"One of My Permanent Occupations"
Eric Voegelin as Literary Critic-Part 2
by Charles Embry
Charles Embry is Professor Emeritus of Political Philosophy at Texas A&M-Commerce. He is editor of Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin: A Friendship in Letters, 1944-1984. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. The material that follows is taken from his The Philosopher and The Storyteller: Eric Voegelin and Twentieth-Century Literature. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. This appears with permission and is presented in three parts.
Voegelin's Criticism of Henry James's
The Turn of The Screw
A third significant statement regarding literary criticism originated in the Heilman-Voegelin correspondence and culminated with the publication in 1971 of a postscript to a letter first written by Voegelin in 1947. Voegelin's analysis focused on
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James as a response to a critique that Heilman had published of a Freudian interpretation of the novella.
8 In his postscript, Voegelin raised the twin issues of the "dustiness" of the symbols in James's story and the consequent necessity that a valid literary criticism must be firmly based upon a critical-existential assessment by the critic. These issues led to a conversation between Donald E. Stanford, editor of the
Southern Review, and Voegelin.
After Stanford completed work on the issue in which both Voegelin's original letter on James's The Turn of the Screw and the newly written postscript appeared, Stanford and his wife visited the Voegelins at their home in Palo Alto.
The Stanfords' visit in the summer of 1970 was followed by an exchange of letters that continued the conversation, in the course of which they had discussed poetry and poetic quality. Stanford had mentioned a poem, "The Course of a Particular," by Wallace Stevens (used in Stanford's "Prefatory Note"). After the get-together in Palo Alto, Stanford wrote Voegelin (August 27), enclosing a copy of that poem and another by Stevens. Voegelin responded, recalling "the splendid evening of our discussion here in Stanford":
On that occasion you stressed very strongly that the formal quality of a work of art is the one and only quality a literary critic has to take into account. And, if I remember correctly, I expressed equally strongly the opinion that in a critical judgment there must also be taken into account the existential content. On that evening, our argument referred to the work of Henry James and some opinion I had expressed about its "dustiness" in my paper. Now I have similar hesitations about Stevens' poem.
Voegelin's view that "critical judgment" must take into account "the existential content" of a literary work, in this case a poem, represents an advance on the third principle of literary criticism identified above, namely, the importance of a critical-analytical consciousness for the literary critic that permits him to evaluate and judge the quality of a literary work. Although this critical awareness is formulated as "reflective distance" in his late work, in the "Postscript" (finished in December 1969) Voegelin was already formulating a symbol for denoting this awareness.10 "Reflective distance" is articulated in the posthumous last volume of Order and History as part of the complex "Reflective Distance-Remembrance-Oblivion" discovered in the philosopher's meditation — e.g., Plato's and Voegelin's. In this late work, "reflective distance" appears to be equivalent to what Voegelin designates as "critical distance" and the "critical-analytical consciousness" of the literary critic in the "Postscript." "Critical distance," of course, applies also to the literary artist and his awareness (1) that he is creating a work of art and (2) that he is aware of what he has experienced and is symbolizing in his work.
The term critical distance developed as Voegelin increasingly recognized the deformation of consciousness that informs much modern thought and literature. He came to understand deformed consciousness as closure to or revolt against reality as it had been experienced and symbolized in myth and philosophy. Ancient mytho-poets and philosophers symbolized the quaternarian structure of reality (i.e., the community of being: God, man, world, and society), and Voegelin recognized that significant segments of modernity were locked in closure to reality structured in this way. This closure marked for Voegelin the deformation of consciousness that he only sensed as he wrote the earlier letter to Heilman but explicitly identified as the "dustiness" of the Jamesian symbols as he was writing the postscript for the Southern Review. In the "Postscript," he elaborated:
The deformation of which I am speaking is the fateful shift in Western society from existence in openness toward the cosmos to existence in the mode of closure against, and denial of, its reality. As the process gains momentum, the symbols of open existence — God, man, the divine origin of the cosmos, and the divine Logos permeating its order — lose the vitality of their truth and are eclipsed by the imagery of a self-creative, self-realizing, self-expressing, self-ordering, and self-saving ego that is thrown into, and confronted with, an immanently closed world.
