Embodying Belief

Jean Kane’s remarkable new study, Conspicuous Bodies: Provincial Belief and the Making of Joyce and Rushdie, showcases what turning to the religious body and its historical record yields, not only for our understanding of Kane’s two central writers, but also for the fraught history of religion and literary criticism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While there has recently been renewed interest in how modern and contemporary literature mediates that broad catchall term “religion,” as a whole this critical discourse often betrays historical imprecision and critical abstraction, at the expense of the lived, embodied conditions of being religious or religious being. In such studies, religion is almost always sublimated or reduced to immanent causes or ulterior motivations drawn from often-outdated sociological and anthropological assumptions. Or a monolithic understanding of “religion” ignores its nuanced and particular forms as they are embodied in vernacular beliefs and practices. Efforts at historicizing religion all too often preclude the self-understandings of theology and its institutions, which are still largely marginalized by critical discourse about literature. Identifying and avoiding these enduring problems, Kane shows how attending to the somatic aspect of being religious in the writings of James Joyce and Salman Rushdie—even as these writers themselves might deny the productive power of belief— reconfigures Western individualism and contemporary conceptions of the nation and cosmopolitanism, rewriting these histories through the distressed body of the often male, colonized subject.

Conspicuous Bodies attentively considers but also moves beyond traditional periods and their associated aesthetic practices to link Joyce and Rushdie in a broader colonial and postcolonial history. Built by attending to the minoritized, believing body, this history helps explain Rushdie’s enduring attraction to Joyce and more emphatically understands Joyce himself as a postcolonial writer, while adding religious nuance to that established reading. Throughout her study, Kane unsettles the categories of modern and contemporary, colonial and postcolonial via the somatic, which she sets as the matrix of her critical connections. While period distinctions are often unsettled by arguments based on aesthetic practices, and while the body alone might not present a new challenge to period divisions, Kane’s believing bodies do. By tracing embodied belief across the twentieth century and through local cultures, Kane demonstrates that the subtle and surprising evolutions of religion further blur the boundaries between modern and contemporary and complicate the relationship between colonial and postcolonial. Turning to the believing body also allows her to connect religion with affect and disability studies and to qualify the often-insistent materialism of the latter two. More significantly for recent studies of the relationship between religion and twentieth-century literature, Kane draws out the implications of her work for the still largely secular, even secularizing, disciplinary practices that shape critical literary study today. More than a striking contribution to understanding these two authors, her book joins studies by scholars such as Gauri Viswanathan, Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate, Pericles Lewis, and Erik Tonning that apply careful critical pressure to the omissions and imprecisions produced by secular assumptions about how religion shapes modern and contemporary literature.¹

Kane moves ably between formal and theoretical levels, recursively shifting from readings of Joyce and Rushdie, to the diseased body, to how colonial modernism paves the way for contemporary postcolonial fiction, all the while displaying the subtle prose of a published poet.² Kane’s challenging choice of Joyce and Rushdie allows her to outline no clear conversion narrative, as with T. S. Eliot, nor clearer religious affiliation, as with Marilynne Robinson, but rather a complex body of belief. Joyce and Rushdie each had or has had a tenuous and vexed relationship with religious inheritance. To tackle this complexity, Kane builds on work by scholars like Ian Baucom and Jed Esty, but with a slightly different approach, tracing “a modernism that moves between autoethnographic and ethnographic positions, cosmopolitan and provincial identifications, insider knowledge and outsider display of identity” (2).³ As she follows this path, Kane crucially resists understanding religion “as...