Embodiment
a look ahead to writing by Vladimir Soloukhin, Abigail Favale, J A Baker and others
To be Christian is to regard oneself in relation to the cosmos and the cosmos in relation to God. –– Abigail Favale
This letter began as a brief note about what’s to come, which I was going to amplify with a personal anecdote about my commute to work and its effect on my presence in the classroom. But somehow these initial comments on several writers have sprawled into an essay of their own. So I will send the complementary and anecdotal essay on embodiment separately in a few days.
First things first: I must apologize for the delay in posting this follow-up to my very long initial essay. That first letter went out at Christmas, and here it is nearing Lent. This year got off to a busier and more hectic start than I had anticipated. It may yet be some weeks before I can begin writing here with the regularity and focus I intend. But I can say that the scope and purpose of this project has become clearer to me than when I wrote at Christmas, and so I thought I would adumbrate what will be one of my main themes by talking about some of the writing I foresee. I’m not absolutely certain I’ll take up all these essays, but they seem promising leads at present.
The next essay on a literary work will have to do mainly with a remarkable book by the Russian author Vladimir Soloukhin (1924 - 1997), called Searching for Icons in Russia. (I’m waiting on two more books by Soloukhin to arrive in the mail, and hope to address those in the essay too.) Searching for Icons in Russia, written in a deceptively casual style, documents the author’s quest (his word) to collect, restore and learn about that hallmark of Eastern Christianity, holy icons. In officially and militantly atheist Soviet Russia, Soloukhin must present himself in his authorial persona as an unbeliever (or at least as agnostic and uncommitted), a collector whose passion is no more than a quirk of curiosity. But a poignant subtext in the book belies that attitude and reveals Soloukhin’s seemingly idle rambles around his native province to be an elegy for a ruined nation whose traditions have been torn away from it.
Soloukhin, I gather, was part of something called the Village Prose movement in Soviet Russia. I hope to learn more about such writing when his other volumes arrive. As far as I can tell, writers of the Village Prose movement celebrated and advocated for traditional agriculture, environmental preservation, and rural culture in general, including its religious and spiritual traditions and sense of place. To me they sound a little comparable to the Southern Agrarians in the US (including John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren et al), but the Village Prose movement would have been a generation later. And it arose in a collectivized, mechanized, systematically anti-religious autocracy. In any case, I’m particularly interested in the questing aspect of Searching for Icons in Russia, because I believe it makes the book a fantasy or romance—terms which for me bespeak the highest metaphysical ambitions of literary art.
I’m also interested in the art and theology of iconography. Years ago I read the Russian philosopher (and martyr) Pavel Florensky’s Iconostasis and Paul Evdokimov’s The Art of the Icon, and I found both books entrancing. For Western Christians, icons aren’t traditionally as central to religious thought and practice. But I have a number of icons in my home, and in the essay on Soloukhin’s work I want to think also about what iconography tells us about embodiment. In the palimpsest of crises we face, I’ve come to see questions of embodiment as the most urgent. I often write the idea as incarnation, but I like to occasionally resort to the Germanic term, because our word body comes from the same Proto-Indo-European root that in Sanskrit and Pali produced bodhi and buddha. Embodiment is the way of awakening to the real. But in an explicitly Christian context one would speak of an incarnational poetics.
(Etymological aside: I have no problem with the Latinate incarnation. Latin caro, like the Greek sarx which gives Greek one of its terms for the Incarnation, means flesh. And flesh means meat, the bloody stuff a butcher cleaves from the bone and that the surgeon cuts open and stitches back together. Latin and Greek have other words better translated as body, such as corpus and soma; and they possess plenty of other words and phrases to speak of the Incarnation when a different aspect of that event is emphasized. So the terms incarnation or sarkosis represent a choice to emphasize the most vulnerable, mortal elements of human nature.)
But what precisely is embodied in human beings or anything else, and whether it is a seamless or a more disjointed embodiment, is debatable—and it is a debate of some urgency. I feel it’s important to speak of embodiment rather than the academic notion of the bodily, because embodiment implies that we (or anything else with a body) are not only bodily. There is that which is not the body, is not even emergent from the body, but is united to the body. The contemporary academic discourse that speaks of the bodily and talks about bodies as synecdoche for human beings, dooms itself to objectifying the human being and treating the body as something less than fully real, something that is (or ought to be) manipulable and subject to our every whim and will. But that is not the body. The body is given: better yet, it is a gift, no matter how corrupt or broken or, to use the old religious term, fallen. Somehow, though, it is very hard to see this unless one understands there to be also that which is embodied—the spirit, soul, mind, heart. Many of us claim to believe in such a reality, but do we really? Can we, individually, if the culture at large denies it?
