Reclaiming the Self: Chapter 6

What Is To Come?

I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's--William Blake

I feel that I must emphasize that this is not a work of specifically religion- or myth-based criticism. Throughout, I have relied on the work of scholars who are, or have been, associated with the study of myth and religion. This essay has also dealt with literature which is often richly woven with religious and mythological themes; however, as I emphasized in the opening chapter, this is because it is my view that literature and "the sacred" are inseparably linked:

Poetry keeps human beings open to the invisible, the hidden, the infinite unknown, always on the threshold of what is to come; at this point, which is both in time and outside time, poetry becomes a bridge joining what a man was, what he is here and now, and what he will be tomorrow in an all-inclusive movement which goes beyond the mechanical, blind indifference of technical progress and embraces the changing unknown. (Said 97)

This essay is in no way intended to be a kind of critical magnum opus in which the final, absolute Truth of criticism is presented; it is, rather, the attempt of a reader/writer who wishes, following Meister Eckhart, to "for literature's sake, take leave of literature," or, perhaps more accurately, to "for criticism's sake, take leave of criticism." I am at this point working my way, hand over hand, to some fixed-or possibly shifting-point of reference whose character and location I do not yet know. I only know that I will find it-or make it.

I chose the works I have discussed in this essay for two reasons: I wanted to look at literature from vastly different times and cultures so as to avoid-or minimize-charges of ethnocentrism, and to give the developing idea of transcendence as a literary paradigm a varied diet on which to cut its teeth; I also wanted-quite frankly-to try out the idea with works that seemed to me to lend themselves in some way to this perspective, works in which transcendence of one kind or another already seemed to play a part. Both the Bhagavad Gita and Faust stress a transcendent connection with that which is divine as the path which leads each of us beyond a state of fragmentation and isolation. The Gita emphasizes the path of bhakti devotion-reverence for, and participation in, the work and the very being of the divine. Faust emphasizes the interdependence of male and female, of Life and its individual manifestations, and the necessity for the joining of these two principles in order to reach the transcendent state of wholeness which is beyond the fragmentation of human life in the realm of the principium individuationis. Troilus and Crysede emphasizes love-embodied human love in this world-as a path to the same end.

Wise Blood, the work which stands out from the rest, emphasizing the violence of transcendence rather than the love, is for me perhaps the most challenging of the four works I have considered in this essay. I include it because it fits, but does not fit neatly; I do not want to appear to be making a case that the notion of transcendence is easy, that it is a mawkish prescription for one-size-fits-all literary sentimentality. Fragmentation is a kind of agony; the attempt to transcend that agony, like God's mercy in O'Connor's writing, burns. Hazel Motes, in some ways a perfect postmodern figure (especially in his strenuous-yet unconvincing-refusal of the "grand narrative" of a transcendent vision), brings this essay full circle. His self-inflicted blindness allows him to see-or at least to search-for the "wild ragged figure" of the divine, while Arjuna's receiving, from Krishna, of "divine eyes, " or "spiritual vision" (XI.8), is what allows him to see Krishna in his true, transcendent state. For highly self-conscious postmoderns, transcendence is no longer a gift from a god who supports and maintains all things; for us, transcendence is found only after a long and painful search, and sometimes we are damaged-blinded?-by the search itself. Like Hazel Motes, we may not find what we expected to find, if indeed we find anything at all, but the search itself is what is necessary.

The ideas of fragmentation and transcendence are already present in the works themselves; my project in this essay has been to trace the manifestations of these ideas. I can easily see this approach coming under accusations of being old-fashioned, even Arnoldian, an endeavor which has pretensions to "see[ing] the object as in itself it really is" (Arnold 583). I am also sure that, in this age of overtly political criticism, my effort to "for criticism's sake, take leave of criticism" may be accused of being political in its attempt to be apolitical, an attempt which is often characterized as right-wing, reactionary, patriarchal, and hegemonic.

