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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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