Harold’s Mobility as a Growth of Negativity: Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations
The result's identifiers
Result code in IS VaVaI
<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11210%2F25%3A10506683" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11210/25:10506683 - isvavai.cz</a>
Result on the web
<a href="https://verso.is.cuni.cz/pub/verso.fpl?fname=obd_publikace_handle&handle=a4Ohw1nRuW" target="_blank" >https://verso.is.cuni.cz/pub/verso.fpl?fname=obd_publikace_handle&handle=a4Ohw1nRuW</a>
DOI - Digital Object Identifier
<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.3917/etan.774.0433" target="_blank" >10.3917/etan.774.0433</a>
Alternative languages
Result language
angličtina
Original language name
Harold’s Mobility as a Growth of Negativity: Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations
Original language description
The poem "To Inez," Harold's "unpremeditated lay" towards the close of Canto I of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, can be interpreted as an expression of the growing negativity of the hero, whom in the Preface to Canto I and II Byron calls "[a] fictitious character [...] introduced for the sake of giving some connexion to the piece." Already in the first two cantos it becomes evident that Harold is a mere structural device used to increase tension between the poem's descriptive and static features and the dynamic of the narrator's volatile, ever-changing mind. Harold's negativity is no mere outcome of sensuous over-satiation and fear of reflection. It may have more serious implications, which can be understood in relation to Nietzsche's early philosophy, namely in the second essay of his Untimely Meditations, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" ("Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben," 1874). Nietzsche understands history and its contemporary consciousness as results of a decline of culture, when reactive forces (prompted by the "cunning and historically cultivated egotism" of the state, science, self-seekers and aesthetes) assume control and start to manipulate history for their own purposes. Resulting "historical knowledge" then shapes "weak individuals" whose memory has lost its significance. In the light of Nietzsche's observations, Harold's attitude voiced in "To Inez" can be interpreted as an expression of resistance against traditional reflections of history. The "retrospection curst," revealing an oppressive destiny of an Ahasuerus-like fugitive in "many a clime," travelling to "zones more and more remote," can be interpreted as the last stage of the disintegration of the Enlightenment perspective typical of the previous topographical poems, whose influence is evident throughout Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Can we say that the representation of Harold's doomed pilgrimage concluded by the hero's spectral fading away "into Destruction's mass" anticipates Nietzsche's critique of the "uses and disadvantages of history for life"?
Czech name
—
Czech description
—
Classification
Type
J<sub>imp</sub> - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database
CEP classification
—
OECD FORD branch
60205 - Literary theory
Result continuities
Project
—
Continuities
S - Specificky vyzkum na vysokych skolach
Others
Publication year
2025
Confidentiality
S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů
Data specific for result type
Name of the periodical
Études Anglaises
ISSN
0014-195X
e-ISSN
1965-0159
Volume of the periodical
77
Issue of the periodical within the volume
4
Country of publishing house
FR - FRANCE
Number of pages
11
Pages from-to
433-443
UT code for WoS article
001600718700004
EID of the result in the Scopus database
—