An analogy obtains in regard to the natural world. I first noticed this phenomenon (if I may call it that) more than fifteen years ago, when I was a very young (and firmly atheist and materialist) doctoral student working on ecology and environmental issues in literature. What I noticed was that the harder one tried to focus on the material/natural/physical world and bracket whatever transcends that world (if not denying it outright), the harder it became to justify caring about preserving and tending the natural world. What morality can come from thoroughgoing materialism? Another way to put it: whatever is not created is not creature, and whatever is not creature is—whether we wish to admit it or not—dead matter for us to do with as we please. And what we please to do, if we are formed only by the implicit materialism of contemporary Western Civ, is to appease the appetites, however much we may gussy up those appetites with the rhetoric of self-help and even the lofty language of rights and virtues. It was my intellectual pursuit of environmentalism and what in literary studies came to be called ecocriticism that led me to serious metaphysical thought.
One thing I will say now and often about a kind of literature—the allegorical or symbolical kind—which often does not seem primarily concerned with the creation or natural world, is that questing, which is intrinsic to allegory and its heart and soul, is predicated on embodied life in a geographical, vital cosmos. This is true no matter how much the quest may seem purely an allegory for something intellectual or spiritual. Maybe I also need to point out an often overlooked point in literary history—though this will require much fuller statement elsewhere—that the allegorical modes of writing, which evolved through the Middle Ages, are the forebears of what we now call genre fiction. Fantasy and scifi, romance, mystery, horror—basically all the fiction that actually sells, that people crave to read—these are called “genre” (i.e. generic) because they are supposed to be formulaic. When the modern critic calls a literary story formulaic, he is really recognizing the old patterns of allegory. But because the modern proceeds from a purely immanentist, materialist worldview (this is more a matter of the background radiation, so to speak, of a civilization, and not individual personal conviction), he does not know what he is seeing. And often the writer of such fiction does not know that he is writing in an inherited form which evolved to contain the stories of a civilization that was, to its core, focused on the transcendent.
But let me turn right around and put in a word for this immanent existence of ours. My main point here, which arises from my concern about embodiment and the nature of living in what Christians call a sacramental cosmos, is that the quest of romance or fantasy or even travel literature is not only an allegory of spiritual drama which, if we could, we would depict directly; it is not philosophy dressing seductively in the pretty images of poetry (though that is how it was justified—to the philistines and moralists we will always have with us—by the generations of artists that habitually composed in allegorical and symbolical modes). No, if it is good art, the allegorical or symbolical art of fantasy and its adjacent genres is just as much about the creation the quest moves through as it is about what the quest represents, precisely because that creation, as a whole and in each particular, embodies something—the divine gift of being.
Perhaps the creation or the cosmos—which we perceive creature by creature and place by place, each with its irreducible haecceitas or ‘thisness’—embodies the divine fiat in a way analogous to how a literary or other artistic work embodies idea. In any case, both sides of an allegory or a symbol, that to which it refers and that which is doing the referring (i.e. that which manifests to our senses and imagination), are equally real and necessary and beautiful. The end game is not to arrive at the far side of the allegory or symbol and rest there, finally content. If we ever arrive beyond our symbols and allegories we may expect to discover greater symbols and allegories. This, I take it, is the upshot of Gregory of Nyssa’s doctrine of epektasis, about which perhaps more later. But metaphysics aside, there is an earthly analogue of the transcendent or eschatological proliferation of symbol, sacrament, mystery, fantasy, allegory, etc: the fact that even in this given, teeming world the end of every quest or story is the beginning of another.
I will continue this line of thought also in the essay to come after the one on Soloukhin’s search for holy icons. There, I want to look at a passage from one of Thoreau’s books, now published as The Maine Woods, that has haunted me for years, ever since I tried to teach it to some bewildered undergraduates at the University of Chicago. The passage has so intrigued and troubled me that I snuck it into my novel which Slant Books will publish in the spring or early summer. Thoreau, like many before him going back at least to Moses on Sinai, went up a mountain and had an epiphany—or you could say he suffered a kind of apocalypse of the body. I say suffered because it is a shocking and disturbing exclamation he writes, by no means purely validating and very far from calm. In fact, the scene which I’ll be looking at reminds me of nothing so much as the Transfiguration of Jesus on Mount Tabor.
I’ll bring in that biblical episode, but I also want to compare Thoreau’s experience on top of Katahdin in Maine to the experience of another New England man on top of a mountain, albeit not one in the northeast. I’m thinking of Jack Kerouac on Desolation Peak in Washington state. Kerouac’s time atop Desolation as a fire lookout, chronicled in Desolation Angels (1957), was a crisis of solitude and memory, and the beginning of his move away from Eastern thought and back to the mysticism of his ancestral Catholicism.
