Against Everyone with Conner Habib AEWCH 308: LITERATURE AS OCCULTISM with ALLAN JOHNSON / THE SPIRIT-ERA & ITS AFTERMATHS, PT 2
This is the second episode in a series called THE SPIRIT-ERA & ITS AFTERMATHS in which I look at the way spiritual, technological, and occult flourishings at the turn of the 19th into 20th century are still with us today.
In the second installment in the series, I talk with ALLAN JOHNSON Professor of English Literature at University of Surrey, meditation coach, and author of the excellent book, The Sacred Life of Modernist Literature: Immanence, Occultism, and the Making of the Modern World
In that book, Allan states: “The occult has always walked the perilous line between desiring a textual form while resisting the possibility that this form can ever be completely achieved.”
One of my big frustrations with spiritual influencers is that most of them don’t seem to have a good grasp of art, but particularly literature. They do something like this: they read literature that has magical CONTENT and create metaphors and analogies that - all-too conveniently - mirror the lessons of their own esoteric view. And they generally reach for the usual suspects: Tolkien, Le Guin, Coehlo, etc.
But the location of esoteric strength in literature is less in the content and much more in its FORMS and STYLES. These forms were brought to us most prominently in modernist fiction - in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and more. But also by poets like TS Elliot, Ezra Pound, and WB Yeats.
In the works of modernist writers, the reader’s involvement is demanded to complete the text. These are writers who initiate us as we read their works.
This conversation with Allan offered the chance to explore ideas I'd been longing to talk about for years, I'm so excited to share them with you here.