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Kane Book4cd.Pdf (1.347Mb) Literature, Religion, and Postsecular Studies Lori Branch, Series Editor Conspicuous Bodies Provincial Belief and the Making of Joyce and Rushdie Jean Kane THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBUS Copyright © 2014 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kane, Jean, 1955– Conspicuous bodies : provincial belief and the making of Joyce and Rushdie / Jean Kane. — First edition. pages cm. — (Literature, religion, and postsecular studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1260-8 (hardback) — ISBN 0-8142-1260-3 (cloth) — ISBN 978-0-8142-9364-5 (cd-rom) 1. Joyce, James, 1882–1941—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Joyce, James, 1882–1941—Religion. 3. Rushdie, Salman, 1947—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Rushdie, Salman, 1947—Religion. 5. Faith in literature. 6. Human body in literature. 7. Human body—Religious aspects. 8. Identity (Psychology) in literature. I. Title. II. Title: Provincial belief and the making of Joyce and Rush- die. PR6019.O9Z66958 2014 823'.912—dc23 2013047490 Cover design by Laurence J. Nozik Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Minion Pro Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Nation- al Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.49–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Raymond Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Joyce’s Conversion and the Counterdiscipline of Drink 8 Chapter 2 The Canonization of Salman Rushdie: Mythic Midnight’s Children and Hindu-Muslim Embodiment 41 Chapter 3 Spirits Discipline Ulysses 69 Chapter 4 Muslim Simulation and the Limits of the “Star Text” 97 Chapter 5 Embodied Panic: Modernist “Religion” in the Controversies over Ulysses and The Satanic Verses 120 Chapter 6 The Religion of Celebrity 141 Notes 159 Bibliography 184 Index 201 Acknowledgments riting feels like a solitary, concentrated enterprise, but is actually a W noisy conversation conducted over many years. The work of imagi- native writers and their interpreters joined with teachers, mentors, and col- leagues in the making of this book. C. Clifford Flanigan, of the Comparative Literature Department of Indiana University, plunged me into Ulysses during my freshman year of college, and I would like to remember him, a teacher of passionate intensity, for sparking my interest in Joyce. Michael Levenson, Stephen Arata, and Teju Olaniyan shepherded this project through its first stages, Karen Robertson its later ones. I am immensely grateful to these lumi- nous intellects and generous people for their help with the conception and execution of the manuscript. My thanks go as well to my past and present colleagues in the English Department at Vassar College, particularly to Tomo Hattori, Laura Yow, Julie Park, Heesok Chang, and Robert DeMaria, and to colleagues elsewhere, Helene Meyers, Guy Raffia, and Elisabeth Frost. Wil- liam Germano gave me insightful advice about shaping the project. Sandy Crooms of The Ohio State University Press has been a spirited and humane guide, an editor among editors. I thank her deeply for her work with me. The colleagues and associates working with me have also been adept and gener- ous. My thanks go to editors Eugene O’Connor, Lindsay Martin, and Taralee Cyphers as well as to Rebecca Bender and Scott Smiley. My parents, Joan A. Williams Kane and Raymond F. Kane, as well as my siblings, Raymond J. Kane, James C. Kane, Joan A. Kane, and Christopher G. • ix • x Acknowledgments Kane, deserve recognition here, as does Jim Kimsey. Judy Nichols, Bill Nich- ols, Nancy Nichols, and Jannay Morrow have nourished and supported me. Thomas P. Lukas also helped me to produce this book. Finally, I would like to thank the Sisters of Providence of St. Mary of the Woods College for their role in bringing this manuscript to publication. Introduction n a 2009 story on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, psy- I chotherapist Jim Cates spoke about treating Amish adolescents. Cates adapted his techniques to help youth whose identity formation differs “funda- mentally” from that of his typical clients, who strive for independence based on their accomplishments. “What [Amish youth] are going to do is some kind of manual labor, which doesn’t really identify who they are; it’s just something they do to make money,” Cates said. “If they’re going to be Amish, they’re going to get married and stay married for the rest of their lives. So they’re not individuating. It’s not about ‘who am I going to bloom into,’ it’s about becom- ing part of a larger group.” His Amish clients feel awkward focusing on them- selves, as they belong to a culture that regards “self-disclosure as prideful.” He often meets them with