Postsecularism and a Prophetic Sensibility

Abstract

Recent fiction signals shift in orientation with regard to religious. Many contemporary novels depict performance of turning in lives of characters or introduction of moments of mystery and religious possibility, such as those found in works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. In other novels, characters who already espouse some religious belief take up secular challenges to religion by reconsidering religious assumptions, toying with practice of faith, attempting to rebuild religion afresh, or placing an existing tradition alongside other faith systems in syncretistic articulation of belief. Yann Martel, E. L. Doctorow, Cynthia Ozick, Marilynne Robinson, and Toni Morrison are among authors engaged in these kinds of activity. John McClure has dubbed this manifestation of turn to religious, the Ina 1995 article in Modern Fiction Studies, McClure described period of resacralization in contemporary fiction and theory as movement toward religious ways of knowing. McClure complicates accounts of postmodern, like Frederic Jameson's and Jean-Francois Lyotard's, contesting their claim that postmodern is already secular, and even post-religious. (1) McClure notes, as Linda Hutcheon's account of postmodernity suggests, that secular strand of postmodern is rivaled by different strand, which allows for different kind of reading than one privileged by critics who assume secular constructions of postmodern. He points to presencing (using Homi Bhaba's term) of religious discourses in some postmodern fiction, including Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. (2) postsecular shift has only intensified in years since McClure first published on subject. (3) Currently, postsecularism in literature describes marked increase in production of novels involving journeys of soul (Ford S6-S7). In December of 2007, McClure published Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in Age of Pynchon and Morrison, first full-length book devoted to subject of contemporary postsecular fiction. In preface, he defines postsecularism as a mode of being and seeing that is at once critical of secular constructions of reality and of dogmatic religiosity (ix). Postsecular narratives, he writes, suggest need for religiously inflected disruption of secular constructions of real, yet they refuse, for most part, to endorse any single religious discourse (3). Postsecular thinkers, for McClure, neither reject religious priori nor do they accept existing interpretations of religious priori. I argue that postsecular can be characterized as turn, as notion is elucidated in Martin Buber's writings. Martin Buber, who wrote in first half of twentieth century, called for renewal of religious to counter prevalent secularism of his age. (4) In works such as I and Thou and On Buber urged not return to existing models of religious but turn toward unmediated relation with divine. Buber's renewalism, and in particular his interest in prophetic, can help us to think out shift of orientation through which we seem to be moving, and especially literary writing now characterized as postsecular. In his article, The Man of Today and Jewish Bible, Buber articulates definition of prophetic reading. Buber states that man must read Jewish Bible as though it were something entirely unfamiliar, as though it had not been set before him ready-made, as though he has not been confronted all his life with sham concepts and sham statements that cited Bible as their authority. He must face Book with new attitude as something new. (5) Buber posits practice of reading scripture in context of one's historical hour and undertakes to move biblical reading from tripartite relation (which is arbitrated by convention) to bipartite relation (which involves unmediated contact with divine) (Prophecy). …