Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960

POSTMODERN BELIEF

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2 0 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

P O ST M O D ER N B E L I E F

American Literature and Religion since 1960

Amy Hungerford

P R I N C E T O N

U N I V E R S I T Y

P R E S S

P R I N C E T O N

A N D

O X F O R D

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 All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 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) I. Title. PS225.H86 2010 810'.9'005—dc22

2009043864

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Helvetica Neue Printed on acid-free paper. 嘷 ∞ press.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Mumiji YOU PLANTED ALL THE SEEDS

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION Belief in Meaninglessness ONE Believing in Literature Eisenhower, Salinger, St. Jacques Derrida

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TWO Supernatural Formalism in the Sixties Ginsberg, Chant, Glossolalia

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THREE The Latin Mass of Language Vatican II, Catholic Media, Don DeLillo

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FOUR The Bible and Illiterature Bible Criticism, McCarthy and Morrison, Illiterate Readers

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FIVE The Literary Practice of Belief Lived Religion, Marilynne Robinson, Left Behind

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CONCLUSION The End of The Road, Devil on the Rise

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CONTENTS

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

his 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.

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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

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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.

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INTRODUCTION

his 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 lit-

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erature’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 oldtime 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 be-

xv INTRODUCTION

comes 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

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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

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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 pre-

INTRODUCTION

to literary form and to religious thought when the meaning of belief is palpable and is, moreover, a central locus of narrative drama.

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cisely 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 latetwentieth-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 meaningless-

xix INTRODUCTION

ness 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

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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 postmodernism, 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 entails—both of central importance to evangelical Christians—with the modes of submission and mediation this version of Christianity embraces, theologically and culturally? What one observer might see as the gap in a person’s logic, then, I see as a whole world of belief, belief in the nonsemantic powers of language. This is a world where religion and literature collaborate.

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This book demonstrates how religion and literature in this period together present us with logical and imaginative structures that bridge the gaps between conviction and relativism, between doctrine and pluralism, between belief and meaninglessness. One may well be inclined either to applaud or to bemoan the ways of speaking about literature and about God that these chapters describe. Indeed, James Wood, who perhaps comes closest to my own perception of how meaninglessness and religious feeling interact in contemporary fiction, expresses a visceral horror at what he sees: empty allegory in Pynchon, he writes, leaves us novels that “hang without reference, pointing like a severed arm to nowhere in particular.”23 Despite the fact that on occasion I share Wood’s feelings about meaninglessness in fiction, I have chosen to sideline such a response in favor of trying to understand what so many people—writers, intellectuals, people whose lives don’t revolve around reading and writing—are doing with religious thought and the idea of meaninglessness in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The longing for conviction and whatever transcendent purpose conviction brings is not something I denigrate, for example—I argue that it is not, as the deconstructive theologian Mark C. Taylor suggests, the failure of the religious impulse to grasp the postmodern world and embrace postmodern deferral. Likewise, the desire for pluralism and tolerance, and perhaps even the celebration of endless indeterminacy (the sort of religious impulse that postmodern thinkers such as Taylor value), might well serve the best good of a diverse world. The effort to have both, and to have both in some version of a common public culture and not just in private experience, is both understandable and radical; whether it will issue in the triumph of intolerance and put irony permanently on the run, or extinguish strong religious commitment within public discourse, or restore to public life the capacity to argue about rather than simply assert religious beliefs remains to be seen. If, as I argue in this book, literary art is specially suited to advancing that effort to have both, then this seems reason enough to keep reading novels and poems; at least for a number of important American writers, it has been reason enough to keep writing them. I argue that such an ambition has been in good measure responsible for the continuing relevance of American literary culture since the 1960s. This book ultimately demonstrates how our ways of speaking both about religion and about literature have become elliptical—have come continually to orbit the dual foci of belief and meaninglessness. The line of that orbit is what I would call belief in literature.

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POSTMODERN BELIEF

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Believing in Literature

Faith in Faith in the Fifties EADING THE 1953 inaugural parade for President Eisenhower was a float known to its builders as “God’s Float.” Added to the parade lineup at the last moment, when a parade official noticed that the event might fail to represent the idea that “this was a nation whose people believed in God,” the float was constructed to make that abstract point concrete. It was built around a “central edifice denoting a place of worship” with “side aprons” carrying “greatly enlarged photographs of churches and other scenes of worship. In Gothic script on the sides and ends of the float [appeared] the legends, ‘Freedom of Worship’ and ‘In God We Trust.’”1 The journalist William Lee Miller, observing the inauguration in a 1954 essay for The Reporter titled “Piety along the Potomac,” suggested that “the object of devotion for this float is ‘religion.’ The faith is not in God but in faith; we worship our own worshipping.”2 The Episcopal Churchnews shared this view of the float, adding an aesthetic critique as well: “Standing for all religions, it had the symbols of none, and it looked like nothing whatsoever in Heaven above, or in the earth beneath, except possibly an oversized model of a deformed molar”: A tooth for a toothless religion.3 This feature of contemporary religion was widely observed in the fifties. A year later in his now-classic study of American religion, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (1955), Will Herberg reflected on the same phenomenon in more academic fashion. Examining the upsurge of religious activity in 1950s America, Herberg found little evidence of specific, deeply held religious

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belief in the survey data he collected, data covering church membership, attendance at services, beliefs about God, and general knowledge of religion. It seemed to Herberg, putting it in the same words Miller chose, that Americans had “faith in faith,” that they believed in the virtue of belief, regardless of the content of that belief. What Herberg did find among his survey data was a specific faith in what he called “The American Way of Life,” a system of beliefs that enfolded such values as consumerism, optimism, self-confidence, and individualism. As the immigrant generations moved farther from the ways of their parents, rooted in the Old World of their origins, people identified with religion—their status as Protestant, Catholic, or Jew—as a way of finding both social belonging and social distinction within what Herberg thought of as America’s “triple melting pot.” It was this social function of religion, for Herberg, that explained how intense religious activity could combine in America with a disregard for the basic beliefs of its three major religions. A version of this argument persists in recent work that reads religious practice as the equivalent of ethnic identity.4 President Eisenhower’s discourse and practice of religion became the most prominent example of the faith-in-faith phenomenon. President Eisenhower, as Miller trenchantly put it, “like many Americans, is a very fervent believer in a very vague religion.” “Like Ike, Americans remember with reverence a pious heritage, the form and spirit but not the content of which they want to preserve.”5 Indeed, Eisenhower has often been credited with a famous line encapsulating such a position: “Our government makes no sense,” Eisenhower is said to have said, “unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith—and I don’t care what it is.”6 What is interesting about the quotation is that it has been reproduced, both at the time and subsequently by historians of religion, in an erroneous form that makes Eisenhower’s notion of religion sound more vacuous than it was, even as he uttered something close to these words. What he actually said was: “In other words, our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is. With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept but it must be a religion that all men are created equal.”7 What Eisenhower actually said locates general religious faith, as it applies to America, in the “Judeo-Christian” tradition, though he implies that democracy might find its grounding in any religious tradition so long as it shared that characteristic of the Judeo-Christian heritage. The difference between the common version of Eisenhower’s quotation and the accurate one points up the complexity of faith in faith. The difference reveals the specific content of the faith Eisenhower invokes—the “Judeo-Christian” tradition—while also showing how even that content reflects the faith-in-faith ethos. In his influential 1967 essay, Robert Bellah noted Eisenhower’s quotation as a prelude to his own effort to describe what he called “American civil religion” as a substantial, and truly religious, tradition of shared belief in certain basic assumptions—prime among them, that there is a God, and that American leaders are

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obligated to that higher authority in addition to—and in crisis, above—the authority of the people.8 The Judeo-Christian tradition is itself a notion that mediates between pluralism and doctrinal specificity. It is the product of postwar religious thinking, popular (as we can see in Eisenhower’s usage) as a way of naming the distinction between Western democracy and Soviet communism. The star theologians of the day, including Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, developed the idea of the JudeoChristian tradition in intellectually substantial detail. (Niebuhr’s celebrity was such that he was chosen to grace the cover of Time magazine’s twenty-fifth anniversary issue in 1948.) Jewish writers such as Herberg and the novelist Waldo Frank embraced the term as well, Herberg invoking it at the conclusion of Protestant, Catholic, Jew as the religion that must be called upon to renew the “inner character of American religion.”9 As the historian Mark Silk puts it, the notion of a JudeoChristian tradition had become “the true emblem” of America’s faith in faith.10 Writers looking at religion in the fifties and the historians following them—including the eminent Sydney Ahlstrom—have found the bowdlerized version of Eisenhower’s remark an even fitter emblem for American religion of the postwar period, demonstrating how even delimited vagueness came to be displaced by something even vaguer in the late-century conception of American religion.11 What faith in faith represents—a version of religious thinking that minimizes the specificity of religious doctrine in service to usually nationalistic goals of civil connection—stands in contrast to the version of religion that stresses doctrinal content, a kind that in 1950s America most prominently includes the multiple versions of Christianity, from committed mainline Protestantism and Catholicism to the more evangelical strains. During the fifties and sixties, minority and working-class churches— Holiness and Pentecostal churches, in particular, with their intense and particular religious expressions—thrived largely out of sight of the faith-in-faith mainstream, while Billy Graham, fully in view of that mainstream, drew the masses to his revivals and had the ear of presidents. This is the window on American religion that James Baldwin gives us in his 1953 novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, showing us the ecstatic worship at Harlem’s storefront churches that he both admires and criticizes years later, from a secular point of view, in The Fire Next Time (1963). These doctrinally focused religions can be usefully described as religions of “conversion,” which emphasize the abandonment of erroneous beliefs and the habits that go with them and the adoption of right ones along with a righteous life.12 While faith in faith has been the favored way of understanding American religion in the midtwentieth century—a tendency evident in the ways Eisenhower’s speech has been misquoted—doctrinal or conversional religions were nevertheless important within American culture in the postwar period. Their presence beside the blander and more dominant versions of fifties faith reveals a dual track in American religion in the postwar period: not simply the coexistence of doctrinal and nondoctrinal faith, but, I will argue, the mutual dependence of one upon the other.

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Unsurprisingly, that mutual dependence sometimes took the form of reaction: some doctrinal assertions were inspired precisely by the phenomenon of faith in faith. In 1959, for example, the minister and theologian Martin Marty gave an impassioned analysis of sectarian weakness, calling for the renewal and intensification of sectarian difference in the face of religion’s erosion by the American proclivity for vagueness.13 More often, doctrinal assertion in the period is not pleaded for, but is simply evident, and evident in ways that reveal how specificity and vagueness feed one another. The year 1949, for instance, saw two signal moments for the Catholic presence in American culture: on the one hand, the publication of Paul Blanshard’s virulently anti-Catholic American Freedom and Catholic Power, which aligned the Roman Catholic Church with communist totalitarianism, and on the other, the ecclesiastical prosecution of Jesuit Leonard Feeney in the Boston Heresy Case.14 Blanshard’s book went through eleven printings in eleven months, and a second, updated edition was published in 1960, suggesting a broad concern about specifically Catholic forms of exclusivity and authority. But Feeney’s crime against that very Church was to argue, in packed public meetings across the street from Harvard, that there was no salvation outside the Church. The Church rewarded him with its strongest doctrinal sanction: he was excommunicated. Some read Feeney’s excommunication as the Church’s attempt to accommodate to an overwhelmingly Protestant American culture, but the picture is again more complicated than that. Feeney’s position and that of his prosecutors both had support in Catholic tradition, and Feeney’s beliefs may have been closer to lay Catholic belief than those of the liberal Richard J. Cushing, the Archbishop of Boston, who was largely responsible for Feeney’s downfall.15 Feeney’s prosecution in fact demonstrated the Church’s insistence on a theological difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. Whereas it is not uncommon in Protestant tradition to suggest that the salvation held out by one’s own denomination is the only salvation to be had, Catholic thought on salvation outside the Church has not, in the last century, been that clear-cut. And so doctrinal insistence in this case meant the insistence that doctrine is not the ultimate arbiter of one’s eternal fate. (I will have more to say about the Protestant–Catholic contrast in the final section of this chapter.) Similarly, Eisenhower’s faith itself can be seen as emblematic of both kinds of religion—faith in faith and specific doctrinal conviction. Eisenhower’s religion first took center stage when he surprised the crowd at his inauguration in 1953 with “a little prayer of my own” at the start of his inaugural address. It read: Almighty God, as we stand here at this moment my future associates in the executive branch of government join me in beseeching that Thou will make full and complete our dedication to the service of the people in this throng, and their fellow citizens everywhere. Give us, we pray, the power to discern clearly right from wrong, and allow all our words

5 our concern shall be for all the people regardless of station, race, or calling. May cooperation be permitted and be the mutual aim of those who, under the concepts of our Constitution, hold to differing political faiths; so that all may work for the good of our beloved country and Thy glory. Amen.

Eisenhower’s prayer was one of four officially offered that day, the other three of which decorously enfolded Herberg’s Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish cohorts.16 Nevertheless, some in the Washington establishment were taken aback by the president’s decision to read a prayer he wrote himself, and not because of what it said. Its religious statement was bland in the extreme. The one whiff of differences among faiths—of disagreements over what one believes and what one does in response to belief—is explicitly displaced from religion to politics, where those united by their loyalty to the Constitution might yet “hold to differing political faiths.” The prayer was surprising not so much because it outlined a set of religious beliefs but because it seemed to indicate that Eisenhower actually believed in some set of religious claims. Unlike the formal prayers offered at the ceremony, it constituted a personal rather than an official, and civil, religious statement. Precisely because of this, Eisenhower’s prayer has had a double afterlife. In addition to being cited by those interested in church–state issues and presidential history or rhetoric, in Christian circles it is held up as an inspiring example of presidential faith. It entered that double afterlife in 1956 at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, when the movie star Irene Dunne recited it on stage, to the accompaniment of violins playing “America the Beautiful,” in the light of the Pacific sunset, all broadcast to millions on their new TVs.17 The prayer’s assumption into the heart of political rhetoric—via the political theater made possible by the new mass medium of television—elevated what looked like a personal expression of faith into something more like civil religion. The prayer in this way drew closer to the formal prayers next to which it looked so uncomfortably distinct when first uttered. But that assumption did not ultimately disperse the scent of conviction that surrounds personal prayer. Thus the very emptiness of “faith in faith” through which the public culture of the postwar years represented America to itself was in many ways true to the predominant sociological facts of American religion—the sociological facts upon which Herberg and others drew in their analyses. But both the Feeney case and Eisenhower’s own example reveal how such faith in faith could become entwined with fervent and specific conviction. Though Blanshard’s anti-Catholic success was not far, historically speaking, from John F. Kennedy’s campaign success, those two poles seem to represent an evolution in American religious thinking, an evolution away from doctrinally specific belief and prejudice and toward the firm establishment of faith in faith as American’s civil religion. Kennedy, of course, secured his victory in part at a Dallas

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and actions to be governed thereby, and by the laws of this land. Especially we pray that

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ministers’ convention on 12 September 1960, where he laid out his own Catholic philosophy: that religion was a private matter, one that should have no bearing on the public decisions of a public figure, this despite the fact that mobilization of Christian principle had already proven powerful in the Civil Rights movement. In the latter case, religious belief was not what one subtracted from one’s thinking upon entering the realm of public policy, but the very springboard from which one launched that entrance. Prejudice against Catholics certainly accounted for some of the difference between the embrace of the largely Protestant religious presence in the Civil Rights movement and the dismissal of Kennedy’s Catholicism, though already in the early 1960s sectarian issues were not the defining ones (as Martin Marty’s 1959 call to sectarianism reveals). More importantly, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and other Civil Rights groups were advancing a version of Christian morality that echoed the tenets of the Judeo-Christian tradition as Eisenhower imagined it—in particular, the notion that all men were created equal. The year 1961, then, saw both Kennedy’s inauguration and, the following summer, the Freedom Rides that prompted Kennedy to bar segregation in interstate transportation and that vaulted the Civil Rights movement into the national consciousness. Together these two events suggest the waning power of any religion of difference and the strengthening of civil religion, where even faith in faith was replaced by a more straightforwardly secular moral and humanist argument. Sociologists and historians of religion observing the developments of the postwar years read them just this way, as the triumph of secularity. Peter Berger, in his 1966 analysis of American religion, The Sacred Canopy, argued that Judaism and Christianity had been digging their mutual grave since the prophets, echoing Weber’s analysis in suggesting that Western religion’s “disenchantment of the world” began well before the Protestant Reformation. By confining the sacred into one gigantically transcendent God (this was the prophets’ contribution), by progressively denying Him mediating beings like angels and saints, by scrapping sacrament and religious art (these accomplished by the Reformation), the JudeoChristian tradition drove the sacred right out of ordinary life. The effect, according to Berger, was to make God less and less plausible as a force within the realm that the Old Testament always did reserve for God’s appearance, the realm of historical event. If God was so transcendent that He was never palpable in one’s ordinary life (so Berger’s argument went), it was hard to believe that He was busy making history. It was hard to believe in Him at all. The thesis of secularization of which The Sacred Canopy is a prime example was dominant for decades and sought to take account of the obvious persistence of religious fervor. The sociologist Bryan Wilson argued, for example, that the increasing intensity of private expressions of religion in the twentieth century does not refute secularization but is rather the product of it, the product of religion’s disappearance from public life.18 Ahlstrom, Berger, Herberg, and even Martin

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Marty saw strong and specific doctrinal belief as a waning enterprise, losing out first to the notion of faith in faith and, finally, to secularism. It is worth noting here that a major literary-critical argument for secularization also appears at this time: M. H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism (1971), which argues that since the Romantics, literature has come to conserve religious values while stripping them of their supernatural scaffolding. His analysis tellingly stops with Eliot; the literature of his own day would have told a different story. Indeed, this interpretation of postwar American religion would turn out to be wrong. Strong, doctrinally specific religious belief was not the shrinking remnant of an earlier form of American religion, but the growing edge of a new form. And faith in faith would not inevitably lead to civil religion and secularism triumphant, but instead proved hospitable to doctrinal religion in the ways hinted at in the Feeney case, where faith in faith fully merges with doctrinal religion. The fifties in these respects was not the end of something but the beginning of something, the beginning of what Zygmunt Bauman would much later identify as a postmodern “reenchantment of the world.”19 We can see this most dramatically in the subsequent growth of conservative Christianity in the late century, which surprised historians of American religion. The growth of Pentecostalism in particular was the major development that Ahlstrom, in his magisterial The Religious History of the American People (1972), did not foresee, a development that commands significant space in the updated edition published after Ahlstrom’s death.20 Berger was more prescient. A Christian himself (though he confessed he had not yet found the heresy to which he belonged), Berger took just a few years before publishing A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (1969), a companion to The Sacred Canopy aimed at the general reader. There he suggested that despite the earlier book’s conclusions, all was not lost for religious perceptions of reality; secularism could be turned around. The angels stripped away from God, beings that for Berger represent the possibility that transcendence can touch the world, are still rumored, and this offers us the opportunity to transform the future. “If the signals of transcendence have become rumors in our time,” Berger wrote, “then we can set out to explore these rumors—and perhaps to follow them up to their source.”21 Berger’s rumored angels can be seen as part and parcel of what one scholar has called “the sixties spiritual awakening.”22 By the end of the century, Berger notes that only academics continue to think of fundamentalism as a rare and hard-to-understand phenomenon. “The difficult-to-understand phenomenon is not Iranian mullahs but American university professors. . . . My point,” he continues in an essay confessing the “Mistakes of Secularization Theory,” “is that the assumption that we live in a secularized world is false.”23 Where secularization persists, Berger argues, it is only among a subculture of global intellectual elites. (Charles Taylor’s magisterial task, in A Secular Age, is in part to account for religious life thriving in the condition of secularism over several centuries.)

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From the early sixties through the end of the century, American expressions of religious belief and the religious practices of Americans would follow a dual track marked by the growth of both public and private religious expression. While liberal politics of the sixties and the multiculturalism of the eighties and nineties tolerated or celebrated the diversity of private personal religious practice on display beginning in the sixties, conservative or radical versions of religion took the public rather than the private realm to be their logical home. We can see this in how groups like the SCLC were displaced by the rise of the Nation of Islam in the late sixties, and how the New Left was trumped by the rise of the Religious Right, culminating in the founding of the Moral Majority in 1979 (one of whose founders, Tim LaHaye, would go on to coauthor the Left Behind series). Indeed, the role of churches in recent presidential campaigns, where pastors have sometimes made it clear that the truly faithful would vote for certain candidates, and some Catholic priests have argued that a pro-choice candidate (or anyone voting for such a candidate) should not receive communion, suggests just how clearly the most conservative factions of Protestant and Catholic churches have seen their role in relation to public life. Private tolerance of religious diversity, and public exertion of particular religious will, characterize, in different formations, the decades from the start of the sixties to the end of the century. I will argue in the following sections that the seeming contradiction at work here—private belief hedged round by a tolerant faith in faith, public doctrinal specificity, what amounts to a reversal of the fifties version of American religion—is in fact not a contradiction. Writers, critics, and religious Americans in the period develop ways of thinking that allow them to hold both positions simultaneously. They seek to have faith in faith and specific conviction, too, and they seek to have both in both spheres of life, the private and the public. Taken as a single cultural development of American religion, the two strains together manifest the logic behind belief without content. This kind of belief, and, more precisely, this way of talking about belief, comes into its own from the beginning of the sixties; it develops with special nuance in the realm of literature, to which I now turn.

Vaudeville and the Jesus Prayer The nutshell history of faith in the fifties I have given here deposits us at the start of the sixties with an abiding tension between “faith in faith” and specific religious conviction. Lionel Trilling used terms that straddle this divide as he insisted on the spiritual quality of recent literature in 1961. In an essay titled “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” Trilling argued that modern literature (what we would call modernist literature, though he speaks of it as if it were contemporary) “asks us . . . if we are saved or damned—more than anything else, our litera-

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ture is concerned with salvation. No literature has ever been so intensely spiritual as ours.” While Trilling does not “venture to call it actually religious,” he yet sees in modern literature “the special intensity of concern with the spiritual life which Hegel noted when he spoke of the great modern phenomenon of the secularization of spirituality.” 24 Trilling looks slightly more mystical than Kenneth Burke, who in the same year published The Rhetoric of Religion, which itself walks a fine line between theology and literary criticism while proclaiming a complete secularity. Burke argues that words about God are in essence words about words. Understanding words about God, in sacred texts such as Augustine’s Confessions, allows us to know something about language itself when those words about God return to the secular realm with new religious valences. This mode of studying words—which Burke calls “logology,” echoing “theology”—substitutes a secular understanding of transcendent language for the sacred understanding of the divine Logos. But Burke’s logology nevertheless bumps literature toward the transcendental meaning traditionally accruing to religion. If words about God are really words about words, it doesn’t take much to reverse the equation and arrive adjacent to Trilling, to suggest that words about words—so many of which are found in literary texts—are in some sense words about God. That is the reversal at the heart of J. D. Salinger’s contribution to the literary discourse of 1961, the novel Franny and Zooey. The novel provides a case through which we can see how a literary text negotiates the relationship between words and God at this particular moment. It exemplifies how a writer might locate religious experience in meaningless language, and how doing so might alleviate the tension between specific doctrine and religious pluralism without giving in to secularism. The narrative of Franny and Zooey follows young Franny Glass’s spiritual crisis from the moment she collapses in a college-town diner to the family’s apartment in New York, where she has holed up with her mother, Bessie; her father, Les; and her older brother, Zooey. Part I of the novel covers the scene in a town that looks much like New Haven or Princeton; it was published first in the New Yorker in 1955. The much longer part II, also published as a separate story in the New Yorker, in 1957, takes place in the apartment, first in the bathroom where Zooey and his mother talk, then in the living room where Zooey finds Franny snuffling on the couch, and finally in two bedrooms—the upstairs room that had belonged to two older Glass brothers, Buddy and Seymour, and the downstairs bedroom belonging to their parents. Between these two bedrooms, a telephone conversation takes place between Zooey and Franny, a conversation that provides the climax and the conclusion of the novel. The narrative tension in the novel is generated by religious questions that swirl around an instance of ritualized religious language—the Jesus prayer that Franny began to mutter unceasingly to herself shortly before meeting her boyfriend, Lane, an English major at an Ivy League university.25 In saying the prayer, she is trying to

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follow the Russian Orthodox mystical classic, The Way of the Pilgrim, out of the spiritual bankruptcy represented by Vassar College and her blueblood boyfriend. When I make this claim about the centrality of the novel’s religious concerns, it should be said that I am contradicting the narrator, who insists that the plot does not hinge “on religious mystification” and that it “isn’t a mystical story” at all, but “a compound, or multiple, love story.”26 I will show how Salinger ensures that this is a religious story in the face of his narrator’s insistence that it isn’t one; indeed, the novel’s simultaneous denial and assertion of religious meaning is the first hint as to how Salinger will approach the problem of doctrine. So what exactly does the novel say about religion? In the first place, Zooey’s monologues on religion respond both to Franny’s breakdown and to their elder brothers’ preoccupation with spiritual matters. As Buddy reminds Zooey in an old letter Zooey reads in the bathtub, Buddy and Seymour decided to take over the education of their younger siblings to promote the children’s spiritual development. Buddy writes that Seymour had begun to believe that education shouldn’t “begin with a quest for knowledge at all but with a quest, as Zen would put it, for no-knowledge . . . to be in a state of pure consciousness—satori—is to be with God before he said, Let there be light” (65). The older Glass brothers attempted to pass this quest on to their siblings by offering them all the best nuggets they had found in their reading, many of which they also inscribed on a panel of whitepainted beaverboard nailed to the back of their bedroom door. Franny’s response to her brothers’ instruction is to say the Jesus prayer. Her practice aligns with their teaching because she utters the prayer as a ritual practice leading to religious enlightenment, not as the result of existing belief. Surprisingly, it is precisely this lack of doctrinal content that Zooey criticizes. He castigates Franny for rolling “Jesus and St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi’s grandfather all into one” (166). According to Zooey, “If God had wanted somebody with St. Francis’s consistently winning personality for the job in the New Testament, he’d’ve picked him. . . . As it was, he picked the best, the smartest, the most loving, the least sentimental, the most unimitative master” (171, original emphasis). If we listen to Zooey, praying specifically—knowing the Jesus to whom one is praying— will solve at a stroke all the other problems he sees in Franny’s approach to the prayer. Christ embodies the principle of selfless love, through which one avoids both the acquisitiveness of which he accuses Franny (she wants to acquire wisdom by saying the prayer) and the harm she is doing to others (to her parents, who are worried about her, and to Professor Tupper, the pompous don leading her religion seminar, whom she mocks). Zooey argues that the specificity of Jesus— as opposed to St. Francis—is that Jesus values any human being more than any bird or beast; even a Professor Tupper qualifies for his love. Specificity looks quite different, though, when, Zooey moves to impersonate his brother Buddy when later calling Franny on the phone from Buddy and Seymour’s

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bedroom. He resorts to this measure having failed, in the living room, to do more than browbeat his sister in her misery. Upon entering his brothers’ room to place the call, Zooey first pays homage to the beaverboard panel of quotations. He appears in the doorway with a clean white handkerchief spread on the top of his head, as if entering a holy place. The beaverboard panel, which we read over his shoulder, suggests the brothers’ syncretic view of religious wisdom, with quotations from Ramakrishna, Kafka, Mu-Mon-Kwan, Ring Lardner, St. Francis de Sales, and Tolstoy. As if to underscore that syncretism, the quotation from Ramakrishna has the sage admonishing a disciple who wants to teach the people to be more accurate in their worship, to worship God instead of images of the gods. “Do you think God does not know he is being worshipped in the images and pictures?” Ramakrishna asks. “If a worshipper should make a mistake, do you not think that God will know his intent?” (178–79). The no-knowledge upon which Seymour and Buddy’s studies were converging is syncretic because the very negation at the root of it denies the importance of the specificity Ramakrishna’s disciple wants to instill and that Zooey argues for in the Jesus prayer. The setup for Zooey’s phone call thus puts the nature and status of syncretism at stake. Zooey’s ensuing monologue, delivered over the phone to the still-snuffling Franny, solves the tension between syncretism and specificity, between wisdom and no-knowledge, by transforming a theory of religion into a theory of acting. At first, this theory still looks simply Christian. He tells Franny that when their brother Seymour found Zooey disdainful of the audiences they entertained as radio quiz show contestants on the program “It’s a Wise Child,” he told Zooey to shine his shoes and do his best “for the Fat Lady.” The imaginary Fat Lady is the abstract but extravagantly embodied human being who is always entitled to one’s love. The Fat Lady is also doubled in Zooey himself: he later tells Franny that he and Buddy, unbeknownst to Franny, drove up to see her perform in “Playboy of the Western World” the previous summer, joining the anonymous audience beyond the footlights. Zooey’s point (and Seymour’s) is that one must project one’s love outward from the stage to all of common humanity, regardless of whom one is addressing, on the off chance—or rather, on the certainty—that someone out there is entitled to the love you project. Zooey could not make his incarnational theology more explicit: “There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady . . . don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy” (202, original emphasis). And Franny receives the wisdom: “For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands” (202). The Christian message thus transmitted and received is not the last word in Franny and Zooey on acting as a religious practice, though these words are not far from the novel’s actual last word. It is rather the paragraph following, the one that does contain the novel’s last words, that completes the religious vision of the

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narrative: “A dial tone, of course, followed the formal break in the connection. She [Franny] appeared to find it extraordinarily beautiful to listen to, rather as if it were the best possible substitute for the primordial silence itself. But she seemed to know, too, when to stop listening to it, as if all of what little or much wisdom there is in the world were suddenly hers” (202). She hangs up the phone and falls asleep in her parents’ bed, and the novel is ended. What would it mean for the dial tone to contain all the spiritual wisdom of the world, or, for that matter, all the wisdom of the novel? How does it reflect back on Zooey’s Christian message? The novel’s religious views about acting, which I’ve begun to detail, explain why Salinger leaves us with doctrine and dial tone. Zooey tells Franny that because she is a good actress, “the only religious thing you can do, is act . . . be God’s actress” (198). Zooey’s own acting career, as he describes it to Franny, commits him to acting in this way, no matter the quality of his material. It is thus the capacity to act—to assume the identities and voices of others and occupy them for a time, returning then to some other state of consciousness—that represents the religious understanding at work in the novel. The content of the acting is spiritually irrelevant. If the specificity of Christ is that he was the “most unimitative master,” the specificity of God’s actress is that she is the most imitative master, moving easily from imitatio Christi to the imitation of Hamlet. By locating religious enlightenment in acting, Zooey preserves the structure of the syncretism his twinned homage to the beaverboard and his Christian hermeneutics represent. That syncretism insists upon the specific content of religious wisdom but finds that content converging in a space of no-knowledge, the consciousness of God before He said “Let there be light.” God’s “light,” in Buddy’s letter, specifically includes Shakespeare and all of literature, pointing toward the incarnational logic of plays as such as well as the incarnational logic of the novel itself. The play and the novel are incarnations of the divine word; as instances of verbal performance, they point back always to the silence they break, to the moment before all incarnation and all speech. They point back, as it were, to the dial tone. Salinger gives us a prose style that places the author of the novel in that originary position. The author himself is always acting. We can see this in Salinger’s self-conscious use of clichés and mannerisms, which intensifies toward the climax of Zooey’s call to Franny. We are told that Zooey’s “shirt was, in the familiar phrase, wringing wet” (172) and that “this was the first time in almost seven years that Zooey had, in the ready-made dramatic idiom, ‘set foot’ in Seymour’s and Buddy’s old room” (175). Of that room we are told that “a stranger with a flair for cocktailparty descriptive prose might have commented that the room . . . looked as if it had once been tenanted by two struggling twelve-year-old lawyers” (181). The novel’s debt to drama is evident as well in the structure and staging of the narrative. The action—mostly histrionic family conversation, giving us no other access to the inner thoughts of the characters—moves in spatial unity from room to room.

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The narrative focuses on characters’ precise movements within those spaces; this is almost excruciating in the bathroom scene where Zooey and his mother, Bessie, converse. Precariously balanced objects such as Buddy’s letter on the edge of the bathtub, Bessie’s cigarette on the edge of the vanity, or Zooey’s razor clattering from the sink into the metal trash can, sensually register the slightest movement of the two bodies within the space. Zooey’s nakedness, and Bessie’s constantly adjusted housecoat, not to mention the incest taboo against which Salinger thereby brushes up, make us acutely aware of their physicality. These formal elements, as well as the narrator’s claim that the story is a “prose home movie” (47), all suggest that writing as Salinger pursues it is modeled on acting: on the structures and demands of the stage (or of the film’s frame) as a physical space, on the assumption of different voices and the interplay of these. Thus perhaps the most powerfully endorsed mode of religious art in the novel is not writing or drama but something like Vaudeville, the source of Bessie and Les’s now-faded fame. We see such a vision of Vaudeville in Seymour’s diary, which we read with Zooey as he sits at Seymour’s desk. The passage we see brims with pleasure in the details of a performance the family stages in the living room to celebrate Seymour’s birthday. The ideal art is something like that performance, something like family Vaudeville. Set in the Upper West Side apartment, Vaudeville can be fully revealed as religious art because the family love it represents is in fact divine love; as Zooey reminds Franny, even the chicken soup Bessie repeatedly offers is “consecrated chicken soup” (196). The novel suggests that pretense without love is just pretension (this is what Franny’s unbearable boyfriend, Lane, represents), though continually inventive pretense—the hallmark of Vaudeville as a genre—constitutes a transcendent state of being and communicates divine love. Vaudeville’s status as the ultimate religious art illuminates the novel’s verbal hedging about Buddy’s identity as the narrator and accounts, in a formal sense, for why Zooey impersonates his brother Buddy when he calls Franny. At the start of part II, the narrator, having confessed that he is Buddy, announces that he will continue to refer to Buddy (to himself, that is) in the third person. If “Buddy” is thus multiplied by two, he is multiplied by three and then by four in the course of the novel. Zooey impersonates Buddy on the phone with Franny, and throughout the ensuing conversation (during which Franny quickly finds him out) he calls her “buddy,” a slangy pet name. It is as if Zooey speaks to the abstracted narrator of the story and to his brother and to his sister all at once. Of course, since Salinger is the author of Zooey’s voice even while Salinger assumes the voice of Buddy-asnarrator, Salinger is talking to himself in the telephone scene, too. All of which, along with the power of Zooey’s rhetoric and his message, places Zooey in the position of the truly “wise child,” displacing the announced narrator as the arbiter of wisdom, incarnating the wisdom that Seymour—who committed suicide— seems to have possessed but with which he could not live.27 And so we must read

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back to the moment when the narrator contradicts Zooey about the essentially religious nature of the story. This is a religious story (which as Zooey tells us in his phone call, must also therefore be a love story), the more because it is Zooey who tells us so through the layers of impersonation. Franny and Zooey is a religious novel in its own terms, then, because it lets us hear the divine dial tone as well as the performance of sacred human speech. The latter we hear in multiple forms: as a family’s private language, and as the endlessly inventive languages of art, all dramatized into something like a Vaudeville routine. Like Franny, the novel knows when to stop listening to the dial tone and when to launch into virtuosic voice.

From the Heresy of Paraphrase to St. Jacques Derrida We could not find a more perfect embodiment of Harold Bloom’s sense of what he calls “the American Religion” than we do in Franny and Zooey. Bloom argues in The American Religion (1992) that the essence of American religion is not Christianity but Gnosticism. Most relevantly, for Salinger’s novel, he suggests that Americans thus imagine themselves as one with God prior to incarnation of any kind. Buddy’s, and then Zooey’s, attempt to imagine true religious enlightenment as the state of being with God before God said “Let there be light,” and the transformation of that state into Vaudeville, fit neatly into Bloom’s model. The coincidence of these two logics, separated by thirty years, attests to Bloom’s intuitive grasp of a postwar American version of literary mysticism, though Bloom dates his “American religion” back to the days of Joseph Smith and to the early-nineteenth-century Protestant revivals. It is not Bloom’s model and its rightness, however, that is most significantly at stake in my alignment of his account and Salinger’s novel. Rather, it is more revealing that Bloom’s juxtaposition of literary criticism and what he calls “religious criticism” matches up with Franny and Zooey, especially when we recognize that for Salinger, literary style—verbal virtuosity—is the manifest form of religious wisdom. For Bloom sees the “religious criticism” he offers in The American Religion as the analog to the literary criticism he practices elsewhere. Where literary criticism, in Bloom’s account, intends to highlight and conserve what is most irreducibly literary—for Bloom, aesthetic experience—his religious criticism intends to highlight and conserve what he sees as most irreducibly religious in religion—“spiritual experience,” which is left untouched, according to Bloom, by the sociological, anthropological, or even psychoanalytic study of religion. Though Bloom takes some pains with this and other distinctions between the two critical modes, between the spiritual and the aesthetic, it nevertheless is difficult here, or in his slightly earlier The Book of J (1990), to discern the difference between literary criticism and reli-

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gious criticism (a point I develop in chapter 4)—just as for Salinger, the sheer capacity for literary style is the corollary of religious enlightenment. The American Religion appears rather late in the explicit convergence of literary and religious vectors in American criticism. Bloom’s earlier entry in that category is noted in 1983 by Edward Said, who spots the trend in The World, the Text, and the Critic, noting all the “influential critics publishing major books with titles like [Kermode’s] The Genesis of Secrecy, [Frye’s] The Great Code, [Bloom’s] Kabbalah and Criticism, [Rene Girard’s] Violence and the Sacred, [Thomas J. J. Altizer’s] Deconstruction and Theology.” For Said, this sort of criticism, which he also names “religious criticism,” is marked by “critical ideas whose essence is some version of theory liberated from the human and the circumstantial.” He identifies a precursor to such religious criticism in Marshall McLuhan, whose work “foreshadow[s] this basically uncritical religiosity” he finds in these books. “All of it, I think,” writes Said, “expresses an ultimate preference for the secure protection of systems of belief (however peculiar those may be) and not for critical activity or consciousness.”28 In The World, the Text, and the Critic, Said is arguing against such criticism and on behalf of a politically and historically engaged criticism he terms “secular.” Said was undoubtedly right about the trend toward religious subjects and sacred texts among the most prominent literary critics between the mid-seventies and the mid-nineties. That trend, and its relation to the way fiction of the period imagines the Bible, constitutes the subject of this book’s fourth chapter. He is also right, in a way, about McLuhan, whom I discuss in chapter 3. But insofar as McLuhan is simply carrying forward a New Critical program into the new media of the late twentieth century, he doesn’t so much foreshadow religious criticism as mark its emergence into popular culture. The New Criticism that thus dominated the study of literature in the university after the war was profoundly Christian in inspiration—though with a peculiarity I will take up. And so what is interesting about Said’s comment in the 1980s is not only that he identifies a distinct iteration of a general postwar trend in criticism, but that he gets its implications subtly wrong. As I have suggested with respect to American religious history since the 1950s, and with respect to the exemplary instance of Salinger’s novel, I want also to suggest with respect to literary criticism: that specific belief—what Said describes, by its effect, as “the secure protection of systems of belief”—is less relevant to the critical trend he spots than something like the inclination to belief as such, found in the literary rather than in the institutions of religion. What seems to Said to be a criticism that imagines itself “liberated from the human and the circumstantial” can be seen, by virtue of that very self-conception, to be embroiled in the human, historical circumstances of the late-century American religious sensibility I have been describing. If this criticism is liberated, it is liberated not from history but from doctrine.

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For the New Critics, one important fact about literary texts—and especially, about poems—was that they could not be paraphrased, that their form carried with it some unspecifiable, or unspeakably particular, literary quality that transcended pedestrian content. The New Critical poem qua poem is form without content imagined as transcendence. This bid for transcendence reproduces Arnold’s effort to make literature a substitute for religion, and is neatly encapsulated in Cleanth Brooks’s notion of the “heresy of paraphrase.” As John Guillory has pointed out, the complexity of this substitution lies in the fact that “literary sensibility takes the place of religious belief.” “The success of this replacement,” Guillory suggests, “depended upon how thoroughly literature could be made to resist translation into doctrine.”29 The poem as the New Critics read it insists that all dogma is external to the text and that “the truth of every poem thus retreats before the act of interpretation; our arrival in its pretty room discovers an empty shrine, but a shrine nevertheless.” For Guillory, this is itself a species of dogma we are “already within”: the dogma of literature’s valued and transcendent distinction from mass culture.30 There is more to say, however, about the dogma we are already within as New Critical readers, for it matters that the literary object so evacuated is represented as a shrine. This dogma is the one whose image I have been assembling so far through other means: the dogma of no dogma, the religion of no doctrine. To put it another way, if Brooks’s “well wrought urn” is thus for Brooks and his disciples a living literary transcendence, Guillory’s longer historical and sociological view yields up a darker circumstance: The urn contains the ashes of something no longer living and thus the figure stumbles unwittingly on the very social conditions for which it attempted to compensate: the perceived decline in the cultural significance of literature itself, the perceived marginality of literary culture to the modern social order.31

But the urn that holds these literary ashes, like the empty shrine, represents something, too, something that sociology also points to, though not in ashen form. It points to the living religious belief exemplified by some of New Criticism’s devoted followers—including, most famously, Flannery O’Connor, but also, in our own time, a writer like Marilynne Robinson. For Robinson, the urn is filled with spiritual and literary power, a power that, in classic New Critical fashion, she finds untouched by attempts to describe the specific content of any literary work. In a review of Harold Bloom’s anthology of religious poetry, for example, she writes that religion “has been seriously distracted by the supposed need to translate itself into terms a rationalist would find meaningful,” a “project more or less equivalent to rewriting Shakespeare into words of one syllable. But the problem of paraphrase is deeper yet,” she goes on to say:

17 rassment and difficulty. This is true because of the way belief lives in experience. By analogy, it is impossible to know how many nuances and associations a given word has until they are discovered in the use of the word. . . . Even the most familiar words exist in us in a field of potentiality to which paraphrase can never be adequate.32

What is alive in the New Criticism as well as in the later iterations of religious criticism is not literary culture so much as the manifestation of religion, the shrine itself as a living thing, the use of words as a practice analogous to religious experience. This is something Guillory’s admirably secular and sociological reading does not register, as if to recognize the continuing power of religion—as more than a “social fantasy” of “shared belief” bearing on literature—is to relinquish one’s secularity as a literary critic.33 If literature by 1950 had found its ultimate institutional home in the university, threatened outside the school by the postwar economy and its mass culture, religion was alive and well in practically every corner of American culture. I want to suggest that this very fact, in the postwar period generally but especially starting about 1960, is imagined by writers and critics alike as the means for literature’s salvation. This is precisely what Trilling’s invocation of personal salvation in modern literature proclaims. To look forward to my reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God in chapter 4, religion serves as the bellows worked—consciously and unconsciously—by writers wishing to feed any remaining sparks among Guillory’s literary ashes. Indeed, the suggestion that what Said calls “religious criticism” substitutes belief for “critical activity or consciousness” finds its counterargument in Michael Warner’s work on “uncritical reading.” He argues that what we call critical reading, the activity Said wants us to prefer over religious criticism, is in fact better understood as another species of the latter. Warner revisits the critical reading scholars practice and teach through the lens of the practices that we label uncritical, concluding that “critical reading is the pious labor of a historically unusual sort of person. If we are going to inculcate its pieties and techniques, we might begin by recognizing that that is what they are.”34 His argument has the effect of validating religious forms of reading by analogy to a practice we respect as academics. At the same time, the argument implies that piety’s rule-boundedness might be challenged by ecstatic or nonrational reading without altering, with respect to the exercise of reason and agency, what was, already, uncritical reading. For Warner, both critical and uncritical reading combine rule-boundedness with a faith that challenges reason’s hegemony. In a companion essay to Warner’s, the medievalist Amy Hollywood is explicit about the sort of criticism that might result from taking his argument seriously.

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Anyone, asked to give an account of her or his deepest beliefs, will experience embar-

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Showing how her own critical reading (here of a thirteenth-century French mystic) is a form of piety, she arrives at a threshold she finds herself unwilling to cross. One presumption I generally refuse to give up . . . is the power of constant skeptical questioning and critical reflection . . . a form of engagement in which I allow my assumptions to be changed by powerful counter-arguments. Yet the one assumption I don’t allow to come into question is that of the value of critical, rationally grounded engagement itself. What would it mean to give oneself over—even provisionally—to a form of life in which criticism is grounded in the divine, in tradition, authority or community?35

Her question, and Warner’s argument, raise another question: Would we want her to give herself over in this way? And what would her doing so accomplish? To give oneself over “provisionally” to belief looks like religious acting on Salinger’s model. The line I am drawing from Brooks and Wimsatt, through Bloom, to Warner and Hollywood, traces the development and persistence of religious thought in literary criticism. But what is perhaps even more remarkable than this line of development is the one that runs alongside it beginning in the late sixties. For the other major critical movement of the second half of the twentieth century, which for a time displaced New Criticism and “critical reading,” was of course “theory,” and more specifically, deconstruction. It is a strange demonstration of Zygmunt Bauman’s argument that postmodernism constitutes the “re-enchantment” of the world to find that the work of Jacques Derrida, whose argument against the sign cast itself from the very beginning as an argument against the reign of theology, should become a veritable fountain of theological renewal within a few years of the publication of Of Grammatology in English translation. This use of Derrida and of deconstruction more generally takes two forms. One form is theology that can be seen as the legacy of modernist, “death of God” liberal theology, where liberal theologians find in Derrida’s work and in French philosophy of the late twentieth century a new description of the absence at the heart of theology, an absence they had already formulated as a negative theology founded on the philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger. For these theologians, the most prominent of whom are Mark C. Taylor and Thomas J. J. Altizer, Derrida’s work provides a location—the sign—for God’s disappearance. These writers produce what Graham Ward calls, in his introduction to The Postmodern God, “postmodern theology”; I take the emphasis here to mean that in some sense they have made postmodernism their theology, rather than making theology responsive to postmodern insights.36 The other form can be found among theologians such as Jean-Luc Marion and Michel de Certeau who begin from traditional theological assumptions about God (arising from their specific faith traditions) and use Derridean “différance” within the purview of faith to reimagine the elements of specific theology—elements such as the alterity of God, the fact of the Incarnation, or the

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mystery of the Eucharist. (Ward identifies this body of thought as “postmodern theology.”) In other words, the presupposition of these theologians is not the death of God but the Living God—mostly the Living God of Christianity, though there are Jewish theologians who use a similar approach. In fact, Derrida is one of those Jewish writers presented in Graham Ward’s The Postmodern God as a source-text for the conception of divinity in the postmodern moment. Late in his career, Derrida invited such a status by turning to quasitheological subjects such as the gift and forgiveness and to explicit study of religion in Acts of Religion (2002). Hélène Cixous has made that mystical strain of deconstruction explicit in her own thinking, avowing that her work is an effort to write “God’s portrait.”37 And she has made Derrida’s mystical standing among the leading lights of French theory even clearer by beatifying him in Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint (2001; English translation 2004). Her act of Jewish beatification calls into question whether such a vision of Derrida belongs more to a Jewish or to a Catholic understanding of religion. (I’ll return to this question shortly.) The appearance of St. Jacques is perhaps the defining one for my understanding of Derrida’s issue at the end of the century. I have argued elsewhere that Derrida, and de Man as well, are informed by religious thinking in a subtle and profound way quite apart from Derrida’s explicit, late-career move toward theological subjects and quite at odds with the common understanding of these writers’ linguistic theories. I have shown how, in the effort to demonstrate the utter absence of presence in the written word, these writers posit the text as radically autonomous, then return language to an intensified version of presence by personifying the text so conceived. Language in their hands becomes immanent in much the same way that the names of God are imagined to contain God’s presence in Hindu and in Jewish tradition and in the way Christ is said, in the Gospel of John, to incarnate the divine Word. In my earlier book The Holocaust of Texts, I argued that the personification of texts I analyzed, and argued against, was not necessarily a Jewish or a Christian notion and that the uses of the personified text with which I was concerned were not religious ones. In this book, I begin from the idea that the personified word is at its root a religious construct and explore the ways words, as formal artifacts, remain religious in contemporary literature and theory. The beatification of Derrida is reinforced by the theologians who do not begin with a recognizable faith, who do not declare, prior to their use of Derrida, the tenets of a particular religion but look instead toward, and beyond, the death of God. As Mark C. Taylor argues persuasively with respect to Altizer, the negation of God in a Hegelian dialectic reaffirms by negation, affirms that God exists, or existed, even if he is now dead. For Taylor, Altizer’s death of God theology (or a/theology, as it is postmodernly called) posits a God whose incarnation in the world only deepens with his death; the death of God thus reenacts the Christian trope

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of a God who takes on a mortal body and experiences death—though it leaves out the trope of resurrection. Taylor’s effort to subvert Hegel and recover God another way, by “de-negating” him, produces in Taylor’s work since About Religion (1999) something like a rampant faith. Theorizing faith through Melville’s “confidence man,” through the structure of complex international financial markets and through the immense interconnectivity of the Internet, in Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption (2004), Taylor argues that religion is not constituted by faith in something, but by faith itself, faith that there is something one may seek and desire, the seeking and desiring limitless because of that Derridean deferral of closure inherent in the sign as deconstruction understands it. It is our pursuit of God, the sense that what we are after is what we have called God, or what we have described as religion, that defines faith after the death of God has been proclaimed. Faith’s incarnation in contemporary culture is found in what I think can best be called an endless restlessness that Taylor delineates, one way and another, in all his readings—of Richard Serra’s work, of Internet technology, of Las Vegas, even of quantum physics and the brain. The fact that for Taylor, God always gets away—through the reports of his death or by sheer abdication—suggests quite vividly how the notion that God is on the run indicates both God’s vitality and the vitality of the faith that sprints after him. Taylor’s deconstructive theology thus constitutes perhaps the best contemporary example of the phenomenon I pursue in this book: a rich and intense faith in faith, imagined as faith in the sign ungrounded by meaning.

Belief in Literature It is telling that Martin Marty’s 1959 argument in favor of saving sectarianism self-consciously proclaims the special status of Protestantism in American culture, suggesting that Roman Catholic claims to have had a formative role in America are a case of “embarrassing” “special pleading,” and that Jewish communities were always so small as to have had only a minor influence on American life.38 Some important studies, including Jenny Franchot’s Roads to Rome, and Julian Levinson’s Exiles on Main Street have by now offered alternative, and well-researched, arguments about the importance of these other traditions in Protestant America.39 Beyond this, Robert Wuthnow has argued in his study of institutional religion in the latter half of the twentieth century that the sectarianism that is so important to Marty’s argument mattered less in American religious culture by 1970 than the skew of religious attitudes—toward the liberal or the conservative interpretation of the faith—within and around the various churches.40 And while whole denominations would certainly take on one tendency or another after 1960, they also began to split internally into liberal and conservative factions.

