What happened to the Millenial hopes of the victorian era? Will future historians view the new age that was supposed to follow the fall of the Berlin wall as a mirage? Perhaps M. Bakhtin had a point when proposing that the Romantic period set in train a division within the Western collective psyche comparable to schizophenia when it assails an individual's mind?

1. The Heart of the Matter: Is Collective Schizophrenia
Mirrored in Post-Romantic Literature and Art?
Cordelia: “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave / My heart into
my mouth” King Lear.(1. 1. 93,94)
Nathaniel Hawthorne made reference to a "separation of
the intellect and the heart" in an entry in his notebook in 1844
and thus encapsulated in a phrase much that is embodied by
characters in his novels such as Chillingworth in The Scarlet
Letter or Ethan Brand in a short story named after him. As
scientifically meticulous investigators both men betray a cold
and almost fiendish indifference to human suffering and
anguish. By contrast, Dimmesdale, Chillingworth’s rival and
antagonist, is the sufferer, one emotionally torn between his
love for Hester Prynne, the mother of his daughter, and his
need to confess what Puritan society will consider a grave sin
calling for his execution. The antithesis between the defender
of noble values and a relentless and inquisitorial snooper is
also a central aspect of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, an
interesting coincidence perhaps. However, the discordant
relationship between Chillingworth, an embittered and aging
husband and Hester, his young and estranged wife, finds a
striking parallel in George Eliot’s Middlemarch with respect to
the married life of Dorothy and Casaubon. It is perhaps not
altogether insignificant that Casaubon suffered from a fatal
heart ailment. Robert K. Wallace understands this parallel as
evidence that George Eliot owed much to Hawthorne’s
treatment of Chillingworth’s attempt to enslave a young
woman by marriage. 1 Richard Kopley argues that Hawthorne,
1
Robert K. Wallace “A probable source for Dorothea and Casaubon: Hester and
Chillingworth,” English Studies, Volume 58, Issue 1 February 1977, 23 – 25.

2. when composing The Scarlet Letter, was himself influenced by
Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Tell-Tale Heart. 2.
In both The Scarlet Letter and The Tell-Tale Heart this
separation induces a suppression of feeling that in the end
cannot resist exposure. Some critics, among them Harold
Bloom, most emphatically reject the relevance and validity of
the very term ‘influence’ as this notion militates against the
notion concerning the unique ‘internal’ structure of each work
of art. For such critics influence is an ‘external’ and therefore
(from a critic’s point of view) uninteresting matter of
consideration. Perhaps we should speak of affinities between
authors when parallels between works by different authors are
too striking to be dismissed as peripheral or incidental.
Influence, in any case, can only pertain when authors share
basic affinities, which themselves find their motive force in
what one might term the spirit of the age at a certain juncture
in the unfolding of historical developments. It is interesting
therefore that M: M. Bakhtin, a literary critic who
preeminently combines a keen interest with the specifics of
literary works with an astounding grasp of the nature of
historical progress within a universal concept, discussed
examples of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories to throw light on the
severed relationship between intelligence and emotion.
According to Bakhtin a deep rift or disjunction, analogous
to the split personality of a schizophrenic patient, produced in
the Western collective consciousness the loss of a previous
ability to see life, nature and all forms of human involvement
as a coherent whole, as an integral unity. The following
quotation in English translation from one of his essays
clarifies Baktin’s position regarding what he sees as the
2
Richard Kopley, "Hawthorne's transplanting and transforming 'The Tell-Tale Heart,'"
Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 23, 1995.

