In Adam Levin's The Instructions (2010), an intoxicating protagonist named Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee is a ten-year-old Jewish boy from Chicago who thinks that he might become the Messiah. The novel therefore dramatizes itself as Gurion's recorded scripture, and it opens with a “Blessings” section that includes a call to “forgive” Adonai for His “mistakes”: “Because you know that Your mistakes, though a part of You, are nonetheless mistakes, we accept that Your mistakes, though Yours, are ours to repair.” E. L. Doctorow's City of God (2000) makes a similar move when a priest converted from Episcopalianism to Reform Judaism prays aloud, “I think we must remake You. If we are to remake ourselves, we must remake You, Lord. We need a place to stand.” While the language of repair has deep Kabbalistic roots in the Hebrew concept of tikkun olam, we see in contemporary American literature a radicalization of this tradition that exceeds Judaic mysticism and extends to philosophical foundationalisms more broadly. Drawing from these novels and a smattering of other contemporary American fictions (e.g., Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski), this essay explores emulations of scripture to think in critical, speculative realist, and even mystical terms about how human beliefs interact with nonhuman realities. A theoretical synthesis centering on the work of Kevin Hart provides a lens through which we see that these contemporary American novels update and intensify the notorious proclamation by Nietzsche's parabolic madman that “God is dead.” New, novelistic interpretations hold this cryptic aphorism to be less a rejection of God per se and more a rejection of “the metaphysicians and moralists” (Hart's phrase: 2004, 41) who use “God” as a sobriquet for “the totalizing perfection of a chosen ground” (my phrase): what's “dead” now is a correlationist adequation of what is wanted with what actually is. Resurrected from this death is realist speculation: what might be. To imagine imperfection but also potentiality into foundationalist traditions is to imagine discursive futures not governed by metaphysics or moralism, which is to imagine repairs to cracked foundations that extend from religious to political discourse. We need new ground—rather urgently, it turns out. A sober, speculative, mystical form of realism might just offer us firmer footing, “a place to stand,” as suggested by novels that emulate scripture in order doubt metaphysical and moralist foundations.“God is dead.” The parabolic phrase “has become tired and doctrinaire,” but a renewed appreciation for its pervasive influence in contemporary literature, along with its “largely forgotten” context, refreshes it (Hart 2000, 279).1 Hart reads it in light of the “competing reference points in epistemology, ethics, metaphysics and religion,” not to mention that “it was spoken by a madman in search of God” and that it “is indebted to Hegel and others” (2000, 279), which leads him to consider what Nietzsche's character might have had in mind. One possibility is that Nietzsche's madman gives voice to Nietzsche's “testimony of atheism, his anguished cry that, alas, there is no God,” although such a statement “is an odd kind of atheism, one in which God is held to have been alive once but has now passed away because of our lack of interest in him” (Hart 2004, 41). While I agree that such an atheism would be odd according to realist ontologies, the point might be simply that metaphysics succumbs to phenomenology, that human minds are the ultimate “realizers” even of such things as divinity, which would be less odd for subjective idealists, and less odd still for subjective idealists more invested in mindsets that are current and collective than they are static and individual.Jitterbug Perfume (1984), a novel by Tom Robbins, explores the implications of a similar atheism by placing the mythological Pan in the unfortunate situation of being endangered by a dwindling human belief in his existence. I say “similar” because a transcendent monotheistic God is replaced here with an immanent pagan god, but each deity suffers the same fate according to the same mechanism. Pan's cameo serves rhetorically to underscore the infusion of Greek metaphysics into medieval Christian theology. Another character, Alobar, is a medieval king who has discovered an anti-aging technique and lives centuries beyond a normal life span. One of Alobar's quests is to transfer Pan safely from one epoch2 to the next, but the difficulty he encounters is precisely the oddity that “our lack of interest in him” is killing Pan. A prophetic nymph called Lalo3 (sister of Echo) explains to Alobar that Pan “lives only so long as men believe in him” (1984, 184), and further, that such belief is born of necessity: “A warning,” snapped Lalo, who at that moment sounded more like a Fury than a nymph. “Thou must never wax smug or arrogant about they influence upon the divine. If thou