Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel

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RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE AND THE MODERNIST NOVEL

The modernist period witnessed attempts to explain religious experience in non-religious terms. Such novelists as Henry James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka found methods to describe through fiction the sorts of experiences that had traditionally been the domain of religious mystics and believers. In Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, Pericles Lewis considers the development of modernism in the novel in relation to changing attitudes to religion. Through comparisons of major novelists with sociologists and psychologists from the same period, Lewis identifies the unique ways that literature addressed the changing spiritual situation of the early twentieth century. He challenges accounts that assume secularization as the main narrative for understanding twentieth-century literature. Lewis explores the experiments that modernists undertook in order to invoke the sacred without directly naming it, resulting in a compelling study for readers of twentiethcentury modernist literature. pericles lewis is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University. His past publications explore the development of modern literary forms in a period of political and social instability and include Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel (Cambridge, 2000) and The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge, 2007).

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE AND THE MODERNIST NOVEL PERICLES LEWIS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521856508 © Pericles Lewis 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2010 ISBN-13

978-0-511-67548-5

eBook (NetLibrary)

ISBN-13

978-0-521-85650-8

Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgments

page vi

1

Churchgoing

1

2

God’s afterlife

23

3

Henry James and the varieties of religious experience

52

4

Marcel Proust and the elementary forms of religious life

81

5

Franz Kafka and the hermeneutics of suspicion

111

6

Virginia Woolf and the disenchantment of the world

142

7

The burial of the dead

170 193 223 232

Notes Select bibliography Index

v

Acknowledgments

I have often thought that, despite their shortcomings, universities provide something like the sense of belonging to those who inhabit them that the “gathered churches” may have afforded the New England Puritans. They lack perhaps the sense of a sustaining purpose provided by a belief in an almighty power; the trustees do not quite inspire such awe. Nonetheless, especially in departments of literature, universities provide sacred texts and offer plenty of opportunity for sectarian strife. Academics tend to imagine themselves as a saving remnant of what the Puritans called “visible saints” in the midst of a fallen world. And what is tenure but a modern covenant of the elect? Along the way, of course, there is frequent occasion for the self-doubt that plagued the true Calvinist. Yale University was founded over three hundred years ago to combat the doctrinal backsliding already apparent at Harvard. Although some of its congregants will complain that a Puritan ethos still lingers at Yale, I have found in the departments of English and Comparative Literature, perhaps not a city on a hill, but a particularly hospitable environment for the research and writing that have culminated in this book. Other religions come to mind as well, of course. Many a literary critic has romanticized the life of the Talmudic scholar, and universities provide degrees of hierarchy and rites of passage worthy of the Catholic Church. Over the last decade of initiation, I have accumulated many debts, which can be only partly redeemed, even in a lengthy note of acknowledgement. While it is impossible here to name everyone who has offered an enlightening comment or two to help me with this study, let me express my thanks especially to those who have read and responded in detail to portions of the work in progress: Daniel Albright, Sam Alexander, Robert Alter, Tobias Boes, Jessica Brantley, David Bromwich, David Damrosch, Elizabeth Dillon, Maria Fackler, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Langdon Hammer, Catherine Labio, Jesse Matz, Edward Mendelson, Siobhan Phillips, David Quint, Paul Saint-Amour, Haun Saussy, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Michael Tratner, vi

Acknowledgments

vii

Katie Trumpener, Elliott Visconsi, Alexander Welsh, Jennifer Wicke, Ruth Yeazell, and the two anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press. Responsibility for any remaining errors is entirely my own. I am also indebted to several colleagues and friends for conversations that helped me to develop my ideas for the project: Nigel Alderman, Richard Brodhead, Peter Brooks, William Deresiewicz, Bevan Dowd, Paul Fry, Barbara Fuchs, Ann Gaylin, Philip Gorski, Michael Holquist, Andrew Karas, Aaron Matz, Sean McCann, Barry McCrea, Christopher R. Miller, Annabel Patterson, Linda Peterson, David L. Porter, John Paul Riquelme, Emily Setina, Marci Shore, Robert Slifkin, Caleb Smith, Frank M. Turner, Michael Warner, and Jay Winter. Fortuitously, the Comparative Literature department at Yale shares a building with the Religious Studies department, and Jon Butler, Carlos Eire, and Paula Hyman generously advised me on bibliography on the history of religion. My undergraduate and graduate students have taught me much as well, and I would particularly like to thank students in my graduate seminars on Modernist Fiction in 2003 and 2006. I am grateful to a number of students who served briefly but ably as my research assistants, and especially to Megan Quigley, who served longer than most and who gave me excellent advice in the early stages of the project; to Elyse Graham, who gave detailed and perspicacious comments on the penultimate draft; to Matthew Mutter, who read more than one draft and liberally shared with me his extensive knowledge of twentieth-century religious thought; and to Jessica Svendsen, who helped assemble the notes and bibliography. My friend and colleague Amy Hungerford has read several drafts of each portion of this book, helping me at every stage to make my vague intuitions more precise; her own research on religion and postmodernism has continually inspired me. The offerings of many who heard me present the work in progress made their way into this book, sometimes by circuitous routes. I am grateful to faculty and students in the English departments of Brown, Duke, Queen’s, Rutgers, and Washington Universities, the University of Michigan, and the State University of New York at Buffalo; the College of Letters of Wesleyan University; the Humanities Center of Harvard University; the philosophy department of Purchase College; the Maison Française of Columbia University; the University of London’s AHRB Centre for Asian and African Literatures; the State University of Rio de Janeiro; and Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center, Comparative Literature Open Forum, and TwentiethCentury Colloquium; and to members of the American Comparative Literature Association and the Modernist Studies Association. For help with my administrative duties at Yale, I thank Mary Jane Stevens,

viii

Acknowledgments

Angelika Schriever, and the staff of the English and Comparative Literature departments. Yale itself provided research support from the A. Whitney Griswold Faculty Research Fund and the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund, as well as sabbatical leave time and a Morse Fellowship. Excerpts from the first three chapters of this work appeared in earlier forms in Arizona Quarterly, Henry James Review, Modernism/Modernity, Studies in the Novel, The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, edited by Michael Levenson (forthcoming second edition), and A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, edited by David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar and published by Blackwell. I thank the editors and referees of these publications and the staff at Cambridge University Press for their helpful contributions, and the presses themselves for permission to reprint the material in revised form. Ray Ryan’s unflagging support as my editor at Cambridge has especially encouraged me in my work. Max Weber claimed to be “absolutely unmusical religiously,” and I feel the same way. I therefore had to learn a great deal from those with first-hand knowledge of religious experiences and institutions, and I am grateful to many friends for conversations that sometimes may have felt to them like discussing a landscape with a blind man. As always, I am conscious of my deep obligation to my family. My children, parents, sisters, in-laws, nieces, and nephews manifested their love and concern during both difficult and happy times. They also gave me insight into the varieties of religious experience. This book is lovingly dedicated to my wife, Sheila Hayre. On our shared pilgrimage, we have endeavored, in our own heterodox way, to achieve the detachment from worldly concerns characteristic of Siddhartha and to celebrate the illusoriness of this world, Maya.

chapter 1

Churchgoing

In Philip Larkin’s “Church Going” (1954), a bored cyclist visits an empty church. Hatless, he removes the cycle-clips from his trousers in a gesture of “awkward reverence.”1 He contemplates the church building with some confusion, uncertain of the names or meanings of various architectural features, and wonders what a future after religion can hold for such houses of God: Power of some sort or other will go on In games, in riddles, seemingly at random; But superstition, like belief, must die, And what remains when disbelief has gone?

For Larkin, superstition, belief, and disbelief all belong to a dead past, albeit one that his poem tries to call back to life. Larkin writes in the 1950s, at the end of the modernist period, and already he expresses some skepticism toward the possibility that literature can take over the “power” left behind by organized religion – a calling, and an anxiety, bequeathed to modernism by Matthew Arnold, who had predicted in 1880 that “Most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.”2 In this book, I argue that the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the “Sea of Faith” that Arnold heard on Dover Beach in the middle of the nineteenth century would continue to sound, even among the ostensibly faithless Western elites, for at least a hundred years.3 As late as 1940, Wallace Stevens wrote of God as a recent loss: “It is a habit of mind with me to be thinking of some substitute for religion … My trouble, and the trouble of a great many people, is the loss of belief in the sort of God in Whom we were all brought up to believe.”4 Poets like Arnold, Stevens, and Larkin tended to treat this loss most explicitly, but novelists, too, sought to provide replacements for religion in the wake of a God whose announced withdrawal from this world never seemed to be quite complete. 1

2

Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel

What does remain? Larkin’s speaker predicts that some people will go on attending the church he sees before him, even once it is in ruins, out of dependence on ritual or antiquarian excitement: “Christmas-addicts” and “ruin-bibbers randy for antique,” he calls them, recovering Christians for whom the church holds a certain attenuated narcotic or sexual thrill. Yet he speculates that the very last person to seek the church for “what it was” will be “my representative,” Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt So long and equably what since is found Only in separation – marriage, and birth, And death, and thoughts of these – for which was built This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth, It pleases me to stand in silence here; A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognized, and robed as destinies. And that much never can be obsolete, Since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious, And gravitating with it to this ground, Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, If only that so many dead lie round.

The speaker concludes that the church still contains some sort of power, which he associates with the ritual function of “robing” compulsions as “destinies”: the church receives its power from the dead and from its long association with central functions of human (or animal) life around which sacraments have arisen. The poem itself has something of the quality of a ritual that persists even after its participants no longer accord it sacred meaning. Larkin’s consciously formal verse emphasizes this belatedness; the poem’s stately pace, pseudo-Spenserian stanza form, slant-rhymes (idea/here), occasional feminine rhyme (surprising/wise in), rhetorical questions, and combination of high and low diction (“accoutred frowsty”) give it an “awkward reverence” like that of its speaker. The use of the first-person plural in the final stanza seems to give the speaker’s personal meditations a universal character. The poet’s ironic use of the expression “Church Going” underscores that regular churchgoing (for worship) is no longer an option for him; nevertheless, when he writes of “mounting the lectern” to read

Churchgoing

3

aloud, experimentally, a few lines of scripture (“much more loudly than I’d meant”), he calls attention to his own ritual function as a poet. His position at the lectern makes his commentary on the end of religion more pronounced than he realizes: he lacks control of his own voice, and the echoes when he reads (“here endeth”) suggest the echoes of belief and ritual that continue to reverberate in his poem. The poet has usurped the position of priest and thus arrogated to himself, bored and uninformed though he may be, the power to interpret the significance of the hallowed site and to speak in some sense for the dead. Larkin’s poem was prescient. Today, English churches are indeed mostly vacant, but most of the decline has taken place since Larkin wrote “Church Going.” Regular church attendance did fall off in the century between Arnold and Larkin. It is estimated that almost half of the population regularly attended church in the middle of the nineteenth century, probably a high point historically. This figure declined fairly sharply near the end of the nineteenth century and then leveled off for the first half of the twentieth century. When Larkin wrote, the Church of England was in fact in the middle of a post-war upswing in membership. As Callum Brown has demonstrated, it is mainly in the last half of the twentieth century that the emptying-out of churches Larkin imagined became a reality: in the year 2000, less than eight percent of the population attended Sunday worship in any given week; less than twelve percent held membership in any Christian church; and, under the supervision of the Advisory Board for Redundant Churches, many churches were closing their doors.5 Larkin’s reference to “marriage, and birth,” moreover, emphasizes the fact that by the middle of the twentieth century it was such rites of passage that attracted most people to church, with large majorities of the population still baptized and married in church throughout the 1950s. Today, in contrast, less than a quarter of English children are baptized in the Church of England, and fewer than half of the marriages in England and Wales are solemnized in church. Attendance at church was lower when Larkin wrote than in Arnold’s day, but in a broader sense, secularization was still a process being imagined and theorized mainly by elites. Larkin’s secularism, like that of the modernists before him, was as yet a distinctly minority affair. In chapter 2, I re-examine the narratives of secularization that have dominated studies of literary modernism. In my view, the early twentieth century was a period when elite groups started to consider the spiritual possibilities of life outside a church or synagogue, even as the broader culture remained largely – and traditionally – religious, particularly in the English-speaking world.

4

Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel

The elites entertained, although they did not always embrace, a Nietzschean skepticism about organized religion: the enlightened madman in The Gay Science (1882) asks, “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”6 The modernists seem almost ghoulishly attracted to these splendid tombs. T. E. Hulme complained that romanticism was “spilt religion” and proposed in its place a hard, dry classicism; churches seem to have maintained a fascination for a number of his modernist contemporaries precisely because they once “held unspilt,” in the words of Larkin’s poem, some ritual or sacramental power that modern writers sought to channel into their own work.7 In well-known poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, the speaker stands just outside the church door (“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”) or not far from a ruined abbey (“Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”) and seeks the consolations of religion outside the church, in nature. The modernists troop back into the churches, but they no longer expect traditional religious consolation from them; rather, like Larkin’s speaker, they find their own form of religious experience in meditating on the sacramental power that can no longer be contained in the church – or on the social imagination that once conferred power on the church. The image of the church as broken container of a sacred essence, which the author seeks to transmit in the frail vessel of the novel or poem, seems to haunt the modernists. If the romantics pursued a “natural supernaturalism,” for the modernists it was no longer nature but society that embodied the power once understood as supernatural.8 Theirs was a social supernaturalism. Among the major modernists, poets were more likely than novelists to espouse religious views or to link their work explicitly with the problem of religious experience. Poems frequently took the tone or even the form of prayers, as in major works by W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden, who said that “a poem is a rite.”9 Eliot and Auden converted to traditional Christianity, while Yeats pursued researches into the occult and joined magical orders. A study of religious experience in modernist poetry could certainly be undertaken.10 By contrast, the major novelists of the period – I am concerned here especially with Henry James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf – tended not to belong to any particular church or cult. The novelists did, however, share the poets’ evident concern with religious experience; the importance of this concern has often been overlooked in studies of the modern novel.11 Perhaps because its characteristic concerns are sociological or anthropological rather than spiritual, the novel tends to approach the sacred more obliquely than poetry; it has more in common with a treatise than a rite.12

Churchgoing

5

Still, Woolf described the work of the modernists (specifically, Joyce’s Ulysses) as a return to the “spiritual” in response to the “materialism” of their Edwardian predecessors, and the modern novel is strikingly engaged with the spiritual aspects of life.13 As Lionel Trilling, alluding to Hegel’s notion of the “secularization of spirituality,” wrote of modern literature, “No literature has ever been so intensely spiritual as ours.”14 The modernists’ spiritual concerns include borderline states of consciousness, forms of the divided self, the process of conversion, the function of ritual, the magical potential inherent in words, moments of sublime experience, and the relationship between social life and sacred power. The demands of the novel form as the nineteenth century understood it, as well as the agnostic views of many novelists, seem to have meant that the modernists conducted their search less for a “substitute” for religion than for a satisfying explanation of such spiritual phenomena – some combination of religion and philosophy. The attempt to turn the novel’s sociological possibilities toward a consideration of this type of religious experience helped the modernists to transform the novel. The resultant metamorphosis of the genre is the subject of this book. when disbelief has gone Modern novelists frequently imagined their own work as competing with churches in terms of spiritual beauty and emotional power. The narrator of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu compares writing a novel to building a church: “How many great cathedrals remain unfinished,” he laments.15 “To go into most of the churches,” writes the protagonist of Henry James’s first novel, “is like reading some better novel than I find most novels.”16 The modernists even developed this view of church, from a position that was closer to competition than fellowship, into something of a topos: the works of several major modern novelists include scenes in which lone wanderers – usually male, often with touristic inclinations – visit churches and brood over the question of just what sort of power remains when, in Larkin’s words, even disbelief no longer motivates their view of religion. This topos, not often noted, embraces a wide range of modern heroes or anti-heroes – including Lambert Strether, Proust’s narrator, Leopold Bloom, Josef K., and (in a variation on the theme) Miss Doris Kilman.17 Their authors all took the churchgoing scene as an opportunity to explore the nature of religious experience in modernity. Unlike Larkin, modern novelists seldom represent a church that is totally deserted. Rather, the churches visited by the modernist protagonists contain

6

Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel

small groups of primarily female worshippers, who often become the object of the protagonist’s fantasies and who represent perhaps the last vestiges of a sacred community. (This tendency corresponds with the “feminisation of piety” and “pietisation of femininity” that Callum Brown sees as central to evangelical religious culture from 1800 to 1950.)18 The churches themselves, whether the novelist is Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish, tend to be Catholic ones, taking advantage of that faith’s rich historical associations and tendency toward aesthetic splendor. Almost always, the protagonist feels like an outsider in the church, whether because of his religion, social class, or intellectual background; often he has entered in the first place only because he feels tired and hopes for a place to sit down or rest. Like Larkin’s speaker, who lingers over the “brass and stuff” near the pulpit and wonders whether the roof is new, the modern novelists focus their attention on church architecture and terminology – perhaps as a way of avoiding theological questions, but also perhaps as a way of finding traction for questions about ultimate meaning, transferring them from the ethereal spiritual realm to the solid world of architectural forms and language. Although the institutions that the church building represents may no longer hold much appeal, a residuum of the sacred seems to remain, and the modern novelists try to control it: some sort of sacred power persists in these churches, which the novelists associate variously with the art of the church building (“this special shell”), the regulation of sexuality and reproduction (Larkin’s “marriage, and birth”), or the passage of time (“because it held unspilt/So long and equably…”). The question posed in each of these churchgoing scenes is whether the novel can in some way sate the “hunger in [one’s]self to be more serious” that Larkin associates with the sacred ground of the church – whether the novel too can become a site that is “proper to grow wise in.” The modernist novel, through the difficulty and self-consciousness of its literary style, characteristically calls attention to the problem of its own interpretation. Scenes of churchgoing highlight such hermeneutical questions, both because the protagonists often expend considerable energy on interpreting the church rituals they witness and because such scenes seem to announce themselves as worthy of heightened attention. Through a kind of comparison, they offer opportunities for the novelist to claim a form of monumentality for his or her own work. If hermeneutics sprang originally from religious texts, it has now become the province of secular literature and the cult of the author. The modernists develop highly formalized sets of linguistic conventions that depart markedly from the novel’s traditional method of narrating events through the use of mainly referential language. Each novelist tends to develop his or her own style so idiosyncratically that it

Churchgoing

7

is easy, for example, to tell a text by Kafka apart from one by Proust (even in translation); in the attempt to create a sense of the ultimate reality behind everyday life, the very language of the modern novel thus becomes ritualized. The first English translators of Proust (C. K. Scott Moncrieff) and Kafka (Willa and Edwin Muir) have met criticism for exaggerating the theological tone of the originals, as for example when Scott Moncrieff translates “transvertébration” as “transubstantiation” or the Muirs describe a church tower as “soaring unfalteringly” rather than “tapering decisively” (“geradenwegs verjüngend”).19 The criticism is fair enough, but these early translators, who belonged to the generation of modernists discussed in this book, were also responding to the frequent use of religious language by Proust and Kafka, even if they sometimes downplayed the irony of those authors. Perhaps, too, it is not accidental that Proust and Kafka, both fascinated by the limits of secularization, became the European novelists who were most influential on English modernism (one reason for their belonging to the canon explored in this study). Along with Henry James, Joyce, and Woolf, they represent the mainstream of high modernism in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Among the first major works of modernist fiction, Henry James’s The Ambassadors (1902) features a central scene in Notre Dame Cathedral. Although the protagonist, Lambert Strether, lacks the possibility of any religious consolation in his confrontation with the alien mores of Paris, when he sees the apparently wicked Madame de Vionnet praying in Notre Dame his attitude toward her unexpectedly changes. Strether begins the episode resignedly conscious of his exclusion from the Catholic Church: “The great church had no altar for his worship, no direct voice for his soul; but it was none the less soothing even to sanctity; for he could feel while there what he could n’t elsewhere, that he was a plain tired man taking the holiday he had earned.”20 His contemplation of his own relation to the cathedral typifies the “double consciousness” that James has ascribed to him early in the novel: there is, as James writes, “detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference” (vol. i, 5). James represents the psychomachia of hesitations, evasions, and self-corrections that make up Strether’s halfhearted struggle to escape from his own subjectivity. Like a “student under the charm of a museum,” Strether attends to the architectural features of the cathedral. The episode introduces some subtle and ancient stereotypes about Catholicism upon which a number of modernists will draw. The plural character of Notre Dame’s “altars” and “clustered chapels” suggests the “far-reaching, quivering groping tentacles” that Strether has imagined earlier in the novel as part of his friend

8

Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel

Waymarsh’s perception of the Catholic Church (vol. i, 41). The novel will play on these tentacles too in the image of Madame de Vionnet as having a mind with “doors as numerous as the many-tongued cluster of confessionals at Saint Peter’s” (vol. i, 230). Strether also takes note of the lighting effects of Notre Dame, seeming to associate the holy gloom with a refusal on the part of such institutions to view the world in the hard light of reason: “Justice was outside, in the hard light, and injustice too; but one was as absent as the other from the air of the long aisles and the brightness of the many altars” (vol. ii, 5). Ultimately, Strether seems more interested in studying those visitors for whom the cathedral retains its theological significance, the “figures of mystery and anxiety,” as James puts it, “whom, with observation for his pastime, he ranked as those who were fleeing from justice” (vol. ii, 5). As interested in anthropology as he is in church architecture, Strether distances himself from the worshippers in the cathedral, the “real refugees,” but he longs at some level to participate in their rites. He sits in the choir as if he might like to sing a hymn, and he goes on to meditate at some length on absolution, a sacrament alien to his own Protestant tradition. He regards Catholicism as a beautiful fiction in which he would like to be able to participate – a theme that Henry and William James shared and one that I explore in chapter 3. Settled into a mood of innocent voyeurism, Strether observes a lady who seems to be praying: “She reminded our friend…of some fine firm concentrated heroine of an old story, something he had heard, read, something that, had he had a hand for drama, he might himself have written, renewing her courage, renewing her clearness, in splendidly-protected meditation” (vol. ii, 6–7). The subject of his observation, in a wonderful example of “delayed decoding” that prefigures the famous recognition scene by the river later in the novel, turns out to be Madame de Vionnet, the woman from whom Strether is supposed to “rescue” Chad Newsome, and this encounter proves to be a turning point in the novel’s plot.21 In this episode are present the central themes of the modernist churchgoing scene: Strether’s attempt to understand the frame of mind of the worshippers, the author’s play with the relationship between the narrator’s observations and Strether’s thoughts, and even a sort of typology whereby Strether associates the real Notre Dame with the imaginary one of Victor Hugo. Although the church itself has only residual theological meaning for Strether personally, as a setting for historical romance it allows him to transfigure a woman whom he admires but mistrusts into a splendid heroine. This “small struggle” of Strether’s shadows forth the monumental subject of the novel as a whole, the question of how he should respond to

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the beautiful lies of Madame de Vionnet and Chad Newsome. The scene of his encounter with Notre Dame emphasizes both his distance from institutional religion and the continuities between his own spiritual crises and those of the “real refugees,” the still-believing Catholics (vol. ii, 4–5). In Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu [1913–27]), the idea of the church as a sort of sacred fiction depends with special force on the history of the church as a building. Proust’s narrator is a serious churchgoer with a taste for Romanesque and Gothic architecture, in which he is inspired in part by Émile Mâle and John Ruskin. (Proust himself had translated Ruskin’s book about the Cathedral of Amiens into French.) The narrator’s memories of summers in Combray come into focus in two churches, each of which brings the romance of the middle ages to the narrator’s childhood and inspires one of his earliest sexual fantasies. At the fictional church of Saint-Hilaire, with its array of aristocratic associations, the narrator’s family used to attend mass. The church is a treasure-house of art, containing two famous tapestries in silk and wool representing the coronation of Esther, the tombs (“in porphyry and enamelled copper”) of the abbots of Combray and the sons of Louis the German, and stained-glass windows depicting medieval noblemen and battles.22 Proust seems to take a certain pleasure in the accuracy of his technical descriptions of these works, several of which connect the church to the noble family of the region, the Guermantes; their ancestor Gilbert the Bad is the subject of one of the stained-glass windows, and an earlier countess of Guermantes is said to have served as a model for Esther in the tapestries. For the narrator, this connection to a legendary history gives the church its “supernatural” power. The narrator is introduced into the passage describing this church in a subordinate clause, one of many in a sentence 384 words long, which has only one main clause. This introduction dramatizes grammatically how the splendor of the church overwhelms the narrator’s tiny self: … je m’avançais dans l’église, quand nous gagnions nos chaises, comme dans une vallée visitée des fées, où le paysan s’émerveille de voir dans un rocher, dans un arbre, dans une mare, la trace palpable de leur passage surnaturel, tout cela faisait d’elle pour moi quelque chose d’entièrement différent du reste de la ville : un édifice occupant, si l’on peut dire, un espace à quatre dimensions – la quatrième étant celle du Temps. … I used to advance into the church, as we made our way to our seats, as into a fairy-haunted valley, where the rustic sees with amazement in a rock, a tree, a pond,

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Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel

the tangible traces of the little people’s supernatural passage – all this made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of the town: an edifice occupying, so to speak, a four-dimensional space – the name of the fourth being Time.23

Immediately upon his introduction, the narrator strides into a kind of epic simile, comparing himself to a peasant who observes with amazement the evidence of the passage of fairies. In order to explain his own feelings in encountering the church, the narrator has to reach for a simile referring to an older form of supernatural belief, while at the same time drawing on the most contemporary science for his notion of Time as a fourth dimension. He continually seeks for parallels between the legendary history of the Guermantes family, the Biblical story of Esther, and his own bourgeois life, just as he imagines his own relation to Swann in typological terms. Swann represents the Old Testament, the narrator the New. Similarly, the story of Esther hints at questions of assimilation and Jewish identity that will play an important role in the sections of the novel that concern the Dreyfus Affair. Proust’s novel emphasizes the magical element of our relationships with others and with the past. The invocation of a variety of religious registers raises the questions of the relative primacy of folk and “advanced” religions (the fairy world versus Christianity), while the emphasis on the question of what makes the church building sacred links Proust to his contemporary, the sociologist Émile Durkheim. (Both questions are addressed in chapter 4.) Although the apse of the church is, in the narrator’s judgment, “so crude, so devoid of artistic beauty, even of religious feeling,” and although its exterior gives it the impression of being, like the adjacent buildings, a “simple citizen of Combray,” the narrator invests the church building itself with an aura of sacredness associated with his fantasies about the Guermantes family. Biblical narrative, legend, and history merge in this passage, just as the colors of the tapestries of Esther melt into one another. The historical associations of Saint-Hilaire contribute to the narrator’s fascination with the current Duchess of Guermantes, who one day appears in the family chapel and seems to the narrator to be watching him with special attention. Although the Duchess’s physical appearance rather disappoints the narrator, since it has more in common with that of her stylish bourgeois contemporaries than with the tapestries or stained-glass windows across which her ancestors parade, he manages, by summoning his fantasies about her aristocratic lineage, to transform this unremarkable-looking woman into a sort of fairy princess – and, thinking that she may have noticed him, he falls in love with her.

