Alvino-Mario Fantini

February 2011    

In Banes, a hole-in-the-wall along Köllnerhofgasse and only a block from my flat, I see people meeting for drinks every evening.  Some of them  appear to be rather disgruntled government servants and others have a manic-depressive aura about them.  It is there that I can almost feel the darkness of spirit of which the early 20th century Austrian writers wrote. It is not merely something seasonal that comes with the early dusk that in winter descends on the city; it is something that wells up from an ever present source.

There are of course many Austrian writers waiting to be read. I’ve in fact had an opportunity to pick and choose among them, in no particular order, and I agree with those who say there seems to be a pervasive gloominess and, some would say, morbidity,  in their manner of writing, a gloominess that in fact preceded the crumbling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

from the Crow's Nest

"We have met the enemy, and he is us!"

by Fritz Wagner

We are presently running a series of reminiscences about Eric Voegelin's years at Notre Dame, collected and edited by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn in their recent Voegelin Recollected. We have a few of our own memories that seem to fit in with the published recollections, so we thought we would offer them here for whatever interest they might have.  Here is the first, relating to the same South Dining Hall mentioned often in part 1 of "Voegelin at Notre Dame."

WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND THEY ARE OURS. —Oliver Hazard Perry, letter to General Harrison after the victory over the British fleet at Lake Erie, 1813.

Many years ago, when I was a very sophisticated, but shy, nineteen year old, I wandered into the public cafeteria at the Notre Dame South Dining Hall. I recall it was about 10:00 o'clock in the morning and I had stayed up late–probably in a residence hall bull session–and had slept through breakfast, so I came over to the cafeteria to get some coffee and a roll.

The cafeteria was a rackety place, with terra cotta floors and brick walls and vaulted plaster ceilings frescoed with pioneer priests greeting Indians. The tables and chairs were heavy oak. It was the kind of place where, if the kitchen helper dropped a tray of silver, the noise would hurt your ears.

But on this morning at this time of day the cafeteria was almost empty. As I walked along looking for a seat, I saw Professor Voegelin sitting at one of the few occupied tables reading a newspaper.  It was a table that sat four and he sat on the inside away from the aisle. He could have been upstairs in the private faculty dining room if he had wished, but he was down here in this huge room.

A Voegelin Literary Criticism

by David Palmieri

Voegelinian literary criticism is still taking its first steps.

Voegelin himself was a master critic of the philosophical text and — he wrote in a letter to Robert Heilman — an amateur critic of the poem, play and novel. Voegelin practiced literary criticism most assiduously in his discussion of Homer and the Athenian tragedians in The World of the Polis and in his analysis of the Henry James novel The Turn of the Screw in a 1971 issue of The Southern Review.

As early as 1967, an article by Anselm Atkins in Drama Survey, “Voegelin and the Decline of Tragedy,” worked to insert the philosopher into literary criticism. Since then, Voegelinian literary criticism has moved ahead fitfully with the most concerted efforts being made by Glenn Hughes in his work on Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson, and by Charles Embry in The Philosopher and the Storyteller (2008), the first monograph to use Voegelin’s later philosophical vocabulary as critical tools in an analysis of novels from England, Germany and the United States.

from the Crow's Nest

Sands of Iwo Jima

What every President needs to know

by Fritz Wagner

I was talking to the plumber, 'Oleg' by name, and when I hung up I looked at the caller ID on the phone and saw that he had a very Ukrainian last name. He had sounded thoroughly American but his name reminded me of the Ukrainian clients I had when I was practicing law in Baraboo, a resort community in southern Wisconsin not too far from metropolitan Chicago and its immense émigré population from central and eastern Europe.

These Ukrainians were first generation Americans, hard working, intelligent and successful. They were buying vacation homes in the area. But they had in common something I could not understand at the time. They were intensely secretive about their personal lives and business transactions, apparently because of “the government.” All loyalty was to the family and the Ukrainian Catholic Church. All distrust and suspicion was directed at government, its tax collectors, inspectors, etc. I understood they came from Communist societies but I couldn’t understand why their suspicions carried over to the United States. After all, they were free men once again.