Approaches to Voegelinian Literary Analysis

a book review by Lee Trepanier

 

Charles R. Embry, ed. Voegelinian Readings of Modern Literature. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011. 290 pp. incl. index. Cloth $60.00.

 

Eric Voegelin's Approach to Criticism

 

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’s 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 the common humanity and spiritual order to which we all belong.

 

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.

 

Charles R. Embry, the book's editor, encourages the adoption of Voegelin’s philosophy in the interpretation of literature. In his previous book, The Philosopher and the Storyteller, Embry outlined 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 single 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.¹

 

In short, Voegelin asked the critic to respect the text and its author and  show scholarly humility rather than insinuate personal tastes. Like philosophy, literature offers its own set of symbols and the experiences behind them, and the critic tries to understand them in his search for truth and order.

 

The Uncertain Certainty of Emily Dickinson

 

Voegelinian Reading of Modern Literature is divided into three parts. The first focuses on pneumopathology of individual consciousness with analyses of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “The Iceberg,” the plays of Henrik Ibsen, and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 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 section examines human existence in the metaxy–the state of tension we endure because we live between the poles of transcendence and temporal existence–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 the contributors ignore the more established approaches to literary criticism. It would have been interesting to see how well Voegelin's principles work when compared to existing critical methods. This absence does not detract from the contributors’ work, but it does make some of the chapters seem isolated from the critical mainstream.

 

One of the chapters that looks at existing literary criticism and therefore shows how a Voegelinian analysis can contribute to the culture of literary criticism 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 lies 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. She questions what it means to be human and articulates her discovery that to be human is to exist in a state of unsatisfied longing; or, to use Voegelin’s philosophical term, 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–

 

“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 known only uncertainly.

 

In Dickinson’s poetry, we encounter this experiential paradox of knowing “Paradise’ existence” as part of a  reality in which we are participants but not  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.

 

de Laclos: Immersion in a Degraded Subject Matter?

 

In contrast to Dickinson’s poetry as articulations of experiences of awe and wonder, 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 as humans substituting themselves for divinity.

 

After a survey of these symbols, Detels concludes that the divine has been banished from 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 imagine 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 disordered, it is not evident whether Laclos himself is. Detels reviews past literary criticism arguing  both for and against identifying Laclos with his own characters.

 

To resolve this impasse, Detels 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 symbolizations representing the metaxy had disappeared, Laclos was not able to provide a spiritual solution to this condition, although he recognized that the symbolic loss would result in a confusion of the spirit and the material.

 

In this sense, Laclos perhaps falls into the same category as Henry James: they both shared an “ambiguous consciousness” that partook of the deformities they explored so ably.

 

Voegelinian Readings of Modern Literature expands the application of Voegelin into the disciplines of literature and literary studies and enriches our understanding of certain literary works. However, the volume assumes one is familiar with Voegelin’s philosophy and his principles of literary criticism–which are not pressented here in a systematic fashion (again, if one wants to know more about these matters, one should consult The Philosopher and the Storyteller).²

 

In summary, Voegelinian Readings of Modern Literature provides excellent examples of Voegelinian literary analysis that one hopes will influence those who are fortunate enough to read them.          

Lee Trepanier is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Saginaw Valley State University. His publications include Russian Political Symbols (Lexington Books, 2007), Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition (co-edited with Steven F. McGuire, Missouri Press, 2010), Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Globalization (co-edited with Khalil Habib, Kentucky Press, 2011), and LDS in USA: Mormonism and the Making of American Culture (co-authored with Lynita K. Newswander, Baylor Press, 2012).

 

NOTES