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UNIVERSITY of NOTRE DAME 2  Secularization Without End Introduction Secularization and the History of the Novel When future generations of scholars look back at the last half of the twentieth century, they may conclude that it was less an era when formalism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and new his- toricism competed with one another for intellectual credibility than an age in which the secular criticism of literary texts rose to domi- nance. They may also conclude that this secular approach to literature accounts in large part for the emergence of the novel as the most sa- lient and significant object of literary interpretation in the academy. For surely, during this period, no literary genre came to exemplify the advent of secular society and culture more fully than did the novel, and no elaboration of the meaning of secular society and culture was complete without careful consideration of the novel. It would be no exaggeration to say that if the last half of the twentieth century began with Ian Watt’s claim, in The Rise of the Novel, that the novel was one of the most important products of secular society, we have now ar- rived at the far more remarkable claim that modern secular society is itself the product of the novel. In Love’s Knowledge, Martha Nuss- baum reads the genre primarily as an elaboration of secular moral philosophy.1 And in the first chapter of Inventing Human Rights, Lynn Hunt locates the beginnings of human empathy itself— somewhat surprisingly for anyone familiar with the great world 1 © UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME 2 Secularization without End religions—in books such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48).2 Given so Eurocentric an approach, one can only wonder how the Arabs, the Indians, and the Chinese survived for so long without em- pathy while they waited for a translation of Clarissa to be smuggled across the borders. The result is what David Foster Wallace, when not writing about the Jesuit substitute teacher for the Advanced Tax course at DePaul University who describes the analytical concentra- tion needed for “real-world accounting” as nothing short of “hero- ism,” might have called “the teeming wormball of data and rule and exception and contingency” that makes modern interpretation of the novel something akin to the interpretation of modernity itself.3 This book is instead about what I would call the afterlife of the novel, the word afterlife here meaning (a) the novel’s current belated- ness as a secular, realistic literary form (it lost the ability to compete in terms of realism with cinema in the 1930s and television in the 1950s, and newer electronic media, including electronic literatures, have made the genre seem all the more quaint) and (b) the lively re- emergence within the novel of certain, supposedly forgotten, reli- gious discourses that become legible by means of—indeed, I will claim because of—the secular trajectory of the prose that is its vehicle. Such an afterlife is not a neatly circumscribable period of literary his- tory; it has no obvious beginning point. If one must identify a pro- genitor, Franz Kafka will do. But the authors found at the heart of this book are all exemplary manifestations of a profound and almost inhuman shame at the fate of being human, and as I hope to show, this shame is given new force after 1945 even as it draws upon some of the most disturbing yet consequential motifs—the inescapable corrup- tion of the human spirit and the helplessness invoked by divine 4 election—in all of Christian theology. Watt published The Rise of the Novel in 1957 and in many ways set the tone for the next fifty years’ identification of the novelistic and the secular. He certainly does not ignore the Puritan inheritance in Defoe or in English literature as a whole, but the secularization nar- © UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME Introduction 3 rative that Watt borrows largely from Max Weber eventually nullifies this heritage as so much ideology. That neither Chaucer’s nor Shake- speare’s characters really fit Watt’s claim that pre-eighteenth-century individuals had little moral autonomy and “depended on divine per- sons” for their meaning—tell that to the Wife of Bath or to Macbeth— we will simply excuse as a function of Watt’s youthful irrational exuberance.5 But it was precisely Watt’s cavalier way of summing up entire epochs that allowed the novel to take on the function that would come to be most often assigned to it, that of the leading cul- tural instrument of Weber’s rising bourgeoisie. Members of that class, having been instructed by Luther that a worldly calling was every bit as pleasing to God as a religious one, and finding intolerable the de- pressing isolation into which Calvin’s ideas about predestination threw them, began to look for the signs of their possible salvation in terms of