3. bifurcation permeating the western perception of time since
the Romantic period.3
The wholeness of a triumphant life, a whole that
embraces death, and laughter, and food and sexual
activity, is lost. Life and death are perceived solely within
the limits of the sealed-off individual life (where life is
unrepeatable, and death an irremediable end), and,
therefore, within the limits of life taken in its internal and
subjective aspect. Thus, in the artistic imagery of the
Romantics and the Symbolists, these matrices are
transformed into sharp, static contrasts and oxymorons
that are either not resolved at all (since there is no all-
encompassing, larger real “whole”) or resolved on the
plane of mysticism.
Later in this chapter M. Bakhtin argues further:
As class society develops further and as ideological
spheres are increasingly differentiated (bifurcation)
of each element of the matrix becomes more and
more intense: food, drink. The sexual act in their
real aspect enter personal everyday life, they become
predominantly a personal and everyday affair, they
acquire a specific narrowly quotidian coloration.
They become the petty and humdrum “coarse”
realities of life.4
The fragmentation and compartmentalization that followed
what Bakhtin termed the bifurcation’ of time consciousness
3
The Dialogic Imagination /Four Essays – forms of time and of the chronotope in the
novel M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist Translated by Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, 1981 Voprosy literatury i estete.
4
The Dialogic Imagination., 213.

4. probably affected every aspect of literature from the Romantic
period onwards, accentuating the following fundamental
dichotomies:
I: The Apparently Upright Citizen, Artist or Scientist by
Day and the Monster by Night
E. T. A. Hoffmann’s novella Das Frǟulein von Scuderi (1819)
provides a clear example of a portrayal of a split personality,
marking a significant stage in a development that would find
its ultimate expression in Robert Louis Stevenson’s story
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). In Hoffmann’s
novella the aging Mademoiselle de Scuderi becomes the
involuntary investigator into a series of bizarre murder cases
in which wealthy men are waylaid by night, stabbed in the
heart and robbed of the expensive items of jewellery they were
taking with them on their furtive excursions to their
paramours. It transpires that their murderer is one by the
name of René Cardillac, a Parisian goldsmith of high renown,
who cannot bear parting company with his precious artifacts.
His act of stabbing his victims in the heart and his name
resembling the Latin word for ‘heart’ (cf. Cordelia’s name in
King Lear) could well imply the story’s concern with matters of
the heart and, in particular, with an incongruity setting this
symbol of the seat of mercy and affection into relief against a
series of brutal crimes. In this we might detect a variation of
the phenomenon identified by Hawthorne as a separation of
the intellect and the heart. Hoffmann’s story reveals a late
Romantic treatment of the motif of the lonely and rejected
artist out of sympathy with his social environment. The role of
the artist, by which term we include poets and writers, posed a
central issue and cause of contention over which the German
Romantics and Goethe became deeply, even bitterly, divided.
Goethe’s artist in the person of Wilhelm Meister realizes the

5. need to prove his value to society in practical and useful ways.
On the other hand, as the very title of his novella makes plain,
Joseph von Eichendorff celebrated the social uselessness of
the artist in Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (‘From the Life
of a Good-for-Nothing’) Increasingly Romantic and post-
Romantic writing suggested an affinity between artists and
those situated on the periphery of conventional society
including criminals, lunatics, moral outcasts and people
Robert Browning once termed "apparent failures." A sense of a
disharmony between art and morality culminated in the age of
‘Decadence’ with Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. In
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde we encounter a rift between the scientific intellect and
"the heart." the natural disposition to sympathize with fellow
human beings, or, for the religious, all those created in God’s
image.
Stevenson, like Edgar Allan Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann
drew amply from a stock of folkloric motifs based on the
notion of supernatural metamorphoses and spirit possession
that included werewolves, witches’ spells and evil sprites;
however, these writers in the nineteenth century adapted
traditional elements to a critique of the modern scientific age.
This trend was already manifested in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein and even in the original story of Dr. Faustus. The
concept of a profound duality in the human race probably
gained a further impetus from Darwin’s theory of human
evolution that emphasized the close relationship between
human beings and apes, though Alexander Pope, indeed
Shakespeare, had pointed to a contrast between human
beings and apes or subhuman forms of life exemplified by
Caliban.

