Reviewed by: Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance by Matthew Mutter David Jarraway Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance. By Matthew Mutter. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017. Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance is a daunting study of the relation between writing and religion in modernist literary discourse. With its broad-ranging focus on the work of both American and British literary practitioners of the last century—Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, and W. H. Auden—Matthew Mutter endeavors to rival what he nominates some of the "best recent books on twentieth-century literature and religion" (7): Pericles Lewis's Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (2010), Amy Hungerford's Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion after 1960 (2010), and John McClure's Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (2007). Flagged by his title, Mutter's particular contribution to all this prodigious critical achievement is to focus on "secularism" rather than "religion," as he states at the outset, clarifying further that "this book investigates not post-secular religious experience but the secular frames that alter the coordinates of all experience, religious or other" (8). The overriding frame, moreover, is Stevens's famous declamation that "The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God," and that "One of the visible movements of the modern imagination is the movement away from the idea of God" (qtd. on 8). For Mutter, then, "secular" becomes a kind of shorthand "for the imaginative frame within which Stevens resists or reworks all of the perspectives he thinks of as religious," so that for the remaining writers he takes up in the book, the term "could mean a number of things and take a number of shapes, including ones that show significant continuity with religious ideas" (218). With that somewhat ambiguous swerve back in the direction of religion, therefore, readers are given to think that "secularism" is a considerably "restless" notion indeed. Stevens's own programmatic secularization of the idea of God, as that famous declamation above goes on to elaborate, suggests a trio of creative alternatives: namely, adaptation, substitution, and elimination. These alternatives can further suggest more particular and highly individualistic gathering points or "fields of experience" from which modernist secularization might be viewed: "language" in the case of Stevens himself, "aesthetics" for Woolf, "emotion" for Yeats, and, finally, "material life" for Auden (3). Some of these idiosyncratic (and in all cases quite extensive) elaborations work better than others, but none is ever facile or uncomplicated or seamlessly uninflected. Be warned, therefore: this is not a book for speed readers. With Stevens, the secular movement away from God by means of language can suggest a kind of "demythologized, self-conscious anthropomorphism" to take His place, according to Mutter (38), a stance about which Stevens can [End Page 131] only be deeply suspicious in light of modernism's existential "still inhuman more" rendered, for example, in a late poem like "The Sail of Ulysses"—"the impersonal [as] 'the ultimate inamorata,'" as Mutter puts it—whereupon "the value and urgency of personhood recedes" (40). This suspicion bleeds into an even deeper one for Stevens: "the way metaphor slides into metaphysics, the way an analogical worldview has been associated with a theological one, and how signs and symbols tend to refer solid, immanent things to supersensible narratives or 'meanings'" (42). At this point, Stevens arguably resorts to a certain rhetoric of "tautology" to halt the analogical slippage into the metaphysics of "signs and symbols" (49). Toward the end of Stevens's writing career, however, the poet's secularization would alarmingly appear to falter. And its restlessness, according to Mutter, can be seen to register in another late poem like "To an Old Philosopher in Rome," for there George Santayana as its eponymous philosopher "has taken upon himself the prerogative of the Christian God by becoming the Word through whom the world is made. He has 'projected the idea of God into the idea of man'" (63). Rather formulaically, then, fracture points of restless betrayal like this one in Stevens recur in aria da capo type moments in Mutter's...
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Oct 2, 2018
Andrey Maidansky 
Open Access