didst create gods, it was because thou needest them. The need must have been very great indeed, to inspire such a complex, difficult, and magnificent undertaking. Now, many art the men who think they no longer needeth Pan. They have created new gods, this Jesus Christ and his alleged papa, and they think that their new creations will suffice, but let me assurest thee that Christ and his father, as important as they may be, are no substitutes for Pan. The need for Pan is still great in humanity, and thou ignoreth it at thy peril.” (1984, 184‑85)In an insightful foundationalist twist, Alobar doubts Lalo's augury of Pan's imminent demise by connecting metaphysical dots: “Surely he shan't succumb. Pan is in this land, in its crags, in its cataracts, its winds, its meadows, its hidden places, he can never go from the land, he will be here always, as long as the land is” (1984, 184). Just as, according to philosophical realism, the actual, physical ground of planet Earth is independent of Alobar's (or anyone's) mind, so are the divinities upon which even the (earthly) ground itself is (metaphysically) grounded. Pan is portrayed here as a grounding figure: an immanent figure yes, but also a transcendental one insofar as Pan's immanence is predicated on a permanent presence that extends to . . . himself.Equally insightful is Lalo's response, because instead of correcting Alobar in a move that would disconnect the actual ground of the land from the metaphysical ground of a divine and extramental Pan, she keeps the figuring ground and the grounding figure tethered to each other, and she grounds those ground-figures on an even higher, phenomenological foundation of human consciousness. Lalo tells Alobar that he is “correct, Pan doth be in the land, he and the wildwoods are part of one another, but thou art mistaken when thou implieth that the land doth last eternal. There be a time coming when the land itself be threatened with destruction; the groves, the streams, the very sky, not merely here in Arkadia but wildwoods the world over . . . ”“Inconceivable,” muttered Alobar.“If Pan be alloweth to die, if belief in him totally decomposes, then the land, too, wilt die. It will be murdered by disrespect, just as Pan is murdered.” (1984, 185)Alobar looks around him, taking in the idylls of a pastoral, preindustrial landscape (albeit an agrilogistical one) that “seemed so inviolable that he could not entertain the notion of its vulnerability, and he said as much to Lalo” (1984, 185). Lalo reverses Alobar's reasoning such that conceiving of Pan as ground for the land (and not the other way around) is metaphysically cogent, but it is as disturbingly difficult to think as it is metaleptic precisely because Arkadia and Pan—world and character, ground and figure—trade roles.4 Failing to conceive or to entertain certain notions is, of course, exactly what Lalo warns against. The irony lies in Lalo's wisdom that whatever Alobar fails to hold in his mind will involve consequences every bit as real as those that follow from his apprehension of Pan, from what his mind realizes. The interpretation in which a divinity “held to have been alive once but has now passed away because of our lack of interest in him” is a counterintuitive foundationalism, even as it turns extramentality on its head. If the statement appears at first to be anti-foundationalist, that's because the transcendent ground of an eternal God is switched first for a belief-dependent Pan, and then for the immanent ground of fleeting human consciousness and textured with a Cartesian consistency.The second interpretation that Hart offers as a way of reading “God is dead” is that “it could be a gnomic way of suggesting that genuine belief in the Bible has faded in modern times and that, while people still go to church, they live as though the transcendent world no longer had any determining power over them” (2004, 41). Hart calls it a better option than the first because it entails “the weaker claim that Christian morality has become so compromised, so hypocritical, that Christians themselves act as though there is no God,” rather than “the strong assertion that the eternal God no longer exists” (2004, 41). In this interpretation, Hart ungrounds reality from human consciousness and regrounds it in an extramental elsewhere, thereby giving minoritized expression to a metaphysical version of philosophical realism, and to the possibility that this version is an upgrade to phenomenology that speculative realists have been calling for recently.5 That many others who answer that call do so with immanence and atheism only affirms that the call itself resonates with a diversity of important thinkers, that the disparate approaches taken by these thinkers indicate a unity in terms of where to focus critical attention. Another unifier is that such realism in the service of philosophical upgrading almost always comes bundled with epistemological crisis, regardless of which approach is taken. The