6. 2: Time Perceived as a Destructive and Tyrannical Force
Bakhtin’s term “the bifurcation” of time consciousness
opens the question as to how time itself has been
comprehended since the Romantic period. Immanuel Kant’s
proposition that time and space are not independent realities
but constructs of the mind imposed on its perceptions and
interpretations of the external world was energetically rejected
by Jean Paul Richter and Johann Georg Hamann, not
Romantics themselves but those who anticipated Romantic
attitudes to the nature of time. Wordsworth’s "spots of time"
bespeak a coalescence and condensation of vivid memories
and impressions produced by a particular event and phase of
psychological development. Bakhtin’s concept of the
"chronotope" evinces a strong affinity with Wordsworth’s
"spots of time" as time loses its supposedly abstract and
impersonal aspect to inform a vision and thus assume the
aspect of a spatial vista. The separation of internal or
emotionally sensed time from external time increasingly
entailed a very negative representation of all objects recording
the passing of time, most obviously clocks and church towers.
The association of the figure of death with instruments for
measuring time particularly sundials and sandglasses did not
begin in the Romantic age. Representations of death as a
skeletal figure bearing a dart or scythe had played a prominent
role in the art of the Baroque period, for example, as a
component of the famous astronomical clock in Münster
Cathedral. However, even the most lugubrious portrayals of
the fleeting and ephemeral nature of life in Baroque art and
literature presuppose the eternity of God and its consolations
or punishments. With the advent of an age in which
scientifically minded and secular attitudes vied with
theological suppositions in leading intellectual circles. Images
evoking the transience of life increasingly took on a macabre

7. and relentless aspect. This appears in Jean Paul’s treatment
of clocks and church towers in Siebenkǟs and other novels.5.
In E. A. Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum the swinging scythe
combines the function of an instrument of psychological
torture with a potent image of the relentless advance of time.
Baudelaire’s "L’Horloge" turns the clock into a horrendous
predator like a bloodsucking insect that drains its victims of
life with the tick of each passing second. Authors devised their
various strategies to heal or mitigate the divisions between
inward and external time, the life of the imagination and
impersonal machinery and the present and the past in their
writings, most notably in André Proust's A la Recherche du
Temps Perdu and Henri Bergson's distinction between temps
and durée. Artists of various schools, whether the Futurists,
Cubists or Surrealists, sought to escape the constrictions and
perceived tyranny of linear time.
.
3: A Trend to Present the Point of View of those Stricken
by Madness and Related Ills
As concepts of time govern the organization of all
combinations of spoken and written language, new attitudes to
time inevitably entailed innovation in literature. An orderly
report will tend to retain the sequence of chronologically
ordered event. The daydreams of the wandering mind may
string memories and thoughts unbounded by the exigencies of
physical time. The clash of daydreaming with the strictures of
the timetable are shown in well known poems and stories by
Romantic poets, such as Ludwig Tieck’s Der blonde Eckbert,
5
Jean Paul Richter, Siebenkǟs, "2. Blumenstück" (1796-97), Hanser 3, 270-275 "Rede des toten
Christus vom Weltgebǟude herab, dass kein Gott sei."

8. Shelley’s “Julian and Maddalo” and Wordsworth’s “The Idiot
Boy.”
Literary concern with madness, feigned or otherwise, is
clearly shown in the Bible and works by Shakespeare and
Cervantes. Madness acquires the aura of secret knowledge and
insight concealed from the ordinary world. Romantic
wandering betrays a certain affinity with madness and even
insubordination, at least in the eyes of conformist society,
which becomes clear, for example. In Heinrich von Kleist’s play
Der Prinz von Homburg. The wandering mind of the
psychologically and morally disoriented became a field of
almost clinical interest in Georg Büchner’s Woyzek, a
psychopath who murders his lover, and Nikolai Gogol’s Diary
of a Madman. The portrayal of a madman’s point of view is
revealed in E. A. Poe’s short stories, The Tell-Tale Heart, The
Cask of Amontillado and The Black Cat. The insane murderer
in each case attempts to avoid detection by hiding a corpse
under a flat surface, a wall or floor panels, in two cases in
vain. The Tell-Tale Heart betrays an affinity with the scenes in
Macbeth in which the guilty conscience abetted by
supernatural visions perhaps, haunts the criminal and
unhinges his or her mind. Bakhtin notes the stark contrast
between the detached and neutral tone of the narrator in The
Cask of Amontillado and the horrendous suffering of his
victim. The tokens of the carnival spirit evoked in the story
accentuate the sense that the genuine generous spirit of
folkloric Carnival now has a hollow and mocking echo devoid
of creative associations of laughter and the grave, a complex
the key of which ‘is lost." 6
An interesting submotif of the theme of a divided
consciousness is that of the so-called “Doppelgǟnger," the
second self understood as an objective being able to
6
The Dialogic Imagination, 199.

