Provincializing the Bible: Faulkner and Postsecular American Literature 9781138502123, 9781315144757

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Introduction: A Postage-Stamp Bible
1 The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels
2 The Literary as Biblical: Beloved and Faulkner
3 Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization: Ceremony and So Far from God
4 Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer: The Book of Salt
Conclusion: A Postsecular Bible?
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Provincializing the Bible

Religious conviction constitutes one of the most powerful forces shaping our global present and future. Given the increasingly pluralistic cast of American letters as well as declining biblical literacy in American culture, it is telling that some of the most highly regarded contemporary ­authors have not simply rejected the Bible as a reactionary and ­oppressive relic. Instead, as Norman Jones demonstrates in his ­rigorous new study of the major novels of William Faulkner and their resonance with key ­landmarks of contemporary American literature, certain ­influential authors provincialize the Bible as a means of re-evaluating and re-­valorizing its significance in contemporary culture. Norman W. Jones is Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University. Author of The Bible and Literature: The Basics as well as Gay and Lesbian Historical Fiction: Sexual Mystery and Post-Secular Narrative, he is also coeditor of The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences.

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

82 Rewriting the American Soul Trauma, Neuroscience and the Contemporary Literary Imagination Anna Thieman 83 Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion Bodies at Prayer Naya Tsentourou 84 TransGothic in Literature and Culture Edited by Jolene Zigarovich 85 Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture Edited by Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz 86 The Literature of Remembering Tracing the Limits of Memoir Edited by Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, and Sue Joseph 87 From Mind to Text Continuities and Breaks Between Cognitive, Aesthetic and Textualist Approaches to Literature Bartosz Stopel 88 Attachment, Place, and Otherness in Nineteenth-Century American Literature New Materialist Representations Jillmarie Murphy 89 Shame and Modern Writing Edited by Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh 90 Provincializing the Bible Faulkner and Postsecular American Literature Norman W. Jones

Provincializing the Bible Faulkner and Postsecular American Literature

Norman W. Jones

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Norman W. Jones to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-50212-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-14475-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Introduction: A Postage-Stamp Bible 1 1 The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels 23 2 The Literary as Biblical: Beloved and Faulkner 58 3 Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization: Ceremony and So Far from God 88 4 Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer: The Book of Salt 114 Conclusion: A Postsecular Bible? 141 Works Cited Index

149 165

Introduction A Postage-Stamp Bible

Why, in our supposedly secular age, does the Bible feature prominently in so many influential and innovative works of contemporary U.S. literature? More pointedly, why would a book indelibly allied with a long history of institutionalized oppressions play a supporting role—and not simply as an object of critique—in a wide variety of landmark literary representations of marginalized subjectivities?1 The answers to these questions extend beyond merely playful reappropriations or ironically subversive resignifications of biblical themes, figures, and forms. First, however, it is worth addressing a more fundamental question that will inevitably arise for some readers—and rightly so: why do we need another book about the Bible and literature? Can anything new be learned from an inquiry framed in this way, which, it might be argued, harbors hidebound and even retrograde assumptions? An ostensibly more forward-oriented framing might be “sacred texts and literature,” which would at least cast its confines beyond the ­Christian traditions that have been profoundly complicit in maintaining oppressive sociocultural hegemonies. Better yet might be “spirituality and literature,” which could help critics move beyond a Eurocentric assumption that textual traditions are more authoritative than oral ones. Going further still, “postsecular literature,” while committing the manifest sin of promoting another vague use of the post- prefix, arguably helps undermine modern Western definitions of the secular as an implicitly normative constellation of discursive practices distinct from and opposed to discursive formations of spirituality and the sacred. After all, modern Western conceptual oppositions between secular and sacred have been used to authorize contemporary forms of imperialistic othering and exploitation, as Talal Asad, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others contend. 2 While Christianity was once invoked to help justify the colonization of putatively benighted and atavistically “heathen” ­peoples, recent decades have seen Western secularism invoked to help justify imperialistic attitudes toward putatively benighted and atavistically “religious” peoples. While Bruce Robbins rightly contends that “the West cannot simply be identified with secularism” (257), for many, the very term religion tacitly harbors secular Western assumptions. 3

2  Introduction Ironically enough, it is precisely such critiques of secularism that should give one pause about dismissing “the Bible and literature” as a topic that inescapably promotes retrograde, backward-looking assumptions. Indeed, the metaphor of “forward” versus “backward” as a way of representing a distinction between modern and traditional typically invokes a notion of the secular embedded in common Western progress narratives that assume a linear development from “superstitious” religious belief to an increasingly “secular” scientific materialism. A growing body of scholarship aims to disrupt such secularization narratives. This book further develops these disruptions by showing how certain influential works of contemporary American literature invoke the Bible in ways that undermine easy distinctions between modern and traditional just as they implicitly undermine simple distinctions between secular and sacred. More specifically, the present study illuminates what this strain of contemporary literature shares with William Faulkner’s invocations of the Bible. In doing so, the study builds on the insights of Amy ­Hungerford and John McClure, who argue that the domains of the spiritual and the literary intersect with one another extensively and at times definitively in contemporary American literature.4 Provincializing the Bible traces a source of such intersections back before Dwight Eisenhower’s 1953 presidential inauguration—which Hungerford identifies with the rise in the U.S. of widespread belief in only a vague sense of religious faith5 —to the decades of the 1920s and 1930s, during which national debates about religion and the Bible were fueled by the Scopes Trial, Bruce ­Barton’s best-selling books on Jesus and the Bible, and ­Reinhold Niebuhr’s responses to Barton.6 Elucidating Faulkner’s influence helps extend and complicate the definitional boundaries of postsecular ­A merican literature. As suggested by its titular nod to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, which critiques the secular assumptions embedded in certain accounts of the history of Western imperialism, the present study finds critical inspiration in postcolonial insights. Here, however, it is not Europe that provides the analytical fulcrum so much as the Bible— and more particularly the English Bible, that diverse collection of translated, retranslated, appropriated, and reappropriated texts that has so frequently been touted as “universal” in both scope and significance.7 Nikita Dhawan lauds Chakrabarty for foregrounding the need to come “to terms with the irony that even as we critique the violent legacy of the European Enlightenment, it provides us with some of our most powerful tools” (220). So too with the Bible—albeit in a distinctively literary way. Faulkner’s most widely influential works focus narrowly on what he described as his “postage stamp of native soil,”8 which many in his day would have considered a cultural and intellectual backwater. In a 1932 review of Light in August in The New York Times Book Review,

Introduction  3 J.  Donald  Adams conceded that Faulkner’s newest novel finally demonstrated, at least at times, that he could “lift his eyes above the dunghill”  (43). Even so, the review was entitled “Mississippi Mud.” ­Despite—or perhaps in part because of—Faulkner’s fascination with his native Mississippi soil, including its unsophisticated and even sordid aspects, he has been fashioned by his literary successors into an icon of American letters. He is valued especially because of his richly evocative and distinctively stylized experimentation with narrative structure from the level of the sentence to that of the novel as a whole. In addition, a significant strain of his literary legacy derives from his complex formal and thematic invocations of an insistently provincialized Bible, as subsequent chapters argue in detail. Faulkner regularly flirted with scandal in his writing, and his uses of the Bible fit this pattern: what better way to invite outrage from his readers than to provincialize what many considered a universal urtext of Anglophone literary history and, indeed, of Western civilization itself, casting it as local and limited in scope, associating it with jejune naïveté at best and ignorant bigotry at worst? What is noteworthy about this particular “outrage” (one of the most common emotions highlighted in Faulkner’s novels) is the way in which he creates scandalously parochial and sometimes perverse echoes of the Bible that nevertheless hum with an insistently vague sense of grandly prophetic moral authority. Indeed, the harmonic undertones certain contemporary writers amplify through their resonance with Faulkner’s invocations of the Bible suggest that the very tension itself between provincial and more broadly applicable significance in such invocations in his work is precisely what makes them powerfully relevant to contemporary American literature.

Secularization Narratives In making this argument, Provincializing the Bible takes up Vincent Pecora’s call for a cultural criticism that explores and engages with “the tensions and inconsistencies in the secularization story” in order to help develop conceptual tools that productively illuminate “the pursuit of social justice” (208, 202). That pursuit constitutes one of the defining features of contemporary American literature, but it is a feature whose relationship to common secularization narratives has not yet been adequately explored. In order to outline here how subsequent chapters of Provincializing the Bible undertake that exploration, it is necessary first to describe the secularization narratives at issue. The most familiar version dates back at least to eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and David Hume: religious belief is the product of an essentially prescientific and superstitious worldview such that the increasingly widespread awareness of the predictive power of scientific methodology inevitably leads to the decline of

4  Introduction religious belief. In recent decades, it has become abundantly clear that this narrative is vastly oversimplified—easily contestable and even counterfactual. Indeed, the most interesting thing about this scientific secularization narrative is that while the narrative has long seemed to some to be self-evident, it has seemed to others to require ardent proponents— whether H. L. Mencken in Faulkner’s day or Richard Dawkins today. Sociologists such as Peter L. Berger in the 1960s theorized that secularization and modernity were concomitant phenomena and that their growing prevalence was evident especially in an increasingly urbanized American culture. Yet by the turn into the twenty-first century, Berger had completely reversed his position, contending that the popular ­secularization narrative is “essentially mistaken” (Berger 2). Kevin Schultz summarizes Berger’s and other sociologists’ critique of this narrative: The central claim of the critique is that, if secularization is defined as the decline of religious beliefs and practices in modern societies, the theory of secularization is bunk. Not only has religion persisted (and the evidence is incontrovertible) but the theory also implies that the past was more religious than today, which, it turns out, is not so easy to prove. Of course, these critics were mainly looking at behavioral data and did not consider institutional secularization (as in the marginalization of religious institutions from a reality-defining role), cultural secularization (the transformation of mythic and symbolic markers), or social secularization (faith as a source of social solidarity and division). Ignorance of these aspects of secularization complicated these critiques and… allowed for numerous scholars to critique the critiques in an attempt to rebuild secularization theory…. The most persuasive attempts to recreate a theory have come from those [such as David Martin and José Casanova] who have gone a long way toward forcing us to reconsider what we mean by secularization and whether we aren’t better off thinking in terms of “multiple modernities,” where no single rule holds true for every society. (Schultz 174, 176) The oversimplified secularization narrative nevertheless persists—­despite the existence of more nuanced narratives—perhaps because institutional and sociocultural forms of secularization are so clearly evident in many contemporary cultures. Charles Taylor’s alternative narrative embraces the notion that the industrialized West currently inhabits a “secular age.” Yet by this, he means to denote not an early modern sense of secular—which referred to worldly or temporal aspects of Christian societies—nor a more modern sense of secular that defines itself in opposition to religion; instead,

Introduction  5 he proposes a notion of secular that denotes a more recent phenomenon in which all belief systems seem eminently contestable. Taylor describes this alternative version of the secularization narrative as “the great ­disembedding” (A Secular Age 146). To understand what he means by this, one must understand what he means by “belief.” Taylor’s notion of belief does not refer to belief in religious doctrine, as Michael Warner, ­Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun explain in their introduction to Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (a collection of essays that reflect on Taylor’s A Secular Age): Nor does he understand belief as an abstract intellectual commitment to the truth of a propositional statement. Rather, he devotes considerable effort to showing how that sort of narrowed “epistemological” approach is part of a package of cultural and i­ntellectual changes that make religious belief difficult and “embattled,” even while they make for advances in other domains, like science. The epistemological approach turns on a strong separation of the knowing mind from culture, social relations, even body and perhaps “spirit”—that is, aspects of our mental activity not readily rendered in rational-propositional terms. (Varieties of Secularism 10–11) Taylor’s narrative identifies secularization with a modern imperative to self-abstraction—an imperative endemic not only to Western scientific method but also to the methodologies of cultural criticism. Crucial to understanding Taylor’s complex secularization narrative is his insistence that, at the same time, this imperative also became endemic to dominant Western forms of Christianity in a process he describes as “excarnation,” which refers to “the steady disembodying of spiritual life, so that it is less and less carried in deeply meaningful bodily forms, and lies more and more ‘in the head’” (A Secular Age 771). Taylor’s analysis of this widespread imperative to self-abstraction resonates provocatively with a range of thinkers in critical race studies, postcolonial studies, sexuality studies, and disability studies. After all, the imperative is not only an epistemological phenomenon but also a social one that frequently gets used to simultaneously promote and mask socioeconomic forces of exploitation as well as institutionalized efforts to disavow and discipline specific types of bodies.9 Some bodies get represented as grotesque or excessive—as agents of violence, disease, and moral corruption—in part through the strategic deployment of self-­ abstraction as an ostensibly universal ideal: bodies represented as failing to accede to that ideal are represented as provincial, so to speak, bearing only limited and primarily negative or cautionary significance. Herein lie the central interests of this book: Provincializing the Bible grew out of the recognition that a particular strain of twentieth- and

6  Introduction twenty-first-century American literature represents the subversion of oversimplified secularization narratives as a necessary component of the multifaceted struggle to valorize the disavowed. Literary works in this strain seem to be no stranger to Taylor’s insight that “neo-­Nietzscheans and acknowledgers of transcendence are together in their absence of surprise at the continued disappointments of secular humanism, and together also in the sense that its vision of life lacks a dimension” (A Catholic Modernity? 29). These works implicitly critique secularism in order to render specific differences in embodied experience—especially abjected differences—more legible to critical analysis. John Milbank’s account of secularization illuminates one general type of disruption literary narratives can offer to the modern imperative to self-abstraction, which he describes as resulting from the shift (inaugurated by thirteenth-century theologian Duns Scotus) from a participatory ontology to an instrumental and voluntaristic epistemology.10 Given that “textuality is the condition of all culture,” Milbank avers, The adequate explanation of a text, or indeed of anything whatsoever, means rather its representational repetition, a narration of text or thing which identifies causes as occasions taken serious notice of by later events…. “Narrating,” therefore, turns out to be a more basic category than either explanation or understanding: unlike either of these it does not assume punctiliar facts or discrete meanings. (Theology and Social Theory 267) The process of narrating is a process of embedding insofar as narration tends to foreground the representational significance of context—which is to say relational significance as opposed to “punctiliar facts or discrete meanings” (Theology and Social Theory 267). Taylor’s and Milbank’s secularization narratives suggest that focusing on the structures and functions of narrative can help articulate alternatives to the disembodying (disembedding) imperative to self-abstraction that is so intractably rooted in modernity.11 Yet, as Milbank points out, narrative “remains an inherently questionable activity” (Theology and Social Theory 267). If Taylor defines belief in highly contextual and praxis-oriented terms that are best suited to being articulated in narrative form, then his insistence that beliefs are eminently contestable in the present “secular age” is an acknowledgment that narratives (or at least certain kinds of narratives) are eminently contestable. It is precisely the relational—which is to say contingent—­ characteristics of narrative that render it liable to charges of partiality and provincialism. So too with Taylor’s own secularization narrative. Jon Butler, for example, criticizes Taylor for offering too much of a “top-down” intellectual history that does not accurately reflect social history (197, 195).

Introduction  7 Taylor regularly invokes the notion of a “social imaginary,” but Butler asserts that A Secular Age rarely offers much evidence about “the way ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings” (Butler 201). ­Taylor contends that the social imaginary underwent a historical transition from a “porous” sense of subjectivity (the self as embedded in and subject to natural and supernatural influences) to a “buffered self” (a  modern Cartesian sense of existing at a critical remove from one’s environment), but Butler sees insufficient evidence for such a widespread and dramatic change (201). In general, Butler finds Taylor’s secularization narrative unconvincing to the extent that it relies on neat periodization. Butler points out, for example, that heresies proliferated in the Middle Ages and that many adults in parts of Europe did not participate regularly in church services (204–06). He concludes that “indifference, born of many different causes, may be more important to difficulties faced by religion in many ages… than unbelief” (209). The differences between “premodern” and “modern” may not be quite as dramatic or profound as some claim. Regardless of whether one agrees with Butler that Taylor’s secularization narrative—although more complex than the more widespread and oversimplified secularization narrative—is itself an oversimplification, the narrative contest staged by these scholars gestures toward what is at stake in contemporary American literature. Certain landmarks in that landscape offer complex representations of spirituality and religion that disrupt common assumptions about secularization. Exploring the implications of such gestures, as this book undertakes to do, is far from attempting to resurrect the claim, commonly associated with Mathew Arnold and Walter Pater, that imaginative literature can function as a surrogate for religion.12 Instead, this kind of exploration resonates more with Hungerford’s contention that in post-World War II American culture, both religion and literature changed, at least by certain lights, from what they had traditionally been. The literary came to reflect and, for some, even take on religious forms and functions but only insofar as both the literary and the religious were understood in new ways—or at least newly traditional ones. Hungerford chronicles the rising prevalence of religious belief without doctrine or any other specific, definable content—indeed, without even the desire for such content. While she notes that she means to describe a variety of related phenomena, not all of which fit that description precisely, she makes the case that these phenomena generally may be described as varieties of postmodern belief that amount first and foremost to a belief in belief itself, which is to say a faith that prizes the forms of faith over and above any specific propositional content. Hungerford finds this postmodern sense of belief variously represented in literary form by authors such as Allen Ginsburg, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo. John McClure similarly defines novels by many of the same authors as

8  Introduction postsecular, by which he means to denote stories whose “ontological signature is a religiously inflected disruption of secular constructions of the real” and whose “ideological signature is the rearticulation of a dramatically ‘weakened’ religiosity with secular, progressive values and projects” (3). Provincializing the Bible argues for a slightly revised definition of postsecular (elaborated later in this Introduction) in part by identifying in Faulkner’s most influential novels a precursor for the phenomena that Hungerford and McClure analyze. Recognizing this precursor expands on and complicates Hungerford’s and McClure’s arguments, both by temporally extending the post-World War II framing of the literary histories they offer and by illuminating the ways in which Faulkner’s literary legacy embraces literary representations not only of the formal qualities of religious belief but also of the content of some of those beliefs. Most pointedly, such content typically takes the form of specific ethical commitments that ironically coexist in Faulkner’s fictions alongside insistent deferrals and destabilizations of modern Western notions of propositional religious belief. In this, he differs from most other modernist “novelists and their characters,” who, as Lynne W. Hinojosa ­attests, generally “question and doubt the truth of the biblical narrative and its view of history, as well as the idea of a universal moral order” (192). In consonance with Faulkner’s major novels, postsecular American literature finds itself not stymied by a sense of intractable mystery but rather inspired by such mystery, locating resources within epistemic uncertainty that help it articulate rather than undermine strong commitments to social justice.13 The apparent irony in this tension between epistemic uncertainty and ethical commitment appears less pronounced if one adopts a less modern understanding of religious belief. While “religious belief” is often assumed to refer to belief in propositional statements of religious doctrine, in fact, many forms of ancient Christianity would not fit well with such a definition, as Taylor argues (indeed, many, if not most, religious or spiritual traditions would not fit that definition well). Take, for example, the classical lex orandi, lex credendi formulation of Christian faith by which the content of faith derives from the practice of prayer: liturgy precedes and grounds theology rather than the other way around. Indeed, historically, liturgical practices did precede creedal statements of belief. Yet beginning in the thirteenth century, as Milbank explains, theologians “from Scotus through to Ockham and then to Suárez… increasingly tended to reduce revelation to the divine disclosure of isolated facts and logically linked propositions which could be distilled from the narrative and typological flow of Scripture” (Postsecular Order 36). By contrast, earlier forms of Christianity associated with Thomas Aquinas and especially with Augustine tended “to think of the disclosive role of the symbol as irreducible, and of revelation as given in signs whose

Introduction  9 horizontal semiosis (linked always to inter-bodily communication) cannot be elided from their vertical import” (36). Milbank charts the development from Scotus onward of what would become modern forms of Christianity that conceive of propositional statements of belief as divorced from narrative as if such statements preceded biblical narratives and were ungrounded in an older Christian sensibility that assumed what Milbank describes as a participatory ontology. This sensibility did not measure itself against the modern Cartesian obsession with foundationalist construals of epistemology but rather assumed that “we ‘see in part’, and cannot ever travel to the back of the ‘dark glass’ in order to compare image with original, or the precise way in which our minds are able obscurely ‘to envisage’ the divine” (36). Milbank is far from alone in this assessment. Other scholars may craft different historical narratives, but many point out various ways in which postmodern commitments to anti-foundationalism may be considered complementary rather than antagonistic to traditional orthodox understandings of Christian faith.14 These include theologians associated with reformed epistemology (such as William P. Alston, Nicholas W ­ olterstorff, and Alvin Plantinga) as well as those associated with radical orthodoxy (such as Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, in addition to Milbank himself).15 As Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart argues, Christian theology has no stake in the myth of disinterested rationality… precisely insofar as the temper of ‘postmodernism’ runs against confidence in universal truths of reason, postmodern theory confirms theology in its original condition: that of a story, thoroughly dependent upon a sequence of historical events to which the only access is the report and practice of believers, a story whose truthfulness may be urged—even enacted—but never proved simply by the processes of scrupulous dialectic. (3–4)

The Bible and Secularization Focusing on the Bible more than on abstract generalizations such as religion, spirituality, or even Christianity, can help foreground historically evolving forms of tension between, on the one hand, institutionalized efforts to prescribe what McClure describes as the “well-ordered systems of belief” (4) constructed by theologians and, on the other, the great variety of beliefs evident within the sweep of Christian history. This history of competing interpretations of the Bible promulgated by different Christian communities—interpretive differences strong enough to have led repeatedly to large-scale schisms—by itself ought to undermine the simplistic notion that traditional Christian faith can be defined primarily by propositional statements of settled doctrine. Indeed, what

10  Introduction many consider “traditional” Christianity is actually descriptive of certain modern forms of Christianity, which may be loosely described as forms of fundamentalism that have been shaped by modern Western preoccupations with epistemological foundationalism. By Milbank’s account, the same theological trends that contributed to the development of scientific methodology also resulted in increasingly “scientific” readings of the Bible, meaning literal rather than allegorical or figurative readings (Theology and Social Theory 20–24).16 Scholars such as Karen Armstrong and Dale Martin corroborate this narrative: Christian ­fundamentalism is not “traditional” in the sense of being premodern but is, on the contrary, a distinctly modern phenomenon, a response to modern worldviews that rejects certain aspects of such worldviews but only on the basis of characteristically modern assumptions.17 This history is elided by academic framings of the Bible “as” literature: such framings typically imply a secular interpretation of its “literary qualities” as if those qualities (narrative and poetic formal structures, diction, figurative language, symbolism, and allusive practices) did not lie at the heart of a long history of spiritual readings of scripture.18 In fact, traditional Jewish and Christian ways of interpreting the Bible embrace literary modes of reading—or more precisely, they embrace ways of reading that have come to be seen as literary but predate the use of that term. Figurative readings of the Bible that would now be considered literary were considered spiritual readings: in the famous words of Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians, “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). Literal readings were often deemed less spiritual, quite the opposite of some modern Christian views. The ancient fourfold interpretation of scripture (which dates as far back as the fifth century CE) approached the literal meaning of a biblical text as the first step in a complex process that embraced typological, tropological, and anagogical readings. Moreover, biblical texts themselves regularly invite or even demand literary interpretations. Many such texts implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) interpret earlier biblical texts in figurative or analogical ways. So Elijah divides the waters of the Jordan like Moses, who parted the waters of the Red Sea, and like God, who parted the waters in creation (2 Kings 2:8, Exodus 14:21, and Genesis 1:6). New Testament writings often embrace this feature of Hebrew scripture, casting Jesus, for example, as a new Moses (e.g., Matthew 2) and a new Adam (e.g., 1 Corinthians 15:45) in ways that have contributed to a long history of typological interpretation. Similarly, figurative language pervades the Bible: descriptions such as “stony heart” (Ezekiel 36:26), “adulterous generation” (Matthew 12:39), and “living waters” (Jeremiah 17:13, John 4:10, and Revelation 7:17) require figurative interpretation, and biblical texts repeatedly describe God in metaphorical terms as a shepherd, ­husband, king, lion, and father. (The similes used in each chapter title of

Introduction  11 Provincializing the Bible are intended to help reinforce the centrality of tropes to biblical signification.) Curiously enough, the past hundred years have witnessed the development of a more modern sense in which the Bible seems literary—a sense in which it resonates with important strains of modernist and postmodern literatures. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Anglophone readers became more familiar with the Higher Criticism, the Bible increasingly came to be viewed by such readers as a mosaic of textual fragments edited together by successive communities that reappropriated earlier texts to suit their own aims. Viewed in this light, the Bible may be considered a paradigmatic text for post-­structuralists. Not only are its component parts highly intertextual, but also its vast ­influence on Western cultural history means it has a uniquely extensive intertextual relationship with that history. It is an epicenter of intertextuality. For this reason, while allusion may serve well for describing certain intertextual relationships, the term resonance can be more useful for describing the relationship between the Bible and twentieth- or ­t wenty-first-century literatures. Gregory Machacek forwards a ­capacious definition of allusion that includes not only the “exact duplication” of part of an earlier text by a later one but also “a more general resemblance” (528). Given the Bible’s uniquely extensive intertextual relationship with Western literature, however, resonance, a term even more capacious than Machacek’s definition of allusion, more fully articulates important aspects of that relationship. An acoustic metaphor, resonance literally denotes the way in which a sound produced by one object elicits sympathetic vibrations in a second object such that it, in turn, produces a complementary sound. The two ­together create tones more prolonged and harmonically complex than ­either one produced alone. The second object may not be designed to resonate with the first, but it must be designed in such a way that it can resonate with the first—not just any object will resonate. ­Indeed, the ­particular form of the second object will determine the kinds of r­ esonance  it can ­produce. It may be that a reader hears a biblical resonance where an ­author did not, but such cases can still be worth considering because of the Bible’s extraordinarily pervasive cultural influence: its sounds are everywhere. An author may have unwittingly or ­subconsciously incorporated biblical imagery, themes, or language into a ­literary work. Even if the author did not intentionally or subconsciously create such resonance, the reception history of a literary work may have been influenced by its readers’ perception of biblical resonance. As Machacek points out, “­allusion is culturally mediated” (534). So too with resonance: whether one hears it will depend upon one’s familiarity with the Bible. Allusion can suggest an overly simplistic, unidirectional model of intertextual influence, which can, in turn, reinforce the reductive claim that the Bible is the great source text of Anglophone literatures—what

12  Introduction Northrop Frye termed “the Great Code.” Such a conception of the Bible’s influence elides the extent to which the Bible’s literary legacy has been shaped by its larger reception history, which includes not only artistic but also political and social history. After all, the Bible’s immense influence on Anglophone literatures owes not only to its own intrinsic merits but also to the immense power once wielded by the British Empire. Furthermore, the Bible is not always the original or most important intertext. It is worth remembering that the Bible itself incorporates earlier influences. In addition, readers interpret it in ways that often reflect later influences: sometimes, what seems to have originated with the Bible might actually have originated with, say, Milton’s seventeenth-century depiction of Satan in Paradise Lost or John Darby’s nineteenth-century notion of “the rapture.” Finally, certain stories and themes in the Bible share so much in common with other cultural traditions and texts that in some cases, the Bible is more accurately understood as one voice among many in a larger conversation, so to speak—not the source of that conversation. Indeed, the Bible has been reflected and refracted in so many ways and through so many different literary topoi that “the Bible,” when viewed through the lens of Anglophone literary history, arguably names not one intertextual tradition but a mode of intertextuality that entails countless modulations. Robert Alter rightly contends that the complex resonance chamber of biblical intertextuality in certain modernist literary texts creates a sense of “transhistorical textual community” and that such communities are most productively understood not as drawing on the Bible as a source or code but rather as invoking it in conversations in which temporal antecedence does not necessarily confer priority (Canon and Creativity 3). Going further, Provincializing the Bible argues that the Bible’s contemporary literary resonance is most generative in the ways it has been claimed by literary representations of marginalized subjectivities; these representations do not necessarily reveal the “influence” (construed passively) of the Bible—or of Faulkner’s novels, for that ­matter—but instead actively re-signify such texts as icons of European and American literature and culture, icons whose resignification is all the more disruptive and powerful precisely because of their canonicity. In making its case, the present study sets itself in conversation with a wide variety of recent scholarship, not only by Hungerford and McClure but also by scholars such as Katherine Clay Bassard, Theresa Delgadillo, Christopher ­Douglas, and Thomas F. Haddox—and, more broadly, by scholars such as Hinojosa and Manav Ratti.19 Bassard charts African American women writers’ varied engagements with the Bible, illuminating common biblical tropes by which women re-signified stereotypical devaluations of black female identity. 20 ­Delgadillo shows how contemporary Chicana writers embrace alternative visions of spirituality as they call for social justice. 21 Douglas traces

Introduction  13 the repercussions of the rise of the Christian Right for American litera­ hristianity ture.22 Haddox demonstrates that the orthodox dogmas of C exhibit a productive vitality in the work of certain influential and critically acclaimed post-World War II authors. 23 Hinojosa challenges common assumptions about the relationship between secularization and modernist British novels, arguing that such novels were deeply influenced by Puritanism. 24 Ratti champions “Anglophone novels that reflect the multireligious nature of India and Sri Lanka, including animism, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism.”25 In various ways, these scholars show how traditional religious themes and forms inform twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. 26 Some—such as Bassard, Douglas, Haddox, and Hinojosa—emphasize the continued relevance of orthodox religious teachings to literary studies, especially when those teachings are wrestled with or questioned. Others—such as Delgadillo, Hungerford, McClure, and Ratti—valorize contemporary literary representations of hybrid religious and spiritual traditions that resonate with postmodern engagements with contingency, ideology, and marginalization. Provincializing the Bible illuminates continuities between these two sets of critical approaches, continuities perhaps most concisely articulated through the following definition of the term postsecular as a fruitful yet vexed sign of disruption. In The Postsecular Imagination, Ratti offers a formulation by which postsecular describes “a nonsecular secularism, a nonreligious religion” (xxi). This can seem paradoxical if one adheres to modern Western definitions of religion and secularism—definitions from which, as Pecora, Taylor, and others argue, contemporary cultural criticism cannot fully escape. 27 Yet one can recognize alternative possibilities that potentially engender a productive discomfort with these definitions. It is precisely such alternative possibilities that the literary texts analyzed in Provincializing the Bible imagine. These texts may be considered postsecular in the sense that they pose a set of interrelated literary challenges to the presumptions of secularism. Such a definition of postsecular derives not from a totalizing attempt to construct a sweeping historical narrative but rather from a more local—or provincial—attention to similar representational practices evident in a variety of contemporary works of imaginative literature. This understanding of postsecular is treated more extensively in this book’s conclusion because the strain of literary history traced in the intervening chapters helps clarify the utility of the term. For now, however, consider how this understanding accords with Lori Branch’s definition of postsecular as an admittedly “imperfect term” that should not be seen as heralding a “new master narrative, whether of the supersession of the secular by the postsecular or a triumphal return of the religious repressed” (94). 28 Instead, drawing on Jean-François Lyotard’s definition of postmodern as signifying “not the end of but a new type of thinking

14  Introduction in relation to modernism,” Branch promotes an understanding of postsecular studies as “passing through and moving beyond an unreflective or ‘presumptive’ secularism,” thereby fostering new understandings of religion and secularism as they have been mutually constituted and as they reconfigure themselves in culture. It also opens up new understandings of the cultural forms that mediate the secularism that emerges and the religiousness that remains in modernity. (94) By engaging certain landmarks of contemporary “postmodern” literature in conversation with Faulkner’s most influential “modernist” novels, Provincializing the Bible embraces the challenge implicit in Branch’s definition of postsecular to attend to historical contexts and changes while avoiding reductive periodization narratives. Indeed, this study contributes to scholarship that challenges the idea of secularism as a monolithic and naturalized given. 29 By recognizing the historicity and variability of forms of secularism, secularism itself becomes more available as a figure of critical analysis rather than as the assumed ground against which all other figures must be viewed.

What Lies Ahead: Conversations with Ghosts The first chapter shows how Faulkner’s novels resonate formally as well as thematically with the Bible, using Absalom, Absalom! as a paradigmatic example. Its diction and rhythms subtly reinforce more overt biblical allusions such that its narrative voices themselves seem haunted by the Bible—to use a Gothic metaphor Faulkner chose repeatedly in his fiction. The metaphor helps articulate an implicit reversal of the expected order of things: the Bible appears uncannily dead and not dead at the same time, at once premodern and modern. Absalom thereby suggests a provincialized sense of the Bible in the sense of being not a timeless universal but rather an archaic product of its own era—the voice of an “old violent vindictive mysticism” (Absalom 64). Yet the novel also suggests that the Bible continues to haunt the present as a ghost whose relevance is murky but inescapable. This ghostly presence contributes to Faulkner’s broader representation of a present thoroughly relativized— itself provincialized—by a sense of historical predecessors and antecedents that are no longer accessible but nevertheless continue to exercise authority over the present. Absalom exemplifies how, in many of his major novels, Faulkner invokes a Bible that is at once smaller yet also larger than Christianity— and not because of the obvious fact that it comprises texts sacred to Judaism and Islam as well as Christianity. He used the word “provincial”

Introduction  15 to describe his own Christian “background” or context, even while he also described the biblical story of Jesus in mythic and arguably universalizing terms as an allegory that can reveal how to “discover” oneself.30 Provincializing the Bible shows how Faulkner’s novels convey a similarly complex sense of the Bible as mythic in the sense of articulating profound truths through often figurative narratives while also being mythical in the common derogatory sense—“Jesus walking on Galilee” being as improbable as “[George] Washington not telling lies” (The Sound and the Fury 51). While Faulkner’s artistic relationship to the Bible probably changed in some respects over the course of his writing career, and while his novels and short stories evince differences in the extent to which each one resonates with the Bible, the present study does not aim to chart those changes as a story in its own right. This is because, first, the larger argument focuses not on his development as an author but rather on the literary legacy of the ways in which his most influential works invoke the Bible. Second, in tracing specific examples of biblical resonance in those works as this book does, one finds a remarkable consistency in Faulkner’s inconsistencies: there is a consistent ambiguity and downright ambivalence in his invocations of the Bible, even while such invocations are sufficiently frequent as to create a Bible-haunted effect. That effect comes and goes in his work, but throughout his career, it always returned—often quite insistently—from The Sound and the Fury in 1929 to A Fable in 1954. Unlike most other explorations of Faulkner and religion, this study does not attempt to determine whether his novels imply one or another Christian worldview or whether they tacitly undermine such worldviews with a modernist skepticism. The focal shift away from modern doctrinal debates to his textual practices—the ways in which his narratives resonate formally with the Bible, which, in turn, informs his thematic representations of folk religions—derives in part from the lessons taught by phenomenological approaches to the study of religion and literature (and to religious studies more broadly). 31 This is not to claim that doctrines are unimportant or are trumped by lived religious experience but rather to claim, with Taylor, that to define religious belief around propositional doctrines is to be committed already to a questionable form of Protestant-derived secularism. Focusing on Faulkner’s complex invocations of the Bible helps illuminate how his novels invite questions of religious belief and experience (the two need not be conceived as mutually exclusive) at the same time that they provocatively leave such questions unresolved. Not despite but through this tension in his Bible-haunted narrative voice, one can hear a call to social justice, albeit a mysterious and even murky call. It is this call with which certain landmark works of postsecular literature resonate. In order to begin delineating the literary legacy of this Faulknerian resonance, the second chapter isolates and amplifies certain unfamiliar

16  Introduction frequencies in an otherwise familiar critical conversation regarding the relationship between Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Faulkner. In so doing, this chapter builds on the foundation laid in the first, elaborating on his uses of the Bible by showing how Beloved helps illuminate that aspect of Absalom and Light in August. Morrison implicitly reads Faulkner for the ways in which his novels are haunted by the sins of history. Her historical fiction creates a sense of postsecular temporality that provocatively materializes the haunting metaphor to which he was often drawn. Beloved represents the sins of history as a ghost that manages to be no less mysterious when embodied, which exemplifies one of the ways in which contemporary authors often depart from Faulknerian invocations of the Bible: many tacitly position themselves in the tradition of magical realism by associating such invocations with the incontrovertibly supernatural. While Faulkner’s stories generally offer more suggestively than definitively supernatural events or figures, his Bible-haunted voice elevates descriptions of the mundane to mythic significance. Beloved suggests that such elevations potentially reimagine the literary as biblical in ways that valorize marginalized subjectivities. Chapter 3 engages with less likely interlocutors—Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God—arguing that these novels’ biblical resonances, and their similarities to such resonances in Faulkner’s work (particularly The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying), are all the more telling for being easy to miss. Ceremony and So Far from God foreground intertextuality by creating collage-like effects that help define their respective representations of marginalized subjectivities. Embracing intertextuality in these novels thereby comes to serve as a strategy for articulating a sense of embodiment in the face of modern imperatives to self-abstraction—imperatives depicted as ­lying at the duplicitous heart of Western imperialist progress narratives. Whereas Beloved draws on the Bible to reimagine the literary in opposition to ­ ehumanizing utilitarian calculations of right and wrong in the face of d oppression, Ceremony and So Far from God counter such oppressions by invoking an even more thoroughly provincialized Bible precisely in order to suggest that it is more relevant when it is understood to be intertextually contingent. In figurative terms, its strength lies (pun intended) in its weakness, in keeping with these novels’ valorizations of contingently embodied storytelling. The fourth chapter shifts emphasis from the storytellers who remain center stage for Silko and Castillo to the readers provocatively represented in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt. This twenty-first-­century novel draws its inspiration from modernist literature of the 1920s and ­ ucharistically queer 1930s but also from the Bible, figuring reading as a E ­engagement with an other. Comparing The Book of Salt with Go Down, Moses and A Fable helps clarify how Truong invokes traditional orthodox interpretations of the Bible to help represent an anti-­assimilationist

Introduction  17 ­ otion of community. The novel’s postsecular r­ eimagining of the alterity n of ­abjected others implicitly undermines reductive historical periodization as a key aspect of its transnational rereading of literary modernism.32 An exploration of biblical resonance in postsecular American literature might have chosen to address the work of highly influential figures such as DeLillo and McCarthy, authors who allude to the Bible and its reception history in complex ways that have been insightfully addressed by McClure, Hungerford, and others. 33 Instead, the present study focuses on novels that have had a similarly wide range of influence but that also interrogate the definitional boundaries of American literature, challenging readers to reconceptualize what “American literature” might mean—not only through their innovative representations of marginalized subject positions but also through their invocations of the Bible. It may well be more than merely coincidental that these works, which include some of the most insightful contemporary literary explorations of marginalization and intersectionality, were all authored by women of color. Yet the novels explored in this study were chosen above all for the illuminating ways in which they simultaneously critique and recuperate mainstream traditions of biblical reception history, resonating with biblical literary traditions, particularly in their representations of ethical challenges and commitments.34 McCarthy may serve as a salient counterexample: his fiction can seem to situate itself in a Faulknerian literary lineage, but his uses of the Bible resonate more with Ernest Hemingway’s in The Sun Also Rises (discussed in Chapter 1) than with Faulkner’s in that they function more as a sign of absence than as a prophetic specter. Provincializing the Bible shows how postsecular reading strategies can disrupt previous characterizations of postsecular literature as embracing primarily the forms of religious belief rather than substantive content 35 or as breaking from religious tradition through a definitively postmodern emphasis on contingency and uncertainty. 36 Such characterizations potentially reinforce oversimplified secularization narratives. Moreover, they do not adequately account for the ways in which representations of traditional religious beliefs often help ground articulations of strong commitments to social justice in contemporary literature. Indeed, Provincializing the Bible concludes by contending that the term postsecular has far from exhausted its productive potential in academic discourse, despite the term’s evident shortcomings. As explained in the conclusion, those shortcomings illuminate more than they obscure. The worlds Faulkner created in his most influential novels remain intensely relevant in the twenty-first century in part because those storyworlds offer provocative representations of religiously infused power differentials among groups and individuals, differentials like those that so extensively inform and challenge contemporary culture and politics. Put simply, religious commitments constitute one of the most powerful set of forces shaping the global present and future. Given the increasingly

18  Introduction pluralistic cast of American letters as well as declining biblical literacy in American culture, it is telling that some of the most highly regarded contemporary authors have not simply rejected the Bible as a reactionary and oppressive relic. Instead, they invoke the Bible as a Faulknerian palimpsest of provincialized interpretations and traditions—a palimpsest that remains, despite expectations to the contrary, hauntingly alive. 37 *** Provincializing the Bible grew out of the work of many years and draws on ideas developed in some of my earlier publications, parts of which are reprinted in revised form with permission in this book. Parts of Chapters 1 and 2 first appeared as “The King James Bible as Ghost in Absalom, Absalom! and Beloved” in The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences, ed. Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones, pages 269–93 (copyright © 2010 Cambridge University Press). Part of Chapter 1 first appeared as “Faulkner and the Bible: A Haunted Voice” in Critical Insights: William Faulkner, ed. Kathryn Stelmach Artuso, pages 202–21 (copyright © 2013 Salem Press). An earlier version of Chapter 4 first appeared as “Eucharistically Queer? The Postsecular as Transnational Reading Strategy in The Book of Salt” in Studies in American Fiction, Volume 41, Issue 1, Spring 2014, pages 103–29 (copyright © 2014 The Johns Hopkins University Press). This project also benefitted greatly from ideas I originally developed in writing The Bible and Literature: The Basics (copyright © 2016 Routledge). I am deeply indebted to the many people who offered helpful feedback on parts or all of this project, whether in its final form or in earlier versions: Erin Arata, Kathryn Stelmach Artuso, Duncan Faherty, Hannibal Hamlin, Heidi Jones, Debra Moddelmog, Jim Phelan, Joe Ponce, Sara Jane Stoner, Eric Sundquist, Jay Watson, and anonymous peer reviewers. I am also grateful to those who helped guide, inspire, or provide resources for the project, especially Ann Abadie, Jennifer Abbott, Theresa Delgadillo, Jared Gardner, Steve Gavazzi, William Griffith, Joe McQueen, Jim Phelan (who deserves to be named twice in these acknowledgements), Christina Torbert, Robyn Warhol, and Charles Reagan Wilson. Heidi and Riley Jones merit special mention and my profound gratitude for going above and beyond the call in supporting what often seemed to be my patently insupportable workload while I wrote this book. To them and to all of the friends, family, and colleagues who provided encouragement, thank you.

Notes 1 Justin Neuman argues that some of the most trenchant and far-reaching critiques of secularist ideologies, as well as the most exciting and rigorous inquiries into the legacies

Introduction  19 of the religious imagination, take place where we might least expect them: in the pages of contemporary novels composed by a transnational group of writers commonly identified as non- or even antireligious such as J. M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie (xi). 2 See Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, and Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. For a critique of the relationship between postcolonial and postsecular studies, see Bruce Robbins’s “Is the ­Postcolonial Also Postsecular?” 3 Robbins proposes “shunning the secular/religious binary altogether,” which resonates with much of the imaginative literature explored in the present study (262). Here, as throughout this book, the terms spiritual and religious are used according to their common dictionary definitions, the occasional vagueness and variability of which can help work against overly limiting assumptions about what spirituality or religion can or should be. 4 See Amy Hungerford’s Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960 and John McClure’s Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison. 5 See Hungerford xiv, 1–3. 6 For a useful account of popular religion during this period and beyond, see Matthew S. Hedstrom’s The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century. 7 Stephen D. Moore provides an overview of postcolonial approaches to the Bible. 8 William Faulkner, “Interview with Jean Stein Vanden Heuvel” (first published in the Spring 1956 edition of The Paris Review; reprinted in James B. Meriwether and Michael Milgate’s Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926–1962, 255). 9 For two especially generative reflections on these issues, see Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body and Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics. 10 Melinda Cooper offers a useful critique of what she terms Milbank’s “totalizing” political vision (23). 11 Ray Horton similarly forwards Paul Ricoeur’s argument that literature privileges “narrative and mythopoeic modes of knowledge and interpretation over instrumental and analytical epistemologies” (121). For a detailed account of how various fields of study contribute to understanding narrative as a basic function of the human mind, see David Herman’s Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind. His work suggests why narrative has become a vital topic of study not just for narrative theorists but also for theologians, psychologists, and neuroscientists. 12 See U. C. Knoepflmacher’s Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel. For a more recent study, see J. Russell Perkin’s Theology and the Victorian Novel. 13 For an insightful argument about the relationship between ethics and epistemic uncertainty, see Simon Critchley’s The Ethics of Deconstruction. The present study does not mean to stake a claim in the long-standing debate concerning the intrinsic relationship between ethics and literature, which may be traced from the scholarship of recent decades by Wayne Booth, Adam Zachary Newton, Martha Nussbaum, and James Phelan back to Aristotle and Plato. Instead, this study contents itself with the more modest observation that some of the most influential literary works of the past

20  Introduction

14

15

16

17 18 19

20

21 22 23 24 25

hundred years engage deeply with historically marginalized subjectivities and in doing so implicitly or explicitly engage with urgent issues of social justice. Provincializing the Bible focuses on how such works invoke the Bible in their representations of these issues. James K. A. Smith reflects on points of convergence between twentieth-­ century pragmatism and classical Christian understandings of the radical contingency of created beings in Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? and Who’s Afraid of Relativism? See also Thomas A. Carlson’s Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God. See Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God and John Milbank and Simon Oliver’s A Radical Orthodoxy Reader. Catherine Pickstock summarizes, “radical orthodoxy rediscovers certain premodern themes as once again viable, by showing how they were not so trammeled by a dogmatic ‘metaphysics’ as both modernists and postmodernists have tended to assume” (xii–xiii). As Milbank describes it, the crucial shift from Aquinas to Scotus and beyond entailed a shift from analogical to univocal predication in statements about God: for Scotus, the word exists in the statement “God exists” carries the same fundamental meaning as in the statement “this tree exists.” By contrast, Aquinas held that literal statements about God could be true only by analogical predication; God exists in a different way than created things exist, but because created things participate in God’s existence, their respective existences are analogically related (Theology and Social Theory 307). See also Taylor’s A Secular Age, 774. See Armstrong’s The Bible: A Biography and Martin’s Biblical Truths: The Meaning of Scripture in the Twenty-first Century. See also Harriet Harris’s “Fundamentalist Readings of the Bible.” David Norton’s A History of the English Bible as Literature chronicles changing opinions of English readers regarding the literary qualities of the Bible. These scholarly conversations have also been informed by a wealth of recent work on religious influences in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literatures. Some highlights include Gregory S. Jackson’s The Word and Its Witness: The Spiritualization of American Realism, Stephen Prickett’s Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible, and Norman Vance’s Bible and Novel: Narrative Authority and the Death of God. Katherine C. Bassard, Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible. See also Allen Dwight Callahan, The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible, and Eric J. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America. Theresa Delgadillo, Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion, Gender, Race and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative. Christopher Douglas, If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right. Thomas F. Haddox, Hard Sayings: The Rhetoric of Christian Orthodoxy in Late Modern Fiction. Lynne W. Hinojosa, Puritanism and Modernist Novels: From Moral Character to the Ethical Self. See also Pericles Lewis’s Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. Manav Ratti, The Postsecular Imagination: Postcolonialism, Religion, and Literature. Peter Coviello and Jared Hickman propose that we replace “secularity with globality as the background condition of modern life” that “fragilized belief in an unprecedented way” by, in effect, provincializing any given belief relative to the great variety of beliefs evident around the globe (649).

