Stories of the Middle Space: Reading the Ethics of Postmodern Realisms (review)

Deborah Bowen has given us a rich and ambitious exploration of a wide variety of British and Canadian postmodern novels and short stories from a Christian perspective. Bookended by A. S. Byatt’s short story “Sugar” and novella “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” Bowen’s examination covers fourteen texts by writers such as Joy Kogawa, Salman Rushdie, Jane Urquhart, and Timothy Findley and four genres of postmodernist fiction: historiographic metafiction, magic realism, parodic mythic, and photographic co-optation. In a nutshell, her argument is that the Bible is not the oppressive master narrative postmodernists say it is; rather, the Christian story jibes with postmodernist fiction and also assists us in a return to an ethical reading of these texts. “Postmodern literary theory has generally speaking been read as anti-theological if not anti-metaphysical,” writes Bowen. “But,” she adds, “some critics see the turn away from positivism and rationalism as actually facilitating the search for spiritual reality” (112).

Using the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Mikhail Bakhtin to underpin her study, Bowen pushes against both postmodernism’s putative amorality and traditional definitions of realism to show postmodern realism as a fecund triangular “middle space,” circumscribed by word, world, and the transcendent. In this middle space, Bowen finds ample evidence of responsibility to the other, the basis for (Christian) ethics. For example, Bowen, reading Obasan against critics like Frank Chin, who once equated a Chinese Christian with a Nazi Jew (as cited by Bowen 73), sees Kogawa’s use of the Christian story as redemptive and shows how the novel has accomplished ethical work in the world by helping to initiate redress for Japanese Canadians.

One of Bowen’s strengths is her ability to synthesize from multiple sources to produce efficient, accessible, and readable histories and summaries of writers and genres. For example, her overview of Levinas and Bahktin, the two major thinkers she uses to frame her argument, is an elegantly written mini-education near the opening of the book. In later chapters, she provides tight genealogies of magic realism and myth in modern culture, both of which I would borrow from if teaching these genres in the classroom. Furthermore, Bowen draws intelligently on a wide range of scholars beyond her primary authors—everyone from Richard Rorty and Paul Ricoeur to David Lyon (Jesus in Disneyland) and Richard Kearney (Anatheism). Her understanding of twentieth-century philosophy and theology is impressive. However, I do have a couple of caveats about Stories of the Middle Space.

Bowen’s declaration of identity as a Christian scholar is unsurprising—the book cover tells us that Bowen looks at postmodern fictions from a “faith-based perspective” and gives Christian readings of various British and Canadian texts. Moreover, Bowen teaches at Redeemer University College, a Christian undergraduate institution in Ancaster, Ontario. In her prologue, subtitled a “Christian Apologia,” Bowen writes that her first premise in writing the book is that “there is a Creator God” (7), and she closes the prologue with the following statement: “However sobered I may be by a religious heritage which must at many key historical junctures be condemned as deeply dishonourable, and however humbled by my own culpable construction within it, I am honoured to confess that, striving to be aware of both my response and my responsibility, I read and write under the sign of the Christian” (19). This claim is not unexpected, and yet my hackles are up: does this argument depend, then, on me believing in this same “Creator God” to buy it? Bowen’s prominent self-situating does her book a disservice because it sets up a spurious link between her beliefs and the persuasiveness of her argument. The extensive justification of her Christianity in the prologue may serve to limit Bowen’s readers and have her preaching mostly to the converted. To give her credit, Bowen does anticipate the objections of her non-Christian readers on pages 8 through...