BREAKING THE FALL STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND RELIGION General Editor: David Jasper, Principal of St Chad's College, The University of Durham This series of volumes will provide an interdisciplinary introduction to the study of literature and religion, concerned with the fundamentally important issues of the imagination, literary perceptions and an understanding of poetics for theology and religious studies, and the underlying religious implications in so much literature and literary criticism. Robert Detweiler BREAKING THE FALL: Religious Readings of Contemporary Fiction Max Harris THEATRE AND INCARNATION David Jasper THE STUDY OF LITERATURE AND RELIGION: AN INTRODUCTION David Jasper and R. C. D. Jasper (editors) LANGUAGE AND THE WORSHIP OF THE CHURCH Ulrich Simon PITY AND TERROR: Christianity and Tragedy Series Standing Order If you would like to receive future titles in this series as they are published, you can make use of our standing order facility. To place a standing order pIe ase contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address and the name of the series. Please state with which title you wish to begin your standing order. (If you live outside the UK we may not have the rights for your area, in which case we will forward your order to the publisher concerned.) Standing Order Service, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG212XS, England. Breaking the Fall Religious Readings of Contemporary Fiction ROBERT DETWEILER Professor of Comparative Literature Emory University, Georgia M MACMILLAN © Robert Detweiler 1989 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1989978-0-333-45808-2 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended), or under the terms of any licence perrnitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 7 Ridgrnount Street, London WCIE 7A E Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1989 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Harnpshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Detweiler, Robert Breaking the fall: religious readings of contemporary fiction.-(Studies in literature and religion). 1. Fiction in European languages, 1945-. Religious aspects I. Title 11. Series 809.3'04 ISBN 978-1-349-09993-1 ISBN 978-1-349-09991-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-09991-7 For Betty and Aaron, Richard and Mary Jane: Religious Readers Contents Acknowledgements vüi General Editor' s Preface ix 1 Playing for Real: Roles, Plots and (Non-) Representations 1 2 What is Reading Religiously? 30 3 Braking the Fall: Walker Percy and the Diagnostic Novel 67 4 John Updike's Sermons 91 5 Sacred Texts/Sacred Space 122 6 Scheherazade's Fellowship: Telling against the End 159 Select Bibliography 192 Index 195 vii Acknowledgements The author and publishers gratefully acknowledge permission to use quotations from the following: From The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Copyright © 1985 by O. W. Toad Ud. Used by permission of the Canadian publishers, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto; of the British publishers, Jonathan Cape Ud, London; and of the United States publishers, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. From Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. Copyright © 1980 by Russell Hoban. Used by permission of the British publishers, Jonathan Cape Ud, London; and of the United States publishers, Simon & Schuster, New York. From The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston. Copyright © 1975 by Maxine Hong Kingston. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York. From The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur edited by Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart. Copyright © 1978 by Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston. The author is also grateful for permission to use, as the basis for the chapter on 'John Updike's Sermons', an earlier and shorter version entitled 'Updike's Sermons' which appeared in Americana Austriaca: Beiträge zur Amerikakunde, vol. 5, 1980, edited by Klaus Lanzinger. Used by permission of Wilhelm Braumüller, Universi täts-Verlagsbuchhandlung, Vienna. viii General Editor' s Preface Robert Detweiler' s Breaking the Fall extends both our notion of reading and the concept of a religiously reading community. As our sense of textuality is expanded beyond the mere sense of words on a page and conventional linguistic idiom, so also our sense of the sacred is expanded. It may be that in our present time we are being called to live out the apocalypse and vitally, therefore, to seek the re situation of religious discourse. It may be that, in Martin Buber's words, distintegration of the Word has taken place, and that the familiar conventions of sermons and the liturgy are reappearing in fictive conditions and with a disturbing ambivalence. Such things are explored in this book. Professor Detweiler is convinced of the importance of enter taining the energetic discussions of contemporary literary theory in the present debates in religious studies. The power of his writing reminds us of the relative neglect of modern and post-modern literature by most studies which are concerned with the relation ship between literature and religion, and its sometimes disturbing qualities may draw us beyond our comfortable, conventional considerations to the point where we rediscover the inventiveness and creativity which flourish only at moments of ambiguity and recombination. In our age we cannot afford to be timid in critical ventures. If we wish to continue in a belief in the possibility of religious interpretations of experience and literature, we must allow our horizons to be expanded and our pre-formed perceptions to be broken. Seeking new contexts and structures, our storytelling against despair may indeed be painful even as it represents a necessary and creative return to the semblance of faith and hope. David Jasper ix Preface ... but as you go on, the writing - if you follow it - will take you places you never intended to go and show you things you would never otherwise have seen.! Scholars of Bible and religion have been learning, in recent years and with increasing finesse, to adapt the methods of the literary critics to their interpretations of the sacred canons, while a number of literary critics have tried their hand at what we could call secular readings of the traditional sacred texts. Much of this crossing of old boundaries has been inspired by the flourishing of post-New Critical theory and practice that has also influenced theology and philosophy and even, to a degree, the sodal sciences. Yet in the midst of this stimulating inter-disdplinary activity, remarkably little writing has been produced in the area that was, for a time, the liveliest of the literature-and-religion nexus: the interpretation of narrative fiction, poetry and drama from a religious perspective. 'The triumph of theory in literary studiesi, as J. Hillis Miller has called it, seems to have caused a timidity among those of us interested in writing religious interpretations of literature, as if we feared that the theory had made, or would make, this interpretive endeavour - already under fire for some decades - invalid.2 This reticence is surprising for two reasons. First is that some of our prominent theorists, such as Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman and Frank Kermode, have suggested the value of recent theory for the religious interpretation of literary texts, causing one to wonder why their lead has not been followed more enthusiasti cally than it has. Second is that critics using other approaches - those that the New Critics labelled 'extrinsic' - such as the psychoanalytic, feminist and Marxist are busily appropriating the newer theory (often while challenging aspects of it) in their reading of literary texts, prompting one to inquire why the proponents of the religious approach are, in contrast, so unenterprising. xi