New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature

Contents

Preface
The Art of Relationships: Henry James and Virginia Woolf
The Hostile Sun: The Poetry of D.H. Lawrence
Anarchy and Order in Beckett's Trilogy
The Nightmare of Naturalism: Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker
The Death Throes of Romanticism: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath
The Visionary Art of Flannery O'Connor
The Teleology of the Unconscious: The Art of Norman Mailer
Out of Stone, Into Flesh: The Imagination of James Dickey
Kafka's Paradise
Notes

Reviews

• Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 1974, p858
• Publishers Weekly, August 12, 1974, p54
• Library Journal, October 1, 1974, p2481
• New Republic, March 29, 1975, p30-31
• Booklist, April 1, 1975, p787
• Choice, May 1975, p386-387
• Hudson Review, Winter 1975-76, p611-615
• New Statesman, March 12, 1976, p332
• Listener, March 25, 1976, p372-373
• Books and Bookmen, September 1976, p61-62

Other Editions

Epigraph

Ah no, I cannot tell you what it is, the new world.
I cannot tell you the mad, astounding rapture of
its discovery.
I shall be mad with delight before I have done,
and whosoever comes after will find me in the
new world a madman in rapture.

—D.H. Lawrence, New Heaven and Earth

Evil does not exist; once you have crossed the
threshold, all is good. Once in another world, you
must hold your tongue.

—Franz Kafka, Diary (1922)

Excerpt

From the Preface:

It is my belief that the serious artist insists upon the sanctity of the world—even the despairing artist insists upon the power of his art to somehow transform what is given. It may be that his role, his function, is to articulate the very worst, to force up into consciousness the most perverse and terrifying possibilities of the epoch, so that they can be dealt with and not simply feared; such artists are often denounced as vicious and digusting when in fact they are—sometimes quite apart from their individual conceptions of themselves—in the service of their epoch, attempting to locate images adequate to the unshaped, unconscious horrors they sense. However, most of the visionaries included in this study are really quite affirmative—all but one or two strongly affirm the life force itself and the artist's relationship to it, and I see in the most despairing of these writers, Sylvia Plath, a furious impatience with the limitations of the ego (which she called the "mind"), a raging self-disgust that, had it not ended in suicide, might have cleansed her of those impurities of her era she had absorbed, and allowed her the visionary experience she sensed was a human possibility.