Confession Versus Collusion

In Agent Running in the Field (2019), his final novel, John le Carré reprises elements of his post-Cold War critique of transnational espiocratic duplicity and collusion, while also emphasizing the moral imperative of principle-driven constancy and confession as an antidote to the pathology of infection he associates with contemporary geopolitics. His virtuosity in tackling this theme, one also addressed though differently in A Legacy of Spies (2017), validates fellow author Ian McEwan’s assessment that le Carré “will be remembered as perhaps the most significant novelist” of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in Britain.

Slender Self-Knowledge

This essay argues that King Lear’s tragedy is largely brought about by Lear’s lack of self-knowledge, a character defect that long precedes the foolish decisions he makes in King Lear’s opening scene and which precipitates his own death and the deaths of those he loves. Lear’s lack of self-knowledge encourages Shakespeare’s audience to have sympathy for Goneril and Regan and to recognize that Lear’s beautiful progress of redemption is mitigated by his failure to ever recognize his longstanding wrongdoing against his elder daughters. By contrast, in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet’s humble choice to learn and be humbled by Darcy’s letter empowers Elizabeth to achieve self-knowledge at a youthful age even as it brings happiness and numerous redemptive benefits to herself and to those whom she loves.

“A private holy spirit in small letters”

Scholars regularly read Sylvia Plath biographically, but few have focused on her religious beliefs and their manifestation in her work. This essay explores Plath’s ideas about religion, and about Christianity in particular, as they are articulated in college papers, in her journals, and in her fiction. It argues, finally, that Plath’s wrestling with Christian religious ideas is that of the kind of “cross-pressured” believer characterized by Charles Taylor; she is a humanist atheist tempted by belief.

Introduction: Modernism and the Turn to Religion

This Introduction contextualizes the volume in modernist tensions between belief and unbelief, and subsequent debates about the nature of secularization. An opening moment considers Pound and Woolf’s rejection of T. S. Eliot’s religious conversion as emblematic of a “subtraction” theory of secularization, in which secularity and religious belief are taken as mutually exclusive horizons of understanding. Such thinking, it is argued, has precluded a more nuanced approach. Criticism has largely ignored more complex and fragmentary religious dimensions of modernist production; or, on the other hand, taken up religion only in the narrow and anachronistic sense of traditional Christianity. This volume attempts to explore the religious dimensions of modernism in a more modernist sense: taking modernist art as a critical liminal space for exploring new modes of religious experience in complex and resonant ways -- often in open rejection of traditional modes of faith, and in authors beyond the usual suspects.

“New Knowledge of Lost Worlds”?

In contemporary academic circles, the fields of science, theology, and literature may be compartmentalized with relatively little interaction. However, such distinctions were less rigid in the early nineteenth century. One of the figures whose writings stretched across these disciplinary boundaries was Edward Hitchcock, a world-renowned geologist and president of Amherst College who also had extensive theological training. Now best-known among paleontologists for his discovery of fossil footprints in the Connecticut River Valley, Hitchcock made use of his considerable talents in an 1836 poem entitled “The Sandstone Bird.” This poem—often known to historians of science but little remarked among students of American literature—effectively uses formal verse to draw out theological dimensions to the prehistoric world conjured up by Hitchcock’s own paleontological discoveries.

The Burial of the Dead in Mann’s The Magic Mountain

During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, readers of modernist literature have often been reminded of the flu epidemic of 1918-1920. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) anatomizes pre-war bourgeois society as represented by the inmates of a tuberculosis asylum in Davos, Switzerland. The novel typifies a concern in modernist fiction with the proper rites for the burial of the dead, which I explored in an earlier study, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. This essay argues that that Mann sees the novel, as a genre, as having a particular ability to represent the process of mourning because of its powers of ironic distancing: it can represent both the public ritual of the funeral service and the private thoughts of the mourner, which may or may not accord with official sentiment. More generally, the modern novel shows how we project our own desires and fears onto the dead.

After Many Gods

In January 1928, The Dial published T. S. Eliot’s review of Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (1926). Even as he acknowledges his indebtedness to his fellow American poet-critic, Eliot seems bewildered by Pound’s belief system, which in his estimation is a heady mix of mysticism, occultism, pseudoscience, and Confucianism. With a touch of exasperation, he ends the review by asking provocatively, “what does Mr. Pound believe?” Although he would never give an answer that Eliot would find satisfying, Pound would revisit the question time and again in his prose and poetry. In the process, he reveals more about his eccentric set of creeds than even Eliot might have bargained for. Striving to synthesize a range of philosophical and polytheistic traditions, Pound would cast off the Presbyterianism of his early youth. From the 1930s onward, his deepening affiliation with Italian Fascism and near-cultic devotion to Mussolini would add yet another layer to his spectrum of beliefs. With Eliot’s query in The Dial functioning as a recurring point of reference, this essay examines Pound’s religious beliefs as a shifting panoply of mythico-theological, aesthetic, and political ideas. The picture that emerges is as complex as it is difficult to pin down, blurring the boundaries of what constitutes “faith” itself.

Do This in Remembrance of Me

Written 136 years apart, Melville’s Moby Dick and Morrison’s Beloved explore the scriptural tension between the material and spiritual. Against two different American landscapes, each work explores incarnation as both manifestations of the divine and the Word given flesh—two uniquely separate functions. Throughout the stages of Queequeg’s and Baby Suggs life, and other characters, as well, the stages of archetypal incarnation are expressed amongst two distinct populations, similar first in their need for incarnated divinity. Ultimately, these incarnations ask us to see the divine in our physical bodies, now—new bodies for new Words.