Neo-Pagan (literature)

Neo-Pagan (literature)

Neopagan is a term for a type of vital philosophy expressed in 20th century literary criticism. This use does not indicate any literal paganism in the religious sense at all. It connotes, rather, a form of positive existentialism comprising an attitude to the environment in which the immediate is indulged in to the fullest, with tomorrow left to fend for itself. To quote from Cyril Connolly's introduction to the first English edition of Albert Camus' "L'étranger":

'Meursault represents the neo-pagan, a reversion to Mediterranean man as once he was in Corinth or Carthage or Alexandria or Tarshish, as he is today in Casablanca or Southern California. He is sensual and well-meaning, profoundly in love with life, whose least pleasures, from a bathe to a yawn, afford him complete and silent gratification. He lives without anxiety in a continuous present and has no need to think or to express himself; there is no Nordic why-clause in his pact with nature.'

By this definition, Ernest Hemingway's philosophy can be construed as neo-pagan, becoming explicitly so towards the end of his life in "True at First Light" in which he advocates an ancient hunter religion based upon Gitche Manitou, in contrast to Islamic monotheism.

This interpretation of paganism as existence in a 'continuous present' is wryly mocked by Dorothy Parker in her poem "The Flaw in Paganism". [http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/4966/]


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