Introduction  21 26 Additional explorations of religion and spirituality in contemporary ­A merican fiction include Davíd Carrasco and Roberto Lint Sagarena, “The Religious Vision of Gloria Anzaldúa: Borderlands / La Frontera as a Shamanic Space”; Karsten Fitz, “Native and Christian: Religion and Spirituality as Transcultural Negotiation in American Indian Novels of the 1990s”; Julian Levinson, Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture; Ellen McCracken, “Voice and Vision in Chicana Religious Practice: The Literary Re-elaborations of Mary Helen Ponce, Denise Chávez, and Sandra Cisneros”; L. Lamar Nisly, Impossible to Say: Representing ­Religious Mystery in Fiction by Malamud, Percy, Ozick, and O’Connor; Shirley Stave, ed., Toni Morrison and the Bible: Contested Intertextualities; John Whalen-Bridge and Gary Storhoff, eds., The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature. 27 See, for example, Nikita Dhawan’s “The Empire Prays Back: Religion, Secularity, and Queer Critique,” which draws on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s insistence that one cannot simply discard the Enlightenment (Dhawan 218). 28 Jonathan Ebel and Justine S. Murison’s 2014 special issue of American Literary History articulates such criticisms of postsecular as a term, especially Traci Fessenden’s “The Problem of the Postsecular.” Everett Hammer offers a useful consideration of such criticisms in “Determined Agency: A Postsecular Proposal for Religion and Literature—and Science.” Aamir R. Mufti describes a special issue of boundary 2 as critiquing “the postsecular as an emergent orthodoxy” (3), but literary works that might justly be termed postsecular belie the fearful imputations of intellectual rigidity and intolerance Mufti seems to imply with his loaded use of “orthodoxy.” 29 Coviello and Hickman similarly contend, “The postsecular need not be taken as periodizing or prophesying eras of secularity or unsecularity … Instead, postsecular refers to an epistemological and methodological reorientation from which history might look different” (646). See also Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, Secularisms; and Craig Calhoun, Mark ­Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, Rethinking Secularism. 30 Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, Faulkner in the University, 203. 31 See, for example, Horton’s “‘Rituals of the ordinary’: Mari­lynne Robinson’s Aesthetics of Belief and Finitude,” Matthew L. Potts’s “‘There is no god and we are his prophets’: Cormac McCarthy and Christian Faith,” and Kevin Hart’s “Phenomenology” in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion. Donald E. Pease offers a useful reading of Amy Hungerford’s Postmodern Belief in terms of the religious studies debate “in which doctrines of belief are opposed to lived religious experiences” (“The Laicization of American Literary Studies” 178). 32 David James analyzes recent challenges to reductively narrow conceptualizations of modernism as a historical period in “Modern / Altermodern.” 33 Regarding McCarthy’s work, see Hungerford (86–96, 105–06), Sara L. Spurgeon (37–38), and Potts. Regarding DeLillo’s, see McClure (63–99) and Hungerford (52–75). 34 In 1997, Ann-Janine Morey lamented “the marginalization of women’s fiction from the study of religion and literature” (247). Provincializing the Bible builds on the work of the many scholars who have changed this aspect of the field. In her 2012 study, Channette Romero contends, “To position their own writing as enacting a form of activism, contemporary writing by women of color often alludes or directly refers to historic interracial rebellions inspired by the religions and spiritualities of people of color” (173). 35 Hungerford identifies a “flight from” particularity evident in certain later twentieth-century literary engagements with religious thought—contra Clifford Geertz’s and George Santayana’s insistence on the necessity of

22  Introduction particularity—which productively describes works by Pynchon, D ­ eLillo, and others (107–08). Yet this sense of a literary flight from religious ­particularity misses something vital in authors such as Morrison, Silko, ­Castillo, and Truong. It is precisely their embrace of certain forms of religious ­particularity that is at issue in illuminating the various ways in which the ­Bible gets represented as “provincialized” in this strain of twentieth- and ­t wenty-first-century American literature. 6 McClure’s work exemplifies such readings. 3 37 Roger Lundin writes in his introduction to Invisible Conversations that a “polyphonic play” of sacred and secular melodies and harmonies “has long marked the religious and cultural life of the United States,” such that U.S. literature often reflects the “presence of the Invisible” as well as “the shadows cast by its absence” (15).

1 The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels

William Faulkner’s work resonates with the Bible in a variety of complex ways that are captured most evocatively in a Gothic metaphor he invoked repeatedly: the Bible haunts his fiction, both formally and thematically. Nowhere is this more clearly evident than in Absalom, Absalom! Once one’s ears become attuned to the Bible-haunted frequencies in Absalom’s narrative voices, one can also hear those frequencies in The Sound and the Fury as well as in several of Faulkner’s other major novels. Many of Faulkner’s stories have been described as examples of “­Southern Gothic,” a subgenre that takes elements of Southern culture and history as key ingredients in a disturbing mixture of decayed settings, twisted psychology, and grotesque affronts to an everyday sense of order and morality. “A Rose for Emily,” for example, shocks the reader with the revelation that an eccentric lady who represents a bygone era with its genteel values actually engages in a horrific parody of social traditions, sharing a bed each night with the corpse of the man she murdered. Absalom might be described as a ghost story: it centers on a midnight expedition to discover what—or who—haunts a now-decrepit and abandoned mansion that once presided over an antebellum plantation. Absalom helps illustrate why an understanding of Faulkner’s uses of Gothic conventions can help one better understand even those of his stories that are less obviously Gothic. In Absalom, one finds that a key to his representations of Southern culture in the early twentieth century is the metaphorical sense of being haunted by the past: he describes “the deep South” as “dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts,” in which young, twentieth-century Southerners have no choice but to listen to “ghosts,” their elders, who obsessively tell stories “about old ghost-times” (4). The “ghost” metaphor articulates a sense of belatedness, of living after the fall, so to speak—the defeat of the South in the Civil War. At the beginning of Absalom, Faulkner describes the voice of one of these elders, Miss Rosa Coldfield, as being haunted by this history: “The ghost mused with shadowy docility as if it were the voice which he haunted where a more fortunate one would have had a house” (4). The novel raises the possibility that the particular ghost referred to

24  The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels here, Thomas Sutpen, the antebellum patriarch who originally built the haunted house at the center of the novel, may indeed haunt his now-­ decrepit mansion. Yet the image of a ghost haunting not a house but the actual voice of a living person potentially reveals something crucial about Faulkner’s own authorial voice—not only in Absalom but in many of his other stories as well. Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, James Phelan defines voice as “the fusion of style, tone, and values”: “to listen to narrative is, in part, to listen to values associated with a given way of talking,” which is to say that voice helps convey ideology (Narrative as Rhetoric 45, 43). Faulkner’s narrative voices are often metaphorically haunted, not only by Southern history but also by the Bible—both stylistically and ideologically. This ghostly intertext creates not a sense of disjunction from the premodern past but a sense of urgent connection between past and present, speaking to the present with uncanny ethical relevance.

Haunting in Absalom In typical ghost stories, the first convincing sign that an actual ghost might be present creates a transformation: it takes an otherwise familiar world and makes it unnervingly and catalytically strange.1 Sigmund Freud described this sense of familiarity-turned-strange as the ­uncanny—the unheimlich that confronts us with something disturbingly unfamiliar hidden in what seems familiar. 2 Thus, the ghost of Jacob Marley appears and unsettles Ebenezer Scrooge, thereby preparing him to revise what he thinks he knows about his world and what he values most: before he takes a fantastical journey through Christmases past, present, and future, he must first come to terms with the very existence of the ghost, which does not accord with his beliefs about the world. 3 Likewise, the ghost of Hamlet’s father sets the play in motion, not by revealing a “murther most foul” but, as the opening scene emphasizes, by first challenging Horatio’s general system of beliefs with his mere presence: in Hamlet’s words, the existence of a ghost suggests that “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (1.5.27, 1.1.23–33; 1.5.166–67). Arguably, the most successful ghost stories don’t merely depict a character’s experience of the uncanny; they actually create such an experience for many of their readers or audience members. Absalom tells this kind of profoundly uncanny ghost story. At the center of the novel’s strange-making representational strategies is the Authorized or King James version of the Bible (KJV)—so much so that, as elaborated later in this chapter, the KJV itself haunts this novel as much as any other ghost. Yet the KJV does not merely haunt the novel. More than that, it defines what it means to be haunted. Specifically, the KJV helps define the implicit sense conveyed by Faulkner that the present

The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels  25 is inescapably haunted by the past, which is to say that the word history names a ghost, as it were—a ghost that constantly threatens to render the present unsettlingly and perhaps catalytically strange to itself.4 Originally published in 1936, Absalom uses several characteristically modernist representational strategies: it disorients the reader, fragmenting its story by narrating it out of chronological order and by telling and retelling parts of the story retrospectively in the voices of different characters whose versions sometimes conflict with one another. The reader thus learns obliquely and recursively about the story of Sutpen, a legendary plantation owner in antebellum Mississippi who amasses a fortune from nothing—creating his hundred-square-mile plantation as if by divine fiat: “the Be Sutpen’s Hundred like the oldentime Be Light” (4). Sutpen is motivated primarily by his racist horror at having realized when still young and extremely poor that he and his family, though white, were even lower in the social hierarchy than house slaves. Despite his rags-to-riches success, his fortune and his plantation eventually fall into ruin in the aftermath of the Civil War. The war comes to symbolize Sutpen’s own house divided against itself as his son, Henry, rejects his father and repudiates his inheritance—­ resonating not only with the New Testament parable of the “house divided” (Mark 3:25) famously used by Abraham Lincoln to describe the Civil War but also with the Old Testament conflict between David and Absalom alluded to in the novel’s title (2 Samuel 13–18). 5 Henry, the only male heir, then cements his apostasy by murdering Charles Bon—Henry’s half-brother as well as his sister Judith’s fiancé—which resonates with the Absalom-Amnon-Tamar story told in 2 Samuel 13.6 Judith’s engagement to Bon threatens not only the incest taboo but also that against miscegenation because Bon’s mother, Sutpen’s first wife, is partly of African descent (which is why Sutpen, upon discovering this fact, repudiated that first marriage). Henry afterward flees in shame, never to be seen again by his father. The novel opens in 1909, with the inheritors of this history telling and retelling it to one another. The narrative foregrounds the subjective nature of each ghost’s perspective by using a style influenced by stream-of-consciousness writing, which emphasizes the shadowy, self-­ occluding, and sometimes self-contradictory complexity of each character’s psyche. The novel’s closing lines, for example, convey a breathless sense of self-conflicted desperation in part by eschewing conventional punctuation: Quentin Compson, a young Southerner in his first year at Harvard, protests too much in response to his Canadian roommate Shreve McCannon’s accusation that he hates the South: “I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!” (303). The novel’s opening similarly abuses the conventions of grammar to help depict the dark recesses of the elderly Rosa’s psyche, doing so in

26  The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels such a way as to leave the obscurity of those recesses still intact. ­Faulkner suggests but does not fully expose some of the reasons why Rosa, who is soon to take Quentin on a midnight adventure to the haunted Sutpen mansion, is figuratively haunted by Sutpen’s story (she played a minor role in it when she was young)—so much so that in telling the story to Quentin, her voice itself seems literally haunted by Sutpen: Her voice would not cease, it would just vanish. There would be the dim coffin-smelling gloom sweet and oversweet with the twice-bloomed wisteria against the outer wall by the savage quiet ­September sun impacted and distilled and hyperdistilled, into which came now and then the loud cloudy flutter of the sparrows like a flat limber stick whipped by an idle boy, and the rank smell of female old flesh long embattled in virginity while the wan haggard face watched him above the faint triangle of lace at wrists and throat from the too tall chair in which she resembled a crucified child; and the voice not ceasing but vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand, and the ghost mused with shadowy docility as if it were the voice which he haunted where a more fortunate one would have had a house. (4) While evoking images associated with a hot Mississippi afternoon, the lines also hint at the uncompromising idealism of a martyrdom at once horrific (resembling a crucified child) and somewhat childish: Rosa casts Sutpen as a “demon” not least for the sin of proposing marriage to her in a way that deeply affronted her honor (4, 223–24). Absalom is not alone among modernist texts in its propensity for Gothic figures that transgress the boundaries between the living and the dead.7 Vampires as well as reanimated corpses inhabit T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.8 Similarly, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock opens with the image of an unconscious “patient etherized upon a table,” ready to be cut open (2–3). Yet in these poems, which were published prior to Eliot’s 1927 conversion to Anglicanism, there is a crucial difference between Faulkner’s and Eliot’s respective uses of such symbols. In The Waste Land and Prufrock, the horror of the living dead represents a sense of disconnection from history. In The Waste Land, only broken “fragments” of history remain (431). Prufrock finds himself hopelessly unable to identify with heroic characters of Western cultural history such as John the Baptist and Hamlet—he is no Lazarus returned to life “from the dead” (94).9 In Absalom, by contrast, the horror symbolized by ghosts represents an uncanny sense of connection with history in “the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts”: not only is Rosa haunted by a ghost, but she herself is figured as a kind of

The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels  27 ghost, as is Quentin, “who was still too young to deserve to be a ghost but nevertheless [had] to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in the deep South the same as [Rosa] was” (4). If anything, these characters feel too much of a connection with history and their forebears. While The Waste Land uses the symbolism of the living dead primarily to reinforce the profound sense of fragmentation conveyed by the poem’s formal strategies of disorientation, Absalom uses such modernist disorientation strategies to help represent a sense of the present as haunted by history—by an uncanny sense of the past as being at once faraway and so close, strange and familiar, in unnerving and ethically challenging ways. This complex temporality resonates with traditional Christian notions of multiple overlapping biblical temporalities, which include not only the linear beginning, middle, and end of eschatology but also the eternally present-tense “I am” of Exodus 3:14 and John 8:58 as well as the near-circular sense in which the gospel stories have been interpreted as the type and cipher for all other stories, biblical and otherwise. The Waste Land’s Gothic symbolism has prompted some critics to describe its dense collage of fragmentary allusions as creating a sense of death-in-life: Maud Ellmann avers that “the speaker is possessed by the writings of the dead”; he “rehearses his own death as he conjures up the writings of the dead, sacrificing voice and personality to their ventriloquy” such that the poem ultimately “stages the ritual of its own destruction” (267, 275).10 Yet it represents an evacuation of the self far beyond the poetics of impersonality that Eliot valorized: as Robert Langbaum argues, not only the speaker but also “the characters… are nameless, faceless, isolated… all they have is a sense of loss” (231). The Waste Land focuses on the disjunction between past and present, on modernity’s loss of any sense of continuity with tradition. The figures of the undead symbolize this loss as being so devastating as to create a sense of being undead, a loss more self-destructive than that symbolized by ghostly haunting. Put simply, Eliot’s poem is no ghost story; his fragmentary allusions to the Bible function not as ghosts but as zombies.11 By contrast, while critics debate the extent to which Faulkner’s work thematizes a similar sense of disjunction between past and present (for example, in The Sound and the Fury12), Absalom emphasizes a strong degree of temporal continuity from its title onward—a sense of historical repetition whereby past and present are intimately interconnected. The undead in The Waste Land and Prufrock symbolize an inability to act,13 whereas in Absalom, ghosts symbolize a call to action, even if that action might ultimately end in tragedy. Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father and the ghost of Marley in A Christmas Carol, Faulkner’s ghosts reveal previously occluded histories, thereby bringing past and present closer together, as it were. Quentin sees himself as a ghost not because he feels cut off from the present but because he identifies with figures from the past. Indeed, he identifies strongly with the entire Sutpen history,

28  The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels especially with Henry but also with the legendary Sutpen himself. Quentin imagines that Sutpen too felt the same powerful sense of being haunted by history. In retelling the story of Sutpen’s boyhood realization of his low social status, Quentin describes him as having … discovered, not what he wanted to do but what he just had to do, had to do it whether he wanted to or not, because if he did not do it he knew that he could never live with himself for the rest of his life, never live with what all the men and women that had died to make him had left inside of him for him to pass on, with all the dead ones waiting and watching to see if he was going to do it right, fix things right so that he would be able to look in the face not only the old dead ones but all the living ones that would come after him when he would be one of the dead. (178) Absalom as a whole tells the story of Quentin’s own realization of how he feels similarly haunted by history, called to account by the Sutpen story and especially by the ghost (who turns out to be a living person) he and Rosa discover in Sutpen’s “haunted house” late one night in 1909: the aged Henry, Sutpen’s son, returned from his self-imposed exile of more than forty years (174).14 The novel centers on this discovery of Henry, teasing the reader toward it as a climactic revelation. The first five chapters describe how Rosa summons Quentin to accompany her on a nighttime adventure to the haunted mansion, ominously insisting, “There’s something in that house… Something living in it. Hidden in it” (140). Yet before this “something” is revealed, the narrative jumps four months ahead to a latenight conversation between Quentin and Shreve in their Harvard dorm room. The second half of the novel describes how they take turns telling each other the Sutpen family history. Only in the closing pages does the reader finally learn that Rosa and Quentin discovered Henry in the haunted house—and that when Rosa returned three months later with an ambulance “to save him,” Henry and his half-sister Clytie (­Sutpen’s daughter by an enslaved woman) set fire to the house and burned themselves to death (298–301). Absalom begins by raising vague questions about ghosts and demons whose answers seem connected to whatever is haunting the old Sutpen mansion. The narrative suggests various possibilities as to who (living or dead) might be the source of the haunting—Sutpen; Clytie; or Jim Bond, Sutpen’s illegitimate great-grandson who (like Clytie) is partly of ­A frican descent. Yet the ghost turns out to be Henry, the figure in the Sutpen history with whom Quentin most closely identifies (236, 280). It is as though Quentin meets himself in history by meeting this figure from the past still alive in the present. The encounter is all the more

The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels  29 uncanny because Henry is not a literal ghost but an actual person: the past lives on in the present, despite what the novel also insists is the otherness of history. In the words of Quentin’s father, We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw. (80) Quentin’s encounter with Henry teaches him that the past can be intimately familiar as well as incomprehensibly strange—indeed, can be both at once. Thus, Quentin feels permanently haunted by the encounter, despite the fact that Henry is not literally a ghost: “Nevermore of peace. Nevermore of peace. Nevermore. Nevermore. Nevermore” (298–99). M.  Night Shyamalan’s 1999 film The Sixth Sense chronicles ­psychologist Dr. Malcom Crowe’s discovery that he, himself, is no longer alive but is one of the ghosts haunting nine-year-old Cole Sear, whom Dr.  Crowe initially takes to be a young patient suffering from hallucinations of being haunted. In Absalom, Quentin makes a similar discovery about himself, though on a symbolic rather than literal level. The shocking, otherworldly history of how Henry came to murder the man he loved in the name of misguided racial and sexual taboos—in effect, destroying himself for the sake of these taboos just as his father did before him15 —is what haunts Quentin, what he “could not pass,” because in that story, he increasingly recognizes himself (139). Henry’s story serves as a call to action and an omen of his own fate.16 It is no coincidence that Faulkner chose to allude to the Bible in the title of this novel that explores and develops the image of being haunted as a metaphor for the relationship between past and present in the early twentieth-century South. The biblical intertext emphasizes the ways in which Faulkner’s meditation on Southern history does not confine its significance to the South alone but also lays claim to a much broader sense of “History” writ large, so to speak. Invocations of the Bible constitute one of the rhetorical strategies by which the local aspires to ­larger-scale, potentially global resonance in Faulkner’s work—although, as elaborated later, his novels also frequently insist on the Bible as a local, even provincial, text. In Absalom, he derives a fictional tale from what he famously referred to as his “own little postage stamp of native soil,” and he turns it into a grand epic of mythic proportions by casting his antebellum plantation patriarch, Sutpen, as a latter-day King David whose hard-won ascendancy comes to symbolize the story of an entire people—the South—much as David in some measure represents Israel. David’s fall from being the greatest king of Israel to having his

30  The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels rule challenged and nearly toppled by his own son, Absalom, becomes the collapse of Sutpen’s would-be dynasty as his son similarly rejects and repudiates his father. Absalom casts slavery and racism as America’s original sin—an association expressed as early as 1820 by James Madison in a letter to the Marquis de Lafayette.17 As Jim Wallis puts it, the U.S. “was established as a white society, founded upon the genocide of another race and then the enslavement of yet another,” and this “original sin has affected most everything about our nation’s life ever since” (308). To suggest that U.S. history is haunted by the sins of its founders—using haunt as a metaphor—accords with biblical depictions of the relationship between history and ethics. The Decalogue, after all, begins by attesting to the importance of remembering the past. God is defined, in part, as a God of history: “I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt” (Exodus 20:2). The Israelites are to rest on the Sabbath to commemorate God’s historical act of creating the world (Exodus 20:8–11). Moreover, the Decalogue insists that past ethical failings—even from the distant past—have an impact on the present: God is described as “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation” (Exodus 20:5).

A Modern Bible Those familiar with the Bible might find it odd that Faulkner would choose the KJV as a primary intertext for his ghost story: unless the definition of a ghost story gets stretched far beyond its customary bounds, the Bible is anything but. The KJV uses the word ghost in two senses: in the Old Testament, it refers to a person’s life breath or spirit and is used only in the expression “to give up the ghost,” meaning to die (e.g., ­G enesis 25:8); in the New Testament, it is used either in this sense or to refer to the Holy Ghost (e.g., John 14:26). Neither sense of the word denotes the spirit of a dead person returned to haunt the living. Similarly, the word haunt appears three times in the KJV and is used only to denote a place frequented by living people (as in 1 Samuel 23:22). One story recounted in the Bible that might arguably resemble a modern ghost story is that of Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee. When his disciples see him coming toward them on the water, they cry out for fear that he might be a “spirit” (Matthew 14:26). More recent translations, such as the New Revised Standard Version, use the word “ghost.” Another such tale involves Saul and the witch of Endor (the 1960s television series Bewitched alludes to this story in the name of Samantha’s mother, Endora). The witch has “a familiar spirit” and raises the spirit of ­Samuel from the dead (1 Samuel 28:7–25). This story has inspired artwork by William Blake and others, but it is not characteristic of the Bible. Witches, wizards, and familiar spirits appear elsewhere in the Bible,18

The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels  31 as do stories of demonic possession (by “devils” or “unclean spirits,” as in Mark 5:2–20). Yet these are not stories about ghosts in the sense of spirits of the dead who haunt the living. Even the story of Saul and the witch of Endor describes less a haunting than a kind of séance. Absalom implicitly suggests that the Bible is a fitting intertext for its ghost story not because of Saul and the witch of Endor, and not simply because the Bible can be said to depict the past as ethically haunting the present (in a metaphorical sense), but also because the Bible—­specifically the KJV translation—has itself, as a text, become a kind of ghost for some modern readers. While ancient Christian traditions generally understood the Bible to be a vehicle through which the Holy Ghost inspired the communities who read it together (typically aloud), by the twentieth century, an increasing number of people understood the Bible to be less a text of the living than of the dead—of lowercase ghosts (rather than the Holy Ghost) who haunt the present only metaphorically as denizens of an archaic world almost unrecognizable to the technologically unprecedented modern era. The voices of such ghosts could therefore seem particularly well suited to the archaic language of the KJV. There were several reasons why a growing subset of early t­ wentiethcentury readers might experience the Bible as a kind of ghostly book. Not only did new historical studies of this book undermine a sense of its unity, but also scientific advances conflicted with the biblical picture of the natural world. Technological advances, moreover, made the modern world seem far removed from biblical times, whose sense of temporal distance was only exacerbated by the linguistic changes that rendered the language of the KJV increasingly arcane. In addition, the relative paucity of representations of interiority in the Bible can make it seem to present only two-dimensional and therefore distant, inaccessible characters in the eyes of modern readers accustomed to detailed literary representations of psychological depth and complexity. To elaborate, first, as the Higher Criticism rose to prominence among English Bible readers in the nineteenth century, it increasingly created a sense of disjunction between the biblical past and the modern present. Developed primarily in Germany, the Higher Criticism implicitly undermined the authority of the Bible as a sacred text by analyzing it according to the same standards that would be applied to any other historical document. It especially aimed to distinguish what was historically verifiable in the Bible from what might be merely mythological. In light of this approach, many biblical narratives appeared historically questionable or even doubtful, which undermined an older, more traditional sense that these narratives offered reliable historical accounts. The Bible could instead be seen as a mosaic of often disparate ancient texts that had been edited together in complex and subjective ways. For many modern readers, the Bible stories thus seemed to be at once there and not there in the sense that the Higher Criticism implied that the true history behind

32  The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels these stories was available only indirectly in the Bible itself, hinted at but also obscured by layers of retelling and editing. Interestingly, Faulkner’s own personal Bible (inscribed by his mother, Maud Falkner, on October 1, 1904 when he was six years old) includes extensive notes and appendices informed by the Higher Criticism.19 The appendices include, for example, Julius Wellhausen’s documentary hypothesis, which holds that the Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses were not written by Moses but are an edited compilation of various narratives that were originally independent of one another. While there is no firm evidence available to establish whether he studied this material or what he thought of it, it was a substantial part of his Sunday-school Bible, which remained with him throughout his life. 20 The literal authority of the Bible was widely seen (by both its supporters and detractors) as being undermined not only by the Higher Criticism but also by modern scientific developments, as emblematized by the 1925 Scopes Monkey trial. Many still felt that the Bible spoke in clear and authoritative tones; others felt it did not. Yet accounts of the trial often pay little attention to those who found themselves in the middle ground between these two positions—those who were unsure whether the Bible were literally true (say, in its account of a six-day creation) but who, at the same time, were not ready to consign it to the trash bin or even to a thoroughly disenchanted status like that commonly accorded to ancient Greek myths. Faulkner’s stories invoke the Bible in ways that speak especially to such readers—perhaps even more so in the twenty-first century, when biblical literacy has decreased so dramatically that many people have only a vague sense of its contents but nevertheless often grant it an equally vague sense of respect. The Bible possesses some kind of authority for such people, but that authority is anything but clear. In addition to the scientific advances of Faulkner’s day, it is important to note that technological advances were rapidly changing the look and feel of daily life to such an extent that the world described in the Bible came to seem radically different from that of modern times. It was not merely a case of increasing urbanization. As many of Faulkner’s stories document, rural areas too were slowly but irrevocably being transformed by new technologies—“patented electric gadgets for cooking and freezing and cleaning” (Intruder in the Dust 118). Only a century earlier, there had been far fewer technological differences between the world inhabited by most Bible readers and the world depicted in the Bible. As the twentieth century wore on, the world depicted in the Bible came to seem remote and archaic in unprecedented ways. As if metaphorically representing the scholarly, scientific, and technological lights by which the Bible could appear archaic, the very ­language—the sound—of the KJV was becoming increasingly archaic too. The second epigraph that Ernest Hemingway chose for his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises attests to this change by implicitly contrasting

The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels  33 his spare, modern style (exemplified in his novel’s title) with the KJV rendering of Ecclesiastes 1:5: “The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose” (7). In effect, the titular allusion suggests the disjunction between the modern world and that depicted in the Bible as much as any continuities between the two. One could argue that The Sun Also Rises thematically emphasizes such continuities inasmuch as its protagonist, Jake, evinces a world-weary cynicism that resonates with Ecclesiastes (and more broadly with the vanitas tradition). Yet the novel seems rather to allude to the sentiments expressed in the opening of Ecclesiastes in order to suggest a negation of the vast majority of biblical themes. 21 Finally, when judged according to the standards of modern fiction, the Bible offers only tantalizingly brief descriptions of individual thoughts and feelings, which can create, for some readers, the impression of partial erasures and hidden voices within biblical texts. 22 What does ­Bathsheba think and feel about King David, for example, in the story told in 2 S­ amuel 11? On this question, the text is silent. Readers schooled by Freud as well as countless novels to assume that childhood and adolescence hold the keys to understanding adult psyches may feel stymied by the omission that seems to occur between the second and third chapters of Matthew. Apart from a brief tale of the twelve-year-old Jesus’s precocious spiritual wisdom told in Luke (2:41–52), the Gospel narratives leap from infancy to adulthood. While The Sun Also Rises, like The Waste Land, may be said to exemplify those who find the Bible to be, for the most part, a dead text in the modern world, Absalom, by contrast, exemplifies those for whom “the very ‘non-modern’ strangeness of the Bible”—all of the outmoded and archaic characteristics described earlier—serves as “an indication of its inexhaustible resources and even a model of art’s own creative capacities,” as Ward Blanton argues (604). Absalom thus invokes the strangeness of the Bible commingled with its familiarity in such a way as to produce a haunting sense of the uncanny. 23 Even in The Sun Also Rises, the world-weary words of Ecclesiastes speak with a vague yet still vaguely powerful sense of oracular authority. Virginia Woolf has similarly been described as creating ghostly allusions to the Bible. 24 Thomas Hardy opined in 1918 that English Bible translations by “Coverdale, Tyndale, and the rest of them are as ghosts what they never were in the flesh”: he explains, “They translated into the language of their age; then the years began to corrupt that language… until the moderns who use the corrupted tongue marvel at the poetry of the old words” (qtd. by David Norton 407). For these authors, despite their markedly different writing styles and estimations of the Bible, the sound of the KJV seems suggestive of an ancient, even otherworldly, voice from the past. This is not to say that Absalom articulates the dominant modern understanding of the Bible. On the one hand, many Christians still

34  The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels experience the Bible as a living text that speaks directly to the present. On the other hand, many non-Christians view it not as a ghostly text but as a dead one. Again, the Bible does not haunt Eliot’s The Waste Land but rather functions as one of many zombie-like reanimated corpses wandering aimlessly through a desolate landscape in which no truly living people remain to be haunted. As David Fuller argues, the Bible in The Waste Land “is just one element in the ‘heap of broken images’”; if the poem offers any sense of religious consolation, it comes not from the Bible but from the Upanishads (669–70). For other modern readers, the Bible is not simply a living text and not simply a dead one either. For many such readers, the sense of distance between biblical past and modern present was exacerbated by the scholarly method known as the Higher Criticism as well as its descendants in modern biblical scholarship: the Bible can be seen as a mosaic of ancient texts that have been edited in complex and highly subjective ways such that the sense of “the immediate presence of ‘history’” offered by biblical narratives has become “deferred and mediated” (Blanton 607–8). Absalom reflects those modern understandings of the Bible that read or hear it as a collection of voices that speak to the present in important ways but are sufficiently attenuated, mediated, and disrupted by historical distance that they sound ghostly. The novel attests that for a significant subset of modern readers, the KJV has become quite a fitting intertext for ghost stories, despite the Bible’s scarcity of conventionally recognizable ghosts. Faulkner’s complex invocations of the Bible can be productively understood as evincing much the same relationship with his writing as that between the early twentieth-century South and its antebellum past such that his narrative voice itself may be heard, in a sense, as a voice haunted by the Bible. This might seem a strange claim to make, primarily because his writing style is so different from that of the KJV, which is the version he knew best. While the KJV favors concrete diction and grammatically simple and direct sentences, Faulkner’s style in Absalom and elsewhere favors abstraction, circumlocution, and hypercomplex grammatical structures. Likewise, neither his elaborate Latinate diction nor his complex narrative structures are characteristic of the KJV. Faulkner’s stories do not imitate these aspects of the Bible; his uses of it are subtler and more interesting than mere imitation would allow. Instead, many of his works create the sense of a ghostly resonance with the KJV—not an obvious repetition but the evocation of multiple yet vague resemblances. Direct allusions to the Bible pervade Faulkner’s stories: Jessie ­McGuire Coffee documents almost 400 such direct allusions in the novels alone (129–30). Thus, for readers who possess even a basic knowledge of the  Bible, the spectral biblical intertext haunting Faulkner’s narrative voice gets raised perhaps first and most conspicuously by these direct allusions. For readers more familiar with the diction and cadences of the

The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels  35 KJV, it can be heard as a ghostly presence in his narrative voice itself— a set of frequencies at once present yet absent in the sense of being repeatedly suggested but not clearly or fully possessing its own authoritative voice in the text.

The Sound of the Bible Ironically, what scholars typically describe as the simple, direct, and concrete diction and syntax of the KJV is often not so simple and clear to nonacademic modern readers but rather remote and archaic-sounding. Even in 1611, the language of the KJV was not that of ordinary speech but already had a slightly strange archaic feel: it was not precisely an older form of English but its own unique amalgam that included genuine archaisms alongside strange new Hebraized English. Examples of once-­ unfamiliar Hebrew idioms made familiar by the KJV include “by the skin of my teeth” (Job 19:20), “stand in awe” (Psalm 4:4), “put words in his mouth” (Exodus 4:15), “rise and shine” (Isaiah 60:1), and “a fly in the ointment” (Ecclesiastes 10:1). Older forms of English now enshrined as “church English” were already falling out of use in 1611, such as “thee,” “thou,” and the “-eth” suffix (as, for example, in Luke 22:21: “Behold, the hand of him that betrayeth me is with me on the table”). By the twentieth century, some of the once-unfamiliar Hebraisms in the Bible had become second nature to most English speakers.25 Similarly, thanks to the Bible, thee and thou now sound formal to most modern ears because they tend to be associated with formal prayer and worship, but they were originally used informally to address well-known friends and family members. By contrast, you was more appropriate for formal situations. Despite the translators’ goal of being faithful to the original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic source texts, the KJV has a fairly uniform sound that distorts some of those texts. Stephen Prickett calls it “the King James Steamroller”: it flattens out the stylistic differences among its various sources and thereby creates a false sense that the Bible speaks in just one uniform voice. While this steamroller effect arguably detracts from the translation’s accuracy, it has also been a strength, contributing to what many consider the beauty of the KJV’s consistently stately rhythm. It was designed to possess this kind of sound: the six companies of scholars tested their translations by reading them aloud, most likely because they expected that the final result would be read aloud regularly in churches. Their success can be seen in how the KJV created a sense that church English should have a slowly measured rhythm. The following grammatical features of ancient Hebrew influenced imaginative literature as well as English language usage more broadly. Some of these features now sound biblical (depending on a given reader’s level of familiarity with the Bible). Some simply sound archaic and formal (especially if a given reader is unfamiliar with the Bible).

36  The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels The KJV forms possessives by using a “noun + of + noun” construction (e.g., “the face of God”) because ancient Hebrew does not form possessives by using an apostrophe as English typically does (e.g., “God’s face”). While there was nothing particularly formal about possessives in ancient Hebrew, English speakers now tend to think of this biblical construction of possessives as more formal than the typical English construction. The KJV also tends to use “noun + of + noun” constructions instead of “adjective + noun” ones: “men of strength” instead of “strong men” (Isaiah 5:22), “altar of stone” instead of “stone altar” (Exodus 20:25), or “man of God” (which appears dozens of times, as in ­Deuteronomy 33:1) instead of “godly man” (which appears only once in Psalm 12:1). Some argue that “noun + adjective” constructions in English derive from this biblical influence (e.g., “gardens bright” in the opening stanza of S. T. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan). In addition, instead of using typical English superlative constructions (e.g., “the greatest king”), the KJV again follows the ancient Hebrew by using a “noun + of + noun” construction such as “the king of kings” (Ezra 7:12) or “the song of songs” (Song of Solomon 1:1). Instead of the typical English subject-verb-object construction, the KJV often reproduces a Hebraism by which the object of the verb comes before the subject, as David Norton attests: “as for his judgments, they have not known them” (Psalm 147:20) rather than “they have not known his judgments.” This helps create a sense of relatively short, periodic rhythms—a sound further reinforced by the fact that ancient ­Hebrew did not use as many subordinating conjunctions as English to mark one clause as independent and the other as dependent, such as although, nevertheless, therefore, until, whether, and while. Such hypotactic grammatical constructions are typical of English, whereas ancient Hebrew favored paratactic constructions, especially using the Hebrew connective transliterated waw as a coordinating conjunction like the English and, which the KJV translators reproduced to an extent that sounds quite unusual in English. Witness the opening lines of the KJV: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light”: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. (Genesis 1:1–5, emphasis added) One might sum up most of these features with the simple observation that biblical Hebrew had fewer options at its disposal—­considerably fewer words than Elizabethan English possessed. This created yet another distinctive feature: writers had to repeat vocabulary and grammatical

The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels  37 structures with slight variations for different purposes, which seems to have inspired its own kind of artistry. A single word or phrase used in a biblical text can resonate with other uses of the same or similar words and phrases elsewhere in the text; each use recalls the earlier ones, creating layered meanings by inviting associations between the various instances of the particular word or phrase. Hebrew scripture creates intentionally cumulative reiterations on this small-scale level of individual words and phrases—a sense of intratextuality that resonates with the Bible’s large-scale intertextuality. When one listens for these self-­ resonating sounds in the Bible, one begins to hear how both the larger stories and individual passages hum with a kind of theme-and-variations intensity that can rise to symphonic levels of complexity. Consider Psalm 69, which uses the image of flooding to articulate a sense of near-hopeless distress: Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me. I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I wait for my God. (Psalm 69:1–3) As David Norton explains, these concrete images (waters and floods instead of words such as misery or despair) exemplify how ancient Hebrew vocabulary favors concrete terms over abstract ones but uses concrete images to express abstract ideas (420–28). Norton points out (drawing on the work of earlier scholars such as Ernest Renan) that the Hebrew verb meaning to be jealous derives from the verb to glow; the noun truth comes from the verb to prop, to build, to make firm; and the same word used for self also means bone (421). Thus concrete words such as bone or build often develop rich, multilayered significance as they are repeated with different meanings in the same text. Robert Alter describes them as biblical keywords—dust, earth, land, clay, blood, flesh, seed, fruit, lamb, gate, and house (Pen of Iron 86). In Psalm 69, the waters invoke not only an abstract emotion but also the creation of the earth when God separated the waters, the story of Noah and the flood, and the Exodus story about the parting of the Red Sea. Those are only the most obvious resonances. Then the Psalm itself associates these waters with tears, ironically contrasting the destructive floodwaters with the suggestion of thirst and dehydration (“my throat is dried”). This contrast foreshadows the change in tone (common to many Psalms) from desperate pleading to confident assurance that “God will save Zion” (verse 35) as the speaker’s potential drowning and failing eyes (verse 3) become imaginatively transferred to his enemies: “Let their eyes be darkened,” and let God “pour out thine indignation upon them” (verses 23 and 24). These sentiments help create the chiastic structure

38  The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels of the Psalm whereby one or more statements are reversed in a self-­ mirroring series—e.g., statement A, statement B, and then reverse B and reverse A. This crossover effect implies the existence of meaningful associations not only between A / reverse A and B / reverse B but also between A / B, A / reverse B, and B / reverse A. The Psalm thus creates a web of self-­reflective repetitions. Psalm 69 also illustrates the frequent use of hyperbole and parallelism in the Bible. Take just two of the opening lines quoted earlier, which include hyperbolic constructions (“no standing” and “overflow me”): the speaker would presumably already be drowned and unable to speak if these extremes were taken literally. They are also an example of what eighteenth-century scholar Robert Lowth first identified as parallelism in Hebrew poetry, a deliberate pattern (as rhythm and rhyme are often used in Anglophone poetry) whereby each verse consists of two or more statements that work together in one of three ways. 26 They can be synonymous (the second restates the first) as in the second verse of Psalm 149: “Let Israel rejoice in him that made him: let the children of Zion be joyful in their King.” They can be synthetic (the second builds on the first): “Let them praise his name in the dance: let them sing praises unto him with the timbrel and harp” (Psalm 149:3). Or they can be antithetical (the second contrasts with the first): “let the wickedness of the wicked come to an end, but establish the just” (Psalm 7:9). The beginning of Psalm 69 uses synthetic parallelism: “I sink in deep mire,” and “I am come into deep waters.” The combined water and earth imagery implicitly reverses the creation account found in Genesis, suggesting that the mire or muddy ground symbolizes the threat that the speaker will be unmade. Creation required separating the water from the ground: by God’s power, the waters were “gathered together unto one place” in order to make “dry land” (Genesis 1:9). Later, God created Adam from the dry “dust of the ground” (Genesis 2:7). Thus, the hyperbole in Psalm 69 is even more grandly exaggerated than it might at first appear to be. By echoing key imagery from Genesis, the opening of the Psalm grounds the speaker’s lament in a sense of dependence on God: God made him, and God can unmake him. This sense of dependence foreshadows the later reversal of mood to one of hope and trust that God will not unmake the speaker but will save him. In other words, the parallelism suggests that these hyperbolic laments serve not to erase subtlety but rather to create it, dramatizing the later change in mood and suggesting that the speaker trusts God, even in despair. (A more famous example of this characteristic reversal is Psalm 22, which begins, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Jesus speaks these words on the cross in Mark 15:34, quoting a Psalm that ends reassuringly: “All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the Lord: and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee.”) Even when not using the formal parallelism found in Hebrew poetry, biblical narratives often achieve a similar effect through a less structured

The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels  39 use of cumulative enumerations. Consider, for example, the story of David and Absalom, specifically the passages from 2 Samuel in which David learns of the death of his son Absalom. First, the story is told sparsely, using few brush strokes, as it were, to paint emotions: And the king said unto Cushi, ‘Is the young man Absalom safe?’ And Cushi answered, ‘The enemies of my lord the king, and all that rise against thee to do thee hurt, be as that young man is.’ And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept. (2 Samuel 18:32–33) The event is told in just a few lines; Cushi’s answer is not explicit or direct, and David offers him no reply. The sense is conveyed, but we are invited to read between the lines for more details. As the story unfolds further, it focuses on a psychological drama that develops from ironic, unexpected reversals: the king mourns for the traitor; victory becomes defeat; and the servant, Joab, corrects the master, David. In David’s famous lament, the curious irony is that Absalom sought to overthrow his father and might well have killed him if David and his army had not fought back, but David’s words belie his earlier actions: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom: would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son” (2 Samuel 18:33). This irony is not lost on the people, who are cast as one character: Victory that day was turned into mourning unto all the people: for the people heard say that day how the king was grieved for his son. And the people gat them by stealth that day into the city, as people being ashamed steal away when they flee in battle. (2 Samuel 19:2–3) Note how the simile (fleeing in battle) drives home the ironic reversal: they were victorious in battle but now retreat as if in defeat. Joab admonishes his king in a stately rhythm that implies a prophetic27 warning: Thou has shamed this day the faces of all thy servants, which this day have saved thy life, and the lives of thy sons and of thy daughters, and the lives of thy wives, and the lives of thy concubines, in that thou lovest thy enemies, and hatest thy friends…. For this day I perceive, that if Absalom had lived, and all we had died this day, then it had pleased thee well. (2 Samuel 19:5–6) The sentences are composed of rather brief phrases (the many commas visibly mark this pacing), and the cumulative enumeration (“lives of thy sons… daughters… wives… concubines”) and chiastic pairings of ironic

40  The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels reversals (“lovest they enemies, and hatest thy friends”) serve to keep the rhythm slow and measured. Joab’s prophetic undertones rise to the surface as he seems to bear witness against David on behalf of God himself: “I swear by the Lord, if thou go not forth… that will be worse unto thee than all the evil that befell thee from thy youth until now” (2 Samuel 7). Finally, and most obviously, the vocabulary in the above passages is often archaic—thee, thy, doth, hatest, and gat.

