Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960

Postmodern Belief

20/21

Walter Benn Michaels, Series Editor

From Guilt to Shame by Ruth Leys

William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words by Richard Godden

American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945 by Gavin Jones

A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government by Sean McCann

Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960 by Amy Hungerford

Postmodern Belief

American Literature

and Religion since 1960

Amy Hungerford

Princeton University Press

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright 2010 © by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

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Hungerford, Amy.

Postmodern belief: American literature and religion since 1960/ Amy Hungerford.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-13508-3 (cloth: alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-691-14575-4 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. American literature—20th

century—History and criticism. 2. Religion and literature—United States—

History—20th century. 3. Religion in literature. 4. Postmodernism (Literature)

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For Mumiji

You Planted all the Seeds

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Belief in Meaninglessness

One

Believing in Literature

Eisenhower, Salinger, St. Jacques Derrida

Two

Supernatural Formalism in the Sixties

Ginsberg, Chant, Glossolalia

Three

The Latin Mass of Language

Vatican II, Catholic Media, Don DeLillo

Four

The Bible and Illiterature

Bible Criticism, McCarthy and Morrison, Illiterate Readers

Five

The Literary Practice of Belief

Lived Religion, Marilynne Robinson, Left Behind

Conclusion

The End of The Road, Devil on the Rise

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This book owes its first debt to the architects of my own religious imagination. These are, above all the many others, my parents: Valerie Hungerford, English daughter of an Anglican priest and, in America, lifelong seeker after God under the (liberal) wings of the Episcopal Church; and Joel Hungerford, now deceased, a seeker, too, whose attraction to spiritual power and paranoid prophecy made me want to understand the reasons behind the exercise of that power.

With these two people as parents, it was hard not to see that what a person believes, as well as what they say and do within the universe of that belief, does matter. The range of religious life they covered over the course of my growing up—from Anglicanism to Wicca—was supplemented by my inevitable efforts to carve out my own religious space at The Church of Our Saviour, in Youth Encounter gatherings in the seventies and eighties, through the charismatic evangelicalism of my boss one summer, who kindly hired both me and my boyfriend and evangelized us when the lawn mowers weren’t running. Working alongside the ex-convicts and young Pentecostals he also hired, I saw yet another version of religious life. In the background of all this, the New Hampshire woods, my playground and refuge, made me a cradle Emersonian, while the language of The Book of Common Prayer tuned my ear for a whole life of reading. These were the earliest teachers of my religious imagination. Those who read this book will, I am sure, read the traces of these people and places. Without them, this book would not be, though any blame for the book’s inadequacies must be laid not at their doors, but at mine.

Less wrenching by far was the education I had from my friends here at Yale, who patiently read and discussed this work over the six years of its composition. As has been true now for a decade, Pericles Lewis was a tireless, challenging, and learned reader of virtually every page of this book, and of many pages that, having considered what he said, I threw out. Though we now have matching books on religion and literature (don’t miss Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel!), it is our differences that have taught me the most as we each struggled to articulate what we thought was religious about the literature we loved. Jessica Brantley, Elizabeth Dillon, and Elliott Visconsi read, too, for most of the six years; for their intelligence, good will, and good suggestions, I am profoundly grateful. Lanny Hammer read much of the manuscript, asking hard questions and giving excellent advice. His exertions as department chair on my behalf during the latter stages of writing this book will never be forgotten. Peter Chemery and his parents, the wonderful Adelaide and Frank Chemery, taught me about Roman Catholicism in a way no book could. As a Conscientious Objector on Catholic grounds in 1970–1971, as a subsequent student of Mircea Eliade, and now as a father to our children, Peter has showed me—daily—a lived religion. He proves to me that with imagination and a good set of beads, one can remain faithful, come war or higher degrees.

