Literary Secularism:
Religion and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Fiction
By AmardEEP SINGH
Published By
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Chapter One
The Critical Tradition and the Modern Novel: from Daniel Defoe to James
Wood
This is surely the true secularism
of fiction—why, despite its being a kind of magic, it is actually the enemy of superstition,
the slayer of religions, the scrutineer of
falsity. —James Wood, The Broken Estate
As a starting
point for thinking about secularism in literature, no literary
critic is more helpful than James Wood. In his introduction to The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and
Belief (2000), Wood
is confidently secular in a way that might be taken as representative of much
modern thinking about literature. In identifying modern fiction as “the enemy
of superstition, the slayer of religions,” Wood presumes that whole categories
of modern literature—where the novel is held to be the most
important—contribute to a broad secularizing project in accord with the aims of
liberal nation-state planners, and modern science and social theory. It is a
position for which one can find ample support. There are, for instance, any
number of examples of writers and critics who have spoken out directly against
religious orthodoxies in their works–one thinks of James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, E.M.
Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and,
more recently, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, and V.S. Naipaul.
Against this array of canonical writers (some of them newly canonical)
who have publicly affirmed a secularist perspective, the number of expressly
religious serious writers is quite small–figures like G. K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis are
among the best respected of twentieth century writers who were avowedly
religious, but even their status is somewhat less than canonical. And writers
(many of them from outside
Admittedly,
the question about secularism in literature could start at a much more
fundamental level than Wood's “slayer of religions.” Basic questions could be
raised, for instance, about what exactly is meant by the “secular” and
“religious,” terms which are widely contested in religious studies, the
sociology of religion, and even theology. There are many frames within which
this course of inquiry might be located, including the sociology of Max Weber, political philosophy in the vein of Marx's
“On the Jewish Question,” as well as broad trends in philosophy, such as the
controversy over Nietzsche’s “death of God.” This is not to mention the
problem of cross-cultural comparison, in which postcolonial theory and the
Subaltern Studies school of historiography would figure strongly. But in all of
these there is a severe danger of diverting an investigation of a question of
literary form through sociology, politics, or theology. James Wood is a better start because he
takes a clear, straightforward approach to the problem, emphasizing the formal
properties of literary works, especially in fiction. Through engaging Wood's
ideas about the secularism of fiction, a course emerges through which at least
some of the above questions about literary secularism can be addressed
substantially, without the exclusion of politics or history. The goal is to
dispense with excessive framing, and get right into the argument.
Though
statements like the above suggest a very muscular approach to secularism in the
novel, a second glance reveals that Wood's own relationship to religion in
literature is quite a bit more complex. Despite his emphasis on secularism, at
several moments in his essays Wood expresses hostility to secularization,
faulting nineteenth-century critics like Matthew Arnold and
Ernest Renan for
opening the gateway to secularization, but unconsciously. Wood prefers writers
to be either openly religious or openly atheist, and expresses impatience with those
who occupy the in-between space of Matthew Arnold’s “religion of culture.” [1]
But literature thrives on ambiguities; there are dozens of examples of
major writers in the nineteenth as well as twentieth centuries whose works as
well as lives reflect a nuanced, ambiguous relationship to religious texts,
themes, and institutions. In the Indian tradition, this sense of ambiguity can
be found as far back as the boundary-crossing Bhakti
poets of the late Medieval period—chief among them Kabir.
In England, such ambiguity is especially interesting in the Romantic Poets,
whose verses reflect a profound secularization of ethos, even while retaining
(especially in Blake and Wordsworth) a prophetic sensibility deeply connected
to Christianity. This phenomenon has, however, been amply
discussed, in M.H. Abrams' Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and
Revolution in Romantic Poetry, [2]
as well as in the subsequent exchange with J. Hillis
Miller in the pages of Critical Inquiry.[3]
It has not, however, been discussed as extensively in the modern novel, which
is what I therefore propose to do here.
Through
close readings of novels by George Eliot, Rabindranath Tagore, James Joyce, V.S. Naipaul, Taslima Nasreen, and
Salman Rushdie, I will argue that the apparent firmness of
these authors’ respective models of secularism and secularization is undone,
along four lines. The first is mimetic: each of these novelists represents the
continued power of religious communities and institutions have in the modern
world. It may not be the determining or the only available world-view, but all
of these writers suggest that it continues to be a viable one. The second is
more structural: the deep co-imbrication of modern,
secular discourses such as nationalism and individualism with particular
religious traditions inflects the form of the narratives themselves. This need
not be a matter of emulating the shape of religious scriptures; in Eliot's Daniel
Deronda, for instance, a seemingly conventional heterosexual marriage plot
between Gwendolen Harleth
and Daniel Deronda is diverted by the latter's discovery of his connection to
Judaism. The third point of interaction
between the secular and the religious is essentially thematic: one sees the
continued reference to religious scriptures, narratives, and metaphors in all
of these works, even as the authors seem to be transforming classical religious
icons (such as the Hindu image
of “Sita,” the devoted wife) through modern recontextualizations. Finally, and perhaps most
importantly, through their assertion of creative will as literary authors,
novelists assert a measure of power over religious scriptures, producing texts
of human rather than divine provenance. This final point might seem obvious,
but the question of the location of authorship becomes the core issue in the
dream-fragments in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses.
Theologians
and anthropologists such as Diana Eck and
Karen Armstrong[4]
have in recent years questioned the received wisdom that there is in modernity
a decisive, universal movement towards secularization as a historical event
with a definite end. A non-teleological concept of modernity is also present in
the works of these authors: the secular and the religious exist in an
intimately antinomian, mutually defining opposition in many aspects of cultural
life, including literature. In Joyce's Ulysses, for instance, Biblical
allegory impinges on the secular engagement with Irish nationalism. Similarly,
a kind of sacralized spirituality is central to
Rabindranath Tagore's conception of an independent Indian nation
in Gora. The social and intellectual worlds of
England, Ireland, and India are in
fact rather closely tied together, through the shared history of colonialism,
the problematic of nationalism, and the conflicted rise of individualism as a
dominant mode of defining social identity.
The Emergence of Literary
Secularism in the Critical Tradition
To
begin with, Wood's critical secularism is placed in plain view in the
introduction of the book, where he sketches a theory of fiction. Let us return
to the quote above, this time including the preceding paragraph for full
context:
Nevertheless, the reality of fiction
must also draw its power from the reality of the world. The real, in fiction,
is always a matter of belief, and is therefore a kind of discretionary magic:
it is a magic whose existence it is up to us, as readers, to validate and
confirm. It is for this reason that many readers dislike actual magic or
fantasy in novels. . . . Fiction demands belief from us, and that is demanding
partly because we can choose not to believe. However, magic—improbable
occurrences, ghosts, coincidences—dismantles belief, forcing on us miracles
which, because they are beyond belief, we cannot choose not to believe. This is
why almost all fiction is not magical, and why the great writers of magical
tales are so densely realistic.
