In Search of Soul. Alejandro Nava
sounding like a classic biblical prophet, this particular dream smacked of fanaticism and misplaced reverence, as it reduced the purpose of education to economic advancement and worldly success. Du Bois of course withheld his allegiance to such a vision, arguing that the examined life had an infinite worth beyond its cash value.
Even when black folks baptized themselves in the rivers of commerce, Du Bois complained, it did not end blatant violations of human rights, the systematic acts of terror and violence against the black community. The black man had often cried “amen” to the principles of commerce and duly done obeisance to them, “but before that nameless prejudice that leaps beyond all this he stands helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license of fancy, the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything black. . . . Before this there rises a sickening despair that would disarm and discourage any nation save that black host to whom ‘discouragement’ is an unwritten word.”80 In these eloquent lines and others, Du Bois left no doubt where the fault lay. Even while navigating the tempestuous waters of American life, black Americans were subject to vicious undercurrents and tides that sank many of their endeavors and hopes. For America to advance on this matter, laws would have to change, rights would have to be defended, and justice would have to be reinforced. As the years went on, Du Bois only strengthened his prophetic commitment to these things, and he always believed that the stuff of liberal education—the training of the mind, heart, and soul—was imperative in the struggle for equality and justice. The ideals of good, beauty, and spirituality were anything but idle, metaphysical matters; they would enliven the search for human dignity and inspire prophetic denunciations of the “dusty desert of dollars” in America.81 He claimed Socrates, Jesus, and St. Francis of Assisi as allies.82
Besides echoing religious and philosophical themes, Du Bois’s depiction of the soul no doubt expressed the worldview of many romantics. His years of graduate study in Berlin (1892–1894) affected him deeply. Besides having the opportunity to learn from thinkers like Friedrich Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt, the imposing ghosts of Johann Goethe, Karl Marx, and Johann Herder were everywhere, and they haunted and instructed him on the matter of soul. During those years he swam in deep rivers of romanticism, and this clearly saturated his thinking. Considering the widespread discontent that many romantics felt with the Enlightenment—especially over its instrumental, syllogistic uses of reason and its alliance with market values and industrial capitalism—the influence is obvious. Almost all romantics took aim at the soul-deforming impact of modern culture, especially in its most sordid incarnation in the industrial world, and sought to recover the value of art, music, poetry, and religion. In a sense, God’s grandeur was at stake in a world where, to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins, “all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil.”83 Du Bois certainly fit into this pantheon of renegade dissidents who raised their pens and paintbrushes in protest against the financier and capitalist, the man who “feels no poetry and hears no song.”84
But there were other romantic innovations surrounding the question of soul that left their imprint on Du Bois, in particular the concept of soul as Volkgeist, or the spirit/soul of a people. In this reading, “soul” belongs to an entire culture and is synonymous with the spiritual life of a nation. Kwame Anthony Appiah describes it thus: “We can think of the soul here not as an individual’s unique possession, but rather as something she shares with the folk to which she belongs.”85 As a communal possession, soul is a product of the finest achievements of a culture, especially its folklore, poetry, myth, and music. By taking aim at the arid rationalism, elitism, and materialism of the Enlightenment, the romantics saw themselves as protecting the endangered life of the spirit, especially its full-bodied, aromatic richness in the culture of a people.
Just as Du Bois imbibed this spirit as a protest against U.S. expansionism and capitalism, a host of Latin American writers and artists would follow suit and embrace the language of soul in opposition to the most base and ignoble of North American ambitions. Hispanic literati came to consider themselves priests of the eternal imagination or, in José Enrique Rodó’s words, “keeper of souls” at war with the spiritual philistines of modern mass society and capitalism. (Besides Rodó, others in this camp include José Vasconcelos, Antonio Caso, Francisco Calderón, Alejandro Korn, and Rubén Darío.)86 For both African Americans and Latin Americans, the romantic vision of “soul” proved elastic and malleable enough to reconfigure in light of each distinct ethnicity and noble enough to confer dignity on each of their traditions. When denied political or economic power, the cultures on the edges of Western modernity adopted “soul”—and its spiritual manifestations in dance, music, folklore, and myth—as an idiom in their struggle for equality and justice.
In seeking to resuscitate the ailing, bedridden notion of myth and soul in this way, the romantics of various stripes, in Europe and beyond, saw themselves as physicians of national well-being (the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were an era of nationalism, after all). By recovering the lost stories, legends, epics, vernacular languages, and songs of a Volk, they would infuse a feeling of pride in cultures and traditions that had been devalued, exploited, and dismissed. “Mythic poetry,” writes Bruce Lincoln, “which the Enlightenment disparaged as a form of primitive irrationality, had been re-theorized under the signs of authenticity, tradition, and national identity.”87 What was trampled upon by the Enlightenment became something like buried treasure for romantics, and every effort was made to excavate and preserve such precious relics. Romantic artists thus hunted for these folk treasures in an effort to shore up cultural nationalism: James MacPherson (1736–1796) published poetry that was purported to be the ancient voice of the Scots; epics like the Nibelungenlied, Kalevala, El Cid, and Chanson de Roland were released as testaments to the greatness of their respective cultures; and later, as the twentieth century arrived, many poets and modernists turned to the cultural reserves of their national traditions. Yeats turned to Celtic legends and myths, Miguel Ángel Asturias looked to Mayan myths, Alejo Carpentier recovered Afro-Latin religions, Gerard Manley Hopkins focused on the Anglo-Saxon vernacular, Lorca celebrated Spanish ballads and “deep song,” Du Bois turned to black spirituals, and the list goes on. Recall in this vein James Joyce’s definition of his literary purpose: “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”88
For the romantics, the “uncreated conscience” of each unique culture was at stake in the war with the defilers of soul. Though their dispute with the Enlightenment was unmistakably modern and new, we can also trace the issues involved here back to the ancient Greeks. As early as Heraclitus and Plato, poets were often slighted by philosophers, such as when Heraclitus heaped scorn on the hoi polloi (common people) for their intellectual shortcomings and affection for poetry: “What understanding or intellect have they? They trust in poets of the common people and treat the mob as their teacher, not knowing that ‘the masses are bad, the good are few.’”89 And Plato followed the basic outline of this model, thinking that mythoi and music appealed to the basest part of the human soul (the emotions more than reason) and to the baser forms of humanity, like women, children, and the lower classes.90 If he conceded the value of poetry, myth, and music, it was largely for those who were unable to follow the subtleties of philosophical argumentation or, more interestingly, on occasions when philosophical certainty could not be established, such as in the fate of the soul after death or on the nature of the gods. (This is obvious in The Timaeus, in which he resorts to myth to make sense of the creation of the universe.)
Whatever the case, it is clear that the romantics wanted to recover the Greek poets (Homer, Hesiod, the tragedians) more than the philosophers and to disturb the hierarchical privileging of prose over poetry, logos over mythos, analytical reason over eros, theory over music, and propositional argumentation over narrative. They were challenging the disembodiment of language from oral inflections, rhythms, and timbres, and they were challenging the rupture and bifurcation of language and music, reason and emotion, form and content, and theory and practice. By reuniting these dimensions—a search for the other half in this dualism, in the manner of the myth of Aristophanes in the Symposium—they would nurse the fractured soul back to health, restore