What I have done in Part 1, is to
look at some of James Wood’s statements in The
Broken Estate, statements which in
their boldness, Amardeep Singh acknowledges, practically invite disagreement, and
have made a sustained argument, in contest, about the continued presence of
religious aspects in novel writing and reading, describing a broad and
inclusive fiction that is consistent with and only possible in a pluralistic
culture where the secular and religious freely coexist. In the latter section of Part 1, I’ve argued
that the rise of a theoretical fiction and an ideology of professional
cooperation in the academy between authors and critics has further usurped and
pre-empted Wood’s notion of provisional belief.
One does not so much believe or
disbelieve in the world of
post-modern fiction as one agrees or disagrees with its stated ideology. The fostering of narrow theoretical
interpretations via author to critic and critic to author reification not only
endangers an independent literature through institutional co-optation, but also
threatens future interest in post-modern literature by aligning these works
with theories which will eventually become, if they have not already become, dated.
Here I will examine a more recent
essay of Wood’s , “Why? The Fictions of Life and Death”, (The New Yorker, Dec. 9, 2013).
In it, there is evidence Wood has migrated away from some of those
fundamental statements about the secularity of the novel, even though Wood’s first
novel The Book Against God (2003)
already displayed an ambivalence about religion that belied the boldest
declarations of those roughly contemporaneous essays. A decade hence, Wood sees the novel as having
both inherent religious and secular aspects. The major change is that he is looking to
texts as the basis of his claims rather than to reader-focused attitudes toward fiction. What hasn’t changed is the fundamental way
Wood applies his theory. I was struck
by the peculiar assertion, the underlying thesis of his reminiscence about
attending a memorial service. It opens
out into a reflection on life and death in the novel:
To read the
novel is to be constantly moving between secular and religious modes, between
what you could call instance and form.
The novel’s secular impulse is toward expanding and extending life; the
novel is the great trader in the shares of the ordinary. It expands the instances of our lives into
scenes and details; it strives to run these instances at a rhythm close to real
time. Think of the way that Henry James
devotes an entire chapter, in ‘The Portrait of a Lady,” to the five or six
hours that Isabel Archer sits in a chair, thinking about the failure of her
marriage. Nearly half a century later,
Mrs. Ramsay, in “To the Lighthouse,” will be sitting by the window, thinking about
her children, about her husband, about all the sorts of different things, and
will forget that she is supposed to stay still, because Lily Briscoe is
painting a portrait of her. Mrs. Ramsay,
in effect, forgets that she is at the center of a portrait, of a novel. This is a kind of secular forgetting: the
novel is so full of its own life that human life seen under the eye of eternity
has been carelessly banished. Death will
roar back, but not yet, not now…When the novel is in this forgetful, profane
mode, it wants its characters to live forever.
It seems a striking change from The Broken Estate, a long way from the
earlier quotes that prompted Singh to say “For Wood, the novel destroys strong
belief as a matter of form…” If the
novel is the “slayer of religions” what then does Wood mean when he talks about
the novel having a religious form? Wood’s assertion gives the impression that a
religious form is there in the novel, as if you could just pick any novel and
find it, the way you’d expect a PC to come with operating software. All the way through , the piece is built on
this kind of overstatement, like a car so precariously overloaded with
possessions, you hope it doesn’t have far to travel. One problem is that you have to accept Wood’s
premise of secular and religious modes in the first place, because he’s vague
in defining them and assumes they exist by virtue of his having conceived of them. Throughout the piece, Wood virally
attaches secular to “instance” and religious to “form” and “time” as if they
were compound nouns, asserting them without first, if ever, making a reasoned
argument for their use. He attempts this
in the above passage with the example of Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay forgetting to sit
still while posing for a portrait. Notice the way he makes the forgetting of
death a secular forgetting by
assuming, it would seem, that death is a religious reckoning in the first place.
But you can tell he's loaded the die to roll his way
when he makes eternity (quite blind to a secularist) into the eye of eternity. He
supplies a divine outlook on the eternal (suggesting it is Godly rather than
evolutionary) and thus circularly justifies the forgetful instance as a secular thing by contrast. But calling the novelist's concern with death a religious mode, is like saying scientists who study human
genes and disease pathology are working in a religious mode because of their
mindfulness of death. It stands to
reason, if eternity exists for secular-minded people, then death and the contemplation
of the eternal has a secular, not a religious, meaning for them. Singh’s quotation of Northrup Frye from The Secular Scripture: A study of the
Structure of Romance, is much to the point about the liberation of time:
The secession of
science from the mythological universe is a familiar story. The separating of scientific and mythological
space began theoretically with Copernicus, and effectively with Galileo. By the nineteenth century scientific time had
been emancipated from mythological time.
