The Complex Vision

by John Cowper

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. This text refers to the Bibliobazaar edition.

Genres: Philosophy

398 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1920

Reviews

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

He obviously influenced Henry Miller, for one.

[Richard S · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book of - philosophy? Psychology? Is so incredibly - unreadable - it hardly seems to be at all like it's written by the same JC Powys of his other books. To call it extremely long and "tedious" would be an understatement - he has an incomprehensible theory about what he calls the "complex vision" - a combination of 11 different things - and - perhaps I'm just not smart enough to understand - but it goes on for pages and pages - and while I kept hoping for nuggets of Powys' insight and - help me - humor - I felt helpless, paragraph after paragraph that just escaped me. Perhaps, and this is a big perhaps, it will help me understand some of his later works - I suspect that the various "epiphanies" many of his characters have are perhaps moments of this "complex vision", but rather I think this is Powys going off on a bizarre tangent. You might say it's genius or insanity, but rather I suspect he's just a very bad and confused philosopher. Writers are sometimes good and bad at various things - JC Powys is a genius at fiction, literary criticism, and personal self-help/realization, fairly decent at poetry, but really terrible at philosophy and contemporary commentary. I suppose the philosophy may turn out helpful in understanding his later work (if so I will come back and edit this review) but my memory of his later novels do not seem to relate to this work at all.