Research Article| December 01 2008 THE EUPHORIA OF GLOOM: An Inquiry into Gottfried Keller's “Green Henry” Dan Latimer Dan Latimer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2008) 91 (3-4): 287–317. https://doi.org/10.2307/41179226 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Dan Latimer; THE EUPHORIA OF GLOOM: An Inquiry into Gottfried Keller's “Green Henry”. Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1 December 2008; 91 (3-4): 287–317. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41179226 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressSoundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2008 The Society for Values in Higher Education and The University of Tenessee2008The Society for Values in Higher Education and The University of Tenessee Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: Witness Against the Beast, William Blake and the Moral Law Dan Latimer Witness Against the Beast, William Blake and the Moral Law, by E. P. Thompson; xxi & 324 pp. New York: The New Press, 1993, $30.00. The social context from which William Blake arose was fundamentally hostile to the grandiose projects of Court and official Church. So modest were the ambitions of Blake’s working-class forebears that their historical oblivion would be assured, had they not professed theological views irksome to those whose job it was to enforce uniformity. The eccentric theology of this nonconformist class earned them the name antinomian, from “anti-nomos,” “against the law,” a term which carried the sense of both “heretic” and “terrorist.” Antinomians emerged from the Puritan Interregnum of the 1650s. They went quiet during the Restoration of Charles II, then were given a second life in the 1790s when the energies of Jacobinism refocused working-class frustrations on the hegemonic alliance of Court and Church. Eventually, sedition laws drove the antinomians underground to stay. Abhorring all official places of worship, they met over pints of beer in public houses, singing songs composed by themselves out of their home-made hymnals set to such unthreatening melodies as “God Save the King” to delude the casual passer-by. One such sect was the Muggletonians, whose very name ensured groans of genteel ridicule from the educated and powerful. They never numbered more than two hundred members in all of England. Taking their name from a seventeenth-century sectary, Ludowick Muggleton, they kept largely to themselves, did not evangelize, and did not pray, since they considered prayer servile. They met for fellowship, song, and hours of intricate theological discussion. For three hundred years, the faithful preserved the manuscripts of their prophets, records of discussion and debate, song books and membership lists, until Thompson tracked it all down in 1975 to a furniture depository in Tunbridge Wells. What Thompson wanted to show was some empirical connection between Muggletonian theology and the eccentric mythos of William Blake, since the two systems had so many already obvious antinomian similarities. It must have been discouraging for him to get no closer than “Hermitage,” the name of Blake’s mother’s first husband, a hosier named Thomas. In the Muggletonian song books are compositions from the 1750s by a George Hermitage, who in Thompson’s working hypothesis is a possible uncle of Blake. Thompson admits, however, that the image of Blake’s mother singing nonconformist family songs over the cradle of her infant son will have to remain a pretty fiction. Why does Thompson specifically want the Muggletonians in the Blakean picture? There are four pertinent articles of Muggletonian belief. The first is that they repudiate moral law, that is, the notion of religion as a system of discipline and punishment for sin. They substitute love and generosity as [End Page 412] characteristic of the divine principle. The second is that Reason is explicitly identified as a Satanic item, binding, constraining, and inhibiting the imaginative vision of God. The third article is the doctrine of the Two Seeds, according to which Satan, in the form of the serpent, had carnal relations with Eve, who subsequently gave birth to Cain, the serpent’s child and half-brother to Abel and Seth, the legitimate offspring of Adam. Henceforth, though, the Satanic and divine seeds are mixed in all human beings. The persistent Satanic element, the humanum maternum, gives our worshippers occasion, not only for an indictment of the rich and powerful, serpent-spawn all, but for a gnostic hostility for all material creation, including the body, implying, one need hardly say, a robust sense of woman’s addiction to the secret and forbidden, the worm that flies in the night. The fourth article deals with the divine influx of God into man on the occasion of Christ’s birth. For the Muggletonians, this incarnation (and eventual extinction) was entire. There weren’t any other parts of God left over somewhere else. Thompson sees here elements of a radical humanism which may have motivated such notions as “the human form divine” in Blake. On the other hand, the doctrine of the...