worldly, secular, and capitalist success. Those who followed in Watt’s steps—and they are legion— fleshed out the Weberian narrative he started, none more fully than Michael McKeon. While, like Watt before him, McKeon claims to be skeptical of Weber’s logic—he stresses instead the “absolutism” of a Pietism that paradoxically reforms “absolutely” enough to overturn the old religious order—it is Weber who again finally rules this new version of the novel’s rise.6 By the time we get to Franco Moretti’s two-volume (four in Italian!) summa romanorum, it would have been quite a shock not to find Jack Goody writing, in the opening pages, the following remarkably unremarkable lines. “The modern novel, after Daniel Defoe, was essentially a secular tale, a feature that is com- prised within the meaning of ‘realistic.’ The hand of God may appear, but it does so through ‘natural’ sequences, not through miracles or mirabilia. Earlier narrative structures often displayed such interven- tion, which, in a world suffused by the supernatural, was present everywhere.”7 When I first read Goody’s sweeping dictum, I won- dered whether Goody had simply confused Protestantism with secularism—both of which eschew miracles. And then I wondered whether that rakehell Christopher Marlowe or any of his less savory friends actually ever imagined a world “suffused by the supernatural,” or whether Shakespeare—whose Cassius, alluding to what was once © UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME 4 Secularization without End thought to be Sallust’s advice to Caesar “that every man is the archi- tect of his own fortune,” tells Brutus that “men at some time are masters of their fates”—ever really believed (as Goody maintains) that divine intervention was “present everywhere.”8 To contemporary critical discourse, Moretti himself contributes the wonderful term fill- ers: that is, the expansion of mundane passages of conversation or description in the realistic novel in which nothing seems to happen. Honoré de Balzac’s Illusions perdues (1837–43), George Eliot’s Mid- dlemarch (1871–72), and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901) are apparently full of them. Moretti’s explanation for fillers is Weberian routinization in a nutshell, as applied to the novel: “Fillers are an at- tempt at rationalizing the novelistic universe: turning it into a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all.”9 By this measure, we could say that all of Henry James is one long filler— though on closer inspection we might say it is a peculiarly Puritan and confessional sort of filler. People still go to church in Henry Fielding; Laurence Sterne comically adapted his own sermons for Tristram Shandy. But the thesis of the secularizing novel pays little attention to such topical embellishments, for it assumes from the start that the novel is the aesthetic exemplification of the deists’ universe, with its deus absconditus and Weberian social rationalization. That we have now reached the point, with Nussbaum and Hunt, at which the history of the novel has actually come to supplant the history of religion as the basis of our moral sensibility—indeed, of human empathy itself—might for some raise the possibility that the secularization represented, and perhaps inaugurated, by the novel might not be as straightforward an affair as it sometimes appears to be in Watt or McKeon or Goody. If for many of its early readers the novel was in fact a secular substitute for diminishing religious feeling, then we might do well to consider Hans Blumenberg’s sense that En- lightenment rationality was often pressed into service as a “formal reoccupation” of now “vacant” theological “answer positions.”10 In this light, the Weberian interpretation of the genre always seems to be haunted by that of Weber’s Hegelian and then Marxian student, Georg Lukács. In the view of the early Lukács, the novel was the supreme expression of nostalgia for the “immanence” of meaning © UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME Introduction 5 once supplied by religion and the epic. Lukács’s novel is a secularized epic, and he specifies the “answer position” the novel has come to reoccupy: “The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.”11 The novelist’s irony, “with intuitive double vision, can see where God is to be found in a world abandoned by God” (Lukács, Theory, 92). Lukács subtly reworks the perspective of Hegel, who elaborates the novel (most obviously the genre of bildungsroman ini- tiated by Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [1795–96] and its se- quels) as exemplifying the unfortunate way irony dominates modern culture. What was fatally missing in the novel, Hegel claimed, was earnestness, which means that the novel lacked all capacity for epic achievement and forms of understanding that transcend the quotidian pursuits of everyday life—which is what fillers represent.
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