Postsecularism and a Prophetic Sensibility

7/21/2019 Postsecularism and a Prophetic Sensibility

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226 MITCHELL

M

H RRIS

WORKS CITED

Badiou,Alain.

Ethics:

n

Essay on the Understanding

of

Evil

Trans.Peter

Hallward.London:Verso 2001.

FinallyObjectlessSubject: Who Comes After the Subject? Ed.Eduardo

Cadava.London: Routledge,

1991

24-32.

Infinite Thought: Truth

and

the Return

of

Philosophy

Ed. and trans. Oliver

Feltham and JustinClemens.London: Continuum, 2004.

Theoretical Writings

Ed. and trans. RayBrassierand Alberto

Toscano

London: Continuum, 2004.

Bailie Gil.

Violence Unveiled:

Humanity

at the Crossroads

New

York:

Crossroad,

1995

Eagleton,Terry After Theory NewYork: BasicBooks, 2003

Hallward,Peter.

Badiou: A Subject to Truth

Minneapolis:U ofMinnesota

2003

Zizek,Slavoj The FragileAbsolute: Or,Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting

For?London:

Verso

2000.

The Puppet

and

the warf

The

Perverse Core ofChristianity

Cambridge,MA:

MIT Press,2003.

ostsecularism and a rophetic ensibility

Kathryn Ludwig

Recent fiction signals a shift in orientation with regard to

the

religious.

Many

contemporary

novels depict the performance

of

a turning in the

lives of characters or

the

introduction of moments of mystery and religious

possibility, such as those

found

in

the

works of Thomas

Pynchon

and

Don

DeLillo. In other novels, characters

who

already espouse some religious

belief take up secular challenges to religion by reconsidering religious

assumptions, toyingwith

the

practice

of

faith, attempting to rebuild religion

afresh, or placing an existing tradition alongside other faith systems in a

syncretistic articulation

of

belief. Yann Martel, E.

1.

Doctorow, Cynthia

Ozick, Marilynne Robinson, and

Toni Morrison are among the authors

engaged in these

kinds

of activity.

John McClure has dubbed this manifestation of the

turn

to the religious,

the postsecular In a 1995

article in Modern Fiction Studies McClure

described

the

period of resacralization in

contemporary

fiction and theory


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as a movement toward religious ways of knowing. McClure complicates

accounts of the postmodern, like Frederic Jameson s

and

[ean-Francois

Lyotards,

contesting their claim that the postmodern is already secular,

and even post-religious. McClure notes, as Linda Hutcheon s account

of postmodernity suggests, that the secular strand of the postmodern is

rivaled by a different strand, which allows for a different kind of reading

than the one privileged by critics who assume secular constructions of the

postmodern. He points to the presencing (using Homi Bhaba s term)

of religious discourses in some postmodern fiction, including Thomas

Pynchon s

Gravity s Rainbow

and Ishmael Reed s

umbo

Jumbo?

The postsecular shift has only intensified in the years since McClure first

published on the subject. Currently, postsecularism in literature describes

a marked increase in the production of novels involving journeys of the

soul (Ford S6-S7). In December of2007, McClure published

Partial Faiths:

Postsecular Fiction in the Age ofPynchon

nd

Morrison

the first full-length

book devoted to the subject of contemporary postsecular fiction. In the

preface, he defines postsecularism as a mode of being and seeing that is at

once critical of secular constructions of reality and of dogmatic religiosity

ix .

Postsecular narratives, he writes, suggest the need for a religiously

inflected disruption of secular constructions of the real, yet they refuse,

for the most part, to endorse any single religious discourse (3). Postsecular

thinkers, for McClure, neither reject the religious a priori

nor do they accept

existing interpretations of the religious a priori.

I argue that the postsecular can be characterized as a prophetic turn,

as the notion is elucidated in Martin Buber s writings. Martin Buber, who

wrote in the first half of the twentieth century, called for a renewal of the

religious to counter the prevalent secularism of his

age.

In works such as

nd ou and

On the Bible

Buber urged not a return to existing models of

the religious but a

turn

toward unmediated relation with the divine. Bubers

renewalism, and in particular his interest in the prophetic, can help us to

think out the shift of orientation through which we seem to be moving, and

especially the literary writing now characterized as postsecular.