The pack of friends who have gathered at Post•45 conferences since 2006 were inspiring interlocutors as I presented parts of this book, especially Mary Esteve, Sean McCann, J. D. Connor, Rachel Adams, Mark McGurl, Deak Nabers, Debbie Nelson, Abigail Cheever, Florence Dore, and Michael Szalay. Among the Post•45 group, Jonathan Freedman and Andy Hoberek also did me the honor of reading the whole manuscript; their brilliant responses were invaluable. Collegial support from like-minded scholars who saw bits of this work or talked about it with me along the way—especially John McClure, Stanley Fish, Tyler Curtin, Matthew Mutter, and Jay Clayton—was more important to me than they know. To the several anonymous readers who reviewed the manuscript or article versions of chapters, I am grateful for the seriousness and rigor of your responses. Those responses made this a better book in every way—as did lively audiences over the years at the University of Kentucky, Boston University, University of California–Irvine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Wesleyan, and the University of California Humanities Center. Yale University provided me with generous leave time without which no book at all could have been written. And finally, I am incredibly lucky to have worked with Walter Benn Michaels and Hanne Winarsky at Princeton University Press, who encouraged this project, and championed it, when it counted most.

I am grateful to the Johns Hopkins University Press and the University of Wisconsin Press, respectively, for permission to include versions of two previously published essays. Chapter 2 appeared as Postmodern Supernaturalism: Ginsberg and the Search for a Supernatural Language, in Countercultural Capital: Essays on the Sixties from Some Who Wheren’t There, special issue of The Yale Journal of Criticism, edited by Sean McCann and Michael Szalay, 18, no. 2 (fall 2005): 269–98; a slightly different version of chapter 3 appeared as Don DeLillo’s Latin Mass, Contemporary Literature 47, no. 3 (fall 2006): 343–80. And finally, warmest thanks to John Holdway, artist and friend, for permission to use his painting, Outer Sanctuary, on the cover. Nothing pleases me more than having our respective arts bound together in the world.

Introduction

This book is about belief and meaninglessness, and what it might mean to believe in meaninglessness. In American culture, belief that does not emphasize the content of doctrine has roots in the transcendentalist thinkers of the early nineteenth century, and among the Romantics more generally. Belief without content for Emerson—the experience of which he imagines, through the figure of the transparent eyeball, or the silent church—makes way for a critique of institutional religion and its discourses of doctrine and theology.¹ This book will argue that a century and a half later, with religious critique so firmly a part of our secular condition, belief without meaning becomes both a way to maintain religious belief rather than critique its institutions and a way to buttress the authority of the literature that seeks to imagine such belief. Belief without content becomes, I will suggest, a hedge against the inescapable fact of pluralism.

The chapters that follow demonstrate how and why writers become invested in imagining nonsemantic aspects of language in religious terms and how they thus make their case for literary authority and literary power after modernism. Whether it is Allen Ginsberg urging his listeners to make Mantra of American language now, James Baldwin’s Brother Elisha speaking in tongues in Go Tell It on the Mountain, Cormac McCarthy’s illiterate kid toting the Bible in Blood Meridian, or Don DeLillo making sacred the multilingual talk of tourists in the Parthenon, American writers turn to religion to imagine the purely formal elements of language in transcendent terms.² The remarkable religious valence of the literary in the secular context of twentieth-century America allows us to observe up close the imaginative component of what it takes for religious belief to persist and what it takes to believe in literature—believe in it as a site of crucial cultural work in the age of literature’s waning social prestige and its eclipse by other media. The efforts of the writers I take up are part of the larger cultural effort to imagine how intense religious belief can coexist with doctrinal diversity in the shared space of public life as well as in the private enclaves of religious community or the nuclear family.³ And so this book demonstrates how belief in the religious qualities and powers of meaninglessness can be found among novelists, poets, and critics, and among the common practices of contemporary American religion in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond—when Pentecostals speak in tongues, when American congregations celebrate liturgies in Latin or Hebrew that few can understand, and when expressions of personal religion in public life become resoundingly vague.

