'Disenchanting Secularization'

Novel Reviews Disenchanting Secularization justin neuman, Fiction beyond Secularism Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2014, pp. 242, Paperback, $45.00. Can secularization really be dead? Apparently so; and it is pretty much buried, too, according to a recent issue of American Literature. There Peter Coviello and Jared Hickman rather adamantly insist that it would be “a fairly noncontroversial position at this point” to assume that “ours is a scholarly moment no longer persuaded by the clarities of [secularism’s] stories of modernity, nor by the neat dichotomies nested within them” (645). But while the controversies may have subsided, those antagonisms resurface, as Justin Neuman persuasively shows in Fiction beyond Secularism. Indeed, while Neuman might agree with Coviello and Hickman that the present condition of postsecularity most usefully “refers to an epistemological and methodological reorientation from which history might look different” (646), it is precisely these methods (and the epistemic postures they perpetuate) that are currently found wanting. In Neuman’s view, we need to find ways of “unlearning the habit of conceiving religion and secularity as opposites” (6), a point he reinforces at the close when arguing that we should “move beyond secular criticism toward the cultivation of interepistemic fluencies” (188). For this task, even the lauded “‘double vision’ of a postcolonial perspective long focused on the colonizer/colonized dyad is similarly inadequate to the irreducible pluralism of the world’s modes of being, both religious and secular” (189). As these muscular complaints might imply, Neuman is unafraid to emphasize the metacritical punch and payoffs of his book. And he is justified in doing so. This monograph makes a strong contribution not only, or most obviously, to the thriving study of religion in twentiethand twenty-first-century writing, but also to broader conversations about what it is we actually believe—in sacred and secular senses of the term—that the contemporary novel is capable of doing for a world of mutually exacerbating differences and historically irreconcilable commitments. As the book’s springboard, Neuman adopts the suitably counterintuitive premise that “some of the most trenchant and far-reaching critiques of secularist ideologies, as well as the most exciting and rigorous inquiries into the legacies of the religious imagination, take place where we might least expect them: in the pages of contemporary novels composed by a transnational group of writers commonly identified as non- or even antireligious” (xi). This group offers an intriguing mix, encompassing outspoken atheists such as Ian McEwan and acclaimed chroniclers of brutality and disconsolation such as J. M. Coetzee. Another of the writers is Salman Rushdie, whose appearance may be predictable in a book concerned with interfaith friction but whose writing warrants renewed attention for the way it treads a complex line between redeeming prospects for spiritual enchantment and the instinctive critique of the tyrannies of religious hypocrisy or intolerance. To Neuman, the novel—as a medium for intellectual debate as much as for imaginative projection—appears more primed than ever to engage those “interepistemic fluencies” he thinks scholars nowadays should acquire. Contemporary writers demand from readers “an attentiveness to echoes, intertexts, and genealogies of religiosity often neglected by literary critics” (16). This is not just a matter of Novel: A Forum on Fiction 49:2 DOI 10.1215/00295132-3509099 Ó 2016 by David James Published by Duke University Press Novel 360 NOVEL AUGUST 2016 thematic concern; formally, too, fiction offers aesthetic correlatives for “multiple, overlapping, and shifting modes of belonging” (14). Neuman thus asserts—in a sentence unfortunately repeated verbatim on page 181—that being “heteroglossic texts, novels are particularly efficient cultural containers; the sustained imaginative investment required to read them, meanwhile, fosters diverse forms of ethical modeling” (14). (A more glaring instance of this sort of repetition turns up in chapter 1, where a rather abstract statement from James Clifford celebrating “diverse cosmopolitan encounters” [31] is quoted again as though for the first time on the following page.) Above all it is the “sustained imaginative investment,” in Neuman’s favored phrase, that “is the lifeblood of literature,” which can “provide the cultural resources—semantic, narrative, and imagistic—for thinking beyond secularism” (18). Neuman probes the narrative expression and critical efficacy of these resources over the course of five chapters: two are devoted to single authors (Rushdie and Coetzee); the remaining three are wide-ranging, blending attention to speeches and governmental texts with close (though largely thematic) readings of multiple novels, some iconic, others less familiar. Chapter 1, “Rushdie’s Wounded Secularism,” reads against the grain Rushdie’s engagement in The Satanic Verses and in numerous essays with secularization as progress. Neuman fruitfully recovers Rushdie’s vision of fiction as an enchanting compensation for culture’s “god-shaped holes” (41). An extended section on Rushdie’s novel Shalimar the Clown then reveals how its author “sets out to interrogate some of the most axiomatic premises of his secularist commitments, including the necessary relation between cosmopolitan pluralism and the secularization of the public sphere” (28). Neuman completes his discussion of Rushdie’s work with a consideration of The Enchantress of Florence, arguing that the novel “severs the links between secularism and its traditional allies: skepticism, reason, and dispassionate analysis” (46). “For far too long,” protests Neuman, “scholars of the novel have abetted the project of solidifying a tenuous equivalence between the novel as a genre and secularization as a normative project” (47). One might assume that Coetzee would be an ideal candidate for this equation. But when Neuman