Escrituras postseculares: sedimentos de la religión en la narrativa española (1950-2010) by Daniel García-Donoso (review)

The religious politics of Early modern counter-reformation, the Civil War and franquismo haunts the novels that are the object of this study. García-Donoso documents how Spanish fiction, in a world that seems to have replaced institutionalized religion with capitalist speculation, re-deploys this legacy with caution. Escrituras postseculares responds to a perceived lack of critical approaches to religion in contemporary Spanish culture (11), outlining the emergence of a non-dogmatic "postsecularism." It analyzes the reconfigurations of Catholic tropes, which he treats as "sediments," a spatial metaphor he borrows from Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of the re-activation of tradition (21). Experimental, historical, crime and (pre) crisis novels perform an (implied or explicit) critique of the Catholic Church. At the same time, they reconfigure spiritual practices like confession, reconciliation and humility, which become narrative devices.

The author's exhaustive research maps out these historical re-sedimentations through compelling syntheses of philosophical, historical, and literary criticism, such as Noel Valis' Sacred Realism: Religion and the Imagination in Modern Spanish Narrative (2010). The introduction provides a helpful, extensive survey of twentieth century critics, like Lukacs and Auerbach, correlating the theory of western "secularization" with the development of the modern novel. Each chapter starts with an extensive and relevant survey of the political and social context of how novelists responded to the consequences of state-sponsored Spanish Catholicism.

Chapter One, "Laboratorios de lo Sagrado," describes how experimental novels in the 60s and early 70s demanded active participation from their intellectual reader in "revealing" and reimagining their painful reality in the context of weakened Francoist Catholicism. Fragmentos del Apocalipsis by Gonzalo Torrente-Ballester is a parody of genres, especially Apocalyptic literature, which proclaims its status as a self-sufficient discourse. Saul ante Samuel by Juan Benet deploys excessive allusions to the Old Testament to the point of emptying out their referentiality. The Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a narrative technique in the late experimental novel Cristo versus Arizona by Camilo José Cela. This constant leitmotif would preserve readers from "sin."

Chapter Two, "Heterodoxa historia de Miguel Delibes," representing an aspect of sixteenth-century Spain's social life only documented in inquisitorial records, is the most relevant for early modernists like this reviewer. For García-Donoso, as opposed to the experimental novel and its exclusive intellectual public, the historical fiction that emerged with the Transición responds to the general reading public's need to re-imagine the past to build a better future. In El hereje, Cipriano turns into a successful businessperson and enters Lutheran circles in Valladolid after his clandestine erotic relationship with his maid/maternal figure was discovered and prohibited, resonating with the prohibition of Protestantism. Cipriano compares his new Lutheran community, an intimate fraternal space, to early prosecuted Christian groups. In his Inquisitorial Auto de Fé, after the confession is shown as an incriminatory practice, his cathartic death by burning resembles Christ in the calvary. The point of view of the public witnessing the execution coincides with the readers' point of view, leading them to question the Spanish Catholic identity.

The novels analyzed in Chapter Three, "Éxtasis del Capital en la novela policíaca española" parody how spiritual exercises that seek evidence to explain mysteries are compared with detective work. In Los misterios de Madrid by Antonio Muñoz Molina, Lorencito is an ad hoc detective hired under false pretenses to investigate the robbery of El Cristo de la Greña. The image's lighting turns on with a coin of 25 pesetas, coined in 1990 for the 1992's anniversary of the "encounter of two worlds." Also, the orgasm at a sex shop is described as a religious experience, the environment resonating with the description of a Catholic souvenir shop. In La piel del tambor by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Lorenzo Quart is an attractive priest sent by the Vatican to prevent the sale...