A map of belief in meaninglessness in the twentieth century might naturally begin, then, with the Christian existentialists who gained such popular renown in the 1950s. In Paul Tillich’s Terry Lectures, published as The Courage to Be (1952), Tillich defines existentialism as a meaningful attempt to reveal the meaninglessness of our situation. He calls his listeners to take the anxiety of meaninglessness upon themselves and in doing so to find a courage rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.⁴ Or we might look to the influence of Frederic Spiegelberg—a friend of Tillich’s and, like Tillich, a German émigré—whose religion of no-religion was so influential at the founding of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, which became a religious center for the counterculture throughout the 1960s.⁵ But belief without meaning in this book goes far beyond Christian existentialist thinkers and the ascendance of spirituality over old-time religion in the late twentieth century.⁶ Indeed, belief in meaninglessness is oftentimes not even directly indebted to such thinking and crops up in venues as traditional as the Roman Catholic mass. This form of belief thrives in what Charles Taylor has described so definitively as the secular age in which we live—an age in which one can no longer maintain religious belief without the simultaneous knowledge that others do not believe, or that others believe differently.

It should be said, at the outset, that belief in meaninglessness, as I have been calling it here, is a various thing. In some instances, what I am identifying in literature and in religious discourse is belief for its own sake, or belief without content, or belief where content is the least important aspect of religious thought and practice. These are the understandings of belief relevant to the public religion of Eisenhower, which I discuss in chapter 1, and for the Charismatic movement, which I take up in chapter 2. In other instances, belief in meaninglessness is more tightly associated with the nonsemantic, as when Ginsberg imagines the vibrations of his words having divine power. And these two versions of belief in meaninglessness come together, too, as when Don DeLillo imagines the ritual aspects of language—of conversation, especially—in sacramental terms modeled by the Latin mass (the subject of chapter 3). For him, the materiality of human speech becomes the basis for a religious practice not focused on doctrinal content, yet nevertheless rooted in long-standing religious tradition. For the critics and novelists I discuss in chapter 4, the nonsemantic qualities of language gain religious authority by virtue of scriptural history—by the precedents of style, cultural prestige, and literary complexity that are rooted in the American understanding of the Bible as a literary and a religious work in the 1970s and 1980s. For these writers, it is not what the Bible says, but what the Bible is, and how scripture sounds, that carries religiously inflected authority. If language becomes in this sense a form of religious ritual, I argue in chapter 5 that belief itself becomes a form of ritual for contemporary writers who profess strong, and doctrinally specific, Protestant belief.

My point, then, is not that certain religious beliefs or practices of others can be or should be understood as meaningless from an outsider’s point of view and in a pejorative sense—an idea with a long and shameful history in Western encounters with non-Western religion—or, indeed, that religion as such must be defined by those internal dispositions we understand, as a legacy of Protestant tradition, to qualify as beliefs.⁷ Nor do I make much of the observation that ordinary practitioners often cannot articulate what would pass for coherent theology to the elites in their traditions—I intend no tacit agreement with the modern idea that a practitioner cannot know how to live religiously without being able to articulate that knowledge.⁸ I am convinced that to live a belief in meaninglessness as that form of belief emerges in all its variousness in this book—to live it especially through the practice of writing and reading—is undoubtedly to live religiously.

I address the question of whether this fundamentally Protestant way of understanding religious belief is still relevant to the study of contemporary literature and religion when I discuss the work of professing Christians toward the end of this book. (I argue that the answer is yes, even—or rather, especially—in light of the persuasive work of contemporary scholars of lived religion.) In the remainder of the book, I am speaking of belief in a more minimal and pragmatist sense—belief understood as those things we think are true about the world and the things in it or beyond it. I argue in this book that belief in meaninglessness, variously conceived within the discourse and practices of writers and readers, has become deeply embedded in American religious practice since the fifties. One of my aims, then, is to demonstrate the very richness and success of such belief, a richness and success that is mirrored and abetted by the language of meaning and belief that we find in the literature of these years.

