Giving the Devil His Due: The Value of the Romantic Anti-Hero
When did Romanticism begin? The most obvious way to answer this question would be to go back to the individuals who coined the term. Following this approach, we might say, with Isaiah Berlin, that Romanticism originates as a turn-of-the-19th-century German phenomenon: sketched out in Weimar by Goethe and Schiller, and then defined and codified in Jena by the brothers Schlegel. Going back a bit further, we might say, with Irving Babbitt, that Romanticism is in fact rooted in the primitivist emotionalism of the counter-Enlightenment Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Going back still further, we might claim, with the likes of Harold Bloom, that Romantic prototypes can be found in the 17th century figures of Milton’s Satan, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, or Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Finally, we may conclude, like Eric Voegelin, that Romanticism is actually just one more expression of Gnosticism, and may therefore be traced back to certain heterodox Judeo-Christian texts of the 1st century C.E.
Perhaps however we are feeling a bit perverse, and wish to keep digging. Why not call Plato, who despised the material world, strove for an ideal realm, wallowed in utopian dreams, and believed the arts irrational, the true father of Romanticism? Of course, if we are going to go that far, we might as well go all out and state that the true founders of Romanticism were the ancient Hindu Brahmins, given the overwhelmingly Gnostic character of Indian religion.
This might seem like a reductio ad absurdum, but each of these views has its merits. Moreover, as the critic Jacques Barzun reminds us, it is crucial in such investigations to distinguish between Romanticism as a historical movement and Romanticism as an ideological stance. The former was a cultural revolution against neoclassicism which took place from the late 18th to the mid 19th centuries; the latter is a spiritual neurosis which has no doubt been with us, in various degrees and forms, since the dawn of human consciousness, and which will continue to be with us so long as finite beings desire to attain the infinite.
For the purposes of this discussion however, I would like to submit yet another Romantic provenance for your consideration— one which holds to a middle path between the ancient and the new. Namely I wish to claim that, while not a Romantic himself, Dante Alighieri is the inventor of Romanticism for the modern world, and that he invents it in a single line. The line comes from the fourth canto of The Inferno, and is spoken by Virgil, who is referring to himself and the other denizens of Limbo: “che sanza speme vivemo in disio.” “Though without hope, we live in longing.” Later, in the 26th canto, Dante creates the first great Romantic anti-hero: Ulysses.
Condemned alongside Diomedes for the sin of false counsel, Ulysses is also the great Dantesque representative of hubris: now nothing but a discarnate burning soul aspiring forever upwards, he recounts how he abandoned his loved ones and responsibilities and lured his men to a watery grave in the pursuit of lands and knowledge unknown. Though his appearance is brief, it is one of the most striking moments of the Commedia, for, as in the encounter with Francesca, Dante portrays this sinner in a tragic and even glorious light.
Dante, Virgil, and the reader are made to listen in awe to this man who, with grand language and stoic dignity, recounts his story with neither complaint nor apology, and inspires us as he once inspired his doomed sailors with the famous lines: “you were not meant to live your lives as brutes, but to be followers of virtue and knowledge.” This statement is dangerous precisely because it is one that not only we, but Dante, Aquinas, and Aristotle themselves would also assent to. The problem is not the sentiment itself but the context, the use of such rhetoric to convince others to attempt to overreach the boundaries of mortal limitations. Ulysses is the great manipulator, and what is masterful about this passage is the way Dante shows us both that Ulysses is legitimately admirable, yet that it is precisely his admirable qualities that have tempted him into great error and grand viciousness. Herein lies the seed of the Shakespearean tragic hero, and of the Romantic anti-hero more generally, as I will discuss later.
For now though, let us linger for a moment on the question of what distinguishes Dante’s vision of these damned Greeks and Romans as particularly Romantic. After all, the Greeks themselves had countless tales of the folly of hubris, of lofty figures who strove beyond their limits and were destroyed: Icarus, Phaethon, Bellerophon, etc. Moreover, Dante is not even unique in portraying his hubristic hero as legitimately attractive: witness Prometheus Bound. There are, however, a few important differences between Prometheus and Ulysses.
