A World Abandoned by God: Narrative and Secularism (review)

In A World Abandoned by God: Narrative and Secularism, Susanna Lee (Georgetown University) has set herself the task of examining the historical phenomenon of European secularism in light of Frederic Jameson's dictum that "Modernity is not a concept, philosophical or otherwise, but a narrative category." Defining secularism as "the idea of the absence of a supreme structuring power" and secularization as "the transition to a world without God" and "the elimination of God from the modern landscape" (and often slipping unremarked from secularism to secularization), she cites Georg Lukács's and J. Hillis Miller's claims that secularization is experienced as loss and abandonment but cautions against interpreting secularism as a spiritual disaster on the grounds that secularism is a human creation "that was introduced and absorbed into European culture for numerous reasons." Lee's interest, however, is not in exploring these reasons, but rather in examining the articulation of secularism in the nineteenth-century novel. Positing that God's abandonment of the world is built into and out of its very structure, she argues that this thematic and structural synergy makes the nineteenth-century novel a privileged locus for the study of "secularism as experience, idea, crisis, opportunity, and narrative instrument" (20). Her study therefore focuses on the relationship between character and narrator, or between character and situation, in five selected novels: Stendhal's The Red and the Black (1830), Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1957), Turgenev's A Nest of Gentry (1858), Barbey d'Aurevilly's Bewitched (1851), and Dostoyevsky's Demons (1872). Applying the instruments of narrative theory as the characters and narrators variously celebrate, reject, try to elude, or try to align themselves with the sacred order in the world, Lee construes these novels as "a series of ideas or fantasies about what it means to live with and without the intrusion (or comfort) of a supreme power" (170).

The results of her analysis reinscribe modernity within a theological or at least spiritual order. She concludes that the novels reveal the secular order to be in fact a "reassembled religious order" (172) in which the old theological powers have not disappeared but continue their careers under new names and identities. The world dominated by the forces of fate and chance, biological and psychological drives, or the grandeur and misery of human nature, remains every bit as inscrutable as when it was ruled by the ideas of God, Providence, sin, and grace.

This book will provide stimulating reading for narratologists, and the connection between narrative and theology is an interesting one (and is the subject of much theological writing unexploited by Lee). Other readers, however, may regret that Lee has chosen not to engage the large body of literature on secularism and secularization by historians and scholars of religion. This is not to say that she should have written a historical work, but rather that a less-than-thorough initial discussion of the state of theorizing on secularism – and on the sacred, for that matter – weakens her literary critical project. Many readers, finally, will find that her brief conclusion connecting her analysis of the five novels to present-day political and social realities leaps too easily from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.