Queer Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida (review)

Rarely is a book on nineteenth-century Christianity so much a day at the beach: bright, splashy, full of laughter, leaving you happy, if exhausted at the end. This is fitting for a book whose central task is uncovering the peculiarly fishy, aqueous metaphors that haunt Victorian and Edwardian texts, even as the hot winds of modern rationalism and capitalism were forcing the sea of faith to recede, leaving us all marooned on Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" (1867). (In this sense, John Schad's obsession with the sea makes a wonderful analog to David Jasper's The Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art and Culture [2004].) The beach-ball bounce of Queer Fish will undoubtedly leave some readers unwilling to play, but its overall point is not to be missed: the late nineteenth century witnessed the moment when "certain forms of Christianity" left behind Enlightenment's rationalized religion and, marginalized by both the established church and an emerging secularist society, recovered its scandal, its queerness.

Queer Fish embarks from Michel Foucault's observation in Madness and Civilization (1965) that St. Paul's "great theme of the madness of the Cross . . . began to disappear in the seventeenth century," and that "Christian unreason was [then] relegated by Christians themselves into the margins of . . . reason," leaving us "to wait two centuries—until Dostoevsky and Nietzsche—for Christ to regain the glory of his madness, for scandal to recover its power as revelation" (qtd. in Schad 1). Close-reading in a playful, deconstructive spirit, Schad weaves together seemingly unrelated words and metaphors, pointing to the symptomatic icon of the Victorian fish; the ancient Christian symbol for Christ becomes the cipher of nineteenth-century belief and believers: queer and damp, gasping, and out of place on the beach of modern unbelief. In Schad's telling, belief crops up in unexpected places, and its unusual suspects make for a list of very queer fish indeed: Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde, but also Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, and even Jacques Derrida.

Christian unreason in the late nineteenth century was, for Schad, not just "a re-run of older forms of holy idiocy, but also a new departure, an effect of that peculiarly modern phenomenon, secularization" (2). He rightly points out the irony that the trinity of secular modernity—Marx, Darwin, Freud—easily "aligned with doubt, uncertainty, and indeterminacy," should be a part of what Derrida calls "'a certain  . . . anti-religious . . . filiation . . . a [quite] determinate heritage . . . of critical . . . reason'" (5). Modernity's disavowal of belief accounts for its haunting by specters of faith:

the 'tradition' of holy idiocy reveals the secret history, or histories of Christian involvement in such radical movements and developments as Anarchism, Surrealism, the Absurd, deconstruction and even quantum physics. Indeed, it is these same secret histories that haunt, disrupt and even terrorize . . . Darwin, Marx and Freud, . . . each of whom seeks a serious science of Man that will control, or even banish the dangerous forces of Christian unreason. These same forces are, though, set in play by . . . Dickens, Wilde, Joyce and Derrida. As Kierkegaard writes, 'what Christianity needs is traitors,' and that is exactly what it gets with Dickens et al.

(4)

The book leaves a distinct image of each of these writers. The Darwin of the first chapter is a moody explorer on mysterious seas; he confesses natural selection as absurd in a way that evokes Kierkegaard's leap of faith, and yet he is triumphalist, even fundamentalist in his way. Chapter 2 ponders the angels, saints, and suicides that roam Marx's prose and his bawdy cartoons of Moses and Christ. "For almost the first time," Schad writes, "Christianity is becoming the regular stuff of parody. We must appreciate that the Victorian death of God is not just a reputable story of loss and mourning; it is also a disreputable story of farce and laughter" (34). Chapter 3 travels Freud's metaphors of trains and time that lead...