For one thing, Prometheus is not a human or even an angel, but a titan. As such, his rebellion against the divine order is not metaphysically hopeless or vainglorious. In the realm of Greek myth, titans are essentially the equals of gods, only second-class citizens due to their military defeat by the Hellenic pantheon. There is therefore not anything inherently ridiculous or fallacious in Prometheus’s belief that he can successfully defy the gods. Indeed, possessed of the gift of foresight, he knows that he will eventually be freed and that Zeus will be defeated, he simply has to be able to endure the punishment allotted to him until then. This plot point alone nearly erases Prometheus’s status as a tragic hero– he is instead merely an admirable figure of fortitude in adversity.
Even more crucially, Zeus is not God with a capital G, and is not even a good guy by any stretch of the imagination. He has no claim, metaphysically or even practically, to being the moral authority of the universe. Indeed, there is nothing to suggest that moral right is not entirely on the side of Prometheus. Take away the cosmic stakes, and what you are left with is a story of a virtuous rebel struggling against a tyrannical despot. There is nothing tragic about this, and the only thing one might call Romantic about it is the glorification of rebellion.
Now let us return to Ulysses. Here is a man who seeks to transgress his mortal limitations. This fact alone does not necessarily make him evil, but it does make him foolhardy, and perhaps irreverent toward the divine order. Now let us add another layer. Here is a man who is willing to manipulate and increase the suffering of others– his wife, his subjects, his crew– in order to fulfill his desires. This is evil. Now let us add another layer. This is a universe in which the Christian God is real. This guarantees that Ulysses’s actions are objectively evil, objectively transgressive, and yet Ulysses in hell remains prideful and not at all repentant. Now another layer: despite all of this, Dante presents Ulysses in an admirable light. And now for the final kicker: Dante not only presents Ulysses as admirable, but makes clear that part of what makes Ulysses admirable is the fact that he maintains his pride and integrity despite being objectively in the wrong. It is this glorification of the blatantly incoherent yet somehow noble metaphysical stance which makes Ulysses a Romantic anti-hero.
This is because spiritual paradox lies at the very heart of Romanticism. As I noted earlier, the line: “though without hope, we live in longing,” perfectly describes the Romantic situation. The Romantic is someone who comes into the world and feels profoundly dissatisfied because they think their surroundings are unworthy of them. They long to escape, either physically or mentally, to a higher, grander, better world of their own making, a world that matches the splendor of their own imaginations. Before long however, they realize that whatever efforts they make will be doomed to failure, and that their vague, infinite desire will never be consummated. This is why the predominant mood of Romanticism is melancholy. Rather than reconsider their suppositions however, the Romantic does the only thing they can do to preserve them: valorize their own failure to achieve their desires, and fetishize longing as an end in itself. When the destination is unachievable, the journey becomes all that matters.
In a sense, then, we can think of the inhabitants of Limbo, the virtuous pagans, as spirits forced into Romanticism purely by dint of circumstance. They know they deserve to be in a better place than they are, and they know that that better place, heaven, actually exists, but is forever inaccessible to them. Therefore, despite the idyllic pleasantness of their surroundings, they are doomed to be forlorn, hopeless, longing. Despite being higher on the infernal totem pole, Virgil genuinely admires Ulysses for his accomplishments, his dignity, and his incoherent spiritual strength, and, we suspect, may even be envious of his total acceptance of his punishment. Ulysses is the highest ideal to which a Romantic can aspire: damned, but looking sexy while doing it.
The virtuous pagans are an apt parallel to Romantics in another sense as well. Part of the pagans’ melancholy stems from their knowledge that the belief system they were saddled with is inferior to Christianity. Similarly, the 19th century Romantic, operating in the wake of the atheistic Enlightenment and under the shadow of Scientism, responds in the spiritually desperate way that they do partly due to the trauma of losing organized religion. Despite thrilling experiments in pantheistic, philhellenic paganism or refined aestheticism or DIY mysticism, they often find these modern ersatz religions as deficient as they are liberating. The Romantics fetishized the Catholic Middle Ages as a lost age of faith, much as the virtuous pagans dream of a heaven they will never have.