Faulkner’s Biblical Resonances Now consider the similarities between the stylistic and structural features of the KJV and those of the following passage from Absalom. First, while Faulkner’s writing style might seem anything but sparse, he often creates such densely multifaceted psychological complexity that the effect is a kind of packed economy that forces the reader to read between the lines: It seems that this demon—his name was Sutpen—(Colonel S­ utpen)— Colonel Sutpen. Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon the land… and built a plantation—(Tore violently a plantation, Miss Rosa Coldfield says)—tore violently. And married her sister Ellen and begot a son and a daughter which—(Without gentleness begot, Miss Rosa Coldfield says)—without gentleness. Which should have been the jewels of his pride and the shield and comfort of his old age, only—(Only they destroyed him or something or he destroyed them or something. And died)—and died. Without regret, Miss Rosa Coldfield says—(Save by her) Yes, save by her. (And by Quentin Compson). (5) Here, the narrative foregrounds Rosa and Quentin’s different investments in the Sutpen story such that the passage becomes a multilayered representation not only of Sutpen but also of Rosa and Quentin (he seems to be speaking with her and being corrected by her as he speaks—a polyphonic representation of multiple intermingled voices that is not characteristic of the Bible). Note too that in addition to creating a legendary or mythic sense of history (Sutpen is a “demon” who “tore” a plantation from the land as if it were built in a single blow), the passage emphasizes ironic psychological reversals: Sutpen’s pride, his jewel, ended up destroying him or being destroyed by him, as may be said of the relationship between David and Absalom; despite his disappointments, however, Sutpen died “without regret.” More obviously, the passage resonates with the KJV in its use of the archaic begot. Alter argues that Faulkner regularly uses this and other thematic keywords from the KJV (86). Even the use of shield and comfort resonates with the

The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels  41 KJV’s frequent use of these words, as in Genesis 15:1 (“I am thy shield”) and Psalm 119:50 (“my comfort in my affliction”). Finally, the rhythm of this passage is built on the same kind of short phrases and cumulative enumeration characteristic of the KJV whereby, as Maxine Rose explains, “each phrase or clause explains or increases or enlarges upon the meaning of the previous one(s)” (139). Not unlike the paratactic opening of Genesis in the KJV (quoted earlier), Sutpen in Absalom “came out of nowhere… and built a plantation… And married… and begot a son and a daughter… and died” (5, emphasis added). Charles A. Huttar characterizes similar uses of and (focusing on poems and sentences that begin with and) as creating a sense that a literary text or passage is part of something much larger, a segment of something potentially as large as the “continuous cycle” of time itself (150). Rose argues that Faulkner’s sentences often create cumulative patterns that resonate with the parallelism of the Psalms (140–43). Consider the following passage from Absalom, in which the past is described as being hidden from the present, inaccessible yet still present in an insistent and mysterious way: It’s just incredible. It just does not explain. Or perhaps that’s it: they dont explain and we are not supposed to know. We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature. (80) The first two sentences synthetically build on one another; the third and fourth sentences similarly offer synthetic repetitions (they do not explain, we are not supposed to know; we have old tales, we exhume old letters). Then the passage creates a series of pairs: “men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw” (80, emphasis added). Finally, we get an antithesis that, in the context of this particular narrative, suggests a further resonance with ancient Hebrew parallelism: “They are there, yet something is missing” (80). Not one of these examples alone is sufficient to establish that the narrative formally alludes to the KJV. Even taken together, they do not create enough of a regular and extended pattern to be considered a clear imitation of it. In addition to the polyphonic intermingling of multiple voices, Faulkner’s elaborately complex sentence structure is not characteristic of the KJV. Yet in the context of this novel that announces the KJV as a crucial intertext, there are enough KJV-esque stylistic features to create (at least for those who possess a basic knowledge of it) a vague biblical resonance in the diction and cumulative enumeration of ­Faulkner’s narrative voice itself.

42  The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels Some might argue that Hemingway’s writing style in The Sun Also Rises (and elsewhere)—favoring the concrete over the abstract and favoring simple, direct, and paratactic grammatical constructions—more closely resembles the KJV’s style than Faulkner’s style in Absalom does, which favors abstraction, circumlocution, and hypercomplex grammatical structures built especially on hypotactic layers of subordination and qualification. 28 What such an argument neglects is both novels’ characteristically modernist preoccupations with the relationship between past and present—with history—and how this thematic concern informs each one’s stylistic choices. Absalom resonates with the strangely archaic “feel” of the KJV’s language, with the stately liturgical rhythms that help confer on that version its authoritative sound, whereas The Sun Also Rises does not. This difference, in turn (in keeping with Phelan’s Bakhtinian definition of voice, noted earlier), conveys an implicit difference in values: Faulkner confers a vague sense of ideological authority to the KJV in ways that The Sun Also Rises does not. For many twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers, the ghostly biblical resonance in Absalom is clear enough to hear: many critics have identified stylistic similarities between Absalom and the KJV. Yet they often disagree about precisely which similarities the novel exhibits, which disagreement itself speaks to the indirect, suggestive, and even elusive— ghostly—textual presence of the KJV in Absalom. Glenn Meeter, for example, argues that this vague similarity is created by Faulkner’s use of concepts that allusively resonate with the kind of mythical, primeval conflicts thematized in the Bible. 29 Alter finds more specific intertextual resonances, agreeing with Meeter that Faulkner’s style does not directly resemble the KJV’s but arguing that the general sense of resonance derives from the novel’s mythical representation of history as well as its incorporations of thematic keywords from the Bible, as noted earlier (Pen of Iron 85–86). Rose insists that Absalom’s writing style resonates structurally with the Bible’s: Faulkner’s grammatical and rhetorical structure is cumulative; each phrase or clause explains or increases or enlarges upon the meaning of the previous one(s). The total effect is that of accumulation and coordination, rather than subordination. Such a structure reflects the basic structure of Hebrew literature. 30 (139–43) Rose qualifies this comparison of Absalom and the KJV by noting that, while Faulkner himself spoke of his high estimation of the Old Testament, she does not mean to suggest that he “was a deliberate student of Hebrew verse forms (though he may have been)” (147). She means to identify not an exact likeness but a stylistic similarity.

The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels  43 Even so, Absalom’s resonance with the KJV may be slightly more ghostly than Rose allows. Series of cumulative statements in Absalom only sometimes fall into identifiably parallel structures, and when they do, they lack the sustained regularity sufficient to create the sense of a larger pattern that one finds in most biblical poetry. Mr. Compson’s description of the past as an unsolvable mystery in the present (quoted earlier), for example, includes what might be considered parallelism: “they don’t explain and we are not supposed to know,” which is followed by, “We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature” (80). These lines arguably involve repetitions whereby the second part repeats and slightly expands on the first, but such repetitions do not continue long enough to constitute a pattern. In this case, they are soon followed by a characteristically Faulknerian sentence that does not echo itself in units of two but builds upon itself by adding several layers of successive qualifications: “they are like chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest, carefully, the paper old and faded and falling to pieces, the writing faded, almost indecipherable, yet meaningful, familiar in shape and sense” (80). In Faulkner’s prose, near-­restatements and qualifications come in twos, threes, and even fours, seemingly at random. Rose notes that Old Testament grammatical and rhetorical structures “accommodate themselves well to stream-of-consciousness techniques” (147), which raises the question: do stream-of-consciousness techniques always resonate with the Bible? More plausibly, such modernist literary strategies—which are well suited to conveying a sense of intertextual haunting in that they readily accommodate fragmented, shadowy ­allusions—can, especially in narratives such as Absalom that thematically foreground the KJV as a key intertext, be made formally to invoke biblical tones and shadings.

A Prophetic Call for Justice The formal resonance between Absalom and the KJV gains significance not only from the novel’s title but also from the ghostly presence-yet-­ absence of the KJV in one of Absalom’s central thematic conflicts: multiple characters in the novel face a tension between what might be described as a “law ethic” and a “love ethic.”31 Absalom casts this question of values in strongly biblical terms, drawing from the David-and-Absalom story as well as from New Testament accounts of clashes between Jesus and the Pharisees. In the David story, the law condemns his rebellious son Absalom as a traitor who sought to overthrow his king, but David rejects the primacy of that legal standard: his lament ignores his son’s culpability and instead asserts the primacy of his identification as a loving father over that of a wronged king: “O my son Absalom, my son, my

44  The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels son Absalom! would God I had died for thee” (2 Samuel 18:33). Sutpen, by contrast, makes no such lament, which renders the novel’s title rather ironic. Sutpen is no King David: unlike David, Sutpen never questions the law or sees beyond it. The novel’s biblical allusions in this vein serve to highlight the disjunction between its story and the Bible at least as much as the similarities between the two. Indeed, when Sutpen tries to rectify the “mistake” in his “design” (his plan to become a wealthy plantation patriarch), he makes the additional mistake of consulting a “legally trained” mind rather than considering that his woes might be the result of a more profound “retribution”: the “sins of the father come home to roost”—particularly the sin of repudiating his first marriage on racist grounds (215, 219–20). He faces the kind of dilemma depicted repeatedly in the New Testament as a conflict between the law and love (the former associated especially with the “scribes and Pharisees” of Matthew 23:1–36): the questions of healing or working on the Sabbath (Mark 3:1–6 and Mark 2:23–28), of having dirty hands at dinner (Mark 7:1–23), of associating with Samaritans (Luke 10:25–37), and of befriending tax collectors and sinners (Mark 2:13–17). Yet it never seems to occur to Sutpen to choose anything but the law. Appropriately enough, Rosa, who sees him as her nemesis, styles herself “love’s… advocate” (117). In Absalom, the formal invocations of the Bible specifically entail the sense of ancient history speaking to the present with a prophetic moral authority that Faulkner frequently contrasts or ironically compares with mundane human laws, which are themselves a textual record speaking authoritatively from the past to the present about codes of conduct: “because of love or honor or anything else under heaven or jurisprudence” (Absalom 248). Indeed, the novel’s hypercomplex grammatical structures and highly abstract, Latinate diction resonate not only with the Bible but also with the exaggerated, parodic legalese of Bon’s lawyer: So take this, Sir, neither as the unwarranted insolence which an unsolicited communication from myself to you would be, not as a plea for sufferance on behalf of an unknown, but as an introduction (clumsy though it be) to one young gentleman whose position needs neither detailing nor recapitulation in the place where this letter is read, of another young gentleman whose position requires neither detailing nor recapitulation in the place where it was written. (252) In the world Absalom depicts, it is easy to confuse the legal with the biblical. This tension between love and the law shapes the central conflicts of all the major characters. Throughout the novel, various characters face critical and revelatory moments of decision—what might be termed

The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels  45 “conversion” challenges (given the novel’s biblical intertext) that force them to change their perspective and consider changing their behavior. These potential conversion narratives are reminiscent of the account in Acts 9 of Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus when suddenly a bright light blinds him and precipitates his conversion from the strictest observer of the law to one who sees that even the ancient circumcision covenant can be abrogated by God’s love. In one such moment in ­Absalom, Bon (Sutpen’s estranged son) feels as though a “jigsaw puzzle” suddenly “[fell] into pattern,” revealing “at once, like a flash of light, the meaning of his whole life” (250). Quentin and his college roommate, Shreve, also imagine that Sutpen and his son Henry must each have experienced such a conversion challenge in their lives (186, 284–86). Going further, it can be argued that the entire novel constitutes an account of Quentin’s own conversion challenge as he realizes the significance of what he and Rosa discovered in the haunted Sutpen mansion. As Charles R. Wilson explains, the “central theme of Southern religion is the need for conversion in a specific experience that will lead to baptism, to a purified new person”; put simply, this “need is to be born again” (59). It should come as no surprise that the call to conversion serves as a central theme in Absalom.32 In keeping with the irony of the novel’s title, the conversion challenges depicted in Absalom all end in failure by biblical standards. Not one character chooses love wholeheartedly. Even Rosa, who thinks of herself as love’s “advocate,” seems consumed instead by a vengeful bitterness. Likewise, Wash Jones, who kills Sutpen because of his heartless treatment of Milly, Jones’s granddaughter, serves as no biblical champion of love: Faulkner pointedly reminds the reader of the nineteenth century’s hateful “Bible defense” of slavery (infamously championed by Josiah Priest) by way of Jones, who believes “the Bible said” that black people should be enslaved because they are “cursed by God” (226). 33 It is in this sense that the characters are thematically haunted by the Bible. They find themselves challenged by a biblical call to choose something deeper and truer than human laws—what Faulkner, in his 1941 story “The Tall Men,” describes as “our backbone,” which is apparently missing from the “investigator” whose blind devotion to the law leaves him “all fogged up with rules and regulations” (59). Yet this something deeper and truer, this backbone of the human species that is associated in Absalom with the Bible, remains ghostly to the major characters because it is at once there and not there: the characters are forced to confront it but cannot accept it—especially the “passages of the old violent vindictive mysticism” in the Bible that seem relevant only to the likes of Rosa’s fanatical and self-destructive father (64). Ultimately, human laws seem more real, and the major characters choose to trust such laws (literally and metaphorically) instead of the vague, shadowy, archaic alternative. These characters might be described as having not

46  The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels so much conversion experiences as conversion challenges: like the rich young man in ­Matthew 19 who finds the price of entering the kingdom of heaven unrealistically high, these characters turn “away sorrowful” (Matthew 19:22). They cannot accept the conversion challenge but cannot completely dismiss it either—by the end of the novel, Quentin is left feeling irrevocably haunted (in tones reminiscent of another Gothic classic, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”): “Nevermore of peace. Nevermore of peace. Nevermore. Nevermore. Nevermore” (298–99).34 Ultimately, this is also how Faulkner casts the South itself (in keeping with the biblical trope whereby Israel is often represented as a single character): like the man described in Matthew 7 who built his house on unsteady sand instead of on a solid rock foundation, “the South… erected its economic edifice not on the rock of stern morality but on the shifting sands of opportunism and moral brigandage” (209). Yet it would be inaccurate and misleading to conclude that Absalom issues to the South a Christian call to conversion. It would more accurately be described as a biblical call for justice. By way of elaboration, consider a scholarly debate regarding ­Faulkner’s 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury—a debate that exemplifies larger arguments about representations of Christianity in his work as a whole. Some argue that the novel ultimately forwards a Christian perspective, others argue that it is not fully Christian but more vaguely and generally hopeful, and still others argue that it offers no hope whatsoever. For this last group, the Easter service described in the fourth and final section cannot redeem or overcome the bleakness of the first three sections of the novel or the bleakness of its title, which alludes to Macbeth’s famous soliloquy just after he learns of his wife’s death: he describes life as “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (5.5.26–28). John Hunt contends that Faulkner presents us with a nihilistic skepticism whereby not only are traditional religious beliefs called into question, but all meaning at even the most basic level finds itself threatened with utter negation (174–75). Faulkner takes this threat seriously but counters it, according to Hunt, with a “theology of tension” that amounts to a “tension between Christian and Stoic visions” (169). While this argument helps clarify key elements of the major conflicts in The Sound and the Fury, he concedes that the argument also “strain[s] [Faulkner’s] fiction by theological language” (176). Indeed, to try to identify which modern theological positions are represented in Faulkner’s stories is to ask the wrong question. These stories do not speak that language. Again, as Wilson argues, the religious world of Faulkner’s stories is primarily that of Southern folk religions, the actual beliefs and practices of “plain folk, the poor whites and blacks” in the South (67–68). In that context, the Bible “possessed a near mystical attraction… even in dissent, it was the source of all authority” (63). One

The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels  47 therefore finds more useful answers if one asks about the role of the Bible in Faulkner’s stories. They may not speak modern forms of systematic theology, but they definitely speak Bible. To understand Faulkner’s uses of the Bible, one must focus particularly on his ambiguous and ambivalent depiction of it as, in Wilson’s words, “the source of all authority.” Virginia Hlavsa, Evans Harrington, and others have shown the importance to Faulkner’s views on Christianity of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, the writings of French philosopher Henri Bergson, and even Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance. Yet when asked in an interview about his “relationship to the Christian religion,” specifically about others’ description of him as a “Christian humanist,” Faulkner replied, I have the sort of provincial Christian background which one takes for granted without thinking too much about it, probably. That I’m probably—within my own rights I feel that I’m a good Christian— whether it would please anybody else’s standard or not I don’t know. (Gwynn and Blotner 203) Far from engaging with the definition of “Christian humanism,” ­ aulkner provincialized and relativized his relationship with ChristianF ity. In response to a related interview question, he turned to the Bible, especially the story of Jesus (which echoes other biblical stories of self-­ sacrificing love): It is every individual’s individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol—cross or crescent or whatever—that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race. Its various allegories are the charts against which he measures himself and learns to know what he is…. It shows [man] how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral code and ­standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope. (Cowley 132) In effect, Faulkner described the biblical story of Jesus (the “example” he refers to) in relativized terms (just one of “various allegories” symbolized by the “cross or crescent or whatever”) yet as a nonetheless meaningful call to a kind of conversion—a potential “discovery” of how to “evolve” a “moral code.” One finds this double sentiment represented in his novels: as noted earlier, the Bible helps convey a global sense of significance to local events, even while Absalom’s implicit skepticism regarding ­historical narratives (potentially including biblical narratives) reinforces

48  The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels ­ ysticism”  (64). its more pointed criticism of the Bible’s “vindictive m This  thematic ideological ambivalence is reflected in the vagueness of the novel’s formal resonance with the Bible.

Faulkner’s Bible-Haunted Narratives: Framing the Questions Rhetorically The same double sentiment may also be heard in The Sound and the Fury. The first three sections of the novel provide, one after the other, the first-person perspectives of three brothers on their declining family and their respective places in it. The Compson brothers all fixate on their only sister, Candace (nicknamed Caddy), whose romantic adventures are seen as having disgraced the family. Each brother harbors a personal sorrow or grudge related to Caddy. In the novel’s fourth section, Dilsey, the black housekeeper and cook who works for the Compson family, finds herself revived and transported by an Easter Sunday church service. The preacher offers a vision of Christian resurrection at the end of history, and Dilsey sits weeping “quietly in the annealment and the blood of the remembered Lamb” (185). Afterwards, she walks home from church voicing a Christian view of the sweep of history as having a beginning in creation and an ending in resurrection: “I seed de beginning, en now I sees de endin” (185). As in Absalom, this grand biblical narrative also implicitly describes the more local history recounted in the novel, that of the Compson family—although, as in Absalom, the comparison is inexact and potentially ironic in its dissimilarities. Yet this is more than simply a moving sermon: by setting the fourth section of the novel on Easter Sunday, the Easter sermon casts the entire novel in biblical terms because the first and third sections turn out to be set on the Saturday and Friday, respectively, of this same Easter weekend. Even so, it remains unclear whether the Easter message outweighs the skepticism and nihilism evident throughout much of the rest of the novel. Faulkner was repeatedly drawn to the imagery of Holy Week in his fiction, the clearest examples being The Sound and the Fury and his 1954 novel A Fable. The latter focuses on the crucifixion and the Passion-­ narrative events leading up to the crucifixion rather than the resurrection. This is arguably true of The Sound and the Fury as well: despite the Easter ending, the effect is not entirely or even strongly hopeful. Some have tried to see the youngest Compson brother, Benjy, as a Christ figure, but while his role is in keeping with the biblical scapegoat, it is not that of the Passover lamb, let alone of Jesus—no one is saved by his suffering, and he does not sacrifice himself willingly for the sake of others. The second-oldest brother, Jason, is a Macbeth-like figure in that he seems unconsciously self-destructive as he pursues his will to power. Quentin, the oldest, is consciously self-destructive. While

The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels  49 some have read him as a Christ figure, a martyr dying for his ideals, there is no redemption in his story, which means he is ultimately more like Sophocles’ tragic Antigone than a Christian martyr. Indeed, his section suggests that his lack of faith, at least in part, is what leads him to commit suicide. He equates “Jesus walking on Galilee,” the miracle of walking on the water, with George “Washington not telling lies”—both are merely legends (51). Quentin cannot believe in a God who transcends time, but he cannot stand not believing either: “It’s not when you realize that nothing can help you—religion, pride, anything—it’s when you realize that you don’t need any aid” (51). By committing suicide, he becomes, in a sense, his father’s definition of a false Christ who “was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels” (49). Christ did not transcend time, according to Quentin’s father, and neither does Quentin: time goes on with or without him, as the rest of the novel pointedly reminds the reader. As Hunt contends, the narrative casts this nihilistic skepticism not as a fact to be accepted but rather as a deeply troubling possibility. One cannot ignore the Easter service that dominates the novel’s fourth and final section. Some have suggested that such representations merely reflect Faulkner’s region and era. After all, in one of his interviews, he explained that the religious cultures of the South were “just there” as part of the world he depicted in his fiction, which “has nothing to do with how much of it I might believe or disbelieve” (qtd. in Wilson, 61). While analyzing Faulkner’s novels with the aim of trying to determine his personal beliefs about religion tends to distort the novels, there are too many references to the Bible and Southern Christian folk religions in the novels to be dismissed as mere background. In addition to the Holy Week setting, there are more direct allusions to the Bible in The Sound and the Fury than in any other Faulkner novel (Coffee 129). The biblical references (direct and indirect) are deliberately and insistently ambiguous in complex ways, functioning together as a ghost that haunts the novel, both formally and thematically. Readers whose ears are attuned to the KJV hear this long before the narration of the actual Easter service. Leaving aside the direct allusions to the Bible in the novel’s first three sections, the opening of the fourth section exemplifies more subtle ways in which the narrative voice in The Sound and the Fury is often haunted by the KJV. First, note the biblical keywords, dust and flesh, in the opening sentence: The day dawned bleak and chill, a moving wall of gray light out of the northeast which, instead of dissolving into moisture, seemed to disintegrate into minute and venomous particles, like dust that, when Dilsey opened the door of the cabin and emerged, needled laterally into her flesh. (165)

50  The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels The commas give a visible marker of the slow, biblical pace of this sentence, which uses fatalistic nature imagery to convey Dilsey’s oppression. To use dust as a simile for rain might seem paradoxical (dry as wet) except in the context of the biblical sense of mortality implied by both rain and dust (as evident in the earlier analysis of Psalm 69): “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19). Likewise, the rain in Genesis 7 brings death to those not on Noah’s ark; also, the rain is “venomous,” suggestive of the serpent whose treachery led to the curse of death. Second, note the grandly prophetic depiction of a rather mundane morning. Initially, the rain conjures a sense of death. As the passage ­continues, concrete images continue to serve, as they so often do in the KJV, to symbolize mythic abstractions: “as though muscle and tissue had been courage or fortitude which the days or the years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like a ruin or a landmark” (165). Similarly, the ground just outside the cabin door is not ground but the more recognizably biblical “earth,” and it suggests the mythic history of an enslaved people (not unlike the Israelites), destitute “generations” whose unshod feet passed there: “The earth immediately about the door was bare. It had a patina, as though from the soles of bare feet in generations” (165). One also finds, as in Absalom, the use of paired adjectives that create a biblical effect of cumulative enumeration: “muscle and tissue,” “courage or fortitude,” “the days or the years,” and “a ruin or a landmark” (165). The use of “and” in the following passage has a similar effect: Dilsey opened the door… and emerged…. She wore a stiff black straw hat perched upon her turban, and a maroon velvet cape with a border of mangy and anonymous fur above a dress of purple silk, and she stood in the door for a while with her myriad and sunken face lifted to the weather, and one gaunt hand flac-soled as the belly of a fish. (165, emphasis added) One finds more paired adjectives here as well: “mangy and anonymous” and “myriad and sunken.” Faulkner goes on to describe Dilsey as wearing a “gown… in color regal and moribund”: the syntactical inversion “noun + adjective” in “color regal” (and in “hand flac-soled”) is a ­Hebraism atypical in English but characteristically appearing in the KJV (as explained earlier) (165). 35 Again, however, all this is not to say that the opening of the fourth section—let alone all of The Sound and the Fury, which is written in four distinctly different styles—sounds like the KJV in any simple or straightforward way. Parts of the novel vaguely resonate with the KJV, sometimes more strongly, sometimes less so. Some of this resonance

The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels  51 might be missed if not for the direct biblical allusions and thematic incorporation of Southern religious practices. All of these elements, taken together, collectively haunt the narrative in an ambiguous and often ambivalent way—troubling it as a prophetic voice in tension with the modern threat of nihilistic skepticism. This tension itself troubles the narrative both formally and thematically. Unlike Absalom, The Sound and the Fury includes characters who choose wholeheartedly to disregard the law (whether metaphorically or literally) in the name of something to do with honor and love—something vaguely to do with the Bible, the narrative suggests. To use ­Faulkner’s phrase from “The Tall Men,” some of the characters in The Sound and the Fury possess backbone. So Dilsey takes Benjy to her church despite her daughter’s protests that this violates social codes of conduct concerning race and (dis)ability. Dilsey’s response is that these codes are in conflict with God and so cannot stand. The codes hold that Benjy “aint good enough fer white church” because of his developmental disability, while a black church “aint good enough fer him” because of his race; this would leave no church for Benjy to attend, an outcome that Dilsey rejects: “de good Lawd dont keer whether he bright er not” (181). She suggests that God also does not care whether Benjy is white or not—a brave position to take in early-twentieth-century Mississippi. The sheriff to whom Jason turns at the end of the novel similarly shows backbone. When Jason solicits the sheriff as “a commissioned officer of the law” to help track down Jason’s niece, who has run away with a large sum of money (which was meant for her upkeep, but which he embezzled), the sheriff refuses to help him: “You drove that girl into running off, Jason…. And I have some suspicions about who that money belongs to that I dont reckon I’ll ever know for certain” (189). Jason specifically accuses the sheriff of flouting the law by refusing to help: “This is not Russia, where just because he wears a little metal badge, a man is immune to law” (189). The sheriff, like Dilsey, holds himself to a higher moral code. It has been argued that these episodes in the novel do not accord with the Calvinistic insistence on the utter depravity of all human beings. Be that as it may, these episodes resonate thematically with the rest of the narrative in ways that have little to do with such modern theological distinctions and much to do with biblical narratives. The characters are faced with a biblical conflict between a “law ethic” and a “love ethic,” and they must make a choice. Dilsey and the sheriff choose the latter, but the novel’s emphasis on the rather more complicated or even opposite choices made by the other characters (especially the four Compson siblings) foregrounds the general challenge posed by such choices more than any one particular answer. This kind of biblical tension—and challenge—evident in Absalom and The Sound and the Fury exemplifies one of the most consistent and

52  The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels salient characteristics of Faulkner’s uses of the Bible. He creates biblical resonances that help raise questions about values and beliefs, questions his narratives ultimately leave unanswered. A Fable, for example, is not only set during Holy Week like The Sound and the Fury but also concludes with considerably more uncertainty than the Holy Week narrative recounted in even the shortest versions of the Gospel of Mark. 36 There is no resurrection. At the same time, there are elements in A Fable that make it difficult for readers to dismiss its gospel parallels as merely satirical contrasts (as argued in Chapter 4). Likewise, Light in August might initially seem to depict a purely negative Christ figure in Joe Christmas, which would be in keeping with that novel’s predominantly negative portrayals of Christians. Yet the story ultimately challenges readers to reconsider Joe as a reflection of his society’s own sins—and potentially of the reader’s as well (discussed further in Chapter 2). Go Down, Moses adopts similarly challenging or even prophetic biblical tones in its account of the struggle to redress the sins of the past. Yet it casts this challenge into doubt and confusion (as noted in Chapter 4). Piero Boitani contends that Go Down, Moses in this regard aims to confuse its readers (115). He explains, Perhaps we do indeed need a medieval exegete to find his way around this fictionalized Bible which replaces the Moses of the title, immediately, within the narrative corpus, with an Isaac, and to extrapolate the perverse, purloined polysemia of Go Down, Moses. (116) As I Lay Dying, like The Sound and the Fury, appears to some readers to offer a literary representation of inescapable epistemological doubt and skepticism, especially in the ways it foregrounds the subjectivity of perspectival limitations and the crisis of representation. 37 Yet some contend that its very “polysemia,” like that of Go Down, Moses and The Sound and the Fury, suggests alternatives to a thoroughgoing skepticism like those explored in Chapter 3.38 In response to these tensions, Coffee concludes that Faulkner’s novels depict “un-Christlike Christians” (47–52). More recent scholarship evinces various positions in the ongoing debate about whether the novels convey one or another Christian worldview, as exemplified by the varied readings of The Sound and the Fury noted earlier. Yet focusing on the role of the Bible in the novels potentially illuminates the importance of their readers as much as any of their characters—which is to say, the rhetorical situation of the novels as texts designed to be read.39 Put differently, focusing on the role of the Bible can help shed new light on long-standing debates about Faulkner and religion. These are stories that invite their readers to wrestle with the questions they raise, thereby resonating with New Testament parables as well as with the Old

The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels  53 Testament tale in which Nathan invites David to judge his story about a poor man abused by a rich one, whereby David ends up judging himself (2 Samuel 12)—much like Faulkner’s depiction of Quentin identifying with Henry in Absalom or Reverend Hightower’s self-reflective struggles with Joe’s plight in Light in August. The novels tacitly invite readers to wrestle with the same biblically inflected questions with which key characters wrestle, which resonates with the Bible’s frequent use of rhetorical structures that invite self-reflection on the part of readers. Bakhtin’s notion of dialogical polyphony can help articulate the complexity of this rhetorical effect. Michael Holquist summarizes Bakhtin’s view of the Bible as a definitively monological text: he interpreted its various voices as inevitably subsumed under and assimilated to the authority of the overarching narrative from Genesis to Revelation, privileging a reading of the Bible that interprets it as a unified whole that speaks in “­absolute language.”40 Yet as explained earlier, many modern readers reject such strongly unified interpretations of the Bible as belated and artificially imposed on a varied collection of different voices. In short, the Bible is often read as a polyphonic and even dialogical text that represents a variety of beliefs (about the existence of an afterlife, for ­example, or about how to understand divine justice).41 Boitani is not alone in reading the B ­ ible as possessing what he terms a “polysemic, polyphonic fullness” (123). Moreover, this modern reading is not such a radical departure from premodern Christian readings as many people assume it to be, including those modern Christians who mistakenly imagine that their own “scientific” approach to biblical interpretation is in keeping with premodern Christian interpretive practices. Ancient Christian orthodoxies need not be seen as undermined or belied by a recognition of the Bible’s polyphony because they need not rely on modern foundationalist epistemologies and their concomitant hermeneutics (as explained in the Introduction). Faulkner’s polyphonic novels can be read in this light as invoking modern but also premodern biblical resonances, voicing the two in a creative tension that amplifies the thematic tensions described earlier through a literary effect akin to the Bakhtinian concept of double-voicing. In addition to his invocations of the Bible as atavistic but ambiguously relevant, Faulkner’s Bible-haunted narrative voice exerts a further tension with the voices of his characters in that it often threatens to dominate them— especially in Light in August; Absalom; Go Down, Moses; and A Fable but also to some extent in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. Yet the characters’ voices cannot be dismissed; they are never entirely dominated. Indeed, some scholars seek to resolve the tensions in The Sound and the Fury by prioritizing one character’s voice over the others, and their resultant interpretations can be criticized as partial to the very extent that they do not sufficiently address the novel’s polyphony. To conclude this chapter by summarizing the most common forms of biblical resonance in Faulkner’s writing, they are (1) direct allusions

54  The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels (most clearly to biblical figures such as Moses and Absalom); (2) plots (especially self-sacrificing Christ figures); (3) themes (law versus love, faith versus doubt, prophetic challenges to those in power, and covenants and betrayals); (4) symbols (the cross, fire, water, and light versus darkness); (5) diction (KJV keywords such as flesh, dust, birthright, and earth); and (6) sentence structure (especially paratactic enumeration, parallelism, and syntactical inversion). Again, however, this is not to claim that Faulkner’s narrative voice mimics the Bible. On the contrary, one finds stark differences in diction (Faulkner uses more abstractions) and sentence structure (Faulkner’s periods are far longer than the ­Bible’s and are as often built on hypotactic subordination as on parataxis). In addition, Faulkner offers far more information about characters’ thoughts, feelings, and motivations than the Bible typically provides. The Bible haunts his narrative voice like a specter, sometimes diminishing or disappearing altogether yet regularly reappearing, often with an aura of prophetic yet ambiguous authority. As noted in the Introduction, while Faulkner’s novels and short stories evince differences in the extent to which each one resonates with the Bible, throughout his career, the Bible-haunted effect recurred ­repeatedly—from The Sound and the Fury in 1929 to A Fable in 1954. A sense of the Bible as a ghost—as an archaic yet still vaguely ­prophetic text—became distinctly available to early twentieth-century readers, and it has remained relevant to many readers and writers throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Faulkner’s work invokes this sense of the Bible as uncannily present and absent, modern and premodern. His novels often insist that the Bible continues to speak to modern readers, regardless of whether anyone will listen to it. Yet they also insist that what it has to say to modern readers is anything but clear or simple. As subsequent chapters aim to show, this ambiguous and ambivalent literary presence of the Bible in Faulkner’s work resonates in illuminating ways with influential novels by later authors—most tellingly in the work of those who might seem to have little reason not to reject the Bible entirely as a dead relic of painful histories.

Notes 1 Julia Briggs offers a useful overview of the genre in “The Ghost Story.” 2 See Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny. 3 Charles Dickens’s story was originally titled A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being A Ghost Story of Christmas. 4 Jacques Derrida describes history as a kind of ghost exemplified by the ghost of Hamlet’s father (127). 5 See also Matthew 12:25 and Luke 11:17. 6 Absalom killed his half-brother Amnon because Amnon raped their sister Tamar. 7 For an overview of modernist uses of the Gothic, see John Paul Riquelme, “Toward A History of Gothic and Modernism: Dark Modernity from Bram Stoker to Samuel Beckett.” See also Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism.

The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels  55 8 See The Waste Land, I. Burial of the Dead (1–76), and V. What the Thunder Said (378–95; regarding the vampire allusion, see also Riquelme 589 and 604, n.4). Faulkner at one point states that Rosa is “like a vampire” (68). 9 See Prufrock, 79–86, 111–19, 94–95. The use of “fragments” in the closing lines of The Waste Land resonates suggestively with the instructions Jesus gives to his disciples after the miracle of the loaves and fishes: “Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost” (John 6:12); in The Waste Land, an attempt has been made to gather together and “shore” the fragments of cultural history (especially of texts) “against my ruin,” but the attempt seems futile (430). Similarly, Prufrock imagines himself beheaded like John but ultimately concedes, “I am no prophet” (83). 10 Eliot invites this Gothic symbolism for literary citation, allusion, and general influence in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: “we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a poet’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously” (The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, 114). As Ellmann argues, while Eliot “celebrates the voices of the dead” in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “he comes to dread their verbal ambush in The Waste Land” (267). 11 For an analysis of biblical resonances in Eliot’s work that includes his post-conversion writings, see Alfred Kazin’s God and the American Writer 194–214 as well as Martin Warner’s “Reading the Bible ‘as the report of the Word of God’: The Case of T. S. Eliot.” 12 Warwick Wadlington argues that Faulkner presents a sense of continuity between historical traditions and modernity. For a contrasting view, see ­Donald M. Kartiganer, “[The Meaning of Form in] The Sound and the Fury.” 13 On this point, F. R. Leavis’s interpretation remains compelling: the poem “exhibits no progression”—it ends with a figure simply sitting, apparently unable to act; “the thunder brings no rain to revive the Waste Land, and the poem ends where it began” (179–80). By contrast, Cleanth Brooks argued against such readings offered by Leavis and F. O. Matthiessen, claiming that The Waste Land subtly thematizes redemption and specifically “resurrection” in response to its “basic theme” of modern life as a kind of “death-in-life”; yet Brooks supports his reading by referencing Eliot’s later conversion to ­Christianity, a questionable lens through which to view the poem composed years earlier (209, 185, 204–05). The poem does offer some grounds for interpreting its biblical allusions and imagery—especially that of the desert—as perhaps suggesting an experience of desolation that leads to a turn or return to faith. 14 For an extended argument that the novel constitutes this kind of self-­ realization on Quentin’s part, see Norman W. Jones, Gay and the Lesbian Historical Fiction, 41–71. 15 Quentin, speaking about Rosa’s father’s view of the Civil War, casts the South as morally misguided, like the man described in Matthew 7:24–27 who built his house on sand instead of rock: “the South … erected its economic edifice not on the rock of stern morality but on the shifting sands of opportunism and moral brigandage” (209). In Absalom, Sutpen’s “house” symbolizes that edifice: both fell as a result of iniquities. 16 Faulkner’s earlier novel The Sound and the Fury offers an account of ­Quentin’s self-destruction that suggests this omen will prove true. Wadlington contends that Quentin thus plays the role of the traditional tragic hero (“The Sound and the Fury: A Logic of Tragedy”). 17 See Madison’s November 25, 1820 letter to “Marquis De La Fayette.” 18 See, for example, Exodus 22:18, Deuteronomy 18:10–11, 2 Chronicles 33:6, Leviticus 20:6, and Isaiah 19:3.

56  The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels 19 The author is grateful to William Griffith, Curator of Rowan Oak, as well as his colleagues, Hannah McMahon and Caroline Croom, for their generous assistance in making Faulkner’s personal Bible available for study. 20 In “Quentin as Redactor: Biblical Analogy in Faulkner’s Absalom, ­Absalom!,” Glenn Meeter argues that the novel’s fragmented narration, in which events get retold and often reinterpreted in different ways, bears similarities to the way in which the Higher Criticism understood the Bible’s composite structure. 21 While acknowledging the ambiguities that keep readers debating precisely where the moral center lies in The Sun Also Rises, S. A. Cowan argues that “Hemingway’s use of Ecclesiastes is true … to the idea that ‘all is vanity’”: ultimately, the novel endorses Jake’s “disillusioned worldly wisdom” (105). James Watson relies heavily on biographical reconstructions to propose that the novel should be read as hinting at “covert references to the Catholic sacraments” (464). Note that Hemingway’s epigraph quotes not the Douay-Rheims Bible but the KJV. 22 See Raymond-Jean Frontain’s “‘Passing the Love of Women’: Sexual Codes and the KJV,” in which he draws on Erich Auerbach’s and Robert Alter’s respective characterizations of the frequent reticence and ambiguity of ­Hebrew scripture on the subject of human emotions and motivations. 23 Freud associated a sense of the uncanny especially with nonnormative sexual desires and expressions, and a comparison of these texts invites the use of sexuality as a thematic lens. Where The Sun Also Rises and The Waste Land represent sexuality as far more destructive than productive, Absalom represents sexuality as potentially transformative in dangerous yet nonetheless productive ways. Regarding Absalom, see Jones, Gay and the Lesbian Historical Fiction, 41–71. 24 Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) invokes the Bible in elusive yet insistent ways that suggest this particularly modern view of ancient scripture. Tracing her beautiful and mysterious invocations of the KJV, James Wood argues that To the Lighthouse is “one of the most religious of modern secular English novels” because of the “ghostliness of its biblical allusions” (253). 25 See McGrath, 262–65, regarding once unfamiliar Hebrew idioms made familiar by the KJV. 26 Some scholars use more than three categories to identify the various types of repetition found in ancient Hebrew poetry. 27 Here and throughout this book, the term prophetic is used in the biblical sense according to which a prophet is a human messenger or spokesperson for God who tends to call attention to moral wrongs that need to be righted. 28 Robert Alter argues that Hemingway’s style does indeed resonate with that of the KJV—although he also argues that Faulkner’s style does too in a different way (see Pen of Iron, Chapters 3 and 5). Elsewhere, Alter notes that one of the differences between the two writers in relation to the KJV is Faulkner’s resonance specifically with the KJV’s “incantatory” style (“The Glories and the Glitches of the King James Bible” 50). 29 Glenn Meeter, “Beyond Lexicon: Biblical ‘Allusion’ in Faulkner.” 30 Rose further contends that the rhythms of biblical poetry, specifically the ­regular patterns of Hebrew accentual units, are also characteristic of Absalom (143–47). 31 This contest between love and law raises a long-standing misinterpretation of the New Testament as a radical reversal of the Old Testament. According to this view, which derives especially from Augustine’s reading of Paul’s New Testament epistles, the New Testament emphasizes God’s loving mercy,

The Bible as Ghost in Faulkner’s Novels  57

32

33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

whereas the Old Testament emphasizes a mercilessly legalistic sense of justice. While this interpretation is part of the Bible’s reception history (witness Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice), it can encourage anti-Semitism and does not accurately represent traditional Jewish interpretations of Hebrew scripture. It is true that the Sermon on the Mount contrasts the Mosaic laws with the teachings of Jesus: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5:38–45). Yet this is not so much a reversal as an extension of Old Testament teachings, emphasizing an ideal articulated in passages such as Proverbs 20:22 (“Say not thou, ‘I will recompense evil’; but wait on the Lord and he shall save thee”) and Isaiah 50:6 (“I gave my back to smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting”). Old Testament laws often promote chesed, a transliteration of the Hebrew term for loving-kindness and mercy. These laws were at least somewhat more compassionate and equitable than other legal codes of their time: “an eye for an eye” and other such rules commended not vindictive punishment but a measure of restraint from excessive retributive vengeance. Indeed, Exodus 23:4 exhorts the Israelites not only to care for non-Israelites and the poor but also for enemies: “If thou meet thine enemy’s ox or his ass going astray, thou shalt surely bring it back to him again.” Similarly, Leviticus 19:9–18 charges Israel with caring for those who are deaf, blind, or poor, and it reminds the Israelites that they should love foreigners as they love themselves. Faulkner’s formative denomination was Methodist, which, despite many critics’ emphasis on the influence of Calvinist theology in his work, departs strongly from Calvinism in its emphasis on free will and personal spirituality (Wilson 60). For an overview of Bible-based defenses of slavery, see Allen Dwight ­Callahan, 21–40. See also Vincent Wimbush’s edited collection African Americans and the Bible and Theophus Smith’s Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America. Regarding this and other Gothic similarities between Faulkner and Poe, see Shoko Itoh’s “Poe, Faulkner, and Gothic America.” See Gerald Hammond, 45–51. Some ancient versions of Mark conclude the narrative at 16:8, which describes fear and confusion at the news that “Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified … is risen” (16:6). See, for example, Roger Lundin, who interprets both novels this way (Beginning with the Word 74). See Stephen Barnes’s reading of As I Lay Dying. See Phelan, Narrative as Rhetoric. See Michael Holquist’s introduction to Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, xxxii–xxxiii. See Walter L. Reed, Dialogues of the Word: The Bible as Literature According to Bakhtin and Roland Boer, Bakhtin and Genre Theory in Biblical Studies. Reed argues, “One of the things Bakhtin’s theory of language and literature suggests is that a literary reading [of the Bible] positions itself between the fragmenting referentiality of the historical view and the consolidating authority of the theological perspective” (ix). Distinguishing between these three types of readings can be heuristically useful, perhaps, but only if one then complicates these distinctions by recognizing how such readings can overlap and even become intermingled with one another.

