Cached Sunday, June 13, 2010, from
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Analyzing the literary image
Book review by Aaron Urbanczyk from Modern Age, Sept.
22, 2005
Christ and Apollo, by
William Lynch, S.J., Wilmington, Del.: ISI
Books, 2004. 275 pp.
CHRIST AND APOLLO IS A provocative theoretical treatise on literary
criticism boldly enlisting perennial Catholic theology and philosophy.
It first appeared in 1960, but literary scholars stand in far greater
need of its argument now than at the time of its original publication.
A cursory reader may find the book a philosophical and theological
treatise merely enlisting imaginative literature as a springboard for
lofty speculation, as if literature was merely philosophy and theology
for beginners. Presuming so would be to misunderstand Father William
Lynch's enterprise, however. The book is first and foremost a work
of literary theory and criticism; analyzing the literary image is
Christ
and Apollo's primary task. Literature is, above all, the making of
images through language, and Father Lynch approaches the literary image
from the perspective of a robustly theistic metaphysical realism.
The very fact that this book's theoretical groundings flatly
contradict the predictable relativism and rhetoric of postmodernism
makes its reappearance both timely and challenging. Indeed, Christ and
Apollo rightly insists that the literary image is born of finite,
concrete, creaturely, and limited being, and any aesthetic theory
attempting to bypass a firm metaphysical account of the real (as
understood by metaphysics and theology) ultimately fails to account for
what literature is.
Lynch evokes the figures of Christ and Apollo as
representing two
diametrically opposed poles of the human imagination vis-a-vis the
terrain of the real. He argues that "literary insight comes from
the penetration of the finite and the definite concrete in all its
interior dimensions and according to all its real lines." Thus,
Apollo represents "a sort of infinite dream ... [and a] fantasy
beauty," while Christ stands for "the completely definite ...
who, in taking on our human nature ... took on every inch of it ... in
all its density." Literature is thus broadly divided into two
categories: Apollonian poetics infused with romantic escapist dreams
indicative of hatred for real being, and the "narrow way" of
Christic poetics, imagining man in his finite, creaturely mortality
where salvation lies within time (not beyond it).
Christ and Apollo begins with grounding its literary theory in the
definite (over the ideal or romantic) and proceeds to a thematic
discussion of literary representations of time, tragedy as genre, and
comedy as genre. Father Lynch chastises Proust, Eugene O'Neill,
Baudelaire, and Poe for indulging the Apollonian imagination while
praising Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Cervantes for their
fidelity to the definite. Yet the theoretical center of Christ and
Apollo comes in the text's second half (chapters 5-8), where Father
Lynch enlists the metaphysical doctrine of analogy, the traditional
four-fold method of biblical exegesis, and Christology (the theology of
the person of Christ) as paradigms for exploring the ontological
dimensions of the literary imagination.
Drawing heavily from Parmenides and Plato, Lynch introduces the
reader to the metaphysical categories of the "univocal," the
"equivocal," and the "analogical," arguing that
these metaphysical categories have analogues in the realm of the
literary image. After critiquing the "univocal" and
"equivocal" modes of literary imagination as insufficient for
representing reality, Lynch discusses the importance and the veracity
of
the "analogical" imagination. Thus, the central dialectical
paradigm of one of metaphysics' thorniest problems (the one versus
the many) becomes a template for analyzing literature.
The authentic literary image may be properly termed analogical when
it mirrors and represents the complex tension in real being between the
ideal and the finite. The analogical imagination images the world as an
interpenetration between the finite particular and the ideal essence
(Father Lynch's analysis owes much to the Platonic notion of
participation). Thus, the literary imagination's highest
achievements do not celebrate the finite at the expense of the ideal
(as
does the equivocal imagination), and neither do they leap straight to
the ideal in a spirit of contempt for the finite (as does the univocal
imagination). Lynch's use of analogy vis-a-vis literature provides,
in a sense, a philosophical basis to the theoretical paradox
popularized
by W. K. Wimsatt (1907-1975), which contends that literature is a sort
of "concrete universal."
