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).

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