9. encounter its other self at certain, sometimes ominous, points
of time. Goethe’s poem “Illmenau” allows the speaker to see
himself at a previous phase in his life when he first joined the
court of Weimar. The ghostly aspect of the Doppelgǟnger as a
specter foreboding the death of its counterpart emerges in
Schubert’s song “Der Doppelgǟnger." In E. A. Poe’s William
Wilson the motif undergoes a change effecting a contrast
between the bad central character and his mysterious better
self, who intervenes at various junctures in life to prevent the
narrator from giving way to his evil impulses. The
Doppelgǟnger motif is implicit in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Is the dichotomy
of the human psyche emerging here the inevitable
consequence of a bifurcation in modern humanity’s sense of
time?
One can understand the separation of the intellect and the
heart in terms of the division between the realm of night and
the realm of day in psychological terms. The fascination of
poets with the night became prominent even before the
Romantic age in Edward Young’s Night Thoughts. With
Novalis’s Hymnen an die Nacht Romantic poetry devoted to the
night combined powers of evocation and sublimity that would
rarely if ever be achieved again. Indeed, in keeping with the
bifurcation in modern man’s sense of time, the relationship
between night and day, previously imbued with a feeling of
reciprocity and mutual enrichment, became frozen and rigidly
compartmentalized. Sexual emotion as conveyed in Romantic
poetry found in the night and the moon the perfect canopy for
love, but sexuality devoid of all sympathy with light and day
degenerated into narcissism, perverted obsessions and the
realm of Dracula or Joris-Karl's Huysmans’ world of
decadence.

10. 4: Stratifying Humanity according to the Notions of
Superior and Inferior
The cause of equality, one of the three watchwords of the
French Revolution, had no easy passage through the
nineteenth century despite the victory of the Union against the
slaveholding South in the American Civil War. The processes
of differentiation and fragmentation that attended what
Bakhtin termed the "bifurcation" of time consciousness
affected theories, notions and assumptions concerning
differences of class, race and religion to yield a bitter harvest
in the twentieth century. Rousseau’s concept of the noble
savage could achieve nothing to forestall the predations and
exploitation that characterized the age of imperialism. The
French diplomat turned sociologist J.-A. de Gobineau, oddly
enough born on 14th July, actually promulgated the theory
that the human races were unequal in a book he dedicated to
George V, the last king of Hanover. This work provided the
basis for the racial theories of the National Socialists, though
it prescribed no actions to victimize or harm any racial group.
Strangely, it was Charles Baudelaire who referred darkly to a
conspiracy to exterminate the Jewish race, perhaps having in
mind Haman’s plot to destroy the Jews living in the Persian
empire as narrated in the Book of Esther. On the other hand,
it had become evident by the end of the 1860s that a modern
form of intolerance against Jews was gathering pace, probably
as an anti-democratic reflex evinced by those intent on
defending the old authoritarian order of Metternich and other
ultra-conservatives. Later The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
gained prominence in times of acute national crisis, in Russia
in 1905 and in Germany in 1919. The works of Marx predicted
a period of class warfare leading to the victory of the working
classes over the forces of capitalism. In this vision there was
no place for harmony, only the violently enforced replacement

