William James, Mysticism and the Modernist Epiphany

Abstract

This chapter contends that the language of religious experience is in many ways indistinguishable from the language of epiphanies so central to literary modernism. Against critics who regard the Romantic epiphany as a secular form of revelation, it posits that modernist epiphanies cannot be fully understood in secular terms; they remind us, instead, of modernism’s religious and Romantic inheritances—two of its many vestigial tails. Indeed, definitions of literary epiphanies supplied by critics and by modernist writers such as Conrad and Joyce are consistently framed using the kinds of mystical and conversion discourse reproduced in William James’s influential study of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), even as they register modernism’s documented obsession with the quotidian or the mundane. These correspondences cumulatively highlight not a thoroughgoing project of secularisation, but modernists’ ongoing—albeit highly varied and sometimes unorthodox—commitments to religious imaginaries and ideals. Moreover, the chapter concludes by suggesting that: (1) James’s own articulation of mystical, ineffable experiences without necessary recourse to institutional religious frameworks was actually entangled with literature—specifically, the poetry of William Wordsworth—from the outset; and (2) Varieties, in turn, provided a popular model for modernist and other twentieth-century writers and critics.