I do favor a certain Arnoldian "disinterestedness" as an approach to criticism. The argument is frequently made that it is not possible to be "objective" in one's critical or pedagogical practice, and that the attempt to be "objective" is itself a political move which privileges the status quo of "modern heterosexual capitalist patriarchy" (Sedgewick 84). While it is true that there is no Archimedean point from which we can, outside of our personal and cultural biases, view any work of art purely as it is in itself, I don't see how this justifies a move toward a radically subjective criticism which deliberately subordinates the work of art to set of political principles. But I am not without my own presuppositions, my own assumptions, my own critical lenses. I regard art as both a set of objects and as an activity that, if given the opportunity, raises us out of ourselves for tantalizingly brief, yet intensely felt and long-remembered moments. Art reminds us that we are somehow part of something greater than ourselves-even if that something is illusory and mythical. Art is the concrete expression of the myths which we must have in order to continue with our fragmented existence. Art is of necessity an expression of the transcendent-even so-called "realist" art raises the viewer/reader/hearer out of his or her narrow and individual frame of reference, providing-for a brief moment-contact with that which is Other. Art may not do something so simple as merely "hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature" (Hamlet III.ii.22), but it does go "back, after all, to that wisdom found in nature . . . not a wisdom built up of theorems but one totality, not a wisdom consisting of manifold detail coordinated into a unity but rather a unity working out into detail" (Plotinus 109). Art, as Colin Falck writes in his Myth, Truth, and Literature: Towards a True Postmodernism, "inscribes reality"; art "gives us an immediate presence or presentation of ontological meaning. It reveals in a more concentrated or intense way what ordinary life reveals in its expressive aspects" (122).

That "ordinary life" is in itself transcendent, or at least it is potentially transcendent. Our potential for transcendence lies in our possibility for connection-as fragmented, theoretically battered "subjects"-with that which is Other. This connection necessarily involves leaving the reifying discourse of "I" and "it," and entering into a discourse of "I" and "thou." In an era of critical monologues which seem to rely on a strategy of reification, this project of connection seems to be one whose prerequisites we have forgotten, and remembering those prerequisites is precisely the "great" message of our literature(s). This is what the Cloud tells the virgin, youngest daughter of the Seraphim, in Blake's The Book of Thel: "Every thing that lives, / Lives not alone nor for itself" (II. 26,27). This is the message of Krishna to Arjuna: "I am the true Self in the heart of every creature, Arjuna, and the beginning, middle, and end of existence" (X.20, Easwaran 143). This transcendent potential is present in the implicit unity of micro- and macrocosms expressed in Emily Dickinson's lines:

The brain is wider than the sky,

For, put them side by side,

The one the other will include

With ease and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,

For, hold them, blue to blue,

The one the other will absorb,

As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,

For, lift them, pound for pound,

And they will differ, if they do,

As syllable from sound.

This potential is also expressed in Blake's "Auguries of Innocence":

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

In "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," Blake phrases it this way: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite." These are unfashionable ideas in an era dominated by Foucaultian talk of "an analytic of finitude and human existence" (The Order of Things, 317).

As a reader and as a critic, I prefer the Romantics to the Moderns and Postmoderns. The German Romantics-Schopenhauer, Schelling, Lessing, and Goethe-have a view of art as somehow salvific, and that appeals to me in a way that the current obsessions with language- and politics-based criticisms never will. My preferences in criticism reflect a simple and somewhat irrational need to feel in awe of something. The complete post-Vietnam, post-Prague Spring, post-Watergate, poststructuralist deconstruction, demystification, demythologization, and desacralization of art and criticism leaves me feeling cold and sad. This cynic needs needs his heroes, his altars, and his idealism, and only now, when such things are "naive," "outmoded," and "logocentric," does he realize that need. That need is why I started reading "literature" in the first place, and that need is-in part-what keeps me slogging through the arid sands of poststructuralist "discourse," with its dry and stinging signifiers and signifieds, its talk of phallocentrism and binary oppositions. I read because I lack . . . something.

I think interpreting a work from Feminist, New Historicist, Post-Colonialist, and Marxist perspectives is valid. The problem lies in claims that a certain perspective invalidates others, privileging one position as the only valid position from which to look at art. This kind of privileging is inherent in such labels as poststructuralist, postmodernist, and frankly, feminist. Is it any longer "permissible" to be a structuralist, or a modernist? Is there any such thing as a masculist criticism? If there were, would it have a place at the academy's table? I am inclined toward a position which holds that there are critiques which are more and less helpful, useful, or illuminating. That criticism which helps me see a work in ways I might not have seen it on my own is, for me, preferable to criticism(s) which seem(s) to use the art rather than contemplate the art. Perhaps it is not so much the method as the user of the method; any critical perspective-as far as I can tell-can be used as a way into the art, a way of contemplating the work. Criticism can be used-and is often used-in such a way that its primary illumination and contemplation is of itself: this is where, in my opinion, criticism borders on being solipsistic, onanistic, and "invalid."