Yet Father Lynch goes further than metaphysics, discovering in
Christology the ultimate paradigm by which to analyze the analogical
imagination. In Christ, true God and true man, the locus of the
hypostases of divine and human natures, he finds the perfect metaphor
for the analogical image. In Christ, the infinite God dwells with and
penetrates the particular without destroying or diminishing it. Christ
and Apollo is at its most provocative and daring when Father Lynch
concludes that the very fact of Christ's incarnation, the fusing of
the divine with the created, offers the only stable point from which to
explicate the inherent tension within all literary images (the tension
to be both immanently concrete and universally intelligible). The
"Christic imagination" is not an imposition of Christian
ideology upon poetic narrative; rather, it is an interior principle by
which one can view the very telos of the created universe.
Father Lynch argues that the "Christic" perspective is
already inherent in reality itself and naturally illuminates it from
within: "I am not ... arguing that Christic materials have to get
into our arts in any formal way; but they are there for all that ...
they begin to push the details of creation even further into our
faces." Literature imitates real being, and thus Christ, author and
redeemer of the real, stands as an ordering metaphorical principle for
the imagination's approximation of the world: "For Christ ...
is not another item of the first creation, to be used as any other item
by the old imagination.... [H]e has subverted the whole order of the
old
imagination.... [H]e illuminates it, and is a new level, identical in
structure with, but higher in energy than, every form or possibility of
the old."
If Christ and Apollo has any flaws, they are those of an innovative
foray into new theoretical terrain. Father Lynch understood his book to
be an "essay," a beginning at a great and daunting
intellectual task which others could carry on after him. In this
spirit,
he leaves many provocative openings underdeveloped. For example, as
much
as Father Lynch relies upon the "equivocal imagination" as one
pole of his central dialectic, he devotes little attention to analyzing
it substantively, preferring to emphasize the contrast between the
"univocal" and "analogical" imaginations. Also, it
is not clear why he fails to complement his excellent treatment of
comedy and tragedy with a discussion of the epic or lyric genres.
Further, it is odd that Lynch, who rightly asserts that "action is
the soul of literary imagination in all its scopes and forms,"
would so largely neglect Aristotle's Poetics, especially as
Aristotle argues literary imitation (mimesis) is precisely and
primarily
ordered toward human action. Father Lynch's assertion that the
"Christic imagination" may be fruitfully explored through a
renaissance of interest in the patristic and medieval fourfold method
of
biblical exegesis (literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogical)
stands in great need of theoretical testing and development. Christ and
Apollo prominently evokes such biblical exegetes as Augustine, John
Cassian, Aquinas, and Hugh of St. Victor (especially in the text's
extensive appendices) while giving only a general outline of how they
may be of service to literary criticism. Father Lynch's insistent
observation, however, that the literal level of reading scripture is
irreplaceable as the foundation for spiritual readings holds much
promise as a guide for humanist literary critics, especially those
exploring the interpenetration between Christianity and literature.
In the last analysis, Father Lynch succeeds where it counts in a
theoretical work. He opens new vistas for critical inquiry in poetics,
especially in the intersection between philosophy, theology, and
literature. Specifically, Father Lynch (a Jesuit priest) writes in the
tradition of, and to a certain extent for, the Christian and Catholic
intellectual. As Glenn C. Arbery points out in his introduction, Father
Lynch's "interest in literature ... cannot be separated from
... his hope for the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in American
cultural life." In an era when postmodernism has violently deleted
the "narratives" of philosophy and theology from literary
analysis, the author stands as a sign of contradiction, prophetically
inviting us to step back into the stream of Christian thought that has
inspired Western civilization's greatest literary works of art. In
this sense, Christ and Apollo is nothing short of scandalous to the
current critical orthodoxies. Yet Father Lynch is careful to nuance his
theoretical intersection of philosophy and theology with poetics so
that
the properly literary is not eclipsed in favor of the purely rational
or
dogmatic.
For those wishing to take seriously the intersection of
Christianity and literary criticism, Christ and Apollo is necessary
reading. Father Lynch forcibly illustrates that such a critical project
cannot be a naive baptizing of the poetic; rather, Christianity offers
the critic a privileged ontological window into the terrain of the
real,
the very terrain the literary work of art takes as its foundation.
AARON URBANCZYK is Assistant Professor of Literature at Ave Maria
University in Naples, Florida.