Beyond the Story: American Literary Fiction and the Limits of Materialism by Christina Bieber Lake

Abstract

Reviewed by: Beyond the Story: American Literary Fiction and the Limits of Materialism by Christina Bieber Lake Liliana M. Naydan Christina Bieber Lake. Beyond the Story: American Literary Fiction and the Limits of Materialism. U of Notre Dame P, 2019. 1 + 212 pp. From where do artistic impulses come and what is the purpose of narrative art? According to Christina Bieber Lake in Beyond the Story: American Literary Fiction and the Limits of Materialism, three camps present possible answers to this question. First, sociobiologists, such as Ellen Dissanayake and Jonathan Gottschall, suggest that material explanations can sufficiently account for the production and celebration of narrative. They extend on Darwinian evolutionary theory, positing that humans create and appreciate literary works in order to survive. Second, metaphysical naturalists, such as Richard Kearney, [End Page 795] argue that humans tell stories in order to make meaning of a life that is otherwise meaningless. Third, classical theists, most notably Christian ones, suggest that we tell stories to express the dignity and significance of humanity as God’s creations. Arguably controversial in our largely secular academic contemporary moment, this theist perspective, which binds art to divinity, functions as the springboard for Lake’s argument that “storytelling is a theological activity because it continually affirms and reaffirms the transcendent value of personal being” (7). As Lake continues, “regardless of authorial intent, stories invariably activate the part of a reader’s imagination that suspects that this world is neither accident nor conclusion.” And the works of “contemporary American fiction” on which she chooses to focus underscore the notion that “love for persons is the fulcrum that moves the art of the story” (8). Ultimately, her book analyzes works by American authors such as Philip Roth, Flannery O’Connor, and Toni Morrison to expose nuances of human relationships with stories and to reveal implicit human relationships with theology. In her book, Lake comes into conversation with phenomenologists such as Gabriel Marcel; literary critics, such as John McClure and Amy Hungerford; literary theorists, such as Roland Barthes and Mikhail Bakhtin; and theologians, including Thomas Aquinas, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Henri de Lubac. She organizes the seven chapters of her book according to the three theological concepts that American philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart identifies as fundamental to the human experience: being, consciousness, and bliss. For Lake, these concepts shape the aesthetic and rhetorical purposes of literary works. She focuses the first two chapters of her book on the concept of being. She focuses chapter three, four, and five on consciousness. And she addresses the notion of bliss in her final two chapters. In the two chapters that focus on being, Lake proposes that all stories center on relationships between individuals, be they characters, writers, or readers. In chapter 1, she argues that Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story, “Baby Shoes,” exemplifies the rhetorical nature of storytelling. She observes that Hemingway creates a sense of mystery for his readers while also inviting them to view his story as “an act of love” for persons (18). As Lake explains, “when we imaginatively enter into the lives of the parents who put the baby shoes up for sale, we, too, participate in that act” (28). Along the same lines, Roth’s Everyman, which Lake analyzes in chapter 2, exposes Roth’s investment in “capturing our interest in a man we otherwise would [End Page 796] not care about” (33) while presenting a parody of a medieval morality play that apparently devalues particular personhood. Admitting that Roth likely would have resisted her reading, Lake believes the novel’s protagonist may masquerade as a contemporary version of the medieval Everyman, a character intended to embody any and every man, but his position as the novel’s protagonist implies that “every person is worth a novel” (31) and that personality exists as a noteworthy mystery. Lake’s chapters on Lydia Davis, O’Connor, and Morrison address the concept of consciousness. In chapter 3, Lake analyzes stories from Davis’s Varieties of Disturbance, suggesting that first-person consciousness in fiction reveals the relationship between persons and communities in the world. According to Lake, Davis invites readers to see that stories welcome us to recognize...