Concerning and Unsnarling Sword and Sorcery, Romanticism, Dark Romanticism, and Fantasy (Part One)

May 19, 2021 Matthew Pungitore

INTRODUCTION

How could understanding the differences between Romanticism and Dark Romanticism be of any benefit to the readers of Sword and Sorcery? Fantasy birthed Sword and Sorcery, but not alone, for it was Romanticism that spawned Dark Romanticism, and it also had a hand in the conception of Sword and Sorcery. These four genres might not appear to be related, but they absolutely do branch together, and understanding the similarities and differences between them can help pulp-readers better appreciate the legitimate literary value of works in these genres.

Why should these things matter to lovers of pulp stories? I have come to my own conclusions concerning this, and I want to share these opinions of mine in the subsequent paragraphs of this informal, unorthodox essay; I will also be sharing many ideas from other individuals and sources, because their ideas helped me explain, understand, and untangle some of the arcane ambiguities about and surrounding these genres. I will also be asking many, many questions, because, on top of all this, I want my readers to come to their own ideas, to think about what these things mean to them. Learning about the differences between Romanticism and Dark Romanticism has helped me to appreciate better what I already love reading. It gave me a richer understanding of Sword and Sorcery and all its worth. There are many similarities between Fantasy, Romanticism, Sword and Sorcery, and Dark Romanticism; I have even seen how both Fantasy and Romanticism have been similarly corrupted by time and by the cynical engine of all that is of modernity and of the meta-postmodernism. What will the future bring for these genres?

E.T.A. Hoffmann

Romanticism and Dark Romanticism might at first appear to be so similar that they should be catalogued as being the same. Although their names are similar, they represent very different perspectives that divide farther and farther away from each other the closer one looks. “For the Romantics beauty was enhanced by exactly those qualities which seem to deny it, by those objects which produce horror; the sadder, the more painful it was, the more intensely they relished it. ‘Welch eine Wonne! welch ein Leiden!’” (Praz 27). Romanticism and Dark Romanticism, the real difference between them rests with the overall perspectives they hold towards human experience and living in general. Romantics love life and worship themselves. The old masters of Romanticism broke away from the limits of any and all authority or censorship, except for their servitude to “art,” “beauty,” and their emotions. There is an overall optimism they feel toward experiencing what life has to offer. The original “Romanticists” loved the power of nature, the Sublime, mysticism, subjectivity, and their emotions, no matter how violent or anguished. They looked at everything with another kind of order and a sense of hope and glory. This puts raw Romanticism closer to the ideas of Transcendentalism. For these kinds of Romanticists, all would be right as long as people lived naturally and in accordance with natural chaos, a kind of chaos that allegedly follows cosmic laws of natural order. Some Romanticists saw this natural order to be the representation of God. Others saw it as a secular being, the only true and good force in the universe, connected with innocence and childhood. These artists saw the goodness in their subjectivity, their individualism, their reformist ideals, and progressivism itself. Looking at it like that, this is where the big divides and outlines between these two nebulous genres start to show.

In “Phantasmagoria: A Look at Dark Romanticism, Romanticism’s Black Mirror,” Nicolas Lietzgau shares many clarifying and enlightening ideas about all this:—

