For review of the OG's:
There are four main parts to this material in the following order.
Traditionalism against which Romanticism revolted:
1. Puritanism 2. Work Ethic 3. Gender traditionalism
Major points are in gray/black boxes
The Romantic revolt comes under 3 headings:
Authenticity Part One: INTUITION: Discover one's true self
Major points are in green boxes
Authenticity Part Two: EXPRESSIVISM: Express your true self
Major Points are in red boxes
Authenticity Part 3: INTEGRITY Have the integrity to maintain your
true self
Major points are in blue boxes:
THE ROMANTIC REACTION:
the O.G.’s
“THE SELF WAS TURNED LOOSE”
HIPSTERS
SHADOW CULTURES
OUTSIDERS
BOHEMIANS
REBELS
COUNTERCULTURES
“Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?
“What’ve you got?”
Marlon Brando as biker outlaw Johnny Strabler in The Wild One, 1953
Important
Romantic/shadow/countercultural
eras
Mid 1800’s: Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau et al
Pre-WWI: Lyric Left
1920’s: Harlem Renaissance
Post WWII: Beats, bebop, abstract expressionism
1960’s: Counterculture, “hippies”
1970’s: Patti Smith, Punk, hip-hop
Since then . . . ?
Features of
romantic reaction
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
the embrace of the present
the importance of joy
rejection of traditional ideas of "success"
rejection of the work ethic
validation of imagination and emotion
the liberation of the self from domination by
conventional values and roles
the refusal to be classified by race, gender, class,
the search for individual enlightenment
the search for authenticity
• Imagination, emotion, and freedom are
certainly the focal points of romanticism. Any
list of particular characteristics of the literature
of romanticism includes subjectivity and an
emphasis on individualism; spontaneity;
freedom from rules; solitary life rather than
life in society*; the beliefs that imagination is
superior to reason and devotion to beauty;
love of and worship of nature;
• *this is imho not true; we’ll discuss it later
• “Romantic” in current usage tends to refer to
a kind of attitude one has toward love and
marriage.
• Reasons for marriage prior to Romanticism:
– Expediency: dowry, e.g.
– Family ties
• Romanticism stressed that one should marry
for love
– Follow one’s heart
– Ignore practical considerations
– Place individual feelings above social or
community needs
Henry David Thoreau
1817-1862
Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1802-1882)
Trust thyself:
every heart vibrates
to that iron string.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892
After you have exhausted
what there is in business,
politics, conviviality, and so
on - have found that none
of these finally satisfy, or
permanently wear - what
remains? Nature remains.
"it was as a revolutionary that Whitman began his
work; and a revolutionary he remained to the
end...It was this revolutionary spirit that made
him the friend of all rebellious souls past and
present...Conventional law and order he frankly
despised and those individuals who sought their
own law and followed it awoke his admiration.
Thoreau's "lawlessness" delighted him-"his going
his own absolute road let hell blaze all it
chooses,: It is a coward and a poltroon who
accepts his law from others....:
" These writers set down the intellectual framework for hip.
Celebrating the individual and the nonconformist,
advocating civil disobedience, savoring the homoerotic,
and above all claiming the sensual power of the new,
the writers articulated a vision of hip that we now carry
everywhere like an internal compass. The hip felicities
that have come since--the uncapped solos of bebop and
hip-hop, the gnostic blur of the Lost Generation and the
Beat Generation, the indie purism of Chapel Hill or Olympia,
the altered consciousness of the drug culture-all built on the principles they threw down. . .
Leland, Hip: A History pp. 40-41
The questions of
Identity: who am I if I am not who society says
I should be?
Individualism:what is unique about me?
and
Citizenship: how do I balance the demands of
My community with my need to be an individual?
that the major [o.g.] writers have raised
have remained the relevant puzzles of America. "
authenticity
1. Discover one’s nature
• Listen to the still small voice
• Ignore conventional wisdom
2. Express one’s nature:
•be nonconformist
•Develop one’s inborn abilities
3. Have the integrity to resist coercion
out of one’s authentic life and seduction
back into a conventional life.
I. The natural self
• People have an inborn nature.
• That nature is good.
Pleasantville shows people finding
their real selves hidden under the
conventional selves they have created
fitting the social conventions of what
boys & girls, men & women are supposed
to be. As they do that, they turn color.
Romantics: Nature is beautiful and good
Puritans: Nature is the home of the
Devil.