On the "dustiness" of James's garden (in the story) and its deformed humanity, Voegelin asserts that the work's existential defect "reflects a warping in the author's consciousness of reality, while the mode of closure in the author's existence translates itself into a want of critical distance in the work. . . . Even in an extreme case, however, the critical distance cannot be abolished [al]together; for if there were no distance at all, there would be no work of art but only a man's syndrome of his pathological state."12 Since works of this type are difficult to understand, it is left to the reader to "supply the critical consciousness of reality" and to discern in what manner reality is deformed, for in such a case he "cannot simply follow the symbolism wherever it leads and expect to come out with something that makes sense in terms of reality."13
Furthermore, the reader must beware of using as an instrument of interpretation one or the other of the prevailing theories of interpretation, such as the psychoanalytic theories, since they are themselves "symbolizations of deformed existence" that participate in the modern proclivity for closure to reality, i.e., to the whole community of being.14 This discussion, aimed by Voegelin at the problems arising out of interpreting The Turn of the Screw, also provides a further clue to the approach that a literary critic must take when confronted with a work of art where the artist has not arrived at the "critical distance" necessary for adequately symbolizing human experience in openness to reality. A philosophy of existence that remains open to the community of being and the ground of Being is necessary for the literary critic who desires to understand works of literature and their place in the trail of symbols left by the human search for order.15
Commenting that his earlier, and to some extent failed, attempt in the original letter to arrive at a "full understanding of the nouvelle" by directly tracing the symbols themselves, Voegelin nevertheless argued that he had met the first demand on the critic "inasmuch as they [the symbols] correctly identify major parts of the reality deformed: God, man, the soul, the drama of salvation and damnation." The earlier attempt at interpretation could, however, be used to meet the second task "of ascertaining the nature of the deformation." In fulfillment of this second task, Voegelin examined the androgynic myth as adopted from ancient mythology and then deformed for the building of modern Edens such as James's garden in The Turn of the Screw. Voegelin distinguished between ancient symbols and the modern "symbols which derive their meaning from the mode of closure they express":
The ancient mythopoets were critically conscious of the non-Edenic character of reality. When they developed speculative symbols within the medium of the myth, they knew they were symbolizing le mystère de la totalité in a cosmos whose order was marred by strife, injustice, unreason, and death. Moreover, they were not spiritual illiterates who would transform a symbol engendered by an experience of imperfection into a program of perfection in this world.... This degradation or perversion is the common denominator in the modern symbolist use of symbols, in the same sense as the experience of non-Edenic reality is the common denominator of ancient mythopoesy.16
Literature and the Time of the Tale
From general interpretive attitudes and principles, we turn now to one of Voegelin's substantive statements about literature. This statement, which I quote in toto, will in turn lead us into the heart, and the complexity, of his philosophical work. On August 13, 1964, Voegelin wrote to Heilman from Munich:
There was a point in my Salzburg lecture that might interest you as an historian of literature: The basic form of myth, the "tale" in the widest sense, including the epic as well as the dramatic account of happenings, has a specific time, immanent to the tale, whose specific character consists in the ability to combine human, cosmic and divine elements into one story. I have called it, already in Order and History, the Time of the Tale. It expresses the experience of being (that embraces all sorts of reality, the cosmos) in flux.
This Tale with its Time seems to me the primary literary form, peculiar to Cosmological civilizations. Primary in the sense that it precedes all literary form developed under conditions of differentiating experiences: If man becomes differentiated with any degree of autonomy from the cosmic context, then, and only then, will develop specifically human forms of literature: The story of human events, lyric, empirical history, the drama and tragedy of human action, the meditative dialogue in the Platonic sense, etc. Underlying all later, differentiated forms, however, there remains the basic Tale which expresses Being in flux. Time, then, would not be an empty container into which you can fill any content, but there would be as many times as there are types of differentiated content.
