Romanticism as A Form of Escape from Colonial & Imperial Powers (Comparative Literature Reflection on Douwes Dekker and Joseph Conrad Focusing on Indonesian Colonial History)
“Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.”
— Manfred, Act 1 Scene 1 by Lord Byron (1816)
The more I read and study Romantic era literature, the more I notice it’s a major escapism from the industrial revolution, capital-based exploitation of laissez -faire world that Karl Marx and Engels popularly confronted in Das Kapital and Manifesto. But what precedes the industrial, Adam Smith-practitioner and stockbroker gentlemen (yes, patriarchal) of gilded cage Western society? colonialism & imperialism have always been there starting, in Dutch historical perspective, 200 years earlier.
Pre- and post-1848 Revolution Era Views on Colonial “Artworks” and The Origin of Political Racism
In 1821 the Greeks had proclaimed their war of independence against Ottoman Empire and led to the massive Massacre of Chiron, a purely xenophobic and genocidal act. Napoleon Bonaparte had just died in his exile in St. Helena. Faraday had just discovered electromagnetic rotation which greatly impacted industry on the production efficiency using generators & motors. 200 years earlier, in 1621, the first great spice trade monopoly (later exploitation by the Dutch under VOC) conducted by the Dutch, British, Portuguese, Spaniard eventually led to the Banda Conquest was the early example of genocide outside Europe by Europeans in Indonesian Isles (quoting Max Havelaar’s “On the Crime of Europeans Outside Europe), resulting in 14000 casualties, where 1700 Banda islanders were enslaved and more were displaced outside the island. The fountainhead of Age of Empire began in 1851, when the World’s Fairs were held on many occasions in European major cities, particularly in the Great Exhibition of London’s Crystal Palace.
Post-1848 French Revolution world marks the end of ideal, daydreaming romanticism and replaces it with practical, compos mentis and sometimes distaste/mockery towards meek, heart-stirring arts & literature (Droogstoppel’s comic yet conservatively dumb aversion). No one really wrote about slavery and exploitation of other countries before the weekly publication of the abolitionist New York-based Freedom’s Journal (first issued in 1827) listing the crimes committed entirely by white people and the slave narrative in epistolary fiction style in 1851 publication of 12 Years of Slave, while in fact Napoleon’s Invasion of Egypt (1798–1801) kicked off the imperialism and modern bureaucracy described in Edward Said’s Orientalism we recognize today, and the impact on Dutch East Indies administration at that time under Herman Willhelm Daendels (1762–1818, in office as Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies 1808–1811), Napoleon’s favorite French Revolution general, immensely contributed the collective trauma narrative and the modern-day Indonesian governmental system.
Amidst these chaotic, violent crimes conducted by European colonizers and Revolutionary Europe, the booming of machinery, worker’s exploitation for minimum wage, great famine and migration of people from urban area to the industrial cities, romantic arts & literature looming over each historical event. The overly sweetened, unrealistic and swoon-worthy Jane Austen’s novel characters; the complex angst and fear of human progress of the Shelley’s; the dignification of honor & friendship of Alexandre Dumas’ books; the exalting and personal historical narratives to promote French history by Victor Hugo; the sweet, turbulent, complicatedly harmonic scale tunes of piano, orchestral and opera pieces by Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms and other members of Neudeutsche Schule in the War of the Romantics (1850s onwards); there were also the epic, national sentiment-inducing paintings to promote the superiority of proletarians over the Bourjois and Enlightenment-era idealization of mythology emerged together with the substantial progress of imperial & colonial power outside Europe. During the 19th century, other than a slave’s narrative of Solomon Thornup, Eduard Douwes Dekker published Max Havelaar (1860) that penned a major criticism on Dutch East Indies government, exposing both the systematic corruption by the natives and the Dutch administration in literary style. About 30 years later, on the dusk of 19th century, Joseph Conrad published Lord Jim that sets in fictional town of Sumatra narrating a British seaman on mission civilisatrice agenda. He also published many other major critical assessments in the form of literary fiction like Dekker’s Havelaar, often in wretched and distressing tone, on European imperialism.
It took almost a century for a literature community to finally open a conversation on the imperial exploitation and the effect of Napoleonic “romantic” revolution that reconstructed the mentality of European society, the power-knowledge relations of Western epistemological systems and records, the instrumentation of imperialism through systems of culture during the course of 19th century. As Goethe, Lord Byron and John Keats’ contributing the depiction of exotic lands to European readers, the political exoticism as a part of Napoleonic strategy of occupying Africa and Middle East beginning with the publication and public propaganda of The Other in Description de l’Égypte (1809–1829) legitimizing the imperial power over the invaded and colonized countries. Could we argue that the romanticized writings of Goethe and Lord Byron were an attempt to sweep the European exploitations in Africa and the conflict with Ottoman Empire under the carpet?
