Fiction Beyond Secularism

257 Pages·2014·1.342 MB·English

by  Justin Neuman

Fiction Beyond Secularism
8
flashpoints
The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly
national and disciplinary frameworks, and that are distinguished both by their
historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books
engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without
falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the
humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence
and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how
literature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in
how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles
are available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/flashpoints.
series editors:
Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Founding Editor;
Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Founding
Editor; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown
University); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and
European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine), Coordinator; Catherine Gallagher
(English, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Nouri Gana (Comparative Literature
and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Jody Greene (Literature,
UC Santa Cruz); Susan Gillman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman
(Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
1. On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant,
Dina Al-Kassim
2. Moses and Multiculturalism, Barbara Johnson, with a foreword by
Barbara Rietveld
3. The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature,
Adam Barrows
4. Poetry in Pieces: César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity, Michelle Clayton
5. Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt,
Shaden M. Tageldin
6. Wings for Our Courage: Gender, Erudition, and Republican Thought,
Stephanie H. Jed
7. The Cultural Return, Susan Hegeman
8. English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India,
Rashmi Sadana
9. The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century, Helmut
Müller-Sievers
10. Polymorphous Domesticities: Pets, Bodies, and Desire in Four Modern
Writers, Juliana Schiesari
11. Flesh and Fish Blood: Postcolonialism, Translation, and the Vernacular,
S. Shankar
12. The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the
Revolutionary Americas, Sara E. Johnson
13. Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the
Luso-Hispanic Atlantic, Erin Graff Zivin
14. Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in
Latin America, Mariano Siskind
15. Fiction Beyond Secularism, Justin Neuman
Fiction Beyond Secularism
Justin Neuman
northwestern university press ❘ evanston, illinois
this book is made possible by a collaborative grant
from the andrew w. mellon foundation.
Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu
Copyright © 2014 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2014.
All rights reserved.
Digital Printing
ISBN 978-0-8101-2989-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Neuman, Justin, author.
Fiction beyond secularism / Justin Neuman.
pages cm. — (Flashpoints)
ISBN 978-0-8101-2989-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Secularism in literature.
3. Religion in literature. 4. Postsecularism. I. Title. II. Series: FlashPoints
(Evanston, Ill.)
PR888.R5N48 2014
820.9382—dc23
2014005101
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Preface xi
Introduction 3
1. Salman Rushdie’s Wounded Secularism 19
2. J. M. Coetzee’s Prophets of Asceticism 49
3. Time and Terror 95
4. Messianic Narrative 134
5. Reading Islam 155
Coda: The Novel and the Secular Imagination 183
Notes 191
Works Cited 217
Index 235

