Religious Nostalgia and Literary Engagement with the Postsecular Age

Home , Don DeLillo, Life Expectancy (novel), Louise Erdrich, Marilynne Robinson

Babel’s Apology: Religious Nostalgia and Literary Engagement with the Postsecular Age

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY

Grace Elizabeth Miller

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Advisor: Dr. Daniel Philippon

December 2018

GRACE ELIZABETH MILLER

Table of Contents

Introduction: Secular Disenchantment, Postsecular Re-enchantment, and Religious Nostalgia…………………………………………………...... 1

Chapter 1: Postmodernism and Literary Sanctity in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead…………...... 23

Chapter 2: Metaphysical Ambivalence and Spiritual Resilience in the Novels of Louise Erdrich………………………………...………….…57

Chapter 3: Walker Percy’s Postsecular Eden…………………………..95

Chapter 4: Religious Nostalgia and Modern Gnosticism in the work of

Don DeLillo………………………………………………………...…132

Conclusion: “That which holds the world together”…………………..167

Bibliography………………………………………………………..….174

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Introduction:

Secular Disenchantment, Postsecular Re-enchantment, and Religious Nostalgia

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), a young man known only as “The

Savage” is plucked from a remote native village in the wilderness and brought to a futuristic utopia he calls the “Brave New World.” Huxley describes the place as an extreme actualization of the modern and secular ideals that were becoming popular in his age; the government of the Brave New World provides necessities and entertainment for all its citizens, and the people enjoy unmitigated sexual freedom without the old world problems of pregnancy and disease. The Savage, whose mother escaped from this society and subsequently suffered a mental collapse, educated himself with an old volume of

Shakespeare and absorbed all the lofty ideals of the Renaissance as he matured. Exposed to the Brave New World, he becomes disenchanted and voices nostalgia for the old world order, reflecting that danger and even death are preferable to the tepid new world order, regardless of its promises of pleasure and contentment: 2

Exposing what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death and danger dare,

even for an eggshell. Isn’t there something in that? Quite apart from God—though

of course God would be a reason for it. Isn’t there something in living

dangerously? . . . I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real

danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin. (214-215)

This is not to say that all religious literary reactions to the secular age are quite so extreme; this is simply to say that they do exist within the scope of the literary trend that has come to be known as “postsecularism.” And, as I will argue, these religious postsecular works share many similar traits with the established canon of postsecular literature and bring many aspects of their value systems into dialogue. The fields of literary studies, theology, and philosophy would do well to examine these trends because they will likely shape the trajectory of religious writing.

What is Postsecularism?

Several fields have come forward to claim expertise on the emerging notion of

“postsecularism” and have variously described it. The term, however, was originally popularized by Jürgen Habermas, who defines postsecularism as a necessary sociopolitical response to the dichotomy of religion and secularism and the ways that proponents of one value system claim ultimate knowledge authority over the other, even using violence to achieve dominance. In 2001, when Habermas was awarded the Peace

Prize of the German Book Trade, he argued in his acceptance speech that

The neutral state, confronted with competing claims of knowledge and faith,

abstains from prejudging political decisions in favor of one side or the other. The 3

pluralized reason of the public of citizens follows a dynamic of secularization

only insofar as the latter urges equal distance to be kept, in the outcome, from any

strong traditions and comprehensive worldviews. In its willingness to learn,

however, democratic common sense remains osmotically open to both sides,

science and religion, without relinquishing its independence. (330)

Later in his speech, Habermas explained that “Determining these disputed boundaries should therefore be seen as a cooperative task which requires both sides to take on the perspective of the other one” (332). At the same time, he acknowledged that these dialogues may not simply involve two sides, that “democratic common sense” must honor a “many-voiced public.” And, according to Habermas, part of a democratic state honoring and supporting a many-voiced public requires a certain approach to language that allows for dialogue and adaptability. One powerful example of his argument occurs in The Dialectics of Secularization, which documents a dialogue between Habermas and

Joseph Ratzinger in 2005, shortly before Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI. Despite

Ratzinger’s reputation as an unrelenting traditionalist, he responded favorably to

Habermas’s notion of postsecular dialogue. When Habermas wrote that, “Indeed, a liberal political culture can expect that the secularized citizens play their part in the endeavors to translate relevant contributions from the religious language into a language that is accessible to the public as a whole” (52), Ratzinger agreed, writing that, “Ultimately, the essential values and norms that are in some way known or sensed by all men will take on a new brightness in such a process, so that that which holds the world together can once again become an effective force in mankind” (79-80). 4

In this dialogue, Habermas and Ratzinger both invoked the concept of mysticism, commonly understood as the experience of God and the supernatural outside the rational or linguistic sphere; Habermas wrote that

Without initially having any theological intention, the reason that becomes aware

of its limitations thus transcends itself in the direction of something else. This can

take the form of the mystical fusion with a consciousness that embraces the

universe; it may be the despairing hope that a redeeming message will occur in

history; or it may take the shape of a solidarity with those who are oppressed and

insulted, which presses forward in order to hasten on the coming of the messianic

salvation. (41)

Habermas’s description of “the mystical fusion with a consciousness that embraces the universe” is a key trait in postsecularism as it appears in literature.

Language and Mysticism

Historian Charles Taylor has provided useful insight into the emergence of the postsecular age, though he does not go so far as to use the term “postsecular,” and he explains why mysticism has come to play such a key role in contemporary spiritual culture. In A Secular Age, he provides a chronology of the factors that led to the secularization and simultaneous demystification of the western world. One particularly influential factor he identifies is the post-Reformation suppression of any religious practice that appeared to involve idolatry or magical powers in the practitioner. For example, the Protestant criticism of the selling of indulgences eventually extended to the several other ways religious people attempted to channel religious power through holy 5 objects or rituals, including the sacraments. Taylor explains that “The energy of disenchantment is double. First negative, we must reject everything which smacks of idolatry. We combat the enchanted world, without quarter. At first, this fight is not carried on because enchantment is totally untrue, but rather because it is necessarily ungodly” (80).

The “disenchantment” of Christianity allowed for a smoother transition to the secularization of western culture. And yet, Taylor points out the secular age’s ironic valuation of art as a vessel for experiencing mystery:

the modern identity and outlook flattens the world, leaves no place for the

spiritual, the higher, the mystery. This doesn’t need to send us back to religious

belief. There is another direction. The idea is: the mystery, the depth, the

profoundly moving, can be, for all we know, entirely anthropological. Atheists,

humanists cling on to this, as they go to concerts, operas, read great literature.

(356)

Later, he explains that art “is what offers a place to go for modern unbelief. As a response to the inadequacies of moralism, the missing goal can be identified with the experience of beauty, in the realm of the aesthetic. But this is now unhooked from the ordered cosmos and/or the divine.”

Tracy Fessenden tells a similar story of religious history in America, in which mysticism is associated with idolatry, but she emphasizes the role of literacy and writing in this demystification. In the religious history Fessenden chronicles in Culture and 6

Redemption, reading and writing were seen as a Protestant foil to the idolatrous mysticism of Catholicism; she explains that

Associating both literacy and their removal from an ensoiling Europe with

freedom from prelatical spiritual tyranny and monarchical political tyranny,

American Puritans sought to project themselves decisively beyond the dividing

line they drew between Catholic “matter” and Protestant “spirit,” between a

moribund, wandering past and a dynamic, providential history, between the

dangerous attractions of sensuous ritual and the disembodying powers of the

Word. The redemptive power they accorded to literacy and to what the Puritan

Richard Baxter called “Self-examination” or “the serious and diligent trying of a

man’s heart . . . by the rule of scripture” resulted, according to Andrew Delbanco,

in habits of “obsessive self-chronicling” that ‘guaranteed for [the Puritans] a

unique afterlife in American culture. (18)

Fessenden’s narrative introduces a further complication in postsecular literary studies; according to her argument, mysticism in Protestant America has typically been seen as idolatrous and sinful, and writing was a way to ensure that humanity remained in its proper place and did not attempt to imbue magic in its religious practice. Thus, mysticism and the word, at least in the West, have a long history of being treated as diametrically opposed to one another. As I will argue, postsecularism has played a central role in reuniting the two.

Postmodernism and Mysticism

And now, mysticism has made a resurgence in contemporary religious culture in

America, including popular culture. Even in theology, mysticism appears within

“postmodern religion,” as described by philosophers and theologians like Christina

Gschwandtner, John Caputo and Merold Westphal. These thinkers tend to agree that the postmodern God defies the various systems of knowledge that would purport to define or explain him. Instead, the postmodern God is an ineffable figure of incomprehensible power and inexhaustible goodness that should leave us awestruck and humbled.

Gschwandtner provides the most thorough explanation for the emergence of the postmodern God, explaining the ways that philosophers such as Heidegger, Ricoeur,

Derrida, and Levinas have variously called into question the West’s tendency to superimpose modern structures of knowledge onto God. Gschwandtner describes

Ricoeur’s God as “A God of poetry and superabundance,” recalls Derrida’s remark that

“the face of God disappears forever in showing itself” (46) and explains the way that

Heidegger’s rejection of onto-theology “may open a different way of speaking about the divine, namely the kind of divine to whom one may pray or before whom one might want to dance and who would not be tied to metaphysical thinking as the ground of all beings”

(30). From these works, she concludes that “Theology is not a speculation about the existence of God, does not seek to ascertain God’s nature, but instead describes faithfully the way in which Christians experience life within the world of faith” (24).

Merold Westphal and John Caputo are two philosophers who earn special mention in Gschwandtner’s book. Both of them similarly reference the works of 8

Heidegger and others to develop their own postmodern approach to the Judeo-Christian

God. In Overcoming Onto-Theology, which relies heavily on Heidegger’s work,

Westphal writes that

In affirming God as Creator I am affirming that there is an explanation of the

whole of being and I am pointing in the direction of that explanation; but I am not

giving it, for I do not possess it. . . . My affirmation of God as Creator is not onto-

theological because it is not in the service of the philosophical project of

rendering the whole of being intelligible to human understanding, a project I have

ample religious reasons to repudiate. (7)

Westphal goes on to explain that onto-theology, or theology that focuses too heavily on rationalism, metaphysics, and the like, is toxic to religious experience because it represses the faith experience, quoting the psalmist who says, “I cannot worship what I comprehend” (8). Later, Westphal writes that “Interpretation is what we do east of Eden, after the Fall, prior to the beatific vision. . . . The task of interpretation is to retrieve the divine voice in the written word, to return as nearly as possible to the garden where truth is immediately present” (72). John Caputo makes similar arguments. In Radical

Hermeneutics, he explains religious hermeneutics as “an attempt to stick to the original difficulty of life, and not to betray it with metaphysics” (1). In his spiritual memoir,

Hoping Against Hope, Caputo introduces a concept he calls “the nihilism of grace.” As he explains, “The gift is for free, given for nothing. A grace has a special good-for- nothingness about it where the nothingness preserves the purity of the gift” (172). Caputo does describe the experience of this grace as “religion,” explaining, 9

I call it a religion with or without religion, or a proto-religion, which I think is the

sort of religion that most merits our faith. But this is not a concoction of mine,

something I just made up. I have taken it from the mystics, who I think of as my

informers, my contacts on the inside. This religion does not break in upon religion

from the outside but irrupts from within religion. I am not forcing anything on

religion, or doing anything to it. I lack the wherewithal for that. Religion itself

already contains something that it cannot contain. (170)

Caputo briefly describes the impact this way of thinking might have on religious narratives, writing that

God’s insistence is to populate these sacred stories with purely fictional

characters, without cost to their veracity, daring to let them be true with another

and deeper truth, with a truth of another order, and thus to be a contribution to a

poetics of insistence where the truth is up to us. When it comes to the deep truth

of narratives, the distinction between fact and fictions collapses in upon itself and

it makes no difference who the author is. (127)

Amy Hungerford, a literary critic who focuses on religion in postmodern literature, similarly emphasizes the inaccessibility of ultimate religious truth. In her readings of postmodern works, particularly in her book, Postmodern Belief, literary voices seem to abandon the project of comprehending and even worshipping God in his own realm, since he is indeed so inaccessible by human faculties, especially language.

Instead, they turn back to their own realm—the text—and the text takes on its own religious significance. In this spiritual climate, Hungerford explains, “the ambiguities of 10 language are imagined as being religiously empowered” (xix). God, insofar as he can exist within the confines of anything created by humanity, becomes present in the text, and the text itself becomes mystical; thus, “Writing is similar both to the experience of speaking without intention and to the ultimate religious experience of being one with

God” (61). Postmodern literature, then, “does much to imagine contemporary fiction as something like scripture—supernatural, transcendent, imbued with ultimate authority”

(105).

While mysticism and its relationship to the text is a central tenet of postsecularism as well as postmodern religion, I will ultimately argue that postsecular works do not envision God or the supernatural as occurring solely within the text. Instead, the text is inextricably linked with God, the supernatural, and all that the text cannot adequately describe. Postsecular religious authors do not simply dwell within their own insular literary traditions; they use their literary traditions to approach something that cannot be written. In interfacing with this mystery, they are able to interface with others from various paths; they achieve what Habermas called “the mystical fusion with a consciousness that embraces the universe.” The act of writing, then, is a conduit to everything belonging to the realm of the sublime: faith, grace, glory, mystery, and religious experience. At the same time, writing becomes a powerful force to preserve the aspects of respective faiths that deserve preservation.

Postsecularism and Literature

Postsecularism is now a burgeoning topic in literary studies. The literary critic most popularly associated with this field is John McClure, alongside his influential work, 11

Partial Faiths. McClure sets forth a definition of postsecularism on “spiritual but not religious” terms, as some might describe it. McClure acknowledges the efforts of both secularism and fundamentalist religions to claim ultimate dogmatic authority and repress alternate ways of understanding reality. He explains that, as a result of these conflicts, postsecular spiritual seekers are distrustful of both secularism and religion. Instead of adhering to either, they forge a new path in which they embrace spiritual freedom and reject dogma. What results is a hodgepodge of magic and spiritualism that includes trappings of the religious past, such as angels and gods, but rarely gives them a name or establishes a metaphysical system through which to understand them. McClure has outlined a canon of authors he deems properly postsecular: Don DeLillo, Thomas

Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich, among others. What tend to be absent in his arguments are the perspectives of religious authors; in the postsecular age, as

McClure describes it, these individuals are all but extinct.

McClure would seem to concur with much of Charles Taylor’s assessment of art as mystery, but he would certainly argue that while the experience of art is supposedly

“unhooked from . . . the divine,” deities, and various spiritual beings like angels and demons, still emerge with surprising frequency in postsecular literature, though they never appear alongside a system of theology that would explain their existence or presence. In fact, he writes that “The religious returns, in much postsecular fiction, with the vulgar exuberance of a tabloid headline” (17). He describes these ambivalent outlooks on religion and the supernatural as “partial faiths”; these belief systems are happy to incorporate some of the elements of religion that are compatible with the aesthetic 12 experience, as Charles Taylor describes it. Ironically, the aspects of religion that were compatible with the secular age—its rationalism, its dogma, and its sterile approach to text—are left behind. Apparently, postsecularism has triumphed over the religious history in America, as described by Tracy Fessenden, that repressed mysticism in favor of the dominance of sterilized, written forms accounts of religion.

As a result, postsecularism has often been depicted as a more forgiving middle ground between religion and secularism that is more conducive to spiritual exploration, development, and dialogue. One might expect that postsecularism’s approaches to spirituality are more palatable to modern readers who might be suspicious of religious claims to authority, often associating them with the West’s attempts to dominate non-

Christian cultures. Thus, literary critics have also taken interest in postsecularism’s role as cultural mediator. In 2008, the American Academy of Religion sponsored a panel on postsecular literature in which the participants, Kathryn Ludwig, Magdalena Maczynska, and Michael Kaufmann, generally agreed that postsecularism challenges the supposed binary of secularism (often substituted or equated with “scientism” in these dialogues) versus religion. Their thoughts on the subject were published in a volume of Religion and

Literature the following year, along with related articles by respondents like Lee

Morrissey and Everett Hamner. All generally agree with Habermas in his description of postsecularism as a reaction to the dichotomy between religion and secularism. Lee

Morrissey goes so far as to define postsecularism as the branch of postmodernism that deals with religious and spiritual topics, recalling Jean-Francois Lyotard’s criticism of

“narratives of legitimation” and rearticulating these criticism as it applies to the 13 theological challenges played out in Paradise Lost. According to Morrissey, Paradise

Lost is the first postsecular text because it describes the drama of characters rejecting God because of his restrictive nature but then returning to God once they realize that there are other avenues to communing with him besides dispassionate and unthinking obedience.

Michael Kauffmann, who also seems to equate postsecularism with postmodern approaches to spirituality, has similarly noted that “There seems to be a broad general agreement that postsecular thought stems from a desire to resist any master narrative— whether it be a supersessionary narrative of secularization, or a triumphal narrative of the return of religion” (68).

Thus, our cultural “postsecular” moment is one of recognizing difference and fostering dialogue or spiritual interchange. As I have indicated above, postsecularism occurs in a cultural moment that embraces means of transcending difference, especially as it is delineated and emphasized by the workings of language. Instead, it emphasizes the aspects of religious and spiritual experience that cannot be put to words, much as a writer may try; the postsecular author frequently takes on the impossible project of putting the ineffable to words.

Postsecularism and Religious works

These perspectives might seem to imply that postsecularism is incompatible with religion, insofar as postsecularism is suspicious of claims to religious authority, but other writers complicate the discussion. Everett Hamner, for example, argues that banning both religion and science (as one vein of secularism) from spiritual dialogue is not conducive to a meaningful exploration of ideas. To Hamner, bringing science and religion into 14 dialogue with other worldviews and other forms of spirituality is the mission and definition of postsecularism. He writes that “literary and critical mediation can reveal far more compelling, productive tensions between the measurable and the immeasurable than can [inform] the endless arguments between religious and secular extremists” (92).

Other AAR attendees and their respondents similarly voiced an interest in including religious writers in postsecular dialogues, and some even describe these religious authors as actual postsecular authors. Andrew Hoogheem, for example, brings

Catholic writer Walker Percy into the conversation, arguing that he has taken on a postsecular project, “attempting to integrate religious and scientific insights into the nature of human selfhood while critiquing the tendency of some of their proponents . . . to turn either science or religion into a totalizing discourse that refuses to grant legitimacy to other ways of knowing” (93). In other words, Hoogheem suggests that, in becoming involved in postsecular dialogues, religious writers are policing the conversational behavior of their own religious traditions. Hoogheem points out that John McClure has left out the insights of those from Abrahamic religious traditions and that

This omission is significant not because any kind of quota is either necessary or

desirable, but because it leaves unexplored a significant opportunity for dialogue.

That is, the postsecular as a category ultimately will have only limited interpretive

value if all it does is point to ways in which some putatively “secular” novelists

have dabbled in “religion” or, even more amorphously, “spirituality.” (93)

These approaches to the difficult question of religion’s engagement with the postsecular illustrate Charles Taylor’s notion that “if pressed to look at the issues, even [secular 15 writers] would begin to sense that they stood in one or other relation to faith as an identity-defining issue. And certainly the argument about faith and unbelief which circulates in our culture, the moves from one to the other that people make, are all understood on this ethically-charged level. Religion remains ineradicably on the horizon of areligion; and vice versa” (592).

Within these arguments, there seems to be a tension between “beatific vision,” or

“immediately present” truth, as Merold Westphal describes it, and the written words that have tried, and, according to many of these philosophers, have failed, to describe it.

According to theologians like Westphal, words can obscure God more effectively than they can reveal him, so where does that leave The Word, which is ostensibly God and with God? Furthermore, one might wonder, given postsecularism’s emphasis on magic and mystery and its rejection of totalizing knowledge systems, whether it might reject certain types of literary practice as oppressive and restrictive, alongside religious dogma itself.

Postsecular Religious Literature

Clearly, religious authors—or authors who at least seek to preserve some aspect of religious tradition and culture—are writing in a complicated cultural moment. Still, many religious writers have chosen not to shield themselves from these dialogues and produce dogmatic writings in a vacuum. As these chapters will argue, many religious authors have not blindly persisted in their own independent trajectory as believers but have instead taken into account the cultural findings of the secular and postsecular age. In the process, they often reflect on the iniquities of their own religious traditions. These 16 postsecular religious works, I argue, are marked by two noteworthy elements; first, they adapt their approach to their own religion to emphasize the same aspects that the entire range of postmodern theologians and postsecular writers tend to emphasize: mysticism over rationalism and faith versus practice, a technique that is possibly meant to make the works more palatable to postsecular readers. These authors do not need to wander from their own religious traditions to accomplish this; they simply incorporate their religions’ own traditions in the realm of mysticism or aesthetic experience.

The second aspect of these works, however, which provides some tension to the narrative, is a keen sense of religious nostalgia. This nostalgia influences every narrative differently; sometimes it ungrounds the faith experience from history, emphasizing the transitory nature of lived experience, including religious experience. At other times, it brings into stark relief the modern age’s inability to provide enough comforts to dull the passions of the human spirit. As I proceed with my argument, the implications of religious nostalgia—and the sense of loss that often comes with it—become increasingly grave, from the death of an individual in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead to the destruction of an entire culture as portrayed throughout Louise Erdrich’s novels, then examining eschatologies in the work of Walker Percy, and finally, Don DeLillo’s portrayal of religious history as it might be applied to mass destruction and death. Each of these narratives illustrate, in their own way, the way these authors and their characters abandon theological authority in favor of emphasizing aspects of religion that can be preserved in the postmodern world, namely, its mystical, ineffable characteristics. As they write, they preserve what deserves preservation. 17

Outline of Chapters

My first chapter addresses the work of Marilynne Robinson, a religious author who would seem to be the most obvious candidate to become “religious postsecular” canon. I focus on her novel, Gilead, which describes the final days in the life of a

Congregationalist pastor named John Ames. Throughout the novel, Ames grapples with the question of how much impact Christianity’s wealth of theological knowledge truly has on believers, as opposed to the sublime experiences of everyday life. As Ames looks back on his career, which spans half a century, he reflects upon the sheer volume of sermons he has written throughout his lifetime to the number of pages produced by prolific theologians like Saint Augustine. Despite John Ames’s impending death, he is not interested in preserving anything he has written and idly muses about whether or not it had any effect; strangely, Ames does not seem to care. However, Ames is less apathetic about the memories of his incandescent faith experiences throughout his lifetime; these emerge powerfully throughout his narrative, always emphasizing the mystery of the experience of God in that moment.

Ames’s enjoyment of the mystery and glory of God is called into question when his godson, Jack Boughton, returns to Gilead. Jack has long been considered a sinner by the townspeople of Gilead, and even Jack himself seems to believe that he is irredeemable. He turns to John Ames for theological answers to the question of predestination, and Ames is unwilling or unable to answer them. Thus, Ames is challenged by a worst-case scenario of the ineffability of words. In addressing the question of Jack’s salvation, Robinson draws upon the particularly difficult theology of 18 the Holy Trinity, which brings the mysterious God the Father into co-substantial relationship with the Son, also known as the logos. In the process, she illustrates other aspects of Christianity that bring the mystery of God into participation with the word, or other linguistic examples of symbolism. The most notable example is sacrament; in

Gilead, sacraments frequently play a role in John Ames’s most powerful religious memories and ultimately provide a way for Ames to realize his own spiritual shortcomings and for Jack to be saved. Thus, Robinson makes a powerful argument for

Christianity’s ability to parse some of the more complicated questions of postmodern spiritual writing alongside experience.

My second chapter addresses the work of Louise Erdrich. While Erdrich has earned a place in McClure’s postsecular canon, McClure does little to emphasize the fact that, while she might not be a religious person, she writes with a deep reverence for the religion of her characters—the religion of her own Ojibwe forebears. Like John Ames,

Erdrich’s Nanapush is witnessing a major part of his religious history vanish, but unlike

Ames’s experience, the vanishing of Nanapush’s religion goes hand-in-hand with the loss of his lands, the death of his culture, and the plague of smallpox that decimates his tribe.

To Erdrich, the characters’ constant, desperate desire to preserve their culture, often swayed by the empty promises of Europeans and modernity, is a trauma all its own.

I focus primarily on the character of Nanapush, named after the Ojibwe demigod

Nana’b’oozoo, as he is depicted in Tracks and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little

No Horse. At first glance, Nana’b’oozoo the demigod might seem an odd namesake for the last remaining patriarch to assume responsibility for his people. Nana’b’oozoo is not 19 the most divinely gifted of the four demigods in his family; he is a “trickster” who often fails at his various schemes despite the fact that he is half-manitou. And yet,

Nana’b’oozoo is a compassionate figure who provides strength and support to his people.

Nanapush’s brother Waub-oozoo, an individual who was actually invested in pursuing theological wisdom, died an early death because of his own hubris and became the ruler of the underworld. The role of Nanapush as the final patriarch of his tribe illustrates ambivalent approaches to metaphysics that are actually typical of Native traditions as described by Native American theologian Vine Deloria in his book, The Metaphysics of

Modern Existence. At the same time, even though Nana’b’oozoo confounds religious formalism, he is the most verbally gifted of his four brothers and loves to talk and tell stories, a trait that the fictional Nanapush shares. As in Gilead, the ineffable mysteries of the spirit work alongside the written word; this becomes the most powerful way in which the Ojibwe engage with people of other faiths and preserve their culture and history.

Thus, while Erdrich comes from a very different religious background than Marilynne

Robinson, she similarly emphasizes the aspects of her religious traditions that are pliable enough to cohere with postsecularism, and these all work together to navigate the troubled waters of religious change.

My third chapter grapples with a different sense of loss, but it is a particularly powerful one that has characterized Judeo-Christianity since its earliest days: the Fall of

Man and his ejection from the Garden of Eden. I examine this narrative as it appears in the work of Walker Percy, especially in his novel, The Second Coming. Walker Percy is frequently characterized as a religious traditionalist who is unwilling to budge from his 20

Catholic roots. In his novels, he often voices a desire to return to some tradition of the past, usually a mythic era of chivalry in the American South and in the Europe that produced it. One of his novels, Lancelot, obviously names the title character after the character in various legends of King Arthur and Camelot. The main character himself voices a desperate desire for the order and discipline of the past, ostensibly tied to religious practice and adherence.

In The Second Coming, however, Percy expresses a different kind of nostalgia.

Instead of pining for an era that occurred decades or centuries ago, the novel pines for the pre-lapsarian innocence of the Garden of Eden. This nostalgia occurs in the story of Will

Barrett who pursues knowledge of God’s existence aggressively, going on a suicidal vision quest in a cave, during which he threatens to let himself die if God does not send him a sign to prove his existence. Instead of sending Will the sign he demands, God appears to provide him a new home and a wife, and the situation resembles a return to the

Garden of Eden—but, of course, Will cannot be certain that this is God’s doing; such is the state of postsecular religious experience. This state of affairs is noteworthy because the Garden of Eden is such a potent topic in Christianity, signifying a perfect grace entirely untroubled by the millennia of human conflict that would follow the Fall. Thus, humanity’s ejection from the Garden of Eden speaks to a sense of spiritual loss that has marked Christianity since its inception. Unlike the loss that occurs in Gilead and Tracks, the loss that The Second Coming draws upon has clear metaphysical dimensions that impact the very nature of the relationship between God and humanity and humanity’s 21 relationship with the world and one another. For this reason, The Second Coming is a noteworthy postsecular narrative that deserves critical consideration.

Finally, my fourth chapter examines the more extreme version of eschatology described by Don DeLillo, an author who is particularly fascinated with the catastrophic possibilities of humanity’s hubris and mismanagement of the planet. I describe the sublime destruction featured in his earlier novels, especially Underworld, alongside the eerily tepid suburban lives in his later novels, which I describe as “modern gnosticism.”

Most interesting is DeLillo’s most recent novel, Zero K, which describes a cryogenic preservation facility promising its patrons eternal life once sufficient technology is available to re-animate them and heal whatever ailments led them to postpone and preserve their lives in the first place. The novel’s protagonist, Jeff, is a young man whose stepmother is soon to be preserved at the facility, and he must grapple with the notion of her cutting short her mortal life in order to be saved from a terminal illness. The facility also offers protection from the physical dangers of the natural world, as it is blast-proof and isolated from the rest of humanity, and Jeff seems to conclude, like Huxley’s Savage, that he would prefer danger and death to this situation which alienates the person from the world and the realm of lived experience. DeLillo’s allusions to religious theology and practice from both Eastern and Western traditions support Jeff’s conclusion. What results is a vision of religion in which the person must immerse himself in the world, with all its passions and dangers, along with the glory and beauty that comes with that immersion, at all costs. 22

The message DeLillo seems to advance throughout his novels, especially in Zero

K, has important implications for the question of the word’s place in religious experience.

DeLillo is fascinated with word play and with the power of the word, or sometimes its lack thereof. So one might wonder whether the unmediated lived experience Jeff seems to pine for in Zero K leaves any room for use of text in religious practice. My reading of

DeLillo’s work concludes that the text is a powerful avenue to religious experience but cannot be a substitute for experience itself.

