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  • Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel
  • Douglas Mao
Pericles Lewis . Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print. xiii + 236 pp.

"There can be for many writers," wrote J. Hillis Miller in Poets of Reality in 1965, "no traditional conception of God as the highest existence, creator of all other existences, transcending his creation as well as dwelling within it. If there is to be a God in the new world it must be a presence within things and not beyond them" (10). Miller's principal subject was the American poetry of the previous fifty years, though as his sly use of "new world" to refer to the modern age signals, his study was meant to point to a general literary condition. For Miller, a certain sacralization of the realm of immediate things, which could also be interpreted as a general desacralization, was the crucial tendency of modern poetry in English—even though at least one major poet featured in his book, T. S. Eliot, enjoyed a celebrated conversion to the Church of England and numerous others not examined (W. H. Auden, H. D., and Ezra Pound, for example) produced poetry on Christian themes or redolent of a world inhabited by pagan gods and spirits.

What about the novel in the early twentieth century? As Pericles Lewis observes in his learned, incisive, and rewarding new book, "we might expect the modernist novel to be doubly secular," since (first) modernity in general has long been associated with secularization and (second) a tradition of grand theories—Benjamin, Auerbach, Bakhtin, Watt, Lukács, Jameson, Moretti—has identified the novel with a turn from free invocation of the supernatural to scrupulous rendering of the observable world (23). Lewis argues, however, that this expectation of secularity is not borne out in any simple way if one examines the major Western European fictions around which a modernist canon has been built. Though their authors had unquestionably given up belief in the God of prior generations, these works were shaped in significant ways by questions and dispositions bequeathed by Christianity and Judaism and by a more general intuition that something important must lie beyond the sensible—in the realm of the spiritual, the magical, the unseen. Indeed the "religious subject of the writers and social thinkers of the modernist generation can . . . be understood as the limits of secularization" (25).

Lewis sets the stage for his literary readings with a broad critique of the "secularization thesis," the view that an essential aspect of modernity, or "modern civilization," lies in a widespread disappearance of belief in God [End Page 1140] (26). In nineteenth-century Western Europe, Lewis observes, the "experience of secularization" belonged mostly to "a small, elite, and articulate minority," and in the succeeding century, "the culture at large witnessed renewed concern with spiritual matters" even as the heirs of that earlier elite, the children of Victorian-era atheists and agnostics, sought ways to account for religious experience less tethered to the dogmas of liberal rationalism (25, 34). Lewis then marshals readings of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce to make the case that modernism's novelists in effect fall somewhere between its poets, who often engaged quite directly with devotional matters (sometimes from a position of faith), and figures such as Durkheim, Weber, and Freud (the "social thinkers" of the sentence quoted in the previous paragraph), who sought to account for religious feeling in non-religious terms.

Recalling Edmund Wilson's 1931 contention that the literature of the preceding decades fused "aspirations towards sacredness and symbolist poetry with the naturalist effort to achieve objectivity and comprehensiveness" (36), Lewis finds modernism's novelists striving to represent religious experiences "without trying to explain them (or explain them away)." Echoing the Miller of Poets of Reality, he argues that these writers "sought a secular sacred, a form of transcendent or ultimate meaning to be discovered in this world, without reference to the supernatural" (21). Yet as one might expect given their chosen genre's trading in narratives of human lives, it was less in the physical objects of the world than in key events of the individual's span that...

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