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AMERICAN LITERATURE's SECULAR FAITH by RAY HORTON

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AMERICAN LITERATURE's SECULAR FAITH by RAY HORTON AMERICAN LITERATURE’S SECULAR FAITH by RAY HORTON Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY May, 2017 2 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the dissertation of Ray Horton candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy* Committee Chair Michael W. Clune Committee Member William Marling Committee Member Sarah Gridley Committee Member Timothy Beal Date of Defense March 23, 2017 *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained herein. 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………..4 Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………5 Introduction Religion as Device in American Literature..……………………………………………...7 Chapter 1 Mark Twain and the Gospel of Mundane Transcendence……………………………….49 Chapter 2 Willa Cather’s Modernist Religion………………………………………………………82 Chapter 3 James Baldwin’s Theology of Art……………...............................................................111 Chapter 4 Don DeLillo and the Religious Meaning of Postmodern Atheism……………………..149 Chapter 5 Marilynne Robinson’s Aesthetics of Belief and Finitude………………………………190 Conclusion Secular Faith: Beyond Postsecular Critique……………………………………………225 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….246 4 Acknowledgements My gratitude goes first to Michael Clune for his mentorship and guidance. I also thank the members of my dissertation committee, William Marling, Sarah Gridley, and Timothy Beal, for the time and encouragement they have invested in my work. I am also grateful to Kurt Koenigsberger, Kimberly Emmons, T. Kenny Fountain, Christopher Flint, and Brian Reed for their ongoing support and guidance. I also wish to recognize Martha Woodmanssee, Daniel Goldmark, all the participants in the fall 2016 College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Seminar, and everyone in the English department’s fall 2015 publication seminar. Steve Pinkerton, Scott Dill, Suhaan Mehta, Olivia McGuire, Eric Earnhardt, Bill Deal, Maggie Vinter, Ryan Siemers, Vincent Pecora, Matthew Mutter, Wilson Brissett, Caleb Spencer, Hal Bush, Norman Jones, Amy Hungerford, and the anonymous reviewers at PMLA all offered generous feedback to portions of this project, and I am grateful for their insights. I owe much to the English Graduate Student Association, the Graduate Council of the Arts and Sciences, and all of my colleagues in the CWRU English graduate program, past and present, for their camaraderie and friendship. I have been fortunate to receive generous financial support from the CWRU College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship, the English Department’s Adrian – Salomon Dissertation Fellowship, the English Department’s Dean’s Fellowship, the Baker Nord Center for the Humanities, and the School of Graduate Studies travel award. I thank my parents, Ray and Joyce Horton, for putting books in my hands at an earlier age than I can remember. And I thank my sister, Gloria, whose lifelong friendship and conversation often spills into these pages. Above all, I thank Erin, whose faith in me helps me to see everything with new eyes. 5 American Literature’s Secular Faith Abstract by RAY HORTON This dissertation argues for a new way to characterize the relationship between religious discourse and aesthetic attention in twentieth century American literature. The study of religion and literature has been dominated by two theses: on one hand, critics since Matthew Arnold have advanced a secularization thesis where art serves as a surrogate for religion; on the other hand, recent postsecular critics study how literature encodes religious convictions. In this study, I demonstrate that an important strain of twentieth century writing requires a third approach, showing how writers achieve the artistic goal of vivifying quotidian experience by incorporating faith as a formal element. For example, in Marilynne Robinson’s fiction, we might ask why novels committed to a Calvinist belief in immortality are simultaneously enamored with material experiences and ephemeral images. Why does faith in eternity compel the narrator of Gilead to attend to the surfaces of ordinary objects, such as a cascade of bubbles that floats past his window while he contemplates his incipient mortality? I argue that Robinson is one of many writers for whom the background of religious conviction activates an aesthetic process that renders the finite as uniquely worthy of attention. For these writers, a robust engagement with religion makes the secular newly visible. Writers as diverse as Robinson, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, James Baldwin, and Don DeLillo elicit new modes of aesthetic attention as they engage religious discourse. If modernist aesthetics are thought to be predicated upon finitude, as in Wallace Stevens’s 6 famous assertion that “death is the mother of beauty,” then this tradition of American writers revises this premise, making the mundane newly visible by grappling with religious ideas. Where American literary history is traditionally conceived as a history of secularization, or as an archive of religious ideas that resist secularity, this study shows how religion’s persistence over the past century has served to instigate aesthetic attention to the ordinary. 