The gentle request to believe is what makes fiction so
moving. Joyce requests that we believe that Mick Lacy could sing the tune
better than Stephen's father. . . . It is a belief that is requested, that we can
refuse at any time, that is under our constant surveillance. This is surely the
true secularism of fiction—why, despite its being a kind of magic, it is
actually the enemy of superstition, the slayer of religions, the scrutineer of falsity. Fiction moves in the shadow of
doubt, knows itself to be a true lie, knows that at any moment it might fail to
make its case. Belief in fiction is always belief “as if.” Our belief is itself
metaphorical—it only resembles actual belief, and is therefore never
wholly belief.[5]
This is a refreshingly strong claim. For
Wood, the emergence of the novel in particular marks a transition from the
dominance of absolute Biblical narratives (authored by “God”) to the much more
contingent world of fiction. Fiction is a kind of storytelling invented by
writers whose authorship is specified and (eventually) advertised, and where
belief in the worlds created in its pages is strictly notional. It may be that
at moments in the passage quoted above Wood's rhetoric is excessive; it is hardly
self-evident that fiction is the “slayer of religions” and the “scrutineer of falsity.” The claims can, however, be tested
in novels themselves, as well as cross-referenced against the critical
tradition. Starting with the latter project, I will briefly survey the ideas of
some major literary critics for whom secularization has been an important
theme. My discussion below, I should say, goes considerably beyond Wood: in my
readings of critics like Ian Watt, Northrop Frye, and T.S. Eliot, I am less interested in establishing
literature's role as an engine of secularization than I am in tracing
how modern literature came to be a primary site where secularism as a
philosophical and political program is expressed. I am, in other words, looking
at secularization as a story that unfolds primarily within literature,
but in parallel with philosophical, cultural, and political phenomena.
Wood's
account of the secularization of literature rhymes quite well with Ian Watt's Weberian account
in The Rise of the Novel, though it also shares some of the problems in
Watt's argument. Watt's idea of secularization depends on his distinguishing
between two eighteenth-century works, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and William
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Though the two
novels are formally quite similar (and Bunyan predates Defoe by some years),
Watt argues that Defoe's novel should be properly understood as the first truly
modern novel because of the “secularization of [Defoe's] outlook,” which is for Watt closely shaped
by the progress of historical events in England at the time:
The relative impotence of religion in
Defoe's novels, then, suggests not insincerity but the profound secularisation of his outlook, a secularisation
which was a marked feature of his age—the word itself in its modern sense dates
from the first decades of the eighteenth century. Defoe himself had been born
at a time when the Puritan Commonwealth had just collapsed at the Restoration,
while Robinson Crusoe was written in
the year of the Salters' Hall controversy, when,
after the last hopes of Dissent in a compromise with the Anglican Church had been
given up, even their effort to unite among themselves proved impossible. In The Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe
Defoe’s hero meditates on the ebbing of the Christian religion throughout the
world; it is a bitterly divided minority force in a largely pagan world, and
God’s final intervention seems remoter than ever.[6]
Watt's historical reference points are
undeniably important, but his conclusions are questionable. In effect, the
events he mentions represent the failure of the Dissenting churches to organize
themselves effectively against the Anglican Establishment. But they don't speak to the
true decline of the authority of the Establishment in the early and
mid-nineteenth century, which was linked to nothing else than the continued
expansion of the Dissenting churches, and with that expansion a probable
increase in the prevalence of a strict form of expressive religious piety in
everyday life.[7] As in
the
More
importantly, England’s secularism or lack thereof doesn’t determine Defoe’s own
attitude—far from it. Watt has to acknowledge, at times uncomfortably, the
pervasiveness of Puritan ethics and theology in Defoe’s novel. Though his
actions are not always harmonious with a strict interpretation of Puritan
religious principles, Crusoe is haunted by a sense of “original sin,” quotes
scripture relentlessly, and is evidently dependent on his faith and “blessings
from Providence” for his survival. Watt's distinction of Defoe from Bunyan primarily on the basis of Defoe's greater
investment in the material world thus seems only partially correct, and the
“secularization” he insists on is driven more by historical events than it is
on the evidence in the text. It may be that it is unnecessary to pose a sharp
distinction between the two forms of Puritan prose-writing, or to assert a
clear connection between the rise of the novel and the idea of secularization
as presented in Watt. Watt's distinction between Defoe and Bunyan does not, in
short, hold. Both of the authors named are situated at a critical distance from
the Establishment, and are interested in defining religion separate from Church
doctrine. And while Defoe is considerably more secular in terms of his
use of characterization and his relatively contained use of Biblical reference,
neither he nor Bunyan is truly “secular” in the sense implied by inventing a
world devoid of God's involvement. If we are looking for what Wood calls the
“fiction's true secularism,” we are not going to find it in these early
eighteenth-century novels.
A
stronger sense of secularity can be found in the writing and criticism of
Romantic movement, beginning in the latter years of the
eighteenth century, and continuing through the early nineteenth century. As the
literary movement unfolds in parallel with the Enlightenment, it is certainly a
time of breakthroughs for secularism, especially in the domain of philosophy.
But even here, the story is not so simple. A number of recent theorists in the
sociology of religion, most prominently Talal Asad,[9]
have put forth arguments rethinking the hard line between pre-modern and modern
discourses of religion. While pre-modern and early modern periods may not be as
straightforwardly “religious” as is commonly thought, close scrutiny of the
true heterogeneity of the modern era, with the continued prevalence of
superstition and myth even in quite secularized contexts, as well as the
emergence of “substitute” discourses such as nationalism, suggest that European
modernity may be “secularized,” but it is not unambiguously “secular.”
A
literary critic who points in this direction in his approach to Romanticism is
Northrop Frye. In The Secular Scripture, Frye lays
out the idea of two literatures operating in parallel with each other, one
“high”—Establishment literature, in both of its senses—and the other “low,”
popular, and irreverent (“secular” in its Latinate sense, worldly). Frye's use
of typology and his “archetypal” thinking, though often problematic, nevertheless
addresses the issue of literary secularism at its basic conceptual level. Frye
affirms the border between secular literature and Biblical (or high
mythological) storytelling, but argues that the two have been coexistent
throughout European literary history, going back as far as Homer.