• Rousseau is an important figure. He loved to go for long walks,
climb mountains, and generally "commune with nature." His last
work is called Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Europe had
become more civilized, safer, and its citizens now felt freer to
travel for the simple pleasure of it. Mountain passes and deep
woods were no longer merely perilous hazards to be traversed,
but awesome views to be enjoyed and pondered. The violence
of ocean storms came to be appreciated as an esthetic object
in any number of paintings, musical tone poems, and written
descriptions, as in the opening of Goethe's Faust.None of this
had been true of earlier generations, who had tended to view
the human and the natural as opposite poles, with the natural
sometimes exercising an evil power to degrade and
dehumanize those who were to drawn to it. The Romantics, just
as they cultivated sensitivity to emotion generally, especially
cultivated sensitivity to nature. It came to be felt that to muse by
a stream, to view a thundering waterfall or even confront a
rolling desert could be morally improving. Much of the nature
writing of the 19th century has a religious quality to it absent in
any other period.
View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, 1836
Frederic Edwin Church, El Rio de Luz (The River of Light) 1877
Bierstadt, Looking down Yosemite Valley, 1865
Albert Bierstadt,
Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite
1871-73
His paintings of Yosmite
Are “imbued with the sense
That divinity dwells within
The wilderness.”
Thomas Cole, Prometheus Bound
Normal truth is not
your truth;
you are unique
It seems as if the Deity dressed each soul
which he sends into nature in certain virtues
and powers not communicable to other men,
and sending it to perform one more turn through
the circle of beings, wrote, "Not transferable"
and "Good for this trip only," on these garments
of the soul.”
Emerson "Uses of Great Men"
• The modern fascination with self-definition and selfinvention, the notion that adolescence is naturally a
time of rebellion in which one "finds oneself," the idea
that the best path to faith is through individual choice,
the idea that government exists to serve the
individuals who have created it: all of these are
products of the romantic celebration of the individual
at the expense of society and tradition.
Natural goodness
A Robin
Redbreast in
a cage
puts all
Heaven in a
Rage.
--William Blake
Contrast one:
the nature of the self: good, bad, neither?
•Romantics see the natural self as
a robin, as good
•Puritans and other more pessimistic
types see it as a wolf. (Puritans
believed in original sin.)
•Taylor, Existentialists believe there is
no “natural” self. We create our selves.
(A) Face In The Crowd
I've got to stop faking it,
I've got to start facing it,
I'm going to take my final bow
Then I'm going to take my place in the crowd.
I know I'll get used to it,
I've got to stop acting like a clown.
I've gotta start facing up to what I really am.
I've got to realise l'm just an ordinary man.
I think that I'll just settle down
And take my place in the crowd.
I don't want to lie to myself any more.
Am I just a face in the crowd, is that all I'll ever be?
Don't want to be anything that isn't really me.
Mister, can you tell me who I am?
Do you think I stand out
Or am I just a face in the crowd?
Dave Davies, The Kinks
Contrast two:
Is each of us really unique?
Or are we all more or less alike? Are we each special
in some way or are most of us just ordinary?
Romantics believe each of us has a unique inborn nature.
Some have believed that we share a common nature
according to our sex or race.
Ayn Rand believes that a few of us are unique geniuses;
everyone else is ordinary.
Taylor believes that we can make ourselves unique but
not completely so because we all fashion our selves
out of common materials.
One must discover one’s true
nature
by listening to one’s
intuition
HEED YOUR INTUITION
An answer in words is delusive; it is really no
answer to the questions you ask. Do not
require a description of the countries towards
which you sail. The description does not
describe them to you, and to-morrow you
arrive there, and know them by inhabiting
them.
--Emerson
The heart has its reasons of which reason
knows nothing.
--Blaise Pascal
• "Talent thinks, genius sees." -William Blake
• For Blake, art was visionary, not intellectual. He
believed that the arts offered insights into the
metaphysical world and could potentially redeem a
humanity fallen into materialism and doubt. His belief
that imagination is the artist's critical filter indicated
the dawn of Romanticism, but his peers failed to
recognize his genius
Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the
following: a deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature;
a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the
senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a
heightened examination of human personality and its moods
and mental potentialities; a preoccupation with the genius,
the hero, and the exceptional figure in general, and a focus
on his passions and inner struggles; a new view of the artist
as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is
more important than strict adherence to formal rules and
traditional procedures; an emphasis upon imagination as a
gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth;
Listening to one’s heart will
reveal one’s true nature.
