The Philosopher and the Storyteller: Eric Voegelin and Twentieth-Century Literature (The Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy) - Softcover

Embry, Charles R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826221521 ISBN 13: 9780826221520

Verlag: University of Missouri Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Throughout his philosophical career, Eric Voegelin had much to say about literature in both his published work and his private letters. Many of his most trenchant comments regarding the analysis of literature appear in his correspondence with critic Robert Heilman, and, through his familiarity with that exchange, Charles Embry has gained extraordinary insight into Voegelin’s literary views.

The Philosopher and the Storyteller is the first book-length study of the literary dimensions of Voegelin’s philosophy—and the first to use his philosophy to read specific novels. Bringing to bear a thorough familiarity with both Voegelin and great literature, Embry shows that novels—like myths, philosophy, and religious texts—participate in the human search for the truth of existence, and that reading literature within a Voegelinian framework exposes the existential and philosophical dimensions of those works.

Embry focuses on two key elements of Voegelin’s philosophy as important for reading literature: metaxy, the in-between of human consciousness, and metalepsis, human participation in the community of being. He shows how Voegelin’s philosophy in general is rooted in literary-symbolic interpretation and, therefore, provides a foundation for the interpretation of literature. And finally he explores Voegelin’s insistence that the soundness of literary criticism lies in the consciousness of the reader.

Embry then offers Voegelinian readings that vividly illustrate the principles of this approach. First he considers Graham Swift’s Waterland as an example of the human search for meaning in the modern world, then he explores the deformation and recovery of reality in Heimito von Doderer’s long and complex novel The Demons, and finally he examines how Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away mythically expresses the flux of divine presence in what Voegelin calls the Time of the Tale.

The Philosopher and the Storyteller unites fiction and philosophy in the common quest to understand our nature, our world, and our cosmos. A groundbreaking exploration of the connection between Voegelin and twentieth-century literature, this book opens a new window on the philosopher’s thought and will motivate readers to study other novels in light of this approach.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Charles R. Embry is Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University–Commerce. He is the editor of Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin: A Friendship in Letters, 1944–1984 and coeditor of Philosophy, Literature, and Politics: Essays Honoring Ellis Sandoz, both available from the University of Missouri Press.

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The Philosopher and the Storyteller

Eric Voegelin and Twentieth-Century Literature

By Charles R. Embry

University of Missouri Press

Copyright © 2008 The Curators of the University of Missouri
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8262-2152-0

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Abbreviations of Works Cited in the Text, 
Prologue "Composed of Wonders": Literature of the Spirit, 
Part I The Philosopher, 
1. "One of My Permanent Occupations": Eric Voegelin as Literary Critic, 
2. "The Attunement of the Soul": Eric Voegelin's Search of Order, 
3. Writer, Reader, and the Adventure of Participatory Consciousness, 
Part II The Storyteller, 
4. The Barren Quest: Graham Swift's Waterland, 
5. "A Secret between Man and God": Second Reality in Heimito von Doderer's The Demons, 
6. Novel of Divine Presence: Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away, 
Epilogue "Our Love of Life, Children, Our Love of Life", 
Appendix 1. Brief Overview of the Literary Topics, 
Appendix 2. Waterland: Primary Characters and Setting, 
Appendix 3. Waterland: Chronology by Chapter Title, 
Appendix 4. Characters from The Demons Included in Chapter 5, 
Appendix 5. Heimito von Doderer: Biography, with Events from The Demons, 
Glossary, 
Works Cited, 
Index, 
Credits, 

CHAPTER 1

"One of My Permanent Occupations"

Eric Voegelin as Literary Critic

The occupation with works of art, poetry, philosophy, mythical imagination and so forth, makes sense only if it is conducted as an inquiry into the nature of man.