Early
in The Secular Scripture, Frye marks a distinction between the “serious”
narratives a society tells about itself—its “high” mythology (this includes
religious and scriptural narratives), on the one hand—and, on the other, the
lighter narratives found in folktales and romance. An obvious example of high
mythology is certainly the Bible, but equally important is the type of myth
defined by Plato in The Republic—myth as an allegory, used to
explain abstract concepts to sub-abstract minds.[10] Myths are also the key explanatory
(rationalizing) component of rituals, which are widely present in secular
aspects of life, including secular narratives (romances take forms that are
ritually prescribed) and dramas (which are presented ritually). Romance, on the
other hand, is exemplified by first Chaucer as
well as Shakespeare, as a countervailing narrative format.
The
import of this distinction between romance and myth for Frye is the way it
opens insight into the paradoxes and complexities of the great Romantic poet,
William Blake, especially given Blake's simultaneous
secularizing and prophesying tendencies. Frye solves one aspect of the Blake
problem via his distinction between secular romance and mythical/religious
storytelling traditions that exist in parallel with each other historically:
Meanwhile, an early absorption in
Blake had expanded in two directions. One direction took me into the Bible by
way of Milton: this is to be explored in another book. The other direction was
on that connected Blake with two other writers in particular, Spenser and
William Morris, both writers of sentimental romance. So Spenser, Scott,
and Morris appeared as three major centers of romance in a continuous
tradition, and these once identified, other centers, like the tales of Chaucer and the late
comedies of Shakespeare, soon fell into place. This left me with a sense of a
double tradition, one biblical and the other romantic, growing out of an
interest in Blake which seemed to have contained them both.[11]
It's a rather different way of framing
literary history than the “great tradition” espoused by critics like F.R. Leavis and Harold Bloom, which sees a direct line from Shakespeare, Milton, to Blake. For Frye, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser—even William Morris—fall on one side, while Milton and the Bible
fall on the other. Blake, at the end of this era in literary history, collapses
the two traditions in his poetry, using his verse to perform hieratic as well
as romantic functions.
Frye's
understanding of Blake is unique in that he never claims that Blake is a
secularizer, in part because his system does not require any teleological
movement towards secularization. Frye's understanding of secularization in
general is probably not so different from that seen in Watt, Weber, or for that
matter Wood. But his understanding of how secularism works in literature
is in fact radically different:
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. In the
chapters that follow I should like to look at fiction as a total verbal order,
with the outlines of an imaginative universe in it. 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.[12]
I find it intriguing that Frye's language is
so close to Wood's at some instances (“fiction as a total verbal order, with
the outlines of an imaginative universe in it”), while his meaning is clearly
different. For Wood, in the passage I quoted above, modern fiction is a
secularizing force because of the way it creates a world that is believed in by
the reader voluntarily and contingently. For Frye, belief is essentially
irrelevant. What counts is form, and in this instance he is arguing that
the form of Romance is not in fact so different from that of the “Epic of the
Creator,” the Bible. The difference between the two narrative genres is really
to be found in their subject. Though I believe Frye means to strengthen the
secular tradition in literary history, his phrasing introduces a powerful
possibility for secular/religious crossover. [13]
With
the continued prevalence of what M.H. Abrams called
“natural supernaturalism,”[14]
Romantic poetry is often only softly and ambiguously secular. While the
movement is often seen as dominated by radical figures like Blake and Keats, it
also produced the pro-Establishment writer
Coleridge, who published a pamphlet on this subject in
1837, called On the Constitution of Church and State.[15]
But the process of political secularization experienced revolutionary advances
through the middle years of the nineteenth century, leading to the
enfranchisement of all religious minority groups (culminating in the
enfranchisement of the Jews, in 1856), the decriminalization of atheism,
and the advent of secular public education (with the founding of London
University and,
much later, the Education reforms of 1870).[16]
The latter half of the nineteenth century also, incidentally, saw the advent of
the specific word “secularism,” as a pragmatic political invention of the
reformer George Jacob Holyoake.[17]
The change in the culture was palpable, though the complete divorce of religion
from the social agenda was still in doubt in the writings of a number of
prominent intellectuals.
Wood
describes this phenomenon and this moment in his essay “The Broken Estate,”
which represents Wood's most substantial engagement with the question of
literary secularism. Wood does not particularly dwell on Europe's social and
political transformations up through the middle of the nineteenth century, and
approaches Matthew Arnold and
Ernest Renan in a
rather unforgivingly theological manner:
But the moment at which Jesus became
the hero of a novel, of a 'prose-poem,' he also became fictional. The old
estate broke. Jesus lost his divinity, became only an inspiring fantasist. We
may wonder what use Jesus is if he is a figure no different from Socrates on
the one hand and Daniel Deronda on the other. Why should we heed his difficult
words, what is the flavor of his command once the taste for his authority has
evaporated? Secularists perhaps relish that point in intellectual history at
which Christianity loses its
theological prestige and begins to fall into the secular ranks. Yet,
intellectually, a new pettiness was the first replacement of the old, divine Jesus,
and it is hard not to lament the passing of actual belief when it is replaced
with only a futile poetry. Christianity was not, of course, shoveled away, it
was coaxed into sleep by nurses who mistakenly thought that they were healing
it. Indeed, it might be said that in the last forty years of the nineteenth
century, until Nietzsche's decisively canceling work began to dominate, the
feeblest evasions and weak-mindedness passed for theological thinking. Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold are the chief
nurses of the sleep of nineteenth-century Europe, and in their work one finds
much false medicine.[18]
What is initially surprising about this
passage is Wood's reference to the “flavor of [Jesus'] command,” and his
seeming self-distancing from the “secularists,” amongst whom it ordinarily
seems proper to place him. But even here, Wood is not particularly hostile to
the finality of secularization, which for him was made definitive by Nietzsche, and which evidently continued without pause
through the twentieth century. No, what irks him is the “false medicine” of
Arnold and Renan, who espouse views about the
rationality of religion and its moral necessity that today might seem “conservative”
(in Culture and Anarchy, Arnold supported the Anglican Establishment as an essential component of the
best in English culture), but which were intended as political buzzwords rather
than rigorous theological concepts. For Wood, the true tragedy is not
Nietzsche's rejection of God (and of Jesus), but the secularization of the
Biblical narrative, such that it becomes merely another kind of novel.[19]
We see the fulfillment of the phrasing in the earlier quote about fiction as
the “slayer” of religion. For Wood, the novel destroys strong belief as a
matter of form, by introducing the option of the provisional, non-committal
type of belief that is typical of a reader's approach to a Dickens novel. Once
that way of reading—which is also a way of being—comes to dominate, it
subsumes all other kinds of narrative.