2 The Literary as Biblical Beloved and Faulkner

In Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction, a hit man named Jules experiences a kind of religious conversion inspired in part by a biblical passage he once memorized merely because he “thought it was some cold-blooded shit to say” before killing someone. Curiously, the Bible in Pulp Fiction is not actually “played” by the Bible, so to speak, but rather is played by a look-alike—not exactly a stunt double but more of a body double, a soundalike passage: The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you. Jules attributes these lines to Ezekiel 25:17, but they are only partially related to that considerably shorter verse: “And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.” The Pulp Fiction “Bible” passage is actually adapted from the 1973 Japanese film Karate Kiba (released in the U.S. in 1976 as The Bodyguard). While most audience members are unlikely to recognize this allusion, many are likely to recognize at least some of the biblical resonance in the passage. “Blessed is he…” recalls the Beatitudes of Matthew 5. The “valley of darkness” resonates with the “valley of the shadow of death” of Psalm 23. The “shepherd” metaphor also resonates with that psalm (“the Lord is my shepherd”) as well as with other such uses of that metaphor in the Bible (perhaps most famously in John 10). “Brother’s keeper” alludes to the story of Cain and Abel (specifically the same phrase in Genesis 4:9). Charity, righteous, and vengeance are what Robert Alter describes as keywords in the King James version of the Bible (KJV). The “finder of lost children” seems to amalgamate biblical references to lost

The Literary as Biblical  59 sheep (e.g., Jeremiah 50:6, Ezekiel 34, Matthew 15:24, and Luke 15:5) and to God’s people as children (e.g., 1 Kings 20:27 and Matthew 11:16). Finally, the two sentences in the passage that begin with and resonate with the Bible’s generally paratactic grammatical structure (discussed in the last chapter). In Pulp Fiction’s concluding scene, the passage is revealed to have helped spark a spiritual conversion for Jules: he will no longer kill people for hire but will “walk the earth… like Caine in Kung Fu,” having “adventures” and trying to be a “shepherd” to “the weak.” Caine was a character in the 1970s television series Kung Fu,1 but the name also resonates with the biblical Cain and Abel story. The use of earth, a biblical keyword, further suggests a biblical cast to this conversion experience. When Jules’s partner, Vincent, asks how long Jules plans to walk the earth, he replies, “Until God puts me where he want me to be.” In short, it is no surprise that critics such as Mark Irwin describe Jules as a “religious figure” who becomes a “man of compassion” (79). The biblical passage Jules memorized is inauthentic. He imagines his new religious life will be like living in a television drama. Moreover, his partner in crime challenges this religious conversion with a secular interpretation: Vincent avers that they have witnessed no miracle and that Jules is choosing to become not a holy man but a disgraceful “bum.” Despite these implicit and explicit challenges to the authenticity of his conversion, the film also counters these challenges: “Whether or not what we experienced was an according-to-Hoyle miracle is insignificant. What is significant is I felt God’s touch, God got involved.” Pulp Fiction in this regard constitutes a pithy example of a widespread phenomenon in contemporary films whereby religious or spiritual experiences get represented in vague and even somewhat ironic terms that nevertheless do not fully undermine the possibility that the experiences are genuinely numinous. This phenomenon is especially evident in horror films, in which, as Mary Ann Beavis points out, the role of the Bible (or a soundalike body double) often bears only a tenuous or even ambivalent relationship to traditional Christian teachings but is depicted as possessing an oracular spiritual authority. 2 A few years before Pulp Fiction was released, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America premiered. Kushner’s play uses the Bible itself rather than a soundalike, but its role is no less ambiguous, ironic, and yet numinously catalytic. Kushner casts his play in part as a new version of the ­G enesis story in which Jacob wrestles with an angel. Yet the physical act of wrestling with an angel is deemed insufficient: according to the human protagonist in the match—aptly named Prior as the play was inspired in part by Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”— the match requires “scriptural precedent” (250).3 While wrestling the angel, Prior quotes the KJV as if it were a spell book: “I will not let thee go except thou bless me!” (250–51; the quotation is originally from

60  The Literary as Biblical Genesis 32:26). The spell appears to work in that Prior obtains a blessing. The angel’s blessing, like the angel herself, is depicted as no more real than the play; yet this is not to say that the blessing and the angel are depicted as entirely unreal. Kushner’s stage directions explain, “The moments of magic” should “be fully realized, as bits of wonderful theatrical ­illusion—which means it’s OK if the wires show, and maybe it’s good that they do, but the magic should at the same time be thoroughly amazing” (11). In keeping with its many nods to camp humor and drag in particular, the play presents itself as both inauthentic and authentic at the same time. Indeed, as with many drag performances, Angels seeks to achieve a level of authenticity through rather than despite its embrace of inauthenticity. The two-part play is bookended by opening and closing scenes that cast the theatergoing experience as a liturgical ritual. Angels begins with a funeral service in which the audience members serve as mourners addressed directly by a rabbi.4 The second half of the play concludes similarly, with Prior breaking the fourth wall, not only to address the audience but to pronounce a blessing on them: “You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More life. The Great Work Begins” (280). While Angels takes evident delight in the ironies of theatergoing as a liturgical ritual, critics generally agree that the play also articulates what Laura Levitt describes as a genuine longing for religion.5 Even critics who decry such longings as vulgar wish fulfillment concede that the play valorizes “immortal longings and heavenly aspirations,” in James Miller’s words (61). “Angels offers a way out of the angelic, reactionary, Reaganite supernatural nexus, but it is through the supernatural performance of a blessing,” Martin Harries laments (194). As in Pulp Fiction, the ambivalent yet insistent turn to a vaguely religious calling in Angels centers on conversion. “Can we Change?” is one of the “Great Questions” heralded at the beginning of the second part of the play, Perestroika (147). Later, one of the characters poses a similar question: “How do people change?” (211). These questions get cast in a religious light through Ethel Rosenberg (a character based on the historical figure), who returns from the dead as a ghost in order to discover whether she can forgive Roy Cohn for his role in the 1953 executions of herself and her husband Julius (245–46). She initially determines that she cannot and therefore refuses his request that she sing him a lullaby to comfort him on his deathbed. When she eventually relents, she finds that Roy has tricked her. Despite his impending death, he refuses to change. One might imagine that the play thereby implies that her choice to extend him kindness is naïve, but on the contrary, Angels seems to endorse her kindness in that she extends it again to him, even after she knows he has tricked her: once he is finally dead, she says the Kaddish prayer over him. She has not been duped—she knows he has not changed, and she concludes the prayer with her own twist: “you sonofabitch” (257).

The Literary as Biblical  61 Claudia Barnett argues that Ethel ends up “effectively sitting shiva for Roy Cohn” (142). In terms of the play’s “Great Question,” the scene conveys not Roy’s triumph but Ethel’s. Through its opening and closing scenes, Angels ultimately poses this “Great Question” to its audience as well. It invites theatergoers to choose to believe in an illusion that gestures only indirectly and ironically towards what it nevertheless represents as a genuine possibility. The play in this sense aspires to achieve something of the quality of a religious icon, an indirect representation of the unrepresentable—which, indeed, is how the play casts America itself (echoing Sir Thomas More’s Utopia as an impossible ideal, literally “no place”): “You don’t live in America. No such place exists” (16). A few years before Angels premiered, the publication of Toni ­Morrison’s Beloved adumbrated the type of vague-yet-­authoritativelyoracular role of the Bible that is evident in both Angels and Pulp ­Fiction. At the same time, the novel also helps situate such uses of the Bible ­ merican literary lineage in which William Faulkner serves as within an A a critical inspiration. That is to say, Beloved illuminates its forbears as well as its contemporaries. While it is risky to outline similarities among works in three different mediums (film, theater, and novel), this chapter’s introductory gambit is intended merely to gesture toward the broader significance of the argument to which the rest of the chapter will confine itself—namely, the complex relationship between Beloved and Faulkner’s uses of the Bible. Subsequent chapters widen the significance of that relationship through extended readings of other contemporary novels. For the time being, however, this brief proleptic sketch of that larger significance, using Pulp Fiction and Angels as illustrative examples, is meant to highlight the pivotal role played by Beloved in Provincializing the Bible’s overall argument. The most telling similarity among the various invocations of the Bible in Pulp Fiction, Angels, and Beloved is their common insistence on the ethical import of such invocations. All three works raise and arguably satirize (especially in the case of Angels) the kinds of questions addressed by metaethics and normative ethics, but they focus primarily on applied ethics—on practical, perhaps even provincial, ethical questions. All three suggest that the Bible harbors productive sources for reflection on such questions. Notably, the ethical reflections they offer do not easily lend themselves to being described as drawing on “iconoclastic” as opposed to “traditional” interpretations of the Bible. On the contrary, they tacitly challenge such dichotomous categorizations, which is precisely the point at which they engage most provocatively with Faulkner’s legacy. Not only is this engagement richly evident in Beloved, but also, going further, Morrison’s novel can help teach readers to reinterpret ­Faulkner’s significance in this light. In a 1993 interview, she praised Absalom,

62  The Literary as Biblical Absalom! for how it depicts a ghostly sense of race: “Faulkner… spends the entire book tracing race, and you can’t find it. No one can see it, even the character who is black [Charles Bon] can’t see it… It is technically just astonishing… No one has done anything quite like that ever.”6 Literary influences, like literary echoes, are often conceived of as operating in only one direction, but Absalom and Beloved suggest that it can be more complicated than that. The latter is arguably haunted by the former, but Beloved can also teach us how to speak back to such ghosts.

Haunted by History: Ghostly Ethics Beloved asserts that the ghost story it tells “is not a story to pass on” (324), much as Absalom (discussed in Chapter 1) describes the story of Henry as something Quentin “could not pass”: these are stories one cannot get over, cannot “take a pass” and ignore, because they insistently haunt the present—sometimes against its will—demanding a ­response. At the same time, these are also stories that cannot be passed on in the sense that they cannot be told fully or adequately. The stories and the larger history of slavery and racism they represent are like the ghost, called ­Beloved, whom people try to forget, “like a bad dream,” though she still haunts them day and night—haunts their sleep, hovers obscurely in their photographs, or leaves uncanny footprints “so familiar” that they fit one’s own feet but then “disappear again as though nobody ever walked there” (323, 324). “Although she has claim” on those living in the present because she is intimately a part of their history, “she is not claimed” and indeed cannot be claimed because she remains apart: “no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name?” (323). The project of Morrison’s novel is to invoke the stories of slavery and racism that are hidden and lost within U.S. history and imaginatively claim those lost stories in the spirit of Romans 9:25 (which serves as her epigraph): “I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.” The book aims to lay claim to and tell these lost stories, even while showing why they can never be fully claimed or told. In short, the novel leaves the reader with a sense of the U.S. as a country whose very weather is haunted by “the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for,” crying out to the present to right past wrongs like Abel’s blood crying out for justice from the ground (324, Genesis 4:10). Beloved was inspired by a historically documented event: in 1856, Margaret Garner escaped with seven other slaves from a Kentucky plantation; they successfully crossed the Ohio River trying to gain their freedom, but the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act allowed the slave owners to capture them even there and return them to enslavement in Kentucky. When they captured Garner, she chose to kill her four children rather than allow them to be enslaved. She succeeded in killing just one of them,

The Literary as Biblical  63 her three-year-old daughter, by slitting the girl’s throat. ­Morrison’s complex reimagining of the Garner story takes place years after these tragic events: the Civil War has ended, and Sethe (the Garner figure), now a free woman living in Ohio, is haunted by the ghost of her dead baby girl. The novel explores various characters’ struggles to come to terms with the “rough choice” Sethe made to protect her children from ­slavery (212), especially when the past comes calling, as it were, in the form of Paul D—a man formerly enslaved with Sethe on a Kentucky plantation ironically called Sweet Home—at whose arrival Beloved, the ghost of Sethe’s dead child, ceases to be a disembodied poltergeist and instead materializes as a very strange flesh-and-blood young woman. The novel suggests that one of the reasons why a ghost is such a fi ­ tting symbol for the haunting legacy of slavery is that the history of African Americans in the U.S. is ghostly in the sense that it is at once there and not there. African American stories are integral to U.S. history yet have often been underplayed, overlooked, and avoided in white accounts of that history. As a result of the many ways in which literacy was made unavailable to slaves, there exist only a small number of firsthand a­ ccounts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American experiences. Most such experiences remain as a ghostly absence from historical ­records, testified to only indirectly and uncertainly. Even the firsthand accounts that do exist are obscured by the profound racism of the discursive contexts that shaped them.7 A range of contemporary thinkers have been attracted to the ­symbolism of ghosts and haunting as a way of representing ethical challenges. Perhaps most famous is Jacques Derrida, who, in Specters of Marx, ­insists that ethical commitments—“taking an oath, therefore promising, deciding, taking a responsibility, in short, committing oneself in a ­performative fashion”—assume a sense of future possibilities that, in turn, necessarily also assume a sense of the past, both of which are imaginative constructs (50). Derrida explains, “justice carries life ­beyond present life or its actual being-there, its empirical or ontological ­actuality” (xx). The resultant instability or indeterminacy of these imagined spaces within which one charts one’s ethical terrain manifests itself as a sense of being haunted: “this element itself,” this imagined temporal framing of ethical commitment, “is neither living nor dead, present nor absent: it spectralizes” (51). Ethical questions thus entail what Derrida calls hauntology: “The specter, as its name indicates, is the frequency of a certain visibility,” a representation of light frequencies that lie beyond the bounds of human perception and that therefore constitute only indirect representations, only gestures toward “the visibility of the invisible” (100). The symbolism of haunting can help articulate the kinds of ethical commitment that arise from challenges implicitly or explicitly posed by past injustices, as Avery F. Gordon argues in Ghostly Matters. Ghosts

64  The Literary as Biblical can represent the “seething absences and muted presences of our historical realities,” the uncanny ways in which past traumas often live on in the present (21). Gordon analyzes Beloved as literalizing this sense of temporality: “Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition” (8). Ghosts, in short, can aptly represent an ironically ­ambiguous-yet-urgent call to action. This haunted sense of temporality can entail a strong biblical resonance. Citing “the power of literary criticism in the twenty-first century to testify to and beyond the haunting truths of history,” Shelly Rambo argues that the biblical accounts of Jesus articulate a similar sense of being haunted, a sense of “remaining” whereby the stories of Jesus’s resurrection “may offer a discourse of love that does not fall prey to zeal but instead repeats the question at the heart of survival: what is it to you that he remains?” (940). In the figure of the revenant ghost and the other characters’ various responses to it, Beloved resonates with this biblical sense of being haunted. Scholars tend to emphasize the iconoclastic uses of the Bible in ­Morrison’s work.8 In distinction from such readings, Amy Hungerford argues that Morrison invokes the Bible’s sacred status to create an impression of supernatural literacy: by maintaining the traditional structure of ­literary allusion but foregrounding only two types of allusions—to the Bible and to the novel’s own accretive symbolism—Beloved conveys the impression that it possesses a supernatural literary authority. The novel represents the Bible as a source of that authority, much as Faulkner’s invocations of it draw on its authoritative role in Southern religious cultures, as discussed in Chapter 1. Hungerford concludes that ­Morrison does not necessarily critique or revise all traditional readings of the ­Bible as a sacred text: on the contrary, Hungerford contends, “Morrison presents the Bible as separable from white religion and violence against blacks” and as holy in that very separateness, in keeping with the root meanings of the biblical Hebrew and Greek words (qadosh and hágios, respectively) that are commonly translated as holy (99). There is an ethical urgency and ambiguity that permeate the ­novel’s biblical resonance. John McClure contends that while Beloved depicts a form of the biblical practice of discernment,9 the novel represents the ethical questions it raises as unanswered and potentially unanswerable in terms of traditional Christian soteriology. Apart from the work of “building peace” through spiritual discernment, McClure ­argues, “the novel knows of no healing strategy, no blessing, that can redeem” those who suffered and “died under slavery” (127).10 Drawing on ­M ircea ­Eliade’s spatial metaphor of enclosure, McClure shows how this m ­ etaphor helps illuminate Beloved’s implicit critique of categorical othering and exclusion in the name of religion, which he sees as fostered especially by the

The Literary as Biblical  65 false sense of certainty promoted by some Christian communities—a sense of certainty that should be undermined by the traditional practice of discernment but too often is not (100).11 He thus positions biblical discernment as at once traditional and iconoclastic, a rich irony that he leaves unexplored but that points to Morrison’s ­Faulknerian literary ­lineage, especially the ways in which Beloved exemplifies the literary legacy of Faulkner’s uses of the Bible. Morrison has acknowledged various ways in which Faulkner inspired her—especially through his representations of history.12 She has also influenced him, in a sense, because her novels have changed how some readers interpret his works. Whereas he was once read primarily as a regional exemplar of modernist formal techniques, Catherine Gunther Kodat argues that, partly as a result of novels such as Beloved, which teach readers to expand their sense of the possible uses of modernist strategies, Faulkner’s novels are increasingly read for his history—particularly for the ways in which his texts reveal how the southern modernist desire to ‘forget’ history arises as much from the white ruling class’s effort to remain in power during a period of social upheaval as from any individualistic psychosexual trauma. (197) Some readers continue to see Faulkner’s novels as articulating a characteristically modernist pessimism and disillusionment, specifically in contrast to Beloved.13 In a recent critical comparison of Absalom and Beloved, however, Peter Ramos insists that the former does not ultimately embrace pessimism but, like the latter, “attempt[s] to speak not silence, but that which might otherwise be unspeakable” (48). It is no coincidence that Ramos grounds this assertion in his recognition that Absalom is also like Beloved in that both are structured as ghost stories. Morrison’s more definitively supernatural ghost story arguably teaches us to read Absalom as one. Indeed, in light of her work, one might justifiably wonder whether Faulkner’s fascination with the notion of ghosts haunting the present derived as much from African American cultural traditions in the South as from Gothic literary topoi. In contrast to Absalom’s emphasis on the law and its relationship to patriarchal succession, Beloved thematizes maternal lineage: the novel testifies to how the repeated physical and psychological dismantling of enslaved African American families contributed to the silencing and erasure of their histories, thwarting not only the written but also the oral transmission and preservation of those histories. By Paul D’s reckoning, Sethe may have chosen Halle to be her husband because of his devotion to family: he purchased freedom for his mother, Baby Suggs, earning the money by working for five years on the one day of the week he was

66  The Literary as Biblical not forced to work at Sweet Home (13). Similarly, Sethe’s mother tried to safeguard their kinship by revealing the unique brand burnt into her skin (72–73). Sethe focuses on a different emblem of connection with her children, one largely unavailable to her own mother: breastfeeding, a union of mother and child perversely violated in what critics describe as the mammary rape of Sethe at Sweet Home (240, 236). Ultimately, these torturous representations of kinship serve in part to symbolize African American history. Many of the characters bear names that constitute attempts to claim and memorialize a family history—names that thus, at the same time, ironically testify to the difficulties they face in trying to make such kinship claims. Baby Suggs named herself after her husband (although they were never allowed to be married): he called her baby, and he was called Suggs (167). Of the characters who were at one time enslaved, Sethe is one of the few who was named by her mother, and her name memorializes the fierce, rough kind of love necessary to create a lasting mother-daughter connection in the world ­Morrison depicts, which retrospectively echoes the kind of love Sethe has for her own children: Sethe’s mother was “taken up many times” by white men during and after her forced crossing of the Atlantic (the slave trade’s infamous Middle Passage), but she “threw away” all the white babies without giving them names; she gave Sethe the name of the one African who impregnated her, the only man “she put her arms around” (74). Stamp Paid, a conductor on the Underground Railroad, re-named himself to attest to his forcibly broken family: Born Joshua, he renamed himself when he handed over his wife to his master’s son. Handed her over in the sense that he did not kill anybody, thereby himself, because his wife demanded he stay alive… With that gift, he decided that he didn’t owe anybody anything. (218) Sethe is inspired to call her dead baby “Beloved” by a phrase used in the baby’s funeral liturgy: “Dearly Beloved” (5). Yet as Sethe’s older daughter, Denver, later reveals, Beloved is not the baby’s “given name” but rather serves, like so many names in the novel, to memorialize the violence done to her family—a renaming born of violence—as well as Sethe’s resistance to that violence (246). Like Absalom and many other Faulkner novels, Beloved unfolds most of these kinship histories retrospectively and in fragments through the thoughts and retellings of various different characters. The narrative foregrounds the subjective differences among these characters through each one’s attempt to come to terms with Sethe’s “rough choice” (212). Ella, a neighbor, “understood Sethe’s rage in the shed… but not her

The Literary as Biblical  67 reaction to it, which Ella thought was prideful” (301–02). Sethe’s surviving children, by contrast, do not understand their mother’s rage in the shed and fear that she might try to kill them, too (242). Paul D simply insists that Sethe “was wrong” (194). Stamp Paid tries to justify Sethe’s actions to Paul D: “She ain’t crazy. She love those children. She was trying to out-hurt the hurter” (276). Baby Suggs “could not approve or condemn Sethe’s rough choice. One or the other might have saved her, but beaten up by the claims of both, she went to bed” (212). At different times, Sethe herself voices aspects of all these reactions: she justifies herself to Paul D by pointing out that her choice did save her children and herself from being re-enslaved (194), but her desperation to explain herself to Beloved (236) leads Denver to conclude, “It was as though Sethe didn’t really want forgiveness given; she wanted it refused. And Beloved helped her out” (297). Indeed, Sethe’s actions at one point suggest that she would make a different choice if she had to choose again: when she mistakenly thinks that a slave catcher has come again to take Beloved (in reality, it is only Mr. Bodwin, a friendly white man who was formerly a conductor on the Underground Railroad), she chooses this time to try to kill the slave catcher instead of her children (308–09, 311–12). More pointedly than Faulkner’s biblically resonant challenges to his readers (discussed in Chapter 1), Beloved seems bent on keeping readers from comfortably identifying with any settled judgment on Sethe’s “rough choice.”14 Indeed, James Phelan contends that the novel formally as well as thematically “shifts responsibility for the ethical judgments— or for the decision that no clear judgments are possible”—to the audience or reader from the very beginning of the narrative through to its end (Experiencing Fiction 54). Consider the killing itself, which is narrated in a flashback that is especially unsettling because it situates the reader in the repugnant position of viewing the event through a slave catcher’s eyes (174–78). The casual, familiar tone he takes in describing his work attempts to ally the reader with his vantage point through the colloquial use of “you”: “sometimes, you could never tell, you’d find them folded up tight somewhere: beneath floorboards, in a pantry—once in a chimney”; “you” had to be careful to keep them under control or “you ended up killing what you were paid to bring back alive” (174). This perspectival shift in the narration seems intentionally and uncannily discomforting precisely through its presumption of familiarity. Beloved works repeatedly to disorient the reader in such ways, transforming what at first seems familiar into the disturbingly unfamiliar. The novel’s opening, for example, strangely names Sethe’s house merely after its street number and insists the house is possessed by an angry spirit, an actual ghost: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom” (3). In the introduction to the 2004 reprinting, Morrison attests that, beginning with these opening lines, she

68  The Literary as Biblical wanted the reader to [feel] kidnapped, thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book’s population—just as the characters were snatched from one place to another, from any place to any other, without preparation or defense. (xviii) The formal disorientation effects help convey the novel’s themes, especially that of forcibly dismantled and denied kinship. Thus the novel implicitly asks to be interpreted in much the same way that Ella, when she was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, interpreted the stories told by those attempting to escape from slavery: “she listened for the holes—the things the fugitives did not say; the questions they did not ask. Listened too for the unnamed, unmentioned people left behind” (108). As Kodat contends, In Beloved, Morrison realizes that the real target for revision and reclamation is not the author’s use of individual black characters, but the very literary language itself. Beloved remembers [Absalom’s] most striking formal properties—its recursive use of multiple voices, its fragmentation, even its acknowledgment that some stories never can be properly told or forgotten—in order to respectfully, but nonetheless thoroughly and without regret, bury the notion of a “pure” white American modernism. (189) Morrison’s use of modernist strategies to create a sense of fragmentation, repetition, and the highly subjective nature of human ­experience—including a section influenced by stream-of-­consciousness writing (248–56)—serves to elaborate the novel’s central mystery, the identity of Beloved. While the reader learns the identity of the ghost right away in the opening pages, Morrison is able to create a sense of complex mystery about the ghost, ultimately inviting a variety of possible ways of identifying Beloved: the dead baby girl, a demonic “devil child” who eventually gets exorcised (308), or an African enslaved and brought by ship to the U.S. in the Middle Passage (like Sethe’s mother, which suggests a kind of mother-daughter circularity) (88, 248–51). Critics have also identified the ghost in more abstract terms as an embodiment of the crushing psychological and physical oppression of slavery that Sethe has internalized as shame and guilt, for example, or as a Christ figure. In these various and variable possible identifications, the ghost-made-flesh symbolizes the novel as a whole in its attempt to represent African American history and the enslavement of so many as a story that is to some extent untellable yet demands to be told.15

The Literary as Biblical  69 Beloved frames this history in terms of what Emily Griesinger contends is a realistic depiction of the intermingling or fusion of Christian and African spiritual beliefs that shaped nineteenth-century black folk religion (693). Morrison’s depiction of the ghost as genuinely supernatural is consistent with such beliefs. In this context, communion with ancestral spirits of the dead becomes what Nancy Berkowitz Bate argues is a Eucharistic sense of communion with the past: the novel “unites two of the ideas inherent in the first Eucharist, remembrance of the beloved and freedom from slavery. A third element of the Eucharist, remission from sin / freedom from the past, is dependent, paradoxically, upon remembering that past” (56). (Chapter 4 explores Eucharistic symbolism in detail.) The Bible—especially the language of the KJV—is intimately interwoven with this sense of the past depicted in Beloved. Like Absalom, ­Morrison’s novel is suffused with allusions to the KJV: key examples ­include its title, the epigraph from Romans, “go and sin no more” (103, quoting John 8:11), “Spirit willing; flesh weak” (203, from Matthew 26:41), and “Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof” (302, quoting ­Matthew 6:34). Also like Absalom, Beloved evinces some a­ mbivalence about the Bible as a text that has been used to uphold a host of ­oppressions, especially slavery and racism—which is perhaps another reason why it takes on a ghostly, ambiguous presence in both novels: they implicitly provincialize the Bible by raising questions about its ­ethical authority and relevance to their respective contexts. Faulkner ­reminds his readers that many believe “the Bible said” people of African descent were “cursed by God to be brute and vassal to all men of white skin” (Absalom 226). Similarly, Morrison has Baby Suggs critique the Bible as much as preach it: “She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek and its glorybound pure” (103). ­Rejecting the beatitudes’ promise of heavenly reward for earthly suffering (­Matthew 5:2–12), she insists “that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine… if they could not see it, they would not have it” (103). One of the most important biblical intertexts in Beloved comes from the Song of Solomon: “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine” (6:3; see also 2:16).16 This verse is echoed several times in the opening lines of four successive chapters, two of which are written in a stream-of-­ consciousness style: “Beloved, she my daughter. She mine”; “Beloved is my sister”; “I am Beloved and she is mine”; and “I am Beloved and she is mine” (236, 242, 248, 253). The last lines of three of these chapters echo their first: “she is mine,” “She’s mine,” and “You are mine” (241, 247, 256). These chapters articulate the thoughts of Sethe, Denver, and Beloved about their relationships with one another as mother, daughter, and sister. By contrast with the Song of Solomon source of these allusions, the lack of reciprocity in the claim to a loving possession suggests a childish, even destructively obsessive possessiveness in this love, as the

70  The Literary as Biblical fourth chapter ends with a chorus of the three women: “You are mine / You are mine / You are mine” (256). Paul D will later voice an alternative to such possessiveness in response to Sethe’s lament that her baby was her “best thing,” countering, “You your best thing, Sethe” (321, 322). That the biblical intertext should figure so ­prominently here, defining the mother-daughter-sister relationships, associates the KJV with the ­almost prelinguistic concatenation of consciousness and ­subconsciousness ­generally represented by stream-of-consciousness writing techniques. The novel’s climax reinforces this association, suggesting that the ­archaic language of the KJV symbolizes an ancient and mysterious ­spiritual power that exists prior to mere human language and that haunts the words of the novel like an ancestral spirit. Thirty women come to 124 to exorcise the ghost and save Sethe, and they do it by singing: “the voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words” (308). The power of this prelinguistic sound—the code beneath the words—is characterized in specifically biblical terms as saving Sethe through a kind of baptism: the women’s voices become “a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash” (308). The word “sound” is ­repeated here deliberately, transformed from a noun into a verb, an action, a power; in a similar repetition, the sound is not only powerful enough to sound (take the measure of) deep water but also becomes (metaphorically) water, washing over Sethe like a wave. Thus the very words of the novel itself are transformed as the line describes how the women “broke the back of words,” transforming their own words to tap into some powerful substratum of sound. The violence of this metaphor suggests the backbreaking violence of slavery, implying that its shattering traumas helped occasion this miraculous and climactic breakthrough whereby the women make the words their own.17 Here, as elsewhere in the novel, Morrison depicts a spirituality that intermingles Christian and African spiritual traditions. The ­biblical imagery of ­baptism used in this passage resonates with the repeated ­biblical intertext of the stream-of-consciousness chapters—chapters that similarly “break” and transform ordinary language—drawing on both the themes and language of the KJV to represent the idea of a powerful sound hidden or locked beneath ordinary words.

Postsecular Temporalities Beloved and Absalom situate their narratives in a retrospective relationship to a past horror—Henry’s murder of Bon and Sethe’s murder of Beloved—that haunts the present not just for its own sake but also as a kind of ghostly representative of a much larger history of oppression and struggle. Both narratives thematize haunting to explore the legacies

The Literary as Biblical  71 of racism and slavery in U.S. history, using the symbolism of ghosts to represent parts of this history that remain irretrievably lost to the present yet call out to it for recognition and justice. While neither novel is sanguine about the possibility of avoiding further tragedy in response to such ghostly calls, both insist that the histories they represent demand some kind of response. In both novels, these ghostly calls are voiced in biblical tones and images, which help reinforce the sense of being haunted by a past that is irrevocably lost to the present while also ­ethically and inescapably bound to it. Both novels thus invoke the Bible to help represent complex temporalities that might be described as postsecular: neither narrative entirely rejects secular modernity’s linear temporality, but both challenge it with a religiously infused nonlinear temporality. Again, as Kodat argues (quoted earlier), the modernist techniques employed in these novels do not merely represent a fragmented sense of subjectivity but reflect more broadly on the social imagination of shared communal and societal histories. That is to say, these novels thematically convey ethical challenges that formally contest what Russell West-Pavlov calls “common-sense” temporality: “the progressivist, evolutionist version of history which, despite a century of waning credibility and mounting attacks, is still largely the one we inhabit” (59). The recursive structure of the novels’ nonlinear narrative fragmentations and repetitions suggests not only the operations of human consciousness but also a repetitive and even ­circular sense of history, a temporality that takes on a distinctly sacred aspect—or more aptly a postsecular one—through the novels’ strong biblical resonances. After all, despite Frank Kermode’s assertion in The Sense of an Ending that biblical time is linear—that Christianity is simply ­apocalyptic— Christian traditions have generally attested to a multiplicity of temporalities, including the linear beginning, middle, and end of eschatology; the eternally present-tense “I am” of Exodus 3:14 and John 8:58; and the near-circular sense of the gospels as the type and cipher for all other stories (as noted in Chapter 1). Faulkner draws especially on biblical forms that entail repetition, such as the parallelism of the Psalms; the recursive use of keywords; and histories retold in different ways, which implicitly convey nonlinear aspects of biblical temporality. ­Beloved evinces the influence of these biblical elements in Faulkner’s narrative forms. For example, the novel repeats key images—such as ­water, trees, and kinship—to create an allusive structure that builds a sense of ­authority, as Hungerford argues, through its biblical resonance. That resonance, in turn, lends a prophetic aura to the ethical challenges faced by the characters (and potentially faced by readers) as they retell troubled histories that continue to trouble the present, much as in Absalom. Furthermore, because both novels set their fictional presents in a retrospective relationship to the central traumas and cataclysms they

72  The Literary as Biblical explore, they thereby foreground various characters’ interpretations of those events—particularly their identifications and ethical judgments. Both novels thereby situate themselves within the ancient tradition of reading the Bible’s recursively self-referential narrative structure— whereby the story of Jesus intentionally echoes that of Moses, which intentionally echoes that of Abraham (to choose the most obvious of many such e­ xamples)—as an invitation to allegorical and typological interpretations whereby one may read oneself into the stories and vice versa, reading the Bible stories as ciphers for one’s own postbiblical life circumstances and challenges.18 In modern terms, such analogical readings can be seen as essentially literary, which can help support Hungerford’s interpretation of ­Morrison and other contemporary writers as inviting belief in the ­literary more than in any given set of religious doctrines. Yet analogical readings are anything but foreign to Christian traditions; quite the contrary: such readings have historically been embraced as ­definitively spiritual. ­Traditional typological, tropological, and anagogical ­readings of scripture embrace figurative signification. Indeed, the modern Western sense of “the literary” owes its genesis in part to biblical hermeneutics.19 The mistaken assumption that Christian traditions have generally prioritized literal over figurative interpretation of the Bible is itself a product of modernity—of the same secularizing forces that gave rise to “scientific” readings of the Bible, such as the theological shift toward ­assuming univocal rather than analogical predication in statements about God. Classical Christianity generally assumed analogical predication in such statements. Thomas Aquinas, for example, held that God’s existence differs fundamentally from the existence of created things, but insofar as the existence of created things participates in God’s existence, the two are related analogically. 20 As John Milbank explains, “analogy does not imply ‘identity’, but identity and difference at once” (Theology and Social Theory 307). By contrast, the univocal predication promoted by Duns Scotus assumed an essential identity between signifier and signified in statements about God, which in effect promoted more literal interpretations of the Bible. Such interpretations also tend to impute a more linear sense of temporality to biblical narratives, in contrast to the complex multilayered temporalities conveyed in the Jewish and C ­ hristian practices of scriptural interpretations exemplified by Aristobulus, Philo, and the Christian “fourfold” levels of meaning. Faulkner and Morrison implicitly acknowledge certain ways in which the biblical and the literary may be seen as coextensive. In Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Addie Bundren muses that biblical terms such as “sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words” (173–74). This notion of a level of experience beyond the sound of words is not unlike Beloved’s representation of a sound beyond

The Literary as Biblical  73 words (discussed earlier): both suggest their respective author’s desire to articulate something beyond what the literal sense of ordinary language can convey. 21 In the larger context of both authors’ uses of the Bible, such passages resonate with the Pauline assertion that “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). 22 One could describe both authors as using the Bible to invite old-fashioned spiritual readings of their work, but it might be more precise and productive to describe them as inviting biblical readings—provided that one has in mind a provincialized, modern sense of the Bible, the prophetic authority of which is vague and questionable but not quite dismissible. This implicit invitation to a provincialized biblical interpretation is precisely what many later authors find so inspiring in Faulkner. In effect, Beloved can help readers appreciate how Faulkner’s work defines the literary in biblical terms that hearken back to premodern spiritual traditions. Yet both Morrison and Faulkner also embrace definitively modern forms and themes, which is one of the reasons why postsecular can serve as a useful term here: their works are informed by and reflective of aspects of secularization. Most tellingly, both authors invoke the Bible as ghostly in the ways described in Chapter 1—a ghostliness that arises from distinctively modern developments such as the Higher Criticism, scientific and technological advances, the increasingly archaic language of the KJV, and modern readers’ tendency to expect detailed representations of psychological interiority. Beloved, like Faulkner’s more influential novels, reflects how the Bible can appear to modern readers as a palimpsest, a record of partially effaced voices and histories that have been edited together in ways that leave considerable evidence of the differences and disjunctions among the originals such that the originals can seem to haunt the Bible in obscure yet insistent ways. The KJV in particular not only sounds archaic but is a composite translation of multiple translations created by approximately fifty scholars working on six different committees. Neither this nor any other English translation derives directly from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek manuscripts because none remain. Indeed, in Christian traditions, the Bible centers on a figure who, like Socrates, never wrote anything that survives and who seems to have been a predominantly or even exclusively oral teacher, which means that even the original manuscripts about him already entail a distance from his teachings as they were originally given. Moreover, the Bible offers four different stories of Jesus’s life, and the complexities of the sources and compilation of both the Greek texts and the even more ancient Hebrew ones are myriad. Morrison and Faulkner can help readers understand how this modern sense of biblical complexity can, perhaps unexpectedly, speak powerfully to modern concerns. As Benny Liew contends, the Bible can be especially useful for exploring “questions concerning multiple and interlocking

74  The Literary as Biblical differential relations of power” because it is, after all, “a collection of texts that was first written by the colonized but then has become instrumental for colonization” (xii). Seen in this light, it is unsurprising that Morrison and Faulkner would use the KJV to help convey the ethical challenges posed to the present by silenced and partially erased ­histories of oppression. The book has been used to help authorize oppressive discourses of racism, slavery, sexism, homophobia, anti-­Semitism, and the like, which means that its resignification can be powerful, especially when such resignification emphasizes the polyvalent multi-vocality of the text alongside not only the Bible’s thematic concerns for the outcast and oppressed but also its history of being repeatedly invoked on behalf of the oppressed. This aspect of the Bible’s reception history resonates with the text’s complex origins and recurrent themes, rendering it an especially rich intertext for modern and contemporary literary representations of marginalized voices. Consider how thematic interests in marginalization and oppression pervade biblical texts. The Mosaic covenant commands the I­ sraelites ­ ation grows to remember that they were once slaves so that, as their n more powerful, they will not oppress others (e.g., Deuteronomy 24:17–22). Yet they arguably do just that, forcibly taking the land ­ anaanites (Joshua 6–12) and then, much later as returned of the C ­exiles, abandoning their non-Israelite wives and children (Ezra 10). In the New Testament, the scribes and Pharisees suffer under Roman ­occupation but at the same time exclude and even do violence to the innocent (Matthew 23). The New Testament also records how the early ­followers of Jesus attempted to marginalize each other: Paul was forced to rebuke wealthy followers for humiliating poor ones (1 Corinthians 11:20–22). Some New Testament writings reinforce ­social inequalities, especially the marginalization of women and slaves (1 Timothy 2:11–15, Ephesians 5:22–24 and 6:5–8, and 1 Peter 2:18), while other such writings resonate with contemporary insights about marginalization. For example, Paul uses the language of binary oppositions such as wisdom / foolishness, strength / weakness, and honor / dishonor, flipping them in order to undermine them and thereby urge humility rather than self-righteous pride (e.g., 1 Corinthians 1:18–31). Most famously, he commends a sense of being spiritually equal despite social disparities: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Literary invocations of the Bible’s propensity for ironically subverting socioeconomic hierarchies—such as Beloved’s reference to ­Romans 9:25 (“I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved”)—can do much more than simply remind readers that the Bible has served to counter oppressions as well as reinforce them. Such invocations can help disrupt ostensibly

The Literary as Biblical  75 definitional distinctions between centers and margins by reminding readers that these disruptions themselves are a constitutive element in both traditional as well as radical and dissenting readings of the Bible. Such invocations can also thereby help unsettle the temporal logic of modernity itself. As West-Pavlov explains, “the singular linear temporality of colonialism has been superseded… by a broad critical consensus that colonial and postcolonial histories in fact consist of a plurality of heterogeneous temporalities” (164). Drawing on the work of Achille Mbembe, West-Pavlov elaborates, The logic of Europe’s temporal self-conception dictates that non-­ Europe must be a temporal abyss. Mbembe suggests that modernity is a largely self-referential term which Europe uses to define itself, arising out of its own engagements with tradition and ­authority since the Enlightenment. It is thus an essentially tautological term whereby “Modernity = the West = Modernity” (164). 23 Morrison and Faulkner challenge this reductive modern temporality, defining the literary as biblical in a way that is at once both modern and traditional and that thereby helps create a complex, multilayered sense of temporality, which, in turn, helps them articulate traces of historically marginalized subjectivities not fully available to representation. The Higher Criticism may be said to have provincialized the Bible by casting it into the “temporal abyss” that is modernity’s other—casting it as the subjective product of various premodern historical moments, which is to say, casting it as definitively not a timeless, universal text. Yet Beloved, Absalom, and other Faulkner narratives cast the Bible as powerful in part because of this very sense of temporal distance, ­reversing the modernist logic by using that sense of distance to provincialize their fictional presents. The biblical haunting effect subverts the assumed priority of the present, marking it as impinged upon and to some extent defined by a prior text, a temporal other that maintains a measure of authority over the present while remaining not fully available to it. In keeping with the thematic strain in the Bible that associates prophetic authority with the perspective of the exile, outcast, or outsiders (at one point or another in their respective stories, Abraham, Moses, Elijah, John the Baptist, and Jesus all fit such a description), Morrison and Faulkner suggest that its authority stems in part from its temporal otherness—a sense of holiness, as it were, derived in part from its very separateness—which allows it to function as modernity’s prophetic exile. In so doing, these authors use the Bible in a way that positions representations of marginalized subjectivities at the very ­center of the literary.

76  The Literary as Biblical

Light in August and Biblical Literary Tradition Faulkner’s Light in August constitutes an apt example: it depicts an outcast character who becomes a scapegoat for systemic societal sins, the significance of whose story, like Beloved’s, is represented in insistently biblical terms as exceeding the limitations of narrative and indeed of language itself. That character is Joe Christmas, who, as a baby, was abandoned at an orphanage by his grandfather, Eupheus “Doc” Hines. As an adolescent, he was abused by his foster father, Simon McEachern. As an adult, Joe apparently murders his lover, Joanna Burden, for which he ultimately gets shot and castrated. The extreme violence of his demise is motivated by racist outrage: Joanna is white, and Joe is black—or is said to be black, although he passes easily for white and is of uncertain parentage. While his surname derives from his having been left at an orphanage at Christmas, his full name has more than a wryly winking similarity to that of Jesus Christ, “the son of Joe,” as is written “in the Book”: he is “Joe, the son of Joe. Joe Christmas” (385). As elaborated shortly, his story exemplifies a description Faulkner once offered of certain forms of Southern Baptist Evangelicalism in response to a question posed to him during a 1957 interview at the University of Virginia: such religious phenomena are instances of “the human spirit aspiring toward something” but getting “warped and twisted in the process” (qtd. in Wilson, 72). Light in August may be described as emphasizing the latter half of that statement in that it depicts a variety of repugnantly bigoted and ignorant religious provincialisms. Whether or not Joe kills Joanna in self-defense after she draws a pistol on him (282), his feelings toward her seem already to have become tinged with violence and even antipathy in part as a result of her “praying over” him (104–08). This would not be surprising. After all, Joe’s racist and sexist religious zealot grandfather, Doc Hines, killed Joe’s father in the name of God and let Joe’s mother (Doc’s daughter) die while giving birth to Joe, refusing to call a doctor for her despite her evident need. The virulently misogynistic Doc sees himself as the instrument of God’s vengeance against “bitchery and abomination” (370). Moreover, Joe’s adoptive father, another abusively pious Christian, beats Joe routinely for such putative failures as not memorizing a catechism. In one scene, when Joe places his copy of the Bible on the floor in preparation for a beating, McEachern laments, “You would believe that a stable floor, the stamping place of beasts, is the proper place for the word of God” (149). Yet a stable was precisely the place where the Word of God became incarnate, according to orthodox Christian theology and biblical accounts of Jesus’s birth (Luke 2:7 and John 1:14), an irony Faulkner seems to drive home through his description of McEachern’s voice as “not unkind” but also “not human, personal, at all. It was just

The Literary as Biblical  77 cold, implacable, like written or printed words” (149). As in the exam­ orinthians notion ples noted earlier, these lines potentially invoke the 2 C that whether one interprets the Bible—and perhaps also Faulkner’s novels by implication—as mere words rather than as pointers toward a more profound though indirectly represented spiritual significance, which the Gospel of John describes as the living “Word” (John 1:14), amounts to nothing less than a life-or-death matter (“the letter ­killeth,  but the spirit giveth life”). McEachern is cast as inhuman (or “not ­human”) in forgetting that Jesus was born and died an outcast, while Joe sides firmly with the outcasts. When McEachern objects to Joe’s last name— “­Christmas. A Heathenish name. Sacrilege. I will change that” (144)— Joe insists ­silently to himself, “My name aint McEachern. My name is ­Christmas” (145). He embraces this sign of his abandonment much as he ­embraces his racialized othering. This tension between McEachern and Joe is similarly evident in the figure of a disgraced and deposed preacher, the Reverend Gail Hightower, who remains a fervent (if twisted) believer despite the fact that he seems to see the churches of the world like a rampart, like one of those barricades of the middleages planted with dead and sharpened stakes, against truth and against that peace in which to sin and be forgiven which is the life of man. (487) Hightower denigrates “Protestant music” as “demanding… death” in an attempt to take revenge on God “as though” the worshippers, “having been made what they were by that which the music praised and symbolized, …took revenge upon that which made them so by means of the praise itself” (367). He concludes bitterly, “Pleasure, ecstasy they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and praying” (368). Despite these criticisms, Hightower’s own life seems a fading and even ghostly presence-in-absence, as Faulkner uses his ­favorite Gothic metaphor repeatedly to represent Hightower’s subjectivity: he “grew to manhood among phantoms, and side by side with a ghost” (474), “so is it any wonder” that he thinks “this world is peopled principally by the dead?” (485; see also 477, 479, and 480). Alongside these depictions of “warped and twisted” religiosity, the novel also conveys “the human spirit aspiring toward something”— which is perhaps why a 1932 review by J. Donald Adams declared that Light in August constituted the first time Faulkner had demonstrated that he could, at times, “lift his eyes above the dunghill” (43). Interwoven with Joe’s story is that of Lena Grove, “a goodlooking country gal” who is trying to find the man who jilted her and left her pregnant and disgraced in the eyes of her family (504). She is helped along the way by

78  The Literary as Biblical Byron Bunch, a man so taken with her that he goes on trying to help her despite the fact that her aim is to reunite with her erstwhile lover—­ although, as another character opines, she may have had another aim all along: I think she was just travelling. I dont think she had any idea of finding whoever it was she was following. I dont think she had ever aimed to, only she hadn’t told [Byron] yet. I reckon this was the first time she had ever been further away from home than she could walk back before sundown in her life. (506) Lena and Byron are provincial and arguably even warped in their own ways, but they are both rather likable and perhaps even commendable as they stubbornly, naively, and comically aspire toward something greater than themselves and their present circumstances. Their ongoing journey, described in the novel’s final pages, symbolizes such aspirations. Not only does Faulkner give Lena the last word, but also his own words throughout the novel often seem to articulate an analogous aspiration, resonating with biblical language in an effort to reach beyond themselves, to elevate the story beyond what ordinary language can convey, thereby inviting ambiguous yet insistently biblical interpretation. For example, when Byron first meets Lena, Joanna’s house is burning in the distance, leaving its smoke visible for miles: “It seemed to [Byron] that fate, circumstance, had set a warning in the sky all day long in that pillar of yellow smoke, and he too stupid to read it” (83). The allusion to God’s beacon, the “pillar of cloud” that leads the Israelites on their journey out of Egypt in Exodus 13:21, lends a prophetic significance to the scene and suggests a biblical symbolism latent in Lena’s journey. Likewise, Faulkner uses the biblical phrase “under the sun” in a way that differs from Ernest Hemingway’s allusion to Ecclesiastes in The Sun Also Rises (published six years before Light in August). The phrase occurs more than two dozen times in Ecclesiastes; one such passage gives the impression of an insuperable and uncaring fate: I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. (Ecclesiastes 9:11) When Joe first enters Joanna’s home by climbing in through an open window, the Ecclesiastes allusion suggests something more than mere coincidence in this easy opportunity for his entrance:

The Literary as Biblical  79 The window was even open, propped open with a stick. ‘What do you think about that,’ he thought. He stood beside the window, his hands on the sill, breathing quietly, not listening, not hurrying, as if there were no need for haste anywhere under the sun. (229) Why rush when all one’s movements are fated? Yet Faulkner wryly complicates any simple assumption that this particular sense of fate or destiny is necessarily inescapable or even negative: Joe “believed with calm paradox that he was the volitionless servant of the fatality in which he believed that he did not believe” (280). As John Duvall argues, Joe’s relationship with Joanna is not entirely destructive but, like Byron’s relationship with Lena, offers a productive if paradoxically self-­destructive “challenge” to the misplaced values of their community (Faulkner’s Marginal Couple, xvii). Similarly, McEachern’s wife trusts Joe with the secret of her “meagre” stash of “nickels and dimes,” which Faulkner describes in biblical terms as the “fruit of… small chicanery and deceptions”; despite her trickery, “none anywhere under the sun” could “say her nay” (168). These apparent paradoxes echo each other in that both imply something right, even possibly righteous, within ostensible wrongs. Faulkner frequently uses language in ways that court a related sense of paradoxical self-contradiction in order to suggest that he aspires to tell a tale somehow beyond what could be described according to simple algorithms of right and wrong or straightforward uses of verbs and adjectives. 24 Witness his use of negations, especially in high-tension scenes such as the last meeting between Joanna and Joe: “she did not rise from where she knelt beside the bed when he entered. She did not stir; her voice did not cease. Her head was not bowed… She did not seem to be aware that he had entered” (280, emphasis added). When she turns to him, “she did not even ask the question; he did not even need to ­reply” (281). Shortly thereafter, Faulkner uses the same technique to describe the townspeople’s reaction to her burnt corpse: they would never forgive her and let her be dead in peace and quiet. Not that. Peace is not that often. So they moiled and clotted… not believing that the rapt infury of the flames and the immobility of the body were both affirmations of an attained bourne beyond the hurt and harm of man. Not that. (289, emphasis added) The allusion to Hamlet’s famous “undiscovered country” (3.1.78) reinforces the implication that these negations point toward an affirmative possibility, however ambiguously and indirectly. This technique differs from litotes, in which a negation implies understatement (often by way

80  The Literary as Biblical of a double negative, such as “he was not uncharitable”): by contrast, Faulkner’s negations are less arch and more searching. Consider Faulkner’s description of Joe: “he looked like a tramp, yet not like a tramp either”; “there was something definitely rootless about him, as though no town nor city was his, no street, no walls, no square of earth his home” (31). These negations resonate with the story of Cain and the curse by which he is doomed to be “a fugitive and a vagabond” but not entirely so because he remains protected by God’s mark (Genesis 4:11–15). So it is in keeping with Faulkner’s representation-by-negation technique that Joe would negate the racist belief that the inheritors of Cain’s curse were marked by dark skin tones. Joe is considered black because he says he is, but he can pass as white and confesses to Joanna, when asked how he knows that one of his parents was “part” black, “I dont know it” (254). He then adds, “If I’m not, damned if I haven’t wasted a lot of time” (254). The townspeople tell and retell Joe’s story, seeing themselves reflected in it but then rejecting that reflection: “they told it again: ‘He dont look any more like a nigger than I do. But it must have been the nigger blood in him” (349). The interpretive challenge he poses to their discursive constructions of race foregrounds the interpretive challenge posed by his story more broadly. The frame narrative reinforces that challenge as Byron and Hightower retell and reinterpret Joe’s story to one another— much as various characters retell and reinterpret Sutpen’s story in Absalom, and various characters reflect on and judge Sethe’s “rough choice” in Beloved. Insofar as Joe’s story alludes to the Gospel stories of Jesus, the interpretive challenges foregrounded by Light in August take on a biblical cast. In a 1956 interview with Jean Stein Vanden Heuvel, Faulkner recalled his process of composing the four parts of The Sound and the Fury in a way that resonates suggestively with certain traditions of interpreting the four Gospels (especially given the Easter setting of the novel): I saw that I had not told the story [in the first section of the novel from Benjy’s perspective]. I tried to tell it again, the same story through the eyes of another brother [in the second section from Quentin’s perspective]. That was still not it. I told it for the third time through the eyes of the third brother. That was still not it. I tried to gather the pieces together and fill in the gaps by making myself the spokesman [for the fourth and final section]. It was still not complete. (David Minter 233) Faulkner concluded, “I never could tell it right… I tried hard and would like to try again, though I’d probably fail again” (Minter 233). Christians have often interpreted the differences among the four Gospels as gesturing toward the notion that the true story of Jesus cannot be fully

The Literary as Biblical  81 articulated by any one story or human perspective because it to some extent remains larger and other than any one person might fully comprehend. There seems to be a similar notion implicit in Faulkner’s description of The Sound and the Fury, which he casts as succeeding through its very failures because these successfully point toward a story so powerful that it remains somehow beyond the reach of ordinary language and storytelling. Light in August likewise suggests that the true story about Joe cannot be fully told. In this light, Faulkner’s novels aim at something rather different from the aim of other modernist writings that emphasize the limitations of language—something rather more biblical. This is not to claim that his novels reflect a particular set of modern systematic theological propositions. Instead, it is to claim that his language and narrative structure often invite interpretive methods and modes that resonate strongly with traditional ways of interpreting the Bible. This is especially clear in those of his narratives that draw inspiration from the story of Jesus. Donald Kartiganer argues that four major characters in Faulkner’s novels are so inspired: Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom; Isaac McCaslin in Go Down, Moses; the corporal in A Fable; and Joe Christmas. Kartiganer contends that all four undertake a “great act that accomplishes nothing,” echoing the crucifixion but in a contrastingly negative, non-redemptive sense (“Getting Good at Doing Nothing” 67). Light in August drives home this contrasting comparison not only through Joe’s name and age (he dies at 33, the same age traditionally ascribed to Jesus when he was crucified) but also by using the word crucify in association with his lynching (289, 368). As with Quentin’s death in The Sound and the Fury and the corporal’s in A Fable, Joe’s demise brings no resurrection, no outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and saves no one; it is simply an exercise in violence—except potentially that, as a work of fiction, it possesses a kind of afterlife in the imaginations of and conversations among its readers. 25 Even so, Joe is less a Christ figure than a scapegoat. Jessie McGuire Coffee points out that, in keeping with the description of the scapegoat ritual in Leviticus 16:21–22, Joe’s “sins are not his own but the sins of society” (45). Many critics agree that his story reflects and challenges his community’s discursive constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Melanie Masterton Sherazi contends that the story “both unsettles and highlights the performative and potentially punishing quality of heteronormative social relations” (503). 26 Abdul-Razzak Al-Barhow analyses how, by “[f]ocusing on the unstable margins of Jefferson, and presenting the role of African Americans as an unbridgeable gap at the heart of the text, Faulkner provides… an even more eloquent expression of the southern need for social change” (70). In this sense, Joe shares important features with the figure of Beloved in that both reflect not only personal but also more broadly societal sins.

