Literature, Religion, and Postsecular Studies Lori Branch, Series Editor Hard Sayings The Rhetoric of Christian Orthodoxy in Late Modern Fiction Thomas F. Haddox THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS • COLUMBUS Copyright © 2013 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Haddox, Thomas F. (Thomas Fredrick) Hard sayings : the rhetoric of Christian orthodoxy in late modern fiction / Thomas F. Haddox. p. cm. — (Literature, religion, and postsecular studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1208-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8142-9310-2 (cd) 1. Christianity in literature. 2. O’Connor, Flannery—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Spark, Muriel—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Updike, John—Criticism and inter- pretation. 5. Percy, Walker, 1916–1990—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Gordon, Mary, 1949-—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Robinson, Marilynne—Criticism and interpre- tation. I. Title. II. Series: Literature, religion, and postsecular studies. PN49.H23 2013 813'.54093823—dc23 2012047044 Cover design by Jerry Dorris, AuthorSupport.com Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Palatino and ITC Leawood Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the Ameri- can National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction Christian Orthodoxy and the Rhetoric of Fiction 1 Chapter 1 Flannery O’Connor, the Irreducibility of Belief, and the Problem of Audience 23 Chapter 2 Catholicism for “Really Intelligent People”: The Rhetoric of Muriel Spark 50 Chapter 3 John Updike’s Rhetoric of Christian American Narcissism 85 Chapter 4 Walker Percy’s Rhetoric of Time, Apocalypse, and the Modern Predicament 125 Chapter 5 The Uses of Orthodoxy: Mary Gordon and Marilynne Robinson 161 Epilogue On Belief and Academic Humility 204 Works Cited 209 Index 218 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS No book is produced alone, and whatever merits this one may possess derive in large part from the contributions of friends, colleagues, and fam- ily members who discussed it with me, offered constructive criticism, and encouraged me to persevere. Among my colleagues at the University of Tennessee, I particularly want to thank Misty Anderson, Dawn Coleman, Allen Dunn, Amy Elias, Heather Hirschfeld, Russel Hirst, Mark Hulsether, Keith Lyons, Chuck Maland, Jeff Moody, and Steve Pearson for reading sections of the manuscript and taking the project seriously; and Stan Gar- ner, who as head of the English Department did much to create a congenial environment for its completion. Looking farther afield, I am grateful to Robert Donahoo and Avis Hewitt, who invited me to present some of the material in this book at con- ferences; to Anthony DiRenzo and David Malone, whose conversations with me at conferences proved to be especially helpful; and to Marshall Bruce Gentry, who was very hospitable when I came to Milledgeville back in the summer of 2004 to examine Flannery O’Connor’s manuscripts. Ralph Wood, whose work I have followed for several years, has provided, from afar, the scholarly standard to which I aspire. Two portions of this book have been previously published. A section of chapter 1 first appeared, in a different form, under the title “On Belief, Con- flict, and Universality: Flannery O’Connor, Walter Benn Michaels, Slavoj vii viii • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Žižek,” in Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Terrorism, ed. Avis Hewitt and Robert Donahoo (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2010): 231–39. Sections of chapter 2 first appeared, in a different form, under the title “Religion for ‘Really Intelligent People’: The Rhetoric of Muriel Spark’s Reality and Dreams,” in Religion and Literature 41 (Autumn 2009): 43–66. I am grateful to both publishers for permission to reprint this material here. I am grateful to Sandy Crooms at The Ohio State University Press for her enthusiasm and professionalism, to the two anonymous readers who evaluated my manuscript and whose suggestions improved it considerably, and to Maggie Diehl and Maggie Smith-Beehler for their meticulous copy- editing. And above all, I am grateful to my wife, Honor McKitrick Wallace, and to my children, James, Elizabeth, and Anthony, for their incomparable love and support. I present this work to them with love, zeal, and apologies for the time it has consumed. The cover of this book is a photograph of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis - kirche in Berlin, an image reflective of the multiple ironies surrounding the situation of Christianity in the late modern world. The old church, perma- nently damaged in an air raid in 1943, dates only from 1891 and was named not for Jesus Christ or for a Christian saint, but for Kaiser Wilhelm I of Ger- many. As such, it is a symbol of the often dubious relationship between the church and the modern state that used to characterize much of