Keeping Faith with Literature

Abstract

Powerful institutional pressures can impede scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American literatures from talking about religion. The essays that Mark Knight and Charles LaPorte collected for this special issue suggest to splendid effect that these intellectual communities are inclined to break that silence. But our fields’ alliance with the modern is a prime factor in the reticence that these authors must have had to challenge even in 2022.Scholars who work on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have, of course, very good reasons to claim jurisdiction over “middle modernity”—a useful term Theresa M. Kelley coined some twenty years ago.1 We have been reluctant to sit on the sidelines of our English departments while our colleagues the early modernists and the modernists share out between them the prestige that accrues to teachers of the modern. To claim the modern for ourselves—however counterintuitively that claim proves for those undergraduates who as often as not think that the works of the Brontës or Keats are written in “Old English”—is a way to avoid our being squeezed out of the curriculum altogether. The problem, however, is that religion continues too often to be treated as though it were irreconcilable with the modernity that middle modernists study. Too often religion is sidelined because it is assumed to be ensconced in the “tradition” that exists before and apart from the secular modern. The assumption is that even as revolutions are made, empires rise and fall, and new modernity-defining literary genres emerge during this era (the realist novel, for instance), religion remains historically immutable and inert.Since the start of the millennium, the religious turn in the humanities has begun to make this assumption less tenable. This is because advocates of that turn—among them contributors to this issue—increasingly emphasize the imbrication of secularity and religion, proposing, variously, that modern secularization might represent the realization and repetition of tendencies already latent in Western Christianity, or that the history of unbelief is inextricable from the historical development in which belief was identified anew as the most salient aspect of Christian lives. That rethinking has had a significant impact for the periodizing schemes and the stories of progress that regulate, explicitly and implicitly, the practice of literary history.In recognition of the fact that MLQ is, as its masthead declares, “a journal of literary history,” I want to begin this afterword by briefly sampling the impact of this rethinking. I am motivated by my recollection of a 2021 special issue of Representations, “Practices of Devotion.” The essays it collected explored the contributions that devotional thinking can make to humanistic inquiry, leaping as they did that exploring from the High Middle Ages to the twentieth century and dropping in only briefly, in an essay about Sir Philip Sidney, on the early modern (Craig, Hollywood, and Trujillo 2021). Here in this special issue of MLQ, however, we find multiple arguments for how a focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries might profit the subfield of religion and literature. Readers of these essays will, I predict, be compelled by those arguments for including rather than squeezing out the middle modern. They will also, the concluding paragraphs of this afterword suggest, be compelled by the redescription of literary studies’ defining methods that emerges from this issue.▪ ▪ ▪As a first example of how attention to religion can reframe the periodizing schemes that govern literary history, consider the recent discussions of a “long Reformation.” Literary scholars and historians now propose that, rather than confining the Protestant Reformation in England to the decades between 1529 (when Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell summoned the Reformation Parliament and initiated England’s break with Rome) and 1559 (the coronation of Elizabeth, the new defender of a new English faith)—rather than, that is, understanding the Reformation as a punctual event bookended by watershed moments in the political realm—we should think of it as something more protracted and plural: a series of small-r reformations that over the centuries have needed recurrently to be remembered, renewed, and reformed in their turn. For this mode of scholarly inquiry, as for many of the essays collected here, religion, far from inert, is in motion too.2 Hence James Simpson (2019b) mobilizes the concept of a “very long” Reformation as he spotlights the ecclesiological doubts that open Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1854 novel North and South. The heroine’s father, the Reverend Richard Hale, is prompted by conscience and his unwillingness to confirm his conformity to give up his Church of England living and uproot his family. (The Reverend Hale has also been reading seventeenth-century Presbyterian texts.) Gaskell’s use of these doubts to kick-start her novel’s plot and to motivate the Hales’ move from the south of England to the north evidences, Simpson argues, the durability of a restless, kinetic Reformation tradition in which, repeatedly and compulsively, dissent elicited ever more dissent.To similarly revisionist effect, literary scholars now challenge with some regularity the notion that the modern is defined by disenchantment—that modernity is shaped indelibly, as Max Weber proposed, by the triumph of instrumental reason and by the scientific revolution that made the