82  The Literary as Biblical Both are cast out, in the end, in ways that foreground rather than remedy the sins they reflect and represent. They thus suggest a mysterious ethical challenge: while neither figure is depicted as purely or wholly “innocent,” both suffer in ways likely to prod readers to think critically about the societies that produced such stories. Stephen Barnes explains, “Faulkner, like many writers, seeks to subvert the status quo, offering instead a deeper form of righteousness that concerns itself with the heart—or imagination—of his readers” (55). That this “deeper form of righteousness” not only defies the conventional moral judgments of the “status quo” but also is framed in ambiguously yet insistently biblical terms links Faulkner and Morrison to a biblical literary tradition that reaches back at least as far as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Blake. 27 Faulkner’s writings repeatedly reflect the influence of the English Romantic poets, 28 who famously allied the Bible with poetic imagination. 29 Shelley in particular, despite rejecting traditional religion, draws on the Bible to affirm the prophetic notion that true justice lies beyond what he calls “the calculating faculty,” which he sees as being unquestioningly and destructively championed by modern “promoters of utility” (A Defence of Poetry 501).30 Indeed, he justifies the importance of poetry by casting it in biblical terms as a prophetic moral corrective. 31 Blake similarly rejects what he calls “systematic reasoning” in favor of inspiration and creative energy: in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he implicitly endorses the “Devil,” who avers, “Jesus was all virtue and acted from impulse, not from rules” (100). A chronologically and artistically less distant forebear of Faulkner’s, Dostoevsky, who was one of Faulkner’s favorite novelists, likewise disdains utilitarian conceptions of morality and famously invokes the Bible to help undermine such conceptions in Crime and Punishment.32 Beloved seems inspired in part by this aspect of Faulkner’s work as well as by African spiritual traditions in its creation of an enigmatically profound ethical challenge for its readers. The novel may thus be read as an innovative new development of a literary tradition in which biblical allusions have been used to help define the literary through representations of ethical imperatives that lie beyond utilitarian calculation. 33 Inspired in part by the idea of biblical ethics that subvert ordinary human legal systems of crime and punishment, this literary lineage includes authors who reject traditional forms of religion, such as Shelley and Faulkner. It is this lineage that is taken up in new ways by postsecular American literature, drawing especially on the latter author’s contributions. Morrison helps illuminate how he situates representations of marginalized subjectivities at the center of the literary and how he invokes the Bible to cast his art as a prophetic response to the ethical challenges he finds most productively articulated through this biblical literary tradition. Moreover, Beloved further illuminates the challenges his works pose to

The Literary as Biblical  83 their readers through what Phelan describes as Morrison’s technically innovative transfer of the responsibility for making ethical judgments to her readers (noted earlier). Briefly consider, by contrast, another American novel from the 1930s that situates itself within a related but importantly different literary tradition: John Steinbeck’s 1939 The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck repeatedly invokes the Bible in this story to help champion the Oklahomans who were forced to flee their home state during the Great Depression. The novel casts them as Israelites who escape from Egypt in the hope of settling in the promised land of Canaan—in this case, California— which turns out to hold only false promises: the Californians greet the Oklahomans with such contempt and malice that the land of milk and honey becomes just another wilderness of hardships. 34 Tamara Rombold explains that, in his uses of the Bible, Steinbeck “has taken away the miracles and the eschatological elements and has placed all the responsibility and action in the hands of the men and women of his own day” (163–64). In keeping with this practical emphasis, The Grapes of Wrath draws far more on naturalist and realist literary traditions than Faulkner’s novels do, and those formal tendencies align with the novel’s implicit embrace of utilitarian philosophy, as John J. Han attests. 35 While both Steinbeck and Faulkner were drawn to biblical allusions in their stories about oppression and marginalization, The Grapes of Wrath does not evince the profoundly self-dissatisfied struggle with narrative structure and language itself that Faulkner’s novels do. Deborah Cosier Solomon describes Steinbeck’s prose as “pragmatic,” evincing a “simplicity” that gains “authority” by mimicking some of the characteristic sounds of the KJV (568). The following passage, in which Grampa’s grave is dug, is indicative: On the edge of the ring of firelight the men had gathered. For tools they had a shovel and a mattock. Pa marked out the ground—eight feet long and three feet wide. The work went on in relays. Pa chopped the earth with the mattock and then Uncle John shoveled it out. Al chopped and Tom shoveled, Noah chopped and Connie shoveled. (148–49) Steinbeck offers a resolutely concrete and mundane vision, which is reflected in his prose style—in stark contrast to Faulkner’s. Faulkner’s representational struggles also differ importantly from those of many of his more experimental contemporaries: he seeks to signify not an utterly nihilistic vision (although nihilism clearly informs his narratives, both formally and thematically) but a more biblical literary vision, which, however provincialized, gestures toward a sense of significance and moral authority beyond what ordinary language can articulate.

84  The Literary as Biblical It is not Steinbeck’s uses of the Bible but Faulkner’s that resonate strongly with contemporary works such as Beloved—and arguably also with Angels and Pulp Fiction. These stories relativize their own claims, eschewing epistemic certainty in favor of highlighting their own provincial limitations while also insisting that the urgent-yet-ambiguous ethical challenges they represent are true on some level—call it a figurative, spiritual, postsecular, or perhaps most productively a biblical level of interpretation. Beloved exemplifies the contemporary inheritors and innovators of this biblical literary tradition. Yet one also finds less likely but no less illuminating examples, and it is to these examples that Chapters 3 and 4 now turn.

Notes 1 Kung Fu aired from 1972 to 1975. See Adele Reinhartz, 140–41. 2 See Mary Ann Beavis, “‘Angels Carrying Savage Weapons’: Uses of the Bible in Contemporary Horror Films.” 3 The version referred to here is the 1995 combined edition of the 1993 and 1994 publications of the two-part play rather than the revised 2013 edition because the earlier version may more closely reflect the literary and cultural context of the play when it premiered in the early 1990s. 4 Mike Nichols’s 2003 HBO miniseries version of Angels does not aim to achieve this effect. 5 See Laura Levitt, “What is Religion, Anyway? Reading the Postsecular from an American Jewish Perspective,” 109–10. Levitt points out that one should not assume American Jewish authors write from a religious perspective. See also Lisa Mulman, Modern Orthodoxies: Judaic Imaginative Journeys of the Twentieth Century, and Eric J. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America. 6 Quoted in John N. Duvall, “Toni Morrison and the Anxiety of Faulknerian Influence,” 8. Morrison explores the visible invisibility of blackness in U.S. literature in Playing in the Dark. 7 See Dwight A. McBride, Impossible Witness: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony. 8 As Amy Hungerford explains, most argue “that Morrison is revising or criticizing the aspects of the Bible she invokes—the Pauline notion of love, the erotics of blackness, the status of the prophet, the ground of holy community, the theology of slavery” (99). By contrast, Hungerford, like John ­McClure, offers a reading of Beloved that not only acknowledges but highlights the strengths of its more traditional, less iconoclastic invocations of the Bible. For her, what Morrison invokes “more than anything else” through her biblical allusions “is the Bible’s status as a sacred book” (99). Other scholars, Hungerford avers, “tend to leave unanalyzed the ‘awe and respect’—the ­sacredness of the text—to which Morrison points” (166 n. 43). 9 Noting that the epistles of Paul have traditionally served as paradigmatic examples of discernment, McClure finds it particularly apt that Beloved immerses itself in Pauline writings: Beloved … takes its title, its epigram, and the name of its male protagonist from [Paul’s] letters, and it shares Paul’s preoccupation with questions of love, the flesh, free will, and the relation of law to revelation.

The Literary as Biblical  85 Discernment, as Paul and other biblical authors describe it, is a faculty made necessary by the abstract nature of divine law, which must always be interpreted when applied, and the fallen nature of the creation, which condemns humans to grope for the truth in a domain dense with deception. (122) 10 McClure holds that the story “even implies that the disremembered can find no refuge in death, that their suffering continues beyond the grave” (127). 11 As Bruno Latour points outs, skeptical doubt and questioning are not the exclusive purview of iconoclasts and progressives: witness how effectively ­t wenty-first-century conservatives have mobilized skeptical doubt in ­response to both climate change science and mainstream journalism. Likewise, while McClure contends that doubt and uncertainty in s­ piritual ­matters create a distinctly postmodern “weak ontology” (drawing on the work of Gianni Vattimo, Stephen K. White, and Jane Bennett) that is reflected in contemporary postsecular literature and that curbs what McClure characterizes as the exclusionary absolutism of traditional ­Christian orthodoxy (McClure 129–30), such traditions often incorporate a distinctly premodern and biblical sense of mystery, incomplete knowledge, and limited understanding. Two well-known passages from Hebrew scripture and the New Testament, respectively, serve as illustrations: “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8–9; see also chapters 40 and 44), and we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face; now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (1 Corinthians 13:9–12) McClure does attest that Beloved affirms certain traditional Christian beliefs, such as “the reality of the spiritual world, the utility of prayer, the place of revelation, the power of prophetic witness, the worth of religious community, the reality of ‘blessedness,’ and the wisdom of persevering on spiritual paths” (129–30). 12 Morrison’s 1955 master’s thesis explores Faulkner’s work, and in an address at the 1985 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, she describes how his work inspired her; nevertheless, in a 1983 interview with Nellie McKay, she explains that she does not view her work as being “like” Faulkner’s. See Duvall’s discussion of these statements and of the relationship between Faulkner and Morrison in “Toni Morrison and the Anxiety of Faulknerian Influence.” 13 See Philip Goldstein, “Black Feminism and the Canon: Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Morrison’s Beloved as Gothic Romances,” and Phillip Novak, “Signifying Silences: Morrison’s Soundings in the Faulknerian Void.” 14 In consonance with the argument in Chapter 1 that Faulkner’s uses of the Bible achieve a polyphonic double-voicing effect, Bula Maddison uses Bakhtinian theory to interpret Beloved as articulating dialogical truths about slavery and racism in U.S. history.

86  The Literary as Biblical 15 See James Phelan’s discussion of the variable significance of Beloved (the character) in Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology, 175–79. 16 See Katherine Clay Bassard’s discussion of the role of the Song of Songs in Morrison’s work more broadly in “The King James Bible and African American Literature.” 17 The author is indebted to Katherine Bassard for this insight. 18 Matthew Engelke explores the relationships between Bible reading and Christian temporalities in “Reading and Time: Two Approaches to the ­Materiality of Scripture.” See also Joseph Rivera’s “Figuring the Porous Self: St. Augustine and the Phenomenology of Temporality.” 19 For an account of the divergence of literary from biblical studies, see ­Stephen Prickett’s Words and the Word: Language, Poetics, and Biblical Interpretation. 20 See David Bentley Hart, 300–18. Charles Taylor explains, From the mechanization of the world picture, and the atrophy of a sense of God as connected to a meaningful cosmos, the sense falls away of a hierarchy of being, and we lose the context for a philosophy of analogy, and hence for a certain understanding of our (limited) access to a knowledge of God. … Once this move has been made, God becomes more easily conceivable as a very big and powerful Being. (A Secular Age 774) 21 Critics such as Roger Lundin interpret Addie as articulating a “desperate sadness” stemming to a significant extent from her realization that “even language has abandoned us” to “hollow emptiness” (Beginning with the Word 74). Lundin reads this passage as akin to Benjy’s section in The Sound and the Fury in that both give voice to the modern crisis of representation. Stephen Barnes emphasizes the larger contexts of such passages, contending, for example, that Addie’s son, Jewel, embodies a “solution” to the “­modernist disillusionment with words” (64). She at one point recalls learning that “words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at” (As I Lay Dying 171). Yet Barnes argues that these musings of hers are far from Faulkner’s last word on this subject, so to speak; on the contrary, his writing “illustrates an attempt on his part to emerge from his own era’s dispassionate skepticism by combating what lies at its heart: a loss of hope in humanity’s singular gift that is speech” (64). 22 C. S. Lewis takes this one step further: it is, perhaps, idle to speak here of spirit and letter. There is almost no ‘letter’ in the words of Jesus. Taken by a literalist, He will always prove the most elusive of teachers. Systems cannot keep up with that darting illumination. (Reflections on the Psalms 100) See also Dale Martin’s Biblical Truths, 112–20. 23 Arguing against Frederic Jameson’s thesis in A Singular Modernity, West-Pavlov contends that “European modernity itself is neither singular nor free from ambivalence. European modernity itself depends upon an internal temporal ‘other’ often provided, for instance, by constructions of the medieval period” (169). David James similarly argues that “modernism is an unfinished argument as much as a principle of organization” (78–79). Yet he warns that “the path to seeking out a truly alternative lexicon of historical organization, value judgment, and aesthetic taxonomy” tends to double

The Literary as Biblical  87 back on itself eventually, reverting to “the solace afforded by durable, mutually agreed keywords of inquiry and professional solidarity” (79). 4 Alfred Kazin makes a similar point: 2 Language [for Faulkner] never quite comes up to the physical shock of the event, the concussion to consciousness. The townspeople exist in Light in August as our chorus in life—they ask questions whose very function is to deny the possibility of an answer. Faulkner’s grim, sarcastic asides show that he views language as in some basic sense unavailing. (253) 25 Anthony Dyer Hoefer reads As I Lay Dying as resonating provocatively with biblical apocalyptic writings but notes that, unlike the Revelation of Saint John the Divine, the novel does not end with the promise of final judgment and revelation: while Byron’s devotion to Lena suggests “the possibility of something that transcends” the otherwise hopeless “prevailing narratives,” “the novel simply feints toward its possibility and remains deeply skeptical” (60). 26 Nathan Tipton reads Joe’s demise as a homoerotic scene of lynching. 27 Harold K. Bush, Jr. argues that Mark Twain’s work similarly valorizes traditional Christian themes and commitments alongside his famous critiques of religion. Bush contextualizes these two impulses in terms of the “spiritual crisis” of the late nineteenth century, the causes of which included Darwinian evolution, the Higher Criticism, new psychological theories of human consciousness, and “grief and trauma from the Civil War” (3). 28 Dieter Meindl builds on Cleanth Brooks’s work to show how Faulkner’s novels were influenced by English Romantic poetry. 29 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the thirteenth chapter of Biographia Literaria, defines the imagination in biblical terms: “The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (167, referencing Exodus 3:14). Alan P. R. Gregory reads Coleridge as developing a theologically infused conception of the imagination that amalgamated radical with traditional impulses. 30 See Norman W. Jones, The Bible and Literature: The Basics, 103–05. 31 Michael Kaufmann provides an overview of recent scholarly explorations of the nineteenth-century relationship between literature and religion. 32 Maria Bloshteyn provides a useful overview of the scholarship attesting to Dostoevsky’s influence on Faulkner in “Dostoevsky and the Literature of the American South.” Stephen Carter attests, “The reduction of morality to ­rational utilitarian calculation attracted Dostoevsky’s particular hostility” (90). For an account of Dostoevsky’s objections to utilitarianism (­especially as articulated by Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s translation of John Stuart Mill), see Alexander Boyce Gibson’s The Religion of Dostoevsky (28 ff.). 33 Morrison defends nineteenth-century American Romanticism in “Romancing the Shadow,” the second chapter in Playing in the Dark. See also Eberhard Alsen’s edited collection The New Romanticism. 34 See H. Kelly Crockett’s analysis of biblical allusions in The Grapes of Wrath. 35 While critics debate the extent to which The Grapes of Wrath exhibits characteristic features of naturalist literature, the relationship is clearly significant, as essays by Charles L. Etheridge, Jr. and Alan Gibbs demonstrate.

3 Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization Ceremony and So Far from God

Among the many eulogies crafted for Prince in the days following his passing, Peter Coviello’s stands out for articulating one of the primary reasons why, beyond the startling catchiness of his Top 40 hits, so many found the pop icon inspiring: Everybody knows that Prince is a miracle of transitivity, invoking then bewildering all the nearest idioms of race, sex, gender, time. (Think of his hotly feminized masculinity, his queer blackness that is also straightness, though one that remains, indelibly, queer as fuck.) (“Is There God after Prince?”) Yet this icon of subversive transitivity allied himself with a conservative Christian community. Claire Hoffman, in a Billboard article, maximizes the shock value: “Yes, the most sexually charged artist in music became a Jehovah’s Witness.” Despite this conversion, “his music,” as Candida Moss attests, “remained devotedly sensual.” Prince at times repudiated forms of sexual expression he had once condoned; his transitivity did not eliminate such conflicts, but it did suggest that they were not the whole story, certainly not the last word.1 Indeed, Moss concludes that his conversion revealed that “in some ways,” even before he converted, “Prince was always religious.” The surprise such statements reflect and anticipate derives from an underlying assumption that goes beyond the simple observation that conservative forms of Christianity tend to be sex-negative (thanks especially to the legacy of Neoplatonism, Stoicism, and the g­ radual theological development of what Charles Taylor calls “excarnation”2). The surprise also suggests that radical critique and traditional Christian faith are anathema to each other. Despite the long history of Christianity’s vital role in social justice movements such as abolitionism, Civil Rights, the New Deal, and Great Society liberalism, the prevalence in contemporary politics of the Christian Right and other forms of religious conservatism seems to have led many secular commentators today to assume that traditional Christianity is inherently conservative.

Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization  89 Prince’s transitivity implicitly subverted that assumption as well, potentially serving as a reminder that sex, art, and faith (including traditional forms of Christian faith) can be understood as intimately interrelated in their potential to gesture toward what Coviello describes as “the exhilarating limitlessness of the world apart from the knowable and known”—the “possibility of that cataclysmic otherwise,” “a world fantastically apart from ourselves”—which, according to him, can be glimpsed or intuited only in and through ourselves in the here and now. In this, his eulogy recalls Slavoj Žižek’s definition of his key term in The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?: “what is the Absolute? Something that appears to us …. say, through the gentle smile of a beautiful woman,” which he describes as a “miraculous” phenomenon in which “another dimension transpires through our reality” (128). His argument resonates with a long history of writings—from Plato’s Symposium to Georges Bataille’s Death and Sensuality and beyond—in which romantic love has been represented as an embodied awareness of radical incompleteness. In Žižek’s words, “the ultimate mystery of love is therefore that incompleteness is in a way higher than completion” (146–47, emphasis original). What Coviello characterizes as a “cataclysmic otherwise” can help ­occasion critique precisely insofar as it at once engages in quotidian experience and also intimates possible alternatives to the putative givens of such experience. Two relatively recent studies provide examples that, taken together, suggest contiguities in the kinds of temporal ­disruptions—sexual as well as spiritual—represented in the postsecular narratives analyzed in Provincializing the Bible.3 Molly McGarry a­ rgues that “certain Anglo-American spiritualities uniquely fostered emergent spiritualities precisely because spiritual embodiment—from hearing the voices of the dead to being moved bodily by the spirit—grounded religious ­experience, which in turn shaped social and sexual subjectivities” (Ghosts of Future Pasts 157). Elizabeth Freeman shows how “queer pleasures” have the potential to contest the “temporal orders on which heteronormativity depends for its meanings and power” because such pleasures can disrupt the capitalist “system of production and consumption” that is “­imbricated” with those temporal orders (Time Binds 58). As McGarry warns, however, one “must avoid both casting spirituality as false consciousness and reviving it in an implicit apologia that fails to acknowledge its place in the history of bodily regulation of queer subjects” (Ghosts of Future Pasts 158). Christian institutions and communities have frequently supported the modern Western imperative to disembodying self-abstraction (noted in the Introduction), which helps explain why the Bible often figures as a contested intertext in literary representations of marginalized subjectivities. Charles Taylor describes this imperative as part of “the great disembedding” (A Secular Age 146–58). Embeddedness, for Taylor, is

90  Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization both a matter of identity—the contextual limits to the imagination of the self—and of the social imaginary…. But the new buffered identity, with its insistence on personal devotion and discipline, increased the distance, the disidentification, even the hostility to the older forms of collective ritual and belonging. (A Secular Age 156) He notes that this individualistic turn was characteristic of society’s “disciplined élites,” a distinction that points toward a catalytic insight underlying many postsecular literary representations of marginalized, non-“élite” subjectivities (A Secular Age 156). Such subjectivities do not necessarily reflect the definitively modern Cartesian self, who is a “disengaged, disciplined agent, capable of remaking the self, who has discovered and thus released in himself the awesome power of control” (A Secular Age 257). Accessing this power attributed to modern liberal subjectivity requires disembodying self-abstraction: “The crucial démarche, as we see it in Descartes, is to isolate the agent from its field, to zero in on it, and to bring out what it has in itself, in abstraction from its surroundings” (A Secular Age 257–58). Modern forms of Christianity have often tacitly supported this process of disembedding. Like Christianity, sexuality has been justly critiqued as a mechanism for social control, most famously by Michel Foucault. Lisa Duggan’s term homonormativity aptly describes how some LGBTQ communities have created forms of normative exclusion that are regrettably characteristic of most group identities.4 Tim Dean invokes the empirically unverifiable notion of the unconscious to help explain how barebacking communities sometimes work to resist such exclusions—not unlike Karl Barth’s invocation of the similarly unverifiable notion of a transcendent God in The Epistle to the Romans (for which he drew on Søren ­K ierkegaard’s writings) in order to resist the exclusionary tendencies of Christian communities. In both arguments, mysterious intuitions of a cataclysmic otherwise serve as catalysts for critique. 5 Yet as suggested by Coviello’s eulogy for Prince, binary conceptions of shame-inducing exclusion versus assimilative inclusion can impede as much as promote critiques of marginalization. Wen Liu, drawing on affect theory, helps explain the limitations of this binary. On the one hand, for example, queer valorizations of shame have been criticized for “producing a defensive subjectivity”—one that, despite the laudable goal of resisting assimilation, can inadvertently “normalize the whiteness” that dominates many LGBTQ communities (59). On the other hand, mainstream psychological discourse about LGBTQ marginalization tends to produce “a damaged subjectivity” because it “wants to get rid of shame,” a construal that can lead one to “avoid theorizing broader conceptions of justice and equality” (59). By contrast, Liu builds on Silvan ­Tomkin’s work to contend that “shame is not something to

Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization  91 avoid or escape from. Instead, in its movement and circulation is found the continual engagement between the looker and the looked at” such that “shame is in actuality an integral part of identity formation” (59). ­Understood thus relationally as an intersubjective phenomenon, shame can “elicit a sense of curiosity” through “the empathetic and desiring capacity of shameful bodily encounters,” which Liu embraces as a way to help “undo the binarisms between shame and pride, health and ­pathology, and assimilation and dissidence” (60). This chapter aims to show how Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God similarly subvert such binaries by foregrounding intersubjective senses of intertextuality6 in their respective literary representations of marginalized subjectivities. The acoustic metaphor of resonance helps articulate the ways in which a relational awareness of intertextuality can undermine oversimplified binary notions of traditional-versus-iconoclastic and center-versus-margin: resonance may connote multi-directional, overlapping relationships among multiple texts (not necessarily just two) in which the relative amplitude or dominance of any given text or group of texts depends not only on various auditors’ positions but also on the resonance (or lack thereof) created by other texts, which thereby offer the potential for articulating subversive senses of temporal transitivity. It is in this sense that both Ceremony and So Far from God figure the Bible as a key intertext for their respective projects by simultaneously courting and critiquing its intertextual dominance. These novels thus resonate also with Faulknerian invocations of the Bible, such as when Rosa in Absalom, Absalom! alludes to Judges 12 while insisting that physical touch can abrogate exclusionary categories of socioeconomic stratification: “let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too” (112).7 Here, the murderous function of the password that distinguishes insiders from outsiders in Judges 12:6 cracks and collapses under the weight of the biblical keyword flesh, promising to overcome division in a way that recalls biblical descriptions of sex as two people becoming “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24, Mark 10:9, and 1 Corinthians 6:16)—a description that, in turn, becomes subversively coupled not only with the racializing discourse of “color” in U.S. history but also with the larger history of European colonization (particularly of India but synecdochically of other indigenous peoples as well) connoted by the word caste. While Rosa’s line provides a useful illustration, however, equally telling for this chapter’s argument are Faulkner’s uses of the Bible in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying—novels that foreground the intersubjective intertextuality of storytelling in ways that help illuminate Silko’s and Castillo’s innovative uses of the Bible, as explained shortly. While many contemporary novels allude to the Bible, Provincializing the Bible focuses on those that also challenge readers to reconceptualize

92  Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization what “American literature” might mean by creating innovative representations of historically marginalized subjectivities. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the legacy of slavery calls on the present to “rememory” its violent past in ways that reimagine the literary (as argued in Chapter 2). In ­C eremony and So Far from God, the borderlands between Mexico and the U.S. symbolize a different kind of potential to redefine the boundaries of the literary, both geographically and textually. In Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt (addressed in Chapter 4), transnational queer migration serves to help articulate a similar representational challenge. Given that all four of these novels explicitly critique the Bible in terms of the supporting role it has played in the marginalization of a wide variety of oppressed peoples, all four also cast it in surprisingly vital and integral roles in their respective literary projects, and they do so in ways that are as traditional as they are radical—or more accurately in ways that implicitly undermine the logic of that ostensible dichotomy.

Stories as Begotten, Not Made A story about storytelling, Silko’s Ceremony invokes the Bible as a significant intertext, not a source or key but rather an emblematic facet of a larger European tradition that achieves significance only as it resonates with the novel’s key intertexts: Pueblo traditions, especially oral ceremonial stories, as well as the spiritual and material significance of the natural world. Published a few years after the end of the Vietnam War, the novel recounts the gradual recovery of Tayo, a veteran suffering from what might be considered post-traumatic stress disorder or “battle ­fatigue,” according to “Army doctors” (28). Yet Silko sets the story in the aftermath of World War II rather than the Vietnam War: Tayo served in the Pacific alongside his cousin, Rocky. He is troubled not only by Rocky’s death but also by the conviction that he saw his uncle, Josiah, in the faces of the Japanese soldiers they encountered. In addition, Tayo fears that, in his frustration with the tropical ­humidity that impeded Rocky’s recovery from a life-threatening wound, Tayo had “damned the rain until the words were a chant,” in effect “praying against the rain” (11). On returning from the war, he learns that his uncle has died and a drought now afflicts the Laguna Pueblo. While post-traumatic stress might typically be considered the psychological problem of a particular individual, Ceremony offers a different understanding of Tayo’s traumatized subjectivity. His journey over the course of the narrative entails his realizing that he will heal from his experiences of the war only by recognizing that his individual story is intimately interwoven with the larger history of the Laguna Pueblo, d ­ espite the fact that “the white doctors” insist that he must “think only of himself, and not about the others, that he would never get well as long as he used words like ‘we’ and ‘us’” (116). His story gradually becomes a quest

Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization  93 narrative that is more externally than internally oriented: to heal ­himself, Tayo helps bring healing to the drought-afflicted land—and potentially ­ rofound relato his community as well—by learning to recognize his p tionship with both the natural world and his community’s history in the process of locating and reclaiming Josiah’s lost herd of cattle. Silko’s choice to set the novel after World War II rather than the ­Vietnam War helps to reinforce this theme of intersubjective and material interconnectedness: she connects the atomic bombs dropped by the U.S. on Japan with the history of the Laguna Pueblo and its surrounding region by reminding readers that the bombs were tested in New M ­ exico, which was also the site of active uranium mining at the time. Tayo comes to appreciate how Laguna is central to the story of World War II, despite the fact that the novel initially conveys an illusory sense of the region’s remoteness from the war, symbolically as well as geographically. The narrative repeatedly emphasizes that the Laguna veterans felt valued and relevant only when they could assume non-Laguna identities by being in uniform far away from their ancestral land. Yet near the end of the novel, when Tayo remembers the uranium mines near Laguna, he realizes that this sense of provincial disconnection from what turns out to be a false center has been merely a trick of perspective: “He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time” (229). Ceremony suggests that the shame associated with Tayo’s disorientation and despondency after the war is coextensive not only with the shame of ethnic marginalization but also with the sexualized shame implied repeatedly by other characters as they denigrate him for being a “­half-breed,” both Pueblo and Mexican (27, 52, 234). This shame is framed in insistently Christian terms. When Tayo’s mother “started drinking wine and riding in cars with white men and Mexicans,” she was upbraided by a “Catholic priest” who “shook his finger at the drunkenness and lust” (63). Yet she was “ashamed of herself” not for that r­ eason but instead because of what the “holy missionary white people” had “taught her in school about the deplorable ways of the Indian people” (63). At first, her interest in white men is motivated largely by her attempt to escape this shame, but as she learns that the whites are no paragons of virtue, her initial shame, rather than dissipating, doubles: “feelings of shame, at her own people and at the white people, grew inside her, side by side like ­monstrous twins” (63). The pregnancy imagery here is central to the novel as sexuality and procreation become metaphors for creating and telling stories (to oneself as well as others). That symbolism is explored more fully later in this ­chapter; first, it is necessary to note that Tayo ­embodies his mother’s story of shame, as his aunt constantly reminds him. Auntie sees this shame as her cross to bear, the “unfortunate burden which proved that, above all else, she was a Christian woman”: “Those

94  Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization who measure life by counting the crosses would not count her sacrifices for Rocky the way they counted her sacrifices for her dead sister’s halfbreed child” (27). The novel repeatedly criticizes the hypocrisy and disembodying prudery of this widespread strain of Christian thought and practice. For instance, Josiah’s lover, the Night Swan, tells the story of a former lover who, in response to his shame over his sexual desire for her, attempts to disown the shame by projecting his desire onto her and rejecting both: he castigates her as a “whore” and a “witch” (79) because “his desire for her had uncovered something which had been hiding inside him, something with wings that could fly, escape the gravity of the Church, the town, his mother, his wife. So he wanted to kill it” (78).8 In response, the Night Swan counters, “You came breathlessly… but you will always prefer the lie. You will repeat it to your wife; you will repeat it at confession. You damn your own soul better than I ever could” (79). Interestingly, she uses the language of his own faith (“damn your soul”) to criticize how he practices that faith (“repeat it at confession”), in keeping with a comment Silko made during a 1998 interview: “Jesus would have a fit, just like I wrote in Almanac of the Dead, if he could see what his followers did.”9 Ceremony conveys a measure of cultural hybridity in the Christian aspects of the Laguna community: “even the Catholics who went to mass every Sunday” observe Pueblo traditions, such as “the ritual of the deer” (48). The most pronounced disjunction in this representation of hybridity arises from the ways in which the novel casts Christianity as reinforcing the disembodying imperative to self-abstraction characteristic of Western modernity, an implication evident not only in the Night Swan passages quoted earlier but also in Tayo’s struggle to understand his disorientation after the war as something larger and more relationally intersubjective than his individual psychological problem: “Christianity separated the people from themselves; it tried to crush the single clan name, encouraging each person to stand alone, because Jesus Christ would save only the individual soul” (62–63). Even as the novel pointedly criticizes Christianity, however, it also complicates that criticism through its thematic resonances with both the Bible and the biblically influenced Fisher King legend famously analyzed by Jessie Weston. The medieval quest legend echoes biblical depictions of sin as a cause of drought and famine (e.g., Deuteronomy 11:13–17 and Jeremiah 14:1–12). In parallel with certain versions of the legend, Tayo returns from a war and must heal his barren land, the barrenness of which seems mysteriously related not only to his own wounded condition but more provocatively to an implied sexual incapacity. His gradual romantic reconnection thus precipitates the renewed fertility of the land. Jeff Karem rightly asserts that the parallels between the Fisher King legend and Ceremony should be understood as subordinated to and given significance by the indigenous Laguna traditions that more deeply

Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization  95 inform the novel’s formal and thematic structure: it is bookended by ceremonial stories drawn from these traditions, and such stories are interpolated at intervals throughout the Tayo narrative, such that this set of stories serves as the primary context for his narrative. Silko thus foregrounds a sense of intertextual resonance in which Western texts such as the Fisher King legends and the Bible are likely to have a more muted resonance, even for readers who are especially attuned to those textual traditions. In terms of its biblical resonances, Ceremony can thereby help remind such readers that the immediate source of a seemingly biblical allusion or thematic resonance might not be the Bible itself but rather one or more elements of its reception history, and moreover that a particular biblical allusion may serve not as a source or origin but instead as an echo of or contrast with aspects of another text or set of texts that may be more central to a given literary project. So, for example, in addition to the Fisher King resonance, with its biblical echoes, Tayo’s quest to recover Josiah’s cattle potentially resonates (depending on a reader’s knowledge of the Bible) with the story of Jacob, Laban, and their trickster conflict over livestock in Genesis 30. Silko introduces her own livestock-trickster story immediately after Auntie “looked up from her Bible”: Tayo and Josiah buy special, extra-hardy cattle from Ulibarri, a trickster who insists on the dubious claim that his horse is related to a State Fair prizewinner (67–68). Tayo and ­Josiah ­mistrust him: they “didn’t want Ulibarri to try anything funny, like substituting a crippled cow for a sound one or sending one with runny eyes” (68). God helps Jacob in his conflict with Laban (Genesis 31:3), and the spirit figure Ts’eh and her brother, the hunter (“Mountain Lion”), help Tayo. Paula Gunn Allen identifies Ts’eh as Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought Woman, the female creator-spirit of Laguna / Keres cosmology (13). Tayo’s sexual romance with Ts’eh resonates with the Bible’s recurrent representation of the relationship between human and divine in romantic terms as a courtship and marriage.10 Ceremony has sometimes been read as an anodyne paean to cultural syncretism, but such a reading does not accurately describe its combination of both discordantly critical and vaguely harmonious biblical resonances. On the contrary, these combined resonances do not suggest a blandly universalizing sense of syncretism as much as a provocative redefinition of the marginalized and putatively provincial as an anti-­ imperialist center.11 The Bible serves as both center and margin in this multilayered re-signification. Consider the aspect of Tayo’s quest that might be read as a fertility ceremony: it resonates harmoniously with the Bible, as noted earlier, but it also suggests a symbolically genderqueer form of reproduction in that a woman (Ts’eh) impregnates a man (Tayo) not with a child but with stories: “The terror of the dreaming he had done on this bed was gone, uprooted from his belly; and the woman had filled the hollow spaces with new dreams” (Ceremony 204). As Mary

96  Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization Chapman argues, this imagery echoes one of the ceremonial story-­poems at the very beginning of the novel in which a male speaker is figured as pregnant with stories: he asserts that stories “are all we  have…  /… to fight off / illness and death”; then, “He rubbed his belly. / I keep them here,” and he invites the reader to “put your hand on it” and feel the “life here / for the people” (2).12 These stories are cast as healing and life-giving in part because they are created relationally and are therefore self-consciously intertextual. To borrow from the Nicene creed, words and stories in Ceremony are begotten, not made.13 Going further, Silko’s description of Ts’eh and Tayo having sex suggests on a metaphorical level that he is having sex with the land itself, becoming one flesh with the land, so to speak, as the rain imagery foreshadows the coming end of the drought: He eased himself deeper within her and felt the warmth close around him like river sand…. When it came, it was the edge of a steep riverbank crumbling under the downpour until suddenly it all broke loose and collapsed into itself. (168) Even her sweat is associated with nature: afterwards, “he could feel the damp wide leaf pattern that had soaked into the blanket where she  lay”  (168). The older men retrospectively interpret this as the key turning point: “you say you have seen her /… / We will be blessed / again” (239). Indeed, shortly after they have sex, Tayo has a dream about the cattle that helps him find them (168); later, the coming of the rain is described in procreative terms as Tayo sees “clouds with round heavy bellies” (236). Tayo’s romance with Ts’eh may be considered queer not only in the sense that she symbolically impregnates him (and thereby the clouds themselves) but also in that their romance eschews—or partially ­eschews— the conventional marriage plot’s ending toward which so many biblical and European narratives aim.14 In the end, she leaves him with a simple, “I’ll see you” (218). Yet Tayo concludes, “she had never left him; she had always been there” (237). His feeling of c­ onnection with Ts’eh seems coextensive with his feeling connected with his ­community: “They had always been loved. He thought of her then; she had always loved him” (237). Silko uses both plural and singular third-person pronouns at this point, reinforcing the relational sense of subjectivity that constitutes a major theme of the novel. Ceremony thus at once rejects and embraces various elements of the marriage plot, creating its own new version that may be read as queerly traditional and in which the Bible serves as a ­secondary or even tertiary but nevertheless significant intertext. The romance helps heal not only Tayo’s “battle fatigue” and the drought but also implicitly a more long-standing loss: Tayo’s earliest

Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization  97 memories include waiting for his mother to return—“He would wait for her, and she would come back to him” (104)—until she left him with her sister and never returned. A brief line from a love song recurs to Tayo, “Y volveré,” “And I will return” (5, 90), implying that he still longs for that return. A retrospective, past-tense framing of his connection with Ts’eh suggests the possible fulfillment of this longing: “she had never left him; she had always been there” (237). To the extent that Tayo overcomes the loss and shame of his childhood, he does so not through individual validation but by coming to understand alienation and shame as relational, contextual, and therefore ultimately intertextual phenomena. He learns to retell his own story as part of a larger story, one that subverts the stories of shameful loss repeated by other characters in the novel and strengthens his sense of embeddedness and community. In keeping with Liu’s analysis of shame (described earlier), Tayo’s quest does not focus on rejecting shame or embracing it in order to resist a culturally normative center but instead on begetting a new intertextual center that revises and reinterprets the shame-inducing stories he has experienced. As Sara Spurgeon explains, while “many critics” have interpreted “mixed-blood characters in the novel as liminal figures,” Silko uses these characters to imagine “a new center” (92). Notably, while mixed-blood and trickster figures both appear in ­C eremony, the former term may apply to Tayo, but the latter does not. This is in contrast to the work of Gerald Vizenor and others, in which, according to Kimberly Blaeser, the trickster figure becomes a “metaphor for the mixedblood” (138). The contrast helps illuminate Tayo’s genderqueer passivity, which seems to be very much in keeping with Silko’s larger project. Indeed, the novel’s climax hinges on his passivity: the decisive event is not an action but inaction. He recognizes that the destructive story unfolding in front of him is just one possibility rather than the only reality and that he can choose not to help beget that violent, self-­ alienating narrative. This is to say that his conflict with the antagonist, fellow Laguna veteran Emo, turns out to be a contest among conflicting ­stories—much as the interpolated story of the Gambler is about not falling for the Gambler’s illusion (159–63). Grandma reinforces this impression: “The story was all that counted. If she had a better one about them, then it didn’t matter what they said” (82). Tayo’s passivity is reinforced by the fact that he is not the sole agent of his realization that his primary conflict is a contest of stories. That realization seems co-engendered by nature: “The wind made his sweat go cold. This was the time. But his fingers were numb, and he fumbled with the screwdriver as he tried to rub warmth back into his hands” (235). As a result of the wind, the opportune moment passes before he is ready to attack Emo with the screwdriver. Tayo’s fumbling helps him realize that killing Emo would only reinforce his destructive and illusory story: “It had been a close call. The witchery had almost ended the story according