But in proportion as the mythological universe becomes more obviously a
construct, another question arises. We
saw that there is no structural principle to prevent the fables of secular
literature from also forming a mythology, or even a mythological universe. Is it possible, then, to look at secular
stories as a whole, and as forming a single biblical vision? This is the question implied in the ‘secular
scripture’ of my title…The Bible is the epic of the creator, with God as its
hero. Romance is the structural core of
all fiction: being directly descended from folktale, it brings us closer than
any other aspect of literature to the sense of fiction, considered as a whole,
as the epic of the creature, man’s vision of his own life as a quest.
If “scientific time” has been
“emancipated from mythological time”, and fiction, via the romance, is a
non-religious, “secular scripture”, why does Wood (given his former secularist outlook) see death and the eternal
as elements of religious form and time, rather than elements of emancipated secular
form and time? Wood never gives a satisfying answer. There is an assumed
matter-of-factness about the significant fundamental claim he makes, as if it
were a boast made at a cocktail party after several drinks,which everybody is
either just drunk enough to swallow, or too drunk to dispute. Early on and then later in the piece Wood
turns to the idea that the act of writing the beginning, middle and end of a
human life, authorial omniscience also, is an “arrogation of divine
powers”. Perhaps this metaphor for what
a novelist does he takes for granted as the religious mode. Wood may view it that way, but when I write a
novel, I don’t feel like god, I feel like my characters. When I envision a beginning and an ending to
my novel, I am not asserting a divine prerogative, but imaging the world, as if I were there to witness it as a
human being. There is a secular way of
seeing the authorial mode without the metaphoric overlay of godly omniscience. It all depends on the author. I like to write my novels from the inside
out; somebody like Nabokov writes from the outside in, artistically controlling
every element and detail. Even if Nabokov
‘s way of playing God is the meaning of Wood’s religious mode, that Nabokovian
extreme cannot be generalized for the novel as a whole.
In Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, the unnamed narrator stands
waiting to book a room at an inn, and in that short period of time the details
of his life, a fictional version of the pianist Glenn Gould’s and the
narrator’s friend, Wortheimer’s life, are expanded on for more than a hundred
pages. Yet, these instances are obsessed with thoughts of death and suicide. Does this mean, according to Wood’s sweeping
definition, that Bernhard’s mindfulness of death makes these religious instances rather than secular ones? Bernhard is
certainly expanding life with a series of rather circular recollections and
scenes, and so this expansion must be the secular mode, and yet, according to
Wood, by imposing death on the moment is not the instance here also contracting life, the way the novel’s form
supposedly flattens it? It’s a
distinction that doesn’t hold, then, because in almost every novel you can
think of an exception to Wood’s new dictum.
The problem is not Wood’s observation that the novel both expands and
contracts our lives, but Wood’s failure to persuade us that the expansion of
life through scenes and details is fundamentally secular and the formal need to
have a beginning, middle and end to a life story is fundamentally
religious. For one thing, the god-like
omniscience Wood refers to early on, which has the temerity to make a
beginning, middle and end to a human life, is also responsible for expanding
that life as well moment by moment. It is the same consciousness at work, part of the same impulse. The causality of the instance is to the
ultimate form of a novel what the values of light and shadow are to a basic
line drawing. When filling in those
instances with the shadow and light that lend perspective and depth, you are
not forgetting the line drawing on the paper, you are ever mindful of the
boundaries of objects and ultimate composition of the drawing. No creator of novels bifurcates their concern
the way Wood suggests, and I doubt readers see it that way either. Whether a novel has religious or secular
elements depends entirely on the novel and the author writing it, not on Wood’s
semantic understanding of death as a religious signifier. Wood’s whole notion seems fundamental to the
exclusion of content. For instance, if
you took Updike’s A Month of Sundays,
it has something of a secular form, yet is full of religious instance, as it is
the month long journal of a sexually disgraced minister sent to a religious
retreat and it is a takeoff on
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Its connection to that other novel makes the
two interconnected in literature’s own extra-Biblical mythology, making
tangible Frye’s sense of literature as “secular scriptures”. Joyce’s A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man does not close out a life but brings a young
man to a point of decision: the beginning of his life as an artist. I would guess the Bildungsroman would meet Frye’s definition of a secular form, not a
religious one.