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If the aristocracy has its historical romance, so too does the peasantry, which the narrator associates with the other important church of his childhood, Saint-André-des-Champs, which stands between Combray and Méséglise (a town whose name suggests “my churches” or possibly “false church”). “How French that church was!” Proust writes. “Over its door the saints, the chevalier kings with lilies in their hands, the wedding scenes and funerals were carved as they might have been in the mind [âme] of Françoise.”24 (The family servant, Françoise, frequently appears in the narrator’s imaginings as a conventional medieval peasant transplanted to late nineteenth-century France.) While out walking with his family, the narrator takes shelter in the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs and compares its statues to “some girl from the fields, come, like ourselves, for shelter beneath the porch, whose presence seemed deliberately intended to enable us, by confronting it with its type in nature, to form a critical estimate of the truth of the work of art.”25 He conceives a desire to clasp in his arms a “peasant-girl from Méséglise,” but it remains unfulfilled.26 Such treatment of the church of Saint-André-des-Champs emphasizes the role of art in constructing the sacred: if the church building seems to elevate the local peasantry through its art, it also takes some of its sacred character from those very peasants and their immemorial way of life, including such timeless social rituals as weddings and funerals, later mentioned by Larkin. Further, the narrator’s fantasy of the “peasant-girl from Méséglise,” like James’s scene in Notre Dame, links a fascination with the sacred to sublimated sexual desire and suggests the role of such desire in artistic creation.27 James Joyce emphasizes the role of such sympathetic fantasy in Ulysses (1922). In the “Lotus-Eaters” episode of that book, Leopold Bloom pays a visit to All Hallows Church after picking up a letter from Martha Clifford, with whom he is conducting a flirtatious correspondence. Although he has been baptized three times – once by a Catholic priest – Bloom, with his Jewish ancestry, still experiences the church as an outsider. As he observes a mass, he lets his mind wander, mingling theological associations with sexual ones: “Nice discreet place to be next some girl. Who is my neighbour? Jammed by the hour to slow music. That woman at midnight mass. Seventh heaven.”28 Like Strether, Bloom admires the practice of confession, which he interprets in sadomasochistic fashion: “Confession. Everyone wants to. Then I will tell you all. Penance. Punish me, please. Great weapon in their hands. More than doctor or solicitor. Woman dying to” (68). (The typical phrase from Bloom’s stream of consciousness, set beside Proust’s gargantuan sentences, resembles a Lilliputian among the Brobdingnagians.) Here as elsewhere, Joyce makes explicit a set of connections between sexual

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Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel

dynamics and sacred practices that James and Proust only imply: the sacrament of penance, in this vision, fulfils the sexual fantasies of women and priests. That Bloom imagines these fantasies in part from the women’s perspective, not only (as it were) from the outside, is characteristic of his temperament as a sympathetic observer; throughout the day, he tends to identify with the thoughts of the women about whom he fantasizes. This style of desire reaches its most complete expression in “Nausicaa,” where Bloom masturbates as he imagines the thoughts of a teenage girl, Gerty McDowell, to the accompaniment of an overheard liturgy from a nearby church. Rather than simply fantasizing about women, Bloom likes to fantasize about their fantasies. In this he resembles Proust’s narrator, who falls in love with Madame de Guermantes because he imagines that she loves him. Indeed, this quality of sympathetic fantasy is a central concern of the modern novel. Since in modernist fiction the minds of others are never quite directly known – even conversation is frequently misleading – the effort to imagine the thoughts of others is a constant concern of the characters of such works and, indeed, of their narrators. Bloom’s gift for sympathetic fantasy helps to explain his acuity as an observer of Catholic ritual. Like Larkin’s ill-informed tourist, Bloom has difficulty with religious terminology; he is fuzzy on Latin acronyms and on details about the function of the Host. Like an amateur anthropologist who has arrived from another dimension with the vaguest knowledge of Catholic theology, he contemplates the sacraments of the Eucharist and Penance and attempts to explain their power. Yet, despite these obstacles, Bloom arrives at a workable theory of the social function of the mass that is not that far from the attitudes of contemporary social scientists: Something like those mazzoth: it’s that sort of bread: unleavened shewbread. Look at them. Now I bet it makes them feel happy. Lollipop. It does. Yes, bread of angels it’s called. There’s a big idea behind it, kind of kingdom of God is within you feel. First communicants. Hokypoky penny a lump. Then feel all like one family party, same in the theatre, all in the same swim. They do. I’m sure of that. Not so lonely. (66)

Some arcane knowledge slips into the narrative under the guise of colloquial language. The phrase “hokypoky penny a lump,” for example, refers to a late nineteenth-century children’s rhyme about a type of ice cream, but “hokypoky” is also a variant of “hocus-pocus,” a term for deception and false magic, associated by probably false etymology with anti-Catholic ridicule of the Latin mass: “hoc est corpus.” Thus Bloom or Joyce, in this apparently childish allusion, combines the uncertain and largely forgotten reference to

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the mass in the name of the ice cream with the idea of the Host as a sort of lollipop to make grown children happy.29 Bloom himself, like Strether and like Proust’s narrator, tends to feel lonely, but if all three are the victims of anomie, each can appreciate in his own way the function of religion in encouraging social cohesion. For Bloom, the Catholic Church and its sacraments seem to offer a model of such cohesion in which he would not mind participating, if only his nature and intellect tended that way: “Thing is if you really believe in it” (66). The theme of the Passover, which this episode introduces in Ulysses for the first time by reference to the matzoth, contributes to a focal symbolic dimension of the novel of which Bloom remains mostly ignorant: the typological parallel between himself and Jesus.30 Bloom recognizes the continuity of the mass with the Passover Seder, but he probably does not realize that in Christian typological reading, the Passover is an Old Testament type for the Resurrection (1 Cor. 5:7). The Christological dimension of Bloom’s day receives one of its most memorable formulations in the final lines of this passage, when Bloom tries to remember the meanings of “I. N. R. I.,” which stands, in Latin, for “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” and “I. H. S.,” a Christogram based on the first three letters of the name Jesus in Greek, often interpreted as a Latin acronym for “Jesus the Savior of Man,” or “In Hoc Signo” – “In this sign [thou shalt conquer].”31 For Bloom,“I. H. S.” amounts to a sort of existential comment on the nature of human life, and Joyce’s punctuation nicely captures Bloom’s selfcorrecting interpretation of the acronym: “I have sinned: or no: I have suffered, it is.” Bloom seems to emphasize the stoical conception of life as suffering over the Catholic doctrine of Original Sin, but his philosophy has room for both. He then remembers I. N. R. I., “iron nails ran in” – an intensely material way of describing the Passion, both funny for its attempt to find a commonsense English meaning for the Latin acronym, and terribly sad in the immediacy of the image of Christ’s suffering, recalling the sheer brutality and mockery of the crucifixion. Over the course of June 16, 1904, Bloom will have his messiah fantasies, and he will commit a few sins, but he will also suffer, and the image of the crucifixion will remain a powerful focus for his suffering. The listing in “Ithaca” of the rites in which Bloom has participated during the day suggests that Ulysses may be read in terms of a search for alternatives to the mass, from the mock mass of Buck Mulligan with which the novel opens, through Bloom’s unconscious re-enactment of Hebrew rites in the burning of the pork kidney, to the black mass of “Circe” (599). Ulysses also continuously highlights the ritualistic character of many of our daily activities: cooking breakfast, reading the mail, feeding the cat,

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Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel

appeasing a grumpy spouse. The novel confers a sacramental quality on these mundane tasks; as Robert Alter has put it, Joyce “sacralizes the profane.”32 One of the more formal rites, the funeral of Paddy Dignam, is the subject of the final chapter of this study. The theme of interpretation dominates one of the bleaker church visits in modern fiction. In the climactic penultimate chapter33 of Franz Kafka’s The Trial (Der Prozeß [written 1914–15; published 1925]), the manager of the bank that employs Josef K. asks him to escort an Italian client on a tour of the local cathedral. Kafka was of course a Jew, but K. has no apparent reason in his biography for his alienation from the church. Where Strether and Bloom visited church in search of a little calm, however, and Proust’s narrator found it an agreeable place to worship art, K. enters the cathedral only on unpleasant business. (Possibly he is sent there as a subterfuge by agents of the Court; his girlfriend, Leni, tells him “they’re hounding you”).34 He arrives at the cathedral in miserable rain; the Italian does not show up; the cathedral is almost deserted: “K. walked down both side aisles and saw only an old woman, wrapped up in a warm shawl, kneeling before a painting of the Virgin Mary and gazing up at it.”35 This prayerful old woman, whom the novel vaguely associates with the Madonna, lacks the attraction or comfort for Josef K. that Madame de Vionnet, the Duchesse de Guermantes, or even Joyce’s masochistic penitents do for K.’s counterparts. Her presence seems almost vestigial, the aftertrace of a consolation that no longer exists. The sexual charge that K. has frequently found from associating with women during crucial moments of his trial, and which may have interfered with his defense, seems drained here too. Formerly a member of the “Society for the Preservation of Municipal Works of Art,” K. seems closer to Proust’s narrator than to Leopold Bloom in his knowledge of art and architecture, but he cannot indulge his connoisseurship.36 He lacks the technical vocabulary in Italian for his assignment as tour guide, and he spends the morning before his visit “copying down various special terms he would need for the tour of the cathedral from the dictionary.”37 Furthermore, the cathedral is dark, and K. must use his pocket flashlight to examine a picture of “the entombment of Christ.”38 (The flashlight contrasts nicely with the candles in James’s Notre Dame and the light of the stained-glass windows in Proust: illumination is now entirely artificial.) A sexton appears and silently gestures for K. to move in “some vague direction.”39 K. disregards him, but a sign and a light above the smaller of two pulpits indicate that a sermon is about to begin. The old female worshipper is nowhere to be seen.

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As K. contemplates his escape, the cathedral seems to grow huge: “the cathedral’s size seemed to border on the limits of human endurance.”40 K. grabs his album of tourist sights and prepares to leave. A priest, who has climbed into the small pulpit, addresses him: “Josef K.!” K. hesitates and again considers leaving, but he remains. Just as Strether thought to escape from his problems by entering Notre Dame, but instead encountered them there in the person of Madame de Vionnet, K. discovers that the cathedral is only an extension of the Court. The priest introduces himself as the prison chaplain and asks, “Was hältst Du in der Hand? Ist es ein Gebetbuch?” “Nein,” antwortete K., “es ist ein Album der städtischen Sehenswürdigkeiten.” “Leg es aus der Hand,” sagte der Geistliche. K. warf es so heftig weg, daß es aufklappte und mit zerdrückten Blättern ein Stück über den Boden schleifte. “What’s that in your hand? Is it a prayer book?” “No,” replied K., “it’s an album of city sights.” “Put it aside,” said the priest. K. threw it down so violently that it flew open and skidded some distance across the floor, its pages crushed.41

The tension evident in each of the churchgoing scenes between the possibility of seeking spiritual solace in the church and the touristic impulse to view it as an outsider, a sort of amateur anthropologist, receives here its sharpest expression in the priest’s command to put aside the book and in the image of the book’s crushed pages, as K. throws it violently away. The action prefigures the surprise of Larkin’s poet at the loudness of his own voice. Some power in the church causes K. to lose control of his own actions, particularly symbolic actions like this one. The scene concludes with the priest relating to K. the parable “Before the Law,” which reveals how the Court, with its legal texts, takes the place of the Church and its scriptures.42 Strether was comforted to imagine that justice and injustice were equally absent from the aisles of Notre Dame, but the perverse justice of the Court follows K. everywhere. “Before the Law” is also, of course, an important text about the power of literary interpretation, in which interpretation itself is seen as a sort of sacred task, a theme shared by Kafka and his contemporary Sigmund Freud, and which will be explored in chapter 5. As a commentary on Kafka’s own text, the parable emphasizes the modernist location of questions of ultimate meaning not in public rituals or sacred scripture but in multiply interpretable literary works.43 Virginia Woolf explores the perspective of the female churchgoer in several of her works. Rachel Vinrace, the protagonist of Woolf ’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), attends a weekly service held in the local Anglican chapel in the fictional South American country of Santa Marina.

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Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel

When the minister, Mr. Bax, reads aloud Psalm fifty-eight (“Break their teeth, O God, in their mouths; smite the jaw-bones of the lions, O Lord”), Rachel experiences a revulsion from “the sudden intrusion of this old savage,” God.44 Unlike many other modernist protagonists, who tend to express bemused curiosity when confronted with religious services, Rachel responds to the sermon and the smugness of the worshippers with a feeling of “keen horror” (217). In a later novel, Woolf tries to present the feelings of an ardent worshipper more sympathetically. In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the city of London seems full of empty or near-empty churches, such as the “decaying” churches that Lady Bradshaw, wife of the psychiatrist, likes to photograph, a symbol perhaps of the disenchantment of modern urban life.45 (In this respect, Woolf’s novel resembles T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land [1922]). When the evangelical Miss Kilman comes upon the Catholic Westminster Cathedral, she encounters a typically modernist juxtaposition: “In the midst of the traffic, there was the habitation of God” (100). Miss Kilman represents Woolf’s effort to understand the evangelical “pietisation of femininity” that Callum Brown would later explore. Shortly after encountering the cathedral, Miss Kilman enters the Anglican Westminster Abbey to pray, joining “the variously assorted worshippers, now divested of social rank, almost of sex, as they raised their hands before their faces” (100). These worshippers are indeed ready at any moment to transform back into tourists, “desirous of seeing the wax works” or shuffling “past the tomb of the Unknown Warrior” (which had recently been dedicated). Although Miss Kilman is a worshipper, she has something of the attitude of the modernist tourist churchgoer, not entirely at home in the church, and is unable to immerse herself fully in prayer. It is as if her evangelical piety has been infected by the more detached attitude typical of the tourist: “she barred her eyes with her fingers and tried in this double darkness, for the light in the Abbey was bodiless, to aspire above the vanities, the desires, the commodities, to rid herself both of hatred and of love” (100). Woolf portrays Miss Kilman being observed by other worshippers of a higher social status in this church, which is one of the national holy places in English life: Her hands twitched. She seemed to struggle. Yet to others God was accessible and the path to Him smooth. Mr. Fletcher, retired, of the Treasury, Mrs. Gorham, widow of the famous K. C., approached Him simply, and having done their praying, leant back, enjoyed the music (the organ pealed sweetly), and saw Miss Kilman at the end of the row, praying, praying, and, being still on the threshold of their underworld, thought of her sympathetically as a soul haunting the same territory; a soul cut out of immaterial substance; not a woman, a soul. (100)

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Miss Kilman herself, however, cannot avoid self-consciousness about her physical appearance, which indeed eventually distresses Mr. Fletcher, and about the complexity of her relationship with God: “(it was so rough the approach to her God – so tough her desires).” Miss Kilman seems, in this passage at least, to be not the religious bigot of Clarissa Dalloway’s imagination (and most critical discussions) but a woman with a complex, if demanding, spiritual life. Woolf may not share Miss Kilman’s solution to spiritual questions, but she does not simply dismiss the questions themselves. Woolf’s experiments with perspectivalism seem designed to explore the possibilities of sympathy, and in the figure of the evangelical Doris Kilman she explores its limits with particular effectiveness. The relationship between this perspectivalism and the disenchantment of modern life, a theme explored around the same time by the sociologist Max Weber, is the subject of chapter 6. The churchgoing scenes that I have examined here range from Lambert Strether’s vision of the Notre Dame of romance, seen by the brightness of the candles in its many altars, to the double darkness of Westminster Abbey in Mrs. Dalloway. The Ambassadors was published in 1902, Der Prozeß and Mrs. Dalloway in 1925. Perhaps the most obvious precursor of such novels is Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1896). Jude works as a stonemason, repairing church buildings if not the institutions they house. What separates Jude from Strether, apart from the arbitrary turn of the century, is that Jude still hopes for some meaning and guidance from Christminster and from the church; although not quite a worshipper, he is more than a tourist. Jude’s immediate literary descendant in the modernist period is D. H. Lawrence’s Will Brangwen. In a central episode of The Rainbow (1915), Will’s wife Anna declares that Lincoln Cathedral’s “altar was barren, its lights gone out. God burned no more in that bush.”46 Here the gender roles are reversed, as Will experiences a sort of religious ecstasy not seen in the other male modernist churchgoers: “His soul leapt, soared up into the great church … His soul leapt up into the gloom, into possession, it reeled, it swooned with a great escape, it quivered in the womb, in the hush and the gloom of fecundity, like seed of procreation in ecstasy” (186–7). Will takes to caring for his local church, looking after “the stone and wood-work, mending the organ and restoring a piece of broken carving, repairing the church furniture” (191). Anna does not understand him: “It was the church building he cared for; and yet his soul was passionate for something” (193). The visit to the cathedral is set in 1883, and Lawrence’s Will Brangwen seems more a contemporary of Hardy’s Jude than of the modernist churchgoers.

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Lawrence both belonged to the mainstream of modernism and explicitly addressed theological concerns in his novels. He did not, however, share the bemused detachment characteristic of the other modernists in their treatment of the church.47 Novelists of the period who do address theological themes more directly often seem to be excluded from the modernist canon. Nevertheless, I shall argue that even in novels with apparently secular themes, the problem of religious experience was crucial to the modernists; in fact, this problem lies at the root of those formal experiments characteristic of precisely the “high” modernism that seems to differentiate itself from the more avowedly supernatural works of many popular writers. While my primary concern is with the canonical authors, my inquiry also raises questions about why we designate certain works as “modernist.” It seems that only by sublimating religious experience into formal concerns have works qualified for such canonization. Around the margins of the modernist canon lurk all kinds of encounters with the supernatural, whether in the traditional form of the devil, in the more esoteric framework of elaborate literary myth, or in the exotic appeal of the East. Many people still went to church for worship in the early twentieth century, and a number of authors wrote novels about people who worshipped in churches. A diverse group of writers of the period, many of them women, made religious or supernatural figures the focus of their novels. The best-selling sensationalist Marie Corelli, the conventional novelist of country life Sheila Kaye Smith, the mildly avant-garde feminist Sylvia Townsend Warner, the controversial lesbian Radclyffe Hall, and the meticulous realist Willa Cather have little in common other than their interest in religious themes, but none of them belonged to the mainstream of modernist literary experiment, and several of them were notably conservative in their formal concerns.48 Similarly, works by the (mainly male) authors of the Catholic revival of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Georges Bernanos, and François Mauriac, bear an uneasy relation to the term “modernism” – their protagonists contemplate theological issues of sin and redemption in the context of fairly conventional novels of manners or genres such as detective fiction.49 In a number of more explicitly modernist works, the grail myth plays a key role, as in Mary Butts’s Armed with Madness (1928) and John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance (1932), both of which share this interest in myth with such poets as T. S. Eliot or David Jones. Surrealists like André Breton and Louis Aragon concerned themselves with locating the “marvelous” or “divine” in modern life, and the excommunicated surrealist Georges Bataille developed his own theory

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of religion, drawing largely on Durkheim. Nevertheless, it is broadly true that, in the “high” modernist novel, characterized by formal experiment and intense subjectivism, organized religion is generally absent as a positive force in the lives of characters. (Even here, of course, there are a number of more direct treatments of religious themes, such as E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India [1924].) For this study, I have selected five novelists who seem to me more typical than Lawrence or Forster of “high modernism” in the novel and who share the bemused curiosity I would like to explore. If the beginning of the modernist period can be marked by the fact that Strether comes to the church not to rebuild it but to admire it, not to worship but to observe the worshippers, its end can be seen in the fact that Larkin’s speaker in “Church Going” enters a church from which even the worshippers have disappeared. Something has certainly happened to religious experience during the first half of the twentieth century, and insofar as it involves an imagined emptying-out of the churches, it might plausibly be called secularization. Yet, the modernists did not accept secularization as inevitable or embrace a world emptied of the sacred. They sought instead to understand religious experience anew, in the light of their own experience of modernity and of the theories of their contemporaries. They sought to offer a new understanding of the sacred in their own texts, and in so doing they created a modern form of sacred text, charged with the meaning and power that seemed to them to have evacuated the church buildings. religious experience in the modernist novel The modernist moment intersected with a critical juncture in the socialscientific study of religion, when the process of secularization, already identified by the Victorians, came to be more fully theorized in a “secularization thesis,” which interpreted secularization as the natural outcome of modernization. In chapter 2, I explore the secularization thesis and recent challenges to it: modern social theory and the modernist novel, I argue, undertook similar efforts to explain, and provide a substitute for, the sorts of shared normative values that institutional religion no longer adequately supplied. Around the turn of the twentieth century, a generation of social thinkers who had been trained in nineteenth-century positivist social science, including William James, Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and Max Weber, sought new means to describe and study religious inclinations without necessarily deciding the question of whether or not there is a God. They were concerned more with the structure of faith than with its

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truth content. In the same generation, the agnostic or atheistic authors discussed here sought to make the structure of the novel more capable of describing transcendent experiences. For the modernists, transcendence generally meant experiences that originated in the ordinary world, not the supernatural, but that opened some sort of insight beyond the realm of the ordinary; for such experiences they often used religious language, such as the term “epiphany.”50 Without submitting to the institutional religion of church or synagogue, the modernists found methods to describe through fiction what came to be known, after William James, as “religious experience,” the basic consciousness supposedly at the root of all religions but isolated from any institutionalization in a theology or a church. I shall argue that many novelists of the period engaged specifically with contemporary social-scientific accounts of religion. No matter what the specific reading of certain novelists, however, the intellectual and religious climate of early twentieth-century modernity made the problem of accounting for apparently supernatural forces and religious ritual as important for the development of the modern novel as it was for the rise of modern social science. In the chapters that follow, I compare each of these social scientists directly with a novelist. The chapters are ordered more or less chronologically, but they are also planned as a set of case studies designed to explore the question of whether direct influence is necessary to understand the shared concerns of these thinkers and writers. As the chapters progress, the links between social thinker and novelist grow more distant: William and Henry James were brothers; Durkheim and Proust did not know each other but studied philosophy with the same professors at the Sorbonne, and they shared many views; Kafka had a mostly passive knowledge of Freud’s work, and the two men lived in different cities of the Habsburg Empire while sharing an ethnic background. Woolf and Weber are the least obviously related, but I will argue that their similar heritage (Weber’s “Protestant ethic”) contributed to their related insights into the “disenchantment of the world.”51 One central concern of all the novelists, our relationship with the dead, is explored throughout and is then the focus of the concluding chapter, which discusses James Joyce’s use of Dante’s medieval typology. Each chapter also explores a major formal or stylistic element of modernism: Henry James’s use of symbolism, Proust’s transformation of plot, Kafka’s undecidability, Woolf’s synthesis of multiple points of view, and Joyce’s mythical method. The attempts of all of the modernists to describe forms of experience that would traditionally have been called “religious” reflects a blurring of the lines between the sacred and the profane. Drawing on contemporary

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ethnological discourse, Durkheim held that every religion presupposes the classification of all things into two domains, the sacred and the profane.52 Auden wrote that “Great changes in artistic style always reflect some alteration in the frontier between the sacred and profane in the imagination of a society.”53 One of the distinctive features of the modernist period, also noted by Auden, is the collapsing of this opposition. I refer to this phenomenon as a “secular sacred,” a term which is not quite an oxymoron. In Catholicism, a “secular priest” works in the world rather than belonging to an order. Among the radical Protestants, Max Weber identified a “worldly asceticism,” the transference of a monastic attitude of self-denial to the world outside the monasteries. The modernists sought a secular sacred, a form of transcendent or ultimate meaning to be discovered in this world, without reference to the supernatural. They were centrally concerned with those functions that define our common humanity – which Larkin would describe as “marriage, and birth,/And death, and thoughts of these.” The cycles of birth and death, and the mysteries of sexuality, are at the same time what make us human and what link us to the rest of animal life. It has been said that what differentiates us from other animals is our awareness that we will die, as well as the relative autonomy of our sexual desires from reproductive processes. Certainly, one of the major functions of religion has been to explain these processes (sex and death) to us. Even after belief and disbelief in a supernatural God have gone, they retain their mystery. They are among the main subjects of literature in any age; in modernism, they constitute the sacred. The modernists concerned themselves with the nature of sexuality and marriage, with the relationships between parents and children, and especially with our relationship to the dead. In the following chapters I consider these themes in relation to such concepts as fiction, magic, interpretation, and enchantment, terms drawn from the thinkers and writers of the period as they tried to grapple with the nature of the redrawn, or disappearing, frontier between the sacred and the profane. The modernists understood all these themes to relate to the problem of the sacred; these human experiences represent the limits of secularization. Larkin’s account of an apparently secular postwar Britain suggests how the problem of sacred power remains central to religious experience after organized religion has begun to fade. In particular, people seem to desire ultimate explanations for the forces – psychic, social, natural, or supernatural – that shape their lives, whether they find these explanations in traditional or modernized religion, in neo-orthodoxy or spiritualism, in fundamentalism or New Age myth, or in such systems of thought as pragmatism, psychoanalysis, dialectical materialism, or quantum mechanics. Although the latter

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few systems are certainly “secular” in that they resist appeals to the supernatural, people’s relationships to these belief systems are often structured by feeling, desire, and need rather than strictly by rational calculation of their material interests. Furthermore, the very appeal of such systems, like that of the great religions, is the rational, intellectual coherence they offer for understanding what are ultimately matters of faith. The modernists are all too conscious of living in what Charles Taylor calls a “secular age,” in the title of an important recent study. The problem for the modern novel is how to revive some conception of sacred community even in an era of purely private experience. Many modernists seek to locate ultimate meaning simply in the flux of individual experience (in Virginia Woolf’s phrase, “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day”).54 At the same time, however, the modernists continually return to the problem of ritual and to the question of what types of ritual are appropriate to the privatized and pluralistic forms that the quest for ultimate meanings takes in modernity. Through its attention to private rituals and forms of meaning-making, the modern novel does what it can to contain and make sense of those “compulsions” that, in Larkin’s words, the church once “robed as destinies.” While this process may be understood as a form of secularization, it does not exactly amount to “disenchantment.” Rather, it involves shifting the forces of enchantment from the public forum of churches to the private world of individual experience, which is the precinct of the modern novel. Ultimately, I will suggest, it is in this sacred precinct that the modernists try to erect structures that will contain new sacred communities in place of the vanishing congregations of the lonely churches.

chapter 2

God’s afterlife

Theories of the novel have tended to emphasize the process of secularization. The most common narrative describes the rejection of earlier, religious narrative forms (especially the epic, but sometimes the saint’s life or the spiritual autobiography), in which events fall under the sway of supernatural forces, such as gods and monsters, in favor of naturalistic techniques of description and subject matter from the empirically observable world. Versions of this story appear in the works of Walter Benjamin, Erich Auerbach, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Ian Watt, but the most succinct account appears in Georg Lukács’s classic study The Theory of the Novel (1916), which describes the novel as “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.”1 Lukács’s interpretation has contributed to the secularist assumptions of many influential recent studies of the European novel, from Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1981) to Franco Moretti’s Modern Epic (1994). The received view relies on a much broader historical narrative, which I will call the “secularization thesis”; the secularization thesis characterizes the emergence of modernity as the result of increasingly rational modes of thought and a rejection of belief in the supernatural. Alluding to Friedrich Schiller, Max Weber called this process “the disenchantment of the world.”2 If the novel is indeed the characteristic art form of secularization, in Lukács’s words, “the representative art-form of our age,” and if modernity is indeed a secular age, we might expect the modernist novel to be doubly secular.3 Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seem to represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of the characters expresses definite religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action. Arguably, too, the modernist attack on the conventions of the nineteenth-century novel itself promotes a further step in secularization, namely the challenging of “grand narratives” and the omniscient narrators who present them. The modernists reject the realist novel’s alleged depiction of an orderly world, represented to us in an 23

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orderly manner by a narrator who speaks as if with the voice of God, and perhaps thereby suggest that our faith in narrative may be a vestige of our earlier religious beliefs.4 Thus at first glance the modernist novel seems to justify the expectations of the secularization thesis. Yet, as the perpetual attraction of modernist writers to churchgoing scenes suggests, a sense of the sacred persists even in the apparently godless modernist novel. In this book, I will explore the limits of the secularization thesis. Although there is no doubt that the relationship of the intellectual elite to the sacred did change radically in the late nineteenth century, I hope to re-evaluate the character of this change and its implications for modernism. I am concerned in particular with those aspects of the sacred that remained central to the philosophies and literary works of the modernists; I contest the assumption that they celebrate the putative secularization of modernity. The modernists were not the devout secularists that most critics portray; rather, they sought, through formal experiment, to offer new accounts of the sacred for an age of continued religious crisis. Stephen Dedalus may shun the Catholic Church and Mrs. Ramsay chastise herself for thinking, in an unguarded moment, “we are in the hands of the Lord”; yet, their creators continued to search for an adequate account of religious experience, albeit a version of such experience without God or church, and this search contributed to the development of literary modernism.5 “Secularization,” I contend, is a misleading word for what happened to art’s relation to the sacred in the twentieth century. In The Gay Science (1882), Nietzsche announces the death of God not in his own voice but in that of a fictional madman, who proclaims: “After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave – a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. – And we – we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.”6 Nietzsche presumably had in mind not only specific belief in God but also the various forms of the sacred in modern humanism, which he attacked relentlessly. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the question of how to cope with these shadows became an important concern of modern novelists, social scientists, and theologians. Recent scholarship in a variety of disciplines, while reaffirming that religion has lost much of its former power in the public sphere, has challenged the conventional lines of the “secularization thesis.” As the historian Callum G. Brown has put it most recently, “Secularization theory is now a narrative in crisis.”7 In this chapter, drawing on the work of Brown,

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philosopher Charles Taylor, and theologian John Milbank, I present a revised narrative of the encounter between sacred and profane in nineteenthand twentieth-century Western Europe. The outlines of my account are as follows. The nineteenth century’s experience of secularization occurred mostly within a small, elite, and articulate minority. The modernists inherited the concern of their forebears with the prospect of a dawning secular age, but they also showed much greater continuity with Victorian concerns about faith than either the modernists themselves, or their later interpreters, were willing to acknowledge. During this time and the decades that followed, the culture at large witnessed renewed concern with spiritual matters; in this the culture was influenced partly by the pain and loss that accompanied the First World War and partly by reactions against, on the one hand, the perceived tepidness of late Victorian faith and, on the other hand, the perceived smugness of late Victorian atheism. More broadly, the twentieth century heralded what Taylor has called an “age of authenticity,” in which the kinds of experience that formerly had been the province of organized religion to channel and explain shifted to belong, in large part, to private life and idiosyncratic expression. While Taylor sees this “age of authenticity” as belonging to the second half of the twentieth century, he acknowledges the extent to which the modernists of the first half of the century prefigure later concerns.8 The religious subject of the writers and social thinkers of the modernist generation can therefore be understood as the limits of secularization. They sought to offer alternative accounts of the role of religion in modern life, frequently by claiming that modern religious life resembles primitive (or pagan) religion and that the twentieth century inaugurates a return to the essence of religion after the false refinements of the nineteenth century.9 The sociologists – the founders of modern social thought – tried both to theorize secularization, which they considered inevitable, and to combat its more corrosive effects. The modernist authors, faced with similar concerns, were more skeptical than their peers in the social sciences about the allegedly secular character of the new era. While less inclined than other writers of their generation, including modernist poets, to seek solutions for spiritual problems in either the occult or traditional Christianity, these authors did regard the challenges of modernity as essentially spiritual. Their quest for a modern form of the “secular sacred” underwrote many of their experiments with form and technique; in particular, they sought the means to combine naturalistic descriptions of the visible world, such as those that the great realist novelists of the nineteenth century had offered, with spiritual insight of the kind found in the symbolist poets. If God died in the nineteenth century, he had an active afterlife in the twentieth.