The methodological approach I take in the chapters that follow is structured by the two aims of this book—the effort to show how belief in meaninglessness confers religious authority upon the literary, and the effort to show how such belief, and its literary vehicles, becomes important to the practice of religion in America. I begin, in chapter 1, with an overview of American religious life since the 1950s and its relationship to the general development of literature and criticism in the same period. I present in that chapter a different context in which to understand the specific writers to which the remainder of the book is devoted. Later in this introduction, I discuss how that context revises two dominant accounts of this period—the story of postmodernism and the story of multiculturalism. But the first chapter also speaks to what I think will soon become another dominant story about this period—the one Mark McGurl unfolds in The Program Era, which makes the rise of the writing program the definitive development for American literature after 1945.⁹ Because of the importance of religion for the New Critics and the centrality of the New Criticism to the writing program as McGurl presents it, I hope that this analysis will fill a crucial gap in that story, even while my aims are quite different from McGurl’s. This book is not a sociology of literature in the period, but an account of how an important strain of American thought comes to imaginative terms with pluralism in the late twentieth century, and what that imaginative work has to do with the fortunes of literature.

Having presented this context in chapter 1, for the remainder of the book I pursue a roughly chronological analysis of how literature speaks to religion and how religion draws from literary understandings of language across the four decades from 1960 to the end of the twentieth century. In three of the chapters, instead of choosing to focus on writers known to be religious themselves, as several existing studies of literature and religion have done, I look instead to writers who live in oblique relation to the structures and discourses of institutional religion, or whose religious biographies are unavailable, or only partly available, to us.¹⁰ In this respect, I am taking an approach similar to John McClure’s study of religion in the fiction of this period in Partial Faiths. The difference between what I do here and his approach is signaled by the religious and historical context I present in chapter 1; McClure’s frame is that of postmodernism as expressed theoretically, which is only one part of the context that concerns me here. The question for the writers I take up in these central chapters is not what they believe about God or any other supernatural being or world order—a question that isn’t answerable for most of them—or how their religious beliefs and practices are reflected in their writing, but what they believe about literature. As I will argue, their literary beliefs are ultimately best understood as a species of religious thought, and their literary practice as a species of religious practice. Chapters on Allen Ginsberg’s chant-imbued poetry of the sixties, on the figure of the Latin mass in Don DeLillo’s fiction of the eighties and nineties, and on Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison’s literary uses of the Bible in the seventies and eighties show how meaning drops away from language in their work to create a formal space that we find filled with religious feeling, supernatural power, otherworldly communion, and transcendent authority. In chapter 5, I turn to writers who publicly profess recognizable Protestant belief, for whom belief is not defined by form without meaning, in order to ask what happens to literary form and to religious thought when the meaning of belief is palpable and is, moreover, a central locus of narrative drama.

It is well-known that many who profess to love literature, especially the high-culture forms of it, look to the literary tradition to show them, as Matthew Arnold wrote over a century ago, the best of what has been known and said.¹¹ As such, literature itself comes to be a discourse to live by, a way of understanding what it means to be human. Arnold was the first to see in literature a possible replacement for religion, a system of genres and works that could offer readers a meaningful life without the absurdities that, for Arnold, beset any Biblical religion. It is significant that Arnold tied a world-ordering literary tradition to the notion of religion, and it would be a mistake to see in his work simply a critique of religion. Indeed, he installs religious ways of reading at the root of literary judgment. Though he goes to great lengths, in The Study of Poetry, to explain why any one of his poetic examples is finer, or less fine, than another, he finally resorts to a mystified notion of literary knowledge to guide the reader toward the true classic, the sort of text that might replace traditional religious forms of meaning. The reader comes to know which poem is a classic only by internalizing other classic examples, thereby infusing the reading mind and heart with that ineffable sense of form and substance that propels the classic toward transcendence.¹² The best poetry is what we want, Arnold wrote, the best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can. The best poetry gives to our spirits what they can rest upon.¹³ The faculty of judgment formed by internalizing classic examples is central to finding in literature a nourishing—rather than an impoverished—religion. For Arnold, the law of literary judgment, like God’s law, must be written on the heart.¹⁴