There are two main reasons why Dark Romanticism is obscure. First, it is an elusive term. In its broadest sense, Dark Romanticism could be considered a subgenre, but that definition is shaky. Except for perhaps the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann, few writers and their works were consistently Dark Romantic, though many share its unmistakable themes up to this day. In his 2007 dissertation on the subject, German literary scholar André Vieregge defines it as a thematic structure, an amalgam of specific themes and recurring motifs applicable to any genre. The second reason is the stigma surrounding much of speculative fiction in (mainly European) literary academia, where fantastical elements are often frowned upon or seen as pulpy. Considering the popularity of speculative fiction and how many of literature’s greatest works contain fantastical elements, this is not only an elitist but also unreasonable sentiment: instead of dismissing these elements as immature, we should analyze the psychology and reasons behind them, as I will try in the following paragraphs. It is hard to define a starting and ending point of Dark Romanticism, but it is generally agreed upon that it began in the second half of the 18th century, with English works such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) or William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), peaked across Europe in the early 1800s, and faded with German writer Eichendorff’s death in 1854. Even though the first Dark Romantic works were by English writers, it is hard to confine it to a specific country. With the early 1800s being an age of relative peace, the upper class’s travel and cultural exchange was common and allowed Romanticism and Dark Romanticism to disseminate across most of Europe and America. To understand what defines Dark Romanticism, it is helpful to look at Romanticism more broadly and the era that preceded it, the Age of Enlightenment, the philosophical and intellectual movement that dominated most of the 17th and the mid-18th century. In an unprecedented wave of clarity, it swept across Europe, spreading values such as rationality, secularism, and the evidence of the senses, the idea that the perceptible should be the lodestar of thinking. Significant scientific advances followed, with inventions such as the steam engine laying the foundation for the Industrial Revolution; it was an era that put reason first and foremost and can be considered the basis of modern liberalism.

(Lietzgau)

Lay scrutiny might lead one to the conclusion that perhaps Romanticism, the Gothic, and Dark Romanticism grew together almost at once. Might it be reasonable to question which really did come first, exactly? Did Dark Romanticism start with Anti-Enlightenment attitudes? Was Romanticism born by the Gothic?

We certainly must not forget the contributions to Romanticism formed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778):—

With Rousseau’s Julie; or, The New Heloise (1761), The Social Contract (1762), Emile, or On Education (1762/1763), readers can see that some of Rousseau’s most “Romanticist” works came before The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horatio Walpole (1717–1797). It would certainly seem that mainstream Romanticism, as it is popularly understood and spoken of today, began with Burke and Rousseau, but who is to say for sure?

When readers are asked to think on Romanticism, they might consider the works of William Wordsworth (1770–1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (1772–1801)—who is more known as “Novalis”—and they might even think of John Keats (1795–1821), while the works of Keats could be said to actually be closer to Dark Romanticism. On the even “lighter” edge of this wild movement, one might even think of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), but these two are better grouped with the Transcendentalists.

As for what is Dark Romanticism, here are four outstanding examples:

1. "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864).

2. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville (1819–1891).

3. “On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822).

4. "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849).

I would like now, as a momentary interlude, to direct attention to some ideas formed by Carl F. Hovde concerning Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), as I believe Hovde’s ideas provide profound insight on the novel; in addition, it is my opinion that the below statements by Hovde appear to show the characteristics of Moby-Dick that connect it to Romanticism; and, in my belief, the below notions made by Hovde, when looking at them all collectively, reveal to me important issues, the subject matters of which to my mind and opinion show traits in Moby-Dick that I personally think are examples of what one might call characteristics of Dark Romanticism:—