11. of one class by another. Perceived divisions in humanity
surface in a poem by Baudelaire that effects an introversion of
the Biblical story of Cain and Abel, the latter being the
innocent victim of his jealous and violent brother. In
Baudelaire’s poem sympathy is shown for the race of Cain,
representing the labouring poor while the race of Abel is
presented as the class of privileged masters. The notion of a
split development in humanity is taken to its logical
conclusion by H. G. Wells in The Time Machine, for this depicts
a future world inhabited by two descendants of the human
race, the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi are a delicate and
defenceless race inhabiting the surface of the Earth while the
Morlocks occupy deep caverns and tunnels under its surface.
The latter constitute a violent and savage race of beings who
prey on the Eloi for food. We note the Biblical overtones of the
names Eloi (Elohim) and Morlock (Moloch). The world of
science fiction is supposedly the scene of scientific and
technical action but religious or mythical motifs and
associations creep in, often culminating in the depiction of a
conflict between Good and Evil. This is at least suggested in
The War of the Worlds, though in a more subtle fashion than
in Star Wars where Darth Vader and ‘the Force’ vie for control
of the Universe. Most if not all good science fiction literature is
more about the world we know than about worlds we know
nothing of. Just as imperialists and supremacists dominated
and ruthlessness had exploited ‘inferior’ human life, so the
Martians were shown to dominate and exploit the technically
inferior earthlings. The War of the Worlds, unscrambled,
uncannily foreshadows the coming world wars of the twentieth
century in a story informed by the figure of Mars in Roman
mythology, whose colour was red and whose governing
number was three. Thus the Martian war machines form
tripods mounted by disembodied and therefore heartless
brains, posing the ultimate manifestation of the separation of

12. heart and intellect referred to in the title of this discussion.
Indeed, the text of the story explicitly states that the Martians
had “hardened their hearts.” Equally uncanny is a prophecy, it
that is the word, found in Wells' later novel The Shape of
Things to Come, for in this a world war breaks out in 1940, a
year off the actual beginning of World War II (unless one were
to argue that 1940 lies between 1939 and 1941, the year when
the World War truly began.
5: The Perversions of Historical Developments,
Particularly in the Twentieth Century. Based on False
Documentations, Satirical Books and, Later, Filmic Tricks
Unfortunately the literature and music of the 19th century
could be misdirected and exploited in ways that at least set
the mood for the unleashing of destructive energies in war,
mass murder and the ills associated with Hitler and Stalin.
Without denying that Richard Wagner’s operatic works are to
be judged as great aesthetic accomplishments in their own
right, we cannot overlook Wagner’s pernicious racism and
anti-Semitism. In Rainhardt Heydrich, the maudlin violinist,
we witness the most grotesque spectacle of devotion to art
shown by one evincing a ghoulish disregard of human values.
Does he pose the ultimate conclusion of a development
anticipated by E. T. A. Hoffmann in Das Frǟulein von Scuderi?
Nor should we forget the role played by the clever and devious
exploitation of literary devices in the propagation of anti-
Semitism. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, concocted in
Russia in 1905 by a weird monk named Sergey Nilus,
demonstrates the psychological power (all too evident to this
day) vested in a false document, a genre that evolved out of
satirical and polemical writings that were not themselves
directed against Jews. Maurice Joly’s satirical book entitled in

13. English translation "Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and
Montesquieu" (1864) attacked the despotism of Napoleon III.
Le Juif Errant (“The Wandering Jew”) by Eugène Sue, a novel
published in 1844 that evinces a certain similarity to Dickens’
Bleak House, exposed the alleged rapacity of certain Jesuits.
The immediate precursor of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
was decidedly anti-Semitic. In fact Nilus lifted entire passages
from it. This was the fictional narrative (subsequently
upgraded to a “documentation”) entitled in English "To Sedan"
(1868) by the Prussian journalist Hermann Goedsche (alias Sir
John Retcliffe). The story purports to record the speeches of
thirteen persons, twelve rabbis and the Devil, who meet at
night in Prague’s Jewish cemetery to discuss ways of bringing
the world under Jewish control by the most heinous and
devious methods. Goedsche himself was expelled from
government service for falsifying evidence against a prominent
Liberal politician active in the fight for democracy in 1848. The
tactic of denigrating a person’s reputation by committing
forgery began long before it played so central part in the
Dreyfus affair. The most pernicious and successful expert in
the manipulation of metaphors and images was doubtlessly
Joseph Goebbels, whose propaganda film Der Ewige Jude
shows swarms of rats pouring out of drains blended into
pictures of Jews in shabby clothes and undignified postures.
Here we cannot assert that the transfer of sensation from
vermin to human beings entailed any separation between
heart and intellect but rather the circumvention of both the
intellect and heart effected by the cynical whipping up of
irrational fears and depraved emotions. Similarly, the National
Socialists' use of bland expressions such as "Endlösung" (final
solution) and "Sonderbehandlung" ('special treatment') reveal
an attempt to pervert language itself.