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39 = 2 American Literature and/as Spiritual Inquiry Lawrence Buell To generalize in short form about the relation between “American fiction” and “American religion” is a very tricky undertaking, so vast is the terrain and so variously might these rubrics be understood. The United States—that is, the portion of “America” Denis Donoghue discusses in Chapter 1—is both the most materialistic nation on earth, measured by its disproportionate consumption of earth’s resources, and the most pious, measured by comparative polling data on the percentage of citizens relative to all other modern nations who affirm that they believe in God, afterlife, hell, and so forth. The U.S. is arguably the most religiously diverse nation on earth, the country that stands par excellence for freedom of worship and receptivity to immigrants and the disparate faiths they bring with them, but it is also arguably one of the most religiously homogeneous (with more than 75 percent professing Christianity, Protestantism being especially influential during the first two centuries of colonial and national history but Catholicism outnumbering any single Protestant sect as early as the mid-1800s).1 As for American narrative, a case can be made for it being either haunted by religion or insulated from it. Which is the more culturally symptomatic document, Jonathan Edwards’s “Narrative” or Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography ? Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall? Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn or his The Mysterious Stranger? William Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust or his Go Down, Moses—not to mention A Fable? The fiction of Flannery O’Connor or the fiction of Carson McCullers? Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye or her Paradise? Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping or her Gilead? 40 Lawrence Buell Faced with such paradoxes, one has no choice but to narrow down the field of investigation in order to make it manageable. Denis Donoghue does this in some long-familiar, indeed old-fashioned, ways. He defines classic “American fiction” in terms of the traditional high canon through Henry James and Henry Adams and the core of “American religion” as a secularized, individualized emanation from Protestantism, with Emerson as the liberalizing pivot-point, beyond which “the religious” loses its spiritual rigor and robustness and dwindles into a solitary negotiation of ethical dilemmas. This secularized attenuation he diagnoses as a legacy of Romanticism’s usurpation of the place of religion from Coleridge through Stevens. To the extent that these moves shape the chapter as a whole, it threatens to read like a thrice-told tale, derived from the great mid-twentieth-century critics Donoghue characteristically uses as his preferred reference points, among whom R. P. Blackmur and especially Allen Tate loom largest. One could never tell from this chapter, for example, that there had ever been a canon war in U.S. literary studies, that scholars of the past two decades have retold the story of U.S. literary emergence in such a way as repeatedly, although by no means conclusively, to depose Emerson from the position of gateway to U.S. literary emergence that first-wave American literary studies had assigned him.2 Donoghue’s essay is no mere recycling project, however. It is too crafty and incisive for that. What to me particularly gives it pith, bite, and originality is its sturdy but subtle counterreformationary brief against the attenuation if not the positive evaporation of the religious wrought by the postromantic Protestant imagination, American style. Three dimensions of this brief strike me as especially provocative, meaning of course that I shall want to quarrel with all of them, but I hope respectfully so. First, and most briefly, the opening rumination that follows from the postulate that “the factor common to religion and literature is language.” This is a deliciously clever trap for the unwary reader. Presumably the author is quite aware that what he states as a self-evident truth could reasonably be disputed as an arbitrary restriction. (Why “language”? Why not, say, “affect” or “invention” or “magic”?) But I take it that he counts, and counts rightly, on his target audience of literature scholars being charmed and disarmed by this seductive proposition, with its promise of containing “religion” within the familiar domain of literary discourse. Yet the argument developed from this starting point turns out to press the very opposite claim, to deny the sufficiency of language to characterize the divine. This leads directly to the ensuing contention that...

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