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Witness, for example, the splits over homosexuality or Biblical interpretation more generally within Protestant denominations. Thus, having journeyed in the first three sections of this chapter from popular postwar religion to literary and critical religion and to postmodern theology, I will turn finally to traditional religion and its institutions, for the fate of Protestantism and the evolution of Catholicism and Judaism in America in this period demonstrate the peculiar status of belief and the ways religious institutions either offered, or refused, the meliorating powers of belief without meaning. The very notion that beliefs are at the heart of religion is at its core a Christian one. It has been argued that traditions such as Buddhism resist Christian efforts to describe them as systems of beliefs, though Buddhism does have ancient and extensive doctrinal writings. Donald Lopez has argued that “belief” understood as an internal religious disposition is the product of a Western gaze that subjects the thoughts of others to ephemeral status—the invisible thing the other holds within him—and renders questionable any worldview held by another.41 The word “belief” seems to imply irrationality by its distinction from “knowledge,” thus painting beliefs with a perpetual shade of uncertainty, and with the indelible sense of relativity. Though the oppressive valence of Western notions of belief in relation to other religions has been palpable, the gaze that calls a thought a belief—when turned upon oneself—also renders one’s own thoughts ephemeral. This effect is especially marked in Protestant traditions, as the Puritan accounts of daily, often anguished, religious introspection (in Cotton Mather’s writing, or in the poems of Edward Taylor, for example) make abundantly clear. This difficulty with internal belief as developed in Protestant thinking figures prominently in the period since 1960, and it is evident in the proliferation of characters in the novels of this period—and of writers—who do not know, or do not wish to know, their own minds. Catholicism and Judaism, in contrast to Protestantism, both have more complicated relationships to the notion of personal belief—to doctrinal truths and the person’s inner attitude toward them—and to the role of belief in religious practice or religious identity. In Judaism, belief is inextricably bound up with ritual and with deference to external laws governing behavior. In Rethinking Modern Judaism, Arnold Eisen argues that ritual is often independent of theological beliefs; he suggests that to focus on the latter in the history of modern Judaism is to bring to the study of Judaism a set of basically Protestant notions about the centrality of belief. Indeed, Mordecai Kaplan, in his important Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life (1934), makes the same point in the second of his book’s three epigraphs. The quotation is from Israel Friedlaender, arguing that “it was a fatal mistake of the period of [Jewish] emancipation, a mistake which is the real source of all the subsequent disasters in modern Jewish life, that . . . Judaism

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was put forward not as a culture . . . but as a creed . . . similar in character to the religion of the surrounding nations.”42 Kaplan goes on to reimagine the Judaism of the past in terms that are not dependent upon Christian notions of creed; this approach gains significant standing in the evolution of Judaism in late-twentiethcentury America, though Kaplan’s Reconstructionist Judiasm remains a small minority among other strains of Judiasm. According to Eisen, the persisting Jewish “emphasis . . . on practice rather than belief,” gave Jews an “indispensable strategy” for dealing with modernity: “avoidance of questions of ‘ultimate meaning’ altogether.”43 The success of this strategy is marked, for Eisen, by the fact that many so-called nonbelieving Jews continue to observe certain rituals such as the Seder or circumcision, while, by contrast, nonbelieving Christians typically retain only a secularized Christmas.44 It is practice, then, that importantly defines one’s relation to Judaism, in contrast with the New Testament Christian notion of the individual believer’s unstable internal hold on belief. The very difficulty of holding that belief is the only drama to be found, for example, in Norman Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son (1997). Mailer’s Jesus regularly performs miracles and even, in the end, rises from the dead, but he is never quite sure whether he really believes anything he is saying about himself or God or the Kingdom of Heaven. And maybe this is the insight that Mailer, a Jew, brings to what he gives us as the otherwise astonishingly orthodox story of the Christian Messiah. There are historical reasons as well that help to explain why the Jewish writers of the late twentieth century by and large do not produce the mystical structures of belief that preoccupy the writers I consider throughout this book. Jonathan Sacks has argued that Jews have been “latecomers” to postmodernity’s enchantments because of their particular response to modernity. “Alone among the faith communities of the world,” Sacks notes, “Jews welcomed secularization.”45 Secularization promised an end to persecution, though it never made good on that promise in most parts of Europe. (Indeed, the very idea of “secularization” as an inevitable historical process is now largely discredited; the secular is better understood as one among many versions of public life within particular societies.) In the decades following the Holocaust, the resurgence of faith was difficult both because of this dream of secular tolerance and for theological reasons related to God’s apparent indifference to the murder of millions of His people. At the same time, the state of Israel promised a political solution to persecution and a way of preserving Jewish identity without necessarily resorting to religious resurgence. Through the eighties and into the nineties, most Jewish Americans continued to identify themselves as Jewish by way of a secular humanist liberalism. A survey of Jews in Los Angeles in 1988, for example, found that 59 percent of the respondents identified “a commitment to social equality” as a quality “most important to your Jewish identity.” Only 17 percent chose religious observance as one of those

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qualities.46 The counterexamples from the period—the growth of Hasidic communities in the United States, and the aliyah movement among young Jewish Americans—in fact prove the point. Those most committed to Judaism as a religion withdrew from the dominant American culture or looked to Israel for their grounding. The Jewish or part-Jewish writers I consider here—Harold Bloom, Ginsberg, and Salinger (whose father was Jewish and whose mother was Catholic)—are either consciously syncretic in their religious thought or (in the case of Bloom and other Jewish literary critics) embedded institutionally in a world where the pressure—or desire—to assimilate to an implicitly Christian reading tradition was at times in tension with a traditionally Jewish approach to texts.47 Myla Goldberg’s novel, Bee Season (2000), exemplifies the literary manifestation of this history as it relates to this book’s project. The novel features Eliza Naumann, the neglected daughter of a Reconstructionist rabbi, whose surprising preternatural success in spelling bees finally piques her narcissistic father’s interest. He soon abandons the hours he had dedicated to the religious training of his eldest son in favor of instructing Eliza in Kabbalah. In the end, she surpasses her father in knowledge and attains the highest state of ecstasy while reciting the names of God. What sets this novel apart from others I consider here, where material language similarly becomes the site of divine immanence, is the strictly therapeutic payoff of her mystical wisdom. While her mother descends into kleptomaniac madness and her brother joins a Hare Krishna ashram, finding his own transcendent experience through meditation, her father pins his own religious attainment on her spelling bee success. At a crucial moment, after her ecstatic access to God, Eliza throws a bee, as it were, deliberately misspelling “origami” as “origamy.” We understand that the wisdom she has attained allows her to see her father’s idolatry of her own mystical talents. Failing in the bee, she forces him to face his own emptiness, a move that will either turn him to a new idolatry (as he had turned from the cultivation of her brother to the cultivation of her) or lead him to a truer religious life. The therapeutic payoff in Bee Season places the stakes of religion firmly in the realm of family and personal health. This is part of what makes the novel a counterexample of the phenomenon I unpack throughout this book, even if it seems both an especially clear and an especially popular instance of divinized language. (The novel was a bestseller and has since been made into a film starring Richard Gere.) Also instructive is its lack of interest as an instance of language: for a novel preoccupied with mystical understandings of language, the prose is surprisingly uninventive and straightforwardly realist, suggesting that ordinary language, the language of narrative, is fundamentally different from ecstatic language. The novel thus veers away from the consequences for literary language or for religion of an experience of the divine based in the materiality of letters. It looks instead to the consequences for the family’s psychospiritual development. More significantly, the

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novel doesn’t pose the immanent letter as existing in tension with the Jewish tradition in which the rabbi-father leads his congregation. That lack of tension sets it apart from Franny and Zooey. Neither the specificity nor the plurality of religious belief matters in Bee Season; what Salinger’s narrator somewhat misleadingly says about Franny and Zooey, that it is a family love story, applies more prosaically to Bee Season. What we see in Bee Season may be best understood as a simplified version of the great family stories of Philip Roth, especially the late Roth of The Human Stain, and also of the humanism that characterizes the most prominent Jewish fiction of the latter half of the twentieth century. Although Saul Bellow invokes the soul at least as often as Don DeLillo, Bellow does not seek to mystify language. He does not seek an engine to lift the human out of itself, since his concern is, above all, the human being. Language, for all its trickery in Roth’s middle career, is for both these writers the medium through which human life unfolds. This is why Roth and Bellow do not appear in this book: they are not concerned either with otherworldly transcendence or with questions of belief on the Protestant model, and this is in keeping with Mordecai Kaplan’s understanding of where salvation is located—not in another world, but in the here and now.48 Put another way, it seems to me that writers like Bellow and Roth are either more completely secular (this would be the case for Roth) or already religious in a way that does not require them to wrestle down the problem of belief (as I would argue in Bellow’s case). The exception, as I make plain in the next chapter, is Allen Ginsberg. For him, poetic vocation learned from Trilling and Mark Van Doren, and from poets including Blake, Whitman, and William Carlos Williams, combined with a secular Jewish upbringing (communism and nudism were his mother’s religions; poetry his father’s) and his attraction to the supernatural make him something like the representative man with respect to literary religion in the sixties.49 One of the surprising findings of this book, then, is the importance of the Roman Catholic religious imagination in the literature of this period, even—or rather, especially—outside the body of “Catholic novels” by believers such as Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, or Graham Greene. Catholicism, which we might describe as something close to halfway between Protestantism and Judaism in terms of the relative importance of internal belief and external practice, and which consistently privileges the oral over the written in religious ritual, proves to be a particularly fertile ground for the struggles over belief and the related literary strategies I follow. I have been consistently surprised, in my research, how often an author whose work demonstrates a mystical understanding of form or language turns out to have encountered Roman Catholicism in some significant way in early life. This is true for Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo, both raised in the Church, and true for Salinger, whose mother was Irish Catholic; Toni Morrison converted to Catholicism on her own initiative as a child, the name “Toni”

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coming from her baptismal saint’s name, Anthony. None of these writers remains Catholic or, in some cases, even recognizably Christian, which is a measure of how mystical understandings of language can exist independently of institutional religion. Indeed, the pervasive orality of the examples of mystified language I examine throughout the book points to Catholicism’s importance to the argument. Walter J. Ong, SJ, working contemporaneously with the Bible critics I discuss in chapter 4, argued in Orality and Literacy (1982) that the oral must be central to our understanding of the written (following, in some respects, the lead of his coreligionist, McLuhan). Though Derrida made writing distinct from speech precisely because writing, in hiding the human speaker, seemed to avoid the “metaphysics of presence,” many of those who used Derrida’s work downplayed writing’s distinction, so that—to take one instance—Mark Taylor sees the deferral of meaning at the heart of his deconstructive theology as inherent in many forms of art and representation, whether written, visual, or sculptural. (He does not discuss much that is explicitly oral.) The oral aspects of Jewish tradition—such as the recitation of Kaddish, in Ginsberg’s work, or the cadence of Hebrew syntax for McCarthy—become avenues to a sacralized literature. Having said this, it is worth noting that the Roman Catholic emphasis on works, on liturgy, ritual, and the sacraments, has historically translated into a practice that puts less emphasis on that fractious internal disposition we call belief and more on one’s participation in a communal, and ritualized, constellation of behaviors. Catholicism thus shares something of the Jewish ambiguity about the role of internal belief in the practice of religion, and recalling the case of Leonard Feeney, we can see how doctrinal beliefs within the Catholic tradition come to posit the limits of doctrine and point toward mystery and plurality instead. Catholicism also shares enough of Protestantism’s interest in belief that it produces, within the tradition itself, the tension between doctrine and ritual, and between conviction and pluralism, that I have argued characterizes American religious culture more broadly in the second half of the century. The often uneasy relationship between the Church hierarchy and lay Catholics, especially in twentieth-century America, sometimes dramatizes the difference between doctrine and practice. Vatican II explicitly testifies to that tension: it was meant to rebalance the relationship between ritual practice and doctrinal knowledge as the basis for religious life. David W. Wills has argued for the increasing centrality of Roman Catholicism to American culture; I do so in a different context and on the strength of a different kind of evidence, but it is worth pointing out the convergence of the demographic and the literary arguments.50 If the erosion of Protestant religious understandings in American culture at large suggests that American culture is, as many scholars of Protestantism argue, “post-Protestant,” Protestantism is certainly not off the stage. Even if the institutional and personal networks that defined the broad reach of the prewar Protes-

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tant Establishment are shadows of themselves by the end of the century, belief, in the traditional Protestant sense, remains powerful in American understandings of religion, and, as Tracy Fessenden has argued, basic elements of Protestantism continue to infuse—and constrain—the development of a secular public sphere in America.51 Arguments such as Wayne Proudfoot’s, in Religious Experience (1987), argue for the continuing relevance of belief in shaping religious experience as such. As his allusive title suggests, he sets out to revise William James’s enormously influential notion that religious experience is prior to religious belief—it is belief, he suggests, that makes us understand experience as belonging to the category of the “religious” in the first place. The study itself is evidence of a latecentury emphasis on doctrine against which the modernist Jamesian version, though it emphasizes experience, looks closer to what I have been describing as the “faith in faith” particular to this period.52 What is more, the rise of the Christian Right was initially a Protestant phenomenon, fueled by doctrinal conservatism. (That conservatism, around abortion especially, later encouraged alliance with conservative Roman Catholics.) In chapter 5, I argue that the instances of sacred form I track in relation to more mystical versions of religion (such as DeLillo’s Catholicism or Ginsberg’s bowdlerized Hinduism) can also be found in the conservative Christian movement of the late twentieth century, a realm known more for the literalism of its Biblical interpretation than the linguistic multiplicity in which my other examples revel, and in the work of that very literary Calvinist, Marilynne Robinson. The major work of Thomas Pynchon, whose first novel, V., appeared in 1961, perhaps best sums up the problem of belief and its relation to the literary in postProtestant America. Pynchon is acutely aware of his own family’s Puritan heritage. (Pynchons can be found in the earliest documents of Puritan settlement in New England.) In Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), he bestows that heritage upon the central character, Tyrone Slothrop, whose old New England roots connect him back to the wilderness of the Berkshires in the eighteenth century. But in that novel, as well as in the earlier The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), the question of meaning and attendant belief is transferred away from the effort to determine one’s internal disposition in relation to God, and toward the notion that whatever is religious, whatever sort of transcendent meaning there is to be had, is incarnate in external pattern. Oedipa Maas’s “religious instant” in Lot 49, for example, comes when she observes San Narciso from above, at night, where its streets and houses take on the form of a “printed circuit.” That notion of the religious, mystical in the mode of the sixties LSD culture (and also parodic of that culture), in fact depends upon the endless deferral of Oedipa’s understanding of what W.A.S.T.E. and its posthorn or the printed circuit of the urban landscape might mean, a kind of deferral that is elaborated on a grand scale in Gravity’s Rainbow, as Slothrop wends his way through the Zone seeking a V2 rocket numbered 00000. In keeping with Slothrop’s search for the rocket’s origin, in Gravity’s Rainbow

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Pynchon seems to reenact the Jamesian (Henry, this time) contact between American Protestantism and the Old World of European Catholicism and AngloCatholicism from which it fled.53 The very fact that the rocket lands before it can be heard suggests the explosive power of what is in this novel understood as a European mysticism on the Catholic model, a mysticism more material than verbal. Likewise, the rocket’s name is not language but the numerical sign for nullity. Readings of Gravity’s Rainbow that seek to delineate its formal structure—most influentially Steven Weisenberger’s, which describes the novel as a mandala— expose the American postwar version of mysticism layered beneath the novel’s European setting.54 The mysticism of both The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow have as much to do with the sixties counterculture, with the history of American syncretic religion, as they do with European Catholicism. Thus a Roman Catholic logic of mysticism merges with an explicitly American post-Protestantism in Pynchon’s work, and his understanding of the Word comes to look, as his ancestors would say, popish. This fact suggests how American literature has entered its own post-Protestant age. For a more extended illustration of that transformation, I turn now to Allen Ginsberg’s poetic self-construction in the sixties. There we see what happens when a writer consciously and simultaneously rejects traditional referentiality and a notion of prophetic voice drawn from Christian and Jewish tradition. The resulting poetics, which aims at conserving the religious power associated with the prophetic voice, turns on what I will call a supernatural formalism.

Supernatural Formalism in the Sixties

The Politics of Om HEN ALLEN GINSBERG testified at the Chicago Seven trial in December of 1969, Judge Julius J. Hoffman and his Federal District Court saw before them the figure who defined Beat poetry in the popular imagination. Ginsberg appeared in 1969 as he had since his return from India in 1963 and as he would for most of the next two decades: a countercultural figure, a thin man with full beard, heavy-framed glasses, and long hair cascading from the edges of a growing bald spot. This was the Allen Ginsberg who had returned from a sixteen-month stay in India in 1963 ready to turn poetry into a spiritual practice that would parallel, and in his personal life take the place of, the exploration and transformation of consciousness that he had long sought through the use of visionary drugs. It was this spiritual practice of poetry that brought Ginsberg to the Chicago Seven trial in the first place, as I will demonstrate in what follows. But more importantly, I will argue in this chapter, it is the spiritual practice of poetry at the center of his testimony—a formal practice that relies on the supernatural to account for poetry’s efficacy in the world—that defines Ginsberg’s general significance in the sixties. My point will not simply be that Ginsberg must be understood as a spiritual or religious poet; indeed, this point has been made by others and comes as little surprise to anyone who has read Ginsberg’s poetry. Rather, I will argue that the ways Ginsberg imagined his poetry as spiritual, in the context of the trial and in the years leading up to it, reveals a set of beliefs about language and the supernatural that have remarkable affinities with, and also raise a challenge to, understandings

W

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of language emanating from other sectors of American culture in the sixties. Specifically, I will show how Ginsberg’s spiritual poetry intersects with beliefs about language common to poststructuralism—which was at the time moving from European intellectual circles into American universities—and to a popular form of religious renewal that transformed American churches during the sixties and seventies. I will argue that his use of a supernatural formalism for political purposes— epitomized by the acts that resulted in his appearance at the Chicago Seven trial—demonstrates, further, the social and philosophical implications of the conjunction between religious belief and language upon which his work relies. As the prosecuting attorney pointed out in the Chicago court room, Ginsberg was listed under “religion” on the letterhead of the Youth International Party Festival of Life, led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, which had planned and carried out the demonstrations in Lincoln Park during the Democratic National Convention in 1968. Or as that attorney, Thomas Foran, put it, he was, on the letterhead, “named as kind of the Yippie religious leader.”1 Ginsberg took exception to the idea that he was a leader, suggesting during his trial testimony that the organizers of the festival “really tried to get away . . . from that authoritarian thing. It was more like . . . religious experimenter” (235). Despite this antihierarchical demurral, however, Ginsberg immediately clarified his role to be exactly that of a countercultural leader. When Foran attempted to tie Ginsberg closely with the Yippies, asking whether Ginsberg played this role of “religious experimenter” in the Yippie “organization,” Ginsberg agreed but also expanded the scope of his influence: “Yes,” he replied, “and also in the context of our whole political life, too” (235). Grandiose as it sounds, Ginsberg was not exaggerating his public visibility or overplaying the relationship between his spiritual status and his political activities; he had become an instantly recognizable figure in “our whole political life” by 1969, partly because he had indeed come to be seen as a “spiritual leader” for the counterculture.2 That status was reflected in the degree to which he was hounded by police and border officials during his extensive travels over the preceding decade but also manifested itself in more benign ways. His picture, projected to enormous size, was used to advertise the 1967 opening of a popular club in Austin, Texas, for example—a club that became a center for the particularly vital countercultural and student activist contingents at the University of Texas.3 The counterculture had become closely associated with—if not identical to—political activism by the end of the sixties, a conjunction embodied in Ginsberg’s public and increasingly vociferous opposition to the Vietnam War.4 But in the Chicago Seven trial, Ginsberg’s reputation as a spiritual leader, not a political leader, was the pretext upon which Thomas Foran attempted to discredit him, despite the political nature of the demonstration that resulted in the prosecution of its organizers. By emphasizing Ginsberg’s “religious” status, and then revealing to the court exactly what seemed to count as religious in Ginsberg’s poetry and practice,

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Foran relied on the most conventional of religious outlooks to provide the unspoken model to which Ginsberg would be compared and found wanting—or, rather, the model to which he would be compared and found offensive. Ginsberg played a major role in the 1968 demonstrations that occasioned the trial of the activists known as the “Chicago Seven.” Ginsberg’s help with—or to be more precise, his endorsement of—the Festival of Life had been sought by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin as they planned what they probably knew would be violent demonstrations.5 Though Ginsberg had reservations about the gathering, especially when Hoffman and Rubin were unable to get city permits for the Festival, he agreed in principle that there should be an alternative expression of political will to offset what he and others on the Left saw as a conservative and pro–Vietnam War Democratic convention. He did see his role as spiritual, or perhaps I should say that for him, the political was the spiritual. He had announced before the Festival, in a New York underground newspaper, that participants should embrace the calming power of Buddhist and Hindu chant if occasions of fear, hysteria, and violence arose at the gathering. “In the case of hysteria, solitary or communal, the magic password is Om, same as Aum,” the announcement explained, “which cuts through all emergency illusions. . . . Ten people humming Om can calm down one hundred. One hundred people humming Om can regulate the metabolism of a thousand. A thousand bodies vibrating Om can immobilize an entire downtown Chicago street full of scared humans, uniformed or naked” (quoted in the context of the Chicago Seven trial testimony, 234). Making good on his promise, if not on the exact effects of Om, Ginsberg led crowds of people in the chant during moments of confrontation between police and demonstrators, at one point chanting continuously for seven hours with a shifting group of demonstrators. His performance during the demonstration lived up to Hoffman’s expectations; Ginsberg’s official association with the organizers of the event—emblematized by his name on the Yippie letterhead—lent credence to their claims of peaceful intention. In seeking to discredit those peaceful intentions as reflected in Ginsberg’s conduct, Thomas Foran’s cross-examination of Ginsberg attempts to cast the chanting of Om as part of a repugnant and sexually perverted hippie religious practice, as antisocial in its own way as the verbal abuse hurled at the police by other demonstrators. Foran accomplishes this in two ways. First, during Ginsberg’s initial testimony, he objects to any mention of the Hindu and Buddhist contexts to which the Om and the Hare Krishna chants (both of which Ginsberg used during the demonstration) belong. He successfully objects, for instance, when Ginsberg is asked to translate the Sanskrit texts of the chants, and objects even to the mention that Sanskrit is used, like Latin, as a ritual and sacred language. The judge himself responds dismissively when he is told in what language Ginsberg is chanting: “What is it?” he asks. “Sanskrit,” Ginsberg replies. “Sanskrit? . . . Well, that is one I don’t know” (214).6 The effect is to make the chants appear to be nonsense,

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to make Sanskrit appear to be gibberish, and to make Ginsberg seem like a crackpot. Second, Foran takes pains in his cross-examination to connect the chanting— now effectively emptied of its specific religious meaning—with Ginsberg’s poetry. He establishes first that Ginsberg chants and reads his poetry regularly, at the same time and “for the same purpose,” making the “poetry and chanting . . . part of that same religious experimentation concept” (235). (Ginsberg points out, to little effect, that “religious” is the letterhead’s term, not his own.) By linking chant and poetry so closely, Foran can, and does, then turn to the poetry to supply the meaning of the chant, in essence replacing the translation of Sanskrit to which he successfully objected with the text of some of Ginsberg’s most sensational lyrics. For his examples, Foran chooses “Night Apple,” a poem describing a wet dream; “In Society,” a poem describing a dream in which the poet chats with “queers,” chews a sandwich of human flesh that includes “a dirty asshole,” and denounces a woman as a “narcissistic bitch”; and “Love Poem on a Theme by Whitman,” describing the poet lying down between the bridegroom and the bride and proceeding to have ecstatic sex with both. Foran asks Ginsberg, in each case, to explain the “religious” meaning of the poem. And Ginsberg does, with characteristic sincerity, though it is not lost on him that his exegesis will only stick if the court “would take a wet dream as a religious experience” (238). Through Foran’s triangulation of chant, poetry, and poetic exegesis, the content of the poetry is implied to be the content of the chant, and by extension, to be the substance of Ginsberg’s religious practice and leadership. Foran’s effort to make the content of the poetry into the content of the chant was a distortion of Ginsberg’s notion of chant, but only because, from Ginsberg’s point of view, the chant transformed the meaning of poetry, rather than the poetry transforming the meaning of chant. Foran casts chant as gibberish and then fills it with the meanings he finds expedient from Ginsberg’s poetry; Ginsberg takes the characteristics traditionally associated with Hindu and Buddhist chant—the ability to yoke body and consciousness, the power to dispel illusion, the capacity to transform the chanter into the god whose name he chants—and transfers them to his poetry, in part, as I will show, by making poems that aim (in theory, at least) to evacuate the kind of referential content that proved so useful to Foran. In doing so, Ginsberg uses the kinship between poetry and chant to advance an idea of poetry that moves beyond meaning into what I will argue had become, by the time of the Chicago Seven trial, a fantasy of supernatural efficacy centered on the power of sound. Let me note, before going any further, that the fantasy I describe here is articulated throughout the sixties in Ginsberg’s audacious and colorful style, a style that blends humor and irony with a penchant for performance and the grandiose. (This should be clear even from the courtroom quotations already cited here.) Though

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the newspaper announcement about Om chanting, to take one example, holds out a fanciful image of chant’s effects, the basic premise behind this use of chant is one, as I will argue, in which Ginsberg deeply believed. On other occasions, as we shall see, Ginsberg uses similarly exaggerated scenarios to spin out the implications of his poetic practice. Like the famous effort to levitate the Pentagon in 1967, or Jerry Rubin’s idea of running a pig for president in 1968, Ginsberg’s acts and statements are sometimes theatrically absurd. That said, this quality of his discourse does not belie his underlying beliefs, but rather (as he surely intended) makes those beliefs all the more palpable, their logic all the more apparent. Hence, despite the humor that is inherent in much of what I will quote here, I will suggest that a serious, and culturally important, understanding of language as supernaturally efficacious emerges from his writing in the sixties. That Ginsberg jokes about himself as a holy man does not mean that he does not, at bottom, believe that he is a holy man; that Ginsberg is flamboyant about claiming supernatural powers for his poetry does not mean that he does not, at bottom, believe that the poetry does indeed have such powers. The personal pain of the crisis that occasions some of these beliefs attests to Ginsberg’s ultimate sincerity. I turn to that crisis next.

Eliminating Subject Matter The construction of an efficacious poetry had preoccupied Ginsberg since his return from India in 1963, where he had gone to confront a spiritual and poetic crisis—a crisis occasioned, in part, by Ginsberg’s encounter with his friend William S. Burroughs’s cut-up method of composition. The poetic practice Ginsberg presents to the District Court in 1969 is produced by Ginsberg’s eventual synthesis of Burroughs’s linguistic theories and a corresponding supernatural structure transmitted within the traditions of mantra chanting he studied in India. Ginsberg’s journals from his early days in India describe his frustration with Burroughs and Burroughs’s new compositional method. On Friday, 13 July 1962, after writing a fragmented but lyrical description of a day disordered by afternoon sleep, morphine hangover, the cries of street vendors, and “the fan whirling overhead for the last 12 hours,” Ginsberg finds “Everything random still, as any cut-up. Burroughs it’s already a year still haunting me. I slept all afternoon & when I woke up I thought it was morning, I didn’t know where I was. I had no name for India.”7 Three days later, he returns to the thought: “I should write Burroughs I’m still stuck in the heart by the cut-ups & still atrophied back where I was in Tangier & not moving anywhere” (45). The “cut-ups” that had “stuck” Ginsberg “in the heart” were of course the new novels Burroughs was assembling at the time using his famous compositional method. Burroughs had developed the method with the collage artist Brion Gysin

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in Paris in the late fifties. By cutting up pages of newspapers or magazines, Burroughs and Gysin had found that the random juxtaposition of words from successive pages produced what they took to be radical new meanings. The method combined literal and metaphorical ideas about how language means: taking the spatial metaphor that claimed meanings were found “behind” words, Burroughs and Gysin translated it into a literal manipulation of the material word, cutting the word away and looking behind it to find what they thought of as the hidden, transgressive, and ultimately truer meaning. For Ginsberg, the evacuation of authorial control and intention implied by the cut-ups was devastating. After all, his major poems to that point had been based on a powerful prophetic speaker who spoke an intelligible, if unorthodox, truth to a suffering nation. This was a speaker who, in a 1949 poem immodestly titled “Psalm I,” celebrated the “majestic flaws of mind which have left my brain open to hallucination” and went on to imagine his writings would be “rediscovered when the Dove descends.”8 In “Howl,” the speaker takes on the mantle of prophetic speech suggested by that early poem, and, more specifically, becomes a latterday Jeremiah in order to catalog the corruptions of present-day America. Reinforcing the Old Testament prophetic aura, the speaker of “Howl” invokes the Old Testament idol Moloch as the embodiment of an American society that he says in a 1956 letter to the reviewer Richard Eberhart, “confounds and suppresses individual experience.”9 Ginsberg takes on the role of the psalmist, too, in “Howl,” especially in “Footnote to Howl,” where the poet’s sacralizing voice makes all things holy: “Holy! Holy! Holy! . . . The world is Holy! The soul is Holy! The skin is Holy!” and so on. Most grandly, the speaker describes his own work as divine, himself as one “who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images / juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual / images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of / consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omipotens / Aeterna Deus” (130). The poet in these lines is nothing less than Genesis’s Yaweh. In “Kaddish,” a more intimate vision—that of elegy—somewhat tempers Ginsberg’s flights of rhetoric, but the notion of a single, powerful, embodied, and yet transcendent, poetic speaker remains, his role now to redeem the death of Naomi by praying a new version of the traditional Jewish memorial prayer, the Kaddish. At the end of section II, Naomi becomes “Naomi of the Bible—/ or Ruth who wept in America—Rebecca aged in Newark” and her son becomes “David / remembering his Harp, now lawyer at Yale / or Sval Avrum—Israel Abraham—myself—to sing in the wilderness toward God—O Elohim!—so to the end” (224). The poem at this point is interrupted by “Hymmnn,” in which, even more directly than in “Footnote to Howl,” we hear a psalmist praising God: “Blessed Praised Magnified Lauded Exalted the Name of the Holy One Blessed is He!” The poem closes with the ecstatic call, “Lord Lord Lord,” alternating with the cries of the crows over

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Naomi’s burial ground. The explicit invocation of Jewish religious tradition, the calls toward divinity, and the verbal power on display throughout the poem—power not just to invoke the divine, but also to represent the most moving human details of the life of mad Naomi—together give us a singular poetic speaker filled with the ancient authority of scriptural and liturgical tradition. “Kaddish” is Ginsberg’s last major poem written before his encounter with Burroughs in Tangier, and it is the speaker represented there that most closely resembles Ginsberg’s sense of himself as poet at the moment of that encounter. For all the authority he had accrued to himself in “Howl” and “Kaddish,” then, Ginsberg was bowled over by Burroughs’s new method. Or, rather, he was bowled over precisely because of the authority he had accrued in the earlier poems, an authority whose very structure was rendered meaningless by his friend’s innovation. He took the cut-ups as proof that his old ways of writing were mistaken, and that he must think anew about his poetic methods. (It remains a question why Ginsberg accepted Burroughs’s method as a revelation, why he took it up as a major challenge to his poetic practice.10) A week before the Indian journal entries I have cited, Ginsberg discusses his poetic methods at greater length, in an entry on the occasion of his lover Peter Orlovsky’s birthday, making reference to a birthday poem Ginsberg composes. “To P.O.—July 8, 1962,” a small lyric poem, sonnet-like on the page, describes their room, the objects cast about, Peter coming in, wet-haired, from a shower. After a break in the page, Ginsberg goes on to reflect upon the poem in the context of what he calls “Poetry XX Century.” Twentieth-century poetry, he argues, is devolving into examination-experiment on the very material of which it’s made. they say ‘an examination of language itself’ to express this turnabout from photographic objectivity to subjective-abstract composition of words a la Burroughs. . . . Now poetry instead of relying for effect on dreaminess of image or sharpness of visual phanopoeia—instead of conjuring a vision or telling a truth, stops. (38–39)

By his own lights, Ginsberg’s conclusion—that poetry “stops” when faced with its materiality—seems inaccurate, for he goes on to list writers who have successfully “eliminat[ed] subject matter altogether” (38–39), including Stein, Kerouac, Ashbery, Burroughs, Corso, and Artaud. He also cites spiritual practices, such as Tantric Buddhism, which he takes to be doing the same thing. Thus, though Ginsberg is discoursing upon poetry in general, that last claim about poetry stopping is more self-descriptive than diagnostic of the century, and the self-description demonstrates the depth to which he has been affected by Burroughs. In fact, it resembles the satirized description of the writer in Naked Lunch, called in to be the “Artistic Advisor” for “Doctor Berger’s Mental Health Hour.” “‘Send in the cured writer,’” the technician calls; “‘He’s got what? Buddhism? . . . Oh, he can’t talk.’ . . . He turns to Berger: ‘The writer can’t talk. . . . Overliberated, you might

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“Possession” they call it. . . . Sometimes an entity jumps in the body—outlines waver in yellow orange jelly—and hands move to disembowel the passing whore or strangle the neighbor child in hope of alleviating a chronic housing shortage. As if I was usually there but subject to good now and again. . . . Wrong! I am never here. . . . Never that is fully in possession, but somehow in a position to forestall ill-advised moves. . . . Patrolling is, in fact, my principle occupation. . . . NO matter how tight Security, I am always somewhere Outside giving orders and Inside this straitjacket of jelly that gives and stretches but always reforms ahead of every movement, thought, impulse, stamped with the seal of alien inspection. . . . (200; original emphasis and ellipses).

For Burroughs, realism is demonic possession. The power relations so vividly evoked by his patrolling consciousness, exiled from the body, striving to prevent the body from performing the most horrific of crimes, translate in Naked Lunch into the junkie’s relationship to junk, the police’s relationship to the deviant, the psychopathic murderer’s relationship to moral constraints. And it is this fraught relation of power that generates writing: “The writer sees himself reading to the mirror as always. . . . He must check now and again to reassure himself that The Crime of Separate Action has not, is not, cannot occur. . . . .[ . . . ] when the reflection no longer obeys. . . . Too late to dial P o l i c e” (202; original emphasis and ellipses). Writing here always threatens to disobey, but this propensity was understood by Burroughs as the very essence of verbal art. It is this conception of art that disposed Burroughs to the cut-up method in the first place, evidenced by the fact that Naked Lunch was written prior to his discovery of the new method. Indeed, these were the terms Norman Mailer used to describe Naked Lunch in his testimony before the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in the summer of 1966. The compositional method Burroughs used, especially its seeming evacuation of authorial agency, was, for Mailer, what allowed his prophetic visions to emerge.

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say.’”11 Ginsberg feared that the liberation from subject matter that he himself imagined and desired would nevertheless leave him as speechless as Burroughs’s cured writer. The fear of abdicating authorial intention was not a problem for Burroughs, or for Norman Mailer, who invoked precisely this aspect of Burroughs’s method when he was called to testify on behalf of Naked Lunch in the novel’s 1966 obscenity trial. In the “Atrophied Preface,” which comes at the end of Naked Lunch, Burroughs describes personal and authorial agency as a battle between demonic possession and alien moral control. He begins by espousing a kind of documentary realism, claiming that “There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing. . . . I am a recording instrument. . . . I do not presume to impose ‘story’ ‘plot’ ‘continuity.’” (200; original emphasis). But this in fact looks more like the condition of “possession,” which he uses as a foil to refine his notion of authorial agency:

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Mailer explains that “one of the mysteries” of writing is the fact that “one’s best writing seems to bear no relation to what one is thinking about.”12 The “work” of great writing “is done while you sleep; the discipline of writing is almost to keep from interfering with that creative work that is done by the unconscious.”13 Burroughs takes his terms from the power relations of the culture and from the supernatural—from madness and the straitjacket, from junkie and police, from demonic possession—and Mailer finds his in psychology—in consciousness and the unconscious. But both find the engine of creativity in the abdication of intention, or at least, in the struggle between intentions arising from different or opposed origins within or outside the body. Tellingly, Mailer also argued that “William Burroughs is in my opinion—whatever his conscious intention may be—a religious writer,” clearly calling on the status of religion to legitimate his claims about the novel’s value (just as Thomas Foran did to an opposite end).14 Naked Lunch, according to Mailer, thus revealed “the destruction of the soul” and gave a “simple portrayal of Hell,” a “vision of how mankind would act if man was totally divorced from eternity.”15 What seems to be a caveat to his claim that Burroughs is a religious writer—that he is so “whatever his conscious intention may be”—is really more like a qualification for that status, revealing that Mailer, like Ginsberg after his Indian crisis, finds the religious in the moment when intention is evacuated. So, while Burroughs defied Ginsberg’s conclusion that abandoning intentionally generated meaning and subject matter would make writing “stop”—producing in short order a trilogy of novels using the cut-up method—Ginsberg did not immediately find a way to embrace the end of subject matter so conceived. Though he writes in his Indian journals that “nobody can seriously go on passionately concerned with effects however seeming-real they be, when he knows inside all his visions & truths are empty, finally” (38–39), he nevertheless cannot see beyond visions and truths. He takes Peter’s birthday poem as a case study: I seem to be delaying a step forward in this field [elimination of subject matter] and hanging on to habitual humanistic series of autobiographical photographs (as in the last writing on Orlovsky’s Birthday)—although my own Consciousness has gone beyond the conceptual to non-conceptual episodes of experience, inexpressible by old means of humanistic storytelling. As I am anxious or fearful of plunging into the feeling & chaos of disintegration of conceptuality thru further drug experiences, and as my mind development at the year moment [at the turn of the year] seems blocked so also does my ‘creative’ activity, blocked, revolve around old abstract & tenuous sloppy political-sex diatribes & a few cool imagistic photo descriptions (which contain some human sentiment by implication)— I really don’t know what I’m doing now. Begin a new page. (38–39)

Ginsberg’s poetic impasse coincides, then, with a spiritual one he had reached in recent visionary drug trips: he repeatedly encountered a serpent-figure that

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Make Mantra of American Language The answer Ginsberg finds in India, after all the conversations with gurus and practice in meditation with Gary Snyder in Japan, might be summed up in a line from one of his major post-India poems, “Wichita Vortex Sutra.” There, Ginsberg writes that we must “make Mantra of American language now.” The line has a specific meaning in the context of that poem, which I will address, but we can also take it as indicative of Ginsberg’s broader poetic effort between his return from India and the end of the decade. Before anyone saw the poem “The Change,” which announced his new approach to poetry and self, they saw the sign of the change in Ginsberg’s mantra chanting. Immediately after his return to the United States, he attended a poetry conference in Vancouver, where, with characteristic over-the-top enthusiasm, he did almost nothing but chant the Hare Krishna mantra. Chant became a routine part of his readings, and he experimented on a number of occasions, well before the 1968 Democratic Convention, with using chant as a political tool—most dramatically in negotiations between the Hell’s Angels, who supported the war, and the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC), which was planning an anti-war protest march in Oakland in November of 1965.16 At the same time, he experimented with chant within poems. The clearest example is “Hu¯m Bo·m,” from Planet News: 1961–1967 (1968), Ginsberg’s first post-India collection.17 The poem takes actual English words—the words “whom bomb,” repeated throughout the poem—and cues the reader, through the phonetic spellings in the title, to take them not for their meaning but for their sound. The diacritical marks in the title—marks that originate in Sanskrit—underline the centrality of sound and align the poem with Hindu and Buddhist mantras. The effect of the poem is then that of a resonant chanted mantra, in which the words produce a sound meant to transform the listener into a person of peace. Of course Ginsberg is making a kind of pun: the content of the poem, which shifts from the lines “whom bomb? / We bomb you” to “whom bomb? You bomb you,” proclaims why one should abandon modern nuclear violence (because to bomb the other is really to bomb yourself). The actual sound of the poem is meant simultaneously to effect that political or moral transformation by means of its intrinsic power. In the yogic tradition, from

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seemed to threaten his dissolution during the trip. He fears stepping across that line into “disintegration” and “chaos,” and he aligns such a step with a poetry empty of meaning. To embrace that condition would be to embrace the disoriented moment of waking in which he has “no name for India.” The cut-ups, the serpent, and the moment in which words are lost stand in for the same dissolution of self. He seeks a spiritual answer to both questions—how to continue in poetry and how to continue the development of his consciousness—by asking every Indian guru he can find for advice.

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which the majority of Ginsberg’s notions about sound and breathing come, vibrations produced in the body can transform the consciousness directly, bypassing the intellect. Indeed, the intellect itself is, through the yogic discipline, revealed to be mechanical, thoughts being no different from other kinds of sensations the body experiences. By transforming words into vibrations, Ginsberg gives us one fairly straightforward example of what it might mean to make mantra of American language. Other poems, in The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965–1971 (1972), make language into mantra less through actual sound than through compositional method. For example, the long title poem was composed by using an Uhr tape machine so that Ginsberg could record the lines in the same time frame that he composed them aloud, broken by his natural breaths and pauses. He would shut off the tape at each break, the click thus produced on the tape marking the pauses and supplying the cue for the written line break when Ginsberg sat down to transcribe the poem. This method of composition had two aims. First, it brought Ginsberg’s long-standing effort to make poetic composition spontaneous one step closer to the ideal of the poem spoken live, eliminating the slow work of writing or typing so that the lines could flow out onto the “page” of the magnetic tape just as they were spoken. Second, and more importantly, Ginsberg believed that in achieving this degree of spontaneity in the written record, he could reproduce in the reader the exact state of consciousness in which the poem was composed. This belief is rooted in his understanding of how consciousness and breath work: as vibration and sensation come and go in the body, as thoughts (another kind of sensation) come and go, the body and the consciousness now yoked together through the practice of yoga are both transformed.18 The listener or reader is then imagined as functioning not unlike the tape recorder, responding mechanically to the vibrations produced by the poet’s spoken words, reproducing also the cadence of breath in which those words were originally spoken. (One might recall here Burroughs’s image of the writer as the “recording instrument” of reality. In Ginsberg’s version, the reality emanates from the poet.) Ginsberg is less interested in producing particular thoughts in the mind of the reader or listener than he is in producing what he calls “the movement” of thoughts in a certain cadence through another’s consciousness. The poem taken thus by the listener or reader as a mantra, to form and direct the movement of consciousness and the vibration of the body, replicates the poet himself. To put the point in his own words: he describes the line of poetry as not so much a unit of sound as a unit of thought . . . it also turns out that if you vocalize the thought’s also a unit of sound and that somehow or other the squiggles for the units of sound are identical to the squiggles of thought. And they’re just as interesting as units of sound as units of thought.19

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The transmission of these squiggles is precisely the mechanism Ginsberg describes when he talks about how his political poetry might affect people. He wishes not to persuade his listener, but to make the listener arrive at a consciousness that coincides with Ginsberg’s but that nevertheless appears to arise from within the reader or listener . “It isn’t necessary for my word to like quote overwhelm or convince, unquote, anybody else,” Ginsberg explains to Paul Carroll in an interview, “it’s just necessary for me to place my word out there, not to overwhelm but to clarify other people’s sane thought, or to make it conscious or to bring it to the surface of their minds, so they say: Oh, yeah! That’s what I think too! Why didn’t I say that before?”20 The squiggles that denote the unit of sound, identical to those for the unit of thought, bring the thought into the listening mind viscerally rather than intellectually. What is more, those squiggles can sometimes achieve an effect in and of themselves. “The rhythmic . . . units . . . that I’d written down [in “Howl” and “Kaddish”] . . . were basically . . . breathing exercise forms . . . which if anybody else repeated . . . would catalyze in them the same pranic breathing . . . physiological spasm . . . that I was going through . . . and so would presumably catalyze in them the same affects or emotions.”21 Indeed, with all their rhythmic pauses, it is as if even Ginsberg’s words in the interview can re-create the physiological spasm that constitutes, for Ginsberg, a thought.22 Michael Aldrich, in this same interview, restates Ginsberg’s claim in such a way that the separation of sound and meaning, as well as their absolute identity, becomes apparent. “If you’re going Dumpty dumpty dumpty dumpty dumpty dum it’s different than if you’re going daahh, duhhh, dummm, duh-dummm,” he suggests. Ginsberg, as if to show just how much difference sound can make, offers his own sonic example: “Or, if you’re going Bum! ba-ta TUM, BUM: BUM, ba-daDAA . . . / BOM, bata BOM BOM, BOM bata DAA . . .”23 Ginsberg seems to feel he has made the point stronger with a far more imaginative example, and this is the case despite the fact that neither “dumpty dumpty” nor “Bum! ba-ta TUM” can be said to mean in any intellectual sense. In the methedrine trip poem, “TV Was a Baby Crawling toward That Death Chamber,” we see a comic vision of such an effect: Ginsberg jokes that the “macrocosm-machine” hooked up to the brains of the “human dragons” who fly bombers, “picks up vibrations of my thought in this poem—the attendant / is afraid—Is the President listening?”24 The vibrations of sound have a power in and of themselves, regardless of their semantic meaning. For all its clanging political invective, then, Ginsberg’s political poetry is meant to produce a desired outcome not by asserting a principle or policy in which one can believe, but by producing people in the image of the poet’s mind. The trip poems— especially the frequently incoherent methedrine poems—attempt the same thing, bringing the expanded consciousness of the trip directly to the reader’s mind. These poems are imagined as a kind of ontologic reproduction, closer to human cloning than to representation because they bring about a state of being rather

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than simply transmitting thought. They are imagined as taking existing people and bringing them into being as Ginsberg’s doubles. Political content raises a question, though, about why what I am arguing is an anti-representational poetry often seems so obviously thematic. The obviousness of Ginsberg’s poetry in the sixties may well account for why most studies of his work break off just as he leaves Tangier for India, why “Howl” and “Kaddish,” both of which are much more linguistically and metaphorically complex and thus more susceptible to the practice of close reading than many of his later works, are often argued to contain within them already the whole trajectory of Ginsberg’s poetic development in the sixties and beyond.25 Indeed, Planet News and The Fall of America were received with tepid reviews, most of which looked for the distinctive prophetic and lyric language of “Howl” and “Kaddish” and found it only sporadically, if at all. “Wichita Vortex Sutra” makes the case for the thematic content of an antirepresentational language by casting itself as a speech act. In the poem, Ginsberg declares the end of the Vietnam War, a speech act he imagines has the power to effect the historical situation it declares. This is not a speech act in the Austinian sense (about which more later), where convention and other conditions surrounding an utterance make speech into an act, but a religious speech act, which is imagined to have supernatural effects. As Ginsberg explains to Michael Aldrich in a 1968 interview, to make mantra of American language does not mean (as Aldrich had suggested) that “we should literally start chanting the lines for mantra purposes.” Making language into mantra instead involves sound that is the thing itself. One function of a mantra is that the name of the god is identical with the god itself. You say Shiva or Krishna’s name, Krishna is the sound of Krishna. It’s Krishna in the dimension of sound—so if you pronounce his name, you, your body, is being Krishna; your breath is being Krishna, itself. . . . So I wanted to—in the English language—make a series of syllables that would be identical with a historical event. I wanted the historical event to be the end of the war, and so I prepared the declaration of the event to be the end of the war by saying “I hereby make my language identical with the historical event, I here declare the end of the war”—and set up a force field of language which is so solid and absolute as a statement and a realization of an assertion by my will, conscious will power, that it will contradict—counteract and ultimately overwhelm the force field of language pronounced out of the State Department and out of Johnson’s mouth. When they say “We declare war,” their mantras are black mantras, so to speak. . . . So I pronounce my word, and so the point is, how strong is my word?26

Obviously not strong enough, in 1965, when the poem was written (or rather, spoken to the tape machine), to end the Vietnam War. Of course, there is an element of play and humor in Ginsberg’s audacious claims, here as elsewhere, but the empirical failure of his word, humorously intended or not, did not deter Gins-

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I stood up and went into some kind of fit of total ecstasy and started chanting Om over and over again. . . . It was a ritual to exorcise all demons in sight, including myself. . . . It was white-magic theater; it helped to break up the mass hallucination of political respectability that the priest’s prayer created for the convention as a whole—if only for a few minutes.29

At the conclusion of the interview, he suggests that the answer to state-sponsored violence would be to “cast the Devil from the hearts of the swine.” I prophesy that the only way to reverse the apocalypse is white magic, because the apocalypse itself is incarnate black magic. What would be the effect of total sacramental harmonious shamanistic ritual prayer magic massively performed in the American or Russian political theater?. . . . Exorcism. We need . . . magic politics to exorcise the police state.30

Paul Carroll notes that the chanting, which Ginsberg describes as being like “a religious service,”31 did not stop the violence, and that people saw him not as an exorcist but as a nut when he chanted Om during the convention’s benediction. Though Ginsberg corrects him, claiming that chanting did, in fact, stop a good deal of violence, he concedes that “to succeed, it would have required an unbroken circle or at least a majority of participants in order to set up mammal-vibrations strong enough to be irresistible.”32

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berg from pursuing a poetics of mantra. Ginsberg does give varying explanations during the sixties for how poetry works, what it does, what effects it can have on the listener, the reader, and the one who speaks the poem. In some cases, he calls the power of chant, and by extension the power of poetry, a scientifically explainable phenomenon, having to do with the stimulation of certain nerve centers in the body. In a 1968 Playboy interview with Paul Carroll, Ginsberg describes the elements of his early poetry that he thought of as transcendental or visionary as being, in hindsight, “really literal realism, simple common sense,” what Carroll rephrases as “prophetic perceptions rather than visionary imaginings.”27 “Although there are all sorts of intellectual-mystical-theological potentials involved in chanting a mantra, on its simplest, most Americanesque level, it’s just like singing in the shower or an interesting phys. ed. that can get you high.” Describing what he called a “trance” that he achieved after chanting OM for six hours during the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, he claims that “it wasn’t mystical. It was the product of six continuous hours of chanting OM, regularizing breathing and altering rhythmic body chemistry.”28 Ginsberg’s account of his physiological experience notwithstanding, within the same interview he describes using the Om to effect a “complete formal exorcism of the [Democratic] convention” at the moment when a priest in the convention hall begins to pronounce a benediction upon “all this massacre and hypocrisy.”

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The variety of Ginsberg’s explanations for the efficacy of poetry and chant reflects not only his own scattershot, syncretic, and continually evolving approach to spiritual practice (he was, indeed, an experimenter), but also an ambiguity at the heart of Hindu and Buddhist practices. While some strains of these traditions present chant as a physiological exercise whose spiritual effects are the result of or coextensive with physical effects, other strains emphasize the ways mantra embodies a divine or supernatural being or force that is then transferred, through the sonic medium, into the devotee. While some scholars of religion cast these traditions as “natural” and thus distinct from the “supernatural” theistic religions, such distinctions have always been difficult to maintain. Ginsberg himself shifts back and forth between natural and supernatural versions of poetic efficacy. The return to the body announced in “The Change”—where he resolves to live comfortably in his own mortal, homosexual skin—ostensibly ruled out the search for the supernatural or the divine, replacing these with acceptance of self and what is clearly, in that poem, a psychologized version of Hindu and Buddhist meditation traditions.33 Previous commentators on Ginsberg’s post-India transformation argue that he is liberated to write in a new way when he abandons what one critic, Paul Portugés, calls the “supernatural” visionary paradigm—derived from Ginsberg’s vision of Blake and his readings of the Bible and Christian mystics—that defined his early poetry’s religious vocabulary.34 I would argue that abandoning Blake’s supernatural visions or those of the Old Testament is not the same thing as abandoning the supernatural altogether. “Wichita Vortex Sutra” and the poems surrounding it in Ginsberg’s two sixties collections clearly contradict any claim that the supernatural is fully replaced by the “natural” of Buddhist practice. Instead, supernatural poetry of the kind proclaimed in “Wichita Vortex Sutra” makes ever grander claims that require a conception of language as magically, supernaturally efficacious. Thomas Foran’s effort in the Chicago Seven trial to use the representational content of Ginsberg’s poetry to fill in the content of the chants he recited during the Festival of Life reverses the process Ginsberg intends to set in motion when he declares that we must “make Mantra of American language.” Ginsberg uses the supernatural structure of mantra to make a “white-magic” poetry—a poetry efficacious even (or especially) in the moments where narration and traditional structures of meaning (representations, narrative logic, the seeming-real he writes of rejecting in his Indian journals) fall away. This makes it possible to sustain the nonsensical elements of a poem like “TV Baby,” overtly political poems like “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” and dream transcription of the kind he defends under Foran’s cross-examination within a single poetic project, within one linguistic understanding. This move is made possible only by the abandonment of reference in the indexical sense in favor of what must be understood as a formal notion of meaning. Ginsberg may ultimately be best described as a formal poet, despite his protests

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against high modernist poetic form, since it is the literal form of the sound, the particular assemblage of “syllables,” that carries the weight of what Ginsberg imagines the poem to do. We might call this a supernatural formalism. There are several points to be made, then, about the story of Ginsberg’s poetic transformation in the sixties. It should by now be clear to readers familiar with poststructuralist theory that his transformation relates directly to Derridian, de Manian, and Lacanian understandings of language. While the materiality of language for these theorists represents a challenge to meaning construed in an idealist paradigm and to what Derrida called, in Of Grammatology (1976), “the metaphysics of presence,” it does precisely the opposite for Ginsberg.35 His rediscovery of the material word—particularly its sound—through Burroughs’s cut-ups, and the elimination of subject matter that for Ginsberg goes along with that rediscovery, ushers in a poetics of absolute presence, and a metaphysics that has more in common with Hinduism’s Brahma or the incarnate Word of St. John’s gospel than with the seemingly secular world of deconstruction. I say “seemingly,” because I have argued elsewhere that deconstruction already entails a kind of supernaturalism—or, if you will, a kind of animism of the literary text.36 The case of Ginsberg suggests that it is a mistake, then, to see the materiality of language as being any challenge at all to an idealist conception of language—at least, that is, when the letter is fortified with supernatural power. Of course, Ginsberg was not the first poet to posit an identity between word and thing, nor to turn to sound as the carrier of a distinct ontology that goes beyond reference, and neither was he the first to suggest that the effect of the poem on the listener was not to persuade but to formulate well what the listener already thought. Alexander Pope brings sound and sense together to explain the latter effect of poetry: “The Sound must seem an Echo of the Sense, What oft was thought but ne’er so well exprest.” William Carlos Williams, a mentor of Ginsberg’s, imagined a poetic language (especially in Spring and All) that aspired to the status of things, and Ezra Pound, also important to Ginsberg’s development, spoke of the audible forms of poetry as aspiring to the condition of pure sound distinct from articulate speech.37 In modernism, then, but also as far back as the eighteenth-century and Romanticism, poets have attempted to reimagine the relevance of poetry by turning to its objectness and, in some cases, imbuing that materiality with occult significance. What is perhaps most interesting about Ginsberg’s version of this move, then, is first the way it translates into a politics of coercion even in the context of the counterculture’s legendary tolerance. The idea that a poem’s sound will render listeners as passive as tape machines and inspire not thoughts but a replication of the poet himself, reveals a political contradiction at the heart of Ginsberg’s practice, which is ostensibly about freedom and selfexpression and the value of all persons. The contradiction stands despite the poetry’s evident failure to have the effects Ginsberg (sometimes playfully) wishes,

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and the fact that he insists he is not trying to “overwhelm” his listeners. The second significant aspect of Ginsberg’s version of the modernist move toward the poem as object, as I will show in the final section of this chapter, is how it intersects with a resurgent mysticism in American religious life in the sixties, a resurgence that also suggests, in another sector of the culture, a certain interchangability between coercion and tolerance.