Beyond the essays on Soloukhin and Thoreau (with Kerouac), I’m less certain about the order of writing, because I’m planning to write about a couple of books yet to be published, and I don’t know if or when I’ll get my hands on advanced review copies. One of the books I’m looking forward to is Eugene Vodolazkin’s latest novel, Brisbane. Vodolazkin is one of the most skilled and important writers working today from a specific metaphysical and religious commitment. He’s also one of the most scholarly of contemporary fiction writers. His field is medieval Russian literature. This is worth noting simply because few creative writers have a strong scholarly formation, let alone expertise in a historical period whose culture was so different from our own.
(Geopolitical aside: As I type this, a war between Russia and Ukraine seems imminent. I deplore this, and my writing on Russian authors or on Russian religion and culture should not be construed as approval for the actions of the current Russian government. I am not a proponent of the continuing expansion of NATO and hegemonic Western civilization; neither am I proponent of aggression and wars of choice anywhere in the world.)
Right understanding of embodiment is essential to the re-enchantment of the cosmos through literature ad the other arts. But it is impossible without right understanding of sex and gender. So I am looking forward to reading Abigail Favale’s forthcoming book, The Genesis of Gender. Favale is a Catholic Christian who converted as an adult (I highly recommend her memoir about her conversion) after having come up through secular academia. Last September she gave a talk at Hope College that serves as an accessible presentation of her new book’s thesis. The epigraph to this letter is quoted from that talk. I value that sentence as a condensed statement of the paradigm (the Genesis Paradigm, she calls it, as distinct from the modern Gender Paradigm) which is able, by means of a right understanding of sexually dimorphic human embodiment, to elaborate a true cosmos, one that is creature and gift.
There is a deep connection between these things, embodiment and sex on the one hand, and the imagination of a created, living cosmos on the other. Hopefully Favale’s book will, so to speak, flesh out that connection. For now I can only commend to you her presentation of it in nuce. There are in fact several moments in her talk where she condenses her thought in clear principles. She also, for example, says, “I cannot truly honor creation if I do not honor my own body.” This strikes me as an effective contemporary way of speaking, the kind of language that people can hear. Anyway, her talk is worth a listen if you feel that the current confusion and agony over sex and gender that only seems to spread and worsen is among the chief stumbling blocks to recovering an enchanted creation, or cosmos, in the arts and in lived experience. (Do listen to the Q&A as well. Favale is erudite, articulate and committed throughout, but especially so, I thought, in responding to questions from the undergraduate audience.)
A remarkable book by a young scholar, Ethan D Smith, just published by Cherubim Press, is helping me to radically rethink the apophatic—that is, saying the unsayable, approaching and paradoxically transcending the limits of language in language, as well as in other arts and in worship. For years I’ve felt pulled to writers or to certain books, certain moments in books, where I feel the art of writing reaches its limits. I think of this as the apophatic frontier: the point beyond which even negation and the most profound figurative language cannot proceed. A l'alta fantasia qui mancò possa—Here the force of high fantasy failed. So Dante writes at the end of his Commedia.
I’ve watched for such moments, kept watch on this frontier you could say, in some contemporary writers, e.g.: Gerald Murnane, Jon Fosse, Karl Ove Knausgaard. (Thoreau in his epiphany on Katahdin arrives at the apophatic frontier, and arguably Soloukhin does as well, pursuing and gazing on the holy icon.) The limits of language… A point worth making is that to imagine language has limits is implicitly to believe in reality as something more than that which can be constructed by language—human language, at any rate. Because the writers I’ve mentioned grapple consciously with the limits of the art, you could say they are a kind of “post-postmodern,” they assent to some objective reality of which humankind is not the measure but which may be accessed precisely through limitation, or in other words, form. They are religious, whether or not they would pick that word.
But I have been frustrated with my thinking about the apophatic frontier. Thanks to Smith’s book (and no doubt a variety of other factors), I think I see what I’ve been missing: the return, on the far side of the apophatic frontier, to the world of cataphasis or affirmative statement: the story begins anew, the liturgy is repeated, the same again yet different. It is a return to and glorification of the world of embodiment. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. At our extreme flight from the earthly, we are back upon the earth, though it is transfigured. And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away…
I think sometimes of Thomas Aquinas and his encounter with the limits of language. A greater exponent of cataphasis, conceived as the capacity of human language to articulate being at least to some degree, would be hard to name. But he is said to have undergone a mystical experience and afterwards to have told his secretary, who was pleading with him to complete his great work: non possum quia omnia quae scripsi videntur mihi palae respectu eorum quae vidi et revelata sunt mihi. That is: I cannot, for all that I have written appears to me straw compared to what I’ve seen and what has been revealed to me. But there is a strange thing about people who say things like this: they tend to go on writing anyhow. The great medieval saint was no exception. It is reported that on his deathbed he was dictating a commentary on the Song of Songs, perhaps the most erotic, earthy, and embodied of all the books in the Bible (with the exception of the Gospels, I would argue). That incomplete commentary is lost; some clever writer ought to update and finish it for us.
