grow, roam, and rebel.
If it is not obvious, I am arguing that the idea of the soul in the classic Christian tradition is bathed in sunsets and twilights of this sort, and many of the artists discussed here sought to preserve this vintage, dusk-like representation. In fearing the betrayal of the soul in America—where the soul is confused with commonplace prosperity without shadow, antiquity, mystery, or the cross—they raised their voices in foreboding and forewarning.
Many black and Hispanic writers would join this chorus of discontent. In Latin America the budding movement modernismo arose as a critical reaction to scientific positivism and economic materialism. (José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel and Rubén Darío’s poetry are classic examples, later followed by the avant-garde and so-called magical realism.) In North America African American writers cried out against assaults on the bodies and souls of their community in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In both cases, Latin Americans and African Americans largely embraced Christian ideas, adding their own signatures and styles to classic views of the soul and consequently fashioning fresh iterations of the “moods of passion”—haunting music, ostentatious pageantry, existential burdens—that are the stuff of the soul. Though often buried under the landslides of economic and political success in America, their perspectives are fresh riffs on the priceless value of soul in our modern or postmodern world. W. E. B. Du Bois held one such perspective; I begin with him because he is a powerful example of the kind of soul that burns brighter than a thin flame, more like a conflagration that swept across the plains and hills of America: the soul of black folks. Though Du Bois’s understanding of the soul was deeply informed by the black religious experience in America, it was also indebted to the romantic tradition, and for that reason I consider him in the second part of this chapter, with an emphasis on the cultural, stylistic, and profane understandings of the soul.
PROFANE INTERPRETATIONS OF THE SOUL
Romantic Soul: Herder and Du Bois
Du Bois’s life echoes many of the themes we have explored thus far, especially the construction of the soul as antibourgeois, a weapon of protest against the vulgar drive for material fortune. This theme emerges most explicitly from Du Bois’s notorious arguments with Booker T. Washington. As is well known, their relationship became strained and sour over fundamental definitions of success in America. In Du Bois’s estimation, Washington’s vision for education, in its concrete manifestation at the Tuskegee Institute, was far too conciliatory to the American idioms of triumphant commercialism and material prosperity and disappointingly silent when it came to black civil rights. To Du Bois and others like him, the model of industrial training at Tuskegee implied that black liberation would hinge on blacks’ success in the marketplace and adoption of the American dream, with all of its glittering promises and fantasies, its cornucopia of goods. The success of the black community would be assessed by how it capitalized on its opportunities and on its diligence, thrift, and industry in the American economy.79 For Du Bois, 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