monotheistic-transcendentalist version of the crisis takes the following form: If belief aims at truth,6 and if God remains a reality even as belief in Him fades, then belief's accuracy fades with it, which is why realists should want a corrective belief about belief (per Morton 2013, 155) that I call doubt. “God is dead” here indicates an epistemological crisis that is really an intuitive crisis, if, as Ridvan Askin has it, following Deleuze, “intuition aims at reality's direct apprehension by the soul” (2016, 128). Askin makes this comment in his reading of Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1999), a novel that he pairs with Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000), among others, for speculative realist purposes because they each experiment with the unknowability of ultimate foundations.In his reading of House of Leaves, Askin posits God as a house with no foundation: “our house is God,” writes the protagonist, Will Navidson, in a letter to his wife Karen (Danielewski 2000, 390). The letter comes in the wake of Navidson's obsessive explorations of “the labyrinthine void permeating the novel's titular house, revealing that there is literally nothing at its foundation. The labyrinth is the house's unground” (Askin 2016, 154).7 The house's foundation of nothingness8 is, for Askin, to be understood according to baroque Deleuzian folds comprising a maze of virtuality and actuality, of difference and repetition, of repetition with a difference, of swarming darkness, of an ontological uncertainty driven by the very “repetition and transformation” (2016, 166) of which an echo—and Echo9—is emblematic: “—there is a reason that the myth of Echo and Narcissus is an episode in Ovid's Metamorphoses (Ovid and Miller 1936)—for an echo is never identical to the echoed and only ever repeats differentially, a point that is both stressed in and responsible for driving the very myth itself. Echo is governed by difference” (Askin 2016, 166). Echo's emergence in House of Leaves, Askin argues, works as the preeminent groundless figure, a presence folded back on herself with nothing underneath her.To establish her as consummate groundlessness, however, Echo needs to be inverted, since echoes depend on originary sounds from prior sources (other figures serving as first principles; other figures serving allegorically as grounds), and because resonance (re-sonating, re-sounding) depends on something with which to re-sonate—something else “in the vicinity,” Morton might say (2013, 173). Lalo, Echo's sister from Jitterbug Perfume, is likely a proto-Eve, an ur-Eve, a sonant first woman. In House of Leaves, we are reminded that Echo is “the daughter of the divine voice” (Danielewski 2000, 44), rendering Echo (and therefore Lalo, too, according to Robbins) “an offspring of God's voice” (Askin 2016, 167). And because myth is “the dwelling place of Echo”—Echo's house, so to speak—House of Leaves sets up so that God is “projected as the grand narrator composing and telling the story of being . . . Literature (or myth) then becomes the expression of the Creator, the transformed and transformative incarnation of the creative powers of God” (Askin 2016, 167).Were this the full account (that is, were the narrative indeed “grand,” and thus totalizing per Lyotard's coinage of “grand narrator”), Askin reckons that Mark C. Taylor's ontotheological interpretation of House of Leaves in Rewiring the Real (2013) would be confirmed, which is to say that an absolute and transcendent ground subtending Echo subtending mythological literature subtending Danielewski's novel and the novel's cosmology would be discernible as totalizing presence, as a “presence which absolutely originates or terminates” House of Leaves as “a sign-system,” to use Hart's language (Hart 2004, 23). For Taylor, the Internet performs this totalizing, and thus metaphysical, function (2013, 155; quoted in Askin 2016, 153). Yes: We have gone from “God is dead” to “God is human consciousness” to “God is unknowable” to “God is a house with no foundation” to “God is networked information”10 (Askin notes at the start of his chapter that most studies of House of Leaves center their analyses on digital and media studies). But Askin maintains that Taylor's is not the full account: By showing that “the daughter of the divine voice” is itself John Hollander's echo (from The Figure of Echo 1981) of Henry Reynold's echo (from Mythomystes) of Ovid's echo (from The Metamorphoses), and then back again the other direction, through the squiggling corridors of the novel's citational networks, Askin teases out the novel's inversion of Echo, the novel's echoing of Echo, its meta-echo that somehow escapes being a grand-echo. In doing so, Askin shoves Taylor into a free fall of infinite regress11 (into a maze?) to arrive at a “God is Narrative” formulation, to be taken in the Nietzschean vernacular to mean that Narrative itself is now the highest ground: Ultimately, House of Leaves