Len Gougeon, Emerson and Eros: The Making of a Cultural Hero.

Richardson, Robert D.

Len Gougeon, Emerson and Eros: The Making of a Cultural Hero, (SUNY Press, 2007), 268 pp., $35.00 cloth.

Len Gougeon is widely known and admired for his full-voiced foursquare endorsement of Emerson the abolitionist. Gougeon's Virtue's Hero, published in 1990, is a strong, indeed an unanswerable, argument against the often-heard complaint that Emerson could have done more than he did for the anti-slavery movement. After Gougeon's book, and after the volume of Emerson's anti-slavery writings he edited with Joel Myerson, there is no creditable way to avoid seeing Emerson as a champion of the movement to abolish slavery. Gougeon's new book, Emerson and Eros: The Making of a Cultural Hero, gives us the same subject, but from a radically different perspective. Where his earlier work is essentially historical, this book is essentially psychological. The argument is that Emerson's nineteenth-century career can be illuminated and explicated by the writings of a group of mid-twentieth-century writers Gougeon calls the "psychomythic humanists." He examines important work by Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Norman O. Brown, and Erich Neumann and finds that the common thread that unites them--beside the Jungian position they all share to some degree--is the importance of our getting away from an "overemphasis on consciousness" and a return to our "collective unconscious" which is the source of the archetypal master narrative of human life and source too of creativity, right action, and personal power or energy. Emerson called this unconscious source the Oversoul; Kant and Coleridge called it Reason (not to be confused with the pedestrian Understanding); Greeks and moderns call it Eros. It is the instinctive, the aboriginal self; it is the divinity within. Gougeon shows how these twentieth century writers can shed light on Emerson's personal journey and on his work. (Gougeon's chapter three is especially important and persuasive). He also notes that the psychomythic moderns were all influenced by Emerson or Emersonianism, so it is not entirely surprising that their work helps explain Emerson.

Gougeon's major achievement in this book is to weld together the stubborn historical facts of Emerson's career as a reformer with the more modern but more general and theoretical mythic constructs of Campbell, Brown, Eliade, Neumann and sometimes Erik Erikson. The result is a new affirmation--coming from an unlooked-for angle of vision--that Emerson's private ideas and his public actions are all of a piece, that the ideals of the collective unconscious (human wholeness, diversity, freedom) found their full expression first in Emerson's own life journey and subsequently in his public campaign against slavery and for freedom. Gougeon's Emerson is himself the hero with a thousand faces, questing through the dark netherworld of his wife's death and his son's death, then returning home bringing the message of liberation, then fighting triumphantly for social as well as for personal salvation. Gougeon's enthusiasm for his hero is infectious; his argument is hard to turn aside. For me, the book's big point is the astonishing social and political power that accrues to the self-confident person whose confidence rests on a thorough unblinking knowledge and acceptance of his own mind. In the end, then, we may confront Emerson's death as Auden confronted Freud's:

   Our rational voice is dumb. Over his grave
   The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved:
   Sad is Eros, builder of cities,
   And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.