The first thing the Anglo-German and French Enlightenment did was destroy literature—its own and everyone else's. Destroying its own wasn’t too difficult, we must acknowledge. Yet, every April 23, seizing the occasion of Cervantes’s eternal anniversary, they parade out Shakespeare. Shakespeare, the best friend of ghosts.
However, as I was saying, the Enlightenment, although it single-handedly ruins the interpretation of its own literatures and tries to ruin others as well, could not bring down Spanish literature, let alone the Golden Age. On the contrary, the result was one of admiration. A sublimation that, despite all its vaunted rationalism, Germany was never able to explain beyond epiphanies and mystical exclamations spilled across page after page by Goethe, Schiller, and the fraternal Schlegel brothers. All of them multi-purpose figures for various emotionally charged quotations, especially when there’s nothing to say.
This is what the Enlightenment owes to Romanticism—its verbose resonance, its academic euphony of hollow verses, behind which hides an unprecedented literary emptiness. All the same, no philosophical demands can silence literature. Nor is there any religious or political prohibition that can silence or intimidate it.
For that very reason, there is nothing more ironic or ridiculous than those writers and literature professors who, driven by who knows what kind of inertia or ignorance, call for a return to “Enlightened reason.” I don’t know if it’s an intellectual ritual practiced by those who, in the throes of philosophical or academic narcissism, seek visibility through any form of publicity. But what I do know is that such a declaration is utter nonsense.
Talking about “Enlightened reason” is galvanizing an oxymoron, within whose core lies the very extermination of literature. Enlightenment rationalism is incompatible with literary rationalism. It is a pseudo-philosophical rationalism, idealistic and narcissistic, like that of Plato and many others, which expels literature from the State and submerges the human being in a third semantic world, utopian and bleak. Literature is incompatible with “Enlightened reason.” The rationalism of literature does not fit within the idealism of philosophers nor in the self-deception of courtiers, academics, and their ilk.
Jesús G. Maestro