Christen- dom. The modern concrete, steel, and glass tower to the right is not a secu- lar office building but the “new” Gedächtniskirche, consecrated in 1961. The small cross on its summit is not visible from the angle of this photograph and seems, even when visible, like an architectural afterthought—perhaps appropriately enough for a building that Berliners like to call “der Lippen- stift” (the lipstick). Yet even granting these mordant ironies, the building remains a Christian house of worship and, through its very imperfections, a testament to the difficulties of speaking the hard sayings of Christianity in a late modern context. INTRODUCTION Christian Orthodoxy and the Rhetoric of Fiction This is a book about the work of six writers of fiction—Flannery O’Connor, Muriel Spark, John Updike, Walker Percy, Mary Gordon, and Marilynne Robinson—and its relationship to what I call “Christian orthodoxy.” I define Christian orthodoxy as the conviction that the central dogmas and moral imperatives of historic Christianity are true and binding and that we ignore their truth and their claims upon us at our peril. Orthodox Christian believers affirm, at a minimum, that there is one God, who has revealed himself in the Old and New Testaments; that there are three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in the one God; that Jesus Christ is both God and man; that his salvific death and resurrection were real historical events, not mythic narratives or metaphors; that those who believe in him and repent will have eternal life; and finally, that such believers, commanded to live in accord with Jesus’ moral teachings, constitute the Church, the Body of Christ, wherein salvation is found.1 Moreover, orthodox Christians do not regard these as merely intellectual propositions but strive continuously to make of their belief and their actions an integrated whole. Christian orthodoxy, in short, is both a narrative that claims to tell the truth about the human predicament and a mode of life lived in obedience to God. 1. Beyond these minimum propositions, of course, orthodox Christians—whether Cath- olic, Protestant, or Eastern Orthodox—disagree considerably about particulars of doctrine and practice. 1 2 • INTRODUCTION I consider the novels and short stories discussed in this book as case studies in what Wayne Booth long ago called “the rhetoric of fiction,” investigating how their authors position themselves in relation to Chris- tian orthodoxy and attempt to persuade their intended audiences of the truth and the desirability of its doctrinal claims. The first four writers— O’Connor, Spark, Updike, and Percy—began their careers in the 1940s and 1950s and have to varying degrees identified themselves as advocates for Christian orthodoxy. Gordon and Robinson, who began writing in the 1970s, have a more complicated stance toward Christian orthodoxy— indeed, Gordon often writes in explicit opposition to it—but they too see it as essential to their projects, whether as a force to be challenged in some of its particulars or as something to be appropriated for other purposes. All six writers, I maintain, have much to teach us about the relationship between Christian belief and literary rhetoric in what I call the late modern period—a time that begins roughly with the Second World War. It would be easy enough—and partially accurate—to explain the broad differences between O’Connor, Percy, Spark, and Updike on the one hand and Gordon and Robinson on the other by referring to the cultural upheaval in the West known as “the Sixties,” which temporally divides the first group of writers from the second. Such an explanation would, how- ever, align too neatly with a classification of the first four writers as “mod- ern” in orientation and the last two as “postmodern.” I maintain that as Westerners of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, all six writers inhabit a late modern world still with us—a condition defined by liberal and democratic forms of government, religious toleration, and an expan- sive cultural pluralism underwritten by an increasingly global capitalism.2 This world has much in common with the one predicted by sociology’s “secularization thesis,” which held that as modernization proceeds, a “dis- enchantment of the world” (Max Weber’s phrase) comes to sever religion from the public sphere and to weaken its cultural influence. Marx, Weber, Freud, and Durkheim all advanced versions of the secularization thesis, 2. Part of what makes this period “late modern” is the perception that some political- economic regimes—mercantilism, fascism, or Soviet Communism, for instance—have been decisively discredited, leaving no viable alternatives to finance capitalism. “Late modern” thus suggests a certain shrinking of horizons, and in this sense it echoes the term “late mod- ernism,” which Fredric Jameson regards as a disappointing interval between the utopian high modernisms of the early twentieth century and the postmodernism that soon supplanted them (Singular Modernity 165–66).