Conspicuous Bodies: Provincial Belief and the Making of Joyce and Rushdie by Jean Kane (review)

Conspicuous Bodies sees the “individual” in James Joyce’s and Salman Rushdie’s fiction as a function of tensions both between the somatic and the spiritual, and between Christian conceptions of the individual and those in other “non-Western” religions. In it, Jean Kane provocatively but persuasively asserts that “[c]ritics of twentieth-century literature have been slow to attend to religious foundationalism, in spite of the explosion of ‘postcolonial,’ ‘transnational,’ and other works that foreground spirituality in diverse modes” (8). Drawing from a wide range of anthropological, philosophical, and historical studies of religion, Kane offers fertile interdisciplinary readings of Joyce’s Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, as well as Rushdie’s novels Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, and The Ground beneath Her Feet. She stresses her “focus on persons who differ in striking ways from the ‘individual’” as a “normative base” that is defined through liberal nineteenth-century Christianity (1–2).

The first of the book’s six chapters deals with illness and excesses, both physical and spiritual, when inebriation produces lapses from agency in Dubliners. In an insightful commentary that opens the chapter, Kane critiques academic, cultural, and political impulses that reduce “non-Western” religions to assumptions accompanying the “mode and development” of Christianity. Kane contends that post-Enlightenment Christianity “moved its basis further toward sentiment and experience to compensate for its loss of epistemological privilege,” a loss that drunkenness itself indicates (10). In Kane’s view, “Joyce and Rushdie use their insider experience of spiritual techniques to reimagine bodily epistemes, yet they read these productions from an external vantage based on theological, ‘religious’ premises” (2). Kane takes the term “insider,” of course, from anthropology while examining, as she herself announces, “a modernism that moves between auto-ethnographic and ethnographic positions, cosmopolitan and provincial identifications, insider knowledge and outsider display of identity” (2). However, the ethnographic terms “insider” and “outsider” disregard the energy that both Joyce and Rushdie invest in complicating and blurring the putative borders of the “inside” and “outside.”

Kane’s second chapter demonstrates the strong resonance of discourse on the “Vedic body” with somatic tensions in Midnight’s Children that pit “Indian spirituality against imperial [European] empiricism” (41). She reads Rushdie’s novel as puncturing the latter and privileging the former. This reading reveals a persistent problem in Kane’s negotiation of two writers for whom irony is an engine for non-binary thought: her argument frequently disregards the elusiveness of irony, instead seeing religious traditions as discrete or foundational in Joyce’s and Rushdie’s work. When she declares, “Vedic and other somatopsychic protocols act as the foundation of [Saleem Sinai’s] semiotic [in Midnight’s Children],” she ignores the novel’s overt appetite for irony and mixture that denies us the convenience of locating a single semiotic foundation for it (55).

In contrast, the next chapter sustains an interpretive alertness, building a trenchant commentary on the influence of performative aspects from Irish Catholicism and European-Irish Judaism in Ulysses, before leading into a chapter on The Satanic Verses, where Kane makes an engaging inquiry into the novel’s exploration of links between Indian religions and popular culture, and a fifth chapter that scrupulously shows that the controversies over both Ulysses and The Satanic Verses had their hub not in confrontations between religion and art, but on contested notions of personhood. Here, Kane elaborates a reading of Joyce’s and Rushdie’s fascination with the empty referentiality of simulated, but religion-inflected, selves that she sees as an extension of Gothic play with evacuated signifiers. Kane’s sixth and concluding chapter argues that celebrity serves as the substitute for spirituality in The Satanic Verses.

In this concluding chapter, Kane juxtaposes a rare critical analysis of the rock-star lead characters in The Ground beneath Her Feet with a sympathetic reading of Rushdie’s own celebrity, the projections of which, for...