Invisible Conversations: Religion in the Literature of America

1. Finding a Prose for God: Religion and American Fiction

19 = 1 Finding a Prose for God Religion and American Fiction Denis Donoghue For the purposes of this chapter (and for some purposes beyond it), I take religion to be Christianity, the expedient—as Nietzsche called it in The Genealogy of Morals—“that paradoxical and awful expedient, through which a tortured humanity has found a temporary alleviation, that stroke of genius called Christianity—God personally immolating himself for the debt of man, God paying himself personally out of a pound of his own flesh.”1 It follows that I do not allude to other religions or to the sinister possibility of “religion without religion” to which Derrida refers in The Gift of Death as “this immense and thorny question.”2 Whether Christianity is an achieved entity or a mysterium tremendum always yet to be fulfilled is a question I do not address. I begin with some general considerations that do not bear peculiarly on American fiction. They are perhaps mere five-finger exercises in the vicinity of the topic, but I hope by this means to make a space for some that do. Ministry of Fiction, Ministry of Form I assume that literature is language subject to the double ministry of fiction and form. It is life as a writer imagines it within the constraints of the language in which it is written. The factor common to religion and literature is language. But that apparently simple notion does not report a harmonious relation between the two values. Geoffrey Hill, brooding over the twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary in its second edition, was persuaded that “sematology is a theological dimension: the use of language is inseparable from that ‘terrible aboriginal calamity’ in which, according to Newman, the human race is implicated.”3 In a lighthearted world a language would 20 Denis Donoghue be comprehensive. There would be words and sentences in it fully expressive of whatever perceptions, judgments, feelings, sentiments, and desires are humanly possible. But that does not appear to be the case, as Wittgenstein held when he maintained that whereof one may not speak, thereof one must be silent. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien’s narrator records that Rat Kiley shot a baby buffalo several times for no clear reason. All he can say is this: “We had witnessed something essential, something brand-new and profound, a piece of the world so startling there was not yet a name for it.”4 Maybe there was a name for it that O’Brien could not find. It is still a matter of debate whether or not there are feelings that never transpire in language. There is always silence, the silence into which the words, after speech, reach, according to the “Burnt Norton” of T. S. Eliot. Or John Cage’s silence, which is presumably different from mine or anyone else’s. Heather McHugh has a poem (“What He Thought”) about the burning of Giordano Bruno and how his captors put an iron mask on his face to prevent him from speaking. The poem ends: “poetry is what / he thought, but did not say.”5 Nonetheless, language seems to be more enabling than one could anticipate. D. W. Harding has argued in Experience Into Words that writers are distinguished from other people by bringing language to bear upon their thinking at an unusually early stage of the transaction. They do not conceive thoughts independently of language and then search about for the best means of expressing them; it is as if the words pressed themselves forward and the thoughts came, a split second later, to complete the action. But words often seem to be not the right ones, and in that character they offer a show of truculence that they have no apparent right to offer. In Style and Faith, Hill quotes Benjamin Whichcote as saying that “by wickedness [a man] passes into a Nature contrary to his own,” and comments that “when you write at any serious pitch of obligation you enter into the nature of grammar and etymology, which is a nature contrary to your own.” You cannot “extricate yourself from this ‘contrary nature’ by some kind of philosophical fiat or gesture of spiritual withdrawal.”6 Language in that character is enemy country. This makes a problem for religion, which the churches resolve as best they can by allowing an aura to suffuse their rituals and prayers. There is another difficulty. Kenneth Burke noted that there...