Martin Bock

Shadow-Line

Estrangement

ISBN 0-8142-0471-6

Martin Bock

Crossing theShadow-LineThe Literature

of Estrangement

Our culture conditions us to perceive the world inways consistent with its own teachings: we interpretthe world through a system of common values basedon the mores, religion, mythology, symbolism, andliterature of our culture. In Crossing the Shadow-Line, Martin Bock explores the work of severalwriters—Christian and non-Christian—whoseworks are heretical in the sense that they exploreways of seeing and knowing the world that departfrom the characteristic modes of perception of apredominantly Christian culture.

While the dream vision and similar visionaryexperiences have long been part of the Christianliterary tradition, major writers of the Romanticperiod such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge andThomas De Quincey used the imagery of opiumvision in their poems and prose fantasies. Theseworks are characterized by exaggerated sensation,an animistic world in which the landscape comesalive, and hallucinatory visions in which time andspace are elastic. The extraordinary way narratorsor characters see the world estranges them fromtheir culture and they become, in effect, hereticalvisionaries.

In later writers, from the French Symbolists tocertain modern British and American novelists,these visions become conventionalized in the disori-enting journey. Unlike the circular journeys of theChristian tradition, the journeys described byJoseph Conrad, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and

CROSSING THE SHADOW-LINE

Gustave Dore's illustration for Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.