Think for instance of Proust's temps perdu and temps retrouvé as times which correspond to the loss and rediscovery of self, the action of rediscovery through a monumental literary work of remembrance being the atonement for the loss of time through personal guilt — very similar to Cosmological rituals of restoring order that has been lost through lapse of time. I believe the regrets of Richard II (I wasted time and now does time waste me) touch the same problem. This reflexion would lead into a philosophy of language, in which the basic Tale would appear as the instrument of man's dealing with reality through language — and adequately at that. Form and content, thus, would be inseparable: The Tale, if it is any good, has to deal with Being in flux, however much differentiated the insights into the complex structures of reality may be. (letter 103, p. 223)
Voegelin's specific references to Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and to Shakespeare's Richard II suggest that the symbolic formulation "Time of the Tale" is a critical tool for approaching and interpreting literature in general, modern literature in particular, and, even more specifically, modern novels. The Time of the Tale also informs Voegelin's late work and reveals ways in which the insights of his late meditations are prefigured in his earlier work. Moreover, understanding the Time of the Tale and the philosophical context from which it emerged in Voegelin's work permits us to see and read modern novels as crucial parts of a historical philosophical enterprise that are built upon more than the idiosyncratic expressions of the private dream worlds of Heraclitus's sleepwalkers and their counterparts among modern novelists. Indeed, perhaps specific works of modern literature — read in the context of the Time of the Tale and Voegelin's work generally — will gain the stature of an Aeschylus's Oresteia, in which "to those who are awake, there is one ordered universe common (to all)."18
The passage from letter 103 opens up a truly panoramic perspective on Voegelin's late-mature work and also indicates how the early work, especially in the first three volumes of Order and History, prefigures his later work — Anamnesis (1966), The Ecumenic Age (1974), and the posthumous In Search of Order (1987). Letter 103 (from 1964) is not the first place Voegelin used the symbol "Time of the Tale," however. We also find the phrase in Israel and Revelation (1956) and Plato and Aristotle (1957), as well as in three works after the 1964 letter: the essay "Was ist Natur?"(1965), The Ecumenic Age (1974), and "The Beginning and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth" (1977). Voegelin continued to explore in his late work the complexes of reality that underlie the Time of the Tale. For example, in In Search of Order, Voegelin meditates on myth and mytho-speculation, on the Beginning, and on Plato's Timaeus, a work that figured prominently in the first use of the Time of the Tale in Plato and Aristotle. The contexts in which all the uses of the term appear reflect topics that we can identify from the paragraph in letter 103:
1. myth as the primary literary form of Cosmological civilizations19
2. differentiation of insights into the structures of reality and subsequent literary forms as a historical event
3. the relation between myth, Time of the Tale, and other literary forms
4. the Time of the Tale in relation to other types of time
5. the Time of the Tale and Being in flux
6. the persistence of the Time of the Tale after differentiation of insights into other complex structures of reality
7. the merger of form and content in the basic Tale
8. a philosophy of language
These topics in turn lead one to other cognate, intimately interrelated topics — especially the primary experience of the cosmos, styles of truth, types of myth, historiogenesis, equivalences of symbolic expressions, the Beginning and the ground of Being, the truth of the myth, observations on language and imagination, and interrelationships between myth and the other symbolic forms of philosophy and revelation.
It becomes obvious that the Time of the Tale is integrally bound up with myths, that is, works of art that symbolize the experiences of human beings in Cosmological civilizations. In "In Search of the Ground" (1965), Voegelin replied, in response to a question about the identification of a ground in relation to aesthetic concerns, that "all art, if it is any good, is some sort of a myth in the sense that it becomes what I call a
cosmion, a reflection of the unity of the cosmos as a whole. . . . It's much closer to Cosmological thinking than anything else."
