II. ORGANICISM, FOR AND AGAINST ITSELF
The work of the nineteenth-century French romantic historian, Jules Michelet—the most "literary" of nineteenth-century historians and for that reason perhaps the most commented upon by literary critics—comes to mind immediately as an example of a developed historical application of organicism, or, better, an example of the use of organicism as the defining element of history. It would be difficult to miss this aspect of Michelet's work, for he repeatedly and triumphantly proclaims his own organicism as his greatest contribution to history. However, rather than constituting the basis for an antirepublican, elitist, totalitarian political position—as it did, for example, for extremist nationalists at the end of the nineteenth century—organicism grounds Michelet's radical, populist republicanism as much as his unquestioning nationalism. His historical work, and the organicism on which it relies, in fact provide a model for national unity which has important political implications for both the extremist nationalist antirepublican right and the democratic left. The problem of the contradictory nature of Michelet's political legacy in turn sheds light on the literary question of organicism as well.
A recent article by Lionel Gossman, "Jules Michelet: histoire nationale, biographie, autobiographie," provides an important critical perspective on the literary dimensions of Michelet's historiography, and an analysis of what could be called the positive, even critical effects of his organicism. Gossman argues that Michelet's organic view of the nation represents his most original contribution to historiography and that it is anything but restrictive or dogmatic:
Michelet's new conception of the nation as a living organism, as bios and soul, has had consequences almost as revolutionary for historical consciousness and historiography as the project of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions had for the modern consciousness of self and autobiography. For whoever
Gossman shows how the organic metaphor in Michelet not only provides a model for thinking the nation and for writing its history, but also greatly expands the scope of history beyond political and diplomatic history to include every aspect of life.
Organicism in Michelet is thus, at least initially, a way of moving history from an exclusive concern with great events, and the kings, queens, and military heroes allegedly responsible for them, to an appreciation of everyday life and the voices of those silenced by the history of great events. Under the banner of organicism, Michelet opens history up to those groups, classes, forces, and subjects which traditionally had no place in history. The concept or metaphor of organicism also provides him with ways to link these various elements together, or allows him to argue that they are already linked together.
In a letter written in December of 1833, Michelet describes the advantages of his own organic view of history and the historiographical practices it supports, in comparison with the views and practices of other schools of history:
The picturesque school of history has been superficial; it has said nothing about interior life and has spoken neither about art, nor law, nor religion, nor even about geography, which more than anything else it considers necessary to its point of view. The philosophical school has been dry and boring.…They have neither the heart nor the feeling for art. They do not realize that all this lives and moves, that all these elements—philosophy, religion, art, law, literature—engender themselves, one after the other…. Before me, no one spoke of geography as an historian; no one attempted the history of art in the Middle Ages. I except neither the Germans nor the author of Notre-Dame de Paris. He circled around monuments. Me, I showed how this vegetation of stone germinated and grew.[5]
The historical enterprise of Michelet thus potentially touches all aspects of economic, political, geographic, and cultural life, none of which in principle is more important than any other because all are elements of the same national organism and are engendered by and grow in connection with all the others. It should be noted that a certain "feeling for art" has an important role to play in understanding the way all aspects of history "live" and "move," how even monuments constitute an integral part of the germination and growth of "the vegetation" which is the national culture, the life of the nation itself.
Michelet's primary concern, and the principal subject of his histories, is of course the French nation, whose "life" provides the underlying principle of continuity in all of Michelet's histories. Michelet repeatedly argues that he was the first (and only) historian to portray the nation as a "living person,
Examples abound in Michelet's work of what could be called the common application of the organic metaphor. In an early work, Introduction à l'histoire universelle (1831), he gives an idealized description of the political harmony of Europe using the image of a living organism: "Modern Europe is a very complex organism whose unity, whose soul and life, is not in one or another predominant part but in their mutual relation and arrangement, in their profound meshing together, in their intimate harmony" (OC 2:238). When the organic metaphor is applied to Europe, its linguistic, cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity and the political conflicts inevitably produced by it appear to Michelet's eyes (even if only ideally) as the harmonious functions of a single, living organism. It is certainly not politics per se that could bring about such harmony, because the politics of Europe are for him competitive, divisive, and destructive. What is needed to make a complex but harmonious totality out of different countries with different and conflicting interests is not the external political repression of differences, but rather the total organic transformation and transcendence of political differences from within each national unity.
