Secular Pleasures and FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Abstract

Nineteenth-century British poetry famously drew upon religious models for secular ends. As M. H. Abrams argues, William Wordsworth offered a modern counterpart to theodicy justif[ying] suffering as necessary means toward ... achieved maturity. Fiction that was ostensibly preoccupied with worldly matters similarly adopted religious paradigms and vocabularies. Pointing out much common ground religious and secular literature share, Barry Quails shows that Victorian novels addressed the pilgrim's query, 'What is truth?' (1) As these literary critics show, fiction and poetry together reabsorbed preoccupations that before had been specific to theological discourse. The overlap between religious and secular modes of thought has been a topic of interest in current cultural critiques as well. Works such as William E. Connolly's Why I am Not a Secularist (2000), Talal Asad's Formations of Secular: Christianity, Islam, and Modernity (2003), and Vincent Pecora's Secularization and Cultural Criticism (2006) treat secular as a mutable and internally contradictory set of concepts and practices, which, like religion, deal with suffering, shape attitudes toward body, and potentially lead to destructive collective formations. (2) prominent recent contribution to this emergent field is Charles Taylor's Secular Age (2007), a comprehensive exploration of origins and trajectory of secular thought in West) Taylor challenges commonplace modern narrative that treats rise of secularity as liberation from irrational delusions. He argues that modern subjects who sought to ascribe meaning to human experience without reference to a transcendent power had to invent new ideologies and myths about human life and its role in cosmos. As Secular Age suggests, to approach secular as a social construct is to look beyond its claims to rational objectivity and explore how it crafts fulfilling accounts of existence. In this essay, I turn to a Victorian text that offers an early articulation of some of insights that have come to inform critical study of secular today: Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which had arguably become by far best known and most popular poem in English language at end of nineteenth century. (4) In this poem, FitzGerald imagines a secular experience that resists reign of reason. Musing on transcendental matters cannot help speaker to make sense of life or his own existence, but neither can rational inquiry. Longing instead for A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse--and Thou / Beside me singing in Wilderness, he relates to material world around him seeking and embracing pleasure. (5) Through senses of wonder, connectedness, and enchantment inspired self's engagement with natural world, FitzGerald transfers some of most fulfilling aspects of religion onto a secular experience. Discussing sensuality and materialism in Rubaiyat, some Victorian reviewers drew attention to poem's secular orientation. (6) a reviewer in National Review, for example, suggested that FitzGerald ably captured zeitgeist (1899): there is now some recent change in mood of Anglo-Saxon race that has caused this wide response to Omar-in-FitzGerald. It is, one must imagine, that there has been of late a wide and rapid decline in religious belief, so that a vast number of English people are able to understand and largely sympathize with old rebel against orthodox Islamite Puritanism of East. (Holland, p. 649) Another reviewer claimed that inexactness of FitzGerald's translation had allowed for infusion of a modern element into quatrains. That we have heard a good deal of late about Omar Khayyam is not due ... to any increase in number of Persian scholars, but to fact that existing translation harmonises with a special phase of modern thought, commented reviewer, diligently comparing individual quatrains to their Persian originals (Cadell, p. …