As Hegel’s Philosophy of History zeitgeist lecture explaining Europe as the end of history and hence the peak of human progress, the metaphysics of Hegelian racism sprouted on the continent, possibly originating in HU Berlin. The superiority ideology of the Europeans was further escalated through the Wagnerian arts bolstered by the flourishing German Nationalism of Bismarck Era (1862–1890), followed by the völkische Bewegung thereafter. During this neuer Imperialismus period, Germany’s first known record of war crimes came in sight: the German Empire perpetrated Herero and Namaqua Genocide between 1904 and 1907 in German South West Africa (modern-day Namibia), during the Scramble for Africa. This genocide was also known as the first genocide of 20th century.
The Legacy of Romanticism in Postcolonial Perspective: Max Havelaar and Lord Jim
Post-1848 Europe was then confronted with the dark side of the progress owing to the ideals they strived during the Revolutions: the sentiment of supremacy over certain races and classes. The romanticization of individuals, be it nation, race, class or certain person, by Europeans evoked a strong mental and emotional response among European society that the world seems to revolve around, and center on them. This is a true, oftentimes perilous, legacy of Romanticism that still persists to this day and a crucial point in postcolonial studies. Romantic era literature and art, ultimately, are assurance that supremacy of European society (“civilization”) abides at the time. The irony is that postcolonial new nations like Indonesia, during the post-WWII era, often adopted the concept of republics and ideal independence from colonizer rooted from Napoleonic French Revolution, often blended with neo-Marxism and crypto-communist behavior to lend credence on anticolonial sentiment as practiced by Soekarno’s infamous cabinet of 100 ministers and Mohammad Hatta’s islamic socialism.
Dekker’s Max Havelaar convoluted, albeit provocative and poetic writing style also brings up a strong romantic era legacy, where Havelaar is presented as a tragic idealist with Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianist values. Unlike other portrayal of white people in the colonies where society expects a civilizing mission as a romantic, colonial Eurocentric gesture, Havelaar strained every nerve against the bureaucracy and the corrupted governmental system in Indies, particularly the outpost of Lebak in Rangkasbitung (the modern-day capital of the Regency of Lebak, Province of Banten, West Java) and insisted that the romantic values lie on his struggle like the Dutch’s independence over Spain in 1648 during Eighty Years War, hence the author’s initial of Multatuli, meaning in Latin “I have suffered (struggled) much”. His portrayal of frustrated, humanist Dutch civil servant reflects the circumstance of the suffering Indies at that time and counters the corrupted Dutch-native noble hegemony of Lebak.
In comparison to Conrad’s Lord Jim where the neuer Imperialismus character was seeking romantic escapade to the unknown and on civilizing mission to Far East, he suffers due to the arrogance of being a pompous, yet coward agent of British imperialism. From the beginning, as in many of Conrad’s novels, the ever shifting between Marlow and Jim’s first-person cognitive narration almost entirely flows in a sombre structuralist, Schopenhauerian views of the world. The narration, although much more masterfully prosaic and well-organized than that of Havelaar, is less provocative and impassive, symbolizing the deadpan post-romantic, industrialist and nihilistic color of European intellectual society during the period. Jim’s project, just like Havelaar’s failure to fight the system, was entirely doomed once he spinelessly abandoned, possibly affected with some variant of racism or discrimination against a demonized “Other", the sinking Patna filled with Hajj pilgrims to Mecca. As he sought redemption over the “cattle beings”, he involved himself in local rebellion of Patusan, where the Bugis chief Doramin attempted to bring down the corrupted local Malay chief Rajah Tunku Allang. The true rebellion, turns out, was the locals against European armed traders across the river, but utilizing the classic VOC legacy of divide et impera, the local tribes warred on each other. Jim, unfamiliar with Indies’ situation and overly-attempted to mask his post-traumatic disorder on the Patna incident, was double-crossed by the European agent to be the perpetrator of the conflict. In both novels, we can notice how the authors created a brutal exposé on both local’s and European’s corruption of the colonial system.
Conrad’s Further Anti-Romantic Exploration on Imperial & Colonialism: the Exertion of “Will” and Spivak’s Subalterns.