Michelet's organicism is, however, uncompromising. In the preface to his monumental Histoire de France, he argues that organicism dictates a specific general task to the historian: to uncover the basis for the unity in all things. Either the historian will penetrate the secrets of the unity of life or he will fail as an historian; either he will capture the organic whole or he will capture nothing:
Life has a sovereign and very demanding condition. It is truly life only inasmuch as it is complete. Its organs are all interconnected and act only together. Our functions are linked together, and each one supposes all the others. If one were to lack, then nothing would work anymore.…Thus, all or nothing.…My historical problem…presented itself as the resurrection of integral life, not on its surfaces but on the level of its profound, interior organisms. No wise man had even dreamed of this. Luckily, I wasn't a wise man. (OC 4:11–12)
It is in fact not the wise, objective scientist, but the intuitive, "instinctual" poet, capable of penetrating the surfaces of history and life, who senses what is not visible to the eye alone. The poet-historian must always have one eye on the way superficial, political unity works, on how material conditions create closure and a sense of totalization. He must also, however, have his other eye on what complicates surface unity and thereby indicates the existence of a higher form of spiritual unity, not determined by geography, race, or the politics of ideologies, parties, and politicians. Michelet's admission of a deficiency in wisdom, of a lack of logical, deductive philosophical or political reasoning, in fact represents what he also feels is his greatest gift as an historian and "poet."
Michelet presents life both in terms of its unity at any one moment and in terms of the continuity among what appear to be the diverse moments of existence: "True life has a completely different sign, its continuity. Born in a burst, it continues on and grows placidly, slowly, uno tenore. Its unity is not that of a little play in five acts but…the harmonic identity of the soul" (OC 4:12). Life itself thus provides the model for both the unity and the continuity of history, of the collective histories of various peoples and of the particular histories of individuals. The history that narrates life itself is not the "little play" staged to amuse and divert the audience, but the total, organic poetic work. The historian is in this sense not just the biographer of the collective "person" called the nation; he is also in some sense the biographer of life itself, the "poet" able to penetrate and resurrect the deep organic unity of bios in all its forms.
Just as personification is perhaps the dominant trope in Michelet's histories, personhood is the summit of life for him, for self-creation is ultimately the determining element of Michelet's organicism, and only a person can have a life that is self-created, not merely unified and continuous. The organicity of life and history is progressive and hierarchical. It consists of the negation and transcendence of material determinants such as race into higher spiritual unities through the process of constant self-creation. This for Michelet is the path nations had to take:
Race, the strong and dominant element in barbaric times, before the great work of nations, is less sensible, is feeble, almost erased to the extent that each nation elaborates and personifies itself.…It is the powerful work of
France made itself; the French people, as the model for all peoples, transformed itself from a mixture of different races into a unified people, an autonomous, self-conscious, creative and self-created, spiritual person. France created itself freely, as the poet creates the poem, through a transformation of "brute elements," but through the process of creation the poet is also transformed by his own creation. The freedom to make oneself, and the process of self-creation, therefore constitute the bases of a truly organic unity, one that cannot be imposed from the outside but arises only out of the internal transformation of disparate parts into a functioning unity.
Organicism also supports Michelet's antiracial or antiracist position. Michelet attacks those historians who evoke the racial (or racist) foundations for national history because he is an antimaterialist organicist, for whom race, geography, and climate are the primary material determinants that must be negated and transcended. If the diversity of races constituting a people represents for him its greatest strength, it does so only if that diversity is successfully unified, if the many become one. And according to Michelet, only the spirit unifies: "Matter wants dispersion, spirit wants unity. Essentially divisible matter aspires to disunion, discord. Material unity is nonsense. In politics, it is tyranny. Spirit alone has the right to unify, alone it includes" (OC 4:328). On the one hand, race is a principle of division and destruction when it constitutes the principal or exclusive determinant of a nation or a people. On the other hand, the mixture of races is constitutive and constructive when different races become part of a unified, organic whole, when race has been transcended, and a free, self-created people born. The political unification of a people on the basis of race, ethnicity, or class alone is always for Michelet a form of tyranny, even when it is carried out in the name of the Revolution. Unification must come from below and not be imposed from above; it must arise out of and manifest the diversity constituting it which Michelet claims strictly political totalizations necessarily destroy.