In his article, The Man ofToday

and

the JewishBible; Buber articulates

a definition of prophetic reading. Buber states that man must

read the Jewish Bible as though it were something entirely unfamiliar,

as though it had not been set before him ready-made, as though he

has not been confronted all his life with sham concepts and sham

statements that cited the Bibleas their authority. He must face the Book

with a new attitude as something new. (5)


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K THRYN LUDWIG

Buber posits a practice of reading scripture in the context of one s historical

hour

and

undertakes to move biblical reading from a tripartite relation

(which is arbitrated by convention) to a bipartite relation (which involves

unmediated contact with the divine) ( Prophecy ). Buber articulates this

idea of relation as a dialogue between heaven and earth and points to the

many dialogues between

God

and man in the Hebrew Bible as examples of

I-Thou relations between humans and the divine ( Dialogue ).

Buber called for a return to betweenness; a notion drawn, in part,

from the teachings of German sociologist Georg Simmel. For Buber, the

space between two people is of more consequence

than

the subjectivity of

the people themselves, which could be understood as its end terms. He is

less interested in dialogue in the Aristotelian sense of a discussion between

two distinct parties

than

people engaged in connectedness. Betweenness,

according to Buber, is the site of openness to the otherness of the other

and to the signs of God s address or summons coming through the other

Between Man and Man . He writes that it is only in relation to another that

one s own being is realized.

Buber laments the loss of community in his age

and

will later

turn

to

dialogue to remedy this loss. His dialogical vision derives from the model

of

the Biblical

prophet.

In Buber s understanding, the prophet s work is

founded in his attentiveness to God s revelation. He faces God and says,

Here I am: ? He awaits God s wisdom, and the prophecy given to

him

results in a moment of decision for those who hear it, a call to turning:

The prophet does

not

give predictions; he is not a soothsayer or a fortune

teller. Rather, the prophet awakens people to the eventualities of their

present course and calls people to action in the face of God s admonition

( Dialogue

219).8

In a similar way, the prophetic reader awaits God s

communication. He dispenses with ready-made interpretations so that he

can read sacred texts and the world as text anew and receive revelation in

the here and now, Buber writes that

man

was created to be a center of

surprise in creation ( Prophecy 178). For Buber, the if... then structure

of the prophetic reveals the partnership between God and man in creation.

For the prophetic reader, reading sacred texts is an encounter with the

Divine a moment

ofbetweenness and

a call to turning.

Buber s writings are valuable to a discussion of a present-day turn to the

religious because of the stylistic and thematic parallels between the two. The

similarities in approach between Buberian renewalism and contemporary

postsecular literature include an emphasis on (1) reading the sacred for


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229

one s historical

hour

(2) the acting out of what Buber calls a turning

and what McClure describes as conversion experiences and (3) the shift

in emphasis away from systematized religion toward relational enactments

of the divine-human connection. While McClure helps us to describe the

postsecular, Buber helps us to theorize it.

The postsecular exemplifies what Buber describes in his writings

on the prophetic, in which the prophetic is a casting off of assumptions

regarding the religious. Postsecular literature shows people trying to

get beyond mediated relations, beyond what Jean Baudrillard called a

simulacrum: Baudrillard argued that the real in

our

age is that which

has already been represented-that which has alwaysalready been mapped.

For Baudrillard, the thing we think of as real is only a manifestation of

the experience modeled in the simulacrum. In the postsecular, as in the

prophetic, the reader endeavors to move beyond this simulacrum toward a

fresh reading and toward revelation. A character in Doctorow s City

God

(2001) argues the necessity of reading sacred texts for one s age when she

challenges the assumption that the ancients were in closer communication

with the Creator than weourselves (252). The entiretyof her speech echoes

Buber s assertion that what happened once happens now and always; that

the dialogue between heaven and earth is a recurrent happening (Buber,

Dialogue 215).

The result of this kind of reading is that the turn toward the religious

in writing of recent years does not necessarily involve a return to any

established religious system with which we are familiar. In fact, much

postsecular writing challenges existing constructions of the religious as

vehemently as it challenges the secular, as is the case in City God In other

cases,prominent religious traditions are weakened; to use GianniVattimo s

term. Consider Yann Martel s

Life of Pi

in which the syncretism of the

main character serves as a decentering technique in a novel that claims to

relate a story that will make you believe in God (x).

etthe examples of the religious set forth in much fiction that I consider

postsecular also attempt construction following an age of deconstruction.

They respond to the fragmentation that has dominated in the postmodern

periodbyemphasizingconnectedness-betweenman and man, and between

the human and the divine. Postmodernism, in opposition to the totalizing

tendencies of high modernism, called attention to the chaos of modern

life. Michel Foucault developed theories of discourses and Jean-Francois

Lyotard wrote about language games: Efforts to recognize a multiplicity


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K THRYN

LU WIG

of silenced voices has often had the drawback of a kind of schizophrenia,

in which the voices are juxtaposed or layered upon one another, but not

brought into communication. In the postsecular, we can see attempts to

bring such voices together. Toni Morrison s

Paradise

(1997), for example,

depicts a group of outcast women engaging in loud dreaming: an ecstatic

ritual in which each woman participates in the private traumas of the

others, facilitating betweenness among the women and access to a state of

transcendence, even (seemingly) over death.

