ON FINDING THE WHOLE WITHIN THE PART: A REASSESSMENT OF WILLIAM F. LYNCH, CHRIST AND APOLLO: THE DIMENSIONS OF THE LITERARY IMAGINATION

Abstract

first published in i960. Its central lines of argument, regarding the nature of comedy, the principles of drama, and, in particular, the capacity of the 'realistic' imagination to construct a relation inbetween the mind and the world which it sees, had initially been presented in a series of articles which Lynch published in Thought through the 1950s.1 Lynch is clearly conversant with the neo-scholastic philosophy which was resurgent at this time, and his defence of realistic, and analogical, modes of imaginative apprehension is underpinned by the thought of Thomistic writers, such as Etienne Gilson. But his is not the analytical mind of the philosopher. In this book, Lynch sets himself the task of the existential appraisal of realism—that is, of showing how the analogising mind experiences the world with which it is face d—rather than that of its argumentative justification. Lynch's work is undergirded by a basic humanism, which from his Christian belief does not prescind, but enlarges. However, Lynch can be placed, amongst theologians, in neither of the currently warring camps of 'liberal' naturalists, on the one hand, and 'conservative' supernaturalists, on the other. I am inclined to think that this is because his own theological 'naturalism' takes as its vehicle the concrete thinking upon which literature depends, thus remaining close to experience, and avoiding the incursions of ideology. In fact, the formative background to all of William Lynch's work is the flowering of literary studies in America in the 1940s and '50s. In his Christ and Apollo, Lynch draws upon Francis Fergusson's The Idea of a Theatre, on Maritain's Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, and, most especially, upon the work of the Southern Fugitive Agrarians. The most significant presence within his early work is that of Allen Tate,2 and the thought of John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and, perhaps, that of Tate's first wife,