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Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel the secularization thesis

To understand the new relation of the modern novel to the sacred we need to re-examine the secularization thesis, which was receiving its most influential formulations precisely during the high season of literary modernism. The idea that modern civilization implies, demands, or depends upon the rejection of belief in the sacred or the supernatural already fascinated the Victorians: Matthew Arnold wrote in Culture and Anarchy (1867–8) of the tendency of English civilization to become increasingly “mechanical and external” and thus to endanger spiritual values.10 Secularization became a basic tenet of twentieth-century sociology, even among those who lamented it, from Thorstein Veblen to Thomas Luckmann.11 There were more and less complex forms of the theory: Max Weber’s theory of rationalization at once upholds and radically revises the connection between secularism and modernity, demonstrating not just the rejection of supernatural beliefs but their persistence, in disguised form, in modern, apparently secular contexts. Weber emphasizes “precisely the irrational element” in the development of capitalism, for example, and argues that “one may…rationalize life from fundamentally different basic points of view and in very different directions.”12 Nevertheless, a unidirectional conception of modernization as secularization seems to dominate conventional accounts of the unique character of the twentieth century or the “modern” age, especially as such accounts took form in literary criticism. In this broad scheme, the nineteenth century appears as the age of faith and its crisis – the age of “the disappearance of God” (in the words of J. Hillis Miller) or “God’s funeral” (the title of a poem of Thomas Hardy’s and a recent study by A. N. Wilson) – whereas the twentieth century appears to have accepted the death of God and to lack further need for Him.13 According to this view, the modernists have gone beyond the crises of faith of the “eminent Victorians”; Victorian earnestness gives way to modern irony and indifference.14 I would like to suggest that such a brittle distinction between the Victorians and the moderns masks important continuities. The modernists’ own emphasis on their differences from the previous generation, as well as the genuine originality of their formal experiments, may blind us to the continuity of their central concerns. The secularization thesis bears comparison with the “repressive hypothesis” that Michel Foucault criticized in The History of Sexuality. According to the repressive hypothesis, the twentieth century had broken away from a repressive “Victorian regime” with its roots in the development, starting in the seventeenth century, of a “bourgeois order.” Modern culture, with its

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more open acknowledgement of sex, was supposed to have broken into the sunlight: “What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation, and manifold pleasures.”15 Foucault disagreed with this historical narrative. Rather than accept a sharp distinction between a repressive phase stretching from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth and then a more liberated twentieth century, Foucault sought to explore the rise of the “repressive hypothesis” as an episode in the continuing “putting into discourse of sex” (12). For Foucault, the proliferation of discourse about sex in both the “repressed” past and the “liberated” present seemed more significant than the simple notion that once sexuality was repressed and now it is liberated. It suggested that what made the twentieth century unique was the multiplication of mechanisms for putting sex into discourse, a development that seems to run parallel to the internalization of forms of power that Foucault traces elsewhere in his writing. Although moderns imagined themselves as liberated, they unconsciously reproduced in their discourses of liberation a structure of thought about the relationship between the body and subjectivity that betrayed important continuities with the putatively repressive Victorian era. The secularization thesis shares some characteristics of the repressive hypothesis: it contrasts the knowing, sophisticated twentieth century with the naïve nineteenth century (or, more broadly, the modern with the premodern period) and it may flatter the theorist’s sense of rebelling against an outmoded authority (God). It is less fun to talk about the modern age in the language of secularization than the language of sexuality, but the same general psychological features give the secularization and repression hypotheses their appeal. If Freud is the prophet of the struggle against repression, Nietzsche is the prophet of modern secularism. Foucault’s inquiry into the modern “putting into discourse of sex” suggests a parallel question about secularization. If the modern age has so comfortably dispensed with the supernatural, why do we continue to produce so much discourse about the need to abandon it, from Nietzsche and Freud through the existentialists to the post-structuralist critique of “grand narratives” and the “metaphysics of presence”?16 What accounts for the persistence of popular and literary fascination with the supernatural? Why does secular modern society produce so many vogues for Eastern religions, spiritualism, or the New Age, from the 1880s to the present? Why did the twentieth century produce so much religious fundamentalism in developing and developed societies alike? In the first decade of the twenty-first century, as religious conflicts have

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grown in political significance, Western intellectuals have continued to produce a raft of volumes, some of them remarkably popular, arguing for or against the existence of God. Without creating a grand historical framework for the “discourse about God,” we can note that discourse about God and the supernatural – whether for or against – continues to proliferate. In the past few decades, a number of social scientists and philosophers have criticized the secularization thesis as oversimplifying the data. Opponents of secularization theory often note that in most of the world, outside Western Europe and the elite strata of some other societies, the twentieth century witnessed a great upsurge in religious fervor, and that even in apparently secular countries a majority of people still often claim to believe in God or Heaven (sin and the Devil are less popular). They note too that in the nineteenth century, when fear of secularization first took root, the intensity of attachment to religious sects seems in fact to have increased, and that in many areas this new religious intensity carried over into the first half of the twentieth century. Hugh McLeod has written that, because of the proliferation of popular, dissenting sects that competed with the established churches, “the nineteenth century was both the archetypal period of secularisation, and a great age of religious revival.”17 The novelists discussed in this book were members of an international elite who did indeed abandon church membership and belief in God, but the intensification of religious belief in the nineteenth century is relevant to understanding their search for non-institutional forms of religious experience in the twentieth. A different order of objection comes from those who note the rise of “functional equivalents” of religion: that is, forms of belief (nationalism, communism, consumerism, liberalism, environmentalism) or social belonging (labor unions, ethnic groups, sports teams) that fulfill roles in modern life that once belonged to the church. This critique of secularization theory derives from Durkheim, who saw social cohesion as the main function of religion; it is relevant to modernist writers insofar as their tendency to establish artistic groups and ideologies may take on a religious cast. It is perhaps more relevant to the social scientists, who often made it a goal of their research to find a way to continue the social and moral functions of religion in the modern age. A related argument claims that even apparently secular systems of belief often take their shape from older religious ideas, myths, or modes of thought. Indeed, arguably the story of secularization retells in the language of social science the myth of the fall. This line of critique derives from Weber, who saw the modern spirit of capitalism as a transmutation of the ethos of early modern radical Protestants. These arguments and others have raised a compelling challenge

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to the argument that modernization always entails secularization; it is for this reason that many recent scholars avoid the suffix “-ization” and talk more broadly about “the secular” or “secularism.”18 One of the more sophisticated and influential recent accounts of the modern “secular age,” from the philosopher Charles Taylor, takes into account recent objections to traditional secularization theory and tries to offer a more adequate narrative. Taylor presents three different senses of the term “secular.” The first is political: religion has become uncoupled from political life and is no longer required for participation in the public sphere. As Taylor puts it, “Our relation to the spiritual is being more and more unhooked from our relation to our political societies.”19 This political change may have been a prerequisite for the second, social, sense of secularity: with the decrease in church adherence among large groups of Western Europeans and international elites, people came to define their religion in increasingly personal terms. Many people turned away from the ritual and sacramental functions of churches, no longer feeling the need for priestly sanction and interpretation of the events in their lives. This attitude of “expressive individualism,” which drew influences from romanticism and consumer culture, insisted that, in Taylor’s words, “The religious life or practice that I become part of must not only be my choice, but it must speak to me, it must make sense in terms of my spiritual development as I understand this” (486). We entered an “age of authenticity.” Religious pluralism and the sense that the individual can choose a religion as one among many “consumer options” seem closely related to this privatization of religion. The churchgoing tourists in Larkin’s poem and in modern novels certainly have something of the attitude of the consumer, the merely private individual contemplating the goods on offer in the church and, for the most part, declining to buy. Taylor shows special concern with a third sense of the word “secular”: a broader context that makes both the changing political status of religion and the changing private experience of it possible: a situation in which belief in religion or God is no longer something that can be naïvely taken for granted. Whether one believes (and what one believes) has changed from a given to a choice. As a result, it is possible – and the modernists represent a major example of this – for people to conceive of “the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing.”20 For Taylor, the sense that the human can be the measure of all values seems new in the twentieth century, or at least the late nineteenth; it defines what it means to live in “a secular age.” I believe that the modernists did regard themselves as living in a “secular age” in something like this sense, but I emphasize that even in such an age – as

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Taylor’s discussion of the privatization of religion indicates – a sense of the “sacred” can persist. As I have suggested in chapter 1, the modernists offer a model of a “secular sacred”: a way of seeing aspects of human experience itself as set apart, venerable, inviolable. If the modernists’ uses of words like “sacred,” “reverence,” “sanctity,” “magic,” and “soul” are not quite orthodox, they are nonetheless more than merely metaphorical. This was the language available to them for speaking about ultimate truths, human truths for which supernatural explanations might no longer seem adequate, but for which a sheer materialism or reductivism also seemed suspect. In other words, I question the clarity of the distinction drawn by Clifford Geertz between the “religious perspective” and the “aesthetic attitude.” It seems to me that, at least in some works, the “aesthetic attitude” is equally concerned with grasping the “really real.”21 Regardless of whether we call the changes in religious life Taylor describes “secularization,” they do not necessarily imply a rejection of all religion, but rather a transfer of authority in religious belief from public to private hands – an exchange that was in some ways a continuation of processes begun in the Reformation and with the liberalism of Locke but considerably accelerated after the American and French Revolutions and the rise of romanticism. The impact on modernist intellectual and artistic life of this privatization of religious experience shows itself in, on the one hand, the increasing value that modernist works accord to intimate experience, and on the other hand, a renewed intellectual and social interest in the very ritual functions that had previously been a central element of religious life but that were now losing their authority. (This latter interest is apparent in the vogue for J. G. Frazer and Jessie Weston.) The modernist moment seems to have been the first in which this newly private character of religious experience earned wide recognition. The modern novel has often been understood in terms of a turn of the alienated individual away from the social world. Even recent accounts from cultural studies that emphasize the modernists’ engagement with a larger culture tend to downplay the centrality of the phenomenon of religion to that culture.22 Yet the longing for a more authentic form of community suffuses the work of even the most apparently solipsistic modernists, like Proust and Joyce, and this longing is often steeped in religious language. The problem for such writers is that existing forms of community, having long since hardened into anachronistic and often inhumane institutions, turn out not to fulfill the high expectations of alienated seekers, so that more indirect approaches to community become necessary. Modernist novels search for ways to reconstruct a sacred community in the absence of

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churches, thereby attempting to resolve the problem of the privatization of religion. They cannot do so, however, by establishing new religions on the model of Christianity or Judaism (although D. H. Lawrence did fantasize about founding his own, anti-Christian religion). Since the modernists are conscious of living in an age in which religious experience is fundamentally a private matter, in which, as Max Weber wrote, the “ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life,” they know that they can found new communities only indirectly, searching within the intimate lives of their protagonists for the keys to a new type of community.23 the “secularization of the european mind” in the nineteenth century To question the secularization thesis in its more dogmatic forms is not necessarily to deny a dramatic change in the consciousness of large groups of people in the late nineteenth century. It is clear that, where mid-Victorian grandparents might attend church (or synagogue) regularly and profess belief in a personal God and the divine inspiration of the Bible, many of their twentieth-century grandchildren no longer attended religious services or professed such belief. The main figures in this book are the product of this transformation. The historical process that Owen Chadwick has chronicled as the “secularization of the European mind” in the nineteenth century should, however, be distinguished from sociological theories that scholars developed in the early twentieth century to show that this secularization was an inevitable aspect of modernization.24 These theories were, to a large extent, the work of secularized elites who wished to account for their own recent experiences. As Frank M. Turner has written of the Victorian period, “That secularization of English and British culture occurred is true, but the occurrence was anything but inevitable, unproblematic, or systematically steady.”25 In the longer term, it is also far from clear that the process was unidirectional or irreversible, or that it was a necessary and universal concomitant of modernization, and it is far from certain that the Victorians’ modernist heirs welcomed the process. The cultural and genealogical parents of the modernists, men like Henry James, Sr., Leslie Stephen, Ernest Renan, John Ruskin, and women like George Eliot, underwent crises of conscience that led them either to agnosticism or atheism or to new forms of spiritual life. The grandfather of William and Henry James was a strict Calvinist. His son, Henry James Sr., got caught up in the Second Great Awakening. After studying at the conservative Princeton Theological Seminary, from which two of his

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brothers had graduated, he underwent a conversion experience in 1844 and became a proponent of the more liberal Swedenborgian religion.26 In turn, his eldest son William James had great difficulty convincing himself to believe in any god at all, while his second son, Henry James, showed little compunction for his lack of religious affiliation. The father of Virginia Woolf, Leslie Stephen, was himself the son of Evangelicals of the Clapham Sect and grandson of the sect’s leader, John Venn, the Rector of Clapham. Stephen was ordained as a deacon in the Church of England in order to fulfill the requirements of his fellowship at Cambridge, and later became a priest; in 1875, however, he left the church after realizing that “it was wrong for me to regard the story [of the Flood] as a sacred truth.”27 He became one of the most famous agnostics of his time; his daughter Virginia grew up without religion and married a Jew. The pattern is familiar: Max Weber’s mother was a fervent Protestant of a liberal bent, but he considered himself “absolutely unmusical religiously” and did not belong to any church.28 James Joyce’s mother was a devout Catholic, but, after a Jesuit education and early thoughts of entering the priesthood, Joyce left the Catholic Church at age sixteen, “hating it most fervently.”29 Marcel Proust, Émile Durkheim, Franz Kafka, and Sigmund Freud all had grandparents (in Proust’s case, great-grandparents) who were practising Jews: born in closed Jewish communities, observant of the dietary laws, and worshipping in synagogues. Yet none of the grandsons observed the dietary laws, and Durkheim and Freud were champions of secularism. Of the four, only Durkheim, the son of a rabbi, experienced a notably religious upbringing, and he left his religion behind during his university years. Proust, the child of a mixed marriage, was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church, but even his nominally Catholic father was essentially a nonbeliever, steeped in the republican anti-clerical tradition. The crises of conscience of the Victorians resulted in part, no doubt, from broad social forces that allowed for freer expression of unorthodox opinion, but also more directly from a series of scientific discoveries that had undermined belief in the Bible. As early as the 1830s, Charles Lyell found geological and fossil evidence that contradicted the time-span of the Biblical narrative of creation. The most significant blow to Biblical literalism, however, came from the work of scholars who employed textual criticism to show the multiple authorship, over a long period of time, of the Bible itself – showing, as they excavated its history of changes and contradictions, cause for serious doubts about the idea of divinely inspired authorship – and who sought to explain Biblical events using the techniques of modern historical scholarship. The Young Hegelian David Friedrich Strauss, with

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his work The Life of Jesus (1835), prompted many intellectuals, including the young Friedrich Engels, to question the Biblical account of Christ. Similarly, in The Essence of Christianity (1841), Ludwig Feuerbach provided the seed for a theory of religion as a projection of a social need. From it, Karl Marx, the grandson of a rabbi but the son of an assimilated Jew, developed the notion of religion as “the opiate of the people,” which in important respects anticipates the work of Durkheim, himself the descendant of a line of rabbis. George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) had spent her adolescence in religious enthusiasm during the heyday of the Evangelical movement, which also encompassed Virginia Woolf’s grandparents. At the age of twenty-two, however, after reading Charles Hennell’s An Inquiry into the Origins of Christianity (1838), Eliot lost her faith and refused to attend church with her father. She soon published translations of Strauss (1846) and Feuerbach (1854). Such doubts, already aloft, exploded in the culture after the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859). The divine inspiration and literal truth of the Bible met further challenges from Renan’s Life of Jesus (1863), Benjamin Jowett’s contribution to Essays and Reviews (1860), and a startling work by John Colenso, the Anglican bishop of Natal, The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined (1862–3). In the last decades of the century many followed Eliot and Stephen into disbelief. Around the same time, the inquiries of anthropologists into the religious beliefs of “primitive” peoples caused some observers to see Christianity as just one more set of superstitions. In particular, Sir James George Frazer’s monumental The Golden Bough (in 12 volumes, 1890–1915; abridged edition, 1922) catalogued such anthropological findings and compared them with ancient Near Eastern, Mediterranean, and European myths and showed that many Christian ideas, including centrally the Resurrection, had close parallels in other societies. There were social preconditions as well for changes in attitudes toward organized religion. The emphasis of the Evangelical revival on intense personal devotion may itself have encouraged the sorts of crises experienced by Ruskin, Stephen, and George Eliot. The atheism associated with Marx’s political philosophy, along with the relaxed strictures of social life in rapidly urbanizing England, may have contributed to the decline in church adherence among the working classes, although recent scholarship calls into question the reputation of the English working classes for being “unchurched”; in France, a stronger tradition of radical anti-clericalism made differing views of religion more evidently class-based.30 Of more relevance to the intellectuals that this work considers, the religious tests

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that required dissenters to conform to the Church of England in order to study at Oxford or Cambridge or to hold government office were abolished during the course of the nineteenth century. Similarly, religious disabilities for Catholics like Joyce in Ireland were eliminated, though Ireland of course continued to lack Home Rule. Jews, as well, had won civic freedoms. In 1791, the revolutionary Constituent Assembly had declared the emancipation of the Jews of France, and in the Habsburg Empire a more gradual process had led to the emancipation of the Jews there by 1867.31 The Jewish authors whom this work considers are products of the subsequent migration of Jews to cities like Paris, Vienna, and Prague. Yet, new and often violent forms of anti-Semitism – evident in the Dreyfus Affair in France, riots in Prague, and the election of the anti-Semitic mayor Karl Lueger in Vienna in 1897 – in many ways took the place of the old restrictions, foreshadowing the later fate of the Jews of Europe. In France, the anti-clerical attitudes of the republican left, which resulted in the formal separation of church and state after the Dreyfus Affair, implied a more forcible rejection of the church than in England, where to this day the Church of England retains its status as the established church and Bishops sit in the House of Lords. Yet, if secularism was stronger in France than in Britain, this did not imply the quiet dying out of Catholicism – quite the opposite, as many of the major social and political battles of the Third Republic concerned the place of the religion in the modern state. In the Ireland of Joyce’s youth, secularism or atheism remained a radical and unusual position. The Catholic clergy had expanded its influence over the social and political life of Ireland in the second half of the nineteenth century, and Catholicism was central to national identity, as it would remain until the end of the twentieth century.32 Even in the nineteenth century, many of those who left behind traditional Christianity maintained a fascination with the occult or idealist philosophy or other alternatives to religion that were not strictly secular.33 By the early twentieth century, a reaction set in against the secularizing tendencies of the late nineteenth century. The moderns returned to the problems that their Victorian forebears had faced in search of new, and less dogmatic, responses. To some extent, this is the story of the grandchildren’s reaction against their parents’ emancipation from the ways of the grandparents, but the younger generation did not seek simply to return to the religion of their elders. Rather, they sought some explanation of religious experience that would seem more adequate or convincing than that offered by the liberal rationalism that dominated their immediate

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intellectual predecessors. In some cases the process of reaction and reassessment took place over three or four generations, in others within a single generation; Joyce and Durkheim experienced the rejection of religion and the search for a substitute in their own lifetimes. Most of their colleagues were searching for something that they understood themselves not to have had as children. Although questions of faith in the literal truth of the Bible no longer had much potency for the modernists, a new sense of religious crisis predominated at the beginning of the twentieth century. The difference between the modernists and their precursors is evident in the development of realism and modernism in the novel. In the Victorian age, when many novels did invoke God or Providence, George Eliot wrote a realist masterpiece without reference to either. “God is absent from Middlemarch,” notes Gillian Beer, who also quotes one of the first American reviews of the novel (first published in 1871–2), which described a “thoughtful and sensitive young man, who rose from the perusal of Middlemarch, with his eyes suffused with tears, exclaiming: ‘My God! And is that all?’ ”34 The world that this magisterial realist represents has no place for the supernatural. The major novelists considered in this study all acknowledged the influence of Eliot’s French contemporary, Gustave Flaubert. In a phrase later borrowed by Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, Flaubert wrote that the “artist in his work must be like God in creation – invisible and all-powerful; he must be everywhere felt but never seen.”35 His realist works, like Eliot’s Middlemarch, seem to imply the presence of a guiding intelligence (the author’s) while betraying no hint of supernatural intervention, and the modernists inherit this ideal of the God-like artist. A scene in the cathedral of Rouen in the first chapter of the third part of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) offers a precursor to the modernist churchgoing scene, as Emma Bovary’s lover grows impatient with the verger’s tour of Rouen Cathedral, and with Emma’s show of piety, and convinces her to join him in a cab where they consummate their affair. Here, Emma’s piety is little more than show and her lover has no real interest in the church itself.36 The modern novel carries forward the secularizing tendencies represented by realism and naturalism; the founder of naturalism, Émile Zola, aimed to make “the experimental novel” into “a practical sociology” and “a help to political and economical sciences.”37 Zola represents the culmination of that aspect of the realist tradition in the nineteenthcentury novel that emphasized the novel’s ability to describe the social world objectively.

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On the other hand, the modernists also draw on the efforts of Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, and Stéphane Mallarmé to find in poetry a substitute for religion. In 1899, Arthur Symons described the symbolist project of “spiritualis[ing] literature”: as we brush aside the accidents of daily life, in which men and women imagine that they are alone touching reality, we come closer to humanity, to everything in humanity that may have begun before the world and may outlast it … [In] speaking to us so intimately, so solemnly, as only religion had hitherto spoken to us, [literature] becomes itself a kind of religion, with all the duties and responsibilities of the sacred ritual.38

In their youths, Proust and Joyce were attracted to the idea of a “religion of art,” closely associated with Mallarmé and Pater. Yet by their maturity they had moved beyond the idea that art is the supreme good and instead saw the artist as working to discover the sacredness of experience itself. In his writings on Ruskin, Proust wrote that “Reading is at the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it.”39 The modernist novel attempts to blend the aspirations towards sacredness of symbolist poetry with the naturalist effort to achieve objectivity and comprehensiveness. As Edmund Wilson claimed, in 1931, “the literary history of our time is to a great extent that of the development of Symbolism and of its fusion or contact with Naturalism.”40 While modern novelists used techniques that had been associated in the realist novel with the accurate description of social phenomena, they tended to adapt these techniques under the influence of symbolism in order to describe more esoteric experiences and to challenge the realist novel’s emphasis on the orderly workings of the visible world. In this respect, too, they were the heirs of Flaubert, who was himself a model for both the naturalists and the symbolists. Flaubert prefigures modernist descriptions of religious experience in two very different works: “Un coeur simple,” the story of a simple woman who worships her stuffed parrot, and whose religious experience is described so drily that it is sometimes hard to believe Flaubert’s assurances that the story “is in no way ironic…but on the contrary very serious and very sad”; and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, a sort of Walpurgisnacht in which religious experience is represented as phantasmagoria.41 The two very different attempts to describe religious experience have their counterparts in the disparate styles of Joyce’s Dubliners and the “Circe” episode of Ulysses. One side of modernism has imbibed realist technique to the point that its representation of transcendence looks like pure immanence; the other side

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celebrates transcendence and abandons realism for the surreal. The most successful modernist works combine the two impulses. The novelists discussed in this study all draw on realist means of representing consciousness, particularly as developed by Eliot and Flaubert, but they also rely heavily on polyvalent symbols, such as James’s golden bowl, Proust’s madeleine, Kafka’s castle, and Woolf’s lighthouse. Critics have occasionally interpreted these symbols as contributing to broader Christian allegories, but I will emphasize their undecidability. They hint at spiritual meanings but resist straightforward allegorical interpretations, Christian or otherwise. Where the naturalist impulse seeks to describe the secular world in detail, the symbolist impulse seeks a subjectively meaningful pattern to hold all these details together. Modernism thus involves both the extension of naturalist or realist techniques and their transformation or even reversal. By presenting life in all its randomness, the modern novel suggests that the randomness itself contains a pattern, albeit one discernible only to the inspired novelist. This is a latently religious view, and while the modernists may have experienced their celebration of the profane as part of a turning away from institutional religion, they were also re-enacting the fundamental emphasis of Christian thought since the late middle ages on the sacredness of the everyday world, later described by Erich Auerbach in his study Dante, Poet of the Secular World.42 To the Lighthouse (1927) hints at the complex attitude of the modernists toward Victorian atheism. Mr. Ramsay, a figure of the Victorian patriarchy whom Woolf based closely on Leslie Stephen, denies the existence of God, yet his son James hopes to find some spiritual meaning in the world; he seeks such meaning in slight sensations and small moments of radiance. At the end of the novel, when the Ramsay family finally arrives at the lighthouse, James observes his father: “He rose and stood in the bow of the boat, very straight and tall, for all the world, James thought, as if he were saying, ‘There is no God’ ” (318). James, the typical modern for whom “any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests,” cannot accept his father’s disenchanted view of this world (11). Indeed, he suspects that his father’s militant atheism masks authoritarian impulses: Mr. Ramsay seems to be setting himself up as an alternative to God. The relationship suggests the limits of standard accounts of the modernist novel. Criticism of the modernists has tended anachronistically to read back into them a blithely secular point of view.