Frye
might disagree. In Frye, religious and secular classes of narrative expression
have a tense, possibly even competitive relationship with each other, but it is
unlikely that one can ever destroy the other. Other objections might arise from
Wood's own examples in the passage just quoted. Take, for instance, the
provocative mention of Daniel Deronda, whose ethical development—away from a
secularized Christianity and
into devout Judaism—is among the most complicated in English
language literature. For Deronda, eponymous hero of Eliot's final novel, the
advent of true belief in Judaism is always social (and rational) in some sense,
but, as a property of Deronda's maternal Jewish
heritage, it is also shown to be decidedly not voluntary. It is curious
that Wood cites Deronda as the key example of what happens when Jesus falls
into fiction, since Deronda is hardly a “secular” figure (unless Judaism and secularism
are identical for Wood; but that formulation would raise other problems).
In
my own close reading of Daniel Deronda in chapter 2 of the present
study, I find that the protagonist's Judaism is
encoded in the novel before he himself learns of it, and in a rather unusual
way. Eliot marks Deronda's difference in the way she
represents his face (and especially his nose) as somehow different from the
aristocratic “Mallinger nose” seen in the portraits
on the wall of his adoptive father's house. Through Deronda's
struggle with the conflicting demands on him as both an English gentleman and a
person of Jewish descent at a time of rife anti-Semitism, Eliot's novel plays
with the idea that Jewish difference might in fact be central to the main
stream of English life in the 19th century. She questions the racialization of Judaism common in nineteenth century life
throughout Europe, and foregrounds its living religious traditions, which are
“still throbbing in human lives.” Her aim is to further the cause of British
secularism, not by disposing of religious traditions and communities, but by
humanizing Judaism through its first realistic literary representation—by a
non-Jew—in modern European literature.
Other
examples of writers who challenge the hard line between the secular and
religious functions of fiction come from outside of Europe, and by implication,
outside of the Christian tradition. Wood, like many English critics before him,
does not seriously concern himself with many non-European—or even
non-Christian—writers.[20]
In the cases of colonial Ireland and
India, the question of secularism is complicated
by the religious impositions associated with colonialism. In the Irish case,
the effect was to suppress the dominant religious tradition of the society by
imposing an Anglican Establishment (“The Church of Ireland”) whose goal was in direct alignment with
the economic and cultural interests of continued British dominance. In the
Indian case the religious imposition was considerably less, though it did grow
throughout the early nineteenth century, only to decline in a dramatic way
after the Rebellion of 1857, which led to the passing of secularizing
laws, of which many continue to be practiced after Indian independence. In both
the Indian and Irish cases, it is impossible to speak of the “natural”
development of political or cultural secularism, though many intellectual
historians have retroactively discovered important pre-colonial experiments
with religious tolerance. Moreover, the development of laws pertaining to the
rights of individual and minority groups in light of the religious beliefs of
the majority after independence in both states has been deeply affected by the
earlier history of colonial intervention in the religious practices of the
“natives,” in both Ireland and India.
No
one is more difficult to place along the scale of religiosity or secularism
than the poet and critic T.S. Eliot. Bucking the modernist trend towards
secularization, Eliot's life in the late 1920s and 30s seemed to be driven by a
reaction to secularism rather than by a positive interest in furthering it. He
published several controversial essays that directly advocated the
Establishment of the Anglican Church
in England, along the way criticizing secularism in England, and even, in one
infamous instance, expressing a somewhat anti-Semitic bent.[21]
And his attitude to literature seems, on the surface, to support this
anti-secularist turn, as when he writes that “the
whole of modern literature is corrupted by what I call Secularism, that is
simply unaware of, simply cannot understand the meaning of, the primacy of the
supernatural over natural life.” And yet, I believe Eliot should still
be called a secularist (of
As
is well known, Eliot quietly converted to Anglicanism in 1927, abandoning the
faith of his father and grandfather, both of whom were accomplished Unitarian ministers in Saint Louis, Missouri. While some
critics and biographers have questioned how devout an Anglican the
author of The Waste Land could actually have become in five short years,[22]
the truth of Eliot’s religious convictions will always be unknowable—though some
biographical context may be helpful in ascertaining Eliot’s emergence as an “Anglo-Catholic.” Though it was a private conversion ceremony, his
conversion soon became public knowledge, as Eliot announced his interest in
Anglicanism (if not his conversion per se) in the famous preface to the
1928 collection, For Lancelot Andrewes. There
he declared himself, "classicist in literature, royalist in politics and
Anglo-catholic in religion.” As his thinking developed, it began to be clear
that Eliot's turn to religion was largely a reaction against the negating
tendencies of much modernist writing on religion and English secular
“culture.” In The Idea of a Christian
Society, Eliot argued that a conservative Anglicanism—and not the atheistic
liberalism of peers such as Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Bertrand Russell—would be the best and only bulwark against
the twin evils of Fascism and Communism.
While
the essays on social theory and politics from the 1930s have been largely
erased from the Eliot tradition because they failed to have much impact at the
time, the latter engage the complex relationship between reading and belief,
including the problems that arise from attempting to read the literature of
secular modernism from the standpoint of belief. Eliot’s literary criticism has
had an immense impact on the constitution of literary criticism as an academic
field in the twentieth century. Initially, his critical output was instrumental
in the early formation of the New Criticism. And as volumes such the recent Close
Reading anthology[23]
show, the influence of Eliot and New Critical methodology remain, invisibly
woven into the fabric of secular reading practices that are taught and
practiced to this day.
Several
of Eliot's essays in literary criticism address the question of the role of
religion in modernism specifically, which is only fitting. In “Religion and
Literature,” one of the more compelling essays in this line, Eliot expresses
his frustration with the secularism of the modernist movement, but nevertheless
continues to affirm it in his own critical appraisal of the British literary
tradition. Eliot begins the essay by defining a scale of religiosity, which
begins with overtly theological writing, including the Bible as well as the key
theological writers of the Church (he mentions Jeremy Taylor with
regard to Anglicanism). This writing is to be thought of as sacred in the
direct sense; mere appreciation of its literary value is insufficient because
it is inappropriately secularized: “Those who talk of the Bible as a 'monument
of English prose' are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of
Christianity.”[24] Here, one notes the similarity to Wood's
response to secularization in Matthew Arnold, quoted above (“But the moment at which
Jesus became the hero of a novel, of a 'prose-poem,' he also became fictional”),
a similarity which is not accidental. For while Eliot and Wood differ in the
surface content of their response to religion, the form of the response—their
resistance to unconscious secularization—is quite similar, and similarly
contradictory.