Arnold’s mystification of literary judgment is the seed of the phenomenon I examine in this book—occasionally in a causal sense, as in the case of the New Critics in the twentieth century, but more often in a logical sense. For if the intersection of literature and religion revolves around the meaningfulness of great literary examples in Arnold and in the work of many who follow him—both lay readers who simply love literature, and those critics like T. S. Eliot who extend Arnold’s project in all its complexity—the mystification of literary judgment in The Study of Poetry demonstrates how meaningfulness begins to recede even at the moment of its apotheosis. What is left is an emphasis on the form of the classic, its sound and feeling of transcendence, a sound and feel that is only inadequately described by pointing to particular features of particular lines and cannot be replaced by pointing to what those lines mean. While the critic James Wood has argued, passionately, that in turning to poetry Arnold becomes a slayer of Christianity and starts us on a course toward its utter evacuation, I want to suggest that it is precisely in setting readers on that course that he lays the foundation for a living religious faith—the faith in literary form.¹⁵

The formal remainder, spiritualized in Arnold, is what I discuss under the rubric of form in this book; like my use of the term belief, my use of form is quite broad. By it, I indicate the constellation of attributes that surround any utterance but are not what we think of as its indexical or referential meaning—what one might also, more narrowly, call the nonsemantic aspects of language. On a local level, these include the sound or look of words, the tone and level of diction that accompanies word choices; in literary works, such attributes also include narrative or poetic form, style, figurative language, or allusion. These may be assigned a meaning by the writer or left to do certain work by virtue of their association with shared cultural meanings; they may be taken up thematically or simply rest in the work’s structure. To recast Arnold’s point about the classics, I would say that literature’s special knowledge about these aspects of language—which are distinct from and sometimes other to meaning—is stored up in the tradition and propelled into individual novels and poems as authors engage that tradition. The use of that knowledge among prominent writers aligns with American religious dynamics in the late twentieth century so that, to reverse a formulation Kenneth Burke used in 1961, words about words become words about God.

This ineffable yet material sense of form is ultimately taken up by the New Critics and institutionally installed as the marker of literariness. For them, the poem (like Tillich’s existential Christian) should not mean, but be.¹⁶ What is more, the religious content of works they read, insofar as it shapes the formal analysis, supplies a religious vocabulary that makes reading for the form look like nothing so much as worship. This is evident, for example, in Cleanth Brooks’s discussion of Donne’s The Canonization (which canonizes the lovers, the sonnet form, and Donne all at the same time), in the way Brooks brands paraphrase as heresy, and in William Wimsatt’s notion of the verbal icon.¹⁷ The power of this conception in the late-twentieth-century literary landscape is difficult to overestimate. As I show across the chapters of this book, the notion of transcendent form is taken up by novelists as well as poets, affecting both committed New Critical descendants like Flannery O’Connor and Marilynne Robinson and writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Toni Morrison, who eschew the New Critical project in favor of a different vision of what literature should be. It endures in a modernist form, as the religion of art, or as the idea of art as secular enchantment, as we see in John Barth’s fiction.¹⁸ It finds renewed expression in the work of Jacques Derrida and other practitioners of deconstruction, even though Derrida’s inaugural writings set him precisely against what he called the theology of the sign. It persists in writers like Baldwin and DeLillo, who have given up the doctrinal forms of religious belief in which they were raised.

The transfer of what in Arnold is an importantly poetic phenomenon into the world of both fiction and theory demonstrates the reach of belief in meaninglessness in the late twentieth century. It migrates from the most rarified to the most popular ambitious writing (exemplified by poetry in general on the one hand and by what McGurl calls high cultural pluralism, found in writers like Toni Morrison or Cormac McCarthy, on the other), from the claret-sipping clubs of Arnold’s time to celebrity culture of academia, where Derrida in his day was greeted by crowds and blessed (or cursed) with disciples.¹⁹ I concede that all this is small potatoes in contrast to the rising mass culture in America, but belief in the absence of meaning does not disappear at the borders of the literary. I ultimately argue that the formal practice of belief—as distinct from the specific content of belief—is vital to understanding American-style Christian evangelicalism as well, where the exact specificity of belief seems to be of literally eternal importance.