My hope is that my argument throughout these chapters will help to illustrate the unique dimensions of religion’s interplay with the postsecular. As I have explained, such a reading is rewarding, as it offers a critical look at the cultural history that brought us to our current state of spiritual affairs. Instead of abandoning the rich artistic history of religion and isolating its context from postsecularism’s appropriation of it, these works examine postsecularism as a theologically challenging opportunity for self-reflection, spiritual interchange, and renewal.

Chapter One: Postmodernism and Literary Sanctity

in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

This chapter examines the work of Christian novelist and theologian Marilynne

Robinson. Some critics, like Amy Hungerford, identify her as a “postmodern” writer because of the way she treats questions of knowledge and authority; according to

Hungerford, Robinson “presents theological questions and theological discourse as something to produce thinking, not conclusion” (118). At the same time, though

Robinson is not often called “postsecular” by her critics, her work has much in common with works that fall more squarely into that genre. As I will explain in this chapter,

Robinson’s novels express a sense of loss of a previous way of life, which, at the same time, does not shy from critiquing some of the harsher social realities of the past that make religious practice less appealing to those who feel like outsiders to those traditions and their respective social spheres. Robinson ultimately becomes an apologist for her faith by setting aside its dogmas and its claims to the truth and allowing that religious people might have just as little grasp on the metaphysics of reality as non-religious 24 people do. Robinson’s work gently suggests that, rather than being divided across sectarian lines, humanity might be united in humility for its inability to fathom God. She further suggests that abandoning claims to theological authority should not be cause for desperation, but for awe and joy.

Robinson’s work is especially significant to postmodern and postsecular literary studies because she takes great care with the topics of language, theology, and the literary arts, all which she admits have historically been weaponized as ways for the church and its constituents to condemn, exclude, and repress. Robinson also addresses the problem that “the word,” in its many forms, has been manipulated into a means of arrogantly confining God to the conceptual limits of the human mind and even misrepresenting those of his characteristics which are accessible to human understanding. At the same time, Robinson is an intellectual who has great reverence for the scholarly traditions of her faith; she expresses great affection for the likes of John Calvin, St. Augustine, and the inspired writers of the scriptures. What results are novels like Gilead, which has been hailed as “a literary miracle” (Schwarzbaum).

From her perspective as a religious traditionalist, Robinson frequently calls upon theological topics to examine the complexities of postmodern faith, particularly its emphasis on the mystery of God and its simultaneous fascination with language as a tool for communing with him. The relationship between uses of the word, alongside the word of God and the mystery of God is a complicated one in the Bible and various Christian theological traditions. The most powerful example of the word-mystery pairing in

Robinson’s work, thus far overlooked by her critics, is her use of the theology of the 25

Trinity: the mysterious and seemingly inaccessible Father, the Son who engages directly and closely with humanity (also known as the logos or “the Word”), and the Holy Spirit, who is said to spring from the relationship and love between the first two. Here, I examine Robinson’s use of the theology of the Holy Trinity and alongside the theological topic of sacrament, one of the most powerful ways the Trinity is present to humanity.

Both these aspects of the Christian tradition have come to define its theology of the written word. The Trinity is integral to this theology due to the person of the Son, who is also known as the eternal Word. Meanwhile, sacrament, due to the involvement of the

Trinity, frequently contains actual verbiage that infuses supernatural power into a certain action or physical item. These theologies illustrate that, in Christianity, the word does not simply serve as a descriptor (and, according to Robinson, it often cannot serve as a descriptor, when the subject is God); the word is inextricably connected with God and can act as a supernatural conduit for God’s grace. Thus, language, and the art it creates, has a holiness all its own. Ultimately, I argue that Robinson uses these theological concepts to compare the power of writing—specifically the act of acknowledging, praising, or in some way communicating holiness to others—to the workings of the

Trinity and the power of sacrament. Robinson suggests that literature has a sacred dimension similar to that of sacrament because it acknowledges holiness, but it does so by emphasizing and celebrating what is beyond the reach of the human mind. Thus, in

Robinson’s work, the two aspects of postmodernism—the primacy of text and the mystery of everything that lies beyond—are inseparable; as I will argue, they are as inseparable as the consubstantial Father and Son of the Trinity. 26

Marilynne Robinson published her first novel, Housekeeping, in 1980 to great critical acclaim. Since then, she has published three novels and four collections of essays that vary in topic from sociopolitical commentary and critique to theology itself. Though critics have thus far given her work, especially her fiction, glowing reviews, they seem uncertain how to approach Robinson’s unique articulations of Christianity. Their readings indicate that Robinson’s work is difficult to plot on a scale of dogmatism because of its tenacious defenses of some theological notions with a simultaneous lack of commitment to offering conclusive opinions about others. In a review of Gilead, for example, New

York Magazine writer Lee Siegel describes Marilynne Robinson as an author who is

“quietly, gently militant about her Christianity.” On the other hand, Christopher Douglas seems to have a different take on Robinson, arguing that her Christianity is “short on doctrine and long on wonder, mystery, and wisdom” (339). These contradictions exemplify the complexity of the situation of religious leaders and writers in the postmodern age. Gilead has widely been hailed as a novel that presents a more palatable, gentler version of Christianity for those who have previously been alienated from the faith, or those who have not been exposed to it at all. And yet, Robinson is a Calvinist, meaning she comes from a faith most outsiders have long viewed as a hardline religious tradition that is perhaps the most condemning of the many versions of Christianity. These are just a few of the complexities of Robinson, her work, and her age.

The common theme in many of these readings is confusion when it comes to understanding what religious argument, if any, Robinson is trying to make on

Christianity’s behalf, especially when it comes to Christianity’s authority regarding 27 questions of knowledge. Robinson’s nonfiction work expresses a variety of ideas regarding the nature of knowledge and the limitations of what the human mind can conclude about God’s involvement in the world around us, but these arguments fall short of validating one form of knowledge as a vehicle to ultimate truth. In her work on

Calvinism and the Reformation, for example, Robinson emphasizes the importance of literacy to the faith experience. Often, Robinson equates literacy with access to God since the Reformation opened access to Scripture by ensuring its translation in a multitude of languages. In The Givenness of Things, Robinson describes the church’s failure to translate the Bible and the mass into the vernacular language, but at the same time, she introduces other avenues to faith that do not require literacy. She explains that “This sense that revelation, scriptural and natural, was essentially available to everyone, pervades Reformation thought” and that “Calvin describes the heavens as intelligible in their deepest meaning to the unlearned as well as the learned” (23). The idea of “natural revelation” that she addresses here has fallen by the intellectual wayside in recent approaches to theology that emphasize the use of metaphysics; some theologians have become critical of its use. Postmodern theologian Merold Westphal, for example, has written that “there may be something to the charge that in various modes metaphysics has contributed to an arrogant humanism that has helped to create and sustain a very inhuman modern world” (259). Thus, Marilynne Robinson’s nonfiction has occasionally edged the disputed intellectual territory of what Westphal would call “onto-theology,” or the type of theology that suggests that God and his being are comprehensible to man: “the pride that refuses to accept the limits of human knowledge” (7). 28

And yet, like many postmodern authors, and in spite of her appreciation for theology, Robinson distrusts claims to absolute authority and absolute knowledge; she has expressed as much throughout her theological essays. In her most recent collection,

The Givenness of Things, she writes that

Holding to the old faith that everything is in principle knowable or

comprehensible by us is a little like assuming that every human structure or

artifact must be based on yards, feet, and inches. The notion that the universe is

constructed, or we are evolved, so that reality must finally answer in every case to

the questions we bring to it, is entirely as anthropocentric as the notion that the

universe was designed to make us possible. . . . So mystery is banished—mystery

being no more than whatever their methods cannot capture yet. (14)

These thoughts echo similar arguments she made in an earlier collection of essays,

Absence of Mind, in which she writes that “the strange ways of quarks and photons might enlarge our sense of the mysterious nature of our own existence” (xiv). While these critiques speak to the problems of knowledge claims in the sciences, she later addresses the problem of theology modeling itself after science: “To the great degree that theology has accommodated the parascientific world view, it too has tended to forget the beauty and strangeness of the individual soul, that is, of the world as perceived in the course of human life, of the mind as it exists in time” (35). This disjuncture between the tendency of the mind toward structure and order and, on the other hand, “the beauty and strangeness of the individual soul” which cannot be mapped speaks to some of the 29 irregularities between different types of knowledge and experience and how these may be enacted in different kinds of literary form.

To examine some of these approaches to knowledge, I now turn to Robinson’s

2004 novel, Gilead. At its heart, Gilead is about the interaction between religious knowledge and religious experience and how these two aspects of religion function in different forms of writing, from Scripture to poetry to sermon to prayer. The novel centers around the last year in the life of Reverend John Ames, a Congregationalist minister from the fictional small town of Gilead, Iowa, who has recently learned that he is terminally ill. Though he is seventy years old, Ames has a seven-year-old son, Robbie, and so he embarks upon a project of writing a journal of letters that he will leave behind for the boy. Thus, all at once, the novel acts as a journal, a record of Robbie’s lineage and family history, a testimony of the life and struggles of Ames’s godson Jack Boughton, and an attempt to relate Ames’s religious experiences. At certain times, Ames confesses that he means for the book to act as some sort of apologetic for Christianity and even for the ministerial life; he explains that part of his motivation in writing the journal is his desire for religion to have at least a small part in Robbie’s upbringing; once Ames dies,

Robbie’s ties to the church will likely be severed. Ames’s wife is a social outsider who was raised in poverty, away from the church, and is still suspicious of many of

Christianity’s customs and beliefs and will probably go back to her transient lifestyle following Ames’s death, bringing Robbie with her. Therefore, the novel itself seems to be a quiet defense of Christianity, and yet, Ames makes the impartial assertion in his first journal entry that “There are many ways to live a good life” (3). Thus, Ames seems 30 ambivalent about his own argument and his ultimate purpose from the outset, but this ambivalence does not particularly trouble Ames—not until the arrival of prodigal godson

Jack Boughton, anyway. The journal never evolves into a formal apologetic because

Ames frequently finds himself de-emphasizing the power of theology in the light of the glorious and mysterious God he has come to know throughout his career as a minister in

Gilead. One wonders whether Ames’s project in Gilead—putting a lifetime of relationship with God to words—is one that might be doomed to fail or at least fall short of its intended goal. If this is the case, what is the point of attempting to relate personal religious experience via the written word?

Gilead’s protagonist, John Ames, is certainly a man of letters; he comes from an educated lineage of pastors and has spent much of his solitary adult life (prior to meeting

Robbie’s mother), in private theological study. Despite Ames’s love for learning, he seems to have achieved a Socratic wisdom in identifying and accepting the limits of his own knowledge of God. In many parts of the novel, Ames equates the written word with the rational mind, and in these cases, he acknowledges that both are insufficient vehicles for comprehending God. Toward the beginning of the novel, Ames reflects upon the thousands of pages of sermons he has produced throughout his tenure as a pastor:

Say, fifty sermons a year for forty-five years, not counting funerals and so on, of

which there have been a great many. Two thousand two hundred and fifty. If they

average thirty pages, that’s sixty-seven thousand five hundred pages. . . . Say

three hundred pages make a volume. Then I’ve written two hundred twenty-five 31

books, which puts me up there with Augustine and Calvin for quantity. That’s

amazing. (19-20)

But despite Ames’s amazement at his volume of work, he questions its impact, vacillating between reverence for the word and doubt of the efficacy of language. Though his wife, an uneducated woman who is new to Christianity, takes pride in those thousands of pages, Ames seriously considers burning them, doubting they’ve had any lasting effect on his flock. Ultimately, Ames has come to the conclusion that faith cannot be subjected to rationalization. He writes to Robbie, “So my advice is this—don’t look for proofs.

Don’t bother with them at all. They are never sufficient to the question, and they’re always a little impertinent, I think, because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp. And they will likely sound wrong to you even if you convince someone else with them” (179).

As a result, Ames frequently tries to impart the wonder and glory of his religious experiences, versus his religious knowledge, throughout the journal. After dismissing the content of his sermons, Ames speaks more candidly about his experience as a pastor, focusing not on his teachings but on the sublimity of his personal exchanges with individuals:

When people come to speak to me, whatever, they say, I am struck by a kind of

incandescence in them, the “I” whose predicate can be “love” or “fear” or “want,”

and whose object can be “someone” or “nothing” and it won’t really matter,

because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around “I” like a flame on a

wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else. (44) 32

Ames describes similar moments of “incandescence” that occur in his family history and current family life. He takes a moment to describe two grease-blackened mechanics resting against a wall and laughing in the sunshine, calling them “beautiful” (5). In another episode, he watches his wife and son through the window as they blow bubbles in the yard, writing, “You two were too intent on the cat to see the celestial consequences of your earthly endeavors,” eventually ending his description of the episode saying, “Ah, this life, this world” (9). One of Ames’s favorite aspects of his calling is the practice of baptism is “knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time” and laments that “I don’t know why there is so little about this aspect of the calling in the literature” (23).

Thus, through Ames’s experience, Robinson highlights the aspects of God and religious life that might otherwise be subsumed in our cultural understanding of him by our frequent emphasis on rationality and dogmatism in religion and in other sources of ideology, like the natural sciences. While Robinson is certainly a student and proponent of sound theological doctrine and professes great reverence for the power and the beauty of the written word, she suggests in her fiction that religious doctrine cannot encompass all aspects of salvation and the faith experience. Once Ames dismisses the significance of his written work, he instead focuses on his transcendent faith experience, which mirrors the life of Augustine far more closely than the number of pages he has written throughout his lifetime. Ames’s God is the God that Merold Westphal describes in Overcoming

Onto-Theology, a God who “remains a mystery that continues to elude our cognitive grasp. . . . If philosophy begins in wonder for the Greeks, it ends in wonder for 33

Augustine. And love. And praise” (284). Philosophy ends the same way for John Ames.

In many ways, the God that Ames encounters is that same God of “divine excess” – a transcendent God of love, glory, and mystery – which, for Westphal, is “the God that comes after” onto-theology.

One might think that Augustine’s “God of wonder” is more accessible and less exclusive and demanding than the God so often described in various Christian sects and, therefore, this God might be more agreeable to postsecular spiritual seekers as McClure describes them. And yet, Robinson does not dismiss the concerns and spiritual troubles of those who have fallen short of God’s expectations. The ever-present glory and mystery of

God might be an attractive notion to someone like Ames, who is as assured of his salvation as anyone can be, but it is an especially irritating theological problem for the character of Jack Boughton, who feels that he cannot possibly be one of the “elect” who is chosen by God to be destined for heaven. Predestination, a particularly troubling point of Calvinist doctrine and therefore Robinson’s own choice of religious faith, is a central concern of Jack that propels his story and defines his character struggle. Jack is the beloved son of Ames’s lifelong friend, Robert Boughton, who also serves as a minister in

Gilead. As Ames describes him, Jack is “The prodigal son, not to put too fine a point on it” (73). Like Ames, Jack is the son of a pastor and was raised alongside the church, brought up with a comprehensive knowledge of Scripture and access to all the theological works his heart could desire. And yet, Jack is an enigma, or, as Ames describes him frequently throughout the novel, a “mystery.” Jack is guilty of a grave sin that rocks the previously sheltered lives of his friends and family. When he was a college student, Jack 34 had a brief affair with a girl of fifteen who came from an impoverished family that lacked the resources of Jack’s comfortable home. She became pregnant, at which point Jack abandoned the girl and refused to acknowledge the baby, who ultimately died due to the squalid conditions of her upbringing. Ever since that episode, some members of Jack’s family and social circle have seen him as a sinner who is capable of great evil and, as a result, consider him one of those rare individuals who might possibly be predestined to hell. In several instances throughout the novel, Jack seems to think the same of himself; though he has risen above his past sins and leads a reasonably virtuous life, he wonders if someone guilty of such a great evil as the one he committed must have a tainted soul that is beyond salvation. Considering the struggles of Jack Boughton, Gilead is clearly not simply the pleasant, lyrical foray into the Christian faith experience critics and fans often describe. The novel provides insight into the beauty and joy of a faith experience well- lived, but it also examines difficult questions about salvation and belonging and is not quick to provide particularly reassuring answers. One might read this as Robinson’s nod to the spiritual concerns of non-religious people and their hesitation to engage with religion. Jack may perhaps represent those postsecular spiritual sojourners who seek spiritual comfort with hesitation, knowing that pursuing religion as a solution may cause more pain and confusion than resolution and healing. As McClure explains it,

“postsecular narratives affirm the urgent need for a turn toward the religious even though as they reject (in most instances) the familiar dream of full return to an authoritative faith” (6). What happens instead is the development of what McClure calls “preterite spiritualities,” which “arise in the cracks of the social order, among the anonymous and 35 excluded. . . . they develop modes of thought and practice that are scandalously impure”

(20). Robinson, however, presents a third option that involves dialogue and healing between the spiritually assured practitioners of Christianity and those who consider themselves outsiders to the faith. As we come to understand, the healing process is just as difficult for Ames as it is for Jack because he is just as responsible as Jack for his spiritual trepidations. In basking in his own spiritual assurance as he approaches his death, he has let himself grow ambivalent about the spiritual tools he previously used in tending his flock, leaving himself unsuited to tend to Jack. Thus, despite Ames’s readiness to emphasize God’s mystery, glory, and grace, he cannot easily engage with

Jack’s spiritual problems. As I will argue, this is partially due to the persistence of what

Jack describes as linguistic barriers between him and Ames that Ames will somehow have to overcome.

As one might imagine, unlike the rest of his family, Jack is not convinced of

God’s goodness, presence, or even his existence. Jack frequently interrogates Ames’s vast knowledge of Christian theology and refuses to settle for the Ames’s conclusion that

God and his ways are a “mystery,” insisting on clear, logical answers. Despite Jack

Boughton’s fine education, his upbringing as the son of the pastor, and his easy ability to cite scripture to suit any discussion, he ironically describes his problems with faith as an inability to “crack the code” of theology (196); in other words, Jack blames his spiritual shortcomings on some lack of rational understanding. In one particularly heated discussion, Jack asks Ames, “Does it seem right to you that there should be no common language between us? That there should be no way to bring a drop of water to those of us 36 who languish in the flames, or who will? Granting your terms? That between us and you there is a great gulf fixed? How can capital-T Truth not be communicable? That makes no sense to me” (201). In this conversation, Jack compares himself to a sinner Jesus describes in the book of Luke; the sinner finds himself diseased and miserable in the afterlife and begs Abraham and Lazarus for intercession (Luke 16:19-31). In response,

Abraham tells the sinner that between them, there is a “great gulf fixed,” and that the sinner cannot cross from one side to the other. When the sinner asks Abraham if he can at least warn his family about these terrible consequences of disbelief, Abraham replies that they have the words of Moses and the Prophets, which he considers to be sufficient resources for a sinner to choose a path to God. In this passage, salvation has less to do with the innate nature of the soul and more to do with the sinner’s ability to read and glean some supernatural motivation from the mere words of those who came before.

Despite the suffering sinner’s desperate pleas, because he did not sufficiently adhere to the writings of Moses and the Prophets, the “great gulf” remains fixed. This seems an unjust punishment for someone like Jack Boughton who, despite his past sins, seems to be desperately seeking the truth and peace of God but does not feel entirely convinced by the teachings of Scripture and those who parse it. Thus, while Ames identifies this void with “mystery” and “glory,” Jack only identifies it with anger and bitterness.

Jack has falsely concluded that comprehensive theological understanding of God exists somewhere, in some form, and his spiritual problems will be solved if he has the answers. And yet, Ames often seems to lack compassion for Jack’s desire for understanding and salvation. Ames’s admiration for the theology of John Calvin, whose 37 theory of predestination restricts salvation to the elect, leads to further theological problems for Jack. In their most direct theological discussion on Calvinism and predestination, Ames becomes irritated with Jack’s desire for definitive answers, explaining to Robbie, “I felt he was deviling me, you see” (150). He finally snaps at

Jack, saying, “I’m just trying to find a slightly useful way of saying that there are things I don’t understand. I’m not going to force some theory on a mystery and make foolishness of it, just because that is what people who talk about it normally do,” finally refusing to provide Jack the conclusion he asks for. Robert Boughton, Jack’s father, agrees, and tells

Jack that “To conclude is not in the nature of the enterprise” (152). These fissures between him and both his biological father and his godfather propel Jack further into despair.

Todd Shy offers useful perspective to the problem of Jack Boughton, describing

Jack as an ineffable mystery in the vein of God the Father, or God as he is so frequently described by proponents of postmodern approaches to faith, like Merold Westphal and

John Caputo. Just as the workings of grace are mysterious in some, the absence of grace is mysterious in others; Shy writes that “[Jack Boughton’s] mischief is irrational, his impulses gratuitous and inexplicable. In Ames’ account he is more devil than prodigal son. We understand what’s driving the prodigal; Lucifer is impossible to fathom” (260).

Therefore, while Ames can appreciate the effluence of grace in God, he is unequipped to encounter what he considers to be the opposite: “For a preacher who sees God’s love as

‘extravagant,’ the absence of all grace in Jack is incomprehensible, and infinitely more difficult to counter than Feuerbach’s porous ideas” (260). Ames himself describes Jack as 38 a “mystery,” but not in the positive sense that he describes God as mystery: “My point is that he was always a mystery, and that’s why I worry about him, and that’s why I know I can’t judge him as I might another man. That is to say, I can’t assign a moral valuation to his behavior” (184). If Ames’s understanding of Jack is right, and he is in some sense steeped in the polar opposite of the glory and mystery of the ineffable God, his existence is far more troubling and presents much farther-reaching theological problems than his

“deviling” theological questions. Jack is living proof that, up to that point, Ames’s religious work—all his carefully researched and written sermons—could indeed have been futile, just as Ames had idly mused. Though Jack was not a congregant of Ames’s parish, Jack was exposed to the same doctrine Ames preached for so many years, and it seems to have had no effect. When Ames encounters what is perhaps the worst-case scenario of the inefficacy of words, he realizes he is powerless to help.

Robinson emphasizes many times throughout the novel that religious knowledge often falls short of its intended purpose of uniting man to God. Is it really true, then, that language cannot be translated from the saved to the sinner and that it can have no effect on a person’s salvation? If so, Ames’s journal for Robbie is problematic; how can Ames bear witness to God when he fails to explain God in a way that is useful to someone who truly needs it: to his godson, as “the father of his soul” (123)? To address some of these problems, I will now turn to Robinson’s references to the Trinity, which she uses to navigate the boundary between what aspects of God can and cannot be rationalized, ultimately showing that both are part of the human experience of the Triune God.

Examining these complications in the light of the theology of the Trinity—particularly 39 the relationship between the father and son, a recurring theme throughout Gilead—sheds light on the word and how it might be imagined alongside ineffable theological concepts such as glory, mystery, and the faith experience. This reading leads us to a follow-on reading of the topic of sacrament, which ultimately reveals the power of writing and sheds some light on the fate of Jack Boughton. Finally, the word and the mystery, examined together, also help make sense of Robinson’s own vacillations between the restrictive and inclusive aspects of faith.

The Trinity is a mysterious tenet of the Christian faith that has theologically baffled every Christian denomination since the proliferation of Scripture. The belief involves the nature and relationship of the three persons in the Christian Godhead: the

Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God the Father is the origin of the Son and the Holy

Spirit, though he is considered by many Trinitarian theologies (and professions of faith such as the Nicene creed) to be co-eternal with both. While God the Father is mysterious and often impossible or dangerous to communicate with, as described in the Old

Testament, Christ the Son was meant to interface with humanity through his incarnation and through his nature as the word, also known as the logos, which John affirms in the first sentence of his Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with

God, and the Word was God.” Throughout Christian theology, Christ is frequently described as the component of the Trinity who executes the power of God the Father, exercising his will by authoring the laws of creation and setting it in motion, or as John writes, “All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that hath been made” (1:3). Where the Father is both physically and intellectually unapproachable 40 by man, as is frequently emphasized in the Old Testament, Christ reaches out to humanity and draws them to himself and therefore, into God. While God the Father’s exhortations take the form of unyielding, eternal commandments, Christ offers teachings that also involve the imagination and the intellect, frequently speaking in metaphors and parables.

The Holy Spirit, an even more complicated character, is said to derive from the love between Father and Son. It descended upon the disciples at Pentecost and is said to inspire and guide the human spirit and human actions. Interestingly, the occasion of

Pentecost gave the disciples the power to speak in a variety of languages to ensure that they could profess the story of Christ to the ends of the earth. The “word,” then, in its many forms, is integral to the very nature of God and his relationship with humanity, but it does not encompass every aspect of the faith experience.

Though it understandably caused some theological consternation in the early church, the prevailing theology of the Trinity has remained relatively unchanged and unchallenged for the past several hundred years, even in the midst of the Schism and the

Protestant Reformation. The theology of the Trinity is unique in that the majority of traditions who have accepted it (which is the majority of Christian denominations) agree that it is a mystery that cannot be overtaken by rationalism. Martin Luther wrote that, at the risk of sounding popish, Christian beliefs in the Trinity have remained unchanged for more than a thousand years and constitute the following:

That Three is One, and One Three (said Luther) the same goeth beyond all

Humane Sense, Reason, Wit, Wisdom and Understanding. No Arithmetician, no

Philosopher, Lawyer, Jew, or Turk, can fathem and comprehend it; neither doth 41

that Comparison or Similitude of the corporeal Father and Son serve any thing to

the purpose; for it is a very weak Picture or Likeness, in which is shew’d only the

Difference of the Two Persons, namely, that those Two Persons are an undivided

Substance, which is not to be comprehended or understood by any Humane

Creature. (2)

In his own writings on the Trinity, John Calvin addresses the theology of the Trinity as a major problem in the early Church, which resulted in the hugely divisive Arian and

Sabellian heresies. Ultimately, Calvin argues, these divisions in the church were not the result of faulty theology or lack of instruction from God. They were the result of men failing to comprehend the distinction between what has been revealed through Scripture and what remains a mystery: “for one little Word’s sake, they were so hot in Disputation, and troubled the quiet of the Church” (21). Robinson seems to have adopted some of

Calvin’s wisdom regarding the limitations of the written word in describing the inexhaustible mysteries of God.

The reason that most Christian traditions accept a mystery so incomprehensible as the Trinity is on account of the authority of Scripture; it offers clear statements that the

Trinity exists, but at the same time, it offers very little theological guidance to make its nature intellectually fathomable to man. Thus, the Trinity, and Christianity’s acceptance of the Trinity, emphasizes the complexities in the relationship between the word of God and the mystery of God, two elements of the Godhead that are both integral to the

Christian experience, as Marilynne Robinson argues in her work. This means that the theology of the Trinity is a necessary aspect to literary interpretations of the theological 42 notions of “the word,” especially when critics emphasize the word’s association with

Christ. According to the theology of the Trinity, Christ’s existence, or the existence of the word, is inextricably bound up in the existence of the Father and the Holy Spirit; it cannot be understood in isolation from either of the other two persons. The word is part and parcel of the mystery of the Father and the similarly mysterious work of the Holy Spirit, which cannot be reduced to theology.

These are the characteristics of Trinitarian theology that Robinson integrates in her work to address the problem of Jack Boughton. In many cases, this theology, and its implications for the word and its efficacy, occurs in different stories of father/son relationships throughout the novel. These frequently serve as meditations upon the relationship between God the Father and Jesus the Son, particularly to reflect on the incongruence between the jealous and demanding Father who led the Jews from Egypt and the forgiving Son who decries violence and vengeance. The characteristics of God the Father appear most powerfully in the character of John Ames’s grandfather, a formidable man who, like God the Father, takes on the project of freeing slaves from bondage and participates in war, apparently with little to no effect on his Christian conscience. Ames’s father, meanwhile, is a pacifist who is intensely critical of Ames the

First’s appropriation of the Old Testament.

Though Ames frequently reflects upon his father and grandfather’s differences, he rarely commits to judgment of either man. His father and grandfather’s relationship is never reconciled, and for that reason, Ames’s father brings Ames on a long journey to

Kansas to find his grandfather’s grave. The two share a powerful moment as they tend to 43 the grave and the heavens seem to open in a manner that echoes the episode in Matthew

3:17 in which Christ is baptized. Ames writes, “Then I realized that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them” (14). In Matthew, the event serves as an affirmation that the Father is pleased with the Son, despite the fact that there seems to be a distance between them.

And yet, though fathers and sons and their relationships dominate the novel,

Robinson rarely draws a clear distinction between the God the Father and the Son.

Throughout the novel, Ames refers to both persons in the godhead as “The Lord.” On the rare occasions he mentions Jesus specifically, it is when God appears as the distinctively human Christ. The word “Christ” is used even more rarely, and primarily only in reference to the sacraments. This blurring of the roles of father and son aligns with an argument John Ames makes as he ponders the story of the Prodigal Son:

It says Jesus puts His hearer in the role of the father, of the one who forgives.