The whole notion that the organic and fluid process
of writing a novel can be carved up arbitrarily like national borders after a
war into secular and religious states is an ill-conceived notion, if only
because it would be impossible to prove as a general rule. This may be why Wood
is so vague and deflects his own assertions with circular reasoning and
conversational drift, like somebody edging toward the door to get out of an
awkward circle. Notice what happens when
Wood attempts to define what he means by a religious mode:
“But the novel’s
eternal or religious mode reminds us that life is bounded by death, that life
is just death-in-waiting. What makes the
mode religious is that it shares the religious tendency to see life as the mere
antechamber to the afterlife—hence John Donne’s characterization of our lives,
in his sermon on the Book of Job, as a sentence already written in a book by
God: ‘Our whole life is but a
parenthesis, our receiving of our soul, and delivering it back again, makes up
the perfect sentence; Christ is Alpha
and Omega, and our Alpha and Omega is all we are to consider.’”
When I read this passage, I stopped cold. The novel shares the religious tendency to see life as the mere
antechamber to the afterlife? Rather than explaining his theory, as reasoned argument should, this assertion compounds the need for further explanation. It digs the hole deeper. I mean, isn’t that how anybody would argue the novel’s concern with death as a religious mode, by deploying a quote from
a sermon that predates the novel, rather than giving us examples from actual novels, or quotes from novelists? The moment is so dumbfounding, the disconnect so complete, Wood sounds like a politician giving an
elaborate answer to a question the interviewer has not even asked. Why not just quote Matthew 6:19/20 as
authority on the novel’s anticipation of the afterlife. Hence, Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount,
“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth
corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in
heaven…” Yes, Donne sees life as a mere
parenthesis, that perfect sentence delivered back to god, but Donne is speaking as a theologian not a novelist, and unless Wood is talking about John Bunyan and C.S. Lewis there is no way to argue his assertion. The novel has no such tendency.
Having made a bold statement
about the novel’s religious tendency and expounded on it by quoting a sermon that has nothing to do with the novel, indeed
Wood’s next line of argument is to quote scripture (and you thought I was being facetious). This paragraph immediately follows the above
quote.
In this mode the novel does as God vouchsafes to do in Psalm 121:
“The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in.” It teaches us about the relation of instance to form. That’s an achievement, because most of us find it difficult to make
this inquiry into our own lives. We are condemned to apprehend our going out
and our coming in retrospectively, as if we were rowing a
boat, clear-eyed only about the distance we have already covered. I was happy in this city, we say, when we
return to it years later; I was unhappy throughout my twenties; I was truly in
love only once; it was a mistake, I now see, to have taken that job; I am forty-eight and it has taken
me this long to realize that I know nothing about my father...
Yes, the novel records the goings out and comings in of our lives, as do biographies, but none of this has anything to do with the afterlife, that is, with religion. Singly or collectively, the instances of life stand on their own as secular facts. Wood is just imposing religion on them without showing any structural relationship between the novel and religious literary forms, which is the case he could be making here by choosing specific texts. Perhaps, with a
deadline approaching and an idea in his head that sounded good at first blush, Wood was seduced by his own rhetoric, and used the escape hatch of rambling reflection when arguments didn't easily follow assertions. The loose form and reflective nature of the reminiscence too easily aided the murky generalities of such a thesis and too little supported a space for the analytic rigor required to argue it. Given how near and dear religion and secularism are to Wood, it's a surprisingly weak distillation of his concentrative powers. Wood is on the right track by
looking to texts for evidence of religious or secular content, but he goes off the rails in
trying to fast track his flimsy general theory. A case can be made, as Singh concludes below, that
within the process of secularization, particular novels can be said to embody
religious aspects, but these are cases that have to be made novel by novel, not
by the sweep of fundamental declarations
about instance and form that simply do not hold up to close examination.
Secularization
never ended as a historical process—nor will it end; it is still in process, in
Europe (where debates about religion in public life have been extremely
important in recent years), in the United States (a highly religious country
with a thoroughly secularized public sphere), and elsewhere. As in history, so in literature. With every generation of modern writers—indeed,
with every novel written—the struggle for literary secularism is rewritten,
reinvented as if for the first time.
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