The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief by James Wood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Theology of Fiction

Fiction is a sacred art; but it is not a religion according to James Wood. To confuse fiction with religion, for him, is the rough equivalent of mixing news reporting with editorializing, or following one’s metaphors to their literal conclusion. The result is fake good news and bad literature. Unless religion and literature are kept separate, a Cicero speaking what is truth for himself can easily slip into a Thomas More who presumes to speak universal truth and is willing to sacrifice himself as well as others to its literal fixity. Or perhaps the transition would be into a neurotic Herman Melville (at his most hysterical) who sees himself as the new Messiah in his own religion and consequently is unable to write anything worthwhile again: “Literature is the new Church, and Moby-Dick its Bible.”

Wood believes the error of considering fiction as religion - his Broken Estate - emerged in the 19th century; but the rot didn’t begin with Melville. Biblical criticism over the previous hundred years had progressively reduced the Christian gospels to mere culturally approved, edifying stories. And Wood feels fiction had smugly transformed itself from story-telling to a cult of technique, he cites a specific point of transition: “Style became religious with Flaubert, at the same moment that religion became a kind of literary style, a poetry, with Emest Renan.” It’s a story with merit given the explosion of fictional technique as well as the rise in devoted readership after this point.

Wood quotes Flaubert to show the disappearance of narrative into the text itself: “... there is no such thing as a subject, style being solely in itself an absolute way of seeing things.“ Although it avoids explicit comment on itself, Flaubert’s stylistic obsession as commentary on itself is obvious. The novel becomes ‘about nothing’ except itself as a work of art. Post-modernism, it seems, came packaged in the placenta of modernism and had already gestated among the readers and writers of novels long before philosophers christened it with a name.

I understand Wood’s point. To allow fiction to be called a religion threatens its destruction by ignoring its core of ambiguity and uncertainty. But Wood does establish fiction as the humanist alternative to religion. At one point he calls fiction “the slayer of religions.” He makes an implicit case that the writing and reading of narrative is the origin of religion; and if it is not the authentic religion, then certainly it is that which undermines anything else making such a claim: “... the triumph of this atheism of metaphor.”

Functionally, Wood has an obvious problem separating fiction from religion, even before his purported 19th century watershed. Fiction unites the individual with himself (Austen); herself with a community (Dickens); community with other communities (Gogol); and human communities with those that are not human (Poe). Fiction even has its heretics (Woolf), occultists (Lawrence), fundamentalists (Eliot), paranoid preachers (Pynchon), unbelieving vicars (Barnes) and liturgists (Steiner). Fiction creates a cosmos, a cosmos which becomes religious when it is no longer treated as fiction but as truth and is therefore fixed in a certain shape (Melville). That is, fiction does exactly what religion does - without the dogmatic structure, indeed, but then not all religion is dogmatic.

And fiction, like religion is transhistorical. That is, it unites generations to each other in a visible community of saints as readers and writers. The fact that Greek classics are still read is the most superficial part of this communion. Each generation steals from and, as Harold Bloom says, distorts through re-interpretation what it inherits. So, “Melville Americanizes Shakespeare, gives it tilt.” Joyce makes Odysseus’s arduous adventure into a leisurely walk. Fiction, that is makes (any other) religion impossible for anyone who reads: “Language breaks up God, releases us from the one meaning of the predestinating God, but merely makes that God differently inscrutable by flooding it with thousands of different meanings.”

This evolution of story-telling implies a continuity of something that must be called belief, a psychological element shared with religion. “The real, in fiction, is always a matter of belief, and is therefore a kind of discretionary magic: it is a magic whose existence it is up to us, as readers, to validate and confirm.” This makes belief in fiction a more not less arduous task than in religion: “Fiction demands belief from us, and this request is demanding in part because we can choose not to believe.”

Beliefs, call them fundamental presumptions about the world if need be, are passed along from generation to generation. Even if one distinguishes the passed along belief in fiction as conditional withholding of unbelief, its effect is the same as that of religion - to open the mind to possibility, including the possibility of that of which it has no direct experience or an interpretation of experience that is novel. It is only perhaps in the insistence of religion that its fictions are superior to experience and are incapable of improvement that the differences between fiction and religion become clear. If so, belief in fiction is hardly distinguishable from the anti-doctrinal stance of, say, quietist Baptists or good New England Universalists. I dare say most Mormons are unable to articulate the ‘secret’ foundations of their cultic beliefs.

Wood is no post-modernist. Stories and the words from which they are constituted are too precious to be treated as arbitrary and isolated ciphers. But neither does he think the relationship between words and things are fixed by something called reality. Wood is a self-described realist, by which he means not that he attends scrupulously to details but that human experience shapes and is shaped by stories which seem important to that experience. Stories don’t drop like manna from heaven; nor do they completely capture any experience no matter how much fine grained detail of ‘externals’ they employ. “Behind one reality lies a deeper, more private reality, which is always lost.” Experience can be chased but never captured. Compared with religion, fiction is more modest; but it still sleeps around. Wood’s sympathetic treatment of Virginia Woolf’s ‘mysticism’ suggests that fiction and religion have an affinity which he doesn’t dare admit.

Fictions are the offerings we make to each other in an attempt to share elusive experience; or, what amounts to the same thing, make sense of it to ourselves. “Fiction is real when its readers validate its reality; and our power so to validate comes both from our sense of the actual real (‘ life’) and from our sense of the fictional real (the reality of the novel).” Fiction therefore involves a kind of conspiracy between writer and reader. The latter is as active as the former, as the congregant is with his priest who is dependent upon him: “Fiction should seem to offer itself to the reader’s completion, not to the writer’s,” Wood says in his critique of Julian Barnes.

The criteria of acceptance of the offering are as transient as the stories themselves. Some ‘work’, others don’t, perhaps because they are too idiosyncratic, perhaps because the world hasn’t caught up to them, or passed them by long ago. But they are never made required reading (except in secondary school) as if they held some essential truth. In this sense all fiction is necessarily experimental. It can’t be said to have value until it’s offering is accepted - obviously so because it carries its standard of value with it, just as does religion and its correlated ethics. Both fiction and religion change not just what we see but what we do.

Ultimately Wood doesn’t think fiction is a religion because he is a Thomist at heart who has an admirable (because humble) fear of disrespect for that which may be beyond language. For him, as for Thomas Aquinas, even the word ‘God’ is a kind of heresy because it is a distortion of the very existence of the divine. As Wood says: “when you bring God into the sea of metaphor, He is placed on equal status with everything else. You dare the infidel idea that God is only a metaphor. No, language is a voice that does not help us get any nearer to the silence of God; it is its own voice.” Fair enough, but then even St Thomas proceeded to write almost a million words about God in his Summa Theologicae. So Wood’s protestation that fiction is not a religion seems more than a bit forced. And certainly there are worse systems of belief.

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