Conrad took the extreme idea of distressing anti-romanticism on the colonial literature further in his most famous work, an imperial horror story of Heart of Darkness, which as the title suggests, explores the darkness of human’s soul, targeting Europe as main perpetrator that exploited Belgium-occupied Congo during King Leopold II’s reign. History now records the period from 1885 to 1908 that many atrocities were perpetrated in the Congo Free State. These atrocities were particularly associated with the labour policies used to collect natural rubber for export, as Conrad also mentions ivory, gold and diamonds. The magnitude of the population fall over the period is disputed, with modern estimates ranging from 1.5 million to 13 million. Tons of colonial prosaic, structuralist symbolism in the book have always been impactfully demoralizing yet eye-opening in the depiction of the suffering Congonese, particularly the forced laborers, adding to the symbolical usage of nature to corroborate the despairing, sinister mental state of the narrator, undoubtedly Conrad himself during his exploration of Congo in 1890.
In this spine-chilling page, the narrator explains how Kurtz, who considers himself as deity among the natives, is a representative of all Europe by “the exertion a power through our will”. Clearly Darkness was heavily influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas on Will to Power, and this, apparently, suggests the reason behind European occupation in the Other according to Conrad: because Nietzschean will-to-power enables them to be as might as the deity among the mortals (in Nazi ideology, it was the inferior race). We have killed God. Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?. In the book “Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism?: On The Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy” (2002), Robert S. Wistrich wrote,
The “fascist” Nietzsche was above all considered to be a heroic opponent of necrotic Enlightenment “rationality” and a kind of spiritual vitalist, who had glorified war and violence in an age of herd-lemming shopkeepers, inspiring the anti-Marxist revolutions of the interwar period. According to the French fascist Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, it was the Nietzschean emphasis on the autotelic power of the Will that inspired the mystic voluntarism and political activism of his comrades. Such politicized readings were vehemently rejected by another French writer, the socialo-communist anarchist Georges Bataille, who in the 1930s sought to establish (in ambiguous success) the “radical incompatibility” between Nietzsche (as a thinker who abhorred mass politics) and “the fascist reactionaries.” He argued that nothing was more alien to Nietzsche than the pan-Germanism, racism, militarism and anti-Semitism of the Nazis, into whose service the German philosopher had been pressed.
Thus it was actually the circle of German academics of philosophy that intermingled, or even made foundation of pan-Germanism, racism, militarism and anti-Semitism with Nietzschean notion on the Power of the Will. Melendez (2001) points out to the parallels between Hitler’s and Nietzsche’s titanic anti-egalitarianism, and the idea of the “übermensch”, a term which was frequently used by Hitler and Mussolini to refer to the so-called “Aryan race”, or rather, its projected future after fascist engineering, as mentioned by Jeffrey (2011) in A Contemporary Introduction to Sociology.
Deconstructing Heart of Darkness’ dual-vocal narration not in unison, or what Edward Said calls as contrapuntal point of view, apropos to Johann Sebastian Bach’s music, was “a musical form… employing numerous voices in usually strict imitation of each other, a form, in other words, expressing motion, playfulness, discovery, and, in the rhetorical sense, invention. Viewed this way, the texts of the canonical humanities, far from being a rigid tablet of fixed rules and monuments bullying us from the past… will always remain open to changing combinations of sense and signification” (interview by Mallios, 2003). Unlike romantic era literature text that aims for tonal, emotional clarity and complicatedly yet harmonious passage, Conrad presents the reader a dissonance: the polyphonic unharmonious narration of the suffering that results from enslavement to the will, as noted in Schopenhauerian metaphysics. The character Kurtz is an extreme case of the consequence of The Will, as Lord Jim is the moderate and banal sample of it. In the case of Max Havelaar however, Havelaar’s exertion of Will was subdued by the system and history in colonial Lebak steered by the dominating zeitgeist. Both authors primarily campaigning social realism is quintessentially dismissing literary escapism of pre-1848 Romantic tradition and belong to the post-romantic literature.
Nietzsche’s influence of autocratic view of mankind along with Marx’ materialism followed by 1848 Revolution and 1851 industrial fair in literature resounding the end mark of Romantic era. We can draw the inference that in the metaphysical sense, the world as Will and Representation is a rebellion against Hegelian absolute zeitgeist, as exemplified in colonial agent implemented orientalism or race ideology to legitimize the colonial power and the decolonization strategy implemented by the former subalterns.
Gayatri Spivak’s “Subaltern” theory, a critical analysis of the marginalization and silencing of oppressed groups in the third world; argues that the subaltern subject is heterogeneous and cannot speak for themselves due to the divisions and displacements imposed by the dominant narratives. Spivak uses Marxist ideology to criticize the leftists. According to her, the leftists essentialize the subalterns i.e. They consider the third world people to be same as one identity and same issues. The problem with this essentialist ideology is among others, the subalterns become dependent on the Western intellectuals to speak for their condition rather than allowing them to speak for themselves. Even so, utilizing Western epistemological and cultural frameworks, what are the postcolonial founding fathers or leaders of Afro-Asian anticolonial movement during the interwar and post-war period, if not the ex-subaltern practicing the exertion of Will?
