Representing the Unpresentable: Between the Secular and the Spiritual in Gordimer’s Post-Apartheid Fiction

Abstract

In this essay, I shall engage with boundary between secular and spiritual, as reflected in attempts to represent and give (fictional) form to intangible, unpresentable. In endeavouring to investigate larger disciplinary context of this problematic - boundary between literature and spirituality - I shall make use of ?spirituality' as blanket term covering, in what follows, subjective expressions of faith-related identification and belief. Such expressions of identity do not necessarily exclude religion, but are not primarily linked to organized forms of faith as encapsulated in dogma and doctrine. In second part of my essay, I shall illustrate ?turn to spiritual' in writer whose more recent work has, intriguingly, veered away from an exclusivist political preoccupation to subtle, and at times even explicit, foregrounding of unpresentable.There has been recent resurgence of interest in things religious and spiritual in society, in (human) sciences and literature, and especially so with regard to postcolonial literatures and societies.1 It is intriguing that, decades after liberation from colonial oppression, literatures of many postcolonial places should show renewed focus on issues religious - cf. Kwame Anthony Appiah,2 who envisaged secularized future for Africa when he equated emancipation from colonialism with an imitation of Western model of secularization. Or, to put it differently, it is intriguing that literary criticism has taken little notice of continuing preoccupation with things religious in postcolonies and their literatures.As an interdiscipline, ?religion and literature' has, over more than half century, explored ways of defining and broadening common ground. Inspired by T.S. Eliot's essay Religion and Literature,3 search for thematic and methodological points of contact has been ongoing. As Giles Gunn has it,their interrelatedness stems from fact that they are both composed of cultural material, namely symbols; their distinctiveness derives from somehow different use to which they put this symbolic cultural material interpretively.4Under guidance of Karl Barth and Emil Brunner (in theology) and various Aristotelian approaches in literary criticism, American universities, in 1960s, started offering courses in ?religion and literature', with figures of stature of Nathan A. Scott promoting a theology of imagination,5 an intriguing paradigmatic intersection. Both literary and theological imagination, namely, are based on art of ?discerning' text, which, according to Teresa Brennan, signifies living attention to text6 - in other words, process of affective understanding that enables readers to become aware of how emotional undercurrents are formed and then circulate. Furthermore, both reading and writing of literature touch on spiritual, in creative embrace of (re)presenting unpresentable: the penumbra of consciousness, thick with half digested impressions and intuitions.7While above comments refer to ?religion and literature' in generic (possibly canonical) sense, 1970s saw broadening of interdiscipline. With religion now understood as de-christianized, ?religion and literature' started to embrace various forms of faiths and beliefs, which would soon become of great interest to comparative literary studies. Scholars of ?religion and literature' - increasingly - became interested in literatures of ?new Englishes' and, later, in postcolonial literatures. To date, this interdiscipline - ?religion and postcolonial literatures' - is still in an initial stage of development, with only handful of scholars who have taken up an interest in link between spirituality and postcolonialism.Many of these interdisciplinary scholars may have been inspired by pioneering work of Jamie Scott, who - in early 1990s - started to galvanize research in this field. …