The Numinous in Fiction

Abstract

Difficult indeed is the struggle of the artist in poetry or prose to limn the picture of the other world, beyond the comprehension of sense and yet “real” and always present to him, even if he cannot give it a local habitation and a name. It is connected, this vision, with the dualism the Christian writer feels intensely: both worlds must be brought into a living relationship, for each world serves to influence the other. Otherworldliness that severs all ties with the human, the things of this earth, spells, as we have maintained, the death of art. A this-worldly approach that catches no hint of any ultimate meaning falls into the despair of silence that is Samuel Beckett’s characteristic note. For it is this tensely held awareness of the contrast between the ideal and the actual, the finite and the infinite, the religious insight and the behavioral fact, which makes for the tragic sense of life. Many of the major novelists of the nineteenth century — Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Melville, Hawthorne — beheld this numinous vision and believed in it, though they interpreted it in strikingly different ways. For them it was a genuine and vital, if mysterious and paradoxical, experience.