If I take up Ethan D Smith’s book on apophaticism and negative theology it will be in connection with Jon Fosse’s recently completed seven-part novel Septology (published in three volumes, of which the last will appear presently in the US edition). I finished Septology (in the UK edition) back in the autumn, but have been unable to come to terms with the book until now. It is written in stream-of-consciousness, which is technically not narration, and gives us the entire life of a Norwegian man who seems to be a lot like the author, except that he is a painter rather than a writer, and childless rather than father to six children. But the novel presents a whole life through the protagonist’s final days, during which time he is overwhelmed by recollection. Another work of fiction, epic in scope, by a modern Norwegian Catholic with which I ought to compare Septology is Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter. It is a very different kind of novel, a great achievement of historical fiction, written just as Undset was converting (Fosse’s giant novel was written not long after his conversion). Kristin Lavransdatter is probably too large for me to work with right now, though I may draw on some shorter essays by Undset (in her book Men, Women, Places), because I think she grasped the biographical nature of quest. Anyway, Septology is a very beautiful book, yet I felt it went astray somehow, that is was too influenced by an Eckhartian mysticism. Or it might be better to say I felt that mystical impulse was at odds with the actual imagery and style of the writing. But Smith’s book is helping me see what exactly went wrong if anything went wrong in Fosse’s novel, or whether in fact the book succeeded in a way I did not at first appreciate.
Beyond these essays—on Soloukhin and iconography, Thoreau and Kerouac, Favale, Vodolazkin, Fosse (and maybe Undset)—I am not sure exactly where this project will go. Quite possibly I will spend the summer immersed in the work of the obscure but genius fantasist R A Lafferty (1914 - 2002). At any rate I spent a considerable portion of my last paycheck on his books and an extended meditation on them will be a major component of my current book project. I also spent an absurd amount of money to obtain David Jones’ unpublished poetry, The Grail Mass, since the project of Romance and Apocalypse, when it finally gets in book form (possibly under a different title), will also have to do a good deal with the Matter of Britain and related literary traditions. This is one way to give one’s book a clear structure: bury your treasure in it.
On the topic of mythopoetic Britain, there is one more author I can mention now as a probable subject of writing in the near future, and that is J A Baker. If you’ve already heard of him he needs no introduction, and if you haven’t heard of him, well… he’s hard to describe. You will have to wait for the essay, which I may insert after the installment on Vladimir Soloukin. J A Baker wrote a piece of nature writing in the 1960s which is always described as a cult classic: The Peregrine. If it is a cultic book then I shall undertake to explain just what its cultus is—bearing in mind that that word means worship. Baker was not religious in the formal sense, not that I know of anyway, but The Peregrine is one of the most religious and prayerful books I’ve read. It is also one of the most stylistically wrought. Everyone talks about how Baker seems to become, in his book, the hawks he watches, but that is not my experience of the book at all. I would say Baker becomes his language. And that language is above all figurative and allusive, more densely so than almost any other text I’ve read. It is language replete with the phenomena and creatures of this world, both what is really there before Baker in the English countryside, and what is not. The hardest thing of all to see, Baker writes, is what is really there. But I think he saw a little of what is really there. I will try to show how he managed to get down in language what he saw.
By way of coda, a note about the header image: That is a photo of Saint Thomas the Apostle I took last autumn. I mentioned the church in the introductory letter, “Changing a Diaper in Snowy Woods.” Thomas the Apostle is the patron saint of India: his evangelizing quest took him there. He ought to be the patron saint of embodiment, too, since he could not believe the Resurrection until he stuck his hand in Jesus’ wounds. I’ve shared the photo here because it’s rather cosmic, or at least solar. What does the cosmos embody? Or, remembering that the Latin word here means oath, whose sacrament is the cosmos?
This looks like a huge project. A lot here to digest.
This line stands out for me, though:
The hardest thing of all to see, Baker writes, is what is really there.
I just bought Centuries by Thomas Traherne. I am at the beginning, but Traherne appears to be saying the same thing. Is there a throughline between the two? I would guess there is.
Hi, Jonathan,
A fascinating project . . . I think there is a kind of rhythmic, musical progress involved in epektasis. The apophatic reaches out beyond the image or perhaps touches upon an aniconic root that then gives birth to new images. Fosse's work lacked that sense of continuing adventure -- and there was something in the desire to renounce memory, the artistic work as a nullification, that is too much purely a disincarnation. The questing symbolic joy is missing. Anyway, it will be rewarding to see how you grapple with all this. I love that David Jones book . . . You should read Peguy's essays, too, btw. You'll see in the ms I sent you just how congenial all these thoughts are to my own mode of thinking.