Courtesy of Dante, we have now sketched three principal features of Romanticism which will prove useful in the foregoing discussion: 1. The spiritual paradox at the heart of Romanticism, 2. The Romantic’s self-conscious awareness of their own incoherence and failure, and 3. The aspiration toward the ideal of the Romantic anti-hero. Let us now shift gears slightly, and investigate that curious, beautiful method by which the Romantic venom may be converted into an antidote: Romantic irony.
“Romantic irony” was, fittingly enough, a term first coined by the great original theorist of Romanticism, Friedrich Schlegel. Also fitting was the mystical nebulousness and vagueness with which he attempted to describe what exact role irony played in Romantic art. In his critical writings he states: “Irony is, as it were, the demonstration of infinity, of universality, of the feeling for the universe…. the clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely teeming chaos.” Classic Freidrich. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy helpfully summarizes Schlegel’s position as follows: “The task of a literary work with respect to irony is, while presenting an inherently limited perspective, nonetheless to open up the possibility of the infinity of other perspectives.”
If nothing else, the radical pluralism Schlegel advocates is just more evidence that not only modernism but postmodernism is a tired rehashing of Romantic ideas. This fact becomes even clearer when we see how the term “Romantic irony” has been subsequently understood. So far as I can discern, it can be used in two major ways, which I would call metatextual and anti-heroic.
Metatextual irony refers to the tendency of Romantic literature to undercut its own narrative illusion by reminding the reader that what they are reading or experiencing is fictional, thereby allowing the work to possess meanings and perspectives beyond the boundaries of the narrative it contains. We see this in Byron’s Don Juan or Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, where the author periodically interrupts the story to talk about the process of writing it, or in the plays of Ludwig Tieck, where characters pause mid-scene to break the fourth wall. Metatextuality of course was not a new idea even then, having been used to great effect by Lawrence Sterne in the previous century, by Shakespeare and Cervantes, by Dante of course, and by the Romans and Alexandrians centuries before that. What distinguishes Romantic irony from other uses of metatextuality is the intent behind it: to throw the legitimacy of the work of art into question and open it to a greater number of expressive possibilities and interpretations. For the militant Romantic, reality is infinitely various, plastic, pluralistic, and inexplicable, and the work of art should reflect this fact. To anyone familiar with Postmodern metafiction, all of this of course will sound very familiar.
Personally, I find this sort of irony very dull. It is a gimmick that may be effective the first time, but then quickly ceases to amuse. It is only as profound as a smart aleck can be profound. Far more interesting is the second strain of Romantic irony– what I have called anti-heroic irony.
Whereas metatextual irony criticizes the integrity, veracity, and limited perspective of the literary work of art as such, anti-heroic irony criticizes an ideology represented within the confines of the literary work. I have stated elsewhere that despite its many flaws and dangers, Romanticism brings at least one invaluable quality to literature, and that is the psychological subtlety that comes with intimate self-awareness and self examination.
Rare is the intelligent Romantic who is naive enough not to realize that their transcendental hopes are doomed to disappointment and failure. Rare is the intelligent Romantic who does not consider their own Romantic position a kind of curse, even if they then go on to glamorize that cursedness. From its inception as a discrete movement, Romanticism has been imbued with self-loathing and self-criticism. Wolfgang von Goethe, one of the movement’s first inaugurators, wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther as a way to work through, understand, and exorcize his own toxic Romantic view of love, and quickly abandoned the Romantic label soon afterward. Decades later, when Gustave Flaubert famously declared “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” he had a similar aim in mind, viciously skewering the selfish, delusional figure of Emma in order to take his own romantic dreams to task. This technique of using literature as a kind of spiritual self-exorcism became not only a template for Romantic writers, but indeed, already had a distinguished pedigree in the works of earlier ages that contained what we might retroactively call a Romantic anti-hero.