considers in his second chapter the ways that Life and Times of Michael K, Age of Iron, Disgrace, and Elizabeth Costello invoke “religious forms of ascetic selffashioning” (52), he demonstrates that while “Coetzee will never be mistaken for a Christian apologist,” his fiction nonetheless “reflects a deep preoccupation with concepts like apocalypse and redemption, grace and disgrace, and charity and sacrifice” (59). In a particularly cogent and sensitive reading of Age of Iron, Neuman reassesses the gift of mutual care that develops between the terminally ill Elizabeth Curren and the homeless Vercueil, to whom Elizabeth offers shelter and who in turn offers unlikely comfort—becoming, as she poignantly describes him at one point, the “weak reed I lean upon” (131). Neuman observes that by “naturalizing charity to an instinctual and almost vicious response, Elizabeth repudiates the ethical primacy accorded to charity in Christian traditions while ironically affirming one of the central tenants of agapic love—namely, its equal regard for others over and against the selective criteria of erotic, maternal, and filial love” (79). This is a fluently argued and genuinely distinctive contribution to Coetzee criticism, revealing how his fiction presents “suffering protagonists not merely as victims but also as agents,” who “often answer questions of right action against the needs of human flourishing and find their most reliable measure of the good in sustained practices of self-abasement” (93). Chapter 3, “Time and Terror,” turns to the legacies of 9/11 and considers McEwan’s Saturday, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, and Jess Walter’s The Zero in light of what Neuman Published by Duke University Press Novel JAMES DISENCHANTING SECULARIZATION 361 terms chronomania: “an obsession with time and a concomitant disruption of temporal experience that characterizes representations of the attacks and their aftermath” (96). The discussion also takes in The 9/11 Commission Report—which receives a closer reading as “an object of aesthetic consumption” (116) than do many of the fictional texts—suggesting that it “reads more like a political thriller than the bureaucratic white paper a bipartisan committee with a $15 million budget and a staff of over eighty might be expected to produce” (115). Rather refreshingly, meanwhile, Saturday is not treated as dismissively as it has been by those keen to see it as socially elitist or simply an exercise in neuro-aesthetics. Neuman effectively combats derogatory characterizations of McEwan as a righteous rationalist penning a parable of war, pointing out that such interpretations rely on “causal claims” about the “analogy between Baxter’s assault and Islamist extremism” (104). With this comes an additional warning: the very critical compulsion to “read Baxter’s intrusion as an allegory of global terrorism” falls prey “to one of the chief narcissisms of the post-9/11 world: the notion that we live in an unbounded, ever-present time of terror” (104–5). In this thoughtful chapter, DeLillo and McEwan are cast in quite a reflexive light, “crafting narratives that appear to fulfil prevalent post-9/11 stereotypes and fantasies and then undermining them” (106). Once Neuman adds rhetorical analyses of President George W. Bush’s September 20, 2001, speech and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, the chapter’s argumentative through line is somewhat diluted, and one wonders whether ultimately it adds up to more than the sum of its parts, effective though the readings of McEwan and DeLillo are individually. Moreover, given the chapter’s canonically white lineup (though Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid does get a brief aside), it is somewhat surprising that Neuman does not reach out to a more capaciously multiethnic corpus of responses to the attacks and their transnational ramifications. Despite what he himself calls the “rapidly growing shelf of 9/11 novels” (127), his own choices are arguably somewhat uniform in background. No doubt pragmatic decisions about selection had to be made, ethnicities aside, and the writers were chosen here for being in tune with the conceptual model of temporality Neuman is advancing. However, given his later contention “that we need a more robustly comparative theological perspective in literary studies” (146), it is noticeable that 9/11 criticism can still have some trouble satisfying these noble aspirations. Chapter 4, “Messianic Narrative,” builds on some of the foundations of reenchantment laid in the earlier discussion of Rushdie, as Neuman turns to the way Orhan Pamuk, Anne Michaels, and Haruki Murakami “stage the encounter with unwitnessed traumas of the past as a form of messianic event” (137). Such an approach has interpretive as much as thematic implications, for Neuman proposes that once “we bring the resources of a critical messianism to bear on fictions of inheritance, we can begin to see them, and the act of reading, as a performative solicitation to the past as Other that transmutes an isolated and devastating inheritance into a communal act that holds something like an emancipatory promise” (146). This is a provocative contention, but unfortunately it is one of those sentences that reappears a few pages later (152), almost unchanged, which only exacerbates the occasionally recursive register and lexicon of Neuman’s prose. Still, the chapter unfolds with appealing variety. McEwan makes a brief comeback, with Atonement providing a pertinent conclusion. An opportunity here is missed, though: more than half of this discussion consists of plot summary, culminating in the suggestive idea that Atonement “implies a fuzzy ontology” about the condition of at-one-ment it dramatizes, a condition “that can be brought into tighter focus through the lens of weak messianism” (154). As motive and motif, “atonement” may Published by Duke University Press Novel 362 NOVEL AUGUST 2016 emerge in McEwan’s narrative as “the description of an intersubjective state” (154). One cannot help feeling that