Sixties Religious Formalism In the early seventies, the popular spiritual writer Alan Watts might have been ventriloquizing Ginsberg when he criticized the Roman Catholic Church for abandoning the Latin mass for a vernacular liturgy. Writing in a 1971 preface to his newly reissued spiritual classic, Behold the Spirit (1947)—which had urged a mystical understanding of religion—he argues that in translating the mass, the Church made liturgy an occasion for “filling one’s head with thoughts, aspirations, considerations and resolutions.”38 The substitution of English for the Latin, which many parishioners did not understand (though the use of Latin–English missals had been widespread since their introduction in 1925), allowed the content of the liturgy to be apparent over and above its purely verbal form. For Watts, who during the sixties came to argue for a pantheistic mysticism to replace what he saw as a desiccated Christian practice, the experience of God could arise only when the person was possessed by God and thus became God. In turn, this could happen only if reason, and rational understandings of language in particular, could be overcome. And so while many reforms in the Roman Catholic Church, to take Watts’s example, revolved around the renewal of liturgy to make it more accessible, more understandable, less formal, and less rote, Watts was recommending reform in the opposite direction, and not because he was a conservative. Unlike those who found the language of the Church dead once its meaning had been drained through formula, repetition, and the continued use of a “dead” language, Watts urged renewal through increased formalism of the sort I have characterized, in Ginsberg’s case, as supernatural formalism. For Watts, propositional content was the enemy of true religious experience, just as for Ginsberg, true political activism entailed not persuasion so much as possession of the listening crowd. Alan Watts was not the only religious thinker in the 1960s to advance such a position. Indeed, a significant movement in American Christianity during that decade centered on the spiritual gift of glossolalia and, as I will show, evinced an equal disregard for propositional content in the matter of religion. This “Charismatic” movement within Christianity (called by some scholars “Neo-Pentecostalism”)— distinct in history and practice from what are called the “classical” Pentecostal churches, such as the Assemblies of God, and from the black and Latino Pente-

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costal strains that had emerged in the early twentieth century—was touched off in 1960 at an Episcopal church in Van Nuys, California.39 The priest of the parish, Dennis Bennett, prayed with some of his parishioners and received what is known as “the baptism in the Holy Spirit,” a second baptism or conversion experience usually signaled (as it was in Bennett’s case) by the manifestation of spiritual gifts, most notably glossolalia. In his enthusiasm for that powerful new experience of faith, Bennett preached on the subject to his congregation; soon after, amid some uproar from the parish and the diocesan leadership, he resigned from the Church to pursue his Charismatic ministries outside the institutional structures of the Episcopal Church. The Bishop of Los Angeles quickly banned speaking in tongues under Church auspices. Bennett’s experience demonstrates one reason why the Charismatic movement was important in American culture in the 1960s. Speaking in tongues was for the first time being practiced by white, middle-class, and elite churchgoers—epitomized by the traditionally upper-class Episcopal Church in which Bennett served. No longer the province of a small (if rapidly growing) white, working-class minority in classical Pentecostal churches, or of revivals occurring in black and Latino communities, the experience of Holy Spirit baptism and of speaking in tongues spread even as far as blue-blooded Yale University.40 In October, 1962, after two campus visits by the Charismatic preacher Herald Bredesen, members of the evangelical Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship prayed for Holy Spirit baptism and began to speak in tongues. (They were soon referred to as “GlossoYalies.”)41 Given Pentecostalism’s social rise, it was reported on by mainstream national media and claimed a newly prominent place in the American cultural landscape.42 The fact that Dennis Bennett left the Episcopal Church soon after his Charismatic conversion belies a critical, and perhaps surprising, characteristic of the new movement that then spread out from California to Christian churches—both Protestant and Roman Catholic—around the country. Typically, Charismatic converts were advised to remain within their own church traditions, to use the baptism of the Holy Spirit to enliven the worship, prayer life, and ministries of those traditions. After Holy Spirit baptism, the believer was not to leave his or her church but rather to become a better member of it. This stance was facilitated by the fact that Charismatics rejected many of the cultural practices of previous revivalism, especially the “clean living” ethic (no smoking, drinking, dancing) and the disdain for contemporary culture. The Charismatics focused instead on the “attitude of heart” of the believer.43 What is remarkable about the movement, then—and has been well-documented by one of the movement’s most prominent historians, Richard Quebedeaux—was its ability to bring together doctrinally various believers, to offer them a transforming experience of God, and to send them back, seemingly unchanged on doctrinal matters, to their own churches. Quebedeaux writes that “apart from specific

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theological and behavioral expectations a given church or fellowship group may impose on its own adherents, Charismatic Renewal as such has no mandatory or even optional statements of faith, and does not require compliance with any set code of conduct. Neo-Pentecostal unity is unity in a great deal of diversity.”44 He goes on to cite several well-known Charismatic leaders who explicitly argue against the importance of doctrinal agreement. Michael Harper, for example, attributes doctrinal disagreement to the fallen nature of the world. Since this fallibility can never be overcome, the Holy Spirit was given to the Apostles in the early Church “as a uniting factor before they were united in truth. Christians then, as now, made the mistake of thinking that men had to believe as they did before they could experience the Holy Spirit.”45 Ralph Wilkerson, pastor of Melodyland Christian Center, an enormously successful Charismatic church founded in 1960, argued that they were “too busy in Anaheim winning people to Jesus to get involved in arguments over doctrine. The most important thing is to get our spirits right with one another, and this can only be done through the crucified life.”46 Wilkerson regularly participated in concelebration of the Eucharist with Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, Assemblies of God, and other ministers, and sometimes with several at once.47 Such blurring of doctrinal boundaries, especially at the moment of the Eucharist, was frowned upon in most mainstream denominations (and in the Roman Catholic Church, forbidden); the fact that Wilkerson could find priests and pastors from these various traditions to break bread with him testifies to Quebedeaux’s core observation. Shared experience of the Holy Spirit trumped any insistence on doctrinal agreement.48 Indeed, cultivating an “attitude of heart,” “get[ting] our spirits right with one another,” and living the “crucified life,” required very minimal doctrinal agreement. Quebedeaux also speculates that the very generality of the Holy Spirit became useful not only in the cause of ecumenism but also in solving problems within mainline churches themselves. Noting (as many Catholic scholars and historians have) the centrality of the Holy Spirit to the framing and deliberations of the Second Vatican Council, he suggests that “one can, perhaps, argue that Vatican II’s stress on the Holy Spirit was the result of the failure of all other legitimations for doctrine, social policy, etc. When legitimations (papal infallibility, for instance) fail or become suspect, then the Holy Spirit might be a very useful (extremely general and unspecific) legitimation for any cause or policy.”49 This suggestion would certainly meet with opposition within some Catholic circles, but it is also clear that Rome embraced the Charismatic revival in its own ranks and looked upon it as a central building block of ecumenism during the early seventies at exactly the moment when, as the Catholic sociologist of religion Andrew Greeley has shown, American Catholics were responding negatively to the Humanae Vitae encyclical (1968) banning birth control, and leaving the Church in droves.50 While I cannot claim that the two phenomena are causally linked—that Rome embraced Charis-

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matic renewal to compensate for the unpopularity of the encyclical—the historical coincidence suggests that the nondoctrinal appeal of Charismatic renewal balanced other forces in the church that were severely dividing Catholics on doctrinal matters. Greeley suggests, moreover, that those who remained in the Church through the time of greatest attrition (from the encyclical until about 1975) did so not because of doctrinal belief but out of loyalty and the fact that, as he puts it, they “liked” being Catholic; those more concerned with doctrine and agreement left the Church. The very doctrinal pluralism of this intense and overwhelming Christian experience—so intense that, as I have noted, it was likened to first conversion at baptism—was echoed in the practical matter of glossolalia and its role in the Church. St. Paul had been wary of its misuse in the Corinthian Church, urging believers there to desire prophecy over the gift of tongues, because the former addresses other people, the latter only God, and thus the former builds up the Church, while the latter builds up only the individual. “If I pray in a tongue, my spirit is at prayer but my mind is unproductive. So what is to be done? I will pray with the spirit, but I will also pray with the mind,” he writes. “I give thanks to God that I speak in tongues more than any of you, but in the church I would rather speak five words with my mind, so as to instruct others also, than ten thousand words in a tongue.”51 Given this history, many contemporary believers considered it inappropriate to exercise the gift in the public rites of the liturgy, though some churches permitted it when the speaking was accompanied by translation, as St. Paul instructed the Corinthian Church to do. Translation, however, was not only rare, but also regarded, even by believers, as seldom being useful. The translations were usually such general pronouncements—about the love of God, or God’s desire for the faithful’s commitment—that they added little to the message of any service. The conventional wisdom on glossolalia for the Charismatic movement, then, was that tongues were most legitimately used as a “private prayer language,” a language in which the soul could speak to God without involving the distracting and distracted intellect.52 One writer, who seems to be trying to preserve a sense of its ordinariness, described glossolalia as a “meditative non-rational form of prayer, wrongly confused by non-specialists with ecstatic experiences.”53 The soul knew what it needed from God, and in the syllables of glossolalia the soul asked. It should be said that the lore of the movement—reaching back to the early twentieth century’s first Pentecostal revivals—always included counterexamples, where a person began to speak in tongues and, as in the Pentecost described in the Acts of the Apostles, he or she happened to be telling God’s good news in the language of a foreign person who was, by chance, listening. But these stories were sometimes discredited even by participants in the movement, and those who did believe them nevertheless did not think that commitment to glossolalia as a spiritual gift in the contemporary Church required that one believe that all tongue-

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speakers were actually fluently speaking, without training, a language foreign to them. Both the disinclination to demand translation of glossolalia in practice, and the lack of emphasis on the claim that glossolalia functioned in the same way it had for the apostles in Acts, echo the movement’s broader lack of emphasis on the propositional content of belief. That is, while glossolalia was, for the Charismatic movement, language without a meaning intelligible to the person who spoke it, the experience of baptism in the Holy Spirit was a moment of conversion largely without doctrinal consequences. This is not to say that those who underwent this second baptism did not change, nor is it to say that the Charismatic movement had no consequences for the churches in which it took root. Indeed, the response of Dennis Bennett’s bishop, in banning glossolalia, is indicative of the repugnance with which many who did not embrace Holy Spirit baptism responded to their newly enthusiastic (and notoriously pushy) tongue-speaking brethren. Rather, it is to say that a single movement, and a single, identifiable religious experience, served to motivate and promote a variety of doctrines, many of them (as in the case of Roman Catholic and Protestant doctrines) conflicting. At the same time, Holy Spirit baptism represented a religious experience that looked like ecstatic possession, where the believer is completely overwhelmed, and his or her tongue taken over, by the power of God. If this doesn’t seem as distasteful or coercive as the idea of Ginsberg taking possession of his listeners, it would only be because God is god, and Ginsberg is not, his holy protestations notwithstanding. Like Ginsberg’s vision of a supernaturally efficacious poetry, the Charismatic movement combined the ultimate experience of supernatural possession with an evacuation of content from language such that pluralism of belief could continue to thrive in the face of a common subjection to God. What we might call the linguistic and doctrinal logic of the Charismatic movement and the arguments about language that we find in the writing of Alan Watts thus share central characteristics with Ginsberg’s beliefs about poetry and language in the sixties despite the obvious, and important, differences in worldview between strictly Christian believers and syncretic believers like Ginsberg and Watts. Ginsberg’s embrace of language as nonrepresentational coincides with Watts’s appeal to mysticism as the engine for the Church’s renewal (though by the 1970s, Watts had left the church and no longer took its reform as his main task). Like Ginsberg, Watts took many of his ideas about the spiritual properties of language from Hindu and Buddhist traditions. (Watts was a Buddhist for many years before becoming an Anglican priest.) Indeed, Watts was an admirer of Ginsberg. And one advocate of the Charismatic movement, C.F.D. Moule, could have been describing Ginsberg’s understanding of poetry—or, for that matter, Cleanth Brooks’s— when he compares glossolalia with “poetry, whose meaning could never be properly conveyed by interpretation.”54 Interpretation was far from Ginsberg’s notion of

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how poetry worked. Though one could certainly talk about poems (and Ginsberg did, at great length), that talking would never be the equivalent of the specific syllables of the poem itself—endowed, as they were, with Ginsberg’s “white magic.” I would note that J. L. Austin, whose performative language can look so similar to the formal and efficacious language I have observed in Ginsberg, Burroughs, Watts, and Charismatic Christianity, specifically argues against any notion of the speech act as “spiritual.” This is partly because a spiritual understanding of speech acts would render them not performative but descriptive of inner states, and thus no different from any other statement (some understandings of glossolalia take this form). More importantly, however, Austin calls the inner spiritual states invoked in such an objection to his theory “fictitious.”55 His secular skepticism sets Austin apart from the believers I have been discussing up to this point, but it is nonetheless significant that Austin’s ideas are first presented in what would be close to their final form at Harvard in 1955, as the William James Lectures, and are first published in 1962. That is, Austin’s work on the question of performativity in language—begun in 1939—comes together and gains a wide audience at roughly the same time that Ginsberg is developing his own version of performative language and Dennis Bennet is speaking in tongues in Van Nuys, and it does so under the auspices of William James, one of America’s great thinkers about religion. It is also the case that part of what interests Austin in performative language is precisely its socially coercive power. If for the New Critics, the poem would not mean but be, for these writers language would not mean but do, and for those I have focused on its doing would be above all supernatural. Ginsberg himself, starting out on the cross-country drive that would occasion the poems of “these states” in The Fall of America (1965–1971), registers how the understandings of language I have been describing were, literally, in the American air in the sixties. The poet, driving south from the Canadian border down to San Francisco and L.A., hears glossolalia coming to him over the radio: “[A]t Santa Barbara exit / the Preacher hollered in tongues / YOUR NAME IS WRITTEN IN HEAVEN.” What follows are other voices that might be described as other tongues in an American glossolalia. He hears “Lodge” speaking from Saigon: “‘We are morally right, / we are Morally Right, / serving the cause of freedom forever giving these people / an opportunity . . . almost like thinking’—/ He’s broadcasting serious-voice on Xmas Eve to America.” And finally, “Entering Los Angeles space age,” the poet hears “three stations simultaneous radio—/ Cut-Up Sounds that fill Aether, / voices back of the brain.” (The poem is “These States: Into L. A.” [Christmas Eve, 1965], 379) As if manifesting the poetic crisis Ginsberg had faced down in India four years earlier, both the poet’s “brain” and the very “Aether” of California are permeated with Burroughs’s cut-ups in sonic form. Reproducing the multiple simultaneous radio broadcasts, Ginsberg reinforces the feeling that the words in the air are somehow beyond intelligibility even when

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the speaker is not “hollering in tongues.” He leaves intact sentence fragments— such as “almost like thinking,” earlier—and in general presents the reader with language torn from the context that would make its sense apparent. The formal unintelligibility and fragmentation of language is a constant presence in the poems of this collection and culminates in “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” where the words of politicians and others are said simply to be “language,” signaling how, in that poem, language is emptied of content in order to display the occult power of the word itself. At this early point in the cross-country poetic journey, however, the content of fragmented speech remains in play. Content matters in this poem because Ginsberg is out to suggest how clear and grammatically complete speech might also be unintelligible, not formally, but politically. On one hand, the poet hears glossolalia and detached sentence fragments, which are formally unintelligible; on the other hand, he records propositions, such as the claim that U.S. actions in Vietnam are “Morally Right” that make no ethical or moral sense. The other voices Ginsberg notes in the concluding verse paragraph of the poem— which include the “voice of a poor poverty worker,” “Evers’ voice the black Christmas march,” and reports of the “Mass Arrest of Campers Outside LBJ Ranch” (379)—connote the clash of beliefs that characterize the sixties’ political landscape, the existence of points of view so at odds with one other that debate— which relies on mutual intelligibility—is given over to demonstration, protest, and repression. In this poem, the formally and the politically nonsensical are not yet rendered utterly, and utterly formally, alike as they are in “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” where the speech of all is rendered simply as “language,” and we are not told what, exactly, each voice says. We see the two kinds of nonsense here in the process of coming together, as debate between incompatible positions is dissolved in formal inclusion. Not only are the glossolalic voices of America included, often verbatim, in the poem proper, but the poet also turns to his signature repetition to smooth out differences between unlike elements. Like a Beat Santa Claus (beard included), Ginsberg wishes a “Merry Christmas” to all in this poem: “Merry Christmas to Mr. & Mrs. Chang Kai Shek,” “Merry Christmas to President Johnson & pray for Health,” “Merry Christmas to MacNamara . . . to Ho Chi Minh grown old . . . Merry Christmas to rosycheeked Mao Tze Tung . . . Merry Christmas to the Pope & to the Dalai Lama Rebbe Lubovitcher / to the highest Priests of Benin, / to the Chiefs of the Faery Churches / Merry Christmas to the Four Shankaracharyas, / to all Naga Sadhus, Bauls & Chanting Dervishes from Egypt to Malaya—” (377–78). The repeated greeting—satirical, even silly—ultimately tends toward redemptive inclusiveness on the model imagined by Whitman in his catalogs. The specifically Christian celebration of God’s incarnation in Christ shifts from being part of American kitsch to being the poet’s hail of cosmic good will, an affirmation of all beings

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and all beliefs. It is as if, on Christmas Eve, 1965, the divine has become incarnate not in the one man, Christ, but in all of creation equally. Both satire and good will are on display in Ginsberg’s poetic version of glossolalia; Ginsberg takes the voices of an American holy night and redeems them by incantation, by taking the syllables of that “Aether,” in all their incompatible, nonsensical glory, and putting them into the poem under the sign of the incarnate Word. If there is political critique in the Christmas greeting—and I think there is meant to be critique—it is critique of a peculiar kind, in keeping with the version of pluralism on display in the Charismatic movement. It is critique that allows opposing voices to continue speaking and that does not argue against, seek to unite, or seek even to interpret, opposing points of view. Rather, the incantation of cosmic good will—the poet’s whimsical “Merry Christmas”—is left as the sole counter to the claims of Lodge and MacNamara and their like. I want finally to suggest that Ginsberg’s success as a public figure in the sixties has to do with the supernatural and indiscriminate good will embodied in this poem’s Christmas greeting. And so, while Ginsberg’s fame in the sixties no doubt has many sources—among them his relentless schedule of public readings, his willingness to grant interviews, his embrace of the counterculture, his tireless promotion of his friends’ work, and his growing political vociferousness—I think his fame is also linked to the popular mystical understandings of language that so closely mirrored his own conception of poetry. While the poetry he wrote after his return from India would never achieve the literary respect and admiration that his earlier work had garnered, and continues to receive, it was nevertheless the poetry that fueled his fame. (Ginsberg won the 1974 National Book Award for The Fall of America, which is considered by many critics, even those who admire his entire oeuvre, as a less successful collection.56) This is precisely because, in the context of increasing interest in both mysticism and the materiality of language, his poetry held out a view of language that allowed it to become mystical to the same extent that it became primarily material, to escape the baggage of propositional content without losing its worldly—and otherworldly—power. And as The Fall of America itself demonstrates, Ginsberg’s poetry acquired this power at a time when the impossibility of reconciling opposing visions of reality on the Left and the Right was shaking American politics to the core. Just as supernatural formalism allowed for both tolerance and coercion to coexist in religious experience and in Ginsberg’s poetic vision, it also became a technology through which political critique could trade argument for incantation.57

The Latin Mass of Language

O TRADE argument for incantation, as Ginsberg’s poetry does, is not what the reformers of the Roman Catholic Church aimed for in the Second Vatican Council, convened from 1962 through 1965, roughly the years when Ginsberg was transforming his poetic practice. Instead, Vatican II sought to reform the practices of the Church such that instruction in the faith would become increasingly prominent in the experience of the lay Catholic. The mystical and incantatory aspects of the mass would be in some sense preserved, but the main source of that mystery and the incantatory feel—the Latin of the mass—would be replaced with the vernacular, the language in which instruction could occur. In this chapter, I show how American Catholic culture in the sixties and beyond sought to reverse that institutional transformation much as Ginsberg, as I demonstrated in the previous chapter, attempts to reverse a referential poetics. For one writer in particular, Don DeLillo, the intersection of literature and Roman Catholicism propels a vision of the novel, and of the practice of writing fiction, that recuperates pre–Vatican II Catholicism in the 1980s and 1990s, maintaining a Catholic understanding of immanent transcendence while skirting the specific beliefs and conventions that governed pious Catholic life in the 1950s. That was a life well-known to DeLillo; indeed, he has described himself as a writer essentially formed by the experiences of his early life in the Bronx, where he was born and raised, and where he attended Catholic schools until he graduated from Fordham University in the late fifties. He points to the Catholic fabric of his childhood and adolescence—alongside his discovery of modern art and jazz in the city in the sixties—as the source of his most enduring preoccupations.1 The traces of this

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source can be found everywhere in DeLillo’s novels, interviews, and essays: in his choice of words, in his subjects, in his imagery, in the ways he understands faith, belief, agency, guilt, redemption, and human relations. I will argue in the second half of this chapter that DeLillo ultimately transfers a version of mysticism from the Catholic context into the literary one, and that he does so through the model of the Latin mass.2 What is most interesting to me about DeLillo’s novels, in the context of my broader project, is that they translate religious structures into literary ones without an intervening secularism. I argue that they can do this because they imagine language in a way that preserves a specifically Catholic understanding of transcendent experience while drifting far from Catholic traditions and themes.3 To understand the mysticism of DeLillo’s novels, one must turn first to the structure of mystery in the Latin mass. The Latin mass, as daily practice, had an uncertain status among the various elements of American Catholicism in the sixties, when DeLillo began his writing career. When the Roman Catholic Church set out to renew its foundational practices and doctrines in the Second Vatican Council, the first, and most visible, thing to be changed was the language of the mass; starting on the first Sunday of Advent, 1964, the Latin mass largely, and immediately, disappeared from the common parishioner’s experience. But the rise of the vernacular mass did not do away with the Latin mass altogether, or do away with the need to respond to a form of religious ritual that, over the centuries, had posited a special relationship between language and the mystical. The Latin mass, as a linguistic and spiritual practice, persisted in the imagination of Catholic writers for decades after its replacement. Indeed, perhaps because it was no longer at the heart of weekly religious habits, it became available, in a new way, for literary engagement.4 The mysticism of the Latin mass relates to the tension quite dramatically evident in late-century American Catholicism between religious feeling and obedience to Church teachings. That tension centered, at this time, on the 1968 Humanae Vitae encyclical banning birth control. Many American Catholics suddenly found themselves faced with the fact that they had decided to live in defiance of an explicitly stated Church injunction; a good many left the Church, but most stayed, as Andrew Greeley, the Catholic sociologist, has shown. Greeley argues that this was possible because Catholics thought of themselves as having a Catholic identity that went beyond the question of whether they agreed with the Church hierarchy, an identity that functioned more like an ethnicity than a belief-system.5 Greeley’s argument is persuasive, but there are other ways that a subjectively powerful Catholicism persists in the period even among the most disaffected believers. Don DeLillo’s novels, as I will show, offer an alternative to traditional belief and also to belief reconceived as identity by embodying a Catholic sacramental logic within a literary structure and by articulating an understanding of language that itself mediates between belief and pluralism. That is, his novels not only demonstrate a kind

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of mystical belief but also show how one would have to think about language in order to sustain such belief while rejecting, or suspending judgment upon, the religious institutions and practices that formerly supported it.

Language and Agency in American Catholic Culture American Catholics have long been subject to the suspicion, among their Protestant neighbors especially, that they mindlessly obey the dictates of Rome; this was a chestnut of American prejudice against Catholics, a feeling that came to a head in John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. We might note, then, that an important effect of Lee Harvey Oswald’s political formation in Libra (1988), DeLillo’s fictional meditation on the assassination of Kennedy, depends upon his memorizing and submitting himself to two conflicting textual authorities: Marxist theory and the Marine Corps manual. The effect is to represent his submission as obedience to two partially understood doctrines—he doesn’t understand much of what he reads in either body of literature. Though Oswald is in one sense characterized by his disobedience—by the fact that he breaks the law in increasingly dramatic ways, first by trying to pass secrets to the Russians, and later by shooting the president—this semblance of disobedience is the product of the multiple textual authorities that he has memorized and alternately obeys. Oswald’s submission to the memorized doctrines between which he oscillates echoes—or more accurately, parodies—the common practice and popular understanding of Roman Catholicism in the fifties and sixties. Such prejudicial views of Catholics were precisely the problem, of course, that for some time dogged Kennedy, the central noncharacter in Libra. One might say that Libra displaces the problem of Kennedy’s Catholicism—which appears nowhere in the novel—onto Oswald. If Kennedy’s speech to the Dallas ministers’ convention during the campaign settled the issue of Catholic agency for Kennedy himself, the stereotype of unthinking Catholic obedience persisted, in literary discourse as it did elsewhere. A well-known Catholic novelist like Walker Percy, in the The Last Gentleman (1966), for example, gives us the Catholic convert-turned-nun Valentine Vaught, an unappealing martinet of a woman who decides, having taken some Catholic instruction, that she simply “believes all of it.” The blindness of her believing, as well as her desperate insistence on imposing the rite of baptism on her brother just before his death (performed reluctantly by a hospital chaplain, who cannot confirm from the unconscious Jamie Vaught that he in fact wishes to be baptized), reveals a faith that disregards agency, thoughtfulness, and reason, and that looks instead to apocalyptic and mystical ultimacies.

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An earlier example, equally pertinent, can be found in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1952), where both major characters—Hazel Motes and Enoch Emery—are utterly at the mercy of a Catholic understanding of metaphysical truth, even if they are not at the mercy of the Church’s worldly authority. In Haze Motes’s case, he simply cannot escape Christ as a bodily reality no matter how hard he tries to be a flamboyant apostate, founder of the Church Without Christ. (He looks like the minister his grandfather was no matter what clothes or hats he buys for himself.) In Enoch’s case, his “wise blood” prompts him—against his will, even—to complete outlandish and opaque rituals, many of which approximate Catholic rituals, that have the effect of driving Haze (whom Enoch dragoons into participating) to the spiritual extreme of self-mutilation. In blinding himself with lye, he fully reveals his inability not to believe in Christ. His lack of freedom to avoid God is epitomized when his car—the embodiment of American freedom, the one thing Haze truly desires, and, finally, an instrument of murder—is pushed over an embankment by a police officer who has stopped him for reckless driving. American freedom, like Haze’s effort not to believe, is good only for the junkyard in the wake of Christ’s inexorable truth. The failure of Haze to leave his Protestant upbringing (he makes clear, at one point, that he is no Catholic) proves the underlying failure of Protestantism in general in the novel: he can protest all he wants, but he cannot leave Christ’s real presence, the foundation of the one true Church.6 Literary discourse was not simply a thematic source for or reflection of Catholic stereotypes of unreasoning submission. Writers concerned with more formal questions—in literature, journalism, and liturgical scholarship, to name just a few areas—connected questions of agency and reason to the formal elements of language. Jimmy Breslin, the Pulitzer Prize–winning liberal columnist, ties Catholic belief to the structure of language itself, especially language as used by the professional writer. When asked to sum up the significance for his work as a writer of being raised Catholic at midcentury, Breslin chose two terms to exemplify the experience: “grammar” and “religion.” “There are two things that you can learn only by rote,” he writes, “grammar and religion. . . . You came out of school with the structure of an English sentence and with the mystical structure, the manner in which a religion is held together. I don’t think I learned anything else. And they’re both based on the same thing: blind obedience. Faith in the sentence and faith in God.”Although Breslin does not link this analogy explicitly to the practice of the Latin mass, he nevertheless suggests such a link by going on, as if part of the same thought, to say that “the Mass should still be in Latin. Why have a secret society,” he wonders, “if you don’t have a secret language?” 7 The notion that the Latin mass represents a secret language suggests a community (the Church) made up of those who understand the secret language, set off against outsiders who do not. But the fact is, as Breslin surely knew, most lay Catholics did not understand the Latin of the mass; outside the ordained ministry, only those who

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served the altar were specifically trained to recite the Latin prayers, and though most laypeople carried Latin–English missals after the missal’s introduction in the 1920s, most could not identify the meaning of specific Latin words or phrases.8 The “secret language” of the Latin mass thus represents an interior secret, a secret held and protected by a group that itself does not know the secret but nevertheless believes in it. Like grammar and the “mystical structure” of the religion, Latin is something memorized, in which one has faith. The links between faith, language, and the Latin mass that we glimpse in Jimmy Breslin’s comments are also described, at much greater length, by yet another New York City Catholic, Garry Wills. In his 1971 memoir and critique of the Roman Catholic Church, Bare Ruined Choirs, he writes that he and his Catholic friends spoke a different language from the rest of men—not only the actual Latin memorized when we learned to “serve Mass” as altar boys. We also had odd bits of Latinized English that were not parts of other six-year-olds’ vocabulary—words like “contrition” and “transubstantiation.” Surely no teenager but a Catholic ever called an opinion “temerarious.” The words often came embedded in formulae (“imperfect contrition”) . . . and distinctions: mortal sin and venial sin, matter of sin and intention of sin. . . . To know the terms was to know the thing, to solve the problem. So we learned, and used, a vast terminology.9

Like Breslin, Wills identifies memorized language in general, and Latin more specifically, with the legacy of Catholic education. Breslin, Wills, and DeLillo, all raised in New York Catholic neighborhoods, before the Second Vatican Council’s 1964 Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy allowed the translation of the mass into the vernacular, reflect (or in Wills’s case, critiques) a veneration of ritual language that was expressed among Catholic writers engaging the subject in the late fifties, when a vernacular mass seemed a long way off. Even then, writers within the Church understood the Latin mass no differently: it was both an obstacle to understanding and, partly because of its lack of transparency, a more adequate vehicle for spiritual experience. Albert Blaise, for example, a French scholar writing in 1957 about “sacred languages” (in a book intended for a general audience), articulated such veneration even while evincing openness to vernacular liturgy. He wonders if there will “be, in the centuries to come, an English, and a French, liturgy, as there is a Slavonic or Greek liturgy now?” Acknowledging that Church Latin had become “a screen” “between the congregation and the celebrant . . . which only a small minority can pierce,” he nevertheless argues that Church Latin is valuable because it is “able more than any other Latin to move the spirits of those who hear it.”10 Both personified and sentimentalized in Catholic discourse, liturgical Latin exerted a powerful imaginative force for a significant number of Catholics because of its distance from ordinary language. That affective and spiritual distance between ritual language and the language of semantic meaning remained a central issue after Vatican II’s liturgical reforms,

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though not always from the point of view we see in Blaise’s paean to liturgical Latin. Monsignor J. D. Conway, who wrote a regular advice column in the National Catholic Reporter, assured disturbed readers that they were better off without the Latin. His own “earliest memories of high Mass,” he said, “center[ed] around the meaningless and threateningly endless repetition of Latin words, sung to cheap and gaudy music by a mediocre choir while the congregation sat in silent boredom.”11 Similarly, Father Joseph Nolan, in an article titled “Questions and Answers by a Pastor Not at All Happy with Half-Vernacular Mass,” published a month after the changes in the mass took hold, invokes St. Paul’s cautions about public glossolalia in First Corinthians to buttress his argument in favor of the vernacular. “I have always agreed with St. Paul that ‘I would rather speak five words which my mind utters for your instruction than ten thousand in a strange tongue.’ But I don’t want to speak five lines in English which they understand and then five lines in Latin which they don’t. It’s like a runner going over hurdles. Every three steps there’s a barrier.”12 Father Nolan’s emphasis on instruction echoes the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, which emphasized the role of instruction in the mass (something traditionally associated with the Protestant liturgy, where sacraments were played down or even absent from worship services).13 For the Council, the vernacular liturgy was a way of countering the stereotypical figure (and, in the eyes of many priests, real problem) of the parishioner listening to prayers and taking care to obey the dictates of the Church without understanding the words or the principles that he or she heard, recited, and lived by. The Latin mass, then, was described by its opponents and its advocates in similar terms: both spoke of “screens” and “barriers” and lack of transparent meaning. The difference came in the utility, or lack thereof, of these attributes. For those who opposed the use of Latin, lack of comprehension was simply that and necessarily bad, producing automatons rather than mature believers, submission in place of understanding; for those in favor of the Latin, the barrier to understanding facilitated a mystical relation to the language, a relation that reinforced the transubstantial, incarnational logic of other elements of the mass. These debates and discussions would seem, literally, parochial, if it were not for the wide dissemination, and, indeed, the celebrity, attached to elements of American Catholic culture in the fifties and sixties.14 The influential work of the first literary-scholar-turned-media-critic Marshall McLuhan makes apparent the pervasiveness and imaginative power of Catholic conceptions of language in American culture at large. McLuhan was author of Understanding Media (1964), the title of which signals McLuhan’s ambition to take academic criticism to the masses: he was alluding to the New Critical monopoly on reading in the classroom constituted by Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry (1939) and Understanding Fiction (1943). McLuhan, controversial among academics and public intellectuals in a way that Brooks and Warren were not, was a popular phenomenon, beloved by

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Hollywood, the popular press, and the talk-show circuit. Shortly after the appearance of Understanding Media, all his books were reissued in new editions, he appeared on the cover of Time, was profiled in the New Yorker, had an hour-long documentary made about him, appeared frequently on television, and took a position at Fordham University at the unheard-of salary of $100,000 a year (a fact that galled his more eminent academic colleagues). More than ten years later, he was still so much in the thick of both academic and popular discourse that he made a cameo appearance as himself in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977). McLuhan argued that dramatic changes in media—from oral to written culture in the wake of the printing press, from written to aural and visual in the age of radio, television, and film—changed cultures not so much on account of the ideas newly disseminated but because the new media disseminated abstract structures of meaning previously unknown to the masses. That is, the new media transformed not what people thought about or perceived, but the very way they thought and perceived. McLuhan’s famous formula, “the medium is the message,” suggests a conflation of meaning and the material manifestation of communication and had a fundamentally Roman Catholic logic that was not lost on his critics. Theodore Roszak, satirically invoking Aquinas in an essay titled “The Summa Popologica of Marshall McLuhan,” suggested that “McLuhan’s medium-in-itself is rather like the substance of the Catholic host and wine which supposedly underlies all the superficial accidents. . . . But subtract the contents of the mass media and, like the Catholic host without its accidents, there’s nothing there.”15 Christopher Ricks puns on McLuhan’s Catholicism, citing an instance in which McLuhan is asked why the “subliminal” power of media is so important. “He has replied with a guided missal,” quips Ricks; “‘Grace is subliminal.’”16 What most bothered these critics, and also others such as Kenneth Burke and Hugh Kenner who do not make Catholicism an explicit issue, is the disregard McLuhan shows for content. He contended that modern media have their effects on American culture not because of what they say, but because of how they say it. Given his emphasis on the medium, it is not surprising to find that in his explicitly religious writing, McLuhan lamented the demise of the Latin mass, a development he blamed in part on the liturgical use of the microphone. Latin, he argues, was meant to be mumbled, not to be made actually audible.17 He was right about the liturgical logic of comprehensibility: Latin was, in McLuhan’s time, not meant to be understood in the mass, so hearing the details of its enunciation through a microphone might well seem at odds with its presence as the medium of liturgy. McLuhan’s analysis of media and, secondarily, of religion and liturgy, locates a mystical reality both within the media of human communication and also, importantly, beyond the media’s communicative functions. McLuhan and his critics, alike, believed that this notion of the mystically powerful medium limited human freedom. His critics despised the way his claims ren-

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The Secret Aspiration In his 1993 interview with Adam Begley for the Paris Review, DeLillo claims that he seeks, as the highest writerly attainment, the state of “automatic writing.” “First you look for discipline and control,” DeLillo explains. “You want to . . . bend the language your way. . . . But there’s a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. . . . The best moments involve a loss of control. It’s a kind of rapture.”18 Leaving aside, for the moment, the religious pedigree of the term “rapture,” I want to note how DeLillo strives to disconnect his agency and control from the words he writes on the page. This is a structure to which DeLillo repeatedly returns in his fiction, and it is a structure, as I have shown, with roots in the American Catholic culture in which DeLillo was raised. The political culture that DeLillo imagines in Libra can be read as a model of the urge to lose one’s agency. The four-stage CIA committee that, in Libra, oversees the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba demonstrates what DeLillo’s self-conception

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dered the fruits of critical intelligence irrelevant. The implication was that one could be ever so clever at understanding media and yet still be at its mercy. His critics thus took as a negative what McLuhan thought was positive. McLuhan suggests that it is by understanding media that one can begin to address (and redress) its powers, but the mode of redress will not return critical faculties to the seat of human control, as his detractors would wish. Rather, McLuhan privileges some media over others, the “cool” over the “hot”; and while the “cool” media, for McLuhan, include that most modern of media, television, the ultimate cool medium is something like Latin, like the preprint, oral, Medieval culture that was replaced by the print culture whose emergence he chronicles in his 1962 study, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. The redress of the media involved, as his comment about grace suggests, not evading the subliminal or even always rendering it conscious, but choosing the correct, and graceful, subliminal channel. Understanding media meant understanding to which media it would be best to submit. The American Catholicism that prevailed during the fifties and sixties is crucial to what I will argue, in the next two sections, is a mystical understanding of language in Don DeLillo’s work in the 1980s and 1990s. I begin with Libra, which demonstrates how the uncertainties of intention are abetted by particular manifestations of language (the memorized text, the misspelled word, the bureaucratic noncommunication of the CIA’s structures). In Mao II, The Names, and finally, Underworld, I show how DeLillo configures the several strands of Catholic culture I have outlined here in such a way as to propel these manifestations of language toward a redemptively mystical end.

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might look like if his compositional logic were transferred to a bureaucracy. The committee is set up to preserve the ignorance of the Director of Central Intelligence about exactly what plans are being made. The Senior Study Effort, we are told, consisted of fourteen high officials. . . . They met for an hour and a half. Then eleven men left the room, six men entered. The resulting group, called SE Augmented, met for two hours. Then seven men left, four men entered. . . . This was SE Detailed, a group that developed specific covert operations and then decided which members of SE Augmented ought to know about these plans. Those members in turn wondered whether the Senior Study Effort wanted to know what was going on in stage three. Chances are they didn’t.19

This committee—designed to keep the various parts of “Central Intelligence” ignorant of what other parts are doing—is a model for other plot elements and characters within Libra, as well. Bobby Dupard, for example, Lee Oswald’s black cellmate in the Atsugi military prison in Japan, has been put there for starting fires; when Oswald asks him if he set them intentionally, he cannot give a straight answer: “I could go either way and be convinced in my own mind” (98). And like Bobby, Oswald himself sometimes does not know what he believes, whether he is a communist spy working in America, or whether he is an American spy posing as a communist to infiltrate the workings of the Party. The root of this instability, in Oswald’s case, lies in the mechanisms by which his identity was formed, which I have briefly mentioned: as a child, he read Marxist theory in the library, loving the words and absorbing them even as he was unable to understand them. In similar fashion, he later memorizes the Marine Corps manual and becomes a Marine. But throughout his life, he is unable to spell, defeated by the materiality of language, a materiality that seems unconnected to concrete meanings in the world. The shifting spelling of names, especially his alias Hidell, becomes the sign of the way these identities, which come to him as memorized language, exist independently, always slipping away from some core intending self. It is not exactly that intention is evacuated in these moments, but rather that DeLillo imagines structures—bureaucratic structures, psychological and imaginative structures, linguistic structures—that, though they sometimes are themselves intended, nevertheless create the effects of nonintention. Those effects include moral ambiguity (often self-serving) and a sense of arbitrariness in the outcomes of the world. To return to DeLillo’s comments on writing with these aspects of Libra in mind, we can see that to confound intentions that could produce particular meanings, a project inspired and supported by the materiality of language, is at the heart of the writerly project that emerges in a novel like Libra. This is because the power of language lies not, DeLillo explains, in its meaning so much as in its look, its sound. He explains that he encourages the materiality of words to shape his writing:

61 too many, I look for another word. There’s always another word that means nearly the same thing, and if it doesn’t then I’ll consider altering the meaning of a sentence to keep the rhythm, the syllable beat. I’m completely willing to let language press meaning upon me.20

This understanding of writing echoes an old notion of poetic language. The poet writing within the discipline of form knows the constant tug of syllable against meaning that DeLillo describes, and some surrealist experimenters explicitly aspired to the state of “automatic writing” DeLillo invokes.21 As articulated here, however, in the context not of poetry but of prose, not early in the century but late, articulated by DeLillo and not someone else, the tension between the language’s form and one’s intended meaning evokes two other sources as well: poststructuralist theories about the materiality of language (which many critics have remarked upon in relation to DeLillo’s writing), and the logic of Catholic agency as I have described it in America’s popular imagination in the fifties and sixties.22 The word “rapture”—a word DeLillo uses to describe the highest state of the writer’s attainment, and which appears repeatedly in other contexts within the same interview— suggests that writing is similar both to the experience of speaking without intention and to the ultimate religious experience of becoming one with God. Indeed, DeLillo makes rapture on the model of the Assumption of Mary the subject of one of his “one-minute” plays—plays to be performed in one minute. “The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven” narrates the spectacle of a victorious tennis player, kneeling with arms raised, rotating under a spotlight on a dais, in the bodily position he held at the moment he was assumed into heaven. The narrator—something like a journalist or commentator—spins out the crowd’s wonder at this sight, and while the terms of that wonder constitute a critique of the consumption that drives it, the play nevertheless centers rapture on the stage, and remains committed to its possibility, its unknowable quality (that the raptured athlete is inaccessible to us except as spectacle).23 The interior privacy of the athlete in this moment, and the way the world talks greedily on, allow us to see in the raptured athlete a figure for DeLillo, the raptured author, made into a spectacle by his own rapturous work. DeLillo thus hearkens back to well-established notions of the writer as priest, or shaman, or saint, but more specifically, he is gesturing closer to home, invoking the Roman Catholic America in which he was raised, at a time when the Assumption of Mary—defined as infallible doctrine by Pope Pius XII in 1950, when DeLillo was fourteen years old—was particularly prominent.24 Just as DeLillo aspires to produce writing without fully intending the construction of particular meanings and imagines the fulfillment of that state as rapture, a pre–Vatican II Catholic worshipper, trained in the Latin mass (through altar service or simple repetition), may recite the prayers without knowing the meaning of the

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The rhythm of a sentence will accommodate a certain number of syllables. One syllable

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words while nevertheless understanding the experience of saying those words as his or her most powerful approach to God. This is the version of Catholicism that would have defined DeLillo’s own experience of religion as a child, especially in the Catholic schools he attended—including Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx, founded in the early forties by the conservative Cardinal Spellman. Spellman would go on, in the early sixties, to become one of a minority arguing for the retention of the Latin mass during the deliberations of the Second Vatican Council. And so while Libra has been read largely as a novel about American cultural paranoia, I want to suggest that the precise way the novel evades problems of intention reflects DeLillo’s understanding of himself as a writer, and also begins to reveal, if only indirectly, how Catholicism functions in DeLillo’s literary project.

The Novelist and the Believer Spectacles of extreme religious or quasi-religious submission clearly fascinate DeLillo; such submission is on display from the opening pages of Mao II, where we meet Karen Janney, one among hundreds of participants in a mass wedding conducted by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. In a classic DeLillo set piece akin to the baseball scene that opens Underworld, Karen’s parents watch as she is married to a Korean stranger. The fact that this opening scene revolves around Karen and the cult of which she is a member suggests how she will become important to the novel, though the narrative revolves more centrally around the story of a novelist named Bill Gray. Karen is important to understanding what DeLillo is doing in Mao II because of her peculiar relationship to language, a relationship profoundly connected to her status as a partly deprogrammed cult believer. Her language is ultimately held out as an antidote to the failure of the writer, Bill Gray. The plot of Mao II follows Bill’s movements from his rural home north of New York City, where he lives with his assistant, Scott, and Karen, who has left the cult and has become Scott’s girlfriend. When we first meet this group, they are entertaining a photographer named Brita who has come to take Bill’s picture—a rare privilege Bill has reluctantly granted at Scott’s urging. Bill is stalled in his work on a third novel, a novel that Scott thinks is bad and should never be published. Bill is ambivalent enough about the novel to continue his efforts at revision, but it is clear he is not becoming more satisfied with the book even as he continues work on it. Bill finally travels away from this impasse and from his tiny circle of intimates to his editor’s office, then overseas to London, then to Greece—where he is hit by a car—and on to Beirut, where he intends to exchange himself for a poet held hostage by terrorists. He never arrives at that final destination, however. The accident in Greece leaves him with internal injuries that prove fatal as he travels the

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last leg of the journey to Beirut. He dies on a ferry, alone, and his identity papers are stolen from his body after death; because none of his friends or family (he has two daughters) knows where he has gone, his fate will never be known. It is Bill, as quoted by Scott, who makes the explicit analogy between the novel and the Latin mass. At dinner with Bill, Karen, and Brita, Scott tells Brita about Bill’s theory of the genre and its decline. “The novel used to feed our search for meaning. Quoting Bill. It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth.”25 What pushes the novel out, according to Scott’s account of Bill’s theory, is “the emergence of news as an apocalyptic force.” As such, news provides the “emotional experience not available elsewhere” (72), rendering the novel as extraneous as the Latin mass in the post–Vatican II Catholic Church. This theory of the novel has something in common with statements DeLillo has made in interviews about the status of the novel in contemporary culture—Bill’s theory and DeLillo’s sense that the novelist stands outside the mainstream of American culture and its media both suggest an embattled art form. But Bill’s theory about the novel, and in particular, its claim that the novel is irrelevant, is made suspect in two ways. First, its appearance in Scott’s voice indicates that whatever Bill might have meant by these words is probably not being communicated to Brita. Scott, though a devoted reader of Bill’s novels, is not represented as someone who has any significant understanding of Bill’s work; Scott is both idolator and manipulator of Bill. He made himself Bill’s disciple on account of Bill’s early novels, and it is the third novel’s incongruence with those books that makes Scott think it is “a grossity . . . a failure so deep it places suspicion on the great early work” (73). Scott cannot see Bill’s writing as a living, changing thing, and thus after Bill’s disappearance, he takes perverse pleasure in the thought that the third “novel would stay right here,” in Bill’s house, under Scott’s control, “collecting aura and force, deepening old Bill’s legend, undyingly” (224). Scott’s petrified notion of the author and the novel has nothing at all to do with writing, and everything to do with celebrity. He is more invested in the fact that “word would get out” (224) about the unfinished novel, than in the words Bill wrote and what they might mean. This is why he can only quote Bill rather than paraphrase—a limit underscored throughout this scene as he repeats the assertion that these are Bill’s words “in my mouth” (73). The structure of quotation reveals how his cultish submission to Bill’s work has prevented him from becoming more than a fanatical disciple, a hanger-on of the most tenacious kind, a mouther of another’s words. But the cult structure prevailing in Bill’s household is not completely the product of Scott’s fanaticism. Bill not only tolerates Scott’s idolatrous manipulations, but his writing practice has made him a cultish figure in his own sight. Finally, the cult of Bill’s writing consumes even the writer himself. As Bill tells Brita, “Once you choose this life, you understand what it’s like to exist in a state of constant religious

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observance. There are no halfway measures. All the movements we make are ritual movements. . . . There’s a force that’s totally independent of my conscious choices. And it’s an angry grudging force” (44–45). Bill’s decision to exchange himself for the hostage poet is his attempt to escape a cult of writing that, through Scott’s attentions and his own wider fame, has become a cult of himself. His decision registers the despair inherent in the claim that the novel has relinquished its power to “feed our search for meaning.” His persistence in writing becomes then the religious formalism he describes, propelled by that “angry grudging force”; when he fails to complete his third novel and trades in writing for participation in the events on the news, he reveals the total loss of the belief—belief in the medium—that might generate a meaningful novel, a “secular transcendence.” The notion that the news has replaced the Latin mass of the novel is thus the product of both Bill’s loss of faith in the medium and of faith’s replacement by a cult. If the failure of belief is at the heart of Bill’s desiccated ritual of writing, the alternative held out by the novel can be found in the figure of Karen, for, as Scott notes to Brita, “if it’s believers you want, Karen is your person” (69). What exactly Karen believes is never quite clear; what matters is her capacity to believe. She is only partly deprogrammed from her cult life, and at the culmination of a series of encounters with the homeless in a New York City park, she finds herself preaching to them using the formulae of the Unification Church, though she no longer lives the life prescribed by the church. Throughout the novel, she is represented as a childlike dreamer, “a cloud dreamer on a summer’s day, someone drifting out of Bill’s own head” (218). Her status as a believer thus stems from her alliance not with a body of doctrine, but with imagination, and specifically, with a writer’s imagination, an alliance oddly promoted by her half-severed association with the cult. I want to suggest that the fractured quality of her language—in part the result of using the pidgin English of the Unification Church in her prayers, in part the result of her dreamy response to the world—demonstrates what it would mean to find a language commensurate to imagination, commensurate to the mystery that Karen honors in all that she encounters. This quality of her language aligns her with the homeless who reappear throughout the novel. Their language is described as a “constant rolling drone, statements and set responses that made Karen think of formal prayers” (151). Karen has trouble understanding what they say to her: “It was a different language completely, unwritable and interior, the rag-speak of shopping carts and plastic bags, the language of soot, and Karen had to listen carefully to the way the woman dragged a line of words out of her throat like hankies tied together and then she tried to go back and reconstruct” (180). A woman in a sleeping bag says to her, “Let me into vibration” or, as Karen thinks it may also be, “Get me annihilation” (181). Karen’s own language is similarly formal and obscure when she speaks to

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them. “She said, ‘Heart of God is only homeland. Pali-pali. Total children of the world.’ . . . She said, ‘For there is single vision now. Man come to us from far away. God all minute every day. Hurry-up time come soon’” (193). Karen’s language and the language of the homeless share an affinity with Buddhist wisdom literature and Christian mysticism; by the very vagueness of their words, it seems there must lie beneath them some spiritual truth, some “unwritable and interior” language that transcends the language of logic and convention. Indeed, it is this language that Bill seems to seek but cannot find as he endlessly revises his third novel, his revisions suggesting an interior and unwritten sense of what the novel should be, to which he struggles to make the written page correspond. That abstract link between Bill and the homeless, at the level of language, is reinforced by the repeated bodily imagery that connects him with them. Karen sees the image of Bill in a homeless man who “slept face down on a bench, shirtless, with Bill’s exact hair color and shoulders and back” (151), giving us the first inkling that Bill will die looking much like the man who is said to look like him, in a similar disposition of body, with a “bruised and unshaved face and . . . dirty clothes” (216). Finally found, in death, by a man responsible for cleaning up the trash on the ferry to Junieh, Bill becomes the double of the homeless in the park to which Karen repeatedly returns. The analogy DeLillo draws between the homeless and the novelist suggests that both the homeless and the novelist represent what has been discarded by the culture, but I want to suggest that the point goes further than this. Perhaps because of their status as discards—and this can be applied to Karen, too, discarded by her family and by the cult—they have access to a kind of language that transcends the ordinary, that gains a beneficent access to something like the rapturous mystery held out by the various cults of the novel, the cult of the Unification Church, the cult of “old Bill’s legend.” In the sense that the language of the novel is likened to the Latin mass, and the language of the homeless likened to formal prayers, we can see the language of prayer as a discarded language, discarded like Bill and like the homeless themselves. But Karen prays in her cult days and maintains not only the voice of those prayers in her head but also an attitude of meditation that looks like a form of empathy close to prayer. We can see this especially in her response to the coverage of Khomeini’s funeral (188–93). For her, the believer, prayer is not discarded language. Her ability to use that language, and moreover, to move between the world of art (her connection to Bill), the world of television (we see her watching it and responding to it), and the world of the homeless (of human suffering), suggests that it is her ability to find something spiritual in all these worlds that offers the prospect of the novel’s regeneration, even if, at the end of Mao II, both the novelist and his novel have disappeared from view forever. Bill’s conception of the novel as the “great secular transcendence” is superseded in the figure of the be-

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lieving Karen, replaced by a transcendence that is marked precisely by its quality of religious mystery, thus holding out the promise that the novel could be imagined as the Latin mass in a fuller sense than Bill had allowed. Lest my emphasis on Karen seem idiosyncratic, it is worth noting that DeLillo remarks in more than one interview that of all the characters in Mao II, he felt a particular “kinship” and “enormous sympathy” toward Karen Janney, and that he “tried to show this sympathy and kinship through the language [he] used when writing from her viewpoint—a free-flowing, non-sequitur ramble.” And DeLillo marks her as special not only with broken language, but also by asserting that the broken language reveals that he had given her “a life independent of [his] own will”; “it shows in the sentences,” DeLillo explains, “which are free of the usual constraints that bind words to a sentence in a certain way.”26 Counterintuitively, Karen’s status as a believer is what enables the linguistic freedom that, for DeLillo, is the mark of his own kinship and sympathy with this character. Seeing words as mystical enables her—and, I want to suggest, DeLillo—to be “free” of constraints that might discipline the language of speakers devoted to reason and logical structure. The novel as such is not so much abandoned with the disappearance of Bill Gray, then, as concentrated into a character that, for DeLillo, embodies the fantasy that the author’s writing can be “automatic,” rapturous, and that it can exist independent of the author’s will.27

Sacred Small Talk I have argued that Mao II sets out to define the language the novelist strives for by recuperating an analogy between the Latin mass and the novel, an analogy that the failed novelist in the story has abandoned. I have argued that this recuperation is accomplished by virtue of the linguistic freedom DeLillo imagines can arise out of the formulae of cult speech once fanatical beliefs have been replaced by the sheer capacity for belief. An earlier novel in DeLillo’s oeuvre interrogates precisely the mystical power of language that is in some ways presumed, rather than explicitly explored, in Mao II. For simply referring to the Latin mass or setting Karen’s broken speech in the context of the Unification Church’s missionary formulae does not tell us exactly why broken or formulaic speech leads to rapture, exactly what relationship material language, language not defined by semantics, may bear to the transcendent. The Names answers such foundational questions. It does so by giving us another writer—a child named Tap—and yet another cult, this one defined in every sense by the believer’s relationship to language. Tap is developed as a writer figure by triangulation, through other, seemingly more writerly, characters. James Axton, Tap’s father and the novel’s narrator,

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writes “risk analysis” reports for a company offering insurance policies to international businessmen to cover them against terrorist risk. He is hired by the firm specifically for his compositional talents. He was a freelance writer before going to Greece to work for them, and he is chosen because the statistics and facts for each region “needed structuring,” the kind of structuring that only a writer could give them.28 Owen Brademas, an archeologist who runs the site in Greece where James’s estranged wife Kathryn works, is another expert in language and writing. Owen excavates ancient tablets and is particularly interested in epigraphs. Describing to James the trajectory of his scholarship, he says that stone inscriptions first interested him as a matter of “history and philology. The stones spoke,” making his work “a form of conversation with ancient people” (35). But now, he tells James, he sees “a mysterious importance in the letters as such, the blocks of characters.” He finds that what interests him most is a tablet at Ras Shamrah that “said nothing” but was simply inscribed with the alphabet. Far from seeing this as a diminishment of his earlier interest, Owen claims that his focus on mere letters “goes deeper than conversations, riddles” (35–36)—deeper, that is, than learning what ancient people thought and did. Owen calls this an “unreasoning passion” (36), and, indeed, it is the unreason of language as Owen sees it that sets his vision off from James’s. James’s reports, after all, are exercises in reasoning from facts and statistics, while Owen’s work seeks some “deeper” truth from language, something inaccessible to reason. The murderous cult at the center of the novel takes Owen’s views to an extreme. (When Owen realizes the affinity, he begins to follow the cult, eventually coming close enough to be called a “member.”) The cells of the cult, operating independently in different countries, stay in a place and wait for a person whose initials match the initials of the place’s name to wander to that place. When the person arrives—when the letters match and the body and geography coincide— the cult ritually murders the person. Most of the victims are old or infirm, usually wanderers or outcasts. The cell does not do anything to force the person to arrive at the designated place; they simply wait and watch. According to Owen, the cult “intended nothing, they meant nothing” by the murders. “They only matched the letters” (308). Their methods highlight, or, rather, produce, the seeming contingency of their actions. The cult thus demonstrates the dangerous limit case of a belief that language is mystically powerful by virtue of its abstract material patterns. Owen’s unreasoning passion for the inscribed alphabet becomes, in the cells of the cult, a passion in the more literal sense: the passion, the suffering, of the sacrificial victim. With the cult at the center of the novel’s plot, DeLillo seeks through other characters and scenes to imagine an alternative to its vision of language, an alternative that retains the mysticism of the cult while making mystical language beneficial to human life rather than destructive of it. In fact, DeLillo imagines two ways that language

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can remain beyond reason and yet respect—and even celebrate—human life. One way is through conversation, especially small talk; the other is through the writing of the child, Tap. Small talk fills every corner of the novel, especially in repeated scenes of expatriate English-speakers gathering for dinner, drinks, or coffee in the cafes of Athens. James, walking at night in the city, is struck by the way small talk permeates Greek culture in general. “People everywhere are absorbed in conversation,” he reflects. “Conversation is life, language is the deepest being. We see the patterns repeat, the gestures drive the words. It is the sound and picture of humans communicating. It is talk as a definition of itself. . . . Every conversation is a shared narrative, a thing that surges forward . . . the participants drawn in completely” (52). James’s reflections at first revolve around the idea that language is about communication and narrative, which is not surprising, given the centrality of narrative shaping to his own reports. But his interest in pattern takes him beyond this rational paradigm to a more formal and liturgical understanding of what conversation is about—or rather, what conversation does. “This is a way of speaking,” he goes on, “that takes such pure joy in its own openness and ardor that we begin to feel these people are discussing language itself. What pleasure in the simplest greeting. It’s as though one friend says to another, ‘How good it is to say “How are you.”’ The other replying, ‘When I answer “I am well and how are you,” what I really mean is that I’m delighted to have a chance to say these familiar things—they bridge the lonely distances’” (52–53). Conversation, to James, can bridge the distance between persons by the production of “shared narrative,” but at its most basic level conversation connects persons through ritual communion. In the latter version, it does not matter what conversation is about, what narrative is being shared, but rather that familiar formulae are exchanged. Hence the fact that it is small talk, rather than any weighty conversation about ultimate questions, that is most powerfully transcendent in The Names. The second way DeLillo imagines a beneficially mystical language is through the writing of Tap.29 In a book bearing the title The Names, it is worth pausing over Tap’s name. It describes a sound rather than being a recognizable personal name, and, moreover, the sound it names is strongly associated with writing since the invention of the typewriter. We know that Tap writes by hand on lined paper, so his name indicates not the sound of his writing so much as the sound of DeLillo’s writing: DeLillo writes only on a typewriter. In one interview, DeLillo explicitly notes the importance of the machine’s sound. He is asked if he thinks he could “get used to a computer.” He replies, “No, I need the sound of the keys, the keys of a manual typewriter.”30 And the most striking characteristic of Tap’s writing (for James) is the way he translates sounds into letters. Like Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra, Tap cannot spell. Instead of knowing and following the conventions of orthography, Tap uses letters to reproduce the sound of the spoken word as he hears it. For “Yield” he writes “Yeeld,” for “fate,” “fait.”

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When we finally see Tap’s story (titled “Prairie”), which makes up the closing chapter of the novel, we find that it is a fictional rendering of Owen Brademas’s life and that it focuses on Owen’s early experience of Pentecostalism—specifically, his failure to speak in tongues. The story describes a child, Orville Benton (Tap names the Brademas character by matching the initials, cult-style), urged by his parents and his pastor to “Yeeld” to the Holy Spirit. He tries to speak in tongues but cannot, and runs out of the church into the night and rain. “Tongue tied! His fait was signed,” Tap writes. “He ran into the rainy distance, smaller and smaller. This was worse than a retched nightmare. It was the nightmare of real things, the fallen wonder of the world” (339). The “fait” signed in Tap’s story points back to the life trajectory Owen lays out for James: his waning interest in solving the riddles of ancient cultures, his subsequent “unreasoning passion” for the material letter, and his final immersion in the cult. It also points to what I want to suggest is the redemptive version of this passion. The phrase “fallen wonder of the world” describes Orville’s sense that his failure to speak in tongues disenchants the world, robs it of wonder; at the same time, it describes just the kind of wonder that inhabits the world in The Names—not the high, pure, abstract wonder of the Names cult, but the ordinary, “fallen” wonder of something like human conversation. This is not to say that fallen wonder is not also religious wonder, or even a humane form of religious purity. As Owen waits with the cult members for their victim to wander into town, he remembers how the preacher exhorted them to let the “babbling brook” of glossolalia come out of them, how he listened to his father speak in tongues. In religious ecstasy, he reflects, “normal understanding is surpassed, the self and its machinery obliterated. Is this what innocence is? Is it the language of innocence those people spoke, words flying out of them like spat stones?” (307). Tap is part of the answer to that question: he is innocent of the conventions that confine language, and his misspellings, his phoneticisms, are the sign of it. The living water of the Spirit’s babbling brook, stopped up in Owen, imaginable to him only as spat stones, flows through Tap and onto the page, revealing yet another aspect of his name’s meaning. And James, for his part, recognizes the spiritual importance of Tap’s language. “Nothing mattered so much” to him, on James’s second reading of his son’s story, “as a number of spirited misspellings” (313). The fact that James sees the misspellings as “spirited” suggests, finally, a revision of the Judeo-Christian debate about the spirit and the letter of the law: here, the spirit might seem to be revealed when the letter is disregarded, but in fact it is in the very material of the letter, revealed when convention is flouted so as to call attention to letters, that the spiritual reality of language can be perceived. It should by now be clear that glossolalia serves as the model for the mystical structure of language throughout the novel, even if the characters themselves do not speak in tongues. Indeed, one of the final scenes recalls the Pentecost recounted in the Acts of the Apostles: when James finally, after months in Athens, visits the Parthenon, he hears the temple resounding with the small talk of tourists

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speaking in many tongues. It is the small talk itself, rather than a message about Christ’s resurrection, that is the divine good news in DeLillo’s Pentecost. It is the chance to exchange the familiar responses that not only heralds but actually embodies the arrival of a holy spirit. Though DeLillo does not align himself with the whole religious frame of Pentecostalism, he nevertheless recoups the heart of Pentecostal practice—the mystical experience of speaking in tongues—in the character of Tap. Tap is like tonguespeakers not only on the occasion of his “spirited” misspellings, but also in his daily language: he speaks “Ob,” a child’s language game (like Pig Latin) where the syllable “ob” is inserted in the middle of every word (as in “lobost obin spobace”—lost in space [87]). Ob carries with it a number of relevant definitions and archaic uses. The Oxford English Dictionary cites it, from Latin, as meaning “in the direction of, towards, against, in the way of, in front of, in view of, on account of.” In Latin “obit” means to die; “ob” designates an archaic halfpenny and, coming through the Hebrew, it means necromancer or sorcerer. And of course, O and B are the initials of both Owen Brademas and Tap’s fictional version of Owen, Orville Benton. I don’t mean to claim, in listing these meanings, that “ob” means all these things whenever it appears; “ob” in Tap’s use is a nonsense syllable that renders ordinary language strange without changing the meaning of ordinary language. To put it another way, etymology—where the history of a word’s uses adheres to the material letters, like the inscriptions on that obsolete halfpenny coin—informs DeLillo’s own understanding of language in The Names but not because it transforms meaning. “Ob” in particular, with its senses of magic, of death, and of orientation and seeing, and with its Latin and Hebrew provenance, represents what material language in general stands for in this novel. Material language—stone letters, the sounds of glossolalia, Tap’s spirited misspellings—incarnates the ultimate mysteries. It contains within it the threat of death (when the cult matches the letters), the possibility of human transcendence hidden in the ordinary (in small talk), and the possibility of intercourse with the divine (glossolalia). Elsewhere, DeLillo connects his fascination with glossolalia explicitly to his interest in the language of children; both kinds of speaking suggest, for DeLillo, the existence of some kind of transcendent language.31 Language, epitomized by glossolalia and made ordinary through Ob and the language of children, is thus figured in religious terms. I want to return, finally, to the Catholic context I laid out earlier to suggest that it is so figured in a particularly Catholic way.