Let us briefly return to Ulysses. It does not take a scholar to recognize that this fierce, talented, selfish, prideful humanist, always daring to overreach and soar toward forbidden realms, is a shadowy stand-in for Dante himself, a scapegoat upon which the poet can project his own sinful tendencies and insecurities, turning his own darkest impulses into a cautionary tale of damnation. Similarly, it does not take a critical genius to perceive that Milton, that fiery revolutionary contemptuous of monarchy, popery, and tyranny of all kinds, makes his Satan a dark mirror of his own mind, a psychological self-study wherein he could work out the dangers of rebellious pride in extremis. William Blake impishly claimed that Milton was “of the devil’s party without knowing it,” but this is to deny Milton the credit he deserves. Milton knew all too well that he was very much at risk of being of the devil’s party, and wrote Paradise Lost partly as a way to demonstrate to himself and others the inadequacy of this very tempting way of thinking when applied to the highest matters.
Both Dante and Milton, but more especially Milton, demonstrate through these characters the kind of Romantic irony that I am most interested in, the irony of the Romantic anti-hero. It is this sort of irony which I not only believe is capable of redeeming Romanticism from itself, but which has proven so powerful a literary tool that it has inspired a staggering proportion of the literary works that we consider the greatest of all time.
Anti-heroic irony is itself a kind of double irony. The first step is usually to introduce a character whom you know, on paper, is bad news–Ulysses, Macbeth, Satan, Faust, Cain, Ahab, Dorian Gray– and then render them charismatic, noble, magnificent, with good talking points. This is the first inversion, and it is a necessary one, for it is only by faithfully showcasing the positive qualities of such characters that the true power and seductive allure of vice can be recognized. Here we are also in the spirit of Schlegel, who believed it was the purpose of irony to bring out multiple, contrary perspectives. This is the level of irony which is obvious to all, and it is the level at which over-enthusiastic adolescent readers often stop, chirping that it is better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. If the glorification of vice were all there were to these works, however, they would be neither profound nor laudable. When we do encounter works which seem to legitimately have no other aim than to glorify vice, such as the writings of the Marquis de Sade, we may be morbidly fascinated, much as we might be fascinated by the journal of a serial killer, but we do not treasure such works as the finest flowers of civilization.
No, what actually makes these anti-heroic works great is that, despite everything, they ultimately have a second layer of irony which reaffirms conventional morality while never ceasing to acknowledge the virtues– the dark beauty, grand dignity, justified indignation, and noble integrity–- which may lie in the heart of the vicious or fallacious anti-hero. It is the cosmic triumph over such magnetic portrayals of falsehood, the tragic denial of such great but wayward souls which gives these works their power, and gives virtue an opportunity to be convincing in its struggle with an opponent worthy of it.
This double irony makes use of a technique which I call the unambiguous ambivalence of judgment. The judgment of the work is clear– it is unambiguous– and yet the judgment itself contains an ambivalent, morally complex claim: “A is ultimately superior to B– but B also has things of value to say to us, and it is by considering the values of B that we can deepen our understanding and improve our practice of A.”
Paradise Lost gives us an excellent example of this process at work. In this epic poem about the fall of mankind, Satan is the villain but also the protagonist. He is by far the most complex and charismatic character in the poem, presented as noble, thoughtful, eloquent, and fiercely determined to stay true to what he believes is right. He does an able job convincing the reader, at least temporarily, of God’s unreasonableness and tyranny, and, much like Jesus himself, makes of his own defeat a kind of deeper victory. As Satan casts his spell over us, it must be said that God and the angels do very little to sway us away from him– indeed, compared to Satan, they come off as bumbling, dull, and two-dimensional.
