“Who is the Lord of the World?”: Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers and the Total Vision

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
“Who is the Lord of the World?”: Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers and the Total Vision
Abstract
The author argues that Montreal author Leonard Cohen's novel Beautiful Losers (1966) is animated by a visionary thrust towards totality. The author notes that the totalizing impulse is expressed in the novel in the trope of the perfect body, but the perfect body implies, as well, the perfect representation — an embodiment, in art, of everything. The author looks at different ways in which Cohen elides sacral images of totality (meaning apocalyptic images, or constructions of the universal body) and fascistic or totalitarian images of totality. The author came to the conclusion that Cohen was making an extreme case for art: he adopts and exposes the darker implications of the quest for perfect (total) form, and yet he pursues the total vision anyway. The author believes that Beautiful Losers suggests that the perfect artist cannot help but respond to a spiritually-inflected desire to perceive the world’s ineffable organization as one body.
Publication
Canadian Literature : A Quarterly of Criticism and Review
Volume
No. 212
Pages
86-102
Date
Spring 2012
Language
en
Citation
Purdham, Medrie. “‘Who Is the Lord of the World?’: Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers and the Total Vision.” Canadian Literature : A Quarterly of Criticism and Review No. 212 (Spring 2012): 86–102.
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