The Affinities Between J.-K. Huysmans and the “Rosicrucian” Stories of W. B. Yeats

PMLA ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 74 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 464-469
Author(s):  
Michael Fixler
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
The Self ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Group ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
God's Grace ◽  
The Guardian ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
The Devil

In march of 1890, after a preparatory experience with Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Society, W. B. Yeats joined the Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn. Like Joris-Karl Huysmans, who at about this time became interested in the activities of the French counterpart of the Golden Dawn, “Le Grand Ordre Kabbalistique du Rose Croix,” Yeats's interests were largely aroused by the willingness of the members of the group to experiment with magical practices. Where Yeats, however, committed himself by oaths and rituals to a cult which pretended to be the guardian of ancient insights into the super-sensory life, Huysmans stood apart, first skeptical, then fascinated, and finally outraged. The eccentric MacGregor Mathers headed the London Rosicrucians, and he and his French wife, the sister of Henri Bergson, were acquainted with all the principal figures involved with the slightly older French order. The latter had been founded in 1888 by Sâr Joséphin Péladan and the self-styled nobleman Stanislas de Guaita. The French group existed on the shady fringe of clerical politics in the hostile rationalism of the early Third Republic, and it was in search of documentary material for a novel about this fantastic circle of clerical Royalists that Huysmans was first drawn to them. Like Saul who only sought lost asses, this quest led him, as he came to believe, to God's grace.Before he became a Catholic Huysmans was, in effect, something of a Manichean. As Yeats did, he sought experimental evidence to confirm the existence of opposing forces of good and evil, and when he had this evidence he rejected forcefully the Devil through whom he had found God. Yeats was more equivocal. The inversion of values in Huysmans' A rebours, and of ritual in his Là-bas never confounded or reconciled the opposition of good and evil and of false and true worship, as Yeats tried to do in his Rosicrucian stories of 1896. But then Huysmans was never so deeply involved as Yeats in constructing out of the farrago of late nineteenth-century occult beliefs a systematic basis for his life. The Rosicrucian Golden Dawn did provide the beginnings for such a systematic basis, and in his three stories of 1896, “The Tables of the Law,” “Rosa Alchemica,” and “The Adoration of the Magi,” Yeats draws on the beliefs and rituals of his cult. It seems to me that there are elements in the first two of these Rosicrucian stories which have curious affinities to the writings of Huysmans, and these become significant in the context of other relations between the two writers.

Innocence and Grace

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiara Bertoglio
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
God's Grace

L’albero degli zoccoli, by the Italian director Ermanno Olmi, polyphonically narrates the lives of peasant families in late-nineteenth-century Italy. The soundtrack prominently features works by J.S. Bach, mostly for the organ, performed by the celebrated Italian organist Fernando Germani. This article recounts the genesis of Olmi’s musical choices, discussing his views on music, on Bach, and on the interaction with musicians. Moreover, it is argued that Olmi purposefully employed some specific pieces in conjunction with particular characters and situations; it will be demonstrated that Olmi considered Bach’s music a symbol for God’s Grace, underpinning the film’s most significant moments in a liturgy of life, of fecundity, and of love. Bach’s music transmits the pervasive religious sentiment of the peasants to present-day audiences, asserting the holiness and the miracle of life.

The Claims of Kinship: Humanitarian Ideals at the Century’s End

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Stokes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formal Organization ◽  
Green Movement ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This Chapter examines the self-styled late nineteenth-century humanitarians and their formal organization, ‘The Humanitarian League’. It stresses the visionary zeal of the movement, and examines the wide range of topics discussed in the League’s two main journals, such as vegetarianism and vivisection, pointing up the tensions and paradoxes in humanitarian thinking at the time. It concludes by noting the holistic nature of the humanitarian vision and its echoes in later phenomena such as eco-criticism and the green movement.

scholarly journals Editorial

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. v-vii
Author(s):  
Diederik F. Janssen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great War ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Great War

I am pleased to introduce Boyhood Studies, Volume 11, Issue 1. This issue’s authors unanimously invite an appreciation of the many regional, temporal and contextual inflections of manliness-in-the-making. After all: “Among boys, as among men, there are ‘all sorts and conditions;’ environment moulds them” (Anon. 1890: 147). This merits a bit of intercontinental timetravel. Ecce puer: from Lord Baden-Powell’s and American contemporaries’ middle ages to late nineteenth-century Mexico’s French Third Republic, back to Baden-Powell and into the Great War, and back again to presentday Mexico. In Mexico, on both visits, we are travelling back and forth as well, between the rural and urban experience.

