Mixed Messages: The Religions of Modernism

Abstract

Mixed Messages:The Religions of Modernism Allen Dunn (bio) Craig Bradshaw Woelfel, Varieties of Aesthetic Experience: Literary Modernism and the Dissociation of Belief, Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2018. 228 pp. Modernity is generally believed to be the age of secularism, the time when age-old structures of religious belief give way to a new scientific view of the world that leaves little room for the articles of religious faith. It is not surprising, then, that many assume that those artists, musicians, poets, and novelists who today are known as modernists must be the inheritors of this secularism and that modernism produces a godless art for a godless age. In Varieties of Aesthetic Experience: Literary Modernism and the Dissociation of Belief, Craig Bradshaw Woelfel argues that scholars have misunderstood the role of religion in literary modernism because they have been misled by the conventional "subtraction" narrative of the emergence of secular modernity wherein religion simply fades away as it is replaced by a modern secular scientific view of the world. However, in modernism as in modern culture more generally, religion does not fade away, Woelfel argues, but remains one of the several irreconcilable elements that generate a world of perpetual conflict. Woelfel quotes Charles Taylor, the most famous and influential advocate of this point of view, who observes that "modernization is not a narrative of unbelief replacing belief; …actually, the change is more drastic. It is more like cacophony replacing meaning as such" (13). As Taylor views it, modernity creates a "pluralist world, in which many forms of belief and unbelief jostle, and hence fragilize each other" (2007, 531). Woelfel's project, then, is to apply Taylor's argument to two exemplary modernist writers, T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster, in order to demonstrate that it is a mistake to classify either writer as either secular or religious. Rather, he insists, we should understand the modernist text as "a liminal site of cross-pressured religious engagement, a space used to critique, simultaneously, traditional or orthodox religious belief and, simultaneously, entirely immanent or rational accounts of life, knowledge, and experience" (2018, 13). As Woelfel demonstrates in a series of close readings, the various cultural cross-pressures that Taylor finds in modernity are readily apparent [End Page 375] in the work of Forster, a self-proclaimed agnostic whose skeptical pluralism entertains mutually contradictory truth claims without prompting him to endorse or refute any of them. In the opening lines of his essay "What I Believe," Forester famously announces that he does not "believe in belief." In Woelfel's account, this means that Forester does not believe that there is a way to reconcile "the emotional reality of [his] religious experience" with the secular scientific world-view that he also feels compelled to affirm. In a trope of Eliot's famous phrase, Woelfel calls this "the dissociation of belief" and finds evidence of it in Forester's correspondence, interviews, criticism, and novels, most notably in the Miramar Caves episode of A Passage to India. He finds that a similar dissociation is implicit in Forester's aesthetics which are predicated on the belief that a rigorous and systematic criticism of art must always fall short of its mark. For Forster, such systematic criticism must necessarily fail because it cannot convey literature's power to unite the experiences of writer and reader in a moment of transcendence, a transcendence that by definition cannot be captured in the critic's intellectual system. Given the inevitable failure of literary criticism, the critic's primary virtue must then be humility, and given his skepticism about human claims to any absolute knowledge, humility emerges as Forster's cardinal virtue. Eliot's case is less straightforward. After his much publicized conversion to Christianity in 1927, his life has usually been framed as a conversion narrative that culminates in his profession of Christian faith. Woelfel, of course, is mindful of this but asserts that Eliot's thought remains thoroughly modern because it incorporates the kinds of conflicting beliefs that Taylor describes. This is true, he insists, both before and after his conversion. As Woelfel summarizes his account of Eliot's attitude toward belief: "I argue that it seems unclear...