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Despite the development
of the internet, novels that you can carry with on you on the tube
continue to flourish. But what impact does the secular novel have
on the reader? And how can a Christian novelist make any inroads
into a literary world that seems to deny the existence of God? Tim
Summers explores the possibilities.
In his 1935 essay "Religion and Literature",
T.S. Eliot referred to "a gulf fixed between ourselves and
the greater part of contemporary literature". For Eliot, a
qualitative difference existed between the work of modern Christian
and unbelieving authors, for "the whole of modern literature
is corrupted by what I call Secularism, […] is simply unaware
of, simply cannot understand the meaning of, the primacy of the
supernatural over the natural life". My purpose in this short
essay is to examine Secularism as it is manifested in fiction today,
and to consider some of its roots and antecedents, ancient and recent.
I would like to suggest that the character of the contemporary scene
presents the Christian author with an opportunity rather than a
hindrance.
In "Religion and Literature" Eliot charts three stages
of progressive secularization in the history of the novel. Christian
moral purpose, present in the work of early novelists like Bunyan
and Defoe, was abandoned by writers like Fielding, and then Dickens
and Thackeray: whose work "took the Faith, in its contemporary
version, for granted, and omitted it from its picture of life".
In the next phase, Christianity became matter for disputation, as
George Eliot, George Meredith and Thomas Hardy "doubted, worried
about, or contested the Faith". The third and final phase is
that of "those who have never heard the Christian Faith spoken
of as anything but an anachronism". It is this which obtained
at the time of Eliot's writing, and which persists today. In other
words, the premise of materialism is a convention in fiction which
is a century old. The convention whereby Christian priorities are
not seriously endorsed is a century older.
One is not surprised, then, to meet the materialist outlook fully
grown in the modern novel. Philip Roth's novella of 2001, The Dying
Animal, is the embodiment of the prevailing ethos. The story is
really an essay, whose argument is straightforward: that humans
are animals, and so must remember and act in accordance with their
animal status. Their aim should be to copulate in the "pure"
manner of dogs, without "crazy distortions of longing, doting,
possessiveness, even of love". Such purity is the reverse of
the Christian kind, and it is necessary because sex must be kept
fresh: being the single (momentary) escape from the power of death.
In the words of the protagonist, cultural commentator David Kepesh:
Only then are you most cleanly alive and most
cleanly yourself. It's not the sex that's the corruption - it's
the rest. Sex isn't just friction and shallow fun. Sex is also the
revenge on death. Don't forget death. Don't ever forget it. Yes,
sex too is limited in its power. I know very well how limited. But
tell me, what power is greater?
This argument is familiar in Roth's novels. We
encounter an earlier version of it in The Human Stain. Sex is redemption:
"the redeeming corruption that de-idealizes the species and
keeps us everlastingly mindful of the matter we are". When
the animal loses its sexual enthusiasm (for instance in monogamous
marriage), or its sexual power over others, it is as good as dead
already. So Kepesh flees his wife and family to remain free and
alive, and temporarily wins; while his young lover, Consuela Castillo,
is diagnosed with breast cancer, and loses. One wonders whether
Roth intended the inescapable contradiction in the book: that the
female lead only becomes interesting when illness takes her. She
remains merely pornographic until the author can no longer avoid
showing the animal as more-than-animal. Only when the reader is
shown Consuela's un-animal fear of death and need for comfort is
he truly engaged, and to this extent, the story debunks its own
central thesis. Yet it remains disturbing: most of all, in the hardening
of secularization which it demonstrates. The Dying Animal largely
concerns questions of mortality, but the Christian comfort is not
thought sufficiently plausible or relevant to merit even a reference.
One type for the book is Saul Bellow's 1975 novel
Humboldt's Gift, in which another aging intellectual wrestles with
his fear of death and seeks refuge in sex with a much younger woman.
Here, too, the Christian solutions are rejected almost without a
hearing. "The main question", death, is deemed to be without
"serious challenge from science or religion or art". The
protagonist Charles Citrine explores one "religious" solution,
Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy, but finally finds it powerless in
face of the grave with its concrete lid: "But then, how did
one get out? One didn't, one didn't! You stayed, you stayed!"
