Eric Voegelin: The Philosopher and the Storyteller

The Philosopher and the Storyteller: Eric Voegelin and Twentieth Century Literature. Charles Embry. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2008.

 

Charles Embry has edited the correspondence between Eric Voegelin and Shakespeare scholar and literary critic, Robert Heilman.¹ If one compares the contents of that correspondence with the correspondence published in the two large volumes published as part of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, one notices that Heilman was perhaps Voegelin’s only American correspondent with whom he sustained high level philosophical discussion over many years.²  Several of Voegelin’s letters with Heilman are mini essays and, indeed, the one on Henry James’s Turn of the Screw was published separately thanks to Heilman’s urging.

Contained within this correspondence are letters discussing a myriad of literary and philosophical topics. When read together they paint a portrait of Voegelin’s understanding of literature, including how best to read it. Embry’s book, The Philosopher and the Storyteller, sets out the insights gleaned from this correspondence, and taking this together with Voegelin’s philosophical writings, Embry develops an account of philosophy and storytelling under the heading “The Time of the Tale,” a concept which Voegelin had refined over many years. The Philosopher and the Storyteller is a report of Embry’s journey with his two teachers, and includes not only an account of philosophy and storytelling, but also of three novels that in one way or another manifest both the “Time of the Tale” and serve as examples of the deformation of reality.

Part One collects the literary insights from the Voegelin-Heilman correspondence in light of Voegelin’s philosophical writings. Embry demonstrates how the activity of philosopher and storyteller are one and the same, though their modes differ. Both live in the metaxy, the In-between of existence. The “Time of the Tale” combines divine, cosmic, human elements to express “the experience of being . . . in flux” (quoting Voegelin to Heilman, Letter 103 from Embry edition — pp 26-29).

The bulk of Embry’s analysis in Part One consists of persuading the reader, who might tend to regard philosophy and storytelling as separate activities, that the two are in fact identical. The greatest storytellers tell the “Time of the Tale” as a means of understanding reality, and the greatest philosopher relies “upon and combines the literary forms of dialogue, myth, analysis, and anamnetic meditation to articulate experiences” (p 33). This is because the “Time of the Tale” is “prior to other literary forms and primary as foundational to and underlying all later literary forms that result from human understanding of differentiated reality” (p 29).

Noteworthy is Embry’s explanation of Voegelin’s principles of literary criticism (pp 16-21). First, the reader must “exhaust the source,” meaning the reader must “assume the role of disciple who has everything to learn from the master,” which assumes, of course, the author knew what he or she was doing. Political theorists familiar with Leo Strauss will recognize in this something of Strauss’s dictum that the reader strive to understand the author as he understood himself.

Second, the reader must rely upon interpretive terminology that is consistent, or is in “closest contact,” with the source itself. This raises questions concerning the degree to which the reader can gain critical distance from the text. Voegelin himself raises this issue when he reads the “eye” symbol, in Shakespeare’s King Lear and in Heilman’s own interpretation, in allegorical terms not dissimilar from the literal-analogical-allegorical categories of Biblical hermeneutics developed in the Middle Ages (p 21). How do we know these categories are applicable to Shakespeare? The answer seems to be in the third principle, which is that the reader must develop a way of interpretation that extends the poet’s “compact symbolizations in the same direction indicated by the poet into a philosophically critical language.”

Storytelling and philosophy share the same end, but philosophy utilizes a more reflective language that must necessarily retain the meaning of the original symbol.  But the reader must fully understand the whole of the poet’s work — preferably all of it that’s available — before embarking on this journey. This means immersing oneself in dialogue with the work, thus returning “full circle to Voegelin’s first principle of literary criticism — ‘exhaustion of the source’” (pp 20-21).

Part Two consists of Embry’s reading of three twentieth-century novels as examples of the “Time of the Tale”: Graham Swift’s Waterland, Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons, and Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear it Away. Embry does not really explain his reasons for choosing these particular novels, but his subtitles demonstrate that he thinks of them as constituting an ascent mirroring the ascent of divine being in the “Time of the Tale.” His book “about” the “Time of Tale” necessarily participates in it.