Relation is the vehicle for the religious in much postsecular fiction.

In Sue Monk

Kidds

Secret Life

ees (2002), a motherless girl finds faith

through a sisterhood of women, who introduce her to a spiritual mother

in the BlackMadonna, and whose care and love provide for her an earthly

reflection of that mother. In Myla Goldberg s Bee

Season

(2000), a girl is

introduced to a world of Jewish mysticism when she attracts, for the first

time in her life, the attention of her father. Connecting with others in what

Buber calls l-Thou relations ushers these characters into the presence of the

divine.

So while postsecular fiction is often infused with the same suspicion

of totalizing narratives that is expressed in postmodernism, the emphasis

on dialogue and reciprocal understanding (which seems to act as a check

against totality and the power structures it can enable) allows postsecular

thinkers to move forward in creating new religious narratives. And while the

postsecular is often continuous with postmodernism in that it favors play

and open-ended readings over the affirmation of any existing discourse or

the formulation of any new

master

discourses, tradition is not altogether

dismissed in postsecular fiction. Religious traditions at times receive fresh

attention in the postsecular, as in Marilynne Robinson s Gilead and at

other times they assert an influence on even the most reluctantly religious

narratives, as can be said of on DeLillo s Underworld: In other works,

ambivalence prevails, as in Jonathan Rosen sTalmudand theInternet which

is about learning to embrace contradictory forces: ancient tradition and

contemporary chaos, doubt and faith, the living and the dead, tragedy and

hope (Preface).

Perhaps the most concrete statement that can be made about the

postsecular project is that it opens up a space in literary studies in which it is

possible to talk about God. Is this sufficient? For those who lament that the

religious has too often been excluded from contemporary literary studies,

the postsecular may seem a positive step. Others may feel that the emphasis


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231

on newness in this prophetic / postsecular turn unduly dismisses the long

and fruitful history of religious discourse.

is my sense that the greatest

value of Buber s work on the prophetic is that it attempts to make the Bible

strange again, not so that tradition may be overturned, but so that God s

voice in the dialogue between heaven and earth will not be drowned out by

any other voice. Likewise, postsecular writers offer a valuable perspective

as they face age-old questions about the human and divine as if for the first

time, and are thus brought into a new articulation of the between:

Whether or not we embrace the postsecular turn as a favorable shift,

however, I argue that an acquaintance with the prophetic as it shows up in

postsecular fiction provides literary scholars with a reference for thinking

about the turn to religion in recent academic discourse. An examination of

the postsecular lends insight to the project, as Susan Felch articulates it, of

balancing the delicate registers of belief and unbelief; because the work of

postsecular writers provides a site in which sacred and secular perspectives

may meet.

Purdue University

OT S

In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic ofLate Capitalism, Frederic Jameson

describes the postmodern as effortlessly secular and as a situation in which

spirituality virtually by definition no longer exists (387). Jean Baudrillard also

notes a diminishing possibility of faith in the postmodern age in his book

Simulacra

and Simulations 170-71 .

or more by McClure on this countersecular strain, see his article, Post

Secular Culture: The Return of Religion in Contemporary Theory and Literature:

Post-secular is a widely used term today. See, for example, Martin Matustik,

Radical Evil

n

the Scarcity of Hope: Postsecular Meditations and Phillip Blond,

Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy

n

Theology. For my sense of the

term, see text of article.

Buber first gained his reputation as a Jewish renewalist and only subsequently

as a registrant of Jewish mysticism and especially Hassidism. Buber s long-term

interest in the religious has recently brought him renewed prominence, as noted

by Harold Bloom in his introduction to Buber s collection of Biblical writings,

the Bible. For more on Buber s cultural milieu, see Carl Schorske, Pin-de-Siecle

Vienna.

For Simmel swork on religion, see Georg Simmel, Die Religion.


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232

KATHRYN

LUDWIG

60

n

prophecy

in

the

Jewish tradition, see Yehezkel

Kaufmann, TheReligion of

Israel from its Beginnings to the BabylonianExileand also

Abraham

J.Heschel,

The

Prophets.

7S

ee,

for example,

Bubers

seminal essay, Abraham

the

Seer in

On the Bible.

Seealso

Sandor

Goodhart,

Sacrificing Commentary.

