Deep Realism: A Discussion of Christian Literary Realism with an Analysis of Passages from Michael O’Brien’s Children of the Last Days Novel Series

Abstract

Introduction Christian authors face many challenges when attempting to use a form of Christian realism that hints, not merely in an indirect way toward the supernatural reality affirmed by the Christian faith, but actually in various ways incorporates it into the empirical world of the novel. Such a literary strategy constitutes an attempt to widen the secular realist framework, instead of, for example, circumventing it by the creation of an alternative fantasy world. the first part of this article, the general problem of the relation between literary realism and the enchanted world of religious belief is introduced, while in the second part I discuss some examples from the novel series Children of the Last Days by Michael O'Brien, a contemporary Canadian novelist and painter. The aim is to contribute to the larger postsecular reflection on the contingent nature of the default neutrality of materialism and consequent privatization of religious beliefs. Realism The literary conventions of the novel genre, developed during early modernity in the eighteenth century (1) with the process reaching its peak in the naturalism of the late nineteenth century, are built upon realism, which restricts its descriptions to the empirical-physical and psychological worlds. (2) Also significant is the depiction of everyday life and ordinary people of the lower classes instead of the aristocracy and its historical or mythical heroes. Realism allows for a serious representation of petty bourgeois or working-class heroes and of their life as representative, important, and often tragic, rather than comical. (3) Dickens's narratives are typical in this respect. But Dickens also makes use of certain supernatural and other gothic devices, in spite of his otherwise empirical and sociological techniques (e.g., A Christmas Carol). (4) However, the amplification of the realist novel toward naturalism at the end of the nineteenth century was, in many cases, parallel to the gradual exorcising of the supernatural from the cosmos through the advance of scientific explanations--this disenchantment of nature and man pushed the larger religious vision of reality into the realms of fantasy, dreams, intoxication, and madness (at the same time as the symbolist movement developed religious and mystique tendencies (5)). the words of George Levine, Despite many apparently realist narratives that affirm the most pious and religiously correct visions of reality, the realist novel was fundamentally secular. (6) The realist novel, as a child of modernity, exhibits its characteristics through a focus on empiricism, individualism, and the interests of the growing middle class made possible by capitalism, as Ian Watt points out in his study The Rise of the Novel, In the literary, the philosophical and the social spheres alike the classical focus on the ideal, the universal and the corporate has shifted completely, and the modern field of vision is mainly occupied by the discrete particular, the directly apprehended sensum, and the autonomous individual. (7) This situation made it problematic for a traditionally Christian author to build upon his or her religious worldview within the limitations of the novel, without violating the underlying empiricist epistemology of the genre. The realist novel injected with supernaturalism turns into fantasy, or a hybrid such as magical realism, but thereby loses its claim to veracity. Scholars after Watt, however, have adjusted and nuanced his analyses in important respects. They emphasize the symbolic and allegorical possibilities for an extended religious dimension of realist meaning that Christian authors like Daniel Defoe made use of. (8) fact, the origin of the realist novel was religious, that is Christian Protestantism, as maintained for instance by Michael McKeon. He says Protestantism was deeply invested in the materialistically-oriented techniques of naive empiricism as a useful means to its spiritual and otherworldly ends. …