Embry’s subtitle for the chapter discussing Swift’s Waterland, “The Barren Quest,” reveals how the search for order by the novel’s protagonist is necessarily stalled because he can only understand the origins of contemporary disorder in terms of historical cause and effect. He believes current disorder is materially caused by past disorder, but he cannot conceive the cause of that previous disorder. The protagonist mistakes the search for order as one of infinite regress into the past, which necessarily reaffirms the despair in his present existence which he suffers as a secular and scientistic personality.

Embry’s chapter on Doderer’s The Demons, subtitled, “A Secret Between Man and God,” is a welcome treat. Readers of Voegelin will recognize The Demons as the source of a key component in Voegelin’s analysis of secondary reality, Apperzeptions-Verweigerung (refusal to apperceive, refusal to bring full awareness to experience). Both this defect of will and descriptions of secondary reality in general have become a bit talismanic for Voegelin scholars, some of whom might nevertheless be unclear as to its literary origin.

Voegelin himself insisted that a key part of understanding political reality is understanding the original meaning of terms because that way we understand why the person who coined that term felt the need to do so. In other words, what were they trying to signify that hitherto had not been signified? In The Demons, the “secret between man and God” is the mysterious refusal to apperceive exhibited by the main character and narrator, Geyrenhoff. At least he is the narrator until the author “fires” him from that job because his refusal to apperceive makes him ill-suited for it. The reader will have to read Embry’s book to find out how Doderer understands secondary reality and the refusal to apperceive. Suffice to say that, for Doderer (unlike the main character of Waterland), there is no “explanation.” The reason why Geyrenhoff suffers the affliction of being cut off from reality remains mysterious.

One wishes in this chapter that Embry would have explained a few other (and simpler) examples in the book before discussing the more complicated case of Geyrenhoff’s secondary reality (Such explanation is complicated because it is difficult for the reader to see the narrator’s apperception problem: how can the reader determine the narrator’s clouded perception when he is also the narrator? Embry explains this very well). Perhaps an examination of the character Schlaggenberg’s obsession with the corpulently endowed Viennese women, and their coffee and cakes, would help by way of contrast. Moreover, one of Embry’s explanations for Doderer’s understanding of the refusal to apperceive is that Doderer seems to root the refusal in eros.

The last chapter of Part Two considers the “novel of divine presence,” The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O’Connor. Here we find the “Time of the Tale” in its fullness, where the “action” of the story, which takes place during the Great Depression, is flanked by the “beginning with Adam” and the Second Coming and the Day of Judgment (p 130). Whereas the previous two novels treated by Embry reflect partial or distorted elements of the “Time of the Tale,” O’Connor’s novel exhibits divine presence in its fullness in the way the characters experience themselves as participants in the drama of creation, fall, and redemption.  Whereas Waterland remains within the cage of secularism, and The Demons is better at diagnosing than healing the refusal to apperceive, O’Connor’s presentation of the “autonomous man”  both offers a superior diagnosis of modernity and points the way towards its healing.

Embry’s Epilogue offers additional thematic connections among the novels in terms of the “Time of the Tale.” Even though the author presents the novels in terms of an ascent, one is still left wondering why he chose these three particular novels?  Surely disorder, as exhibited in Waterland, is a common theme of the modern novel, and the reader is left wondering whether this was the best novel to demonstrate the nature of this disorder. Is The Violent Bear it Away as profound a meditation on divine love as, say, The Brothers Karamazov? Was it chosen because it is contemporary but not too well known and Embry wished to propose it to his audience rather than a novel such as the already much considered The Brothers Karamozov? One can only surmise.

The Philosopher and the Storyteller is an important contribution to our understanding of Voegelin, our understanding of philosophizing, and, of course, to the literary analysis of story-telling. The author’s exposition of the “Time of the Tale” is illuminating and those interested in the instruments of literary criticism would do well to consult it.

 

Notes

[1] Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin, A Friendship in Letters, 1944-1984, ed., Charles R. Embry, (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004).

[2] Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, volumes 29 and 30 of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007 and 2009).