Unification in Michelet's terms is thus not organic unity, but only its exterior form. This is why unification can produce disunity and disharmony. For example, in his Histoire de la Révolution franÇaise, Michelet stresses the importance of unity for a people, even arguing that it is a question of life or death: "The unity of the homeland, the indivisibility of the Republic, is the holy and sacred word of 1793…. No life outside of unity. For organized beings, to be divided is to perish." But he also distinguishes the "sublime idea of true Unity" of the people in the Revolution from both "the false royal unity that for so long covered over a real disunion" and the "feeble federal
In terms of class differences, the historical product of the mixing of classes is anything but positive, for it has produced a "bastard" class—the middle class. Though it might pretend to be universal, the middle class in reality lacks an identity of its own: "There has been between classes not union and association but rapid and vulgar mixture [mélange]…. This class of all classes, this bastard mixture which was made so quickly and which is weakening already, will it be productive? I doubt it. The mule is sterile."[6] Sterility is the sign of an organism that doesn't work and can't (re)produce, of an artificial, forced mixture without its own integrity or unity. Organicism demands unity, but not just any unity and not at any price. Certainly not at the price of the negation of the productive potential of the various elements—in this instance, the different social classes—that contrast with each other and are in conflict. In Michelet's organicism, as in all organicisms, distinctions have to be constantly made between artificial, material mixtures and true organic (spiritual) unities. Unity as such cannot be generalized.
Michelet's most developed discussion of the two opposed tendencies within any organic unity or process of unification—whether historical, political, or aesthetic—occurs in Le Peuple, and is focused on "the man of genius." Michelet evokes this highly charged romantic ideal of the literary and scientific visionary in order to demonstrate how the dialectic of division and unification actually works, as a dialectic of criticism and complication, on the one hand, and of spontaneous intuition and simplification on the other.
[The genius is] the man who, in acquiring the gifts of the critic, retains the gifts of the simple man. These two men, opposed everywhere else, are reconciled in him. At the moment when his interior critique seems to have pushed him toward infinite division, the simple man in him maintains the present unity for him. He always conserves the feeling for life and keeps it indivisible. But even though the genius has in him these two powers, his love of living harmony and the tender respect for life are so strong that he would sacrifice research and science itself if they could be obtained only by means of dismemberment. Of the two men that are in him, he would leave the one who divides; the simple man would remain. (184)
The genius would not be a genius if he were simply simple, if all he had to do was affirm and slavishly imitate the harmony that already existed outside him and/or in him. And he certainly would not be a genius if he were simply a critic, a man of distinctions and divisions. The choice of the simple
If the mule (or the bourgeoisie) is sterile, the genius represents creativity and productivity in their highest form because he embodies the reconciliation of all sexual, generational, cultural, and class differences: "He is in some sense man and woman, child and adult, barbarian and civilized, people and aristocrat.…He alone is complete; also he alone can engender" (187). The art of the genius is to have made his works and himself into the perfect work of art, into the ultimate figure of dialectical synthesis and production, the natural product that also serves as the model for art: "If perfection is not of this world, the man who approaches it the most closely is in all appearances harmonic and fertile man.…This overabundance of gifts, this fecundity, this lasting creation, each is apparently the sign that we should find there the plenitude of nature and the model of art" (187). The genius is not just the origin of the organic work of art; he is also the most complete and elevated example of art, a masterpiece (chef-d'oeuvre) in himself.
The genius is also, therefore, or at least for Michelet he should be, the model for society in general: "The art of the social, the most complicated of all, should look very carefully to see if this masterpiece of God, in which rich diversity is in harmony in a fertile unity, cannot shed some light on the object of its own pursuits" (187). Michelet's organicism is thus essentially aesthetic, and as such it serves as a model for the art of the social and the political as well. It, and not politics or the application of political principles, is the fundamental model for the active, internal unification of diversity and for the creation and production of works modeled after such a procedure. In the political realm, these organic works of art have a particular name: "The world [is] harmonically divided into these great and beautiful systems that are called nations" (219). Michelet is thus an aesthetic organicist before being a specifically French nationalist, in the sense that the nation-form itself is for him the highest form of political art, the organic form that maintains diversity in harmony. In his eyes, the privilege of the French is based on their mastery of the art of the creation of the nation-form and therefore their mastery of their own self-creation.