9In Buber's

understanding and

in

much postsecular

fiction, revelation includes,

but is not

confined

to

written

scripture. All

of creation

is revelation, much as, for

Barthes,

the world itselfis a text.

lOIn

both Buber's

work

and

postsecular

literature,

the

emphasis on reading is

accompanied

by debates

about

the practice

of

reading religious texts and a sense

of

the

limitations

of

language/the unutterablity

of

the

divine.

The issue

of

textual reading is central to

many

novels

that

I take to be

postsecular, including Morrison's

Paradise,

Doctorow's

City of God

and Cynthia

Ozicks Heir to the GlimmeringWorld 2004 .

1

McClure

examines the postsecular

with

reference to Vattimo in

Partial

Faiths

12-16. See also Gianni Vattimo, Belief

13Foucault describes this as a

heterotopia.

In

her article Don DeLillo's Latin Mass; '

Amy

Hungerford writes

that

Underworld

shows the influence of the author's Catholic upbringing. According to

Hungerford, it is through the translation

of

Catholic structures into literary

ones

that DeLillo articulates an understanding of language that itselfmediates between

belief and pluralism (346).

WORKS CITED

Baudrillard, Jean.

Simulacra and Simulations.

New

York: Semiotexte-McNally

Robinson, 1983.

Blond, Phillip. Post Secular Philosophy: BetweenPhilosophy and Theology. London,

New

York: Routledge, 1998.

Buber, Martin.

BetweenMan and Man. New

York: Collier, 1965.

The Dialogue Between Heaven and

Earth:

On Judaism. Ed. Nahum Glatzer.

New

York: Schocken, 1967.214-25.

_ I and

Thou. Trans.

Kaufmann.

New

York: Scribner, 1970.

Prophecy, Apocalyptic

and

the Historical Hour: On the Bible. Ed. Nahum

Glatzer. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2000. 172-87.

Doctorow, E.

1. City of God.New York: Plume, 2001.

Ford, Marcia,

Beyond

Evangelical Fiction;'

Publishers Weekly

(Sept. 15,2003): S6-

S7.

Goodhart, Sandor. Sacrificing Commentary. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.

Heschel,

Abraham

J.

TheProphets. New

York: Harper

Row, 1969.

Hungerford, Amy. Don Del.illos Latin Mass:'

Contemporary Literature 47.3

(Fall 2006): 346-48.


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SEMINAR

ON

CHRISTIAN SCHOLARSHIP 233

Hutcheon Linda. The

Politics

of Postmodernism. London, NewYork: Routledge,

1989.

Jameson, Frederic.Postmodernism

or

the Cultural

Logic

Late Capitalism.

Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Kaufmann,

Yehezkel TheReligion of Israel from itsBeginnings to the Babylonian

Exile.Trans.M.Greenburg. Chicago:U ofChicago

1960.

Martel, Yann.Life

Pi.Orlando: Harcourt, 2001.

Matustik,Martin.

RadicalEviland the Scarcity of Hope: Postsecular Meditations.

Bloomington: Indiana UP,2008.

McClure, John,

Partial

Faiths:

Postsecular Fiction in the Age ofPynchon and

Morrison. Athens: U ofGeorgia

2007.

Postmodern/Post-Secular:

Contemporary Fiction and Spirituality:'Modern

Fiction Studies

41.1 (1995): 141-63.

Post-SecularCulture: The Return ofReligion in Contemporary Theory and

Literature:' Cross Currents 47.3 (Fall 1997):332-47.

Rosen, Jonathan. Talmud and the Internet. New

York:

Picador, 2000.

Schorske,Carl.Pin de Siecle Vienna. NewYork: Knopf,Random House, 1980.

Simmel,Georg.

DieReligion

Frankfurt am Main: Rutten Loening, 1906.

Vattimo,Gianni.Belief Trans. LucaD'Isanto and DavidWebb.Stanford: Stanford

UP 1999.

frican merican Literature as Spiritual Witness

The Poetic Example

Margaret lexander Walker

Yolanda Pierce

Birthed during the watery baptism of

the

Middle

Passage

between

Africa

and the New

World, African American literature is

the product

of

hybrid

cultures, hybrid worlds, and hybrid religions. The experiences and

memories of traditional African religions, along with a brutal introduction

to Western Christianity, created

the cauldron

in

which

African

American

literature was

born. From the poetry

of

Ann

Plato

and

Phillis Wheatley, to

the novels of Toni Morrison and John

Edgar

Wideman African American

literature has

been

haunted by its religious birth-pangs

which produced

both

acceptance

and

contestation of its African

and

Christian origins.

Using the

poetry

of

Margaret

AlexanderWalker, this

brief

article simply

argues

that

while

there

does

appear

to be a

return

to religion in

the

larger

Postsecularism and a Prophetic Sensibility

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