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Religion and American Literature Since 1950
Mark Eaton
New Directions in Religion and Literature Series London: Bloomsbury, 2020 Hardcover. vii+267p. ISBN 978-1350123755. £80
Reviewed by Claude Le Fustec Université Rennes2
“Suspending Disbelief”:
this phrase, the title of Mark Eaton’s introduction to his Religion and American Literature Since 1950, is a good summary of this
study of “American writers from the postwar period to the present who represent
religion and spirituality with open-minded sensitivity and historical
specificity.” In order to approach the way “religion as lived experience gets
woven into narrative fiction”, Eaton makes deliberate use of four major
concepts drawn from religious studies and theology: apostasy, conversion,
theodicy, and eschatology, to construct four chapters dedicated to Flannery
O’Connor; James Baldwin; Saul Bellow/ Philip Roth / E.L. Doctorow; and finally
Don DeLillo, respectively. As he makes it clear however, Eaton’s methodology is
not theological but “literary-critical” and “socio-historical” with each
chapter delving into the surrounding social context pertaining to religion, on
the one hand, and into the representation of religion and spirituality in the
fiction examined on the other. An attempt to “coordinate the literary with the
religious”, Eaton’s work claims “historical formalism” as its source of
inspiration, “a method that attends to aesthetics and historical contexts to
uncover the social power of forms.” Though each
chapter revolves around a different concept, a common point to all the writers
under scrutiny is the complexity of the relationship their fiction bears to
religion. Introduced through the narrative of religious resilience in a secularist
context examined in Updike’s In the
Beauty of the Lilies, this mapping of lived religion in contemporary
fiction takes various shapes. O’Connor’s
fiction, first, is characterized by its narratives of “failed apostasy,” based
on “a sort of cognitive dissonance that allows someone to believe and disbelieve
at the same time.” This makes sense in the paradoxical social context of her
time, both marked by secularization and a search for spiritual renewal, where the
author set herself the task of making belief believable to a largely
unbelieving audience. Writing from a
somewhat different posture as an African American northerner who had imbibed
the religious fervor that sustained the new city dwellers after the Great
Migration, James Baldwin did experience actual apostasy after an initial
conversion (the focus of the chapter) depicted in Go Tell It on the Mountain. However, as Eaton points out, he never
relinquished religious rhetoric to express his beliefs, notably, in the most
Christian one of all: the saving power of Love. The third
chapter (built around secular theodicy) is dedicated to a group of Jewish
writers part of the literary renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s, who were all
faced with the scandal of the Holocaust: Bellow, Roth and Doctorow are all considered
“post-religious” authors obsessed with religion. Faced with the challenge of
defining Jewish identity outside Judaism in a post-Holocaust context, theirs
was a period marked by the death of God movement and controversy around the
notion of a broken Covenant. The writers, for their part, Eaton argues, were more
interested in pluralizing viewpoints from secular stances, though their
underlying concern with religion produces a type of fiction constantly mixing
the sacred and profane. Finally, the
last writer considered, Don DeLillo, is envisioned from the perspective of the
apocalyptic vein of his fiction. However, as Eaton underlines, this often-mentioned
feature in Don DeLillo’s writing still remains in need of connection with Christian
eschatology. With
this essay, what Eaton manages to do is show the depth and power of literary analysis
when it takes the religious into serious consideration. IIn return, theology comes out as an incredibly rich field in which to mine a
vast array of concepts reflecting back on the spiritual lore of Literature, a
potential response to Rita Felski's call for an alternative to the reign of
suspicion as the paradigmatic academic critical stance..
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