Intuition is the voice of Nature
speaking in you.
It is the “still small voice” that
will reveal the truth to you.
Romanticism emphasized
the individual,
the subjective,
the irrational,
the imaginative,
the personal,
the spontaneous,
the emotional,
the visionary, and
the transcendental.
To their true natures. . .
In each case there is a convention that has been adhered to
That is suddenly broken in order to express the true self:
Mary Sue’s convention is that she’s a “slut” who never
opens a book
The Mayor’s is that he is a rational, calm person who
would never do anything unpleasant
George’s is that he could never do anything
unconventional or love someone who did.
Bill’s is that he only paints once a year and is content
with that.
Betty’s is that she is happy being a traditional housewife
The Lovers’ Lane kids’ is that they are content showing
their affection by holding hands and that sex should wait until
they are married
Mary Sue really has a brain;
She discovers that she
enjoys using it.
Betty has a hitherto hidden sexual nature
Bill is really an artist at heart.
Other awakenings
• Kids have sex
• Betty falls in love--Bill paints her and reveals her true,
colored, self to her
• The mayor gets angry
• Bud defends his mother from the gang harassing her
• Some kids stand in the rain--it’s a gentle rain
standing for the benevolence of Nature.
“Maybe it’s not the sex, Mary Sue”
And it isn’t--it’s doing something
real,
something authentic,
Something that expresses
who they really are deep down Inside.
As Bud/Emerson says
“It’s inside all of us”
The voice of nature:
Emerson’s reasons for
listening to one’s heart
Every natural process is a version of a
moral sentence. The moral law lies at the
centre of nature and radiates to the
circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every
substance, every relation, and every process.
All things with which we deal, preach to us.
Nor can it be doubted that this moral sentiment
which thus scents the air, grows in the grain,
and impregnates the waters of the world,
is caught by man and sinks into his soul. The
moral influence of nature upon every individual
is that amount of truth which it illustrates to him.
Who can estimate this? Who can guess how
much firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught
the fisherman?
The cultivated inwardness of the hipster
and the jazz performer points toward a
realm of "pure being" (Kerouac's term)
somewhere underneath and beyond verbal
and social expression. It is the "beyond" and
The "IT" so many of Kerouac's characters
pursue . . .In the Beat aesthetic, this
Nonverbal, nonsocial interior is a place of
Purity and spirituality-perhaps the last
remaining place exempt from society's
predatory systematizations and mechanizations
I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's
affections, and the truth of Imagination.What the
Imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth--whether it
existed before or not,--for I have the same idea of all our
passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative
of essential Beauty . . .. . .The excellence of every art is
its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables
evaporate from their being in close relationship with
Beauty and Truth . . . several things dove-tailed in my
mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a
Man of Achievement, , especially in Literature, and which
Shakespear possessed so enormously--I mean Negative
Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason.
--Keats
Contrast 3:
What do we see when we look inside?
Romantics: Nature
Medievals: God speaking to us
Puritans: our bestial nature
Psychologists (some): the internalized
voice of society.
Taylor: our created natures
Buddy Holly: Rave On
A-well the little things you say and do
They make me want to be with you-oo-oo
{Refrain}
Rave on, it's a crazy feeling and
I know it's got me reeling when you
Say, "I love you," rave on
The way you dance and hold me tight
A-well rave on, it's a crazy feeling and
I know it's got me reeling I'm
So glad that you're revealing your love for me
Rave on, rave on and tell me
Tell me not to be lonely
Tell me you love me only, rave on to me
“Rave-on” is the tune that plays when Bud rebelliously
turns the jukebox back on after the City Council has
banned rock ‘n roll.
Note its themes:
• Craziness and irrationality of love
• Following one’s heart
• Revealing one’s true self (“love”)
These are Romantic themes:
just why the Council banned rock ‘n roll.
The stillness of nature allows one to hear oneself think.
Other than the fact that it’s not thinking that goes on,
this is Emerson’s view.
REJECT CUSTOMARY WAYS OF
THINKING
As an aesthetic of the hybrid, hip embraces difference
and loves experiment. Where divisions exist, as
between black and white or gay and straight, it
crosses them.
”
the revolutionary process of changing ...external
conditions is comparatively easy; what is difficult
and necessary is the inner change of thought and
desire”
emma goldman
“If we keep an open mind, too
much is likely to fall into it.”
--Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972),
Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
Rebels are not afraid of uncertainty, are not
Dogmatic, do not insist that everyone believe
As they do.
Romantics live in the hyphens
Whenever society divides the world
into two exclusive classes, Romantics
try to combine them.
Diane Diprima in Memoirs recounts
how she and her friends "made art, smoked dope,
dug the new jazz and spoke a bastardization of the
black argot."
We know all their gods; they ignore ours.
What they call our sins are our gods, and
what they call their gods, we name otherwise
Natalie Clifford Barney, bohemian of the twenties
In Pleasantville, the revolt is led by kids
According to Romanticism, kids are
•less set in their ways and it’s easier for them to
hear the “still small voice” inside because
•social customs have not had time to
set in so deeply that they are
•obeyed without even realizing one is
obeying anything--the point where those
conventions become “second nature”
•Kids can become nonconformists more
easily too because the ruts of their lives
are not very deep yet.
Contrast 4: intuition vs. reason
Romantics:Follow one’s heart
Franklin work ethic:
Be a practical person who plans
one’s life and does what is sensible.
Be suspicious of conventional wisdom
1. It will mislead you about how you should live
2. It will blind you to your true and unique nature.
3. It will lead you into conventional “scripts” that
will not suit you
4. These “scripts” will occupy your time and your
imagination, deafening you to your intuition,
stunting your imagination, preventing you
from imagining alternatives to the status quo.
5. It will put your mind in a straitjacket, preventing
you from seeing things that do not fit those
views.
Postwar America was the era of the expert. . .Americans
Were looking for professionals to tell them how to manage
Their lives. The tremendous popularity of Benjamin Spock’s
Baby and Child Care reflects a reluctance to trust the
shared wisdom of kin and community. . .the reliance on
expertise was one of the most striking developments of the
postwar years…”Experts took over the role of psychic healer
but they also assumed a much broader and more important
role in directing the behavior, goals and ideals of normal
people. They became the teachers and norm setters who
would tell people how to approach and live life. . . Science
moved in because people needed and wanted guidance.
--Alice Tyler May, Homeward Bound
Allen Ginsberg’s Romantic response:
“Who the hell were these people to tell me how to live my life?”
Conventional views will lead you away from
the truth
Men have looked away from themselves, and at
things, so long that they have come to esteem ...the
religious, learned, and civil institutions, as guards of
property...They measure their esteem of each other,
by what each has, and not by what each is. But a
cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property,
ashamed of what he has, out of new respect for his
being.
--Emerson
there are vices and follies incident to whole populations
and ages. Men resemble their contemporaries even
more than their progenitors. It is observed in old
couples, or in persons who have been housemates for
a course of years, that they grow like, and if they
should live long enough we should not be able to
know them apart. Nature abhors these complaisances
which threaten to melt the world into a lump, and
hastens to break up such maudlin agglutinations. The
like assimilation goes on between men of one town, of
one sect, of one political party; and the ideas of the
time are in the air, and infect all who breathe it.
--Emerson
The highest merit we ascribe to
Moses, Plato, and Milton is that
they set at naught books and
traditions, and spoke not what me
but what they thought.
•--Henry David Thoreau, Walden
I have not loved the world, nor the world me
I have not flatter’d its rank breath, nor bow’d
To its idolatries a patient knee,Nor coin’d my cheek to smiles,-nor cried alo
In worship of an echo; in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such; I stoo
Among them, but not of them; in a shroud
Of thoughts which were not their thoughts. .
--a favorite quotation of Eugene O’Neill’s; from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
Re-examine all you have been
told at school or church or in
any book, dismiss whatever
insults your own soul,and
your very flesh shall be a
great poem...
•
Walt Whitman
•-Preface to 1855 ed. of Leaves of Grass
Each age, it is found, must write its
own
books; or rather, each generation for
the
next succeeding. The books of an
older period
Books are the best of things, well used;
abused, among the worst.
What is the right use? What is the one end,
which all means go to effect? They are
for nothing but to inspire.
I had better never see a book, than to be
warped by its attraction clean out of my own
orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.
The immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like
holes dug by generations of ants.
Let us beware of common folk, of common
sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of
the obvious.
The city fathers
--Charles Baudelaire
19th century poet and
Inspiration for generations
of Romantic artists
Following conventional wisdom will lead
you into conventional “scripts” that
will suppress your unique individuality
and that will be hard to escape from
The Unknown Citizen
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word,
he was a saint.
