60 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022
BOOKS
EGO TRIP
The early Romantics and their troublesome legacy.
BY NIKHILKRISHNAN
THE CRITICS
I
remember the first time I encoun-
tered a pierced eyebrow. I was six-
teen, travelling with the debate team
from my high school in the quiet sub-
urbs of Bangalore to the busy city cen-
ter for a regional meet. I had managed
to get the team together only by prom-
ising the other boys that there would
be girls there. But the girls we were
ranged against, who went to a “progres-
sive” school for which we had an unre-
flective contempt, were creatures from
another world. They all wore a kind of
shapeless tie-dyed garment that couldn’t
be part of any uniform, spoke in a slack,
almost American drawl, and, with their
air of casual privilege, were amused by
our prissy diction—our try-hard idea of
what proper English was supposed to
sound like—and our evident lack of ease
around them.
Being well practiced, we won the de-
bate. But, chatting with the girls after-
ward, we found that they disdained our
pleasure in victory, along with our hand-
me-down polyester ties and blazers, our
identical short-back-and-sides haircuts.
I awkwardly asked the one with the
pierced eyebrow whether her piercing
had a “meaning.” She smirked a little.
“Self-expression,” she said. “But what
does it express?” I asked, entirely in ear-
nest. She repeated herself very slowly,
as if to a total doofus, “Self. Expression.”
I thought that I’d eventually under-
stand what she meant, but even now
I’m not sure I do. The episode came to
mind as I read Andrea Wulf ’s “Mag-
nificent Rebels: The First Romantics
and the Invention of the Self ” (Knopf ).
Wulf ’s book concerns a period, from
the mid-seventeen-nineties to the early
eighteen-hundreds, when Jena, a small
German town on the river Saale, be-
came home to a formidable coterie. Here,
she writes, was “a group of novelists,
poets, literary critics, philosophers, es-
sayists, editors, translators and play-
wrights who, intoxicated by the French
Revolution, placed the self at the cen-
tre stage of their thinking.”
There we have that peculiar thing,
“the self.” Wulf sometimes allows us
the German original: “The Ich, for bet-
ter or worse, has remained centre stage
ever since. The French revolutionaries
changed the political landscape of Eu-
rope, but the Jena Set incited a revolu-
tion of the mind.” If Wulf is right, the
girl with the pierced eyebrow was part
of an unfolding world-historical drama
that began on the banks of the Saale.
In the manner of such works—and
consistent with the Ich philosophy that
she chronicles—Wulf tells us a fair
amount about her own self. I discovered
that she was, like me, born “in the riot-
ous colours of India”; studied, as I did,
philosophy in college, a subject that pulled
her “into an intoxicating world of think-
ing”; and now lives, as I do, in London,
“a big dirty metropolis full of people.”
Wulf had, as I did not, parents who
taught her “to follow my dreams,” hav-
ing done so themselves when they left
Germany to do public-spirited work in
India. She had a daughter when she was
twenty-two and moved, when that daugh-
ter was six, from Germany to England:
“It was a snap decision. I quit my stud-
ies, sold my few possessions and moved
to London.” Wulf was “a single mother
with a half-finished education, a trunk
full of books, no income, and a seemingly
never-ending supply of confidence,” she
writes. “Maybe some of the choices were
reckless, but they were mine.”
She acknowledges, of course, that all
this spontaneity rested on “the privi-
lege of knowing that if it all went wrong,
I would always have been able to knock
on my parents’ (middle-class) door.” A
great deal of freedom, it’s clear, came
from her “clever, liberal, loving and ac-
ademic parents” and from her E.U. pass-
port. Perhaps the reason I am reluctant
to join her ardent advocacy for the Jena
Set has something to do with the ways
in which my own path to philosophy
differs from hers: no E.U. passport and
only a grim told-you-so awaiting me
on the other side of a knock on the pa-
rental door.
The philosopher Johann Gottlieb
Fichte is supposed to have declared in
his first lecture at Jena that “a person
should be self-determined, never let-
ting himself be defined by anything ex-
ternal.” Let’s put aside the fact that the
world, with its passport controls and its
subtler hierarchies, makes not being
“defined by anything external” a harder
task for some people than for others.
Does the broader Romantic fixation on
the autonomous self make sense where
it matters?
“
M
agnificent Rebels” is a buoyant
work of intellectual history
written as what was once termed the
“higher gossip.” Wulf ’s story, as the
movie ads used to say, has everything.
There’s the handsome young poet in
love with a sickly pubescent girl; the
brilliant woman whose literary work
was credited to the men in her life; the ABOVE: LALALIMOLA
THE CRITICS