98  Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization to its plan” (235). The influence of nature in this climactic moment recalls the larger narrative’s insistence that storytelling is a fundamentally embedded, relational activity. Ceremony refuses to forget that human relationships can go horribly wrong. It recounts the sexual commodification and objectification of women, the neglect and abuse of children, the oppression and subjugation of indigenous peoples, and the tendency of even marginalized groups to police their own boundaries and marginalize those considered different. Yet the novel also suggests that such relationships, even when they go wrong, can serve as reminders of embodied relationality and contingency, which, in turn, can help counter the modern Western imperative to self-abstraction that tacitly supports so many contemporary forms of marginalization. Ceremony thus potentially reminds readers that sexual desire constitutes a critical fault line in that imperative. As suggested by the episode described earlier in which the Night Swan is denigrated as not only a “whore” but also a “witch” (79), sexual desire shares a certain kinship with putatively magical forms of spirituality in that both have often been cast in Western modernity as dangerously and atavistically prerational or even irrational.15 In Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World, Randall Styers shows how Northern Europeans derogated as “magical” many of the indigenous spiritual traditions of peoples they colonized, distinguishing such traditions from the definitively modern, highly abstract Protestant forms of Christianity that were held to exemplify “religion.” (Indeed, the same distinction was used by Protestants to criticize Catholic rites deemed insufficiently informed by modern science.) In “Mana and Mystification: Magic and Religion at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Styers argues that modern definitions of magic served to restrict “the proper scope of religion… to rationalized, transcendent, otherworldly concerns,” contributing to the process of disenchantment, which, in turn, helped “foster the rational manipulation of the material world by modern ­science and capitalism” (230). This history means that “magical” spiritual ­traditions—like non-normative sexual desires—can serve as productive sites of re-signification for alternative narratives about centers and margins, especially those that gesture toward the inevitable incompleteness of any such narrative. Ceremony foregrounds on a formal level the notion that certain ways of embracing intertextuality can help represent a cataclysmic otherwise to the status quo no less effectively than certain forms of spirituality and sexuality can. The opening pages of the Tayo narrative appear to struggle against the self-abstraction of the modern liberal subject at the level of individual sentences and words: Tayo tries to follow the guidance of the white doctors who insist that he will “get no rest as long as the memories were tangled with the present,” but the word tangled itself undermines his aim and leads him back to his memories, which are

Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization  99 tangled up like colored threads from old Grandma’s wicker sewing basket when he was a child, and he had carried them outside to play and they had spilled out of his arms into the summer weeds and rolled away in all directions, and then he had hurried to pick them up before Auntie found him. (6) Words are cast as inextricably relational, context-bound, and contingent. Tayo tries to focus on “something that existed by itself, standing like a deer,” but because nothing exists by itself, the deer soon becomes “the deer he and Rocky had hunted,” which leads to yet another set of memories (6). A Laguna medicine man, Ku’oosh, later explains that “no word exists alone”: one of his own words, for example, is “filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web” (32). Here, as throughout the novel, nature serves as a kind of intertext that grounds and complements cultural traditions. James Phelan, in describing Morrison’s narrative construction in Beloved and likening it to Faulkner’s and those of “many other modernist novelists,” could also be describing Silko’s construction of the beginning of the Tayo narrative: it “requires the authorial audience to be very active not only in piecing the fabula together but also in recognizing implied connections between elements of the progression” (Experiencing Fiction 72). Provided with very little backstory and learning bits and pieces of the story through Tayo’s feverishly confused perspective, readers may feel some empathy with his state of mind. Yet Silko gradually resolves more of that confusion than Morrison and Faulkner typically do. Whereas novels such as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying offer narrative collages comprising several different characters’ individual perspectives that remain significantly disjunctive from and unreconciled with one another, Tayo eventually recognizes in Ceremony how his story fits into a larger pattern of other stories in a way that helps resolve his earlier confusion—a resolution that is implicitly or explicitly confirmed by many (albeit not all) other characters. The interpolated ceremonial stories create a mythic sense of scale in Ceremony, not unlike the effect of Faulkner’s biblical resonances in his novels but without any ghostly ambivalence about the Laguna traditions: both the initial narrative fragmentation effects and the interpolated ceremonial stories ultimately reinforce the novel’s depiction of intertextuality as a vital tool for countering the disembodying self-abstraction and colonizing forms of marginalization inherent in Western modernity. It may therefore seem odd to pair Silko with Faulkner. The artistic connection between the two has been remarked upon in interviews but has not been explored extensively by critics, perhaps in part because it is

100  Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization clearly far less significant and vital than Ceremony’s innovative grounding in oral Laguna storytelling traditions. Even so, the ways in which the novel resonates with certain aspects of Faulkner’s work can help illuminate its implicit engagement with and critique of him as an icon of the American novel tradition. In more than one interview, Silko has attested to his importance to her: “When I was thirteen or fourteen, I was very much interested in American authors, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner” (5).16 As Ellen Arnold notes, “Her interviews reveal that Silko has been deeply influenced by her reading in Euro-American narrative traditions” and that Faulkner is among those “whose work she admires” (x). Ceremony shares with many of Faulkner’s novels a sense that the past is inextricably entangled with the present and that individual characters’ experiences are bound up with and synecdochically represent the larger history of their community and region. As Lindsey Claire Smith points out, the two authors also share, in their common focus on the particularities of geographical setting, the aim of denaturalizing oppressive categories of sociocultural distinction, although Smith rightly contends that Silko surpasses Faulkner in “evoking cross-cultural hybridity” in a way that “locates identity in particular cultural geographies” (5). Both Silko and Faulkner emphasize the differences among various characters’ perspectives—most famously in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying for Faulkner and less extensively, though no less effectively, in two episodes in Ceremony: the Night Swan’s story is narrated in the third person but from her perspective, switching clearly from Tayo’s (78–79); likewise, the story of a minor character, Helen Jean, is told from her perspective (149). Both Silko and Faulkner focus extensively on sexual shame,17 and both interweave their interests in sexual shame, the land, and community in ways that resonate with Arthurian legends.18 Both also associate Christianity and the Bible with ignorance and bigotry. Silko is far less ambivalent in her critique, but Faulkner’s implicit critiques are no less biting for their ambivalence: in As I Lay Dying, to choose one of many possible examples, religious characters such as Cora Tull are powerfully unsympathetic, while her far more sympathetic husband, Vernon, challenges the authority of the Bible (73).19 Alongside Ceremony’s negative depictions of Christianity, however, the novel resonates with biblical themes (as explained earlier) in ways similar to one of Faulkner’s most characteristic uses of the Bible. While such resonances in Ceremony are far less evident than they are in his work, both create an uncanny sense of the Bible’s vaguely prophetic relevance to issues of social justice, despite its evident misuses and abuses. Consider again a formal commonality shared by both authors: the opening pages of the Tayo narrative seem to acknowledge that the types of narrative fragmentation effects that suffuse Faulkner’s novels have a certain utility as a way of representing the context-bound contingency

Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization  101 of embodiment. Yet the novel gradually forwards the possibility of intersubjectively organizing such narrative fragments into intertextual patterns that are at once old and new, traditional and iconoclastic, and that are capable of undermining colonizing forms of marginalization by re-signifying shame and alienation as tricks and illusions in a storytelling agon or contest. The hogan of the mixed-blood medicine man, Betonie, symbolizes the anti-dichotomous vision of cultural hybridity that the novel as a whole articulates: it offers a kind of collage of traditional “medicine man’s paraphernalia” alongside Woolworth bags, newspapers, telephone books, Coke bottles, and “layers of old calendars, the sequence of years confused and lost” (110–11). This temporal and cultural amalgamation is not cast as entirely new. On the one hand, Betonie explains that a “medicine person” in “the old days” “could get by without all these things” (111). On the other hand, his medicine is cast as complementary with the more traditional medicine of “old man Ku’oosh,” who, of the two medicine men, has the last word in the novel as he leads the other “old men” in learning “the story” from Tayo (238). When Grandma hears the story a few pages later, she too undermines any sense that this story—the story of Ceremony itself—represents a break with past traditions: “It seems like I already heard these stories before… only thing is, the names sound different” (242). This spirit of temporal and cultural hybridity ultimately frames the novel’s biblical resonances as well. In the scene in which Ku’oosh and the old men listen to Tayo’s story in the kiva, they ask him to sit in a chair “with ST. JOSEPH MISSION stenciled in white paint on the back,” and Tayo wonders “how far the chair had gone from the parish hall before it came to the kiva” (238). The presence of the chair in this culminating meeting renders that conjectural distance suggestively symbolic of the novel’s complex invocations of Christianity, Catholicism more specifically, and the Bible and its reception history more broadly. Readers only vaguely familiar with the Bible may simply register critique. Those more familiar with it may also register the novel’s more subtle biblical resonances as reinforcing its larger formal and thematic engagements with intertextuality. After all, the Bible, in both its origins and reception history, exemplifies pragmatist conceptions of the contingent, context-bound notion of human understanding that lie at the root of the term intertextuality. 20 It is composed of texts that originated in various languages and historical eras, and their origins and interrelations are complex enough to fuel an entire scholarly industry. These texts have been shaped by culture clashes, territorial disputes, and violent conquest; the Bible as a whole may be read as thematizing oppression and marginalization, which it frequently represents in terms that defy simple binaries of center-­versusmargins. 21 Throughout its reception history, it has repeatedly served as a rallying cry for the outcast and oppressed but also as a “clobber text”

102  Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization used to support nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, homophobia, slavery, the abuse of animals, and the mistreatment of people with disabilities.

Questioning Faiths Castillo’s So Far from God exemplifies contemporary homologies of the Faulknerian double-movement whereby the Bible is invoked both critically and prophetically at the same time. Yet the narrative structure and writing style of this comic novel have less in common with Faulkner’s work than those formal aspects of Ceremony do, which makes Castillo’s novel particularly illuminating for the present argument. While all three authors foreground the intersubjective intertextuality of storytelling, they do so in different ways. So Far from God entails an innovative mix of genres, 22 which, in turn, shapes its invocations of the Bible in ways that bear some similarities to Tony Kushner’s biblical resonances in Angels in America (addressed in Chapter 2) but that are richly attuned to the cultural tensions and hybridities of the borderlands region between the U.S. and Mexico (especially northern New Mexico). So Far from God chronicles a mother and her four daughters through an almost picaresque series of adventures, calamities, and triumphs. While each chapter begins with an early-modern-style argument or description reminiscent of the chapter openings in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the narrative structure arguably borrows more from contemporary telenovelas, with their highly dramatic and often romantic plotlines, which switch back and forth among various members of an interrelated group of characters. 23 The time-warp effect thereby created gets reinforced by an allusion to Dante’s Divine Comedy as one of the four daughters, la Loca Santa, describes her visionary “trip” to “hell… pulgatorio, and to heaven” (24). 24 Indeed, the names of the novel’s main characters suggest a medieval allegory: three of the daughters’ names—Fe, Esperanza, and Caridad—reflect the Christian virtues named in 1 Corinthians 13:13. Their mother, Sofi—described as “wisdom” for those who might miss the personification implicit in her name (56)—seems to allude to Lady Wisdom, who calls to “fools” and scoffers in order to teach them to amend their ways in Proverbs 1:20–33. At the same time, however, So Far from God is also suffused with more contemporary references, especially to magical realism 25 and the rich cultural matrix of northern New Mexico. Daniel Cooper Alarcón argues that the novel thus achieves a “literary syncretism” that combines older textual traditions with contemporary regional deployments of “hagiography and Catholic legends” as well as “popular Mexican American proverbs, folk legends and remedies” (145). Castillo also references Pueblo culture: as Theresa Delgadillo points out, 26 for example, the creator spirit, Ts’its’tsi’nako, who figures so prominently in Silko’s

Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization  103 Ceremony, also appears in So Far from God as “the spirit deity Tsichtinako” (211). 27 Alarcón concludes that “by practicing a type of literary syncretism, Castillo is able to illuminate the advantages and disadvantages of syncretic beliefs and practices” (145). Yet Delgadillo contends that the novel does not take a syncretic view of spirituality. That is, it does not attempt to fuse divergent spiritual and religious practices into a unified whole. Instead, the novel emphasizes differing traditions and practices coexisting in the same world as aspects of the multiple subjectivities that define its characters. (“Forms of Chicana Feminist Resistance” 890) Delgadillo offers a compelling reading of the novel’s “hybrid spirituality” as posing a “challenge to the status quo” that “arises not from a reinterpretation of Christianity, but from its embrace of both indigenous and Christian elements” (“Forms of Chicana Feminist Resistance” 890). 28 This sense of non-syncretic hybridity aptly describes the formal as well as thematic resonances with the Bible in So Far from God. In Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion, Gender, Race and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative, Delgadillo builds on her earlier notion of non-syncretic hybridity in developing Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of spiritual mestizaje. 29 Delgadillo renders representations of spirituality more legible to scholars by exploring how race, gender, sexuality, spirituality, and material realities intersect with one another productively in a variety of textual representations of borderland hybridity. 30 She defines spiritual mestizaje as “a liberatory and holistic spirituality in tandem with social justice work, usually drawing from alternative spiritualities rather than mainstream religions” (Spiritual Mestizaje 18). This form of spirituality is evident in So Far from God, which invokes alternative spiritualities in ways that implicitly provincialize Christianity—and, in effect, the Bible as well, as the joyously freewheeling mix of genres and other intertextual resonances render it just one among many intertexts in the novel rather than a dominant (let alone the most dominant) one. Ultimately, So Far from God uses the Bible primarily to help represent not so much a questioning of faith as a questioning faith—or more precisely, multiple different questioning faiths. Analyses of the novel’s biblical resonances have focused on its allegorical personifications of the three famous virtues enumerated in 1 Corinthians 13:13 (noted earlier) and the Holy Friday “Way of the Cross Procession,” in which the traditional Passion remembrance is transformed into a political protest focused on contemporary social justice issues (241). Another vital biblical intertext, however, is the Book of Job and also potentially that ancient text’s (or collection of texts’) echoes in the John 9 account of the healing of a blind man. When asked whether the man’s blindness resulted

104  Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization from his own sin or that of his parents (presumably because the man was born blind), Jesus rejects both answers and potentially the question itself: “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him” (John 9:3). The Gospel story resonates with the more famous story of Job’s questioning God about why undeserved calamities have befallen him. His friends, like Jesus’s questioners, assume that Job does indeed deserve such afflictions as a result of wrongdoing—whether his own wrongdoing, that of a member of his family, or the general sinfulness of all people. When God finally answers Job “out of the whirlwind” (Job 38:1), he not only rejects these answers but also chastises those who offered them, praising Job’s questioning confusion. The only answer provided is that God’s ways cannot be fully understood by humans: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding” (Job 38:4). While his thunderous answer may sound like a rebuke, God seems to approve of Job’s attempt to wrestle with him (metaphorically). By contrast, God criticizes the false complacencies of Job’s friends who thought they understood God perfectly well: “ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath” (Job 42:7). In the opening pages of So Far from God, Castillo implicitly invokes Job by raising the classic question of theodicy. At the funeral for her baby daughter, Sofi wonders, “Why?… when all she had ever done was accept God’s will” (22). Her priest, like Job’s friends, urges “decorum” and a quiescent faith in God’s providence: we must not show our lack of faith in Him at these times and in His, our Father’s fair judgment, Who alone knows why we are here on this earth and why He chooses to call us back home when He does. (22) Castillo implicitly rejects the priest’s complacency through a miraculous event, in keeping with John 9 and the Book of Job: the young girl returns to life and warns onlookers, “Don’t touch me!” (23), alluding to the iconic noli me tangere of John 20:17. As with the mix of genres noted earlier, intertextual hybridity is the novel’s hallmark, which equally characterizes its many biblical resonances. Sofi’s daughter explains, “God sent me back to help you all, to pray for you all, o si no,”31 she warns the priest, “you, and others who doubt just like you, will never see our Father in heaven!” (24). She reinforces this imputation of bad faith by correcting the priest when he offers to pray for her: “No Padre… ­remember it is I who am here to pray for you” (24). As a result of this miracle, she gets renamed La Loca Santa but is soon called simply La Loca. The novel’s opening thus raises the question of true versus false faith, the struggle to speak out against injustice, and the complacent pretensions that masquerade as faithful civility. Throughout the novel, these

Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization  105 questions are developed in a theme-and-variations pattern that resonates with biblical intertexts such as the Book of Job. Indeed, much of the plot might be described as a series of bad things happening to good people. Finally, this pattern culminates in Sofi’s creation of an organization called the “Mothers of Martyrs and Saints,” or “M.O.M.A.S.” for short, which holds annual meetings to exchange “news and advice” among “Las Mothers” and “their all-too-glorious (if hard to pin down) santito and martyred ‘jitos” (247, 251). So Far from God suggests that, like Job in his afflictions—and like Moses in the desert and Elijah on the run (Exodus 3 and 1 Kings 19)— revelation tends to be experienced through one’s struggles. “Hell is where you go to see yourself,” as Loca explains of her father Domingo: “Only in hell do we learn to forgive and you got to die first” (42). The novel ­repeatedly yokes together questions of faith and social justice, ­resonating with Job’s faithful but questioning insistence on justice. True faiths, it implies, are questioning faiths. The character whose name suggests that she personifies faith must learn, through its betrayal, to question her misplaced “loyalty to Acme International” and her larger faith in the corporate American dream represented by that loyalty—the dream of having “a life like people do on T.V.” (185, 189). Fe dies from cancer as a result of working with toxic chemicals at Acme, but in keeping with a pattern repeated by other characters, she develops a more critically engaged questioning of her old loyalties (186–89). Fe’s sister Esperanza “was Catholic heart and soul” as a teenager but, by graduate school, becomes an “atheist and, in general, a cynic”; she eventually begins to pray “to Grandmother Earth and Grandfather Sky” (38–39). Her faith exemplifies the kind of non-syncretic hybridity ­Delgadillo describes: “No kind of white woman’s self-help book and no matter how many rosaries she prayed, would result in giving her spirit the courage she got from the sweat lodge and which she surely needed now more than ever” (47). She works for political engagement and reform; although she is killed while covering the Gulf War for a U.S. news agency, she returns “in spirit” (246) and continues to engage in political critique (163). The fourth sister, Caridad, seems to have faith in love, which gets cruelly tested when she is attacked and mutilated (32–33). Her “attacker or attackers were never found” because the police were among “those for whom there is no kindness in their hearts for a young woman who has enjoyed life, so to speak” (33). Caridad recovers, thanks to the prayers of La Loca, and she becomes a curandera; in the process, she “saw for herself” that “as long as the faith of the curandera was unwavering, successful results were almost certainly guaranteed—the only thing that could prevent them was the will of God” (63). 32 She finally takes a literal leap of faith as she and her lover jump off a cliff in response to the call of

106  Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization “the spirit deity Tsichtinako”—a leap the narrator vindicates, attesting that the two women’s bodies were never found because they went “deep within the soft, moist dark earth” to “be safe and live forever” (210–11). This pattern whereby characters develop truer forms of faith gets reinforced by Dona Felicia, a curandera who initially feels “suspicious of the religion that did not help the destitute all around her despite their devotion” (60). Eventually, however, “she did develop faith, based not on an institution but on the bits and pieces of the souls and knowledge of the wise teachers that she met along the way” (60).33 The novel arguably presents itself as just such a collection of “bits and pieces” of human experience along with knowledge and wisdom gained thereby—not only in its collage-like mix of genres but also in its complex representation of one of the most maligned yet pervasive forms of storytelling: gossip. The narrator repeatedly refers to the reader in the second person as “comadre” (215) and “hombre” (250), and the narrator’s knowledge seems that of a neighbor or bystander in the sense of being limited, subjective, and sometimes communal: in telling a story about Caridad, for example, the narrator avers, “we don’t know why she did what she did next” (210). Earlier, the narrator attests of La Loca’s recipes, “Loca would not say a third of an inch, of course, but for our purposes here, I am adding specific measurements myself” (167). While not specifically identified with a major or even necessarily a minor character, the c­ haracter-narrator is depicted not as a disembodied omniscience but rather as a contingent storyteller embedded in the world of the stories she tells. The thematic questions of faith and justice raised in the novel’s opening become coextensive with questions related to this narrative f­ raming. As Sofi trades stories with a friend who is “one of those doubting ­Tomasas who were never convinced of the things Sofi and her family were capable of doing,” she implies that the friend is a bad-faith listener: “It’s not ‘imagination’ that I’ve always had, comadre, it’s faith!” (137, 138). Faith here is not only a question of belief in the miraculous experiences of Sofi and her children but also in charity or kindness: the doubting Tomas comadre is a bad-faith listener because she is “unkind” (136). Given that the novel frames itself as a series of stories shared between friends or neighbors, it thus implicitly stages its primary conflict as one of storytelling, not unlike Silko’s Ceremony. It should therefore come as no surprise that the primary activity of the M.O.M.A.S. at the novel’s conclusion is sharing “news and advice” (251). In this way, the novel potentially points readers back to the oral traditions that seem to serve as part of its inspiration—very much including what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (drawing on the work of Patricia Meyer Spacks) describes as “the precious, devalued arts of gossip, immemorially associated in European thought with servants, with effeminate and gay men, with all women” (Epistemology of the Closet 23). Sedgwick proposes that these arts

Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization  107 have to do not even so much with the transmission of necessary news as with the refinement of necessary skills for making, testing, and using unrationalized and provisional hypotheses about what kinds of people there are to be found in one’s world. (Epistemology of the Closet 23, emphasis original) So Far from God portrays the arts of gossip not as idle but as potentially productive, both personally and politically. The novel foregrounds oral traditions such as gossip and folktales as critical elements in its intertextual mix of genres, emphasizing the changeability of such traditions by telling multiple versions of the same story—such as the legend of La Llorona, the Weeping Woman (160–63). Castillo thus potentially recalls the history of biblically resonant imperialism in the borderlands region of the U.S. and Mexico. As R. S. Sugirtharajah argues, an especially destructive effect of the Bible among colonized peoples was the way in which its uses promoted the idea that a book—a printed, fixed text—was more authoritative than the indigenous oral traditions that colonizers typically sought to undermine and discredit. 34 Castillo alludes to this history not only through her satirical portrayals of Catholicism but also through her title, which, as she reminds readers in an epigraph, is taken from ­Porfirio Díaz: “So far from God—So near the United States” (15). 35 She plays ironically with this epigraph, attributing the sentiment to the Spanish colonizers of the region: pious Catholics in Tome who express their devotion by creating bultos “did not have the actual relics of saints to mix with their paints like the Russian monks who produced Byzantine icons,” so “they labored with the natural elements” and “prayed all the while… like their Spanish ancestors had done for nearly three hundred years on that strange land they felt was so far from God” (101–02). The novel implicitly rejects any such “nationalistic faith” (82). It characterizes the Catholics in the region as only belatedly recognizing that the land they initially considered distant from God is actually “holy earth” (75). Eventually, “the Catholic Church endorsed as sacred what the Native peoples had known all along since the beginning of time” (73). The most prominently featured bultos-maker, who is called Francisco el Penitente because of his fervent self-castigation, serves as another example of bad faith in the novel’s theme-and-variations meditation on the Book of Job. Like Job’s friends, who imagine sins where there are none, Francisco believes the “enemies” of his “soul” include both “the world” and “the treacherous flesh,” both of which he associates with “the devil” (193). He exemplifies how the imperative to disembodying self-­abstraction inherent in a widespread strain of Christian thinking and biblical interpretation has historically contributed to the misogynistic demonization of sexual desire. Quoting Ecclesiastes 7:26, he laments,

108  Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization “More bitter than death I find the woman who is a hunter’s trap, whose heart is a snare” (191).36 The stories of Sofi’s four daughters play on various aspects of the sexualized shame that constitutes a primary policing power in this larger tradition that Francisco represents. La Loca dies after contracting AIDS, despite avoiding physical contact with people; she seroconverts possibly as a result of intense spiritual contact when she prays for others, which is her “principal reason for being alive” (32). Fe earns the nickname La Gritona after her boyfriend leaves her because she permanently damages her vocal cords in her despair (reminiscent of Dido) by screaming continuously for more than ten days (30, 37). Her ability to speak remains partially occluded until she dies. Esperanza too is left by a male lover, like Sofi herself, who was left by her husband—until Sofi eventually ­revises that story, recalling that she actually “gave him his walking papers” because of his compulsive gambling (214–15). Esperanza “always had a lot of ‘spunk,’ as they say, but she did have a bad year after” her lover, Rubén, left her; she becomes “a news broadcaster” but “felt that a woman with brains was as good as dead for all the happiness it brought her in the love department” (26). Caridad, the most beautiful of the sisters, is also left by her high school sweetheart and then becomes the victim of a brutal attack that carries strongly sexual undertones (described earlier). She gets stalked by Francisco, who becomes more dangerously obsessive when she falls in love with another woman (204–12). The novel’s concluding story about the formation of the M.O.M.A.S. implicitly aims to counter the four daughters’ sexualized marginalization as well as the larger cultural phenomena their respective stories represent. Again, So Far from God as a whole may be read as performing the kind of storytelling that serves as the primary activity of the M.O.M.A.S.’s “annual conference,” in which “all kinds of news and advice… was, as part of the bylaws, generously passed on to relatives, friends, the petitioning faithful, and community agencies, as well as to relevant local or federal governments”; the event becomes more popular than “the World Series and even the Olympics” (251, 249). This closing chapter’s implicit retrospective reflection on the rest of the novel valorizes what might be dismissed as gossipy, telenovela-like stories about romantic betrayals, shame, and scandal. Castillo reimagines such stories as the vital center of a spiritual community that represents, just as the complex sense of intertextuality foregrounded throughout the novel represents, the cultural and spiritual mestizaje of the borderlands region she depicts. If Faulkner’s novels are not major intertexts in Ceremony, they are even less evident in So Far from God, which is why this chapter touches only lightly on his work and instead draws primarily on the preceding chapters’ arguments to support its analysis of how Silko’s and Castillo’s respective uses of the Bible share telling similarities with his. Yet

Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization  109 Brian Norman contends that As I Lay Dying and So Far from God (and Beloved as well) share another significant commonality: both feature a dead woman who speaks, whether to living characters or to the reader. He describes these figures as resisting “familiar tropes of gothic, horror, and mythic modes”; instead, most of them “seek agency… as citizens, which is ultimately more disturbing to the communities from whom they seek recognition” (9). He notes that Addie Bundren breaks the pattern somewhat in that she wishes not for belonging but solitude. Even so, this similarity between the two novels parallels one aspect of their respective uses of the Bible: in both cases, Faulkner and Castillo repeatedly construe the boundary between the ostensibly dead past and living present as more permeable and even contestable than secular modernity would typically allow. Like many of Faulkner’s stories, both Ceremony and So Far from God offer trenchant critiques of social injustice and oppression in U.S. history, including the supporting role played by various forms of Christianity. Also in consonance with Faulkner’s work, these novels’ respective critiques do not simply reject the Bible but invoke it in traditional as well as iconoclastic ways, especially through resonances in Ceremony with the grail legend and its biblical roots and in So Far from God with the Book of Job and its depiction of a questioning faith that cries out for justice. The biblical resonances in the two novels create complex ­double-voicings37 that help articulate their respective visions of a cataclysmic otherwise. Sexuality and spirituality are often represented as inspiring powerful commitments despite harboring ineffable mysteries. Ceremony and So Far from God elaborate on this similarity through their self-­consciously intertextual representations of the potential for storytelling to subvert the disembodying imperative to self-abstraction that is endemic to ­Western modernity, to secularization, and to many modern forms of Christianity. Both novels emphasize the permeability and contestability of borders— personal, geographical, and textual—not in order to promote a return to older, more intersubjectively embedded cultural traditions but to contest modern secular assumptions that would cast such cultural traditions as definitively past, which is to say, as requiring a “return.” Such traditions may be heavily contested and marginalized in the present, but they are far from dead and gone.

Notes 1 Hoffman recounts, as an emblematic example, Prince’s relationship with Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman, lovers who were one-time members of his band: “The early acceptance of the gay couple—and then the rejection and acceptance all over again—is an example of the puzzling contradiction that Prince acted out in his attitudes toward sexuality and religion.” 2 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age 771–72; see also 644–46.

110  Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization 3 Scholars such as Carla Freccero, Carolyn Dinshaw, and Judith Halberstam also variously conceptualize queer temporalities. In addition, see Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature through Deep Time. 4 Noting such tendencies, Channette Romero explains, “Instead of a­ sserting single-issue identity politics, fiction by women of color since the 1980s ­advocates alternate ways to imagine public engagement. It increasingly promotes spiritual beliefs and political alliances that cross static notions of ‘identity’” (177). 5 Dean’s psychoanalytic approach to sexuality resonates with queer theoretical conceptions of sexuality itself as an intractable mystery. For example, Halperin’s What Do Gay Men Want? (2007) embraces an anti-systemic understanding of sexuality by promoting not a theory of sexuality but a “critical anti-theory” that “reminds us of what we do not know”—­ reminds us of the mystery of sexuality (103–04). Before Halperin, Bruce Smith defined the history of sexuality as a lacuna; before that, Sedgwick argued that the history of homosexuality (and its closeting) has been shaped by a knowledge-ignorance binary that entails ineradicable ignorance. Lee Edelman’s Homographesis contends that “the signifier ‘gay’ comes to name the unknowability of sexuality as such, the unknowability that is sexuality” (xv). 6 Julia Kristeva famously coined the term intertextuality in the 1960s, drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. In the present study, the term is used especially with an eye toward its roots in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Dewey, and Martin Heidegger, who offered holistic accounts of linguistic meaning and influenced pragmatist thinkers such as Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom. 7 Sharon P. Holland argues that Rosa’s reflection here is true, despite its context (she recounts how she objected to Clytie’s touch in vituperatively racist terms). More accurately, the reflection is true precisely because of that self-contradictory context, as Holland attests: “there is no adequate language for Rosa’s experience of Clytie’s touch” because language itself is implicated in the “eggshell shibboleths” she describes, which means that her own language breaks down and comes into conflict with itself as she tries to reflect on her experience of Clytie’s touch (419). 8 Tara Causey builds on earlier interpretations of the Night Swan as a ­spirit-helper and embodiment of female sexuality, reading the character’s dancing as “a symbol of cross-cultural exchange” in which certain binary conceptual categories become “disrupted and redefined” (210). 9 Quoted in Ellen Arnold’s edited collection, Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko, 168. In a brief essay for Blue Mesa Review entitled “Tribal Prophecies (after Almanac of the Dead),” Silko excoriates Christianity and Catholicism in particular for their role in supporting the colonization and exploitation of indigenous peoples. As Daniel White attests, she characterizes Christianity as exclusionary in contrast with Pueblo culture, which she characterizes as inclusive (138–39; see also Chanette Romero, 142–43). The sense of a dichotomous conflict between the two sets of traditions arguably informs aspects of Almanac of the Dead. Yet the present study focuses on Silko’s first novel rather than on her career as a whole primarily because this study aims to trace homologies among types of biblical resonance evident in certain contemporary novels, the resonance of which is provocatively audible in Ceremony and may constitute a significant element in that novel’s wide range of influence on other contemporary novels.

Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization  111 10 See for example Judges 2:17, Ezekiel 16, Hosea 4:12, Jeremiah 3:2, Matthew 9:15, and Revelation 21:2 as well as allegorical interpretations of the Song of Songs. 11 Sharon Holm counters “Ceremony’s more debilitating depoliticizing critical history” by arguing that the novel offers “a vital political ‘groundedness’ for Indigenous peoples involved in the ongoing struggle against ‘placeless abstractions such as capital, the nation-state, and their discursive expressions in the realm of theory’” (269). 12 Chapman notes that there are multiple examples from indigenous literatures in which storytelling is figured in erotic terms. 13 The fourth-century C.E. Nicene Creed, in aiming to clarify Christian understandings of biblical depictions of God, held that Jesus was “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father” (according to a modern Catholic translation of the Greek). C. S. Lewis explains, To beget is to become the father of: to create is to make. And the difference is this. When you beget, you beget something of the same kind as yourself. A man begets human babies, a beaver begets little beavers and a bird begets eggs which turn into little birds. But when you make, you make something of a different kind from yourself. A bird makes a nest, a beaver builds a dam, a man makes a wireless set … (Mere Christianity 157) The creedal reflection on biblical narratives and imagery resonates with Silko’s depiction of stories not as tools humans use but rather as integral elements of who humans are. 14 For another example of a queer reimagining of the conventional marriage plot, see Robyn Warhol, “Queering the Marriage Plot: How Serial Form Works in Maupin’s Tales of the City.” 15 For an analysis of the origins of this association of sexual desire with magic and the supernatural in the early modern period, see Walter Stephens’s Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief. 16 Quoted in Ellen Arnold’s edited collection, Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko, 60, 5. 17 This claim should be nearly self-evident in regard to Faulkner’s work. In The Sound and the Fury alone, one finds castration, incest, and depictions of female sexuality that flaunt social conventions of the time, the censure of which is a central theme of the novel. 18 See Taylor Hagood’s “Faulkner’s ‘Fabulous Immeasurable Camelots’: Absalom, Absalom! and Le Morte Darthur.” 19 See also the discussion of As I Lay Dying in Chapter 2. 20 As explained above in Note 6, intertextuality is used here in the sense used by pragmatists such as Rorty and Brandom. 21 The Mosaic covenant specifically commands the Israelites to remember that they were once slaves so that, when they are powerful, they do not oppress others (e.g., Deuteronomy 24:17–22). Yet as escaped slaves, they conquer the Canaanites in order to obtain a land they can call their own (Joshua 6–12). Likewise, as returned exiles, some of the Judean men intermarry with local inhabitants of the land but later abandon their “strange” (foreign) wives as well as their own children (Ezra 10). In the New Testament, the “scribes and Pharisees” suffer under Roman occupation but at the same time exclude and even do violence to the innocent (Matthew 23). While the early Christians were often considered outsiders by others, they were also perfectly capable

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22

23 24 25

of marginalizing one another: Paul rebukes wealthy Christians for humiliating poor Christians (1 Corinthians 11:20–22). Early Christianity developed in what some scholars describe as a multiethnic context—a s­ ituation rife with social tensions and inequalities. Some New Testament writings reinforce those inequalities, especially the marginalization of women and slaves (1 Timothy 2:11–15, Ephesians 5:22–24 and 6:5–8, and 1 Peter 2:18). At the same time, other New Testament writings resonate with contemporary insights about marginalization, especially Paul’s use of binary oppositions such as wisdom / foolishness, strength / weakness, and honor / dishonor, which he flips and subverts in order to urge humility rather than self-­righteous pride (e.g., 1 Corinthians 1:18–31). Paul commends a sense of being spiritually equal despite apparent disparities: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). B. J. Manríquez reads the novel in the absurdist tradition, arguing that Castillo mixes “parody, allegory, black comedy, tragic farce, poetry, and ­Heloise-type advice for women in order to mimic the absurdist vision” (40). While more politically charged and pointed than definitively absurdist texts, the novel creates a powerfully comic feel by combining elements of the genres Manríquez identifies. Gail Pérez reads So Far from God as exemplifying the notion that “the essence of the popular is its effective deployment by subordinate groups” (77). Michael Porsche reads this scene as also referencing “the legend of St. Christina of Liege (1150–1224)” (185–86). Marta Caminero-Santangelo reads the novel’s engagement with magical realism as not playing a central role in its representations of political engagement: When is their ‘vision’ for a better future—and their voice to express protest—clearest? It is remarkable that such moments generally occur in passages devoid of magical elements, although not necessarily devoid of religious faith, as the Holy Friday procession shows. (“‘The Pleas of the Desperate’: Collective Agency versus Magical Realism in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God” 95)

26 Theresa Delgadillo, “Forms of Chicana Feminist Resistance” 904. 27 Focusing on Almanac of the Dead and The Mixquiahuala Letters, Tereza M. Szeghi sees tensions in Silko’s and Castillo’s respective representations of indigeneity and mestizaje identities. Jane Robinett compares and contrasts the figures of the shamanic healer in Ceremony and the curandera in So Far from God, arguing that the latter figure generally remains more ambiguously valued in literary representations as well as in social practice. 28 Delgadillo (“Forms of Chicana Feminist Resistance”) and Carminero-­ Santangelo argue compellingly that liberation theology informs Castillo’s depictions of faith. 29 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza 81. 30 In reviewing Spiritual Mestizaje, Karen Mary Davalos writes, Chicana/o studies has been largely unwilling to examine religion, assuming instead that Catholicism has only produced and supported domination and that Mexican American spirituality cannot foster community empowerment. Delgadillo’s book rectifies this mistaken assumption and illustrates through her analysis of Chicana narratives how spirituality and religion are sources of renewal and critical consciousness. (901)

Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization  113 31 Castillo’s use of English and Spanish together reinforces the heightened sense of intertextuality that informs her representation of Nuevomexicano culture. The Spanish is left untranslated here in order to help reinforce that sense. In a 1993 interview with Simon Romero, Castillo notes that in writing So Far from God, she consulted Rubén Cobos’s A Dictionary of New ­Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish. 32 Similarly, a “psychic surgeon” (213) in the novel explains, “We are now in the age of the Spirit,” adding, “If we do not have faith altogether, there is no hope for any of us—es decir, en todo el mundo” (227–28). 33 Dona Felicia’s faith is in certain ways quite traditionally Christian: “she came to see her God not only as Lord but as a guiding light, with His retinue of saints, His army, and her as a lowly foot soldier” (60). 34 Many oral religious traditions among the peoples colonized by the British once embraced various degrees of open-endedness and changeability, ­Sugirtharajah contends, but under the influence of colonial rule, they came to adopt the more fixed and even absolutist sense of authority associated with the Bible as a printed text. In this case, the distinction between print and oral transmission is especially ironic because the central story of the New Testament (and probably much of Hebrew scripture as well) originated in oral traditions. 35 Castillo identifies Díaz as “Dictator of Mexico during the Mexican Civil War” (15). 36 The Bible frequently figures God as a lover and husband in shame-laden language: God is “a jealous God,” according to the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:5), and when the Israelites worship other gods, it is like committing adultery in the most degrading way: they went “whoring after other gods” (Judges 2:17), “committed fornication,” “increased thy whoredoms” (Ezekiel 16:26), and went “a-whoring from under their God” (Hosea 4:12). The prophet Jeremiah accuses Israel of having “played the harlot with many lovers” so openly and frequently that he caustically demands, “Lift up thy eyes … / and see where thou hast not been lain with?” (Jeremiah 3:1–2). The Song of Solomon offers the most extended positive depiction of sexual desire in the Bible. For more about biblical depictions of sexual shame, see Johanna Stiebert’s The Construction of Shame in the Hebrew Bible: The Prophetic Contribution; L. William Countryman’s Dirt, Greed, & Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their Implications for Today; and Avaren Ipsen’s Sex Working and the Bible. 37 See the discussion in Chapter 1 of a similar double-voicing effect in Faulkner’s work.

4 Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer The Book of Salt

Building on the previous chapter’s exploration of self-reflective representations of storytelling, this final chapter turns to figurative reflections on reading in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, which has garnered a remarkable wealth of critical attention in its relatively brief existence.1 Truong’s novel presents itself as a reading of The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book—and also of Gertrude Stein’s writing, which may serve as an ­emblem of literary modernism more broadly. The novel’s epigraph is a quotation from Toklas about the “good cooks” she and Stein hired when they lived in Paris. One of these cooks serves as the novel’s protagonist, and Toklas and Stein are major characters. The titular Book of Salt ­appears in the narrative as a study written by Stein about this cook, not unlike Stein’s actual stories about servants in Three Lives and “B.B. or the Birthplace of Bonnes.” The novel’s title also follows the formula used in the names of many biblical texts (“The Book of…”), and its narrative resonates strongly with certain traditional readings of the Bible. In effect, as this chapter elaborates, Truong creates a meditation on reading and alterity that provocatively intermingles not only literary and culinary traditions but also biblical ones. The Book of Salt implicitly critiques the role of Catholicism in the French colonization of Vietnam, specifically highlighting the complicity of Catholic institutions and theology in racist, sexist, heterosexist, and economic forms of marginalization. Far more interesting and innovative, however, are the subtle ways in which the narrative also simultaneously embraces key elements of Catholicism. Most provocatively, Truong invokes the Catholic Eucharist liturgy less in an attempt to queer it—to make it strange, subverting it in eroticized ways that transgress social norms2 —than to use traditional Eucharistic theology to help represent historical, sexual, racial, and national difference and disjunction as paradoxically enabling rather than thwarting a sense of connection, fostering a sense of anti-assimilationist community that crosses and embraces such demarcations of difference. As in the novels by Leslie Marmon Silko and Ana Castillo analyzed in Chapter 3, the resonances in The Book of Salt with ­Faulkner’s invocations of the Bible are more thematic than formal and are

Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer  115 less extensive—though no less pointed—than in Toni Morrison’s ­B eloved. The argument therefore relies on foundations laid in the first two chapters such that individual Faulkner novels are addressed only briefly in this chapter’s final section. Go Down, Moses and A Fable both help clarify how Faulkner’s work resonates with Truong’s. A ­F able does not rank among his most influential novels and therefore falls s­ omewhat outside of the scope of the present study. Given Truong’s innovative use of Eucharistic symbolism, however, which memorializes the passion narratives recounted in the Gospels, ­Faulkner’s recasting of those narratives in a French World War II setting serves as a telling example of how an awareness of his biblical double-voicing can help readers attend more closely to and more fully appreciate some of the most provocative registers in Truong’s ­t wenty-first-century narrative.

