he insinuates the suprasensible world that is neither the empirical world of the
senses nor the abstract world of the intellect: the I maginal Realm. I ndeed,
throughout history both Western and Eastern literary traditions have exhibited
elements of gnostic, hermetic and mystical or talismanic magic, the latter being a
belief that words arranged in a particular way are capable of invoking and
concentrating occult or cosmic energies. More generally, the writers of such
literature espouse a certain attitude toward life. This attitude may be said to consist
of the conviction that direct, personal and absolute knowledge of the authentic
truths of existence is accessible to human beings, and, moreover, that the
attainment of such knowledge must always constitute the supreme achievement of
human life.
This knowledge, or gnosis, is not thought of as rational knowledge of a
scientific kind, or even as philosophical knowledge of truth, but rather a knowing
that arises in the heart in an intuitive and mysterious manner and therefore is called
in at least one Gnostic writing, ‘the knowledge of the heart’ (Hoeller, 1982:11). This
is a mystical-religious concept that emphasizes interior insight and transformation
and is really a process of depth psychology. I ts early practitioners, identified by
Harold Bloom throughout the pages of his Omens of Millennium (1996), include
Michelangelo Buonarroti, Shakespeare, Spenser, Dante Alighieri, William Blake,
Goethe and Balzac and, more recently, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau,
Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, Robert Musil, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and W.B.
Yeats. Segal recognizes as Gnostic Emerson, Melville, Byron, Conrad, Weil, Stevens,
Singer, Kerouac, and Pynchon (Segal, 1992:4). Bloom, in fact, suggests that from
Valentinus, and his influence upon the Christian Gnostic literature, through the
German Romantic poet Novalis, the French Romantic Nerval, and the English
William Blake, Gnosticism has been indistinguishable from imaginative genius and
that it is pragmatically, “ ... the religion of literature” (Bloom, 2002:xviii). I ndeed,
one may well be persuaded of the Gnostic inference of Bruno Bettleheim’s
suggestion that Sigmund Freud, throughout his psychoanalytic writings, discussed
literature in an attempt to appeal to his readers’ intuition, to engage them in both
an unconscious and conscious understanding, often quoting Goethe, Shakespeare,
Dostoevsky and Nietzsche maintaining that they knew everything that needs to be
known about the unconscious (Bettelheim, 1983:38).
ron
(Ron)
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