Michelet's ultimate poetic-political credo for both the individual and for the people is: "Be yourself." For what threatens a people more than anything else is imitation of the other. Imitation destroys the imagination and all possibility of creativity. It brings into the living organism material that is already formed, dead, foreign—material that cannot be successfully appropriated and made an active, integral part of the organism:
One takes from a neighboring people something that in him is living. One appropriates it as well as one can, in spite of the repugnance of a organism that was not made for it. But it is a foreign body that you thus allow into your flesh; it's an inert and dead thing, it's death that you adopt. What can be said if this thing is not only foreign and different but enemy[?] (224)
The difference between imitation and assimilation is quite slight. Being yourself means assimilating but not imitating others; being a living "poetic" organism means appropriating everything that can be made a living part of the organism and rejecting and expelling out of the organism everything which remains a foreign body and thus would ultimately threaten the very life of the organism into which it is forced.
This is not an argument for ethnic or cultural purity or purification, however, for Michelet throughout his work argues that the strength of the French comes precisely from the diversity of their ethnic and racial origins, from the fact that the French have been able to assimilate "others" into themselves and continually remake themselves and remain one. Still, such an exclusion of the foreign, no matter on what level it occurs, does of course present a problem. For even if ethnic, racial, cultural, and religious diversity are crucial for the formation of a people, there is always a moment when the foreign must be confronted and rejected, when the internal demands of the living organism must expel every foreign body that interrupts or complicates its life and the smooth functioning of its internal organs. The very organic model that depends on diversity and complexity thus also provides the basis for an argument against them.
If the choice is presented as being one between life and death, the living organism must always choose its own life over the death represented by the foreign, just as it chooses its own internal functioning over the imitation of others. Here it is not even a question of hastily analogizing aesthetic perception to the perception of sociopolitical objects, but rather a contradiction built into the model or metaphor of organicism itself. Organicism always reaches its limit at precisely the point where the living, self-created organism functions the most smoothly and completes itself, thus closing itself off to everything that is not itself and that cannot be incorporated into what it has become. In this sense organicism is always "against itself" by having to be at some point—at the moment of the realization or completion of unity—against everything that is determined to be foreign to the unity the living organism has achieved. It thus has to be against elements, no matter what their origin or nature, which could, in principle, have been the very components that might have been actively linked together to constitute organic unity, or at least that would have been able to lose their foreignness by being assimilated into the national (or poetic) organism.
Michelet's organicism—that is, his use of the metaphor of a living organism
Michelet's organicism is thus constituted by an irresolvable tension between the incorporation and the rejection of the foreign. Near the end of his life, and after France's humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, Michelet attacked Germany's annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in La France devant l'Europe, on both racial and linguistic grounds. In this attack, he evokes the special status of the French people, whom he characterizes as the most linguistically, culturally, and racially diversified, and thus the most perfectly unified, of peoples. "There is one thing that is extremely ancient and specific to this country; it is the singular perfection with which the fusion of races was accomplished in it, the exchange and marriage of diverse populations" (OC 20:705). The "singular perfection" of organic unity clearly arises only out of such diversity and the resulting exchanges and marriages necessary to fuse the various populations together. A country that has no need of such fusion is one that is paradoxically inorganic, precisely because its unification depends exclusively on geographical, political, or racial factors. It may perhaps constitute a "natural" or material totality, but its unity, by not being sufficiently "aesthetic," that is, self-made, cannot be considered truly organic.