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Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel the limits of secularization in the twentieth century

The churchgoing scenes that the first chapter analyzed point to two processes running beneath the modernist attempt to invoke the sacred for the modern age. The first is the privatization of religious experience which Charles Taylor analyzes; the second is the longing for some new community to replace the sacred community, now lost, of the church. Rather than marking a further stage in the inevitable process of secularization, the early twentieth century witnessed a great deal of anxiety about the dangers of secularization and a search for alternatives to the privatized, liberal religion that had dominated the late nineteenth century. In the modernist period, and especially the 1920s, traditional religion continued to occupy a central role for most of the population. Some measures of church adherence, including renewed interest in Catholicism and High Church Anglicanism, even saw a jump, albeit not necessarily to prewar highs. In 1927, the year that To the Lighthouse was published, baptisms in the Church of England reached 66.8 percent of all live births, the highest level ever, and Anglo-Catholicism won its most famous modernist convert, T. S. Eliot.43 Even those who had left the church behind often became dedicated to finding alternatives to traditional religion. The vogues for occultism, spiritualism, and magic that had fascinated William James and W. B. Yeats around the fin de siècle made a comeback in the 1920s, especially as people tried to communicate with the war dead.44 A survey that took place in 1926 under the auspices of the Nation and Athenaeum, a prominent journal of literature and politics, gives a fascinating account of the religious views of the readership of a large publication with a modernist flavor. John Maynard Keynes served as editor of the journal, whose contributors included T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Aldous Huxley. The study had its inception when Leonard Woolf, the magazine’s literary editor, casually referred in a book review to the “liberal scepticism, atheism, or agnosticism which is characteristic of the majority of educated moderns.”45 Several readers objected to the remark; among them was the head of a Quaker school, who advised that if the magazine planned to throw around such assertions, it should publish a canvass to back them up. A questionnaire was distributed to readers of the Nation and Athenaeum and the mass-circulation Daily News (both Liberal-Labour in their political attitudes). The results suggest both the continued vitality of traditional religion and reasons for the renewed appeal of spiritualist beliefs. Fifty-one percent of respondents for the Nation and Athenaeum said they believed in

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some “form of Christianity” (as against 75 percent for the Daily News), while only 44 percent believed in “personal immortality” and 6 percent in the historical truth of the first chapter of Genesis (as against 72 percent and 38 percent respectively for the Daily News). The lack of belief in central dogmas of Christianity is notable. Conversely, more readers of the Nation and Athenaeum than of the Daily News (38 percent vs. 34 percent) believed in an “impersonal, purposive and creative power” such as the Life Force or élan vital; more than half of such “spiritualist” readers did not believe in a Christian God.46 The figures, while not disproving the claim that church attendance and doctrinal loyalty were falling among the educated classes in Britain, suggest the limits of the “scepticism” that Leonard Woolf assumed in his readers. A large majority (over 70 percent) of “educated moderns” believed either in Christianity or in some sort of “Life Force”; they were, however, reluctant to accept traditional religious dogmas. Thus, in the early twentieth century, secularism – in the sense of total disconnection from the church or from other forms of supernatural belief – was still distinctly an elite, minority position in England. Outright unbelief was by no means the only possible response to the decline of Biblical literalism. Throughout the nineteenth century, religious liberals, in response to the challenges of modern science and shifting social norms, including the rise of democracy and working-class anti-clericalism, had attempted to reconcile belief in God with faith in progress and the bourgeois state. Although many clergymen defended literal belief in the Bible, the mainstream Protestant churches of Britain, Germany, and the United States increasingly took up views associated with theological liberalism, whose leading proponents were such theologians as Friedrich Schleiermacher and Ernst Troeltsch, a close friend of Max Weber and a fellow founder of the sociology of religion. These theologians drew attention to the historical development of Christian ethics and emphasized the importance of private religious feeling. As Owen Chadwick has written, over the long term faith adjusted to the intellectual fruits of Darwinism “without more than a hesitation and a backward glance of regret.”47 Liberal Protestants discarded doctrines such as original sin and predestination in favor of broad ethical principles; they also sought an accommodation between religious institutions and modern intellectual developments, such as German idealism, Biblical criticism, historicism, and evolutionary theory. These emphases constituted a strategy to hold on to believers amid social currents flowing towards the privatization of religious experience, albeit by promoting forms of religious observance that critics regarded as increasingly

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vague and undemanding. (Matthew Arnold typified such trends when he defined religion as “morality touched with emotion” and God as “the Eternal not-ourselves that makes for righteousness.”)48 Meanwhile, evangelical movements took the opposite tack, demanding from their followers intense specificity and commitment. Callum Brown has argued that the nineteenth century was, very possibly, British history’s age of greatest religious commitment, and that throughout the early twentieth century this religiosity remained widespread and influential. Around the turn of the century, in theology, sociology, and literature alike, the privatization of religious experience came under attack. Liberal descriptions of religion as a private, personal experience increasingly gave way to descriptions that stressed the sacramental and ritual elements of religious life. The twentieth-century theologian H. Richard Niebuhr would later sardonically summarize liberal theology in a famous phrase: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without justice through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”49 The attacks on the liberal consensus came from a number of quarters, but crucial to all of them was renewed emphasis on the social dimension of religious life and on the search for new forms of sacred community. Within religious communities, theologians began to criticize many of the premises of nineteenth-century liberal religious thought. In 1910, a distinguished group of theologians began publishing The Fundamentals, a series of booklets expounding the conservative case for traditional Protestant theology. Their success led to major controversy in American Protestant churches. American fundamentalists attacked the teaching of evolution in the schools and liberal scholarship in the churches. Adventist and millenarian groups split off from the major denominations. Although such movements were deeply conservative in theological outlook, they were radical in their rejection of mainstream theology, and they set the tone for the most successful American religious movements of the twentieth century, Protestant evangelicism and fundamentalism, which have since become American exports.50 Literary modernism participated in a different sort of reaction against theological liberalism. After the First World War, a new “theology of crisis” arose in Protestantism. Karl Barth’s influential commentary The Epistle to the Romans (1919) presented a picture of Christianity that emphasized God’s transcendent nature, human sinfulness, and the vastness and mystery of the chasm between the two: the principle, which Barth took from Kierkegaard, of the “infinite qualitative distinction” between time and eternity, God and man.51 Similar sentiments were later voiced in the United States, where, in

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1935, Reinhold Niebuhr, a leading American theologian (and brother of Richard Niebuhr), criticized the “illusion of liberalism that we are dealing with a possible and prudential ethic in the gospel.” He argued that “The ethic of Jesus does not deal at all with the immediate moral problem of every human life… It transcends the possibilities of human life…as God transcends the world.”52 These theologians did not refuse to take up the problems that modern scholarship had created; on the contrary, they were respectful of the implications of historical scholarship and deeply aware of the problems raised for theology by perspectives that emphasized the historical nature of human experience and the historicity of Christ. (Nor did they refuse the burdens of modern politics: Niebuhr was an active advocate for social justice, and Barth’s theology was given extra moral authority by the fact that Barth and his followers actively resisted Nazism, while some other mainstream theologians accommodated themselves to Hitler.) They did, however, provide a much more conflicted, and even tragic, account of religious life than the one that nineteenth-century liberals proposed. At the same time as movements within Protestantism challenged the liberal consensus, other religions examined the extent to which their own practices had come to resemble liberal Protestantism. The nineteenthcentury movement toward liberalism in the Catholic Church and the rise of Reform Judaism suggested that other religions could change in ways familiar to liberal Protestants, with a shrinking role for ritual, more freedom from traditional dogmas, and greater emphases on ethical teachings and on the individual believer’s relationship to God. For instance, although Pope Pius IX bore great hostility to liberalism in all its forms, which he expressed in the 1864 Syllabus errorum modernorum, towards the end of the century the Catholic Church shifted to more liberal attitudes under Leo XIII, whose encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) set out a progressive social vision. As in Protestantism, a Catholic backlash against such liberalism arrived with the twentieth century. Indeed, the term “modernism” itself, before it was applied to literary or artistic experiments, originally referred in Europe to a liberal movement in the Catholic Church that modeled itself to some extent on nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism. The “modernist” crisis exposed a deep rift between the church hierarchy and those priests and theologians who embraced modern science and Biblical criticism. The Catholic Church excommunicated a number of modernists, notably Father Alfred Loisy, who had applied textual criticism to the Bible, and Father George Tyrrell, who questioned the permanence of Catholic dogma and the doctrine of papal infallibility. Pope Pius X labeled these views

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heretical in the decree Lamentabili and the encyclical Pascendi of 1907; vigilance committees were formed to root out the heresy; and priests and theologians were required to swear an oath against “modernism.” The NeoThomist revival, whose most famous representative was Jacques Maritain, himself a convert from liberal Protestantism, moved decisively away from liberalism.53 For the emancipated Jews of the late nineteenth century, liberalism meant the conviction that one could retain one’s Jewish identity, in a reformed or even secular mode, while also participating as a full citizen of the French Republic or a subject of the Habsburg Empire. Jewish liberals tended to identify with the values of French Republicanism and with the enlightened Habsburg monarchy, since these states had proclaimed emancipation for the Jews. The thinkers of the Jewish Enlightenment, from Moses Mendelssohn to Hermann Cohen, defined Judaism in terms of its commitment to what Cohen called “ethical monotheism,” which they saw as a purer form of the ethics preached by liberal Protestantism. Two major Jewish philosophers of the early twentieth century, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, were students of Cohen’s. Buber tried to reconcile the Western Enlightenment with Eastern European Hasidic spiritualism; he had a direct impact on Kafka and his circle in Prague.54 Rosenzweig’s attitude towards Jewish Enlightenment was more hostile; he criticized Cohen’s ethical monotheism as “the false Messiah of the nineteenth century,” a form of historicizing liberal Protestantism, and proclaimed that “the battle against history in the nineteenth-century sense becomes for us the battle for religion in the twentieth-century sense.”55 The new religious movements and ideas of the twentieth century rejected the notion that religious experience could be reconciled with nineteenthcentury ideals, such as historical progress and bourgeois culture; the notion that organized religions could, without severe tension, support the development of the liberal state. Fascination among writers, social thinkers and theologians with the thought of Nietzsche and the novels of Dostoyevsky pointed to the sense of dissatisfaction with optimistic liberal theology. Joyce, Proust, and Kafka all read Nietzsche in their youth, around the turn of the century, but they distanced themselves from him to varying degrees later on. From a resolutely anti-religious perspective, Nietzsche criticized liberal religion (and secular liberalism and socialism) for imposing herd morality on elites and for failing to recognize the reality of suffering and the centrality of conflict to human experience. Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and celebration of pagan values also inspired many social thinkers of the period, notably Weber and Freud. The modernists also

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read Dostoyevsky, who was being translated into Western European languages around the turn of the century. Both Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche articulated the sense that there could be no successful liberal compromise between God and the forces of modernity. Within religious life, in short, the early twentieth century was a period not of widespread agnosticism and liberalism, but of heightened tension and conflict over the possibilities for a religious life in the modern world – conflict that we cannot simply dismiss as “reactionary,” since it came from all parts of the political spectrum and included the most avant-garde as well as the most conservative religious thinkers. The sense of crisis evident in the birth of fundamentalism, the modernism controversy, the struggles over Jewish emancipation, and the theology of crisis informed the work of an important generation of social scientists. In their various disciplines, Weber, Durkheim, William James, Freud, and others struggled with the perceived limits of nineteenth-century materialism. Their confrontation with religion was a central moment in the development of modern social theory, which allowed them to address the persistence of religious forms of belief and experience. Although each takes religious ideas and concerns seriously, none is committed to a particular religious tradition. They seem to feel the inadequacy of nineteenth-century liberal religion, but they do not respond by returning to conservative religion or by embracing a new theology, except to the extent that their own theories can be regarded as theological. Positivist social science of the nineteenth century had tended to dismiss religious experience as irrational. For the social theorists of the early twentieth century, the ongoing need to explain religion was a central impetus for rethinking the methods of the social sciences. They are the uneasy heirs of nineteenth-century liberal theology. secularization in modern social thought While theologians of many faiths criticized what some regarded as the merely ethical and private view of religion associated with theological liberalism, social scientists sought to draw greater attention to the relationships between religious ritual and social power, and thus, through their research, to offer new alternatives to the liberal model. Durkheim and Weber emphasized the social aspect of religion – as well as the religious aspect of society – and challenged the Whiggish consensus that regarded secularization as the inevitable triumph of reason over prejudice.56 These thinkers tended to set up their own sciences as competitors or substitutes for traditional religion; they hoped to supply scientific accounts of problems that

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religion no longer seemed able to solve. Notions like James’s “reality of the unseen,” Durkheim’s “social force,” Freud’s “unconscious,” and Weber’s “disenchantment of the world” offered naturalistic explanations for religious phenomena and even a sort of religious consolation for the human condition. As Raymond Aron has written of Weber and Durkheim, “It is not too much to say that the fundamental theme of their thought – and, in their view, the fundamental cause of [the crisis of European society] – was the relation between religion and science.”57 The theologian John Milbank puts the case more sharply: “sociology has always been, by definition, primarily sociology of religion and…it is constituted, as a discipline, by a theory of secularization.”58 When social scientists turned their attention to religion, they tended to redefine their own disciplines in order to account for phenomena of human experience that had not previously been seen as amenable to social-scientific study. The problem facing sociologists and psychologists of religion was how to explain the nature and influence of religious sentiments without actually endorsing the existence of religious forces. They wanted to describe how religious beliefs function without making a judgment on the truth or falsehood of the beliefs in question. Such thinkers, from the aspiring believer James to the militant atheist Freud, attempted to find in the data of religious experience material for developing suppler and less dogmatic forms of social science. Despite the variety of their religious commitments, none is quite willing to dismiss religion as a mere “opiate,” just as none can quite bring himself to accept religious beliefs as true in themselves or make a Kierkegaardian “leap of faith.” The social sciences needed to explain religion without explaining it away. Durkheim summarized this position in a famous statement: “Fundamentally, then, there are no religions that are false. All are true after their own fashion: All fulfill given conditions of human existence, though in different ways.”59 To account for the persistence of the sacred in the modern world, each of these thinkers had to reinvent his discipline and turn away from the prevailing positivism of the nineteenth century.60 The challenge facing the developing social sciences of religion in the early twentieth century was how to account for the force of religious experiences that have no empirical basis other than the impressions of the individual worshipper. Whereas various forms of positivism might dismiss such impressions as primitive, ideological, or irrational, the new psychology and sociology of religion sought specifically to understand how irrational elements in human behavior work and what role they play in the organization of the mind or society. In place of the institutional religion of

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churches and divinity schools, theorists of religion in the early twentieth century began to pay increasing attention to individual religious experience and to “primitive” forms of religious life associated with broad supernatural forces rather than with a single God. Weber, Durkheim, James, and Freud were all committed to rational, scientific inquiry, but each of them understood human behavior as involving elements that could not be accounted for by traditional scientific methods. Although these thinkers tend to deny any intention of treating religious phenomena reductively, some element of reduction is of the essence of social-scientific method, and each must find a balance between interpreting religions on their own terms and decoding them. Each therefore faces the twin dangers of a “hermeneutics of suspicion” and an attempt to functionalize the transcendent.61 On the one hand, their methods reveal that the true meaning of religion is to be discovered outside religion, whether in social force, or the structure of the unconscious, or in the process of secularization itself; in making these discoveries, each thinker tends to decode religious beliefs and find, underlying them, some true process that they reflect, and this despite the social scientists’ stated goal of understanding the function of religion without judging the truth value of its propositions. On the other hand, in the process of functionalizing the transcendent, each of these thinkers identifies an unseen process for which religion has served as a substitute or a sort of rationalization – these forces are transcendent in the sense of not being empirically verifiable (like Freud’s “unconscious” or Durkheim’s “society”) – and thus risks re-establishing an idea of the transcendent at the heart of his own system. The typical “plot” of their major works involves the social scientist presenting the apparently irrational nature of some form of primitive or historical religious belief and then “discovering” its rational basis in one of these pseudo-empirical terms. John Milbank has argued that “sociology is only able to explain, or even illuminate religion, to the extent that it conceals its own theological borrowings and its own quasi-religious status”; a similar case could be made regarding the psychology of religion.62 Of the four social thinkers, only William James refrains from engaging in a hermeneutics of suspicion in favor of an open-ended investigation that in fact amounts to a justification of a modernized form of religious faith. None was able to do entirely without faith. It may help to gauge the strain that the attempt to account for religion in rational terms had on these thinkers – and the importance for them of providing such an account – if one recognizes that each of these major theorists of religion underwent a period of profound depression and that,

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from what we can tell, their major works on religion were written very much with the effects of these depressions in mind. (Among the novelists, too, Woolf suffered from severe mental illness and eventually committed suicide. Proust and Kafka were both frequently depressed; it is possible that their mental states contributed to their early deaths from pneumonia and tuberculosis respectively.) Each of the social thinkers also returns frequently to the dualism of human nature, a theme pursued in William James’s discussion of the “sick soul” in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Durkheim’s essay on the “Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions” (1914), Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1930), and Weber’s famous meditation on the “iron cage” of modernity in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5).63 This fundamentally tragic theme can be traced through their shared Kantian influence to Reformation thought and ultimately to a text of St. Paul that was also crucial to Karl Barth: “For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I” (Romans 8:15). Although these thinkers all differ quite widely from Nietzsche in their attitudes to religion, this tragic element in their outlook owes something as well to Nietzsche’s rhetoric of heroic tragedy. In this respect furthest from Nietzsche, William James, the leading psychologist of his generation, offered a particularly sympathetic account of religious experience. Of the four social scientists that this study considers, James attempted most explicitly to reconcile scientific inquiry with religious belief.64 He served for two years as President of the Society for Psychical Research, which sought (but seldom found) empirical evidence of occult phenomena.65 In The Varieties of Religious Experience, he argues that the essence of religion consists in a belief in the unseen: “Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto” (53). This broad definition allowed James to turn away from institutions, beliefs, and dogma in order to attend to individual experience, thus placing James closest of this group to the liberal Protestantism of the nineteenth century, although his was an extreme, “modernistic” form of liberalism.66 Still, the close ties that his thought retains to Christianity are suggested by the echo in his remark of St. Paul’s definition of faith as “evidence of things unseen” (Hebrews 11:1). The work takes the form of a series of case studies, based not so much on individuals as on types (the sick soul, the saint, the mystic); it reads like a novel of epic scope. Its characters are both famous and obscure: St. Teresa of Avila, John Wesley, unnamed

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sufferers of severe depression. In the conclusion, James finds evidence of the existence of a “subconscious self” from which religious experiences arise and that may be in touch with a higher, unseen world (511–19). William James had a considerable impact even on those social scientists who thought that he underestimated the role of ritual and social structure in shaping religious life, such as Durkheim and Weber.67 Even Durkheim and Weber participated in their field’s rising emphasis on direct encounters with forces associated with the supernatural, such as Durkheim’s mana or Weber’s charisma, rather than on formal theological dogma. Freud’s studies of religious experience (in such works as Totem and Taboo) exhibit a similar tendency. Indeed, Freud and James admired one another, while disagreeing in their assessments of religion, and Freud and Weber each met with James when they visited America. James used his broad conception of religious experience as a means for bridging science and faith; his philosophy of pragmatism allowed for a defense of the existence of God on the basis of the effects that belief in God has on our actions in this world. As he put it in Pragmatism (1907), “if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.”68 In his Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Émile Durkheim criticized James as an “apologist for faith”; he regarded the modern social sciences as engaging in necessary conflict with religious belief (Elementary Forms, 420). “We must choose between God and society,” he insisted, as a guiding hypothesis for morality.69 Durkheim attacked the “private and personal” view of religion typical of liberal Protestantism and sought instead a new religion that would reconcile modern individualism with the worship of society (Elementary Forms, 175). Despite his generosity in recognizing that “all [religions] are true after their own fashion,” Durkheim insisted that the truth of religion was generally only latent: “The most bizarre or barbarous rites and the strangest myths translate some human need and some aspect of life, whether social or individual. The reasons the faithful settle for in justifying those rites and myths may be mistaken, and most often are; but the true reasons exist nonetheless, and it is the business of science to uncover them” (Elementary Forms, 2). For Durkheim, transforming the latent truths of religion into the manifest truths of science involved a sort of decoding. Though desiring not to “explain away” religion, he did in fact seek a nonreligious explanation for religious experiences, and he found one in the concept of society. Throughout Durkheim’s work, the idea that religion reflects some basic truth seems often to mean that it serves a basic social purpose. In his analysis of Australian totemism in Elementary Forms of Religious Life, he seeks to demonstrate that, in worshipping the totemic

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object (usually an animal or plant), the Australian is really worshipping the “anonymous and impersonal force” of the clan (191). Accordingly, the study reads like classic detective fiction, with the central, apparently irrational beliefs of totemism outlined in the first half of the book before the rational origins of these beliefs are revealed through analysis in the second half. The difference of this approach from William James’s pragmatism is apparent in Durkheim’s argument that James treats the religious experiences of “the faithful” as “privileged intuitions,” whereas, in Durkheim’s view, “we must apply to those sensations an analysis similar to the one that replaced the senses’ representation of the world with a scientific and conceptual one” (313). Durkheim sought the meaning of religious phenomena in structures of meaning unrecognized by the participants in religious rites. As a system for understanding the natural world, religion is “barely more than a fabric of errors,” Durkheim writes; but its “paramount role” is to represent, in a “symbolic and metaphorical” manner, the “obscure yet intimate relations” between individuals and “the society of which they are members” (227). Oddly, however, Durkheim’s social functionalism ultimately resembles the apparently opposite view of William James. James defends the reality of religious experience by pointing to its functions in this world; Durkheim declares that the only reality of religious experience is as a mystified form of the real-world functions of society. The similarity can be attributed in part to their shared intellectual heritage. Both men retain a considerable element of nineteenth-century positivism or empiricism despite their embrace of elements of German idealism (especially as conveyed by the late nineteenth-century neo-critical philosopher Charles Renouvier). Sigmund Freud was the pre-eminent modern practitioner of the hermeneutics of suspicion. He combined a hostility to religion, evident in The Future of an Illusion (1927), with a desire to apply psychoanalytic methods to understanding the origins of religious feeling and of human society. Like Durkheim, he found in totemism the key to all religious experience, which he interpreted in terms of an originary act of violence: the murder and ritual eating of a primeval father by a horde of sons. Later in life, Freud applied the theory developed in Totem and Taboo (1912–13) to the religion of his own father, Judaism. His Moses and Monotheism (1939) presents Moses as an Egyptian (a hypothesis that others, including Max Weber, had already suggested) who molds the Jewish people by introducing them to monotheism, and who dies at the hands of a mob.70 It is collective guilt stemming from this murder that eventually allows monotheism to triumph. In this

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work, Freud’s hermeneutical method resembles Durkheim’s, insofar as Freud, while denying the “material truth” of Judaism, affirms its “historical truth.”71 Freud’s anthropological and historical theories of religion are more speculative than those of the other theorists discussed here. In his attempt to extrapolate from the individual psychic drama of the Oedipus complex to the foundation of religious communities, however, he is perhaps the most “modernist”; indeed, he originally conceived Moses and Monotheism as a “historical novel,” and a distinguished interpreter has labeled it a “countertheology of history.”72 Freud famously admired Sherlock Holmes, and he gleefully presents himself as a detective in search of a counter-intuitive but ultimately rational explanation for apparently illogical events. In Weber, the Protestant elect turn out to be elect, not in the spiritual sense but in the sense of being the first to discover modern rationality. Similarly, for Freud, the Jews are the chosen people, chosen not by God, but by Moses, who introduces them to monotheism. Like his liberal Jewish precursors, Freud regarded monotheism as the essence of Judaism and as the Jews’ contribution to civilization, insofar as it embodies the most transcendent form of the Oedipal myth. Max Weber shared with Freud a sense of alienation from religion, but Weber attempted to refrain from endorsing or condemning any particular religious beliefs in order to study the social consequences of such beliefs. This method did not, in theory, require that the “true” reason for the belief be decoded, and Weber’s statement of his own religious sensibility implies a profound agnosticism as to the truth or falsehood of religion: “It is true that I am absolutely unmusical religiously and have no need or ability to erect any psychic edifices of a religious character within me. But a thorough selfexamination has told me that I am neither antireligious nor irreligious.”73 It may be this agnostic attitude that allowed Weber to develop a particularly subtle theory of secularization, one that emphasizes the persistence of irrational motives even in a world that has apparently been thoroughly rationalized. Weber, like William James, concerned himself with the relationship between particular ethical attitudes to life and religious belief; Weber, however, had the sociologist’s tendency to see social institutions as primary, and so he treated the “protestant ethic,” which for him underlies the spirit of capitalism, mainly as the reflection of institutionally sanctioned religious beliefs, albeit beliefs that a society had internalized. From a contemporary reader’s point of view, the narrative he develops in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism seems remarkably satisfying: rich and nuanced, but with a central idea whose transformation creates the modern world. Like

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James, he includes a number of memorable characters, notably Benjamin Franklin and Count Nicolaus Zinzendorf, who embody his “ideal types.” In contrast to Durkheim, Weber was particularly concerned with the history of particular religious dogmas and their impact on beliefs we continue to hold in the “disenchanted” modern world. Although he attempts a profoundly historicizing form of sociology, the generalizing requirements of the discipline force him to transform history into metanarrative. As John Milbank has argued, Weber relies on a “liberal Protestant metanarrative” that projects modern Western rationality back into the Reformation, the origins of Christianity, and indeed (like Freud) into ancient Judaism. Weber laments the purely private character of religious experience in modernity, the disenchantment of the world, and seeks an alternative in a modern form of polytheism, a new form of “charisma” capable of overcoming the loss of energy accompanying the institutionalization of religious and social life.74 The social scientists confronted many of the same problems and phenomena as the novelists of their generation; the tendency of social scientists to find a transcendent force that religion masks and for which religion is fundamentally a code, however, makes them differ in an important respect from novelists. Like their contemporaries in the social sciences, the modern novelists concerned themselves with describing and accounting for the experience of the transcendent. Like the social scientists, the novelists tended to be atheists, and they generally adopted an attitude of agnosticism toward the question of the actual existence of the “unseen.” One could say that they participated with James and Freud in the psychologizing of religious experience, and this is part of what we mean when we refer to the “modern psychological novel”; the modern novel explores those borderline areas of consciousness that psychology was trying at the same time to colonize and that had previously been the territory of religion and mysticism. Nonetheless, precisely because (unlike the psychologists or sociologists), novelists did not need to present scientific theories about the origins of religion or religious feeling, their explorations of these border zones of consciousness tend to be less dogmatic – more “overdetermined,” to borrow a phrase from psychoanalysis. So, as novelists do, they tend to represent experiences without trying to explain them (or explain them away). The function of novels is precisely to represent a world and a sensibility without asserting the truth-value of its propositions – to represent a world “as if,” in the words of the philosopher Hans Vaihinger.75 For novelists, the question of how to account for experiences that have traditionally been considered religious gets displaced from a methodological problem to a formal one:

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they seek formal devices that describe the sorts of experiences generally associated with faith while avoiding a judgment as to the reality of those experiences. William James made an important contribution to the sociology of religion when he proposed to define religion “in the most general terms possible” as “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”76 In this book, I follow William James in giving the term “religious experience” the broadest possible meaning in order to accommodate the sheer variety of ways in which novelists and social thinkers of the early twentieth century responded to the question of what to make of religion in the modern world. But while keeping this breadth in view, my emphasis on “experience” also seeks to make the question of their response a historical question: it derives largely from liberal Protestantism, and it is shared by many of the figures I study in this book. Weber, Woolf, and the James brothers all came from Evangelical or liberal Protestant backgrounds, while Kafka, Durkheim, Proust, and Freud were all more or less assimilated and secular Jews (although Proust was baptized Catholic) and drew indirectly on the Jewish Enlightenment with its teachings of “ethical monotheism,” the Jewish counterpart of liberal Protestantism. It can be argued that the categories I use in this study, such as “belief,” “meaning,” and “experience,” are products of the same historical developments. In this respect, as is often the case in the study of the modernist novel, Joyce the Irishman is both exemplary and singular. Less motivated than Joyce by hostility to the church, the other writers in this study also had, ultimately, less faith than he did in the redemptive power of art.77 For these reasons, I have not paired Joyce with a social thinker but have instead chosen to treat his work in relation to his literary precursor, Dante, in the concluding chapter. Among the novelists and social thinkers I consider here, some concerned themselves with the institutional structures of religion, such as churches, and their influence on social life; others addressed specifically theological concerns, like the existence of God or supernatural forces; some sought to provide new explanations for sacred ritual, or to give it new forms; others explored intense forms of personal experience that seemed to carry spiritual implications. The figures in this study did not necessarily believe in an “unseen order”; nor did they often think it possible to adjust themselves to any that might exist. Yet all concerned themselves with the implications of the disappearance, as it were, of that unseen order, and with the difficulties of living in the visible world without recourse to the unseen.

chapter 3

Henry James and the varieties of religious experience

When, in The Ambassadors, Lambert Strether introduces Waymarsh to his new acquaintance Maria Gostrey, he fears that his friend will see her as “a jesuit in petticoats, a representative of the recruiting interests of the Catholic Church”: The Catholic Church, for Waymarsh – that was to say the enemy, the monster of bulging eyes and far-reaching, quivering groping tentacles – was exactly society, exactly the multiplication of shibboleths, exactly the discrimination of types and tones, exactly the wicked old Rows of Chester, rank with feudalism; exactly in short Europe.1