What is special about literature of the late twentieth century, then, is the way some of the most prominent writers of the time use language as a religious form to salvage what they see as a threatened literary authority. That bid for significance might have constituted a feeble sort of empowerment without the developments in American religious life with which it is entwined. If literature is a steadily declining source of cultural authority in the postwar mass culture, religion is an ever-stronger one. Each chapter of this book reveals how the strengthening of American religion in the late twentieth century informs and propels the major literary work of the time. The Charismatic movement, the fascination with Eastern religions, the reforms of Vatican II, the explosion of literary interest in the Bible, the exhaustion of the older Protestant establishment, and the rise of Pentecostalism and the revival of evangelicalism all underwrite the success of the literary bids for authority with which I am concerned. I show how major writers of the period draw on these religious changes in their work: how Ginsberg uses the figure of glossolalia, how DeLillo imagines the novel as the Latin mass, how McCarthy uses the literary style of the Bible, how Robinson makes the idea of religious pluralism into the scaffolding of her narrative forms.

The view of late-century American literature I am presenting calls into question the assumptions entailed in postmodernism as a critical paradigm. Postmodernist critics such as Fredric Jameson, Brian McHale, Linda Hutcheon, Jean-François Lyotard, and others have defined the period by the self-conscious ambiguity, fractured narratives, ironic play, and aesthetic virtuosity of writers like Pynchon, Gaddis, Acker, DeLillo, and Barth and have looked to the economic substructures of culture as a way of understanding these aesthetic developments. Attending to religion allows us to see how several prominent features of postmodernism thus conceived are eclipsed. I argue that sincerity overshadows irony as a literary mode when the ambiguities of language are imagined as being religiously empowered. Writers in this mode see fracture and materialism not as ends in themselves but as the conditions for transcendence. Cultural embeddedness—in the panoply of American religious contexts—comes to matter as much as transhistorical (or posthistorical) aesthetics even for the most formally ambitious of writers. Don DeLillo’s work provides a signal example of these shifting qualities of late-century literature: the ironic, playful White Noise (1985), a standard text of the old post-modernism, now seems an aberration within DeLillo’s oeuvre. Where White Noise is reasserted as central now, it is reread to highlight its Romantic tropes.²⁰ Underworld (1997) and The Names (1982), both of which are ambitious and only locally ironic, more fully define DeLillo’s literary project. The unbelieving nuns who tend Mr. Grey’s gunshot wounds in White Noise are just one more satirical joke in a secular white suburbia, whose denizens look for transcendence in sunsets on the overpass. But in Underworld, Sister Edgar’s embrace of a mystical vision in the multiethnic Bronx is rewarded with a very Catholic-looking afterlife on the Internet. My reading of DeLillo as a religious writer, informed by the transformations of Roman Catholicism during the Vatican II era, grounds the changing assessment of his work in the history of America’s peculiar religiosity.

At the same time, I am returning to questions of meaning and belief that have been superseded since the 1980s in religious studies but also, in a different form, in literary studies. The multicultural emphasis on identity as a way of understanding and dividing up the literary landscape has sidelined belief (as distinct from, and considered opposed to, ontology or performance) as a topic in the study of literature. Equally, the new religious studies, which favor the thick description of religious practice (what is now called lived religion) over efforts to parse what religious people and churches say about their beliefs, makes belief, as Robert Orsi suggests in Between Heaven and Earth, the wrong question.²¹ What is distinct about literature, when we see its religious elements in the formal ways I have suggested, is that it is both a religious practice as understood by the new religious studies and also a species of discourse about religion; it is the enactment and the discussion of belief, religious life and religious thought brought together.²²

Literature in the period I delineate thus extends a tradition going back to the Romantics into a moment of American history where the tension between pluralism and intensity of belief is very much at the surface of public culture. The tension between these two modes manifests itself in specific questions this book draws from its central texts: What do people believe (about language, about themselves, about God, about other people) such that conflicting beliefs can be sustained? How can one celebrate freedom of thought and yet aim to produce poetry—as Ginsberg does—that can change the listener’s mind by the power of its sound, rather than the meaning of its words? How can one reconcile the notion of freely chosen belief, and the agency such choosing