Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (review)

Of all the cultural trends announced by neologisms containing the prefix “post,” postsecularity may well be the most unpalatable to twenty-first-century scholars. Though one could argue that it is simply the inevitable culmination of various efforts in the past several decades to repudiate European enlightenment thought, an explicit return to religiosity will seem to some like a dangerously anti-intellectual development. Nevertheless, judging from John A. McClure’s Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison, there is nothing terribly unsettling in this new paradigm. Indeed, the virtue of McClure’s book is its ability to make the religious impulses that it identifies seem congenial to contemporary intellectual attitudes, but this is also its weakness. McClure is so intent on establishing the appeal of the postsecular by distinguishing it from traditional, dogmatic, fundamentalist religious practices and beliefs that his central concept at times runs the risk of losing its positive content, becoming merely a container for prevailing academic values with a vaguely spiritual inflection.

Partial Faiths attributes a postsecular sensibility to several important contemporary theorists, including Harold Bloom, William Connolly, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Hadot, and Gianni Vattimo, while focusing in its chapters on the novelists Don DeLillo, Louise Erdrich, Scott Momaday, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje, Thomas Pynchon, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Almost all of these figures, according to McClure, share a sense that secularity has become a restrictive and unsustaining worldview. If people are turning now more than ever to religion, this is because “worldly life [has become] intolerable” and “secular modernity’s promises of peace, prosperity, and progress [have failed] to materialize” (10). Moreover, notwithstanding its purported purchase on truth, rationality offers an inadequate account of reality, excluding certain dimly apprehended registers, marginalizing or discrediting the sublime, the supernatural, and the extraordinary. The postsecular project, according to McClure, seeks to reenchant the world (7), revealing it to be “shot through with mysterious agents and energies” (2). At times, proponents of this perspective flirt with the notion of a benevolent higher power, or at least with the idea that the “world is seamed with mystery and benignity” (6). But the forms of belief espoused by postsecular thinkers are never dogmatically committed to universal axioms or closed to other possible worldviews. Thus they are entirely unlike the forms of religious fundamentalism that McClure acknowledges as an alternative response to secularity’s failings.

All of the novelists that McClure considers attempt to synthesize symbols, concepts, and practices from a variety of different traditions. Unwedded to any particular cosmology, they typically set out to “weaken” the religions they appropriate, rethinking or recasting them so as to make them capable of accommodating ambiguity, ambivalence, uncertainty, and risk. And most of these writers, according to McClure, attempt to ally the postsecular with some form of progressive local politics, a communal orientation, an emphasis on tolerance, an ethic of care. While the chapters generally attribute a similar, at times predictable, set of insights to each author, McClure is adept at articulating and distinguishing the particular tonal or affective dispositions constitutive of the various religious impulses that he considers. Thus McClure notes that “DeLillo’s registration of this ‘something beyond’ is as cautious as Pynchon’s is exuberant,” contending that “while Pynchon introduces a vast array of supernatural beings and domains, DeLillo resacralizes the world in the mode of modernism by subtly loosening the fabric of everyday reality so that something else—presence or emptiness—shines through and by introducing, often without any fanfare, a series of mysterious interruptions of quotidian reality” (65). In another chapter, McClure cleverly reads Louise Erdrich’s depiction of her protagonist’s laughably clumsy attempts to reclaim his Native American spirituality as perfectly in accord with the Ojibwa conception of the cosmos as “comic” and “antiheroic,” thus discovering a covert embrace of religious tradition concealed behind a guise of satire (159).

Overall, McClure’s eloquence infuses...