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”

HIPSTERSSHADOW CULTURESOUTSIDERSBOHEMIANSREBELSCOUNTERCULTURES

“Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against? “What’ve you got?”

Marlon Brando as biker outlaw Johnny Strabler in The Wild One, 1953

Mid 1800’s: Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau et alPre-WWI: Lyric Left1920’s: Harlem RenaissancePost WWII: Beats, bebop, abstract expressionism1960’s: Counterculture, “hippies”1970’s: Patti Smith, Punk, hip-hopSince then . . . ?

Important Romantic/shadow/countercul

tural eras

• 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

Features of romantic reaction

• 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 Thoreau1817-1862

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. "

1. Discover one’s nature• Listen to the still small

voice• Ignore conventional

wisdom

authenticity

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.

• People have an inborn nature.• That nature is good.

I. The natural self

Pleasantville shows people findingtheir real selves hidden under theconventional selves they have created fitting the social conventions of whatboys & 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 theDevil.

• 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, Yosemite1871-73

His paintings of YosmiteAre “imbued with the senseThat divinity dwells withinThe wilderness.”

Albert Bierstadt, The Sierras near Lake Tahoe, California

Thomas Cole, Prometheus Bound

Normal truth is not your truth;

you are uniqueIt 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 self-invention, 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 cageputs all Heaven in a Rage.

--William Blake

•Romantics see the natural self as a robin, as good•Puritans and other more pessimistictypes see it as a wolf. (Puritans believed in original sin.)•Taylor, Existentialists believe there is no “natural” self. We create our selves.

Contrast one: the nature of the self: good, bad, neither?

(A) Face In The CrowdI've got to stop faking it,I've got to start facing it,I'm going to take my final bowThen 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 downAnd 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 outOr 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 selvesout 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 willreveal one’s true nature.

Intuition is the voice of Naturespeaking in you.

It is the “still small voice” thatwill 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 neveropens a book

The Mayor’s is that he is a rational, calm person whowould 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 housewifeThe Lovers’ Lane kids’ is that they are content showing

their affection by holding hands and that sex should wait untilthey are married

Mary Sue really has a brain; She discovers that sheenjoys 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" andThe "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: NatureMedievals: God speaking to usPuritans: our bestial naturePsychologists (some): the internalized

voice of society.Taylor: our created natures

Buddy Holly: Rave On

A-well the little things you say and doThey make me want to be with you-oo-oo{Refrain}Rave on, it's a crazy feeling andI know it's got me reeling when youSay, "I love you," rave onThe way you dance and hold me tight

A-well rave on, it's a crazy feeling andI know it's got me reeling I'mSo glad that you're revealing your love for me

Rave on, rave on and tell meTell me not to be lonelyTell 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 notDogmatic, do not insist that everyone believeAs they do.

Romantics live in the hyphens

Whenever society divides the worldinto two exclusive classes, Romanticstry 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 live2. It will blind you to your true and unique nature.3. It will lead you into conventional “scripts” that

will not suit you4. These “scripts” will occupy your time and your

imagination, deafening you to your intuition,stunting your imagination, preventing youfrom imagining alternatives to the status quo.

5. It will put your mind in a straitjacket, preventingyou from seeing things that do not fit those views.

Postwar America was the era of the expert. . .AmericansWere 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 healerbut 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 truthMen 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 men,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’dTo its idolatries a patient knee,-Nor coin’d my cheek to smiles,-nor cried aloudIn worship of an echo; in the crowdThey could not deem me one of such; I stoodAmong them, but not of them; in a shroudOf 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 whateverinsults 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

will not fit this.

Emerson, “Self-Reliance

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.

--Charles Baudelaire

19th century poet and

Inspiration for generations

of Romantic artists

The city fathers

Following conventional wisdom will lead you into conventional “scripts” that will suppress your unique individualityand that will be hard to escape from

The Unknown CitizenHe was found by the Bureau of Statistics to beOne against whom there was no official complaintAnd all the reports on his conduct agreeThat, 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 retiredHe 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 foundThat he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every dayAnd 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 declareHe was fully sensible to the advantages of the

Installment PlanAnd had everything necessary to the Modern Man,A phonograph, a radio, a car, and a frigidaire.Our researches into Public Opinion are contentThat 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 narrow-minded:

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 all-pervading 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 illustrateIn an exaggerated form how people sometimesunthinkingly 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.

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.

Contrast 5: the value of conventional wisdom

An obvious traditionalistAdam/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, aggressiveand 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 aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Having discovered one’s true self by

Listening to one’s intuition which is thevoice 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