The only remedies which Citrine feels able to rely upon are artistic
(he is a playwright), and sexual. The anti-marriage polemic in Bellow's
novel comes from a second character, the therapist Ellenbogen. Ellenbogen
holds that "Our span is short and we must make up for the shortness
of the human day in frequent, intense sexual gratification":
and that marriage and family, which threaten the intensity, are
the enemy.
A single pattern of ideas, then, dominates these
works of Bellow and Roth. They are a manifesto of Secularism, illustrated
manuals for living life under the shadow of a death which is absolute.
And for all its broad interests, it is normative for the contemporary
"literary" novel in general to proceed from the same assumptions.
Although its political subject matter is remote from the solipsistic
flamboyance of Bellow, J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), for instance,
is shaped by the same fundamental view of life and death. The protagonist
employs the literary language of the old religion (from Piers Plowman),
to give voice to the new one. The women he has slept with are "A
fair field full of folk: hundreds of lives tangled with his",
enriching his life, keeping death away; for it is inescapable, for
him as for Kepesh or Citrine, that "I'm going to end up in
a hole in the ground. And so are you. So are we all."
The zeitgeist in fiction is - the triumph of death. It is unsurprising
that Don DeLillo should choose the expression, halfway up a white
page above a sea of black, to open his self-consciously epoch-defining
Underworld (1997). The prologue's title refers literally to Bruegel's
painting, which DeLillo proceeds to stew up, in masterful "postmodern"
manner, with J.Edgar Hoover, Sinatra and Gleason, baseball, racial
politics. Its symbolic significance lies in its diagnosis of contemporary
culture, and fiction in particular. Being believed to have no serious
challengers left, in Bellow's expression, death has triumphed in
the modern novel. It appears in the very first words of Underworld
like the invocation of a muse: one befitting a materialist epic
to inaugurate the literary culture of the third millennium. It is
the purported reversal of Christ's resurrection. For DeLillo, the
only true faith left to us deals in celebration and amelioration
of the purely temporal. So Underworld envisages landfill sites as
the new cathedrals, where people can worship the remnants of their
own consumption.
Make an architecture of waste. Design gorgeous
buildings to recycle waste and invite people to collect their own
garbage and bring it with them to the press rams and conveyors….
Bus tours and postcards, I guarantee it.
Might there not be a "reverence for waste,
for the redemptive qualities of the things we use and discard"?
Or might the materials of industrial process not become the new
holy waters, "people flocking to uranium mines in order to
cure themselves", where "they pray and chant and sing
soaring hymns"? DeLillo's 1984 novel White Noise depicts the
secret terror of death hidden beneath the noisy surface of an American
couple's life. It is a wistful elegy for the old religious hopes,
ending with a conversation with an atheist nun, and the questing
couple discovering that the modern world's answer to the problem
is simply to consume: the rituals of supermarket shopping giving
the liturgical comfort once offered by the church; the tabloids,
"The cults of the famous and the dead", the holy writ
once provided by Scripture.
Yet we should not despair of fiction. As Eliot points out, contemporary
literature, unlike "the established great literature of all
time", always involves "a mass movement of writers…
working together in the same direction"; although each believes
himself unique. Only the longer perspective of posterity can reveal
the whole landscape, and this may not be wholly death's dominion.
However if the majority of contemporary fiction works in a direction
opposite to Christianity, our first task is to retain our Christian
criteria of judgment and our proper sense of separation in reading
it. Our alienation is a right response: we need not seek to accommodate
anything irreconcilable with a personal God who redeems the world.
The writers we have been discussing are the philosophical progeny
of Sartre in his declaration (in Nausea) that "Things are entirely
what they seem, and behind them… there is nothing." They
are the artistic progeny of Joyce, whose Ulysses is an epic of immediacy,
of the quotidian and subjective, of the body conceived only as perishable
stuff. They come from a tradition established on precepts directly
opposed to ours.
