The Revivifying Word: Literature, Philosophy, and the Theory of Life in Europe's Romantic Age (review)

In this "contribut[ion] to the cultural history of the Romantic century" (xi), Koelb argues that European literature of this period is decisively motivated by the idea of reading as a problematic mediation between the dead letter and living spirit. This opposition is already drawn by Plato in his Phaedrus and later by St. Paul: "For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life" (2 Cor. 3:1–6). However, Koelb suggests, Paul's words acquire a new resonance in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century aesthetics, in, for instance, the writings of Hamann, Herder, Kant, Fichte, and Coleridge (11). Here, the association between reading and forms of revivification becomes increasingly evident (21), as does what Koelb describes as "the demonic underside of Romantic reading": "For the Romantics, an unread or illegible text could be a terrifying corpse that frightens not only or even principally because it is dead but because it has the unrealized potential of coming to life" (25). Part 1 of The Revivifying Word traces the genealogy of this idea in science and philosophy from the European Enlightenment to the work of the physiologist Sir William Lawrence and the poets Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Parts 2 and 3 examine the topos of the reanimated and reanimating word in chapters devoted successively to Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, Keats's Endymion, Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris, Gautier's Spirite, Kleist's "Michael Kohlhaas," Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, and texts by Poe—in particular his "Berenice" and "The Fall of the House of Usher."

The first of these chapters begins with the climactic scene, toward the end of Goethe's epistolary novel, in which Werther reads to Lotte from his translation of Ossian. The lengthy inserted text frees Goethe's narrator from a direct description of the emotionally laden final meeting between the two protagonists and similarly provides the characters a safe object to which to direct their attentions (47–48). As Koelb argues, however, the passage reflects a pattern: Werther reads and animates his world through literature but in doing so also subjects his life to the effects of the dead letter (61). "Werther's attempts to read himself into Homer, Ossian, and even Emilia Galotti are in a way all too successful. The sensitive young man makes himself so completely into a text that he becomes, like a true text, unable to control the acts of reading performed upon him" (67). Indicating that no clergyman (Geistlicher, or "spiritual person") accompanies Werther's corpse to its burial, the novel's concluding sentence confirms Werther's failure to invest the dead letter with Paulinian spirit, Geist (67).

"This is the supreme Romantic question," writes Koelb: whether a "productive transformation by way of reading" is "wonderful and vital" or "terrible and deadly" (84). Keats celebrates the imagination as that vital faculty that brings words to life (75). By contrast, the reading and ingestion of a written prophecy by Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas serves as a violent revenge against an opponent who remains, in words that Koelb cites from the narrative, "physically and mentally a broken man" (122). In the gothic fiction that succeeds Kleist, revivification engenders other kinds of horror. In Maturin's Melmoth we see "the Word made flesh.… Yet no sign of Christian hope appears in [the text's] rhetoric of living corpses" (154). In the case of Poe, the dead letters contained in books bear the promise of revivification through reading, but this is a terrifying promise that they have in common with those human corpses that seem perpetually inclined to stagger back from their graves to haunt those who once survived them (168). In Shelley's novel, the monster is both composed of dead body parts and informed by his and his maker's readings. Koelb relates these ideas to show how Shelley invests reading...