Moby-Dick (1851) was Melville’s sixth novel in a series of nine plus a collection of shorter tales, a sequence that began with Typee in 1846 and ended with The Confidence-Man in 1857; there was later poetry, and the novella Billy Budd was found in manuscript after his death in 1891. (Hovde xv) The third Extract quotes the Bible about Jonah, who will be the central figure in “The Sermon” by Father Mapple (chap. IX). Jonah is also mentioned in the thirtieth Extract, which reports in a matter-of-fact way that a harpooner caught a whale “that was white all over” (p. 15). Melville begins to complicate that creature at the end of “Loomings” (chap. I), where Ishmael, in the “wonder-world” of his experience and in his “wild conceits,” sees a procession of whales “two and two,” evoking thoughts of both fertility and the destruction of the Flood. At the chapter’s end there is the vision of the “grand hooded phantom” in language that combines magnificence and foreboding. (Hovde xix) Despite Ahab’s force of character, it seems unlikely that he could retain the crew’s loyalty, deranged as he is. Except for him and his mysterious boat crew, everyone on board has signed on for the money to be made, about which Ahab cares nothing. But as with Ahab, Melville’s quarry is much larger than life: Every allusion to Moby Dick heightens the whale’s status to that of a nature-god, who does not so much swim in water as in myth. Seen this way, the novel concerns a crazy man who tries to kill a legend. (Hovde xix–xx) One of the major sources of the book’s vitality is this vividness about the ordinary. Melville brings everything to life—not only the human characters and the creatures of the sea, but also the sea itself and the Pequod upon it. Such passages operate on us like animism, giving life and energy to inanimate things such that the whole world is charged with intention though we do not know to what end. (Hovde xx) That in the passage’s final image neither ocean nor air offers safe haven points to a large difference of view about nature’s role among our nineteenth-century writers. Attitudes toward nature are often related to religious beliefs, and for Ralph Waldo Emerson, as usually for Henry Thoreau, nature is our secure home and the source of inspiration if our imaginations are open to it. Religious reformers and social commentators, both were New Englanders who had grown up in a landscape humanized by two centuries of settlement. They were concerned to make human life worthy of its natural surroundings, and these were in turn seen as informed by spiritual truth. Writers of fiction were less confident about our home in nature. In the dark stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the physical world can give way at any moment, and in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, nature is benevolent or malign as a function of the psychology of the characters. For Melville, as later for Mark Twain, nature may be the mother of us all, but her violence destroys life as readily as she creates it; vigilance is the cost of survival, and even then we take great risks. (Hovde xxi–xxii) The greater emphasis on the individual mind found diverse literary expression up to Melville’s time, from the Byronic hero to the protagonists of Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (both published in 1847). In America, Charles Brockton Brown and Edgar Allan Poe portrayed psychological derangement and its effects, and by the time Melville met Hawthorne the older man had already written much about how a will to dominate can distort the personality and damage others. (Hovde xxviii) Ahab is at the same time a grand figure of Romantic individualism and an example of individualism gone terribly wrong; he sums up what is both noble and lethal in the cult of the great man. (Hovde xxix) The novel’s third stylistic manner is what one can call the American sublime, a high and extravagant rhetoric designed to sweep us away in an emotion-charged thought so powerful that we for a time suspend judgment in the thrill of the linguistic flood. (Hovde xxxii) Melville was drawn to Hawthorne’s work for a number of reasons, and while concern for the darker shades of human nature was central in that attraction, Melville must have recognized a literary sensibility in some ways like his own. (Hovde xxxvii)

How do you feel about those above statements that were made by Hovde? What is your interpretation? Do you agree with my conceptualization that Hovde’s ideas, the ones I have quoted above, are evidence of how Dark Romanticism swims through Moby-Dick? Is it simply Romanticism that lives in the novel? Or is it something else?

Matthew Pungitore graduated with a Bachelor of Science in English from Fitchburg State University. He volunteers with the Hingham Historical Society. The town of Hingham, Massachusetts is where he was brought up, and he has lived there for many years. Matthew is the author of The Report of Mr. Charles Aalmers and other stories, Fiendilkfjeld Castle, and Midnight's Eternal Prisoner: Waiting For The Summer.

If you’ve liked what you’ve read here, check out some of Matthew Pungitore’s writings at his BookBaby author-page.

Contact him at: matthewpungitore_writer@outlook.com

WORKS CITED

Court, Simon. "Edmund Burke and the Sublime." Wordsworth Grasmere. 02 Mar. 2015. Web. 13 May 2021.

Hovde, Carl F. "Introduction by Carl F. Hovde." Introduction. MOBY-DICK. By Herman Melville. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003. Print.

Lietzgau, Nicolas. "Phantasmagoria: A Look at Dark Romanticism, Romanticism's Black Mirror." CrimeReads. 23 Nov. 2020. Web. 13 May 2021.

Mambrol, Nasrullah. "Romanticism in France." Literary Theory and Criticism. 29 Nov. 2017. Web. 13 May 2021.

Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony. Translated by Angus Davidson. Foreword by Frank Kermode. 2nd ed. London: Oxford Paperbacks, 1970. Print.

Part Two of this article can be found here.