Because if we are, so to speak, the debtor (and of course we are that, too), that

suggests no graciousness in us. And grace is the great gift. So to be forgiven is

only half the gift. The other half is that we also can forgive, restore, and liberate,

and therefore we can feel the will of God enacted through us, which is the great

restoration of ourselves to ourselves. (161) 44

From this, we might conclude that we are only whole when we are able to participate in the mystery of grace and forgiveness from both sides. And yet, though Ames can make this argument to his own son theologically, he cannot bring himself to execute its implications in his own life when it comes to his forgiveness of Jack Boughton. Loving

Jack is Ames’s most intense Christian struggle; following his description of Jack as the prodigal son, Ames writes that “there is an absolute disjunction between our Father’s love and our deserving. Still, when I see this same disjunction between human parents and children, it always irritates me a little” (73). Even at this point in his life, Ames’s spiritual development is hindered by the arrival of Jack and Jack’s insistence on interrogating and antagonizing Ames’s spiritual assurance. While Ames notes that Jack brings out the worst in him, Jack feels extremely insecure in John’s presence, as in the episode where

Jack feels that he is being specifically targeted by the content of Ames’s sermons. Both parties are enormously dissatisfied with and troubled by their relationship.

Thus, the Trinity sheds significant light on the relationship between the word of

God and the mystery of God in Gilead—the theme of word versus mystery characterizes the novel’s spiritual climate and takes shape alongside another predominant and also

Trinitarian theme: fatherhood, sonhood, and filial relationships. Nearly all the characters in Gilead are male, and these characters are described and examined closely in their roles as fathers and sons. John Ames’s act of writing the journal itself is an act of love for his son and an attempt to articulate his faith in God so that some part of him can survive his death. And yet, as Ames notes several times in his writing, his ability to write his faith experience is not sufficient to its content. The journal (and the novel) itself, then, serves 45 as a way of reflecting on some of the inconsistencies between the language/literature of faith and the experience of what language and literature fail to signify. What, then, can

Ames’s journal, religious writing, and the literary arts in general, accomplish? In the remainder of this paper, I will draw upon another theological topic, sacrament, to examine further the role of the word in the process of salvation.

The practice of the sacraments is a major part of the theology of the Trinity and its participation in human life and, like the Trinity, it combines the word with God’s mystery and glory. Sacraments normally consist of a certain way to access God’s grace, with the help of a concrete object signifying that grace, and a minister from an organized church.

Most versions of Protestantism recognize only two sacraments, baptism and communion, and both occur frequently in Gilead. Various literary scholars and theologians have examined sacrament, understanding that, because it serves primarily as sign and results in a closer experience of the reality of God, it is significant to the concept of the Trinity as well. Roger Lundin explains the work of Calvin regarding the sacraments and their significance to the question of the word and its efficacy, writing that “For Calvin, the relationship of language to truth, of words to things, was anchored in the bedrock of the divine word and will. He believed the ‘sacraments were dependent on the word of God, apart from which they had no function, and, borrowing a key concept from Augustine, he held that sacrament is ‘the word made visible’” (67). The sacraments are visible through the items that are used in the sacrament, like water for baptism and bread and wine for communion. Different iterations of Christianity have imagined the power of those items 46 in different ways, Catholicism going so far as to call them “efficacious signs”: items that actually perform the very grace they symbolize.

Theologian J. Billings has also taken special interest in the topic of Calvin, sacrament, and symbol, arguing that

While Calvin develops a wide-ranging theology of participation, his strongest

language of participation relates to the sacraments. The sacraments are not empty

symbols, but they involve the “communicating of Christ,” for in them God “truly

executes whatever he promises and represents in signs.” The sacraments are gifts,

not to be venerated in themselves, but received in gratitude and faith. The grateful

response of believers is rooted in a Trinitarian sacramental theology, such that

they receive the gracious pardon of the Father, having been united to Christ and

empowered by the Spirit to live a new life of gratitude. (323)

Later, he affirms that “through the Spirit we become participants in God. Through Christ and the Spirit, believers are gathered into participation with the Father” (324).

Robinson also calls upon the theological topic of the Trinity in her frequent descriptions of the sacraments throughout the novel, repeating the Trinitarian formula of

“I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” in the baptism scenes and describing several episodes in which a father baptizes or gives communion to a son. Most significant is the way that sacrament first brought Ames to the realization that much of God is beyond human understanding but that the glory of the faith experience makes up for that failure of understanding. He recounts a childhood memory in which he and his father work to clean out a church that has been struck by lightning and partially 47 burned. The destruction of the formal, physical church, and the community’s loving disposition of it while enacting several of the traditions that occur during a church service—hymns, prayers, and even a makeshift version of communion that Ames’s father gives to him—seem to momentarily draw heaven and earth closer together. Ames tells

Robbie, “I can’t tell you what that day in the rain has meant to me. But I know how many things it put altogether beyond question, for me” (96). Years later, when Ames gave bread to his own son, he recalled that episode in the church. For the rest of his life, Ames would accept and embrace the mystery of his faith experience that day.

Through her references to the sacraments, Robinson emphasizes postmodern notions of divine excess and the ineffability of the transcendent similar to the “wonder” described by theologians like Westphal. Ames maintains that sacrament is a mystery but that he is ultimately “outside the mystery” (21). This is especially the case when Ames’s wife, Lila, is present; as a grown woman who was previously an outsider to the church,

Lila interrupts the typical flow of baptizing babies into Christian families of the insular

Gilead, making it seem an even more powerful event. While Ames often highlights his own inability to comprehend the power of the sacraments, he is especially at a loss under

Lila’s intensely critical gaze. The first time he sees her, he happens to be performing a baptism: “I could feel how intensely she watched. . . . I looked up, and there was just the look of stern amazement in her face that I knew would be there even before I looked up, and I felt like saying quite sincerely, ‘if you know a better way to do this, I’d appreciate your telling me’” (21). When he baptizes Lila herself, Ames says, “I felt like asking her,

‘What have I done? What does it mean?’ That was a question that came to me often, not 48 because I felt less than certain I had done something that did mean something, but because no matter how much I thought and read and prayed, I felt outside the mystery of it” (21).

As Ames approaches his death and becomes absorbed in God’s glory in the process, he emphasizes his appreciation for the mystery of baptism. He writes, “I’ve always loved to baptize people, though I have sometimes wished there were more shimmer and splash involved in the way we go about it” and calls water “miraculous”

(63). The miracle of water, a substance that exists in divine excess, as Westphal might say, intensifies the experience of baptism: “For us the water just heightens the touch of the pastor’s hand on the sweet bones of the head, sort of like making an electrical connection” (63). In another journal entry, Ames recalls watching a young couple walk underneath a row of trees after a rain: “It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. . . . I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing” (28).

And yet, despite Ames’s emphasis on the power of baptism, we are left with the problem that Jack was baptized and still does not seem capable of achieving spiritual peace. According to Rebecca Painter’s reading, the reason Jack is such a troubled soul might have to do with the circumstances of his baptism. It is not until the actual event of the baptism that John realizes the boy will be named after him; Jack’s father, a dear friend of John’s, makes John the boy’s namesake partially to soothe John’s own pain after losing his first wife and child, but the episode only serves to make John even more bitter about what he has lost: “As it was, my heart froze in me and I thought, this is not 49 my child—which I truly had never thought of any child before. I don’t know exactly what covetise is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else’s virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it” (188). As a result, Painter concludes that Jack’s baptism has somehow been tainted: “Embittered at the loss of his own wife and child, Ames took offense at his friend’s generosity, and Jack’s baptism was perhaps compromised” (329). Theologian James White sheds light on some of these problems, citing Luther’s belief that “infants are aided by the faith of others, namely, those who bring them for baptism,” which might explain some of Jack’s spiritual difficulties (62). Whether Jack’s baptism was really “tainted” by some theological imbalance, or because he grew up with a sense of Ames’s ambivalence toward him, is not clear. Either way, Ames did not do right by his godson, despite his quickness to profess beauty or holiness in the laughter and joy of strangers, as I described before. This acknowledgement and profession of goodness proves to be vital to religious practice as

Robinson sees it.

At the end of the novel, we find that Jack returned to Gilead because he is hoping to make the town his home once again; he meant to be reunited with his family and the church. He finally reveals to Ames that he has a family of his own, which he has kept secret from his father and sister, because his wife is African-American, and Jack, having witnessed his father’s physical deterioration, believes that if his father found out, it would kill him. Jack expresses further concern about a fire that happened when an African-

American church did exist in Gilead; though the fire is in the distant past, it indicates that perhaps Gilead may not be quite so perfectly Christian as its uninterrupted cycles of 50 births, baptisms, and deaths make it appear to be. Ironically, what is most profound about

Della and Jack’s relationship is its transformative effect on Ames. Though Ames has witnessed the spiritual shortfalls of his father and grandfather and seems to be moving toward a postmodern version of transcendence that would seem to provide “divine excess” to others, it has not, up to this point; John Ames is a poor representation of God the Father, as his love for Jack Boughton is impoverished.

But, with the revelation that Jack is also a father, and that Jack loves his son just as deeply as Ames loves Robbie, Ames is so moved that he offers to bless him. Earlier in the novel, Ames had addressed the concept of “blessing,” which he often associated with baptism; he wrote, “There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that” (23).

Ames notes that when Jack opens his eyes following the blessing, he looks “as if he were waking out of a dream” (241), which mirrors Ames’s atheist brother Edward’s description of departing Gilead for the secular world: “John, you might as well know now what you’re sure to learn sometime. This is a backwater—you must be aware of that already. Leaving here is like waking from a trance” (26). Comparing the two episodes, one might conclude that Jack has experienced a definitive spiritual transformation, almost in the vein of the religious “return” McClure mentions. Painter, who pointed out the problems associated with Ames’s spirit on the occasion of Jack’s baptism, calls Ames’s spontaneous blessing of Jack at the end of the novel a “re-baptism” (331), and the event does seem to reverse the ugliness of Jack’s first baptism, in which Ames described covetise as “not so much desiring someone else’s virtue or happiness as rejecting it, 51 taking offense at the beauty of it” (188). Instead, in this episode, Ames acknowledges

Jack’s beauty, and makes it part of his record for Robbie: “I just don’t know another way to let you see the beauty there is in him” (232).

Jack’s blessing completes the arc of the novel, especially the recurring question of what a religious work such as Ames’s journal might be able to accomplish for a reader like Robbie. Throughout his journal, Ames has borne witness to the holiness of his surroundings. If it is true that acknowledgement of sacredness amounts to “blessing”— which, as Ames explains, is similar to sacrament, Ames’s project of portraying the sacredness of his small-town life in Gilead is sacramental. One is reminded of similar occurrences in Scripture, such as John’s account of heaven in the Book of Revelation, in which mysterious creatures are gathered around the throne of God, “and they have no rest day and night, saying Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God, the Almighty, which was and which is and which is to come” (Revelation 4:8); here, closeness to God, even to the extent of beatific vision, naturally results in proclaiming his holiness. Toward the end of the novel, we see two instances in which Ames acknowledges Jack’s holiness. One is the instance in which Ames blesses Jack at the train station—a ritual which Ames describes as an acknowledgement of holiness—and the other is Ames explaining to Robbie why he has divulged Jack’s secret about his wife and child: “I just don’t know another way to let you see the beauty there is in him” (232). The idea that the act of professing beauty, goodness, or holiness is sacramental has its own implications for how the Trinitarian formula—word, mystery, and spirit—appears in postmodern and postsecular literature.

Like sacrament, and like the life and actions of Christ himself, the word draws the 52 believer into relationship with the triune God himself, a relationship replete with the

“foretastes of glory divine” Ames experienced as a result of his relationship with God.

It also raises the question of how fiction, versus other literary forms such as the

(still fictional) first-hand account of John Ames, can acknowledge or profess holiness. To examine some of these questions, I turn to the work of Amy Hungerford, who examines

“how literary form—an analog to creedal form for Robinson—is related to religious understanding” (113). By “creedal form,” Hungerford refers to the formal professions of faith of the Christian tradition, which she considers central to the Christian tradition because they unify believers into a common church, and this unity is integral to religious practice. And yet, Hungerford’s work highlights the American tendency to privilege the often-vacuous notion of “belief” over experience or practice and calls upon literary examples that privilege the latter over the former.

Ultimately, Hungerford argues that “While scholars of lived religion have sidelined belief as a way of understanding religion, Robinson insists that belief is in fact something 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 relations to humanity” (116). But Hungerford’s description of the condition of holiness in literature, as it applies to her reading of Robinson, falls short of describing literature itself as in some way holy or supernatural. Instead, Hungerford’s reading of Robinson concludes that literature, and the written word, inasmuch as it can function as discourse, can be a type of religious practice, rather than the supernatural result that practice achieves. She writes that “Robinson is a formalist in both religion and in fiction for all her low-church 53

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” (113).

This reading of discursive practice is common in the field of religious studies, which emphasizes the communal dimensions of religion, as described by scholars like

Durkheim, Darwin, and Frazer. The same field, however, has been accused of attempts to secularize religious practice by reducing it to a function of evolution or a way to enforce social structures and norms. In Absence of Mind, Robinson argues against reducing religious experience to a social tendency, calling upon the work of William James, who describes religious experience as an intensely individual phenomenon. That Jack

Boughton feels that his spiritual state depends upon acceptance into the church, and that acceptance into the church depends upon his acceptance into the close-minded society of

Gilead, where his interracial marriage will be frowned upon, is part of his problem.

One way that Hungerford’s work sells religious life short is her description of the word and its role in reconciliation and bringing individuals together. She describes a scene in Gilead in which a magazine is lent back and forth between the homes of John

Ames and Robert Boughton as a pretext for visiting and a way of prompting forgiveness.

Hungerford, however, does not acknowledge the most important instance of forgiveness

(and the most desperate need for it) in the novel, which is the forgiveness of Jack

Boughton, a spiritual event which requires none of the actual theological background or any form of written content of belief other than the verbiage that is required for the blessing to occur, a verbiage that echoes the formulaic verbiage that occurs in the sacrament of baptism that takes part in granting it a supernatural, transformative power. 54

“Lord, bless John Ames Boughton, this beloved son and husband and father” (241) recalls the naming of the child in baptism and the recitation of the Trinitarian formula that calls upon the multiple persons of the triune God.

Hungerford does not examine the central problem of Jack’s baptism, simply attributing his spiritual problems to a “lack of sympathy” for theology, a problem Ames acknowledges early in the novel. When she addresses Jack’s desire for theological conclusions, she writes that “Jack, a professed believer, 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” (118).

Finally, she makes the conclusion that

the human effort, at great cost, is to bridge the gap, draw difference closer, knit up

the world. . . . 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 than occasion for living a

religious life. (120-121)

In my reading of Robinson, the profession of holiness at work in certain versions of the written word is sacred, and that sacredness, and its theological dimensions, are reinforced powerfully at the end of the novel, when Ames continues and completes his project of

“acknowledging sacredness.” Ames ends his journal with one last profession of the beauty of the prairie: 55

I love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the

land and everything turn radiant at once, that word “good” so profoundly affirmed

in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing. There

may have been a more wonderful first moment “when the morning stars sang

together and all the sons of God shouted for joy,” but for all I know to the

contrary, they still do sing and shout, and certainly might well. (246)

Here, Ames references the Book of Job, the full passage emphasizing the power and mystery of the omnipotent and incomprehensible God: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38: 4-7). The rejoicing that God describes in this instance is a type of worship that has been unadulterated by the fall of man and the sin and suffering that resulted from it; it is an unfiltered experience and acknowledgement of

God’s goodness. This affirmation of “good,” which takes place both in Ames’s blessing of Jack and in Ames’s writing about the prairie and his experiences of life on earth are both sacramental. We are reminded of the moment when Ames reflected that “There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that” (23). What this means for religious or spiritual literature is that uses of the word to acknowledge or rejoice in holiness, as Ames has done throughout the novel, has a supernatural power like the power that occurs in the sacraments. And yet, Robinson makes no attempts to provide an onto-theology of the 56 word. Like Ames performing a baptism, we are ultimately “outside the mystery of it”

(21).

Chapter Two: Metaphysical Ambivalence and Spiritual Resilience

in the Novels of Louise Erdrich

In its first few pages, Louise Erdrich’s 1989 novel, Tracks, seems to have several narrative elements in common with Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. First, the novel begins with an old man addressing the topic of death; where John Ames begins his journal with the difficult task of explaining to his son that he might soon go away to be with the Lord, Tracks’s Nanapush opens his narrative with the stark remembrance that “We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. It was surprising that there were so many of us left to die” (1). And like Gilead, Tracks takes special interest in the “begats” of its characters, going so far as to include a drawing of a family tree prior to its first chapter. But Tracks’s most critical element in common with

Gilead is that both novels are narrated by a spiritual leader writing in the first and second person to a young relative in order to make a case for a way of life that is vanishing from the modern world and therefore might not be part of the child’s future.

However, where Gilead’s John Ames is ultimately ambivalent about how much his 58 son’s belonging in the formal community of the church truly matters to him, Nanapush seems desperate for his adopted granddaughter to embrace and preserve the traditions of her Ojibwe home and family.

Alienation from religious tradition and subsequent return is a common theme in contemporary Native American literature, a “postsecular” characteristic John McClure has identified in Partial Faiths. In these works, as McClure explains, Native Americans are “secularized” by the forces that tear them from their traditions and homelands; he notes that these forces are just as frequently religious as they are secular. This alienation often results in a prolonged period of spiritual rootlessness during which Native

Americans turn to Western coping mechanisms, some more innocuous than others: drugs, commodities, the Church. Eventually the character experiences a spiritual struggle or collapse before finally returning to their religious traditions.

Since these narratives fit so neatly with the other postsecular narratives of spiritual alienation he describes in his work, McClure places Native American authors like Louise Erdrich, Leslie Silko, and N. Scott Momaday squarely within what he describes as the literary canon of the postsecular, and, in some ways, this is a fitting category. And yet, McClure identifies several features of these works that make them distinct from the rest of the postsecular canon; for example, “they have less patience with modern, secular ways of seeing and being than most postsecular novels” and “they are less enthusiastic in the celebration of mixture and hybridity than many contemporary texts” (151). Certainly these differences have to do with the fact that, while American Christians who have escaped to secularism and subsequently returned 59 to spirituality did so by choice and due to dissatisfaction with their original religion,

Native Americans were violently torn from their faiths and often forced into

Christianity through government-mandated programs like boarding schools.

Here, however, I would like to point to another critical difference between

Western and Native American postsecularism. While Western postsecular texts have supposedly taken on postmodern elements due to the era’s distrust of spiritual sources of knowledge and authority, similar “postmodern” religious elements exist in Native

American literature simply because those ways of understanding the world—including the denials of metaphysical certainty so common in Gilead—are integral to its religious worldview and have been since the beginning of those traditions’ cultural memory. This metaphysical uncertainty, like the uncertainty John Ames describes in Gilead, is not cause for fear or concern about salvation but a joyous way to experience God and creation beyond the often too harshly defined boundaries of Western knowledge. At the same time, spiritual uncertainty of a different and much more nefarious kind has been forced on these populations due to the destruction of their traditions and removal of their spiritual leaders. Thus, in postsecular Native American literature, readers encounter two different types of spiritual ambiguity. One comes with a culture that has been forcibly torn from its religious traditions and left devoid of spiritual leadership.

The other comes from the pre-existing metaphysical attitudes in Native American traditions that refuse to assign meaning or rules in a universe populated by ineffable mystical beings. One is endemic to the very nature of the religious tradition, and the other is the result of an unforgivable violation of it. 60

To examine some of these dynamics, I approach some of these “postsecular” texts, especially the work of Louise Erdrich, by examining their narrators and how these narrators accept or reject the burden of spiritual authority. To help situate this discussion in its proper context in Native American history and theology, I refer to traditional Ojibwe religious stories that provide some useful perspective. My primary topic is the recurring character of Nanapush in Louise Erdrich’s novels; Nanapush, named after the Ojibwe manitou Nana’b’oozoo, is one of the last elders remaining in a tribe that has been ravaged by smallpox. Unlike many of the other characters in the novel who leave the community or decide to side with the local government for the sake of self-preservation, Nanapush is a traditionalist who attempts to mentor young men in the “old ways” and ensure that his granddaughter, Lulu, remains part of the family. And yet, unlike the characters McClure examines in his chapter on Erdrich, Momaday, and

Silko, Lulu never does return to tradition in the way that Nanapush so desperately hoped she would. And while Nanapush speaks from the first person in the next chronological novel after Tracks and appears as an important character in many others, he never seems to carry the profound voice of spiritual authority he did in Tracks when he made his original appeal to Lulu. What purpose, then, does his narrative serve? Is

Erdrich suggesting that these spiritual leaders are doomed to vanish in their version of the “Secular Age”? If so, how might we revise our understanding of contemporary

Native American narratives and the people who write them?

As McClure seems to imply, Native American spirituality is popular with non- natives for the same reasons that “New Age” spirituality has become popular in recent 61 decades; readers conflate Native American mysticism with the freedom and exoticism they associate with the New Age. Though it is unfortunate that many of these assumptions are made without a close and respectful look at the tradition, some of those common assumptions about Native American spirituality as it pertains to mysticism are true. Vine Deloria, a contemporary Native American theologian, writes extensively on many of these topics, especially in his work Metaphysics of Modern Existence which, strangely, has much in common with recent approaches to science that question its ability to provide the totalizing metaphysical explanations people seek when they seek answers about God and the nature of the world around them. The Metaphysics of

Modern Existence, first published in 1979, was republished in 2012 with a forward by

Daniel Wildcat, who notes that, at the time, it was Deloria’s “least read and most misunderstood book” (ix). The work is a description of the many ways that Native

American approaches to being and reality confound Western metaphysics and its attachment to scientific laws and proofs, even in the realm of the humanities, and especially in theology. In his introduction, Deloria explains that “In the Indian world, experience is not limited by mental considerations and assumptions regarding the universe. For the non-Indian the teachings of a lifetime come thundering down. . . .

Reality [in Western culture], in a certain sense, is what you allow your mind to accept, not what you experience” (5). He critiques several modes of understanding that Western culture has used to superimpose a form onto experience, such as time, history, and place. The book’s underwhelming reception is a mystery, given the popularity of similar approaches to science at the time, like in the work of Paul Feyerabend in Against 62

Method (1975). Perhaps readers felt that The Metaphysics only offered more of the same and did not take the time to consider its implications for Native American theology and its history.

In the much more popular God is Red, originally published in 1973, Deloria examines related topics of spirituality, particularly the question of authority and the differences between generations of Native Americans that have shaped the future of their culture. He acknowledges the absence of Native American spiritual leadership in contemporary sociopolitical movements involving Native Americans, especially inasmuch as the task of spiritual leadership has belonged to elders among that tradition.

He points out the ways that even modern depictions of Native Americans, their leaders, and their histories often come to an abrupt halt in the 1960s, just prior to “The Indian

Movement” of the 1970s, which seems to lack a prevailing spiritual definition.

Individual tribal histories are cut even shorter, normally ending around 1890. “At that point,” Deloria writes,

the tribe seems to fade gently into history, with its famous war chief riding down

the canyon into the sunset. Individuals appear within this history only to the

extent that they appear to personalize the fortunes of the tribe. A mythical

Hiawatha, a saddened Chief Joseph, a scowling Sitting Bull, a sullen Geronimo;

all symbolize not living people but the historic fate of a nation overwhelmed by

the inevitability of history. (25)

Following their disappearance came the conclusion that America had a sufficient range of literature and knowledge of Native Americans and their traditions: “The trail of 63 books written by Indians is significant if considered as the recorded feelings of a race once extant, but insignificant if it is meant to communicate modern social and legal problems that have created and intensified poverty conditions among a segment of the

American population” (26).

Deloria’s description of these two types of stories draws a stark divide between these two types of narratives: the survival stories that belong to the “old-timers” and spiritual leaders such as Nanapush and stories of the “modern social and legal problems” of those who have survived the struggle with their cultures and lifestyles not entirely intact. To anyone who has read both Tracks, which belongs to the first variety, and Love Medicine, which belongs to the second, the difference is obvious and more than a little unsettling.

Accordingly, there is a missing link between the spiritual leadership of the chiefs that are immortalized in the Native American history that is popular and acceptable to the reading public and the new type of leadership that follows, the political and social leadership of the National Indian Youth Council and similar organizations. Many of the protagonists in the works of other contemporary Native

American authors belong to this demographic and toy with their responsibility to act as a leader for their tribe or interface with the political or commercial world outside the reservation. Gerald Vizenor’s Blue Ravens, Joseph Boyden’s The Three Day Road,

Leslie Silko’s Ceremony, and N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn are all examples. Many of these works feature an elderly character who cannot take a central 64 role in the story because of language or cultural barriers that prohibit their close involvement with the outside world.

This focus on the struggles of Native American youth is what makes Nanapush such a unique type of character in postsecular Native American literature. While elders often appear in these novels, offering small segments of wisdom to the young

“postsecular” seekers or offering some means of spiritual healing, Nanapush narrates half of Tracks, the first chronological novel of the Love Medicine series; his narration alternates with that of the problematic character of Pauline, a troubled half-Ojibwe woman who has converted to Catholicism. Nanapush’s confident, unassuming, and at times playful storytelling voice is a welcome relief from the bitter, frenetic, and almost schizophrenic half-truths, half-lies of Pauline. In the next chronological novel, Four

Souls, Nanapush returns and tells the story from a first-person perspective rather than narrating directly to Lulu, and, again, his narration alternates with an outsider to his community, this time a white woman with no Native American background. Love

Medicine takes place after Nanapush’s death and is narrated by a variety of characters, many of whom are at odds with one another. There is no longer the reassuring voice of

Nanapush, alternating from one chapter to the next, to balance out the voices of those who might threaten his way of life.

Throughout the novels, Nanapush communicates his own version of spirituality that harkens back to some of the more comedic and light-hearted aspects of Ojibwe tradition. Though the other characters in Tracks have decidedly European or Christian names, like Fleur, Pauline, Napoleon, and Margaret, Nanapush was named for an 65

Ojibwe religious figure. In Ojibwe lore, Nana’b’oozoo, also known as “Nanapush” and by several other variations of the name, is half man and half manitou, or spirit, with special responsibilities to humanity. He receives these responsibilities through the

Ojibwe supreme being, “Kitchi-Manitou,” which means “Great Mystery”; like the

Christian God the Father, Kitchi-Manitou is an ineffable being that is benevolent but intellectually unapproachable. Basil Johnston explains that “As a being of the supernatural, transcendental order, Kitchi-Manitou cannot be known or described in human corporeal terms. What little is known of Kitchi-Manitou is known through the universe, the cosmos, and the world” (2). Kitchi-Manitou shares elements of his divinity with the manitous, especially Nana’b’oozoo, whom he often uses as an intermediary to humanity; thus, the parallels between the Christian Trinity and these two religious figures are worth noting. However, where the role of Christ the Son is to teach humanity and to offer a reasonably defined route to salvation, Nana’b’oozoo is described as a trickster who befuddles the Ojibwe just as often as he instructs them.

Furthermore, Nana’b’oozoo is the butt of jokes just as frequently as his mortal counterparts.

Nana’b’oozoo is just one of several manitous venerated by the Ojibwe. He is the half-human son of the male manitou Aepungishimook and female human Winonah but not their only son. The couple had a total of four sons together, all representing different qualities. The first son, Maudjee-kawiss, was a hot-blooded warrior, renowned for his impressive size, strength, and hunting abilities. The second son, Pukawiss, was more pleasant and good-natured than the first son and took no interest in violence or feats of 66 strength. He loved creatures and emulated them in song and dance, eventually becoming a traveling entertainer, partly because of his skills, and partly because he was disowned by his father for not being a warrior like Maudjee-kawiss. He is said to have passed on the gifts of song and dance to the Ojibwe.

Their third son, Waub-oozoo, has a particularly interesting narrative that could shed light on postmodern and postsecular studies of Native American religion and spirituality because it concerns questions of religious dogma versus personal experience. As a child, Waub-oozoo was insatiably curious about the workings of nature and would spend hours listening to the sounds of birds or waterways; unlike

Pukawiss, who was interested in creatures for their artistic appeal, Waub-oozoo took an intellectual interest in their origins and their lives, and just as nature blended with spirituality for the Ojibwe, Waub-oozoo’s intellectual curiosity about the physical world naturally translated to theological curiosity. Ultimately, Waub-oozoo’s desire for knowledge led him to the dwelling place of the manitous, where he did not receive the direct answers he had been seeking but nevertheless had spiritual experiences that granted him wisdom and peace. These spiritual methods caused extreme doubt among the Ojibwe at first:

To those who had never seen or heard of such practices, drumming and chanting

were strange though innocent exercises that Waub-oozoo performed as a ritual

before he undertook any trip or major task. They thought it was hocus-pocus to

ask for the goodwill and favors of the manitous. But as skeptical as many may

have been, they could not deny the results. Waub-oozoo now enjoyed unfailing 67

success in all his ventures, when before he had reaped no better luck than

anyone else. (43)

The Ojibwe began to emulate Waub-oozoo’s example of communing with the manitous, and he was respected in the community as a spiritual leader. He met an untimely demise when he gathered with his three brothers for the first time and Maudjee-kawiss challenged him to a feat of courage and strength, which Waub-oozoo foolishly accepted; he was killed as a result. Perhaps the story means to make the point that

Waub-oozoo’s desire for knowledge was in some way related to the hubris that resulted in his foolhardy decision. In any case, following his death, Waub-oozoo became

Cheeby-aub-oozoo, the god of the underworld. Nana’b’oozoo, the fourth and youngest son, was heartbroken by his brother’s death because they had shared a special bond, though they were not much alike.

