The Harmony of the Apollonian and Dionysian Aesthetics in Thomas Wolfe and in the Visual Responses of Douglas W. Gorsline and Harvey Harris

[H]e tried to speak, to get into a... phrase, all the pain, the beauty, and the wonder of their lives.... Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (500) While periodization is always precarious, Modernism strikes one as being, in the words of J. A. Cuddon, an especially "comprehensive but vague term" (515). Finding a common creative concern among Modernism's philosophically and aesthetically disparate literary movements can seem a daunting intellectual exercise. However, in many ways these diverse schools were unified in their essential desire to discover, as H. H. Arnason asserted of the Modern visual artists, "not only ... new forms, a new plastic reality, but also ... a new content and new principles of synthesis" (67). In both the visual and literary arts, this pursuit of a new mode of creative expression gave rise to various aesthetics that blended Dionysian and Apollonian artistic tendencies. In The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872), Friedrich Nietzsche developed the antinomy to distinguish differing artists' embrace of either "reason ... [and] culture" or "instinct ... and primitive nature" (Cuddon 49). Employing the figures of Apollo and Dionysus to embody these respective artistic impulses of intellectual order and physical delight or suffering, Nietzsche maintained that every artist, often unconsciously, exhibits a stylistic and thematic tendency toward one inclination or the other. Whereas Apollonian artists are largely bent on producing symmetrically "understandable and beautiful world[s]" (Preminger 41), the poet in whom the Dionysian impulse is dominant thrives in absolute physicality, searching out the "blind irrationality, pain, and suffering in the world which gives rise to the Dionysian dance of orgiastic worship" (41). Even the most cursory survey of the various movements within Modernism reveals a clear division between those schools that favored either the Apollonian or the Dionysian aesthetic. Nietzsche noted, however, that it was indeed possible to find a balance between the two, combining both creative forces to communicate more fully a human experience of complexities. The Modernist novelist Thomas Wolfe accomplished this feat to a degree that was rarely matched by his contemporaries. In his thematic concerns, his formal innovations, and his vision of life, the self, and society, Wolfe was able to explore the darker subjects, the moral and stylistic freedoms of the Dionysian aesthetic while maintaining an essentially Apollonian appreciation for order and the beautiful. This creative triumph must have made the individual projects of Douglas W. Gorsline and Harvey Harris, who both created strikingly beautiful sets of illustrations for Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, all the more challenging. In creating visual accompaniments to Wolfe's novel that demonstrated their original artistic vision and yet maintained harmony with Wolfe's imagination, Gorsline and Harris set about to visually transmit, in markedly different ways, Wolfe's synthesis of Dionysian and Apollonian aesthetics. As prelude to examination of Wolfe's, Gorsline's, and Harris's interaction with Apollonian and Dionysian aesthetics, it is fruitful to consider how these tendencies operated in Modernism more broadly. The French poet and theorist Aime Cesaire characterized the dawning of literary modernity in Paris as follows: "1850.--The revenge of Dionysus upon Apollo.... The great leap into the poetic void" (233). Undoubtedly, in emphasizing this date, Cesaire is asserting that the emergence of the art of the French Symbolists, such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud, served as a transformational literary moment in which "Poetry ceased to be a game.... ceased to be an occupation.... Poetry became an adventure. The most beautiful human adventure. At the end of the road: clairvoyance and knowledge" (233). While previous literary schools of the burlesque and carnal had existed throughout history, the ascension of the Symbolists and their accumulation of a minor but avidly loyal reading audience marked the preliminary rise of a popular and immensely influential literature of Decadence. …