Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel by Pericles Lewis (review)

In Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, Pericles Lewis deftly challenges the narrative of secularization—that belief in God and participation in traditional religious institutions trailed off in the wake of science and rationalism—which has come to describe both modernism and the history of the novel: "If God died in the nineteenth century, he had an active afterlife in the twentieth" (25). Lewis marshals an abundance of data to show that, despite the warnings about secularization by Victorian cultural critics and other public intellectuals, church attendance and related practices remained quite high through the middle of the twentieth century. In addition, social scientists at the turn of the century began to explain religion not in terms of whether or not God exists, but in terms of the structures of experience and belief that characterize religions in general. Modernist writers were not immune to these developments and turned to the symbolic space of the church and to various kinds of religious experience in order to capture the aesthetic of modernity. Lewis's thesis argues that, "[w]hile this process may be understood as a form of secularization, it does not exactly amount to 'disenchantment'" but rather shifts those forces "from the public forum of churches to the private world of individual experience, which is the precinct of the modern novel" (22). The novel is precisely where "the modernists try to erect structures that will contain new sacred communities in place of the vanishing congregations of the lonely churches" (22).

Identifying the novel's historical association with social science and realism, Lewis pursues a method of pairing each novelist with a sociologist or psychologist, highlighting the mutually constitutive areas of concern among art, religion, and science at the time. Henry James is paired with his brother William, Marcel Proust with his schoolmate Émile Durkheim, Franz Kafka with fellow secular Jewish intellectual Sigmund Freud, and Virginia Woolf with Max Weber for their shared Protestant disenchantment with the world. The final chapter acts as a general conclusion, bringing into the mix of figures a discussion of the sacramental and typological aspects of James Joyce's Ulysses.

The most compelling aspect of Lewis's book is its contextualization of the disparities between religious practice and ideas about religion in various realms of print culture. It concretely presents the contours of European intellectual and public discourses as embodied in canonical modernist novels. The first chapter performs this feat admirably, discussing surveys in The Nation & Athenæum, articles in national newspapers, and the private and public writings of many of the figures whose work will be analyzed in the later chapters. This contextualization is most illuminating in the chapters on James and Woolf. For instance, in citing the major tenets of William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience,¹ Lewis is able to show that the unreliable narrators of Henry James's fiction present ghosts and other supernatural phenomena at face value, "as if" they were real. It is the characters who take different perspectives on their meanings, forming bonds and changing allegiances according to the shared fictions they create to explain them: "[Henry James] emphasizes not their reality or unreality, but their fundamentally social character" (59). Still, argues Lewis, "[s]uch fictions may seem to be entirely secular," but in the "fallen world" of Henry James's novels, "the aura of sacredness around the fictions . . . seems to be the only remnant of faith that can allow James's characters to live together" (62).

The final chapter, "The Burial of the Dead," acts as a general conclusion, though the lion's share is devoted to Joyce. It is here that Lewis turns away from the novelist-social-scientist pairing and toward pagan models common among modernist authors. Paganism appealed to modernists' engagement with the problem of "re-pacifying the world after war," of burying the dead, of what we owe the dead, while at the same time satisfying modernists' desire to eliminate comforting Christian superstitions (171). Many novelists used...