world measurable, predictable, and objectifiable as mere matter. Contesting paradigms for historical analysis that pivot on desacralization and demystification, some of these scholars trace, with Courtney Weiss Smith (2016), for example, how Restoration and eighteenth-century practitioners of natural science believed that acts of close observation and fine-grained description of the natural world were themselves acts of devotion. Faith helped legitimate empiricist science, Smith proposed.There have been other ways to counter the assumption that the story of modernization is a story of disenchantment and debunking—the assumption writ large within the “subtraction” story, as Charles Taylor (2007) calls it in A Secular Age, in which, first, you take away from the picture the church, with its vested interest in cultivating superstition and credulity; then you go farther and take away the God that the priests fabricated to keep human beings in line; and, finally, after these subtractions, you create a world in which people are emancipated from their false consciousness and able to see things as they are. (That is the triumphalist version. The story can also be told wistfully and nostalgically, as a eulogy for lost plenitude.) Significant challenges to this scheme for demarcating the premodern from the modern have been mounted by some scholars of fictionality—for instance, Nicholas Paige (2009), Sarah Tindal Kareem (2014), and Emily Ogden (2018)—who, rather than trace disenchantment and reenchantment as successive phases in a linear and teleological historical process, present the modern story as one in which disenchantment and reenchantment are simultaneous and mutually dependent. It is crucial to note that within this account of “permanent re-enchantments” (the splendidly tendentious title that Paige [2009] gives one of his essays), a lot of importance is ascribed to narrative fiction, precisely because its formal intricacies enable readers and writers to work through that tangle of epistemological attitudes and affective dispositions.3▪ ▪ ▪The essays collected here offer additional models of how and why literary scholars in particular should treat religiosity as part of the ongoing history of modernity rather than as the static residue of an unenlightened premodernity. Consider, for example, Jan-Melissa Schramm’s account of the realist novel, the genre that literary studies often treats as quintessentially and indisputably secular and modern. Things change, she shows, when theology is treated as a dynamic part of cultural history. Ian Watt (1957: 31) famously proposed that the novelty of the eighteenth-century English novel lay in part in how its formal realism invited its readers to think of themselves, while they engaged with minute particulars, as akin to “another group of specialists in epistemology, the jury in a court of law.” Schramm complicates this proposition, however, when she reminds us that theology was as important a contributor as the law to the epistemological debates of the eighteenth century: just as the protocols governing the rules of evidence altered in English courtrooms, Protestant theologians were thinking in forensic terms about the eyewitness testimonies gathered in the Gospels. Likewise engaging the history of the novel, and drawing on the sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s Religion as a Chain of Memory, Dawn Coleman traces how in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s transhistorical, multigenerational bildungsroman Oldtown Folks (1869) religion comes to be valued as a vehicle of group memory. The departed spirits that in secular modernity religion is charged with sheltering represent in new ways the connections linking the present to the national past.This issue of MLQ does more, however, than alter our understanding of individual texts or genres from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After reading these essays, the discipline of literary studies, another product of that era, looks different as well. Where Timothy Larsen’s essay, for instance, demonstrates how twenty-first-century scholars’ illiteracy about scripture and Christian theology causes them to misread allusions that Victorian texts’ original audiences would have grasped immediately, other essays collected here center on the possibility that religiosity is intrinsic to literary studies’ methods as well as to literature’s contents. Lori Peterson Branch describes how the students in her course on postsecular studies and the novel are invited to identify the overlap between “spiritual practices and the rituals of literature.” Colin Jager points out how the discipline’s defining protocols of aesthetic reading require us while we read to treat invented, bodiless worlds and characters as though they were real and commanded our belief. If there is something “in our object of study that resists the terms handed down to us by our secularization stories” and that preserves literature’s special role in creating religious meaning, it “ought to be here.” Peter Coviello uses the case of the novelist Herman Melville to track two processes that, he contends, proceeded in tandem in nineteenth-century America: the stabilization of a secularist regime and the solidification and autonomization of the category of literature.