DeLillo’s Catholic Vision Underworld, as any reader of the novel will remember, closes with a Catholic vision. Sister Edgar, a nun who has appeared throughout the Bronx sections of the novel as a cruel disciplinarian (she is a terror to her students), a

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And what do you remember, finally, when everyone has gone home and the streets are empty of devotion and hope, swept by river wind? Is the memory thin and bitter and does it shame you with its fundamental untruth—all nuance and wishful silhouette? Or does the power of transcendence linger, the sense of an event that violates natural forces, something holy that throbs on the hot horizon, the vision you crave because you need a sign to stand against your doubt?34

The questions are general enough in their terms to suggest that they apply not only to the vision of the murdered girl but also to a whole remembered experience of religion, the religion of childhood, the religion of Catholic school and street pro-

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strict traditionalist (she still wears a habit after Vatican II), and wary of being contaminated by the poor she serves (she wears rubber gloves to touch them), sees a vision of a murdered girl on a billboard in the South Bronx. Gathered there with a crowd of believers, she sees the vision they see, strips off her rubber gloves, and finally enters into the state of spiritual communion that until then sat latent in her religious life. DeLillo notes that she even pumps the hands of some Pentecostals—about whom she’s been skeptical—who are also there to see the vision. She dies soon after, and the final pages of the novel contain a dreamlike meditation on her afterlife in some virtual state within what Gerald Howard calls, in an interview with DeLillo, a “very Catholic conception of cyberspace.”32 There, in that space, Sister Edgar—or her spirit—sees a website of atomic bomb explosions, thinking, for a moment, that she is seeing God, and she merges with the novel’s other Edgar, J. Edgar Hoover, before the screen turns black and the novel’s final word appears: “Peace.” What are we to make of this ending? What of the merging Edgars—which seems of a piece with DeLillo’s satirical humor—set next to peace and the afterlife—which critics generally agree are not presented ironically? Readers of DeLillo have typically been reluctant to say that vision, peace, and the afterlife triumph over J. Edgar Hoover and the bomb, preferring to set DeLillo in a middle space where he is expressing longing for the transcendent or uncertainty about it rather than some version of the transcendent itself. These readers argue that the critique of fundamentalism so evident throughout his work makes any endorsement of religion impossible in the novel, that the violence DeLillo aligns unmistakably with fundamentalisms of all sorts, including Sister Edgar’s violence in the classroom, discounts a religious answer.33 I want to come at the problem from a different direction. That is to say, I want to suggest that in the closing scenes of Underworld, DeLillo posits, after the fact, the central question about religion that I think his earlier work has been attempting all along to answer. At the close of the novel, speaking of Sister Edgar’s miraculous vision, the narrator ruminates on what happens after the vision is gone. The narrator is ostensibly asking what happens to the faith of Sister Edgar, but DeLillo switches to a second person address that implicates the reader, and perhaps the writer, too:

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cessions and a parent’s devotion, experiences no longer part of an adult life in which one is only religious, or even spiritual, as DeLillo has described himself, “in a very general sense.”35 Indeed, Sister Edgar is the evocation of just such memory: she is named after one of DeLillo’s grade-school teachers.36 But it is that remembered tradition itself—most specifically, the liturgical tradition of the Latin mass, and most generally, the tradition of prayer as such—that allows DeLillo to avoid being shamed by the memory of a Catholicism he sees tainted by some “fundamental untruth” and, moreover, that allows him to continue to suggest that there is something “holy,” that “violates natural forces,” to stand against the doubt that there is anything to transcend the miserable real of the South Bronx. In a 1995 letter to a reader named Jon Jackson, DeLillo writes that “fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment.”37 What I think he means, given the evidence of his novels, is that language becomes an instance—or rather, for DeLillo, the instance—of something like divine immanence. It is not so much the medium through which persons can come into contact with God as a medium that contains the transcendent within it. The syllables of glossolalia are generated when the Holy Spirit blows into the body of the believer like breath. (It should be noted that Owen Brademas fails to explain the phenomenon away as a “neutral” experience or the product of human psychology.) This religious mysticism does not fall away when glossolalia is reproduced as Ob, or as the small talk of tourists. And it is here that Bill Gray’s comparison between the novel and the Latin mass in Mao II makes the most sense. One is reminded of the way that Catholic theology—particularly the doctrine of the Eucharist and the liturgical signs that enact the Eucharist in the mass—posits the Real Presence of God in the material sign, in the everyday substance of bread and wine. I don’t mean to imply that DeLillo is a believer in that transubstantial doctrine. To the contrary, he seems to retain only a general mystical sense that nevertheless bears the imprint of Catholic doctrine. Moreover, doubt, akin, for DeLillo, to mystery, appears central to any religious sense in his work. (James Axton, in The Names, describes a shared “religion of doubt” [92] as the one thing about which he and his estranged wife never disagree.) Doubt here is not so much the sense of wondering whether something is true, though that rational uncertainty is part of it; DeLillo’s doubt is the state of consciousness that cannot be resolved by reason but demands something like the honoring of mystery as a response. If he does not exactly embrace, with Sister Edgar, “a fellowship of deep belief” (824), he nevertheless recuperates a religious sense from a midcentury Catholicism dogged by traditions and stereotypes of submission and rote memorization.38 What is more, he thus argues against the violence he associates with any fundamentalism or cult, Catholicism included. The spiritual practice in which one can avoid human abasement (the violence of

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the cult murders or the lesser violence of the parochial school classroom) is language, and not because language is the medium of agency, reason, and selfexpression. Language counters human abasement because it is, like the “incense” of jet fuel for Sister Edgar, “a retaining medium that keeps the moment whole, all the moments, the swaying soulclap raptures and the unspoken closeness” (824) that is, for her, the fellowship of belief. At a formal level, this is the sort of wholeness that Underworld aims for by holding the history of America and American culture since 1950 between its covers. When we see that language is conceived as a “retaining medium,” the weakness of plot structure in Underworld and in DeLillo’s work in general takes on new significance; plots, in DeLillo, can’t do that ultimately spiritual work. Language conceived as a retaining medium frees the person from the strictures of reason to reach a mystical relation to the material world and to what transcends the material world. (And here we can see DeLillo’s affinity with Marshall McLuhan.) This is the point of Nick Shay’s Jesuit education in Underworld: Father Paulus teaches him to name the parts of a shoe, and through the act of naming to see “the depth and reach of the commonplace” represented by that “gorgeous Latinate word,” “quotidian” (542).39 The recurrent theme of the cult in DeLillo’s work reinforces the point, but also complicates the sharp distinction between fanaticism and the “religious meditation” of his fiction. The cult—be it the CIA, the Names cult, the Unification Church, or the Catholic Church—is never endorsed. Even the cult of writing, if it becomes faithless, rather than faithful, formalism, as it does for Bill Gray in Mao II, cannot be tolerated. That said, the kinship between the CIA and Catholic practice made explicit in Underworld, the kinship Bill Gray posits between his writing life and monastic life, indicates something more than critique. One is tempted to see these kinships only as critique of the Catholic side of the doubling. But when Sister Edgar and J. Edgar Hoover merge in the Internet fantasy that closes Underworld, we see not the negation of the nun’s religious vision, but rather how easily the structures, the logics of secret and mystery, can veer from life-sustaining to deadly. As Irving Malin and Joseph Dewey point out in their essay on the three Edgars of the novel (the third being Sister Edgar’s favorite poet, Edgar Allan Poe), the nun may be dead, but she’s got a soul and an afterlife, while Hoover is dead in life, busy contemplating his custom lead-lined coffin.40 DeLillo explains the connection between the church and the CIA this way, well before Underworld was written: “The important thing about the paranoia in my characters is that it operates as a form of religious awe. It’s something old, a leftover from some forgotten part of the soul. And the intelligence agencies that create and service this paranoia . . . represent old mysteries and fascinations, ineffable things. . . . They’re like churches that hold the final secrets.”41 While DeLillo’s fiction never ceases to register the guilt associated with political versions of paranoia and the search for world-ordering meanings, by revealing the “old mysteries”

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at the heart of these things he nuances the critique. The longing for mystery and meaning bears the highest human value; where one finds it, how one insists upon it, will determine its moral valence. When Sister Edgar merges with J. Edgar Hoover, something close to the traditional Catholic mode of redemption is at work. Her holiness—in all its flawed humanity—holds out hope for the unredeemed Hoover. Sister Edgar, for all her faults, has been given an afterlife that doesn’t look out of place in Catholic tradition. DeLillo has suggested that there is something we could call “the untellable” (a term he uses somewhat satirically in an early novel, End Zone) that could be “another, clearer language”: “Will we speak it and hear it when we die? Did we know it before we were born?”42 DeLillo’s fondness for the open question at such moments is telling; it testifies to the sense of doubt surrounding what here seems like an assumption that there is an existence prior to birth and after death. What he wonders is whether those states have a language, not whether those states exist; similarly, in the earlier quotation about the CIA, he speaks of “some forgotten part of the soul,” implying that he believes in the existence of a soul even as it is partially forgotten. In line with this sotto voce belief, the doubling of the Edgars mixes redemption with critique, but the critique is not at odds with, and does not negate, the redemption, the idea of a human soul that persists beyond bodily death. I have placed Underworld last in my analysis of religion in DeLillo because it plays out, in Catholic terms, the mystical structures articulated in his earlier work. Underworld shows how the version of the mystical that DeLillo constructs in the earlier novels is used in the later novel to account for the religion of his childhood. In this sense, DeLillo’s work imagines how religion that is abandoned in most respects can persist in a literary form, and how it can do so without ceding religious experiences or meanings to secular versions of the same. The bulk of my readings here have shown how such a structure is imagined in the characters and situations within DeLillo’s fiction. My invocation of DeLillo’s biography hints toward the perhaps more provocative claim I have just argued, that there is some evidence to suggest that DeLillo’s own conception of his work demonstrates a similar conservation of an ostensibly abandoned religious practice. The two ideas at work here—that DeLillo represents a mysticism of language and also sees himself as practicing that mysticism in his fiction—are not necessary to one another. That is, DeLillo need not see his own writing practice as mystical in order to write novels in which characters do see language as mystical, or even in order to write novels that seem to endorse such mysticism at the level of form. The interest of connecting these two arguments is thus not in their ability to reinforce one another—though this may nevertheless be persuasive—but in what the juxtaposition of the artistic and the biographical reveals about the work literature does historically. DeLillo’s status as a nonpracticing American Catholic sets him within a significant demographic in the late twentieth century—the demo-

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graphic of the “lapsed Catholic.” His turn to language as the site of the mystical, and his embrace of a writing practice based on this notion, demonstrates an individual’s transposition of religion from its traditional setting to the realm of art at a particular moment; the popularity of novels that themselves imagine such a transposition suggest that DeLillo’s response, like his demographic, is not his alone. Perhaps one can best see the line DeLillo walks between the cult he, and his novels, reject and the redemptive belief that he, and his novels, embrace in his essay on the events of September 11, “In the Ruins of the Future,” which appeared in Harper’s in December of 2001. In this essay, DeLillo indicts fundamentalism for its failure to see the human person as such and to value her. The carefully told story of what his niece, Karen, and her family experienced in their apartment building near the site that day responds to that failure. It is full of detail about children and food, phone calls to loved ones, chairs in the hallway for the old. Embedded in a critical essay, the story enacts DeLillo’s insistence on ordinary human life, an insistence increasingly palpable in his novels over the course of his career. In the closing image, a Muslim woman prays on her rug on a busy Wall Street sidewalk. That simple image makes visible how the sacred most compellingly inhabits ordinary life and brings us back to the language of formal prayer as a legitimately transcendent language even in the age of terror. Glossolalia, the Latin mass, small talk, the ritual of conversation or of the sentence: this is how DeLillo imagines fiction as a religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment. He imagines an enlightenment that consists not in doctrine, but in prayer; not in instruction, but in vision; not in reason, but in rapture; not in knowledge, but in mystery. In Sister Edgar and her vision, DeLillo’s religion of language comes home to its pre–Vatican II, Catholic origin.

The Bible and Illiterature

N THE previous two chapters, I have shown how particular writers, working in the context of certain popular religious cultures, turn to the material aspects of language as the foundation for a literary mysticism, to find a way of believing without doctrine, to craft a belief without meaning that will satisfy the religious longings that are so much on the surface of both Ginsberg’s and DeLillo’s work. In this chapter, I examine the fate, in the late twentieth century, of what is probably the literary text that is, as a material object and as a literary text, the most mystified in American life—the Bible. In their dealings with the Bible, literary critics and novelists in this period work out the relationship between literature and the sacred in ways that make literature akin to scripture. To imagine literature as scripture is not the same as imagining it as supernaturally powerful on the model of Hindu chant, as Ginsberg does, or as transcendent on the model of the Latin mass, as DeLillo does, though all these impulses share a recognizable desire to connect the religious and the literary. The elite literary writers and critics engaged with the Bible in the eighties and nineties are in many ways less invested in traditional religion and its powers than the writers I have focused on up to this point, though they write at a time when the persistent religious status of the Bible hedges around its role in public education, as the first section of this chapter lays out. But if the writers here are less invested in religion, they are even more invested in literary authority and its powers, and thus their example begins to connect the analyses of specific writers and popular religious contexts I have been detailing to the literary critical history I laid out in chapter 1. The fact that the figure of the illiterate, to which this chapter’s title alludes, becomes central to working out the relationship between literature and scripture in two of the period’s most

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The Bible after Abington Since 1963, the status of the Bible in public school classrooms has been largely stable. Two cases decided together in that year—Abington v. Schempp (PA 1963) and Murray v. Curlett (MD 1963)—determined that reading the Bible devotionally, that is, without comment, violated the First Amendment.1 The decision affirmed, however, that religious texts could still be taught in public schools as long as they were part of a “secular program of education”: It might well be said that one’s education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization. It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.2

Following this ruling, secondary school educators sought to design the sort of curricula that could allow the Bible to be thus studied in public schools, but that effort was complicated by a quality of the Bible that the opinion in Abington highlights as a reason for the court’s decision against the school district. Arguing that the Abington school district’s practices were not secular though their lawyers had argued that they were intended to be, the decision declared that “the place of the Bible as an instrument of religion cannot be gainsaid.” No matter how secular the exercise of reading the Bible without comment was intended to be, the Bible’s status made its ritualized use a violation of the Establishment clause. “The place of the Bible as an instrument of religion” haunts the efforts of those secondary school teachers who sought to advance the study of the Bible in public schools in the years following the decision. We can see this plainly in a 1967 handbook for teachers designing courses in the Bible as literature, prepared by what would become a center for development and dissemination of such curricula, Indiana University’s English Curriculum Study Center.3 (The handbook also had federal endorsement, in the form of support by the Cooperative Research Program of the Office of Education of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.4) Philip B. Daghlian, a professor of English at Indiana University, suggests in the manual’s prefatory note that it is “virtually impossible to get away from the sense that the Bible is a sacred book and as such is subject to attitudes and pressures in connection with the teaching of it that do not apply to the teaching of, say, Emily Dickinson or Shakespeare.”5 The problem

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celebrated novelists, Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison, is thus both surprising and telling; to explain why, and how, and what that means for the status of literature in the late century is the burden of this chapter.

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is solved, he suggests, by finding the right expert to design the curriculum (in this case, James S. Ackerman, a well-known Biblical scholar). But this solution does not obviate the “fact that the Bible is a sacred book”(viii); that persistent fact returns like an unlaid ghost. The authors, for example, “make the following respectful and sincere request of readers of this book: If, as you read these pages, you feel the slightest twinges of annoyance, outrage, shock, or any other unpleasant emotion evoked by the way in which the Bible material is being presented, please do not plan to prepare a teaching unit of your own based on this material” (viii–ix)—that is, on the material as it is offered up in the handbook. The admonition is repeated twice, once in the prefatory note and once in the introduction. Likewise, the explanation of the authors’ responses to religious leaders, given in the preface, is quoted verbatim in the acknowledgments. The sense that even scholarly, secular expertise could not erase the aura of sacredness surrounding the Bible pervades these anxious promptings. What is striking about them is that they imply that disagreement and its attendant “unpleasant emotion(s)” should not become the basis for constructive engagement with the handbook or, indeed, with the analysis of the Bible it offers. Rather, such feelings should simply lead one to find a curriculum with which one already agrees. Offering an authoritative and state-sponsored curriculum on the Bible, the authors nevertheless subordinate that authority, and the notion of instruction itself, to the religious feelings of their readers. In the same vein, a 1978 curriculum handbook, a successor to the first and arising from the same institute at Indiana University, suggests that one is safer to teach the “literary” qualities of the Bible over the “human” value of the text, despite the fact that both approaches represent legitimate ways of teaching literature in general.6 The reason is so obvious as to be left unstated: the fact that the Bible is seen by some as a sacred book gives its social or moral implications a potentially coercive authority that simply doesn’t flow from books not considered sacred. The author suggests that these secular books, unlike the Bible, may be used freely to stimulate thought about morality and human values. Aesthetics—the Bible’s “literary” qualities—become a refuge from the problem of sacred aura and from the problem of what the Bible has to say about human life and behavior. The problem highlighted in these handbooks is thrown into relief by the history of the practice banned by the Abington decision—that of reading the Bible without comment, which for the court means reading it devotionally. Paradoxically, this was a practice intended to promote religious pluralism. Bible reading without comment in the classroom began with the rise of nonsectarian schools in the early nineteenth century, where daily readings from the King James Bible, along with King James versions of the Lord’s Prayer and Ten Commandments, replaced substantive discussion of doctrinal issues, such as predestination, that divided Protestant denominations.7 The practice of reading without comment was advocated

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by Horace Mann (the first State Secretary of Education, serving in Massachusetts) during the great debates over religious teaching in public schools in the 1830s, though his approach was not without controversy, since Catholics did not recognize the King James Bible as legitimate scripture. Prior to the significant Catholic immigrations of the nineteenth century, allowing the Bible simply to be read rather than instructing students in the interpretation of scripture toward a particular doctrinal stance promised a degree of pluralism in the classroom—pluralism narrowly circumscribed by the Protestant realm, to be sure, but a species of pluralism nonetheless. What had changed, then, since the 1830s was that reading the words came to look less like the presentation of a text to be interpreted variously and more like the ritual enactment of a majoritarian Christian religious identity, an identity far less troubled in the 1960s by denominational difference than had been the case a century earlier.8 It was the very notion that the Bible was open to multiple interpretations, which is to say, the notion underlying the practice of reading without comment in the early nineteenth century, that the courts affirmed over and against reading without comment in the middle of the twentieth century. In arguing that the study of the Bible as literature or as part of the history of religion was not inconsistent with the First Amendment, the court suggested not only that the Bible could be interpreted variously, but also that students would do well to understand these various interpretations and to learn to produce some of their own. The development of Bible as Literature curricula such as the ones found in the curriculum handbooks aimed to close this gap and reinstate the centrality of interpretation, albeit literary rather than doctrinal. The realm to which the majority in Abington and the educators at the Indiana Curriculum Study Center looked as the guarantor of a secular understanding of the Bible—the realm of literature—was at the time fostering other ways of using the Bible and of understanding the kind of devotional practices banned in 1963. I will argue in the next section that some of the most prominent uses of the Bible in late-century literature work against the line of reasoning and the pedagogical developments coming out of the Abington decision. Rather than seeing uses of the Bible that underline its capacity to be interpreted, what emerges is a sense of the Bible as a closed object, an object at once aesthetic and sacred, an object that becomes a talisman, rather than an example, of literary authority. As the history of aesthetics might suggest, and as we shall see in the discussions of late-twentiethcentury fiction and criticism that follow, focusing on Biblical aesthetics might help insulate instruction against the persistent authority of the Bible’s social, moral, theological or philosophical claims, but to do so cannot dispense with the Bible’s sacred aura. In the writers I take up in the following, the sacred aura persists as a religious feeling about literary form. Thus if the teaching manuals understand the Bible as literature that is awkwardly saddled with sacred status, the writers I en-

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gage here see the Bible crowned as literature by that status. Conversely, I will argue that such writers imagine that literary works appropriating some essential quality of the Bible (what that quality might be varies from writer to writer) can surpass the secular realm of the merely literary to enter the higher realm of cultural authority occupied by the Bible as sacred book. We see a late-century conjunction, then, between the Bible as literature and literature as Bible.

The Bible as Literature We find the most concerted effort to tie literature to the Bible, and the Bible to literature, at the high end of literary criticism, at the moment of what Edward Said called, in 1983, “religious criticism.”9 Between 1975 and 1995, many of the most prominent literary critics turned to Biblical criticism, often regardless of their prior literary specialties. A surely incomplete list of books, arranged chronologically, demonstrates the point: Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism (1975); René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1977); Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (1979); Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981); Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982); Gerald Hammond, The Making of the English Bible (1982); Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (1985); Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (1985); Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick’s collection, Midrash and Literature (1986); David Damrosch, The Narrative Covenant (1987); Alter and Kermode’s collection, The Literary Guide to the Bible (1987); Gabriel Josipovici, The Book of God: A Response to the Bible (1988); Bloom, The Book of J (1990); Leslie Brisman, The Voice of Jacob: On the Composition of Genesis (1990); and Alter, Canon and Creativity (2000). While some of these accounts of the Bible—such as Frye’s The Great Code or Damrosch’s Narrative Covenant— understood the Bible in structuralist terms informed by narrative theory (and in Frye’s case, by a Christian tradition of typology), others claimed a more historicist motivation, the effort to see the texts of the Bible as historically situated documents written by various authors for varying purposes. All this critical activity has important ramifications for how one interprets the scriptures, but those are not my concern here; it is rather the stakes for literature that interest me. For while some of this work hewed close to a secular purpose, prominent examples of it drifted inexorably toward the redeployment of the Bible’s sacred status. Two things distinguish this body of writing as a whole from earlier engagements with the Bible as literature. First, it coincides with a sociological shift in American higher education—the end of formal and the waning of informal Jewish quotas in elite higher education after the Second World War.10 Among the critics turning to Bible-as-literature scholarship—some of the foremost literary critics of their time—

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we find a new generation of Jewish scholars finding a home in elite English departments, many of which (Yale in particular, where Bloom, Brisman, and Hartman taught, and where a number of these critics were educated) were bastions of the New Criticism. Jonathan Freedman has argued that this generation of Jewish critics both revised and conserved the New Criticism of their teachers, continuing its “formalist project without adhering to the particular onto-theological predispositions of high Yale formalism at is high Anglican best.”11 Thus the conception of literature to be found in this body of criticism must be understood to constitute one of those moments in which a traditionally Jewish outlook on texts (respecting and, in religious ritual, making sacred their material forms) finds common theoretical ground with the ritual forms of Anglo-Catholicism as enshrined in the New Criticism. Second, as David Norton, the foremost scholar of the history of the Bible as literature, has pointed out, this body of Bible criticism is distinguished by a new focus on Biblical narrative and the question of whether the Bible (or books within it) are unified texts. Of course, this fact is related to the New Critical pedigree of these scholars; through that approach, they come to make large claims for the literary as such through their engagement with the Bible. Matthew Arnold, who was the first to use the phrase, “the Bible as literature,” preceded twentieth-century critics in the latter enterprise. For Arnold, his ideas about the spiritual effects of culture and literature are tied up with his ideas about religion such that to see the Bible as an example of great literature only promotes its religious significance, though not in a traditional way. He does not, for example, advocate reading scripture as literature in the schools as a way of enticing students toward the moral or doctrinal teachings of the Bible by teaching them how to find literary pleasures in the text.12 In America in particular, this was often the explicit or implicit rationale for including the Bible in literary curricula in the schools: more often than not, studying the Bible as literature was a “camouflage” for the study of the Bible as religion.13 While the religious importance of studying the Bible as literature was not absent from more scholarly writing on the Bible in the early twentieth century, the literary importance of doing so emerged along with the discipline of literary studies. Richard Moulton, a professor of literature at the University of Chicago and the coauthor of The Bible as Literature (1896), argued that “an increased apprehension of outer literary form is a sure means of deepening spiritual effect” and that “form is the foremost factor in the interpretation of matter.”14 Moulton saw his focus on form as new in part because “the study of literature, properly so called, is only just beginning.”15 He was not interested in the study of the text’s history or in its possible authors, as the nineteenth century’s Higher Criticism had been, suggesting that “the study of literature will never reach its proper level until it is realized that literature is an entity in itself, as well as a function of the individuals who contributed to it.”16 Similarly, John Hays Gardiner, of Harvard, opens The Bible as English Literature (1906) by stating that he has “assumed the fact of inspiration, but without at-

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tempting to define it or to distinguish between religious and literary inspiration. The two come together in a broad region where everyone who cares for a delimitation must run his line for himself.”17 The implication is that Gardiner does not see such a “delimitation” as crucial to his mode of reading. As we shall see, Moulton’s and Gardiner’s understanding of literature is very close to the view held out by Frank Kermode—and, indeed, by a whole generation of literary critics—a century later.18 The question of the Bible’s unity, newly ascendant in late-twentieth-century criticism of the Bible as literature, is related to the effort to make new claims for literary study. Harold Bloom, for example, irritated by Frye’s and others accounts of the Bible as a literary whole, sought instead to recover the luminous fragments eclipsed by the redactor of the Pentateuch. He thus posited The Book of J, a reconstruction of the original text of the Yahwist writer, whom he imagines as a woman, a consummate ironist, a sublimely literate and clever member of the court of King Solomon. What emerges from Bloom’s account is not a more rigorously historicized recovery of the source text, however, but a flight of literary imagination. The fragment is reimagined as a lost literary whole that Bloom has been given to intuit. He introduces his act of reading as a species of monotheistic faith: “I can prove nothing; I can only invite other readers to the hypothesis that there is one J.”19 Where Frye may give us the Bible as a literary whole, made whole by a version of Protestant faith in typology, Bloom gives us another divinely inspired whole, albeit a smaller one. He gives us the sacred individual genius of imagination that is always, for Bloom, at risk of being obscured by the ham-handed institutional editor, the undiscerning masses, and the demands of sanctioned dogma. As I have suggested in chapter 1, Bloom’s sacralizing of genius leads him to posit, in The American Religion, a “religious criticism” very difficult to distinguish from literary criticism. As these brief discussions of Frye and Bloom suggest, the stakes of Biblical study for literature are often implicit. But sometimes they are not, as is the case with Frank Kermode’s early contribution to the flood of Biblical literary criticism, The Genesis of Secrecy. Presented at Harvard as the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures for 1977–1978, the book postulates a hermeneutic practice revolving around the “secrecy” of texts, a practice that always privileges latent over apparent meaning. Such a practice will lead the interpreter not to truth within the text but to momentary “radiance,” analogous to the radiance that the man shut out from the Law is given to see at the end of Kafka’s parable, Before the Law.20 The vehicle for Kermode’s analysis is the Gospel of Mark, chosen because of its seemingly unsophisticated surface, and, within Mark, Kermode is most interested in the parable as a literary form. The parable fascinates Kermode because it is announced in Mark as Jesus’s way of speaking secretly to his disciples, to those with ears to hear. It is just this sort of secrecy, hidden in plain sight in the parable’s skeletal narratives, that for Kermode characterizes the best of secular literature as well— including any canonized text, such as the plays of Shakespeare, as well as a novel

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like Henry Green’s Party Going, which, though not yet canonical, shows its potential for that status through the way meaning is hidden behind a parable-like simplicity of scenario. For Kermode, secrecy is what makes literature literary. Kermode insists upon the secularity of his hermeneutics, though I would take issue with his implied definition of secularity (he does not elaborate on what the term means for him, except that it clearly means one is not a Christian or a religious Jew), since the terms he uses to describe the act and the fruits of interpretation are distinctly numinous even if they are not doctrinally religious. Interpretation is called “divination” throughout, and is associated, through the structure of midrash, with the act of writing scripture. The manifest sense of a narrative like Mark is what he calls the “carnal”sense; the latent sense, the “secrecy” of the narrative, is the “spiritual” (4). The reader who can see the secrecy in Party Going, we are told, is possessed of the “circumcised ear” (7). And yet such faithful perception is always fleeting. He laments that “We are most unwilling to accept mystery, what cannot be reduced to other or more intelligible forms. Yet that is what we find here [in Mark]: something irreducible, therefore perpetually to be interpreted; not secrets to be found out one by one, but Secrecy” (143). Like Don DeLillo, Kermode finds spiritual mystery at the heart of the literary enterprise. While advocating this kind of spiritual reading, Kermode connects scripture to contemporary literature by imagining the authors of the gospel texts in terms that seem drawn from the vocabulary of the modern craft of writing. Of the story of the end of Judas’s life, included in Matthew, but not in Mark, Kermode claims that “nothing but an interest in character can account for these narrative additions” (91). David Norton rightly takes issue with the assertion, suggesting that it is entirely possible that something like research into the matter of Judas’s life supplied the material for these additions rather than, as Kermode would have it, simply the way “narrative begot character, and character begot new narrative” (91). Though Kermode admits that “it cannot have seemed” to Matthew “that he was simply inventing” the details he adds in his own account of Judas, since there were hints of a larger story to be told already implicit in Mark’s text, Kermode continues to describe that work in terms we would use for a writer of fiction today. “It was all part of the business of being a writer,” he explains. “Matthew is generally thought to have been a more skillful writer than Mark. . . . Certainly he was neater than Mark. For example, he sees no reason for referring twice, as Mark does, to the testimony about the bread; once was better, and he cut the first one out. He is quick, too, to spot gaps in Mark’s narrative” that he could fill with new narrative (89–90). The language of this description sounds awfully like the language we might use to describe a student’s work in a writing workshop. Kermode argues, too, that John’s revisions of Mark are the product of John’s superior skill as a writer of narrative, and the result of deliberate decisions about how he could best use that skill. What emerges is a vision of a modern fiction writer who knows he is

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writing scripture. (As Norton points out, the latter point is misleading; canonicity and the shape of the modern Bible emerged well after Matthew wrote.) Kermode’s indifference to content—his explicit aim of privileging “what is written over what it is written about” renders his gospel writers ambiguously faithful in their scripture writing. These writers’ faith is faith in narrative form. If The Genesis of Secrecy connects the Bible with modern fiction through an interpretive mode that is more numinous than rational, that equates the “business” of writing modern fiction with that of writing scripture, and that is driven by a latetwentieth-century interest in opacity and latent meaning, Robert Alter’s Canon and Creativity (2000) takes up the relation of modern writing to Biblical writing through the question of canonization. In doing so, he places them together under the sign of aesthetic authority that presides, on Alter’s account, equally over the modernist canon and its original Biblical model. For the canon debates to which Alter directly speaks in this book are about what counts as literature and what counts as literary quality; Alter enters these debates through the vehicle of scripture. As a major force in the surge of interest in the Bible as literature beginning in the seventies, Alter’s view is both influential and, in many ways, representative. Looking back to the originary act of canonization manifested in the Hebrew Bible, and then to the ways modernist writers reinforced and deployed the canonicity of the Bible, Alter argues that these examples of canon formation reveal that canonicity is not, or not entirely, a function of ideology. One would be mistaken, he suggests, to posit the canon as a collection of works that speak together in a common ideological voice.21 Alter sees canonicity as inhering in the literary quality of texts as set apart from doctrinal normativity, even in the originary instance of the Hebrew Bible, where doctrinal normativity is assumed to have been the point of enshrining a set of texts imagined to possess a divine origin and used to define a religion. Through meditations on the doctrinal and stylistic variety to be found in the texts included in the Hebrew Bible and through readings of modernist writers who deploy the Bible, he argues that both believing writers and those, like Joyce, who use the Bible as a secular text recognize the literary qualities of the Biblical text as separable from the doctrinal content.22 As Alter’s learned readings demonstrate, even believing writers use the literary qualities of the scriptures and of their own compositions to turn the doctrinal sense of the narrative structures, metaphors, and wordplay they borrow from the sacred text. The Bible’s canonicity, as it is reaffirmed among the modernist writers on whom Alter focuses, depends not upon ideology but upon the capacity of scriptural language to feed the ongoing production of literariness. Thus Alter argues that that modernists carry forward what was always a “bifocal” understanding of the scriptural canon: that these texts constitute an authorized body of works not simply because of their doctrinal acceptability, but also because they embody the best instances of writing in the language. “The stylistic and imaginative authority of the works that became canonical,” Alter writes,

85 versely, it seems plausible that there were Hebrew texts excluded from the canon not for doctrinal reasons but because they were inferior as works of literature. The soaring, and searing, poetry of Job, the lovely lyricism of the Song of Songs, were so keenly appreciated by the ancient audience that it was unwilling to have them lost to posterity, for all the theological radicalism of the former and the sensual secularity of the latter.23

Note how the tentative claims of the first sentence—“must have been,” “it seems plausible that”—shift into the confident assumptions of the second as it restates the point. Alter’s ultimate point about literature is still, as in so much of the “Bible as literature” scholarship of the period, an unspoken one: if the literary, the quality that defines canonicity above doctrine even in a canon whose very existence as such is a doctrinal assertion—the Hebrew Bible—is “not entirely secular after all” because (as Alter says of Joyce’s use of the Bible) it is a source of “value and vision” (183), the sacred thus separates out from doctrine just as surely as literary quality does. Literary quality in Alter’s reading thus ushers the sacred back into the realm of the literary quality—if, indeed, it ever really left after Matthew Arnold completed his work. Though unspoken as such, this point resonates in Alter’s language when he speaks of the literary qualities of various texts in a way reminiscent of Kermode’s textual “radiance.” The language of magic, of cosmic order and fate, and the language of transcendent agency—often a specifically masculine transcendence and agency—comes frequently into Alter’s descriptions of literary quality.24 These terms conjure for literary quality the masculinely personified but ultimately transcendent force we associate with the Hebrew Bible’s God. For Alter, literary power and religious power, like Gardiner’s literary inspiration and divine inspiration, are not easy to distinguish; like Gardiner, Alter does not draw the line of distinction for us. The presence of this language is related to Alter’s approach to the contemporary canon debate. Why, we might ask, does he locate the “dual vision” of canonicity in the original scriptural canon? Alter’s argument about the relative importance of doctrine and literary quality in canon formation is fully satisfied by demonstrating how the Bible remains canonical among modernists who transform or discount the doctrinal claims of scripture while using it for its literary resources. But to locate this balance in scripture, he must enter the realm of speculation—learned, to be sure, but still speculation. “It is not unreasonable to surmise” that the Jewish leadership chose texts for their literary qualities as well as for—or despite—their doctrinal ones. Alter attributes to the Jewish elite not a more complex theology, which would be one way of accounting for “problem-texts,” but a more modernist literary sensibility. Either Alter is positing an ancient Jewish elite who look a good bit like a modernist elite or he wants to posit a modernist elite who see literary quality in religious terms. I think he is doing both. Alter’s account makes the case ultimately for a necessary connection between the founders of the first monotheism and the

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must have played a role in the desire to preserve them in the national legacy—and, con-

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founders of the literary order that defines twentieth-century literature and Alter’s own criticism. Modernism gave to literary criticism its twentieth-century exegetical focus, and Judaism—as Alter points out—inaugurated textual exegesis as a religious discourse by embracing a sealed canon. Alter strikes a fine balance between positing literary criticism as religion and positing religion as literary criticism, but like the canon-makers he imagines and emulates, he finally has a “binocular view” of canonicity that binds together the literary and the religious. The fact that doctrine is not central to the religious—that it is evoked as something like religious feeling—marks the difference between his historical moment at the end of the twentieth century and the ancient moment of canon-making he contemplates. It also marks his affinity with the fiction of his own time.25 The relevance of modern writers for Alter’s understanding of Biblical texts as literary objects is clear when he invokes these writers in the preface to his striking translation of the Pentateuch, The Five Books of Moses (2004). In the introduction to the translation, Alter argues that the style of Cormac McCarthy, along with that of Stein, Faulkner, and a few others, which renders in English the kind of parataxis essential to the grammar of Biblical Hebrew, reveals the possibility of an English that matches the literary qualities of the scriptural original. Alter’s ambition, as he makes plain in the introduction, is to write a version of the Bible that will match the literary importance of the King James version, a translation that will honor the specificity of Hebrew scriptures as that translation did not, but that will also honor the literary advances of the twentieth century. Alter wishes, at the end of the twentieth century, to write a version of the Bible that, like the Authorized Version, will embody the achievement of a literary epoch, with the difference that modernism’s achievement is so close to that of Biblical Hebrew on Alter’s account that the translation becomes equally genuine English literature and Hebrew literature. And so the process comes full circle: the Bible supplies to literature its sacred status, which literature then offers back to the Bible in the form of modernist style.

Literature as Bible It makes sense for Alter to invoke the style of Cormac McCarthy to demonstrate the possibility of a literary English that can match the Bible’s literary Hebrew. Readers of Blood Meridian, the novel that made McCarthy’s literary reputation, were immediately struck by the way the novel’s style radiated Biblical authority.26 That Biblical style is embodied in the parables and orations of the novel’s famous villain, Judge Holden, and in the archaic cadence of the narrative voice—in what we might call the book’s “numinous rumble,” to borrow a phrase from a contemporaneous commentator on the King James Bible.27 McCarthy believes that the novel can “encompass all the various disciplines and interests of

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You want to keep your fire high, said the smith. Three or four inches above the tuyer iron. You want to lay a clean fire with good coal that’s not laid out in the sun. He turned the axehead with his tongs. You want to take your first heat at a good yeller and work down. That there ain’t hot enough. He had raised his voice to make these observations although the forge made no sound. He cranked the lever again and they watched the fire spit. Not too fast, said the smith. Slow. That’s how ye heat. Watch ye colors. If she chance to get white she’s ruint. There she comes now. (71–72)

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humanity”—including disciplines such as physics, astronomy, archeology, and botany and crafts such as ironwork, stonemasonry, munitions, animal husbandry, and pottery.28 Encompassing the giants of English literary history through allusions to Wordsworth, Faulkner, and, above all, Milton, and also all the work of the world, McCarthy’s ambition for the genre begins to look Biblical in proportion. That said, I will argue that it is not so much genre as style that becomes the basis on which McCarthy builds his work’s complex relation to scripture. In privileging style over other sources of connection to scripture McCarthy’s approach to the Bible joins that of Alter and Kermode, who argue for the importance of scriptural aesthetics (of enchantment, power and radiance) over doctrinal or historical content. To see how McCarthy accomplishes this in fiction, I want to look first to one section of an earlier novel, Child of God (1973), where the relationship of style to the divine is assiduously worked out. Child of God is the story of Lester Ballard, “a child of god much like yourself perhaps,” a man dispossessed of his farm, a tramp-cum-necrophiliac-cummurderer inhabiting shacks and caves in the Appalachian hills.29 Before Ballard makes his first kill, while he still seems basically harmless, he finds a blunt axehead and takes it to a blacksmith for sharpening. The smith, a real craftsman, insists that the axe needs not sharpening but reforging to produce a true blade. Lacking the money to pay him full price for the work, Ballard tries to negotiate, but the smith soon decides to render the service for free, or rather, to render it for payment of another kind. The smith marks his changing tack—the moment when he ceases negotiating for money—by saying, abruptly, “Tell me somethin.” This is an odd remark, as it will be several pages before the smith gives Ballard an opening to say anything at all. From this moment and for most of the chapter, it is the smith who will tell Ballard something: while he works on the axe blade, the smith tells Ballard exactly what he is doing and how, as if Ballard must pay with his attention if he cannot pay in coin. The construction “tell me” in the smith’s dialect is best translated as “let me tell (you) something.” That said, its reflexive structure highlights the question of who is telling what to whom, and suggests that despite all the smith’s talking, it may be Ballard who tells most. The smith, for his part, tells of craft. He talks mostly about colors, shapes, altitude, orientation, and timing:

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The “colors” the smith admonishes Ballard to watch are assiduously cataloged throughout the short chapter, by the smith and also by the voice of the narrator. The latter describes this first “good yeller” as “translucent yellow”; the next heating will be to a “high red” (72), where the bit is brought to what the narrative voice describes as “a deep orange color with pins of bright heat breaking on it” (73) that then “faded to a faintly pulsing blood color” (73). At other stages, the axehead is brought to a “shine,” rendered “black and shiny as a nigger’s ass,” brought to a “low cherry red” (73), and finally given a “blue temper” (74), which requires that the metal be heated until “brown” (74). The procession of colors is matched by a string of archaic words and constructions and technical language belonging to the smith’s craft. “Tuyer,” for instance, is the term for the pipe that admits a blast of air from the bellows into the forge-fire; the most recent citation given by the Oxford English Dictionary for the word (there spelled “tuyere”) is dated 1900. The effect is twofold: to render the smith’s work aesthetic and to remind one of the origins of both his tools and the materials of language. If there is a question to follow upon the smith’s enigmatic “Tell me somethin,” it comes only after much instruction from the smith, when the axe is finished and cooling. “Reckon you could do it now from watchin?” the smith asks as he sorts through a barrel of handle stock to find the right fit. The chapter ends with Ballard’s reply, giving him, after a long silence, the last word: “Do what, said Ballard” (74). Ballard’s question is not indicated as such; it stands as statement by virtue of punctuation and by the dialog tag (“said” instead of “asked”) that goes with it. These two words are the sum total of what Ballard has to tell the smith. So what do the words mean? Ballard’s question at one level is the sign of his ignorance; more disturbingly, it betokens his narcissism, the way other persons bear a simply instrumental relation to himself. The smith’s words are irrelevant to him, as is the kindness they embody and the way they recognize him as a human being (who might be abject, but who still possesses the capacity to learn, to do for himself despite dispossession). But his question is also one we must take seriously as a question despite the lack of interrogative markers. What has he, and what have we, the readers, been shown how to do? Ballard has been shown how to make an axe, and perhaps McCarthy thinks he has shown the reader how to make one, too. More importantly, however, the chapter is a virtuosic demonstration of verbal art imagined as plastic art, signaled as high style by the way the smith “raised his voice . . . though the forge made no sound.” We have been shown how to make something out of words, how to forge something from the stubborn material of language, from the obscure words, archaisms, and vocabularies of technique that McCarthy excavates here and throughout his writing.30 What’s made, too, is character (Ballard, and also the smith), character dignified by human traits. In the interaction between Ballard and the smith, McCarthy

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transmits the sense that Ballard could be remade—reforged—as a human being who could attain the dignity of doing for himself. The axehead, in a synecdochal relation to Ballard, takes on living flesh itself, not only as it cools to that “blood color” but also in the “muscle” the smith “put in on the flats” of the blade (73) and, in the smith’s racist idiom, in the way it gets “black and shiny like a nigger’s ass” (73) just before the steel is hardened. Indeed, the language is freighted not just with animation but with phallic imagery (hardening) and the language of sex (the smith’s repeated “now she comes”), bringing the work closer not just to Ballard as a man who might be remade but to Ballard’s own obscene work with corpses, where he has sex with dead women, hacks up bodies, and fashions clothes for himself from their skin and hair. Though we aren’t told so, one assumes he eventually uses the axe for just these purposes. The chapter thus aspires to creative acts of the most fundamental kind: the creation of tools, the creation of art, even the creation of the human person or the remaking of the human body, in both the material sense and the metaphysical sense. The rhetoric of rightness suffuses the chapter: “Shape ye fire for the job always” (74); “It’s like a lot of things, said the smith. Do the least part of it wrong as ye’d just as well to do it all wrong” (74); the smith calls the color of metal right for each stage of work “the color of grace” (72). As much as the smith’s work can be aligned with Ballard’s butchery, then, it can also be aligned with the work of God—a line of reasoning suggested, from another angle, by the novel’s title. At the level of plot, the notion that Ballard could be so remade as a person as to be able to “do it himself” is absurd, of course; nothing suggests he’d have that capacity of mind or manual skill, let alone the tools and the forge. But what about the reader? For Ballard’s position in relation to the smith is also the reader’s: both are spectators to the smith’s performance; as Ballard watches the blacksmith, the reader watches the wordsmith—McCarthy. Ballard’s question is implicitly attributed to the reader, then. Can a reader learn to make art from McCarthy’s demonstration of verbal making? We might say that the right reader could, and McCarthy himself is proof of it. In the novel’s structure, thematics, and style, Child of God closely resembles Faulkner’s novels, and, in particular, As I Lay Dying (also a novel about what people do with corpses). McCarthy imitates shamelessly and despite the borrowing, or maybe because of it, this chapter is clearly meant to dazzle. The text’s aesthetic pleasure, as will be the case in Blood Meridian, exists in tension with the horrific acts upon which the novel dwells, acts that can be read as metaphor for how McCarthy has learned the art of the novel by watching and using the writing of others. There is a kind of necrophilia in the way McCarthy sees his dead predecessors’ corpus as the material of his own artifice. Ballard, though I have been arguing that he is aligned closely with the reader, is in this sense also very much an author figure as he fashions clothing for himself from his victims’ skin and hair. That said, he, and the novel, are McCarthy’s creation. McCarthy calls both of

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them, and, most audaciously, the reader, the “child of God,” bluntly placing himself in the top position with respect to all of these: God’s position.31 The sense that McCarthy imagines his novels as divine creations gels in his violent magnum opus, Blood Meridian, where the narrative voice is distinguished by its archaic diction and Old Testament, paratactic cadence, and the central character, Judge Holden, sounds both like Christ telling parables and like Milton’s Satan addressing his fiends. As if in complement to the critical assessments of McCarthy’s style that have made such comparisons to Biblical language commonplace, readings of the novel have been preoccupied with how to characterize the novel’s worldview—as nihilist, Darwinist, naturalist, anarchic, Gnostic, or as a humanist critique of the extreme violence it represents with such equanimity (one is tempted to say, with such relish). Dana Phillips gives perhaps the best of these readings, arguing that none of the philosophies spouted by the judge can account for the novel’s violence, that the novel’s world is in the end purely a materialist world of facts.32 I want to suggest that these two aspects of the novel—its style, which, as James Wood has noted, can produce something close to nonsense,33 and the meaninglessness of its metaphysical and philosophical discourses—reveal the counterintuitive way the novel aspires to the authoritative status of scripture. The God-like status of the writer worked out in Child of God is more palpable at the surface of the text in Blood Meridian. In a well-known passage where Judge Holden sermonizes on the high calling of war, a follower named Irving notes that “the good book does indeed count war an evil. . . . Yet there’s many a bloody tale of war inside it.”34 The description applies just as well to Blood Meridian. The sense that McCarthy must be delivering a critique of violence has always hovered over the novel despite McCarthy’s hard-edged comments about the inevitability of bloodshed and the utopian stupidity of thinking civilization can progress beyond the need for violence.35 Though Blood Meridian does not “count” war an evil, McCarthy ensures that we see it as such, all the while giving us, as the Bible does, “many a bloody tale.” Doing so ensures that his novel is a “good book” in the literary sense: McCarthy believes that great literature must engage life and death matters. If it does not—and in McCarthy’s view, the work of Henry James, to take one example, does not—it is simply not great literature. McCarthy’s aim to tie the novel to scripture is buttressed by the judge’s habit of speaking in parables and parallelisms. Discoursing to the members of the Glanton gang on the ruins of the Anasazi Indians, he concludes his account thus: “For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us” (146). Similarly, on man’s desire for knowledge, he intones, “the man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition

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Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god. (249)

As with most parables, these leave us puzzled. How are we to read them? What do they mean? I want to suggest that to leave the reader thus questioning is the point of the parable; it is what the parable is about. And so I note first what is obvious in these passages, that is, the way McCarthy makes the judge’s language echo the familiar Biblical structures of scenario, simile, and rhetorical question found in the Bible’s wisdom literature and in Jesus’s teachings in the New Testament, and how his metaphysical conclusions become so dense or elliptical as to make one wonder whether one has ears to hear. I want also to note the preoccupation with will that is on display here. This is not simply the judge’s preoccupation. The narrator, too, raises the question of agency constantly, as when the kid and his companion Toadvine clean their weapons after the gang has massacred an encampment of peaceful Tigua Indians: “They ran balls and cut patches as if the fate of the aborigines had been cast into shape by some other agency altogether. As if such destinies were prefigured in the very rock for those with eyes to read” (173). McCarthy describes the two, who will in the wake of these sentences briefly question the violence in which they have just participated, in the terms the judge uses to describe the players in the passage on war. Even those apparently exercising agency in McCarthy’s novel are controlled by some other agency. A vaguely personified form of war, or of Darwinian selection, sometimes looks to be responsible, as in the preceding passage, but if war thus looks like God or Nature, it also looks like writing. After all, Judge Holden de-

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will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate” (199). On war, I quote at length:

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scribes war—as the “ultimate trade,” in which “all other trades are contained” (248, 249)—in the same terms McCarthy uses to describe the novel, as the genre that can “encompass all the various disciplines and interests of humanity.” And by the transitive property of McCarthy’s metaphor, he thus elides writing and God: the life-and-death selectivity of that “other agency” Judge Holden speaks of can only be the selectivity of McCarthy himself. To flaunt that selective agency is the point of the novel’s violence and the structural reason why the judge’s language is so often indistinguishable from that of the narrative voice.36 The character so often responsible for random deaths in the novel also speaks with the novel’s voice even if he is not the novel’s narrator. My point thus far is akin to what I have argued about Child of God, and places McCarthy firmly among the generations of writers who have imagined the artist as God. One image in the later novel exemplifies, in a more pointed way, what it means to make this claim. For scripture—understood religiously as the text written by God through the divine inspiration of human agents—is figured explicitly in Blood Meridian at a crucial joint in the novel’s structure. It appears as “the kid,” the boy whose travels with the Glanton gang we follow through most of the novel, leaves the gang after their rout by the Yuma Indians, and sets out on his own: He traveled about from place to place. He did not avoid the company of other men. He was treated with a certain deference as one who had got onto terms with life beyond what his years could account for. By now he’d come by a horse and a revolver, the rudiments of an outfit. He worked at different trades. He had a bible that he’d found at the mining camps and he carried this book with him no word of which he could read. In his dark and frugal clothes some took him for a sort of preacher but he was not witness to them, neither of things at hand nor things to come, he least of any man. (312)

The Bible, carried by the illiterate kid, seems the sign of some change in him, the sign of his departure from the murderous life he had led in the Glanton Gang. The passage in which his possession of it is announced suggests that others, too, see in him the sign of something like wisdom. But to read the Bible figuratively—as sign, or as icon, of maturity—we need first to ask how the kid has changed. If this novel is a bildungsroman, has there been maturation? It is at this point in the novel, after all, that “the kid” comes to be called “the man.” A more obvious assertion of maturity would be difficult to devise. I would argue that the kid does not develop, especially not in the moral sense that his attachment to the Bible might seem to suggest. In other words, we should take seriously the narrative’s assertion that “he was not witness to any of them . . . he least of any man” even though so much of the novel’s structure and tone prompts us to think otherwise, and to read these sentences as understatement. I take these lines not simply to be a description of his behavior—that he looked like a preacher but didn’t witness to them—but also as an assessment of his charac-

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ter as such. The passage suggests that he had nothing at all to tell those who interpret his clothes and his possessions as the signs of some worldly or otherworldly wisdom. What makes the narrative’s insistence on this point hard to see is the fact that the judge so dramatically insists otherwise. When the judge finds himself exposed in the desert after the gang’s dissolution, passing before the kid’s gunsights as the kid hides, the judge calls out to him mockingly. “There’s a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know?” he taunts. “You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen” (299). Later, in their final encounter, where the judge will finally kill the kid, now become the man, the judge asks, “Was it always your idea . . . that if you did not speak you would not be recognized?” (328), implying that the kid, in not speaking against the massacres in which he participated, had in fact been trying to hide his weak but authentic self, that soul which harbored “some corner of clemency” for other human beings. Readers—student readers, especially—are often tempted to use the judge’s accusations as the narrative thread along which to string what has, up to that point, been an unbroken and frankly repetitive series of massacres. It gives them a way of understanding the kid’s transformation into “the man” and a way of accounting for his apparently special, and perhaps adversarial, relation to Judge Holden. But it would be a mistake to take the judge’s word about the kid. It is worth pausing here—given his importance to the literary tendency I am tracking—to note that Harold Bloom is one of the readers who makes this mistake. Bloom describes the kid’s minimal resistance to the judge as “heroic,” as if to tell the judge in their final confrontation, “you aint nothin,” is a significant act of speech in a character not known for his eloquence.37 When the judge replies, “You speak truer than you know,” he is imputing meaning to the tough-guy cliché the kid uses, and McCarthy is drawing together the strands of his novel. In Bloom’s desire to believe the judge, and to believe that these strands have a traditional literary shape on the model of Shakespearean tragedy, he misreads (though not, I think, powerfully): the sign of it is when he heedlessly capitalizes the kid’s name—“the Kid”—when it appears this way nowhere in the novel, typographically telegraphing his conception of the kid as a hero. To his credit, Bloom registers the novel’s moral ambiguity and takes seriously the novel’s claim that the judge cannot be accounted for by any “system”—Gnostic, or moral, or supernatural. But Bloom holds onto the system that for him is so close to the religious—the system of literary greatness represented here by the traditional structure of great tragedy. Bloom loves Blood Meridian, and he is seduced by the novel’s style to believe that the novel gives us the sort of structure that can sustain the notion of a heroic act. To be sure (returning now to the novel), the kid’s role in the major massacres of

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the novel is artfully obscured by the narration; he virtually disappears into the gang’s collective pursuits for about seventy-five pages at the exact center of the novel, pages during which they are most active in hunting down and murdering any person whose scalp might be taken to be of Indian origin (these “receipts” to be presented to the Governor of Chiapas for bounty). On the few occasions that we do see the kid in these pages, we see him perform what seem to be acts of mercy. He walks toward a man shot through with an arrow as if to help him, though Glanton shoots the man before the kid can reach him. He pulls an arrow from the thigh of a fellow gang-member, David Brown, when all others, including the judge, have refused to help. He joins his comrade Toadvine in grumbling against the judge—or at least, he listens to Toadvine’s complaint—when Holden leads them to attack peaceful Indians and when the judge takes an Indian child, dandles it on his knee to the delight of the men around the campfire, and then strangles and scalps it when it is time to break camp. It is strangely easy to forget that these acts and intimations of mercy bear no fruit that we would want to call good. David Brown, for instance, who with the kid’s help goes on to fight another day, joins the gang in slaughtering yet more innocents. Though the kid listens to Toadvine and seems to agree with his indictment of the judge, neither he nor Toadvine acts against him. Toadvine gets as far as putting a gun to Holden’s head, but soon puts the weapon away of his own accord when the judge challenges him to shoot or desist. And the kid, too, refuses to kill Holden when he has the chance in the desert after the gang had been routed. Though the judge mocks him for harboring clemency for the heathen, and suggests that this is why he forbears to kill the now-defenseless judge, the kid’s action—or failure to act—at that moment contradicts the judge. If the kid harbored mercy for the heathen, he’d kill the judge in an instant. Acts of mercy such as these are morally ambiguous at best. They represent the futility of even trying to fire up a moral machinery to parse the bloodshed McCarthy represents. At worst, such acts perpetuate violence and are motivated not by mercy but by the desire to preserve oneself by ensuring the gang’s well-being. Even at the close of the novel, where the newly minted man makes his final kill in self-defense, the act seems not so much a morally redeemed—if also tragic— version of the violence that dominates the kid’s earlier life but rather the pathetic repetition of it. McCarthy links the man’s last kill specifically with that previous violence by suggesting that the boy he kills in this scene is related to the murdered traveler featured in one of the judge’s earlier parables about the irresistible patrimony of violence. Holden’s claim that only the kid harbored clemency for the heathen or refused to join wholeheartedly in the gang’s bloody work looks finally like another instance of the judge’s sophistry. He will kill the kid at the end of the novel, having provided, for himself and for the naïve reader, the explanation for his act. The judge instructs us to see the kid as his nemesis, the good (and therefore

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weak) force opposed to his heroic evil. The narrative of moral exception, of moral development, even of maturity that counts for wisdom, is not what the novel gives us so much as what the judge gives us. The novel simply substitutes “man” for “kid.” Indeed, it is in this respect that the language of the judge is significantly distinct from the language of the novel. In almost every other way—in verbal style, in philosophy, in scientific and anthropological knowledge, in reading, even in humor—the narrator and the judge are indistinguishable. This is why the kid carries the Bible. He carries it not despite the fact that he is illiterate but because he is illiterate. An authoritative account of the world and its history that denotes a final redemption, offers meaningful explanation for how the world works, or provides a framework for understanding the morality of men, is irrelevant in Blood Meridian. Or rather, it is less than irrelevant; it is illegible. What matters is that there are such accounts, that the Bible can become an icon of divine authority. And this is finally what McCarthy’s ambition to write something that sounds like scripture means. He aims to point to the existence of violence, the features of it, its variety and sameness; he does not aim to give us a system by which to understand that violence. As Dana Phillips has argued, all the discourses held out by the judge as candidates for explaining the world—science, evolution, metaphysics, philosophy, religion—are in his hands, and in McCarthy’s hands, only the rhetoric of narrative shape. What matters is one’s ability to impose one’s words and shape the world out of them. In the forge chapter of Child of God, McCarthy imagines a creator of verbal and plastic art and lets us (and Lester Ballard) watch him work. In Blood Meridian, the virtuosic display of vocabulary is located not just in a character like the smith (that is, not just in Judge Holden), but also in the narrative voice itself, a voice whose identity and origin are not shown and that overlaps conspicuously with Holden’s voice. What’s more, from the novel’s first moment, all literary predecessors are ostentatiously banished, for “in truth his father was a schoolmaster,” who “lies in drink,” and “quotes from poets whose names are now lost” (3). We are left with McCarthy’s style standing alone, much as the judge dances alone at the end of the novel and, we are told, “never sleeps” and says “he will never die.” We are left with the presumptuous creation of a prose that sounds like scripture, tempts one to read (for metaphysical structures) as if one were reading scripture, and yet withholds all but the aesthetic and sentimental effects of scripture. In this sense, McCarthy has written, in Blood Meridian, a sentimental novel of the highest order, albeit quite a different sort of sentimental novel than one would find in the nineteenth-century America that provides the novel’s setting. Blood Meridian is designed to make us feel, above all, like God is speaking, but to leave us in possession only of the unreadable aesthetic object, like the illiterate kid clutching his Bible. This is Bible as style, as a tone of authority as opposed to authoritative argument or history or supernatural claim. Indeed McCarthy has been called a “nov-

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elist of religious feeling.”38 It is that “feeling” that I want, finally, to emphasize: Blood Meridian gives us sentimental novel as scripture.