their families, at home, and encourages them to talk about others as a route to articulating their emotional difficulties.1 Cates’s work with a contemporary American subculture illuminates my focus on persons who differ in striking ways from the “individual,” just as his viewpoint highlights the problems in describing them. His characteriza- tion of Amish adolescents shares with many theories of the contemporary an assumption of the “individual” as a normative base even as deviations from the subject position are being articulated. In Anglo-American literary criticism, religion acts as a locus classicus of such foundationalism: the con- temporary worshipping subject is understood through the somatic, psychic, and cognitive premises of the individual who emerged in concert with liberal • 1 • 2 Introduction Christianity in the late nineteenth century. Persons formed by other modes of belief are routinely erased or distorted by the premises of the Christian formation buried in the universalism of “religion.” This book distinguishes such subjects, and the practices that generate them, from what Certeau calls the “strategy” of individualism.2 In disinterring disciplined spiritual agents from the hermeneutic “religion,” I aim to show the crucial role of minority spiritual practices in modelling the bodies devised by cosmopolitan modern- ists and their successors. Disciplinary belief, long understood as aesthetically generative but physically and intellectually repressive, in fact also produces the somatic knowledge that centrally informs modernist representation. I trace the genealogy of anthropological religion in the twentieth century through the careers of James Joyce and Salman Rushdie, paradigmatic “masters” of modern and postmodern experiment. Joyce and Rushdie use their insider experience of spiritual techniques to reimagine bodily epistemes, yet they read these productions from an external vantage based on theological, “reli- gious” premises. Under the sign of oppression, spiritual regimes enhance and enlarge the capacities of the free “individual” in the texts as well as in the public profiles of the writers. The entrenched opposition between a gothic religion and a liberatory art actually reveals the challenges that performative agency has posed to Western understandings of subject formation—depic- tions that elicit panic over the imagined dissolution of physical and psychic boundaries. While the anthropological borrowings of modernists—Eliot, Lawrence, Forster, and Joyce premier among them—have been amply explored,3 critics have until recently paid little attention to the historical premises of religion as an analytical category. In recent decades work on modernist literary pro- duction has focused, after Andreas Huyssen4 and exemplified by Lawrence Rainey,5 on the professional and commercial strategies and material practices that generated the seemingly autonomous art object and its creator.6 Critics such as James Buzard, John Marx, Jed Esty, and Ian Baucom7 have textured the criticism of the last twenty years in examining the finer transactions among the British imperium, English nationality, and colonial formations. I follow a different but related plot through a modernism that moves between auto- ethnographic and ethnographic positions, cosmopolitan and provincial iden- tifications, insider knowledge and outsider display of identity. Rather than understanding religion as an analogue—for language, for commodity,8 or for other symbolic systems—I focus on the meanings of belief that are assumed in such comparisons. Joyce and Rushdie claim spiritually disciplined bodies that authenticate and animate colonial and postcolonial identities in the act Introduction 3 of surpassing and objectifying them. These formal and professional maneu- vers would not be possible without the framework of a “religion” that sits comfortably with the sedimented structures of modern and contemporary individualism, and that continues to freeze and misread other modes of belief and techniques of embodiment, as well as the epistemic premises with which they interact. “Belief’s transformation into pastness is, in fundamental respects, the nar- rative of Western culture’s birth into the modern,” signifying both quaint- ness and authenticity, says Jenny Franchot.9 Modes of disciplinary belief have exemplified not just anachronism, but archaism. The association of regulated practice and countermodernity arose in part from modal differences between Christianity and orthopractic systems such Judaism and Islam. As a domi- nantly “orthodox” religion, Christianity has from its origins placed doctrine and theology, rather than somatic moral techniques, at the core of belief.10 But these differences were greatly amplified
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