Winter's Tale
Pietro, Thomas De
Fletcher Brumit, who told the FBI that all the hotel cards for June 3 were dated "June 4 , " probably through a missetting of the stamping machine. In the court of history, where all burdens...
...innocence shames experience...
...Thumbnail sketches and philosophical digests hardly suggest the novel's cornplex design for it resists summary as forcefully as the works of Dante, Blake, and Melville which it so stirringly invokes...
...The U.S...
...Hardesty's journey eastward re-enacts Lake's ethereal quest, for he too seeks the just city...
...John A. Coleman I N HIS recent volume, Religion in Sociological Perspective, the British sociologist of religion Bryan Wilson notes that "the fundamental concepts of the sociology of religion have, since the subject's very beginnings, been heavily indebted to Christian theology, and their applicability to the religions of the nonChristian world has always been problematic...
...We can, indeed, "pass over" to other cultures and world views and feel relatively at home there...
...Likewise, whenever the pope reasserts established moral doctrine on a topic like abortion, some observers seem wide-eyed with astonishment and wonder what obscure Eastern European idiosyncrasy could be at work, as though the norm for popes since Vatican II were to take one's ethics from the New York Times...
...Perhaps as a Westerner, I am unable to appreciate the monism of Hindu thought...
...Of course, insight, understanding, even truth claims are possible...
...Peter Lake, Helprin's gilded-age wanderer, contains Whitmanic multitudes...
...Change continues, both good and bad...
...Gardner sighted few truth-seekers on the literary horizon...
...Archaic forms of myth must be transcended before the subtler transpersonal consciousness is reached...
...The heart of the book contains a development scheme of nine levels of knowing (a symptomatic term...
...But there was a more nefarious reason for the longevity of the case...
...Although it suffered from a generous dose of blather and bluster, Gardner's polemic argued for an essentially sound idea: that art should serve morality, not in a self-righteously didactic sense, of course, but in the way art can inspire humanity to venerate beauty, truth, and goodness...
...After all, there is little we can do about the facts, and we can certainly forgive, if not condone, the reflexive making of myths which affirm our politics...
...Instead we are encouraged to enter the flux of time, contoured as it is by a variety of worldly arts...
...from the subconscious or pre-rational through the rational to the super-conscious or transpersonal...
...But claims for trans-cultural languages, concepts or "deep structures" have always struck me as either culturebound imperialisms (as in persistent neo-Kantian schemes in ethics and history of religions) or terribly thin abstractions...
...Both views reflect reality -- and exaggerate it...
...I do not much care for Wilber's intellectual heroes: Loevinger, Kohlberg, and Chomsky...
...His epic adventures, which shape the second third of the novel, introduce us to yet more pilgrims and miscreants, from angelic Virginia Gamely to effete Craig Binky, all of whom Helprin unerringly brings to life...
...I believe the trend of rationalization per se is necessary, desirable, appropriate, phase-specific and evolutionary...
...In any event, his earlier books such as The Atman Project or Up From Eden are carefully read and widely regarded by contemporary seekers of spirituality outside the Christian churches...
...Helprin's winding, sometimes windy, narrative enacts these abstract ideas through his masterly orchestration of character and event...
...those of living with nature and of discovering God in the details (mastered by both Lake and Mattara) are two which lead to a justified faith: a theology of eternal love...
...By relying on Vedanta and Buddhist concepts, Ken Wilber's brief introduction to a transcendental sociology of religion corrects this Western Christian bias...
...For a long time it was standard operating procedure among historians and cultural critics to see the Catholic church as the antithesis of modem flux, a fortified island of permanence in the sea of change...
...and the causal (the God-identity of the sages...
...This is the saddest subtheme of the book: that so many people may have used the Rosenbergs as a means to an end...
...at time he strains for effect, drunk in his visionary company...
...Set in a past that never was (hut that closely resembles turn-of-the-century New York) and a future that probably will never be, Winter's Tale speaks to a time sorely bereft of worthy heroes and genuine visionaries...
...Good outwits evil...
...This grand, Breughellike feast of a novel resoundingly answers the call for a moral fiction invigorated by consummate artistry (so it's a shame Gardner didn't live to read it...
...And like Dante's saintly intercessor, she suggests divine things: she (quite literally) scores the music of the cosmos...
...The mythical Lake of the Coheeries, so far upstate that it's forgotten by cartographers, shimmers in its icy whiteness while an equally imaginary Manhattan prepares for its consumption in flames...
...Vedanta/Buddhist sociology of religion A SOCIABLE SOD Ken Wilber McGraw Hill, $12.95, 160 pp...
...It would be nice if the daunting factual complexity of the case, together with the human propensity to weave ideologically compatible myths, were the only reasons the matter remained so long unresolved...