The Bible as Illiterature If the illiterate figure for McCarthy serves to empty the Bible of all but its style, to make scripture above all an extraordinarily authoritative sound pattern that confers a godlike status on the author, for Toni Morrison the illiterate’s relation to scripture figures another kind of power in relation to reading, or rather, to nonreading. I will suggest that this could be described as supernatural power, or supernatural reading, and that the Bible plays a crucial role in figuring this sort of literacy. While I will argue that the notion of supernatural reading effaces the work of the author, at the same time the resulting mystification of the author suggests an otherworldly expertise or access to the spiritual, casting Morrison as a shamanistic figure that in the African American tradition has a power equal to the sacred aura McCarthy recruits from the giants of the Western tradition. Her use of the Bible in constructing that mystification not only invokes the religious and artistic traditions of African American life, but also broadens her reach, out to the white Christian world and its literary tradition. Morrison seeks to replace white possession of the Bible, and its cultural and spiritual authority, with an authority based in the illiterate’s possession of that sacred book, in the process maintaining—and, more importantly, deploying—the ultimate privilege accorded to the Bible in Western culture. Establishing such a vision of literacy in Morrison’s work is a two-part project. On the one hand, she critiques traditional literacy in terms that demonstrate the complicated status of the Bible in relation to the white aesthetics she seeks to deconstruct. On the other hand, she offers narratives of literacy where learning to read coincides with taking possession of supernatural power. Though many of Morrison’s novels seek to accomplish the first part of this work, we can see it very clearly in her early novel, The Bluest Eye (1970). There Morrison explicitly pursues the problem of white standards of beauty and directly addresses the question of how to construct the “Black aesthetics” she has sought to articulate throughout her work. It is telling, then, that the novel begins not with beauty but with reading: the opening passages are pages from a Dick and Jane primer, describing Jane, her family, her dog, and her blue eyes. The primer returns frequently as epigraph to the novel’s sections, the passages selected for the way they provide a vision of the white cultural baseline against which the narrative of Pecola Breedlove and her family stands in abject contrast. In addition to thus—by juxtaposition—becoming the object of critique, passages from the primer are arranged on the page with no

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breaks between words, in capitals, with words broken at the ends of the passages. The formatting, in addition to the repetition native to the old-fashioned primer, makes the passages difficult to read, makes them a figure for the way the world they represent proves unintelligible in the world of the Breedloves. Or rather, the primer’s intelligibility—so simple, so plain, made for a child—is revealed to be distortion, illegibility, and madness when set next to Pecola’s story. To learn to read in The Bluest Eye is simultaneously, and inseparably, to learn the aesthetic codes of whiteness. For the black child, Morrison suggests, abjection is the companion of reading. And so learning to read is not the liberating act that it is in the tradition of African American writing going back to the slave narrative, but rather the instrument through which the black body is insidiously reenslaved after slavery’s end.39 Appropriately, then, it is the novel’s one book-learned black man—the lecherous Soaphead Church, a crank spiritualist—whose authoritative narrative honoring the virtue of black desire for white beauty finally drives Pecola into madness. When Pecola comes to believe, at the end of the novel, that God, through the intercession of Soaphead Church, has turned her eyes blue as she so desperately desired, her psyche splits in two: one part, Pecola with the blue eyes; the other, the voice of a best friend, the only one who can also see and appreciate those new blue eyes, the one who embodies the love that Pecola expects will accompany her accession to white beauty. Because Soaphead Church is so thoroughly committed to the propaganda of white aesthetics, he perceives his deception of Pecola not as cruel but as redemptive. And he honors her desire with another reward, too: instead of molesting her as he would most other young girls who cross his path, he lets her be. He seems satisfied that he has acted righteously toward her, both in not molesting her and in convincing her that her eyes had turned blue. Afterward, in a letter addressed to God, Soaphead explains to God that he has now taken over where God has failed. “You forgot [the “little children”], Lord. You forgot how and when to be God. That’s why I changed the little black girl’s eyes for her, and I didn’t touch her. . . . Not for pleasure, not for money. I did what You did not, could not, would not do: I looked at that ugly little black girl, and I loved her. I played You.”40 Soaphead implies that in failing to make the world entirely white, God has allowed the suffering of the black child. He, taking over for God, supplies the sort of love God is unwilling to provide. The primer, as the figure for literacy, and Soaphead Church, as the figure for a godlike creator-by-the-word, stand in contrast to the fractured narrative of the Breedloves, a narrative that “could become coherent only in the head of a musician” (159). Morrison implies that making Pecola’s and her father Cholly’s life into a whole, into art, into beauty, requires something other than narrative, something other than the fruits of literacy. In keeping with that view, Morrison indicates in the afterword appended to the novel in 1993 that she continues to be dissatisfied with the novel as such. “The shattered world I built (to complement what is happening

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to Pecola),” Morrison writes, “does not in its present form handle effectively the silence at its center: the void that is Pecola’s ‘unbeing’” (215). The sense that the medium of the novel was inadequate to the creation of a black aesthetic, a sense conveyed within the novel, persists for Morrison over two decades later, and can be seen in fuller form in her 1992 Jazz: A Novel.41 It is hardly surprising that Soaphead Church is associated with religion—he trained for the Anglican priesthood—or that Pecola’s mother Mrs. Breedlove, whose love of beauty and order can only find expression in the house of her white employer, is an ardent churchgoer. While Mrs. Breedlove’s white aesthetics seem superficially acceptable, the perversion of Christian love that accompanies them breaks out in abhorrent ways. That perversion is best demonstrated when, during a ritual fight with her husband, Cholly, he falls onto the hot stove. She screams “‘Get him, Jesus! Get him!’” The narrator explains that “if Cholly had stopped drinking, she would never have forgiven Jesus . . . the wilder and more irresponsible he became, the more splendid she and her task became. In the name of Jesus” (42). The critique of white cultural aesthetics extends naturally to the structure of (Anglophile) religion that declares those aesthetics a species of orderly virtue. The Bible, however, as distinct from the institution of both the black and the white church, has a more complicated status in the novel. Claudia, the sometime narrator of the story, suggests one tedious Saturday, when their mother is in a bad mood, that she and her sister Frieda entertain themselves by looking at their boarder’s Bible after Frieda declares she doesn’t want to look at his girlie magazines. As opposed to the girlie magazines, Claudia reminds her, the Bible is “pretty” (26). Frieda still doesn’t want to go, and we soon overhear their mother’s invocation of the Bible in her ill-tempered mutterings against her children’s natural demand for milk to drink. “‘Bible say feed the hungry. That’s fine. That’s all right. But I ain’t feeding no elephants. . . . Anybody need three quarts of milk to live need to get out of here’” (27). While this harassed mother sets herself up against the Bible her daughter finds “pretty,” Aunt Jimmy, who rescues Cholly Breedlove, Pecola’s father, when he is abandoned by his mother on a junk heap, wants the Bible read to her during her final illness. The Bible’s association with Aunt Jimmy doesn’t so much reflect well on Aunt Jimmy as it reflects well on the scripture she craves to hear: Aunt Jimmy is the one character in this novel who simply loves a black child. This is how her attachment to Cholly is described by the community that gathers for her funeral, and this is what Cholly comes to realize only after she is gone and he is turned out into a world of pain. If Aunt Jimmy also loves the Bible, that speaks well for the Good Book. To make the point clearer, we might note that the Christian text subjected to explicit critique is not the Bible but Dante’s Divine Comedy, the text favored by the fastidious Soaphead Church for its “narrow” and neatly categorized view of virtue and vice (an impoverished reading of Dante to be sure, and surely not one we can

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attribute to Morrison). The way Morrison figures the Bible, as the book the one loving black woman in the novel loves, the book that the perceptive Claudia finds “pretty” by contrast to the white standards of beauty embodied in the girlie magazines, suggests that Morrison sees it as a potentially more capacious religious site than any other text or institution invoked in the novel.42 That view is not elaborated in The Bluest Eye, but it is borne out and elaborated by the Bible’s function in a later novel, Song of Solomon, whose title of course names both Morrison’s novel and a Biblical text. Song of Solomon, published in 1977 and thus contemporaneous with Kermode’s The Genesis of Secrecy, revolves around an enigmatic woman named Pilate Dead, so named when her illiterate father, Macon Dead, puts his finger down randomly in the Bible to name her at her birth and laboriously copies out the shapes of the letters. This connection, along with the title and the many other allusions to the Bible in this novel (and, indeed, throughout Morrison’s fiction) has given rise to a large body of criticism examining Morrison’s use of scripture. Most of that criticism argues that Morrison is revising or criticizing the aspects of the Bible she invokes—the Pauline notion of love, the erotics of blackness, the status of the prophet, the ground of holy community, the theology of slavery.43 At its most basic level, that line of argument typically juxtaposes the Biblical source of allusion with readings of the novel to demonstrate the differences and similarities between them, surrounding such comparisons with a larger theoretical or historical framework. Following on my claim about the Bible in The Bluest Eye—that Morrison presents the Bible as separable from white religion and violence against blacks— I want to take a different tack. Morrison’s debt to the Bible is certainly thematic in all the ways this criticism has shown, but it is more than thematic. What she borrows, more than anything else, is the Bible’s status as a sacred book, a book that gives a culturally authoritative account of the relation between what we see before us in the world and its supernatural meanings. Thus I want first to stress the novel’s supernatural commitments. Pilate is distinguished by the fact that she has no navel; her mother died, as Pilate counterintuitively explains, “before I was born,” and this is sometimes cited as an explanation for the lack. Because of this peculiarity, she is regarded as a supernatural, or at least, as an unnatural, being. Even her brother Macon, who grants her no competence in this world, admits her otherworldly powers: “Pilate can’t teach you a thing you can use in this world,” he tells his son Milkman. “Maybe the next, but not this one.”44 Macon is only half right (Pilate can teach plenty that’s useful in the world), but significantly so.45 Pilate, the novel intimates, is in fact supernaturally gifted. She sees and communicates with her father regularly long after his violent death, and she carries in a sack what turn out to be his bones, and from these emanate, throughout the novel, an unnatural cold, a spicy fragrance, and the animated sound of a sigh.

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Indeed, Pilate refers to the contents of this sack as her inheritance, and by the end of the novel we can see that it is not only the bones that she inherits from her father and passes down; she also passes down to her nephew, Milkman, the supernaturalism entailed in the bones and in her relation to them. As we learn through Milkman’s search for the gold he thought was in Pilate’s sack, he, and Pilate (his father’s sister), and the rest of his father’s “people” trace their ancestry to a “flying African” slave named Solomon who decided simply to fly away out of slavery one day. At the close of the novel, Milkman comes into his inheritance on a rocky outcropping, named Solomon’s Leap to commemorate his ancestor’s act. There, as she and Milkman bury her father’s bones at last, Pilate is shot by Guitar Baines, a friend-turned-enemy of Milkman’s, with a bullet meant for Milkman. Milkman takes Solomon’s leap before he, too, is shot, and finds that he has inherited his forefather’s supernatural ability to fly. Without “taking a breath, or even bending his knees—he leaped. As fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheeled toward Guitar and it did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother. For now he knew what Shalimar [his ancestral town] knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it” (337). As it turns out, his childhood dreams of flying, of which we learn earlier, signal the inheritance he thus seizes at the close of the novel.46 This supernatural ability is conserved in the genes of the Dead family. The notion that this is a sacred genealogy, marking them as a chosen people, is intensified both by the Biblical allusion of Solomon’s name, and through the Biblical language of the “begats” Morrison uses to recount the family’s lineage early in the novel: “Macon Dead who begat a second Macon Dead who married Ruth Foster (Dead) and begat Magdalene called Lena Dead and First Corinthians Dead and . . . another Macon Dead” (18). This is also, however, a genealogy of words, for the name “Dead” that the genealogy tracks was “a literal slip of the pen” by a drunken Yankee in the Union Army, who was registering blacks with the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Yankee wrote down what the man before him said, “but in the wrong spaces,” leaving the man who used to be Jake with “Macon” as his first name, “Dead” as his last, and “Dunfrie” as his place of birth (53). Thus, the family’s identity is conserved analogously in genes and in a genealogy of words, specifically, in a lineage of names that appear to be meaningless, the product of a “slip of the pen” rather than the “love and seriousness” of parents (17). Milkman’s search for the gold that he hopes will free him from his family’s demands paradoxically depends upon his learning to use and to interpret these family names. Mentioning the names of his father and his aunt to people in the town where they were born, he is suddenly admitted into the private history of the townspeople; his family’s names become a kind of currency, better, it will turn out, than the gold he so desires. The names’ power allows him access to the woman named Circe who cared for his father and aunt after their father was murdered.

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Circe gives him the next set of names: those of his grandparents (Jake and Sing) and of the town where she thought Jake had come from in Virginia—Charlemagne. Charlemagne turns out to be the oral transformation of Shalimar, pronounced by its denizens “Shalleemone,” which in turn is the oral transformation of “Solomon.” Following this trail south to the town of Shalimar, Milkman recovers the story of Solomon the Flying African by decoding a “meaningless rhyme” (264) he overhears as the children of Shalimar play an elaborate circle game: “Jake the only son of Solomon / Come booba yalle, come booba tambee / Whirled about and touched the sun / Come konka yalle, come konka tambee” (303). Milkman’s act of reading transforms him as a person but also transforms his understanding of language. Listening to the sounds the hunters of Shalimar make to communicate with their dogs and with each other in the night woods, he reflects that “it was not language; it was what there was before language. Before things were written down. . . . [the hunters] whispered to the trees, whispered to the ground, touched them, as a blind man caresses a page of Braille, pulling meaning through his fingers” (278).47 Road signs suddenly seem full of meaning, too: “He read the road signs with interest now, wondering what lay beneath the names” (329), and he thinks with new respect of the street back home named, for his maternal grandfather, “Not Doctor St.” when the city imposed the name “Mains Avenue” on the vernacularly known “Doctor St.” Nonsensical language, haloed by a penumbra of associated meanings, contains the revelation of the family’s supernatural endowment, and transforms Milkman’s life on the model of religious conversion—he returns home humbled, cured of his former narcissism.48 It is significant that the moment Milkman hears the rhyme marks his own departure from literacy to orality. He had a scrap of paper (the stub of his airplane ticket) but “no pencil to write with, and his pen was in his suit” back in the car; “he would just have to listen and memorize it. . . . And Milkman memorized all of what they sang” (303). And so while the second Macon Dead—the villain of the novel if there is one—declares that “everything bad that ever happened” to his father, “happened because he couldn’t read,” the best thing to happen to the third Macon Dead (Milkman), happens because, momentarily, he cannot write. It is as if when he memorizes the rhyme, it and the heritage it represents take hold within him, rather than residing outside himself on the back of the ticket stub. He has no need of that ordinary ticket to fly once he is given—in the language of the rhyme—a supernatural ticket to fly.49 In the end, Morrison privileges the oral and the illiterate over the literate for the conservation of both meaning and power. The idea that Pilate is associated with flying—which is announced by Milkman and the narrator at the end as the ultimate truth about who she is, a woman who “flew without leaving the ground”50—is uttered twice by illiterate men in the novel. First, by her father, upon hearing the word he copied out as her name, and much later, by an illiterate man in Shalimar named

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Small Boy, who, like her father, initially takes the name to be “Pilot.” “Sound like a newspaper headline: Pilot Dead,” he says; “She do any flying?” The men of Shalimar tease him for his misunderstanding, and for the fact that spelling the name out loud won’t clarify matters for him: “He don’t read the Bible”; “He don’t read nothin”; “He can’t read nothin” (283). He may not read the Bible, but he prophesies Pilate’s imminent death, and what’s more, he owns a larger truth about her not possessed by those who can or do read the Bible. The wisdom he possesses is precisely the kind the Bible instructs us to value: At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.” (Matthew 18: 1–5, RSV)51

Small Boy’s name, then, blesses his illiteracy with otherworldly status.52 The surfeit of meaning waiting behind the words in Song of Solomon is of a sort that, according to the novel’s explicit story, cannot be recovered through reading, but only by doing what Milkman does: finding one’s people, following the names not across a page but across state lines and back in time, entering into an oral culture. But of course we recover this very point by reading in the ways I have demonstrated, and so we are left to wonder what happens to the reader in Morrison’s novelistic structure. Are all traditional readers discredited in Song of Solomon? Is the kind of reading the critic performs, and Morrison herself clearly performs, always an enterprise that falls short of meaningfulness?53 In answering that question, it is helpful to note that there is some disagreement among readers about Pilate’s literacy. Brenda Marshall has shown that Pilate misquotes the passage she cites from Matthew when making up to the policemen who are holding Milkman in jail (he’s been caught trying to steal Pilate’s sack): we don’t know whether she is working from the memory of her own reading or, because she is illiterate, from the memory of hearing others quote, or misquote, the Bible. Marshall argues that Pilate is misquoting it deliberately, so as to mock the policemen (who don’t spot the error), assert her intellectual superiority, and cast herself in the role of Christ’s trusted disciple (or even in the role of Christ himself).54 That reading might run counter to my suggestion that the misquotation calls Pilate’s literacy into question, but not necessarily. Is it Pilate, or Morrison, who is mocking the ignorant white policemen, or, indeed, the ignorant reader who doesn’t know or look up the citation? Is it Pilate, or Morrison, who can bend the Bible to her own uses? In the hands of these characters, and in the hands of Morrison, the Bible becomes the site on which to assert readerly and writerly prerogative even —or especially—as nonreaders, nonwriters, or something in between, someone writing as if preliterate, as if for an unlettered reader. The condition of illiteracy

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which allows, for example, Small Boy to see Pilate as a Pilot, to see her true identity, is morally superior to that of the reader who can detect the wisdom the illiterate does not know he possesses, the reader who can see the difference between the spelling of Pilot and Pilate, and who can recognize the complex meaning of the first term’s relation to the novel’s trope of flight and the second term’s relation to the Biblical scene of moral abdication. In keeping with this argument, Macon Dead Sr.’s illiterate naming of his daughter models the literary self-assertion Morrison herself seeks to practice in naming her novel after a Biblical book. When he copies out the name “Pilate,” chosen because he liked the strength and protectiveness he read into the physical disposition of the letters on the page, he asserts the primacy of the meaning he assigns to the Bible’s words as an illiterate reader.55 Instead of burning the paper on which he wrote the name, as the midwife makes to do, Macon puts the paper back into the Bible, declaring that “It come from the Bible. It stays in the Bible.” Jan Stryz reads this as a kind of veneration for the source text, “rendered ironic by Macon’s unconventional reading” of scripture. I would argue—to follow Stryz’s argument further than she herself pushes it—that in fact irony isn’t necessary to make this act consonant with his audacious use of scripture. In effect, he alters the Bible, adds to it, makes his own writing and meanings, illiterate though they may be, part of that sacred book. This assertion of writerly power connects back to what I have argued is the supernatural achievement of Milkman’s illiterate reading; we can see the point and its implications most clearly in the context of Morrison’s most famous novel of supernaturalism, Beloved. At the close of that novel, the child Beloved, the supernatural embodiment of black history and black suffering, is banished from the town so that its black community can finally live and thrive in the present. Nevertheless, as the final section of the novel proclaims, “this was not a story to pass on”—“this” being the story of Beloved, the novel itself since the novel bears her name, and the story of black suffering embodied in Beloved, which is the story of black history. The dual meanings of “pass on,” however, mystify the story’s relation to actual readers and tellers. Does it mean that it is not a story one should tell others, or does it mean that it is not a story that will die, not a story that can “pass on” as the mortal person, or a lesser story, does? The dual meaning implies that the story has an existence and an agency that exceeds any ordinary human being’s words or intentions, and in the end Morrison implicitly claims for her own novel that sort of supernatural status. Similarly, the children’s rhyme that proves so crucial to unlocking the secret of Solomon the Flying African, Song of Solomon itself, and the Biblical book of love written (as tradition has it) by the divinely wise King Solomon merge, too, with the effect of rendering mysterious Morrison’s role as author. It is as if her words channel a supernaturally autonomous wisdom that threads through a succession of texts and persons, and finally through Morrison

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herself. The revelation of supernatural power is available for the reader who can, because of his illiterate status, see beyond the words themselves to this otherworldly meaning. In the light of these readings, it is worth listening to the way Morrison describes her literary aim. In a 1984 essay, she writes that she wants her reader “to respond” to her writing “on the same plane as an illiterate or preliterate reader would.”56 This startling conception of the ideal reader—complete with the seeming contradiction at the heart of it, where a reader is imagined as illiterate—comes as Morrison explains how and why she refuses to indulge in references to the established canon of written literature. By instead using oral traditions and folktales, she aims to show how her characters—many of them uneducated, some of them completely illiterate—approach the world with a vocabulary of narratives that shape the way they think about what and whom they encounter. Denied the shared assumption of a body of knowledge belonging to the educated, the reader as Morrison imagines him (and she does use, in this essay, the male pronoun) is denied his “traditional comfort” of knowingness and given instead, “an unorthodox one: that of being in the company of his own solitary imagination.” The sentence reveals a strange effect of Morrison’s effort to eschew the literary tradition and the resulting “pose” and cultural “authority” that redound through it to the author. In the end, the reader is imagined to be alone with his own imagination, rather than—as we might think—being left alone with Morrison’s imagination, as the latter is made palpable on the page. This is the more striking because Morrison’s major novels—Beloved and Song of Solomon in particular—are incredibly dense with internal allusion. It is as if all the traditional literary allusiveness that would be at Morrison’s command given her talent and her wide reading is channeled into a structure of allusion internal to the novels themselves. Thus in Beloved, trees, feet, shoes, a tobacco tin, the sound of buzzing, colors, water, hats, earrings, velvet, roosters, sugar, a baby’s pink fingernail, and a host of other things recur throughout the novel, accruing meanings, supporting allusion and revision as such things might through intertextual citation. It is nearly impossible to find a repeated image that is not completely integrated into the novel’s overall structure and thematics, and in this sense the novel’s structure looks most like the Bible read as a unified whole through a typological lens or understood as a masterpiece of narrative art—ways of reading the Bible that, as I have noted, are articulated by Bloom, Frye, and Kermode at roughly the same moment Morrison wrote these novels. Morrison’s conception of the reader as illiterate or preliterate effaces the reader’s prior knowledge and, along with it, the fact that he is a reader at all—this is a humbling of the reader that may explain why she retains the masculine pronoun. More surprisingly, though, it effaces the specific instance of reading that connects Morrison to him in the first place. But most amazingly, the notion of the preliterate reader effaces the fact of Morrison’s own literacy, the fact that it is her writing and

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her imagination that is manifested on the page and that fills most every slot at every level of allusion.57 And so Morrison’s literary ambition cannot be understood solely by her rejection of traditional literary authority and her emphasis on oral and folk tradition as a substitute for the canon. In rejecting traditional authority and yet keeping its traditional structure of allusion, she gathers all literary authority into herself. And the Bible fits seamlessly into this structure: Morrison has said that “the Bible wasn’t part of my reading, it was part of my life.”58 As such, it is not effaced by the rejection of canonical intertextuality but in fact becomes one with her personal, writerly authority.59 Understanding the Bible as the possession both of high Western literate culture and of the black illiterate, she uses the sacred text to imagine a supernatural literacy that transcends both constituencies she touches in her work—high-culture literates and the illiterate possessors of oral tradition. She goes on to donate the double authority thus accrued to an autonomous and supernatural instance of language (her own novel) that does not pass on, that seems somehow not to be the product of human authorship at all. It is in this respect that Morrison’s point does not look so different from McCarthy’s, and both writers make good on Frank Kermode’s suggestion—albeit anachronistic in his articulation of it—of congruence between modern fiction writing and the writing of scripture. McCarthy, like Kermode, sees the opaque form of the parable as the embodiment of literature’s ultimate claims; McCarthy, Kermode, and Alter all three see high literary form as the site of religious feeling. Kermode’s understanding of latent meaning—where the Bible, unitary like the novels of Henry James, sows seeds of meaning in the early pages of the text that are taken up and expounded in the later pages—maps directly onto Toni Morrison’s embedded symbolism and the way she thematizes latent meaning in Song of Solomon. And further, Kermode privileges a kind of deafness or blindness in the interpreter that gives access to the latent, just as Morrison imagines the incompetent reader, the illiterate, the blind person, as the reader who will most surely find the latent spiritual meaning in the materiality of words. Like Morrison and McCarthy, who write historical novels in this period based on historical fragments and oral history (Beloved, Song of Solomon, and Blood Meridian all fit that description), the gospel writers, on Kermode’s account, also produce stories that are “history-like”: “The gospels sound like history, and that they do so is the consequence of an extraordinary rhetorical feat, one without which the Resurrection would not have had its place in a context of sober fact” (113). For Kermode, historical fiction, if it is sufficiently accomplished, can found an entire religion. Morrison and McCarthy write the most accomplished historical fiction of the late twentieth century, and if their work does not found a religion, it nevertheless does much to imagine contemporary fiction as something like scripture—supernatural, transcendent, imbued with ultimate authority. Morrison and McCarthy’s shared turn to scripture as a source of literary author-

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ity bears some relation to their shared prestige, if, as I’m arguing, their work represents a broader desire in the period to see literature bolstered by the status of the Bible—at a time when the Bible’s religious status in public culture was on the rise, with the rise of the Religious Right. Each of these novelists won prestigious prizes—Morrison the Nobel Prize, McCarthy a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant”—and each enjoys an enthusiastic readership and much scholarly attention to their work. Their major novels (Beloved and Blood Meridian) took first and third place, respectively, in a 2006 New York Times Book Review poll of critics, writers, and public intellectuals, asking them to name the single most important novel of the previous twenty-five years (DeLillo’s Underworld came in second). But these similarities are made all the more significant by the differences between the two writers. For fame, their generational identity (Morrison was born in 1931, McCarthy in 1933), and a debt to the Bible are about all these two writers share—except, perhaps, Oprah Winfrey’s enthusiasm for certain of their books.60 Morrison, of course, is well-known for carving out a place in American fiction for African American experience, for envisioning women’s preeminence as storytellers, and for arguing against the traditional canon (in Playing in the Dark, which has become required reading for anyone interested in race and literature in America). McCarthy, on the other hand, tells us that “the ugly fact is books are made out of books. . . . The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.”61 The evidence of this view, and its high-culture bent, is all over his novels. McCarthy is considered the man’s man of contemporary writers, and men dominate his novels to an even greater extent than women dominate Morrison’s work. In contrast to Morrison’s assumption of a notable public voice outside her fiction, McCarthy has cultivated one of the most private of authorial lives, exceeded only, and only slightly, by the reclusive lives of Thomas Pynchon or J. D. Salinger. McCarthy has granted just a few interviews and has published nothing besides his novels and a play since he began writing in the late sixties. He never does readings; he never teaches writing. In the face of these differences, the Bible is the one precursor text prestigious enough for McCarthy’s view of what matters in literary history and common enough for Morrison’s.62 The way these two writers use the Bible makes it possible to see how literary ambition pulls away from the trappings that surround it, as I’ve just rehearsed them: the trappings of public presence or celebrity withdrawal, of political stances and gender affinities, of these writers’ relation to the debates about literary value contemporaneous to their writing.

The Literary Practice of Belief

Fiction and Religious Studies LIFFORD GEERTZ begins his influential essay, “Religion as a Cultural System,” with the following epigraph from the early-twentieth-century philosopher and novelist George Santayana:

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Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular. . . . Thus every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens and the mysteries it propounds are another world to live in; and another world to live in— whether we expect ever to pass wholly over into it or no—is what we mean by having a religion.” (from Santayana, Reason in Religion)1

Geertz invokes Santayana’s praise of particularity—the “marked idiosyncrasy” of “every living and healthy religion”—as the prelude to his own argument about the specific meanings to be found when one attends to the symbolic systems he claims are inherent in the religious practices of any society. But I have been arguing in the foregoing chapters that in a surprising number of literary cases roughly contemporaneous with Geertz’s career, what it means to “have a religion” in literary works entails something very much like the “attempt to speak without speaking any particular language.” In this sense, we might see these developments in literature since 1960 as being at odds with the ways the study of religion has evolved since the early twentieth century—indeed, not only in this sense.

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For I have also been arguing that these literary manifestations of religious thought constitute an effort to retain the idea of belief in the absence of specific beliefs—to retain the idea that there can be a religious “message” or “revelation” that biases “life,” even when we don’t know, or can’t know, what that message is, and even when we are left with the formal elements of language as a substitute for the content of belief. I have argued, in other words, that there is an implicit relationship (as Santayana’s comparison suggests) between the idea that the nonsemantic aspects of language are the vehicle of its transcendent power and the idea that belief continues to matter even when the specific content of belief falls away. Santayana’s claim that the one effort is “not more hopeless” than the other thus intrigues me. Though he means to suggest that the one is as obviously hopeless as the other, in the latter part of the twentieth century the phrase takes on a different cast. The writers I have been discussing imagine a logic by which religious hope resides precisely in speaking without speaking any particular language, and in believing without having, of necessity, any particular belief. In this chapter, I make a final turn in this analysis, demonstrating how it can inform our understanding of writers who are invested in particular belief, in keeping with Santayana’s description of religion. The writers I take up here—Marilynne Robinson and the authors of the popular millennial fiction series Left Behind—espouse, and write about, belief that is anything but contentless. Yet I argue that to examine the functions of belief in their work is once again to discover form as such at the center of their religious imaginations—as it has been for the writers I have discussed up to this point. I thus suggest how religious writers in the late-twentieth and into the twenty-first century imagine belief—abstract, articulated often in the language of theology or piety—as itself a practice, something as much like a set of rituals as it is like a set of doctrines. In doing so, I not only articulate a necessary nuance to my own larger argument, but also suggest a needed revision of arguments now dominant in religious studies. One question for this chapter, then, is what kind of practice believing itself might be? The answer to that question opens up the related claim that writing, as both articulation of thought in an abstract sense and as the concrete practice of literary art or literary convention, is a site where approaches to religion that scholars have held to be at odds—specifically, the interest in discourses of belief and the interest in “lived religion”—are simultaneously inhabited. Writing, I will argue, becomes both the articulation of belief and a form of religious practice. It is not the only religious practice these writers imagine, but it is a central one; I will suggest, in the conclusion that follows this chapter, that it is one that carries important stakes for my larger argument in this book, about the relationship between religion and literature more generally since 1960. There I embrace the intuitive connection one might make between religion as Santayana describes it in the passage I have quoted—

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“another world to live in—whether we expect ever to pass wholly over into it or no”—and the imaginative worlds that literature gives us. It is by now well-known, even among literary scholars, that the most innovative branches of religious studies have, since Geertz’s groundbreaking work in the 1970s, focused less on religious institutions and their doctrines—and, eventually, less on the discourses of “belief”—and more on what Geertz called “the meaningmaking subject”—the subject who constructed a religious world through action and word in everyday life, and through the rituals woven into that life. Building on Geertz’s approach, scholars since the 1980s have emphasized “lived religion”— religion as practiced by individuals and communities—as a corrective to the field’s prior focus on organized religion and its institutional discourses or, more locally, on what believers might say about that internalized disposition we call belief, a disposition whose very existence as an object of knowledge has been debated. As one of the most prominent scholars of lived religion, Robert Orsi, puts it, belief is, at the very least, “the wrong question,” the question asked by the naïve, the oldfashioned, the child, the student, the Fundamentalist (and also, one might add, the atheist). Orsi argues that the scholarly question of belief is an unwitting masquerade for the evangelical Protestant question—Do you believe in Jesus? Have you been saved?—while the better question (which can be cast as the Catholic, Jewish, or agnostic question, validated by the outstanding work of, among others, Thomas Ferraro and Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin, and of Orsi himself) is about what you do: Have you been to mass? Have you ever prayed to St. Jude? Are you observant? Do you talk “Jewish”? The question of belief, such scholars suggest, simplifies the messiness of religious practice, cannot tolerate internal contradiction, and lacks the capaciousness to speak to the diversity of religious life in America, not to mention the world at large. A focus on belief smuggles into the discussion of religion implicitly Christian assumptions about what religion is, and how central to it belief must be.2 Orsi argues that to say that one “‘believe[s] in’ a religion means that one has deliberated over and then assented to its propositional truths, has chosen this religion over other available options, a personal choice unfettered by authority, tradition, or society,” remarking that “this account of religion carries real normative force.” 3 To resist that language of belief has been cast as the move one must make against a normative mode of study that obscures what is significant about religion as lived by historically situated persons. Talal Asad takes this critique right back to Geertz, arguing that Geertz’s stress on mental concept and neglect of social power in religious formations skips over the question of how religious discourses come to exert pressure on religious practice—the question of “how . . . power create[s] religion.”4 But can we do without the idea of belief? In Beyond Belief (1970), Robert Bellah, a pioneer in the study of the American religions of his own time and a colleague of

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Geertz’s at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in the 1970s, gives us an early example of the effort to do without it when he casts the interest in belief as a disabling legacy of Platonism. Yet in the introduction to Beyond Belief, recounting his own religious life, Bellah invokes Paul Tillich’s notion of “meaninglessness” as articulated in The Courage to Be (1952) as the site of a kind of belief that, for him, can continue after one becomes disillusioned with traditional systems of transcendent meaning—for Bellah, the theology of Protestantism and the social theory of Marxism that originally replaced Protestantism in his life. Tillich had argued that “the courage to take up the anxiety of meaninglessness” brings us to a state in which “all forms of courage are re-established in the power of the God above the God of theism. The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.”5 For Bellah, Tillich’s Christian existentialism was inspiring but inadequate, and not because it remained Christian, that is, committed to the idea of a transcendent God rooted in a particular tradition. Rather, it was inadequate, Bellah writes, because Tillich’s “somberest moods” were not “wholly convincing.” Bellah found instead that “the deepest truth” he could discover was that “if one accepts the loss” of traditional faith, “then the nothing which is left is not barren but enormously fruitful.” His mode of faith finds “patterns of meaning in a world where all the great overarching systems of belief, conservative and radical, have lost their viability.” His analyses of belief’s end and the nothing that is left are themselves, he writes, “expressions of ‘belief,’ . . . without belief, beyond belief” (xx, xxi). (He is quoting Wallace Stevens, of course, and I will return to the significance of that allusion.) Bellah ultimately calls for scholars to study religion in their capacity as “religious subjects” (256), and, he goes on to say, “if this seems to confuse the role of theologian and scientist, of teaching religion and teaching about religion, then so be it” (257). Orsi and Bellah share the notion that the place of the scholar in relation to his or her subject must be other than objective, that to claim an impossible objectivity is implicitly always to devalue the subject one studies, as well as to deny one’s own embedded relation to history. Thus if the beliefs of informants have been set aside in favor of analyzing the practices they engage in, the beliefs of scholars have become the focus of intense scholarly self-reflection of the kind we see in Bellah’s introduction, in Orsi’s analysis three decades later of what has happened in religious studies since then, and in an array of scholars, such as Stanley Hauerwas, who argue that the virtues of pluralism and tolerance must open the door to teaching religion from traditionally religious points of view even in the secular academy.6 Jeffrey Kripal, in a different vein, has shown how such calls are already after the fact. In Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom (2001), he argues that the ecstatic, and personal, religious experiences of scholars—and their understandings of those experiences—lie at the heart of some of the most prominent academic work on religion since the start of the twentieth century.7

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This contemporary interest in the religious orientations of scholars of religion, and in the relationship between these orientations and intellectual discourses about religion, is one sign that religious studies does not itself want to dispense entirely with the notion of belief, or, more generally, with religious thought, even as the focus shifts to practice. Asad claims that “discourse involved in practice is not the same as that involved in speaking about practice”; literature, understood as a mode of religious practice, is an occasion for which this claim does not always hold, but this is no less true for the discourse of religious studies.8 The self-analysis of contemporary scholars of religion in recent years has essentially argued that their scholarly discourse is—or has been—both a discussion of religion and a form of practice, whether that practice is conventionally religious or secular in a way that remains faith-based. I expound upon this element in the discourse of a neighboring discipline in order to ask, and to begin to answer, a related question in the discipline of literary studies: What are we to do with writers for whom the discourse of belief—and more broadly, religious discourses in general—are not only in play, but carry with them stakes other than the power relations that preoccupy Asad’s work, or the descriptive commitments to be found in Geertz’s and in Orsi’s writing? That is, how should we read writers for whom the effort to define life as “religious”—which includes a sense of what religious practice is, who can participate and under what conditions, what a religious life means, what its implications are for human experience, what “belief” is and what is the content of such belief—is precisely the point? The decisive shift of interest from belief to practice, and, in general, the shift away from interest in religious meanings in favor of thick description or efforts to track the workings of power, assumes already a secular point of view that must be different from a religious point of view, because the latter remains invested in knowing itself as such in its own terms. As Orsi notes, many ordinary people—many Americans in particular—remain interested in thinking and talking about religion, and in using the language of belief to do so. The genealogies of the concepts of religion and religious belief that Asad and others give us are helpful insofar as they show us how the very idea of the internal disposition known as belief, and the centrality of that disposition to religion, is a Christian idea that comes to bear upon persons through the exercise of power within social structures. The desire to get outside of that thought tradition, and reveal religious formations as the product of secular power, is itself the desire for secularity. As recent work on the secular has shown, secularity is not only (as Charles Taylor has defined it) the condition in which we all live; it is also, as a social and intellectual formation, something that needs actively to be built. The secular is both a fact and a project. These developments can help us to understand writers who understand themselves to be working within a religious paradigm—a religious paradigm they do not aspire to escape and whose terms they

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do not wish to cast aside—but only insofar as we do not jettison the aspect of religious life we call belief, and discourse about belief, as an object of study. For belief has not dropped out of lived religion in America even if it has dropped out of “lived religion.” That quality of literature we are always teaching our students—that its form and content are both relevant—when cast in religious terms gives us the opportunity to take some of the best insights of the new religious studies (the focus on practice, on what you do) and reunite them with the discursive, reflective elements associated with such practice. In the next section of this chapter, I examine the work of Marilynne Robinson, an avowed and outspoken proponent of mainline liberal Protestantism (in addition to writing three highly acclaimed novels, for example, she makes the construction of John Calvin’s reputation as a liberal her special mission); in the third section, I take up the bestselling evangelical fiction series, Left Behind, written collaboratively by the megachurch pastor and cofounder of the Moral Majority Tim LaHaye and a professional Christian writer, Jerry B. Jenkins. Asad notes that “it is a modern idea that a practitioner cannot know how to live religiously without being able to articulate that knowledge.”9 As I examine how belief functions for these writers, I demonstrate how it may yet be a modern fact that the Christian practitioner in America—perhaps in any Western culture rooted sufficiently in Protestant Christianity—cannot live religiously without on occasion trying to articulate that knowledge, never mind ability. Articulating the knowledge is part of the practice. To take seriously the question of belief is to take seriously what practitioners do as well as what they say about what they do. To take up questions of belief does not necessarily entail the assumptions Orsi lays out—that to talk about what people “believe in” must always demand as its object something that aspires to logical, or doctrinal, coherence, something freely and rationally chosen. This is to acknowledge, in an open rather than a normative way, that belief remains at the heart of American popular discourse about religion; it is also to acknowledge that the content of belief does matter to many traditional believers, and that it matters in prominent examples of what we might call religious fiction. The following sections suggest, however, that it matters in ways that do not track traditional understandings of how belief—understood as mental concept—informs the literary, or, indeed, those traditional understandings of how belief informs everyday life. Amy Frykholm makes a plea for this kind of thinking at the end of her excellent field study of the readers of the Left Behind series. For all the scholarly skepticism about belief as a category—which she reviews in a quick tour through the work of Orsi, Catherine Bell, Donald Lopez, and Rodney Needham on the subject of belief—she declares, “As a researcher, I cannot shy away from the category to which readers would give the most emphasis.” She calls for an understanding of religious belief “as dynamic, fluid, and flexible as it functions in people’s everyday

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Marilynne Robinson and the Theology of Difference Marilynne Robinson would seem to embody the peaceful coexistence of contemporary scholarly thought about religion and commitment to religious life. In a review of Harold Bloom and Jesse Zuba’s anthology of religious poetry, Robinson takes the opportunity to reflect on the definition of religion as well as the relationships between religion and poetry in ways that are immediately recognizable in the context of the debates in religious studies I have been discussing. One anecdote she uses and interprets suggests, in compact fashion, how she negotiates these ideas in her many essays and, as I will demonstrate, in her fiction as well. She writes that when the fifteenth-century Zen monk Shumpo Soki writes at his death, “My sword leans against the sky. / With its polished blade I’ll behead / The Buddha and all of his saints,” his meaning is not that he has rejected his belief but that he will move beyond the forms in which it has been known to him in life. In something of the same spirit, the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as devout a man as the modern world has seen, longed for a “religionless Christianity.” Any writer who has wearied of words knows the feeling of being limited by the very things that enable. To associate religion with unwavering faith in any creed or practice does no justice at all to its complexity as lived experience. Creeds themselves exist to stabilize the intense speculations that religion, which is always about the ultimate nature of things, will inspire.11

The position Robinson stakes out here analogizes the word-hoard a writer draws upon (sometimes wearily) with the creedal resources of the world’s religions. Both the reality of the divine and the human meanings a writer seeks to articulate exceed these “stabilizing” resources, these formal discursive structures through which human beings attempt to channel lived experience (of the divine, of the world). The limitations of these resources are not a reason, for Robinson, to abandon the effort to shape experience through creedal reflection or to throw out the idea of creeds—or to stop writing. Robinson is a formalist in both religion and in fiction for all her low-church Protestantism; what I mean is that form stands at the very heart of what she imagines religious life and literature (both the reading and the writing of literature) to be. Robinson’s narrative strategies in her three novels to date reveal how literary form—an analog to creedal form for Robinson—is related to religious understanding. The basic assumption behind those narrative strategies, different as they are

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lives.” 10 My aim here is to advance such an understanding in the context of literary discourse and literary visions of everyday life.

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from novel to novel, is that ordinary people have rich and complicated interior lives, that they embody a silent discourse of thought that, if we knew its voice, would astonish us. That assumption, standing behind her fictional articulation of such voices, runs against the contemporary scholarly demotion of discourse in favor of practice. It enacts a Protestant understanding of inner life, the kind of understanding that, all too recently, defined what scholars thought religion had to look like. What Robinson’s novels imagine, though, is both discourse and practice: thematically and narratively, they give us the mental discourse of religious persons while also spinning stories that situate those persons within religious life. Religious discourse and religious life converge though a formal and thematic feature prominent in Robinson’s second and third novels: what I will call the discourse of relationship. Both Gilead and Home are essentially domestic novels. Gilead (2004) is the long letter of John Ames, a Congregational minister in the small Iowa town of Gilead, to his young son; Home is the story of what happens in Gilead told from a different perspective. The overlapping story is set in 1956. Ames, a longtime widower, has remarried late in life and has a seven-year-old son. In his seventies, with an ailing heart and a bleak prognosis, he writes down all that he would want to have said to his son if he had lived to see the boy grow up. He reflects upon his life—and the lives of his father and grandfather, also ministers— through the lens of his theology and his faith, which are tested by the unfolding difficulty on which his meditations converge: the arrival in Gilead of his namesake, John Ames (Jack) Boughton, at once the most beloved son of his friend Robert Boughton and the black sheep of the Boughton family. Robinson’s third novel, Home (2008), tells this same story from within the Boughton household, from the perspective of Boughton’s grown daughter, Glory (narrated in third person, free indirect discourse). While it thus lacks the second-person direct address of Gilead, Home is overwhelmingly characterized, at the level of the sentence, by verbal address, spoken dialog—a prose form largely missing from both Gilead and Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping.12 The discourse of relationship that defines both the formal structures of Home and Gilead and the content of their shared domestic stories, like the commitment to internal voice, is imbued with religious significance; it revolves around what Robinson represents as the problem and the opportunity of religious belief within the life of the family. We might say that John Ames is a character fully imagined to be living within Charles Taylor’s secular age: he emerges in Gilead as a believer profoundly aware of the possibility—even the plausibility—of unbelief. His beloved older brother, Edward, went to study for the ministry and came back reading Feuerbach and Marx and renouncing his faith. The ensuing arguments between brother and father distressed young Ames, but his love for this baseball-throwing older brother is such that he seeks, ever after, to say nothing about belief that would sound insincere to the beloved but skeptical listener. He read everything his brother talked

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of, and the evidence of that reading persists in his old age. Reflecting, then, on belief in something of the same way Robinson does in the passage I quoted earlier, he notes “The oddness of the phrase ‘believe in God’” which, he says, “bring[s] to my mind that first chapter of Feuerbach, which is really about the awkwardness of language, and not about religion at all.” Feuerbach, he notes, “doesn’t imagine the possibility of an existence beyond this one, by which I mean a reality embracing this one but exceeding it” but this does not, for Ames, suggest that his thought is less useful than that of the theologian who does imagine such an ultimate reality. Ames compares such human efforts at cosmic comprehension to the hypothetical efforts of their cat: “The inadequacy of her concepts [about the world] would have nothing to do with the reality of the situation” (143). While such an analogy renders Feuerbach’s concepts as far from the truth as the cat’s, this is not a smug dismissal of the philosopher; indeed, Ames’s example of the unlikeness between creaturely thought and “the reality of the situation” is simply an important instance of a radical unlikeness that can be found at every level of human experience. Remarking “how a thing we call a stone differs from a thing we call a dream” (143), Ames moves analogically from “the degrees of unlikeness within the reality we know” to “a much more absolute unlikeness, with which we exist”—that is, the distance between human perspective and God’s perspective. As if to demonstrate how the effort to order the world through language is subject to radical unlikeness, he tells his son, as he concludes these thoughts, “Your mother wanted to name the cat Feuerbach, but you insisted on Soapy” (143). The mother’s and son’s attempts to assimilate the cat into a world of experience and concepts is revered here in this small anecdote, one of many details of their family life that are among the most radiant passages of the novel. Robinson writes elsewhere that “to attempt obedience to God in any circumstance is to find experience opening on meaning, and meaning is holy.”13 The naming of Soapy is in this sense a religious act: in it, mother and son find “experience opening on meaning,” though both the experience of the cat and the animal’s meaning differ so markedly between mother and son. And Ames’s reflection itself is that kind of holy act, finding a theological meaning that comes as the sum of a whole life of attending to the different thought of other persons—his brother and father, his wife and son, Feuerbach and Calvin. Despite Ames’s exemplary tolerance of those who differ from himself, a tolerance vigorously argued for in Robinson’s essays, strongly held belief still matters for Robinson and for the characters she creates in these novels. This is clear despite how complex and utterly provisional thought about belief always is in Ames’s narrative. In one of his broadest reflections on his ministry in the novel, Ames explains to his son that he has felt there are certain things he must tell his congregation “even if no one listened or understood”: “One of them is that many of the attacks on belief that have had such prestige for the last century or two are in fact

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meaningless. I must tell you this, because everything else I have told you, and them [his congregation], loses almost all its meaning and its right attention if this is not established” (144). The choice of the word “meaningless” is crucial: he does not say that the arguments are wrong, or mistaken, but that they do not participate in the religious practice of making experience open upon meaning. To take them as meaningful is to rob of its meaning, and thus its holiness, “everything else” Ames has told his son and his congregation. Belief here is imagined as a religiously understood reality that is simply other to arguments against it. That understanding of belief underwrites everything he says, not just as a pastor, but also as a father writing to his son. A shared commitment to that religiously understood reality underwrites the possibility of speaking about what matters, and this is above all a book about what matters in a life by virtue of its original premise—the idea that it is a letter reaching proleptically from dead father to living son. That premise is invoked as the closing thought that follows this particular discourse on belief: “If I were to go through my old sermons, I might find some in which I deal with this subject. Since I am presumably somewhere near the end of my time and my strength, that might be the best way to make the case for you. I should have thought of this long ago” (144). The very fact that Ames wants to “make the case” for belief suggests its ultimate value for Ames, and for the novel itself. But what, we might ask, is belief valuable for? One reason belief remains important to Ames, and to Robinson, is because of its relationship to religious experience. Ames remarks that “it is religious experience above all that authenticates religion, for the purposes of the individual believer” (145)—so attacks on religion that claim that such experience is an illusion for the individual are, for Ames, insidious. Similarly, he argues that “if the awkwardness and falseness and failure of religion are interpreted to mean there is no core of truth in it—and the witness of Scripture from end to end discourages this view—then people are disabled from trusting their thoughts, their expressions of belief, and their understanding, and even from believing in the essential dignity of their and their neighbors’ endlessly flawed experience of belief” (146). While scholars of lived religion have sidelined belief as a way of understanding religion, Robinson insists that belief is in fact something one experiences, just as thought is something that one experiences, and that the content of belief includes claims about the dignity of persons just as surely as it contains claims about God and God’s relation to humanity. She thus works parallel to a minority strain of scholarly discourse working within religious studies to reassert, albeit in a newly nuanced way, the importance of mental concept; this work is exemplified by Wayne Proudfoot’s reengagement of William James in Religious Experience.14 We can also see that Robinson’s fiction—and especially Gilead—extends an American revival of the philosophical novel initiated by Saul Bellow in the 1950s. Influenced by Thomas Mann and Dostoyevsky, this tradition imagines fiction as a way of taking thought

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beyond philosophy proper, beyond proposition and argument (while including those things) and into a sense of what it is like to live with and through philosophical—or, in Ames’s case, theological—reflection. If belief makes religious life possible because it allows one to trust one’s own and one’s neighbors’ religious experiences as such, talking about belief in the abstract is imagined in Robinson’s work as one kind of religious experience, a kind that is not separate from that social context in which the religious life is most compellingly led in her novels: in the family, and through long-term friendship. And so it is crucial to note that Ames’s reflections on belief and his effort to “make the case” for it in the extended letter to his son arise from a supremely practical attempt to heal a friendship. To do so is to register (as with the appearance of Soapy the cat in a meditation on Feuerbach) how the form of the novel comes to matter to its expression of abstract thought. More specifically, to recognize how this particular novel’s form matters to its expression of abstract thought is to see abstract discourse on belief as part of the larger religious practice of relationship. The meditations on belief in Gilead that I have been discussing, then, are prompted by an article Boughton sends Ames on contemporary American religion—at the suggestion of Jack and Jack’s sister, Glory—to provide the pretext (literally) for reconciliation between the two ministers. Boughton is angry with his old friend because he learns that Ames preached on unkindness to children (a sermon on the banishment of Ishmael and Hagar) when Jack showed up at Ames’s church. Seeming to refer to Jack’s notorious youthful abandonment of an illegitimate child, who later died as a result of the poverty in which it was raised by its teenage mother, the sermon causes Jack to flee the church as soon as the service ends. Still worse, the sermon threatens the rapprochement Jack is awkwardly, but persistently, trying to bring about between himself and Ames. The sermon becomes itself an instance of unkindness, a use of a religious discourse to judge and impugn—though John Ames’s motives are truly mixed, and the sermon was not originally intended to be given in Jack’s hearing. In Gilead, Ames thinks it is his idea to return the magazine article so that he can look in on the Boughtons and make sure they are not angry with him; in Home, Jack and Glory plant the magazine at Ames’s house, knowing Ames will return it having read the article, and knowing that this act and the ensuing conversation will help Boughton set aside his anger at Ames. Indirection, tact, considerateness, kindness, and loyalty to an old friend are the hallmarks of the transaction for all parties. These qualities set the meditation on belief in a relational context of forgiveness; the scene bears significant rhetorical weight in Gilead alone, but with the publication of Home it appears even more freighted. The front-porch conversation between Ames and Boughton—a rare conversation that also includes all the other important characters of the novel: Jack, Glory, and Ames’s wife, Lila, and Ames’s son, Robby—occurs over some

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notable pages (150–52 in Gilead, 216–28 in Home), where text intermittently repeats between the two novels. The relational context for Ames’s meditation on belief is thus central to not one but two novels; it is the navel of their connection. Unlike Ames’s private reflections on belief, the conversation sparked between Boughton, Ames, Jack, Glory, and Lila is inconclusive and contentious. It leads Jack to ask “how the mystery of predestination could be reconciled with the mystery of salvation.” In a conversation already fraught with theological and personal difficulty, Jack presses for an answer, fulfilling his role as the thorn in the ministers’ sides but also expressing the urgency of this question for his own position in the world and the family. Is he helplessly damned in the scheme of divine predestination, or ripe for the salvation he is reminded of through the persistent love of his family? “No conclusions?” Jack asks his father. “‘None that I can remember.’ Then he said, ‘To conclude is not in the nature of the enterprise’” (Gilead, 152; the corresponding moment, with slightly different wording, can be found in Home, 227). Theology in Gilead is understood to produce arguments, and not just the scholarly kind: Glory’s objection to Jack’s question about predestination is that the conversation always arrives at an argument in the ordinary sense within five minutes. The scene presents theological questions and theological discourse as something to produce thinking, not conclusion, but also, perhaps more importantly, as something that can become a productively shared discourse only between, as Ames says, “people who have . . . sympathy for it” (he says he “always dreaded having to talk theology with people who have no sympathy for it”; Gilead, 153–54). I take “sympathy” here as a way of describing a shared commitment to the activity of trying to know an unknowable divine reality (in which the partners in conversation together believe) through the special kind of discourse we know as theology; belief matters, then, because it is the foundation of relationship between believers and the raw material of their discursive activity. Jack, a professed unbeliever, wants to be convinced through the conceptual content of religious discourse; his difference from his father and from Ames is only underscored by his lack of what Ames calls “sympathy” with theology—his mistaking it for a discourse of answers rather than a discourse of relationship. He mistakes it, that is, for a discourse that could produce individual belief rather than a discourse that enacts shared belief. This is of course appropriate for Jack, who at every turn seems to challenge the very idea of relationship and its presumptions.15 (It will be the ritual of blessing—of Ames placing his hand on Jack’s forehead in benediction—that will signal their final reconciliation, not agreement about religious truths.) If Jack is unable to enter sympathetically into the discourse of theology—to participate in that formal practice of relationship—he is a master of another kind of formal practice of relationship: verbal courtesy. The most striking thing about Jack as a character is the utter perfection of his courtesy, a perfection unmatched even by the father who taught him that skill, or by the even-tempered Glory. That per-

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fection at times renders him mechanical, as when Ames and Lila and their son come over for dinner; his anxiety fatally exaggerates his courtesy so that it translates as parody. This suggests that these mundane forms of maintaining relationship (which Robinson extols throughout her writing) are only the lesser reflection of that higher sympathy of shared belief as practiced in its verbal and social forms. In the absence of shared belief in the nature of ultimate reality, Robinson seems to suggest, the shared courtesy is essential. It is the form in which pluralism can thrive without people losing, as Ames put it, “the essential dignity of their and their neighbors’ endlessly flawed experience of belief.” “Home” is another such formal structure. Inside the walls of home, the religious practice of maintaining mutual dignity in the face of difference extends from the challenges of familial disagreement to the horror of race relations in midcentury America. Indeed, racial reconciliation is presented as another version of the familial reconciliations that take up most space in the two novels; one could say that the work of both novels is to translate racial reconciliation into another mode of familial reconciliation. The attempt of Ames’s grandfather—the bloody attempt to help John Brown in his revolt against slavery—is one, somewhat discredited, version of the attempt at racial justice; the other is Jack’s private one, of falling in love with a black woman named Della and having a son with her, and naming that son after his father, Robert.16 We see that effort thwarted by the violence of American race relations at midcentury, and by the prejudices of both Jack’s father and Della’s own family, the latter led also by a powerful minister. Each family is embedded deeply in a coherent and racially homogeneous religious community to which the mixed-race couple cannot be courteously admitted. Home, in placing Jack at the center of the narrative, allows us to see the complex, religiously understood reality of the eponymous world, then. We can see Jack and Della’s mode of reconciliation—love, loyalty, and the formation of a family—as the revision and, indeed, the redemption of Jack’s earlier encounter with unlikeness: with the poor girl of fourteen whom he impregnates and abandons. The mode of reconciliation Jack embodies is that of making kinship from unlikeness. This is related to Robinson’s consistent emphasis on kindness—the root of that word invoking the likeness of kin as the basis for affection and gentleness. The inverse of this understanding of kinship and difference is also imaged in Home: a home can bridge difference by producing kinship, but home can also physically and spiritually contain difference within a benign sphere. In Home, we learn, eventually, that Jack, so often in childhood missing from the family gathering, was usually still within the family compound. After the novel’s crisis—his two-day drinking binge—we discover that instead of reeling about town, he pitched a tent in the loft of the family barn and furnished it with a bookshelf and a light (and liquor). In this context, we can see that the narrative strategy even of a novel so formally distinct from Home and Gilead as Housekeeping is also founded upon the reli-

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gious opportunity of difference. Indeed, analogy—the novel’s relentless figurative mode—may be understood as the privileged discourse of contained difference: as the poet Allen Grossman would often declaim to his students, with upraised hands, “‘Like’ means is not!” If metaphor is the language of collapse, simile is the language that maintains difference within the embrace of kinship. The truth of this is fully realized in Housekeeping, which repeatedly works out from the verbal figure of simile to the extended logic of analogy. The absolute difference that presides over this novel is that between the living narrator, Ruth, and her mother, Helen, who commits suicide by driving her car into the local lake when Ruth is a young girl. The difference between the living daughter and her dead mother in turn figures other differences: that between dreamy Ruth and her socially conventional sister, Lucile; between these girls and their eccentric aunt, Sylvie; between the inside and outside of houses; between one mind and another; between the presence of memory and the absence of person. The structure is most lyrically expressed by the novel’s final lines, where Ruth, after running away with the incorrigibly transient Sylvie, imagines the effect of her and Sylvie’s absence on Lucile: “No one watching . . . could know how her thoughts are thronged by our absence, or know how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie” (219). Millennial images, Biblical allusions, and scriptural cadence imbue such longing throughout the novel with specifically religious overtones. The novel’s poetic style becomes the literary equivalent of the analogical work found in much traditional religious thought—a mode of thought long examined by scholars of Christianity.17 The discourse of reconciliation that is defined formally by second-person address and by reported dialog in Gilead and Home, respectively, is not missing, then, in Housekeeping, but rendered in a different literary form. By the same token, “home” is a practice rather than a place in the earlier novel—we might say that “housekeeping” is the literary practice of making analogies. Reconciliation is the project of Housekeeping as surely as it is the project of the two later novels—the narrative is designed to knit up a broken world into a whole, through simile and analogy, or through the idea that absence produces the present thing through the intensity of longing. The relentless generation of likeness in Housekeeping is not so much a remedy for radical unlikeness, then, as the natural response of human longing upon the perception of unlikeness. Just as Sylvie and Ruth finally cross the bridge that a doomed train spectacularly fails to cross in the novel’s opening scenes, the human effort, at great cost, is to bridge the gap, draw difference closer, knit up the world. Difference, then, is encompassed by the family sphere; radical unlikeness is comprehended by “home.” The difference external to the family is analogous to the difference internal to it. These structures repeat the abstract structure at the heart of Ames’s reflections on belief: the unlikeness within the world (the difference

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Media and Message in Left Behind I have tried, in my discussion of Marilynne Robinson’s work, to show in some detail how discourses of belief become religious practices, and how literature—both the novel as a narrative form and various poetic structures she uses within narrative—comes to catalyze this communion between approaches to religion currently held apart in scholarly work on religion. I now turn to a very different version of religious fiction—the Left Behind novels—in order to show how even in the world of American evangelicalism, where belief is routinely represented in the normative way Robert Orsi and others resist, belief may nevertheless be productively understood as a form of religious practice in Orsi’s sense. My purpose in presenting this second case is not to give a comprehensive analysis of the whole series—others have done this in service to other kinds of arguments. It is rather to suggest, in a somewhat condensed way, that there is more than one way of mobilizing the literary to reimagine belief as a practice. I do not claim, in presenting the cases side by side, that what I discover here about the practice of belief

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between stone and dream) repeats the difference between what Soapy the cat understands and what Feuerbach understands, between what Feuerbach believes and Ames believes, between the boy’s name for the cat and his mother’s, between human thoughts about reality and the larger reality the religious person believes in, but also believes she cannot know (“my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, says the Lord”). As we come full circle from a theology of these differences to the lived experience of difference and reconciliation in the home and in the writer’s housekeeping (knitting up a fictional world), it becomes clear that difference is not for Robinson a problem to be solved but rather the occasion for living a religious life. Ames’s meditations on belief reveal that the very structure of human belief in Taylor’s secular age (that it is both importantly totalizing and inescapably partial) encompasses that most radical of differences—between human and divine. The tautology produced here is what Robinson means when she has Ames say that arguments against belief are meaningless. Religious life is above all the practice of reconciliation; religious belief in the secular age, with its capacity for containing difference, is the beginning and the end of religious life. In an essay in the American Scholar, Robinson quotes Emily Dickinson’s line, “The abdication of belief / Makes the behavior small.” But she suggests, too, that “There is a powerful tendency also to make belief itself small, whether narrow and bitter or feckless and bland, with what effects on behavior we may perhaps infer from the present state of the Republic.”18 Her novels imagine belief made capacious, and aim to show us behavior within the life of belief that can heal both family and Republic.