Modern Ideas of the Present

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Wright
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Paris Commune ◽  
The Third ◽  
Experience Of Time ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
Commune Of 1871

With Walter Benjamin’s concept of a ‘messianic present’ as its starting point, this chapter uncovers the different ways in which modern history can be explored using concepts of time. It considers the tradition of revolution and the focus on ‘abstract, unknowable’ futures analysed by Reinhardt Koselleck and draws on the idea of plural experiences and concepts of time in the work of Georges Gurvitch. It suggests that the late nineteenth-century experience of time was thought through in new ways in France, particularly after the Paris Commune of 1871. The chapter explains the theoretical and ideological basis for a new focus on change in the present that emerged across the French political spectrum during the Third Republic (1870–1940).

Directors/Directing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Switzky
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
The Self ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Theatrical Performances ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Electric Light

Although some official has organized the acting and scenery in theatrical performances since ancient Greece, the director only emerged as a significant creative figure in the late nineteenth century. Directors introduced innovative acting methods, modernized staging through new technologies such as electric light and mechanized scenery, proposed theories about the function of the theater in social and political life, and provided unified interpretations of complex plays. As the self-designated authors of productions, directors often competed with playwrights and actors for artistic control, a tension that continues to characterize the division of labor in theaters.

Reading the Gothic and Gothic readers

Interventions ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
The Self ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Relationship

In ‘Reading the Gothic and Gothic Readers’ Andrew Smith outlines how recent developments in Gothic studies have provided new ways of critically reflecting upon the nineteenth century. Smith then proceeds to explore how readers and reading, as images of self-reflection, are represented in the fin de siècle Gothic. The self-reflexive nature of the late nineteenth-century Gothic demonstrates a level of political and cultural scepticism at work in the period which, Smith argues, can be applied to recent developments in animal studies as a hitherto largely overlooked critical paradigm that can be applied to the Gothic. To that end this chapter examines representations of reading, readers, and implied readers in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), focusing on how these representations explore the relationship between the human and the non-human. An extended account of Dracula identifies ways in which these images of self-reflection relate to the presence of the inner animal and more widely the chapter argues for a way of rethinking the period within the context of animal studies via these ostensibly Gothic constructions of human and animal identities.

The Two Faces of Social Science

1994 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-45
Author(s):  
Alan Wolfe
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
The Self ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Public ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
Real Science ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth

From biology in the late nineteenth century to information theory in the late twentieth, the social sciences have turned to the natural sciences for inspiration. Yet the expectations have never fully been satisfied. After more than one hundred years of effort, the ability of social scientists to say anything with certainty about human behavior is not very impressive. We remain close to where we started, developing theories, trying to test them against data, arguing about methodology, and disputing conclusions. The social sciences have neither the public legitimacy nor the self-confidence that comes from the practice of "real" science.

The heritage of slavery and the educationalist shehe of the Sufi brotherhoods

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicitas Becker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Swahili Coast ◽  
Social Distinction ◽  
Culture Area ◽  
Arabic Script ◽  
Unity In Diversity ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Ritual Practices

This chapter describes the significance of the Sufi brotherhoods. It starts by addressing the arrival of the tarika in Southeast Tanzania. The tarika-shehe of the inter-war period, who are most clearly remembered in the coastal towns, were themselves fairly well travelled, well connected, and partly of patrician parentage. Ritual practices constitute a crucial unifying element for the tarika. Two tarika became influential in the late nineteenth century in Southeast Tanzania. The main characters of twentieth-century saints are summarized. The outlines of the shehes' lives and work already give a sense of the tensions they negotiated: between urbanites versed in Arabic script and immigrants to town versed in ngoma, between the ideology of patrician separateness and superiority, and the self-assertion of villagers struggling to make the colonial towns their home. The ritual expertise, colonial domination, and the reformulation of categories of social distinction are discussed. The spread of the tarika and their ritual practices along the Swahili coast illustrates the unity in diversity of this culture area at work.

“Indebted to No One”

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 217-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Abrams
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Mathematical Society ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
Rural Identity ◽  
American Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth

In 1894, Ohio mathematician Benjamin Franklin Finkel founded The American Mathematical Monthly to engage a broader audience of mathematicians than were involved with the newly formed American Mathematical Society. Along with mathematical puzzles, articles, and discussions, the first ten volumes of the Monthly included biographies of American mathematicians who worked as teachers, writers, and broadly skilled practitioners. Although the details about each mathematician were different, their biographies often followed a similar narrative template to contemporary depictions of the self-made man. This article argues that the story of the self-made mathematician, as presented in early issues of the Monthly, helped ground mathematics in day-to-day American life while asserting ties to different forms of masculinity. Such assertions were particularly significant in the late nineteenth century when a professional mathematics community was taking shape in the United States, and its leaders were becoming increasingly focused on “modern,” abstract forms of research. By marshalling a variety of cultural tropes tied to self-making, physical labor, rural identity, and manhood, biographies in the Monthly offered a particular image of American mathematics at a time when the boundaries of the category “mathematician” were shifting, and what it meant to be an American mathematician had yet to be defined.

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