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The Lure of Disillusion The Lure of Disillusion RELIGION, ROMANTICISM & THE POSTMODERN CONDITION A manuscript submitted to Palgrave Macmillan Publishers, October 2010 © James Mark Shields, 2010 SHIELDS: Lure of Disillusion [DRAFT] i The Lure of Disillusion ii SHIELDS: Lure of Disillusion [DRAFT] [half-title verso: blank page] SHIELDS: Lure of Disillusion [DRAFT] iii The Lure of Disillusion Religion, Romanticism and the Postmodern Condition James Mark Shields iv SHIELDS: Lure of Disillusion [DRAFT] Eheu! paupertina philosophia in paupertinam religionem ducit:—A hunger-bitten and idea- less philosophy naturally produces a starveling and comfortless religion. It is among the miseries of the present age that it recognizes no medium between literal and metaphorical. Faith is either to be buried in the dead letter, or its name and honors usurped by a counterfeit product of the mechanical understanding, which in the blindness of self-complacency confounds symbols with allegories. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual, 1839 [R]eligious discourse can be understood in any depth only by understanding the form of life to which it belongs. What characterizes that form of life is not the expressions of belief that accompany it, but a way—a way that includes words and pictures, but is far from consisting in just words and pictures—of living one’s life, of regulating all of one’s decisions. – Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, 1992 SHIELDS: Lure of Disillusion [DRAFT] v [epigraph verso: blank page] vi SHIELDS: Lure of Disillusion [DRAFT] CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix INTRODUCTION 1 Excursus One: Romanticism—A Sense of Symbol 6 PART ONE: ROMANTICISM AND (POST-)MODERNITY 1. Romancing the Postmodern 16 The Forge and the Flame A “True” Post-Modernism The Two Faces of Romanticism Romanticism as Reality-Inscription Romantic Realism 2. Allegory Run Amok 27 Structuralism’s Revenge The Rhetoric of Atemporality 3. Counterproposals 34 Symbol and Semblance Romantic Expressivism Sprachdenken 4. What the Lightning Said 47 Romantic Modernism: The Attraction of Imperfection Lyric as Norm: The Poetics of the Moment The Melody of Language Janus: A Summing Up Excursus Two: Realism in the Balance 61 SHIELDS: Lure of Disillusion [DRAFT] vii PART TWO: WORK ON MYTH 5. Understanding in Time 70 Romanticism and Religion: A Fearful Symmetry Kairos and Chronos Myth as Symbolic History The Melody of History 6. Partial Magic 83 Myth, Metaphor, Meaning Supreme Fictions: The Truth of Masks The Alchemist in the City Kairotic Love Magic Realism: A Third Face Magic Realism as Work on Myth 7. Between Barth and Barthes, Calvin and Calvino 107 The Sound(ness) of Theological Science The Problem of Subjectivity Rationalism, Realism and Language Theological Literature, Art, Music 8. Remythologization 128 Euhemeros Redux Demystification and Demythologization Rethinking the Coy "de" CONCLUSION 138 BIBLIOGRAPHY 170 INDEX 188 viii SHIELDS: Lure of Disillusion [DRAFT] ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Kathleen Roberts Skerrett, the late Abbot Conway, Joseph C. McLelland, and Barbara Galli, for their helpful editing and comments. I would also like to acknowledge a debt to a number of former teachers and colleagues at McGill University’s Faculty of Religious Studies, particularly Maurice Boutin, the late Edward Furcha, Arvind Sharma, and Douglas John Hall, as well as Karen Lebacqz of the Pacific School of Religion and Anthony Giddens of the London School of Economics. And of course, thanks to my muses, Sachiko Ikeda and Annika Ikeda Shields. [mention Palgrave editorial staff] SHIELDS: Lure of Disillusion [DRAFT] 1 INTRODUCTION “What is today more boring,” asks Frederick Turner, in a essay published in Harper’s Magazine, “than the up-to-date?” All of our arts, all of what we call culture, including sculpture, music, painting, performance art and fiction, “tread the same postmodern circle,” in which the following alchemical formula is applied: first, the subversion of the traditional means of representation, which are held to serve the interests of the power elite; next, what post-structuralist critics call the ‘play of the signifiers’, designed to undermine the expectations of the public; finally, the reminder that the sucker who buys the thing is complicit in the fraud described by the fashion magazines as the late capitalist commodification of desire.1 The problem with this circle, as Turner sees it, is that there is no escape; it is an endless loop, in which the reality of anything external (“outside the text,” in postmodern parlance) is not only bracketed but also forgotten or denied. Spinning out of control, like the child’s hula hoop in the crowded fairground, the process nonetheless makes a return, the joke (if it is a joke) “always turns in upon itself,” and the perpetrators