Just enough over the top to signal itself as parody, this description of the Catholic Church as an octopus ironizes Protestant stereotypes about Catholicism on which James had drawn less self-consciously in some of his earlier novels. Yet if he shifts the tone of its expression, the equation of all the evils (and all the attractions) of Europe with the Catholic Church is a motif that appealed to James’s imagination throughout his career. His writing draws continually on traditional Protestant conceptions of Catholicism, some positive but few without a suspicious underside: historical consciousness and dusty rituals, aristocratic grandeur and hyperconsciousness of rank, intellectual complexity and Jesuitical dissembling, spiritual suppleness and devious conduct, chivalry and mistreatment of women, aesthetic richness and sensual pleasure but also hypocritical asceticism. Despite his lack of interest in formal theology, Henry James’s imagination seems profoundly shaped by the Protestant religious tradition. James’s late novels return, somewhat indirectly, to a concern evident in his earliest works, namely the role of the Protestant and Catholic inheritances in shaping the “moral senses” of his thoroughly modern heroes and heroines. In some of his early novels, James frames the conflict between American and European cultures in specifically religious terms. In The American (1876–7), 52

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he represents Christopher Newman’s horror when the aristocratic French family of his fiancée, Claire de Cintré, confines her to a convent: “The idea struck Newman as too dark and horrible for belief.”2 Most of James’s American protagonists are Protestants who see the world of European sophistication as a snare. Expatriate Americans such as Felix Young and Eugenia Münster in The Europeans (1878), the Misses Bordereau in “The Aspern Papers” (1888), and the title character of The Princess Casamassima (1886) lose much of their “national quality” through their associations with Catholicism.3 These narratives draw on well-established Protestant stereotypes of Catholicism, found for example in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860), a literary precursor of James’s Roderick Hudson (1875). A more explicitly religious form of a typically Jamesian conflict appears in his contemporary Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), in which a Methodist minister finds himself attracted to Catholicism’s worldliness and sensuousness but, for failing to recognize the sexual element in his attraction to Catholicism, is ultimately damned. James’s novels similarly suggest that the Catholic world may have something to offer as an antidote to Protestant narrow-mindedness, but they frequently show that his Protestant heroes misinterpret Catholicism as simply high-minded libertinism. James’s Protestants typically recoil from the Catholic values that at first appear so liberating to them; they often discover an atavistic Protestant aversion to these values within themselves. James’s fascination with romance cultures, and with the Catholic Church in particular, included an element of personal identification, but the characteristic mode of his fiction is to represent the Catholic world from the perspective of a Protestant outsider – of the bemused Strether in Notre Dame, if not of the self-righteous Christopher Newman, who also visits Notre Dame at a crucial moment in The American.4 In the first book of The Golden Bowl (1904), however, James reverses his usual technique and shows us the Anglo-American world from the perspective of a Catholic aristocrat. Early in the novel, Prince Amerigo distinguishes, for his friend Fanny Assingham, the Anglo-American “moral sense” from the Italian. The Prince claims to have what in Rome “sufficiently passes for” the moral sense; “but,” he explains, it’s no more like yours than the tortuous stone staircase – half-ruined into the bargain! – in some castle of our quattrocento is like the ‘lightning elevator’ in one of Mr. Verver’s fifteen-storey buildings. Your moral sense works by steam – it sends you up like a rocket. Ours is slow and steep and unlighted, with so many of the steps missing that – well, that it’s as short in almost any case to turn around and come down again.5

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If the Italians remain in the fifteenth century, Mr. Verver’s fifteen-story buildings belong to the twentieth. Although the phrase “moral sense,” as the Prince uses it, lacks any overtly theological significance, his speech underlines the relationship between religious traditions and national character. The image of the Italian spiral staircase seems to associate Amerigo, whose family has produced an “infamous Pope” and at least one Cardinal, with the winding casuistry of the Catholic Church (vol. i, 10). This relationship between church and nation is a theme that underlies much of James’s writing, which often shows how right-thinking Protestants, especially Americans like Christopher Newman or Isabel Archer, learn to see their own apparently straightforward ethical beliefs as failing to account for the complexities that can be discerned on the tortuous staircases of Catholic Europe. The more modern and efficient route upward, James’s earlier novels tend to suggest, does not necessarily take the protagonist to a morally satisfying conclusion. In its polarity, the Prince’s contrast between moral senses resembles the distinctions that William James makes in The Varieties of Religious Experience. The elder James describes Lutheran and Calvinist theology as faiths that appeal to “sick souls,” and Catholicism, by contrast, as “healthyminded.” His discussion of the sick soul and the healthy-minded centers on the problem of evil. The healthy-minded individual tends toward pluralism and a view of evil as not central to human experience, but rather “a waste element…so much ‘dirt,’ as it were.”6 The sick soul, by contrast, regards the problem of evil as the essential fact of this world, something to be surmounted only by appeal to supernatural forces. For the sick soul, “evil is no mere relation of the subject to particular outer things, but something more radical and general, a wrongness or vice in his essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy” (134). William James’s attitude toward the healthy-minded sometimes seems condescending; he apparently sympathizes more with the sick soul. Yet he finds aspects of both attitudes worthy of respect and argues that each has something to teach the other about the problem of evil. To illustrate the attitude of the sick soul, William James quotes a passage of Ecclesiastes: “if a man live many years and rejoice in them all, yet let him remember the days of darkness; for they shall be many” (Ecclesiastes 11.8; Varieties, 139). Henry James, in the title of his 1904 novel, alludes to a similar passage: “Remember now thy creator in the days of thy youth, [before]… ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the

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dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:1, 6–7).7 The title of his previous novel, The Wings of the Dove (1903), also alludes to a scriptural text: “Oh that I had wings like a dove! For then would I fly away and be at rest” (Psalms 55:6). In each passage, the speaker complains of the corruption of this world and begs for, or predicts, supernatural intervention. It is a wish that Henry James’s fictions treat skeptically: bereft of the possibility of a direct encounter with the supernatural, James’s protagonists must accept the world in its fallen state. The difference between Milly Theale, in The Wings of the Dove, and Maggie Verver, in The Golden Bowl, lies in their responses to this discovery. Milly is essentially a sick soul, whereas Maggie is strikingly healthy-minded; and this accounts in large part for the very different endings of the two novels. Of all James’s novels, The Golden Bowl refers most explicitly to religious themes. The novel’s first book presents Adam Verver and his daughter Maggie as innocents, and Amerigo objects to their expecting him to live in close proximity to Charlotte Stant “in a state of childlike innocence, the state of our primitive parents before the Fall” (vol. i, 335). In the early pages, the gossip and pander Fanny Assingham declares that Maggie “was n’t born to know evil. She must never know it” (vol. i, 78). After Maggie begins to suspect that her husband, the Prince, is having an affair with Charlotte, her stepmother, she awakens to the problem of evil. By the end of the first book, Fanny tells her husband that Maggie is about to experience “what’s called Evil – with a very big E: for the first time in her life” (vol. i, 385). The narrative structure of the novel follows the theological motif of the fall. The first book channels the narration through the “focalizing” or reflecting viewpoints of the Prince, Adam, Charlotte, and Fanny; it is only after Maggie’s fall into knowledge, at the beginning of the second book, “The Princess,” that the novel starts to be narrated from Maggie’s perspective. So, as with Jewish and Christian theology, a fall accompanies self-knowledge. Whether Maggie’s is a “felix culpa,” a fortunate fall that allows her to achieve a redeemed and higher form of innocence, is unclear. The theme of sacrifice becomes central in the second book, as Maggie has to decide whether to become like “the scapegoat of old, of whom she had once seen a terrible picture, [who] had been charged with the sins of the people and had gone forth into the desert to sink under his burden and die” (vol. ii, 234). Maggie protects her father from knowledge of the infidelity between the Prince and Charlotte, however, not through the kind of redemptive suffering that Milly Theale endures in The Wings of the Dove, but by sacrificing others. The first candidate for sacrifice would seem to be the

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Prince, whom Fanny imagines near the beginning of the novel as “a domesticated lamb tied up with pink ribbon” (vol. i, 161). Maggie decides to keep him, however. Later, in a reversal of the Abraham and Isaac story, she chooses to sacrifice her father, whom she imagines as a “precious spotless exceptionally intelligent lamb” bleating “Sacrifice me, my own love; do sacrifice me, do sacrifice me!” (vol. ii, 82–3). Ultimately, however, the brunt of this sacrifice seems to fall upon Charlotte. She is imagined in the last part of the novel as tethered to her husband by a “long silken halter looped round her beautiful neck” or a “silken noose,” a sort of paschal lamb and no longer the “splendid shining supple creature” who seemed to have broken “out of the cage” during the card game at Fawns (vol. ii, 287, 331, 239). Maggie thinks of Charlotte’s departure for her hated America “as if she were dying”; Charlotte seems to have taken on the role of redemptive martyr played in the earlier novel by Milly (vol. ii, 346). The Golden Bowl recapitulates many themes of The Wings of the Dove, but always in a slightly different key. The scenes in which Fanny Assingham discusses Charlotte’s past with her husband suggest the possibility, which eventually occurs even to Maggie, that Charlotte herself planned Amerigo’s marriage to Maggie, in much the same way that Kate Croy plans to have Merton Densher marry Milly in The Wings of the Dove. It is as if we joined the plot of The Wings of the Dove only after the plan had succeeded and Merton (here the Prince) had become engaged to Milly (here Maggie). In a wonderful scene at the end of the novel, Maggie joins Charlotte in the garden at Fawns in order to deliver the first volume of a novel. Charlotte has brought with her only the second volume. If The Golden Bowl seems in some respects to start where its predecessor left off, then in this scene Maggie seems to be offering an alternative beginning to her own novel, in which she edits out the imagined love affair between Charlotte and the Prince in Rome (which The Golden Bowl never explicitly describes). Maggie’s skillful editing suggests the differences between the two heroines, which result in such different novels. Milly is continually compared to a fairy-tale princess; Maggie actually becomes a princess by marrying Amerigo. James prepares the reader for the possibility that, upon learning of evil, Maggie will be stricken, as Milly is, and will become another sick soul. The first book of the novel ends with Fanny’s prediction that Maggie will do anything to prevent her father’s learning of his wife’s adultery: “She’ll die first” (vol. i, 402). Even after her triumph, Maggie confirms that if she actually knew that her father knew of the adultery, “I should die” (vol. ii, 305). If Maggie were to accept such a role of “scapegoat,” she would indeed serve a function like Milly’s (vol. ii, 234). But Maggie does not die.

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The Golden Bowl turns out quite differently, and the difference results from Maggie’s healthy-minded response to the revelation of Charlotte’s and Amerigo’s deception. James’s final three completed novels, in revisiting the “international theme,” return to the problem of the differing “moral senses” of Catholics and Protestants. Amerigo’s definition of these senses hints at the nature of James’s transformation of religious ideas in the late fiction. Religious categories seem to have given way to broader ethnic or cultural identities; theological concerns to ethical and aesthetic ones. The characters in James’s novels seem to pay little heed to articulated religious belief. Indeed, they often seem to inhabit a moral world in which absolute measures of value such as those associated with God are no longer available.8 For James’s late novels, however, religion implies more than just culture. James presents a world that remains haunted by some of the ethical beliefs and prejudices associated with the religions from which his characters are superficially emancipated. His sick-souled Americans and healthy-minded Europeans may lack the assurance in the supernatural that guided the “moral senses” of their Protestant and Catholic forebears. Nonetheless, these characters remain deeply concerned with what, for both William and Henry James, was the most important theological problem on which the two traditions differ: the problem that Fanny Assingham describes as “Evil with a very big E.” Many of Henry James’s American heroes and heroines, accustomed to the sort of easy-going nineteenth-century liberal religion that produced the mind-cure movement, experience crises when they encounter evil and revert to an older American model deriving from the Puritan past. Graham Greene wrote of Henry James that “a sense of evil religious in its intensity” was “the ruling fantasy which drove him to write.”9 The theological resonances of The Golden Bowl pose the question of how to account for and respond to evil in a modern age where appeals to the sacred or the supernatural seem to remain unanswered. henry james, william james, and the reality of the unseen The lines of influence between Henry and William James are too complex to be disentangled. William stayed with Henry (and made use of his typist Mary Weld) in the spring of 1901, while writing The Varieties of Religious Experience; Henry read the resulting work in July 1902, while finishing work on The Wings of the Dove, and the influence of his brother’s text may be detected in the later works “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) and The Golden

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Bowl.10 William in turn, before he sat down to write his own work on religion, had read many of Henry’s stories, with their speculations about the spirit world, and his novels, with their continual references to the clash between Catholic and Protestant cultures. The interest of both men in apparitions undoubtedly owed something to their father’s experience, in 1844, of a supernatural encounter (“the vastation”), which led him to take up the Swedenborgian theology with which he was identified for the rest of his life. Recent critics have tended to see the younger Henry James as a typically secular modernist.11 Yet, as F. O. Matthiessen noted years ago, James’s later works, those most closely associated with modernism, demonstrate an interest in “the religion of consciousness.”12 Although he remained conscious of traditional religion and of his father’s restless spiritual quest, Henry James attempted to address central problems of the Protestant tradition in the context of a radically new spiritual situation, one in which organized churches had little role left to play and religion became increasingly a matter of personal experience. As R. P. Blackmur wrote, James’s sensibility offers “an example of what happens to a religious man when institutionalized religion is taken away.”13 James set little store by conventional religious belief or the institutions of formal religion, but his work probes precisely those zones of consciousness that organized religions had once explored. Most studies of the James family have emphasized William’s influence on Henry, and many literary critics have simply dismissed any influence in the other direction because William seems to have failed to understand his brother’s late style. Yet William’s interest in the experience of the unseen sometimes causes his work to echo that of his “younger and shallower and vainer” brother Henry.14 In Varieties, William meditates upon a number of recorded experiences of people sensing unseen presences, such as his father’s experience in 1844; his transcriptions of these encounters often read like drafts of his brother’s ghost stories. Typically, William James uses such experiences as a basis for a criticism of positivist and associationist psychology: “It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something there,’ more deep and more general than any of the special and particular ‘senses’ by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed” (Varieties, 58). William James thus saw a fundamental aspect of religious experience in the sorts of encounters with the supernatural that form the basis of several of his brother’s most successful stories. As I have argued elsewhere, the ghosts and the haunting ideas of James’s short fictions resemble William James’s Pragmatist account of the way ideas

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work – adaptable, provisional, socially constructed.15 Henry James in the ghost stories and William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience even share elements of what might almost be called a method: both take the experience of the supernatural at face value and do not try to ascribe to it straightforward underlying causes. Like most of the other writers considered in this study, the James brothers had a strong interest in mental illness, and they frequently posed the question of a possible link between such illness and religious experience. Yet, William’s work seeks to account for people’s experiences of the “reality of the unseen” without either affirming the existence of supernatural forces or reducing religious experiences to mere symptoms of mental illness, sexual repression, or other organic causes. Influenced by the skeptical element in Kant’s idealism, William refuses to address the question of the “thing-in-itself,” the “real” origin of experience, including religious experience; rather, he argues that the reality of the unseen consists in its effects in this world.16 Similarly, Henry James, in his ghost stories from “The Ghostly Rental” (1876) through “The Turn of the Screw” (1898) to “The Beast in the Jungle,” leaves the source of his many apparitions a mystery: he refuses to tell us where the ghosts “really” came from and leaves us in doubt as to how closely they betray the unconscious desires of those who experience them. He emphasizes not their reality or unreality, but their fundamentally social character. His later ghost stories, which carry into the realm of fiction something like the Pragmatist attitude to the “will to believe,” go far to justify his 1907 claim, after reading his brother’s work Pragmatism, to be “lost in the wonder of the extent to which all my life I have…unconsciously pragmatised.”17 Rather than unveil the ghosts and show their “true” origin in some particular material cause – say, repressed sexual desire – James treats the ghosts as real because they have a reality for those who experience them. For William James, the justification of epistemological claims about what we know lies in their practical import, their ethical consequences. As he wrote in Pragmatism, “The pragmatic method…is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true?”18 In a crucial passage of The Varieties of Religious Experience, he summarizes Kant’s attitude toward the supersensible realm of ideas such as God, freedom, and immortality: These things…are properly not objects of knowledge at all … Yet strangely enough they have a definite meaning for our practice. We can act as if there were

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a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life. (54–5)

In his paraphrase, William James subtly shifts Kant’s emphasis, in line with a shift of emphasis occurring at the same time in the studies of Kant by the philosopher Hans Vaihinger, which were later published as The Philosophy of As If (1911).19 In Kant’s argument, the ethical claims of The Critique of Practical Reason are dependent on the epistemological claims of The Critique of Pure Reason. William James turns the relation on its head. This shift, which resulted in part from James’s reading of the neo-critical philosopher Charles Renouvier, signals the great distance between American Pragmatism and German Idealism. William James defines traditional religious beliefs essentially as fictions by which we understand the inchoate nature of our own religious experiences and which can in turn help us to guide our lives. As he put it, “God is real since he produces real effects” (Varieties, 517).20 The unseen order is, in a sense, the product of our beliefs, and its truth consists neither in the possibility of proving it scientifically nor in the possibility of having an unmediated access to it, but in the fact that it influences our actions in this world. Despite William James’s own sometimes scoffing references to German Idealism, his interpretation of transcendental ideas as shared fictions suggests the importance of the Kantian legacy for James’s Pragmatist revision of Anglo-American positivism. In this respect, William James participated in a broad current of social thought that took inspiration from Kant but also sought to emphasize the fictional character of our religious beliefs and their role in maintaining social order, a current that includes Durkheim, Weber, and Vaihinger. One necessary conclusion of William James’s position was that we could, at some level, choose what to believe. William James himself eagerly attempted to believe in God, although, as Louis Menand has observed, he never quite succeeded. He also believed in the power of belief. In the midst of a great spiritual crisis, and after reading Renouvier, he wrote: “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”21 Henry James, more skeptical by nature, explored in his fictions those mechanisms by which individuals attempt to elicit particular beliefs from one another. In the ghost stories, the claim to believe in another’s vision is a central act of friendship. In “The Turn of the Screw,” Mrs. Grose tells the governess: “I believe.” In “The Beast in the Jungle,” May Bartram tells John Marcher, “I believe you.”22 In order to belong to a group (often simply a couple, but equally a social set or class), one must accept certain beliefs, and accept them so wholeheartedly as to experience them as one’s own. The

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shared fictions of Henry James’s ghost stories and late novels offer a literary manifestation of the widely shared contemporary interest in the role of belief in forging social bonds. For James, shared fictions take the place of more traditional religious beliefs; he often describes them as “sacred.” They mark a point of convergence between the novels of Henry James and the philosophy of William; for although Henry, unlike his brother, never explicitly formulates the problem of belief in God, other forms of belief are central to his fiction. The problem of believing in another person’s good will, for instance, troubles many of his characters; particularly in the later novels, the characters frequently ensnarl themselves in complex speculations about each other’s motives. These ruminations often develop into attempts to live with each other with the help of shared fictions: for their relations with each other, the characters require a shared, willed belief in one another, and even a mutual belief in some vague idea that is either not susceptible of precise definition or patently false. The characters in James’s late novels live within fictions that they share among themselves: the fiction that Merton Densher loves Milly Theale rather than Kate Croy in The Wings of the Dove, the fiction that Chad Newsome’s relationship with Mme. de Vionnet is “virtuous” in The Ambassadors, and a similar but much more complex fiction about the Prince and Charlotte Stant in The Golden Bowl. There are also negative fictions, areas of life into which the characters, by implicit mutual consent, do not inquire: the nature of Milly’s illness, the origin of the Newsome fortune, the contents of the telegram Amerigo sends to Charlotte on the occasion of her engagement to Adam Verver, even the price that Maggie has paid for the golden bowl. James even suggests that lying might be a moral responsibility, when the lie is “in good faith.” The dénouements of the three last great novels turn (like the final scene of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) on the question of whether a protagonist will tell a necessary lie in order to maintain an illusion in which a community would prefer to live. Merton Densher, although he has acted a charade and promised to “lie with his lips,” balks at the moment when to do so might save Milly’s life.23 Similarly, Strether comes to recognize that he has not heeded Little Bilham’s lesson: how to lie like a gentleman.24 While these two male protagonists flinch from outright lies, Maggie’s solution to the problem of the two marriages at the end of The Golden Bowl depends precisely on her successfully lying to Charlotte: she denies, on her honor, that she has any reason to be angry with Charlotte. James describes the mutual misinformation as “their conscious perjury.” Later, Maggie prevents Amerigo from revealing the truth, telling him, “I’ve chosen to deceive her and to lie to her” (vol. ii, 348).

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In defense of the reality of the unseen, William James reinterprets Kant: “We can act as if there were a God” (Varieties, 55). Although they are not peopled by apparitions, Henry James’s late novels confront the problem, always present in the ghost stories, of the “reality of the unseen,” and they do so using the very phrase, “as if,” that William James and later Hans Vaihinger noted as central to Kant’s philosophy. When, in The Golden Bowl, Charlotte Stant asks the antiquarian what is the matter with the golden bowl, he replies: “But if it’s something you can’t find out, is n’t that as good as if it were nothing?” (vol. i, 114). The phrase returns continually throughout the last three major novels, and it stands for the possibility of an illusion accepted, by all parties, in “good faith” (vol. i, 115). Faith, for Henry James, seems to mean something rather different from what it does for Kant or for William James. Belief in the power of the “as if” allows Kant to affirm the existence of a supersensible realm and William James to proclaim the practical reality of the unseen without ever really affirming its existence. For Henry James, however, the “as if” seems to become something more like an acceptable social lie, but one that gains its acceptability only as the result of a complex moral calculus; his characters develop elaborate systems of as-if thinking. James’s novels continually describe the need to make sense of others’ motives within the context of what Kant called the phenomenal realm, even though those motives lie in the inaccessible realm of the noumenal. Such fictions may seem to be entirely secular, but in a number of ways James links them to themes of religious experience: by direct reference to scripture, by allusions to the theological origins of certain ways of seeing the world, and by casting an aura of sacredness around the fictions themselves. In the fallen world of James’s novels, the shared fiction seems to be the only remnant of faith that can allow James’s characters to live together. The problem for James, his characters, and his readers is that these shared fictions can hardly be distinguished from lies. the economy of the sacred Critics have frequently noted the religious echoes in The Golden Bowl, and most have found some form of “redemption,” however ironized, in Maggie’s victory.25 R. W. B. Lewis wrote in The American Adam that “The Golden Bowl is a startling inversion of the Adamic tradition; it is the world, this time, which is struck down by aggressive innocence.”26 Leo Bersani has commented with some asperity that The Golden Bowl “succeeds in eliminating the crucificial aspect from the imitatio christi.”27 Many interpreters recognize that the novel dwells on Christian themes. Surprisingly little

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attention has been paid, however, to Maggie’s Catholicism and even less to the relevance of The Varieties of Religious Experience. Evil, for Henry James, is ingrained in the individual (and this he shares with the sick soul), but James also recognizes the need to confront and live with evil in this world (and in this he resembles the healthy-minded). As Andrew Taylor has noted, Henry James complained of Baudelaire that he understood evil merely as “the nasty,” an external force like a bad odor, whereas Hawthorne knew that evil is an internal experience: he “felt the thing at its sources, deep in the human consciousness.”28 James’s characters, intensely conscious of evil, are also aware of the absence of supernatural intervention in a modern world where notions of the sacred are perpetually subject to doubt. In The Golden Bowl, James portrays the evil that rules this fallen world and probes the fictions that might permit us to overcome it. The Golden Bowl differs from most of James’s earlier novels not only in having a Catholic American heroine, but also in being related partly from the perspective of an Italian Catholic, albeit one who speaks English so well that he finds the language “convenient, oddly, even for his relation with himself,” that is, for his unspoken thoughts (vol. i, 5–6). James reminds the reader of the Catholicism of these two characters subtly but continually. The Prince’s family history is intertwined with that of the Catholic Church. Maggie, too, is frequently associated with Catholicism, and especially with the Madonna. In discussing Maggie with Charlotte, the Prince comments that “the Blessed Virgin and all the Saints have her in their keeping” (vol. i, 52). Their marriage takes place at the Catholic Brompton Oratory, also the site of Merton Densher’s conversion to love of Milly Theale’s memory in The Wings of the Dove. Maggie’s own personal devotion is apparent: she wears a “little silver cross…blest by the Holy Father” (vol. ii, 112). Fanny thinks that Maggie’s true nature is golden, and “blest by a greater power I think even than the Pope” (vol. ii, 112). While the guests at Fawns tramp off to the local Anglican chapel, Maggie takes her husband to the nearest altar, modest though it happened to be, of the faith – her own as it had been her mother’s, and as Mr. Verver himself had been loosely willing, always, to let it be taken for his – without the solid ease of which, making the stage firm and smooth, the drama of her marriage might n’t have been acted out. (vol. i, 152)

That Maggie and (at least nominally) her father should be Catholic seems surprising, since most of James’s American heroes and heroines are Protestant, and since Adam seems another embodiment of the Protestant ethic, an idealized version perhaps of Henry James’s wealthy grandfather, William James of Albany. It is true that Catholicism as an institution still

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appears somewhat from the outside: the main representative of the Catholic Church, Father Mitchell, who pays an extended visit to Fawns near the end of the novel, seems ineffectual. Maggie rather pities him and thinks that “Some day at some happier season she would confess to him that she had n’t confessed, though taking so much on her conscience.” She fears even “the jostle of the higher light, of heavenly help itself,” and to this extent she faces her choices without divine assistance (vol. ii, 298). Maggie must rely on her own “sacred depths” in her encounter with Charlotte (vol. ii, 315). Yet although Maggie depends on her own resources, her Catholicism seems an important factor in her gift for confounding Amerigo’s expectations. He imagines the Ververs to be straightforward Protestants, unskilled at moral calculus and incapable of compromises with evil. In fact, Maggie proves herself as capable as any European of making the compromises necessary to ensure her victory over Charlotte Stant. As Maggie tells her father of Fanny Assingham, “She does n’t…quite so much mind [people’s] being wicked,” and Maggie must learn a similar attitude (vol. ii, 261). Indeed, despite their apparent cultural differences, all the characters in The Golden Bowl are ultimately healthy-minded in their approach to their moral situation, skillful at managing evil, as William James put it, “like so much ‘dirt.’ ” James relates the religious themes and conflicts of The Golden Bowl to the social and spiritual situation of modernity, in which economic values seem to have triumphed and a sense of the sacred is largely absent. If the characters all manage a healthy-minded appreciation of the necessity of evil in the world, the novel’s symbolic structure indicates the persistence of a sick-souled view, in the larger culture, in social configurations that still feel the tug of old dogmas, or perhaps, more darkly, in some feared reality that their willed beliefs seek to shut out. Throughout the novel, James emphasizes the incommensurability of two types of value: the exchange value associated with the market forces of capitalism and an altogether different measure of value appropriate to sacred objects and consecrated relationships. Although at times he treats these clashes of value as comedy, the novel strongly suggests that the compromises its characters make with what a sacred view would call the evils of this world should be questioned. The Golden Bowl abounds with churches seen only from the outside and works of sacred art admired for their aesthetic and not their ritual value. All of its characters seem to lack a proper reverence for the sacred, having allowed all values (including aesthetic ones) to be measured in terms of the market. Their lack of reverence allows them to treat each other, as well, simply as objects for exchange. The novel suggests that, despite the apparent triumph