Nana’b’oozoo, Nanapush’s namesake, had few noteworthy qualities other than his plethora of very human flaws; he was not strong and brave or a beguiling entertainer or a patient thinker. He was timid, sensitive, impatient, and sometimes temperamental;

Basil Johnson explains that “In outlook and conduct, doing what he ought not to have done and neglecting to do what he ought to have done, Nana’b’oozoo behaved more like a human being than a manitou” (52). However, Nana’b’oozoo earned a reputation as a warrior when he left the village to challenge his absentee father; though he and his father agreed to reconcile, the villagers assumed that Nana’b’oozoo had matched his strength to his father’s and won. Later, when a nearby village was terrorized by a war chief, the villagers asked Nana’b’oozoo to intervene. But rather than immediately 68 defeating the chief, he ran screaming in fear, which the chief interpreted as the screams of many warriors and fell into a faint, after which Nana’b’oozoo clubbed the chief to death. Johnston writes that

Yes, Nana’b’oozoo was a champion for everyone. Nana’b’oozoo cared. He was

a manitou, a human, who could not bear to see anyone unhappy. Nana’b’oozoo

cried to see others cry, was unhappy to see others unhappy, mourned when he

saw others mourn, and laughed when he saw others laugh. He was a champion

who understood. He wouldn’t turn anyone down. (75)

And yet, his actions to save that mythical village, which the villagers interpreted as heroism at the time, Nana’b’oozoo was remembered in legend as a hapless, clumsy individual who was always in some kind of trouble due to his own shortcomings:

Yet, despite his intentions, Nana’b’oozoo often fell short of carrying out his

objectives. Something always interposed itself between his intent and his

fulfillment of it and resulted in mishap or indiscretion. . . . Eventually, the

Anishinaubaek applied the name ‘Nana’b’oozoo’ to anyone who committed

blunders as a result of acting on impulse or instinct, rather than on reason and

common sense. (96)

Thus, Erdrich’s choice of Nana’b’oozoo as the namesake of her patriarch is a telling decision. Though the arrogant Maudjee-kauwiss or the cheerful Pukawiss would not have fit into the troubled world of the Ojibwe at the beginning of the twentieth century, Waub-oozoo could have been a sensible choice. A Waub-oozoo figure might have provided spiritual guidance and healing for a tribe who needed it desperately. But 69 there are several reasons for the nod to Nana’b’oozoo in this narrative. One is due to the metaphysical approaches to spirituality and reality Erdrich chooses to highlight in her novels. Another is due to Nanapush’s adaptability and his ability to interface with the white (in this case, French Catholic) world. It seems to suggest an ecumenism where indigenous religion can be preserved in spite of its frequent contacts with Christianity; unfortunately, this is not what happens to Pauline.

One way Nanapush is able to adapt in the face of adversity is with his powers of speech, and along with it, his powers of negotiation and reflection. Speech, especially in the form of storytelling, is an important means of spiritual practice throughout the novel and in Ojibwe tradition, as Jennifer Sergi has explained. Tracks is simultaneously an effort to preserve tradition that sometimes becomes desperate; the narrative is often interrupted with moments when Nanapush stops to chastise Lulu when he does not feel she is listening carefully enough, but he ultimately remains in control of his own story, even if it takes some persuasion to tell it in the first place. We do not hear from Lulu at all within the course of the novel; she has no speech of her own, though Pauline is allowed her oppositional voice and conflicting narrative. Nanapush’s speech, as Jennifer

Sergi notes, becomes a form of protection for himself and for his family and tribe, a way to ensure their longevity. She cites the episode in Tracks in which the local priest,

Father Damien, finds Nanapush and Fleur nearly dead of starvation and illness in a cabin in the woods. When Damien tries to speak to Nanapush, Nanapush responds with a flood of words: 70

My voice rasped at first when I tried to speak, but then, oiled by strong tea, lard

and bread, I was off and talking. Even a sledge won’t stop me once I start.

Father Damien looked astonished, and then wary, as I began to creak and roll. I

gathered speed. I talked both languages in streams that ran alongside each other,

over every rock, around every obstacle. The sound of my own voice convinced

me I was alive. (7)

Sergi, however, does not note the similarity between this episode and a story of the mythic Nana’b’oozoo during his childhood. Nana’b’oozoo was too afraid to experience a vision during the appointed night of his vision quest, an important rite of passage for an adolescent. At a loss for what to do, he faked a vision in order to appease his grandmother and compensated with a flood of language:

Words poured from Nana’b’oozoo’s lips; he even stuttered as he spoke of

eagles, bears, wolves, hawks, watersnakes, and other beings that boded much

good for the future as they appeared to him in succession in the one night-long

dream or in a series of dreams, he knew not which. Nana’b’oozoo claimed to

have seen a vision that was far richer and deeper in meaning and that had greater

promise than had any other person, as far as his grandmother knew, in his first

venture into the world of manitous and spirits. (57)

In this episode, as in his legendary defeat of the war chief, Nana’b’oozoo succeeds in spite of (and perhaps because of) characteristics that would seem to be foibles: his own fear, confusion, and persistence in spite of those feelings. Ojibwe legend is not critical of Nana’b’oozoo’s character for his impiety; this episode is simply considered one of 71 many steps in his development. In both episodes, when words pour fourth from each figure, the nonstop talking seems to be a defensive measure. That Nanapush does so in front of a white priest, where Nana’b’oozoo did so to please his grandmother, who raised him as a parent, raises questions about Nanapush’s spiritual integrity and his ability to guide the youth of his tribe. Linda Krumholz points to this adaptability as a common feature in Erdrich’s work, arguing that

Erdrich suggests ways that English and the contemporary novel can be adapted

to represent Ojibwe cultural stories and beliefs. Concepts of “assimilation” and

“hybridity” have been used to suggest that Native American cultural change

means the end of Native cultures, but others argue that Native adaptations, such

as the adaptation of the dominant language and religion, in fact demonstrate the

resilience of Native cultures. (173)

Therefore, despite Nanapush’s likeability (especially when compared to his fellow narrator, Pauline), one is left wondering whether he might be compromised as a narrator and whether he can really represent an “old-timer” who can be counted on to adhere to the “old ways.” However, I would like to address some aspects of Nanapush and his approach to spirituality that reflect another side of his character and his activities as a patriarch, narrator, and storyteller. These have to do with Nanapush’s own approaches to belief, which strongly align with the native approaches to belief Vine Deloria emphasizes in God is Red and The Metaphysics of Modern Existence. Rather than being subsumed by the encroaching white culture, Nanapush is able to manipulate the 72 uncertainty of the cultural climate in order to survive and even to draw a white character into his own spiritual traditions and practices.

Throughout the rest of this chapter, I argue that Nanapush accomplishes this ecumenical feat not by setting forth religious dogma but by pointing to the instances in which dogma fails. One of the ways he accomplishes this is by familiarizing a white character, Agnes, also known as “Father Damien,” with the natural world and the mysteries and spiritual significance it contains for the Ojibwe people. These are mysteries that Nanapush fights to honor and emphasize in his day-to-day life with his own family, concurrent with his mentorship of Agnes. In Love Medicine, we see echoes of Nanapush’s attempts even following his death. In the remainder of this chapter, I will demonstrate that Erdrich’s version of ecospirituality coheres with the Ojibwe lore of

Nana’b’oozoo. I conclude that Erdrich’s collection of novels, and their portrayal of the

Native struggle against ecological destruction, force the reader to look beyond Western frameworks of boundaries and binaries when understanding spirituality.

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse is another novel that includes the character of Nanapush, his story, and the spiritual power that comes with it, but with a white character, Agnes, as the primary focalizer. Since Agnes keeps a journal, she also plays the role of storyteller. In this novel, which I will summarize in more detail later, Erdrich reveals the outcome of Nanapush’s flood of words from

Agnes’s perspective, and we find that Nanapush was not simply baring his soul as a self-defensive measure as critics have sometimes concluded; the incident was an 73 interchange between the two that fostered a spiritual intimacy that would last the rest of their lives:

Once Nanapush began talking, nothing stopped the spill of his words. The day

receded and darkness broadened. At dusk, the wind picked up and cold poked

mercilessly through the chinking of the cabin. The two wrapped themselves in

quilts and continued to talk. The talk broadened, deepened. Went back and forth

in time and then stopped time. The talk grew huge, of death and radiance, then

shrunk and narrowed to the making of soup. The talk was of madness, the stars,

sin, and death. The two spoke of all there was to know. And although it was in

English, during the talk itself Nanapush taught language to Father Damien, who

took out a small notebook and recorded words and sentences. (222)

Over the years, Agnes develops her own sense of spirituality that resembles a hybrid of

Catholic mysticism and Ojibwe spirituality. Hybridity is a problematic topic in

Erdrich’s works, especially Tracks, because the character of Pauline is so clearly presented as a cautionary tale of the hazards of syncretism gone awry, and many critical readings focus on Pauline without taking into consideration the story of Agnes and her spiritual development. But Agnes’s story highlights a critical point. The difference between Agnes’s syncretism and Pauline’s is that Agnes’s is a blend of mystical experiences that stem from both traditions, where Pauline’s is a blend of dogma. Thus, where Erdrich suggests that dogma makes different faith traditions incompatible, mysticism and experience can draw them together and erase unnecessary difference.

Such is the influence of Nanapush as spiritual guide. 74

Though I am hesitant to confine an examination of mysticism to a limited set of lenses, an ecospiritual reading of these texts is especially rewarding because it provides opportunity to advocate for readings of spiritual texts across the broad spectrum of creatures and environments they draw from and influence. In her chapter in Material

Ecocriticism, for example, Kate Rigby outlines the potential of eco-materialist readings of contemporary religious and spiritual narratives. She concludes that the stories of indigenous people offer some of the best arguments for an ecologically sensitive spirituality, writing that

A new materialist ecology emphasizing connectivity, nonlinear causality, trans-

corporeality, material agency, and an ethics of more-than-human “mattering” is

likely to make far more sense within an Indigenous horizon of understanding than

either the reductive materialist discourse of “resource management” or its

counterpart, New Age (or, worse, evangelical Christian fundamentalist) notions of

“spirituality.” (284)

Thus, Rigby advocates “Extending the new materialist conversation in this cross-cultural direction” which “also opens onto postsecular territory” (284). Rigby’s mention of postsecularism here, however brief, is timely and important in light of some elements of postsecularism and postmodernism that might otherwise discredit materialist readings of religious and spiritual works. Postsecularism, after all, at least in McClure’s influential description of it, tends to mean a wholesale re-enchantment of the cosmos that ignores the theological definitions and boundaries formerly imposed on it by organized religion.

And postmodern readings of religion tend to deemphasize questions of ontology and 75 epistemology, instead privileging a mindset that favors the conceptual ambiguity of the faith experience over theological certainty. Considering these circumstances, now is an especially important moment to reconsider the material aspects of religious and spiritual traditions, especially those that belong not to the fundamentalist traditions that have fallen under the scrutiny of post-secular spiritualists for their histories of oppression, but to those who themselves have been oppressed. As McClure writes, “since this ‘planetary’ form of spirituality has, at least since the romantic era, been identified with a critique both of modernization and the institutional religions of the West, Native American spirituality has long been accorded respect by religious-minded Westerners critical of the dominant Western religions,” and “many spiritually homeless Americans, alienated by secular values and from the dominant religious institutions, continue to turn to Native

Americans for inspiration and instruction” (132). Rigby is certainly conscious of these dynamics as she argues for the consideration of Native American material ecotheology.

My reading takes into account both Ojibwe and Catholic perceptions of the spiritual ontology and significance of the land, or “ecomaterial religion,” as Rigby calls it, alongside their own approaches to mysticism. I would argue that proper stewardship of and relationship with the land helps characters of various religious backgrounds overcome the problems of syncretism Erdrich’s earlier novels represent; Nanapush is a character who truly understands these problems and attempts to ameliorate them as he interacts with people from both spiritual traditions. Ultimately, The Last Report, which features both of these enchanted spaces—both Catholic and Ojibwe—calls for a spiritual ecology that blurs the lines between binaries that would otherwise restrict our religious 76 connection to the land. This reading sheds light on the novels’ seemingly ambivalent attitudes toward the church.

Though it follows the same cast of characters, The Last Report differs from the other novels in this grouping because it primarily follows the story of a white person rather than one of the many Ojibwe characters that had become so familiar and beloved in Love Medicine, Tracks, and Four Souls. In the novel, Agnes DeWitt, formerly known as Sister Cecilia, abandons her convent in favor of her obsession with playing the piano.

She falls in love with a German farmer and starts a life with him, only to lose him in a tragic shooting and then to lose the farm and her piano in a catastrophic flood. Having lost the most meaningful aspects of her life, she abandons her identity as Agnes and assumes the identity of Father Damien Modeste, whose body and effects she found in the aftermath of the flood. She also assumes Father Damien’s mission as a priest and missionary to the Ojibwe reservation of Little No Horse, hiding the fact of her gender

(from most) until her death more than eighty years later. Much of what Agnes learns from the Ojibwe in the process of her own spiritual education as Father Damien has to do with perspectives on the spiritual significance of the land. Though Agnes is responsible for the

Church’s carefully delineated tract of land alongside Little No Horse, Agnes also wanders throughout the reservation, questioning her own notions of boundaries of land and the spirit.

While The Last Report differs from most of Erdrich’s novels due to its white narrator, it continues to focus on the relationship between the Catholic Church and the religion of the Ojibwe. These two religions frequently diverge, intermingle, and challenge 77 one another by turns in Erdrich’s novels, resulting in numerous stories of conversion and spiritual interchange. The most in-depth spiritual narrative by far is Agnes’s, but Agnes’s narrative in The Last Report has the primary purpose of determining whether Pauline, the character who narrated half of Tracks, should be canonized as a saint. Pauline, half white and half Ojibwe, lives with a perpetual identity crisis and becomes a religious fanatic as a result, and her fanaticism has deadly consequences. Still, Erdrich’s presentation of the

Catholic Church’s influence on Ojibwe people has long been ambivalent. Catherine

Rainwater has argued that, while Erdrich presents “conflicting codes” in her works, she never privileges one over the other. Meanwhile, Brian Ingraffia has argued that Erdrich’s novels are blatantly critical of Catholicism, and Pauline’s conversion illustrates those problems. Finally, Linda Krumholz sees conversion in Erdrich’s novels not as a process of converting someone wholly from one religion to another, but an opportunity for the spirit to navigate the spaces in between religions. The characters of Agnes DeWitt,

Pauline Puyat, and their respective versions of religion remain rich topics for critical investigation.

At the beginning of The Last Report, the Ojibwe lands and people are clearly in peril. Since they have been sickened by European diseases and have lost access to some of the parts of the land they need to survive, many of the Ojibwe are near death. Though the Ojibwe have not traditionally believed in ownership of the land, they have assumed legal ownership in order to guard against having their lands taken from them; they lose the land anyway. Susan Friedman describes this dabbling in bureaucracy as a

“syncretism” of its own. These legal attempts, as first described by Sister Hildegarde, the 78 convent’s superior, are the first in a series of attempts to traverse various boundaries between white and Ojibwe that only exist because of an idea of the land as a place that requires boundaries. When Agnes arrives at the reservation, she finds that it has become

“a place of fluid definition, appearing solid only on a map, taking in and cutting out whole farms sometimes on the say-so of the commissioner” (75). The government misreads the local native population, believing that land ownership will be a source of pride and contentment, but the plan backfires decidedly. Still, Sister Hildegarde attempts to explain the reservation to Agnes in terms of its boundaries, showing her that the layout of the reservation has the rough shape of a (European) house, roof and chimney and all.

As the nun explains, “They’ll [the Ojibwe] lose all the land, of course, being unused to the owning of land. Incredibly, it makes no sense to them. They avow, in their own peculiar way, that the earth is only on loan” (72).

Sadly, Erdrich constantly reminds us of the spiritual suffering that Native

Americans have had to endure as a result of the loss or destruction of their lands. In

Tracks, Four Souls, and Love Medicine, the Ojibwe characters witness widespread environmental degradation at the hands of various white developers. The novels frequently pit bureaucracy against holistic ecospiritual systems that would otherwise offer support for the body and soul.

In Erdrich’s novels, the Ojibwe soul is utterly dependent upon its surrounding lands for several reasons. For instance, the Ojibwe understand that the body’s physical and spiritual health often go hand in hand, and identity is inextricable from land as well.

In Tracks, Nanapush relates that, following his escape from Jesuit school, he fled to the 79 woods where he forgot all his (Catholic) prayers (33). Pauline, on the other hand, flees the woods, hoping to make a place for herself in town, where she will abandon her

Ojibwe identity in favor of becoming more like her white forebears. Her selection of the

Catholic Church as a bastion of whiteness is what problematizes Agnes’s spiritual development; ironically, Pauline, a living and breathing instance of white and native fusion, and a troubling one at that, complicates Agnes’s comfortable syncretism.

Meanwhile, Fleur departs the reservation to exact revenge on John James Mauser, the lumber tycoon who harvested her forest, only to fall in love with him, marry him, and become completely subsumed into urban life; she returns to the reservation wearing city clothes, which leads to Lulu’s denial of Fleur as her mother. Fleur suffers an intense physical and spiritual collapse while in town, falling ill and producing a baby who is described as having no clear identity. The child is remarkably white, doughy, and shapeless. Fleur even neglects to name him, and he becomes known only as “the Mist” on the reservation. Fleur is completely unable to rehabilitate herself, as her land is destroyed and no longer belongs to her. She must instead get her healing from Margaret, an Ojibwe woman who has managed to retain her land and, by extension, her spiritual power.

Critics have parsed these transformations of identity in different ways. Laura

Furlan examines The Antelope Wife’s apparent argument that Indians can indeed survive and thrive in urban spaces, problematizing common narratives of Indians being separated from their homelands. She notes that cities simply overlie formerly Indian lands, that nature exists just beneath them, “lying in wait.” She also examines the mobility of

Indians and how movement across various types of borders defines their culture, 80 concluding that “Erdrich challenges the notion of a fixed Indian identity, rooted in the past, unable to adapt to modern living” (66). Still, adaptation does not automatically mean preservation of identity; Love Medicine illustrates this problem with the character of June, who loses her sense of self and literally wanders until she dies (and even after she dies). John McClure discusses this episode as an example of the trope of the

“narrative of return.” In McClure’s reading, separation from or destruction of the land entails a “painful oscillation between the secular and the sacred” (134). When Native

Americans return to their sacred lands,

they reactivate the inner voices that focus the self and the world in Native

American terms, reestablish the tactile and visceral relation to the natural

surround that comes from moving with it in accordance with their own bodily

powers, and reacquire habits of attention powerfully honed in the work of

tracking game and wresting sustenance from the earth. (146)

This narrative occurs in Four Souls, when Fleur returns to the reservation and must recuperate after losing her spiritual powers entirely. These narratives have more to do with the boundaries between the sacred and secular than the boundaries between different religious traditions, and this is a “liminal space” I do not investigate in detail here. Still, it is important to note that Native American literature is ever-conscious of the spiritual states of its characters, and these spiritual states always have to do with closeness to or separation from their land.

Luckily for Agnes, her living situation, including her church, is not so troubled by the environmental havoc that is always at the heels of Ojibwe characters like Fleur and 81

Nanapush. The Catholic Church’s existence alongside the reservation is an environmental anomaly. While the mission is an extension of a powerful subsection of white culture, the

Catholic Church has no particular interest in development of the land; at least, not at

Little No Horse. Still, the church enjoys some privileges of its place in white culture. Its rights to its own land never comes into question, even as its neighbors lose their own. The church has a semi-static existence in this turbulent world and, as a result, has seemed to acquire a grace in its presence that does not go unnoticed among many of the Ojibwe. In later novels, the church seems to serve as a reminder of what spiritual comfort and security looked like, and how necessary the land was in achieving that. Environmental destruction does have an oblique effect on the church; Agnes notes that, due to various land disputes, she has to conduct two separate masses each week so that certain members of the tribe can avoid contact with one another (168). In other words, problems with the land become just another factor that divide people from one another and disrupt the community’s religious and spiritual order. A healthy and spiritually beneficial sort of syncretism, like the one Krumholz describes, will require restoration of the land to its people. And doing so will require removing the borders that have come to hinder the

Ojibwe’s use of the land and their relationships with one another; restoration of the land will require a syncretism of its own.

Agnes, who at first has only a passing interest in her surrounding environment, has much to learn about Ojibwe religion and its spiritual connection to the land. For the

Ojibwe, land does not simply provide sustenance or peace; it is peopled by both good and evil spirits—sometimes both in the same entity—which exist in a constant balance. 82

Manitous like Nana’b’oozoo and his brothers exist within living organisms and non- living features of the environment, sometimes plants and at other times animals. Some animals are spirit-animals, which seem to have an entirely separate but equally confounding ontology (or lack thereof). The most powerful spirit in Tracks, however, is

Misshepeshu, the water monster, who resides in Lake Matchimanito. Pauline’s description of Misshepeshu illustrates the way that the supernatural permeates nature at every level, blurring the distinction between man, animal, plant, and inanimate matter:

Our mothers warn us that we’ll think he’s handsome, for he appears with green

eyes, copper skin, a mouth tender as a child’s. But if you fall into his arms, he

sprouts horns, fangs, claws, fins. His feet are joined as one and his skin, brass

scales, rings to the touch. You’re fascinated, cannot move. He casts a shell

necklace at your feet, weeps gleaming chips that harden into mica at your breasts.

He holds you under. Then he takes the body of a lion, a fat worm, or a familiar

man. He’s made of gold. He’s made of beach moss. He’s a thing of dry foam, a

thing of death by drowning, the death a Chippewa cannot survive. (11)

One reason Pauline’s syncretism becomes hazardous is that she incorrectly identifies

Misshepeshu as the embodiment of the Catholic version of Satan. Since Misshepeshu can take various forms, Pauline mistakes her lover, Napoleon, for the monster and takes it upon herself to kill him. Pauline appears to have assumed the right and the ability to destroy this spiritual creature by virtue of her association with white people. Pauline’s delusion leads to several questions, all more difficult to answer than the last. If she primarily identified herself as an Ojibwe woman, would Pauline have had the right to 83 destroy Misshepeshu, even if she had truly encountered him in a physical form? What does this mean for the Ojibwe’s purported rights to select various elements of nature to destroy? Are there any situations in which nature, when perceived as evil, should be harmed? Nanapush seems to answer some of these questions in his discussion with Agnes about a devil who appears to her multiple times, taking the shape of a black dog:

“Say, for instance,” [Agnes] decided to be specific, “I was sitting down to eat, and

a devil in the form of a black dog walked in through the window. Say it stood on

the table, one paw in the soup bowl. What would you say to it?”

Nanapush leaned toward [her], thoughtful. “You would say this: ‘Get your foot

out of my soup bowl!’ . . . If it took its foot out, you would know it had

understood you and was no ordinary dog.”

“It wasn’t ordinary. No, the dog spoke to me.”

“Ah,” said Nanapush. “In that case, you would open your mouth and bark! . . . In

order to confuse it.” (229)

Throughout the novels, Nanapush tends to favor discourse, humor, and trickery over destruction, exemplifying the Ojibwe character of the trickster who by turns does good and mischief but can never be characterized as entirely evil. The only evil Erdrich’s novels seem to recognize is the type that leads to destruction of both the environment and the life within it.

Though Nanapush and the other Ojibwe characters recognize the distinction between spirits and regular creatures, the line between nature and the supernatural—like the line between good and evil natural or supernatural beings—is never clear. One 84 particular instance in which manitous arrive en masse is when Fleur is in labor and the animals of the forest come into dialogue and argue with one another regarding the future of Fleur and her child. The sequence of dialogue is reminiscent of the instances in the traditional Nana’b’oozoo story, the earlier episode in Tracks, and in The Last Report, when Nanapush’s flood of words acts as a form of defense for himself. Nanapush relates,

“I recognized them. Turtle’s quavering scratch, the Eagle’s high shriek, Loon’s crazy bitterness, Otter, the howl of Wolf, Bear’s low rasp” (Tracks 59). A bear enters Fleur’s cabin when she is giving birth, and reflecting upon the event later, Nanapush concludes,

“it could have been a spirit bear. I don’t know” (Tracks 60). In other words, Nanapush refuses epistemological confirmation of the supernatural; instead, like in his ontological analysis of the black dog, he requires some sort of dialogue with the manitou, whether it is through Fleur in the act of giving birth or through a contest of wits. His relational approach to the supernatural gives Nanapush supernatural abilities that ensure his family’s survival when they risk starvation during a particularly bad winter. Nanapush is able to monitor and direct Eli’s hunt from a distance, using a song and manitou helpers.

The supernatural, which permeates all of nature, also permeates the human body, and can ensure the body’s survival in the process, but humans often lack the power or desire to determine where the supernatural begins and ends, even within themselves. This dynamic suggests a holistic spiritual system that denies the boundaries between nature and the supernatural, the body and the spirit.

Pauline, however, seems to cling to, but often become confused by, the distinctions between nature and the supernatural because she sees Ojibwe spirituality as 85 backward superstition compared to the Catholic religious tradition of the whites. In her rejection of Ojibwe spirituality, Pauline embraces some elements of Catholicism that seem contrary to Ojibwe spiritual worldviews, but she still seems to subconsciously retain much of her religious heritage. This retention leads to a troubling confusion about the boundaries between good and evil, especially as it is manifested in the natural world.

Because of Pauline’s confusion, many readers have concluded that Erdrich uses Pauline to point out the potential problems with attempting to convert Native Americans to

Christianity. Brian Ingraffia’s reading is probably the least forgiving, but even Susan

Friedman inaccurately interprets Pauline as a metonym for Catholicism. Still, Friedman rightly identifies several important elements of mysticism that cohere with Ojibwe spirituality. Interestingly, she compares Pauline’s experiences of self-mortification and deprivation with the Ojibwe’s own spiritual experiences with illness and starvation: “The hunger that pervades Tracks functions not only as a reminder of historical deprivation but also as an echo of the deliberate fasting in Ojibwa tradition that provides visions and puts human beings in contact with the manitous” (123). Pauline’s fasting, however, becomes a source of mockery for Nanapush, whose spirituality fosters physical flourishing rather than deprivation. Agnes and the nuns also disapprove of Pauline’s extremism, chiding her and even forbidding her to fast.

Working alongside these problems is the question of whether what really occurred at Little No Horse, the events surrounding the life of Pauline Puyat, were truly miraculous. The answer has high stakes for the question of the ecological dimensions of the Catholic Church as well. While the Catholic Church officially teaches that all of 86 creation is in a sense sacred, it has a long history of declaring certain sites holy based on the miraculous events that happened (or did not happen) there. The Holy Land, the site of the incarnation of God and therefore the site of the most powerful Christian miracles, has indeed become a “holy land.” Its dirt is often incorporated into items for religious tourists to take home, like crucifixes and rosaries. In the same way, Pauline’s dirt becomes a prized religious material following her death, an event steeped in mystery. Sister

Leopolda was last seen in the mission’s garden, ostensibly “to contemplate the image of

Christ as she saw it growing in the flowers,” when lightning struck (53). No trace of her was ever found except for ashes on the ground in the shape of a cross. The ashes became a source of immediate religious frenzy, said to heal various physical ailments. The

Catholic Ojibwe, for whom the land is already infused with holiness, immediately recognize its potential for miracles. To determine her sainthood, however, Pauline’s life must be evaluated by a representative of the Vatican, who will judge her miracles to determine whether or not she can be canonized.

Agnes writes the Vatican repeatedly to request an investigation into Pauline’s life to determine whether or not she was a saint. Still, her motives are not entirely clear, and they become increasingly mysterious as she becomes more absorbed into Ojibwe spirituality, thanks to the spiritual guidance of Nanapush. When Father Jude, the

Vatican’s representative, questions her about the most corporeal examples of miracles,

Agnes, like Nanapush in the episode of the spirit bear, merely shrugs and refuses to commit to an ontological interpretation, at one point dismissing his questions with the remark, “I have never seen the truth without crossing my eyes. Life is crazy” (135). Thus, 87 while Erdrich challenges Catholic representations of the supernatural, as Alison Chapman notes, “Erdrich does not depict a straightforward act of narrative iconoclasm enacted by

Indians onto dominant Catholic paradigms.”