7 Introduction Religion as Device in American Literature Religion stands accused of taking our eyes off of the world. Philosophers, writers, and critics have long warned against putting faith in whatever purports to be eternal, supernatural, or transcendent. We trivialize the immanent, such thinkers caution, when our imaginations are preoccupied with the infinite. A century and a half ago, the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach offered an influential version of this argument when he described Christianity as an alienating denial of this world for another. “God is the highest subjectivity of man abstracted from himself; hence man can do nothing of himself, all goodness comes from God” (31). His main concern is not whether such a God exists; rather, he asserts that the basic structure of the religious longing is incoherent, for it takes our attention off of the temporal by enrapturing us with dreams of eternity. More recently, literary critics such as Martin Hägglund have revived Feuerbach’s critique of transcendence, resisting the so-called “religious turn” in recent cultural theory on similar grounds.1 “It is because one is invested in the survival of temporal life that one seeks to save anything from death,” Hägglund contends. “Yet the state of immortality cannot answer to the survival that is desired,” for such a state would annul the very contingencies that elicit our misguided longing for an “eternity where nothing comes into being or passes away” (Dying for Time 9). According to Hägglund, the world’s religions misplace our care for the world by disavowing the finitude on which that care rests. For these and countless others, religious faith eclipses our attention to the world before us. It 1 For Hägglund’s overview of the religious turn in cultural theory and in continental philosophy, see Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. He challenges the view, advanced by thinkers such as Richard Kearney and John Caputo, “that there was an ethical or ‘religious’ turn in Derrida’s thinking” (1). I return to Hägglund’s argument in my fourth chapter, as part of my reading of DeLillo, religion, and postmodernism. 8 deadens our capacity to apprehend what is material, ephemeral, and finite. For it’s because of the finitude of our experience, the ephemerality of our perceptions, and the lack of any transcendent guarantees, these thinkers explain, that we cultivate an attachment to the world in the first place. “Death,” as one modernist poet declares, “is the mother of beauty.” Or as a more colloquial American voice cautions: “You’re so heavenly minded you’re no earthly good.”2 This dissertation uncovers a tradition of twentieth century American writers who reverse this charge. Writers as varied as Mark Twain, Willa Cather, James Baldwin, Don DeLillo, and Marilynne Robinson, each working under the auspices of a disenchanted age, reimagine religious faiths as aesthetic models which intensify, rather than annul, our perception of the material world. But in order to appreciate how these writers turn being “heavenly minded” into an “earthly good” (and in order to ask what such an “earthly good” might entail), we must first consider how deeply the critique of transcendence sketched above has permeated critical discourse, shaping a familiar story about secularization in literary theory and in American literary studies. In the United States and in Europe, this iconoclastic warning was sounded as both a sociopolitical project and a scholarly method.3 This project and this method, woven into a master narrative of Modernity, came during the twentieth century to be called the secularization thesis. The secularization thesis provided a useful shorthand for the 2 The first quotation is, of course, from Stanza VI, line 13 of Wallace Steven’s “Sunday Morning.” The second is from the Johnny Cash song titled “No Earthly Good.” 3 Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age remains one of the most comprehensive accounts of this project. The edited collection, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, by Warner, VanAntwerpen, and Calhoun provides an important range of responses to Taylor’s analysis. Another important resource for this history is The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere, a scholarly website
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