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212Philosophy and Literature Even the chronology of the articles is not linear, after the first essay. Who, Heilbrun asks, are strong, self-assertive or creative women to look to in their quest for new myths of the self? Must they always be their own point of origin? One essay on May Sarton is particularly striking in this regard. Heilbrun quotes Sarton's assertion that "we have to make myths of our lives. ... It is the only way to live without despair" (p. 184). The myths of our lives, in Heilbrun's terms, are constructed through a series of associations. One association is that between our lives and our work, a reciprocal symmetry between author and subject. She herselfunderstands Woolf's professional courage after the age of fifty because of her own experience of being in her fifties. She documents "the bravest acts" of her own life as two essays in which she "spoke as a woman" and sees a similar transformation in Woolf's own later style. By this stage in the essays, it is clear to us that Heilbrun sees herself as a composite identity, constructed not only of her own voice and experience, but of all the women—fictional and real, dead and alive—she's come to know. (Her knowledge , it must be noted, is comprised largely of middle-class, well-educated, white women.) It seems pertinent that the final essays in the collection discuss mysteries; her identity as Amanda Cross, at one time secret and disassociated from her "real" self, now allows her to cross the once-impenetrable lines of defined genre. Appropriately, similar questions ofidentity and belonging, myth and return are addressed in Cross's latest novel, The Players Come Again (1990). "One cannot make up stories," Heilbrun asserts in her discussion of Penelope, "one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard" (p. 127). In presenting us with the evolution ofher own intellectual, literary, and feminist identity, Heilbrun invites us to use her as a story to be rewritten. She both leads us into the labyrinth of women and textuality and provides us with a string of striking associations, not so that we may imitate her, but rather that we may, by knowing her, come to know ourselves. Whitman CollegeRoberta Davidson HarmonyofDissonances: T. S. Eliot, Romanticism, andImagination , by John Paul Riquelme; xiii & 354 pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, $32.95. John Paul Riquelme offers us a new Eliot, one with whom we can presumably be seen in public, one whose work, if not "postmodern" already, can't really be distinguished from the "new writing it heralds" (p. 17). Eliot's sacrifice of Reviews213 private identity to a larger entity, which we had thought the sinister strategy of a fascist, turns out to be the trendiest notion of the nature of the self. This self, once celebrated as the inspired personal source of lyric poetry, doesn't really exist at all except as a grammatical construct, a holographic phantom generated by language (p. 157). A poem for Eliot is not what it was for the deluded, despised Romantics, Wordsworth and Coleridge, a "direct, spontaneous , presumably unmediated utterance and self-revelation. . . ." Eliot's poetry is not an expression of personality, as we know. It is an escape from personality. Nor does "voice" have anything to do with what winds up in a book. Eliot's language is "written rather than spoken." It shows every mark "of having been composed" (p. 50). That there is no conscious unified self to emit poetry in the first place is a point made relendessly in this book, and is surely its favorite critical insight. Eliot never writes to express something he has felt; he writes to allow the work to express something he, as a writer, never felt before (p. 67). The emotion of writing is "structural emotion" (p. 145). Eliot's compositions are so disdainful of the ego's coherence that the reader is unable to identify with, or indeed even recognize, a speaking selfthere (p. 50). Neither in "Gerontion" nor in "Prufrock" can one ascribe the poem's language to a speaker (p. 156). If ever we imagined "Prufrock" to be the utterance...

near the heart of what she means by the "reflexive interdependency" of the novel and the theory of the novel. Like the interplay of the two worlds of grace and nature in, for example, "Parker's Back," the interplay between fiction and analysis of fiction is possible because each agent in each case is manifest in a universe of discourse. Each universe of discourse is, of course, governed by the interests and activities of rhetoric. But just as O'Connor's fiction is not a theological tract, neither is McKeon's a rhetorical tract. It is a concentrated, patient, and often passionate defense of our ability to encompass the matching ambiguities of die Etrtistic and the human enterprise witiiin a context of meaning rather than its opposite.