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covers the spectrum of how believing becomes a practice in contemporary America, or what it looks like as practice in the culture at large. My implicit claim, and the broadest one I want to make in this regard about American religious culture, is that there are about as many versions of the practice of believing as there are believing people. To get a full picture of belief’s status as a lived practice in America and to make the more general cultural claims such fieldwork could support are obviously beyond the scope of this book. My more local and specific claim is that literature of all kinds—not only literary fiction such as Robinson writes, but also the popular genre fiction of LaHaye and Jenkins— plays a special role in the culture by embodying the imaginative work required to maintain the viability of belief in the secular age. This claim, like this book as a whole, suggests both the relevance of literature to a major cultural feature of America (its simultaneous religious pluralism and the continuing prominence of belief understood in traditional Protestant ways) and the relevance of American religion to the contemporary development of literary work. The inaugural novel of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ apocalyptic fiction series highlights belief about as dramatically as any fictional scenario could. Believing in Christ is not only, for these writers, the defining characteristic of true religion, subject only to the free choice of individuals, but it defines the fate of every character in the novel. Those who are true believers are assumed bodily into Heaven at the opening of the novel; unbelievers are “left behind.” The central dramas thus set in motion have to do with the moments when the men remaining (and I will explain why men’s belief is so central to the novels) must decide whether they believe in Christ or not and what they are going to do about it. My section title nods to Marshall McLuhan because these novels represent a mass, and massmedia, version of contemporary religious fiction, one that wrestles with the Catholically inflected formalism—a formalism that downplayed the importance of message—around which McLuhan built his theory of media’s power (as I argued in chapter 3). If Robinson’s medium for a meditation on belief is the literary, the medium for Left Behind is the television or the action-adventure movie. If the choice of the literary fits Robinson’s theology of difference through its particular formal qualities (simile, analogy, address, genre, allusion, narrative arrangement), I will argue, in a parallel way, that the choice of television and, more specifically, the action-adventure genre, can be understood to fit LaHaye and Jenkins’—and their putative audience’s—theology of conversion. Conversion, imagined in these novels as centering on the willingness to change from wrong belief to right belief, entails a theology not of difference but of the erasure of difference: the separation between God and the believer is wiped out by belief in, and submission to, the mediating body of Christ. There is perhaps nothing surprising in what I have just said; my claim will be that there should be something surprising in it, given the profound uneasiness about such erasure of

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difference that invests every crevice of this novel. I will argue that this uneasiness centers around two problems: first, the need for men to submit in the context of their decision to be believers, and second, the power of the media to enable, or compel, submission as such. The first problem is entailed by the traditional Protestant theology to which LaHaye and Jenkins subscribe; the second is the very premise upon which these novels—and the raft of Left Behind media products available in films, DVDs, teen versions, and merchandise—stake their success as instruments of conversion in the world of actual readers, whether or not the books actually produce such conversions.19 The action-adventure movie becomes a religious form in the hands of LaHaye and Jenkins because it embodies the simultaneous insistence on action and passivity that characterizes their theology of conversion; even more specifically, it models how men can negotiate this contradiction while remaining men. Belief is no dry, conceptual matter in Left Behind. Men’s pulses race and they lock eyes with each other as they talk about what to believe. After Rayford Steel, a pilot whose wife and son disappeared in the rapture and who soon becomes a Christian himself, tells the as-yet-agnostic Buck Williams (the journalist/action hero of the novels) his theory of the rapture, “Buck was desperate to maintain his composure.” “Maybe it was wrong,” he thinks, “maybe it was mumbo jumbo. But it was the only theory that tied the incidents so closely to any sort of explanation. What else would give Buck this constant case of the chills?”20 What else, indeed? I will return to the erotic charge such scenes give off; for now, I simply want to note that the somatic drama flags belief as being more complicated than the surface discourse of the novel indicates, where belief is highlighted as free choice. That drama arises within a condition of belief that all of the characters who eventually “become Christian” in the novel undergo: they hear the millenarian theory of the disappearances, come to believe it, know their only hope is Jesus, but have not yet prayed the so-called sinner’s prayer (in which one acknowledges one’s sinfulness and need for Christ’s sacrifice, and declares one’s sincerity in asking God’s forgiveness through Christ). Rayford, his daughter Chloe, and Buck all undergo this condition of what must be called belief: they believe that the story of the rapture is true, they believe that God has taken his people and that Jesus is the way to salvation in this time of tribulation. In fact, it is the condition in which all the somatic drama is concentrated—you don’t get chills after you become a Christian, but right before you decide. The state is protracted in Rayford’s case, as we see in his encounters with Bruce, an assistant pastor at his wife’s church—a man sufficiently lukewarm in his prerapture faith to be spit out at the decisive moment; he is left behind but is quick to become a hot believer. Here is Rayford before his conversion, then: “Rayford could feel Bruce’s eyes burning into him as if the young man knew Rayford was nearly ready to make a commitment. . . . He was analytical, and while this suddenly made a world of sense to him and he didn’t

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doubt at all Bruce’s theory of the disappearances, he would not act immediately. ‘I’d appreciate the tape [a video left by the pastor, to be watched in case of rapture], and I can guarantee you, I will be back tomorrow’” (202), he tells the pastor. Bruce describes Rayford’s condition in terms that make one wonder what the difference is between this state and the state of what he calls “commitment”: “just let me encourage you that if God impresses upon you that this is true, don’t put it off. What would be worse than finally finding God and then dying without him because you waited too long?” (203). What does it mean to “find God” if it can somehow be different from being saved and if, in turn, the internal disposition we call belief is as central to the religious vision as it is declared to be? One way to answer that question is to say that Rayford’s and Buck’s state of mind seems a species of the state of “conviction” traditionally avowed before repentance and reconciliation with God in the formal conversion narrative, whose roots go back to the Puritans, even though, as Calvinists, the Puritans emphasize what Marilynne Robinson, a Calvinist in our own time, calls God’s “radical freedom” to save those he will. This state of conviction highlights instead the freedom of the person to choose what they will do in the face of conviction: to be saved, they must first pray, and in doing so both repent and “accept Jesus Christ into their hearts.” Most of us have heard these formulae, but it is worth pausing over the process if we are interested in belief and its relation to ritual. The condition of believing is not enough for the evangelical Protestant; it must lead to the act of repentance. If evangelicals are reluctant to see repentance as a form of ritual, associated as ritual is with mere religious habit and with Roman Catholicism, it is a reluctance hard to maintain. The act has a clear formula, despite the fact that, as Chloe tells Buck, it can be done anywhere, anytime. (In fact, these prayers in the novel mostly don’t happen in churches.) The study of lived religion thus attunes us to the ritual aspects even of a version of religion that disavows ritual in favor of belief and the free and rational choosing of belief. “Commitment” is understood in Left Behind as a species of submission—the decision that one will submit one’s whole life to Christ’s direction. In light of this theological fact, it is crucial to note that action and passivity, control and lack thereof, are constantly set against one another in the novel; the tension between these is concentrated around the action of the media, and the fact of mediation in general. For Nicolae Carpathia, the Antichrist, becomes a world leader by the general acclamation of the media. He seems passively to accept the elevation offered to him by others and, we find out later, passively manipulates others’ evil acts. (He’s the ultimate passive-aggressive type.) When he comes to power, he uses supernatural means, effected through a ritual that bears a marked resemblance to the Eucharist in Anglo-Catholic tradition, to ensure that people see and remember only what he tells them to see and remember. The Antichrist not only uses the media, he becomes (like the Christ whom he inverts) the ultimate me-

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dium himself. By contrast, the righteous men of the novel are full of action that reads like action: Rayford pilots planes, and Buck scuffles in a hotel hallway with the journalistic competition to protect his scoop on Carpathia. Video, and the media in general, are a threat to this preference for action over passivity in the righteous man. If prayer is the ritual act that transforms conceptual belief into salvific belief through commitment or submission, it is the act of watching the Christian video that is its analog in the narrative architecture of Left Behind. Rayford in fact becomes a Christian while watching such a video, and the language describing his interaction with the videotape is marked with masculine action and control: He “hit the pause button”(209) on the tape in order to get his wife Irene’s Bible; we are told then that he “let the tape roll” (210) even though some of what the pastor said “was gibberish to him” and then he “paused” (213) the tape when thinking over the Pastor’s message (which we’ve now been reading in transcript for three pages without interruption—we, like Rayford, become the tape’s passive audience). When Rayford declares to himself that “it was finally time to move beyond being a critic, an analyst never satisfied with the evidence,” we are told that “there was only one course of action. He punched the play button” (214). He pauses the tape one more time as he hesitates to pray the sinner’s prayer, but finally we are told he “pushed the play button and tossed the remote control aside” (216). “The pastor said, ‘Pray after me,’ and Rayford did” (213). Conversion, then, is submission to the medium first, and then to the pastor, and to God. In this scene, McLuhan proves right: the medium is, after all, the message. The gendered stakes for this conception of religious action become evident when Rayford’s daughter Chloe converts. The moment is described in diametrically opposed terms. She has arrived at that preliminary condition of belief but has not yet prayed to God in the way the pastor teaches—which is not to say that she has not prayed. She has: she asks God for some sort of sign to show that he loves her and cares about her. The next morning, she is surprised by the appearance of Buck, the one person she most wanted to see, who has booked a seat next to her on her father’s flight to Chicago. He, she says, is the answer to her prayer, and as she explains this to him, the two discuss her position vis-à-vis faith: “God has called your bluff,” Buck tells her; “you asked and he delivered. Sounds like you are obligated” (406). And this is reassuring to her: “‘I have no choice,’ she agreed. ‘Not that I want one’” (406). The submission to God entailed in the sinner’s prayer is not hedged but highlighted in the case of Chloe’s conversion; God’s instrument in that submission is a man, her emerging love interest.21 It won’t come as a surprise that women’s submissiveness is not simply evident at the scene of conversion; it is the mode of their lives in the novel. Hattie Durham, who becomes Personal Assistant to the Antichrist, is initially a flight attendant carried from place to place by the male pilots; Chloe Steele is the purer example on the plane, because of her status as a daughter and because she doesn’t have a

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job on the plane or even a chosen destination when she flies with her father. She flies on Rayford’s flights for free and without pay and, after the catastrophe of the rapture, for no reason other than to mark time and stay near her father. Buck, we are told, has had trouble dating because “he had always been considered too mobile for a woman who wanted stability” (357). Chloe seems the perfect match— she’s portable. The gender of passivity and its relation to the media is evident as Buck worries about suggesting that he and she walk around the terminal as they get to know one another: “Would she rather sit down or people watch or windowshop?” (365). That is, he wonders whether she would she rather passively experience the terminal as if it were a TV—one perhaps tuned to that window-shopping station, QVC. Submission, then, is a theological problem. It is an essential aspect of belief— belief understood in that deliberative sense about which Orsi warns—but one surrounded with anxiety. Written and rewritten in multiple forms and versions, it is the novel’s central problem, and for men in particular it is not adequately solved by “punching” the play button, for there are larger questions of submission that men in the novel must deal with every day. As Christians, they must continually submit to other Christian men, and here the somatic accompaniments of conversion, which cannot fail to look like the signs of erotic attraction, are helpfully displaced onto other, more acceptable forms of submission. Buck is attracted to Chloe, but finds, upon interviewing her father, that it was simply “Rayford in Chloe” that really drew him to her. When he is overcome by Rayford’s testimony about the rapture at dinner, he fears that he will lose his composure under the gaze of the phallically strong Captain Steele; he sits with “his pulse racing, looking neither right nor left. . . . He was certain the women could hear his crashing heart. Was all this possible? Could it be true?” (385). The formulaic language of sexual anticipation—the “crashing heart”—is deflected toward the women (unless they somehow just have better hearing than Rayford). Buck’s submission to Rayford comes in tandem with his growing bond with Chloe—who is thus classically between men in Eve Sedgwick’s sense. In submitting he becomes son, not the feminized erotic figure that he appears to be while first listening to Rayford’s testimony. In turn, Rayford’s submission to the young pastor with the burning eyes is soon renegotiated: once he becomes a Christian, his greater age puts him safely in the position of father figure in relation to Bruce even if Bruce is still leader of the church. Buck’s submission to Bruce toward the end of the novel is dramatized when Bruce denies Buck access to a meeting of the core group of believers (which includes Rayford). Bruce makes a point of saying he has told Buck everything he will cover in that meeting, and so what he is denying Buck is intimate access to Rayford, and the power status he and this core group possess. Buck has to submit to Bruce in this instance, but once he becomes a Christian he becomes Bruce’s equal, or even, by virtue of his native talents and intelligence, his

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superior. The notion of these two as brothers, while it leaves open the question of who would submit to whom, locates the prospect of male submission safely in the dynamics of patriarchy. Submission to bosses is harder to navigate for the Christian man. In the secular world, and in the age of feminism, the problem can’t always be solved by recourse to patriarchy: the problem with a boss, the novel tells us, is that he may not promote you, he may promote a woman in your place; even worse, your boss may turn out to be a woman. Rayford at one point describes God in these terms, before he becomes a Christian: he says to Chloe that he feels as if the people who disappeared—his wife, in particular—“got promoted,” while he didn’t. Buck Williams, when offered the job of senior editor at Global Weekly, which he does not really want, decides that he “was going to have to accept the promotion just to protect himself from other pretenders” (328). He takes the job, that is, just to ensure that his boss isn’t someone to whom he doesn’t want to submit. Later in the novel, we know the Antichrist has taken power not only because he can now completely control what world leaders think and see, and not only because he can now commit murder with impunity, but also because Buck has been demoted on account of his resistance to Carpathia. His personal tribulation begins with the publisher’s order that he must leave New York and the senior editor’s job to work in the Chicago branch office of the newsmagazine under a “woman with sensible shoes.” And although, as Buck says, “no one” calls flight attendants “stewardesses” anymore, Hattie Durham is comfortably stereotyped in that role during the first part of the novel, becoming evil when she seizes the chance to become the assistant to Carpathia, who has become the Secretary General of the UN. Hattie’s is a big promotion if there ever was one, imagined at the expense of the novel’s realism (if you can call it that). There is nothing in the novel to suggest why she should be a candidate for this job, or how she would have warranted such attention from clever Carpathia. Among the ways to solve this version of the submission problem in the novel is for men to consort primarily with women either much younger or much older than themselves—to have women preemptively arranged around themselves either as mothers or daughters. At the surface of the text, we see lots of worry about exactly how much younger a woman can be and still be a legitimate object of a man’s sexual interest. Rayford makes it clear that a fifteen-year difference (between Hattie and himself) does not put her in the illegitimate category of the woman who, in the common pejorative cliché, is “young enough to be his daughter.” Fifteen years younger does not plausibly impinge upon the incest taboo; likewise, the age difference between Buck, at thirty and a half, and Chloe, at twenty and a half (I don’t know why the specificity of the “half” is important), does not constitute a statutory difference. Once this is established, Chloe is quite freely represented both as a child—Buck at one point wipes chocolate off her mouth,

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she punches him as they flirt—and as exceptionally mature. Buck assures her that she “plays a lot older” than her twenty and a half years, and she appears at dinner “radiant, looking five years older in a classy evening dress” (381). Submission to women in the workplace can be alleviated, then, by finding younger ones to be with outside the office, by disqualifying women from scenes of sexual equality, or by translating submission to women into submission to God by reading such submission as the means of God’s tribulation. Yet another form of submission—to the media—is even harder to manage. For the novel is as obsessed with the media as it is with belief. The talismanic medium here is televisual, so much so that even the Bible is almost completely displaced as the medium through which God’s message comes to people. On the videotape that Rayford, Chloe, and Buck must see in order to be saved, six verses of 1 Corinthians 15 scroll on the screen, and though Rayford runs to get his wife’s Bible, he doesn’t really need it—“though it was slightly different in her translation, the meaning was the same” (209). Even the pastor on the tape says that his audience “won’t need this proof by now, because you will have experienced the most shocking event of history” (209). The pastor shows the text of 1 Corinthians not because it will instruct the viewer, but in order to answer the pressing question he thinks his future audience will ask: “How did he know” what the rapture and its aftermath would be like? (209). The Bible establishes the authority of the minister by virtue of prophecy; once it has accomplished that, its job is done. (This suggests the minimalism of the theological content of belief.) The novel later withholds the text of Revelations altogether, its literary density hustled offstage by Bruce when he quickly “translates” Revelations into the mediated reality they should expect to see soon on CNN (the red horse is bloodshed, the black horse is World War III, and so on), while the novel holds scripture at bay. The character of Buck seems intended to solve the problem of the media’s mediation in a fundamental way: he makes the media look like the arena of active men. His early stardom as a reporter is signaled by the way he “covers” the “newsmaker of the year” stories, putting him in a passive position. As he begins the transformation that will eventually result in his becoming a Christian, he becomes an action-adventure hero: he fakes his own death, he is handy enough with wirecutters to take apart phones and hook up his computer to their batteries in times of crisis, and he makes news himself as those newsmakers do that he formerly covered. In this sense, Buck is the double of LaHaye and Jenkins. In the novel, and in the array of media products tied to the Left Behind series, they aim to use the forms and conventions of American media to evangelize the world. To put the point another way, the premise of the novel is that we really want to watch TV. How can we allow ourselves to do that? To be seduced by it? How can we allow ourselves to see through the eyes of the media? LaHaye and Jenkins use the media’s forms and conventions to construct some-

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thing that seems to allow you to be making your independent assessment of the media. “God had tried to warn his people by putting his Word in written form centuries earlier” (312), the novel tells us, suggesting that new forms may supplant that writing.22 LaHaye and Jenkins are now putting it in written form again, but in a form, or rather, in multiple forms—the action-adventure genre novel, but also in videos and movies based on the books—that they think will reach the masses. The words “Left Behind” are a registered trademark, and lest we think the TM on the cover is the mark of the beast, LaHaye and Jenkins, in touting the novel’s successes, imply that they are in control of the media, and the novel itself demonstrates that control in the ways it deploys for God the conventions of television and generic action-adventure. As Jonathan Freedman has pointed out, the problem of mind control—and, in particular, an anti-Semitic fear of Jewish mind control popular among the neo-Nazi fringe—hovers behind the representation of the media in Left Behind even if that fear is not specifically attached to Jews.23 I want to suggest that the fear of mediation, while it certainly has a root-system in the history of anti-Semitism, is more broadly a fear of social change. What is perhaps remarkable about the Left Behind series is the way fears about mind control have less to do with modern media than they do with modern gender relations, and, indeed, with the gendered aspects of the believer’s relationship to the Protestant God. This holds true for evangelicalism in contemporary America more generally, in the sense that the politics of marriage, sexuality, and the family topped the agenda of the Christian Right as advanced by LaHaye’s own organization, the Moral Majority. (LaHaye has also written extensively on Christian marriage and sexuality.) In the novels, the ultimate compensation for the believer’s submission to God is the fact that he or she becomes immune from the mind control of the Antichrist. Christians—both men and women—are the only ones who can resist his charisma. The litany of responses to the problem of submission I have outlined here are mined from the conventions of TV; the fantasy entailed in that use of convention is that the conventions of TV can in fact liberate you from the power of its mediation.24 This is a version of belief in belief: it is belief in the normative idea of belief—belief in the idea of the freely chosen worldview that can be learned and then adopted by the rational man of action. Such a version of belief solves, or at least masks, the problem of men’s submission to God, with all the baggage of cultural emasculation it seems to carry along with it—in particular, the emasculation of the middling man in the workplace. I should note here that the Left Behind books deploy a wide array of narrative devices and conventions to deal with the various implications of gender and submission. Those include the representation of the tender Christian man made popular through the Christian men’s movement, and the story about a mother (Chloe) doing important work for God and humanity through a home business—a job so crucial to God’s cause that it eventually gets her martyred. Belief, highlighted in the drama of conversion, moves among these

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conventions, entwines with them; it does not stand apart from them or speak, unidirectionally, to them or through them. Robert Orsi is right that this conception of belief is a Protestant idea; in Left Behind, we can see an example of the work that conception of belief is doing for those who live that religion.

The Lived Religion of Religious Literature My discussion of how belief functions in the two very different versions of religious fiction I have taken up in this chapter has dwelt upon details of theme, plot, and narrative. This focus on what might be considered literary detail is precisely what constitutes my argument with respect to the theoretical questions about belief with which I began. When we attend to belief as a thematic and a formal structure in these writers, we begin to see why it cannot be neglected in favor of a focus on practice. The conditions of belief imagined by religious writers are themselves not the engines or the meanings of practice (as Geertz’s notion of the symbolic meanings of ritual would suggest) but are a form of religious practice that is at once material, ritualistic, discursive, and abstract; it is a form of religious practice both internal to individual consciousness and inextricably linked to the social. My discussions of these novels are meant to demonstrate the psychic, erotic, and familial implications of belief; these implications vary as the writer’s way of imagining religious belief varies. It is not that belief informs or directs certain ways of living a religious life, but that belief is itself a way of living a religious life, connected, as all religious practices are, with the whole world of daily practices we call culture. To put the point another way, though the gender dynamics I am describing in Left Behind are predictable, it is worth seeing how the structure of belief, the very idea of belief—rather than something like Biblical teachings about sex and gender—informs these dynamics. In a review of a dozen recent works on religion in American literature and culture, Lawrence Buell describes two reigning approaches to the subject that has occupied me and the dozen scholars whose books he surveys. For one group of scholars, he writes, “religion,” is conceived “at the level of life-and-text informing beliefs that imbue discursive forms”; for another group, religion is “a set of cultural practices.” Each approach, he suggests, “has its possible payoffs and occupational hazards, but both, I think, might be pursued to (even) greater effect if literary criticism entered more self-consciously into conversation with lived religion studies.” But Buell sees a special challenge for the first, text-oriented group: “Indeed,” he goes on to say, “lived religion explicitly disassociates itself from text-based analysis in the sense of taking the records of religious experience as its primary site of inquiry over against canonical scripture.”25 Buell is correct in his assessment

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of lived religion’s difficulty in accounting for religious discourse, but that difficulty goes well beyond the preference for records of experience over scripture. When, in Between Heaven and Earth, Robert Orsi notes the increasing focus on words rather than figures in Catholic practice as a sign of modern discomfort with religious presence, we should pause to consider. To take one example: the “Agape” or “Peace” on church banners is not presence, exactly; neither is it precisely, or only, abstract discourse. The popularity of the “Agape” should clue us in: the word, by virtue of its foreignness becomes a verbal icon. No matter how liturgical words come to us—as sermons, or vows, or banners, or scripture readings, or modernized prayers—the context of liturgy, repeated week after week, inexorably transforms the instructional into the material.26 In reading the practice of belief in Robinson’s literary novels, and in the massmedia phenomenon of Left Behind, I offer what, in Buell’s schema of the critical landscape, can be understood as a third way. Though my approach is clearly text based, and is concerned with how individual belief imbues discursive forms, it understands texts as a form of cultural practice that imagines belief in ways that have more in common with ritual than with doctrine; these novels are examples of discourse as practice, medium as message. The fact that human relationship in both examples (familial and racial, in Robinson’s work; relationship between men, and across genders, in Left Behind) turns out to be the ultimate manifestation of a belief in belief shows how Orsi’s understanding of religion as relationship can yet illuminate an analysis of religious fiction. He is not wrong about relationship, but he underestimates the life of words. I want to return, finally, to Santayana’s description of religion, which opens Geertz’s essay and also this chapter—that description of religion as “another world to live in,” whether or not we think we will ever “wholly pass over into it.” It sounds so much like a description of the imaginative world of novels that one has to ask: why wouldn’t we think of fiction as religion? (Certainly religion has been described as fiction.) And surely it is telling that Robert Bellah, in searching for a way to describe his religious subjectivity in the wake of belief, turns to literature— to the poetry of Wallace Stevens—with a kind of religious hope that Stevens never clearly evinced even as he proposed his luminous “notes towards a supreme fiction,” toward a (refrigerated) plenitude that might stand in for the emptiness of a churchless “Sunday morning.” In this sense, Bellah and Geertz, as writers embedded in their own historical context, in late-twentieth-century America, reflect a belief in literature born in the Victorian skepticism of Matthew Arnold, made monumental in the modernism of writers like Stevens and Eliot, disseminated through New Critical reading practices taught to the rising middle classes of America going to college on the GI Bill, and found supremely useful by so many American writers at the close of the twentieth century.

CONCLUSION

The End of The Road, Devil on the Rise

HE WRITERS I have considered in this book turn to religious understandings of language at moments of high ambition in their work and at watershed moments in their careers. For Ginsberg, the turn to supernatural formalism comes during his poetic crisis of 1960–1961. For other writers, we can track the importance of the religious turn in the structure of the work itself: they place their most potent evocations of literature’s religious or supernatural power at the endings of major novels—we find it at the end of Song of Solomon and of Beloved, and at the conclusion of The Names and Underworld, and in the final sound of the dial tone in Franny and Zooey. And we find a belief in the religious powers of language, not surprisingly, at moments of sustained high style—as for McCarthy in his breakthrough literary masterpiece Blood Meridian or, as I will argue here, in his defining late novel The Road. Conversely, as if conceding the power of the genre itself, even (or perhaps especially) in its most conventional forms, Tim LaHaye turned to the action-adventure novel as the ground from which to launch his most popular Christian outreach. And Marilynne Robinson—a writer of many essays and a nonfiction book, who is mindful of literary capacities honed in the nineteenth century (by Dickinson, Whitman, and Melville)—presents her most nuanced considerations of religious life in fiction. Indeed, there is much that is compelling about the way these writers move from the Bible as literature to literature as Bible, from language as a common tool of ordinary persons to the inspired babble of the Pentecost. Each in their own way at the top of their respective fields, these writers aim to “reenchant” the literary world, urging it away from rationality and realism even when working in realist modes, insisting on a species of meaning that is not

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reducible to historical context and cannot be fully perceived even by the most sublimely literate reader.1 They have often been rewarded for these turns, too, reminding us of the public appreciation for literature that draws upon religious funds of authority: Robinson won the Pulitzer for Gilead, not for Housekeeping; Morrison sealed her career with the profoundly supernatural Beloved; McCarthy made his reputation with the Biblical style of Blood Meridian; LaHaye, though well-known in political and evangelical circles for his work with the Moral Majority, became a celebrity only when Left Behind made him visible to the nonevangelical world. But the reenchantments have their own emptiness despite such triumphs, and this is the problem I want to consider more directly here at the outside edge of this book. The emptiness is evident in the writers I have spent time thinking about over the course of these chapters, though these are mostly writers I admire. Among these writers, the most frustrating (to me) uses of belief without meaning dehumanize literature, the writer, or both: Morrison masks or empties out her learning and her human authority as well as that of her reader; McCarthy asserts authority on the grounds of pure rhetoric; Kermode pulls a veil of secrecy over meaning and suggests that we will always be shut out from it; Ginsberg verges upon the absurd, claiming powers for his poetry while the poetry itself declines—in direct proportion—in its capacity to move readers. (How many of us would rather read “Wichita Vortex Sutra” than “Kaddish”?) And all the while, these writers want for literature, and sometimes for themselves, what religious belief underwrites: submission on the grounds of religious feeling (McCarthy); supernatural power and wisdom (Morrison); ordinary life as sacrament (DeLillo); poetry as transformational prayer (Ginsberg); meaning so transcendent it appears as sheer radiance (Kermode). In other words, they want the fruits of religious power—or at least, they want to help us imagine compelling versions of religious power—without having to answer for the assumptions about the world, and about writing, upon which such visions are built. Having to answer for those assumptions, or make them visible to those who do not share them, is what it means to bring religion into a putatively secular or pluralist public sphere. It is what we owe to each other in a world where what we believe very much matters, but where understanding and tolerance—rather than consensus—are what we hope for. There are undeniable advantages to leaving religious commitments vague or unarticulated: it makes them easier to tolerate, and perhaps less intrusive upon those who do not share them. But when vague religion has consequences, which it often does, that vagueness insulates religious assumptions from the push and pull of public discourse. Vagueness in this sense insulates religious assumptions from individual and communal thought, and from individual and communal response. This is the most basic reason why I wanted to write this book: I wanted to bring thought to bear on the currents of underarticulated religious assumption I have long felt eddying in the flow of contemporary

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literature, of American politics, and—closest to my daily round—in the very fabric of a supposedly secular academic discourse. The emptiness I am now making free to criticize in political or even moral terms is especially evident in two novels that were published when I was well into the writing of this book; I turn to them briefly as a way of speculating about where the strain of literary and religious thought I have been tracking will go in twenty-first century American writing. The first is Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke (2007)—a book both “wildly ambitious,” as Michiko Kakutani called it in her review for the New York Times Book Review, and as large-scale as any I have discussed so far. Its significance is probably best assessed in the context of other “Vietnam” novels, as Kakutani and others have suggested, but in light of Johnson’s previous novels, it seems the author himself is most invested in its religious freight—witness, for starters, the title’s Biblical allusion to the burning bush. (In the novel, the “Tree of Smoke” refers to a comprehensive file of intelligence data gathered in Southeast Asia.) Early in the novel, before the protagonist Skip Sands takes up residence in Vietnam, he has a dream that, for me, epitomizes the novel’s religious ambitions. Sands is visiting a priest on the island of Mindanao, trying, on the orders of his CIA boss (and uncle), Colonel Francis Xavier Sands III, to suss out a rumor that the priest is running guns to Islamic guerrillas. He sleeps as the priest’s guest, bedding down near that Host that sits “sleepless on the priest’s dresser.” During the night, he wakes “from a dream of biblical force, a prophetic dream.” He wakes suddenly assured that “Mindanao held no interest for the United States, that this Catholic priest couldn’t possibly be running guns to Muslims, that life had called him . . . to this place only to enlarge his understanding in aid of his future work. Because here there lay no present work. Not one particular of the dream remained. Only this certainty.”2 In Tree of Smoke, Johnson has produced a novel about a blindingly absent mystery that moves like God, that leaves few memories of the particulars through which transcendence makes itself known. We might apply to it the same words Skip uses to describe his dream: Tree of Smoke struggles to enlarge understanding of the mystical structures of the world, but in the end the novel lacks much sense of the human particular. The characters sound the same; their struggles and passions are hard to fathom; the love relationship in the novel is unconvincing. The risk of Johnson’s vague and vast ambition is that the novel itself ends up producing a feeling of biblical force but little else—we might say it has no “present work.” This, on my reading, is the final sum of Tree of Smoke.3 Cormac McCarthy seems to understand this risk and, in The Road (2006), to meditate upon it even while remaining powerfully attracted (as, I confess, I am) to the numinous nothingness that enchants Denis Johnson. The Road is about the journey of a father and his beloved young son from Appalachia to the Gulf of Mexico ten years into what most readers take to be a nuclear winter. They pass through the decimated landscape trying to avoid starvation and, worse, the can-

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Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. (287)

Who tells us this? If the spirit of the father is properly understood as God’s spirit “yet,” the description of the trout are the father’s words, the narrator’s words, and God’s words. Their lyricism, their sensuousness, flaunt the power of the word to evoke a world. Like the dial tone humming at the end of Franny and Zooey, the divine meaninglessness of language—that mystery which “hummed” from the things in the glen—is one with the divine creativity of language in the moment that hum becomes articulate speech. And so it is the words, not the light, that hold out hope—that put the speckled trout back into the river and the river back into the

CONCLUSION

nibalistic gangs that now roam the roads. What readers—including Oprah Winfrey—love in this novel is the tenderness of the bond between father and son, the father full of words and practical knowledge of how to survive, the boy laconic and suffused with a child’s beauty.4 The father gives the boy reason to survive in a world without such reasons by assuring him that they, and the son especially, are “carrying the light.” The novel thus splits between two characters the twin engines of McCarthy’s art: on the one hand, McCarthy loves the endless universe words— sensual, concrete words that can describe and name and build every possible thing, that can create a world out of nothingness; and on the other, he is enchanted by the transcendent, numinous space of nothingness (of death, of desert, of a destroyed world, of a child not fully come into language). At the end of the novel, the pair reach the Gulf, where they find, miraculously, an intact family—a mother, a father, and a boy and girl—with whom the boy, and the light he is said to carry, live on after the father dies and the narrative ends. It is hard to decide whether the boy’s light is nothing or everything. Reviewers found the image of light difficult to assess as they presented the first readings of the novel, and the novel suggests that McCarthy himself wondered, too, which was more important: the dying of the father or the preservation of the son. At the end of the novel, the father and his words are gone; the boy’s access to them must run through a religious channel, on the model of prayer, and we do not hear the words: “He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didn’t forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.” 5 Then again—reminding me of the ending to Franny and Zooey—this is the conclusion to the penultimate paragraph of the book; the book’s final paragraph is this:

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valley and make things right again even as the words say these things cannot be done. The father dies and the narrator stops shortly after, and so unlike the final scene of Blood Meridian, where the judge “never sleeps” and “says he will never die,” the final wordfish of The Road feel like sheer assertion, without even the fiction of an immortal character to keep them pinned to the world. One is reminded— as surely McCarthy himself was—of this author’s own lateness, of how all too soon he himself, also in life the father of a young boy, will die and his narrators will fall silent for good. When that happens, the unsatisfactory nature of any continuing “light” will be all the more apparent, though thankfully we will still have some remarkable words. What are the stakes of the attraction to the belief in meaninglessness for literature itself, as an art form and as a cultural institution, imbued (if with ever-weakening force) with cultural significance in classrooms at every American college and university that teaches the liberal arts? One way of answering that question is to note that the religious turn can be read quite clearly as a response to the challenges posed to a modernist understanding of literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Poststructuralism questioned the literary artifact as such, the power of the author, the metaphysical capacities of literature, the grand narrative, and the possibility of meaning; the culture wars questioned the aesthetic and ideological assumptions assumed to underlie the traditional literary canon; the reading public, even that segment educated to appreciate modernist literature, began to fall away from reading—from reading books, at least.6 The writers I have considered here, both novelists and critics, seek a version of literary authority closely allied to the ambitions of modernism—to reveal in art the large-scale structures of the world as well as the very texture of consciousness, to make literature a secular religion and critics its priestly caste. If postmodernism on Beckett’s model entailed stripping away grand narratives, if writers of fiction like John Cheever, Raymond Carver, or even an experimentalist like Kathy Acker turned to the short novel or the small form of the story, one might say that the writers I have considered represent a different kind of postmodernism, something Joycean in scale and ambition. DeLillo, Pynchon, McCarthy, and Morrison are of a piece in this respect, in turning to the world-encompassing tradition of the novel that Joyce represents. The turn to religious authority as a renewable resource for literature can be seen as an attempt to restore to literature the traditional cultural authority that deconstruction and multiculturalist critique called into question in the latter half of the twentieth century—though this turn is of little help to teachers struggling to keep the Bible secular by presenting it as literature in their public-school classrooms. For the novelists, it provides authority that can be mobilized at the level of feeling: we feel the significance of Morrison or McCarthy’s best novels through the allusive webs and logics that draw the Bible into their orbit. Uninterested in restoring cultural unity on the basis of a Christian orthodoxy imagined to be inherent in the liter-

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ary—as Eliot wanted—they transform Biblical authority into literary authority reconceived as supernatural authorship or rhetorical power. These writers balance a commitment to modernism with a response to forces within modernism—such as the difficulty of its aesthetic forms—that by the century’s end had come to threaten its success. They reject the most extreme stylistic obscurities of modernism, preferring as the source of prestige the obscurities of belief without content, belief in meaninglessness, belief for its own sake. These are the kinds of obscurities American religious worlds have embraced as they have come to terms with what Charles Taylor calls the “secular age,” the modern age in which it is impossible to practice any religion without understanding that your beliefs and practices are not shared, and will never be shared, by everyone. From the resurgence of civil religion under Eisenhower and beyond, to the tongue-speakers of the Charismatic movement, to the syncretic and personalized spiritualism that thrives after the 1960s, to the strangely market-conscious certainty of conservative Christianity in America, the decades since the 1960s reveal how religious worlds do the imaginative work necessary to go on being religious, and fervently so, and to do so in public, without pulling up short at the demands of American pluralism. The question is whether we need that religiously inflected belief in meaninglessness, or the belief in form for the sake of form, in order to believe in literature. Does literature need to be somehow religious or to cast its power in religious terms in order to assert its value and move its readers? Is literature something to “believe in” at all? McCarthy’s ambivalence and the moving conclusion to The Road suggest that we might need this supplement to the secular power of literature—the boy must find the father’s posthumous voice through the intention to pray—though it comes at a cost. The career of a writer like Philip Roth, probably the only other novelist with a status equal to Morrison and McCarthy in this period, suggests that we don’t, and it may be this strain of contemporary writing that brings us beyond the impulse to appeal to a religious belief in literature in order to assure its value.7 In Everyman, for instance, Roth makes Medieval religious drama about mortality and redemption into a resolutely human and materialist meditation on death. When the unnamed narrator visits his parents’ grave and speaks to their bones, what he hears in response is not the mysterious sigh of Morrison’s supernatural mystery, but the voice of the Jewish mother, plain in its meaning, childhood memory turned inside out. And unlike the son’s posthumous conversation with his father in The Road, we actually hear the words, and get to enjoy them, their particular humor and cadence. Everyman’s resulting elation, his renewed force of life as he goes into surgery the next day, cannot save him; death finds him on the table. And more: when, in American Pastoral, Nathan Zuckerman confronts the human form of sublime nothingness—in the person of the bland American hero, Swede Levov—he finds nothingness filled not with the dial tone, or the hum of mystery in

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the glen, or the numinous rumble of a Biblical prose style, but with a welter of human detail. The cipher that is “the Swede” is filled with a human tragedy which, if it has a biblical model, evokes Job not as a verbal icon but as a guy we know from high school. And he has the Swede himself launch a critique of a specifically Protestant art of nothingness—the formalist abstract paintings of his blue-blood neighbor, Bill Orrcutt—over and against the history, and human event, that representational art can contain. Roth’s late fiction is, as A. S. Byatt has written, “postreligious”; how to be post-religious and still have literature worth venerating is, in my view, what Roth has to teach. The decade that has elapsed since the publication of American Pastoral has perhaps closed off, at least for now, the wider paths of the post-religious or, more productively, has ensured that secularity needs its cultural architects as much as any religious world needs them. And the potency of religion in the new century ensures that even if Roth’s strain of American literature will endure, and find its successors, the religious strain will find its continuance, and its renewal, as well. For my money, renewal of religious thought and practice in literature lies not in the everblowing vapor of a Tree of Smoke but in something much closer to home: in the devils that strut, simper, and sit on the chests of old ladies in the stories of Edward P. Jones. It should be said that in Jones’s epic novel, The Known World, he gave us a distant, narcissistic God who neglects the world while busy with other, unnamed, business. Wrapped up in his own abstraction and unknowability, he cannot spare a thought for the suffering creatures he had made down below. There is no enchantment with humming mystery here; if divine mystery hums, it hums to itself while the world burns. In Jones’s stories, befitting their smaller scale, we get devils more than God, and these devils are intimate, their scope seemingly trivial. Their all-tooattentive interest in human beings is their worst quality. They stake their claim upon certain families, particular women, local grocery stores. But for all the specificity and ordinariness, they have no trouble superintending a vast, insidious evil: as the dapper Devil “swims across the Anacostia River” to torment the next woman in a family he has dogged for generations, confronting her finally in a Safeway grocery store with his slippery questions, an older woman with a child in her charge in the next aisle launches into a foul-mouthed rage at a man who has bumped her cart.8 By comparison to the Devil’s slyly decorous speech, and his victim’s attempts to preserve her dignity, the rage of the stranger hits the ear with the force of true obscenity. Jones manages as a writer the nearly impossible feat of giving words now often used casually—fucking, shit—real destructive power. This, the story implies, is the fruit of the Devil’s work, a glimpse of the vast human pain he manufactures by harassing women such as Laverne Shepherd, one by one by one. Jones does not stand apart from the consequences of the metaphysical worlds he imagines, and makes unmistakably visible, in his fiction. The narrative structure

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and the content of the work—long- and short-form—put him squarely in the position of both God and Devil. Like God, in The Known World the narrator knows past and future, and the vertiginous shifting between these and the present dramatizes how much more this narrator knows than his characters, more than any human being ever could. If the novel is the “known” world, it is known omnisciently by the narrator, and to the degree that the narrator doubles the author, then, we might also say that it is the God-like author who knows how to make all the suffering happen. It is he who decides that an evil slave patroller will happen upon the free man Augustus in the road, that a slave dealer will then appear, and on the patroller’s vicious whim, that Augustus will be sold back into slavery. The difference between the author and the novel’s self-involved God is that the latter could care less about his creation; to the former it is the object of enormous compassion, energy, and sympathy—even when the author is author of its characters’ pain. The moral complexity entailed in the latter stance is of a piece with the way narrator and author are tied up structurally with the Devil in the stories. Like the Devil, the narrator knows the secret motivations and desires of the characters, and the author, like his Devil, actively manipulates these. If the Devil’s relation to the world is thus more hands-on than God’s, Jones’s narrators and Jones as author take both positions at once: they double God’s omniscience and creative power to the same degree that they are implicated in the Devil’s cruelty and double his intimate knowledge of human weakness. What his narrators have that neither his God nor his devils have is mercy. In drawing close to the costs and the capacities of a world understood in religious terms, Jones stakes out a fictional space that vibrates with the sheer fact of religious belief, with the human consequences of it, and with the narratives entailed in the practice of ritual and of belief as such. This, to me, is lived religion as it can be found, perhaps uniquely, in literary art. And so I would conclude by saying that the scholars I discuss in chapter 5 are right: lived religion is the kind of religion that deserves our attention—that demands our attention. What we believe about literature, and about language, underpins our participation in literary culture; this is true for professional and recreational readers and writers alike. I have tried to show here that literary beliefs are not always distinct from religious beliefs and that literary practices are not always separate from religious ones. In this, I aim to show what discourse—about belief and about other things—looks like when understood as religious practice; the specificity of such discourse allows us to see what sort of cultural work belief still can do. But there is another kind of specificity that reveals the capacities of literature in equal measure. Whether it is Roth unfolding what it would mean to locate the bland bright Swede here in the muck of the world or Jones fighting out the relationship between a blank, transcendent God and personal, personified evil, at its best literature is full of particular life. When religious life is the subject, it is full of

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religion’s difficulties—difficulties that include a pervading sense of meaninglessness in the face of human suffering and the problem of how to be religious in a secular world. Belief in meaninglessness has a valuable place in American religious life, then; its most significant role in literary work is in some ways just as important to the worlds we share: its role, when handled well, is to provoke the imagination. The boy’s empty light in The Road makes the trout in the stream seem miraculous, their bodies heavier in the hand because of the light’s contrasting weightlessness. And the fish are flexibly miraculous, as we are religious or secular readers, as we read in religious or secular ways. The fish may be quick beauty in a mortal world, or God’s creation still reflecting the divine in a fallen world, or just—just!—verbal art. We catch them as we can.

NOTES

Introduction 1. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” (“I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching”) and “Nature,” (“My head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”) 2. On Go Tell It on the Mountain, see my “Religion and the Twentieth-Century Novel,” in The Cambridge History of the American Novel, eds. L. Cassuto, Clare Eby, and Ben Reiss (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010). This analysis is not included in the present book. 3. José Casanova made the definitive argument that countered the common claim among sociologists of religion that religion thrives in a secular age only within a walled-off private sphere. See Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994). 4. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1952), 140 (“meaningful attempt”), 190. 5. On the religion of no-religion at Esalen, see Jeffrey Kripal’s fascinating history of that institution, Esalen: America and the Religion of No-Religion (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press), especially chapter 1. Spiegelberg opens The Religion of No-Religion with a quotation from Whitman (“I and this mystery, here I stand”) affirming the continuities between American transcendentalism—not to mention American literature—and twentieth-century spirituality. See Spiegelberg, The Religion of No-Religion (Stanford: James Ladd Delikin, 1948), 1. 6. For a fine historical account of American spirituality and its roots in the nineteenth century, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005).

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142 7. Talal Asad has elucidated this history in his response to, and critique of, Clifford Geertz’s emphasis on meaning in the analysis of religious practice, and, specifically, Geertz’s claim that religion must “affirm something.” Asad argues that “the requirement of affirmation” enabled Christian missionary work in which “the unevangelized come to be seen typically either as those who have practices but affirm nothing, in which case meaning can be attributed to their practices (thus making them vulnerable), or as those who do affirm something (probably ‘obscure, shallow, or perverse’), an affirmation that can therefore be dismissed. In the one case, religious theory becomes necessary for a correct reading of the mute ritual heiroglyphics of others, for reducing their practices to texts; in the other, it is essential for judging the validity of their cosmological utterances” (Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993], 43). 8. Asad, 36. 9. McGurl argues that the rise of the writing program is the truly novel development that drives, and shapes, American literary production and reception since World War II. He deals persuasively with the arguments of postmodernism and of multiculturalism as perioddefining narratives and expands significantly upon the account of literature’s relationship to social institutions that John Guillory has presented so influentially in Cultural Capital (1993). But McGurl’s analysis, like John Guillory’s, doesn’t tell us how religion fits into this picture. McGurl’s analysis of Flannery O’Connor, for example, simplifies the connection between her willingness to submit to the “discipline” of New Critical craft taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop and her commitment to the disciplines of Catholic faith, suggesting these are connected by her personal fondness for submission. And while McGurl sees the connection between religion and the commitment to form as such, calling the latter “limitation theology” (155), the significance of his own observation immediately evaporates in an historical narrative that is essentially uninterested in religion, despite the snappy allusive handle and the chapter title, “Understanding Iowa: The Religion of Institutionalization.” See McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2009), especially the introduction and chapter 2. 10. In my combined emphasis on writers who are not clearly believers, literature understood in religious terms rather than secular ones, and contemporaneous American religious practice, I depart from a number of previous studies of literature and religion. These tend to focus on believing writers, or choose theory over social history as the relevant context, or work to trace the remains of religious ideas in what they consider secular literature. In Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981), David S. Reynolds argues that religious fiction by the end of the century “replaced rigorous exposition of dogma with diverting narratives in which outward secular crises and consummations supplanted inward self-analysis and contemplation as the center of faith” (6). The sort of faith communicated in fiction ultimately led to the “painful suspicion . . . that the otherworldly religion in which [writers of religious novels] ostensibly had faith was a fiction” (215). Peter Kerry Powers, in Recalling Religions: Resistance, Memory, and Cultural Revision in Ethnic Women’s Literature (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 2001), criticizes the tendency to collapse difference among religious traditions or ethnic traditions into a “monomyth” of universal humanism or a homogenizing conception of religion. He argues

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that the “spaces of tension” between particular world views “are precisely those places that allow us to encounter the possibility of change. This is, I think, the best that great literature can hope for” (xvii). Robert Detweiler, in Breaking the Fall: Religious Readings of Contemporary Fiction (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), locates religiousness in the reading community, rather than in the text itself. He nevertheless selects “texts that signal, one way or another, an openness to a religious reading” (xiv). This seems to mean texts that though they are basically realist, “slide . . . toward the surreal, the magical, the implausible, the unthinkable” (xiv). He eschews an overall argument or consistent methodology across the chapters in deference to the spirit of Derridian “deep play.” He suggests that religious reading is defined by precisely this lack of concern for doctrinal consistency, which is refigured here as pernicious power—“control.” In his encyclopedic American Catholic Arts and Fictions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), Paul Giles tracks the work of Roman Catholic writers, artists and film-makers to show how Catholic ideas are transformed into secular art forms and cultural logics in twentieth-century America. Hedda Ben-Bassat, in Prophets without Vision: Subjectivity and the Sacred in Contemporary American Writing (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2000), reads the postmodern dissolution of the subject in mid- to late-century American fiction through the lens of prophetic traditions. Doing so allows BenBassat to recast the “death of the subject” as the rebirth of a prophetic subject. Like Detweiler, Ben-Bassat locates the religious valence of the reading in the reader, while choosing texts that are either written by believers (Updike, O’Connor) or by secular writers (like Paley) whose work has religious themes. L. Lamar Nisly, in Impossible to Say: Representing Religious Mystery in Fiction by Malamud, Percy, Ozick, and O’Connor (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), combines readings of Jewish and Catholic writers because in both traditions “the practice of . . . religion involves the making physical of mystery” (xii). He aligns storytelling with the nonrational in religion. 11. The famous line can be found in this form, and also in the more common form, “the best that has been thought and said,” in Arnold’s Literature and Dogma: An Essay Towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible (1873). 12. Here is how Arnold puts it: “There can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one’s mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry. Of course we are not to require this other poetry to resemble them; it may be very dissimilar. But if we have any tact we shall find them, when we have lodged them well in our minds, infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality, and also the degree of this quality, in all other poetry which we may place beside them” (“Study of Poetry,” 5). Quotations here and following are taken from “The Study of Poetry” [electronic resource], (Hoboken, NJ: Bibliobytes; Boulder, CO: NetLibrary, n.d.), in the collection of the Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University. 13. Arnold, “Study of Poetry,” 2 (“delighting us”), 10 (“gives to our spirits”). 14. I note that for Arnold, this is not merely an aesthetic judgment about poems; it also entails assessment of the poem’s “high seriousness,” its morality, and its conception of human life. The stakes of calling something a classic are high for Arnold: “If our words are to have any meaning, if our judgments are to have any solidity, we must not heap that supreme praise upon poetry of an order immeasurably inferior” (“Study of Poetry,” 5).