Metaphorizing Abjected Difference A densely lyrical novel, The Book of Salt is structured both formally and thematically as an interrelated set of questions. These questions are posed about as well as by the protagonist (who is also the narrator) Bính, a character inspired by a cook named Trac who worked for Stein and Toklas. According to The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, Trac possessed a limited command of English, which led him to invent creative ways of using language—a pineapple, for instance, he called “a pear not a pear” (Toklas 186). Beyond the brief glimpse that Toklas provides of Trac, there are no available records of this historical figure. The novel thematizes the mysteries posed by such figures: our understanding is limited by the paucity of historical records; moreover, the scant records are products of sexist, heterosexist, racist, and colonial contexts that further obscure the lenses through which we might attempt to read the remaining traces of this “Indo-Chinese” cook. Formally, The Book of Salt emphasizes this obscurity in several ways. In keeping with its focus on Stein and Toklas, the novel echoes a characteristically modernist narrative technique by fragmenting the fabula in recursive fashion through the protagonist’s jumbled memories of past events—a technique particularly characteristic of Faulkner’s narratives. Truong thereby creates a strongly retrospective sense of temporality that serves to foreground the uncertainty and nonlinearity associated with a modernist understanding of fragmented subjectivity. The narrator also turns out to be unreliable, actively engaging in coy deceptions with the reader. Even when he occasionally reveals these deceptions, he does so in ways that keep the reader guessing. In addition, Truong creates a specifically transnational metafictional effect by which the novel calls attention to itself as an artifice that attempts to represent an unrepresentable diasporic experience: the first-person narrative is written in

116  Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer beautifully crafted English but repeatedly reminds us that the narrator knows ­almost no English. Thematically, the novel emphasizes this unrepresentability of the transnational—the inability to render diasporic experience fully legible to others—by consistently foregrounding the imperialistic attitudes and assumptions of those who interact with Bính, which lead to uncorrected misinterpretations and misunderstandings. The other characters try to get to know him but largely fail. Ultimately, the reader is placed in very nearly the same position as these characters: Bính’s first-person narration conceals as much as it reveals. Truong, who immigrated to the U.S. at age six as a refugee from Vietnam, begins The Book of Salt with a decision Bính faces: it is 1934, and as Stein and Toklas prepare for a trip to the U.S. aboard a ship from France, Bính must decide whether he will return home to Vietnam as directed by a recent letter from his brother (229). The rest of the novel is composed of lyrical flashbacks in Bính’s mind as he makes his decision— flashbacks about living in Paris and growing up in Vietnam. His memories of Vietnam focus on an earlier decision he made about taking a voyage on a ship: he left Vietnam as a young adult, intending to commit suicide because his father, “the Old Man,” disowned him on learning of Bính’s romance with another man, the head chef in the kitchen of the Governor-General’s mansion where Bính worked as a sous chef (250). In the end, Bính decides to remain in Paris because of a question rather than an answer—a question about who he really is, a question that gets framed in terms of the intimacy of a shared meal or a shared erotic encounter. He suggests that this question constitutes its own kind of answer in that he is someone who desires to be desired, someone who wants to share a hunger that attests to a kind of connection simply through its being shared, even if this particular hunger is never satiated. This is also the kind of question The Book of Salt seems to aspire to constitute for the reader. The novel repeatedly creates a sense of certainty only to undermine that certainty with questions, representing such questions as invitations to intimacy. It ultimately becomes unclear, for example, whether the Old Man is truly Bính’s biological father (229–30). The reader also discovers that Bính is not his real name: it “means ‘peace,’” which he calls himself because it provides “an elegant counterbalance to” his real name, Bão, which means “storm” (249). Bính-as-narrator characterizes this deception as a form of erotic flirtation with the reader: “real names are never exchanged. Or did my story about the man on the bridge not make that code of conduct already clear?” (243). The man on the bridge—a moniker that similarly conceals a name, Nguyễn Ái Quốc (243)3 —is a stranger he meets while cruising the streets of Paris at night for men; they flirt and share a romantic evening. The present study refers to Bính by the name he uses for himself throughout most of the novel in order to

Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer  117 highlight this coy flirtatiousness in the narrative, which teases and dares the reader to presume some form of certainty about who the Vietnamese cook really is. The Book of Salt implies that the reader will emulate Bính’s employers in that all of them “provide me with a new moniker, whether they know it or not. None of them—and this I do not exaggerate—has called me by my given name. Their mispronunciations are endless, an epic poem all their own” (32). This mock-epic suggestively serves, much as the name Bính does to Bão, as a catachrestic4 stand-in for the irretrievable epic of the “Indo-Chinese” cooks described in the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. Yet the questions the novel raises indirectly about these cooks, questions potentially shared by the reader, are represented as suggesting a sense of potential connection—potential intimacy—despite the fact that they remain unanswerable. The mysteries posed by such figures from the past to interested readers in the present become inextricably interwoven with the narrative’s sense of mysterious disjunction and difference, which is created not only by historical change and distance but also by the mutually constitutive ­discourses of gender, sexuality, class, race, and nationality. This c­ omplex web of disjunction, difference, and (paradoxically) the potential intimacy of connection gets represented most powerfully and provocatively by the novel’s symbolic use of food. As its title suggests, The Book of Salt’s meditation on historical, sexual, and colonial othering centers on cooking and eating. Bính describes one of his employers—who is also one of his ­paramours and therefore goes by “Sweet Sunday Man,” another flirtatious ­nickname—as a “persistent bee” who “craves” Bính’s “honey” (149). The erotic implications of this metaphor are not confined only to those with whom Bính actually has sex. He describes Stein and Toklas using the same honey metaphor: they are the type of employers who “are never satiated by my cooking. They are ravenous. The honey that they covet lies inside my scars… They yearn for a taste of the pure, sea-salt sadness of the outcast whom they have brought into their homes” (19). 5 They want to lick his wounds, so to speak. Yet in an almost Gothic inversion of that familiar figure of speech, their desire is not to salve his wounds but rather to take pleasure from his pain, finding honey in his salt—the salt of his tears (his “sea-salt sadness”) and of the blood beneath his scars. Indeed, the “salt enhances the sweetness” (185). Put differently, the mysterious difference Bính embodies in the eyes of the other characters raises cannibalistic desires: he “becomes an allegory for the colonized vulnerable to the cannibalistic practices of ­colonialism—practices that nourish the Self by consuming the Other,” as Wenying Xu argues (141). Xu shows how the novel’s representations of food echo the ways in which “the racialization of Asian Americans has been achieved prominently through the mainstream’s representation

118  Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer and appropriation of Asian foodways” (8). Various practices of cooking and eating have historically served as metonyms for nationalistic notions of cultural difference. The Book of Salt uses this common trope to develop its meditation on how “the ruling class” (here, the French elite) becomes “enamored” of the “differences” of the other, craving “the fruits of exile” (14, 19). Bính’s expertise in French cuisine (learned in the Governor-General’s mansion in Vietnam) helps him challenge this gustatory power relationship, much as a dinner with the man on the bridge challenges Bính’s own nationalistic assumptions about foodways. The man on the bridge takes Bính to a restaurant where (the man tells Bính) the chef is from an American city, which conjures, for Bính, expectations of “bargelike slabs of beef and very tall glasses of cow’s milk” (94). When the exterior décor leads him to assume instead that it is a Chinese restaurant, he is shocked, on entering, to find “no red letterings, no gold-leaf flourishes, no spangled dragon, no shiny-bellied Buddha, all the things that the French look for in a good Chinese restaurant” (94). Afterward, having enjoyed an exceptional feast of mysterious national provenance, Bính is surprised to discover that the chef from an American city is Vietnamese: the man on the bridge explains that, like himself, the chef “traveled the world” for a time and that, while he now lives and works in Paris, “he will always cook from all the places where he has been” (99).

Eucharistic Symbolism The Book of Salt develops this critical food metaphor by way of a spiritual practice that has invited associations with cannibalism: the Catholic ­sacrament known as the Eucharist (literally thanksgiving), a liturgical consumption of bread and wine in memory of the sacrificed body and blood of Jesus as described in Gospel accounts of the last supper as well as in 1 Corinthians 11:20–34.6 As elaborated shortly, the novel uses ­Eucharistic symbolism to valorize Bính’s abjection, figuring such ­abjection as meaningful and ethically powerful especially through its implicit insistence on the intimately relational interconnectedness of subjectivities alongside their irreducible differences. The novel thus embraces traditional Catholic Eucharistic symbolism: rather than representing Eucharistic practices through a queer lens—queering the ­Eucharist—it moves in the opposite direction, invoking traditional ­Eucharistic theology to help create a sense of what could be aptly termed the Eucharistically queer. This is surprising, not least because Bính strongly criticizes the ­Catholicism practiced by his father, depicting his religion as a hypocritical vehicle for reinforcing racist, sexist, heterosexist, and economic oppressions. The Catholic Church is represented as collaborating with the French government’s colonial policing of the Vietnamese—policing

Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer  119 that reinforces repressive sex and gender norms. Bính attests that as long as his employers “can account for my whereabouts in [Paris] or in one of their colonies, then they can trust that the République and the Catholic ­ atholic Church have had their watchful eyes on me” (17). His father is a C convert who is paid by a local church to convert other Vietnamese men. Such evangelizing-for-hire suggests a predatory hypocrisy that implicitly associates the Christian missionary imperative with a capitalist growth imperative, thereby casting Church and state as united together in fostering an imperial enterprise. Bính’s mother similarly represents an implicit critique of Catholicism: “born a Buddhist,” she was also “taught from birth to worship her ancestors” (166). Baptized into Catholicism the morning of her wedding day, she later “set up a small shrine at the back of the kitchen in honor of Buddha” as an “act of defiance” against both her husband and the church that performed their arranged marriage (168). In this act, Bính’s mother represents some of the complexity of the religious landscape in Vietnam, which has been shaped by three religions (the tam giáo) imported from China—Confucianism, Daoism, and Mahayana Buddhism—as well as Catholicism (since the seventeenth century) and a variety of indigenous beliefs and practices concerning spirits and ancestor worship.7 A Buddhist revival occurred in Vietnam in the 1920s and 1930s (the period in which The Book of Salt is set). Notably, this revival did not necessarily entail a sense of officially imposed orthodoxy, which might have excluded ancestor worship or other spiritual practices. Indeed, in Vietnamese Buddhism today, there is no consensus about which activity is “essential” for being a Buddhist “other than moral behavior,” as ­A lexander Soucy documents (4). Especially for women, Vietnamese culture has historically created spaces that allowed for hybrid intermingling and fusions of spiritual beliefs and practices from various traditions.8 Throughout the colonial period, however, ancestor worship and other indigenous spiritual beliefs and practices were often criticized by “male Vietnamese urban elites”: Soucy explores the gendered divide in the religious landscape of Vietnam whereby women have historically been associated with such beliefs and practices, which have been denigrated as “superstitions” (33, 35). Moreover, this gendered landscape has been shaped by state interests: Vietnamese history offers many examples of the state using religion to bolster its authority—which has often “meant that religion also could pose a threat” to the state if practiced in such a way as to undermine governmental authority (Soucy 7–8). The religious defiance of Bính’s mother thus resonates with the novel’s implicit criticism of French Catholicism’s historical complicity in imperialist and sexist forms of marginalization in Vietnam. In keeping with its critique of Catholicism, The Book of Salt subversively associates the Eucharist with queer sexuality: for Bính, “drinking wine from each other’s lips” with Sweet Sunday Man constitutes a

120  Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer “communion” (83). Similarly, he sardonically characterizes his father’s Catholic faith as “craving the body of a man named Christ—‘a Holy Communion’” (197). Such depictions echo a long history of using the Eucharist to symbolize same-sex eroticism and romance for both women and men, from medieval writings to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liturgies in which the Eucharist served as a same-sex pair-bonding rite for women and men.9 It has also at times been understood as figuring Christ as the romantic lover of a male believer.10 Likewise, it has been seen as enacting triangulated desire between two women, using God as a kind of liturgical conduit—thus creating “a consumable female ­Eucharist,” Frederick Roden contends (39, 265). Yet such queer invocations of the Eucharist are not necessarily as subversive as they might seem. Traditional Christian theologies frequently associate the Eucharist with sexuality.11 Theologies of marriage, for instance, are often described in Eucharistic terms: wife and husband are to give themselves to each other in marriage as Jesus gave himself for humanity, a self-sacrifice that is commemorated in the sacrament of the Eucharist (thereby emphasizing the cost as well as the value of creating human connections through communal relationships).12 Eugene F. ­Rogers, Jr. explains that “sex, like the Eucharist, is a participation, analogous and derivative, in a marriage of sacrifice for others and therefore a thanksgiving for involving us in their involvements” (234).13 Similarly, Paul’s description of sex in 1 Corinthians echoes the body metaphor he uses to explain the practice and significance of the “Lord’s supper” (quoted later in this chapter), the liturgical ritual that later became the Eucharist: “know ye not that he which is joined to a harlot is one body? ‘For two,’ saith he, ‘shall be one flesh’” (1 Corinthians 6:16, alluding to Genesis 2:24). To the extent that queer sexual desires and practices have often been cast by dominant cultural discourses as grotesque, unnatural, and shameful, the Eucharist as a symbol for these desires and practices provocatively embraces cultural marginality by evoking the grotesque depravity of cannibalism—a taboo multiply laden with cultural significance when employed as a symbol for queer diasporic eroticism because it potentially conjures subversive associations between gender, sexuality, race, colonial imperialism, and food. At the same time, the Eucharist also ­represents the transcendent aspirations of traditional Christian spirituality. This is to say, Eucharistic symbolism can offer a productively anti-­dichotomous paradox by representing queer sexual desires and practices as entailing both radical abjection and valorized transcendence (at least symbolic transcendence)—a rhetorical figure that can signify complex, multifaceted relationships between margins and centers— without euphemistically evading the embodied specificity of sexual desire, such as the desire to have part of someone else’s body (potentially a non-­normatively gendered body, at that) literally in one’s own mouth.

Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer  121 Xu reads the Eucharist as symbolizing assimilation: the self ingests the other (167–68). This interpretation perhaps derives in part from Sigmund Freud’s use of ingestion as a key metaphor for identification, which he defines as an internalization of the other: identification aims at an identical sameness that would subsume the other into the self, dissolving all differences between the two. Yet traditional Eucharistic theology does not accord with this ingestion metaphor. On the contrary, the Eucharist liturgy is believed to enact ingestion without the expectation of full internalization: the believer seeks to become like Christ but does not expect to become Christ. The two become more closely connected but remain distinct from one another. C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters imagines a diabolical sense of metaphorical ingestion in contrast with this Christian one: the demon, Screwtape, explains to a junior demon, We want cattle who can finally become food; [God] wants servants who can finally become sons.… We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our ­Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct. (41; see also 109) This sense of identification as connection-with-a-difference resonates with queer theories of identification articulated by Judith Butler and Diana Fuss.14 The Eucharist enacts this sense of identification in an insistently nonbinary fashion: identification with Christ ideally creates a sense of community (communion) with other believers. The Eucharist liturgy traditionally positions the believer as a member of a larger community whose other members remain vitally different from one another, even as they also constitute one whole. Phillip Blond holds that this theology conceives of identity as intersubjective relationality rather than as subjective interiority: “Trinitarian consciousness (or rather personhood) forbids any subjective interiority at all” because “any solipsistic realm would find itself eclipsed by a theology of the endless relationality of creatures” (50). Indeed, a Eucharistic understanding of subjectivity and community exemplifies one of the key ways in which traditional Christian notions of subjectivity can be understood as queer. Michael Warner attests that queer writings “attribute as much moral importance to self-­dissolution as fundamentalist religion does” (“Tongues Untied” 43). A central ­element in many Christian traditions (not only among fundamentalists) holds any human sense of the individual self to be at least partially false. Tanya Erzen documents examples of this in her work on contemporary ex-gay ministries; like Warner, she concludes that Christian notions of the self can therefore be considered queer.

122  Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer The Book of Salt suggests a similarly queer notion of subjectivity. A French chauffeur explains to Bính, “Men with men. Men with men who behaved like women. Women who behaved like men with women who behaved like women, et cetera. The mutations of your condition are endless” (128). Bính takes this sense of variability one crucial step further: he is not impressed with the medicalized discourse of the “Dr.  ­Chauffeur”—“What a quack!”—in part because these putatively “endless” categories remain bounded insofar as they collectively demarcate a “condition,” which term Bính rejects for its implication of pathologizing difference from those without such a condition (128). He counters this rhetorical othering by undermining the chauffeur’s self-distancing metaphor of illness versus health, ironically suggesting the chauffeur himself has a “condition” (129). Making a related point later in the novel, Bính offers a telling allusion to 1 Corinthians 12:12–27 when, in his imagination, he questions how his father could have rejected him: Will you wake up tomorrow, Old Man, and look at yourself in the mirror and declare to your right foot, ‘No, you do not belong to me’? The day after that, will you deliver the same judgment to your two hands? (164, 248) This allusion does more than offer a convenient metaphor to emphasize the devastation of being disowned. It also helps articulate an understanding of community defined by intimate relationships among irreducibly different subject positions: in effect, Bính characterizes his father’s disowning him as a denial of faith in a Eucharistic conception of community. In the 1 Corinthians passage Truong alludes to, Paul uses the body as a metaphor to convey his belief that the Lord’s supper enacts a sense of Christ’s followers as individually distinct members of a single, united body that is Christ: For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ…. For the body is not one member, but many. If the foot shall say, “Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body”; is it therefore not of the body? And if the ear shall say, “Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body”; is it therefore not of the body?… Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary. And those members of the body, which we think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour. (1 Corinthians 12:12–23)

Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer  123 Here, as Dale Martin explains, Paul uses sōma, body, to refer at the same time to four things: the bread consumed at the Lord’s supper; the actual body of Jesus, whose crucifixion is memorialized in the Lord’s supper; the community of believers (the church) united as Christ’s body; and the individual body of each believer (The Corinthian Body 194–96). Paul commends equality and unity among members of the church when they eat the Lord’s supper because the event should ideally enact this profoundly multifaceted notion of sharing or koinōnia—communion— despite the many differences among the churchgoers in the multiethnic city of Corinth (1 Corinthians 11:20–22). Contemporary thinkers such as Blond and Elizabeth Stuart use this traditional Eucharistic theology to assert anti-assimilationist notions of community and undermine dichotomous binary views of the differences and similarities between self and other.15 Jeremy Ayers provides an ­illuminating example: he calls on Eucharistic theology to help counter “self-defeating modern conceptions of race” that depend on the ­self-other dichotomies that subtend “binary logics of master-slave, black-white, man-woman” (105). Likewise, in Torture and Eucharist, William Cavanaugh documents how Eucharistic liturgies were used in Chile ­under Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s and 1980s as a form of political resistance to violent oppression: Torture creates fearful and isolated bodies, bodies docile to the purposes of the regime; the Eucharist effects the body of Christ, a body marked by resistance to worldly power…. Isolation is overcome in the Eucharist by the building of a communal body which resists the state’s attempts to disappear it. (206) David Halperin provides another telling example in that he similarly invokes a Catholic conception of subjectivity that gets enacted in traditional Eucharistic theology (although he does not specifically address the Eucharist) in order to help articulate productive possibilities he sees in queer forms of relationality. He argues that public health efforts to prevent HIV infection would be more effective if they eschewed, on the one hand, the pathologizing vocabulary of psychoanalysis—which tends to suggest that people who don’t practice “safe sex” are psychologically diseased—and, on the other hand, that of liberal humanism’s self-­determining subject, which suggests that people who don’t ­practice “safe sex” are irresponsible and immoral decision-makers. As an ­alternative, he advocates adopting a highly relational and specifically Catholic conception of subjectivity that allows for more complex and useful articulations of the mysterious mix of voluntary and involuntary aspects of sexual desires and practices: he invokes “the rhetoric of religious and erotic martyrdom that goes by the name of abjection” (104).

124  Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer This martyrdom, like the Eucharist, constitutes a memorial (through imitation) of Christ’s death on the cross. Such a valorization of abjection informs Paul’s i­nsistence in 1 Corinthians that the Eucharist emphasizes the vital importance of the seemingly undesirable members of the community. ­ ucharistic Halperin’s use of religious abjection shares with Truong’s E symbolism an intimately relational representation of subjectivity that helps valorize the abject figure of the other. The Eucharist implicitly enacts community-formation as the product of not only redemption but also violence: the Eucharistic community is created (as perhaps all communities are in some measure created) by consuming particularity. The Eucharist memorializes the crucifixion of an innocent. Yet it also figures community-formation in terms of an anti-assimilationist ­valorization of ­ ucharist is a sacraparticularity, especially of abjected difference: the E ment of salvation, a memorial of the resurrection and vindication of the outcast scapegoat. Truong’s allusion to 1 Corinthians develops the novel’s culinary symbolism by invoking the Eucharist to assert that ­communities should valorize the particularities, especially the abjected differences, on which they feed. Given that Truong foregrounds the novel’s fictional ­engagement with historical figures and events, this v­ alorization implicitly applies also to the sense of transhistorical community-­formation conjured for many readers by historical fiction. While it is difficult not to interpret Paul’s missionary writings in terms of later debates in systematic theology about whether the Eucharist liturgy entails a symbolic or actual consuming of Christ’s body and blood,16 such debates can remain largely bracketed for the purposes of this argument inasmuch as Truong’s invocations of the Eucharist embrace the symbolic. Another later development in Christian theology, however, holds special significance for The Book of Salt: the fifth-­ century C.E. Council of Chalcedon’s articulation of the incarnation affirmed that in order to save or heal humanity, Jesus had to be both fully divine (i.e., having the power to save) and fully human (i.e., becoming part of—connected to—what needed saving so that he could save it through his own person by extension). The Chalcedonian understanding of these two “natures” of Jesus has shaped subsequent Eucharistic theology. The Council insisted that the divine and human are joined in the person of Jesus without being confused or intermixed with one another: the divine could be no less divine as a result of the union and the human no less human, so the two were conceived as being united in Jesus yet as fully retaining their respective particularities—their distinctiveness. The ­Chalcedonian conception of the incarnation shares with Paul’s description of Christ’s Eucharistic body the notion of a whole that is more valuable because of the irreducible differences among its constituent parts. This “Chalcedonian union without confusion” constitutes “a unity without dissolution of particularity,” Ayers maintains—a unity

Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer  125 that “preserves and enhances particularity by allowing it to mean more than binaristic difference” (112). The socially devalued person becomes valued as part of the community, not only because of that person’s vital connection with the group but also because of that person’s differences from other members of the group. Similarly, in The Book of Salt, Stein and Toklas’s recognition of Bính’s otherness—in a form that literalizes the liturgical enactment of ingesting blood—helps lead to a stronger rather than weaker sense of connection among the three characters. Stein and Toklas are appalled when they realize that they have consumed some of Bính’s blood in their food, which they discover due to its taste (70–71). The shock of the other is symbolized here as a grotesquely Eucharistic ingestion of the literal blood of the person on whom they have been metaphorically feeding (eating the food he prepares as well as craving his stories of exile and abjection), which surprisingly helps transform Bính’s difference into something more than mere entertainment for them. As a result, he gives up his habit of purposefully cutting himself with knives (142) because, he attests, “I do not need… red on the blade of a knife [to prove] that this body of mine harbors a life. I have my Madame and Madame. As long as I am with them, I have shelter” (149). In keeping with Christian traditions, the horror of the cannibalistic appropriation of the other—a vampirism that transgresses the biblical prohibition against eating blood, which was viewed by ancient Israelites as a life force17—gets transformed into a saving act of grace, a Passover meal: the shock of consuming Bính’s blood helps temporarily create a more genuine communion among these characters, which the novel represents pointedly in terms of shared meals. Bính’s Mesdames, “­unlike all the others whom I have had the misfortune to call my Monsieur and ­Madame, extend to me the right to eat what they eat” (209). He d ­ escribes a “meal en famille” with his Mesdames as a kind of liturgy, “a ritual in intimacy,” a meal one has with a “family member, maybe a friend, ­ ertrudeStein but never a servant”: “With Miss Toklas on one arm and G on the other, I step into the circle” (102).18 In the same vein, when he ­sacrifices this “unexpected kindness” by lying to make himself look bad in order “to save another” (his paramour), he uses religious vocabulary to describe his rejection by Stein and Toklas as being “excommunicated… from that perfect circle” (103). While Bính never fully achieves a stable and lasting sense of Eucharistic communion with other characters, his desire or hunger for connection with others is repeatedly cast as a hunger for a specifically Eucharistic notion of community. The relational conception of subjectivity suggested by the various uses of Eucharistic symbolism in the novel gets reinforced by the depiction of Bính’s habit of cutting himself. He describes cutting as “silver” (the knife blade) “threading [his] skin” but also as “a fire burning inside,” referring to the burning sensation he felt the first time he cut his fingers while

126  Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer working in his mother’s kitchen, when she squeezed lime juice onto the wound to protect it from infection (72). The ­domesticity of the needleand-thread imagery resonates with that of the fire in that both potentially evoke his mother, her kitchen stove, and their home. Cutting, for Bính, is a temporary stand-in for what he actually desires—­communion with another person, a sense of kinship or home: “loneliness will trigger my habit” (72). This habit is portrayed as being like an addiction, replete with a difficult-to-avoid trigger, which resonates with Halperin’s argument about the comingling of voluntary and involuntary aspects of both sexual desire and Catholic notions of abjection. Bính’s blood, “red on the blade of a knife,” bears witness “that this body of mine harbors a life”: to him red is “the color of faith,” and his faith centers on community (149, 190). He tells the story of three unrelated orphans, destitute and hungry, who were devoted to each other; their faith “forever sanctified” a marketplace in Vietnam for him: “faith lives here… Faith that there will always be something left at the bottom of the bowl, that none of them will take more than his share, faith that there will always be three” (121). For Bính, shared meals symbolize a potentially sanctifying hope for a Eucharistic sense of community. Being invited to share a meal en famille with Stein and Toklas thus helps explain his ability to give up his cutting habit while working for them: the self-destructive stand-in becomes unnecessary in light of the possibility of participating in that kind of communion. Cutting similarly gets associated with cruising—with Bính’s search for sexual communion. Cutting, cruising, and sharing a meal are all similarly represented as depending on a kind of faith Bính’s father lacks, specifically a faith in a potential sense of connection among irreducibly different subject positions: “To walk by [another man] without blinking an eye”—to cruise him, staring long enough to signal a potential sexual interest— is to say to each other that we are human…. Before I came to [the home of Stein and Toklas]… the only way I knew how to hold onto that moment of dispensation, that without-blinking-an-eye exchange, to keep it warm in my hands, was by threading silver through them. (142) Given the novel’s development of its central food metaphor through Eucharistic symbolism, and that this symbolism also shapes the novel’s representations of cutting and sex (especially the pursuit of sex in cruising), Bính’s description of “drinking wine from each other’s lips” with Sweet Sunday Man as a “communion” appears less ironic than it might at first have seemed (83). This story is less about subversive skepticism than about hope.19

Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer  127

Postsecular Reading Strategies Yet The Book of Salt depicts hope in the form of a question rather than a settled and definitive answer. Bính gets “excommunicated” from the shared-meal communion he treasures with Stein and Toklas just as he gets betrayed by Sweet Sunday Man. 20 This sense of not-yet-fulfilled hope extends similarly to the implied relationship between narrator and reader in the novel: as noted earlier, Bính-as-narrator flirts with the reader in much the same way that Bính-as-character flirts with men (by giving a false name to the reader at first, for instance), and the hoped-for connection seems equally uncertain in both cases. Indeed, the narrative uncomfortably aligns the reader with Bính’s employers by suggesting that the reader similarly misperceives him through a distorted colonizing lens, although Bính-as-narrator implicitly hopes for more from the reader in this regard by making the reader more aware of such distortions than his employers seem to be. Even so, Bính-as-character entertains Stein with his botched efforts at communication much as the narrator entertains the reader with stories about those efforts, and the poetic English used by Bính-as-narrator serves to remind the reader of the unrepresentability of Bính-as-character (who, again, has no facility with English). 21 The fictional Book of Salt, which is a study of Bính written by Stein, further emphasizes this parallel between the reader and Stein. Sweet Sunday Man tricks Bính into stealing this book but not to learn about him: the unfaithful lover hopes to learn more about Stein (and possibly make money) from it. An interest in Stein may well be part of a reader’s initial motive too for picking up (pun intended) Truong’s The Book of Salt. If so, the reader’s interest in Bính is aligned once again with that of characters who exploit (whether fully intentionally or not) his marginalized status in order to serve their own interests. Much as he hopes for communion with others, the novel seems designed to instill in its reader the desire to know more about the Vietnamese cook on his own terms, even while it insists that such a desire cannot be satisfied. Indeed, the narrative repeatedly creates a sense of assumed certainty about Bính only to undermine it subsequently. By the end of the novel, for example, the reader discovers that what at first seemed to be Bính’s decision about whether to accompany Stein and Toklas to the U.S. turns out not to have been his decision at all: he was never invited to join them on the trip (258–59). In keeping with the coy flirtatiousness of the narrative, the reader is at first encouraged to think he has chosen to go with them: he narrates at length how he boards the ocean liner with his “Mesdames,” apparently about to set sail (255). Yet the reader eventually learns that his decision was actually between staying in Paris and returning to Vietnam.

128  Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer The novel closes by insisting on a more provocative uncertainty by repeating a question about Bính’s decision to stay in Paris, a question originally posed by the man on the bridge but now also presumably shared by the reader: “What keeps you here?” (261). Bính’s answer, the final words of the novel, also arguably explains why he continues to choose life rather than the suicide he originally intended: “Your question, just your desire to know my answer, keeps me, is my response. In the dark, I see you smile. I look up instinctually, as if someone has called out my name” (261). This answer suggests that some questions, some hungers, can attest to desire and hope that, if shared, intimate the possibility of a kind of communion even if the question finds no complete answer—even if the hunger cannot be satiated. Thus Bính derives a sense of connection with Stein from their shared inability to communicate with one another, which is to say a sense of connection derived from disconnection: her bad French, for which she “compensates with the tone of her voice and the warmth of her eyes,” he thinks of as “a companion to my own [bad French]… this we have in common” (34). The question with which the novel ends, like the rhetorical 1 Corinthians question Bính poses to his father, expresses a hope for communion with others, even as its answer, like a Zen koan, also maintains a sense of incompleteness and deferral, of disjunction and difference. 22 It resonates with the paradoxical English narrative by a narrator who knows no English, especially with one of his reminders of that paradox when he recounts trying to describe a pineapple without knowing its proper name: “a pear… not a pear” is the best he can manage (35, ellipsis original). This is taken directly from The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (quoted earlier) and neatly encapsulates the novel’s meditation on similarity and difference. The referent of the second-person “you” in the novel’s closing lines is slippery: “Your question, just your desire to know my answer, keeps me [here]” (261). Bính addresses various characters in the second person throughout the novel; he also directly addresses the reader at times. In the third-to-last paragraph, he uses “you” to address Sweet Sunday Man  (260); in the penultimate paragraph, he uses it to address Stein (261); the closing words answer a question originally posed by the man on the bridge, so the “you” might address that character. Yet the crowding effect of the various possible referents of the second person in these closing paragraphs suggests multiple possible addressees for his parting words, potentially including the reader, who now (presumably) shares the desire to know Bính’s answer as well. After all, what literally keeps Bính “here” narrating is a given reader’s desire to know more about his story—to keep reading. The possibility that the reader is implicitly addressed at this point gets reinforced by the closing words of the penultimate paragraph: “A story is a gift, Madame, and you are welcome” (261). It is the reader, not Stein, who has actually

Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer  129 been gifted with Bính’s story. While inviting a sense of intimacy and connection, however, the narrator also tacitly asserts that this is a connection with a difference, a spectral conversation in which the reader’s interlocutor is at once there and not there: the reader cannot speak to Bính, and (again) the narrative emphasizes on multiple levels (both formal and thematic) that it cannot truly disclose his story. 23 Much as Stein and Bính share a connection through their common desire to communicate and concurrent inability to communicate, so too does the narrative position the reader as sharing this kind of hoped-for-but-unfulfilled connection with the narrator. Ultimately, by implicitly associating its reader with various characters with whom Bính has sought a Eucharistically inflected sense of communion, the ending of The Book of Salt suggests that reading and writing stories can be understood as symbolically Eucharistic activities. This crowded, spectral conversation with which the novel concludes reinforces the earlier representations of a Eucharistic sense of ­subjectivity-as-relationality, according to which the boundaries and significance of one’s subjectivity begin to approach or flirt with legibility only in the context of abjected others who must be understood as vitally related to oneself. Such an intersubjective relationality pushes beyond dichotomous conceptions of self and other to an open-ended, dialectical sense of self defined by an expansive community of others. It might be termed “Eucharistically queer” in that it conceives of subjectivity as strange, limit-breaking, and intimately relational. This notion resonates with the work of Channette Romero, who shows how “‘sacred’ notions of interdependent self-in-relationship subjectivities” in novels by women of color implicitly help broaden the kinds of “imagined communities” that the novel as a genre has historically been taken to foster among readers. 24 This notion also resonates with the work of Nayan Shah and Ann Laura Stoler, who draw on queer theory and postcolonial theory to conceptualize transnational subjectivities and relationalities. 25 The Book of Salt seems to anticipate their work in its focus on relationality, sexuality, and category-breaking representations of the transnational. A Eucharistically queer sense of subjectivity likewise resonates with queer migration scholarship. Eithne Luibhéid, for example, argues that while queer migration scholarship understands “queer migrants” as “impossible subjects” whose histories are unrepresentable because they “exceed existing categories” of analysis, this scholarship insists that it can be productively meaningful to engage in “recovering, theorizing, and valorizing [these] histories and subjects that have been largely rendered invisible, unintelligible, and unspeakable [by previous scholarship] in both queer and migration studies” (171). 26 The Book of Salt may be read as an astute attempt to engage in just such an undertaking, drawing on traditional Eucharistic theology to help render the illegible spectrally legible.

130  Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer This particular attempt suggests how the postsecular can play a potentially vital role in anti-imperialist transnational reading strategies. Brett Neilson argues that the “spiritualist dream of a metaphysical outside promises an external standpoint from which the operations of global capitalism might be questioned and opposed,” provided that this “metaphysical transcendence is understood as a deferred or forgotten possibility” (195–96). Neilson contends that spiritualities can serve as sources of resistance to global capitalism’s fantasy of dominance and control—at least where the notion of a transcendent reality retains a sense of intractable mystery. Without that sense of epistemological humility, it too easily becomes just another illusion of dominance and control. Shira Wolosky draws on the work of Emmanuel Levinas to argue for a similarly deferred because unrepresentable notion of transcendence. She asserts that this sense of unrepresentability does not negate signification because it situates itself in the ethical rather than ontological relationship of self and other—a discursive relationship that “confirms plurality and difference” (97). Her Levinasian conception of the relationship between self and other resonates especially with The Book of Salt’s biblically infused meditation on the legibility of abjected difference. Even so, some might find it strange that Truong invokes traditional Catholic theology in her representation of marginalized subjectivity because Catholicism is often associated with dogmatic orthodoxy rather than a deferred sense of transcendence. Yet such an association reductively oversimplifies a complex set of phenomena. Catholicism names a varied array of peoples, practices, and beliefs, which are interrelated not only with the long history of European imperialism but also with postcolonial subjectivities, diasporic borderland dwellers, and many marginalized inhabitants of the Global South. More pointedly, orthodoxy and a deferred notion of transcendence need not be mutually exclusive, as explained in the Introduction. 27 In an interview, Truong explains that she intended the title of The Book of Salt to allude to the Bible, in keeping with its similarity to the traditional way of referring to many of the books in the Old Testament: Salt—in food, sweat, tears, and the sea—is found throughout the novel. The word ‘salary’ comes from the word salt, so salt is another way of saying labor, worth, value. For me, the title is also a nod toward the biblical connotation of salt, in particular to the turning of Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt for ‘looking back’ at her home, the city of Sodom. She continues, “[the story of Lot’s wife] says to me that the Catholic God, whom the cook is so wary of, not only disapproves of the activities of the Sodomites but also of nostalgia. Bính is a practitioner of both.”28 Even so, the novel is not precisely anti-Catholic. Bính does not

Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer  131 completely reject the faith that his father espouses so much as the hypocritical version he actually practices: “faith… is a theory of love and redemption,” and Bính knows “no vessel more empty of that” than his father (249). He insists, by contrast, that “in me, faith did flourish” (63; see also 195). Bính’s faith is represented not only in the Catholic terms of love and redemption. As is especially apparent in the relationship between Bính and his mother, The Book of Salt embraces a hybrid intermingling of various spiritual practices and theologies. This hybridity resonates not only with other works of contemporary U.S. literature (as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3) but also with a long-standing aspect of Vietnamese culture. Even after being baptized, Bính’s mother continues to pray to her parents; as Bính sees it, however, “there is no forgiveness in ancestor worship, only retribution and eternal debt” (196–97). So, eventually, she “turned to Catholicism for refuge” with mixed results: In Catholicism, she recognized a familiar trinity: the guilt, the denial, and the delay in happiness that defined her adult life… In ­Catholicism, my mother heard her voice lifted in prayers and in songs… There was only a small part of her, only her earlobes, I imagine, that felt remorse, that regretted that her own mother and father would not be [in heaven] to greet her. (198–99) She therefore “still kept her family altar and the Buddha… She is Vietnamese, after all. She hedges her bets” (198). The reference here to the Vietnamese tradition of religious hybridity and fusion takes on greater significance when understood in terms of the novel’s use of Eucharistic symbolism. While this passage acknowledges important differences between Buddhism and ancestor worship, on the one hand, and Catholicism, on the other, it also echoes Bính’s earlier allusion to Paul’s Eucharistic body metaphor as a figure for the interconnectedness as well as the differences among these spiritual beliefs and practices: will his mother say to her own earlobes, “You are not a part of me”? This campy suggestion implicit in Bính’s description of his mother’s religious faith emphasizes the significance of her keeping a family altar and the Buddha: his description undermines the sense of definite boundaries among these different spiritual traditions, even while it acknowledges their differences. It resonates with one of the central tenets of Catholicism (the Eucharist), even as it undermines a sense of Catholic hegemony or triumphalism. Like his mother, Bính seems to possess a characteristically Vietnamese faith in a hybrid intermingling of spiritual practices and beliefs. He attests, for example, that his mother visited him supernaturally just before her death in “the form of a pigeon, a city-worn bird who was passing

132  Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer away” (230). The bird, “an ordinary, city-gray pigeon,” is dying in a park in Paris where it has the misfortune to become the object of fascination and excitement for a group of children; it tries to fly away, and the right wing “opens to its full span, a flourish of white,” but the “left one collapses halfway, a crush of gray” (218). “A flourish of white, a crush of gray” (218): the dying bird is an embodiment of his dying mother in a gray áo dài, with her hair now turned white. He imagines the white rising, the gray falling as “her body became one with the earth, and her soul rose to heaven,” the “flourish of white” (230). There in heaven, “Her husband, a false prophet, could never follow” (230). As he senses her impending death, Bính addresses his mother directly as he sometimes addresses the reader: “You touch your face the way that no one else has since I have gone. You smile because you know that I am with you” (221). The supernatural visitation by his mother as she dies, fused with a Catholic notion of heaven, cannot be simply dismissed as mere metaphor, a flight of poetic fancy. While some readers might interpret it in such terms, the novel leaves open the possibility that its representations of supernatural phenomena might be taken literally. Bính tells many stories (e.g. that his name is Bính, his father is dead, and his real father is the scholar-prince29) that turn out not to be entirely or simply true. Is his mother’s passing also one of those stories? In thus troubling the borders between spiritual and secular reading, The Book of Salt unsettles customary conceptual boundaries between “traditional” and “modern” worldviews by subverting the critical function of the spiritual in contemporary Western distinctions between those worldviews. As Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, “the attempt to objectify the past is an expression of the desire to be free of the past” because it is a desire for the Lockean tabula rasa—freedom from the authority of cultural traditions (244). Such a desire is not necessarily a bad thing: ­traditions can be oppressive. Yet Chakrabarty aims to temper the utopian historicism that implicitly desires to free itself from history, as exemplified in the work of G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx. Chakrabarty characterizes such utopian historicism as totalizing the past into “­general historical trends” that can thereby be defined more neatly as the historical other (in relation to the present) so as to posit a future free of that other (22). By contrast, he aligns himself with the non-totalizing strategy that Martin Heidegger employs in Being and Time: Chakrabarty favors an understanding of history that embraces “the plurality that inheres in the ‘now,’ the lack of totality, the constant fragmentariness, that constitutes one’s present” (249, 243). This anti-presentist sense of history subtends his call for scholars to approach non-secular ways of reading as potentially “illuminating possibilities for our own life-worlds” (112). Such arguably postsecular reading strategies can help counter the imperialistic othering of traditional cultures that the modern secular West tends to cast as benighted, irrational, and premodern.

Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer  133 Zhange Ni characterizes postsecular reading as challenging “the secular’s claim to epistemic, affective, and moral-political supremacy” while also questioning “symbolic assumptions, cultivated sensibilities, and power relations associated with religion” (51). Going further, postsecular reading can productively challenge ostensible distinctions between secular and religious modes of reading, suggesting not that they are the same but that they are more intimately interrelated than they might initially seem to be. Warner recommends that literary critics acknowledge and examine the “pieties” that inform modern critical reading by exploring not only the history of different modes of reading but also how “uncritical” reading inevitably shapes critical reading (“Uncritical Reading” 36). Indeed, he avers, “Uncritical reading is the unconscious of the profession” (“Uncritical Reading” 33). Among such seemingly uncritical modes of reading, he notes (citing the work of Peter Stallybrass) that certain forms of religious reading—especially traditions of Bible reading that embrace the fragmentary, discontinuous, and affective interpretation of excerpts as opposed to a more modern insistence on “grasping the totality of a text”—were historically not viewed as opposed to or even distinct from scholarly critical reading practices (“Uncritical Reading” 28).

A Eucharistically Queer Reading of Literary History An awareness of the limitations and historicity of modern secular reading practices is not the sole purview of twenty-first-century readers and writers, of course. Thus, for example, Elizabeth Freeman’s interpretation of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood resonates not only with The Book of Salt but also (albeit less directly) with Faulkner’s biblically charged narratives. Freeman argues that Nightwood imaginatively attempts to recover a premodern sense of Christian sacramentality through its representations of baptism and the Eucharist, rites that help articulate a sense of “queer sociability” in the novel (“Sacra/mentality” 759). It thus prompts Freeman to consider “a Eucharistic imagining of the historical,” which “would not counterpose the figural and the historical” but would rather “exploit the trace of the visceral in the sign for new forms of connectivity, insisting that the queer and the social are inseparable” (“Sacra/mentality” 760). In a provocatively similar vein, The Book of Salt challenges notions of neat historical periodization30 by which non-secular reading practices would be relegated to the premodern past as secular modernity’s abjected other—much as the Communist state tried to suppress religion as “a vestige of the feudal past” after Vietnam achieved independence in 1954 (Soucy 7). Instead, Truong suggests a Eucharistically queer notion of history that is messier in the sense of being at once both stranger and more intimately interconnected. The novel embraces what many would

134  Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer dismiss as superstitious symbolism derived from the first-century C.E. writings of Paul, the fifth-century Council of Chalcedon, and later developments in the practice and conceptualization of the Eucharist. Such a dismissal would ignore the fact that Eucharist liturgies, quite traditionally conceived, continue to be practiced around the world in the twenty-first century. Indeed, Vietnam has experienced a resurgence of religious practices in general since the late 1980s, when the state began to adopt more permissive attitudes toward religion—despite that, among male urban elites, there remains a “continued bias” against such ­practices (Soucy 34). Truong’s work draws on multiple cultural contexts, perhaps not unlike the chef in The Book of Salt who cooks “from all the places where he has been” (99). One of those places for Truong is Boiling Springs, North Carolina, where she lived for three years as a child when her family first moved to the U.S. In an interview with Jihii Jolly about her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth, Truong explains, “I like to say that I am a Southern girl, twice over: South Vietnam and the American South. It’s, of course, only the former that defines me in most people’s eyes.” Faulknerian influences are traceable in Bitter in the Mouth, as Denise Cruz attests: “a canon represented by Faulkner and Morrison, Lee, and McCullers haunts the novel” (“Monique Truong’s Literary South” 731). There are signs of such haunting in The Book of Salt as well. In addition to the fragmented narrative structure and emphasis on subjective retellings of past events (as noted earlier), the novel also resonates with Faulkner’s invocations of the Bible as a prophetic yet ambiguous voice crying out for social justice. This resonance is particularly salient in the two authors’ respective representations of marginalized subjectivity, particularly through ­characters who figuratively embody larger histories of colonization and oppression. As Taylor Hagood argues in Faulkner’s Imperialism, this is a recurrent theme in Faulkner’s work, and Go Down, Moses exemplifies the biblical motifs frequently used to help articulate it—especially Egypt as a symbol of colonization and the Exodus story as liberation, in keeping with long-standing African American traditions in the South (Faulkner’s Imperialism 119 ff.). The novel’s title is thus a biblical call for social justice that refers to the well-known African American spiritual (and to ­Exodus 8:1), which, as Linda Wagner-Martin argues, signals that the title is meant to be “shameful, and shaming” to white readers (10). Hagood agrees with many critics that Go Down, Moses is concerned with not only Africans and African Americans enslaved by whites but also with indigenous peoples such as the Chickasaw and Choctaw who were exploited, displaced, and worse—as well as with the whites who struggle with the legacy of their forefathers’ sins (Faulkner’s Imperialism 147).

Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer  135 At the same time that Faulkner’s novels frequently sound this type of call for social justice in prophetically biblical tones, however, they do so with marked and often profound ambiguity and ambivalence, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. Thus Piero Boitani reads Go Down, Moses as challenging readers with its “perverse, purloined polysemia” (116). Ike McCaslin is no Moses. Liberation, let alone redemption, remain unavailable in the novel, as Jessie McGuire Coffee argues: while Ike seeks to rectify the sins of his forebears, he “is not sacrificial enough to become a believable Christ-figure,” and “his efforts do not change the pattern of land ownership or of racial relationships even in his own family” (15). The series of stories raises challenging and pointedly shameful questions without offering clear answers. Boitani concludes that Go Down, Moses thereby pushes readers “to add our own counter-melody” to its troubled and discordant tune (123). Scott T. Chancellor reads the novel similarly, pointing out that this collection of stories, like most other Faulkner narratives, does not even “wax theological on the presence of a God” (209). Drawing on Jewish traditions as well as black liberation theology, Chancellor interprets Faulkner as engaging in the kind of insistently immanent particularity commended by James Cone, which is meant to upbraid a white “failure to see that God did not become a universal human being but an oppressed Jew” (Cone 85, qtd. in Chancellor 204). Chancellor sees Faulkner’s uses of Hebrew scripture as evidence of his “Jewish sensibility” (228), a reading that constitutes a potentially productive addition to analyses of anti-Semitism in Faulkner’s work.31 Yet Faulkner uses New Testament texts in much the same way that he uses Hebrew scripture. Consider, for example, The Sound and the Fury (discussed in Chapter 1) and A Fable, which exemplify the pattern whereby he repeatedly provincializes the Bible. He represents it not merely in particularized but often parochial terms that invite associations with jejune naïveté at best and ignorant bigotry at worst. At the same time, these provincializing representations are inextricably intertwined with his biblically resonant calls for justice, creating a double-voicing effect that renders the very authority of such calls ambiguous and ambivalent. A Fable might be said to reflect the Gospel of Mark’s passion narrative more than any other biblical account of Jesus’s crucifixion, especially if one reads Mark as concluding with what were most likely its original final verses, in which the women followers of Jesus flee from the “young man” who tells them Jesus “is risen,” subsequently saying nothing about this encounter “to any man; for they were afraid” (16:5–8). This is not a triumphant resurrection narrative in which doubters become believers. Yet Faulkner’s retelling is considerably less hopeful, offering no assurance of the resurrection. On the contrary, the novel rather suggests that the biblical resurrection story may be nothing more than a fable (in the negative sense of being patently untrue). Dinnah Pladott, for instance,

136  Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer agrees with most critics that the “Christ-like corporal” achieves a sacrifice that is only tragic and not redemptive (80, 90). In this regard, she sees the novel as exemplifying a pattern in Faulkner’s work in which such “destructive” sacrifices are intermingled with “affirmative” sacrifices, such as Dilsey’s in The Sound and the Fury and Byron Bunch’s in Light in August (discussed in Chapter 2). Pladott reads these two types of sacrifices in Faulkner’s work as existing in “tightly braided” tension with one another, in keeping with the present study’s argument about his biblical double-voicing more broadly (90). The most telling example of the latter type of sacrifice in A Fable, as Pladott argues, comes from an interpolated tale about a three-legged racehorse, which is told by an old African American man to a cynical military courier referred to as the “runner” (Pladott 78–80; A Fable 126–72). The story reads almost like a caricature of the American tall tale. Yet it occasionally elevates to a more serious, tragicomic register that may seem incongruous but is typical of Faulkner’s uses of such provincial tones in his work as a whole. The story foregrounds hope and self-sacrifice for the good of another in the figure of a man who loved the racehorse and “set it free” (128), eluding the authorities not in order to win prize money at races but just “so that it could run, keep on running”—even if it lost races—rather than be consigned to the ignominy of a stud farm (137). The interpolated tale potentially reflects on the primary narrative about the corporal’s apparently meaningless sacrifice. The teller and listener emblematize the biblical tension in Faulkner’s work: to the runner, the old man represents a traditional, Bible-believing, and definitively provincial worldview—a rural American in Paris, as wishful and willfully ignorant as he is naïve (167–72). The runner sarcastically proposes, “Maybe what I need is… To believe. Not in anything: just to believe”; yet he quickly concludes, “If I only could. You only could. Anybody only could” (171–72). He implies that even the old man, if he is honest with himself, cannot truly believe. Ultimately, the tenuous, stripped-down vestige of belief suggested by the runner raises the question not so much of an entire religious tradition or set of complex theological propositions but, in the context of the novel’s larger narrative, more immediately of whether the biblical stories of Jesus’s redemptive sacrifice can be considered anything other than mere fables or tall tales—whether traditional interpretations of those stories have any place in the modern world. Even if A Fable does not rise to the same level of artistic achievement as Faulkner’s more influential novels, it clearly aims to do so, and its reaching—which characteristically includes the Faulknerian attempt to make the words and formal structure reach beyond themselves, as discussed in Chapter 2—is cast in insistently biblical terms, just as in his more influential works.32 This biblical reaching in his novels resonates

Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer  137 with Truong’s technical paradox in The Book of Salt whereby her narrator cannot speak English but narrates in it with the grace of a celebrated poet. Again, the very act of reading the latter novel is cast by the narrative as aligning the reader with Bính’s Eucharistically queer hope for communion. Yet the novel tries to keep the reader from imagining that this is an easy communion or that the hope for such communion can rest easy, even simply as hope: the reader is implicated in the rapacious hungers of those who would devour Bính for their own delight, albeit in the name of hoped-for communion but often uncritically and perhaps hypocritically so. In this, as well as in the multilayered questions that help structure the narrative, Truong renders the authority of her ­Eucharistic symbolism ambiguous and questionable—yet not easily dismissed. In effect, The Book of Salt seems designed to challenge the reader in part through its invocations of the Bible, much as Faulkner’s biblical ­double-voicing seems designed for the same purpose.33 Both authors develop complex and productive tensions between traditional and iconoclastic readings of biblical texts. Ultimately, this resonance between Truong’s and ­Faulkner’s work itself helps articulate the transformational reading of literary modernism implicit in The Book of Salt.

