Metamorphosis. Jolles and Huizinga and Comparative Literature

This essay gives an outline of a shared “intellectual constitution”, the spiritual bioi parallelloi that united two Dutch scholars, André Jolles and Johan Huizinga, in their endeavour of cultural analysis and cultural criticism. First, it presents the background of their effort, the world of learning they shared with philologists such as Ernst Robert Curtius, Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach. It explains, in particular, the idea of cultural harmony and of methodological notions like that of the possibility to extrapolate from small facts to large issues, and of cultural criticism as a counteroffensive against the loss of harmony. Next, the essay focuses on the common creativity of Jolles and Huizinga and their views on metamorphosis as the inner mechanism of cultural change. For both of them, the notion of form was a trait d’union between mutable life and immutable human nature. Forms, that existed in a limited number, in typological series of social identities or cultural genres, were their main tool in cultural analysis and criticism.