Second, we must perceive the ancient familiarity
of what is on offer in the contemporary scene. For all its sophistication,
the new paganism is merely a cousin to the pre-Christian kind, although
more insidious. Its rites are as feral, as Dionysian, as any in
the ancient world, although rationalistic creeds have superseded
fertility gods as the basis of the cult. Its melancholy is bleaker
than that of the old English pagans, who had still to encounter
the unexpected revelation, and to be transformed by it. The new
pagans inhabit a culture which believes it has already encountered
that possibility, and found it insubstantial. Their art invokes
the comfort of greatness, the survival of works of genius: living
to "Make something, and die", as Ian McEwan's composer
in Amsterdam has it. But this, too, is an old formula, the hope
one finds in Ovid's Metamorphoses that its author will "live
to all eternity, immortalised by fame"; or, in the more primitive
versions, that military "glory" will defeat the death
of the individual by its continued life in stories and poems. The
contemporary scene is nothing more than pagan, in the old way: like
Rome and Greece at the time of Christ.
Third, we should consider what the Christian author's aspiration
should be. Our own times, the maturity of the final phase of secularization,
is in one sense fertile ground. The age in which faith could be
confused with social custom, or some abstract moral decency, is
over. What is most relevant in Eliot's account from this point of
view, perhaps, is his opinion of the work of Dickens, as a degeneration
from the original Christian standard; moral, but not specifically
Christian, notwithstanding his general reputation then and now;
at home in mainstream culture, the comfortable Christendom of the
High Victorian period in England. The outlook of an author at home
in today's culture is unlikely to be confused with Christianity,
when Christianity is the polar opposite of the position taken by
the literary market leaders. Equally, no author showing an overtly
Christian point of view today could be thought to do so out of conservatism
or convention. Such an author, or even one demonstrating more subtly
a Christian view of life, will be an original in the overwhelmingly
pagan marketplace. To take a position against the creative mainstream
may be an inspiration for good work and confer the vitality which
posterity will prefer, in the purge of the merely reactive which
Eliot envisages. And what is The Dying Animal, if not reactive?
Eliot's essay famously calls for writing by Christian authors which
is "unconsciously, rather than deliberately and defiantly,
Christian", to avoid the fringe status which tends to befall
"Religious Literature". What might an unconsciously Christian
novel look like? Paradoxically, and perhaps in defiance of Eliot's
intention, one might look to the novels of Leo Tolstoy: not, for
most of his life, a Christian. Amid a European literary culture
preoccupied by collective ethics but dismissive of personal spiritual
life, Tolstoy stands apart from contemporaries such as Flaubert,
Turgenev and Dickens. His novels concern themselves relentlessly
with the individual soul, his protagonists continually awakening,
from selfishness, lust, greed: in the Christian understanding, away
from the world and towards God. If such conversions omit the one
thing vital, faith in Christ, for the Christian reader they cannot
but seem permeated by his presence. Malcolm Muggeridge described
reading the work of Tolstoy and having an "almost overpowering
sense of how uniquely marvelous a Christian way of looking at life
is, and a passionate desire to share it". One thinks of the
many epiphanies in War and Peace, such as Andrei Bolkonsky's reflections
as he lies wounded on the battlefield, expecting death:
Sympathy, love of our brothers, for those who
love us and for those who hate us, love of our enemies - yes, the
love that God preached on earth, that Princess Maria tried to teach
me and I did not understand - that is what made me sorry to part
with life, that is what remained for me had I lived. But now it
is too late. I know it!
Is it still possible to write like this
and be taken seriously? How can one convey the excitement of goodness
and survive the cynicism of our times? Such questions are outside
the scope of this essay, but are the pressing ones for the Christian
author. What we can learn from the work of Tolstoy, prominent in
"the established great literature of all time" of Eliot's
long view, is that fiction can and should defy the spirit of the
age, make us hungry for God, and lose no credibility in so doing.
In its rejection of the prevailing despair, the new old paganism
of The Dying Animal, a novel which meets that challenge today will
win readers and, it may be, the judgment of posterity as well.
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