▪ ▪ ▪“The very practice of Anglo-American literary criticism and pedagogy depends on presenting literature as resistant, anti-hierarchical and anti-institutional,” James Simpson (2019a: 3) writes in Permanent Revolution, a book that takes issue, much as Simpson’s essay on Gaskell’s very long reformation does, with the conventional account of how historical periods are formulated. Simpson in this passage identifies a secret code of “Protestant triumphalism” (3). He proposes that this code continues to be deeply embedded in the everyday praxis of literary studies, to the point that it ultimately determines the discipline’s governing definitions of its object of study. Simpson is also, of course, gesturing at the reasons why practitioners of literary studies cannot own up to the Reformation roots of their praxis, why literary studies as a discipline for so long defined itself against religion, insisting that it was a modern, impartial, and secular enterprise. For antitraditionalism is itself an English department tradition, something we confirm with regularity whenever we hunt out indications of dissent and subversion in texts or we privilege as exceptional the figures from the past whom we (mis)recognize as being (so Jager states in his description of this critical habit) in “the avant-garde of advancing secularization.”But over the last decade something has changed in our praxis. It has become easier to see the critical ethos and critical agon that Simpson describes as normative for the discipline as instead merely one of many variants of the literary-critical enterprise. Readers of this issue of MLQ encounter alternative descriptions of how our literary doings register the history of religious practice, descriptions that confirm that criticism is increasingly open to exploring the nature of the critic’s relational fidelity both to texts and to other readers. When, in her contribution to this cluster, Emma Mason describes the importance of kenosis, the spiritual practice of self-emptying, to nineteenth-century poets like Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins, she links this mode of receptivity and vulnerability to current speculations about how “weak theory” might reshape critique (see also Saint-Amour 2018). Winter Jade Werner and Mimi Winick propose here that decolonizing Victorian studies will depend on jettisoning a Victorian model of world religions. They then model a mode of “connective” reading that bypasses the national and ethnic categories privileged by that older set of comparative methods. Alex Eric Hernandez demonstrates that the devotional practices of people who pray with Jane Austen (a saint substitute) should be studied not as examples of untutored (and bad) lay reading but for their overlap with a critical practice that also acquires, through its care and devotion, “the power to materialize spirits.” (Hernandez takes an interest in departed, disembodied spirits, just as Jager and Coleman do.)Even while operating at a distance from the religious turn that engages the scholars who appear in this issue, critics like Rita Felski have over the last few years helped us realize that devotion is as worthy of analysis as dissent. To arrive at that realization, Felski (2020: 9) says, means reappraising the account of the modern as a “drama of scission and separation” (Taylor’s separation story) in which individuals are incrementally sundered “from any form of taken-for-granted community or unity.” Endorsing the premise that modernity has been productive of new modes of attachment (or the premise that it is literature’s capacity to solicit those attachments that makes it a key modern institution) is not tantamount to agreeing that the discipline of literary studies should now proceed to a postcritical phase. I think that it is important to maintain that devotion has an autocritical component (an edginess I tried to keep in view in Loving Literature [Lynch 2015]). I share the conviction of a number of contributors to this issue that religious readers are as often as not critical readers.Yet I have found especially helpful here the pages in which Hernandez calls to our attention the arguments made by those practitioners of religious studies whose definitions of religion bracket credal content and focus instead on a pragmatics—scholars who stress that faith is not a set of propositions to which the believer assents but that it is best seen as a way to do things and bind oneself to others. Hernandez’s alignment of this work with the so-called descriptive turn in literary studies (spearheaded by Heather Love, Sharon Marcus, and Stephen Best) occasions the thought that literary studies seems right now to be developing, without quite calling it this, a concept of “lived literature” that might be the counterpart of religious studies’ concept of lived religion (see Love 2010; Marcus, Love, and Best 2016). Explicitly claiming this concept might help the field acknowledge more readily how the literary text is not only an assemblage of signs to be interpreted but also a nexus of connections, at once aesthetic, erotic, moral, and spiritual. To be a lover of literature is to construct the aesthetic relation as though it put us in the presence of other people; to take the measure of that as though is to realize that this relation involves a kind of faith. I conclude by offering up this reflection as one last testimony as to why I think that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary studies should welcome further talk about religion. As an early reader of these essays, I discovered that by listening to this talk, literary scholarship can learn new things about the distinctive sociality that literary reading involves. We will be better at recognizing how literature is, among other things, a medium through which we forge our relations with others—immaterial spirits included.