Secularization without End

The author of this study is deeply learned in modern cultural theory; his analysis is complex and nuanced; his style is dense. Summary of his ideas is therefore challenging. The leading idea can perhaps be stated in this way: Classic historians of the novel (Ian Watt, followed by many others) got the story wrong when they characterized the genre as product and agent of a final secularization. They missed the reemergence of Christian ideas, especially ideas of sin and redemption, in narratives that could not be continued without them. The very denial of God's relevance to human life reemphasized the problem of a sinfulness that could not be expiated. Inescapably, though in diverse ways, authors of the past seven decades have reinscribed the novel with a radical Calvinism, a system of assumptions and deductions that insists upon the infinite and intractable evil of the human condition. Secularization, which cannot cure or even ameliorate this evil, is “without end” because it cannot end with itself; it continually reinstates the old religious problems, in their most hopeless form.It must be said that a sense of absolute isolation in one's own evil is not something that greatly afflicted John Calvin, who believed in an active God and in Heaven as well as Hell. It seems an unlikely inspiration for any school of literature. Vincent Pecora does, nevertheless, find three prominent authors—Samuel Beckett, Thomas Mann, and J. M. Coetzee—who, he thinks, project this sense of human life.Pecora's analysis of Beckett is convincing, and illuminating. He shows the ways in which Beckett's attempt to achieve writing at “degree zero” expressed a feeling for life as secondary and puppet-like, the affair of “someone else” (40–41). He elaborates the many real connections between Beckett and the radical Calvinism of Arnold Geulincx (1624–1669).The succeeding discussion of Mann is largely, and quite naturally, concerned with the overtly theological Dr. Faustus. In the sadistic complications of this novel it is not hard to discover “the overriding sense of arbitrary election, the shame of having been born, radical humility and humiliation, in short, an oddly religious world without grace” (57). There are, perhaps, more authorial attempts at comedy in Faustus morbidity than Pecora is willing to recognize; but his account is a competent guide to the novel's theological problems.It is Coetzee, however, who is Pecora's major interest; about half the book is devoted to him. It provides an impressively integrative account of the apparent hodgepodge of narratives in Coetzee's novels, emphasizing the allegories (and loud announcements) of inexpiable guilt that abound in these works; and it adds a set of valuable reflections on allegory itself and on its place in literary theory.Unfortunately, making sense of Coetzee in this way does not engage any more evident literary issues. Pecora makes little attempt to show that Coetzee's characters and events are obligatory to his themes, not merely illustrative or decorative—that they emerge naturally or inevitably, not just plausibly or whimsically, from his moral (in fact, moralistic) allegories.To Pecora, Coetzee, Beckett, and Mann exemplify a “particular tradition of novels after 1945” (55), a tradition that cannot be explained by standard social-historical accounts of the genre. He relies, instead, on the ahistorical insights of such cultural theorists as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger. These are currently canonized figures, available for almost any kind of academic use; but Pecora's appropriations from their ideas are aptly chosen and useful in providing intellectual contexts for students of his three novelists.None of this, however, is useful in establishing the existence of a “particular tradition” or even in providing an introduction to substantial movements in the novel or the society around it, 1945 to present. Pecora barely gestures toward the fact that during this period religious ideas have been formative in thousands of novels, from Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea to James Wood's The Book Against God, or that traditional religious belief remains one of the most potent phenomena in the contemporary world. There is little indication that “religion” means anything except a Calvinism that Calvin himself never embraced.Pecora's idea that secularism provokes its own replacement might have been illustrated by the frequent resumption of religious interest among authors who find secularism drab and unrewarding, the shrug of the lonely crowd. What interests him is something even drabber and less rewarding, “our postmodern, postcolonial predicament” (166), manifested in “theological” works that deny both theology and any hope of reward, let alone of glory. But his brief attempts to show that this theology has broad social relevance merely emphasize the fact that it has not. He takes seriously the idea, propounded by a death-of-God theorist, that the “civil rights movement of the 1960s, with its heavy dependence on the African American Protestant tradition, is ... the proof that only a form of Christianity that embraced its worldliness in the absence of God was of any value from that point forward” (81). It is hard to think of a notion that could be farther from reality.“Death of God” may or may not be a theology, and it may or may not derive from a possible interpretation of Calvinism, but it was certainly not a problem that occupied Baptist pastors sweating on the streets of Selma, Alabama. They had clearer, yet more complex, ideas. They were armed with traditional Christian theology; they believed in a God who cares about you and expects something from you, but does not require you to be perfect to gain his favor. And they won. They did so by appealing to the common sense of morality—call it, roughly, “liberal,” “bourgeois,” “Judeo-Christian,” “humanitarian,” “civic”—that is the obvious, though unheralded, standard of judgment against which even Pecora's authors (and Pecora himself) measure right and wrong. That standard didn't come from the obscure theologies of the seminar room, and it has yet to suffer any transvaluation of values.Secularization without End is a helpful guide to the paradoxes of the novels it studies. Its relationship to the multitude of religious, nonreligious, and anti-religious novels that have been written since World War II is much less certain, as is its relationship to wider phenomena—the prestige of scientific atheism, the a-theistic attractions of popular culture, and the faith and practice of billions of people for whom even an imperfect relationship with divinity appears a solution rather than a problem

Art · Calvinism · Denial · Epistemology · Heaven · Literature · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Secularization · Style (visual arts · Theology · Undoing · Philosophy · Psychology · Samuel Beckett and Modernism