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of an economy based on impersonal exchange, the economy of the sacred maintains its power in modernity, albeit mainly in one corner of modern life. This power is closely associated with sexual intimacy. Despite Maggie’s Catholicism, the novel trades on the typical Jamesian plot of an American heroine who finds herself trapped in a fallen, European world of conspiracy and casuistry, a storyline that makes use of the familiar dichotomy between American innocence and European experience. The first hints that the novel will deconstruct this dichotomy come from James’s references to the power of global, and especially American, capitalism. The novel plays with competing systems of exchange; it anticipates the work of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss on the role of gift-giving in archaic cultures. Mauss, a nephew and collaborator of Durkheim, argued in The Gift (1923–4) that in archaic societies, where money is not used, a complex system of rules governs the exchange of gifts: these rules include the obligation to bestow gifts, the obligation to receive them, and the obligation, which Mauss calls “the most important feature among these spiritual mechanisms,” to reciprocate what has been received.29 Mauss notes that in archaic societies the object of exchange was thought to have a special power; even sacrifice was a form of exchange with the gods. To give a gift is thus to make an important claim on the receiver: the exchange of gifts is “apparently free and disinterested but nevertheless constrained and self-interested” (3). The system of rules governing gift exchange changed significantly, Mauss continues, after the introduction of money in ancient societies, which established the notion “of purely individual contract, of the market where money circulates” (46). The moneybased market is impersonal and disclaims magic – although Mauss insists that elements of pre-modern gift exchange continue to function in modern market economies. Claude Lévi-Strauss went on to emphasize the idea that the central form of exchange in all societies is the exchange of women, and thus called attention to the link that Mauss had already drawn between gifts and sacred ceremonies, such as marriages.30 The wedding gift is one survival of the gift-economy that continues up to our own day. The Golden Bowl, with its central symbol of a flawed wedding gift that bears an almost magical power, suggests the continued role of the sacred even in a modern world that seems totally dominated by the impersonal relations of the money economy. In the symbol of the golden bowl, James leaves open the possibility that only ersatz forms of the sacred remain viable, but he also hints that our fictionmaking power can confer some true form of sacredness even on the flawed products of human invention. Along these lines, James figures the conflict between the profane and the sacred as a conflict between modern economic values and an older economy

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that regulates art, gifts, and people. The Golden Bowl develops a central plot of nineteenth-century fiction, a young woman’s exchange of father for husband.31 Maggie is a literary descendant of Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse. Emma insists to Harriet Smith that she will never marry: “never, never could I expect to be so truly beloved and important; so always first and always right in any man’s eyes as I am in my father’s.”32 When she eventually does marry, she manages to stay in her father’s house, Hartfield, with her new husband, Mr. Knightley. Maggie has a similar fantasy: at the beginning of the second book, she recognizes that “She had surrendered herself to her husband without the shadow of a reserve or a condition and yet had n’t all the while given up her father by the least little inch” (vol. ii, 5). When Adam marries Charlotte, he does so, as he admits to Charlotte, “for Maggie’s sake” (vol. i, 224). Charlotte complains that “Maggie thinks more on the whole of fathers than of husbands” and that Adam’s love for his daughter is “the greatest affection of which he’s capable” (vol. i, 257, 262). She frequently hints at Adam’s impotence, which possibly arises from sublimated incestuous desires for Maggie. By the end of the novel, Maggie recognizes that she must part with her father; the novel’s successful outcome involves her success in exchanging a father for a husband and thus, in anthropological terms, in re-establishing exogamy. In tension with this anthropological plot of marital exchange is the modern system of monetary exchange. The fallen world of Christian tradition becomes, for James, a world of international capitalism dominated by the cash nexus. For the Ververs, cash has almost entirely triumphed as a measure of value. The novel’s opening scene, in which Amerigo contemplates London as the new Rome, “the City to which the world paid tribute,” sets up a theme of translatio imperii, the transfer of imperial power from Rome to London to Adam Verver’s American City.33 Prefiguring the later search for the golden bowl, Amerigo is window-shopping, admiring valuable objects in a shop in Bond Street that are “tumbled together as if, in the insolence of the Empire, they had been the loot of far-off victories” (vol. i, 3). Adam Verver, a wealthy American collector the source of whose billions is never revealed, is in the process of buying up as many of Europe’s great works of art as he can in order to found a museum in American City, a town west of the Mississippi where he has made his fortune (vol. ii, 147). The imperial power being transferred via London to American City, suggested by Adam’s triumphant place in the capitalist order, entails cultural power as well. Fanny Assingham says of Amerigo’s name, which he inherited from an ancestor who was the “godfather, or name-father,” of America, that it will help him win Maggie: “ ‘By that sign,’ I quite said to

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myself, ‘he’ll conquer’ ” (vol. i, 78, 79). James here alludes to Constantine’s vision of the cross on the eve of battle, which led to the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity: according to the legend, an angel spoke the words “In hoc signo vinces” to the emperor before he went into battle. The phrase became the motto of the Jesuit order, and James’s allusion to it here suggests the intertwining of spiritual and worldly power implicit in the transfer of Europe’s greatest art objects to American City. The Prince, who will marry Maggie in exchange for having his debts paid off, recognizes his own status among these objects as a work of art to be purchased. Maggie makes it clear to him: “You’re a rarity, an object of beauty, an object of price” (vol. i, 12). Still, she prefers to keep herself ignorant of the crasser financial details of the bargain: “I have n’t the least idea…what you cost” (vol. i, 12). The wealth of Maggie and her father enables them not only to control the exchange of objects once sacred in the temples of religion and art, but to control more personal human transactions as well. Through a number of references to pre-modern cultures, all of which describe those cultures as caught up in an exchange relationship with the capitalist world system, James associates this purchasing power with the forces of global capitalism. Thus, near the end of the novel the heiress Maggie is compared to “some Indian squaw with a papoose on her back and barbarous bead-work to sell” at an “advanced” post in “a new country” (vol. ii, 323–4). (James often compares his Americans to Indians. In The Ambassadors, Waymarsh is jokingly called Sitting Bull, and Fanny Assingham thinks of herself as an heiress of Pocahontas.) In this case, the image of Maggie as a (perhaps unwed) mother who tries to survive on the sale of primitive artwork connects her to an elaborate system of exchange in which works of art get their value from the market, and in which people from alternative exchange economies simply appear to the dominant culture as exotic objects available for consumption. If native Americans represent the archetypically “new” people, exposed for the first time to the global marketplace, Jews enter into the symbolic economy of The Golden Bowl as a people in contact with the oldest secrets of civilization – secrets they are ready to part with at a price, generally payable by Adam Verver. Just before proposing to Charlotte, Adam takes her to examine some Damascene tiles being sold by Mr. Gutermann-Seuss; their shared perusal of his merchandise in a back room of his house seems in its solemnity almost a prelude to their marriage, and after making the purchase they join the Gutermann-Seuss “tribe” for “heavy cake and port wine” that, Charlotte later comments, “added to their transaction, for a finish, the touch of some mystic rite of old Jewry” (vol. i, 213, 216). The only real rite

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that Charlotte has witnessed has been the exchange of a great deal of money for an old piece of art; but throughout the purchase, Adam has been privately thinking more of his plan to acquire Charlotte than about the tiles – a kind of transaction in which Charlotte is herself, like Amerigo, available for purchase, a pearl of great price. The suggestion is that we are entering, whether we will or not, a truly global marketplace; into the larger, modern world identified with the shop window and defined by the market forces of British and American capitalism, every civilization, the “new” Indians and the “old” Jews alike, is drawn. The Prince too hails from origins that, if not quite archaic, are certainly pre-industrial. Amerigo frequently thinks about his own fate in terms of that of his race (meaning both his family and his nation); he reminds himself “how little one of his race could escape after all from history” (vol. i, 10). Of course, the history of his family, too, is available for purchase by the Ververs, who constitute a new aristocracy of money: Adam compares his own role as a “Patron of Art” favorably with those of popes and princes, such as populate Amerigo’s family tree (vol. i, 150). Although a Catholic, he tells himself a version of a typical Protestant myth about Providence: “A wiser hand than he at first knew had kept him hard at acquisition of one sort as a perfect preliminary to acquisition of another” (vol. i, 144). Perhaps to return this sentiment to a spiritual accounting with which a Catholic might feel comfortable, he justifies his acquisitiveness as preparing the way for his building of a temple to art, “a monument to the religion he wished to propagate, the exemplary passion, the passion for perfection at any price” (vol. i, 146). The Golden Bowl addresses the fundamental incommensurability of financial and other measures of value – the difference between the parts of the world that can be measured in cash value and those that deserve the label “sacred” – but Adam seems ultimately to have little sense of the sacred, and perhaps for the same reason little sense of good and evil. Despite his seeming devotion to art, it is clear that he measures all forms of value in terms of money; the narrator even observes of him that “Nothing perhaps might affect us as queerer, had we time to look into it, than this application of the same measure of value to such different pieces of property as old Persian carpets, say, and new human acquisitions” (vol. i, 196). Although he looks with pleasure on the parish church, he stays home on Sundays; his admiration is aesthetic, and as the narrator dryly notes, his acquisitive heart quickly translates aesthetic feeling into the terms of capital and ownership: “our friend had often found himself wishing he were able to transport [it,] as it stood, for its simple sweetness, in a glass case, to one of his exhibitory halls”

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(vol. i, 152). In all of James’s novels, the most sacred (and perhaps for that reason the most frequently profaned) of institutions is marriage. That the Ververs enter their respective marriages in part as business deals brands their morality as sharing at least something with that of the wicked Catholic Bellegardes of The American, whose arranged marriages discount love for the sake of other gains, rather than such earlier James heroes as Christopher Newman and Isabel Archer, who treat marriage as a sacred expression of devotion. This suggestion of what the sacred might be is left implicit, however. In fact, explicit invocations of the “sacred,” like other direct uses of religious language, tend to appear in the novel in ironic contexts. Maggie is suitably skeptical when, at the crisis point of their marriage, the Prince, whom she has accused of having betrayed her with Charlotte on the eve of their wedding to one another, tells her that “You’ve never been more sacred to me than you were at that hour – unless perhaps you’ve become so at this one” (vol. ii, 199). Yet he has already used this expression. On the eve of the second wedding (Charlotte’s to his father-in-law), Charlotte, having come alone to his rooms, discusses with the Prince their duty to their respective spouses and the trust they must have in each other. Taking her hand, the Prince comments of this trust, “It’s sacred” (vol. i, 312). Charlotte repeats the phrase and they kiss – thus beginning their affair, in an extraordinary turn of hypocrisy, by asserting the sacredness of their relationship to each other at the expense of their relationships to their spouses. James’s irony about the sacred constitutes something of a negative theology, as Gregory Erickson has noted; by continually stressing the profane, James hints at the existence of sacred realities that lie beyond our grasp – realities that can find expression only in this world, that is, in the photographic negative of the profane.34 The golden bowl is the symbol of those sacred realities, but it is an ambiguous symbol. It seems to mark the limits of the money economy personified in Adam Verver and to suggest the need to maintain, against the pressure of modern life, some positive expression of the sacred, even if that expression is no more than a shared fiction. Just before Amerigo’s wedding to Maggie, Charlotte, who has known him in Rome, convinces him to help her search for a wedding gift. At first she means the gift to be for Maggie, but eventually Charlotte begins to speak of it as a gift for the Prince himself. The pair stops by an antiquarian’s shop in Bloomsbury, where they debate in Italian the propriety of her accepting a brooch from the Prince. Where would she wear it? “Under my clothes?” (vol. i, 110). The shopkeeper, who has been watching them, addresses Charlotte in Italian, and they realize that

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he has understood their conversation. He denies being either Italian or English, and Amerigo later refers to him as “the little swindling Jew” (vol. i, 359). The Jew reveals to Charlotte the golden bowl: a gilded crystal cup made “by some very fine old worker and by some beautiful old process” in “a lost time,” but available cheap because – the shopkeeper hints, although he only hints – it is flawed: “But if it’s something you can’t find out, is n’t that as good as if it were nothing?” (vol. i, 113, 114). When Charlotte asks whether one can make a present “of an object that contains, to one’s knowledge, a flaw,” the shopkeeper responds, “Well, if one knows of it one has only to mention it. The good faith…is always there” (vol. i, 115). The Prince refuses to accept a wedding gift that might have a crack in it – “an omen’s an omen” – so Charlotte does not purchase the golden bowl (vol. i, 119). She decides not to give the Prince a wedding gift, but promises to accept one from him on her own wedding day. The novel’s major theme of the incommensurability of values is central to the first golden bowl scene. The value of the golden bowl is a subject of haggling and dispute among Charlotte, the shopkeeper, and the Prince. The shopkeeper offers it to Charlotte for fifteen pounds, but she tells the Prince that the price is even lower, apparently hoping he will accept; the Prince replies, “If it had cost you even but fivepence I would n’t take it from you” (vol. i, 118–19). His superstition about accepting a cracked gift suggests the conflict between the realm of market exchange, in which everything and everyone has a price, and the realm of gifts, where the exchange of objects has a symbolic power not reducible to money. The sexual connotations of the gift exchange are palpable: marriage is a form of sacred exchange; it has a power beyond that of a merely profane contract. The golden bowl mysteriously returns four years later, when Maggie, having wandered into the shop in search of a birthday present for her father, buys the bowl and brings it home. The reader learns later that the shopkeeper has told Maggie of his encounter with Charlotte and the Prince and has been able to inform her of the date of this encounter. When Maggie confronts first Fanny and then the Prince with this new information, however, she does not explain how she came across it; she simply gestures to the golden bowl as her witness. When Fanny arrives at Maggie’s house, where, having set the bowl on display, Maggie prepares to reveal what it has helped her learn about Charlotte and Amerigo’s relationship, James emphasizes the sacred quality of the bowl: If [Maggie’s] apartment was “princely,” in the clearness of the lingering day, she looked as if she had been carried there prepared, all attired and decorated, like some

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holy image in a procession, and left precisely to show what wonder she could work under pressure. Her friend [Fanny] felt – how could she not? – as the truly pious priest might feel when confronted, behind the altar, before the festa, with his miraculous Madonna. (vol. ii, 153)

Invocations of the sacred continue. Fanny prepares herself for the climactic golden bowl scene as a priest for the mass: having learned that the bowl is the source of Maggie’s knowledge, Fanny raises the “precious vessel” above her head, as the priest raises the chalice in preparation for Holy Communion (vol. ii, 179). She then smashes it on the floor, where it breaks into three parts. At that moment, the Prince speaks, revealing that he has witnessed Fanny’s act of destruction. Fanny and the Prince are described as “communicants,” silently exchanging an understanding of the significance of the golden bowl (vol. ii, 180). If the fact that Fanny’s holy rite involves smashing the golden bowl initially seems to represent the destruction of the fictions that the golden bowl has come to represent, it soon becomes clear that none of the protagonists wishes to live in a world without illusion. The split in the bowl is “so sharp and so neat that if there had been anything to hold [the pieces] the bowl might still quite beautifully, a few steps away, have passed for uninjured” (vol. ii, 182–3). Maggie does hold the pieces together for a moment. Fanny Assingham having retreated, Maggie and her husband have their frankest exchange of the entire novel, and it becomes apparent that Maggie intends to reassemble the golden bowl, to keep her father’s illusions intact. The miracle that Maggie will perform consists in reassembling the golden bowl of her marriage, of her relationship with her father, even after it has been smashed. In the remainder of the novel, shared fiction becomes illusion; the plot depends on Maggie’s ability to lie successfully. The Prince has already indicated his distaste for lying; even after he has started his affair with Charlotte he relieves his guilt somewhat with the thought that “one had never to plot or to lie for [the Ververs]” (vol. i, 15, 314). Yet this is just what Maggie ultimately forces him to do. As Maggie boasts to Fanny near the end of the novel, Amerigo has lied to Charlotte for her, Maggie’s, sake. Fanny in turn has already recognized that her task throughout the second book will be to “lie for” Maggie. Although Fanny informs Maggie that her first lie has been to pretend to believe Fanny’s denial of the Prince’s affair, Maggie herself is unwilling until the end of the novel to embrace lying explicitly – but then she embraces it with force, even expressing pride in having lied to Charlotte. The lie is impressive: Maggie denies, on her honor, that she feels wronged by Charlotte, and seals the denial with a kiss. The kiss is witnessed by the rest of the group staying at Fawns, who, having evidently seen that

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Charlotte and Maggie are making up after a fight, find themselves unable to produce “off-hand a fictive reason for any estrangement” (vol. ii, 277). Adam, Amerigo, and the Assinghams are afterwards therefore involved in their own implicit lies when they are forced to act “as if nothing in life were the matter” (vol. ii, 277). The various exchanges of people, art objects, gifts, and money in the novel follow a complex logic worthy of Mauss’s archaic societies. All subtend the novel’s marriage plot. Having taken from her father the gift of Amerigo, Maggie pays him back with the gift of Charlotte. Charlotte and Amerigo, however, have exchanged their own gifts. In order to break this cycle of exchange, Maggie needs to send Charlotte and her father away. The golden bowl itself serves at various times as a symbol of each of these exchanges. The central element of this system of exchange is the sexual encounter, which is sanctified in the marriage vow. Marriage is in a sense the archetypal shared fiction, a relation of mutual dependence built up around a complex of implicit understandings, but also, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer, an earthly representative of the concept of mystical communion itself: “an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church.” Despite the introduction of civil ceremonies, marriage remains the most prominent vestige of the sacred in the world of global capitalism. The approach that James takes toward this institution suggests an aspect of the modernity of his social views: rather than make a conception of the sacred the basis for social agreement, Henry James makes social agreements, especially those having to do with sex, themselves the origin of the sacred. Mauss emphasizes that in gift economies, the objects of exchange themselves retain a certain magical power that keeps the system of gift exchange in motion. This power, of course, is a manifestation of the power of human relationships, a phenomenon closely related to the magical force that Durkheim identified with the Polynesian concept “mana.” The golden bowl manifests this sort of magical power, acting somewhat like a fetish or totem. Yet the novel’s attitude toward the golden bowl remains ambiguous. Late nineteenth-century symbolism often made appeals to Catholic theology, and, as a symbol, the golden bowl resembles the Eucharist. A Catholic interpretation might insist on the unity of the symbol and the symbolized – a sort of transubstantiation. On the other hand, the effort to invest the sacred in a precious object would strike a Puritan as idolatrous, and the characters’ tendency to see their own fictions as sacred does seem to suggest a perverse and self-serving religion. It is notable that Charlotte and

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Amerigo’s visit to Gloucester, which they make ostensibly to see the cathedral, is the very rendezvous that leads Maggie to suspect their affair. Their interest in the cathedral does not have much to do with religion – they go as tourists – and the site of worship that serves as its replacement is not even the marriage bed, but a bed at an inn where they can consummate their adultery. Nonetheless, although every sacred space and object in the novel has fallen under the spell of the money economy, traces of power still seem to cling to sites like the parish church at Fawns and the Gloucester Cathedral as well as objects like the golden bowl. In this, James seems to suggest that even in an apparently secularized world, the sacred retains a crucial power, if one that we moderns have almost forgotten how to see. the “as if” The “as if” logic of the antiquarian’s morality provides the key to a number of functions in James’s prose that, taken together, suggest a broader commentary on fictionality and the power of symbols. For instance, James’s technique of relating events from the perspectives of a series of “centers of consciousness” means that frequently the reader learns about the motives behind a character’s action not through a direct account of that character’s thoughts but through the reflections on that action of another character, a center of consciousness. Such speculations about each other’s motives imply, of course, the impossibility of ever knowing another person’s thoughts. They typify James’s tendency to disclaim knowledge of his characters’ motives, which itself perhaps draws on, if indirectly, the theological proposition that we can never know another person’s soul and must judge people only by the fruit of their deeds. “As if” can also, of course, introduce a simile. Ruth Bernard Yeazell has analyzed the power of Jamesian metaphors as fictions shared by his characters: “much Jamesian conversation is the mutual creation of metaphor.”35 With the phrase “as if,” James often turns his elaborate metaphors into explicit similes, to be discussed by the characters themselves. On several notable occasions in The Golden Bowl, “as if” introduces a simile having to do with churches and especially church buildings. Towards the end of the novel, Charlotte gives a tour of the artistic treasures at the country house, Fawns, and her guests listen “as if it had been a church ablaze with tapers and she were taking her part in some hymn of praise,” although to Maggie the lecture sounds like “the shriek of a soul in pain” (vol. ii, 290, 292). Earlier on, the narrator tells us of Adam, “The spark of fire, the point of light, sat somewhere in his inward vagueness as a lamp before a shrine

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twinkles in the dark perspective of a church” (vol. i, 127). The most elaborate extended metaphors that involve church buildings concern Maggie’s marriage to Amerigo, which appears to Adam as “a great Palladian church, say – something with a grand architectural front – [that] had suddenly been dropped” into the middle of the “pleasant public square” of his “decent little old-time union” with Maggie (vol. i, 135). The public space between Maggie and Adam seems taken up by the formal church-front, but Adam learns to accommodate himself to this new building – the architectural metaphor representing the institution of Maggie and the Prince’s marriage – and adjusts himself to the changed cityscape. A related, and much more elaborate, metaphor describes Maggie’s sense of strangeness upon coming to suspect the adulterous affair of Charlotte and the Prince. She imagines the situation created by the two marriages as resembling “some strange, tall tower of ivory” or an “outlandish pagoda” planted in “the very centre of the garden of her life” and resembling perhaps “a Mahometan mosque, with which no base heretic could take a liberty” (vol. ii, 3–4). Having given a hint of her suspicions by a simple action (returning home early from her father’s house on the night of Charlotte’s adulterous expedition to Gloucester with the Prince), Maggie imagines that she has knocked on the outside of the ivory tower: “Something had happened; it was as if a sound, at her touch, after a little, had come back to her from within; a sound sufficiently suggesting that her approach had been noted” (vol. ii, 4). The image of the ivory tower, an allusion to the Song of Songs (7.4), suggests that the forbidding temple represents Maggie’s sexual relationship with the Prince. The elaborate metaphors relating to church (and mosque) buildings, each connected to the spiritual secrets of a relationship between a man and a woman, suggest the sacred character of these relationships and also suggest how dependent they are on the mutual good faith of the parties. Not infrequently, the similes that follow the phrase “as if” merge with counter-factual analyses by the characters of their situations. The “as if,” like fiction itself, allows the characters to imagine a variety of different relations to one another, to inhabit a world of fantasy, and to reveal what they take to be a certain logic behind their moral decisions. Reflecting on life before their respective marriages, Maggie observes to Adam, “it was as if you could n’t be in the [marriage] market when you were married to me. Or rather as if I kept people off, innocently, by being married to you” (vol. i, 172). Just as Maggie likes to imagine herself as having innocently been her father’s wife, Amerigo fancifully reinvents his relationship with Charlotte: “Isn’t it rather as if we had, Charlotte and I, for bringing us together, a benefactor in common?…as

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if he were her father-in-law too…as if he had saved us both” (vol. i, 269). Maggie also, in order to balance her own marriage to Amerigo, thinks of Charlotte’s marriage to her father “as if Charlotte had been ‘had in’, as the servants always said of extra help” (vol. ii, 23). In each of these cases, the “as if” function permits the characters to reimagine their relationships in ways that feel more in line with moral experience: frequently, the “as if” invests an imagined object (the tower of ivory, the Palladian church) or an imagined situation (Maggie’s marriage to her own father) with a reality and a kind of sacred power, the kind of power that the golden bowl embodies. The golden bowl symbolizes the power of the sacred and the power of symbolism itself. As a kind of chalice, it hints at religious mysteries. It opens itself to either a “transubstantial” reading, which would grant the symbol a true unity with the thing symbolized, or a more disenchanted view that would reject such symbolism as a form of fetishism or idolatry. As a more earthly symbol, it brings together a range of possible interpretations, beginning with the conventional literary association between broken crockery and adultery or deflowering. The Prince likens himself to the golden bowl, but denies having a flaw. Maggie later reflects that she and her father have paid too cheaply for their marriages and have therefore taken spouses with cracks. By this figure, Charlotte and Amerigo suggest flawed wedding presents that Maggie and her father make to each other, since he arranges her marriage and she his. Along this line, the golden bowl seems to symbolize sex, or the knowledge associated with it. Charlotte is eager to give it to Amerigo, and Maggie eventually wants to give it to her father but is warned not to. The golden bowl is actually gilt, and therefore an appropriate symbol of the sacred for the Gilded Age – here its fetish character might be related to Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism; perhaps the golden bowl is no more than a supreme form of commodity. Equally, it indicates the capacity of an artwork to fulfill multiple meanings. In relation to the religious themes of the novel, it allows James to invoke the sacred without committing himself to an explicitly theological view. Present in this invocation is the suggestion of occult knowledge: the Jewish shopkeeper who offers it for sale intervenes in the plot in an almost magical way, and his knowledge resembles divine gnosis. The revelation that the Jew is the source of Maggie’s information about the Prince and Charlotte offers a plot device to explain Maggie’s knowledge, but the whole episode has an air of the occult: through her encounter with the golden bowl, Maggie appears to have achieved some kind of mystical knowledge, and the Jew appears more than ever as a magical figure, the keeper and revealer of secrets, and a stand-in for James the author.