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144 15. James Wood, “The Broken Estate: The Legacy of Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold,” in The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (New York: Random House, 1999), 244. Wood takes Arnold and his contemporaries to task for reducing religion to “good conduct and poetry” while removing it from the “the precinct of truth” (245). 16. The phrase is from Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica”; M. H. Abrams uses it to epitomize the understanding of poetry he develops in The Mirror and the Lamp (1953). Because of the success of Abrams’s book, the phrase becomes a shorthand for New Critical formalism more generally. 17. See Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace: 1947), especially 16 (where he sums up his reading of “The Canonization” and of paradox), and chapter 11, “The Heresy of Paraphrase.” Also W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1954). 18. I am thinking here of the kinds of enchantment we see in his story collection, Lost in the Funhouse, and in particular, the story “Glossolalia.” 19. McGurl, 57. 20. See, for example, James Berger, “Falling Towers and Postmodern Wild Children: Oliver Sacks, Don DeLillo, and Turns against Language,” PMLA 120, no. 2 (2005): 341–61. And Paul Maltby, “The Romantic Metaphysics of Don DeLillo,” Contemporary Literature 37, no. 2 (summer 1996), 258–77. 21. Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2005), 18. 22. Asad notes that “thoughtful Christians” would “concede” that “discourse involved in practice is not the same as that involved in speaking about practice” (Genealogies, 36). I suggest in this book that literature, because of its formal aspects, is an instance in which these two can become the same thing. 23. Wood, “Thomas Pynchon and the Problem of Allegory,” in Broken Estate, 179. This collection of essays takes up many of the writers I examine in this book, including Arnold, Pynchon, DeLillo, Morrison, and Roth; taken together the essays argue that this nothingness constitutes literature’s great delusion about its own possibilities.

Chapter 1: Believing in Literature 1. The New York Times, quoted in William Lee Miller, Piety along the Potomac: Notes on Politics and Morals in the Fifties (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), 43. 2. Miller, 43. 3. Episcopal Churchnews, quoted in Miller, 43–44. 4. For Catholicism as identity, see Andrew M. Greeley, The Catholic Myth: The Behavior and Beliefs of American Catholics (New York: Scribner’s, 1990), and Michele Dillon, Catholic Identity: Balancing Reason, Faith and Power (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999). A more recent version that owes an important debt to academic study of lived religion can be found in the cultural–historical work of Thomas Ferraro, in Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2005). This approach is very common in analyses of Jewish culture because religious practices, general cultural practices, and racial

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and ethnic elements of Jewish identity are historically intertwined. General theories of religion also reflect this trend when they emphasize belonging as a primary function of religious practice. This is a central strain already in Herberg; for a later example, see Thomas Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2006). 5. Miller, 34, 33. 6. Patrick Henry, “‘And I Don’t Care What It Is’: The Tradition-History of a Civil Religion Proof-Text,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 49, no.1 (Mar. 1981), 36. This is Henry quoting Sydney Ahlstrom’s version of the quotation; throughout the essay, he tracks others who invoke the quotation in a similar form and to similar effect. 7. Henry, 41. 8. See Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus (winter 1967). 9. An excellent account of the history of the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” can be found in Mark Silk, Spiritual Politics: Religion and America since World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), chapter 2. Herberg, quoted in Silk, 50. 10. Silk, 53. 11. As Henry elegantly puts it, “It begins to look as if the tradition of what Eisenhower said on December 22, 1952 . . . is materially shaped by the polemical/rhetorical concerns of those who pass the tradition on” (44). 12. I take the term from Silk, who sets religions of conversion in contrast to, but also as related to, “adhesional” religion, that stresses common understandings over doctrinal differences. 13. See Martin Marty, The New Shape of American Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1959). 14. My account of the Feeney case is indebted to Mark Massa’s description of it in Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team (New York: Crossroad, 1999). Massa also notes the ways it speaks back to Blanshard’s anti-Catholic success. 15. See Silk’s wonderfully colorful account in Spiritual Politics, chapter 4, “The Wages of Conversion (II).” Feeney’s followers eventually formed a dissident group called “The Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary,” which set up an enclave near the site of Bronson Alcott’s nineteenth-century utopian community, Fruitlands, and not far from an old Shaker Village. Feeney meanwhile continued to preach increasingly anti-Semitic and belligerent sermons on the Boston Commons. Archbishop Cushing, in contrast, spent the postwar years working with great success to reinvigorate Catholicism in a way that would fit more comfortably into Herberg’s “American Way of Life.” 16. Text of the prayer and information about the formal prayers is taken from Edward T. Folliard, “Ike Takes Helm in a ‘Time of Tempest’; Says ‘We Are Linked to All Free Peoples,’” The Washington Post, Wednesday, 21 Jan. 1953, A01. The benediction was said by the Most Rev. Henry K. Sherrill, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church; the invocation was said by the Most Rev. Patrick O’Boyle, Archbishop of Washington; and there had been a prayer in between by Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver of Cleveland. 17. Scene recounted in Miller, 48. 18. See Bryan Wilson, “Secularization,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: MacMillan, 1987), vol. 13, 159–65.

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146 19. Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (New York: Routledge, 1991), x–xi. 20. The editor of the second edition points out this blind spot in the first edition, not so much as Ahlstrom’s failure of insight but as testimony to the movement’s rapid and unlookedfor rise. See Ahlstrom, The Religious History of the American People, foreword and concluding chapter by David D. Hall (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2004). 21. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 95. 22. See Robert Ellwood, The Sixties Spiritual Awakening: American Religion Moving from Modern to Postmodern (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994). 23. Peter L. Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, ed. Peter Berger, a publication of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington, DC (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), 2. 24. Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 8–9 (all quotations). 25. The Jesus prayer is as follows: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” 26. J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (New York: Bantam, 1964; first published in 1961), 48, 49. All further citations are from the Bantam edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 27. Less courageous souls, like another brother named Wake, mentioned from time to time in the story, embrace specific doctrine without even trying to grasp its relation to preincarnational wisdom: Wake has become a Roman Catholic priest. 28. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), 291–92 (all quotations). 29. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), 136, 138. See also Robert Scholes, The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1998). The opening chapter gives a compatible account of how Christianity and literary studies are entwined from the nineteenth-century onward. 30. Guillory, 165 (“empty shrine” and “already within”). Elsewhere, Guillory argues that this distinction soon rendered the New Criticism’s Christian investments unnecessary as the engine of literature’s transcendence. Guillory argues that “The difficulty of the literary language valorized by the New Criticism distinguished it from the mass culture, from the works of popular modernism,” and thus “the crypto-religious polemic of the New Critics against the secularity of modern life could drop away in the 1950s: that polemic could be received as the polemic against mass culture per se” (172). All literature needed to justify its survival (albeit in the narrow halls of academia) was the claim that “difficulty” marked its transcendence of mass culture. 31. Guillory, 166. 32. Marilynne Robinson, “That Highest Candle,” Poetry 190, no. 2 (May 2007). 33. Guillory, 154. The full quotation shows how religion disappears into sociology: “The sense in which most criticism remains, as Edward Said has argued, ‘religious criticism,’ is by no means simple or easy to explain, because the element of the ‘religious’ occupies a realm of social fantasy, which yet testifies to a certain reality about literary culture.”

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34. Michael Warner, “Uncritical Reading,” in Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, ed. Jane Gallop (New York: Routledge, 2004). He traces back to their eighteenth-century philosophical roots the pieties and techniques to which he refers and draws attention to some of the alternative disciplines of reading that might throw critical reading’s discipline into relief as discipline. Among these alternatives, religious reading is, as he says, the most obvious example, but he also suggests that pornographic reading might qualify as another. Warner argues that “because the historiography [of reading practices] is still emerging, and because the tendency to project critical reading as the necessary implication of reason or agency is so great, we do not even know as much as we would like about what the alternative frameworks have been, are, or might become in a future of screen literacies” (33). It is not entirely clear how screen literacies will by their very nature change or challenge the practice of critical reading as it is currently understood (though N. Katherine Hayles tries to answer that question in My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005]), but the essay is meant to be more suggestive than exhaustive in its claims. 35. Amy Hollywood, “Reading as Self-Annihilation,” in Polemic, 56. 36. See Ward, Introduction to Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, ed. Graham Ward (Malden: Blackwell, 1997), xl. He argues that in the work of Taylor, Altizer, and a few others commonly labeled postmodern theologians, “we have not yet attained to the postmodern.” We won’t have reached that condition “until we recover for our time the world before and beyond the secular” (xlii). “We are only just beginning to see what such a postmodern theology might look like” (xlii, original emphasis). Ward is similar to Bauman in the sense that both see postmodernity as the condition of going beyond modern secular rationality, either back or forward to an unsecular mode of thought. For Bauman, it is the Holocaust that most dramatically demonstrates the need to abandon secular humanism, which he holds responsible for reducing the natural—including the human being—to the instrumental. The forest becomes “timber,” the person “a Jew.” It is not clear to me that the pitfalls of rationality and secularity are by definition preferable to the pitfalls of the “magical” and “unsecular” modes of thought Bauman prefers. The latter gave us the Inquisition and jihad, after all, and it is hard to see the Nazis as secular humanists (though that characterization may better fit Soviet communism with its pogroms). 37. Quoted in Ward, xxxix. 38. Marty, 3. 39. Jenny Franchot argues that both anti- and philo-Catholicism have long been important to the articulation of Protestantism and its limitations in the American context. See her magisterial study of nineteenth-century American literature and culture, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994). Levinson, in Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2008), is arguing less for the centrality of Jewish experience to American culture than for its persistence, and its importance to a set of prominent writers from the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, thus offering an alternative to the thesis that the story of Jews in America is simply the story of assimilation. 40. Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988). See especially chapter 5, “The Declining Significance of Denominationalism,” and chapter 7, “The Great Divide: Toward Religious Realignment.”

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148 41. See Donald S. Lopez Jr., “Belief,” in Critical Terms for Religious Study, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), 21–35. 42. Israel Friedlaender, Past and Present (1919), quoted in Mordecai Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life (New York: MacMillan, 1934), vii. 43. Arnold M. Eisen, Rethinking Modern Judaism: Ritual, Commandment, Community (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), 4. 44. Eisen specifies that both lapsed Protestants and Catholics fit this model. I would argue that lapsed Catholics can look quite different from lapsed Protestants in this regard. The discussion of DeLillo and American Catholic culture at midcentury in chapter 3 is a case in point, as is the predominance of Catholic authors among those typically chosen in the existing scholarly studies of religious fiction in the late twentieth century. It is also telling that Eisen singles out Mary Douglas (author of Natural Symbols), whom he praises for her work in countering the anti-ritual bias of modern Christian scholarship, as having been informed in this respect by her Catholicism. See Eisen, 9, 10. 45. For a lucid analysis of Jewish modernity and the history of Jewish faith in the twentieth century as it relates to the question of secularization and desecularization, see Jonathan Sacks, “Judaism and Politics,” in The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, ed. Peter Berger. Quotations on 63. 46. Survey cited in Sacks, 59. 47. For an account of Jewish scholars’ integration into university English departments during the heyday of New Criticism and (later) “theory,” and the effects of this upon the culture of reading in the university and beyond, see Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture, especially chapter 5, “Henry James Among the Jews.” 48. Kaplan was committed to the idea that the question of salvation was relevant only as it applied to this world, and he looked to supersede the “other-worldly stage” of Judaism, where salvation was to be had in a future world of God’s making. “The center of gravity of the spiritual interests will again be the here and the now” in “the next stage” of Judaism that Kaplan sought to usher in (Kaplan, 212, 214). See also Arnold Eisen’s discussion of Kaplan in Rethinking Modern Judaism. One exception to my claim about Roth’s lack of interest in belief might seem to be Roth’s early short story, “The Conversion of the Jews,” from Goodbye, Columbus (1959), where the young Ozzie insists that he be given answers to his questions about certain Jewish and Christian beliefs about God. When Rabbi Binder becomes angry with him for asking such questions, and finally hits him, Ozzie climbs to the synagogue roof and threatens to jump unless his mother, and Rabbi Binder, and the assembled boys from the Rabbi’s class, say they believe in Jesus, and promise “never to hit anyone about God.” The story dramatizes not so much belief as the American culture of belief, where beliefs are held and protected from rational questioning. Ozzie’s last name is Freedman, Roth’s way of suggesting that his questions represent freedom from any belief that is unanswerable to human reason. In other words, what matters in the story is not so much the answers one can give about certain beliefs but the questions one should be able to ask. 49. Maeera Y. Shreiber’s Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics (Stan-

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ford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2007), constitutes a rich exception to the focus on culture over religion in Jewish American writing. She gives a nuanced and theologically sophisticated account of poetry’s relationship to prayer, for example, and reads a distinctly Jewish theology out of the poetry of Allen Grossman, among others. She argues that it is the insistence on the otherness of God that makes for a Jewish poetics, a literary enterprise at odds with the Christian urge—expressed throughout the canon of American literature—to see God as both personified (in Christ) and immanent in the world (through the Spirit). The question for the Jewish religious poet (as I understand Shreiber’s analysis) is not “who or what is God?” but “How can human beings speak to God?” 50. See David W. Wills, Christianity in the United States: A Historical Survey and Interpretation (Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame, 2005), especially 54–56. He notes in the summary statistics at the end of the book that “The largest single group of Christians in the United States is by far the Roman Catholic Church, reporting an inclusive membership of 62 million. This figure alone makes clear the current central place of Catholicism in American religious life. In recent surveys of religious self-identification, around one-quarter of all Americans usually indicate they are Roman Catholics” (82). 51. There is a significant scholarly consensus that this is the case, so much so that the fact of post-Protestantism becomes the underlying assumption (rather than the point that needs to be argued) for a number studies of American and World Christianity. See the essays in Beyond Establishment: Protestant Identity in a Post-Protestant age, eds. Jackson W. Carroll and Wade Clark Roof (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993). Fessenden’s Culture and Redemption (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006) gives a cultural history of Protestantism in the American public sphere, elaborating an argument that has much in common with the nutshell argument Bellah makes in his essay “Civil Religion in America” (1967), in that it recognizes the genuinely religious quality of seemingly bland public expressions of religion. Fessenden’s book should give us some pause in declaring Protestantism over. 52. James’s emphasis on religious experience, which he usually makes no effort to translate back into causes (he doesn’t, for example, meditate much on why a given informant might suddenly fall into a feeling of terror at his own existence), suggests a religious structure similar to the one I describe when I speak of locating religious experience in meaninglessness, or more specifically, in meaningless language. That said, James finds the specific content of religious thought that accompanies the varieties of religious experience—the precepts of healthy-minded religions or of the religions of the sick soul—to be crucial to understanding religion as such. For James, the content of these different types of religion makes all the difference both to the study of religious life and to the way one might live it. See William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902), ed. and intr. Martin Marty (New York: Penguin, 1982). 53. On James and Catholicism, see Pericles Lewis, “Christopher Newman’s Haircloth Shirt: Worldly Asceticism, Conversion, and Auto-Machia in The American,” Studies in the Novel 37, no. 3 (fall 2005): 308–28. 54. See Steven Weisenberger, A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1988).

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150

Chapter 2: Supernatural Formalism in the Sixties 1. Chicago Seven trial testimony, in Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958–1996, ed. David Carter (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 235; hereafter cited parenthetically. 2. See, for example, Ginsberg’s interview with Bob Elliot, for the Washington University campus paper Freelance, 3 March 1967. Elliot’s first question makes reference to this fact: “In anticipating your coming here, the reaction of many people was not so much to you as the poet, but rather as a spiritual leader. How do you react to this?” Ginsberg replies, “I don’t know, it’s kind of pleasant. . . . Sure, I’ll be a holy man. I’m holier than Cardinal Spellman probably” (interview reprinted in Spontaneous Mind; quotations on 67). 3. Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1998), 256. 4. On the relationship between the counterculture and political activism in the sixties, see Rossinow. Rossinow shows how student groups like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), who in the early sixties disdained the counterculture as simply frivolous, drew closer to the “freaks” as they embraced culture—as distinct from institutions and government—as a legitimate realm for and target of political action. This shift made someone like Ginsberg seem political even when he was simply reading poetry. 5. Rubin and other organizers of the Festival anticipated the violence but had not communicated this to Ginsberg, probably because they knew that Ginsberg would not participate in a demonstration intended to be violent. See the account in Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), especially 510. 6. Judge Hoffman was notoriously hostile to the defendants and defense witnesses in the trial, and was later rebuked when the verdict in the case was overturned along with his many contempt of court rulings regarding the participants in the trial. See Doug Linder, “Famous American Trials: The Chicago Seven Trial” at http://www.umkc.edu/famoustrials, (ca. 1995–2004). 7. Ginsberg, Indian Journals, March 1962–May 1963: Notebooks, Diary, Blank Pages, Writings (New York: Grove, 1970), 42–43; hereafter cited parenthetically. 8. “Psalm I” (1949), from Empty Mirror: Gates of Wrath in Collected Poems, 1947–1980 (New York: HarperCollins, 1984),18. The poems discussed in this chapter are, unless otherwise indicated, quoted from the Collected Poems rather than the individual collections; Collected Poems is hereafter cited parenthetically. 9. See To Eberhart from Ginsberg (Lincoln, MA: Penmaen Press, 1976), 32. 10. It is plausible that Ginsberg might have simply disagreed with Burroughs and carried on with the poetics he established in “Howl” and “Kaddish.” It may have been his relationship to Burroughs, and the latter’s charisma, that persuaded Ginsberg that the cut-up method must be taken seriously. Indeed, Ginsberg took most things (ideas, novels, poems, etc.) seriously if they emanated from a beloved friend. 11. William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, with foreword by Terry Southern (New York: Grove, 1991; first published in 1959), 125–26; hereafter cited parenthetically. 12. Transcript of selected testimony, from “Naked Lunch on Trial,” in Naked Lunch, xv. 13. “Naked Lunch on Trial,” xv. This reflection seems to conflict with Mailer’s assessment,

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a moment earlier in the trial, that on a second reading he “began to feel that . . . there is more to his [Burroughs’s] intent” than he “had ever recognized before; that the work was more of a deep work, a calculated work, a planned work. In other words, the artistry in it was more deliberate and more profound than I thought before” (“Naked Lunch on Trial,” xiv). Perhaps the “intent” he refers to here is unconscious intent, and the calculation, planning, and artistry was to be found in Burroughs’s willingness—his deliberate decision—to write in such a way that unconscious intent could be made manifest. (Mailer says he did not know exactly how the book was written, but that he had heard several different accounts.) 14. “Naked Lunch on Trial,” xvii. 15. Ibid. 16. In a last-ditch effort to avoid confrontation over the march, the VDC and the Hell’s Angels agreed to meet for a combination negotiation session–party at the home of Sonny Barger, leader of the Oakland chapter of the Angels, to be moderated by Ken Kesey. When tensions showed no sign of abating, Ginsberg took out his harmonium and started chanting the Prajnaparamita (known as the “Highest Perfect Wisdom” chant); soon one of the most belligerent of the Angels joined in with his own version of chant, and the evening quickly took a turn for the better. In the end, the march was able to go forward without interruption, and the Angels were able to walk away from the confrontation without losing face. This account can be found in Schumacher, 454–55. 17. Though the publication dates of Planet News (1968) and The Fall of America (1972) place these collections at the end of the decade and into the seventies, the poems within them were composed between Ginsberg’s return from India and the end of the sixties, and were well-known to the public throughout those years because of his frequent readings and interviews. Ginsberg did not hoard poems, but usually made them public in one way or another soon after they were composed. 18. For an excellent brief summary of the varieties and characteristics of yoga and of chant, see Mircea Eliade, “Yoga,” and Sanjukta Gupta, “Mantra” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade, 15 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1987), vol. 15, 519–23, and vol. 9, 176–77, respectively. 19. Spontaneous Mind, 127. 20. Ibid., 154 (original emphasis). 21. Ibid., 141–42; ellipses in original. 22. It is worth noting that in this passage, Ginsberg is characteristically rereading his early work to coincide with his latest theories of language, perhaps in the interest of making his poetic project appear seamless over time, or of enlisting the popularity of his older poems to serve his newest enthusiasms. For example, when Ginsberg writes a foreword to the 1976 publication of his 1956 letter about “Howl” to Richard Eberhart, he disavows his earlier “insistence on a divine self rather than a relatively heavenly emptiness” but goes on to suggest that “it was implicit that mindfulness insight and perfection of Self would lead to no-Self.” (See Ginsberg, “More Explanations Twenty Years Later,” in To Eberhart from Ginsberg, 12.) Following Ginsberg’s lead in this causes one to miss the distinctive difference between the prophetic poetry of “Howl” and “Kaddish” and the poetry of emptiness and materiality that I argue defines his post-India work. 23. Spontaneous Mind, 142.

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152 24. Ginsberg, Planet News (San Francisco: City Lights, 1968), 21. 25. Tony Trigilio argues that the “Lord” and “Caw” at the conclusion of “Kaddish” signal the “Ah” of the later poetry: the nonreferential material-transcendent prophetic language. I take the point that the Caw—as well as the incomprehensible manuscripts, scribblings, yacketyyak, and babble of “Howl”—might be read as pointing toward a Buddhistic emptiness. But in the sources Trigilio cites to support his reading, Ginsberg is looking back at “Howl” and “Kaddish” from a markedly more Buddhist perspective than he had while writing the poems, rereading them in light of his later practice. Ginsberg seems invested in making his early poems continuous with his later poems by the mid-sixties, even, but especially by the 1980s (the date of the annotations to “Howl” that Trigilio frequently cites). In the context of his discussion, Triglio provides a useful overview of various critics’ responses to Ginsberg’s Buddhism. See Trigilio, Strange Prophecies Anew: Rereading Apolcalypse in Blake, H. D., and Ginsberg (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), especially 131–49, and 172. Paul Portugés, for his part, marks a strong distinction between Ginsberg’s post-India poetry and the early work that made him famous by emphasizing the difference between Ginsberg’s discipleship to Blake and his post-India discipleship to Buddhist teachers. Nevertheless, many of the readings in the first part of the book, which examines the poetry from 1948 to 1961, focus on Buddhistic aspects of the early poetry, deploying, as do Trigilio’s readings, Ginsberg’s own later rereadings of his early poems (see, for example, the reading of “Kaddish” as a “physical poetry” centered around the breath, which is supported by reference to Ginsberg’s 1972 version of “How Kaddish Happened”; 80–81 and 172, n. 62). Portugés’s interviews with Ginsberg on Buddhism and mantra chanting are taken up largely with the details of how Buddhistic practice has translated into the poetry, and how Ginsberg’s mantrachanting practices evolve in response to the advice of different teachers. He argues elsewhere, as I do here, that Buddhism is a way for Ginsberg to circumvent the rational mind. See Portugés, The Visionary Poetics of Allen Ginsberg (Santa Barbara, CA: Ross-Erikson, 1978), especially part I, chapter V, and all of part II, and also “Allen Ginsberg’s Paul Cézanne and the Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus,” Contemporary Literature 21 (1980): 435–49. John Lardas’s study of the Beats’ Spenglerian notion of religion and history is another example of an analysis that defines Ginsberg’s spiritual poetics by the early work: his study breaks off by the late fifties, and insofar as it addresses Ginsberg’s work in the sixties and beyond, it focuses on his psychedelic experimentation (assigning Buddhism to Kerouac) and assimilates that to Ginsberg’s early Spenglerian religious outlook. Ginsberg’s Om chanting in Chicago in 1968, for example, is dismissed by Lardas as a caricature of religious sensibility, corrupted by celebrity. See Lardas, The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs (Urbana: University of Illinios Press, 2001), especially 32 (for dismissal of Ginsberg’s Om chanting) and 231 (for the Beats’ ongoing Spenglerian outlook). A notable exception to these critics’ tendency to read Ginsberg’s work as expressing one essential outlook can be found in John Tytell’s Naked Angels (1976), an early attempt to account for the Beat movement and the importance of its major writers. Tytell, providing detailed readings of Ginsberg’s poetry from the first collection through Fall of America, is less concerned with making these collections cohere around one poetic project than with revealing the evolution of a poet he sees as especially significant, and as part of a major tradition that includes the Romantics, Emerson, Whitman, Pound, Williams, and even Eliot. For Tytell,

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Ginsberg’s Buddhism is part of a larger thread in the poetry that seeks to embrace all of life without judgment or anger. As such, Buddhism is a force in the poetry that moderates the anger Ginsberg also mobilized (especially in “Howl,” “TV Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Death Chamber,” and in the poems of Fall of America.) See Tytell, Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976). 26. Spontaneous Mind, 152. 27. Ibid., 174. 28. Ibid., 177, 178. 29. Ibid., 184. 30. Ibid., 196. 31. Ibid., 183. 32. Ibid., 183. 33. When Ginsberg describes what the return to the body in yoga and meditation means to him, he invariably speaks of calming the emotions, accepting one’s humanity, ceasing the anger and the critical judgments that impede the disinterested love of all things. Nevertheless, as I will argue, a residue of supernaturalism remains, one which is especially revealing of more general understandings of language as supernatural in the sixties. 34. Portugés, 95–96. 35. “The metaphysics of presence” denotes the assumption that language implies a human speaker; Derrida argues against this assumption. 36. See my The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003), especially chapter 3, “Nuclear Holocaust and the Literary Victim.” 37. I am grateful to Sean McCann for pointing out these elements in Pound. 38. Alan Watts, Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion (New York: Random House, 1971), xii. 39. It should be noted that the Charismatic movement was not just an American phenomenon, though, as I will show, it has a particular history in this country with specific implications for American literature and culture. The movement had an impact on churches all over the world during the sixties and seventies, especially in Latin America. On the movement worldwide, see Welcome, Holy Spirit: A Study of Charismatic Renewal in the Church, ed. Larry Christenson (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1987); The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, ed. Stanley Burgess (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 2002); Between Babel and Pentecost: Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America, eds. André Corten and Ruth MarshallFratani (London: Hurst & Company, 2001); David Lehmann, Struggle for the Spirit: Religious Transformation and Popular Culture in Brazil and Latin America (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996); Perspectives on Pentecostalism: Case Studies from the Caribbean and Latin America, ed. Stephen D. Glazier (Washington, DC: Univ. Press of America, 1980); and Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism, eds. Margaret Lamberts Bendroth and Virginia Lieson Brereton (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2002). 40. For an excellent account of the roots of American Pentecostalism in the first half of the twentieth century, see Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001).

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154 41. Richard Quebedeaux, The New Charismatics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), 58–59. 42. This is not to say that the phenomenon was exclusively the province of white, middleclass America during these decades. Indeed, Charismatic practice grew among Christians of color as well, though this did not result in the sort of media attention produced by Episcopalian tongue-speakers and GlossoYalies. On the history of Pentecostalism among African Americans, see Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1997; first published in 1971), chapter 9; David Michel, Telling the Story: Black Pentecostals in the Church of God (Cleveland, TN: Pathway Press, 2000); Arthur E. Paris, Black Pentecostalism: Southern Religion in an Urban World (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1982), a case study of black Pentecostalism in Boston. On the role of women and people of color, see Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism. 43. “Attitude of heart” quoted from Robert Frost, respected Neo-Pentecostal teacher, in Quebedeaux, 134. 44. Quebedeaux, 107; original emphasis. 45. “Christian Unity—The Growing Fact” Renewal (Dec. 1970–Jan. 1971), 4–5, quoted in Quebedeaux, 111, original emphasis. 46. Quoted in Quebedeaux, 124. 47. Ibid., 133. 48. Quebedeaux’s examples of explicit statements to this effect are numerous and fascinating. Howard Ervin, whom Quebedeaux describes as “a chief theological spokesman for Neo-Pentecostalism” argues that doctrinal conformity is not so much an impossible ideal of unity as an actual barrier to Christian faith. “An anti-supernaturalism ‘theology’ has no solution, only theories, for the human predicament, which is basically man’s alienation from God. . . . On the other hand, a doctrinaire theological orthodoxy is not a serious option. It is essentially a refurbished scholasticism whose concept of metaphysical reality has congealed in abstract definitions and propositions. It is too prone to confound definition with essence.” (Ervin, These Are Not Drunken, As Ye Suppose [Plainfield, NJ: Logos International, 1968], 225–26, quoted in Quebedeaux, 127). Quebedeaux also points out that many who attended Charismatic “Christian Centers” like Melodyland (established in 1960; in 1969, it moved into a defunct theater across the street from Disneyland) in fact have two religious affiliations— one to the center and another to a historical denomination (Quebedeaux, 122). 49. Quebedeaux, 230, n. 6. 50. See Greeley, The Catholic Myth. 51. See 1 Corinthians 14:1–39; quotations from The New American Bible, 1 Corinthians 14:14–15, 18–19. 52. As C.F.D. Moule writes, “The gift of tongues, as it is known today, seems usually to be a spontaneous welling up of a special language. It is not recognized as any known language. . . . [For the private individual] it is, it would seem, a significant outlet of pent up praise or emotion too deep, too intense, for words: it is a perfect mode of private devotion. . . . what is offered as interpretation . . . is often very general; and although it may have independent value, it can hardly be more successful as an interpretation of the tongues themselves than the notoriously hopeless attempt to describe the ‘meaning’ of music, of ballet, of a

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Chapter 3: The Latin Mass of Language 1. DeLillo was born in the Bronx in 1936, among an immigrant community of Southern Italians. He has said that “New York made me.” “There’s a sensibility, a sense of humor, an approach, a sort of dark approach to things that’s part New York, and maybe part growing up Catholic, and that, as far as I’m concerned, is what shapes my work far more than anything I read” (quoted in David Remnick, “Exile on Main Street,” New Yorker [15 Sep. 1997], 45). Vince Passaro quotes DeLillo describing how Catholicism made “important subjects, eternal subjects” that he approaches in his fiction “part of ordinary life” (“Dangerous Don DeLillo, ” New York Times [19 May 1991], Sec. 6:76). DeLillo also aligns the writer’s way of thinking with the way Jesuits think (“Writing as a Deeper Form of Concentration,” interview with Maria Moss, Sources [spring 1999], 96). 2. Given the thematic presence of Catholicism in what is perhaps DeLillo’s most ambitious novel, Underworld, a number of critics have begun to think about religion in DeLillo’s work in a sustained way. Evidence of the difference Underworld makes can be seen in the first essay collection on the novel, UnderWords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo’s Underworld (eds. Joseph Dewey, Steven G. Kellman, and Irving Malin [Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2002]). Nine out of the fourteen essays in the volume make an argument that bears upon religion, whereas religion was only an occasional subject in DeLillo criticism before the novel’s appearance. In the “Don DeLillo II” special issue of Modern Fiction Studies (ed. John Duvall, MFS 45, no. 3 [1999]), the subject of religion and, more generally, of belief, hovers over many essays, the most explicit engagement being David Cowart’s fine essay on one of the early novels, “‘More Advanced the Deeper We Dig’: Ratner’s Star” (in Duvall, 600–620). Cowart, also the author of one of the religiously oriented essays in UnderWords, has since included both these pieces in a book, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2002). Jesse Kavadlo’s Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief (New York: Peter Lang, 2004) is focused on DeLillo as a humanist who shows us “a spiritless world but also dramatize(s) the longing beneath it” (10); DeLillo’s recent work, he argues, “suggests the need, the desire, for belief” (10, original emphasis). James Berger reads De-

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poem, or of abstract art.” Moule, The Holy Spirit (London: Mowbrays, 1978), 87, quoted in Gervais Angel, Delusion or Dynamite?: Reflections on a Quarter-Century of Charismatic Renewal (Eastbourne, UK: MARC, 1989), 118. 53. Walter Hollenweger, quoted in Quebedeaux, 129. 54. C.F.D. Moule, The Holy Spirit, 87, cited in Angel, 102. 55. See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed., eds. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), 10. 56. John Tytell, for example, sees it as less accomplished than the previous sixties volume, Planet News, and certainly as more despairing, Ginsberg having become “disoriented” from the yogic joy of his previous verse. See Tytell, 255–56. 57. For a trenchant critique of this political turn during and after the sixties, see Michael Szalay and Sean McCann, “Do you believe in magic? Literary thinking after the New Left,” Yale Journal of Criticism 18, no. 2 (fall 2005): 435–68, 479–80.

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156 Lillo as gesturing toward something beyond language that he identifies as possibly religious, possibly traumatic. See Berger, “Falling Towers.” Of the recent books on DeLillo, Mark Osteen’s American Magic and Dread (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000) allows for the most mystical reading of DeLillo. 3. The most important early work on DeLillo and religion before Underworld can be found in John A. McClure’s essay, “Postmodern/Post-Secular: Contemporary Fiction and Spirituality” (Modern Fiction Studies 41 [1995]: 141–63). McClure argues “that some of the very features of fiction which secular theorists have singled out as definitively postmodern must at least in some cases be understood in terms of a post-secular project of resacralization” (144). With respect to DeLillo, McClure suggests that he “insistently interrogates secular conceptions of the real, both by focusing the reader’s attention on events that remain mysterious or even ‘miraculous,’ and by making all sorts of room for religious or spiritual discourses and styles of seeing” (143). It is also worth noting that McClure aligns DeLillo’s conception of language in The Names with the Latin mass, though only briefly, in Late Imperial Romance (London: Verson, 1994), 140. This work on DeLillo is expanded in McClure’s more recent book Partial Faiths. McClure argues there that Underworld marks a shift in DeLillo’s religious outlook, toward a less ambivalent embrace of charismatic and ecstatic manifestations of popular religion. See Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2007), chapter 2, “Worldly Vocations: Don DeLillo.” My argument differs from McClure’s in two ways. First, I place DeLillo’s work in a different context—that of midcentury American Catholicism, rather than theoretical postmodernism; second, I find DeLillo to be more committed to religious understandings of language even in his early novels. My reading of DeLillo confirms Thomas Carlson’s sense that his work is an example of a larger mystical tradition that attempts to unite immanence and transcendence. Carlson, having laid out the history of this tradition, cites Underworld briefly as an example of the tradition’s contemporary technological form. See Carlson, “Locating the Mystical Subject,” in Mystics: Presence and Aporia, eds. Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003), 226–29. 4. DeLillo suggests this paradox when he notes, in an interview that “The novel is the most powerful form of writing there is . . . even though someone in Mao II calls it ‘the Latin Mass of ideas and feelings and perceptions”’ (quoted in H. J. Kirchhoff, “Influence of Novelists on the Wane?” Globe and Mail [Toronto] 26 Jun. 1991, C2:1). What I think DeLillo means is that the Latin mass may seem outmoded—like the novel—but in fact the Latin mass can be compared to “the most powerful form of writing there is.” 5. Greeley, The Catholic Myth,1–33. For another version of how Catholic identity mediates between the hierarchy and the lay Catholic who disagrees with the hierarchy’s positions, see Michele Dillon, Catholic Identity. Dillon focuses on women and gay Catholics. 6. More strictly popular novelists like Francine Prose and Robert Byrne also aligned the loss of agency with Catholicism, and often posed these two things against American freedom. In a comic passage from Robert Byrne’s Memories of a Non-Jewish Childhood (1970), cited by Garry Wills in Bare Ruined Choirs, an altar boy trips on the bell used to signal to the parishioners when to rise, kneel, or “strike their breasts symbolically with their fists,” and in the mayhem that results we hear the bell “ringing furiously and people were kneeling down and striking their breasts all over the place.” Prose, writing somewhat later, in Household

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Saints (1981) describes an immigrant mother-in-law who figuratively suffocates her daughterin-law and the daughter-in-law’s unborn child with rituals, prayers, and superstition. A child born later to the daughter-in-law turns out to be mad in a way that unwittingly reincarnates the traditional Catholicism of the grandmother. Gerald Howard, in the introduction to his interview with DeLillo, explicitly connects DeLillo with O’Connor. He writes that “[Underworld] ends in a brutal death and a moving transfiguration in the South Bronx—one of the few convincing manifestations of grace, in the precise Catholic sense, in American fiction since Flannery O’Connor” (Don DeLillo, “The American Strangeness,” interview with Gerald Howard, Hungry Mind Review 43 [1997]: 13–16; reprinted in Conversations with Don DeLillo, ed. Thomas DePietro [Jackson: Univ. of Mississippi Press, 2005], 120). DeLillo’s early short stories also share that certain kinship with O’Connor. This is especially apparent in his first published story, “The River Jordan,” Epoch 10, no. 2 (winter 1960): 105–20. 7. Breslin, “Grammar and Religion,” in Once a Catholic, ed. Peter Occhiogrosso (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 177. 8. The Vernacular Missal was introduced in 1925 and, according to one historian of Catholicism, “took the laity by storm and probably constituted the most significant grassroots influence on growing popular interest in liturgical issues” (Mark S. Massa, Catholics and American Culture), 150–51. In general, Massa gives a very useful picture of Catholic presence in American culture at midcentury. 9. Garry Wills, Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophecy, and Radical Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 15, 16. 10. Albert Blaise, “Historical Sketch of Christian Latin,” in Sacred Languages, trans. J. Tester, eds. Paul Auvray, Pierre Poulain, and Albert Blaise (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1960), 142–43. 11. Monsignor J. D. Conway, “Question Box.” National Catholic Reporter 1 (25 November 1964): 4, quoted in Massa, 154–55. 12. Joseph T. Nolan, “Questions and Answers by a Pastor Not at All Happy with HalfVernacular Mass,” National Catholic Reporter 1 (6 January 1965): 6, quoted in Massa, 154– 55. 13. In his introduction to the text of the Constitution, Gerard S. Sloyan writes that the Constitution builds on the idea that in the ideal state of worship, the worshippers’ “behavior . . . has meaning for them. The rites they employ, in other words, are instructive. If the prayers or actions of the liturgy no longer speak to men so as to teach them, this meaningless activity is to be replaced.” He nevertheless is careful to remind his reader that “any supposition that a merely human understanding of a tongue or a rite can save man is quite false. Only the believing heart can comprehend the Christian mysteries, and that but dimly. No grasp assured by a revision of rites or languages can deliver over what is available to faith alone” (The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council and the Motu Proprio of Pope Paul VI, with commentary by Gerard S. Sloyan [Glen Rock, NJ: Paulist Press, 1964], 8–9, 10). 14. It is worth noting that one of the earliest television shows—and an extremely successful one—was Father Fulton Sheen’s Life Is Worth Living, which debuted in 1952. For details on Sheen and on other Catholic elements of the new mass culture after the war, see Massa; on Sheen in particular, see chapter 4.

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158 15. Theodore Roszak, “The Summa Popologica of Marshall McLuhan,” in McLuhan: Pro and Con, ed. and intr. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Penguin, 1969), 263. 16. Ricks, “McLuhanism,” in Rosenthal, 103. 17. See McLuhan, “Liturgy and the Microphone,” in The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion, eds. Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szlarek (New York: Stoddart, 1999), 107– 115. 18. “Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” Interview with Adam Begley, Paris Review 35, no. 128 (1993): 281, 282. 19. DeLillo, Libra (New York: Viking, 1988), 20. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 20. “Don DeLillo,” 283. 21. For a thoroughgoing account of these phenomena in modernism, see Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2002). Sword argues that modernist experimenters, beginning in the late nineteenth century and up through the midtwentieth century, were profoundly influenced by popular spiritualism. According to Sword’s account, automatic writing and other occult writing practices were useful to modernists not because such techniques promised to resacralize the world (to use McClure’s term for what DeLillo is up to) but because they allowed writers to transgress established notions of what writing could do and what an author could be. 22. I will focus here on the religious logic rather than the poststructuralist logic inherent in DeLillo’s views of language. In interviews, he claims not to have read the theorists—such as Baudrillard or Bakhtin—that critics so often point to when reading him on the subject of language. I think that these theorists articulate an analogous understanding of language that in turn demonstrates the reach of the themes and forms I (and others) have seen in DeLillo. That said, the religious and poststructuralist views of language are not far apart in many respects, as McClure suggests with respect to postmodern theory. 23. “Mystery” is another such term that DeLillo uses frequently when he speaks of writing, and is also the subject of his other one-minute play, “The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life.” That play is about the fundamental mystery of other persons to whom we are proximate—neighbors, husbands, wives, children. “Revelation” is a third quasi-religious term DeLillo uses to describe how the material of his novels comes to him. For “mystery,” see, for example, Mark Muro, “From Novels to a Play,” Boston Globe (10 Apr. 1986): 78; DeLillo, “An Outsider in This Society,” Interview with Anthony DeCurtis, South Atlantic Quarterly 89, no. 2 (1990): 293, reprinted in Introducing Don DeLillo, ed. Frank Lentricchia (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1991), 43–66 (“I think my work has always been informed by mystery. . . . Possibly it is the natural product of a Catholic upbringing.”); and “Don DeLillo,” 291. For “revelation,” see “Don DeLillo,” 295–96; “American Strangeness” in Conversations, 128; Interview with Maria Nadotti, trans. Peggy Boyers, ed. Don DeLillo, Salmagundi 100 (fall 1993): 95 (also “mystery”). For DeLillo speaking of his plays, see Interview with Jody McAuliffe, South Atlantic Quarterly 99 (2000): 609–15. 24. DeLillo sees his most revered modernist predecessor in these terms as well. When Gerald Howard suggests in an interview that DeLillo’s “lifelong allegiance to Father Joyce has paid off splendidly,” DeLillo notes in reply that “Mailer calls him Doctor Joyce. You and I know that he’s a priest” (“American Strangeness,” in Conversations, 128). 25. Don DeLillo, Mao II (New York: Penguin, 1991), 72. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

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26. “Don DeLillo,” 294. 27. In the wake of several analyses that read Bill Gray as a figure for DeLillo, critics have begun to argue that characters other than Bill Gray are the novel’s author figure. Ryan Simmons’s reading, like mine, focuses on Karen, but he argues that Karen’s status as an author figure reveals only that anyone can write a novel (Bill Gray describes the novel in Mao II as a “democratic shout”), that it requires no special relation to language or the world. Simmons gives a useful summary and critique of readings that equate Bill Gray and DeLillo; see “What Is a Terrorist? Contemporary Authorship, the Unabomber, and Mao II,” in Duvall, 675–95. Mark Osteen argues that Brita is the figure for a revised mode of authorship, in that she both engages the spectacular aspects of culture and pushes back against their tyranny. See “Becoming Incorporated: Spectacular Authorship and DeLillo’s Mao II,” Duvall 643–74, reprinted in American Magic and Dread, 192–213. 28. Don DeLillo, The Names (New York: Vintage, 1989; first published in 1982), 48. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 29. I here join several other readers who have argued that Tap is a redemptive figure, though we disagree about how he is so and what he redeems. Paula Bryant, for example, reads Tap as celebrating the fragmentation of narrative and the ambiguity of meaning, both being, according to Bryant’s reading, a hedge against the cult’s fundamentalism. In contrast, Paul Maltby argues that Tap is the metaphysical center of the novel, a character who reveals DeLillo’s allegiance to a Romantic conception of the unitary self and to an allied understanding of the child as metaphysically wise. This allegiance makes DeLillo, for Maltby, the exact opposite of the postmodern enthusiast Bryant finds him to be. Berger reads Tap as redemptive, too, though not in the mystical, psychic, or postmodern sense so much as in the aesthetic sense. According to Berger, the failure of glossolalia Tap’s story recounts is recuperated through the aesthetic achievement of the story. Berger also gives a helpful guide to critical readings of another DeLillo child, Wilder (n. 19, 357). In general, critics have agreed that the children in DeLillo’s fiction—Wilder in White Noise, Billy Twillig in Ratner’s Star, Tap in The Names, Esmeralda in Underworld—embody some especially valued, and often mystical, state of consciousness or being. See Bryant, “Discussing the Untellable,” Critique 29, no. 1 (1987): 16–29; Maltby, “The Romantic Metaphysics of Don DeLillo,” Contemporary Literature 37 (1996): 258–77; and Berger. 30. “Interview (Nadotti),” 96. 31. “Interview (LeClair),” 24–25. 32. “American Strangeness,” in Conversations, 128. 33. Critics who read Underworld or other novels in this way include Berger, Cowart, Dennis A. Foster (“Alphabetic Pleasures: The Names,” in Introducing Don DeLillo, 157–73), Kavadlo, Irving Malin and Joseph Dewey (“‘What Beauty, What Power’: Speculations on the Third Edgar,” in Dewey et al., 19–27), and Maltby. Osteen, in American Magic and Dread, allows for a DeLillo who celebrates mysticism, though he still sees DeLillo emphasizing the undecidability of spiritual matters (chapters 5 and 8). McClure, perhaps the most subtle reader of the tension between belief and fundamentalism in DeLillo, gives us a more religious DeLillo but also registers his discomfort with the “inexorable order and agency” (“Postmodern/Postsecular,”159) that characterizes DeLillo’s religious sensibility. 34. DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), 824. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

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160 35. “Writing as a Deeper Form of Concentration,” Interview with Maria Moss, Sources (spring 1999), 87. 36. Ibid. 37. This letter is published only on the web, but I credit it as genuine in part because it is included in two excellent online bibliographies of DeLillo’s work: “Don DeLillo’s America” and, using a link to the former, on the Don DeLillo Society site. Elsewhere DeLillo writes that “fiction is a kind of religious fanaticism” and that “language lives in everything it touches and can be an agent of redemption” (“The Power of History,” New York Times Magazine, 7 Sep. 1997, 60–63). These statements are repeated and elaborated quite explicitly in DeLillo’s interview with Marc Chénetier and François Happe in Review Francaise des Études Américaines 87, no. 1 (2001): 102–11. 38. DeLillo’s recuperation of Catholicism may owe something to his family’s heritage among Southern Italian Catholics, who made up much of the Italian immigrant population in New York City in the early twentieth century. This group has historically favored popular mystical practices of Catholicism over regular attendance at mass and reverence for the parish priest. Two studies are useful in filling out the cultural background of DeLillo’s work in this respect. Michael P. Carroll’s Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996) gives the history from the sixteenth century; chapter seven, “Reformation and Ricettizie” explains the distinction between Northern and Southern Italian Catholicism. Robert A. Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2002), which describes Southern Italian Catholicism in Italian Harlem in the first half of the twentieth century, demonstrates how the mystical strains of that heritage persisted among immigrants much like those in DeLillo’s Bronx. He shows how such mysticism is sometimes at odds with the views of the Catholic hierarchy and its institutions. 39. For a fine reading of DeLillo’s sense of the everyday, and its relationship to language and transcendence, see Matthew Mutter, “‘Things That Happen and What We Say About Them’: Speaking the Ordinary in DeLillo’s The Names,” Twentieth Century Literature 53, no. 4 (winter 2007), 488–517. 40. Popes, it is worth noting, are also buried in lead-lined coffins. Malin and Dewey come close to seeing DeLillo privileging the nun in a redemptive turn, but argue in the end that it is the tension between the two main Edgars that DeLillo cares about, not the resolution embodied by the word “Peace.” When Maria Moss asks DeLillo whether the ending is “about redemption,” he replies, “I think it is, to some degree” (“Writing,” 87). 41. “Don DeLillo,” 303. 42. Interview with Thomas LeClair. Contemporary Literature 23 (1982): 24–25.

Chapter 4: The Bible and Illiterature 1. The school district of Abington, PA, enforced a practice of reading ten verses of the Bible followed by recitation of the Lord’s Prayer at the start of each day. The Court ruled that although students could opt out of the recitation, the ritual constituted a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. 2. Abington School Dist. v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963).

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3. For several decades, the School of Education at Indiana University ran seminars and institutes to train secondary school teachers in teaching the Bible and published books to assist a wider audience of teachers across the nation. A later manual prepared by the same institution gives a sense of this history. See the foreword to Thayer S. Warshaw, Handbook for Teaching the Bible in Literature Classes (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1978), 5–6. 4. James S. Ackerman with Jane Stouder Hawley, contributing editor, On Teaching the Bible as Literature: A Guide to Selected Biblical Narratives for Secondary Schools (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1967), xix. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 5. In Ackerman, vii. 6. Discussion in Warshaw, 13–21. 7. See Joan Delfattore, The Fourth R: Conflicts of Religion in America’s Public Schools (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2004), 14–15; for more extended accounts of these conflicts, see William K. Dunn, What Happened to Religious Education (1958), and James W. Fraser, Between Church and State (1999). 8. The reasons for the fading importance of denominational differences are various, including the simpler dichotomy that reigned during the Cold War of Christian America and Godless Communism, and the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, which consolidated the sense that Roman Catholicism was no longer anathema to American culture and freedom. See Wuthnow; Ahlstrom. 9. Edward Said sees the rise in Biblical and religious criticism in the 1980s as the reassertion of the religious character of criticism as such, its refusal of what he calls “the world.” “When you see influential critics publishing major books with titles like [Kermode’s] The Genesis of Secrecy, [Frye’s] The Great Code, Kabbalah and Criticism, [Rene Girard’s] Violence and the Sacred, Deconstruction and Theology, you know you are in the presence of a significant trend. The number of prevalent critical ideas whose essence is some version of theory liberated from the human and the circumstantial further attests to this trend.” Said also includes renewed interest in Walter Benjamin “not as a Marxist but as a crypto-mystic” and in versions of “Marxism, feminism, or psychoanalysis that stress the private and hermetic over the public and social” as “part of the same curious veering toward the religious.” He sees Marshall McLuhan’s work as “foreshadowing this basically uncritical religiosity.” “All of it, I think, expresses an ultimate preferance for the secure protection of systems of belief (however peculiar those may be) and not for critical activity or consciousness.” Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), 291–92 (in “Conclusion: Religious Criticism,” which he opposes to the worldly, “secular” criticism he announces in “Introduction: Secular Criticism,” and advocates throughout the book’s collected essays.) 10. On the history of Jewish quotas in elite American universities, see Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005); Marcia Synnott, The Half-Opened Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 1900–1970 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979); and Dan Oren, Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2000; first published in 1985). 11. Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 184. See also Freedman’s “Coda” for an exuberant reading of Harold Bloom’s efforts to shore up the traditional notion of the

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162 Western literary canon in the 1990s, and its significance in the context of the history of Jewish intellectual life in the late twentieth century. 12. I discuss Arnold’s ideas in more detail in the introduction. Norton sums up Arnold’s distinction thus: “Whereas in America the Bible as literature became a disguise for the Bible as religion, in Arnold there is a sense that the Bible as religion is a disguise for the Bible as literature. . . . The stress of his argument [for including Bible reading in the schools] is on literature: in itself the discovery ‘of a single great literary work as a connected whole’ is a sufficient aim; it is a religious aim only in so far as his literary ideas are part of his religious ideas.” See David Norton, A History of the English Bible as Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 274. 13. Norton, 271. Le Roy Halsey, a Presbyterian Doctor of Divinity, in his The Literary Attractions of the Bible; or, a Plea for the Word of God Considered as a Classic (1858), advocates the literary merits of the Bible as a way of enticing people to read it and thus to “save our young people from the evils of that flimsy, superficial literature which, in the form of the wild, extravagant romance, the lovesick novel and the run-mad poem, is coming upon us like a flood” (Halsey, 18–19; quoted in Norton, 265–66). The widely used McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers (Norton reports that “by the time their use declined in the 1920s, some 122 million had been published, and most of these had gone through several sets of hands” [Norton, 271]) included passages of the King James Bible set next to passages from Shakespeare, sometimes with an accompanying essay on Biblical poetics or some such related literary topic. Though the Readers did not imagine the literary pleasures of the Bible as the dross that would burn away, as Halsey does, the motivation for including such study of the Bible remains religious. See Norton’s discussion of the Readers. 14. Moulton, The Literary Study of the Bible, xiv, 75; quoted in Norton, 279. 15. Moulton, iv, quoted in Norton, 279. The newness of Moulton’s work is doubtful, as Norton’s account of prior efforts to consider the Bible as “a classic” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveals. Moulton’s work was another version of an older effort. 16. Moulton, 96, quoted in Norton. 17. The Bible as English Literature, vi–vii, quoted in Norton, 320. 18. There is one example of Biblical presentation in this period that is entirely aesthetic: Sir James George Frazer’s Passages of the Bible Chosen for Their Literary Beauty and Interest in 1895, which presents “gems” of the Bible as “pure literature” (quoted in Norton, 287). (Frazer’s Golden Bough was of course the source for Eliot’s mythology in The Waste Land.) This, according to Norton, is an example of something that looks like Arnold but isn’t, because Frazer, unlike Arnold, wants to free the Bible from all religion (Norton, 287). Despite his importance as a thinker to Eliot, Frazer’s approach does not have the presence in the later century that Arnold’s does. Indeed, Eliot himself rejected any attempt to separate Biblical aesthetics from religious import, arguing explicitly against the notion that the King James Bible is a monument of English literature: “Those who talk of the Bible as a ‘monument of English prose’ are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christainity . . . the Bible has had a literary influence upon English literature not because it has been considered as literature, but because it has been considered as the report of the Word of God. And the fact that men of letters now discuss it as ‘literature’ probably indicates the end of its ‘literary’ influence.” (“Religion and Literature” [1935]; Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953], 32–33; quoted in Norton, 336). Eliot’s prediction here underestimates the ways the literary and the religious are intertwined.