emphasizes that it is constituted by echoes all the way down. In this vein, the divine voice whose daughter is Echo is dispersed as the fractured immanent principle of echo rather than a transcendent commanding higher source. There is no narrator-God located outside the narrative orchestrating the spinning of the tale. Rather, narrative voice, multiplied and diffracted, while generating the story always remains immanent to it. Indeed, there is nothing but the unfolding of narration—of morphosis and metamorphosis. Accordingly, the above relation between God and Echo is explicitly reversed two pages further on: while the Mythomystes characterizes echo as the offspring of and thus as determined by the divine voice, “divinity” now “seems defined by Echo.” It is in this fashion that House of Leaves explicitly projects narrative as metaphysical while avoiding the lapse into onto-theology. (Askin 2016, 167–68)In reading House of Leaves as grounded in an unground of sourceless echoes reverberating in endless differential repetition off maze walls, Askin challenges the n + 1 logic premised on Morton's notion that “irony is the echo of a mysterious presence” (Morton 2013, 173). Read anew in the light shone by Askin, Morton's definition of irony appears not only as a foundationalist one, but perhaps even as divinely inspired foundationalism: Irony is the daughter of the divine voice, says Hollander (1981). Hollander's divine voice comports with Morton's mysterious presence, certainly. Echo is governed by difference, says Askin. Synthesizing, we might conjecture that an echo is ironic, and that “mysterious presence” is really difference itself. If so, then God is difference, and He repeats. Foundation pluralizes into a thousand differently repeating plateaus acting as pedestals to elevate an ironic Echo. Echo is raised up here, from spritely woodland nymph, a figure traversing Arcadian grounds, to Goddess who, like Pan, is in the land—mainly in hauntingly acoustic caves or in Gothic American houses.Askin argues convincingly that Danielewski inverts Echo such that she ceases to be the offspring of any divine voice or mysterious presence. Like her sister Lalo, or Eve, or Morrison's Pilate from Song of Solomon (1977), this inverted Echo has no belly button, no trace of origin. Sonance, repeating with inverted difference, comes now with a built-in negation per Hart's rehearsal of Derridean “erasure and palænomy”: ǝɔuɐuosǝɹ. Without any divine voice or mysterious presence from which to have sprung, Echo either assumes her own metaphysical authority through narrative textuality, or else she dissolves in a meaningless flux of floating and flickering signifiers, forever adrift in a “fractured immanence” devoid of transcendentalist harbors, forever trapped in unlit labyrinths atop those thousand plateaus that are now fully ungrounded. In the film Avatar, directed by James Cameron (2009), the native Navi of the planet Pandora refer to (what humans call) the Hallelujah Mountains as Ayram alusìng, meaning “floating mountains,” a plurality of ungrounded grounds. Dispensing with metaphysical authority in favor of immanent dissolution, Askin's reading of an inverted Echo is also an inversion of Morton's n + 1 levels of signification, and it brings us to something like a 1 – n logic: “precisely by decentering and dispersing any notion of authority, be it authorial or narratorial,” the divine voice/mysterious presence drops out of the equation. A 1 – n logic obtains when Echo is no longer of a mysterious presence, when her house (mythology), built over a maze, amounts to a house hovering over meontic nothingness. This 1 – n logic might be just as potent as Morton's n + 1 logic of irony, not to mention a novel approach to negative theology.A nonmetaphysical or anti-foundationalist theology is most uncomfortable with just n: It wants to add to or subtract (from) whatever presence—Aristotelian Prime Mover or its immanent equivalent—is traditionally seen as responsible for initiating irony and echo, to problematize that presence as something inherently textual and mysterious. To supplement, or to de-base, n is precisely to recognize it as mysterious text that fluctuates waveringly, like a Necker cube: It pops to certain readers as totality, to others as nothingness, and somewhere between those two perspectives is what Arthur Kroker, in Exits to the Posthuman Future, calls “figural aesthetics” (2014, epilogue). This might explain why, “in the course of his discussion of echo,” another character from House of Leaves, Zampanò, quotes John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (Danielewski 2000, 45; Askin 2016, 168). It's not just an anti-foundationalist, de-basing, postmodernist, nihilistic anti-scripture of a novel that (un)grounds ultimate presence in textuality, diffracting narrative (figure) as Narrative (ground), it's also canonical scripture itself that (un)grounds whatever mysterious presence that stands behind it into the