...but a young Mark Helprin earned his discerning praise on the basis of his slim volume of tales-vignettes really--A Dove of the East and Other Stories (1975...
...Because of his evolutionary biases, Wilber sees "secularization," rather idiosyncratically, as a stage-specific rung on a ladder leading, it would seem inevitably, to transpersonal consciousness...
...Wilber is something of a guru in transpersonal psychology...
...Magnanimous message WINTER'S TALE Mark Helprln Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $14.95, 688 pp...
...those who are apart are brought together, the lost ones are redeemed...
...And these same values, whether a respect for the Godhead in nature or a belief in the visionary authority of the innocent, generate the finest pieces in the uneven collection Ellis Island and Other Stories (1981...
...Helprin's magnanimous message of hope and affirmation--this is an old-fashioned novel of ideas-provides a welcome tonic for our weary time, an antidote to fashionable despair...
...Gardner's shamelessly Platonic dicta may have struck us as naive, but our studied cynicism conveniently ignores the history of Western art--a history in which the desire to instruct and delight far exceeds the compulsion to shock and numb...
...The latest development is a spate of committees, centers, and publications presenting themselves as lay-initiated counters to the excesses of the clergy and hierarchy . . . Beyond the question of nuclear arms, the chief areas of contention are the degree of moral legitimacy to be granted the current form of American capitalism, the critical stance of U.S...
...As Dante, the master poet, sought to make heavenly truth permanent through the power of art, so too does Peter Lake, master artisan, seek to annihilate time enroute to the heavenly city...
...The Atomic Energy Commission saw in the case a chance to strengthen its control of atomic policy, and the ACLU "displayed an unseemly eagerness to use the case to curry favor with the government and dissociate themselves from any taint of Red...
...In this second move, Commonweal: 154...
...Lake, after marrying her, witnesses her untimely death, but not before he is transformed by her perfect love, with its intimations of immortality...
...Little has changed, in other words, since John Gardner lashed out against his own generation of irresponsible doodlers in On Moral Fiction (1978...
...Most unlike Blake though, he never obscures his meaning in protean myth...
...I admit to serious ambivalence about Wilber's attempt, in this book, to correlate transpersonal psychology with sociology of religion...
...Wilber forgets that the project of hermeneutics involves more than "passing over to another world of meaning in empathy" within the closed hermeneutical circle...
...And their dramas require correlative scenery--occasions Resistance to Change...
...In example after distressing example, Radosh and Milton suggest that people all across the political spectrum purposely and cynically exploited the Rosenberg case for political or personal ends...
...So does resistance to change, both good and bad...
...Rather than chance a vision of a better world, our most lauded writers, from Anne Beattie to Raymond Carver, artlessly chronicle the anxious lives of so many forgettable, self-absorbed nebbishes and nihilists...
...All rivers run full to the sea...
...Similarly, he appeals to hermeneutics but objects to what he sees as the intrinsic danger in hermeneutics, i.e., the theoretical absolutizing of cultural relativity...
...And so, Radosh and Milton seem to have answered the question of the Rosenbergs' guilt as definitively as it ever will be...
...Wilber's project of developing a nonreductionist transcendental sociology of religion utilizes sociological structuralfunctionalist analysis while rejecting its reductionist tendencies...
...Nor have I ever thought that there really is such a thing as Aldous Huxley's philosophia perennis to which Wilber consistently appeals...
...In the world of the novel, the goldflection to make plain the plan: In the end, or, rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others...
...I think that all we ever have, as starting point, is history, hermeneutics, the conflict of interpretations, and culturebound concepts, affects and artifacts...
...Editor-in-chief of Re-Vision Journal, he is also the author of some six earlier books which are, probably, better introductions to his passionate interest in transpersonal psychology than this brief attempt to correlate that psychology with sociology of religion, a field he has merely delved into...
...Hermeneutics has no teeth...
...The apotheosis of his heroes and heroines restores the timeless verities to their rightful place in a just society...
...Thomas DePietro H ONESTY, courage, sacrifice, patience: we rarely find these ideals celebrated in serious contemporary fiction...
...The well-oiled engine at the h6art of the city and at the core of thi~ novel moves Helprin to risk metaphysical reCommonweal: 152 for Helprin to display his technical virtuosity...
...Thus, Wilber's useful distinction between the authenticity and legitimacy of religions, his taxonomy of nine quite divergent definitions of religion, his recognition that every "level" of religion allows inauthentic distorted expressions, and his project of devising a non-reductionist sociology of reli.gion won me to the book...
...the dead come back to life...
...But, like Blake, Helprin can be cloyingly cute...
...and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but as something that is...