Notes 1 The Book of Salt achieved “bestseller” status and won several literary awards as well as praise from a wide range of reviewers, including The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and The Times. It won the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award; it was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and for Britain’s Guardian First Book Award. Scholars who have published journal articles that focus on The Book of Salt include Chris Coffman, Denise Cruz, Naomi Edwards, David L. Eng, Catherine Fung, Megan Molenda LeMay, Michelle Peek, Y-Dang Troeung, Meg Wesling, and Ingrida Žindžiuvienė; Susan Shin Hee Park and Daniela Fargione have published essays that focus on it in edited collections. Scholarly monographs by Carolyn A. Durham, Anna Linzie, Wenying Xu, and David Eng devote extensive attention to the novel. 2 Using much the same sense of queer used here, Gerard Loughlin argues that theology is and “has always been a queer thing” (7–10). 3 Nguyễn Ái Quốc was one of the pseudonyms used by Ho Chi Minh. The novel thus tacitly suggests that seemingly private intimacies help constitute and are themselves partially constituted by the kinds of public identities claimed by nationalities. 4 Eng uses the phrase “historical catachresis” to describe the novel’s complex representation of history in The Feeling of Kinship 62–65. 5 See Troeung, “A Gift or a Theft Depends on Who Is Holding the Pen” 126. 6 Insofar as The Book of Salt presents itself as a reading of The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, perhaps Truong’s use of Eucharistic symbolism was inspired in part by the fact that Toklas converted to Catholicism in 1957.

138  Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer 7 For a case-study exploration of the historical relationship between these ­various religious practices and beliefs, see Anh Q. Tran, “Inculturation, Mission, and Dialogue in Vietnam: The ‘Conference of Representatives of Four Religions.’” 8 See Soucy, The Buddha Side. Given that The Book of Salt centers on cooking as its primary symbol, fusion seems an appropriate term for the hybrid commingling of various spiritual traditions historically found in Vietnamese culture. 9 Carolyn Dinshaw cites Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ as evidence that, in medieval writings, [t]he erotic aura around celebration of the Eucharist clearly extends beyond the thirteenth-century women mystics Caroline Walker Bynum has famously studied. Bynum discusses the ways in which an empowering female fusion with Christ in the Eucharist is achieved “through asceticism and through eroticism,” sometimes themselves completely fused: the Eucharist provided “a moment of encounter with that humanitas Christi which was such a prominent theme of women’s spirituality.” (83) Dinshaw points out that “some male clerics” also experienced the Eucharist as a kind of bodily fusion with Christ, which “fusion may indeed have been understood erotically” (83). For accounts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-­ century Eucharist liturgies as same-sex pair-bonding rites, see Alan Bray’s The Friend. 10 See James C. Waller, “‘A Man in a Cassock is Wearing a Skirt’: ­M argaretta Bowers and the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Gay Clergy” (Dinshaw references Waller’s work in Getting Medieval, 256 n. 103); see also F ­ rederick S. Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious ­C ulture, especially 18 and 112. 11 Some Biblical texts associate eros with food, such as, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine” (Song of Solomon 1:2). The Eucharist is associated with marriage in the imagery of “the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Revelation 19:9). 12 See David Matzko McCarthy, especially 206–07. 13 For a feminist reading of the Eucharist and its relationship to sex, see Martha Kalnin Diede’s “Take and Eat: Eve, Mary, and Feminist Christianity.” 14 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter, 93–119, and Diana Fuss, Identification Papers. 15 See Elizabeth Stuart’s Gay and Lesbian Theologies: Repetitions with Critical Difference and Phillip Blond’s “Introduction” in Post-Secular Philosophy, especially 48. 16 Even this description of the debates oversimplifies the history of, for example, ninth-century contentions over “the real presence,” the thirteenth-­century doctrine of transubstantiation, and later alternative conceptualizations, such as consubstantiation, memorialism, and transignification. 17 See Genesis 9:4. 18 The typographical play on Stein’s name, “GertrudeStein,” is intentional— “No longer a diminutive, as female names are doomed to be, but a powerful whopping declaration of her full self, each and every time” (207). 19 The Eucharist is in many traditions cast as a variation on the Passover seder, which memorializes the liberation of the Israelites from captivity in Egypt. The Eucharist may thus be read as a figure for the liberation of a people from colonization.

Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer  139 20 Denise Cruz argues that while “the culinary” in The Book of Salt “offers, at least for ephemeral moments, access to nonnormative communities and intimacies that work against imperial and heteropatriarchal structures,” the novel also depicts “immiscibilities that are critical to Truong’s exploration of potential queer affiliations across class, race, and nation” such that “food, rather than representing unquestioned forms of ethnic authenticity or easy possibilities for community, instead underscores painful and bitter realizations” (“Love Is Not a Bowl of Quinces” 360, 262). It is precisely this tension between fleeting experiences of communion, on the one hand, and crushing disappointment when those experiences are not fully realized or sustained, on the other hand, that Truong’s use of Eucharistic symbolism helps articulate. 21 In “Vietnamese American Literature,” Truong discusses the exploitation of non-native English speakers by native English speakers in collaborative writing projects. 22 In this, The Book of Salt resonates with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, which invokes Buddhist traditions while displacing the question of belief in the supernatural (specifically reincarnation) that, for many, would neatly distinguish whether the author’s interest in Buddhism is secular or spiritual. She achieves this displacement by emphasizing that certain Buddhist pedagogies embrace epistemological mystery by endlessly deferring answers while fostering productive change and learning—pedagogy as a process that aims not to arrive at a definite answer but rather to continue exploring. 23 See the discussion in Chapter 2 of Jacques Derrida’s notion of spectrality. 24 Romero explains, Rather than conceiving of the ‘imagined community’ as made up of isolated, private individuals, contemporary fiction by women of color appropriates the novel to encourage readers to imagine more public, dynamic, and interdependent relations with others. The fiction transforms the traditional function of the novel to uphold nationalism and individual selfhood, revealing instead the potential novels possess to reimagine relations among disparate peoples. (178) 25 See Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West, and Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. For another productive melding of queer theories and postcolonial studies, see Gayatri Gopinath’s Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. 26 This emphasis on the unrepresentability of transnational sexualities developed in part from queer theory’s insistence on the intractable mystery of sexuality; see Chapter 3, Note 5. 27 Wolosky contrasts Paul Ricoeur with Levinas in this regard, arguing that the differences between these thinkers echoes a similar difference between Thomas Aquinas and Moses Maimonides (94). Wolosky’s framing is heuristically productive for the purposes of her argument, but the distinctions among these four conceptions of transcendence could be framed less divisively: a notion of analogical predication and participation need not preclude a sense of the radical contingency of human understanding, as noted in the Introduction. 28 “A Conversation with Monique Truong.”

140  Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer 29 A schoolteacher, a “scholar-prince” with whom Bính imagines his mother had an affair and who might have been his biological father, gave her “a small amount of money and no way to contact him” as he left for France to pursue “further studies” (but he might have taken up with another young woman in Saigon) (170). Bính’s mother used the money to buy the áo dài of gray silk, ­intending to be able to wear it even when her “hair turned white” (221). 30 Eng argues that The Book of Salt challenges historical periodization and historicism more broadly (“The End(s) of Race”). 31 See, for example, Thomas Peyser, “Faulkner, Jews, and the New Deal: The Regional Commitments of ‘Barn Burning.’” 32 For example, early in the novel, a description of “a single gun, a big one” invokes biblical imagery to convey a sense of significance immeasurably beyond the literal: … as though it were firing at the Channel, the North Sea itself fifty miles away, or perhaps at some target even vaster and more immune than that: at Cosmos, space, infinity, lifting its voice against the Absolute, the ultimate I-Am, harmless. (47) 33 The Bible also characteristically turns its central questions back on the reader, implicitly posing those questions as challenges, especially by foregrounding how different characters or groups react to and interpret interpolated stories. Thus the story of David and Nathan (2 Samuel 12), the structure of the Gospels (which emphasize various reactions to and understandings of Jesus), and the very nature of parables and parabolic reading resonate with Jewish and Christian traditions whereby reading biblical texts is like wrestling with an angel (drawing on the story of Jacob told in Genesis 32). The challenge posed to the reader in The Book of Salt differs somewhat from this biblical reception history in an important way, one that could be described as postsecular: as explained above, the challenge itself troubles the secular-sacred divide that often operates normatively in what Taylor describes as the contemporary “secular age.” By this, he means that religious worldviews are eminently contestable in many contemporary cultural settings in the sense that such worldviews are subject to what he terms a “fragilizing effect” (A Secular Age 304).

Conclusion A Postsecular Bible?

“The Bible is modern.” So proclaimed Jean Rhys, a contemporary of Faulkner’s (seven years his elder) in an unpublished essay.1 Heather ­Walton argues that Wide Sargasso Sea reflects Rhys’s sense that the ­Bible resonates strongly with modernist concerns, including the issues of oppression, marginalization, and social justice that interested her as a woman raised in Dominica when it was still a colony of Great B ­ ritain. Faulkner’s invocations of the Bible seem to reflect a similar sentiment about the premodern text’s relevance to modernity: it can be read as exemplifying a modernist understanding of recursive fragmentation through which multiple layers of signification may be glimpsed only partially and obscurely through one another in a palimpsest-like effect. Additionally, Faulkner—more insistently than Rhys—casts the Bible as speaking prophetically to modern issues of social justice. By the end of the twentieth century, the Bible had been claimed as a postmodern text, too: 1995 saw the publication of A. K. M. Adam’s What Is Postmodern Biblical Criticism? as well as the Bible and Culture Collective’s The Postmodern Bible. Six years later, companion volumes appeared: Adam’s Postmodern Interpretations of the Bible: A Reader and The Postmodern Bible Reader edited by David Jobling, Tina Pippin, and Ronald Schleifer. 2 These readings should have come as no surprise. Quite literally a copy of a copy of originals that no longer exist, the Bible could be read as a simulacrum, an example of the unbounded reproducibility that constitutes a defining hallmark of late capitalism. Calling to mind Don DeLillo’s satirical notion of “the most photographed barn in America” (White Noise 12), the Bible is, in fact, the most reproduced book in the world. If one also counts partial copies, brief excerpts, quotations, and allusions in both print and nonprint media, the frequency and variability with which the Bible gets reproduced in contemporary American culture alone is dizzying. Ironically, however, biblical literacy in the U.S. has been declining for decades, further calling to mind DeLillo’s most photographed barn in America—especially the semi-parodic analysis of this barn offered by one of the characters, Murray Jay Siskind: it’s a “religious experience in a way, like all tourism,” in which “we’re not here to capture an image,

142  Conclusion we’re here to maintain one” (12). Ultimately, for that reason, “No one sees the barn” (12). One might similarly argue from a postmodern viewpoint that it is impossible to read the Bible, at least in the sense of reading for its original authorial intentions: some argue that one can read only its reception history and that present-day readings are bound to constitute only another chapter in the ongoing narrative of that reception history—in effect, that one cannot presume to offer the final word on the “Word.” Dale Martin argues that this predicament should be embraced: he forwards a postmodern approach to interpreting the Bible that accepts an anti-foundationalist sense of epistemological contingency. At the same time, he attests that such an approach can support an orthodox Christian worldview (Biblical Truths 32). In this, he is far from alone among theologians and biblical scholars (as discussed in the Introduction), many of whom reject “scientific” approaches to interpreting the Bible as modern departures from and distortions of premodern hermeneutic traditions—traditions that resonate with postmodern insights. Such academic theologians and biblical scholars can help elucidate Faulkner’s uses of the Bible but not because his novels anticipate their arguments (they do not). These scholars increasingly complicate and undermine the account of biblical hermeneutics commonly assumed by the dominant secularization narrative, which holds that the progress of science has inevitably eroded traditional ways of reading the Bible— again, the most commonly shared feature of which is the imputation of a sense of prophetic authority (especially moral) to biblical texts. Once that oversimplified narrative gets sufficiently qualified as to become at least partially muted, one more easily hears the double-voicing that Faulkner regularly creates in his invocations of the Bible. On the one hand, he represents it in modernist terms as fragmented, primitive, and thereby provincialized. On the other, however, he also represents it in more traditional terms as an ambiguous-yet-authoritative voice from the distant past (as explained in Chapter 1). The overall effect suggests an intermingling of iconoclastic and traditional interpretations of the Bible. Faulkner’s novels thereby suggest a sense of permeability between “modern” and “premodern.” This biblical tension in Faulkner’s narrative voice helps answer one of the questions that inspired the creation of Provincializing the ­Bible: given that the Bible has so often been used to support and defend ­devastating forms of marginalization and oppression—including ­racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, classism, nationalism, and ­imperialism—why is it not simply a dead text for contemporary ­authors who grapple with the history and contemporary legacy of such oppressions?3 As the previous chapters aim to demonstrate, some of the most innovative and influential of these authors invoke the Bible in ways that are

Conclusion  143 not only iconoclastic, as would be expected, but also surprisingly traditional. Their most celebrated novels resonate with Faulkner’s ­invocations of the Bible in ways that suggest why postsecular rather than postmodern serves as a useful form of shorthand to describe these authors’ representational strategies. While the latter term may connote the views of the Bible sketched earlier, postsecular does not necessarily negate such views but adds an imperfect and vexed yet nevertheless fruitful connotation of disrupting dominant secularization narratives. In various ways, these novels convey a nuanced, complex sense of textual and broader cultural traditions that does not accord with the temporal logic of modernity by which premodern authorities are inevitably and entirely superseded by secular modernity. Indeed, the very tensions in scholarly debates about the term postsecular can help rather than hinder analysis inasmuch as they reflect larger tensions evident within the strain of literary history charted in Provincializing the Bible. Consider three critical questions commonly raised in such debates.4 First, what historical narrative does the term imply—does it suggest a troubling desire for the supersession of the secular, whether through a “return” to traditional religions or the development of “new” forms of religion and spirituality? Second, does the term adequately address ethical and political concerns about the problematic role of dogmatic religious worldviews in pluralistic academic and public discourses? Third, is the term too provincial—­i nsufficiently transnational and global—in the sense that the very notion of the secular tends to connote modern Western conceptions of spirituality and religion? To start with the first question, Lori Branch defends against potentially troubling and improbable temporal implications of the post- prefix in postsecular by likening the term to Jean-François Lyotard’s definition of postmodern as signifying “not the end of but a new type of thinking in relation to modernism” (94). Branch’s argument accords with this book’s larger argument in that the novels analyzed here generally convey a sense of permeability between past and present that tends to undermine reductively neat conceptualizations of historical periodization, including that which is conveyed by the most common secularization narrative. Provincializing the Bible argues that certain novels gesture toward more productive histories of the secular in part through their invocations of the Bible. Placing less emphasis on abstract categories such as Christianity or religion in favor of focusing on the interpretive practices implicit in these novels’ intertextual biblical resonances can help avoid the mistaken assumption that Christianity—or Judaism or Islam—­constitutes one clear and easily definable category as well as the concomitant and equally mistaken assumption that these religious traditions can be reduced to propositional statements of belief. Both assumptions tend to reinforce the reductive secularization narratives

144  Conclusion that contribute to the sociocultural and inevitably economic forms of marginalization critiqued by the novels in question, as noted repeatedly throughout this book. These novels critique the Bible and its reception history even as they at times invoke distinctively traditional ways of interpreting it. Indeed, some of their most iconoclastic representations resonate with the Bible in powerfully traditional ways. In effect, the tension in the term postsecular to which Branch responds reflects a tension in this literary l­ineage that may be aptly articulated using the Faulknerian metaphor of haunting: these novels tend to cast the Bible as textually living on in the present yet doing so in a ghostly way that still implies some degree of temporal disjunction, thereby creating a sense of spectrality in their biblical resonances. Some criticize postsecular for failing to name that which might supersede or (more accurately) coexist with the secular. This putative failure or lacuna is sometimes taken to imply not a present or future orientation but a reactionary desire to return to an imagined pre-secular. Given the rhetoric of certain contemporary religious communities, this fear is not unfounded. Yet such fault lines in the term should not automatically be taken as failures or disqualifiers. After all, they illuminate and potentially help reimagine precisely those sociocultural fault lines the term aims to represent. That is to say, this ghost may have the salutary effect of disrupting the presumed hegemony (especially in most academic discourse) of Western secularisms and by extension the temporal logic of modernity, even while this haunting also has a potentially chilling, even threatening aspect. One might argue that its salutary possibilities are increased by this tension itself, in keeping with the arguments of Charles Taylor, Vincent Pecora, and others who insist that while academic discourse needs more critical ways of conceptualizing secularisms, such discourse also cannot fully abjure the secular because it is itself constituted in part by secularism. These temporal issues are coextensive with the second question noted earlier. As Timothy Aubry argues, “postsecularity” can strip religion of all its potentially disagreeable elements, i.e. certainty, faith, dogma, Truth—the very features, however thorny and unfashionable, that might render it worth thinking about—and offering a formulation whose emphasis on ambiguity, plurality, and negative capability underscores propensities celebrated within literary studies far more than those typically associated with religion. (493) Others have similarly accused certain postsecular readings (not without cause) of homogenizing different religious phenomena into a postmodern ethos of the spiritual-but-not-religious, which describes some

Conclusion  145 forms of spirituality in the U.S. today but not others. Postsecular reading strategies need not be construed this way, as explained in previous ­chapters. Even so, Ben LaBreche criticizes scholars such as ­Talal Asad, José Casanova, William Connolly, Jürgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor: the postsecularists… run into the same questions that troubled pluralistic calls for religious toleration in the early 1640s: how can groups disinclined to pluralism be integrated into a free society grounded in open debate, and how can reasoned discourse escape turning into its own form of exclusion? (157–58) LaBreche’s question helps articulate an important issue, but his answer relies on the problematic assumption that people who believe in “absolute metaphysical truths, divine punishments and rewards, apocalyptic eschatology, and restrictions on contact with outsiders” find it “difficult or impossible” to engage in “[c]ommunication, self-restraint, and compromise” (157–58). There is a winking vagueness in this claim in that it implicitly refers to Christian and Islamic fundamentalists without fully addressing them; it also ignores nonreligious forms of extremism and thereby casts as religious what is actually a broader and different kind of problem.5 This vagueness both obscures and is underwritten by what Aubry describes as “academic orthodoxies” regarding religion and secularization; he rightly proposes that the postsecular ought to offer a productive opportunity to “rethink” the “axiomatic status” of such orthodoxies (493). The problem, however, is not with orthodoxies as such. Indeed, among the more defensible academic orthodoxies are many of those having to do with social justice—the ethical commitments of pluralism, for example, as well as efforts to attune academic discourses to the often spectralized frequencies of historically marginalized voices. The notion of the postsecular can help illuminate and interrogate such orthodoxies by undermining the tendency of academic discourses to marginalize (often inadvertently) a variety of religious communities. Going further, the notion of the postsecular can help spark the recognition that not all orthodoxies are intellectually unsound, exclusionary, or immune from critique. It is a mistake—and an anachronistic one at that—to assume that religious orthodoxies necessarily entail a commitment to foundationalist epistemologies. As explained in the I­ ntroduction, a sense of the radical contingency of human understanding can be found in premodern Christian writers, for instance. In order to avoid presentist distortions of such traditions, however, it is important to keep in mind that the presumed centrality of epistemological questions generally reflects modern assumptions.6 Nor are orthodoxies necessarily inimical

146  Conclusion to reasoned analysis and debate, as evidenced by many centuries of such debates within a variety of orthodox communities in the Abrahamic traditions. This is why postsecular can be more accurate than postmodern as a description of certain contemporary literary engagements with such traditions. Postmodernism tends to emphasize epistemological contingency as a defining theme and can therefore miss the mark in significant ways as a reading of postsecular narratives that resonate with anti-­foundationalist commitments but that do not foreground those commitments as centrally as others do.7 The novels analyzed in Provincializing the Bible, for example, foreground their respective ethical commitments—especially their calls for social justice—more than their depictions of epistemic ­uncertainty, even though the latter depictions are important.8 Even The Book of Salt, which so insistently foregrounds uncertainties about its protagonist, shares more with the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas than with that of Ludwig Wittgenstein in the sense that its uncertainties are more ethical than strictly epistemological. The notion of the postsecular can help illuminate such narrative representations of both traditional and contemporary orthodoxies, whether these are depicted as secular, religious, or some fusion (or rejection) of such categories. These narratives lend themselves to reading strategies that prioritize what the present study describes as intertextual resonance, and similarity in and alongside difference—strategies that draw on and are partly inspired by premodern biblical hermeneutic traditions such as the fourfold interpretation of scripture, the principle of coincidentia oppositorum, and the concept of two Torahs (written and oral).9 Indeed, one might argue that the Bible itself can be read as postsecular (albeit anachronistically) in the sense that the tensions and questions inherent in the term itself resonate with the Bible’s complex origins and reception history—the various and often overlapping temporalities represented in biblical texts, its compositional history as a series of textual and more broadly cultural appropriations and reappropriations, and the resultant interpretive tension between unity and diversity among its component parts. The biblical inspiration for the reading strategies practiced throughout this book, as well as the foregoing discussion’s regular use of examples from Christian traditions, recalls and illustrates the third question noted earlier regarding the provincialism of the term postsecular. In response to that indisputably justifiable question, it is worth asking whether focusing on the local and particular, even when doing so risks potentially provincial limitations and blind spots, can be productive—whether it can foster transformational analysis and critique. Faulkner’s novels, and the wealth of contemporary literature that resonates with his novels, suggests that it can. To illustrate, consider that the three questions raised here about the term postsecular ultimately constitute symptoms of the very problems

Conclusion  147 with which the term wrestles. To see the wrestling not as a deficiency and not as simple conflict but rather as the intimacy of closely related positions in tension with as well as in support of one another—to see these wrestlers’ poses as the queer embraces that they are—can lead to a more productive because more inclusive and accurate understanding of the tension itself.10 The term postsecular ultimately works best as a heuristic device when hailed for its limitations and even its flaws as a local, contingent, and admittedly provincial term that nevertheless struggles productively to point beyond itself—much like the novels analyzed in Provincializing the Bible do and much as this book aspires to do.11 Postsecular is used here in the hope that its use will help render the term obsolete when academic discourses open themselves more fully to concepts and ways of knowing that do not fit well with the secular paradigms that currently dominate those discourses. For now, postsecular reading strategies respond to ongoing challenges and opportunities that remain vitally relevant to many. For decades, influential works of contemporary literature have responded insightfully to these challenges and opportunities. They offer models from which literary criticism still has more to learn.

Notes 1 “The Bible is Modern.” Unpublished and undated article, Jean Rhys Archives, University of Tulsa. See Heather Walton’s discussion of Rhys and the Bible in “Jean Rhys, Elizabeth Smart, and the ‘Gifts’ of the King James Bible.” 2 For a useful overview of the place of postmodern biblical criticism within biblical studies more broadly, see George Aichele, Peter Miscall, and ­R ichard Walsh, “An Elephant in the Room: Historical-Critical and Postmodern ­I nterpretations of the Bible.” 3 Some might propose an easy answer to this question: the Bible helps confer a sense of authority on literary works that allude to it. This answer does not sufficiently credit the intelligence and artistic innovations of the authors addressed here, who invoke the Bible to help articulate their respective calls for social justice and to help undermine the reductive temporal flattening of human history that would demarcate secular Western modernity as “the present.” 4 See Magdalena Mączyńska’s analysis of some of the terminological issues in her 2009 essay in Religion and Literature, and see David Harrington Watt’s response to her essay in the same issue. See also Tracy Fessenden’s “The Problem of the Postsecular” as well as essays by Melinda Cooper and Aamir R. Mufti in a 2013 issue of boundary 2. 5 Harriet Harris provides a useful overview of fundamentalism. See David Harrington Watt on problems with scapegoating “fundamentalism.” See also Everett Hamner, “Determined Agency: A Postsecular Proposal for Religion and Literature—and Science.” 6 Many forms of Christianity constitute a way of life more than a merely intellectual position with which one agrees or disagrees. Faith, pistis, is in

148  Conclusion many cases most accurately understood as trust rather than belief, depending on how narrowly one defines belief. See the discussion of belief in the Introduction; see also George Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. For a useful perspective on the epistemology question, see Charles Taylor’s Philosophical Arguments, especially the first chapter, “Overcoming Epistemology.” Taylor addresses these issues more extensively in A Secular Age. Lori Branch asserts that a “thoroughgoing postsecular perspective frees us from the tyranny of both tradition and novelty—of entrenched certitudes or the need to triumph over them with the next new critical paradigm” (100). The assumed “tyranny” of traditional “certitudes” is a distinctly modern construal of older worldviews, one that is salutary in some respects but also obscures the tyranny of certain widespread modern commitments. A central aim of the present study is to illuminate the alternative construals represented in a number of influential contemporary novels. 7 In this light (see also Note 6), Amy Hungerford’s notion of “postmodern belief,” while it describes some works of literature well, misses important aspects of others due to the connotative emphases of both terms (postmodern and belief). 8 In consonance with these readings, Erick Sierra argues that Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America evince a distrust of those who over-emphasize epistemic uncertainty; instead, they anchor their respective visions in ethical encounters with human suffering. 9 See Sandor Goodhart’s “Back to the Garden: Jewish Hermeneutics, Biblical Reading, PaRDeS, and the Four-Fold Way.” 10 The sexual metaphor here may serve as a reminder that sexuality and religion have both been critiqued as masks for power—and both have indeed functioned as such masks. Yet they have also been more and other than that. Sexuality and religion exhibit sometimes fearful symmetries; one of the insights explored in previous chapters, however, is that sexuality, particularly in its queerer representational forms, can serve as a fulcrum for shifting uncritical assumptions about spirituality and religion in ways that can help render the imperative to disembodying self-abstraction more fully available for analysis and critique. 11 By focusing on intertextual resonance and thereby placing slightly less conceptual emphasis on more abstract generalizations such as religion, spirituality, Christianity, and the secular, the present study aims not to avoid such terms but rather to temper their implicit assumptions of universality by anchoring the argument in the textual particularity of the Bible. The biblical focus here in part reflects the author’s own—my own—provincial limitations. Yet such weaknesses can also be strengths as they constitute the postsecular terrain in which I can contribute most effectively.

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Index

Adam, A. K. M. 141 Adams, J. Donald 2–3, 77 Aichele, George 147n2 Alarcón, Daniel Cooper 102–03 Al-Barhow, Abdul-Razzak 81 Allen, Paula Gunn 95 Alsen, Eberhard 87n33 Alston, William 9 Alter, Robert 12, 37, 40, 42, 56n22, 56n28, 58 Anzaldúa, Gloria 21n26, 103, 112n29 Aquinas, Thomas 8–9, 20n16, 72, 139n27 Aristobulus 72 Armstrong, Karen 10, 20n17 Arnold, Ellen L. 100, 110n9, 111n16 Arnold, Matthew 7 Asad, Talal 1, 19n2, 145 Aubry, Timothy 144–45 Auerbach, Erich 56n22 Ayers, Jeremy 123–25 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 24, 42, 53, 57n40, 57n41, 85n14, 110n6 Barnes, Djuna 133 Barnes, Stephen 82, 86n21 Barnett, Claudia 61 Barth, Karl 90 Barton, Bruce 2 Bassard, Katherine Clay 12–13, 20n20, 86n16, 86n17 Bataille, Georges 89 Bate, Nancy Berkowitz 69 Beavis, Mary Ann 59, 84n2 Bennett, Jane 85n11 Berger, Peter L. 4 Bergson, Henri 47 Bible, the: as ghostly 14–15, 23–27, 29–35, 53–54, 64; as literature 10; as modern 30–34, 141; as postmodern

141–42; colonialism and 19n7, 73–75, 107, 113n34; defense of slavery and 45, 57n33; formal characteristics of the Authorized or King James Version 35–40; intertextuality and 11–12, 101; literal readings of 10, 72; traditional readings of 2, 8–10, 46, 142 Blaeser, Kimberly M. 97 Blake, William 30, 82 Blanton, Ward 33–34 Blond, Phillip 121, 123, 138n15 Bloshteyn, Maria 87n32 Blotner, Joseph L. 21n30, 47 Boitani, Piero 52–53, 135 Booth, Wayne 19n13 Bordo, Susan 19n9 Branch, Lori 13–14, 143–44, 148n6 Brandom, Robert 110n6, 111n20 Bray, Alan 138n9 Briggs, Julia 54n1 Brooks, Cleanth 55n13, 87n28 Bush, Jr., Harold K. 87n27 Butler, Jon 6–7 Butler, Judith 121, 138n14 Bynum, Caroline Walker 138n9 Calhoun, Craig 5, 21n29 Callahan, Allen Dwight 20n20, 57n33 Caminero-Santangelo, Marta 112n25 Carlson, Thomas A. 20n14 Carrasco, Davíd 21n26 Carter, Stephen K. 87n32 Castillo, Anna: Faulkner and 91, 108–09; So Far from God 16, 22n35, 91–92, 102–09, 114, 146 Causey, Tara 110n8 Cavanaugh, William T. 123 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 1–2, 19n2, 21n27, 132

166 Index Chancellor, Scott T. 135 Chapman, Mary 95–96, 111n12 Cobos, Rubén 113n31 Coffee, Jessie McGuire 34, 49, 52, 81, 135 Coffman, Chris 137 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 36, 87n29 Cone, James H. 135 Cooper, Melinda 19n10, 147n4 Countryman, L. William 113n36 Coviello, Peter 20n25, 21n29, 88–90 Cowan, S. A. 56n21 Cowley, Malcolm 47 Critchley, Simon 19n13 Crockett, H. Kelly 87n34 Cruz, Denise 134, 137n1, 139n20 Davalos, Karen Mary 112n30 Dawkins, Richard 4 Dean, Tim 90, 110n5 Delgadillo, Theresa 12–13, 18, 20n21, 102–03, 105, 112n26, 112n28, 112n30 DeLillo, Don 7, 17, 21n33, 22n35, 141–42; White Noise 141–42, 148n8 Derrida, Jacques 54n4, 63, 139n23 Dewey, John 110n6 Dhawan, Nikita 2, 21n27 Dickens, Charles: A Christmas Carol 24, 27, 54n3 Diede, Martha Kalnin 138n13 Dimock, Wai Chee 110n3 Dinshaw, Carolyn 110n3, 138n9, 138n19 disembodiment 5–6, 89–90, 99, 109; sexuality and 88, 94, 107–08, 148n10 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 82, 87n32 Douglas, Christopher 12–13, 20n22 Duggan, Lisa 90 Durham, Carolyn A. 137n1 Duvall, John N. 79, 84n6, 85n12 Ebel, Jonathan 21n28 Edelman, Lee 110n5 Edwards, Naomi 137n1 Eisenhower, Dwight 2 Eliade, Mircea 64 Eliot, T. S. 55n10, 55n11; The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 26–27, 55n9; The Waste Land 26–27, 33–34, 55n8-n10, 55n13, 56n23

Ellmann, Maud 27, 55n10 Eng, David L. 137n1, 137n4, 140n3 Engelke, Matthew 86n18 Erzen, Tanya 121 Etheridge, Jr., Charles L. 87n35 Fargione, Daniela 137n1 Faulkner, William: A Fable 15–16, 48, 52–54, 81, 115, 135–37; Absalom, Absalom! 14, 16, 23–34, 40–48, 51, 53, 61–62, 65–72, 75, 80–81, 91, 111n18; As I Lay Dying 16, 52–53, 72–73, 86n21, 87n25, 91, 99–100, 109; biblical resonance and 14–15, 40–54; Christianity, comments on 47, 76; Go Down, Moses 16, 52–53, 81, 115, 134–35; Higher Criticism and 32; Intruder in the Dust 32; Light in August 2–3, 16, 52–53, 76–82, 136; The Sound and the Fury 15–16, 27, 46–54, 80–81, 99–100, 135–36; “The Tall Men” 45, 51 Fessenden, Traci 21n28, 147n4 Fitz, Karsten 21n26 Frazer, James 47 Freccero, Carla 110n3 Freeman, Elizabeth 89, 133 Freud, Sigmund 24, 33, 54n1, 56n23, 121 Frontain, Raymond-Jean 56n22 Frye, Northrop 11–12 Fuller, David 34 Fung, Catherine 137n1 Fuss, Diana 121, 138n14 Geertz, Clifford 21n35 Gibbs, Alan 87n35 Gibson, Alexander Boyce 87n32 Ginsburg, Allen 7 Goldstein, Philip 85n13 Goodhart, Sandor 148n9 Gopinath, Gayatri 139n25 Gordon, Avery F. 63–64 Gregory, Alan P. R. 87n29 Griesinger, Emily 69 Gwynn, Frederick L. 21n30, 47 Haddox, Thomas F. 12–13, 20n23 Hagood, Taylor 111n18, 134 Halberstam, Judith 110n3 Halperin, David M. 110n5, 123–24, 126 Hammond, Gerald 57n35

Index  167 Hamner, Everett 147n5 Han, John J. 83 Harries, Martin 60 Harris, Harriet 20n17, 147n5 Hart, David Bentley 9, 86n20 Hart, Kevin 21n31 Hedstrom, Matthew S. 19n6 Hegel, G. W. F. 132 Heidegger, Martin 110n6, 132 Hemingway, Ernest 56n28; The Sun Also Rises 17, 32–33, 42, 56n21, 56n23, 78 Herman, David 19n11 Hickman, Jared 20n25, 21n29 Hinojosa, Lynne W. 8, 12–13, 20n24 Hlavsa, Virginia 47 Hoefer, Anthony Dyer 87n25 Hoffman, Claire 88, 109n1 Holland, Sharon P. 110n7 Holm, Sharon 111n11 Horton, Ray 19n11, 21n31 Hume, David 3–4 Hungerford, Amy 2, 7–8, 12–13, 17, 19n4, 19n5, 21n31, 21n33, 21n35, 64, 71–72, 84n8, 148n7 Hunt, John W. 46, 49 Huttar, Charles A. 41 intertextuality: definition of 110n6; representations of marginalization and 91, 97–103, 108–09 Ipsen, Avaren 113n36 Irwin, Mark 59 Itoh, Shoko 57n34 Jackson, Gregory S. 20n19 Jakobsen, Janet R. 21n29 James, David 21n32, 86n23 Jameson, Frederic 86n23 Jobling, David 141 Jolly, Jihii 134 Jones, Norman W. 55n14, 56n23, 87n30 Juergensmeyer, Mark 21n29 Karem, Jeff 94–95 Kartiganer, Donald M. 55n12, 81 Kaufmann, Michael W. 87n31 Kazin, Alfred 87n24, 55n11 Kermode, Frank 71 Kierkegaard, Søren 90 Kristeva, Julia 110n6

Knoepflmacher, U. C. 19n12 Kodat, Catherine Gunther 65, 68, 71 Kushner, Tony: Angels in America 59–61, 84, 84n4, 102, 148n8 LaBreche, Ben 145 Langbaum, Robert 27 Latour, Bruno 85n11 Leavis, F. R. 55n13 LeMay, Megan Molenda 137n1 Levinas, Emmanuel 130, 139n27, 146 Levinson, Julian 21n26 Levitt, Laura 60, 84n5 Lewis, C. S. 86n22, 111n13, 121 Lewis, Pericles 20n24 liberation theology 112n28, 135 Liew, Tat-siong Benny 73–74 Lindbeck, George 148n6 Linzie, Anna 137n1 Liu, Wen 90–91, 97 Loughlin, Gerard 137n2 Lowth, Robert 38 Luibhéid, Eithne 129 Lundin, Roger 22n37, 57n37, 86n21 Machacek, Gregory 11 Mączyńska, Magdalena 147n4 Maddison, Bula 85n14 Madison, James 30 Mahmood, Saba 19n2 Maimonides, Moses 139n27 Manríquez, B. J. 112n22 Martin, Dale. B. 123, 142 Marx, Karl 132 Mbembe, Achille 75 McBride, Dwight A. 84n7 McCarthy, Cormac 7, 17, 21n31, 21n33 McCarthy, David Matzko 138n12 McClure, John A. 2, 7–9, 12–13, 17, 19n4, 21n33, 22n36, 64–65, 84n8, 84n9, 85n10, 85n11 McCracken, Ellen 21n26 McGarry, Molly 89 McGrath, Alister 56n25 Meeter, Glenn A. 42, 56n20, 56n29 Meindl, Dieter 87n28 Mencken, H. L. 4 Meriwether, James B. 19n8 Milbank, John 6, 8–10, 19n10, 20n15, 20n16, 72 Mill, John Stuart 87n32 Miller, James 60

168 Index Millgate, Michael 19n8 Minter, David 80 Miscall, Peter 147n2 Moore, Stephen D. 19n7 Morey, Ann-Janine 21n34 Morrison, Toni 134; Beloved 16, 22n35, 61–75, 80–84, 92, 99, 146; Faulkner and 61–62, 65–66, 70–75, 80–84; Playing in the Dark 84n6, 87n33 Moss, Candida 88 Mufti, Aamir R. 21n28, 147n4 Mulman, Lisa 84n5 Murison, Justine S. 21n28 Neilson, Brett 130 Neuman, Justin 18n1 Newton, Adam Zachary 19n13 Ni, Zhange 133 Nichols, Mike 84n4 Niebuhr, Reinhold 2 Nisly, L. Lamar 21n26 Norman, Brian 109 Norton, David 20n18, 33, 36–37 Novak, Phillip 85n13 Nussbaum, Martha 19n13 Oliver, Simon 20n15 Park, Susan Shin Hee 137n1 Pater, Walter 7 Pease, Donald D. 21n31 Pecora, Vincent 3, 13, 144 Peek, Michelle 137n1 Pellegrini, Ann 21n29 Pérez, Gail 112n23 Perkin, J. Russell 19n12 Peyser, Thomas 140n31 Phelan, James 18, 19n13, 24, 42, 57n39, 67, 83, 86n15, 99 Philo 72 Pickstock, Catherine 9, 20n15 Pippin, Tina 141 Pladott, Dinnah 135–36 Plantinga, Alvin 9, 20n15 Plato 19n13, 89 Prickett, Stephen 20n19, 35, 86n19 Priest, Josiah 45 Prince 88–89, 90, 109n1 Porsche, Michael 112n24 postsecular: American Jewish authors and, 84n5; debates concerning 21n28, 143–47; definition of 1,

13–14; reading strategies 127–33, 146–47; temporalities 70–75, 147n3 Potts, Matthew L. 21n31, 21n33 prophetic: definition of 56n27 provincialize: definition of 3, 14–15 Rambo, Shelly 64 Ramos, Peter 65 Ratti, Manav 12–13, 20n25 Reed, Walter L. 57n41 Reinhartz, Adele 84n1 religious: definition of 19n3 Renan, Ernest 37 resonance: definition of 11–12 Rhys, Jean 141, 147n7 Ricoeur, Paul 19n11, 139n27 Riquelme, John Paul 54n7, 55n8 Rivera, Joseph 86n18 Robbins, Bruce 1, 19n2, 19n3 Robinett, Jane 112n27 Robinson, Marilynne 21n31 Roden, Frederick S. 120, 138n10 Rogers, Jr., Eugene F. 120 Rombold, Tamara 83 Romero, Channette 21n34, 110n4, 110n9, 129, 139n24 Romero, Simon 113n31 Rorty, Richard 110n6, 111n20 Rose, Maxine 41–43, 56n30 Sagarena, Roberto Lint 21n26 Santayana, George 21n35 Schleifer, Ronald 141 Schultz, Kevin M. 4 Scotus, Duns 6, 8–9, 20n6, 72 secularization 3–9 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 106–07, 110n5, 139n22 Shah, Nayan 129, 139n25 Shakespeare, William: Hamlet 24, 26, 27, 54n4, 79; The Merchant of Venice 57n31 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 82 Sherazi, Melanie Masterton 81 Sierra, Erick 148n8 Silko, Leslie Marmon: Almanac of the Dead 94, 110n9, 112n27; Ceremony 16, 22n35, 91–101, 109, 114, 146; Faulkner and 91, 99–101, 109 Smith, Bruce R. 110n5 Smith, James K. A. 20n14 Smith, Lindsey Claire 100

Index  169 Smith, Theophus 57n33 Solomon, Deborah Cosier 83 Soucy, Alexander 119, 133–34, 138n8 Spacks, Patricia Meyer 106 spiritual: definition of 19n3; readings of the Bible 10, 73, 77 Spurgeon, Sara L. 21n33, 97 Stallybrass, Peter 133 Stave, Shirley 21n26 Stein, Gertrude 114 Steinbeck, John 100; The Grapes of Wrath 83–84 Stephens, Walter 111n15 Stiebert, Johanna 113n36 Stoler, Ann Laura 129, 139n25 Storhoff, Gary 21n26 Stuart, Elizabeth 123, 138n15 Styers, Randall 98 Sugirtharajah, R. S. 107, 113n34 Sundquist, Eric J. 18, 20n20, 84n5 Sword, Helen 54n7 Szeghi, Tereza M. 112n27 Tarantino, Quentin: Pulp Fiction 58–61, 84 Taylor, Charles 4–8, 13, 15, 20n16, 86n20, 88–90, 109n2, 140n33, 144–45, 148n6 Tipton, Nathan 87n26 Toklas, Alice B. 114–15, 117, 128, 137n6 Tomkin, Silvan 90 Tran, Anh Q. 138n7 Troeung, Y-Dang 137n1, 137n5 Truong, Monique: Bitter in the Mouth 134; The Book of Salt 16–17, 22n35, 92, 114–34, 137, 146; Faulkner and 114–15, 134–37 Twain, Mark 87n27

VanAntwerpen, Jonathan 5, 21n29 Vance, Norman 20n19 Vanden Heuvel, Jean Stein 19n8, 80 Vattimo, Gianni 85n11 Vizenor, Gerald 97 Voltaire 3–4 Wadlington, Warwick 55n12, 55n16 Wagner-Martin, Linda 134 Waller, James C. 138n10 Wallis, Jim 30 Walsh, Richard 147n2 Walton, Heather 141, 147n1 Ward, Graham 9 Warhol, Robyn 111n14 Warner, Martin 55n11 Warner, Michael 5, 19n9, 121, 133 Watson, James 56n21 Watt, David Harrington 147n4, 147n5 Wesling, Meg 137n1 West-Pavlov, Russell 71, 75, 86n23 Weston, Jessie L. 47, 94 Whalen-Bridge, John 21n26 White, Daniel 110n9 White, Stephen K. 85n11 Wilson, Charles Reagan 18, 45–47, 49, 57n32, 76 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 110n6, 146 Wimbush, Vincent 57n33 Wolosky, Shira 130, 139n27 Wolterstorff, Nicholas 9, 20n15 Wood, James 56n24 Xu, Wenying 117–18, 121, 137n1 Žindžiuvienė, Ingrida 137n1 Žižek, Slavoj 89