The
most significant contradiction in Eliot's critical response to secularism is in
fact rather congenial—he embraces a thoroughly secular concept of literary
value despite his stated disavowal of secularism. It happens when he addresses
the category of “religious poetry,” which has traditionally remained rather
marginal in the English tradition: “For the great majority of people who love
poetry, 'religious poetry' is a variety of minor poetry: the religious
poet is not a poet who is treating the whole subject matter of poetry in a
religious spirit, but a poet who is dealing with a confined part of this
subject matter: who is leaving out what men consider their major passions, and
thereby confessing his ignorance of them.”[25]
Surprisingly, here Eliot agrees with the critics who would call these religious
poets “minor,” since their writing seems to spring from a “special religious
awareness,” rather than the “general awareness which we expect of a major
poet.” By requiring a “general awareness” of major poets, Eliot contradicts his
own interest in furthering religious literary criticism, and supports the
interests of literary secularism.
It's
not quite that simple. Later passages in the same essay reinflect his comment about the “general awareness.” Eliot
argues that there are some religious poets who are minor, but there are also
some “great religious poets” (he names Dante, Corneille,
and Racine). These writers combine a “special religious awareness” with a
“general awareness,” but it is worth noting that none of these three writers
are his contemporaries, and none are English.
Finally,
Eliot lists a third type of religious literature, the output of modern writers
such as G.K. Chesterton, which he dismisses as a form of religious
propaganda. This type of literature is too self-consciously religious, too
instrumental:
But my point is that such writings
do not enter into any serious consideration of the relations of Religion and
Literature: because they are conscious operations in a world in which it is
assumed that Religion and Literature are not related. It is a conscious and
limited relating. What I want is a literature which should be unconsciously,
rather than deliberately and defiantly, Christian: because the work of Mr.
Chesterton has its point from appearing in a world which is definitely not
Christian.[26]
What Eliot is looking for is “great”
literature that demonstrates that the world is in fact Christian. He wants to
be able to see signs of unconscious religiosity, signs that confirm what he
believes to be true—signs, in short, of England's positive Christianity in a
“general” (universal and secular) framework. So what does “secular” mean to
him? Perhaps Eliot wants secular literature to occupy something akin to the role
of the unconscious in a Freudian model of the psyche. The conscious mind wears
Christianity on its sleeve, but there is also an unconscious area, at times
unformed, that preexists any crude ideological packaging. This is what he
wishes to see in the modern writers he admires—writers of the calibre of Shaw, Woolf, and Joyce. But with the exception of Joyce,
the unconscious adherence to belief is simply not there, and “the whole of
modern literature is corrupted by what I call Secularism, that is simply
unaware of, simply cannot understand the meaning of, the primacy of the
supernatural over natural life.”[27]
It
is worth noting that despite Eliot's complaints about secularism in modern
literature, his influence has a critic has been based on his secular judgment.
Followers of Eliot's critical method as disparate as I.A. Richards and
F.R. Leavis have generally claimed Eliot as a supreme
influence in a wholly secular way. They generally ignore Eliot's various
religious investments; Leavis's famous “great
tradition,” controversial as it is, is essentially a secular book-list. The
subsequent Anglo-American critical tradition, though it has not been free of
occasional bigotry or narrow-mindedness, has been more or less straightforwardly
secular until the advent of some recent challenges from critics like Wood.
However, even if the mainstream of Anglo-American literary criticism remained
somewhat complacently secular through the New Criticism and
into the early writings of poststructuralism, some
strong challenges to literary secularism can be found in writings from
Anglophone regions outside of England. Two such sites are Ireland and
India.
Literary Secularism in
Ireland and
India
Indian
and Irish writers in particular wreak havoc on the categories of the secular
and the religious. The sources of the complication are many. For one thing,
since ideas of the secular are deeply intertwined with—dependent upon—the local
concept of “religion,” differences in religious culture need to be considered.
The role of religion in public life in a Catholic country is different from that experienced in
Protestant or
Hindu contexts. Both Catholicism and Hinduism are,
traditionally, “embodied” faiths, heavily oriented to practices such as the
Communion, or ritual cleansing in Hinduism. The difference in the experience of
religion changes the possible parameters of secularism and secularization in
ways that are not always easy to map. There are also major differences in the
history and structure of religious institutions, where Ireland and
England seem to have much in common, and where India—without a centralized “church” or a history
of intra-religious sectarian wars—is sharply at odds. However, what may end up
being the most important factor for our purposes is India and Ireland's shared
experience of extended colonial occupation, which deeply marked their
experience of religious freedom. In both contexts, the imposition of foreign
religious authority was an essential part of the colonial establishment, and
consequently, the religious identity of the local majority became an essential
component of the nationalist movement. In Ireland the imposition of an Anglican “Church of Ireland” with preferential treatment for Irish
Protestants was particularly destructive, and lasted nearly two centuries. The
incursion was less severe in India, where no definitive religious authority was
imposed, and where religious missionaries only began to play a significant role
beginning in the early 1800s. Interestingly, between 1855 and 1870, the era
when secularizing reforms internal to England were reaching their peak, similar
reforms were enacted in the colonies in support of religious freedom. Ireland
in 1869 saw the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, leading to equal
rights for the Catholic majority, [28]
while in India the 1857 Mutiny
led to the implementation of a series of “personal” laws designed to protect
local religious traditions from British rule.[29]
Though latter years of British colonialism in both England and Ireland were
marked by a “hands-off” attitude to religion on the part of the colonial
authority, the atmosphere of tolerance was not enough to fend off violent
struggles at the moment of independence of both nations, leading to political
Partitions along religious lines, which continue to scar Ireland, as well as
the entire Indian subcontinent.
The
complex nexus of political and religious concerns led to diverse responses by
Indian and Irish writers, which I will consider in turn, beginning with India. Just as the historical emergence of
literary secularism in England is a long and twisty road, there is no simple
progress from “secular” to “religious” in modern Indian literature. Early
Bengali writers like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, show the strong influence of Hindu myths
and narrative strategies, but the Bengali Renaissance also produced Sukumar Ray and Bibhutibhushan Bannerjee, both of whom were self-consciously
“modernist” and highly secular in orientation. Other writers in the modern
Indian canon, writing in a dozen or so languages all over the Indian
subcontinent, have shown quite various responses to religion in their work.