Agnes’s investigation of Pauline’s miracles becomes even more complex when compared with her own spiritual experiences. These begin when she arrives at the reservation and, like Nanapush, experiences a brush with death by starvation. On two different occasions, she gains sustenance by supernatural means. In the first, Jesus feeds her soup in a dream. In the second, Agnes experiences the transubstantiation of the

Eucharist in an especially powerful way: “Real and rich, heavy, good. Agnes choked with startled shock. She hesitated, put the food to her mouth again. Real! Real! Hunger roared in her as she broke the bread. Ate the flesh. . . . Was this something that happened, always, to priests? Did their part of the sacrament transubstantiate in real as well as metaphorical terms?” (69). Kate Rigby’s conception of the Eucharist provides some relevant perspective for this episode:

Although the actual bread that is shared in communion of fellow Christians is

conventionally understood as the symbol or embodiment of the Word made flesh

in Jesus Christ, within the ecotheology of “deep incarnation” (Gergersen), it is

understood more inclusively as a synecdoche for the wider creation, the inspirited

“flesh of the world,” in which we are called into fellowship, not only with other

Christians, or even other humans, but, ultimately, with all creatures, for all our

differences and sometimes conflictual entanglements. (288) 88

This instance of transubstantiation gives Agnes just enough strength to ensure the survival of her convent and the local Ojibwe; the physical sustenance that comes with the

Eucharist, especially powerful in this occurrence, has the secondary effect of ensuring the survival of the tribe and their continuation as members of creation. The episode prompts

Agnes to write to the pope, and in the letter we notice that she is beginning to trouble the lines between the physical and the metaphorical: “would it be wrong for a cleric to request a visit by the devil, just to make certain of his physical shape?” (70).

As Agnes acclimates herself to the supernatural complexities of Ojibwe country,

Erdrich parallels Agnes’s spiritual journeys with the journeys of Ojibwe characters.

Though identity and land is an obvious theme among the Ojibwe characters, Erdrich extends the theme in applying it to Agnes, even before Agnes reaches the reservation.

Prior to reaching the reservation, Agnes changes her identity twice, both times in conjunction with a move from one place to another. Still, Agnes’s identity shifts differ from the Ojibwe’s identity shifts for an illuminating reason. Agnes’s changes in identity have had to do with moral systems which set up exacting boundaries that aren’t entirely valid in the Ojibwe world. Agnes’s abandonment of the convent, for example, took place because she felt that her love of music was more powerful than her love for Christ. As she was supposed to be the bride of Christ, Agnes considers her love of music a form of adultery. Later, she refuses to marry Berndt for the same reason, explaining that she already committed adultery against Jesus and would likely do the same to Berndt. In other words, identity is not quite as fluid for Agnes as some readers might automatically 89 assume based on the fluidity of her gender; it still exists within a framework of boundaries.

Agnes experiences similar spiritual episodes when the devil/dog visits her, threatening to take the life of Fleur’s baby. Agnes must bargain with the devil, as

Nanapush directed, in order to save the baby. Little is Agnes aware that Fleur also bargains for Lulu’s life in a separate but similar episode in Tracks, playing a game of cards with ghosts in the spirit world. In both cases, the women lose one life in order to save Lulu’s; Agnes assumes that she has committed her own soul to hell (falsely, as she still clings to Catholic distinctions between good and evil as it relates to place) in order to save Lulu, and Fleur, as part of her own gamble, loses the life of the baby she is pregnant with. Like Nanapush, Agnes learns to negotiate with the spiritual rather than attempting to command or overpower it. Still, Agnes’s eco-spiritual development is a lengthy process, as she has been born and raised in a system in which the land is tied to various systems of bureaucracy rather than the soul. Her white counterparts at Little No Horse and its neighboring town, like the local commissioner and the nuns at the mission, have continued in that tradition. Despite her religious background, Agnes comes into contact with manitous simply by virtue of her presence on Ojibwe land. Agnes encounters

Ojibwe spirits when she visits Nanapush and Fleur for the first time: “The voices merged with her senses, filling her head. She tried to regulate her breathing, not to panic, but a vast weakness swallowed her and she thought she heard, maybe knew, could not be sure—were there spirits beyond the experience entrusted to her so far?” (79). Later, in a letter to the pope, Agnes describes the Ojibwe god as “a spirit behind or informing all 90 that exists on earth” and affirms that she has been visited by this spirit. In the same note, she says “I fear I may be losing my mind” (192).

With her continual spiritual progress, Agnes begins to witness the enchantment of the world around her, feeling and seeing both manitous and Christ in unlikely places. In one episode, the face of Christ appears in some ice in the schoolyard, “the cracks forming a gaunt visage with deep spiritual eyeholes in the skull. . . . The miraculous portrait had been sawed out of the ice and carefully deep frozen, only to be lost in a summer power outage” (141-142). While this apparition might suggest that the Catholic Christ may still be alive and well and even present in the natural world, he, like the other spirits in the

Ojibwe spiritual worldview, cannot be preserved or contained against his will and contrary to the order of nature. Other images of Christ manifest themselves through other means, almost like Misshepeshu appearing as both natural elements, animals, and humans. Agnes believes she sees Jesus in Mary Kashpaw, a troubled young woman who nevertheless possesses extraordinary characteristics of dignity and integrity, and also sees

Christ’s image in the face of an old woman (139).

What results is a spiritual interchange between Catholicism and Ojibwe religion that looks a lot like syncretism which, due to Pauline’s story in Tracks, remains a contested topic among critics. Most are quick to point to the problems associated with syncretism, though Friedman acknowledges that Erdrich’s later works tend to treat

Catholic-Ojibwe syncretism more favorably, especially when Catholic mysticism is involved. Indeed, various forms of mysticism seem to be the most valid vehicle for

Catholic and Catholic-Ojibwe religious experience in The Last Report, for these mystical 91 experiences, like the experiences of the Ojibwe, happen primarily in conjunction with some representative of the natural world. The most noteworthy is the role of Agnes’s pianos. The piano functions in other parts of the story as a mystical object that challenges superficial boundaries, such as the ones Agnes outlines in her perceived adultery against

Christ. When a piano is donated to the church at Little No Horse, Agnes is at first unwilling to play it, afraid that her devotion to music will subvert her devotion to her priesthood. Only by giving herself over to the mystical elements of faith, which blur the boundaries between one mode of love and the next, can Agnes be reunited with her piano. As she plays, snakes begin to come up from the floor and slither throughout the church (219). Though Catholic narratives have characterized snakes as evil creatures,

Agnes considers the creatures friends. As Alison Chapman explains when she examines

Agnes’s reflections on small creatures:

The linguistic connection between insects and the Great Spirit illustrates Ojibwe

beliefs that spirit and personhood dwell in all living things; the words

“penetration,” “unites,” and “shares” suggest the concepts of interdependence and

reciprocity that grow from this belief. Father Damien’s descriptions of “[t]hat

which we consider vermin” and “the lowest form of life” contrast Ojibwe beliefs

with Euro-American worldviews in which hierarchies of value allow people to

dismiss and even despise those considered smaller or lesser. (183)

Music, as a spiritual vehicle that inspires nature across the spectrum of life, has mystical properties and continues to defy even Agnes’s understanding; when she tries to describe its power, Agnes tells Nanapush that music is time itself (223). As they exchange their 92 different ways of understanding time, their different brands of metaphysics begin to merge and become nearly indistinguishable from one another.

At length, based on these revelations and her own spiritual progress, Agnes realizes that the entire world is “Spirit, surrounded by a shell of substance, just like her”

(344). This language matches the Catholic Church’s theology, which argues that the

Eucharist, a vehicle of the spirit of God, deserves respectful physical treatment of the utmost respect and care. However, Agnes’s affirmation of the entire world as spirit demands the respectful treatment of its entirety. This conclusion means that the land that contained Agnes, who Father Jude eventually recognizes as a saint, is no more holy than any other part of the land. And yet, Agnes comes to this realization without having to reject her own faith. Though Agnes threatens to “convert” to Ojibwe religion, she never truly does. She refuses to shed her identity as a priest, even after her death, because she truly believes that it will negate the good she has done in that capacity. Instead, she remains in that liminal space between religions, a space in which the believer has access to the power of both, and in which anything is possible. Thus, while Kate Rigby notes that “relational process ontology raises the specter of the erasure of difference” (288),

Erdrich’s ecotheology only erases difference when it should not have existed to begin with.

By the era in which Love Medicine takes place, Nanapush has been dead for many years and does not seem to have been replaced with another patriarch. Instead, the women serve as the figureheads for the reservation, and the tone of the narrative changes dramatically. Instead of the one steady, meditative, and authoritative voice that 93 guided Tracks, readers are left with several different voices of characters who have all completely internalized and been transformed by the problems that had begun to haunt

Nanapush; these characters are often petty, gossipy, vindictive, or sorely disappointed with their lot in life. Suddenly, a schizophrenic and hateful character like Pauline does not seem out of place. Meanwhile, the community lacks unity and direction because it lacks spiritual leadership. There are no notable matriarchs or patriarchs to provide guidance, a point that becomes painfully obvious in the town council meeting at the senior citizens’ home. Thus, there is a stark divide between the narrative atmosphere of

Tracks, The Last Report, and Love Medicine, between the steady, soothing voice of

Nanapush, the calm and reflective voice of Agnes, and the many uncertain voices of

Nanapush’s cultural descendants. It seems that it is just as impossible to recover spiritual unity and wholeness as it is to recover and knit back together the bits and pieces of land that have been stolen or bought off by the whites. The most obvious way in which Erdrich drives home this point is the problem that frames the entire novel: the death of June, who was raised by Eli, the last of the “old-timers,” who was mentored by

Nanapush. Despite Eli’s guidance, June leaves the reservation, At the beginning of Love

Medicine, June tries to return home to the reservation, freezing to death before she actually makes it. Still, Erdrich writes that “The snow fell deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, but June walked over it like water and came home” (7). Perhaps June’s

“home” really only exists in the land of the dead.

The question is whether that home—and the spiritual peace and stability that finally vanished with the death of “old-timers” like Nanapush—can ever be recovered. 94

If it is “lying in wait,” as Furlan argues, what is it waiting for? I would argue that, like the tribe in Ojibwe lore, the land is waiting for a Nana’b’oozoo figure to come to its rescue—to hoodwink the conquerors and erase all the boundaries they were responsible for drawing, including Lulu’s refusal to accept Fleur back into her life. For this reason,

Nanapush’s narrative, seemingly functioning just as an appeal to Lulu to reconcile with her mother, is also an appeal for every node in the relational network of the Ojibwe— people, earth, and creatures—to reconcile with one another and remove the borders that divide them.

Chapter Three: Walker Percy’s Postsecular Eden

In many postsecular narratives, a strong sense of place is essential for situating the trials and resolutions of spiritual loss. In Louise Erdrich’s work, the Ojibwe see their land requisitioned by the government or destroyed by economic opportunists at the same time as they begin to lose fidelity to their religious traditions; those two types of loss are one and the same. In Gilead, John Ames is painfully aware of the fact that the church his family has served for three generations will likely be torn down upon his death, and his young son will likely live a rootless existence with his mother. One reason place is so central in Judeo-Christian narratives and Western tropes that have sprung from them is that “What was lost” in the Fall of Man was the literal or figurative Garden of Eden, a place that signifies innocence, peace, material plenty, and perfect union with God;

Christians consider Adam’s sin and the resulting loss of the Garden to be the original source of all conflict and suffering. In Western narratives, the more distant a culture is from God, the clearer and more poignant is the yearning for the garden; postapocalyptic narratives that depict utter destruction and rampant evil, such as Cormac McCarthy’s The 96

Road and Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, feature characters desperately in search of a place that is safe, and along with it, a sense of innocence they seem to believe will be restored if they can find that safety. The question is whether that safety, innocence, and union with God can be achieved in this world, and under what terms.

Aside from the postsecular emphasis on place, there are clear theoretical links between the concerns of modernity, postsecularism, and post-lapsarianism. In A Secular

Age, Charles Taylor writes that “The dawning sense in modern times that we are in a meaningless universe, that our most cherished meanings find no endorsement in the cosmos, or in the will of God, has often been described as a traumatic loss, a second and definitive expulsion from paradise” (587). His earlier chapters consider humanity’s response to that sense of loss; he argues that early versions of Christianity were more inclined to accept the consequences of the Fall as the inevitable lot of mankind. Such is not the case with modern Christianity, as this chapter helps to illustrate. Lee Morrissey has even argued that, based on the way Paradise Lost treats the narrative of the fall, as “a dramatic contemporary change in a relationship with God,” Paradise Lost is a postsecular tale and Milton is “our first postsecularist” (101). In any event, postsecular tales in general describe a spiritual dissatisfaction with the modern world, and though this state of affairs drives postsecular characters to approach God, they tend to approach God with some measure of defiance, cynicism, or disbelief.

In this chapter, I examine these themes of post-lapsarian resolution in the work of

Catholic writer Walker Percy. Critics are often intrigued by the variety of end states

Percy depicts in his novels. Sometimes there is a clear resolution to the main characters’ 97 spiritual turmoil and other times there is not; sometimes, there are distinctive theological underpinnings to these conclusions, and sometimes there are not. And yet, despite the strong sense of place in Percy’s work, it does not always figure into the final end state of the characters. The only novel that clearly matches the topic of place with the characters’ spiritual resolution is The Second Coming and, as could be expected of a Catholic novelist addressing spiritual issues, the place of that spiritual resolution looks a lot like the Garden of Eden.

Most of Percy’s novels speak to a sense of loss of a pre-modern and therefore (as

Percy sees it) more virtuous, harmonious, and satisfying way of life. A perennial irony of

Christian belief is each generation’s certainty that this age is more depraved than the last; according to this worldview, sin may have existed in previous eras, but this one is especially and somehow uniquely depraved; this seems to be a typical complaint in

Percy’s writing and in the writing of some of his Catholic literary contemporaries, like

Flannery O’Connor. To resolve these problems of the modern world and its depravity, in

The Second Coming, Percy centers his narrative, and especially its resolution, around pre- lapsarian theology, or the theology of man’s state of being prior to the Fall. To Percy, the fall from grace is a drama that has haunted man (my gendered language is intentional – women don’t seem particularly troubled by it in most of his novels—normally, they are only troubled by the consequences of the spiritual shortcomings of their male counterparts) throughout history. As a result, most of his novels that achieve some degree of spiritual resolution at the end will in some way harken to mankind’s pre-lapsarian state of affairs. 98

It comes as no surprise that Percy is cognizant of the centrality of the Garden of

Eden in this drama; however, it is a surprise that Percy, who typically avoids a clear sense of closure, places this apparently satisfying and redemptive end state in his novel. Even more is the theologically roundabout way in which The Second Coming achieves that resolution; while Percy’s other novels are far more focused on the Catholic economy of salvation, The Second Coming seems to sidestep that in its eventual narrative journey towards Eden. This chapter examines this unique narrative, its equally unique resolution, its spiritual underpinnings, and how this resolution can be read from a postsecular perspective and alongside works that describe a sense of religious nostalgia or religious loss. While The Second Coming poses several theological challenges for Catholic readers, its treatment of post-lapsarian problems provides insight into non-religious postsecular questions of place as well. How might the novel’s conclusions about knowledge, spiritual contentment, and the Garden of Eden apply to postsecular utopias? Do postsecular works, which are ostensibly unmoored from religious traditions, associate spiritual loss and recovery with a sense of place? If so, what is the nature of that place, and why?

At first glance, the Will Barrett of The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming is much like the protagonists of Percy’s other novels, and his spiritual tribulations that give the narrative its trajectory are much the same as the tribulations of Percy’s other characters. Like Percy’s other protagonists, Will is a white Southern male from a privileged background and has an advanced education. Also like Percy’s other protagonists, Will drinks excessively, seems mentally distant from his surroundings even when sober, and only achieves some sort of focus and motivation in his activities as an 99 incessant womanizer. When we meet Will in The Last Gentleman, he is a young man, a recent Princeton dropout trying to make his way in New York City as a night shift watchman at Macy’s. By chance, he stumbles upon the Vaughts, a family from his southern hometown, and is invited into their inner circle to become a companion for the youngest son, Jamie, who is dying of leukemia. Will becomes fascinated by the family’s black sheep of an eldest son, Sutter, a former psychiatrist who refuses to provide Will the metaphysical answers he seeks as he attempts to grapple emotionally with Jamie’s impending death. In the novel’s sequel, The Second Coming, Will is a father and a widower in his mid-forties. He has lived an ideal life by modern standards; he has married into money, lives next door to the local country club, and has become involved in several philanthropic organizations, even being named Man of the Year in his local community. And yet, as is nearly always the case with Percy’s protagonists, Will is unsatisfied with his comfortable life.

All of Percy’s characters seek “truth,” as they perceive it, to satisfy their spiritual malaise in one way or another. Lancelot’s title character, for example, rigs cameras throughout his plantation home to prove his wife’s infidelity, and he believes that doing so will reveal to him the moral “holy grail” that is proof of the existence of sin. Thomas

More of Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome invents a device that is supposed to diagnose man’s alienation from himself; More believes that there must be a scientific answer for humanity’s spiritual ailments. Like The Second Coming, Love in the Ruins includes references to the Fall of Man and its repercussions. In the novel, Catholic psychiatrist Thomas More has invented an encephalographic device that diagnoses 100 spiritual problems, primarily the malady of angelism-bestialism, or a condition in which a man’s strictly material or spiritual nature outstrips his unified humanity. He calls this device a “More’s Qualitative Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer” (“lapsometer” for short) because, in measuring spiritual problems, it measures how far a person has

“lapsed,” or, in other words, how much the consequences of the Fall of Man have impacted him. In the course of the novel, More finds that his device is not sufficient to permanently cure the ailments of mankind, so he effectively abandons his attempts to do so.

Will Barrett is different from the likes of Lancelot and Thomas More because he is far more theologically direct and even aggressive in his search for God. He shares those other characters’ affinity for drinking and womanizing, and like Lancelot and More,

Will seems to be socially inept, and is becoming more so every day. All three characters often provide only mono-syllabic and noncommittal responses to the conversation or concern of their friends, family, and colleagues. In his earlier novels, Percy offers little insight into whether this quirk is due to apathy, disagreement, bafflement, or whether the protagonist’s mind is on something else entirely. This is especially the case with Thomas

More. In The Second Coming, however, we see Will’s noncommittal, evasive, and piecemeal conversations contrast his intense inner monologues about God’s nature and/or presence.

These monologues eventually evolve to the point where Will demands an answer to the ultimate religious question—the question of God’s existence—literally on pain of his own death. He promises to wrestle with God as Jacob wrestled with the angel, 101 deciding to camp out in a cave with limited supplies and, while there, demand that God provide a sign to prove his existence. Will writes a letter to psychiatrist Sutter Vaught, a character who does not even appear in the novel and who purposely evaded Will’s theological interrogations in the previous novel, The Last Gentleman. The letter serves as a manifesto of Will’s theological frustrations, culminating in his threat to end his life.

Sutter bears the brunt of Will’s anger toward God because Will believes that Sutter has the answers he himself deserves but simply chooses not to divulge them. Thus, where his language toward the rest of humanity is bored and apathetic, his language toward Sutter brims with vitriol: “You seemed to know what was what and you end up how? Marking time with the V.A. and watching M*A*S*H. Toward what end? So you can retire on your pension and watch soaps all day? Quite properly, you refused to give me any answers. Perhaps you didn’t have any. It doesn’t matter now. . . . So much for you” (188).

Following a lengthy rant that attacks believers, unbelievers, Sutter, and God Himself,

Will outlines his demands and how he will achieve them:

Unless I am mistaken, I’ve hit on the perfect, the definitive experiment—as

definitive as the Michelson-Morley experiment which asked a question about the

nature of space which could only be answered by a yes or no, no maybes allowed.

We have had five thousand years of maybes and that is enough. Can you discover

a single flaw in this logic? I’ve got him! No more tricks! No more deus

absconditus! Come out, come out, wherever you are, the game’s over. No, I do

not mean to joke. What I am doing is asking God with the utmost respect to break

his silence. No, not asking. Requiring. (192) 102

If the sign does not appear, Will will remain in the cave and die. This episode occurs after

Will has lived through decades of mental illness and obfuscation—including amnesia, flashbacks, and blackout episodes—and general avoidance of ultimate moral commitment to God or to any other source of authority. Thus, while Gilead’s John Ames becomes less concerned with ontological certainty as he approaches his death, Will Barrett seems to grow more concerned. And while John Ames savors the last weeks of his life, abandoning his claims to knowledge and his desire for ultimate understanding of God,

Will (quite obnoxiously) attempts to force ontological proof by threatening his own death.

As one might expect, God does not provide an immediate ontological response to

Will’s confrontation in the cave. However, by the end of the novel, God has offered a resolution by providing two gifts as a result of the cave confrontation that will bring Will a sense of peace and ultimately lead him back to a desire for God: a lover who will eventually become his wife and a new, edenic environment in which Will can thrive. As I have mentioned before, how this edenic end state was achieved is an anomaly among

Percy’s works, as is the spiritual assurance that comes with it; once Will is comfortably ensconced in this utopian situation, he concludes that he “must have. And will have” God

(360). In other words, God reverses the lapsarian clock, bringing Will even prior to the days of chivalry, holy warfare, violence, struggle, and southern gentlemanhood which characters in his other novels seem to pine after; he brings Will as close as one can get to the pre-lapsarian state without actually reversing the Fall of Man—and Will believes that, in this environment, he will finally find God. 103

Walker Percy’s sense of place has long been a topic of interest to his critics due to his vivid but often ambivalent treatment of the South; he frequently seems transfixed by its beauty alongside its extreme penchant for violence, which has become the stuff of deeply troubled American legends. Walker Percy’s South, however, contains only half- hearted echoes of the South as it once was; a place of chivalry and religiosity ironically linked to extreme racial hatred and violence. In Lancelot, the title character lives in a

Southern plantation that has been taken over by his Yankee bride. Lancelot is relegated to the pigeonnier, where he spends his days writing and drinking whiskey; it seems that his separation from the plantation, which is his birthright, goes hand in hand with his emasculation, which is ultimately actualized by his wife’s infidelity. In a fit of marital vigilantism, Lancelot burns down the entire home after finally proving his wife’s infidelity.

Lancelot may have been longing for what he considers the glory days of the

South’s past. But instead, Percy’s south, as it is represented in his other novels, is not much different from the rest of America. Its land has begun to be bought up and manufactured into golf courses or oil fields; its suburbs are practically indistinguishable from those that exist anywhere else. Percy has frequently remarked on this phenomenon, this

feeling of alienation from American suburban life, the suburb, the country-club,

the business community. There is a difference between my protagonists and so-

called counter culture . . . the leading characters in my books are much more

consciously embarked on some sort of search. . . . One of their beliefs is that the 104

American scene is phony. . . . The characters in my books are embarked on a

much more serious search for meaning. (Abadi-Nagy 4)

Thus, despite the fact that Will “lived in the most Christian nation in the world, The

U.S.A., in the most Christian part of that nation, the South, in the most Christian state in the South, North Carolina, in the most Christian town in North Carolina,” there is nothing about those Christian practices—not in this place, at least—that provide any perspective to the spiritual vacuum Will seems to have identified (13). As Will tries to understand this spiritual emptiness, he starts to draw upon metaphors of return to a homeland. He becomes obsessed with the question of the Jews’ whereabouts, believing that the settlement of the Jews in one place will signal some sort of eschatological resolution. But, oddly, Will never stops to question whether he himself has a place to go; despite the fact that Will is clearly a spiritual sojourner, he does not compare himself to the Jews. The resolution of that spiritual malaise is dependent on Will finding that place.

Will’s ontological confrontation with God in the cave at first appears to be unsuccessful. He becomes ill from a toothache, develops nausea, and stumbles out of the cave and through the roof of a greenhouse occupied by the novel’s other focalizer,

Allison Huber, and with Allison, along with the garden she has established, Will ultimately achieves a resolution to his spiritual dilemma. In the process of seeking knowledge of God—quite literally demanding it—Will happens upon this garden entirely by mistake. In The Second Coming, the lapsarian story of man’s disobedience in seeking knowledge to which he was not entitled comes full circle. It seems that, in the process of seeking knowledge, he is ironically rewarded with the Garden and all that it represents to 105

Christianity. Morrissey sees the same cycle occurring in Paradise Lost; he calls Adam and Eve’s sin, as described by Milton, a “felix culpa,” and he says that Milton

proposes a positive reading of modernity, represented in the poem by the severing

of Adam and Eve’s prior relationship, with God and with each other. That is, by

moving from the destabilizing scientific discoveries to the destabilizing political

breakthroughs, and by possibly casting these changes as both decentering and

recentering, Milton’s Paradise Lost, from the seventeenth century, is postsecular

in several senses of the phrase. (101)

Morrissey goes on to argue that Adam and Eve, based on the fact that they are thus unmoored from their original religious structure, “have achieved a paradise within, happier far” (104).

Allison is another unique character for Percy, most notably because she is a woman; none of Percy’s other novels have female protagonists or female focalizers. The other women in Percy’s novels only serve as sexual interests, even despite their own religious practices; Thomas More’s wife, for example, is described as a “lusty

Presbyterian,” and the various women he has pursued throughout the rest of the novel are various forms of Protestant; Katherine Vaught, the love interest of Will’s youth in The

Last Gentleman, is much the same (383). She seems to exemplify the vacuous version of womanhood Percy implies criticism of in those novels. Allison, who is Katherine’s daughter, represents a generation of women who have been betrayed by the spiritually vacant outcomes of Percy’s “phony” modern America. 106

At the beginning of the novel, Allison has just escaped from a mental institution where she was subjected to shock treatments that left her with amnesia, only a very rudimentary understanding of human social systems, and strange speech patterns few people can understand. Allison, who has been thoroughly betrayed by her parents and modern America’s reliance on various therapeutic responses to spiritual problems, is physically and mentally damaged. As she writes to herself in a journal in the form of instructions for her own escape following her upcoming shock treatment, “You’ll feel like a rape victim in every way but one” (29). Once Allison has escaped, she spends just a few hours in the city before naturally gravitating toward a solitary life on a homestead she has inherited outside of town. The only remaining building is a greenhouse at the edge of the woods, where she installs a stove and begins to grow plants and live a subsistent lifestyle. Over time, she becomes content and even happy with her situation and establishes a home.

The pre-lapsarian vision of church fathers like St. Thomas Aquinas begins to emerge with Allison and her placement in the greenhouse. The greenhouse and its surroundings offer a perfect climate to maintain a subsistent lifestyle; her greenhouse is fed by air from the caves that is always the same temperature, and the cave supplies enough air that it could warm several other buildings to a uniform temperature throughout the year. Thus, Allison seems to have happened upon a second Eden as St.

Thomas Aquinas described it when he adopted Damascene’s idea that “Paradise was permeated with the all pervading brightness of a temperate, pure, and exquisite atmosphere, and decked with ever-flowering plants” and argued that “We must hold that 107 paradise was situated in a most temperate situation, whether on the equator or elsewhere.”1

Allison’s attitude toward work, and other characters’ desire for it, are particularly telling. To Allison, work is a singular joy that aids in her physical recovery from the damage done by her shock treatments. Percy’s description of the recovery process is satisfying, as it threads Allison’s work together with eating, sleeping, and relaxation, inviting the reader to take pleasure in Allison’s progress. These descriptions again recall the work of Aquinas who explains, “It is written (Genesis 2:15): ‘The Lord God took man and placed in the paradise of pleasure, to dress and keep it.’” And “God placed man in paradise that He might Himself work in man and keep him, by sanctifying him (for if this work cease, man at once relapses into darkness, as the air grows dark when the light ceases to shine); and by keeping man from all corruption and evil” [emphasis added].2

The problem of corruption and evil stemming from the lack of useful work is a common theme throughout The Second Coming. But the fruits of evil are different than one might expect. Rather than resorting to infidelity, drugs, or crime, the characters become susceptible to what Percy calls “living death” (271): a mindless spiritual apathy the characters themselves aren’t aware they suffer from. These people, as Percy describes them in one of his articles, are “alienated, abstracted, isolated, disoriented and so on, and this in the very face of unprecedented secular riches” (“Reflections on the Novelist’s

Characters and the Language”144). As Will puts it, “How can the great suck of self ever hope to be a fat cat dozing in the sun?” (17). In several of Percy’s novels, the characters

1. First Part, Question 102, Article 2, reply to objection four. 2. Article 3. 108 are beset by some sort of mental or spiritual illness that manifests itself most strongly in situations of leisure or play that belong in the comfortable life of suburbia and its ubiquitous golf courses. The presence of games and activities normally speaks to a shallow culture that requires a distraction, any kind of distraction, for expending time and mental activity. For his protagonists, this often occurs at the golf course, where Thomas

More of Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome often finds himself drunk and befuddled with some or other female who has accompanied him for a tryst through no real courtly effort of his own. In The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming, the golf course is the home of the new suburban aristocracy, where “at any rate stands Will

Barrett on the edge of a gorge in old Carolina, a talented agreeable wealthy man living in as pleasant an environment as one can imagine and yet who is thinking of putting a bullet in his brain” (14). It is on the golf green that Will has a mid-life crisis and blacks out without warning. At the end of the novel, Will and Allison work together to establish a utopia that depends on the steady climate of the cave air and the healthy, natural desire for work as described by Aquinas.

