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Article Excerpt
This article forms part of a larger project designed to rekindle interest in the place that Romantic philosophy and aesthetics take in contemporary Australian literature. Poet Gwen Harwood's 'Professor' sequences engage strongly with German Romantic philosophy, specifically the early, German Romanticism of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. The sequences began to appear during the 1960s and continued to be published with decreasing frequency until 1991; many of the Professor Krote pieces first appeared under the pseudonym of Francis Geyer between 1943 and 1967. The debate waged between Dennis Douglas and A D Hope in ALS during the 1960s and 1970s over the meaning of Harwood's sequences introduces the topic of irony in these poems. By extension, this article tracks the concept of Romantic irony as central to both the formal and thematic adventure undertaken in these poems.
Since Robert F Brissenden's anthology of Harwood criticism in 1978, continuing scholarship has shied away from Romantic readings of the poet's work. (1) Alison Hoddinott's important study of Gwen Harwood's poetry, The Real and The Imagined World (1991), opens a critical investigation of the convergence between philosophy and poetry in the poet's work. Current scholarly work on Harwood promises to go further into this subject. (2) However, despite Hoddinott's acknowledgment of the general influence of 'German intellectual life' upon Harwood (3), and of the poet's self-proclaimed stance as 'an uppercase Romantic', she does not investigate to any depth the rich links between German Romanticism and Harwood's poetry. (4) Elizabeth Lawson has gone so far as to make a case for Harwood's 'anti-romanticism', opened up by Jennifer Strauss's earlier investigations of 'feminine sensibility' in the poetry of Harwood and female peers (5); and a timely biographical essay by Gregory Kratzmann, focusing upon Harwood's numerous pseudonyms, reflects Andrew McCann's recent suggestions of declining critical interest in Romantic influence upon Australian literature. (6)
Yet, contradicting her anti-romantic reading, Lawson describes Harwood's technique of 'admitting the antithetical voice outright' through 'counterpoint'. (7) The technique of counterpoint is not only undeniable evidence of Harwood's Romantic agenda, but is the formative element of Romantic irony in the Professor narratives. Romantic irony is again underlined when, in her 1996 obituary to the poet, Strauss quotes Harwood's belief that 'human beings have only language and laughter against the dark'. (8) This claim echoes the philosophy of early, German Romanticism, and the roles of women, children and nature in the Professor poems.
Reacting to the idealism of Fichte and Schelling with a brilliant jumble of ontology and aesthetics, Schlegel comes to view the self as a site of reflection, comprised of 'knowing and the knowing of knowing'--a meeting point of subject and object. (9) For Schlegel, the Romantic subject is defined not only by inhabiting the self-posited 'I' (Ich), but also by eternally stepping-outside-of-itself into objectivity.
His philosophy claims knowledge of the realm not instituted by the existence of the 'I', a realm that idealist philosophy avoids as the not-'I' (Nicht-Ich). Schlegel expresses annoyance at exclusive claims to self-knowledge promoted by Fichte and Schelling:
That unhuman and absolute knowledge, as it pretends to embrace all at once, and by one step place us in full possession of the whole sum of human knowledge, so, ever fluctuating between being and non-being, it soon dissolves into thin air, and leaves behind but a baseless void of absolute non-knowing. (10)
When we first meet Professor Eisenbart, at the ceremony of 'Prize-Giving', he is 'in full possession'--shimmering in his mind's mirror as the subject of a schoolgirl's crush. Harwood drew the character from a German folk song, 'Ich bin der Doktor Eisenbart', in which the namesake 'can make the lame see, and the blind walk'. This figure represents the Promethean 'victory of the modern scientist': a Romantic triumph over God by controlling the giving and taking of life. (11) The name 'Eisenbart' itself translates as 'ironbeard', connoting 'a robot, a metallic man', a futuristic Tin Man unencumbered by a heart. (12) Arguably, Harwood found fascinating inspiration for Eisenbart in atomic physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, bringing an utterly fitting contemporary illustration to German Romanticism. Whilst we cannot place Eisenbart in a particular time period, Harwood feeds us some clues in the final poem of the sequence, 'The Death of Eisenbart':
He dreams of what Ouspensky saw in Poland before World War One: two heavy lorries with their load of new unpainted wooden crutches reaching up to the first floor windows for legs which were not yet torn off. I was responsible. Absurd. I was at school just starting Latin and fencing. Even then I thought of games which had not been invented at which I'd shine. (13)
Eisenbart's occupations as a physics professor and inventor of a bomb (Hydrogen?) are closely tied to his psychological journey throughout the sequence. Indeed, his dying premonition, above, resembles Oppenheimer's accused 'Shakespearean posturing' over his development of the atomic bomb: 'the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.' (14)
With 'one hand placed / like Rodin's Thinker', Eisenbart's deluded sense of self exudes an impressive charisma in 'Prize-Giving'. An attempt to withdraw from the not-'I' of surrounding society, to appear a cold monument to something higher than the 'insect nervousness' of adolescent sexuality, lies in his pose of mannered thought. Harwood's repetitive 'indifference'/'indifferently' emphasises Eisenbart's tone of self-glorification; and the narrative approach of the poem's first half is biased toward Eisenbart's view of things: groupings of belittling adjectives divide not-'I' ('humble', 'humbler', 'flapped', 'tortured', 'halfhearted') from 'I' ('distinction', 'pride', 'the best', 'advantage'). (15)
For Schlegel, however, such division is fruitless. The combination of the known and unknown is an ideal model for social life, the creative process and the Romantic work. Art is the presentation of thinking drawn from the model of Classical dialogue, the 'amazement of the thinking spirit at itself', wherein 'the eddying stream of speech and counter-speech, or, rather, thought and counterthought, moves livingly onwards':
And unquestionably this form of inner dialogue is, if not in every case, equally applicable and absolutely necessary, still it is all but essential, and at least highly natural and very appropriate to every form of living thought and its vivid enunciation. (16)
Literary and aesthetic 'enunciation' enacts this dialogic rhythm of Romantic irony by achieving a state of infinitude 'at the midpoint between the portrayed and the portrayer, free of all real and ideal self-interest ... still in the state of becoming'. (17) Romantic irony of personality, as of the artwork, forces imagination to be contradicted by objectivity, and objectivity by imagination in 'absolute synthesis of absolute antitheses'. (18) Whilst the ironic method is synthetic it is never complete or finite; in Novalis's description, 'self becomes nonself, the symbol becomes symbolized, and philosophy becomes poetry'. (19)
The dialectically structured poem has both an aesthetic and social/moral function. The significance of Harwood's 'language and laughter' lies in this alliance. Romantic irony appears in the forms of analogy and joke, suggests Schlegel, which gesture beyond the self and puncture its bubble. (20) In The Literary Absolute, which revisits German Romanticism in the postmodern context, Philipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy acknowledge that Romantic aesthetics remains (globally) relevant to us now because, still, 'we have not left the era of the Subject'. (21) We can address this through literature, as Gary Handwerk argues:
The artwork's presence for analysis and its fixing of patterns long enough to permit...
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