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chapter eighteen Overcoming the Oversoul Emerson’s Evolutionary Existentialism The stern old faiths have all pulverized. ’Tis a whole population of gentlemen and ladies out in search of religions. emerson, “worship” Flying back from Seattle to Tucson in July 2003, rereading Emerson for the first time in forty years before getting down to reviewing a new book about him, looking out the window to see Mount Rainier poking its snow-covered head through the clouds, I had a sudden vivid remembrance of things past, followed in rapid succession by a flash of insight, a Eureka! moment. The remembrance, like a clip from an old newsreel, replayed a scene from my almost weekly get-togethers with Joyce Carol Oates and her husband, Ray Smith, when we were all young professors teaching at universities in Detroit in the sixties. A recurrent field of debate , which we seemed unable to shake off, had to do with Emersonian optimism at a time when I was teaching Emerson’s essays and writing about his religious views and their relation to Kierkegaard. Joyce Smith, not yet celebrated as Joyce Carol Oates, was unremittingly ironic and satiric when it came to Emerson’s Oversoul and similar noumena, an irony very pronounced even then, in her twenties. Her underlying, if unspoken , query in the old days was, “How can you believe such claptrap?” She was particularly skeptical about the confidence in the decency of the “self” that Emerson’s “self-reliance” depended upon. Given her vision of the horror and depravity that underlie human existence—fearful in her youth and increasingly savage in her later writings—she felt that all that could be depended upon to animate the self was a kind of primal barbarity , not the cosmic, upbeat, Rousseauvian, somewhat goofy wisdom that Emerson often seemed to convey. And as that period of my life was fetched 198 up for me again while the plane made its way back to Tucson, I felt, after all these years, that hers was a challenge I had to reconsider and take seriously , though I’d now rephrase it as, “How can someone as skeptical as you be conned by such fatuous optimism that human life has cosmic meaning after all?” After that replay had come a flash of awareness that this was a very different Emerson from the one I had read long ago or, to put it another way, this was a very different me doing the reading. Forty years had produced major intellectual revolutions that changed scholarship, literary and cultural studies, and my equipment for understanding them. Since 2003 was the bicentennial anniversary of Emerson’s birth, I was about to read and review Lawrence Buell’s Emerson, which I figured (not incorrectly ) would provide a global retrospective at the start of a new century. But what I could not have guessed from my sudden illuminations was that this book would turn out to be only the beginning.1 After a few days at home, I opened Emerson and read: “Instead of concentrating on a single narrative or topical strand, [this account] provides concise intensive examinations of key moments of Emerson’s career and major facets of his thought” (1). But would this extensive overview touch upon the materials of my epiphany? In the event, the absence of a single driving force or theme made this book of moderate length seem extremely long. The reader felt like someone given an opulent but fractured necklace whose beads were constantly rolling out of sight. But having said this, I need to add that Buell is one of the most intelligent, learned, and sane literary historians currently in practice, with almost forty years of involvement in Emerson studies. So although there was no single driving force, there were, nonetheless, several major themes, a few of which hovered around my own preoccupations: that Emerson’s recurring engagement with the individual and his deepest “self” reflects an individualism largely purged of ego; that this self is compatible with the monism that pervades Emerson’s later thinking (i.e., everything is an expression of the unity of the universe); and that “he opened up the prospect of a much more profound sense of the nature, challenge, and promise of mental emancipation, whatever one’s race, sex, or nation might be” (5). Given Emerson’s consistent rejection of dead traditions and his avid importation of ideas from European and Asian thinkers, which he melded into his distinctive voice as America’s first public...

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