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19. The Book of J, trans. David Rosenberg, interpreted by Harold Bloom (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 22. 20. See Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), throughout. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 21. This is a point made earlier, and differently, by John Guillory, in Cultural Capital, Guillory’s influential reading of the canon debates. 22. It is worth contrasting Alter’s argument with Guillory’s. Guillory does not dispense with ideology but locates it in the institutional structure of university and of literary studies as a practice within the university. For Guillory, canonicity denotes not a set of texts so much as a sociological location and its function in class differentiation. For Alter, canonicity is that quality of literariness that is revealed by close reading—the kind of reading that for Guillory is an institutional practice that transmits an ideology about literature as such (that its value inheres in its difficulty, in its distinction from the mass culture). 23. Alter, Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2000), 31. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 24. He writes that it is “worth insisting on the concept of power” when speaking of the Bible’s canonicity, because later writers like Faulkner remain “under the sway of the literary force of the biblical text” (17). The biblical canon remains “a guide for contemplating the dense tangle of human fate” (20). The Song of Songs, which requires heavy-handed allegory in order to fit comfortably as a doctrinal text, was likely included in the canon because it “turns biblical Hebrew into an instrument of enchantment” (28). Alter argues that “it is not unreasonable to surmise” that Ecclesiastes and Job (the latter another “problem-book” [28] with respect to doctrine) were included because of their “unique power as instances of literary Hebrew” (29). He goes on to praise Job for the “vigor of the poetry . . . its stunning ability to inscribe pain and outrage and cosmic vision in taut, muscular language”; these “give it an awesome intensity” (29). Ecclesiates, Alter tells us, “has a mesmerizing effect in the Hebrew” (30). 25. John Guillory briefly analyzes the relation between scriptural and literary canons, and the rise of “Bible as literature” scholarship, in terms similar to mine in Cultural Capital. He writes that “the very fact that the body of literary works can be analogized to the scriptural ‘canon’ betrays the fact that vernacular writing must borrow the slowly fading aura of scripture as a means of enhancing and solidifying its new prestige. Indeed the retroactive annexing of the Bible itself to the history of literature in our own time has effects that are quite distinguishable from the humanist imitatio of the Greek and Latin classics. The vernacular canon belongs to a nationalist agenda, quite distinct from the multilingual cultural internationalism of the Renaissance humanists. To mistake the emergence of the vernacular ‘canon’ for a process like the formation of scripture, then, is to confuse the institutions of the church and the school. Even more, it is to misunderstand the atavism that allows the bourgeois school to be staffed by an unreconstructed clergy” (76). I would not go so far as to say that Alter is advancing a nationalist agenda; such an analysis is counterindicated by his truly “multilingual cultural internationalism.” Likewise, Alter does not so much “confuse” the institutions of church and school as imply, in a New Critical vein, that they can be considered equivalent points of access to the sacred precisely because literary quality and its sacredness inhere in both the Bible and the modernist canon. 26. Richard B. Woodward, in the first of McCarthy’s interviews, writes that “McCarthy’s prose restores the terror and grandeur of the physical world with a biblical gravity that can shatter a reader.” See Woodward, “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction,” New York Times,

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164 19 Apr. 1992; hereafter citing full text version from the archives, available at http://www.ny times.com/1992/04/19/magazine/cormac-mccarthy-s-venomous-fiction.html#, 2 (accessed 15 September 2009). 27. The phrase belongs to a member of the committee that created the New English Bible in the 1970s, who argued that we needed a new translation of the Bible in English because the King James Version had become a barrier to comprehension of the scriptures, no more than a “numinous rumble.” See Norton, 419. 28. Woodward, “Venomous Fiction,” 2. 29. McCarthy, Child of God (New York: Vintage, 1993; first published in 1973), 4. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 30. McCarthy is fascinated by crafts like ironwork. In his first play, The Last Stonemason, he attempts to encapsulate that craft both in words and in action—which explains, I think, why he chose to make it a play. 31. Richard B. Woodward notes that Saul Bellow described McCarthy’s writing in similar terms. According to Woodward, Bellow, who sat on the committee that in 1981 awarded McCarthy the MacArthur Fellowship, admired McCarthy’s “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences.” See Bellow, quoted in Woodward, “Venomous Fiction,” 1. 32. See Dana Phillips, “History and the Ugly Facts of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” American Literature 68, no. 2 (Jun. 1996): 433–60. 33. See James Wood, “Red Planet,” New Yorker (25 Jul. 2005), 90. 34. McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West (New York: Vintage, 1992; first published in 1985), 248. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 35. Woodward quotes McCarthy at some length on the subject: “‘There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,’ McCarthy says philosophically. ‘I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.’” See Woodward, “Venomous Fiction,” 5. 36. Other elements of the novel I won’t detail here support my basic contention. Judge Holden has disciples, for example, and McCarthy deploys numerous allusions both to scripture and to Paradise Lost. The governing understanding of the Bible, in this context, is not as a set of historically situated texts, but as a single text with a single divine author at work among the individual writers of the scriptures. Indeed, one might better invoke Wimsatt and say it is Bible as verbal icon. Northrop Frye’s approach to the Bible—articulated explicitly in The Great Code (1982)—in this sense runs parallel to McCarthy’s and renders it a New Critical artifact (hence Wimsatt). There he reads the Bible as a single (literary) text, bucking the historicizing trend that governed Biblical criticism at the time and suggesting a different approach, New Critical but also historicist in its own way. Frye argued that the since the Bible’s influence on literature was established by readers who had not had the benefit of historicist criticism, who saw the text as a whole within a religious context, he wanted to read it—for its literary features—in that way as well. 37. Harold Bloom, introduction to Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West (New York: Modern Library, 2001), xii.

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38. Woodward, “Venomous Fiction,” citing Robert Coles’ review of the book for the New Yorker. 39. Morrison’s critique of education is noted—and criticized—by Cynthia Dubin Edelberg, who connects this critique to the Bible. “Morrison gives her characters Biblical names seeming to say that the Bible is the wrong book for blacks,” Edelberg argues, noting that Soaphead Church has a Biblical name within his full name—Elihue Micah “Soaphead Church” Whitcomb. “The pattern continues in . . . Sula. That is, formal education is derided, characters with Biblical names live their namesakes’ lives in reverse, and the omniscient narrator will not allow the all-pervasive suffering to come to rest” (223). Edelberg is correct to draw together the critiques of religion and of education, but misses the distinction between the Bible as the book of white religion and the Bible as the possession of the black folk tradition. See her “Morrison’s Voices: Formal Education, the Work Ethic, and the Bible,” American Literature 58, no. 2 (May 1986): 217–37. The article is notable for its early date, prior to the publication of Beloved and Morrison’s ascendancy as a literary figure; she accuses Morrison of “towering cynicism” (227) with respect to the “conventional values” of hard work, education, commonsense, and the Bible. 40. Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage, 2007), 182. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 41. There she turns to an art form already located in black tradition—jazz—to provide the complex formal structure through which she tells another story of shattered black lives. In that novel, however, the ending provides something of a synthesis for two of the three main characters, suggesting that the structure of jazz can provide a redemptive element that the structure of literacy and the primer cannot. 42. The body of criticism that reads in Morrison’s work a rejection of a white Christian religious tradition—a reading that is, in its larger contours, accurate—rarely separates the Bible from that rejected tradition, so that to revise the Bible through allusion, or to represent characters who use the Bible to abuse other persons, is tantamount to rejecting the Bible as a sacred text. I argue that Morrison separates the Bible out from white Christianity and from its use as a bludgeon (on the model of Mrs. Breedlove), retaining it for specifically literary— and still religious—use. 43. The tendency to stress the irony, revision, or critique entailed in Morrison’s use of the Bible is widespread, especially among critics who engage the Bible as the representative of Western hegemony or of orthodox Christianity. Beth Benedrix, for example, sees the Biblical Song of Songs as “thoroughly subversive,” a text that “challenges the assumptions and conventions that dominate the Hebrew Bible,” and thus an appropriate analog for Morrison’s “revaluation” (95) of Biblical notions of love, exile, patriarchy and Messianism and for the ways Morrison “rewrites” (110) Biblical sources in her novel. Here the Song of Songs’ status as a “problem text” in the Hebrew canon ensures that Morrison’s use of that text will constitute a critique of orthodoxy. Ágnes Surányi and Shirley Stave use Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s notion of “signifying”—an African American tradition of satire—to analyze Morrison’s engagement with the Bible. (There are yet other essays in the collection I have cited most—Toni Morrison and the Bible—that advance the argument that Morrison revises the Bible one way or another; I mention here the most relevant examples for Song of Solomon in that collection.) Amy Benson Brown argues that the novel’s title leads us to see the novel as a love

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166 story that revises the love story of the Biblical book in the context of American racial violence. R. Clifton Spargo, writing of Beloved, sees Baby Suggs’s preaching on the body as a parody and critique of the Pauline notion of a spiritual unity among believers that cannot register the suffering of the individual body. Going even further than these critics, Nicole Wilkinson argues that the Bible is always for Morrison fully subsumed under the white man’s discourse that Morrison rejects, and therefore the Bible in her novels remains “unread” and sometimes even completely “irrelevant” even when invoked (236). Morrison herself explains that she “used Biblical names to show the impact of the Bible on the lives of black people, their awe and respect for it coupled with their ability to distort it for their own purposes” (Tom LeClair, “The Language Must Not Sweat: A Conversation with Toni Morrison,” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie [Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1994], 126). The critics I have mentioned here, who are interested in how Morrison “distorts” or transforms the Bible for her own purposes, as well as those who read Morrison’s work to analyze its implicit theology (Beverly Foulks, Sharon Jessee, and Patricia Hunt are examples of this approach) attend in enlightening ways to the content of the Bible as an intertext, but tend to leave unanalyzed the “awe and respect”—the sacredness of the text—to which Morrison also points. Wilkinson, who is, to my knowledge, unique in arguing that the Bible is figured as unreadable through the trope of illiteracy (a reading I find intriguing for the ways it connects with my reading of McCarthy), nevertheless also fails to register the residual “awe and respect” that can’t, for Morrison, be separated from the Bible whether one reads it or not, whether one accepts its theology or not. This sense of sacredness, and the status of authority that accompanies it, is at the heart of my analysis. See Benedrix, “Intimate Fatality: Song of Solomon and the Journey Home”; Foulks, “Trial by Fire: The Theodicy of Toni Morrison in Sula”; Surányi, “The Bible as Intertext in Toni Morrison’s Novels”; Jessee, “The ‘Female Revealer’ in Beloved, Jazz and Paradise: Syncretic Spirituality in Toni Morrison’s Trilogy,” all in Toni Morrison and the Bible: Contested Intertextualities, ed. Shirley A. Stave (New York: Peter Lang, 2006); and see Brown, Rewriting the Word: American Women Writers and the Bible (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 127–57; Nicole Wilkinson, “‘The Getting of Their Names’: Anti-Intertextuality and the Unread Bible in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Beloved” in Intertextuality and the Bible, eds. George Aichele and Gary A. Phillips, a special issue of Semeia: An Experimental Journal for Biblical Criticism 69/70 (1995): 235–45; Patricia Hunt, “The Texture of Transformation: Theology, History and Politics in the Novels of Toni Morrison” PhD diss., City University of New York, 1994 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Dissertation Services, order number 9417474); R. Clifton Spargo, “Trauma and the Specters of Enslavement in Morrison’s Beloved,” Mosaic 35, no. 1 (Mar. 2002): 113–30. 44. Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Plume, 1987), 55. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 45. Morrison herself attests, extra-textually, to Pilate’s supernaturalism: “Pilate is larger than life and never really dies in that sense. She was not born, anyway—she gave birth to herself. So the question of her birth or death is irrelevant.” Morrison, interview with Nellie McKay (1983), Taylor-Guthrie, 146–47; quoted in David Z. Wehner, “To Live this Life Intensely and Well: The Rebirth of Milkman Dead in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon,” in Toni Morrison and the Bible, 79.

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46. Morrison locates the belief that black people can fly in the cultural fabric of her upbringing. “I’ve heard all my life that Black people can fly, just as I heard the tooth fairy story, and I accepted it. Then I used to read about it in the slave narratives.” This statement, unattributed, is quoted in Wilfred D. Samuels, “Liminality and the Search for Self in Song of Solomon” in Song of Solomon: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999), 26. 47. David Z. Wehner also reads the sounds of the hunters, and the howl of the assembled women at the close of Beloved, as a foundational spiritual language “that predates a whole theology that figures light as good and darkness as unable to comprehend the good.” Drawing on Morrison’s Nobel Prize address, he suggests that she is thereby questioning a notion of the master tongue implicit in the Babel story—specifically, the idea that a single human language would allow men to reach heaven. For Morrison, the diversity of tongues is the difficult path to an earthly heaven of human understanding (89). Wehner thus stresses how Morrison uses illiteracy to figure the refusal of the slave-master’s discourse, a discourse that includes sanctioned understandings of the Bible. Wehner, 71–93. 48. Wehner notes that the novel has been read most frequently as bildungsroman, rather than as a conversion narrative. He argues that the novel is best understood as the latter, though he looks to pre-Christian narratives of being “born again” as the relevant model. He sees Song of Solomon as “a conversion narrative outside the Christian paradigm” (72). Karla F. C. Holloway also identifies Milkman’s flight as salvific, arguing that in his leap, he “literalizes Pilate’s flight and his own salvation.” “Only through his liberation into myth,” she continues, “does Milkman re-member his birthright” (“The Lyrics of Salvation,” in Bloom, 71; reprinted from Holloway and Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos, New Dimensions of Spirituality: A Biracial and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987]). It should be noted that while flight is universally acknowledged as a metaphor in the novel, there is some debate over whether we are meant to understand Milkman’s fight literally. I think it is consistent with the wording of the passage, with Morrison’s magical realism more generally, and with her statements about the enchantment she accepts as a part of life to do so. 49. It is also worth noting another fortuitous accident of illiteracy, the fact that Milkman’s great-grandfather Jake, driving a cartload of escaping slaves from the South with his soonto-be wife, Sing, “took a wrong turn, because he couldn’t read, and they ended up in Pennsylvania” (323), where he would build his farm and orchards—a kind of Eden named, appropriately, “Lincoln’s Heaven.” We might also recall Sixo, in Beloved, who refuses Mr. Garner’s offer to teach him to read, and finally stops speaking English completely. Sixo is held out as an ideal man in the context handed him by slavery. 50. It seems that only the male members of the family can fly in the supernatural sense, as in the children’s circle game, the one in the middle, arms spread as if in flight, “seemed always to be a boy” (299). Women, as Pilate’s father tells her, can’t just “fly off and leave a body”; they are too profoundly connected (through their own bodies) to their children. 51. Another verse appropriate here is of course this point’s reiteration in the next chapter of Matthew: “The disciples spoke sternly to those who brought [the children]; but Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.’ And he laid his hands on them and went on his way.” (Matthew 19:13–15, Revised Standard Version [RSV]).

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168 52. In a related way, Morrison uses the Bible to argue for the superiority of the body’s work to the mind’s work. First Corinthians, Milkman’s sister, finds her work as a maid redeeming where her Bryn Mawr education has failed her, and, like the letter that is her scriptural namesake, testifies to the importance of love (albeit an un-Pauline physical version of it) over wisdom, learning, or oratory, finally at the end of the novel giving herself fully to her uneducated lover. 53. Joyce Irene Middletown tracks the importance of illiteracy in the novel through many of the passages I have mentioned here, emphasizing the orality they feature. Middleton argues that “Morrison privileges orality so that her readers can hear and feel the unique oral character of African American language use and see how the survival of cultural consciousness, or nomos, is preserved in a highly literate culture” (29). She ultimately suggests that this oral tradition is what Milkman inherits and that Morrison plays literacy off orality in the text itself through the lyricism of her prose, which “seduces the readers’ oral memory to recall and retell the tale. . . . Her bardic voice . . . reveals the universal and unique energy of the black community” (37). I agree with much of this argument, though to separate out lyricism from writtenness seems problematic. (Is every lyrical novel an attempt to privilege an oral culture?) My argument takes for granted the point that Milkman’s inheritance is specifically African American, but to call it simply a cultural heritage (of whatever sort) either leaves out Morrison’s supernaturalism (what she has called the “enchantment” that characterized her own family’s approach to the world) or subsumes it, unanalyzed, into the notion of culture. To do the latter is certainly a common approach to the study of religion, but it stops short of asking—as I seek to do here—what it means to imagine orality (or illiteracy) as giving access to otherworldly power, and what it means to do so in the context of an author’s search for literary power. See Middleton, “From Orality to Literacy: Oral Memory in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon,” in New Essays on Song of Solomon, ed. Valerie Smith (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 19–39. For Morrison on “enchantment,” see her interview with Christina Davis in Presence Africaine 145 (1988), 144; this passage quoted at length in Valerie Smith, introduction to New Essays, 10. 54. Brenda Marshall, “The Gospel According to Pilate,” American Literature 57, no. 3 (1985): 486–89. 55. Jan Stryz, who advances a similar reading, notes that when the midwife objects that he’s named his child after a “Christ-killer,” he asserts the justice of the name, noting that he prayed to Jesus all night to save the life of his wife. The disregard Jesus had for his wife, Macon (aka Jake) suggests, is mirrored by Pilate’s disregard for Christ’s life. Thus Macon risks blasphemy and asserts his own interpretation of the Bible (Stryz, 117). Middleton interprets Jake’s act as similarly subversive, though not necessarily because of his illiteracy; rather, she argues that it is his “reading” of the name’s significance—made orally—that subverts the written, and authoritative, text. Marianne Hirsch casts that subversion as a more general subversion of the patriarchal logos, or law, that makes Macon/Jake the victim of white manipulation of words. (He is tricked into signing away his plantation.) He reasserts a patriarchal authority within that context by turning to the Bible as his source for Pilate’s name and by insisting on his own interpretation of the word—an interpretation originally based on how the letters looked to him. See Middleton; Hirsch, “Knowing Their Names: Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon” in New Essays.

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56. Toni Morrison, “Memory, Creation, and Writing,” Thought 59, no. 235 (Dec. 1984), 387. 57. Jan Stryz argues that Morrison’s yearning to create a text that has no precursor, or that invents its own precursor, produces a “crafted sort of innocence” (122). “Just as Morrison’s craftsmanship simultaneously calls attention to and repudiates the presence of an author in Song of Solomon, it echoes the biblical “Song of Songs” in such a way as to deny the authority of the earlier text” (122). For Stryz, the novel in general “illustrates how [Morrison] negotiates the obstacles imposed by the task of freeing her own story from a literary past” (116). I disagree with Stryz’s excellent reading only in the sense that I think Morrison is as invested in retaining the Bible—even under the sign of negation—as she is in replacing it with another level of her own text as an intertexual source. That she wishes to do this marks the Bible’s different status within the Western canon she resolutely rejects. 58. Naturally, this quotation is widely cited in the criticism on Morrison and the Bible, though is it generally used simply to argue that Morrison continues to make use of the Bible’s resources despite her novels’ tendency to offer revisions and critiques of the Bible. The quotation can be found in Charles Ruas, “Toni Morrison,” in Taylor-Guthrie, 97. In another interview, she also describes the religious quality of her upbringing: “I have a family of people who were highly religious. That was part of their language. Their sources were biblical; they expressed themselves in that fashion. But they combined it with another kind of relationship, to something I think which was outside the Bible. . . . I mean they were quite willing to remember visions, and signs, and premonitions and all of that. But there was something larger and coherent, and benevolence was always a part of what I was taught and certainly a part of what I believe” (Bessie W. Jones and Audrey Vinson, “An Interview with Toni Morrison,” in Taylor-Guthrie, 179; quoted in Sharon Jessee, “The ‘Female Revealer’ in Beloved, Jazz and Paradise: Syncretic Spirituality in Toni Morrison’s Trilogy,” in Toni Morrison and the Bible, 154, n. 2). 59. Morrison’s authority is often described in religious or spiritual terms by herself and others. She describes the response she wants to produce in her readers as analogous to the response a black minister expects from the congregation, who stand in response and speak back to the preacher. In a review of Jazz, Deborah E. McDowell likens Morrison’s work with the fragments of African American history to that of God in Ezekiel, who through the prophet’s commands makes the “dry bones” live. See Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” in Black Women Writers 1950–1980: A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans (New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1984), 341; and McDowell, “Harlem Nocturne,” Women’s Review of Books 9 (Jun. 1992): 3. I am suggesting that such figurations are not simply explanatory or laudatory, but in fact register the ways that Morrison’s work depends upon a religious vision of her own authorship and the text she produces. 60. In the New York Times Book Review survey, published 21 May 2006 (the accompanying article by A. O. Scott, “In Search of the Best,” appears on 16–19), a select group of over 124 literary critics, public intellectuals, and writers were asked to identify the single most important novel of the preceding 25 years. Morrison’s Beloved received the most votes; DeLillo’s Underworld came in second, McCarthy’s Blood Meridian came in third, tied with Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom novels, followed by Roth’s American Pastoral. The novel of McCarthy’s that Winfrey featured in her book club was a later one, The Road, which I discuss in the conclusion.

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170 61. Woodward, “Venomous Fiction,” 4. 62. The other precursor they share—Faulkner—has something of a different status. While for McCarthy, Faulkner’s work is as serious and literary as the Bible and shares its prestige, Faulkner’s works don’t qualify as common person’s reading on Morrison’s model, and thus don’t carry the redemptive capacity that the Bible does. Morrison’s use of Faulknerian style registers his importance to Morrison as a kind of competitor: she uses his rhetorical power to revise Faulkner’s version of the black woman, in particular, and blackness, in general. That said, Biblical genealogy is essential to Faulkner and Morrison both.

Chapter 5: The Literary Practice of Belief 1. In The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), chapter 4; epigraph on 87. 2. Asad gives a brief digest of the thinking on belief along with his criticism of Geertz on the subject. See Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 47–48. 3. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 18. 4. To quote Asad more fully: “The connection between religious theory and practice is fundamentally a matter of intervention—of constructing religion in the world (not in the mind) through definitional discourses, interpreting true meanings, excluding some utterances and practices and including others. Hence my repeated question: how does theoretical discourse actually define religion? What are the historical conditions in which it can act effectively as a demand for the imitation, or the prohibition, or the authentication of truthful utterances and practices? How does power create religion?” (Genealogies, 45). 5. Quoted in Robert Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991; first published in 1970), xv. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 6. See Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, chapter 6; he discusses Hauerwas’s teaching as a Christian “witness” on 196–97. 7. See Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001). 8. Asad, Genealogies, 36. 9. Ibid., 36. 10. Amy Frykholm, Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America (Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), 186 (“as a researcher”), 185 (“dynamic, fluid”). 11. Robinson, “That Highest Candle,” Poetry 190, no. 2 (May 2007), 130. 12. Indeed, in Housekeeping dialog is the subject of parody in the scene of Lily and Nona, the spinster aunts who simply repeat each other’s sentences in an extended dialog about the fate of the orphaned Ruth and Lucile. Conversation is certainly the discourse of relation, but the relation is sameness, one in which Robinson is not much interested. See Housekeeping (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 37–39; Gilead (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004); Home (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). Hereafter cited parenthetically. 13. Robinson, “Onward Christian Liberals,” American Scholar 75, no. 2 (spring, 2006), 43.

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14. Proudfoot argues that experience itself cannot be said to be religious—either by the person having the experience or by anyone else—without structures of belief that exist prior to that experience and make it understandable as assimilable to a religious understanding of the world. See Religious Experience (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985). 15. It is worth noting here a point to which I will return: that relationship is precisely the term that Robert Orsi uses to understand the workings of lived religion. For him, it is relationship not only with other persons, but also with presences such as saints, or Christ, or God Himself, that is the very substance of religion. See Orsi, “Introduction: Jesus Held Him So Close in His Love for Him That He Left the Marks of His Passion on His Body,” Between Heaven and Earth, 1–18. 16. It is sometimes tempting to see in Robinson an endorsement of segregation—segregation of cultures, in the private realm of the family and community, so that the black church of Della’s family and the white Methodist Midwestern world of Jack are the coherent wholes where meaning and human value can be conserved. This view would be consistent with what Robinson has said about the formation and transmission of morality and a viable sense of one’s humanity—that it requires private time and space, away from the voices of mass culture. In the essay “Family,” she writes that “the setting apart of the weekend once sheltered the traditions and institutions that preserved the variety of cultures. French Catholics and Russian Jews and Dutch Protestants could teach morals and values wholly unembarrassed by the fact that the general public might not agree with every emphasis and particular, and therefore they were able to form coherent moral personalities in a way that a diverse and open civic culture cannot and should not even attempt” (in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought [New York: Picador, 1998, 2005], 98). Robinson imagines Della in this sense as an analog for Jack—the daughter of a powerful minister, part of a large, close family dignified by its religious commitments, flawed in the prejudices that naturally arise from its otherwise valued insularity. The force of longing in Gilead is for Jack’s return to the Boughton family, his reconciliation with those people, and that place, that formed his coherent moral context. What little we learn of Della suggests the power of her own longing to remain in relation with her own family’s coherent world. 17. For example, David Tracy’s The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1998). 18. Marilynne Robinson, “Onward Christian Liberals,” 43. 19. Amy Frykholm’s fascinating study of readers’ responses to the Left Behind books demonstrates that readers’ responses to the series have to do with entertainment as much or more than they have to do with belief, which suggests how discourses of belief both do and don’t have traction in the world of lived religion. The discourses of belief that provide the context for the novels’ existence—that enable their marketing and encourage their sales— may make possible a literary object, and an experience of reading, that has very little to do with the discourse of belief among ordinary readers. See Rapture Culture. 20. LaHaye and Jenkins, Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1995), 385. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 21. There are, of course, many conversion scenes in the thirteen novels of this series, and they display differing qualities. For instance, Jonathan Freedman notes the significance of stereotypes of the Diaspora Jew versus the Biblical type of the Jew in the conversion nar-

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

172 rative of one of the central characters, Chaim Rosenzweig. The drama of his conversion entails abandoning the former in favor of the latter, and thus we might argue, as Freedman does, that in this case the drama of belief tangles with evangelical philo- and anti-Semitism rather than with the gender dynamics I attend to in the conversions of Rayford, Buck, and Chloe. This is simply to point out that belief in freely chosen belief animates more than one set of social dynamics; as a practice, Protestant belief is as flexible as any other religious practice—such as a church’s practice of collective prayer. For the reading of Rosenzweig’s conversion, see Freedman, Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2008), 152. 22. This has become a point of contention within the evangelical community. LaHaye and Jenkins’s way of playing loose with scripture has drawn criticism from pastors worried that their flocks will think the novels represent what they should expect to happen in the endtimes. See Amy Frykholm’s account of this opposition in Rapture Culture, 176. 23. See Freedman, Klezmer America, 154–55. 24. Glenn W. Shuck notes this aspect of the novels as well, placing it in the context of what he calls the “electronic church” (113), and next to the work of televangelists, who, he argues “display a naïve confidence that they can somehow broadcast the message of Christ through a media infrastructure they believe the Beast controls. . . . They assume that as soon as the red light activates atop God’s Panaflex camera that their words—inspired by God—will flow directly to the audience without any distortion” (115). See Marks of the Beast: The Left Behind Novels and the Struggle for Evangelical Identity (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2005), especially chapter 4, “Technologies of Transcendence.” 25. Lawrence Buell, “Religion on the American Mind,” American Literary History 19, no. 1 (spring 2007), 52. 26. Orsi’s discussion of the ascendancy of words in the 1970s and 1980s can be found at Orsi, 157–58. For him, the devotional words prior to Vatican II reforms are “efficacious” and created relationship with “beloved saints.” After the Council, he writes, “the new words derived their legitimacy from a strict and precise connection to church authority and not from their association with a beloved saint” (157).

Conclusion: The End of The Road, Devil on the Rise 1. The phrase is Zygumnt Bauman’s. 2. Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007), 110. 3. For a full reading of Tree of Smoke, and an account of how it relates to the religious valences of Johnson’s earlier work, see my “Fiction in Review,” Yale Review 97, no. 1 (winter 2009). 4. Winfrey made The Road a selection for her Book Club, and McCarthy responded by granting her his first and only televised interview, only his third interview of any sort in three decades of writing. 5. Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Vintage, 2006), 286. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 6. Based on a paper by the National Endowment for the Arts, called “Reading at Risk,”

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an analysis of data gathered in the 2002 Census Bureau’s “Survey of Public Participation in the Arts.” The New York Times reported that “among its findings are that fewer than half of Americans over 18 now read novels, short stories, plays or poetry; that the consumer pool for books of all kinds has diminished; and that the pace at which the nation is losing readers, especially young readers, is quickening. In addition it finds that the downward trend holds in virtually all demographic areas” (Bruce Weber, “Fewer Noses Stuck in Books, Survey Finds,” 8 July 2004, New York Times archive: 1). 7. The New York Times Book Review’s 2006 survey of the best novel of the last quarter century noted that if they “had asked for the single best writer of fiction over the past 25 years, [Roth] would have won, with seven different books racking up a total of 21 votes,” trumping Beloved’s winning 15 votes. See Scott, “In Search of the Best,” 19 (original emphasis). 8. Edward P. Jones, “The Devil Swims across the Anacostia River,” All Aunt Hagar’s Children (New York: Amistad, 2006), 291.

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186 http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/07/25/050725crbo_books (accessed 14 September 2009). Woodward, Richard. “McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction.” New York Times Magazine, 19 Apr. 1992, Sec. 6, p. 28 and following. Full text available at http://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/ 19/magazine/cormac-mccarthy-s-venomous-fiction.html?pagewanted=1 (accessed 14 September 2009). Wuthnow, Robert. The Restructuring of American Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988.

INDEX

Abington v. Schempp (PA 1963), 77, 160n1 Abrams, M. H., Natural Supernaturalism, 7 Acker, Kathy, xix, 136 Ackerman, James S., 78 acting, religion and, 11–13 aesthetics, race and, 96–98 agency: of author, 33–36; Catholicism and, 54–55, 61–62; in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, 91–92 Ahlstrom, Sydney, 3, 6; The Religious History of the American People, 7 Aldrich, Michael, 39, 40 Allen, Woody, Annie Hall, 58 Alter, Robert, 87, 105, 163n22, 163n24, 163n25; The Art of Biblical Narrative, 80; The Art of Biblical Poetry, 80; Canon and Creativity, 80, 84–86; The Five Books of Moses, 86; The Literary Guide to the Bible (with Frank Kermode), 80 Altizer, Thomas J. J., 18–20 analogy, 120 angels, 6, 7 anti-Semitism, 129 Arnold, Matthew, xvii–xviii, 16, 81, 85, 131 Artaud, Antonin, 34 Asad, Talal, 109, 111, 112, 142n7 Ashbery, John, 34 Assemblies of God, 44 Assumption of Mary, 61

Austin, J. L., 49 authorship: agency/intention and, 33–36; DeLillo and, 59–61, 61, 66; Ginsberg and, 33–36; Jones and, 139; McCarthy and, 87–92, 95; Morrison and, 95, 102– 5, 169n59; as religious practice, 108; Salinger and, 12–14 Baldwin, James, xiii, xviii; The Fire Next Time, 3; Go Tell It on the Mountain, 3 Barth, John, xviii, xix Bauman, Zygmunt, 7, 18, 147n36 Beckett, Samuel, 136 Begley, Adam, 59 belief: Catholicism and, 24–25; Christianity and, 21–22; DeLillo and, 53–54; Judaism and, 21–22; in Left Behind series, 122– 30; literature’s role in, xx, xxi, 122, 131, 139–40; and pluralism, xx; as practice, xix, 108–9, 112, 114, 116–22, 130; Protestantism and, xv, 21; and ritual, 124; Robinson and, 114–21; significance of, 111–12, 115–18; study of, xx, 109–11; submission and, 124–27, 129; thought in relation to, 21, 112; vagueness about, 2–4, 133. See also faith in faith belief in meaninglessness: literature and, xxi, 136–37, 140; roots of, xiv; varieties of, xiv–xv, xviii–xix

INDEX

188 belief without content: Eisenhower inaugural parade float and, 1; evangelicalism and, xix; limitations of, 133; literature and, 107–8; in 1950s, 1–2, 6; in 1960s, 8; overview of, xiii–xxi; pluralism vs., xiii; roots of, xiii Bell, Catherine, 112 Bellah, Robert, 2, 131; Beyond Belief, 109– 10 Bellow, Saul, 13, 116 Ben-Bassat, Hedda, Prophets without Vision, 143n10 Benedrix, Beth, 165n43 Bennett, Dennis, 45, 48, 49 Berger, Peter, 159n29; A Rumor of Angels, 7; The Sacred Canopy, 6 Bible, 76–106; canonicity of, 84–85, 163n24; King James version of, 78–79, 86; in Left Behind series, 128, 172n22; literary criticism and, 80–86; as literature, xv, 77–86, 162n12, 162n13, 162n18, 163n25; McCarthy and, xvi, 86–87, 90– 92, 95–96, 105–6, 136–37; modernism and, 84–86, 105; Morrison and, xvi, 96, 98–106, 136–37, 165n42, 165n43, 169n58; and pluralism, 78–79; in public education, 77–81, 162n12, 162n13; race and, 96, 98–99, 165n42, 166n43; and the sacred, 76–78, 80, 84–85, 99; translation of, 86, 164n27; unity of, 81–82, 104 birth control, encyclical banning, 46–47, 53 Blaise, Albert, 56 Blake, William, 24, 42 Blanshard, Paul, American Freedom and Catholic Power, 4 Bloom, Harold, 14–16, 23, 81, 82, 93, 104, 113; The American Religion, 14–15, 82; The Book of J, 14, 80, 82; Kabbalah and Criticism, 80 Boston Heresy Case, 4 Boyarin, Daniel, 109 Boyarin, Jonathan, 109 breath, 38–39 Bredesen, Herald, 45 Breslin, Jimmy, 55 Brisma, Leslie, 81; The Voice of Jacob, 80 Brooks, Cleanth, xviii, 16; Understanding Fiction (with Robert Penn Warren), 57; Understanding Poetry (with Robert Penn Warren), 57 Brown, Amy Benson, 165n43 Bryant, Paula, 159n29

Buddhism: and belief, 21; chant in, 42; Ginsberg and, 30, 31, 34, 37; Watts and, 48 Budick, Sanford, Midrash and Literature (with Geoffrey Hartman), 80 Buell, Lawrence, 130–31 Burke, Kenneth, xviii, 58; The Rhetoric of Religion, 9 Burroughs, William S., 32–36, 49; Naked Lunch, 34–36 Byatt, A. S., 138 Calvin, John, 112 canons, 84–86, 104–6, 163n22, 163n24, 163n25. See also literary quality Carlson, Thomas, 156n3 Carroll, Paul, 39, 41 Carver, Raymond, 136 Catholicism: and agency, 54–55, 61–62; and belief, 24–25; and Boston Heresy Case, 4; and Charismatic movement, 46–47; Christian Right and, 26; DeLillo and, xx, 24, 26, 52–53, 59–66, 70–75, 155n1, 160n38; Derrida and, 19; and doctrine, 25; and identity, 47, 53; and language, 55–59, 131, 172n26; and Latin mass, 44, 52–53, 55–59, 62; literature and, 24–25; and orality, 24–25; practice in, 24–25; Protestantism vs., 4, 54; Pynchon and, 27; and ritual, 44, 52– 53; Southern Italian, 160n38; tensions in, 46–47, 53; in United States, 4, 6, 20, 25, 54, 149n50; Vatican II, 25, 44, 46, 52–53, 56–57, 62 Certeau, Michel de, 18 chant, 30–32, 37–38, 40–42 Charismatic movement, xiv, 44–48, 153n39, 154n42. See also Pentecostalism Cheever, John, 136 Chicago Seven trial, 28–31, 42 Christian existentialism, xiv, 110 Christianity, and belief, 21–22 Christian Right, 26, 129. See also Religious Right church-state relations, 5 civil religion, 2, 5–6 Civil Rights movement, 6 Cixous, Hélène, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, 19 classics of literature, xvii. See also literary quality consciousness, 38–39

189

Daghlian, Philip B., 77–78 Damrosch, David, The Narrative Covenant, 80 Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, 98–99 death of God, 18–20 deconstruction, 18–20, 43 DeLillo, Don, xix, 52–75, 136; and art as religion, xviii, 72, 75, 133; and authorship/writing, 59–61, 66; belief and pluralism in work of, 53–54; and Catholicism, xx, 24, 26, 52–53, 59–66, 70–75, 155n1, 160n38; on contemporary literature, 63; critical reception of, 155n2, 156n3; and doubt, 71–72, 74; The End Zone, 74; and fundamentalism, 71, 72, 75; “In the Ruins of the Future,” 75; and language, xiii, xiv, xvi, 59–61, 65–70, 72–75; Libra, 54, 59–61; Mao II, 62–66, 72; “The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life,” 158n23; and mysticism, 66–70, 74–75, 156n3, 160n38; The Names, xx, 66–70, 72, 132, 159n29; and postmodernism, xx; “Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven,” 61; Underworld, xx, 62, 70–74, 106, 132, 155n2; White Noise, xx de Man, Paul, 19 Democratic convention (1968), 29–30, 41 Derrida, Jacques, xviii, 18–20, 25; Acts of Religion, 19; Of Grammatology, 43 Detweiler, Robert, Breaking the Fall, 143n10 devil, 138–39 Dewey, Joseph, 73 Dickinson, Emily, 121 difference: in Left Behind series, 122–23; in Robinson’s novels, 115, 119–21, 171n16 disenchantment of the world, 7 doctrinal religion: Charismatic movement and, 45–48, 154n48; faith in faith vs., 3, 8; in Franny and Zooey, 10–11; limitations of, 113; literary quality of religious texts separable from, 84–86, 162n18; resurgence of, 7–8

Donne, John, “The Canonization,” xviii Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 116 Dunne, Irene, 5 Eberhart, Richard, 33 ecumenism, 46 Edelberg, Cynthia Dubin, 165n39 Eisen, Arnold, 148n44; Rethinking Modern Judaism, 21–22 Eisenhower, Dwight D., xiv, 1–5 Eliot, T. S., xvii, 7, 131, 137, 162n18 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, xiii emptiness in recent literature, 133–36 English Curriculum Study Center, Indiana University, 77–79, 161n3 Ervin, Howard, 154n48 Esalen Institute, xiv evangelicalism, xix, 121, 124, 129 existentialism, Christian, xiv, 110 faith. See belief faith in faith: doctrinal religion vs., 3, 8; in Franny and Zooey, 10; Left Behind series and, 129; in literary criticism, 15; in 1950s, 1–8; postmodernism and, 20 family, 13, 23–24 Faulkner, William, 86, 87, 170n62; As I Lay Dying, 89 Feeney, Leonard, 4, 25, 145n15 Ferraro, Thomas, 109 Fessenden, Tracy, 26; Culture and Redemption, 149n51 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 114–15 First Amendment, 77–79 Foran, Thomas, 29–31, 42 form: defined, xviii; Ginsberg and, 42–43; Latin mass and, 44; limitations of, 113; in Robinson’s novels, 113–14, 117, 119; transcendent, xviii. See also the nonsemantic Franchot, Jenny, Roads to Rome, 20 Frank, Waldo, 3 Frazer, James George, Passages of the Bible Chosen for Their Literary Beauty and Interest, 162n18 Freedman, Jonathan, 81, 129, 171n21 Freedom Rides, 6 Friedlaender, Israel, 21 Frye, Northrop, 82, 104; The Great Code, 80, 164n36 Frykholm, Amy, 112, 171n19 fundamentalism, 7, 71, 72, 75

INDEX

conversation, 68 conversion: Charismatic movement and, 45, 48; doctrinal religion and, 3; in Left Behind series, 122–25, 171n21; Morrison’s Song of Solomon and, 167n48 Conway, J. D., 57 Corso, Gregory, 34 counterculture, 28–29, 43, 51, 150n4 Cushing, Richard Cardinal, 4, 145n15

INDEX

190 Gaddis, William, xix Gardiner, John Hays, 85; The Bible as English Literature, 81–82 Geertz, Clifford, 107, 109, 130, 131, 142n7 gender, in Left Behind series, 125–29 Gere, Richard, 23 Giles, Paul, American Catholic Arts and Fictions, 143n10 Ginsberg, Allen, 28–44, 48–51; and art as religion, xviii, 132, 133; and belief without content, 133; “The Change,” 37, 42; and Chicago Seven trial, 28–31, 42; and drugs, 36–37, 39; early and later work of, 151n22, 152n25; The Fall of America, 38, 40, 49, 51, 151n17; “Footnote to Howl,” 33; and Hinduism, 26; “Howl,” 33, 40; “Hu¯m Bo˙m,” 37; and India, 28, 32, 37, 49; “In Society,” 31; and Judaism, 23, 33–34; “Kaddish,” 33– 34, 40, 133; and language, xiii, xvi, xix, 28–29, 32, 37–44, 48–51; “Love Poem on a Theme by Whitman,” 31; “Night Apple,” 31; and orality, 25; Planet News, 37, 40, 151n17; poetic practice of, 32– 38; and politics, 29–30, 43, 50–51; “Psalm I,” 33; as public figure, 29, 51; and sound, xiv, xx, 38–40, 43–44; and spiritual practice of poetry, 24, 28–32, 38–44; style of, 31–32; and the supernatural, 24, 28–29, 31–32, 40, 42–43, 49, 51; “These States: Into L.A.,” 49–50; “To P.O.–July 8, 1962,” 34; “TV Was a Baby Crawling toward That Death Chamber,” 39, 42; and vibration, xiv, 30, 38– 39, 41; “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” 37, 40, 42, 50, 133 Girard, René, Violence and the Sacred, 80 glossolalia, xix, 44–45, 47–51, 69–70, 72 Gnosticism, 14 God: artist as, 92; death of, 18–20; existentialism and, 110; in Jones’s work, 138–39; in Judaism, 149n49; language and, 9–10, 19; in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, 97; mysticism and, 44; postmodernism and, 18–20; weakening of belief in, 6 Goldberg, Myla, Bee Season, 23–24 Graham, Billy, 3 Greeley, Andrew, 46–47, 53 Green, Henry, Party Going, 83 Greene, Graham, 24 Grossman, Allen, 120

Guillory, John, 16, 146n30, 163n22; Cultural Capital, 163n25 Gysin, Brion, 32–33 Halsey, Le Roy, The Literary Attractions of the Bible, 162n13 Hammond, Gerald, The Making of the English Bible, 80 Hare Krishna chant, 30, 37 Harper, Michael, 46 Hartman, Geoffrey, 81; Midrash and Literature (with Sanford Budick), 80 Hauerwas, Stanley, 110 Hegel, G.W.F., 19–20 Heidegger, Martin, 18 Hell’s Angels, 37, 151n16 Herberg, Will, 6; Protestant, Catholic, Jew, 1–3 Higher Criticism, 81 Hinduism: chant in, 42; Ginsberg and, 26, 30, 31, 37; Watts and, 48 Hirsch, Marianne, 168n55 history, literature and, 105 Hoffman, Abbie, 29–30 Hoffman, Julius J., 28, 150n6 Holloway, Karla F. C., 167n48 Hollywood, Amy, 17–18 Holocaust, 147n36 Holy Spirit, 45–46, 48 Howard, Gerald, 71 Humanae Vitae encyclical, 46–47, 53 Hungerford, Amy, The Holocaust of Texts, 19 Hutcheon, Linda, xix illiteracy, 76, 92, 95–96, 101–5, 168n53. See also literacy; orality; readers and their experience of literature Indiana University, 77–79, 161n3 inner life, 21, 49, 114 Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, 45 James, Henry, 90, 105 James, William, 26, 49, 90, 116, 149n52 Jameson, Fredric, xix Jenkins, Jerry B., Left Behind series (with Tim LaHaye), 112, 121–30 Jesus: in Left Behind series, 122–24; in Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son, 22; in O’Connor’s Wise Blood, 55; in Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, 10–12 Jesus prayer, 9–11, 146n25

191

Kakutani, Michiko, 134 Kaplan, Mordecai, Judaism as Civilization, 21–22, 24 Kennedy, John F., 5–6, 54 Kenner, Hugh, 58 Kermode, Frank, 82, 87, 104, 105, 133; The Genesis of Secrecy, 80, 82–84, 99; The Literary Guide to the Bible (with Robert Alter), 80 Kerouac, Jack, 34 King James Bible, 78–79, 86 Kripal, Jeffrey, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom, 110 LaHaye, Tim, Left Behind series (with Jerry B. Jenkins), 8, 112, 121–30, 132, 133 language: Catholicism and, 55–59, 131, 172n26; DeLillo and, 59–61, 65–70, 72–75; Ginsberg and, 28–29, 32, 37– 44, 48–51; glossolalia, xix, 44–45, 47–51, 69–70; and God, 9–10, 19; of Latin mass, 44, 52–53, 55–59, 62; limitations of, 113; literary, religion’s influence on, xiii; materiality of, xiv–xv, 34, 43–44, 51, 60–61, 67; McCarthy and, 135–36; meaning in, 33; mystical understanding of, 24–25, 51, 66–70, 74–75; performativity in, 49. See also the nonsemantic Lardas, John, 152n25 Latin mass, 44, 52–53, 55–59, 62 Left Behind series, 8, 112, 121–30 letter vs. spirit, 69 Levinson, Julian, Exiles on Main Street, 20 liberal theology, 18 literacy, 96–97, 102, 104–5. See also illiteracy; readers and their experience of literature literary criticism: and the Bible, 80–86; and faith in faith, 15; and religion, 14–17, 86

literary quality: Arnold on, xvii; of the Bible, 80, 85, 162n18; canonicity and, 84–85, 163n22; form as vehicle of, 16; and the sacred, 85 literary studies, xx, 81 literature: authority of, xiii, xv, xix, 76, 80, 95– 96, 104–6, 136–37; belief as approached through, xx, xxi, 122, 131, 139–40; belief in, xiii–xiv, xvi–xviii, xxi, 131, 137–38; Bible as, xv, 77–86, 162n12, 162n13, 162n18, 163n25; marginality of, 16; religion in relation to, xiii, xvi–xxi, 9, 15–17, 107–8, 111–13, 122, 130–32, 136–40, 142n10. See also language; literary criticism lived religion, xx, 109, 112, 116, 124, 130– 31, 139 Lopez, Donald, 21, 112 Lyotard, Jean-François, xix Mailer, Norman, 35–36; The Gospel According to the Son, 22 Malin, Irving, 73 Maltby, Paul, 159n29 Mann, Horace, 79 Mann, Thomas, 116 mantras. See chant Marion, Jean-Luc, 18 Marty, Martin, 4, 6–7, 20 Mary, Assumption of, 61 mass media. See media Mather, Cotton, 21 McCarthy, Cormac, xix, 136; achievements of, 106; Alter on, 86; and art as religion, xix, 133; and authorship/writing, 87–92, 95; and belief without content, 133; and the Bible, xvi, 86–87, 90–92, 95–96, 105–6, 136–37; Blood Meridian, 86, 89–96, 106, 132, 133; and Catholicism, 24; Child of God, 17, 87–90, 95; and Faulkner, 170n62; and language, xiii, xvi, 135–36; on literature, 86–87, 90, 106; and orality, 25; reclusiveness of, 106, 172n4; The Road, 132, 134–37 McClure, John, 156n3; Partial Faiths, xvi McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers, 162n13 McGurl, Mark, xix, 142n9; The Program Era, xvi McHale, Brian, xix McLuhan, Marshall, 15, 57–59, 73, 122, 125; The Gutenberg Galaxy, 59; Understanding Media, 57

INDEX

Jews: and Biblical criticism, 80–81, 86; fear of, 129. See also Judaism Johnson, Denis, Tree of Smoke, 134, 138 Jones, Edward P., 138–39 Josipovici, Gabriel, The Book of God, 80 Judaism: and belief, 21–22; Derrida and, 19; and God, 149n49; literature and, 23– 24; and orality, 25; practice in, 22; and secularization, 22–23; in United States, 20. See also Jews Judeo-Christian tradition, 2–3, 6

INDEX

192 meaninglessness: existentialism and, xiv, 110; in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, 90; in Morrison’s Song of Solomon, 100– 101. See also belief in meaninglessness; emptiness in recent literature media: Left Behind series and, 122–25, 128–29; McLuhan on, 57–59; televangelists and, 172n24 Middletown, Joyce Irene, 168n53, 168n55 Miller, William Lee, 1–2 Milton, John, 87 modernism: and the Bible, 84–86, 105; and materiality of art, 43–44; postmodernism and, 136–37; religious turn as response to, 136; and spiritualism, 158n21 Moral Majority, 8, 129, 133 Morrison, Toni, 96, 136; achievements of, 106; and art as religion, xviii, xix, 133; and authorship/writing, 96, 102–5, 169n59; and belief without content, 133; Beloved, 103–6, 132, 133; and the Bible, xvi, 96, 98–106, 136–37, 165n42, 165n43, 169n58; The Bluest Eye, 96–99; and Catholicism, 24–25; and Faulkner, 170n62; Jazz, 98, 165n41; and language, xvi; and literature, 104–6; Playing in the Dark, 106; Song of Solomon, 99– 105, 132; and the supernatural, 96, 99– 101, 103–5, 133 Moule, C.F.D., 48 Moulton, Richard, The Bible as Literature, 81 Murray v. Curlett (MD 1963), 77 mysticism/mystery: DeLillo and, 66–70, 74– 75, 156n3, 160n38; Johnson’s Tree of Smoke and, 134; Kermode and, 83; language and, 24–25, 51, 66–70, 74–75; of Latin mass, 53; in 1960s, 44; Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and, 27 Nation of Islam, 8 Needham, Rodney, 112 Neo-Pentecostalism. See Charismatic movement New Criticism: and Arnold, xvii; Jewish scholars and, 81; and mass culture, 146n30; principles of, 16; and religion, xvi, xviii, 15–17, 131 New Left, 8 New Yorker (magazine), 58 New York Times Book Review, 106 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 3 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 18

Nisly, L. Lamar, Impossible to Say, 143n10 Nolan, Joseph, 57 the nonsemantic: Ginsberg and, xiv, xx, 38–40, 43–44; poets and, 43; religion and, xiii–xv. See also form Norton, David, 81, 83–84 O’Connor, Flannery, xviii, 16, 24; Wise Blood, 55 Om, 30, 32, 41 Ong, Walter J., Orality and Literacy, 25 orality: Catholicism and, 24–25; Morrison and, 101–2, 104–5, 168n53. See also acting; illiteracy Orlovsky, Peter, 34 Orsi, Robert, 109, 111, 112, 121, 126, 130, 171n15, 172n26; Between Heaven and Earth, xx, 131 Oswald, Lee Harvey, 54 parables, 82, 90–91 paraphrase, xviii, 16, 17. See also translation Paul, Saint, 47, 57 Pentecostalism, 7, 44–45, 47, 69–70. See also Charismatic movement Percy, Walker, 24; The Last Gentleman, 54 Phillips, Dana, 90, 95 the philosophical novel, 116–17 Pius XII, Pope, 61 pluralism: belief and, xx; belief without content vs., xiii; Bible and, 78–79; Charismatic movement and, 47–48; DeLillo and, 53–54; importance of, 133; literature and, xvi, 9; religion and, 137; Robinson and, 119; in United States, xvi, xx– xxi, 122, 137 politics: Ginsberg and, 29–30, 43, 50–51; religion and, 4–6, 8 Pope, Alexander, 43 Porter, Katherine Anne, 24 Portugés, Paul, 42, 152n25 postmodernism: and faith in faith, 20; and God, 18–20; in literature, 136; religion and, xix–xx postmodern theology, 18–20, 147n36 post-Protestantism, 25–27, 149n51 poststructuralism, 29, 43, 61 Pound, Ezra, 43 Powers, Peter Kerry, Recalling Religions, 142n10 practice, belief as, 108–9, 112, 130; acting and, 11–13; evangelicalism and, xix; in

193

quality. See literary quality Quebedeaux, Richard, 45–46, 154n48 race: and aesthetics, 96–98; and the Bible, 96, 98–99, 165n42, 166n43; in Robinson’s novels, 171n16 readers and their experience of literature: Arnold and, xvii–xviii; of the Bible, 77–79, 81–82; critical vs. uncritical, 17; Ginsberg and, 38–41; Left Behind series and, 171n19; and literary quality, xvii–xviii; McCarthy and, 88–91, 95–96; Morrison and, 102–5, 169n59; New Criticism and, 16; and religious approach to literature, xvii–xviii, 16, 83. See also illiteracy; literacy Reconstructionist Judaism, 22 reenchantment of the world, 7 relationship: in Left Behind series, 131; lived religion and, 131, 171n15; in Robinson’s novels, 114, 117–20, 131 religion: belief without content and, 1–2; growing interest in, xix; liberal vs. conservative divisions in, 20–21; literary criticism and, 86; literature in relation to, xiii, xvi–xxi, 9, 15–17, 107–8, 111–13, 122, 130–32, 136–40, 142n10; in 1950s, 1–8, 17; in 1960s, 44–51; politics and, 4–6, 8; and postmodernism, xix–xx; private vs. public, 8; in United States, 1–8, 14, 17, 20–27, 137; vagueness in, 2–4, 133. See

also specific denominations; belief; belief in meaninglessness; belief without content; doctrinal religion; faith in faith religious criticism, 14–17, 80, 82, 161n9 religious fiction, 112; Left Behind series, 121–30; Robinson’s novels, 113–21 Religious Right, 8, 106. See also Christian Right religious studies, xx, 107–13, 116 Reynolds, David S., Faith in Fiction, 142n10 Ricks, Christopher, 58 ritual: belief and, 124; Catholicism and, 44, 52–53. See also Latin mass Robinson, Marilynne, xviii, xix, 124, 132; achievements of, 133; and belief, 114– 21; and conservative Christianity, 26; and form, 113–14, 117, 119; Gilead, 114–18, 133; Home, 114, 117–19; Housekeeping, 119–20; and Protestantism, 112; and religion, 16–17 Romanticism, xiii, xx Roszak, Theodore, 58 Roth, Philip, 24, 137–38, 148n48; American Pastoral, 137–38; Everyman, 137 Rubin, Jerry, 29–30, 32 Sacks, Jonathan, 22 the sacred: the Bible and, 76–78, 80, 84– 85, 99; Judeo-Christian tradition and, 6; Latin and, 56; literary quality and, 85; in ordinary life, 6, 75 Said, Edward, 80, 161n9; The World, the Text, and the Critic, 15 Salinger, J. D., 23, 24, 106; Franny and Zooey, 9–14, 24, 132, 135 Sanskrit, 30–31, 37 Santayana, George, 107–8, 131 scripture. See Bible Second Vatican Council. See Vatican II secular humanism, 22, 147n36 secularism: and belief, 111, 114, 121; Jews and, 22–23; in United States, 6–7, 137 Sedgwick, Eve, 126 Shreiber, Maeera Y., Singing in a Strange Land, 148n49 Shuck, Glenn W., 172n24 Silk, Mark, 3 sinner’s prayer, 123, 125 Snyder, Gary, 37 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 6, 8

INDEX

Left Behind series, 121; in Robinson’s novels, 114, 116–21; in United States, 122 prayer: Charismatic movement and, 47; conversion and, 123–25; in DeLillo’s novels, 64–65, 72, 75; Eisenhower and, 4–5; Jesus prayer, 9–11, 146n25; Latin, 56, 57, 61–62; in Left Behind series, 123–25; sinner’s prayer, 123, 125 Protestantism: and belief, xv, 21; Catholicism vs., 4, 54; Christian Right and, 26; post-, 25–27, 149n51; Robinson and, 112; in United States, 20, 25–26 Proudfoot, Wayne, Religious Experience, 26, 116 public education, the Bible in, 77–81, 162n12, 162n13 Puritans, 124 Pynchon, Thomas, xix, xxi, 106, 136; The Crying of Lot 49, 26–27; Gravity’s Rainbow, 26–27

INDEX

194 Spargo, R. Clifton, 166n43 speaking in tongues. See glossolalia speech acts, 40, 49 Spellman, Francis Cardinal, 62 Spiegelberg, Frederic, xiv spirit vs. letter, 69 Stave, Shirley, 165n43 Stein, Gertrude, 34, 86 Sternberg, Meir, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, 80 Stevens, Wallace, 110, 131 Stryz, Jan, 103, 168n55, 169n57 subject matter, elimination of, 34–37, 40 submission, 43–44, 48, 124–29 the supernatural: Charismatic movement and, 48; Ginsberg and, 24, 28–29, 31– 32, 40, 42–43, 49, 51; Morrison and, 96, 99–101, 103–5, 133; religion without, 7 Surányi, Ágnes, 165n43 Sword, Helen, 158n21 syncretism, 11 Tantric Buddhism, 34 Taylor, Charles, xiv, 111, 114, 121, 137; A Secular Age, 7 Taylor, Edward, 21 Taylor, Mark C., xxi, 18–20, 25; Confidence Games, 20 Tillich, Paul, 3; The Courage to Be, xiv, 110 Time (magazine), 3, 58 tolerance, xxi, 115 transcendence: Catholicism and, 52–53; in DeLillo’s novels, 63–66, 68, 70–73, 75; Ginsberg and, 23, 33, 41; of God, 6, 139; in Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, 134; literary form/language and, xiii, xviii, 16, 73, 108; literary quality and, xvii, 85; McCarthy and, 105, 135; Morrison and, 105; New Criticism and, 16 transcendentalism, xiii translation: of the Bible, 86, 164n27; of glossolalia, 47. See also paraphrase Trigilio, Tony, 152n25 Trilling, Lionel, 17, 24; “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” 8–9 Tytell, John, 152n25

uncritical reading, 17 United States: the Bible and public education in, 77–81, 162n12, 162n13; Catholicism in, 4, 6, 20, 25, 54, 149n50; Protestantism in, 25–26; religion in, 1–8, 14, 17, 20–27, 137 U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 77 vagueness in religion, 2–4, 133 Van Doren, Mark, 24 Vatican II, 25, 44, 46, 52–53, 56–57, 62 Vaudeville, 13 Vietnam Day Committee (VDC), 37, 151n16 Vietnam War, 29–30, 37, 40 Ward, Graham, The Postmodern God, 18– 19, 147n36 Warner, Michael, 17, 147n34 Warren, Robert Penn: Understanding Fiction (with Cleanth Brooks), 57; Understanding Poetry (with Cleanth Brooks), 57 Watts, Alan, 48; Behold the Spirit, 44 Weber, Max, 6 Wehner, David Z., 167n47, 167n48 Weisenberger, Steven, 27 Whitman, Walt, 24, 50 Wilkerson, Ralph, 46 Wilkinson, Nicole, 166n43 Williams, William Carlos, 24, 43 Wills, David W., 25 Wills, Garry, Bare Ruined Choirs, 56 Wilson, Bryan, 6 Wimsatt, William, xviii Winfrey, Oprah, 106, 135, 172n4 Wood, James, xvii, xxi, 90 Wordsworth, William, 87 writers, religious, 111–12 writing. See authorship the writing program, xvi, 142n9 Wuthnow, Robert, 20 Youth International Party Festival of Life, 29–30 Zuba, Jesse, 113