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A version of the morality that the antiquarian proposes seems to triumph in the novel. By pretending that their relationships remain intact, the characters manage to act “as if it were nothing.” Robert Pippin has suggested that James “rejects the attitude evinced in” the shopkeeper’s dictum, but James never does so explicitly.36 Although Pippin writes convincingly of the “social character of intentionality” in James, and despite his appreciation of the moral ambiguity of the modern world, he ultimately seems unwilling to let the characters live within the shared fictions they create for themselves; and this seems to account in part for his unmitigated hostility towards Maggie (76). Pippin ignores the mutual character of the deceptions in this novel. Although the characters constantly deceive one another, they do so in order to make their lives together bearable. None goes so far as to acknowledge explicitly the flaws in their shared fictions – indeed, not to mention those flaws is one of their cardinal rules – but I think we must allow for the possibility that they attempt to live with each other in the “good faith” that the shopkeeper recommends to Charlotte and which Maggie continues to claim, even in the penultimate chapter of the novel, as one of her motives (vol. ii, 350). James certainly does not tell us otherwise – but silence on the deepest motives of his characters is among his own cardinal rules. He thus authorizes those areas of the negative shared fiction into which his characters refuse to inquire. James critics frequently take sides either with Charlotte or with Maggie. James seems to refrain from doing so, although of course he gives more attention to Maggie’s perspective and this may encourage our sympathy for her. I do not think that we as readers should make it our business to take sides on this issue any more than on the “reality” of James’s ghosts. (How many failed marriages are the fault of just one party?) Maggie seems to have little alternative to managing the evil that she confronts (except, like Milly, to die), but there is no doubt that her recognition of evil in the world also includes the recognition of the evils in herself: pleasure in control; willingness to listen (if with teary eyes) to Charlotte’s voice that sounds “like the shriek of a soul in pain” (vol. ii, 292); even the simple desire for her husband. The novel’s moral landscape suggests that all of these realities must be acknowledged, but not that any of them is good. A plausible case could be made for Charlotte’s, and even the Prince’s, having planned the two marriages and the adultery before the Prince ever met Maggie. Alternatively, Maggie and her father can be seen as essentially culpable for having bought Charlotte and the Prince with little regard to their worth or needs as human beings. No one in the novel remains innocent, except perhaps Maggie’s son the Principino, whose words and thoughts James

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never records, although he claims that the boy “abounded…in remarks worthy of the family archives” (vol. ii, 367). James’s technique forces his readers, like his characters, to think in terms of the “as if.” Like the Assinghams, we are forever speculating on what happened between Charlotte and the Prince before he met Maggie. Many chapters begin in the past perfect tense or describe a character’s reflections some hours, days, or even years after the events that will be the main focus of the chapter. Frequently the question of what is being retrospectively considered remains a mystery for several pages, forcing the reader to entertain all sorts of possibilities – as for example in the wonderful scene after Maggie’s purchase of the golden bowl, in which we realize that she knows but we cannot understand how. The speculative tendency that this encourages contributes to James’s peculiar and layered irony, since the reader frequently knows more about the characters than they do about each other, but just as frequently lacks information about a character’s thoughts at a crucial moment. James’s late novels require a new kind of reading; for all their continuities with the nineteenth-century novel, they clearly introduce new formal procedures for explaining how our knowledge of the world comes together, notably the turn away from actual narrated events and towards the reflection of those events through the consciousness of his characters and the related turn away from the omniscient, God-like narrator. The Golden Bowl, with its rich use of symbolism and its central concern with the problem of evil, stands as an important early example of the aspirations of the modern novel, since it represents one of James’s most successful attempts to integrate what he called the realist and romance elements of the novel as a genre. James’s contribution to the development of modernism in the novel results in part from his attempt to bring the techniques of literary realism, learned from Balzac, Flaubert, and George Eliot, to bear on materials from the romance tradition of Hawthorne and the Gothic novel. James’s own comments on the relationship between romance and realism in his 1907 preface to the New York Edition of The American prefigure later analyses such as Edmund Wilson’s and Fredric Jameson’s that emphasize the interaction of two strains of fiction in the modernist novel. He defined these two elements in a parenthesis: “The real represents to my perception the things we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another… The romantic stands, on the other hand, for the things that, with all the facilities in the world, all the wealth and all the courage and all the wit and all the adventure, we never can directly know; the things that can reach us only through the beautiful circuit and

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subterfuge of our thought and our desire.”37 The romantic stands, in other words, for the reality of the unseen, and for Henry James the word “desire” is key. In James’s last great novels, the power of symbols like the golden bowl permits James to re-integrate the romantic with the realist elements of his work. Although they are detached from their theological moorings, his shared fictions ultimately demonstrate the impossibility of escaping from the sacred even in a modern, apparently secular world. James is clearly conscious of writing in an age when no transcendent justification is available for the shared fictions of social intercourse. To live with the “as if” in this world means to accept the fictions of the others among whom one is thrown. Any form of the sacred appropriate to this modern age will be, as for William James, one that is effective because people accept it. Yet Henry James seems more conscious than William of how the loss of transcendent justifications for religious beliefs turns religion itself into a form of sociology. William’s essentially voluntaristic account of the shared fictions of religion allows each individual consciously to subscribe to those fictions that he or she deems effective. Henry James’s shared fictions have a more insidious power to shape the beliefs and desires of those who participate in them. Henry James thus pays more attention to the coercive element in the social character of belief.38 In this respect, Henry James perhaps shares more with Émile Durkheim than with his own brother. He, too, witnesses the making sacred of the social identified by Durkheimian sociology, although without celebrating it. His novels thus seem to pose the problem of how to achieve social consensus without having access to a transcendental truth. Henry James’s ghost stories demonstrate this distinction. Whereas the Pragmatist tends to describe ideas as chosen by people pursuing their everyday interests, Henry James emphasizes the unconscious element in the embrace of one’s ghosts. Pragmatism does not claim, of course, that people are fully conscious of the interests their ideas serve, but Henry explores far more intensely than William the extent to which ideas can be not just tools but demons. Whether chosen half-consciously, accepted willingly in response to an appeal, or embraced enthusiastically for the distinction they confer, virtually none of his ghosts is the fully conscious creation of the person to whom it appears. Something of this difference in emphasis between the brothers can be seen in Henry James’s only published essay on an explicitly metaphysical question, “Is There a Life After Death?” (1910). James wrote this essay on the afterlife a few months before his brother William’s death and, as Richard Hocks notes, his approach to the question is broadly Pragmatist. Yet Hocks does not note

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a discrepancy between the two brothers that arises in this context and that points to a tension between their respective views.39 Henry James writes that although all the evidence of the senses suggests the absence of any life after death, he himself has a powerful sense of a communication with sources of consciousness that lie beyond the empirical world. He concludes by calling attention to the role of desire in his affirmation of a life after death: I “like” to think, I may be held too artlessly to repeat, that this, that, and the other appearances are favorable to the idea of the independence, behind everything (its everything), of my individual soul; I “like” to think even at the risk of lumping myself with those shallow minds who are happily and foolishly able to believe what they would prefer. It isn’t really a question of belief, which is a term I have made no use of in these remarks; it is on the other hand a question of desire, but of desire so confirmed, so thoroughly established and nourished, as to leave belief a comparatively irrelevant affair… If one acts from desire quite as one would from belief, it signifies little what name one gives to one’s motives.40

The broad outlines of the argument are clearly Pragmatist. They bear a resemblance to William James’s view that the immortality of the soul is true or false to the extent that it affects how one acts in this world. Yet Henry’s reference to those “shallow minds who are happily and foolishly able to believe what they prefer” seems to undercut his apparent similarity to William James, since who but the author of The Will to Believe could be taken to have argued for believing what one prefers? Is William James’s “shallower” younger brother here accusing the philosopher of shallowness in turn? In place of belief, “a comparatively irrelevant affair,” Henry James refers to “desire,” that realm of urgent, uncontrollable and perhaps even undefinable motive that is the subject of so many of Henry James’s stories and novels. The difference between “desire” and “will” lies in the physicality of desire and its tendency to confound and surprise the desiring subject. The shared fictions of Henry James, and the “will to believe” of William James, suggest the paradoxical status of belief for modernism. In an era that seeks increasingly to replace the institutional structures of religion with individual religious experience, belief still seems to have an important role to play in social cohesion. Belief is not typically a voluntary state, desire still less so. One either believes or does not, desires or does not. It is generally not possible to choose what one will believe, certainly not with the most fundamental beliefs, such as religious and moral ones. Desires are even more intransigent. Yet William James developed a philosophy of religion around the idea that one could choose what to believe. Henry and William James explore an aspect of community that political theorists generally ignore: in addition to the rational consent of its members, a community

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often demands their non-rational allegiance. It demands their acceptance – not only at a conscious level, but at an unconscious one too – of certain basic beliefs. It needs their desires. Whereas voluntarist social thought, which emphasizes the will, portrays members of a community as coming together to create a social contract, shared fictions create their own communities of belief and desire. What marks the Jamesian shared fiction as an echo of religious experience is the emphasis it places on this confluence of desire and belief. The social contract and political forms of consent, practices typically associated with modernity, depend on the free will of those who consent to them; traditional forms of belief demand acceptance on the basis of faith. William James’s will to believe lies somewhere in between – the product, paradoxically, of an effort willfully to submit to a fiction that demands passive submission. Henry James’s shared fictions explore the way that such a will to believe interacts with our desires and interests. His greatness as a chronicler of the modern moral imagination depends on the fact that the “unseen,” which for him also wields peculiar force in the visible world, involves not only efforts of will but also unconscious desires; in James, will, desire, and belief seem to work on each other in ways that have profound effects not only on his characters, but on his readers.

chapter 4

Marcel Proust and the elementary forms of religious life

Just before relating the incident of the madeleine, which sets in motion the series of memories that compose Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu [1913–27]), Proust’s narrator remarks that before he tasted the madeleine, the memory of his family home in Combray was to him nonexistent, as good as dead. “Dead for ever?” he asks (“Mort à jamais?”).1 He replies by commenting on an ancient form of religious belief: I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those we have lost are captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate thing, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death [“elles ont vaincu la mort”] and return to share our life. And so it is with our own past.2

Proust thus establishes an analogy between his own theory of involuntary memory and “primitive” religion. The central element of this analogy is the notion that inferior beings, such as inanimate objects, can contain the souls of the dead or the essence of someone’s past life. Proust refers frequently, and at crucial junctures, to theories about the capture of souls in inanimate objects, or about “metempsychosis” or the “transmigration of souls,” the transfer of a soul from one being to another.3 These references serve almost exclusively to illustrate personal experiences of the narrator, in particular the shaping of his consciousness by his own past and by “those we have lost” (either the literal dead or those who no longer play their former roles in his life). These dead are more fully internalized than the ghosts of Henry James’s stories: in moments of “resurrection” like the one described in the passage above it is not an actual ghost that surfaces, but the long-forgotten memory of a person or experience. Proust apparently did not subscribe to any literal belief in the resurrection of the dead (though his 81

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narrator hesitates to make a definitive judgement on the question), but his conceptual interest in metempsychosis and the transmigration of souls underlies the development of his ideas about the relationship of the individual to society, and as such it drives much of the plot of the Recherche. For Proust, the magical object, whether it be the madeleine, the spires of Martinville, or an uneven paving stone, has the power to resurrect a past existence. The resulting moments bienheureux often take the form of deeply private reveries, yet each also reveals an entire social world whose contours the author, with the aid of the magical object, erects anew: “the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.”4 Proust is famous as the solitary explorer of the subtleties of the artist’s inner world; yet his references to pre-Christian versions of religious experience allow him to show that seemingly hermetic inner world to be shaped by a solid social world. Proust understands this shaping in terms of the power of the dead over the living and the responsibilities of the living towards the dead. It has often been noted that the incident of the madeleine contains echoes of the Catholic mass.5 Upon tasting the mixture of cake and tea, the narrator feels a rush of “all-powerful joy”: “I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal.” Rather as the transubstantiated body and blood of Christ transcend the bread and wine in the mass, his experience “transcends” the cake and tea themselves: “I sensed that [this joy] was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?”6 The power of the mass also finds correlation in the “infinite” difference in “nature” between the cake and the joy it produces; in the name of the cake, Petite Madeleine, which derives ultimately from that of Mary Magdalene, who, as Proust notes, failed at first to understand the Resurrection; and especially in the narrator’s sense of overcoming his own mortality. Proust also refers frequently to the mass over the novel’s course, as when the narrator compares the Host with his mother’s kiss, presented to him in “an act of peace-giving communion in which my lips might imbibe her real presence and with it the power to sleep.”7 This comparison he later repeats ironically for the kiss of his mistress, Albertine, who “used to slide her tongue between my lips like a portion of daily bread, a nourishing food that had the almost sacred character of all flesh upon which the sufferings that we have endured on its account have come in time to confer a sort of spiritual grace.”8 Notably, it is the suffering of the narrator, and not Christ or

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Albertine, that gives her flesh its “almost sacred character,” but he manages to give his individual suffering a collective character with the use of the generalizing pronoun “we” (nous), a technique that probably owes a debt to Dante’s “nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,” and one he also uses in the second paragraph of the novel (“les joues de notre enfance”).9 Here, as elsewhere, the author transposes the language of Christianity into the symbolism of private mythology, but that private mythology then becomes a model for a universally shared experience, such as the sufferings undergone in love. Such allusions to Catholic theology are often ironic and always heretical, but they help nevertheless to establish the reverential tone of the narrator’s memories. M. H. Abrams, Harry Levin, and others have suggested the continuities between Proust’s “religion of art” and the Christian theological tradition of confessional writing.10 While it is true that Proust makes use of Christian imagery and archetypes in his treatment of art as a higher calling, remarks about his “religion of art” are somewhat misleading, since he associated that concept with the hermeticism of Mallarmé and the symbolist and decadent movements of the 1890s, from which he distanced himself throughout his career. In recent years, critics have given increasing attention to Proust’s Jewish heritage, though they have done so primarily in social terms, in relation to the Dreyfus Affair.11 My concern in this chapter will be to suggest the importance to Proust of other, non-monotheistic, forms of religious experience, which are sometimes at odds with the patterns he inherits from Christianity. In particular, his references to “primitive” and pagan religions indicate concern with understanding modern spiritual life as sharing some of the features of the most ancient forms of religion, a theme that also appears in Durkheim, Weber, Freud, and Joyce. Proust seeks a genuine community, such as that in the early church (in French, l’église primitive), but which today is available neither in institutional religion nor in the social groups that present themselves as alternative religions. Proust also understands the technological and social forces controlling modern life on a religious analogy, not with an omniscient God, but with the variety of powers, spirits, fairies, and gods that populate primitive and folk religions. Proust’s interest in understanding religious experience in ways independent of the formal theology of “advanced” religions takes part in the modernist theme of bypassing institutional religion in favor of the search for direct encounters with the sacred or supernatural. Influenced in part by the primitivist enthusiasms of his era (he attended the infamous opening night of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on May 29, 1913),12 Proust looked, to explain aspects of modern life for which Judaism and Christianity could not account, toward primitive religion. At moments of particularly intense

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subjective experience, Proust makes references to totemism, animism, paganism, and magic. Such allusions allow him to make observations both existential and anthropological – that is, observations about both the subjective quality of his experience and its relationship to social roles and structures. In so doing, Proust shifts the novel from what we might call the providential plot of the nineteenth-century novel towards the totemic plot of modernism. In the nineteenth century, a narrator figure, whether a thirdperson or a mature first-person version of the protagonist, tends to loom over the entire narrative, channeling it toward an appropriate outcome (not necessarily a fair one, but one that makes sense.) In the modern novel, the narrative force is much more diffuse. We encounter multiple narrators (as in Joseph Conrad or André Gide), narrators who seem to represent society in general or simply the air (as in the middle section of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse), or the superego of a particular character. Meanwhile, plots lose their forward motion; they tend to collect as though in pools; sometimes they coalesce around chosen objects, such as Proust’s madeleine, or, less famously, the cigarettes of Italo Svevo’s La coscenza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno, 1923). This failure of forward-driving plots bears close resemblance to Durkheim’s interest in mana as an anonymous and impersonal force. The loss of faith in a providential or personal God (an analogue of the nineteenth-century narrator) does not eliminate the problem of the force (the social force, Durkheim would say) that he represents. That force simply becomes more diffuse. The effect of this development on novels is not to eliminate plot, but to make the sense of what constitutes a plot more problematic. Proust’s experiments, for instance, lead him towards a totemic distribution of narrative force. Joseph Frank wrote famously of the “spatial form” of the modern novel; what I am suggesting is that modern novels still exist in time, but they are less sure than their predecessors of where that time is headed – less certain of how to achieve the “sense of an ending.”13 Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov asked, “But what’s to become of man then? Without God and without a future life? Why, in that case everything is allowed. You can do anything you like!”14 In the modernist novel, at least, the omniscient narrator is dead, but this does not mean that everything is permitted. Rather, the search for new modes of narration and plotting becomes an explicit part of the modern novelist’s quest. proust, durkheim, and the religion of individualism Proust’s conception of magical objects and their relationship with the social world bears comparison with the theory of totemism, which was

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influentially formulated by Proust’s contemporary, the sociologist Émile Durkheim. In his major work on religion, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, which first appeared in 1912 (ten years after James’s Varieties of Religious Experience and one year before Swann’s Way), Durkheim argues for totemism as the most primitive species of religious belief. Although ethnologists before him had described totemic practices, Durkheim was the first to elaborate a systematic theory of totemism as a religion containing the essence of all later religions; he seems to have seized on totemism, like Freud after him, because it allowed him to understand religion in a very abstract (and hence, paradoxically modern) sense as a pure force prior to any incarnation in a god or gods.15 This religion, which he links with the organization of society into clans, consists in the worship of a plant, animal, or rarely an inanimate thing that is a given clan’s totem or “heraldic coat of arms.”16 Durkheim emphasizes that the clan worships the totem not so much for its own sake as for the access it grants to more general sacred powers. He finds descriptions of an anonymous and impersonal force that inheres in the natural world and that believers attempt to control in Australian, Native American, and Melanesian religions. In analyzing this force, he draws on the works of English and Scottish anthropologists, notably E. B. Tylor, W. Robertson Smith, and J. G. Frazer, whose The Golden Bough (1890–1915) had such an impact on English modernists.17 To define it, he quotes R. H. Codrington: “The Melanesians believe in the existence of a force absolutely distinct from any material force, that works in all kinds of ways, for good or evil, and that it is in man’s best interest to take in hand and control: That force is mana … Mana is by no means fixed on a definite object; it can be carried by any sort of thing… The whole religion of the Melanesian consists in procuring mana for himself, for his own benefit or for someone else’s.”18 Durkheim then goes on to argue that “religious force is none other than the collective and anonymous force of the clan” (223). Far from being sheer fantasy, religion is in fact a form of the implicitly rational worship of society: “Indeed, we can say that the faithful are not mistaken when they believe in the existence of a moral power to which they are subject and from which they receive what is best in themselves. That power exists, and it is society” (226–7). Even in more advanced religions, the gods derive their power from this mystified form of social force (and not from natural forces, as one alternative to totemism, the naturist theory, holds). Durkheim’s is the supreme statement of the social supernaturalism that underlay the thought of many in his generation.

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Proust pursues his own sociological investigations, in René Girard’s words, through “the sociology of the novel” rather than “the sociology of sociologists,” but the similarity his concerns bear to those of the leading sociologist of his day is striking.19 Proust draws for his theory of involuntary memory on exactly the sort of “primitive” religion that Durkheim studied. He also shares Durkheim’s fascination with the clan as the source of all values. The salon of Mme. Verdurin, referred to as the “little clan” (“petit clan”) offers the narrator many opportunities for sociological exploration, as do the narrator’s own family and dozens of other small social groups that have their own forces, their own mana, within the novel.20 Proust’s persistent interest in sacred or magical objects, of which his account of the madeleine is only the most famous illustration, reflects a conception of these objects as the sites at which sacred power converges and therefore as potential keys to the magical element in our relations with each other and the past. In the novel, such sacred objects restore to the narrator the kind of communion that he can no longer, even in his most intimate relations, achieve. Involuntary memory is, in a sense, Proust’s mana: the amorphous force that particular objects localize, but that also taps into a broader social force beyond the control of even the mightiest authorial will. A fellow skeptic, Proust nevertheless shares Durkheim’s deep concern with finding underlying truths to religious phenomena. An early practitioner of the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” Durkheim sought to delve beneath the surfaces of sacred rituals in order to expose the true force at the basis of religion, society. Much of Proust’s novel concerns precisely the hermeneutics of suspicion: the analysis of lying, for instance, and the major love plots, which above all address the lover’s efforts to discover the truth about the beloved’s sexual life. As with Durkheim, Proust’s analysis of the sacred frequently reveals that the sacred is effectively an invention of society. Nonetheless, Proust seems also to need the sacred to represent something besides a mystified form of social force. Proust therefore differs from Durkheim in the assessment of how social force works through religious experience. For Durkheim, it is sufficient to understand mana as the disguised form of social force and thus to solve the equation, God = Society. For Proust, the recognition that what we hold sacred is no more than the product of social rituals, that God is no more than Society, was troubling. He needed to find some form of sacred experience other than social ritual, and he found it in magic. Whereas Durkheim excludes magic from religious life, Proust finds in magic and in animistic theories of the soul more authentic forms of religious experience than in the empty structures offered by religious organizations and social sects.

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Although no evidence suggests that they ever met, Proust and Durkheim belonged to the same milieu and they shared some formative intellectual influences. The extent of their shared training seems to have been noted by neither Proust critics nor Durkheim scholars. Durkheim was a classmate, at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), of the philosopher Henri Bergson, who married Proust’s cousin.21 At the ENS, Durkheim studied philosophy; he received his doctorate from the Sorbonne (also in philosophy, as sociology was not yet a recognized discipline) in 1892. Proust likewise studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, where his professors included the examiners for Durkheim’s doctoral defense, Émile Boutroux and Paul Janet (uncle of the psychologist Pierre Janet, who was Durkheim’s classmate). Boutroux, a Kantian who had taught Durkheim at the ENS and to whom Durkheim dedicated his doctoral thesis, The Division of Labor in Society (1893), exercised a profound influence on Proust as well. During this period Proust described Boutroux as one of his “heroes in real life,” and he later referred in the Recherche to Boutroux’s experiments with spiritualist séances.22 Boutroux later wrote an influential study of William James. Thus Pragmatist ideas and the exploration of the sacred played a role in the intellectual climate of both Durkheim and Proust. Proust does not seem to have read Durkheim’s work, though it was much debated at the Sorbonne while Proust studied there, but both men’s philosophical attitudes were shaped by the Kantianism that dominated liberal French circles in the late nineteenth century, exemplified in Boutroux and in the “neo-critical” philosophy of Charles Renouvier. Proust’s five references to Kant in the Recherche echo this intellectual milieu’s neo-critical emphasis on the relationship between the freedom of the moral will and the determinism of nature.23 Proust’s ideas about Kant, and about philosophy in general, were probably most influenced by another of his heroes, his high school teacher Alphonse Darlu, who founded the Revue de métaphysique et de morale – in which Durkheim would, in 1909, publish the introduction to The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Darlu greeted Durkheim’s work on religion with sympathy, while rejecting the sociologization of Kant implicit in Durkheim’s conception of the “social origin of the categories,” a sign of Durkheim’s inadequate attempt to reconcile Kant with the positivist tradition.24 Darlu’s own version of Kantian idealism was, in the words of Proust’s biographer Jean-Yves Tadié, “spiritualism without God.”25 These shared intellectual influences account for some of the similarities in Proust’s and Durkheim’s attitudes. A shared social and religious background, and shared experiences of the major public events in the history of

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the Third Republic, probably shaped their views of the sacred and of primitive religion more profoundly. Both men came from Alsatian Jewish families (Proust on his mother’s side). The relevance of the Jewish background to each of the men has been the subject of much discussion.26 Proust, the son of a Catholic father and a Jewish mother, was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church, but his mother, who came from a prominent, largely assimilated Jewish family, did not convert, and neither parent practiced any religion. In the Recherche, the narrator’s mother and maternal grandmother, whom Proust modeled on his own mother and grandmother, are figures of ideal humanity, although the novel makes no mention of their religion and the characters are presumably gentile.27 The novel discusses extensively the role of the Jews in French society during and after the Dreyfus Affair, but the perspective from which Proust’s narrator describes the Jews is that of a gentile, and Proust transfers many details from his own affiliation with Judaism to the narrator’s school friend Bloch. Durkheim was of course more steeped in his Jewish heritage; his father was Chief Rabbi of the Vosges and Haute-Marne. Coming from a long line of rabbis, Durkheim rebelled against his religious upbringing, though without denying his Jewish origins or converting to Christianity. He nonetheless regarded the modern social sciences as necessarily in conflict with religious belief, and insisted that we must choose, as a guiding hypothesis for morality, “between God and society”.28 Durkheim’s Jewish upbringing probably influenced his emphasis on the communal and ritual aspects of religious life, and also, paradoxically, his secularism, since his commitment to enlightenment and modernity was typical of the assimilated Jewry of late nineteenth-century France.29 More broadly, Durkheim’s conception of religion as a disguised worship of society seems to owe something to the close relationship between the Biblical Yahweh and his chosen people and to the conception of Judaism as a national religion. Since emancipation, the Jews of France were understood to have left behind their claims of nationhood in favor of an understanding of Judaism as simply a religion and therefore an essentially private matter, entailing no political commitment different from that of other French citizens.30 For the Jews of France, the choice lay not between God and society, but between the Jewish people and the French people; they could maintain their God as long as they gave up their separate nationality. (One of the fervent supporters of Jewish emancipation, Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre, summarized this view during debate in the Constituent Assembly: “To the Jews as a Nation, nothing; to the Jews as individuals, everything… They must not form a political corps or an Order

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in the state; they must be citizens individually.”)31 Durkheim’s decision to reject his Judaism is not well documented, but he may have found that religious affiliation could not be disentangled from social belonging. The starkness of his opposition between God and society, as well as his eagerness to understand society as a valid alternative to religion, seem to reflect aspects of the French Jewish situation. Durkheim’s sociology overlooks, however, a key feature of the relationship between Yahweh and his chosen people. In Judaism, God stands outside society and judges it, extending a moral norm for evaluating current social practices. In short, by conflating God and society, Durkheim lost the sense of religion as offering a critical alternative to society. Scholars have remarked on his tendency to hypostasize the concept of society and treat it as the equivalent of a divinity. The social anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard commented that “it was Durkheim and not the savage who made society into a god.”32 Although the official liberal Jewish ideology of the period denied any conflict between French and Jewish identities, both Durkheim and Proust may have felt tension between their personal status as assimilated, supremely French, Jews and the growing presence in France of traditional, eastern European Jews, refugees fleeing the pogroms. During the First World War, Durkheim served on several committees to support the emancipation of Russian Jews, assist Russian Jewish immigrants, and encourage their assimilation to French culture. Proust, less civic-minded, has his character Bloch, an assimilated French Jew, lament “the swarm of Israelites that infested Balbec,” the sea-side town where the narrator spends his summers as an adolescent, while the narrator himself observes that Balbec was “like such countries as Russia or Rumania, where the geography books teach us that the Jewish population does not enjoy the same esteem and has not arrived at the same stage of assimilation as, for instance, in Paris.”33 The tensions wound up in their status as Frenchmen and Jews became apparent to both Proust and Durkheim during the Dreyfus Affair, a national scandal that resulted from the wrongful conviction for treason of a Jewish army officer. The affair, which plays a large role in Proust’s novel, shaped his generation’s sense of the necessary conflict between church and state. Proust writes in detail of the “rising tide of anti-Semitism” in the period, and disgust for this anti-Semitism shaped the attitudes of both Durkheim and Proust.34 Proust claimed to have been “the first Dreyfusard” because he asked Anatole France to sign the January 1898 “Petition of the Intellectuals,” supporting Zola’s public demand for revision of the Dreyfus case.35 Durkheim, who was later secretary of the Bordeaux

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branch of the Dreyfusard Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, claimed in remarkably similar language that since he had suggested to a colleague the foundation of such an organization, “I was a member of the Ligue in advance; I was part of it before it existed.”36 The politics of the period were as much shaped by religious conflict as by class or economic ideology. The early history of the Third Republic is largely that of a cultural struggle between the secular, republican left, to which both Proust and Durkheim showed allegiance, and the Catholic, royalist or Bonapartist right. The secularists won this struggle decisively with the pardoning and later exoneration of Dreyfus, the election of the Bloc des Gauches in 1902, and the subsequent passage of the Law on the Separation of Church and State, which created the modern French secular state that, even today, forbids the wearing of religious symbols in public schools.37 This move towards secularism won Durkheim’s support, whereas Proust repeatedly expressed reservations about the left-wing government’s anti-clericalism. The Dreyfus Affair and the drive for secular education contributed to the development of Durkheim’s sociology of religion. In 1898, in an essay defending the petition of the intellectuals (which he had not signed), Durkheim wrote approvingly of the origins of the Dreyfusard cause in the emergence of individualism as a “religion of which man is, at the same time, both believer and God.”38 This religion of the individual, which echoed Comte’s “religion of humanity” and foreshadowed Durkheim’s later sociological explanations of religion, could support liberal and social democratic ideals, and Durkheim claimed that it would reconcile the needs of individual and of society, since it implied “the glorification, not of the self, but of the individual in general” and a broad-based “thirst for justice” (64). Durkheim, who would regularly criticize the view typical of liberal Protestantism that religion was fundamentally “private and personal,” nonetheless (approvingly) saw the individual as “sacred” in modern society, a vessel imbued with the “moral catechism” of Rousseau, Kant, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. For modernity, Durkheim argued, the human person, “the touchstone according to which good must be distinguished from evil, is considered as sacred, in what one might call the ritual sense of the word. It has something of that transcendental majesty which the churches of all times have given to their Gods.”39 For Durkheim, the religion of the individual seems to have offered a way out of the impasse of liberal religion at the end of the nineteenth century. While recognizing the need for religious experience to originate in the individual rather than from outside pressure, individualism could also offer access to a sacred

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community, the universal community of all individuals. The individual is the totem of modern society, for it condenses all social force. Although Durkheim did not ultimately pursue the “religion of individualism” that he proposed in his polemical essay of 1898, his later sociological studies of religion emphasize not only the disguised role of society as an object of worship but also the role of modern political movements in manufacturing the sacred. He looked back to his student days, and to his participation in the celebrations of the Republic on July 14, 1880, for a model of sacred rites, in this case a rite commemorating a great popular upheaval. For Durkheim, such political activity, compounded with the psychology of crowds, can contribute to the invention of new religions and new divinities. The crucial modern example of such an invention of gods was the French Revolution: “Nowhere has society’s ability to make itself a god or to create gods been more in evidence than during the first years of the Revolution. In the general enthusiasm of that time, things that were by nature purely secular were transformed by public opinion into sacred things: Fatherland, Liberty, Reason” (Elementary Forms, 215–16). The communion with others, as happened in the Revolution, the later celebrations of the Republic, and the Dreyfus Affair, creates the sacred. By contrast, Proust’s attitude toward groups and crowds (and toward the Revolution) was ultimately more skeptical than Durkheim’s. Indeed, although he was an enthusiastic Dreyfusard and participated zealously in the cause, the experience probably added to his skepticism of religious and social groups by revealing their tendency to make use of scapegoats. Readers have often interpreted Proust as devoting himself entirely to the private life of the individual at the expense of society more generally, but like Durkheim he is aware of the ways in which society shapes the individual, and he pays particular attention, as an important site of this shaping, to the border between sacred and profane. In the modern religion that Durkheim and Proust share, the sacred individual is not the site of a personal relationship with God, such as nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism envisioned. Rather, sacred power bonds the individual to modern society and to its new gods. Though the ossified structure of institutional religion no longer serves the modern individual’s spiritual needs, the individual can yet gain access to a more profound form of the sacred community. For Durkheim, this link between the individual and the community lies in sacred universal principles like “Fatherland, Liberty, Reason.”40 For Proust, it can be found only through magical experiences of the sort known to the most primitive religions, experiences that allow the individual to delve inside himself. Paradoxically, it is only through this