Acknowledgments
Before expressing my gratitude to the many people and institutions
whose support made it possible for me to write this book, I want to
offer an acknowledgment about my relationship to its subject matter.
Religiously “unmusical” was Max Weber’s preferred self-description. I
too have little aptitude for religion, though, while growing up in rural
Vermont on the hippie fringe of New York’s Jewish diaspora, where the
Jewish community shared space with a local church, I made a weekly
pilgrimage twenty miles each way on mountain roads for enough reli-
gious education to become a bar mitzvah. For my parents, Judaism had
more to do with the memory of the Holocaust and with schlepping to
High Holiday services than it did either with faith in God or with the
practices of halakha, or Jewish law. As is the case for many Jews both
assimilated and practicing, the commonplace reduction of religion to
belief was foreign to my experience of religion, which took its inspira-
tion from my paternal grandfather, a lifelong atheist and a respected
Talmudic scholar.
The earliest roots of this project go back to the fall of 2001. I was
teaching English at a private school, and my senior English elective on
contemporary fiction was in its second week on Salman Rushdie’s The
Satanic Verses at the time of the 9/11 attacks. Over the subsequent
weeks a book I had begun to suspect was too challenging for the syl-
labus became the source of a transformative reading experience for my
students and a pivotal one for me. I decided later that year to go back
viii ❘  Acknowledgments
to graduate school in English, with the vague sense that it might be an
opportune time to reconsider the relationship between religion, secu-
larism, and the novel on a global scale. At the end of my coursework in
the spring of 2004, I had the honor of giving a paper as respondent to
French philosopher Alain Badiou at a conference on Saint Paul at the
University of Virginia; though his work does not figure directly in this
book, our encounter gave it the spark of life.
The thanks I offer here cannot do justice to the debts I have incurred
as I worked on the project that has become Fiction Beyond Secularism.
I am especially indebted to Jennifer Wicke, Peter Brooks, and Michael
Levenson, my mentors at the University of Virginia, for their insight,
guidance, and generosity. It is they who shaped my sense of the profes-
sion, and they who challenged and supported my project and me dur-
ing a formative phase. Other teachers influenced me substantially in
graduate school, among them Eleanor Kaufman, Caroline Rody, Jahan
Ramazani, Joseph Davis, James Davidson Hunter, and Eric Lott. I am
also grateful to acknowledge the financial assistance of the Institute for
Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, which pro-
vided me with a dissertation fellowship, an office, and an intellectual
community including Slava Jakelic, Josh Yates, and Jenny Geddes. My
cohort at Virginia were my first readers and continue to be the best
of friends; special thanks to Elizabeth Anker, Sean Borton, Bethany
Mabee, Chris Nichols, Erich Nunn, Lily Sheehan David Sigler, and
Eric Song.
There could be no better place than the English Department of Yale
University to complete a book like Fiction Beyond Secularism. I am
particularly grateful for the generous readings and inspiring guidance
of Michael Warner, Amy Hungerford, and Pericles Lewis. The nov-
els analyzed in this study also feature in several courses I have had
the privilege to offer at Yale, and I would like to thank my students
in several courses, especially “Religion and the Postwar Novel” and
“The Novels of J. M. Coetzee,” for their vibrancy in the classroom. My
extraordinary colleagues Jessica Pressman, R. John Williams, Caleb
Smith, and Paul Grimstad have been both stern readers and sources
of support in times of need. This book has also benefited immensely
from the provocative readings of Rebecca Walkowitz, Akeel Bilgrami,
Bruce Robbins, and Simon During; I thank them for their honesty and
insight. Many thanks as well to Emily Gum, Rachel Fishkis, Merve
Emre, Amanda Crego-Emley, and Elisabeth Magnus for their research,
editorial work, expertise, and help preparing the manuscript for
Acknowledgments ❘  ix
publication. I would also like to thank Jody Greene, Ed Dimendberg,
and Henry Carrigan at Northwestern University Press for their roles in
making Fiction Beyond Secularism a reality.
Lectures rooted in this material were presented at Brandeis Univer-
sity, the University of Colorado, the University of the Witwatersrand,
Yale University, and the University of Virginia. Early versions, trial
balloons, and other adventures were presented at conference meetings
of the American Comparative Literature Association, the International
Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, and the Modern Lan-
guage Association. I would like to thank my hosts as well as my audi-
ences on those occasions for their questions, their patience, and their
good humor. My thanks to Jonathan VanAntwerpen, Wei Zhu, and
others at The Immanent Frame for publishing my work and for mod-
erating the best site on the Internet for those interested in secularism,
religion, and the public sphere.
Parts of several chapters have appeared in other forms: “Salman
Rushdie’s Religious Cosmopolitans,” in Cosmopolitanism, Religion,
and the Public Sphere, ed. Maria Rovisco (London: Routledge, forth-
coming); “Religious Cosmopolitanism? Orhan Pamuk, the Heads-
carf Debate, and the Problem with Pluralism,” Minnesota Review 77
(Fall 2011); “The Novel against God: Questioning the Form’s Inher-
ent Secularism,” in Culture 3.2 (Fall 2009); “The Fictive Origins of
Secular Humanism,” Criticism 50.4 (Fall 2008); “Radical Asceticism:
The Turning Away of the Other in J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of
Michael K,” in The Camp: Narratives of Internment and Exclusion,
ed. Coleman Hogan (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007). I
am grateful to Routledge Press, Duke University Press, the Institute
for Advanced Studies in Culture, and the Cambridge Scholars Press for
permission to include the portions of these essays published here.