Secularization Without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee by Vincent Pecora (review)

In Secularization Without End, Vincent Pecora applies to the novel the prescient framework he developed in Secularization and Cultural Criticism, in which he argued that secularization is a process characteristic of modernity that creates the modern by extirpating the religious and anything else that is not secular or rational. In turn, the modern is far more entangled with the religious than its self-understanding permits it to recognize, not only because it sequesters itself to the spaces that remain uncontaminated by religion, but also because it arises from the very past from which it works to make a break. In Secularization Without End, Pecora recovers the religiosity that persists in the novel despite its ostensible status as the secular modern genre par excellence.

Focusing on the Calvinism that pervades the work of Samuel Beckett and J. M. Coetzee and the influence of Augustine on Thomas Mann, Pecora demonstrates convincingly that a secular critical perspective will always fail to understand these authors’ novels because it must blind itself to the presence of theology and because these authors write self-consciously from within a tradition that modernity, in its hamstrung binary, can only recognize as theological. Working beyond this binary at the same time that he derides its myopia, Pecora argues for a critical approach that is neither secular nor religious, that draws its explanatory power from both streams at the expense of neither, and that finds in the combination of temporal and sacred narratives a rich description of the human condition that would otherwise remain illegible. At times challenging because it unsettles the perspective from which it attempts to see, Secularization Without End nonetheless offers its reader a sure guiding hand (as well as many precise and sonorous turns of phrase). It is unlikely to convince the committed secularist to let down his guard against the religious, though it provides a valuable contribution to those who find the persistence of religion a worthy modern mystery or who have seen and felt, if only obliquely, the peculiar contradictions of the secular novel.

In the book’s first chapter, Pecora manifests in Beckett’s writing “a distorting transformation of a Calvinist, Puritan religious tradition” (26). With the term distortion, Pecora refers to Heidegger’s Verwindung, which he sometimes translates in Lucretian vocabulary as the “swerve” to describe the non-teleological movement of history, “a peripeteia—a wandering, errant process that often folds back on itself, producing not only the return in distorted form of something perhaps hastily repressed … but also a host of unintended consequences … that we have only begun to understand” (22). The swerve of history is the distortion of the past through the constraints of the present—an inheritance neither faithfully received nor forsaken. Beckett acknowledged his debt to the Calvinist philosopher Arnold Geulincx, who described himself as a spectator in a machine-like world in which he is unable to make any difference because he and the world are creations of a God who is infinitely distant but totally in control. Beckett’s absent God does not make room for human agency. The individual’s authorial “I” is always also authored, “since he is never anything other than the personae that come to life through him, unbidden… and yet inescapable” (54). In Beckett’s mechanical world, like the predetermined one of Calvin, we are observers who have become aware midstream of a process we did not set in motion and cannot complete.

In the second chapter, Pecora reads in Mann’s Doktor Faustus the “distorted echoes” (58) of Augustine and in its protagonist an uncertain hope that the truth can set him free of the need for divine grace. Leverkühn turns away from God in a pact with the devil that guarantees his musical virtuosity, and in the process, he descends into a moral corruption like that of Hitler’s Germany, which made “genocide itself seem to the perpetrators a heroic task” (71). The novel’s narrator, Zeitblom, asks without answer whether there can...