R.K. Narayan appears to be quietly spiritually inclined,
while Khushwant Singh and Qurratulain Hyder are
determinedly secular, even as they deal intensely with religion as a social and
intellectual problem in modern India. But of all the modern South Asian writers
who precede the postcolonial emergence of V.S. Naipaul and
Salman Rushdie, it is Rabindranath Tagore who is
the most important and most difficult to place. With his independent education,
his facility in both Bengali and English, and his participation in the
nationalist movement from an early era, no writer is more important to defining
the idea of “literary secularism” than is Tagore. But Tagore's writings also
pose a difficult problem of interpretation along the religious/secular axis.
Though Yeats, Tagore's first western champion, saw the
Indian poet as a lyricist with elements of spirituality, Yeats never truly
understood the subtleties of Tagore's relationship to spirituality or religion.
Tagore was for his early western readers a kind of esoteric Indian saint, whose
naïve lyricism made him seem all the more suspect to readers less tolerant of
spiritualism than Yeats. But the influence of Yeats on subsequent interpretations
of Tagore's work has been so powerful that most readers, even today, question
Tagore's relationship to religion.
In
light of Tagore’s biography and other contextual writing, it becomes clear that
Tagore was in fact decidedly “secular,” though this label requires critics to
deemphasize the discourse of belief in favor of that of social identity and
caste. In the latter framework, Tagore's novels and essays are decidedly
secular, as Tagore relentlessly criticizes both Brahminical religious
orthodoxies and social caste in his many novels, plays, and essays. In chapter
3 of Literary Secularism, I show how Tagore's critique of religious
orthodoxy even extends to nationalism, which he sees as a terrible modern
substitute for the discourse of religion in the modern European nations. This
critique comes in its most direct form in Tagore's 1917 lectures on nationalism
(collected in the volume Nationalism,[30]
and in the 1909 novel Gora, in which the
caste-obsessed protagonist is torn apart when he realizes he is in fact
adopted; his blood is European, which completely invalidates his sense of
caste-identity.
As I have already indicated, many late colonial
novels of literary secularism engage the tension between national identity and
religion. This interest overlaps with the question of the relationship of
religious identity with an idea of “blood” heritage along racial lines. As
critics like Sander Gilman have
noted, English Jews were
often represented in racial terms, and certainly, ethnic identity is a huge
part of the constitution of the idea of caste in the Hindu tradition. Both Eliot and Tagore make a plea
for secularism by choosing protagonists whose blood-inheritance transgresses
religious and racial lines. It is also seen in Joyce's Ulysses,
with the famous characterization of Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew who has
(repeatedly) converted to Christianity, without ever fully disavowing his Judaism.
In
contrast to Tagore, who was always in some sense a Hindu (albeit an unusual kind of Hindu), James Joyce
is an unambiguous secularist. The inimitable Stephen Dedalus,
protagonist of both A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man and Ulysses, states his
feelings about religious orthodoxy with a famous phrase: “I will not serve.”
But these words, like so much of Joyce's best imagery, take their force from
theological tradition—“I will not serve” refers to the Biblical incident of
Satan's rejection of God. Notably,
when Stephen makes this statement near the end of Portrait of the Artist,
he speaks in English rather than Latin (or Irish, but that's another matter).
The translation of the Biblical Non Serviam
says something about both Stephen's and Joyce's interests in the efficacy of
language in its everyday, secular context. One of the reasons Stephen turns
away from Catholicism, it seems, is the transcendent irrelevance epitomized by
the continued use of Latin, which might also be described (literally) its
failure to enter the saeculum of the
modern. In translating Satan's language in the Bible to an English epithet, the
content of Stephen's rejection of the Church is reinforced by the form of its
enunciation.
At
the same time, Joyce's “I will not serve” is in some sense weakened by its
association with religious discourse—it is a rejection of the Church in the
Church's own terms (if not its literal language). And this is a familiar
pattern in both Portrait of the Artist as well as Ulysses, where
Joyce develops an extended metaphor of Ireland as the “Promised Land” through several
sections of the novel. Though the metaphor is occasionally deployed quite
seriously—in effect, sacralizing Irish nationalism—in
some instances it is also satirized, and its sacramental qualities are
deflated. One such satirical moment is the parodying of the Citizen at the end
of the “Cyclops” Episode. Another is Stephen's “Parable of the Plums” at the
end of the “Aeolus” episode. In these passages, Joyce
mocks the apparent masculinity of Imperialist conquest and the apparent
impotence of Dublin's dominance by the Catholic Church.
Beyond
the mere textual influence of religious metaphors, in Ulysses Joyce also
engages religious identities and beliefs as a social and political problem in
modern
The
complexity of Joyce's literary secularism is a helpful model for that seen in
the work of numerous writers in the postcolonial world. With Indian writers
especially, a secular attitude faces a significant number of obstacles.
Religious discourse is widely prevalent in
For
V.S. Naipaul, despite his frequent fierce attacks on
religious orthodoxies (both Hindu and
Muslim), “literary secularism” is in fact an elusive ideal, which unravels at
certain crucial moments in his body of work. Naipaul is a writer of Indian
descent who derives considerable freedom of perspective from his status as a
member of a “displaced” community in rural
In
contrast to Naipaul, Rushdie's upbringing in a liberal Muslim household in
But
these two parallel projects can be self-canceling, and ultimately Rushdie's
literary secularism in The Satanic Verses is not quite as stable or
sure-footed as it might seem. In my reading of The Satanic Verses, I
argue that it is in fact impossible to decide whether Gibreel Farishta's dreams of himself as the Archangel Gibreel are
symptoms of his own unconscious desires, or actual interventions from a divine
agent (God or Shaitan). The undecidability of Gibreel's will points to the limits of any assignation of
agency in fiction; the character's agency is always defined by the will of the
author. But that very blurring of the line between self and other (or self and author)
also blurs the lines between religious and secular worlds.
This
blurring is one that has been discussed at some length in the ongoing debates
over secularism in India, many of which refer to the famous line near
the end of the novel, uttered by the character Zeenat
Vakil: “Battle lines are being drawn up in India
today . . . Secular versus religious, the light versus the dark. Better you
choose which side you are on.” Some writers, Meera Nanda and Kumkum Sangari among
them, have amplified this perspective in their works. Others, including Partha Chatterjee, Akeel Bilgrami, and Madhu Kishwar, have argued that this model of “hard”
secularism, imposed by the state on a reluctant populace, is both ethically
questionable and probably doomed to failure. In a separate chapter, I work
through some of the critical issues in the Indian debate over secularism in the
“uniform civil code” debates. I find that, while the “soft” secularists are
certainly correct in identifying a strategy for sustaining secularism, in the
long run the interest of human rights—and women's rights especially—requires a
concept of secularism based not on the interests of religious groups, but
on justice in the liberal universalist tradition.
