Mulhern’s Transcendentalism

I. A Creed Stated, Not Inferred

Criticism ordinarily has to infer a writer’s philosophical commitments from pattern and implication. James Mulhern has made that inference unnecessary. In “An Artistic Creed,” printed as a companion piece to the “Note from the Author” in The Collected Stories and Poems of James Mulhern, he states his intellectual lineage without hedging: “I write as a Transcendentalist — in sensibility and in spirit. I came to this not as a doctrine to be argued but as a way of seeing I could not put down. Emerson taught me to trust the inner light and to call the great current of things the Oversoul. Thoreau taught me to look long and closely at the near and the small until they open. Whitman taught me that a single life, honestly told, contains multitudes and belongs to everyone. I am in their debt, and I do not pretend otherwise.”¹ This is an unusual document for a contemporary fiction writer working in an Irish-Catholic and Italian-American idiom to have produced, and it deserves to be read as closely as any passage of the fiction itself, because it names, with philosophical precision, terms that recur constantly in the work: the Oversoul, the inner light, recurrence, the single life that “belongs to everyone.”

The creed continues into territory that would be heretical in a strictly doctrinal Catholic framework and states it as considered belief rather than accident: “I believe the sacred is not far off but here — in a kitchen, a sickroom, a stretch of shoreline, the face of someone loved and lost. I believe the soul is not sealed within us but joined, through the Oversoul, to every other soul that has been or will be.”¹ A companion “Note from the Author” extends the theology of recurrence explicitly: “What looks like repetition is recurrence, and recurrence is how the spirit comes to know itself… This is resurrection — the same old truths rising again and again… And it is the Oversoul’s work as much as mine.”² Where an essay elsewhere on this site, “The Habit of Return,” treats recurrence primarily as a craft technique, this essay argues that recurrence is, for Mulhern, first a metaphysical claim and only secondarily a compositional method — the method exists because the belief demands it.

II. Emerson and Thoreau in the Classroom: “Drenched to the Bone”

Mulhern’s fiction does not merely allude to Transcendentalism from a distance; it stages the tradition’s actual texts being taught, misheard, and half-understood inside an American public-school classroom, which is itself a Transcendentalist gesture — Emerson and Thoreau surviving their own domestication into curriculum. In “Drenched to the Bone,” the narrator, a Florida high-school English teacher named Jack, reads Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” aloud to a restless class and paraphrases its central claim: “Thoreau is talking about an individual’s conscience as being the most important aspect of who we are. You remember Emerson? ‘Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind’ and his other quote, ‘What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?’”³ The direct citation of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” inside a scene of failing pedagogy is a deliberate irony: the students immediately misunderstand or mishear nearly everything, one asking, “Isn’t he the guy that invented electricity?” (confusing Emerson with Edison), while another calls Marx’s “opium of the people” the “oxycodone of the masses.”³

Yet the scene does not simply mock the students’ ignorance; it dramatizes Transcendentalism working precisely as Emerson intended, on minds untrained to recognize the philosophy by name. Two students, Amelia and Brandi, arrive independently at a lay version of civil disobedience once black roofing dust begins falling from a vent during the lesson: “This school is like a prison,” Amelia says, and moments later, following a real disruption, “This is a type of injustice. We should break a law or something… We should stage some kinda civil obedience… Make a big statement,” a malaprop (disobedience for obedience) that the story allows to stand uncorrected, itself a small Emersonian joke about trusting one’s own garbled formulation of an idea over its received, correct phrasing.³ The scene’s final adversary to Transcendentalist individualism is Mary Grace, a devout evangelical student who denounces Thoreau directly: “You can read all you want but it won’t make you a better person. You need to act in the world, not retire from it like Thoreau. Helping others is what God wants us to do,”³ a critique that lands with real force precisely because the story does not resolve it in either direction — Mary Grace’s subsequent violent breakdown neither vindicates nor refutes her theological objection to Emersonian self-reliance, leaving the tension exactly where Mulhern’s creed leaves it: faith and Transcendentalist self-trust “held in the same hand, neither one permitted to win outright.”⁴

III. Whitman’s Multitudes: The Single Life That Belongs to Everyone

The creed’s Whitman debt — “a single life, honestly told, contains multitudes and belongs to everyone”¹ — supplies the philosophical justification for a device that might otherwise seem simply comprehensive: Mulhern’s insistence, across the introduction to his collected volume, that his work constitutes “one people, gathered and remade” rather than a set of discrete, unrelated character studies.² The editors’ introduction makes the Whitmanian claim about the volume’s design explicit, describing water as the master symbol precisely because it “is what carries you away from where you were and what returns you, altered, to the place you started,” language that transposes Whitman’s democratic, boundary-dissolving self into Mulhern’s own hydraulic register.⁵

The clearest textual embodiment of this Whitmanian claim may be Nonna’s own vernacular theology in “A Bath,” where a working-class Irish grandmother, without any exposure to Emerson or Whitman that the text records, arrives independently at the Oversoul’s central proposition — that individual suffering is not sealed off but shared and redistributive. Confessing that her own husband hit her, she tells her daughter Grace, “You’re not that horrible word, Gracie. You’re opinionated and strong. I wish I could have been more like you when I was a young woman. I followed the mold. Too afraid to do what I really wanted… To be a competitive swimmer. But we were poor, and poor women had little chance of pursuing such a dream.”⁶ Nana’s recognition that her daughter’s strength is, in some sense, the fulfillment of a thwarted self she recognizes as continuous with her own — not a separate person to be judged but a “multitude” she contains — performs, in an idiom of whiskey and stepladders rather than philosophy, exactly the joined-soul claim the Artistic Creed states directly.

IV. The Unresolved Seam: Oversoul Against Sacrament

The most rigorous critical question this material raises is whether an Emersonian Oversoul, which dissolves the individual soul into “every other soul that has been or will be,”¹ is philosophically compatible with the Catholic sacramental theology — confession, communion, the Assumption of Mary — that structures the same body of work, and which other essays on this site have treated as the fiction’s primary theological register. Mulhern’s own language suggests he experiences no contradiction, treating the two systems as mutually reinforcing rather than competing: “In art, as in faith, what is laid down is taken up — and it becomes life eternal,”² a sentence that borrows the vocabulary of the Mass (offertory, elevation) to describe an essentially Emersonian process of recurrence.

But the seam is visible in the fiction, not just smoothed over in the creed. Emerson’s Transcendentalism is famously a philosophy of the sovereign individual conscience, distrustful of inherited institution and “the sacredness of traditions”³; Catholicism, especially the Catholicism of Mulhern’s Irish and Italian grandmothers, is a religion of inherited institution nearly by definition, its authority residing precisely in tradition’s unbroken transmission. The unauthorized-confessor structure examined elsewhere on this site — grandmothers hearing confession with no priestly warrant — can be read as the fiction’s own unconscious solution to this seam: an institutional sacrament (confession) performed by a resolutely individual, uncredentialed conscience (Nana, Peggy, Aiden), which is to say a Catholic form filled with Transcendentalist content. Mulhern’s Boston and Philadelphia interiors are, on this reading, the site of an ongoing negotiation between two American religious inheritances that rarely speak to each other directly — the immigrant Church of his grandmothers and the native Protestant dissent of Concord — conducted almost entirely without the characters, or perhaps the author himself, naming the negotiation as such. The Artistic Creed is the one place in the corpus where the negotiation is named, and it is for that reason an indispensable document for reading everything else.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays Teaching as Vocation and Trap → A Working Philosophy