – the ability to hold “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (letter quoted in The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature: 393). This description sounds remarkably similar to Breton’s notion of marvelling at disparate juxtapositions without requiring reasonable justification of one’s delight.
Breton was by all accounts a forceful and charismatic leader, and the Surrealist group was formed and shaped by his powerful personal charisma, perhaps more so than by the ideas he advocated. So, paradoxically, the movement which desired the most complete liberation of the mind from all authoritative constraints, may well have depended most on the demands of one particular individual. Even though he insisted on a total rebellion against all authority, Breton nevertheless insisted that his own supremacy as leader of the Surrealists be maintained. Over the years, many who were part of the initial founding of the Surrealist group, including Phillippe Soupault, Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard, were tried, judged, and ostracised by Breton for what appears to be nothing less than asserting their individuality by disagreeing with him.
Where Romanticism and Surrealism are unashamedly ideological, and focus the brunt of their attack on the liberation of the imagination, Marx roots his discourse, in the material nature of existence. The materialistic revolutions envisioned by Marx, however, only occurred decades after his death, and they eventually took place because of the forcefulness of his ideas, his texts, rather than as a result of his personal magnetism and charm, as may, perhaps, have been the case with Breton. In this sense, Marx’s materialistic philosophy is the most ideological of all, since it is housed entirely in ideas, and not in any manifestation of personality, physical presence, or psyche.
Perhaps the greatest difference between Marxism and the other movements discussed here, is that Marx is not primarily preoccupied with literature as such. However, as the other two movements also have political implications (democracy in the case of Romanticism and anarchy in the case of Surrealism), so too Marx’s thesis contains implied suggestions for literary production, though these have not always been consistently interpreted. His theoretical justifications are also the most explicitly rational of the three. Whereas the other two kick against the idea of reason, Marx’s justification for rebellion lies precisely in, what Bertrand Russell calls his “rational formula summing up the evolution of mankind” (1991:748). Marx also has the most easily identifiable enemy – the bourgeoisie. His goal is also the most direct – the liberation and eventual rule of the proletariat. And yet, even though his thesis is rooted so firmly in the material, it does seem that his description of the ideally human worker reads very much like a depiction of the Romantic relationship between the artist and his art, in that it becomes a uniquely individual gesture. Take for example the following passage, in which Marx puts himself in the position of the creative (and therefore, human) labourer on the completion of a task in a world liberated from alienation:
I would have…objectified in my production my individuality and its peculiarity and thus both in my activity enjoyed an individual expression of my life and also in looking at the object have had the individual pleasure of realising that my personality was objective…
(In Wiser, 1983: 355)
Three times here Marx makes reference to the individual. The one area in which Marx’s philosophy is similar to that of Wordsworth and Breton, is that he bases much of the reason for his resistance on damages wrought to the individual. In Marx’s description, the responsibility for this damage is due not to a particular group of people necessarily, but to a style of human relationships dominated by capital. For example, part of his complaint about the industrial revolution is that is destroyed “all individual character” of work for the proletariat, whose work consequently “lost all charm”, since it reduced the worker to “an appendage of a machine” (Communist Manifesto (1848) In Rius, 1998:114). Marx’s justification for rebellion rests precisely in the individual’s having been made powerless by capitalism, and that exchange value negates all individuality (In Readings from Karl Marx, 1989:61), and he claims that, in a free market economy, “It is not individuals, but capital that establishes itself freely” (151):
This kind of individual liberty is thus at the same time the most complete suppression of
all individual liberty and total subjugation of individuality to social conditions, which take the form of material forces.
(Marx’s Grundrisse, 1973:153).
And yet, in the final analysis, Marx’s theories are essentially about groups, about classes, and he never suggests an easy solution by empowering the individual. As in Hegel’s philosophy, the group is always more important than the individual. An uneasy tension is then created between Marx’s valorisation of both individuality, and the unified proletarian class as a whole.
In every one of these rebellions – Romanticism, Marxism and Surrealism, it seems that the struggle between individual and group is at stake. But is this not perhaps what lies at the root of the revolutionary spirit itself, of every revolution – the desire of an individual person to assert themselves, to refuse to comply? And it does seem ironic that all those joining the instigators of these revolutions inadvertently sacrifice part of their own liberty in agreeing with and supporting the leader they have chosen as their own. This summarises one of the paradoxes, which beset revolutionary movements: one often sacrifices one’s individuality in the hope of liberating it.
There are also a few other, uneasy contradictions and tensions beneath all three of these movements’ revolutionary claims. For example, in The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth calls for a return to everyday language, the “very language of men” (1988:109), and yet his own poetry is surely far from the language of uneducated laymen, or “workers” if you will, and his aesthetic preoccupations are evident throughout. Andre Breton, for his part, produces endless rational arguments, (in his appeals to Freud and the subconscious, for example) in his defence of irrationality. And Marx, ultimately, sanctions the proletarian state over and above the individual, based on his defence of the self-same individual.
So, it seems that each revolutionary idea, in some way nurtures precisely what it opposes. Perhaps, in distancing oneself from a notion in such explicit terms, as required by revolutions, it is impossible not to incorporate the very ideas one kicks against, since one is forced to manifest these ideas by expressing one’s distaste for them. Language creates meaning, and I wonder if there is such a thing as negative meaning. It seems as impossible an idea as negative acceleration from a state of rest. What one might hope to mean by such an expression is rather the act of forgetting.
In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates refers to exactly this curious behaviour of opposites, in that they are invariably compelled to operate on the same continuum. For example, he states that the opposites of pleasure and pain are connected, and states:
They will never come to a man both at once, but if you pursue one of them and catch it, you are nearly always compelled to have the other as well. They are like two bodies attached to the same head.
(1978:102).
Revolutionary movements, operating as they do in terms of opposition, inevitably set up bipolar systems which favour what they advocate above what they decry, such as imagination / reason, proletariat / bourgeoisie, and individual / group. One solution could lie, then, in diffusing the structure of these bipolarities which frame our sense of meaning. And yet, subsuming these bipolarities would also, inadvertently, deny the possibility of revolution. That’s one possibility – to let the game go, to refuse to play; like the postmodernists, who abrogate their right to insist on one judgement over another by toying with parody, irony, and pastiche. On the other hand, one could take a cue from Breton’s essay and avoid the sticky sinking sands of movements dead and gone by trying to maintain a sense of Revolution Now and Forever. A third possibility is that one could come to terms with the necessity of forgetting, and practise relinquishing our frenetic, anxious, grasping of the past by moving into the moment.
(This paper was delivered at a plenary session of the “International Conference on European Literature” at Peking University, 2001. It was translated and published in Chinese in “Modern Perspectives and Views on European Literature”. The Ethnic Publishing House, Beijing: 2003).
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