This resolution creates a portrait of how people might ideally survive and thrive in their imperfect, fallen world without compromising their nature as God created them; they can still accomplish physical work and make spiritual progress toward God without the pain of spiritual rootlessness. As I have mentioned before, this is a more complete type of resolution than appears in Percy’s earlier novels, and that resolution depends on place. Mark Johnson has written extensively on the primacy of place in Walker Percy’s novels, explaining that Percy’s spiritual seekers are searching for an “authentic mode of 109 living in the world” versus the morally and intellectually shallow environments of contemporary suburbia that ultimately produced the spiritual turmoil of Will and the physical and mental suffering of Allison: “on the one hand, his characters are particularly concerned with their place in the world; on the other, they are never at home in the world, but see themselves as wanderers and pilgrims” (63). Johnson wrote these remarks before

The Second Coming was published and an “authentic” environment as an end state was fully realized. In The Last Gentleman, Will is musing over purchasing a pre-fabricated mansion, a “Gold Medallion Home,” weighing this option against his desire to live a nomadic life in the camper Katherine’s family has lent him, to wander the desert like the

Israelites. However, by the end of The Second Coming, he is preparing to take up residence in the ruined greenhouse on Allison’s land until one of his retiree friends is able to construct for him a log cabin so he can live a sustainable and modest existence in the hills.

Johnson’s question of “authenticity,” alongside Percy’s criticism of suburban life and its bland predictability raises difficult questions about man’s purpose from day-today versus questions of an ultimate metaphysical purpose, like union with God, which could potentially be achieved within the minutes it takes to seek reconciliation or receive a sacrament. These questions have to do with the nature of time, as time is obviously the cause of this requirement for man’s activity to populate the hours of the day somehow, as

Allison frequently ponders. When she begins to establish her life in the greenhouse, realizing that it will be much the same from day to day once she has settled in, she asks herself 110

How to live. How do you live? My life expectancy is approximately another fifty

or sixty years. What to do? One good sign: I can already feel myself coming down

to myself. From giant red star Betelgeuse, Dr. Duk’s favorite, trying to expand

and fan out and take in and please the whole universe (that was me!), a great

gaseous fake of a star, collapsing down to white dwarf Sirius, my favorite,

diamond bright and diamond hard, indestructible by comets, meteors, people. (93)

Here, Allison is referring to her psychotherapist, who insisted that Allison heal herself by becoming involved with the other patients and the shallow activities of the mental hospital, versus being allowed personal space and solitude for introversion and self- reflection. Allison relates the passage of time with recovery, self-knowledge, and self- refinement. This inward growth is infinite and could continue perpetually. Allison further identifies work with the possibilities of problem-solving, reflecting that

With pulleys and ropes and time to plan, one could move anything. Now that she

thought of it, why couldn’t anyone do anything he or she wished, given the tools

and the time? It was hard to understand why scientists had not long ago solved the

problems of the world. Were they, the scientists, serious? How could one not

solve any problem, once you put your mind to it, had forty years, and people

didn’t bother you? Problems were for solving. (234-235)

Allison’s acknowledgement of the forty years she has available to her, versus any other number, seems to be a reference to the forty years during which Moses and his people wandered aimlessly throughout the desert, seeking the resolution to their spiritual turmoil that would come with arriving at the promised land. Here, Percy compares Allison’s 111 ability to problem-solve with the spiritual troubles of the Jews and their inability, for many years, to come to terms with God. Allison may take the same amount of time, but her path to a solution is a direct path with a foreseeable resolution to it; where the Jews frequently doubted the faithfulness or even the existence of God, Allison never doubts that an answer to her own problems is on the horizon.

Given Will’s own spiritual rootlessness and his fascination with the Jews and their travels, Allison seems to be an ideal spiritual companion. The problems that plague Will on a regular basis do not seem to affect Allison. She is completely comfortable with her place in the world because her place is Eden. Until Will meets Allison, he is deeply cynical about life’s purpose. Will reflects that “There is no mystery. The only mystery is that nothing changes. Nothing really happens. Marriages, births, deaths, terrible wars that had changed nothing. . . . Only one event had ever happened to him in his life. Everything else that had happened afterwards was a non-event” (51-52). Here, Will is referring to an incident when he was hunting with his father, and his father’s attempt to murder Will and then commit suicide. Will’s father was eventually successful in taking his own life, but

Will was only wounded in the incident. Throughout the novel, Will grapples with the memory of his father, trying to determine whether or not his father’s suicide was an appropriate response to the spiritual vacancy of the modern world. At one point, Will falls into the same line of thinking that Lancelot did—that sin and violence are a way to come back in touch with reality—and John McClure has written that this is often the trajectory of postsecular narratives: “Mortal illness, the horrors of war, extreme experiences of displacement are represented in these novels as painfully enabling sources 112 of self transformation” (11). When Will is shot at for mysterious reasons, Will reflects that “No, it was too simple. That would mean having a simple enemy. The world is crazier than that. He smiled and nodded: I know why it is better to be shot at on a Sunday afternoon than not be shot at. Because it means maybe there is an enemy after all” (21).

Will’s bringing the notion of “mystery” into the sequence of time is problematic, as God is the only true mystery, and God is ostensibly outside of time. Will’s remark that

“the only mystery is that nothing changes” flips the theology of the omnipotent God on its head, as God, the only mystery, is also the only thing that does not change. Will’s morbid fascination with eschatology and the movement of the Jews indicate that he is begging for some form of religious transience. Just as Lancelot needed proof of the existence of sin, Will needs proof of cosmological adversity, failing to realize that the entire drama of cosmological adversity is playing out within himself alongside his literal process of approaching and finding the garden.

Allison, however, is entirely aware that her self is the location of this cosmological conflict; her “self” has been embattled since she was sent to the asylum, and she can only recover and recuperate her self when she finally escapes. Having been through such invasive psychological treatment, without her consent, Allison can at least appreciate the miracle of self-determination. For this reason, Allison does not have the spiritual shortcomings of those who have become distant from God. Allison’s process of installing herself in the garden and making a home of it goes hand in hand with Allison’s recovery from the forced self-alienation she has suffered in psychotherapy, to the point that she has to take direction from a journal she wrote to herself prior to her last round of 113 shock treatments: “INSTRUCTIONS FROM MYSELF TO MYSELF.” The directive voice in the journal is entirely different from the voice of the Allison that results. Allison can only communicate in bits and pieces of words, usually in the form of a question or a half-hearted comment. To Allison, taking the direction of the version of herself who wrote the journal is like taking direction from a stranger.

Allison is not the only character of Percy’s to fall victim to alienation of herself, and as Johnson has noted, “An alienated homelessness is a controlling concept in much of Percy’s fiction.” He cites Percy’s remark that “Alienation, after all, is nothing more or less than a very ancient, orthodox Christian doctrine. Man is alienated by the nature of his being here. He is here as a stranger and as a pilgrim” (55). With “being here,” Johnson is referring to man’s residence on earth, a state of affairs Will seems to find extremely unnatural, unjust, and deserving of explanation, as he explains in his letter to Sutter:

The present-day unbeliever is crazy because he finds himself born into a world of

endless wonders, having no notion how he got here, a world in which he eats,

sleeps, shits, fucks, works, grows old, gets sick, and dies, and is quite content to

have it so. Not once in his entire life does it cross his mind to say to himself that

his situation is preposterous, that an explanation is due him and to demand such

an explanation and to refuse to play out another act of the farce until an

explanation is forthcoming. (189)

Believers, Will reflects, are just as intolerable as non-believers because they “think they know the reason why we find ourselves in this ludicrous predicament yet act for all the world as if they don’t” (190). It is in the process of demanding an explanation that Will 114 falls through Allison’s roof and into the little world she has constructed for herself.

Allison, and the edenic home she is constructing, is God’s answer to Will’s spiritual quandary. As was the case with Allison, readers might presume that the place will help to heal Will’s sense of alienation from God. Thus, according to The Second Coming, there is a resolution to the spiritual post-lapsarian malaise of the modern world. This resolution occurs when characters are able to cast aside socially constructed versions of religion or well-being and go straight back to the garden itself and all that the garden implies; the process of the return to the garden is synonymous with the process of recovering one’s unadulterated self, as I will continue to explain. This state of affairs—the physical garden alongside a version of the self that has reversed the process of alienation that comes from living in the modern world—would seem to be the ultimate and most extreme version of

Christian nostalgia.

While most critics emphasize the Christian characteristics and context of the novel’s resolution, few have examined the resolution as a pre-lapsarian metaphor. Ted L.

Estess reads Percy’s narrative arc as an eschatology in which an old era comes to ruin and is replaced by a new one. He also identifies the novel’s emphasis on the question of time and to what extent nostalgia impacts the narrative:

For Barrett’s father, the fabulous yonder is the past: he simply was born too late.

For Barrett, the fabulous yonder lies in the future: he simply was born too soon.

The result of their respective eschatologies is the same: the present loses its

significance; anger and nostalgia, the moods of the dispossessed, engulf them

both. . . . To begin again, and once more to recover a bond to the reality of one’s 115

life, requires an event—and a person—sufficiently surprising, sufficiently grace-

full, to counterbalance, even offset, the father’s curse, the mother’s demand. (74)

Ultimately, Estess argues that, “Finally, though at times ambiguously, even tentatively, it makes a simple and profoundly reassuring affirmation: endings occur; new beginnings are possible. This affirmation reflects Walker Percy’s moorings in the Christian tradition”

(63). Later, he notes that this drama plays out with our two main characters: “Together,

Will and Allison exemplify the eschatological drama of beginning and ending that everywhere interests Walker Percy” (65). Estess identifies several points of allegory in the novel, comparing Will and Allison to the Prodigal Son, for example, but does not place them in the Garden; the sunny future of Will and Allison is merely “an eschatological embrace of life in the present” (83). To Estess, The Second Coming is about the future, about a cycle of death and then rebirth that moves forward with a linear sense of purpose, and several characteristics of the novel support that reading. And yet, the new world Will Barrett is born into is not merely a second chance with the right person; he has, in many ways, been returned to the Garden of Eden. One wonders whether a return to the Garden of Eden in the midst of a modern world that continues to function just outside its borders, is truly an eschatology. Another necessary consideration is the cyclical nature of these narratives Estess identifies. To examine some of these questions, I will consider Percy’s use of the pre-lapsarian setting alongside similar settings in postmodern and post-secular literature.

As John McClure points out in Partial Faiths, utopian narratives often appear in postsecular works of fiction; he usually identifies these utopias as new, spiritually 116 invigorated communities that are often built upon the ruins of the religious past, sometimes literally. These locations appear most commonly at the end of a narrative, at a time of spiritual re-birth, that often involves a community that has been cast off by a local religious or secular majority. He points to examples from several postsecular works, such as Tony Kushner’s play, Angels in America, in which a gay AIDS patient named Prior

Walters, after an intense spiritual struggle, gathers with various other New York City social cast-offs at the Bethesda statue in Central Park to emphasize his spiritual pursuit of

“more life.” The reference to Bethesda is significant because in the Gospel, Bethesda, or

“house of grace,” was the location of one of Jesus’s healing miracles, so the site tends to symbolize healing. One might conclude either that Prior and his followers will get the life they seek, or that they will ironically be refused the support of their community despite their attachment to a statue that references Christian themes of healing and mercy.

McClure also references the marginalized but intensely spiritual communities that sometimes appear in Toni Morrison’s novels, such as Paradise and Beloved; in Paradise, a group of women who have been subject to domestic violence or the harsh judgment of their social circles have fled to the safety of an abandoned convent and founded a new spiritual community in its walls. In Beloved, Baby Suggs holds independent spiritual gatherings in the forest for freed slaves. McClure also references the scene at the end of

Don DeLillo’s White Noise, in which the neighborhood gathers to witness a sunset together, reflecting that “The transformation produced at the overpass event does not in itself sponsor some new commitment, on the part of the congregants, to social responsibility. But DeLillo has already suggested that any practice of responsibility will 117 require, as a prerequisite, some such shift” (93). And though McClure never calls any of these communities edenic, he emphasizes their aspects of spiritual recovery. In these communities, “people are born again, the dead are brought back to life, gods walk the

Earth, and windows open in the walls of the secular world” (4). The triumph over death and the return of gods to earth—the reversal of two major consequences of the fall— suggests a sense of lapsarian resolution.

However, as McClure argues, these spiritual communities never reconstruct a theology or spiritual resolution to the problems that first brought them to this ambiguous spiritual end state. He writes that, “the communities founded or discovered by postsecular pilgrims are dramatically small, fragile, and transitory—the very opposite of the dogmatic faith communities and vast megachurches that are now a troubling feature of the American landscape” (4). He points to an example in Angels in America; he writes of the main character, Prior Walters,

his understanding of the extraordinary experiences that have overtaken him

remains ambiguous, unsettled. Have his visions been hallucinatory products of

disease and drugs, or has he actually been in touch with beings of a different,

supernatural order? . . . Kushner makes it clear in his stage instructions that he

wants to leave these questions hanging, or open us to the possibility that the world

is shot through with mysterious agents and energies without insisting on this or

endorsing any particular supernatural system. (2)

Instead, these individuals focus on mysticism and experiential versus rational and intellectual spirituality. So it is interesting, and maybe even appropriate, to read The 118

Second Coming alongside these other works and McClure’s readings of them to reflect on whether the same tenets of postsecular spirituality, particularly as it pertains to spiritual turmoil and resolution might apply to religious works that respond to the problems of secularism.

Critics like Andrew Hoogheem, who has written extensively on Percy, have already argued in favor of postsecular readings of religious works, arguing that

McClure’s book

largely omits consideration of works by authors who consciously identify with

and write from within the context of the Abrahamic religious traditions. . . . if a

postsecular interpretive framework reveals hitherto unnoticed common ground

between religious and secular imaginations, complicating both as it does so; if it

generates intriguing new readings of texts whose meaning seemed exhausted; if it

brings into conversation surprisingly diverse partners—then and only then will it

have moved our understanding of religion and the secular forward. (93)

This argument occurs in the context of Hoogheem’s reading of Percy’s peculiar nonfiction work, Lost in the Cosmos, another narrative with post-lapsarian themes that direct its characters toward an edenic resolution. Hoogheem argues that the seemingly incoherent work is actually narrative-driven, citing Michael Mikolaczak’s description of the work as “carefully structured and highly controlled” (95). The narrative, as

Hoogheem describes it, sounds much like that of The Second Coming, and most of

Percy’s other novels, for that matter; as Hooghem describes it, “In the last years of the twentieth century, a reasonably successful, intelligent middle-class individual, finding 119 himself strangely disenchanted with and even alienated from the culture in which he has unquestioningly lived his entire life—indeed, he hardly feels as though he knows himself—sets out in search of clues that will help make sense of his predicament” (97).

But Hoogheem recognizes that the narrative does little to provide a rational, theologically sound answer to the characters’ spiritual “predicament.” Indeed, “Percy’s answers throughout the book are maddeningly partial and evasive,” in the vein of the spiritual answers Sutter provided, or did not provide (101). Instead, Percy offers a glimpse at a future state that looks much like the second Eden in The Second Coming, just one that matches the science fiction appeal of Lost in the Cosmos. A man and a woman who have been on a space voyage (the captain and surgeon of the ship) return to earth, which has been ravaged by nuclear war. They find a relatively unradiated spot in

Tennessee and live a pastoral life. Hoogheem argues that this conclusion is not necessarily an argument for complete return to a Catholic lifestyle because, as the trajectory of the work makes clear, easy theological answers are not forthcoming. Instead, we find a protagonist who, like Will Barrett, is “more or less at peace with himself”

(102). Hoogheem considers but dismisses the possibility of a reading of this climate as a second Eden: “life in the Lost Cove is not a Christian paradise, but fundamentally a repetition of life in the old twentieth century. The catastrophe, whether edenic fall or something else, remains in effect” (102).

And yet, I would argue that Percy’s postsecular climate is close enough to the original Eden to make living in the world bearable for those who cannot come to terms with modernity. After all, this is the way a postsecular utopia functions; it is a place of 120 refuge and renewal for those who have been unable to thrive in either religious or secular environments, or, as John McClure explains, “Religion returns . . . when worldly life becomes intolerable” (10). Like the characters in the novels McClure describes, Will

Barrett and Allison Huber find themselves grappling with a culture that is toxic to them, particularly for spiritual reasons, and they abandon that culture to create a new community of their own. And yet, for obvious reasons, Percy’s use of the postsecular formula seems a little ironic. After all, the Catholic Church has existed for two thousand years and has just as frequently been a source as a victim of persecution. It has a spiritual community, and that community is not a ramshackle group of spiritual castaways; it is one of the largest and most lasting religious demographics on the planet.

The reason Percy’s novels are able to sustain these postsecular environments, despite his Catholic religiosity, is that his characters are in some sense unmoored from the Church, or even the secularized community that would otherwise act as a proxy for the church. Will’s father felt so alienated from his community and what it represented that he attempted to murder Will himself, believing that there was no hope for Will in a world where he could not be reconciled with his broader community. Will addresses his dead father with the same direct manner he addresses Sutter and God but with less aggression; he addresses his father as one would address a companion who is of a similar mind but with a slightly differing opinion: “Father, the difference between you and me is that you were so angry you wanted no part of the way this life is and yourself in it and me in it too. You aimed only to make an end and you did. Very well, perhaps you were right.

But I aim to find out” (134). Will’s flashbacks to the suicide episode continue to occur 121 throughout the novel, most frequently in Will’s moments of existential crisis; by agreeing that he feels alienated from the world around him, Will feels that his father has in some way “won,” meaning that he should not live. Allison’s support system, including her parents and her doctors, tried to force her into communion with her local community, the very culture Will’s father could not bear, at great cost to her mental and spiritual health.

Thus, the failures of Will and Allison’s southern Christian community at large to provide a spiritual home for its constituents is central to the novel and perhaps what it has most in common with the postsecular works as McClure describes them, even though it is not quite in the same spiritual vein as the works of Morrison, Pynchon, and DeLillo.

Also, alongside these postsecular narratives, Percy’s spiritual resolution seems rather dull, even secular; it lacks the magical realism of narratives like Angels in America,

Paradise, and Beloved. Despite being steeped in the Catholic tradition, in which mysticism is a common occurrence, Will’s postsecular community is not at all mystical.

The residents of the new community he plans to build are ordinary men and women who simply want freedom and the ability to work. Will Barrett rescues two old men from a nursing home community; the men are pining for their youth and want to reinvigorate themselves with physical work. Will hires one to become a gardener and one to build cabins for the community. The emphasis is on a lifestyle that prioritizes mental presence in the here-and-now, one that casts off the mindless and pointless tasks that come with living in suburbia in favor of contact with the world as God made it: as a garden to be worked in and cared for, or an “authentic environment” as Johnson calls it (74). 122

The question of an “authentic environment” proper to humanity is one that might be overlooked in the study of contemporary American literature since the topic has been so robustly examined in earlier period studies. Questions of land and land use are so much more frequently found in earlier American or British novels; the likes of Moll

Flanders and Robinson Crusoe, for example, must tangle with the implications of their fresh new world. The tired and wasted world of the twentieth century seems a much less appealing topic. And yet, Edens still have their place in contemporary American literature, and in an article about Flannery O’Connor, Richard Giannone explains why this was the case. He describes a postwar fascination toward ascetic environments and communities, partly due to their popularization through Thomas Merton and his Seven

Storey Mountain.

Richard Giannone explains that these themes apply to O’Connor and her work because, in a sense, O’Connor lived an ascetic life. Giannone points out that Flannery

O’Connor “became a monk despite herself” when she was diagnosed with lupus and therefore had to retire to her mother’s home in rural Georgia, arguing that “O’Connor’s writing, we now see, flourished in isolation, probably because of seclusion. The Georgia desert became the vital ground of O’Connor’s success” (50). “Once its modern artistic possibilities were opened, the desert life of solitude and inner warfare provided the ideal against which O’Connor would henceforth judge the heartrending dissensions of the society around her. . . . In short, the history of desert trials is O’Connor’s canonical story”

(50). As desert lifestyles play out in her writing, instead of illustrating the public 123 repercussions of social injustices such as racism, O’Connor’s characters tend to feel privately and deeply the pain inflicted by these injustices.

Thus, Walker Percy was not the only twentieth century Catholic writer fascinated with eschatology and spiritual cults, but his approach differed quite a bit from

O’Connor’s, and most certainly from Merton’s, most obviously because Percy’s characters have obvious irascible appetites that Percy does not seem interested in dismissing at the end of the novel, even as these individuals improve spiritually. Where

Flannery O’Connor sees the world as a cult of “brutality and materialism” in equal measure, Percy’s world is one of spiritual apathy and materialism; in Percy’s world, brutality is a means many use to attempt to overcome that apathy and provide some definition to the good and evil forces that are supposedly at war, but violence as a means of spiritual triangulation is only ever temporarily successful.

Most interesting are Giannone’s ideas regarding monastic treatment of the body, which O’Connor seemed to share. For both O’Connor and the desert fathers, the body was “the battleground of their warfare. . . . By dominating their bodies, the hermits were free to resist the physical impulses that violated their search for holiness” (49). The purpose of early monastic life, he explains, was for spiritual seekers “to find their true selves that could draw close to God” (48), and that process was “correspondingly austere,” unlike Allison’s process of finding her true self, which involves a large cozy stove, beer, steak, and eventually, sex and southern comfort food. In Percy’s narrative, unholy physical impulses become holy purely based on situation; in Eden, where the residents are innocent, food is plentiful and sex is not sinful. And yet, the ascetic process 124 of seeking in O’Connor and Merton brings readers to the same natural conclusion.

Eventually, the characters in this desert environment work together to reachieve something similar to Eden, though that ending is a long time and great effort in the making.

Despite the novel’s clear parallels to the Garden of Eden, Percy’s obvious criticism of the moral and intellectual shortcomings of modern existence, and the seemingly satisfying resolution of the Garden of Eden—all characteristics that would seem to imply an anti-postsecular religiosity—Percy does not seem interested in providing a roadmap to the outcome that Will and Allison ultimately achieve, which suggests a postsecular avoidance of theology. But as Percy himself has written,

If you are a Catholic and you are also a novelist, you do not preach in your

novels. In fact you’d better not. That is not your vocation. One is what one is. And

if you are a Catholic, you can’t help but be informed by a certain view of the way

things are, the way people are. And people are usually in a fix. And that is what

one writes about, people and the fixes they’re in. (“Characters and Language”

144)

He argues that, “Paradoxically, and strangely and wonderfully, one finds the answer not in the conventional Catholic lexicon but in the very extremity of the Postmodern predicament” (145).

However, we must consider in our reading that Will Barrett finds the garden because of the demands he made of God. In Will’s case, it seems that he has only made this demand of God because he has a sensitive conscience and an inner desire for God 125 that everyone else in his community has managed to ignore. Allison seems to be of the same intellectual stripe. Thus, if The Second Coming does not offer much in the way of theological and ontological conclusions about God, his existence, and the steps we must take based on those conclusions, it points to the power of taking the first spiritual step; acknowledging the power and primacy of the self and seeking God as a response: “Where is it? What is missing? Where did it go? I won’t have it! Why this sadness here? Don’t stand for it! Get up! Leave! Let the boat people sit down! Go live in a cave until you’ve found the thief who is robbing you. But at least protest. Stop, thief! What is missing?

God? Find him!” (273). The Will Barrett who is so apathetic in his conversations with his peers is startlingly demanding in this scenario, and in the other scenarios where he demands answers from God and from Sutter Vaught. This behavior defines Will Barrett as a postsecular character, one who refuses to accept the failings of the modern world, who refuses to accept the consequences of the fall, and goes out in search of God as a response. And the God who responds is different from the kind of God we might expect; this God is the God that Sutter has already found in his quiet and simple life in the desert where he offers people medical care.

Despite this “authentic environment” and the similarities it bears to Canaan, the

Garden of Eden, or some other setting pre-ordained by God, God never appears. Will and

Allison are married by a priest, the utopia Will and Allison have created seems even more secular than the enchanted postsecular atmosphere in which “gods appear but not God,” but at the same time, Will insists that God is within his grasp. What God does provide in

The Second Coming to ameliorate the problems of “the living death” is a solution to that 126 problem without a conclusive answer to the question at hand. In many ways, the answer is experiential, but it is not mystical as many postsecular faith experiences become when theology, dogma, and rationalism are dismissed. And yet, while the solution is not rational, it is at least practical; Will and Allison have everything they need to create a comfortable home and to provide for the needs of everyone who lives in their community. Will’s confidence that he “must have. And will have” God in this spiritual climate seems to imply a potential beatific vision in the vein of both edenic and eschatological narratives; humanity only had beatific vision in the beginning and only will again in the very end.

What is perhaps the strangest and most unique element of this conclusion is that it deviates from the more Catholic and more theologically clear post-lapsarian implications of Percy’s other novels, particularly Love in the Ruins. Love in the Ruins shares a narrative arc that is very similar to The Second Coming, but its insights into post- lapsarian spiritual turmoil offer far different theological conclusions. In Love in the

Ruins, healing and redemption depend upon resolution of the precise spiritual problems that brought physical suffering to the world. These resolutions depend upon the theological combination of sacrament and social life, while the topic of sacrament, so central to Catholicism, is nearly absent from The Second Coming. As a result, in Love in the Ruins, Percy emphasizes that disobedience to God is what originally led to physical suffering in the Fall, whereas The Second Coming is less interested in sin and more interested in spiritual apathy. The emphasis on the interconnectedness of physical and spiritual strife recurs throughout Love in the Ruins. More’s “lapsometer” produces 127 physiological effects to get a spiritual result, but part of the problem with More’s patients is that their bodies and souls are somewhat at odds, or, in other words, are subject to the

Cartesian gap.

According to the Biblical model of suffering and redemption, if spiritual transgressions precede physical suffering, spiritual healing should result – as far as it can

– in some manner of physical healing. Predictably, the novel goes on to suggest that the appropriate cure to spiritual problems is through spiritual means. For Catholicism, spiritual cures exist in a number of mediums, including blessings, prayers, and sacrament, sacrament being the most powerful. Sacrament is the primary source of spiritual healing in Love in the Ruins and has to do with the physical, spiritual, and social dimensions of human life. Thomas More explains that his wife, who is not Catholic, does not understand the extent of the sacraments’ power, which, among other things, serves to unify body and soul:

What she didn’t understand, she being spiritual and seeing religion as spirit, was

that it took religion to save me from the spirit world, from orbiting the earth like

Lucifer and the angels, that it took nothing less than touching the thread of the

misty interstates and eating Christ himself to make me mortal man again and let

me inhabit my own flesh and love her in the morning. (254)

In other words, the sacraments may help to prevent the problem of angelism-bestialism that More hopes to cure with his “lapsometer,” but oddly, they are not entirely fit to heal it. The missing piece of the healing equation, which is prevalent throughout the Catholic theology of the sacraments, is social life. The lapse had a severe impact on social life, 128 especially on relationships between men and women; Eve’s temptation of Adam to sin, and Adam’s subsequent blaming of Eve for his own decisions, sowed initial discord, which was followed by the physical consequences of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden, including the pain that women would experience in childbirth. This set of consequences establishes the relationship between physical and spiritual consequences of sin, and also how they relate to social life, points to a solution to the novel’s theological problems. Catholic theologian Nicholas Halligan illustrates the communal nature of the sacraments in his work, The Sacraments and their Celebration. He explains that

“Liturgical actions themselves are not private actions but celebrations of the Church itself” (3). In his discussion of the Eucharist, Halligan also explains that the unity of the members of the Church through the Eucharist transcends the physical world and even unites “the worshipping Church in heaven” (54).

For John Sykes, reconciliation with the social sphere is necessary for More to overcome his spiritual problems. Sykes notes that, in Percy’s characters, “Their cold indifference to the consequences of their actions threatens their very humanity. Before they can find forgiveness, they reason, they must come under some felt conviction of sin,” or, in other words, the spiritual healing that comes with the sacrament of reconciliation (53). Sykes goes so far as to prescribe the church as the proper place to achieve healing, noting that More’s “distracting preoccupation with the self impoverishes his sense of the church, making it difficult for him to envision it as a healing community”

(54). What Sykes and others have failed to recognize is that the Catholic Church’s ability 129 to function as a healing community primarily results from its status as a source of sacrament; the Catholic sacraments cannot exist outside of the context of the Church.

Thus, More’s constant reminding of himself, “Physician, heal thyself!” is ironic, because More cannot possibly heal himself—no one can. His healing can only be achieved through Christ or through the social context of the Church. And the only manner of healing that fully occurs within a social context, with respect for both the physical and the spiritual nature of man, is sacrament. Though Percy recognizes that sacraments are important for spiritual healing, by making social healing precede sacramental healing, Percy undercuts the true significance of the social nature of man.