...I am not at all convinced that he succeeds in generating a sociology of religion without its own set of problems of applicability, this time to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam...
...It also entails passing back in challenge to one's own initial world of meaning...
...Helprin's second book, Refiner's Fire (1977), an ambitious, multi-layered narrative (which unfortunately collapses under its shifting textures) no doubt further impressed Gardner as a bold testament to heroic action in pursuit of noble values...
...What many, following Weber, argue is ironically a descent into hell, Wilber sees as an inevitable step toward mystic breakthrough...
...On the other hand, I am deeply suspicious of the main theoretical premises of this work: (1) a reliance on a development structuralist scheme which postulates invariant ahistorical and transcultural "deep structures" and (2) an evolutionary perspective which sketches a movement from the pre-rational through the rational on its way to the trans-rational (as if these are not always mixed) and (3) a hierarchical "tree" of levels of analysis wherein the higher level encompasses, yet surpasses, lower levels...
...It is now the style to see just the opposite: the church swept away by a whirlwind of updating...
...the subtle (the God-communion of the saints...
...In the court of history, where all burdens of proof are equal, the Radosh and Milton solution, more plausible, wins in this and in most other instances...
...From his arrival on the Bayonne shore in a boat called The City of Justice to his reappearance at the end of the twentieth century (which beckons that very kind of city), Lake assumes the roles demanded by his various keepers: rugged marsh-dweller, expert burglar, crack mechanic...
...the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible...
...bishops and many other Catholics toward Washington's policy in Central America, and the appropriate focus for the peace-and-justice activities of the church, both at the level of the U.S...
...It is undoubtedly more profitable to ponder that sad record than to bring into its fourth decade the dreary, narrow debate over the long-dead couple's technical guilt...
...3/9/~ 9 March 1984:153 en age does arrive, prepared for, on the one hand, by master-builder Jackson Mead's massive bridge to the sky and, on the other, by mayor Praeger dePinto's deistic nostrums delivered to the populace...
...With varying degrees of persuasiveness, Radosh and Milton make similar charges against a host of other groups and individuals...
...In this, Wilber mistakenly thinks that hermeneutics must maintain, without remainder, that all religions are true, "a stance that precludes any sort of sustained critical appraisal...
...Wilber postulates three levels of transpersonal knowing: the psychic (yogic nature or cosmic consciousness...
...But what of honesty, courage, sacrifice, and patience...
...On one hand, this volume includes perceptive insights, analytic acuity and genuine wisdom in places...
...Winter's Tale, Helprin's spirited new novel, takes up where the best stories in Ellis Island (~'The Schreuderspitze," "Martin Bayer," and "Tamar") leave off...
...But Helprin's apocalypse delivers neither Bunyan's celestial city nor Marx's classless utopia...
...And this city, like the rest of Helprin's unruly landscape, testifies to the order within disorder--the efficacy of "the plan...
...These very words decorate the golden salver (which functions as a kind of holy grail in the novel) of Hardesty Mattara, a Californian who, at the turn of the twentieth century, has chosen the salver rather than inherit the millions left by his wise father...
...The rogues and patriots, lovers and mourners, seers and pragmatists who people Helprin's miniatures here join together on a panoramic historical canvas...
...Communist party, they say, connived to use the Rosenberg case to deflect "international attention from the anti-Semitic Slansky purge trial in Czechoslovakia...
...Catholic Conference and the dioceses . . . . Commonweal, March 11, 1983 . . . . 6 months for $9 OFFER FOR NEW SUBSCRIBERS ONLY COMMONWEAL, 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...Curiously, for one who invokes the work of Jurgen Habermas, Wilber sees little of the shadow-side of modern bureaucratic technical rationality...
...A white flying horse, "incorruptibly innocent," carries Lake into his immediate future, where h'e discovers, on a latenight, second-story job, a Beatrice named Beverly, daughter of an Ahab turned millionaire publisher...
...But it's during his pursuit by a gang of scoundrels and scamps (his ex-partners, Pearly Soames and the Short Tails) that dreams begin to coax Lake towards a higher reality...
...We view these democratic vistas as Beverly and Lake view her father's treasured paintings: tableaux vivants, artworks that also weave dreams and reality into a seamless fabric...
...Thus the press portrays the bishops' pastoral letter on nuclear armaments as a radical departure from past teaching when in fact it is a document that largely synthesizes and applies traditional approaches to a new situation...
...10016 Please send the next 6 months of Common weal to: Name Address City, State, Zip [] I prefer a full year subscription at $24...
...His poignant melancholy engenders new meaning for his life...
...The FBI, they say, allowed Ethel to die knowing she was only peripheral to Julius's spying...
Vol. 111 • March 1984 • No. 5