After
postcolonial
Full Circle: James Wood's The Book Against God
By
way of concluding this introductory discussion of literary secularism, it might
be profitable to return to James Wood, who, in his recent novel The Book Against God, has explored these
issues in a rather more nuanced way than he has in the critical writings
discussed earlier. The conflict between “hard” secularism and “soft” secularism
as philosophical positions form the core problem for the novel’s
protagonist—and impacts his political strategies, his intimate interpersonal
ethics, as well as the narrative form itself, forming the core concern of the
text. According to some reviews of the novel, [32]
The Book Against God is somewhat autobiographical, and while one should
be careful in referring to biographical interpretations, the parallels between
the upbringing of Wood's protagonist Tom Bunting and Wood's own experience as a
child in an Evangelical Anglican household are striking. Wood does not shy away
from offering some traces of that memoir in the latter sections of “The Broken
Estate”: “My childhood, which was a
happy one, was spent in the command economy of evangelical Christianity. Life was centrally planned, all
negotiations had to pass by Jesus' desk.”[33]
Several passages in Wood's novel The Book Against God closely mirror
Wood's autobiographical experience. Tom Bunting's father, Peter Bunting, is, at
the start of the story, a vicar in a small town in northern
I had a happy childhood, I'm sure of
it. I loved the vicarage, even the church. It was painful to witness my widowed
mother having to abandon the vicarage this summer for a bungalow in
Narrator Tom Bunting's description of his
father's religious practice is surprisingly complimentary, given how corrosive
his own atheism is in his personal life. Tom sees his father, Peter Bunting, as
inhabiting Christianity “that
was inseparable from life,” rather than as a source of dogma or oppression.
Elsewhere, he indicates that though his father's status as a Christian is never
really in doubt, Peter's belief is soft rather than hard: “Peter, the supposed
believer, the great parish priest, the former lecturer in theology, aerated his
faith with so many little holes, so much flexibility and doubt and easygoing tolerance,
that he simply disappeared down one of these holes.”[35]
In the sense that his religion is “full of holes,” motivated more by a concept
of social order and responsibility than it is by a desire to affirm strong
belief, Peter Bunting might be similar to the late nineteenth-century writers
(Arnold and Renan), about whom Wood writes so
critically in “The Broken Estate.” And indeed, there is considerable anger and
resentment in Tom's feelings for his father, which seem to be oriented to his
frustration with his father's holey faith.
If
the first half of The Book Against God is an image of a proud atheist,
the second half of the novel undermines the same atheism as a kind of
social, ethical, and philosophical failure. Tom Bunting's character, which had initially
seemed to embody a kind of philosophical honesty (he was the only one who
seemed to be serious about the problem of God), soon comes to seem riddled with
holes. When he is not railing against his father, Tom Bunting is a graduate
student in philosophy at University College London, habitually unable to
complete his dissertation. Instead of writing it, he's developed at length a
private “Book Against God,” in which he plans to definitively dismantle the
theological arguments of philosophers like Soren
Kierkegaard, who argue for the presence of God through the back door of
negative theology. But the excerpts of the “Book Against God,” when they are
finally inserted in the novel, tell a much more idiosyncratic story. Tom
Bunting's book is not a decisive and brilliant work of philosophy, but a
hyper-elaborated, obscure, but still personal confession of his feelings for
his girlfriend Jane.
Against
Tom Bunting's atheism, which demands the confinement of religion to a single philosophical problem, in which one
is either absolutely devout or an atheist,
a series of counter-examples show a much broader role for religious
experience in everyday life, sometimes through rituals that are not even
explicitly religious. For instance, Tom observes that Jane has a mystical
relationship to music, which requires her absolute commitment, and a ritualized
kind of performance not so different from praying. Ritual means commitment,
which Tom rebels against wherever he finds it (be it his professional
advancement, his romantic life, or his understanding of himself as an
individual).
When she plays, she raises her head
and closes her eyes, and seems to leave the world a little, to be alone with
her notes in almost religious silence. I have sometimes to struggle with selfish
resentment—resentment that she is so free, that she can so easily slip out of
reality, that she cannot take me with her, that she seems almost to be at
prayer (which as a secularist I am bound to disapprove of). We do indeed differ
on religious matters, though Jane is so mystical that we have never really
argued about the subject. She pities me a little, I think, for having no God to
believe in. But if Jane does believe in God, then, as far as I can tell, He is
really little more than a bearded old patron of music, a male saint Cecilia. 'A
note,' she once said to me, 'is an extraordinary thing. It wasn't created by
humans. Humans reproduce it; they borrow it and lend it to each other, by using
instruments.' [36]
In the reference to the external Truth of the
musical note, Tom Bunting suggests a theological center to Jane's musical
universe. Passages like this hint at a longing for a kind of religious basis of
experience suggesting that Tom Bunting's atheism is either unsustainable, or a
very elaborate kind of self-deception. Tom Bunting sees the advantages of a
positive relationship to religion too clearly, and is evidently paralyzed by
atheism. It cracks open in the final paragraphs of the book, which ends with
Tom’s lament for his losses—of his father, and of his childhood—that is
strikingly similar in form to a confessional:
Oh father, there were days so
exciting when I was a little boy that each morning was a delicious surprise, a
joy adults can only mimic when they are fortunate enough to make a long journey
by night and rise in an undiscovered place in the morning and see it in the
first light.[37]
In a not-entirely unpredicted twist, Wood's Book
Against God ends with its protagonist reaching, haltingly for the faith he
thought he had lost. It's an ending that humanizes and restores Tom Bunting,
but it also seems to undo the hard line between belief and unbelief that Wood
draws in essays like “The Broken Estate.”