Ignoring the social dimension of sacrament is what results in an unreliable and incomplete reconciliation between the physical and spiritual aspects of man.

The Eden of More’s Paradise (the actual name of his community) regained at the end of the novel is a strange place. The various dichotomous groups who were previously at war – from the liberals to the “knothead” conservatives to the whites and blacks, have finally reconciled. Even male and female have paired off. Paradise now belongs primarily to the Bantu population, who have achieved ownership of the land on a legal technicality.

The social sphere is temporarily and superficially resolved for everyone, but it does not seem to lead to an ideal spiritual state for anyone but Thomas More. The Bantu community has abandoned Christianity to worship a god of their own creation, Longhu6.

More continues his work as a doctor, earning extra money by presiding over a weekly

“fat class” for local ladies, and even plans to enter politics. People of different faiths use the Chapel to worship on Christmas Eve – “Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing 130 hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him” (396). Catholics join in a Protestant hymn. Still, the environment is one of placid complacency as people continue to pursue the same distractions they did prior to the disaster with More’s lapsometer.

There is much to be considered in the difference between these two versions of the garden at the end of Percy’s novels and how his respective characters go about achieving that paradise. Love in the Ruins may reach a different result than The Second

Coming simply because it addresses a different set of concerns; while Love in the Ruins is about failed attempts to heal spiritual ailments, The Second Coming envisions a world that is ailing spiritually but is for the most part unaware of or unconcerned with that fact.

Where Love in the Ruins considers sin the primary reason for spiritual ailment, The

Second Coming implies that spiritual apathy is responsible for separation from God.

While none of these perspectives necessarily conflict with one another, the perspective

Percy offers in The Second Coming aligns more closely with the notion of

“postsecularism” as John McClure and Lee Morrissey have described it.

The paradise that Will Barrett achieves is much like one of the “partial faiths”

McClure describes in his book. Barrett has secured some elements of Christian life but is not participating in the sacraments, aside from marriage, which he does not seem interested in treating as sacrament; he finds a priest to perform the ceremony as a matter of course. It may seem ironic that, after Will Barrett demands such a conclusive answer from God, he happens upon an Eden of this kind, but the fact that Will does achieve an

Eden at the end of his postsecular journey means that The Second Coming is well worth consideration alongside other utopian postsecular narratives. Its environment is certainly 131 unique; through this Eden, Percy makes distinctions between the implications of a rational and a practical life, and between mysticism and everyday human experience of

God. Where in postsecular works of literature, rationalism (which is often conflated with theology) and mysticism (which is often conflated with experience) are automatically assumed to be in conflict with one another, Percy shows that the practicalities of everyday life and the joys of every experience can go hand in hand, and this combination is an achievable resolution to all that was lost in the Fall.

132

Chapter 4: Religious Nostalgia and Modern Gnosticism in the work of Don DeLillo

Like Walker Percy, Don DeLillo has illustrated a cultural nostalgia for a religious past in his novels. In Underworld (1997), he describes the activities of a New York City nun named Sister Edgar who pines for “the old rugged faith” that no longer seems to exist in her religious community (811). In DeLillo’s most recent novel, Zero K (2016), a young man learning about the scientific possibility of extending human life reflects momentarily that he prefers the passion and danger of the past, even if it comes at the price of suffering and death. These themes are unsurprising from DeLillo who, like Percy, comes from a Catholic background and is well acquainted with the vibrant polarities of good and evil, virtue and sin, and life and death so prominent in that religion’s theology, art, and traditions. One is reminded of the idealistic, Shakespeare-loving Savage in Aldous

Huxley’s Brave New World, who rejects the utopia of the new world order and instead reflects on the power of “Exposing what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death and danger dare, even for an eggshell. Isn’t there something in that? Quite apart from

God—though of course God would be a reason for it. Isn’t there something in living 133 dangerously? . . . I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin” (214-215).

Some aspects of these yearnings would seem to align with the postsecular canon as described by John McClure, in the characters who find themselves disenchanted with the material promises of secularism and a scientific world that, having cast aside the values of religions that privilege suffering and redemption, seek to heal and forget those conflicts once and for all. However, while these characters gravitate toward spirituality, they do not turn toward organized religion and certainly not toward the unsavory elements of religion that had been discarded by secularism, particularly the polarizing question of sin, which often aligns with religious discourse regarding the problems of suffering and death. Unlike DeLillo, many of these authors in the postsecular realm seem to dismiss the problem of death just as frequently as they dismiss the question of sin; it is one of the elements of religion postsecularism has found unworthy of appropriation and preservation. Such is the case with Prior Walter of Angels in America, an AIDS patient who ironically preaches the gospel of “more life,” even as his prognosis is uncertain. The magical realism so common in postsecular narratives also enables this convenient dismissal of death, as in Toni Morrison’s Paradise, in which the group of wayward women massacred by local fundamentalists mystically vanish into thin air rather than dying miserably of their wounds. This is not the case in the work of DeLillo. In DeLillo’s earlier novels, the stark, gritty reality of death is ever-present and extreme instances of it, like when it occurs in great numbers or as the result of epic catastrophes, are often even portrayed as sublime, as critics like Leonard Wilcox have noted. In other novels, like 134

White Noise (1985), Point Omega (2010), and The Body Artist (2001), DeLillo illustrates a modern suburban world in which death is a harsh reality lurking just beneath the surface, never entirely subdued; characters become deeply troubled and unsettled from the gnostic modern realm—the realm in which the comforts of modern life have allowed humanity to set pain and suffering aside—when death finally and inevitably breaks through.

DeLillo expresses the problems of modern gnosticism and abandonment of “the old rugged faith” most directly in his most recent novel, Zero K (2016). In the novel, a young man named Jeff Lockhart visits a mysterious cryogenic preservation facility at the request of his father to say a final goodbye to his terminally ill stepmother; she has decided to have her body preserved in the facility until such time that medical resources are available to cure her disease and grant her eternal youth. Part of the facility’s self- promotion is a propaganda campaign involving television screens that descend from the ceiling at random and show clips of mass human chaos, panic, suffering, and death. Jeff must weigh his moral objections to the facility’s project against the obvious horrors it seems to have conquered once and for all. What the novel ultimately concludes is that a person cannot experience actualization when he or she rejects the lived experience of the material world, painful and bewildering as it may be. This conclusion is particularly relevant to postmodern and postsecular studies because DeLillo makes this argument in the context of the division between the power of language, or “the word,” and the realm of experience. Though DeLillo has often been described as granting the word a religious significance, Zero K, and especially its pluralistic invocation of both Eastern and Western 135 mysticism, makes clear DeLillo’s perspective that the word, and the literary realm in general, must be treated as a lesser companion to lived experience, unmediated by language. This is especially true of spiritual and religious experience; there is no transcendence otherwise.

To DeLillo, religion is a total immersion in the world of experience at any cost, even death, and his characters frequently push the envelope of suffering and danger to attain that experience. The literary-religious notion of the “word,” however, does serve as a powerful mode of worship and even as a coping mechanism for those who struggle to take the ultimate leap into union with God or transcendent reality. Thus, most significant to the definition of DeLillo’s novels as “postsecular” works is their rejection of modern gnosticism. DeLillo rejects one “new age” spirituality in favor of another version that is far more challenging, demanding, and maintains poignant traces of the religious past. He primarily achieves this through his writing on death, the one aspect of human life that can interrupt even the most impeccable order the American dollar can buy; until Zero K, that is, when DeLillo challenges even that outcome.

Don DeLillo is one of the authors John McClure features in Partial Faiths as a paradigm of postsecular authorship, along with other contemporary authors like Toni

Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, and Louise Erdrich. He considers DeLillo part of this milieu because his work “resacralizes the world in the mode of modernism by subtly loosening the fabric of everyday reality so that something else—presence or emptiness—shines through and by introducing, often without any fanfare, a series of mysterious interruptions of quotidian reality” (65). McClure argues that DeLillo does not place the 136 supernatural in magical factors that somehow intervene in everyday life; he sees the supernatural as

emanating not from some transcendental beyond but from the world itself and its

inhabitants. Thus his most successful characters are converted to a certain

earthliness, reconnected to a viscerally experienced, sacramentally infused world

that is neither secular nor spiritual in the common sense of these terms. . . . There

is no hint of triumphalism in DeLillo’s work, only the suggestion that a preferable

way—weakened and postsecular—may be available, for some people, for some

time, in a world dominated by religious and secular fundamentalisms. (65).

When McClure describes the notion of “triumphalism,” he means a full-circle return to religion that rarely happens in postsecular literature as he describes it. McClure makes mention of DeLillo’s religious background; DeLillo was raised Catholic and therefore has retained some of its ways of understanding the transcendent order of the enchanted cosmos, but he ultimately rejects Catholicism itself. According to McClure’s reading,

DeLillo identifies certain Catholic traditions with violence, hostility, and unethical systems of power. He writes that, according to DeLillo, “the most dangerous aspects of religion—its promises of ultimate security, its insistence on absolute authority, its repudiation of dialogue and difference—threaten human efforts to build a more peaceful equitable world. DeLillo’s fiction relentlessly exposes the religious and quasi-religious roots of our contemporary woes.” But he notes that “DeLillo also suggests, in work after work, that the only proper way of addressing these woes will likewise be religious” (64).

Thus, DeLillo is hesitant to incorporate certain Catholic elements into his descriptions of 137 spirituality. However, one particular aspect of Catholicism DeLillo thinks is acceptable, according to McClure, is sacramental communion, which is a theme that happens in a

“weakened” fashion in postsecular literature as McClure has described; the postsecular communities I described in chapter three are all examples of communities that experience a religious form of communion in one way or another. And yet, McClure seems to miss the essence of DeLillo’s religious references. He has not simply loosened the fabric of reality to let moments of magical realism bleed through. In DeLillo’s cosmos, the transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient God—a God of unfathomable power—exists, though he is much less accessible than he was prior to the events that distanced humanity from him, whether one would identify that event as the fall or the encroachment of secularization.

It is interesting, given DeLillo’s fascination with the topic of death, that McClure writes that DeLillo’s brand of postsecularism “speaks the language of survival” (63). In

DeLillo’s work,

the old gods thrive, mostly in virulent forms, at the margins of the global capitalist

system he so brilliantly maps, in foreign and domestic zones of misery populated

variously by Islamic militants, ecstatic Hindu pilgrims, Moonies, and

Pentacostals. But religious ways of seeing and being survive as well at its

ostensibly secular core, shaping consciousness and conduct among brokers,

businessmen, and professors. (64)

Some critics, like McClure, have suggested that DeLillo simply appropriates Eastern religions or fringe religions (according to the Western world, at least) to imbue a sense of 138 mysticism into his work. I would argue that Western and Eastern mysticism appear in his work in equal measure, and neither has complete ownership of the transcendent realm.

Instead, mystics and businessmen alike reach for that transcendent realm, and Zero K shows that both are equally susceptible to the empty promises of science and secularism.

Death is a common topic in most of DeLillo’s novels. Perhaps most memorably,

White Noise is the story of a professor of “Hitler Studies” who, ironically, is terrified of death and seeks a cure for this phobia. Libra follows the story of Lee Harvey Oswald as he is drawn into the CIA’s JFK assassination plot. Mao II describes the final days of a terminally ill writer as he becomes involved in a suicidal attempt to rescue another writer from a group of terrorists. More recently, Point Omega describes two men who seek a woman who has vanished into the desert and is assumed dead, and The Body Artist examines the quotidian life of a woman who has recently lost her partner to suicide.

Of all DeLillo’s novels, however, death occurs most viscerally in Underworld.

The novel takes place in New York City, which DeLillo describes in far more particularity than he does in some of his later novels, beginning with vibrant descriptions of the unwashed hordes of people in the stadium and the garbage they eventually heave onto the field in celebration; these dirty people have “jaws working at the sweaty meat and grease bubbles flurrying on their tongues” (13), and even the miraculous ball itself, an item that inspires obsession in several collectors throughout the novel, does not escape the filth. As DeLillo describes it, the ball is “the thing they rub up and scuff and sweat on” (45). 139

New York is populated by characters of various backgrounds and cultures, frequently experiencing brushes with death, violence, disease, or poverty. DeLillo also offers vivid depictions of the trappings of biological human life as people live it through food, sex, drugs, and other physical elements that keep his characters as embodied as a fictional character possibly can be. One of the novel’s main characters, Nick Shay, is a waste management specialist who grapples with one of the most grotesque elements of humanity: its waste. Packaging and disposing of garbage becomes an obsession, which

DeLillo describes in religious terms; Nick reflects that “Waste is a religious thing. We entomb contaminated waste with a sense of reverence and dread. . . . The Jesuits taught me to examine things for second meanings and deeper connections. Were they thinking about waste?” (88), later declaring that he and his co-workers “were the Church Fathers of waste in all its transmutations” (102). Thus, Nick’s religious practice becomes a matter of fixating on the very worst realities of human life and distancing himself from them accordingly, rather than experiencing the good with the bad. Sister Edgar is a similar case; though she has devoted her life to serving the community, often in the very worst neighborhoods with the most troubled demographics, she also happens to be a germophobe who avoids actual human contact.

These narratives—narratives of harsh realities and avoidance of them—are interwoven with the stories of two parallel sublime events that occur at the beginning of the novel. The first is Bobby Thomson’s home run in the 1951 Giants/Dodgers game for the National League championship, also known as “the shot heard round the world”; though the Dodgers had all but won the game, Thomson’s home run meant that the 140

Giants ultimately prevailed with a score of five to four. Even following the real event, sportswriter Red Smith offered a commentary describing this moment in unmistakably sublime terms: “Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again” (126). This is one of many instances in which the intervention of the sublime usurps the power of humanity’s attempts to impose order on its surroundings, especially through the vehicle of language, as I will consider in more detail later.

The second sublime event, occurring on the same day, is Russia’s test detonation of a nuclear weapon, an event which overshadows the Giants/Dodgers game through the eyes of J. Edgar Hoover, present at the game and aware of the nuclear test. He ponders their similarities as he reflects on the problem of death, looking at a magazine page featuring the chaotic scene of the Pieter Bruegel painting, The Triumph of Death and compares it to the events on the field:

He takes the page from his face—it is a wrenching effort—and looks at the people

on the field. Those who are happy and dazed. Those who run around the bases

calling out the score. The ones who are so excited they won’t sleep tonight. Those

whose team has lost. The ones who taunt the losers. The fathers who will hurry

home and tell their sons what they have seen. The husbands who will surprise

their wives with flowers and chocolate-covered cherries. The fans pressed

together at the clubhouse steps chanting the players’ names. The fans having

fistfights on the subway going home. The screamers and berserkers. The old 141

friends who meet by accident our near second base. Those who will light the city

with their bliss. (51)

Critic Leonard Wilcox refers to sublime moments such as these as “the event,” or the tuché. According to Wilcox, in DeLillo’s work, the sublime frequently takes the form of violence, catastrophes, or some combination thereof. He emphasizes those that could only be made possible by the technology of the modern world; the “airborne toxic event” of

White Noise and the atomic bomb in Underworld are two examples. Like the troubled

Will Barrett in Percy’s The Second Coming, DeLillo’s characters seem to consider violence and death as the only real “events” to trouble the surface of comfortable

American suburban life, and suburban Americans are so desperate for a brush with reality, they embrace it. If one equates the malaise of suburban boredom with secularism, as DeLillo’s characters sometimes seem to do, the natural result is to equate religious experience with catastrophic disruptions of suburban order. Wilcox explains that, when it comes to fascination with the power of the bomb, “the drive is toward plentitude, the unmediated vision of apocalypse, the ineffable moment when all is revealed. In this sense there is a mystical impulse associated with the sublime and unsayable power of the bomb” (130). Wilcox cites the episode in which Eric Deming imagines the missile as some divine being and realizes “It made him want to be Catholic” (131); from this episode, Wilcox concludes that “For nuclear apocalypse promises precisely that—an unveiling, a revelation of divine truth” (131). Thus, Wilcox calls the joy of the game “an eros haunted by Thanatos,” an apt description for much of the spirit of DeLillo’s work when it involves death (122). 142

Therefore, McClure’s description of DeLillo as a postsecular author “subtly loosening the fabric of everyday reality” does not encompass the entire spectrum of

DeLillo’s representation of the sublime, or of God. DeLillo, like Marilynne Robinson, emphasizes the sublime power and ineffability of God, though he does so a little more aggressively. When Wilcox describes the tuché or the punctum, he tends to mean disasters or violence of cosmological proportions, but DeLillo gives God that same sublime role. Underworld is full of these moments of punctum, and they often include frank discussion of God. All other kinds of punctum are simply reflections of God and the way that humanity experiences God. The clearest example is in DeLillo’s descriptions of sex, a methodical act with certain rules and tendencies that ends (or doesn’t) in an orgasm, which DeLillo describes as a sublime event that cannot be understood as the sum of the processes that led to it. The parallel is stated plainly when the character Nick Shay, the waste management specialist, has an affair while discussing his belief in God and his reading of The Cloud of Unknowing, the work of an anonymous medieval Christian mystic. Nick relates,

I read this book and began to think of God as a secret, a long unlighted tunnel, on

and on. This was my wretched attempt to understand our blankness in the face of

God’s enormity. This is what I respected about God. He keeps his secret. And I

tried to approach God through his secret, his unknowability. Maybe we can know

God through love or prayer or through visions or through LSD but we can’t know

him through the intellect. The Cloud tells us this. And so I learned to respect the

power of secrets. We approach God through his unmadeness. We are made, 143

created. God is unmade. How can we attempt to know such a being? We don’t

know him. (295)

Nick’s description of God as “unmade” versus those who are “made” recalls the chaotic

“unmaking” of the fans at the stadium in the Giants/Dodgers game and the destructive power of Russia’s nuclear weapon.

Nick explains to Donna, the subject of his affair, that the book recommends the reader approach God by choosing one simple word to describe the “intent that fixes us to the idea of God.” Throughout his life, Nick has wracked his brain to select such a word and cannot. The closest he can come to making that selection is the phrase todo y nada,

“all and nothing.” Nick asks Donna to describe a real-world example that captures the essence of the phrase, and Donna unhesitatingly answers that it describes sex perfectly, and Nick agrees. In this same scene, Nick tells Donna what he has never told anyone, not even his wife: that when he was a teenager, he shot and killed a family acquaintance; he thinks it was an accident, or tells himself so, but he cannot be sure. The enormity of taking a life, the situation of sex, and the mystical question of God’s ontology all converge in this unlikely setting—a conference at a nondescript American hotel and with a complete stranger Nick will most likely never encounter again.

The question of language and its sufficiency to describe God or to help humanity experience God is as common a topic in DeLillo’s novels as the topic of death. Often, language, or “the word,” as Christianity would call it, figures as a means to achieving union with God; this dynamic is deeply woven into the fabric of Christian theology, as

God’s son, or the logos, is how people are redeemed and brought to God. It is also worth 144 mentioning that God’s son was also the only person of the trinity who was subjected to suffering and death.

Amy Hungerford has theorized DeLillo’s theology of the word, arguing that

“DeLillo’s novels 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” (348). She observes 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. This

transfer does not, moreover, mark him as either doctrinaire or conservative in the

sense that one might think; rather, it marks the way he skirts doctrine while

maintaining a Catholic understanding of immanent transcendence. (343)

To Hungerford, Underworld is significant because “it plays out, in Catholic terms, the mystical structures articulated in [his] earlier work” (344). Hungerford argues throughout her book, Postmodern Belief, that in postmodern works that deal with religion, these aspects of mysticism and transcendence are somehow transferred from their origins in their respective traditions and supplanted into the literary realm, and she argues that such is the case with DeLillo’s fiction.

And yet, I would argue that Hungerford does not give sufficient credit to Wilcox’s notion of the punctum, the tuche, or moments of elevated consciousness in general. Much as DeLillo may be an aficionado of rhythm and meter, these only exist to usher in some form of contact with the sublime. One example of this dynamic is DeLillo’s descriptions 145 of the rules and outcomes of a game of baseball, which, like sex, he seems to relate to the relationship between religious methodology and practice and then the actual emergence of the sublime. DeLillo describes game rules in his novel, Players, as “almost metaphysical” (LeClair 22).

In a 1982 interview, fifteen years prior to Underworld’s publication, DeLillo described his fascination with games and his reason for writing about them, explaining that

People leading lives of almost total freedom and possibility may secretly crave

rules and boundaries, some kind of control in their lives. Most games are carefully

structured. They satisfy a sense of order and they even have an element of dignity

about them. In Ratner’s Star someone says, ‘Strict rules add dignity to a game.’

There are many games in Ratner’s Star and the book is full of adults acting like

children, which is another reason why people play games, of course. (LeClair, 21-

22)

These rules, however, cannot possibly explain or govern the moment of one particularly spectacular home run that releases a stadium already brimming with excitement into total frenzied havoc. If religion is the rules and act of carrying out the game, the home run— which is sublime experience of God or the supernatural—is the entire reason for the existence and practice of those rules. As it happens, one can play the game of baseball for years and never have such an experience. The most important takeaway from these moments of the sublime is that they do not occur spontaneously, independent of a structure or system. Each of these moments depends somewhat on process. In other 146 words, there may be mystical experiences that depend upon the word as a vehicle, as individual Christian redemption and union with God depend upon relationship with

Christ, or the logos.

For this reason, it seems that Nick’s obsession with sorting and packaging trash— as would be an obsession with the rules of baseball or with rational approaches to theology—is an attempt at control with almost religious connotations, as some critics, like Kathryn Ludwig, have noted. The obvious problem, however, is that his obsession with organization and separation—or, in other words, in method—prevents experience, which is the only proper mode of contact with the sublime; the sublime cannot be relegated to words, rules, systems, or rationalism, though each of these processes can create a bridge to the sublime. Ludwig has aptly made a connection between this problem of self-separation and Charles Taylor’s theory of the “buffered” or “porous” self in relation to God. According to Taylor, the pre-modern consciousness did not identify any boundary between the self and God and all his supernatural state implied. On the other hand, modern humanity, having identified the role of the mind in the interpretation and disposition of God and theology, has a “buffered” experience of God. Ludwig argues that

“In the case of DeLillo’s characters . . . turning consists in movement from attempts at

‘buffering’ to the acceptance of ‘porousness.’ In Underworld, the postsecular shows up as the recognition that we are and always have been porous, despite our claims to modern autonomy” (85).

The question of “buffering” occurs most poignantly in the story of Underworld’s

Sister Edgar and Esmeralda, a young girl who lives among the ruins of one of the 147 impoverished neighborhoods Sister Edgar serves. Though Sister Edgar buffers herself from the unwashed poor with gloves and various other materials to prevent contact,

Esmeralda, a forgotten soul, helps Sister Edgar set aside her trepidations: “Sister Edgar, seeing a radiant grace in the girl, a reprieve from the Wall’s endless distress, even a source of personal hope, a goad to the old rugged faith. All heaven trembles when a soul swings in the wind—save her from danger, bring her to candles and ashes and palms, to belief in the mystical body” (811). Sister Edgar’s consideration of the “old rugged faith” references the traditional hymn, “The Old Rugged Cross,” which highlights the religious dimensions of suffering and death. The song describes the cross as “An emblem of suffering and shame / And I love that old Cross where the dearest and best / For a world of lost sinners was slain.” Later, the song describes the cross as “stained with blood so divine” (Bennard).

The song’s emphasis on suffering is an appropriate reference for the story of

Esmeralda. Tragically, the girl is eventually captured, raped, and tossed aside like garbage—like the garbage Nick Shay made his life’s work to compartmentalize and discard. It is this instance that prompts Sister Edgar to abandon her phobias and reach out to the world, and in doing so, she finally achieves transcendence. Unfortunately, Sister

Edgar’s moment of spiritual discovery was apparently not enough to earn her a place in

Heaven; instead, she is uploaded into cyberspace, where she has the experience of all the information knowable to humanity, at least at that moment. She has found what she feared in life, “The faith of suspicion and unreality. The faith that replaces God with radioactivity, the power of alpha particles and the all-knowing systems that shape them, 148 the endless fitted links” (251). Though the novel never explicitly says that Sister Edgar escapes cyberspace in favor of unity with God in some form of Heaven, she seems to do so with her encounter with the word, “Peace,” which draws her back into the realm of lived experience: “the tissued grain of the deskwood alive in light, the thick lived tenor of things, the argument of things to be seen and eaten, the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray, and the dense measures of experience in a random glance, the monk’s candle reflected in the slope of the phone, hours marked in Roman numerals, and the glaze of the wax, and the curl of the braided wick” (827). The word is a “whisper of reconciliation, a word extending itself ever outward, the tone of agreement or treaty, the tone of repose, the sense of mollifying silence . . . a word that carries the sunlit ardor of an object deep in drenching noon, the argument of binding touch.” In other words, the logos has properly served Sister Edgar as a vehicle to transcendence, though it is not transcendence itself, as readers of DeLillo have sometimes suggested.

The grit, garbage, and chaos of Underworld’s New York City are a stark contrast to the sparse detail of DeLillo’s later novels, like Point Omega (2010), The Body Artist

(2001), and especially Zero K (2016). The characters are reminiscent of Alice in

Wonderland, who, having been unmoored from the world of reality, is in a freefall and, as she falls, passes by physical objects that situate her only temporarily and do not seem to exist in the context of a unified whole. And yet, despite the downplay of physical detail, death is still central to these novels, suggesting that while these characters may have abandoned the gritty 80s and the gritty climes of New York City in favor of a more comfortable and sheltered suburban world, the problem of death still lurks just beneath 149 the surface. In The Body Artist, for example, a woman’s lover dies before either of the characters are named or described in any physical detail, on a day like any other, featuring some of the quotidian items of everyday life: “It happened this final morning that they were here at the same time, in the kitchen, and they shambled past each other to get things out of cabinets and drawers and then waited one for the other by the sink or fridge, still a little puddled in dream melt, and she ran tap water over the blueberries bunched in her hand and closed her eyes to breathe the savor rising” (9). Readers are only apprised of the details of the man’s life after his death and through the written form of an obituary. Though the reader might assume that the woman is suffering from the tragedy of losing her companion, DeLillo provides very few hints to the depth of her suffering.

Point Omega acknowledges this willful attempt to keep suffering beneath the surface. The protagonist notes that “Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story” (45). Later in the novel, a female character disappears, and though the characters assume that she has been murdered in the desert, the novel offers no physical detail of her demise. The novel is framed by two instances of the protagonist visiting an artistic display of Psycho being played on a large screen in slow motion and where viewers are treated to Norman Bates, described as

“scary bland,” committing a grisly murder (115). Both of these novels suggest a fascination with death in the modern world, a world in which death is not a constant peril 150 but something prevented and postponed by various safeguards modernity has made possible.

Both of these novels seem like a gentle afterthought to White Noise, packed as it is with an overflow of commodities alongside frenzied emotional and mental grappling with death. John McClure rightly explains that the purpose of the commercial world is to subdue humanity’s terror in the face of death; marketers are able to persuade buyers that their products will provide stability, cleanliness, and convenience, all things that help humans feel that they have a sense of control over their environment and their lives.

McClure writes that, in White Noise,

Humans who shop for manufactured goods in order to assuage their fears of

death, who chant product names as charms against anxiety, and who turn to

officially sanctioned ‘experts’ and politicians for comforting constructions of

reality are caught in a particularly vicious circle. They depend for consolation on

the very forces that are orchestrating ecological catastrophe. DeLillo suggests as

well that the new church [of secular commercialism] is even less successful than

the old in helping people assuage the terrors of the self. For if the traditional faiths

offered a similar sort of ‘magic’ to the many—taught them that they could

conquer uncertainty and mortality through specific sets of ritualized practices—

these same traditions also offered believers the opportunity to acknowledge and

grapple with what terrified them: to see themselves as mortal, human authority as

imperfect, the cosmos as mysterious. (89-90) 151

Ultimately, Jack’s wife finds what she thinks is an antidote to this fear in the form of a pill offered by a quack testing his product on volunteers in a motel room in exchange for sex. Babette’s quiet reverence for the process of testing the drug, and her refusal to apologize for her infidelity, suggest a religious devotion to the drug and its properties.

And yet, even if the drug had been successful, it would only have resulted in abolishing terror of death and not death itself. At the end of the novel, Jack has accepted that he has no power over the mysterious realities of life and death, and this realization frees him from his devotion to the commercial world.

DeLillo addresses this modern denial of and fascination with death most directly in Zero K, in which the main character, Jeff, visits a mysterious cryogenic preservation facility, called “The Convergence,” where his terminally ill stepmother, Artis, is soon to be interred. Ostensibly, Artis will be awakened at the point when humanity has developed technology to heal her disease and make her young again. The novel is titled after the temperature of zero kelvins, the temperature at which all atomic movement ceases, and the facility’s dramatic exaggeration of the much less extreme temperature at which the bodies are actually cryogenically preserved. Thus, on its face, the novel recalls the atomic and subatomic horrors outlined in Underworld and White Noise, from the splitting of atoms to the mysterious toxic materials in the “airborne toxic event” to the airborne pathogens Sister Edgar dreads. Those horrors do not occur in the preservation facility, as it is supposed to be sterile, blast-proof, and resistant to any conceivable means of destruction. If Underworld “explores the residue of the real harbored in the cultural 152 unconscious,” as Leonard Wilcox describes it, Zero K seeks to imagine and explore an environment that sets “the real” and all its unsavory residues aside (122).