For in everything he did he served the Greater
Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every
day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal
in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully
insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital
but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the
Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car, and a frigidaire.
Our researches into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace;
when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the
population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a
parent of his generation,
And our teachers report that he never interfered
with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we would certainly
have heard.
w.h. auden
Because you have a unique nature,
the conventional truths will not be
true for you.You will have to find
your own way.
• The romantic rebellion against
traditional ways of thought probably
reaches its apex with the women’s
liberation argument that traditional
thought was “linear” and that women
needed to find “nonlinear” ways to
express themselves.
Conventional wisdom is narrowminded:
it rejects facts that don’t fit its
preconceptions.
Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable
folk to keep up pretences.
•
John Buchan (1875ﾐ1940), British author, statesman.
• Jim Stark’s parents in Rebel try to cover up the
death of the kid in the “chicky-run.”
• Larry’s mom in Next Stop Greenwich Village
refuses to accept that he is sleeping with
Sarah.
The solid black and white citizens of Pleasantville
refuse to recognize anything that doesn’t fit their
views on how the world should be.
Geography lesson: “What’s outside of Pleasantville?”
Nothing, of course.
Books have no contents. No one can learn anything that
doesn’t fit with the conventional views which are
obviously limited.
After the kids’ rebellion, they close the library and
mandate the teaching of the theory of “nonchangism”
• Absurdity. A statement or belief
manifestly inconsistent with one’s own
opinion.
--Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Once people hated to concede that their
behavior was determined by anything except
their own free will. Not so with the new
suburbanites; they are fully aware of the allpervading power of the environment over
them.. . But they have no sense of plight; this,
they seem to say, is the way things are, and
the trick is not to fight it, but to understand it.
William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (1953)
• There are more ideas on earth than
intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are
more active, stronger, more resistant, more
passionate than politicians think. We have to
be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting
outward of their force: not in books
expressing them, but in events manifesting
this force, in struggles carried on around
ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule
the world. But it is because the world has
ideas ... that it is not passively ruled by those
who are its leaders or those who would like to
teach it, once and for all, what it must think.
– Michel Foucault , (1926-1984) French phiosopher and
social critic
If you get hung up on everybody else’s
hang-ups, then the whole world is going
to be nothing more than one huge
gallows.
--Richard Brautigan (1935-1984), U.S. novelist, countercultural
poet.
Early scenes with Bill are meant to illustrate
In an exaggerated form how people sometimes
unthinkingly do what they’ve always done; and
how they may be paralyzed by novelty.
When Bud doesn’t show up for work, Bill keeps
wiping the counter, waiting for Bud to show up and
do the next thing in the script so that he can move
on. Bill doesn’t know what to do if the script for
closing the malt shop deviates. He can’t ad lib.
He continues uselessly wiping the counter because
that’s what he’s always done.
Contrast 5:
the value of conventional wisdom
Romantics: it was a good thing for those
Pleasantville kids to discover their sexuality,
for Bill to discover his artistic nature and so on.
Traditionalists: It was a bad thing that will
lead to permissiveness and a loss of values.
An obvious traditionalist
Adam/Eve parallel is drawn:
Betty Jean offers Bud this red apple
from the tree
George refers to Pleasantville as this
“paradise.”
The TV repairman (Don Knotts) brings
up the shot on screen and
circles and arrows the apple.
Knowledge destroys their paradise
Romantic view: it’s a false paradise
-You can’t do this, Mary Sue. They’re happy.
-Nobody’s happy in a sweater set and poodle
skirt.
They’ve got potential.
(girl leaning against locker blows colored
bubble.)
• In the 50’s, films showing youth rebellion were
common, but the rebel kids had switchblades, were
promiscuous, aggressive
and definitely more trouble than the kids in
Pleasantville.
• Parents & other establishment figures were portrayed
much more sympathetically.
• Pleasantville’s establishment represented the
nation’s values & films supported it.
• We now for the most part* support the kids and
Pleasantville reflects that.
*Some studies indicate that we are now more in agreement with 50’s
values than at anytime since the 60’s
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Having discovered one’s true self by
Listening to one’s intuition which is the
voice of Nature inside one
and by
Avoiding the traps set by conventional wisdom
One must now
Express that true self in one’s life
and
Protect it from social pressures