Word. Scripture appears to be the urtextual mode that collapses that which was with God into just that which was God (past tense!), diffracting word (figure) as Word (ground), vitiating any representationalist function we might otherwise associate with it. Originary sound and echo merge and split; they cleave; they are each other just as they are with each other; they are both blades of the hatchet whose cuts are the drafting of a labyrinth (see fn. 7), whose cuts are, in fact, virtuality.12 Hatchet cuts are between themselves as materiality and virtuality are between themselves, an idea that surfaces in Jeffrey Kripal's The Serpent's Gift (2007, 125), and that Morton attends to in Dark Ecology (2016, 155–56). Maybe the mysterious thing about mysterious presence is that it is so mysteriously virtual, so maddeningly present without being local, so ontologically other than the world that it inhabits (like an avatar)—observations that seem to hold for n + 1 as well as 1 – n logics, for Deleuzian as well as Derridean difference.If so, then we arrive finally at Hart's third and final suggestion.13 Here, Nietzsche's “formula” that God is dead “has little or nothing to do with religious belief and is, rather, an elliptical way of saying that there is no absolute ground that will support our longing for the truth” (Hart 2004, 41), which is to say that belief's aim is errant not so much because it is “off the mark” as because there's no “true” mark to be “off” of in the first place. In this interpretation, Nietzsche prefigures Foucault's dissolution of truth claims and transcendent foundations, or conversely, the resolution of “regimes of truth” with immanent and discursive structures of power/knowledge. “If this interpretation is correct,” Hart continues, “Nietzsche is not offering a dismissive comment on the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but is rejecting the God of the metaphysicians and moralists” (2004, 41), those who supply the normative apologetics that predetermine what counts as a bullseye, those who subjugate the discourse of n to ecclesial and theological purpose. Nietzsche's rejection, here, is a kind of doubt that is directed toward a form of foundationalism that postmodernism attacks relentlessly, but postmodernism seems to have forgotten that the doubt springs less from certainties concerning atheistic immanence and more from proto-posthumanist speculations that foundations might just exist differently than we realize, or differently than we (try to) enforce.We should pause here to appreciate how remarkable it is that the most radically anti-foundationalist way of interpreting Nietzsche is also the one in which Ridvan Askin and St. John the Apostle, son of Zebedee, converge. Neither Askin nor John espouses total nihilisms, even if the former leans strongly in that direction.14 God may or may not be, but unless we accept the complicity that comes with acting as gatekeepers of discourse, we should doubt whether our longings have anything to do with answering the question (Deleuze's “?-being” works perfectly, here15), let alone whether we have any moralistic bearing on ?-being's personality. Metalepsis goes both ways: “Mysterious presence,” whatever it is, gets sucked into textual orbit, but it also gets blown back into inarticulable cosmological wonderment. The movement from was with to was reverses, so that was morphs back into was with, and the Word ungrounds as word, as the echo of whatever mysteriously and originally speaks it. That's how metalepsis works, after all: It is ontological crossover and doubling in action. Deleuzian folding and the trope of the labyrinth capture it well; internal difference extrapolates well to Derridean différance. ?-being is a way of taking what Plato calls the Idea and opening it up the possibility that “the Idea” is not necessarily coextensive with “the good.”Clearly, variations on the “God is dead” motif abound: God is dead, gods will die if unplugged from the life support of human consciousness, God is unknowable, God is an information superhighway. God dissolves into His own textual-creative expressions and then reconstitutes from them. Intriguingly, such variations abound just as much for metaphysicians and moralists as they do for doubters and Nietzschean nihilists: God is absolute transcendence, God is totalizing, God is untrespassing, untrespassed, untrespassable. My point is largely that the temperament that doubts the metaphysicians and moralists is a pool of reflection for the Narcissists who love a God created in their own images, a God born of their normative desires, sculpted like an idol to fulfill their wishes for identity—for identities in which certain kinds of belief are desirable. When Nietzsche's madman says we have killed God, he becomes an inverted Echo, repeating an ecclesial and theological Narcissus, but with a difference. To announce God's death is to fold metaphysics and morality baroquely, to put Deleuzian creases through absolutism and transcendence, to invert Echo by repeating what comes first (“God is is is . . . ”) rather than what comes last (“. . . outside of time and space ace ace”), to start with an open-ended question mark (“?