Neuman has left himself little space in which to do justice to what it is, exactly, about Atonement’s texture that enriches the novel’s formal enactment of the appeal to impossible redemption McEwan plots. The final chapter, “Reading Islam,” offers a rigorous consideration of Khaled Hosseini’s best-seller, The Kite Runner, as a novel “[b]eginning with sin and redemption” that “renders key moments in Amir’s spiritual awakening through the tropes and rhetoric of notable interfaith resonance” (165). By contrast, in a section where Neuman is most explicit about his misgivings, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi “serves as a reminder of how thin the rhetoric or pluralism and spirituality can be, even as it signals a deep desire for substantive interfaith dialogue in a climate of conservative religious revival” (173). With the end in sight, Neuman shifts again into a more methodological mood. Just as contemporary secularist thought has looked disparagingly upon the more visceral aspects of experience in the name of reason, so for him reading itself “suffers from a similar estrangement from the corporeal” (173). Looking back at the preceding chapters in the context of this statement, it’s all the more noticeable that Neuman’s own readings do not always counteract this neglect of somatic response in “textual encounters with alterity” at the level of form (173). For all their thoroughness with regard to diegetic details and dissonances, his own encounters are themselves somewhat estranged from matters of technique. To be sure, the necessary signposts are all there—“[a]t the level of style and form” (12), “[o]n a formal level” (22)—but what often ensues is only indirectly or fleetingly concerned with formal specificity. Opportunities for this level of reading are lost when long quotes are presented from Shalimar, for instance, that receive no hands-on textual analysis (31). Likewise, a potential opening for form is promised when Neuman suggests that “[b]y aligning himself with the stylistic and political norms of the modernists, Rushdie appeals to the idea that literature might serve as a surrogate for religion in a secular world” (42). But this observation is stated rather than formally substantiated, left tantalizingly underdeveloped in the context of subsequent readings. As such Neuman passes up the chance to trace for his reader—in a more patient, textually particularizing way—how the politics of Rushdie’s modernist style connects to the work of reenchantment. Similarly, in Coetzee’s case we are told at one point that a passage from Michael K “is one of the novel’s most resistant and haunting” (65), but the quote in question does not really get the kind of attention—in terms of diction, tempo, or stress—that would show how it formally resists and haunts with equal measure. Certainly there are exceptions. Neuman offers a compelling and illuminating take on the way Falling Man’s “form echoes” the “spiralling pattern” of temporal experience reminiscent of the World Trade Center’s stairs down which DeLillo’s Keith escapes, a pattern that in turn “symbolizes the mode of suspension prior to ethical judgment or agential action that the novel attempts to reclaim as a site of resistance to the teleological war on terror” (110). Elsewhere, though, form’s effects are mentioned rather than engaged, as in Murakami’s case: his stylistic “strangeness generates a phenomenology of encounter that resonates with a field of messianic tensions,” yet the following discussion operates predominantly at the level of narrative events (147). Neuman concludes his final chapter by warning that “[r]eviewers, book club guides, pedagogic practices, and paratextual materials reveal that readers overwhelmingly approach texts about Islamic societies as semitransparent containers of ethnographic content” (181). Given how attached to character and plot his own readings can become, he can’t always escape the trap of finding novels salient primarily because of their ostensible content— Published by Duke University Press Novel JAMES DISENCHANTING SECULARIZATION 363 however much he wants to treat them as far from transparent, to uncover their contradictions, and to reveal their complicated compatibility with “aspects of religiosity that privilege questioning, debate, and polyvocalism” (187). Nevertheless, Fiction beyond Secularism is unafraid of setting a bold and evocative agenda, and the extent to which Neuman genuinely cares about the stakes of his intervention is everywhere apparent (not least in his timely coda, “The Novel and the Secular Imagination”). Indeed, he is a most energetic devil’s advocate for religion. For that reason, his book will make readers look back from the contemporary to reconsider other phases in the novel’s secularization: by asking, for instance, whether modernist fiction too was really as enchanted as we might assume with the relentless project of disenchantment. Such are the larger implications of this book. Spiritedly argued, it is a sterling defense of how critical and creative discourses alike can help readers examine with greater clarity the religious imagination amid the hubbub of competing claims about our postsecularity. david james, Queen Mary, University of London * * * david james is reader in modern and contemporary literature at Queen Mary, University of London. Author of Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space (2008) and, most recently, Modernist Futures (2012), he has edited several collections, including The Legacies of Modernism (2012) and The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945 (2015). He is currently editing Modernism and Close Reading while also completing a new book, Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Writing and the Work of Consolation, both forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Works Cited Coetzee, J. M. Age of Iron. 1990. London: Penguin, 2010. Coviello, Peter, and Jared Hickman. “Introduction: After the Postsecular.” American Literature 86.4 (2014): 645–54. Published by Duke University Press