20 About three years later, in "Anxiety and Reason" (finished c. 1968), Voegelin writes that "the myth has not remained a mere object of inquiry but has become an active force in the creation of new symbols expressing the human condition. The new situation will be suggested if there be named representatively the work of James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, and Thomas Mann. In relation to the perversions both of transcendence and immanence, the revival must be acknowledged as a ritual restoration of order. The truth of the cosmos full of gods reasserts itself."
21 
[This is the second of three parts. Part 3 will appear next week. Part 1 may be read HERE.]
NOTES
(for full citations see the bibliography in Professor Embry's book)
8. Heilman, "The Freudian Reading of The Turn of the Screw" Voegelin's 1947 letter to Heilman was published in a lead article, entitled "The Turn of the Screw," in the Southern Review, n.s. 7 (1971): 9-48. In addition to Voegelin's original letter, this lead article contained Donald E. Stanford, "A Prefatory Note"; Heilman, "Foreword"; Voegelin, "A Letter to Robert B. Heilman"; and Voegelin, "Postscript: On Paradise and Revolution."
9. Voegelin Papers, Hoover Institute, box 36, folder 34. Emphasis added.
10. Cf. especially In Search of Order, 54-56, 58-59. See also Voegelin, "Postscript: On Paradise and Revolution," Southern Review, 27, 39-40.
11. Voegelin, "Postscript: On Paradise and Revolution," in Published Essays, 1966-1985, 151. Further citations of "Postscript" will be to this version.
12. Ibid., 162-63. Cf. Voegelin, "Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme," 315-75, and Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 291-303.
13. Voegelin, "Postscript," 152.
14. Ibid.
15. This book itself is rooted in the conviction that Voegelin's philosophy will provide the literary critic the necessary philosophical "tools" for understanding the call of stories and the human condition as it is explored in works of literature.
16. Ibid., 152, 153, 170-71.
17. In an August 31, 1958, letter to Heilman, Voegelin wrote that "at present I am struggling with the literary form of the Gospels which, as always, is inseparable from its contentb—bbut at least some notable results are in sight now. When I have finished this section, I shall be greatly relieved, for the Gospels are, after all, a cornerstone in the spiritual history of the West" (AFIL, letter 79, p. 183). In this letter, Voegelin is already struggling with the central component of the Time of the Tale, namely, Being in flux or, alternatively, the flux of divine presence. And since the Gospels contain the story of the Incarnation — the timelessness of divine presence revealing Itself in time — I think that he already sensed that he was dealing with the Time of the Tale, in which form merged with content. In the Christian universe of discourse, insofar as I know, he only dealt with the Time of the Tale in one place and that was in his discussion of Saint Paul in The Ecumenic Age. Clearly the Gospels merge form and content in their Tale. 18. Fragments from Ancilla, trans. Freeman.
18. Fragments from Ancilla, trans. Freeman.
19. The reader who would like better to understand Voegelin's use of the term Cosmological civilization and its literary symbolization, "myth," should begin by consulting Voegelin's Israel and Revelation (vol. I of Order and History), The Ecumenic Age (vol. IV of Order and History), and perhaps the Candler Lectures, "The Drama of Humanity," in vol. 33 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. In his late work, Voegelin came to understand that the myth is never supplanted by the differentiations of revelation and philosophy but must, rather, symbolically ground the later differentiations, just as the primary experience of the cosmos — participation in the primordial community of being — must suffuse and invigorate the cognitive-linguistic-imaginative participation of consciousness in the cognitive-meditative-imaginative structure of reality.
20. Voegelin, "In Search of the Ground," in Published Essays 1953-1965, (CW Vol.11), 240.
21. Voegelin, "Anxiety and Reason," in What is History? and Other Late Unpublished Writings, (CW Vol 28), 84.