Like in The Body Artist and Point Omega, the sense of place in Zero K contrasts sharply with that of Underworld due to its lack of physical detail. Underworld takes place in New York City, including its gritty underworld, as the title indicates. Unlike

Underworld, which takes place in the very epicenter of the West and all it represents, which is continuously emphasized by references to the culture and history of the city,

Zero K takes place in an ambiguous location somewhere on the border between East and

West—it is quite literally on that border, as it is located somewhere in the wilds of

Pakistan, a nation that only exists because of a forced divide between the Islam and

Hinduism that both resided in India prior to its partitioning. Still, Jeff’s father is hesitant to pinpoint the actual physical location of the Convergence.

The facility itself, in its construction, décor, and even in the people who staff it and the food they serve, lacks geographic particularity and is nondescript in an unsettling way. The facility is staffed by persons of ambiguous race, whom Jeff attempts to humanize by naming and imagining fictional biographies for, or, as he describes it, “a tepid attempt to read meaning into their appearance” (226). The facility’s clients are for the most part nondescript as well; Jeff never has the opportunity to meet or speak with them, and the only characteristic they have that Jeff can be certain of is that they have vast amounts of money, otherwise they would be relegated to the suffering outside world like everyone else. When he broaches the subject of the place’s unsettling lack of detail or sense of place with his father, Ross, Ross explains that “This is land traveled by 153 nomads for thousands of years. Sheepherders in open country. It’s not battered and compacted by history. History is buried here. Thirty years ago Artis worked on a dig somewhere north and east of here, near China. History in burial mounds. We’re outside the limits. We’re forgetting everything we knew” (31). The Convergence has abandoned the particular events of history alongside the physical characteristics of the present.

Where in his earlier novels, a transcendent version of death occurs or threatens to occur in an episode of mass destruction, in Zero K, characters can forego death through a lengthy process involving medical diagnoses, paperwork, legal proceedings, counseling, and several physical processes to prepare the body for an awakening that may never occur. Part of the irony of this state of affairs is its almost worshipful focus on method which, as I explained earlier, can also exist as an avenue to the sublime. Jeff ultimately realizes that the people of the Convergence as pilgrims without a destination, which prompts him to question the state of affairs these individuals are attempting to achieve.

The Convergence makes no mention of what makes survival at all costs worth it, only what this form of survival seeks to avoid. It is one final divorce from the reality that was already slipping away from the world DeLillo’s characters have lived in.

Unlike Jack in White Noise, Jeff is not particularly afraid of death and is able to approach the Convergence’s project objectively, unlike the patrons of the convergence, who seem devoted to its cause as members of a cult might be. He reacts to his stepmother’s decision in the way a family member might react when they realize a loved one has joined a cult following. He is suspicious of those who run the facility since their project is so radical and because they do so for monetary gain; he also seems to have 154 moral qualms with cutting short his stepmother’s life and is not convinced that the project will actually succeed. Throughout the novel, he attempts to crack the code of the meaning and intent behind the preservation facility as an outsider would, drawing upon a metaphor of the many doors in the hall which he assumes are fake. Jeff secretly believes that the doors to nowhere symbolize the false promise of resurrection, the false assumption that there is a future beyond the freezing of the body. His hesitation becomes adamant opposition when his father makes the choice to “go with her”—to join Artis in preservation—despite being entirely able-bodied. In other words, Jeff’s father has rejected life itself in favor of an ambiguous spiritual enterprise which by its very nature rejects the human experience. To attempt to ground himself to the material world, Jeff thinks about his relationship with his partner, Emma. Jeff tries to convince himself that

Emma and the life he and Emma live together are a more intense version of reality, if not

“the real” as Wilcox would call it, using similar mind tricks that he does with the staff at the Convergence. He also tries to rely upon the word, almost as a form of religious practice, pondering Emma’s status as “lover,” carefully examining the word, and recalls romantic moments with her in which they recite the names of obscure Soviet cities. He also obsesses over the physical particularity of his moments with her, as he can recall them. And yet, once Jeff returns to the real world outside of the Convergence, these particular details fail to mark reality, and Jeff refers to them as “the soporifics of normalcy, my days in middling drift” (209). Jeff recalls specific conversations with

Emma in which he acknowledges his own insignificance:

“Suit and tie.” 155

“Yes.”

“Close shave, shined shoes.”

“Yes.”

“You look forward to this.”

“Yes I do.”

“Will this transform you?”

“It will remind me that this is the man I am.”

“Down deep,” she said.

“Whatever there is of deep.” (170)

Jeff and Emma’s most direct connection to “the real” is Emma’s teenage son,

Stak, who was adopted from the Ukraine, ostensibly saved from a life of violence and suffering in his deliverance into the tepid world of American comfort and security, which he does not seem to embrace. To Stak, death is the stuff of hobbies; he amuses himself by making bets with an underground organization about when and where the next terror attack will occur. Stak is also fascinated with ontology, particularly the ideas of Martin

Heidegger, which Jeff tries to dismiss by noting that Heidegger was sympathetic to various Nazi ideologies. However, Jeff fails to offer a better solution, only thinking to himself, “Stak had his own twisted history to think about, mass starvation of his forebears” (214). Throughout Zero K and Underworld, history is a powerful force to mark the sublime’s trajectory and intervention in the material world. In Underworld, for example, DeLillo pairs the historical significance of the nuclear “shot” that occurred on the same day as the miracle of Bobby Thomson’s home run, as Red Smith described. 156

Critics have often described DeLillo’s tendency to disperse moments of glory and horror throughout his portrayal of the past. Kathryn Ludwig explains that the reason for this interruption of the sublime in descriptions of history is because DeLillo’s work advocates looking to the future. She writes that “as Paul Gleason suggests, instead of urging, as

Eliot seems to, a return to the idealized past—a time of religious uncertainties—DeLillo thrusts his readers farther into the uncertainty of the present so that we may ‘reinvent and redeem the waste that defines America in the second half of the twentieth century’” (89).

Still, the word “redemption” literally means a returning to an earlier state meaning, coming from the Latin word redemptionem, which means “a buying back, releasing, ransoming.” There can be no redemption, per se, without becoming what one was before.

Ludwig’s argument raises the important question of whether or not the spiritual future, regardless of the interplay of the sublime, can ever be completely free of the religious past. Wilcox offers an explanation to how the past remains present in the spiritual realm:

“Such moments of punctum or tuché destabilize a linear sense of narrative continuity and evoke a multidirectional temporality, a commingling of past and present, where one never captures that past as ‘past.’ Rather, the past is grasped in belated and retroactive revision in the light of later phases of understanding” (129-130). The Convergence attempts to imagine a world in which the past does not exist, evident by Ross’s statement, “We’re forgetting everything we knew” (31).

Ross’s statement is not entirely true. Despite the Convergence’s isolation and its supposed imperviousness to physical damage, the horrors of death and violence appear there in the form of carefully managed propaganda; it appears that one cannot discuss the 157 significance of eternal life without a constant reminder of the magnitude of death and suffering. As Jeff wanders aimlessly about the facility, screens emerge spontaneously from the ceiling or the wall and show those very things; impersonal depictions of nuclear war, disease, and contamination. Like Underworld and White Noise, the world of Zero K contains propaganda from every angle—it appears everywhere and when Jeff least expects it—but where the narratives in Underworld and White Noise are peppered with incoherent bits and pieces of corporate advertising, of companies with their own names, characters, and identities, the preservation facility simply displays the horror of the life of the masses, alongside slogans describing what the preservation facility claims to provide:

“It’s an escape from our personal mortality. Catastrophe. It overwhelms what is weak and fearful in our bodies and minds. We face the end but not alone. We lose ourselves in the storm.” Jeff says that this propaganda is “Nicely translated but I didn’t believe a word of it. . . . It didn’t apply to real people, real fear” (66).

Jeff eventually becomes desperate for “the real,” and ironically seeks the

Convergence’s videos of suffering and death to provide proof of reality: “This was a welcome sight. The serial force of images would overwhelm my sense of floating in time.

I needed the outside world, whatever the impact” (235). Jeff has become Aldous

Huxley’s Savage, realizing in the midst of this seemingly utopian state of affairs that he prefers the danger of the outside world. Nick Shay admits something similar in

Underworld, musing,

I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the

earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled 158

and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of

disarray when I walked the real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and

ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself. (810)

As Jeff yearns for the material world, DeLillo further emphasizes the ways in which the Convergence has isolated itself from the material world. One of the facility’s anonymous spokespeople explains ironically that the Convergence aims to “establish a consciousness that blends with the environment,” but, as we find out, the patrons of the

Convergence are no more likely to “blend with the environment” than is the human waste in Underworld that is carefully disposed into receptacles surrounded by multiple plastic barriers (64). What Artis and the leaders of the Convergence fail to realize that preservation of the body can only occur at the expense of sealing it off from the rest of the world, including even God, regardless of whether one examines the problem from an

Eastern or Western perspective. In Eastern traditions, and especially Hinduism, meditation and withdrawing into the Self, divine as the Self may be, are only temporary means for a brush with divinity and not actual union with divinity. That union can only be achieved by moksha, which means release from the body, something Artis will never achieve if she remains in the Convergence. And, of course, in Western religions, union with God can also only be achieved through the finality of death.

Ironically, the facility’s choice of the name “Convergence” recalls the work of

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest and philosopher. In one of his most influential works, The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard describes a state of transcendent consciousness toward which all of creation is supposed to aspire and evolve, which he 159 calls the “Omega Point,” the concept from which the title of DeLillo’s Point Omega is drawn. One of Teilhard’s defining statements regarding the Omega Point, a statement

Max Bégouën quotes in his forward of Teilhard’s lesser-known work, Building the Earth

(and popularized by the title of one of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories), is “Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge” (13).3 Teilhard’s acknowledgement of the necessity of remaining true to the individual self, while at the same time pursuing spiritual unity with the rest of creation, provides important insight into the ironic problem of self-centeredness and self-isolation in the Convergence.

DeLillo has long been fascinated with the notion of collective consciousness, especially in crowds during emotionally charged events such as the 1951 National

League game. In his interview with Maria Nadotti, DeLillo describes the psychological effect of being part of a crowd:

The need is not only to abandon responsibility, but to abandon one’s self, to

escape the weight of being and to exist within a collective chorus—to lose not

only one’s own identity but one’s own language, to be in the midst of a million

people who are screaming the same word, always the same word forever. For

some it amounts to a sort of ecstasy. . . . Yes, it’s frightening, but it is also

interesting and can be beautiful to behold. Think of Mecca. . . . There is an

enormous structure, the Kaaba, a great black cube. The pilgrims run around it,

3. It is unclear whether Teilhard ever described his theory in these exact words or whether this quote is a paraphrase by Bégouën that became popularized and accepted as the original words of Teilhard. 160

thousands of people running in a circle around a gigantic black cube. It’s

fantastic. . . . and I might even like to run with them. (91).

DeLillo’s idea of “a million people who are screaming the same word . . . forever,” recalls Nick Shay’s search for the right word to describe God, which for him is the closest he can come to an act of worship. In Zero K, Artis lights upon a similar idea with her repetition of the phrase “for ever more.” She tells Jeff, “I’m so eager. I can’t tell you.

To do this thing. Enter another dimension. And then return. For ever more. A word I say to myself. Again and again. So beautiful. For ever more. Say it. And say it. And say it”

(53).

While, in the past, mysticism and particularly references to Eastern religion have been treated as a novelty, as they often are in Western culture, DeLillo brings forth religious approaches in both Western and Eastern religion to examine this odd state of affairs, in which humanity has rejected suffering and death through an ultimately selfish and isolating process since it is prohibitively expensive for all but a very small segment of the population and preserves the individual in a pod with no contact with the outside world. Jeff finds traces of both Eastern and Western mysticism in one of the staff members who, like the atheist nun in White Noise, does not accept the beliefs of his institution and serves as a simple voice of reason throughout Jeff’s interrogation of the site. He tells Jeff, “I want to die and be finished forever. Don’t you want to die? What’s the point of living if we don’t die at the end of it?” (40). Despite describing his history as

“post-evangelist,” the man resists relegation to one religious tradition or another. When

Jeff tries to place the origin of the man’s cloak, saying it makes him look like a monk, the 161 man says “Russian monks, Greek monks. . . . Carthusian monks, Franciscan monks,

Tibetan monks. Monks in Japan, monks in the Sinai desert” (43). The man, who Jeff refers to as “the Monk,” describes a wide range of religious experiences throughout the world, describing his worship in Tibet, where he chose to circumambulate holy sites while repeatedly prostrating himself face-first in the snow. The Monk’s worship is wholehearted and embraces pain and suffering as part of the process of worship. He ends his tale by saying, “The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it”

(89).

DeLillo’s deft treatment of Eastern and Western religious references throughout the novel address the problem from both sides, ultimately arguing not for an ambiguous version of mysticism that glosses over death but confronts it directly and even joyously, along with all of the other sublime elements of human life. Mysticism is only an act of mental worship that appreciates the primacy of the sublime, especially as it relates to

God.

Artis has much in common with the Monk. Like the Monk, she has traveled the world and has had a wide range of cultural experiences. Therefore, despite her choice to cut her imperfect mortal life short, Artis is a character who would seem to have a capacity to appreciate the primacy of the sublime. She tells Jeff,

I’m aware that when we see something we are only getting a measure of

information, a sense, an inkling of what is really there to see. I don’t know the

details or the terminology but I do know that the optic nerve is not telling the full 162

truth. We’re seeing only intimations. . . . I know that research is being done here,

somewhere in this complex, on future models of human vision. (45)

Later in the conversation, she says, “I will be reborn into a deeper and truer reality. Lines of brilliant light, every material thing in its fullness, a holy object” (47). Jeff tries to place

Artis’s conclusion somewhere within her vast education and cultural experience, noting that “She had worked in a number of countries, taught in several universities. She had observed, identified, investigated and explained many levels of human development. But holy objects, where were they?” He dismisses the absence of the holy in Artis’s dialogue by concluding that the future Artis hoped to achieve “was transcendence, the promise of a lyric intensity outside the measure of normal experience” (47-48); he is simply not certain that the Convergence is a valid route to achieving it. And yet, the moment Jeff sees Artis in her pod is a described in a way a reader might not expect, given Jeff’s skepticism and resistance to her choice. It is only toward the end of the novel that Jeff actually sees people frozen in their “pods,” and the bodies are ordered with uniform, scientific precision: “All pods faced in the same direction, dozens, then hundreds, and our path took us through the middle of these structured ranks. The bodies were arranged across an enormous floor space, people of various skin color, uniformly positioned, eyes closed, arms crossed on chest, legs pressed tight, no signs of excess flesh” (256). Artis’s final state, however, is much different than the state of the masses. Jeff describes her in almost sublime terms:

Her body seemed lit from within. She stood erect, on her toes, shaved head tilted

upward, eyes closed, breasts firm. It was an idealized human, encased, but it was 163

also Artis. Her arms were at her sides, fingers cusped at thighs, legs parted

slightly. It was a beautiful sight. It was a human body as a model of creation. I

believed this. It was a body in this instance that would not age. And it was Artis,

here, alone, who carried the themes of this entire complex into some measure of

respect. (258)

Artis understands the significance of the self, having spent time in a number of Eastern religious traditions that recognize its primacy, but the Convergence misinterprets the metaphysics of the self—the self cannot be isolated if it is meant to reach its full potential. Hinduism, which teaches the reality of a substantial self, teaches that one can temporarily achieve moksha via meditation but even that does not occur in a vacuum; meditation is interaction with a higher form of reality that has its own existence. Artis, in the pod, is isolated and cannot be released. Moksha is impossible.

Buddhism, on the other hand, which critics like Robert Kohn have noted plays an integral role in DeLillo’s spiritual worldview, places less emphasis on the reality of the metaphysical self and encourages abandonment of the self in favor of integration with ultimate reality. Artis does not manage to have that experience either. In Artis’s stream of consciousness, she asks herself several questions that interrogate the problems of the self in isolation. She asks herself “What is it that I am waiting for,” and “And why just here and nowhere else” without the question mark (158). She sadly concludes in this state that

“I only hear what is me. I am made of words,” and that she is nothing else (158). The narrator informs us that “She is living within the grim limits of self” (160). One might conclude that the project of the Convergence has failed; the pods are both literally and 164 metaphorically the project of abandoning the rest of the world in favor of isolating oneself from death and suffering, and we see in Artis that doing so is contrary to the nature and purpose of humanity. Thus, DeLillo presents us two options: the world of the inner consciousness and the world that opens the consciousness to experiences of what is external. A person who is only conscious of his or her inner self is “made of words,” as

Artis says, and as I have explained previously, the physical world is necessary for sublime experience. The Monk, who embraced the physical world alongside his religion, literally flinging himself face-first into it, understood what Artis did not.

The climax of the novel occurs when Jeff is watching a warfare scene on one of the screens of the Convergence and sees Stak himself killed in the battle and questions the reality of the video. To cope with what he considers his increasingly frail grasp of the real, Jeff explains,

I listen to classical music on the radio. I read the kind of challenging novel, often

European, sometimes with a nameless narrator, always in translation, that I tried

to read when I was an adolescent. Music and books, simply there, the walls, the

floor, the furniture, the slight misalignment of two pictures that hang on the living

room wall. I leave objects as they are. I look and let them be. I study every

physical minute. (218)

Jeff’s study of the physical becomes increasingly focused on particular items; he describes, one paragraph at a time, the geography of the campus, dog excrement, smoking, sliced bread, and the zipper of his pants. But, he writes, “Then I recall the taxi driver, kneeling in gutter slime, turned toward Mecca, and I try to reconcile the firm 165 placement of his world into the scatterlife of this one” (271). The “scatterlife,” as Jeff describes it, is just as distancing from transcendence as the individual bodies in their pods at the Convergence. Transcendence requires a complete surrender to the circumstances of the real, just as the taxi driver lowered himself in the mud in order to pray. This is the only situation that enables a “firm placement” in the world, a placement Jeff has yet to achieve.

Jeff appears to achieve his placement in the world in the light of a sublime moment that finally and irrefutably privileges the realm of human experience. He is riding on a city bus when he witnesses a particularly beautiful sunset and witnesses a young boy, who is possibly mentally disabled, shouting with joy:

I left my seat and went to stand nearby. His hands were curled at his chest, half

fists, soft and trembling. His mother sat quietly, watching with him. The boy

bounced slightly in accord with the cries and they were unceasing but also

exhilarating, they were prelinguistic grunts. I hated to think that he was impaired

in some way, macrocephalic, mentally deficient, but these howls of awe were far

more suitable than words. . . . I told myself that the boy was not seeing the sky

collapse upon us but finding the purest astonishment in the intimate touch of earth

and sun. I went back to my seat and faced forward. I didn’t need heaven’s light. I

had the boy’s cries of wonder. (274)

The boy expresses his wonder but does so without words. It seems that if the boy had had the faculties of language, the experience would have somehow been cheapened. In this 166 moment the sublime has intervened in the quotidian world, in a situation as commonplace as public transport.

Despite its similarity to the conclusion of White Noise, which also ends with an especially beautiful sunset, Jeff’s spiritual contentment seems a little more certain than that of White

Noise’s Jack Gladney, who was witnessing the sunset following a recent brush with his own death, where Jeff witnesses the sunset after he has affirmed his desire to return to the world of mortal life; he has affirmed the godliness of the world and its entirety, with all its imperfections. This ending implies a leap of faith, affirming the old order, like the joyous marriage at the end of Mao II that occurs in the midst of an ugly battle in Beirut, which contrasts the mass marriage at the beginning of the novel, in which thousands of pairs of strangers, who are members of a cult, are wed in a stadium in orderly fashion.

Thus, we have much to gain when we read Don DeLillo’s work as a profound acknowledgement of the spiritual significance of human life in its most rugged entirety.

Though the work purportedly shows signs of a postmodern approach to God that might cast aside reality in favor of the text, DeLillo shows us that the text is only one of many modes of worship, secondary and inferior to the actual existence and experience of God.

Given DeLillo’s love for the word and his life’s work as a novelist, his novels are simultaneously offerings of worship and gestures of deep humility.

167

Conclusion: “That Which Holds the World Together”

The eleventh chapter of Genesis describes the story of the Tower of Babel, in which the people of God’s early creation decide to build a great city with a tower that reaches to the heavens. Since humanity had just recently been expelled from the Garden of Eden for defiance of God, the decision to build this city is portrayed as a similar act of hubris, and God punishes humanity accordingly:

And the Lord said, ‘Look, they are one people, and they have all one language;

and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to

do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language

there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered

them abroad from there over the face of all the earth. (Genesis 11: 6-8)

Later in the Christian narrative, humanity’s sins are cleansed once and for all when “the word is made flesh” as Jesus Christ. Though the figure of Christ is the centerpiece of

Christianity, theologians still struggle to fathom the mystery of the trinity, of the word’s relationship with the transcendent Godhead. According to Christianity, the relationship 168 between God and the word extends back prior to the beginning of time and exists as part of God’s trinitarian nature, one of the deepest mysteries of Christianity. The word, as affirmed in various iterations of the Nicene creed, is “consubstantial with,” “of one being with,” or “of the same essence as” the seemingly unapproachable and ineffable father.

Language, then, originally used as a tool for punishment, eventually became a way to reapproach God; “the word made flesh” repaired the original fissure between God and humanity.

Maybe it is appropriate that the story of Babel identifies divisions in language as a consequence for humanity arrogantly trying to reach God in the heavens. Though language has been used as a tool for worship ever since—whether as prayer, hymn, chant, sermon, or scripture—different iterations of Christianity have long been divided on the theology of language. Even following the biblical narrative of Judeo-Christian history, some of the tradition’s most profound historical events, especially its conflicts, still centered around questions of the power and uses of language. One of these was the

Protestant Reformation, which determined that the words of God should be available to those who were uneducated; church services should be said in the common tongue, and the church should make efforts to make the Bible available in those languages as well.

Marilynne Robinson devotes a chapter to this moment in her most recent collection of essays, The Givenness of Things. She writes that “one immediate and remarkable consequence of the Reform movement was the emergence of the great modern languages out of the shadow of Latin, with their power and beauty and dignity fully demonstrated in the ambitious uses being made of them” (18). Robinson describes this moment not as a 169 moment of hubris reminiscent of Babel, but as a moment of great humility and awe that inspired a curious and gradual turning to God. At the same time, Protestant churches cast doubt upon the efficacy of the Catholic sacraments, which use a specific sequence of words as part of the formula that infuses the situation—whether that be baptism, communion, or reconciliation—with God’s grace. As Charles Taylor explains, this was one of many aspects of the process of secularization.

The question of language and its supernatural efficacy has thus remained a point of contention across different versions of Christianity and is central to postsecular religious works. Throughout the novels I have described in my previous chapters, the authors and the characters they write about do not use brick and mortar to approach God in his heaven; they use language, God’s very instrument of both punishment and redemption, but they do so in a spirit of humility, with complete consciousness of the limitations of language as a vehicle for describing, understanding, or interacting with

God. Therefore, I would argue that the postsecular age is a significant moment in religious history because it signifies that humanity is healing after what Judeo-

Christianity considers to be its previous offenses to God. Michael Kaufmann suggests as much when he writes that “what Paradise Lost tells us is that the decision to live in the modern world can increase the ways in which we can be happy and can contribute to

God’s happiness, precisely because choice means we have left behind the hierarchies and pre-determined arrangements of the pre-modern world” (105). Despite Paradise Lost being about humanity’s first offense against and break with God, it also imagines 170 humanity coming full circle, returning to God not through dictum and dogma, but by achieving a “paradise within.”

The authors I have acknowledged in this work all agree that while language has its limitations, it can still function as a companion or vehicle to transcendent experience.

They have also recognized, in one way or another, that language is a central topic in narratives about spiritual loss and recovery. Postsecular religious literature is a self- reflective critique of religion’s own weaponization of the word to condemn and repress those who fail to fall in line with it, and, at the same time, it is an attempt to preserve the aspects of its cultural history that it has found worthy of preservation, following that critique. Above all, it is a realization that the word does not exist to create barriers between persons but to approach God, in whom all of humanity may be united.

We’re not privy to the nature of John Ames’s eventual union with God, but his attempt to parse that glory prior to his death is very beautiful. Ames concludes his missive with the words, “I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep” (247) using the words of King Lear when he finally abandons his wild struggle to maintain control of his kingdom and his family and gives himself up to God. Nanapush weaves a mystical family history for his granddaughter, Lulu, but the power of the story fades into the background in deference to the touching moment when the family “[braces themselves] together in the fierce dry wind” (226). After desperately searching for proof of the existence of God, Will Barrett winds up in an Edenic garden with a mentally traumatized woman incapable of normal

English speech patterns. And Jeff Lockhart experiences transcendence on a city bus when he listens to the “prelinguistic grunts” and “howls of awe” of a child overcome with 171 feeling in witnessing a particularly beautiful sunset (274). Whether or not those who use language as an avenue to worship—writers, storytellers, theologians, or individual believers reciting prayers—actually achieve the transcendence of unity with God is not guaranteed. Believers often say that God works in mysterious ways, and these uses of language are one way to acknowledge, approach, or merely appreciate the mystery in hopes that it will respond somehow. As Will Barrett discovered, the mystery doesn’t respond in kind—with a linguistic proof of its presence—but by providing a sublime experience.

The transition between semantic and vernacular modes of worship and the transcendence they inspire tends to happen in moments of weakness, crisis, or extreme humility. In the narratives I have cited in this project, these situations often occur when a religious tradition is somehow imperiled by the future, whether it is the fading of John

Ames’s religious tradition in the life of his son, the Ojibwe’s loss of their spiritually significant lands, Will Barrett’s crisis of identity in the encroachment of blasé suburbia, or Lockhart witnessing humanity’s repression of human experience in its efforts to conquer death. But as Walker Percy finally admitted in The Second Coming, there has never been a perfect world order since humanity’s expulsion from the garden; a sense of spiritual rootlessness is endemic to human nature. While characters in McClure’s postsecular canon feel that they have been shortchanged by the promises of organized religion and have been left without a home, the novels I have discussed here indicate that people from formal religious traditions consider themselves sojourners as well.

Ultimately, it is for the sojourner to recognize that God is approachable, but not via 172 dogma and directives; he is approachable only through the humility that comes from abandoning those human institutions as ultimate arbiters of God’s character and deferring to aspects of human life and experience that defy rationalization.

Emphasis on the aspects of human life and experience that defy rationalization are also central to postsecular narratives as John McClure describes them. They also align with the work of postmodern theologians like John Caputo and Merold Westphal. These writers have expressed why religion proper has often been targeted as an adversary of spiritual progress. John McClure describes the painfully and arrogantly restrictive teachings of fundamentalism (8), and, as I have cited previously, Westphal contends that the intellectual authority of onto-theology has at times resulted in an “inhuman modern world” (259). The problem with these authoritative systems was ultimately that, in attempting to monopolize knowledge, they forgot to emphasize the aspects of God that transcend knowledge: glory, mystery, and grace. It seems appropriate, then, that postsecular communities that have diverged entirely from religious traditions have gravitated toward these aspects of the faith systems they thought had nothing left to offer.

Thus, I would argue that these writers offer an opportunity for reconciliation between these different modes of spiritual seeking and set aside the authoritarian aspects of language, theology, and rationalism that have damaged these relationships in the past.

In his dialogue with Habermas, Ratzinger encouraged such a reconciliation, writing that

It is important that both great components of the Western culture learn to listen

and to accept a genuine relatedness to these other cultures, too. It is important to

include the other cultures in the attempt at polyphonic relatedness, in which they 173

themselves are receptive to the essential complementarity of reason and faith, so

that a universal process of purifications (in the plural!) can proceed. Ultimately,

the essential values and norms that are in some way known or sensed by all men

will take on a new brightness in such a process, so that that which holds the world

together can once again become an effective force in mankind. (79-80)

Ratzinger’s words are reminiscent of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s remark that

“everything that rises must converge.” Flannery O’Connor’s ironic use of the quote to title a short story about humanity’s inability to treat one another with grace and compassion was certainly apt.

Literary studies can and should play an integral role in this reconciliation. In accommodating these dialogues, it can further examine uses of language that have functioned as modes of worship, and how and why these uses of language align, guide, or break with established religious norms. As I have previously argued, acknowledging the spiritual power of language ultimately requires humility, abandoning the notion that we can force God into a structure of our own linguistic making. And yet, there is a supernatural significance in the outcome of the postsecular literary project—communion with God or some experience of the sublime—which only occurs after abandoning the linguistic project, after acknowledging its limitations. After all, according to John, the word is with God and is God. There is much room for further examination of this relationship between language and what lies beyond; that project will require its own kind of humility.

174

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