~ ERIC VOEGELIN TO ROBERT B. HEILMAN

There are many reasons for writing a book that relies upon the philosophical work of Eric Voegelin for the interpretation of modern literature. Not the least of these is Voegelin's own understanding of the nature of his work and vocation. In a letter dated December 19, 1955, he wrote to his friend Robert B. Heilman, the English literature scholar and literary critic:

Your letter of Dec. 11th came just in time this morning, for I wanted to write you today anyway to thank you for the delightful review of Critics and Criticism. It had thrown me into a mood of indecision, because your refined politeness left me in doubt whether I should not read the volume, because literary criticism is after all one of my permanent occupations. (AFIL, letter 57, p. 142)

Eric Voegelin considered literary criticism one of his permanent occupations because of the necessity that confronted him as he worked toward the preparation of what he intended as his first major work in English — The History of Political Ideas. In order to command his material, Voegelin began systematically working through the primary texts left by human beings who had themselves searched for, explored, and articulated the nature of their humanity and its order. Confronting these ancient documents led Voegelin to reflect upon how a modern scholar could understand these literary works by penetrating to the experiences that had engendered their articulations in stories, myths, scripture, dialogues, and treatises. While working on the History of Political Ideas in 1952, and still several years before his abandonment of that project and its replacement with Order and History (volume I was published in 1956), he wrote to his friend Heilman, asking him to read (and mark for correction any errors) the "MS of the first chapter of the History of Political Ideas, which [is] supposed to develop the principles of interpretation for the whole subsequent study. The chapter, thus, has a certain importance, both as the first one and as the statement of principles" (letter 37, May 3, 1952, p. 107). Indeed, this manuscript was to become the introduction to the heir of the abandoned History of Political Ideas, namely, Order and History. The reflections contained therein expanded beyond the development of interpretive principles that guided Voegelin's reading of texts into a philosophical search not only for manifestations of order in history but also for the ground of being and the destiny of humanity.

Voegelin's considered observations focusing specifically on literature, literary issues, and literary criticism, and the philosophical issues that flow from these — perhaps nowhere more explicitly expressed than in his correspondence with Heilman — appear in four places in that correspondence:

1. explicit principles of literary criticism expressed in letters 63 (July 24, 1956) and 65 (August 22, 1956) in response to his reading and responding to Magic in the Web, Heilman's book on Othello;

2. brief comments on interpretive method with specific statements on the use of language in imaginative works contained in letter 9 (April 9, 1946) as response to Heilman's Lear MS, later published as This Great Stage;

3. a substantive interpretation of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw found in letter 11 (November 13, 1947), supplemented by more explicit attention to the philosophical dimensions of literary interpretation in his 1971 postscript to the earlier letter, both of which are published in Southern Review;

4. a substantive sketch that focused on literature and myth found in letter 103 (August 13, 1964), which drew Heilman's attention to the symbol "Time of the Tale."

While an examination of the principles of Voegelin's criticism offers an obvious starting point in looking at his work with literature, it must be emphasized before we begin that his philosophy and philosophical work provide the framework within which these principles are embedded. In fact, Heilman recognized this characteristic in Voegelin's work. In his remembrance of Voegelin, first published in the winter 1996 issue of Southern Review, Heilman, while identifying his own form of literary criticism as "psychological" analysis, remarked that Voegelin found in literature "an interplay of philosophical issues and spiritual forces, a clash of symbols rather than a confrontation of psyches."

For a literary critic to be first and foremost a philosopher would appear to be a formidable qualification, but in returning to the Platonic understanding of that term — as Voegelin did — we find that a philosopher need only be a lover of wisdom. This is a very important understanding of the term philosopher, because it places the accent on lover without forcing a definition of wisdom. The philosophical search in which a lover of wisdom engages is fundamentally Socratic, characterized by an essential humility and knowing ignorance, which requires the philosopher to recognize that for human beings there can be no final, complete knowledge of wisdom. A philosopher must remain open to a continual search that builds, nonetheless, on the activities and insights of all individuals so engaged. The philosophical search, however, proceeds from a foundational experiential knowledge, for as Socrates says in his Apology, "to do wrong, and to disobey those who are better than myself, whether god or man, that I know to be bad and disgraceful." The philosopher then can discover and experience the ground of being even though this ground remains rooted in mystery and cognitively impenetrable. For Voegelin, as we will see, it is the human lot to exist in the metaxy, the In-Between, and to participate in reality with the "body, soul, intellect, and spirit."

Since Voegelin's philosophy of consciousness occupies center stage in his work,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Missouri Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0826221521
• ISBN 13: 9780826221520
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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