Book Review: The Cultural Revolution of Modern Time
Peter Fritzsche; Stranded in the Present: Modern Time
and the Melancholy of History
Reviewed by Matthew Brown
According to the
Romantic poet Novalis, our paths in life lead "always homeward" (immer
nach Hause). Read against the background of the French Revolution and its
upheavals, the desire to return to a place and time of safety and security
becomes easily understandable. But as Peter Fritzsche's Stranded in the Present suggests about this era and its legacy for modernity, we can
never truly arrive at this destination. For Fritzsche, the Revolution itself
and the entire revolutionary period experienced by its interpreters (and
survivors) created a fundamental sense of rupture between past and present as
well as between individuals, groups, and their previously accepted sources of
personal and social meaning.
Following the works of George Steiner and Lynn
Hunt, Fritzsche argues forcefully and convincingly for the revolutionary
mindsets that accompanied the events of the Revolution and its seemingly
endless aftershocks.[1] The creation of a new sensibility about the place of
the individual in the drama of history provides the impetus for Fritzsche's
work, which traces the dislocations experienced by individuals living through
these literally unsettling times. Following an introduction and first chapter
on the centrality of the Revolution, Fritzsche continues in thickly descriptive
prose, creating a rich cultural history that draws upon an impressive array of
sources to create a tapestry of this new historical awareness.
Each subsequent
chapter examines a symbol of the shift in outlook by modern Western Europeans
and Americans between the Revolution and the first decades of the nineteenth
century. The second chapter, "Strangers," examines the experience of
exile through diaries, memoirs, and biographical-fictional works, the literary
forms most common to describing the initial encounters with the Revolution. For
Fritzsche, Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, the French aristocrat, Romantic
author and later diplomat, embodies the modern phenomenon of displacement and
discontinuity. His personal experience with the Revolution served as the basis
of his enduring feelings of dislocation, which came to structure the ways that
he narrated his life. His frustrating efforts to continually recreate himself
through his forty-year memoirs, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave,
stand as a poignant testament to his generation's need to come to terms with
loss and exile, not so much from a place but from another time.
Perhaps best
captured by Chateaubriand's insight into the difficulties of modern identity
that "Man does not have a single, consistent life" (p. 57), his
fellow émigrés expressed similar existential anxieties about their own
contingency. Writing their lives against the background of historical
experience, contemporaries such as the well-known Germaine de Stael and the
less-known Madame de Menerville told their stories to create meaning out of the
disruptions of their age. The author's insightful readings of these sources
help reveal the important relationship between their content and their literary
form, but the crucial point for Fritzsche is that the stranger and the exile
serve as compelling symbols for modern life itself, or at least life
experienced in this nostalgic, melancholic temporal mode… read more: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10214
