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.