find themselves “trapped in the present, in a narrow little moving box of power struggle and injured self- esteem.”2 Turner’s remarks reflect a backlash that has been brewing in scholarly circles for some time, and now seems to have entered into the broader intellectual culture. The past few decades, in particular, have witnessed a polyphonic reaction to the hegemony of so- called postmodern modes, models, and methods, particularly those going by the labels poststructuralism and deconstruction. These are not completely synonymous terms, yet “deconstruction,” as a catchword for the program of one of poststructuralism’s patriarchs, 2 SHIELDS: Lure of Disillusion [DRAFT] Jacques Derrida, became, in the 1960s and 1970s, the archetypal instance of post- Saussurean criticism, and, as such, left its indelible stamp upon both European and American (and, to some extent, Japanese) academies. Turner’s skepticism notwithstanding, his formula for postmodernism is an apt summation of the deconstructive process: subversion of traditional means of representation; resultant play of the signifiers, now liberated from the shackles of Western metaphysics—i.e., from the shadows of Plato’s caves; and finally, the deconstruction of textual meaning, which serves to undermine (“dualistic”) expectations and challenges traditional hierarchies. It is the first stage in this process which will be most crucial to the purposes of the present study, and it is this first assumption that contemporary critic Colin Falck questions most vociferously: Why, Falck inquires, do we feel the need to subvert traditional means of representation? What, exactly, is the problem with the metaphysics of presence; and what are the implications of subverting the sense of presence, while proclaiming the dawn of a new, freer world, where unchained signifiers float languidly in the matinal breeze? Though such deconstructive work is ostensibly to be done “without positive terms”—that is, without setting up new dichotomies to replace the old—it is obvious upon which side deconstruction stands, and how it thus falls prey to the myth of liberation so ensconced in modern Western culture. “Traditional metaphysics” and “means of representation” are clearly falsehoods to be attacked, or, to use Heideggerian terms, overcome. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of effective criticism without a certain sense of this—what I shall be calling the lure of disillusion: i.e., the curious tendency of human beings, and particularly modern Westerners, to believe in the revelation of truth negatively, through the progressive unveiling of falsehood and illusion. SHIELDS: Lure of Disillusion [DRAFT] 3 Yet deconstruction, and post-Saussurean criticism more generally, hides its concern for values behind a veneer of detachment, playfulness, and irony.3 For all its aspirations to “answerable style” (Hartman), poststructuralist theory has been taken to task for ivory tower posturing, sterility, blindnesses, and even “crypto-Stalinism” (Paglia). Within continental thought, Jürgen Habermas has questioned postmodernism’s prima facie rejection of “the Enlightenment project,” while Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer have developed alternative methodologies of interpretation, under the broad rubric of hermeneutics. On the Anglo-American scene, where analytical philosophy has long reigned supreme, thinkers like Hilary Putnam, Nelson Goodman, and Richard Rorty have suggested syncretic alternatives to (or emendations of) poststructuralism and hermeneutics, often based in a reworking of empicirism or the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce, John Dewey and William James. But the most vociferous attacks on the work of Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva have come from a loose group of cultural critics (or Kulturkritiker, to use George Steiner’s term) interested in retrieving alternative ways of understanding, and, moreover, of coming to terms with, the “postmodern condition” (i.e., postmodernity), without resorting to what they perceive as the hyper- relativism/ nihilism/apathy of postmodernism—typified by the misapplied and much- abused premise that “there is nothing outside the text.” For the Kulturkritiker, poststructuralists are heirs of the Pedant in Goethe’s Faust, Part Two, who, upon seeing the beautiful Helen in the flesh, can only stick his nose back into his Homeric annotations, while stammering: “Above all I must stick to the text” (§6536–40). For the poststructuralist-as-Pedant, Beauty, feeling, love, are lost. Traditional theories of language, like classical (post-Renaissance) theories of visual art, understand its primary function as mimesis, as an attempt to indicate the reality of the given (i.e., extralinguistic) world. Poststructuralists turn this around, and, in the 4 SHIELDS: Lure of Disillusion
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