-being”) rather than to end with a conversation-ending and totalizing period. Hart's Nietzsche reminds the metaphysicians and the moralists that their interpretations involving grand narratives may “appeal to scripture but do not arise from it” (Hart 2004, 115). What God is is is, is still open to speculation, not just in spite of scriptural words, but actually according to the Word. Doubt encourages and even impels us to repeat that “God is . . . ” in different ways, to fill in the elliptical blank with anything ranging from absolutely transcendent to dead, and everything between. God is . . . “shuffling his feet” (Crash Test Dummies 1993), “not short of cash, mister” (U2’s Bono: U2 1987), or suffering from a bad case of dandruff (Rushdie's Ooparvala: Rushdie 1988). God, like Nietzsche, speaks in mysterious parables. God is is is . . . Questions as to whether God be “multiform, plural, representing union-by-hybridization of such opposites as Oopar and Neechay, or whether [God] be pure, stark, extreme” were not to be “resolved” in The Satanic Verses (1988, 329), but they will be considered here.In fact, that which does arise from scripture might be closer to immanence-oriented realisms than to transcendentalist idealisms. Hart points out that If you begin reading the Bible looking for transcendence, you will quickly find obstacles placed in your path by the text itself. No sooner have you reached Genesis 1:2 than you will encounter a massive one. For the Bible tells us that God fashioned the world from that which was “without form and void” (tohu vabohu) and from a primal ocean, “the deep” (tehom). He did not create everything out of nothing, according to this verse, and no passage later in scripture explicitly contradicts this view. The traditional image of God whose transcendence is so absolute that he creates the heavens and the earth ex nihilo is not biblical but theological. (Hart 2004, 116)Likewise, if you begin reading the Hebrew Bible looking for a strict and consistent monotheism, you will quickly find that the text overtly presents the Jews as polytheists. Martien Halvorson-Taylor rehearsed this point as a well-accepted truism of contemporary religious studies in a guest appearance at the World Religions, World Literature proseminar at the University of Virginia in February 2019, describing it as a “fascinating” aspect of Hebrew scripture. In The Satanic Verses, we get a good look at what it means for Rushdie to read the Qur'an against the hegemonically monotheistic grain. People died because of this. Yet the overwhelming consensus is that the Qur'an and the Hebrew Bible are both held to be exemplary for their espousals of transcendent monotheism. That's an interpretative phenomenon, to be sure—a complicated series of ecclesial and theological developments that appeal to scripture, but that do not arise from it (to echo Hart, but not differently and without inverting him).My next step is to explore Adam Levin's The Instructions as part of my attempt to think through the reparative logic of scripture, to borrow Peter Och's terminology.16 What does it say that novelists like Levin (and Doctorow17) seek spiritual repairs by emulating scripture? An answer to this question relies on a movement from a wariness of metaphysically inflected moral interpretations to an appreciation for the possibility that reality might just be a fractured immanence, independent of and oblivious to our categorical imperatives. And because a fractured immanence also fractures the dialectic counterpointing a perfect transcendence, it opens speculative space for a fractured transcendence, too—for a less than moralistic divinity, a cracked foundation.Ten year-old Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee sets out to write scripture with the thought that he might be the potential messiah. He claims no knowledge of being the messiah (except in potentiality); rather, he allows that he might become the messiah. Such a becoming is intimately connected with his writing: what it is, what it might become. In this respect, The Instructions is not eternal in the way that the Qur'an is thought by its adherents to be eternal. Gurion's scripture takes time to develop, and once developed, it does not make any retroactive moves to build eternity into its program; its black ink does not pretend to correspond to an eternally white parchment but rather to a white parchment that is itself spatially and temporally bound. When he “started writing scripture,” he began his Blessings with “There is love. There was always love, and there will be more love, forever. Were there ever to be less love, we would all be at war, and Your angels would learn suffering” (Levin 2010, 366). We recognize this as a proto-Blessings or an ur-Blessings,18 sinc