Milton however never intended to decisively reprove Satan from without– he understood sinfulness too well for that. Instead, Satan is left to be the architect of his own suffering, to build his own hell both literally and figuratively. Once we get past the enthusiasm of rebellion and the glamor of Satan’s diabolical rhetoric, we are forced to observe how utterly miserable he becomes. Lonely, loveless, racked by grief and envy yet fossilized by pride, Satan himself becomes the demonstration of the inadequacy of the Satanic viewpoint. By the end of the poem, if we have read carefully, we have been led to appreciate how right Satan was about the importance of individuality, critical thinking, and resisting tyranny, yet how wrong he was, on the basis of such thoughts, to try to elevate himself to the level of deity, and how devastatingly pride can destroy the souls of those it infects. Satan’s failure, misery, and wrongheadedness do not however destroy his grandeur– rather, his grandeur only brings home to us all the more powerfully how easily great gifts and virtues can be corrupted, how seductive sin can be, and what waste occurs when it is given into. As A.C. Bradley noted, it is this sense of waste which lies at the heart of Macbeth’s tragic effect as well.
Nor need a character be outright evil to be the subject of anti-heroic irony. Consider the case of Ivan Karamazov, whose only “crime” is to be an atheist intellectual. In what is unquestionably the most famous section of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, Ivan speaks movingly and convincingly of divine injustice, using talking points which we feel must have tormented Dostoevsky himself during his own struggles with faith. In what is simultaneously one of the most explicit yet effective uses of point-counterpoint in literature, Dostoevsky immediately follows this famous indictment with an achingly beautiful account of Father Zosima’s religious meditations, which indirectly respond to the seemingly irrefutable accusations against God leveled by Ivan. Through the thoughts and actions of Zosima and especially Ivan’s brother Alyosha, Dostoevsky offers a subtle rebuttal to Ivan while never discounting or diffusing the gravity of his serious critiques, and frames The Brothers Karamazov as a battle for the soul of mankind, caught between atheist rationality and religious transcendence. Later, we watch in sorrow and horror as Ivan drives himself mad in theological despair, culminating in a hallucination of a demon which is one of the great scenes in literature. Dostoevsky’s position is clear– the path of holistic wisdom leads to faith, the path of cold rationalization to angst and lunacy. Yet rather than a banal affirmation of traditional values, The Brothers Karamazov is one of the greatest novels of all time precisely because it provides complex, sympathetic characters on both sides of the issue, deals unflinchingly, fairly, and insightfully with the great problems of existence, and while it suggests a vision and a verdict, ultimately leaves it to the reader to seek a road to salvation for themselves.
From these two examples alone, we can see that the Romantic anti-hero comes in a variety of forms. Some are diabolical supermen like Ulysses, Manfred, Faust, Ahab, and Brand; others are absurdist dreamers like Don Quixote and Michael Kohlhaas; still others are neurotic brooders like Hamlet, Ivan Karamazov, and Antoine Roquentin. Moreover, the treatment of the anti-hero may be completely sincere, as in Paradise Lost, mockingly playful, as in Eugene Onegin, or savagely satirical, as in Madame Bovary.
In nearly every case, however, the Romantic anti-hero is an individual who is intelligent, charismatic, selfish, prideful, and relentlessly devoted to an ideal which is untenable within the limitations of reality and human nature. When such individuals are not merely valorized, but convincingly shown to be simultaneously virtuous and vicious, seductive and wrongheaded, grand and wretched, a great and morally complex work of art may be achieved– one which does not recklessly assent to Romantic egotism, delusion, and melodrama, but objectifies these elements in characters to both faithfully portray something of human nature and make us more aware of Romantic neuroses as neuroses, and thereby calibrating us to a clearer and healthier vision of reality.
The tools and grammar of Romanticism, used against themselves in the ironical, tragic, and ambivalent contemplation of an anti-hero, have produced some of the greatest art that we have. If it were not clear enough by now, here is a partial list of literary masterworks which revolve around such an antihero: Inferno 26; Don Quixote; Hamlet; Macbeth; Paradise Lost; Faust; Frankenstein; Cain; Eugene Onegin; Moby Dick; Madame Bovary; The Picture of Dorian Gray; Brand; Hedda Gabbler; The Brothers Karamazov; Lolita; and many more. Romantic anti-heroic irony is a testament to art’s ability to transfigure– naivete into awareness, suffering into knowledge, folly into wisdom, longing into acceptance. Among the alchemical formulas of literature, it is one of our best.