Michelet claims that the French are the "only people" to possess such perfect organic unity, and because of that, they are the one people, the only national organism, that cannot afford to lose any of its members. The French people is "the least dismemberable, the one from whom, its circulation being rapid and perfect, a member cannot be separated" (OC 20:705). This applies especially to its members that have a different ethnic, linguistic, or cultural formation than the peoples constituting the majority of the organism. To remove such members violently, and implant them or graft them onto another organism that is not yet formed, represents for Michelet the height of folly: "To pull out Alsace and Lorraine from a living body, from the strongest organic unity that ever was, to extract these intestines from us with a knife in order to stuff them into a body like Germany which is still being formed, is a strange form of surgery" (OC 20:706). Such transplants cannot take, because they weaken and even destroy the body from which the members are taken as well as the body into which they are grafted or "stuffed," as if into a sausage. In other words, the identity of the parts can only come from the organism in which they function. Assimilation is necessary for the formation, growth, and perfection of the organism, while both the surgical removal of any of its members and the violent, artificial grafting
Michelet repeatedly insists that, even if parts cannot be removed from the whole without causing serious damage to its unity, at the same time the process of unification is never completely accomplished. Unity as such, were it to be achieved, would signal the end of the harmonious union based on diversity:
Union always advances in this way without the risk of ever achieving unity…. If the impossible happened and all diversity ceased to be, if unity were achieved, every nation singing the same note, the concert would be over…. The monotonous and barbaric world could then die, without even a regret. (Le Peuple, 220)
This metaphor of the concert works as a way of describing both relations among different nations and the relations of various peoples and groups within each nation. In each case, their death comes only when organic unity and closure are in fact achieved. The moments during the Revolutions of 1789 and 1830 in which, Michelet claims, all social, political, and regional divisions were overcome and the organic unity of the people spontaneously manifested itself on the historical scene, did not and in fact could not be perpetuated in history. Organic unities serve in his work as ideals to be pursued in the future, not models to be applied to the present (or the future).[7]
What Michelet is proposing for the nation is a totalizing process without totalization, a historical-political, nationalist organicism without closure. And this is perhaps another reason why his nationalism has two very different, even opposed historical implications. As an applied organicism that stresses the organic integrity of each nation as opposed to every other nation, it gives support to extremist forms of nationalism. As an unfinished, incomplete, self-contradictory organicism that keeps the nation open to what it is not, it leads in an entirely different direction. Extremist nationalisms and opponents of nationalism can both find support for their positions in Michelet, but only if they read him selectively. Read in terms of the conflicting tendencies found in his nationalist organicism, his organicism should perhaps also be considered a (nationalist) organicism against itself.
Murray Krieger argues that in the most critical expressions of literary organicism, from Aristotle to the present, the elements that most risk undermining the principle of organic unity are neither excluded nor admitted only reluctantly into the organism constituted by the poem. Rather, the critical organicist welcomes these elements into the poem and makes the struggle to incorporate or assimilate them central to its organic unity itself. What Krieger claims is the case for Aristotelian poetics would certainly apply
If, as Krieger also argues, the explanations and justifications of how and where the poetic or political system completes itself are inevitably based on aesthetic mystifications—mystifications of the Poem or, in Michelet's case, of the People—it is also true that opposing forces of resistance to unity can be found underlying and resisting such mystifications. In terms of the necessarily unfinished nature of the contradictory dynamics constituting an "organicism [that works] against itself"—regardless of whether the metaphor of organic unity refers to a literary, historical, or political entity—all claims to aesthetic (or historical) closure can be seen as potentially "self-undermining." The unity of the poem (and the people) can be argued thus to constitute a "restless and, hence, endangered oneness"—in spite of all poetic and political (ideological) arguments to the contrary.[9] Krieger's organicism, one of the most radical and critical of organicisms—and perhaps the only defensible form of organicism today—affirms and at the same time breaks with the organic tradition whose apology it writes. Looking back on Michelet from the critical perspective on organicism Krieger delineates allows us to see all the more clearly in Michelet a militant nationalist who nevertheless preferred "restless and endangered oneness" to determinable unity, an organicist for whom closure was more a problem than a solution.
Krieger defends literary organicism only by opening it up to the diversity that originally and, in his interpretation, finally constitutes it. He defends literature by insisting on literature's resistance to ideology and what I would now call an organicism that is exclusively for itself. In fact, he makes the analysis and support of that resistance the primary obligation of the literary critic: "It is up to the critic to respond to the obligation to dwell upon that resistance [to ideological closure] as a special feature of literature."[10] I would argue that the same obligation should be carried over into the study of history and politics, where the critic should dwell on what in history, as well as literature, resists organic closure and the ideological and aesthetic ideologies that support it.
Meeting this obligation is perhaps never more necessary than when the critic is confronted with a form of history such as Michelet's, which borrows organic models, strategies, and practices from literature and attempts to assimilate them into, rather than simply apply them to, history and politics. In doing so, history makes the poetics (not the politics) of the people its central concern, and invites the literary critic as well as the historian to investigate