Wood's
opening to the possibility of a restorative role for religious faith at the end
of his novel ties the book to other the other primary texts in this study. Like
Wood, nearly all of these writers tell powerful stories of the loss of
faith at some point. George Eliot, for instance, had such an experience early,
leading to a major falling out with her religiously devout father, when as a
young woman she decided she would no longer attend church. James Joyce's fall
from Catholicism is even more famous—or perhaps, notorious. Tagore and
Naipaul's respective struggles with Hinduism are also noted, as is Rushdie's
struggle with Islam. What these writers and their works have in
common, despite their myriad cultural differences and chronological spread, is
the sense that the loss of faith is not the end of the story for literary
secularism. The rise of the individualist framework, in which authorship and
narrative agency are defining aspects of literary production, are challenged by
the continued prevalence of religious texts and religion as a social identity
in their respective works. In Wood's case in The Book Against God, that
excess comes from Tom Bunting's feelings for his father, which are in some
unconscious way responsible for his antipathy to Christianity. Another example of this is in Naipaul's
work, where Naipaul's strong desire to establish himself in the secularized
occupation of the “writer” (a desire evident in the themes of Naipaul's early
novels, as well as in his memoirs and essays) is undercut by the almost
primordial attachment to a concept of Hindu caste
and ritual. In both Wood's and Naipaul's cases, the continued influence of
religion enters the story as a kind of psychic trauma. A similar reading might
be applied to Gibreel Farishta's turn to
schizophrenia in The Satanic Verses, though the parameters are somewhat
different because of the postmodern form of Rushdie's novel.
The
readings I provide in the following chapters do not provide a definitive
exploration of the theme of secularism in modern literature. Many other authors
might merit chapters, including writers as diverse as Iris Murdoch, Ajeet Cour, or Marilynne Robinson. My goal here is to show that the history of
literary secularism has led, not to an ending (literature as comprehensively
secularized), but to an extremely heterogeneous present free from telos.
Secularization never ended as a historical process—nor will it end; it
is still in process, in
[1] Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, 49.
[2] M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution
in Romantic Poetry.
[3] J. Hillis Miller, “Tradition
and Difference.” Diacritics Vol. 2, No. 4, Winter 1972, 6 13. Subsequent
essays in the same exchange, including Abrams' “The Deconstructive Angel,” and Hillis Miller's “The Critic as Host,” rapidly move away
from the question of religious influence, and into fundamental questions of
language and signification.
[4] Diana Eck, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman
to Banaras, especially Chapter 7, “Is Our God
Listening: Exclusivism, Inclusivism,
and Pluralism.” Karen Armstrong discusses this
theme in a number of different places, but a good starting point might be A
History of God: The 4000 Year History of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.
[5] James Wood, The Broken Estate, xi-xii.
[6] Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 82.
[7] This history is well described in lay terms in Susan
Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism.
It is also detailed more technically in chapter 2 of Monsma
and Soper’s The Challenge of Pluralism: Church and
State in Five Democracies.
[8]See the discussion of Thomas Jefferson and the role of the
evangelical churches in achieving disestablishment in
[9]See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity,
1-4.
[10]Arguably this particular deployment of myth is still in
use in our own, current age. Rationality itself continues to be dependent on
mythical shapes—and is still used in many contexts as part of managing (or
ruling) large masses of people.
[11] Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study
of the Structure of Romance, 6.
[12] Ibid., 14-15.
[13] In that sense, Frye is quite different from Romantic
critics like M.H. Abrams, who in The Mirror and the Lamp uses related language to describe
the advent of Romanticism. But while Frye considers the changing relationship to
religion one of the key elements of Romantic thought, Abrams gives this
important theme fairly short attention: 'The paramount cause of poetry [in
Romanticism] is not, as in Aristotle, a formal cause, determined primarily by
human actions and qualities imitated; nor, as in neo-classic criticism, a final
cause, the effect intended upon the audience; but instead an efficient
cause—the impulse within the poet of feelings and desires seeking expression,
or the compulsion of the 'creative' imagination which, like God the creator,
has its internal source of motion' (22).
[14] This phrase was echoed by Edward Said in his
characterization of the Romantic movement in Orientalism, where he argued that the continuing religious frame
of mind in Romanticism can be
contrasted to the more scientific, contemporaneous discourse of Orientalism.
[15] See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950,
61-62.
[16] See Monsma and Soper, especially 124-128.
[17] This was first brought to my attention by Talal Asad, who describes it in a footnote in Formations of
the Secular (23). I have confirmed it via Charles Taylor, “Modes of
Secularism,” in Secularism and its Critics. Holyoake articulates his
idea of secularism in The Principles of Secularism [1870], which is
available online: <http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~stolley/scholarship/atheism/secularism/secularism_plaintext.htm>.
[18] James Wood, The Broken Estate, 259.
[19] Interestingly, in Wood's second book of criticism, The
Irresponsible Self, he describes Coleridge as doing
something rather similar, only he doesn't seem as bothered by the aestheticization of the Bible in Coleridge's works as he is
by that in
[20] More recently, Wood has written incisive reviews of
books Monica Ali's Brick Lane, V.S. Naipaul's letters Between Father and Son, Zadie Smith's Wihte
Teeth, and Salman Rushdie's Fury. All of these reviews are compiled in
the volume The Irresponsible Self.
[21]See Anthony Julius, T.S. Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form. Julius argues that anti-Semitism was central to T.S.
Eliot's aesthetic project, using a small amount of primary evidence and a great
deal of inference. The argument won over a number of critics, including The
New Yorker's Louis Menand, but other critics
criticized Julius's account of Eliot, accusing Julius of alternately of
exaggeration and of saying nothing new (Eliot was criticized for his
anti-Semitic remarks and
early poems as early as 1935). One example of a particularly strident critique
of Julius is James Wood's “T.S. Eliot's Christian Anti-Semitism,” from The Broken
Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief. As I mention, the strongest
evidence against Eliot is found in a few poems published before 1920, and in
one lecture/essay that appeared in 1933. The evidence of anti-Semitism from the
poems seems incontrovertible, though potentially minor, as the great body of
Eliot's writing comes later, and does not reflect explicit anti-Semitism. And
the evidence from After Strange Gods is real, and disturbing. The quote
is as follows: “The population should be homogeneous; where two or more
cultures exist in the same place they are likely to be either fiercely
self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is
unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make
any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.”
[22]Lyndall Gordon,T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. (1999).
[23]See Andrew DuBois and Frank Lentricchia, Eds., Close Reading. (2003).
[24] T.S. Eliot, “Religion and Literature.” In Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, 98.
[25] Ibid., 99.
[26] Eliot, Selected
Prose of T.S. Eliot, 100.
[27] Ibid., 104.
[28] For more on the
[29] See Gary Jeffrey Jacobsohn, The
Wheel of Law:
[30] Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (1917).
[31] V.S. Naipaul, Finding The Center: Two Narratives (1984).
[32]See for instance Alice K. Turner's review in The
Washington Post (
[33] James Wood, The Broken Estate, 265.
[34] James Wood, The
Book Against God (
[35] Ibid., 49.
[36] Ibid., 84.
[37] Ibid., 257.