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Approaches to Voegelinian Literary Analysis

Voegelinian Readings of Modern Literature. Charles R. Embry, ed. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2011.

 

The work of Eric Voegelin encompasses not only the disciplines of history, theology, philosophy, and political science but also literature, as evident in the publication of his letter to Robert B. Heilman, “On Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw,” in the 1971 issue of Southern Review. Voegelin himself believed that, as a philosopher, he needed to be open to the insights of all individuals engaged in the search for truth, which included poets, dramatists, and novelists. Furthermore, Voegelin’s preoccupation with language, and its relationships to human experience and symbolization, would lead him to look at literature to gain a better understanding of language itself. For Voegelin, literature provided an imaginative and fictive account that enables us to understand a common humanity and spiritual order to which we all belong.

The editor of Voegelinian Readings of Modern Literature, Charles R. Embry, supports this adoption of Voegelin’s philosophy in the interpretation of literature. In his previous book, The Philosopher and the Storyteller, Embry outlines some principles of literary criticism that Voegelin himself employed: 1) the critic must first give precedence to the text itself; 2) the critic must assume that the author knew what he was doing and that the parts of the text work together as a singular entity; 3) the critic must rely upon an interpretative terminology that is consistent with the language symbols of the source; and 4) the critic must develop a system of interpretation that is an analytical, rational continuation of the author’s work from compactness to differentiation. In short, Voegelin asked the critic to respect the text and its author with an attitude of scholarly humility rather than privileging one’s current existence in the interpretation of literature. Like philosophy, literature offers its own set of symbols, and the experiences behind those symbols, for the critic to understand in his search for truth and order.

Voegelinian Readings of Modern Literature is an application of Voegelin’s principles of literary criticism to a variety of literary texts. The introduction speaks of the two foundational experiences in Voegelin’s philosophical project – the experience of disorder and the experience of wonder and awe – and how the works of literature selected comports with these two experiences. However, if one wants a greater understanding of Voegelin’s understanding of literary criticism and its place within his thought, then one should consult Embry’s The Philosopher and the Storyteller rather than this volume. In other words, The Philosopher and the Storyteller provides the theoretical principles that guide the interpretations found in Voegelinian Readings of Modern Literature.

Voegelinian Reading of Modern Literature is divided into three parts. The first focuses on pneumopathy of individual consciousness with analyses of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “The Iceberg,” the plays of Henrik Ibsen, and Choderlos de Laclos’ novel, Les liaisons dangereuses. The second section explores the loss of public order and the search for its recovery in the various writings of D. H. Lawrence, the poetry of Stefan George, and the novels of Dazai Osamu and Thomas Carlyle. The final part examines human existence in the metaxy, the state of tension between the poles of transcendent and mundane reality, in the works of Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, and Hermann Broch. Although these chapters are excellent examples of the application of Voegelin’s philosophy to the interpretation of literature, some of them lack engagement with the actual literary criticism of the work the contributors are analyzing. It would have been interesting to see how well the principles of Voegelin’s literary criticism would work when compared with existing literary criticism. This absence does not detract from the contributors’ Voegelinian analyses of literature, but it does make some of the chapters isolated and apart from the disciplines of literature and literary studies.

One of the chapters that does engage with the existing literary criticism and therefore shows how a Voegelinian analysis can contribute to literary studies is Glenn Hughes’ “The Tension of the Metaxy in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry.” Hughes is able to show that the greatness of Dickinson’s poetry is not only in her cognitive originality, the discovery of new imaginative and ideational connections, as critics have claimed, but in the underlying motivating experience that guides her poetry: the questioning of what it means to be human and the articulation of her discovery that to be human is to exist in a state of unsatisfied longing; or, to use Voegelin’s terminology, to exist in the metaxy. In the analysis of several of her poems, Hughes is able to show the paradox of metaxic consciousness – the ontological simultaneity of the immediacy of divine presence in consciousness together with its nonpossessable, unknowable, and transcendent character – that underlies Dickinson’s poems. For example, Dickinson wrote:

Of Paradise’ existence

All we know

Is the uncertain certainty –

The “Paradise’ existence” serves as a reference to what Voegelin calls the “pole of timelessness” experienced in metaxic existence. Dickinson experiences this reality not as a separate existence, as if it were some object to be observed, but subjectively as part of her consciousness where we can only know it uncertainly and therefore we can only be certain in this uncertain knowledge. In Dickinson’s poetry, we encounter this experiential paradox of knowing “Paradise’ existence” as part of the reality in which we are participants and not as objective observers. The “God” of Dickinson therefore is ultimately the “Unknown God” that Voegelin accounts for in his theory of mystical differentiation which reveals Itself in various manifestations in human history. Affirming the reality of transcendence in her poetry, Dickinson longs for communion with this transcendence, although knowing such a union is ultimately not possible

In contrast to Dickinson’s poetry as articulations of experiences of awe and wonder, Choderlos de Laclo’s Les liaisons dangereuses reveals the experience of disorder, specifically the soul’s closure to God. Following the principles of literary criticism outlined in Voegelin’s “On Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw,” Polly Detels starts with the religious symbols in the novel as a means to interrogate the storyteller’s consciousness. In Les liaisons religious symbols are either associated with the doctrine, rituals, institutions, and offices of the Catholic Church or are connected with the divine. In this second set of symbols, God is either formulated as an inscrutable, distant judge or humans substituting themselves for divinity. After a survey of these symbols, Detel concludes that the divine has been banished from the consciousness in these characters and instead has been subsumed in vestigial pieties with libertine double entendres. The result is what Voegelin has called “a satanized environment” where humans imagined themselves as gods and the symbols of piety have been emptied of their original meaning. The experience of disorder reigns everywhere.

Although it is clear that the characters in the novel are fundamentally disorder, it is not evident whether the author, Laclos, is, as Detel reviews the past literary criticism of the novel that argues both for and against that Laclos himself being identified with the characters. To resolve this impasse, Detel looks to Voegelin’s concept of balance of consciousness where the author must not sever the ties that bind human and divine even when he or she is at their most god-like as a storyteller; otherwise, they will enter into a rivalry with divinity itself. As creators of characters who deified themselves, Laclos understood this danger himself. But living in a world in which the language of piety was deformed and the symbolization of the metaxy has disappeared, Laclos was not able to provide a spiritual solution to this condition, although he recognized that the absence of the metaxy would result in a confusion of spirituality with mundane existence. In this sense, Laclos perhaps falls into the same category as Henry James with their “ambiguous consciousness” who partakes of the deformity that he explores so strongly.

Voegelinian Readings of Modern Literature expands the study of Voegelin into the disciplines of literature and literary studies as well as enriches our understanding of certain works. However, the volume assumes one is familiar with Voegelin’s philosophy and his principles of literary criticism and does not present them in a systematic fashion (again, if one wants to know more about these matters, one should consult The Philosopher and the Storyteller). Nevertheless, Voegelinian Readings of Modern Literature is an excellent example of the application of Voegelin’s philosophy to the interpretation of literature and hopefully will pave the path for more studies in the analysis of literature.

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Lee Trepanier is Chair and Professor of the Political Science Department at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama and former editor-in-chief of VoegelinView (2016-21). He is author and editor of several books and editor of Lexington Books series Politics, Literature, and Film (2013-present).

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