The Emblematic Novel, Jon Woodson, Wild Pineapple Press, Providence RI, 2023

I have already noted the value of Jon Woodson’s research: http://www.josephazize.com/2024/04/26/review-yuval-taylor-zora-and-langston/

This volume, The Emblematic Novel: Esoteric Realism in the Harlem Renaissance and the Lost Generation, takes Woodson’s research much further and is, I shall suggest, significant for three reasons: (1) his treatment of the writing of and associated with the “Harlem Renaissance;” (2) his demonstration that there was a much-under appreciated interest in serious Western esoteric traditions in the USA in the 1920s which helps to explain why the initial mission of Gurdjieff and Orage succeeded as it did; (3) his explorations of the possible value of fiction in making a contribution to what we might call “the culture of esotericism.”

First, the book itself. There is an introduction, three more chapters, and a “coda.” It includes list of works cited, the illustrations, and abbreviations, and an index. The illustrations to this book are central, as we shall see. It runs to 233 pp. all in all.

However, it opens with a note on the frontispiece, which is George R. Locher’s drawing for Carl Van Vechten’s novel The Blind Bow-Boy. The boy concerned is Eros. This is the key to the title, “Emblematic Novel.” The illustration is based on this passage:

Campaspe’s garden, at the rear of the house, was enclosed in high brick walls on which were trained espaliered fruit-trees. Dwarf shrubs forced their miniature trunks between the mossy crevices of the flagstones of various sizes and colours that paved the ground. Over these a quaint tortoise of considerable size and incredible age, named Algaë, wandered in a disconsolate manner. There were a few comfortable chairs and, in one corner, under the shade of a spreading crab-apple tree, a table. In the opposite corner rose a rococo fountain which Campaspe, entranced at first sight, had purchased in an antiquary’s shop in Dresden. This fountain gave the atmosphere to the whole place. On a low pedestal, in the midst of a semi-circular pool, a marble Eros, blindfold, knelt. His bow drawn taut, the god was about to discharge an arrow at random. Beneath him, prone on the marble sward, a young nymph wept. The figures were surrounded by a curving row of stiff straight marble narcissi, the water dripping from their cups into the pool below, in which silver-fish played. 165, 1926 edition

First, note that the garden is enclosed, given the alchemical sub-text which runs all through this novel, that is significant. It is not only a microcosmos, it is a crucible for transformation. The fruit trees in the illustration are pears, and are said to be “espaliered,” meaning that the tree is trained to a trellis. As Woodson points out, this is an “intentional otherwise”: the trees cannot grow on a lattice. That is, the laws of growth are expanded here: what should not be able to grow here does in fact do so. It is no accident that the line-drawing was executed in green ink and the aged tortoise is named “Algaë.”

Eros’ head looks backwards, while his bow-and-arrow is pointing forward. This highlights the randomness of his shots, which Van Vechten explicates anyway, but as Woodson says, this figure is central. The impulse of growth and movement is therefore as central as the fact that his aim is blind and haphazard, just as the tortoise is wandering about “in a disconsolate manner.” Hence, the nymph is crying on the ground.

Just as the “dwarf-shrubs” incongruously shoot up “between the mossy crevices of the flagstones,” Algaë, the amphibian creature in an urban garden, is both “quaint [pleasingly unusual, having old-fashioned charm]” and “of considerable size and incredible age.” The post referenced at the end of this post says of the tortoise:

Archetype of the Turtle/Tortoise: a creature that both embodies the world and carries the world on his back, “comprising the totality of the cosmos … Folk etymology attributes the names ‘turtle’ and ‘tortoise’ to the Latin Tarturus, or underworld, conveying the sense of psyche’s subterranean ground supporting all the ascending levels of life and consciousness. … In alchemy it signifies the primal matter to which the things of the spirit must be linked if they are to become incarnate.

Unlike the ancient Algaë, the ever-youthful Eros is not aimless, but his aim lacks judgment. Their garden is, as the flagstones of all shapes and colours suggest, the entire mosaic of the elements – another alchemical link. The crab-apple is a symbol of love and marriage, but it shares the garden with the symbol of selfish love: a “curving row of stiff straight marble narcissi.” Once more, the symbol is ambiguous. The water which drips from the “cups” of the narcissi (they have rather small cups) into the pool below, in which there are silver-fish: symbols of change and adaptability. All of these figures represent features which will appear in the personalities of the novel’s characters.

In Woodson’s words, this drawing, commissioned for the work, is Van Vechten’s means of providing: “his own emblem for his emblematic model … The drawing is rife with clues and sets up the novel for being read as an esoteric work.” (vi) As is noted there, contemporary scholars of the USA “do not have any concern for the centrality of occultism in the formation of modernism.” I would only add that the reason seems obvious: with the decline of religion from the dominating position it once held in culture, the possibility of spiritual aspiration, of values higher than the material either had to be denied (as in Marxism) or else smuggled in quietly, often enough from streams such as occultism. In alchemy, there was at hand a developed panoply of symbols which attributed higher and supernatural meanings to nature and to ordinary phenomena.

I have dwelt on this symbol, but it is necessary: it is the emblem of what Woodson’s scholarship unveils as an paradigmatic emblematic novel. As we shall see, if this book does not make it clear to academics that Van Vechten and his contemporaries were much deeper and more serious than they had realised, then they are closing their eyes more securely than Cupid ever did.

 

https://www.michaelheadrick.com/writing/archetype-of-a-turtle-tortoise#:~:text=In%20Hinduism%2C%20the%20world%20rests,they%20are%20to%20become%20incarnate%E2%80%A6