Ultimately, my critical perspective springs from my early experiences with literature. Books-and their characters-captured me. The first book I remember being captured by was the Bible: the second book was the Odyssey. For a nine-year-old boy, the characters and adventures in these books were a kind of narcotic: I daydreamed during math lessons about encounters between Odysseus and Satan, Jesus and Polyphemus, Captain Kirk and the Nephilim (OK, so I tended to get my larger-than-life characters confused. I was nine-what do you want from me?). I love books. I love reading. I come from a working-class family in which reading-at best-meant reading the Bible and school textbooks; my mother-a recent Jehovah's Witness convert-proscribed fiction. My mother's idea of wholesome-if "worldly"-reading material was the issue of Good Housekeeping she picked up weekly at the grocery check-out line. My father's idea of reading material was the collection of old issues of Popular Mechanics in the bathroom magazine rack. Reading was either a way to create and/or reinforce a desired worldview through the use of theological, political, and moral messages (in this way my family's approach to reading was much like that of current politically-centered criticism), or it was a nice way to while away the time spent waiting for peristalsis to work its magic (somehow I don't think this is what Aristotle had in mind when he wrote of purgation of fear and pity). I snuck books into the house before I was old enough to even begin thinking about sneaking in old issues of Playboy my friend Patrick would later steal from his father's collection. Reading fiction, simply for the pleasure of reading-because it had for me the flavor of forbidden fruit-excited me intellectually. Those larger-than-life characters gave me a vicarious feeling of intensity-as if I were more real when in contact with them than I was otherwise.

At about thirteen I discovered Arthur, in T.H. White's The Once and Future King; not long after that, I discovered Paradise Lost. Milton's Satan still gives me the delicious, dark, and forbidden thrill of my first reading each time I encounter him. At thirty-one, there is yet much of the nine-year-old in me, daydreaming of characters writ large: Heathcliff, Tom Jones, Hamlet, Manfred, Prometheus, Rosalind, Alisoun, Ahab, Haze Motes, and Yossarian . . . and more . . . and more still.

Why am I telling you this? Why should you care? The best response I can give to those questions is to say that this is how I came to knock on academe's door in the first place. When I finally realized-at twenty-six-that not only was there a place in which students could read books full-time, but that this place would take me, a factory worker with a high-school diploma and a library card, I thought I had found Utopia. However, I did not, at the time, realize the political complexities and struggles of the arena which I was about to enter. Now, I realize that I am a belated contributor to the debates over the canon, arguments over what-if anything, should be read and why.

I'm all for opening up the canon. Great, let's do it-the more books, the merrier. I just have a couple of questions before I roll up my sleeves and join in. What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Yes, I've heard the usual explanations: the hegemony of Dead White Males; the privileging of a male-normative view of the cosmos and of human experience within that cosmos; and the imposition of a Eurocentric, capitalist, colonialist perspective as the single perspective in literary study all need to be "put into question." OK. That answers the "what." I'm still a little confused about the "why," however. Why must those of us who love reading so much that we have chosen to center our lives around it seek-through our reading-to change the world? If I disagree with the hegemony developing inside academia itself does that mean that I must take my library card and go home? As a product of an era and an environment which claims to value dialogue over monologue, multivocalism over univocalism, and heterogony over homogony, I understand the desire for change; I understand the desire-no, the necessity-to try harder to bring every one of us to the table, to demand that inequities end and to set about ending them. I cannot accept, however, an organic and inevitable connection between that goal and the world-changing agendas (based on certain reading lists) which claim to be steps toward that goal's realization. Can such a connection be made? Obviously yes, since it is being made now. Need such a connection be made? I submit that it need not.

Given these assumptions, what more remains to be done with the ideas presented in this essay? Can the idea of fragmentation as not new, as a given of our lives, and the idea of the urge to transcendence as an urge to the overcoming of that fragmentation be used helpfully as a way of looking at literature in general? If this is eventually to be a comprehensive criticism, a lens useful for more than texts which have a strong metaphysical component, then I must grapple with texts that do not seem to immediately lend themselves to this approach. This will help test whether I am living up to, or betraying, my own earlier rhetoric about contemplating and using art. I certainly would not be the first to become so fascinated with a shiny intellectual toy that he neglected to remember that there are other views, other perspectives, other criticisms than his own, and that these are not somehow defective, false, bourgeois, or generally evil.

First, however, comes the necessity for more thought, more reading, and more study-an ongoing process of trying to transcend my own fragmentations: the fragmented state of my knowledge, and my relationships both to the world of academe and the larger domain of literature. My reading and my writing are the "fragments I have shored against my ruins." Together they help me work toward the transcending of my own fragmentation, a project whose demands I must meet anew each day, each hour, each moment, for whatever remains of my life.

Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Works Cited List