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immersion in the self that Proust’s narrator is able to establish a link with the only sacred community available to him, that of the dead. social ritual and the totemic plot The fundamental religious experiences of Proust’s novel, the moments bienheureux, are decidedly individual, even solitary. Nonetheless, each one opens a portal to a whole social world. As I have argued elsewhere, Proust was far from conceiving of the individual as existing in isolation from social forces.41 The narrator writes that “none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone … our social personality is the product of the thoughts of others”; but it is not just the social personality that is multiple and riven with conflicts, but the entire self.42 The whole drama of the book involves reconstituting a coherent self from the competing impulses of an unconscious life. Proust’s first reference to reincarnation, or “metempsychosis,” occurs on the first page of the novel, when the narrator relates how, while falling asleep, he would imagine himself to be the subject of the book he was reading, “a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V.”43 He compares waking from sleep with reincarnation, and his belief that he is the subject of the book he is reading remains present to him after he awakens, but eventually becomes “unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be after metempsychosis.”44 Proust believed that only through immersion in the individual could the artist achieve expression of the universal: “another law of life… is to realize the universal or eternal, but only in individuals … [It] is when [literary works] are most themselves that they realize most fully the universal soul.” Proust is referring here to War and Peace and The Mill on the Floss, which, he argues, realize the universal more completely than symbolist poetry. Theodor Adorno, echoing Proust himself, writes that Proust achieves the universality of religion “only by reaching the acme of genuine individualization, only by obstinately following up the desiderata of concretion … It is his obsession with the concrete and the unique, with the taste of a madeleine or the color of the shoes of a lady worn at a certain party, which becomes instrumental with regard to the materialization of a truly theological idea, that of immortality.”45 Although he draws on the Bible and on Catholic ritual, it is ultimately a more primitive type of religious experience that Proust seeks to express: a form of resurrection known before Christ, and one that he understands through a combination of Plato and Darwin. After the initial moment of “metempsychosis,” the narrator finds himself in darkness:

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he loses all sense of himself and retains “only the most rudimentary sense of identity, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness; I was more destitute than the cave-dweller; but then… [a memory] would come like a rope let down from on high to draw me up from the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself.”46 The task of the novel will be to complete this resurrection. Proust continually figures the moment between sleep and waking as resurrection or reincarnation. His reference to metempsychosis on the first page of the novel suggests the concerns that his epic work shares with Joyce’s Ulysses. In Ulysses, the theme of metempsychosis or, as Molly Bloom calls it, “met him pike hoses,” emphasizes the way that people live out inherited mythical patterns without recognizing them.47 In Proust’s novel, the transmigration of souls provides a crucial metaphor for the fact that the most private self is not self-generating or isolated from society, but rather begins its journey shaped by forces that precede and control it. Though not invoking God, Proust emphasizes that each awakening is like a new birth, in which the soul must once again find its home on an earth whose conflicts, social structures, and art it inherits anew.48 The formal differences between the novels of Proust and those of Henry James point to their differing conceptions of the relationship between the social world and religious experience. James, as I have argued, concerns himself with the social function of “shared fictions” of religious experience; but his emphasis falls foremost on very small social groups and secondly on relatively intimate forms of experience, such as seeing a ghost or sharing in a marriage. Like his brother William, Henry James tends to ignore the institutional side of religious experience. Proust, on the other hand, takes a more sociological attitude to the sacred, an impulse in which he resembles his countryman, Durkheim. Proust directs his analysis to the nature of large-scale social rituals that invoke the sacred, rituals at the level of the “little clan” of Mme. Verdurin or the “little tribe of humanity” composed of the girls on the beach at Balbec.49 The shared fiction whereby a social relation comes to have a sacred character for Henry James undergoes a bifurcation in Proust. On the one hand, in the figure of the “clan,” “tribe,” “church,” or “closed society,” the shared fiction becomes ossified and institutionalized.50 Those small social groups that set themselves up as alternatives to the church quickly lose any relation to authentic religious experience and become as arid as the traditional church (an important exception being the closed society of Combray in the narrator’s youth). Proust’s analysis of social lies is even more remorseless than that of James, and his novels introduce the possibility that a shared

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fiction might be sacred only in order to dismantle that possibility. On the other hand, in Proust’s reckoning this general fall means that a more authentic sort of religious experience, one that I will call magical, becomes available to the individual; through it, the individual is capable of discovering the sacred community retrospectively, in memory and through the attempted resurrection of the dead. Proust probably knew the works of James only indirectly, and no very precise record exists of James’s reactions to Du côté de chez Swann, which he read near the end of his life. Still, Proust’s earliest English reviewers compared him to James, and the two had much in common: an imperfectly closeted homosexuality, a conceptual interest in lying, a preoccupation with the divisions in the self, stylistic traits such as long sentences and a predominance of what the Russian Formalists would call sjuzhet over fabula (perspectives on events over events themselves), and a number of crucial influences, notably Balzac, Flaubert, Emerson, and George Eliot.51 While Proust was fascinated with problems of literary perspective, however, his novel contains little of the play with multiple characters’ perspectives typical of James’s last major works.52 It is true that Proust’s narrator, obsessed with finding out the truth about Albertine’s sexual life, resembles the prosecutorial narrators of some of James’s shorter fiction,53 but whereas James abjures the first person for his longer novels, Proust combines his greater interest in social ritual with a narrative technique that is famously dependent on the first person. This preference for the first person might not seem to reflect what I have called Proust’s sociological interests, but Proust takes the role, familiar in later anthropology, of the “participant-observer”: he chronicles his narrator’s participation in the sacred rituals of society – first in order to demonstrate how society shapes the perspective of the individual in such matters, and then to show how the individual breaks away from social definitions of the sacred. At the level of technique, Proust replaces James’s multiple perspectives with the interplay of voluntary and involuntary memory, whereby Proust’s narrator reveals his own multiple perspectives, over time, on the events he narrates. His use of the first person allows Proust to combine the investigation of the social rituals that manufacture the golden calves of the modern world with the effort to demonstrate the magical powers of truly sacred objects. At the level of plot, Proust makes the novel form looser and baggier than anything James could have imagined, while still maintaining a real plot structure, albeit one in distended form. (Proust’s most important precursor in this respect was Dostoyevsky, whom James criticized for his formlessness.) Proust achieves this

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transformation of structure by removing the narrative from the mastery of an arranger like James and submitting it to the power of involuntary memory.54 Durkheim argues that in totemism, the power of the totem is “none other than the collective and anonymous force of the clan” (Elementary Forms, 223). A Durkheimian reading of Proust might suggest that the involuntary memory that the taste of the madeleine produces is no more than the collective and anonymous force of the Combray society that seems to spring fully formed, as the narrator says, from his cup of tea. In the section of his novel that describes life in the salons of the fin de siècle, Proust seems to explore the possibility of such an interpretation of experience (although in Proust “la société ” refers to “high society” far more often than to French society as a whole). Proust’s description of the salons shows that he shares Durkheim’s interest in the way that clans, tribes, and other social groups, including those on the scale of the nation, express their force through rituals and sacred objects. His novel relies on the repeated experience of disillusionment, which continually shows the narrator that the experiences that he anticipates as sacred rituals turn out to lack real transcendent power, in fact to contain no more than the earthly effects of social force. Society’s attempt to manufacture for itself the sacred always turns out ersatz products. Yet Proust would ultimately disavow the reduction of the sacred to the effects of social force. A residue of an unironic sacred does survive Proust’s cutting analysis of the ersatz sacred in modern life; in order to grasp that true sacred, he must reach beyond society and its rituals for a more primitive encounter with social power in its less institutional forms. Although his novel abounds with theories of all kinds, Proust does not develop an explicit theory of religious experience in general. Still, his frequent references to various religions – animism, magical practices, folklore, the classical gods, the Bible, Judaism, medieval and modern Catholicism, and occasionally Eastern religion – keep in play a constellation of ideas about the sacred and its relationship to the social. The narrator seems fascinated by the distinction between the sacred and the profane, as in his description of the Church of St.-Hilaire. He recognizes that, although the church is no more than a “simple citizen of Combray” (a term with secular, republican associations), “there existed, nonetheless, between the church and everything in Combray that was not the church a clear line of demarcation which my mind has never succeeded in crossing.”55 Thus even though the fuchsias of Mme. Loiseau, who lives next to the church, grow up against the church walls, “the fuchsias did not become sacred for me on that account; between the flowers and the blackened stone against which they

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leaned, if my eyes could discern no gap, my mind [esprit] preserved the impression of an abyss.”56 Sacredness for Proust, however, is not so much an eternal quantity as a product of social and historical forces. The narrator considers the church at Combray sacred because of its historical associations. In counterpoint to this slow compounding of history into the genuine sacred, Proust presents a cheap and accelerated parody of this process as the manufacture of the sacred in modern life. A case study appears in his account of the salon of Mme. Verdurin, the “little clan.” The second section of the Recherche, “Un Amour de Swann” (“Swann in Love”), opens with the observation that: To admit you to the “little nucleus,” the “little group,” the “little clan” at the Verdurins’, one condition sufficed, but that one was indispensable: you must give tacit adherence to a Creed one of whose articles was that the young pianist whom Mme Verdurin had taken under her patronage that year and of whom she said “Really, it oughtn’t to be allowed, to play Wagner as well as that!” licked both Planté and Rubinstein hollow, and that Dr Cottard was a more brilliant diagnostician than Potain. Each “new recruit” whom the Verdurins failed to persuade that the evenings spent by other people, in other houses than theirs, were as dull as ditch-water, saw himself banished forthwith.57

The emphasis in Proust’s description of the little clan falls on unity of doctrine. The little clan resembles a church or sect that demands not only participation in its rituals, but commitment to its beliefs. Mme. Verdurin, an “ecclesiastical power,” brooks no disagreement with her (shifting) pronouncements on people and art; she maintains her absolute rule by portraying it as a religion of art, one in which Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the operas of Wagner, and the chamber music of Vinteuil represent the “most sublime of prayers.”58 To maintain discipline, the little clan relies on the principle of the scapegoat: Mme. Verdurin expels anyone among “the faithful” whose “critical spirit” might, “by contagion, prove fatal to the orthodoxy of the little church.”59 In this principle the members of the little clan discover a way to make the institution’s power serve their individual interests, as for example when a relatively new recruit, Forcheville, forces the withdrawal from the group of his pathetic brother-in-law Saniette. Such episodes reveal the basic cruelty of groups like “the little clan,” a cruelty that the novel will expose again and again over its course. The others will even find it useful to make Saniette a perpetual victim, readmitting him to the clan and then, as the narrator witnesses, banishing him again, in a scene in which the “faithful” gather around Saniette “like a group of cannibals in whom the sight of a white man has aroused the thirst for blood.”60

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The protagonist of the first volume of the Recherche, Charles Swann, himself falls victim to the cruelty of the little clan. Though Swann claims membership in the Jockey Club, friendship with the Prince of Wales and the highest French aristocracy, and access to social circles far above that of the Verdurins, Swann follows his beloved, Odette, into the little clan. Unfortunately, Swann’s valuable intellectual and social qualities, and in particular his association with the aristocracy, disturb Mme. Verdurin. Although his admiration for Odette prompts him to “place the Verdurin circle above all others,” Swann fails to laugh at the pitiful jokes of Dr. Cottard or to declare that his friend, the Princesse de Sagan, is grotesque, and therefore the little clan senses in him, “for all that he never deviated from his affability or revolted against their dogmas, an impermeability to those dogmas, a resistance to complete conversion, the like of which they had never come across in anyone before.”61 When Swann fails again to speak ill of an aristocratic friend, M. Verdurin senses danger, seeing “with regret” that his wife has become “inflamed with the passion of a Grand Inquisitor who has failed to stamp out heresy.”62 Shortly afterwards, Swann finds himself shut out from the home of Mme. Verdurin, who dismisses him as “too deadly for words, a stupid, ill-bred boor.”63 Over time, Mme. Verdurin grows increasingly tyrannical in her rule over the little clan, insisting “like the Roman Empress, that she was the sole general whom her legion must obey, or like Christ or the Kaiser, that he who loved his father or mother more than her and was not prepared to leave them and follow her was not worthy of her.”64 Proust’s portrayal of the “little clan” shares many insights with Durkheim’s theory of mana as the “collective and anonymous force of the clan.” Proust interprets religion in its institutional forms, with the example in this case of a religion of art, as having social cohesion as its primary function. Mme. Verdurin’s theatrical displays of emotion during performances of Vinteuil’s septet, regardless of whether they reflect genuine feeling on her part, serve foremost to direct and focus the collective emotions of the faithful. When the faithful believe that they are worshipping Wagner, Beethoven, or Vinteuil, they are in fact worshipping the standards of the clan itself; Proust calls attention to the importance of such shared standards in unifying the clan. When the narrator confesses admiration for the conversation of Professor Brichot, for instance, the others cannot understand his regard for someone they consider stupid: “I was not one of the little clan. And in every clan, whether it be social, political, or literary, one contracts a perverse facility for discovering in a conversation, in an official speech, in a story, in a sonnet, everything that the plain reader would never

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have dreamed of finding there.”65 The personal standards of each member are shaped by the dogmas of the group. Specific works of art thus serve for the little clan something of the function that the totem does for Durkheim’s Australians. Proust’s clan differs from Durkheim’s in its emphasis on the compulsory nature of certain beliefs, but this chiefly reflects a difference in milieu. Durkheim’s Australians take the centrality of the totem for granted, but Mme. Verdurin’s “little church” must compete for the attention of “the faithful” with families, with work, and with other salons. While the emphasis on doctrinal purity in the sect of Mme. Verdurin gives its style of worship a Protestant cast, Proust’s discussion of other social groups tends to emphasize their worship in its ritual aspect and thus to bestow a Catholic flavor. The narrator’s preoccupation with such rituals begins in childhood. His family treats anyone unfamiliar with its custom of taking lunch an hour early on Saturdays as a “barbarian.” The servants’ dinner is a “solemn passover,” during which they cannot be disturbed because they are “ ‘taboo’ ” (a phrase Proust puts in quotation marks).66 Françoise presides over these dinners, “at one and the same time, as in the primitive church, the celebrant and one of the faithful,” and folds her napkin after wiping her lips with the reverence of the priest after mass.67 On the momentous night when the narrator is deprived of his mother’s kiss, Françoise refuses to interrupt his mother at table because of “the sacred character with which she invested the dinner-party.”68 In later years, the chants of Parisian street hawkers remind the narrator of “the drone of a priest intoning his office, of which these street scenes are the goodhumoured, secular, and yet half-liturgical counterpart.”69 In these scenes, daily life, especially the life of the lower classes, achieves a certain beauty because of its ritual character, an association that Proust reinforces through reference to Flemish and Dutch paintings.70 At this social level, rituals, if quaint and modest ones, do seem for Proust to unify their communities in benevolence, perhaps because the community enjoying the ritual of a simple dinner knows without pretense that what is being venerated and savored is the community itself. The narrator becomes more ambivalent about the sacred character of social rituals as he reaches adolescence and steps tentatively “into society,” advancing first to the household of the Swanns, whom he regards, because they are the parents of his beloved Gilberte, as “all-powerful gods.”71 In describing social occasions, Proust often seizes the language of religious ritual. Generally the effect is ironic: the mature narrator draws analogies between social life and religious customs in order to emphasize the mystery and profundity that these customs held for him as a young man. Thus the

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Swanns’ house, an “enchanted domain,” seems to contain in its private rooms an even more mysterious “Sanctuary,” where “Swann and his wife led their supernatural existence.”72 Admitted to that holy of holies, “that mystic chapel which was the habitation of Mme Swann,” the narrator invests his passion in her décor and her clothes, which “by virtue of the liturgy and ritual in which Mme Swann was so profoundly versed…were connected with the season and the hour by a bond both necessary and unique.”73 Yet when he finally gets the chance to spend an entire evening with the Swanns, he suffers that sense of disillusionment that is the keynote of the entire novel: Sometimes the Swanns decided to remain in the house all afternoon, and then, as we had lunched so late, very soon I would see, beyond the garden-wall, the sun setting on that day which had seemed to me bound to be different from other days; and in vain might the servants bring in lamps of every size and shape, burning each upon the consecrated altar of a console, a wall-bracket, a corner-cupboard, an occasional table, as though for the celebration of some strange and secret rite; nothing extraordinary transpired in the conversation, and I went home disappointed, as one often is in one’s childhood after midnight mass.74

The faint echo of the child’s question at the Passover Seder (“Why is this night different from all other nights?”) calls attention to the childishness of the adolescent narrator’s perspective. This device, along with the reference to the midnight masses of childhood, suggests an ecumenical theory of disillusionment. As often happens with Proust, the analogy works in two directions. Initially, the references to the Swanns’ house as sanctuary suggest the awe in which the narrator holds the family, and more broadly the way that social customs come to take on the force of almost sacred ritual for their participants. Yet later, the narrator’s disappointment in the customs themselves deflates by extension the religious language that had once given expression to their emotional power. Thus, although religious ritual seems to promise a mysterious and potentially transformative experience, the child who expects this night to be different from other nights, or who expects midnight mass to differ from other masses, in fact experiences “nothing extraordinary,” just as in later years the burning lamps on the “consecrated altars” of Odette’s fashionable furniture will fail to transform the dull conversations in her room into a “strange and secret rite.” Not only is the Swanns’ house not quite the Olympus that the narrator had imagined; even the sacred sites of childhood turn out, in retrospect, to have had less power than the child’s imagination. As the novel progresses, and as the narrator moves up the social ladder, Proust scales up his religious rhetoric.75 Every social group in the Recherche

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seems to foster a different supernatural analogy. If the artistic salon resembles a Protestant sect and fashionable society a Catholic ritual, the classical gods feature in Proust’s descriptions of those social heights from which his narrator feels excluded. At the Grand Hotel Balbec, for instance, he compares the unknown reception clerks to “Minos, Aeacus and Rhadamanthus,” the mythological heroes who judge the souls of the dead, and whom Dante in the Inferno makes into guardians of hell.76 When he tries, in À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, to imagine himself playing with some girls at the seaside, the scene seems as unlikely “as if, standing before some Attic frieze or a fresco representing a procession, I had believed it possible for me, the spectator, to take my place, beloved of them, among the divine participants.”77 In the narrator’s eyes, the Duc de Guermantes, with his “jupiterian brows,” bickers with his wife as Zeus does with Hera, and when the narrator learns that the Marquis de Norpois has been ridiculing him among the Guermantes set, he imagines that the diplomat has been “diverting at [my] expense the banquet of the gods.”78 This polytheistic register allows Proust to represent, with ironic distance between the young narrator’s pious attitude and our own irreverence as readers, social forces that seem beyond individual control, sublime and indifferent to the narrator’s mortal fate. When the narrator finally wins entry to the salon of the Duchesse de Guermantes, he seizes the highest register of all, comparing dinner at her house to the Last Supper. The guests at these dinners all bear great historical names; “Even for small and intimate gatherings it was from among [such great names] only that Mme. de Guermantes could choose her guests, and in the dinners for twelve, assembled around the dazzling napery and plate, they were like the golden statues of the apostles in the Sainte-Chapelle, symbolic, dedicative pillars before the Lord’s Table.”79 Having been admitted to the Guermantes circle, the narrator finds that the guests “did assemble there indeed, like the early Christians, not to partake merely of a material nourishment, which was incidentally exquisite, but in a sort of social Eucharist; so that in the course of a few dinner-parties I assimilated the acquaintance of all the friends of my hosts.”80 Yet even here, disillusionment quickly sets in, as it had with the Swanns, and as it does even with the young girls of Balbec. Disappointed to discover that the guests at these dinners “spoke nothing by trivialities,” the narrator comforts himself by imagining that his presence is what prevents the other guests from “carrying on, in the most precious of its drawing-rooms, the mysterious life of the Faubourg Saint-Germain”; he hopes that his departure “would allow the guests, once the uninitiated [“le profane”] had gone, to form themselves at

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last into a closed group [“comité secret”].”81 Thus, initially unwilling to believe that the group he had pictured as Christ’s Apostles has nothing interesting to say, he decides that there remain mysteries that he has not penetrated; but eventually he must acknowledge that the dinners of the highest society have no more magic, indeed for him less, than the lunches served early on the “asymmetrical Saturdays” of his childhood.82 The elaborate set of metaphors with which Proust compares social functions with religious rituals seems ultimately to indicate not only society’s power to confer sacred character on the music of Wagner, a cornercupboard, or even a glass of orangeade, but, by the same logic, the basic emptiness of all apparently sacred objects and rituals, their status as hollow vessels into which we pour values that we create elsewhere. Proust suggests that the true sacred reveals itself mostly in moments of profanation, when the border between the sacred and the profane is breached, as in the signal episode of Mlle. Vinteuil’s encouraging her lover to “profane” the photograph of her dead father by spitting on it.83 The Baron de Charlus will entertain prurient fantasies of profanation, such as his desire to see Bloch thrash his own mother or to witness a circumcision, or his excitement at Morel’s plan to marry, deflower, and then abandon a young woman. The narrator comments on “this sort of black mass in which [Charlus] took pleasure in defiling the most sacred things” and alludes to the importance in psycho-sexual life of “the profaned mother.”84 Proust shares his concern with the border between the sacred and the profane, like his interest in the power of inanimate objects, with Durkheim. Durkheim stresses the border between the sacred and the profane as the crucial factor in the definition of religion. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim attempts to formulate the most basic possible definition of religion. In contrast to James, for whom belief in the supernatural (the “unseen order”) is the hallmark of religion, for Durkheim the concept of the supernatural is, like the invention of gods, a relatively late development in religious experience. Thus he defines religion in its simplest form as follows: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”85 Durkheim takes the division between the sacred and the profane to be the most fundamental form of religion. He emphasizes that the essence of the totem is its sacred character: “[While] the totem is a collective label,” writes Durkheim, “it also has a religious character. In fact, things are classified as sacred and profane by reference to the totem. It is the very archetype of sacred things” (Elementary

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Forms, 118). Durkheim writes of the “abyss” (a term also in Proust) that “separates the sacred world from the profane one” (58). He quickly adds, however, that such a belief, in order to constitute a religion, must be shared by the members of a church. It is in this respect that religion differs crucially from magic (not, as Frazer claimed, the absence of gods in magic).86 Magical practices do not depend on a community of belief; indeed, typically they are practiced by individuals or subgroups in resistance to a dominant culture. Magic, Durkheim writes, “takes a kind of professional pleasure in profaning holy things, inverting religious ceremonies in its rites”; his main example of this is the black mass (Elementary Forms, 40). In short, while Durkheim attempts to define religion as something even more basic than William James’s “unseen order,” he still finds it necessary to distinguish religion from something even more primitive, namely magic. One reason for this distinction between religion and magic is that for Durkheim, the sacred derives its power from the social, whereas the profane is individual. He emphasizes religious participation in communal rituals over private ones because, as he writes, “First and foremost, the rites are means by which the social group reaffirms itself periodically” (Elementary Forms, 390). Throughout his novel, Proust emphasizes the role of sacred rituals in uniting communities, but it is in magic that he, in contrast to Durkheim, seems to find the potential for more genuine kinds of transcendent experience. Proust seems at once more reverent and more skeptical than Durkheim. His narrator approaches each new social situation expecting confirmation of his belief in its sacred character, but he is perpetually disappointed, finding no more in these rites than the mundane experience onto which the narrator’s imagination, taking cues from the social imaginary, has projected the aura of the sacred, as the stained-glass windows of Saint-Hilaire project their light onto the paving stones below, or as the magic lantern in the young narrator’s bedroom once projected fantastic scenes upon the walls. The social creates the sacred; does this mean, as the narrator comes to fear, that the sacred is no more than the social? Proust’s reverent tone, in short, is in perpetual counterpoint with an astonishing depth of skepticism, a play of belief and doubt that reproduces the loss of balance familiar to moderns in a changing spiritual landscape. Nevertheless, certain episodes do seem to affirm the persistence of a genuine form of the sacred, even if they do so only by representing its opposite. For by showing the defilement of the sacred, the scenes of profanation in the novel paradoxically demonstrate its existence. The

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central scene of this kind occurs in the narrator’s childhood, when he watches Mlle. Vinteuil as she encourages her lover to spit on a photograph of her dead father, a piano teacher who turns out to have been the composer of those works so revered by the narrator and the members of the Verdurin salon.87 A widower, Vinteuil had abandoned many of his musical compositions at the manuscript stage in order to raise his young daughter – whose affair with the woman beside her has hastened (says the narrator’s mother) his death. Now the two young women enact their resentment in a kind of black mass: they perform “ritual profanations” over the photograph, exchanging vicious comments about the dead man “in words which were clearly a liturgical response.”88 The friend calls Vinteuil an “ugly old monkey”; the daughter dares her to spit on the portrait. What strikes the narrator, however, is that he is not witnessing real evil, but evil acted out as if on the stage “for melodramatic effect.”89 It is only because Mlle. Vinteuil has in fact “practised the cult” of “virtue, respect for the dead, filial affection,” that she can take “impious delight in profaning them.”90 Even her friend, who seems to encourage her sadism, reveals her character most fully when she gives Mlle. Vinteuil a chaste, maternal kiss on the forehead, thus attempting the utmost cruelty “by robbing M. Vinteuil, as though they were actually rifling his tomb, of the rights of fatherhood.”91 In short, this episode, though it describes an act of profanation, does not show real evil. Rather, the attempt at profanation demonstrates only that Mlle. Vinteuil, and even her lover, have something to profane; they have a higher conception of the sacred than almost anyone else in the novel, certainly higher than that of the Verdurin or Guermantes salons, who go through their rituals with little sense of true devotion. The scene at the Vinteuil house illustrates the close bond between profanation and worship. Mlle. Vinteuil’s lover reveals herself, many years later, as the most devoted of Vinteuil’s followers; only she is capable of deciphering his musical notations and “establishing the correct readings of those illegible hieroglyphs,” his last works.92 It turns out that she too venerates her lover’s father. Proust notes that the daughter’s “adoration of her father was the very condition of [her] sacrilege.”93 Furthermore, it is the love between the women, which has since transformed from the “morbidly carnal” into “pure and lofty friendship,” that has provided the impetus for the lover’s veneration for Vinteuil, and thus the cause of the “immortal and compensatory glory” that she earns him by deciphering and publishing his last works.94 The narrator concludes by suggesting that the lesbian relationship, which had once seemed to him such a profanation, has in fact a sacramental quality: “Relations which are not sanctioned by the law

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establish bonds of kinship as manifold, as complex, and even more solid than those which spring from marriage.”95 The true presence of the sacred in Proust, it seems, is not in the grand rituals of salon life, but rather in more intimate relations such as those of Mlle. Vinteuil and her friend – relations that give every appearance of being profane. Further, a crucial factor in the story of the Vinteuils is the lover’s role in resurrecting the apparently lost works of the father, for the truly sacred relations that Proust identifies, and that salons of the Verdurin type do their best to avoid, are our relations with the dead. What dominates these relations is not religion in Durkheim’s sense, the cult and its rituals, but rather the more private, less regulated realm of magic. And for Proust, art is closer to magic than to religion. By these lights, Proust considered his own version of the Durkheimian analysis of the sacred, but then rejected it for a more optimistic conclusion. His novel suggests that although the apparently sacred dimension in the rituals of culture reflects no more than the effects of social force, this false front does not invalidate the reality of the sacred. proust’s animism In his analysis of these social rituals, Proust does not, in fact, make use of the language of totemism (although he does use the related term “taboo”). More often he refers to “fetishism,” a term crucial to Marx and Freud and also to the early anthropology of religion, where it referred to the tendency of humans in certain “primitive” religions to worship their own creations as gods, a more individualized version of Durkheim’s totemism. Proust writes, for example, of the “fetishistic attachment” to “old things” that survives the loss of belief, “as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause – the death of the gods.”96 Samuel Beckett took up the term and identified the moments bienheureux as fetishes; Beckett’s use of the term, however, is misleading.97 Proust’s analysis of social ritual does suggest that social totems are no more than fetishes, but the moments bienheureux give Proust access to a different kind of religious experience, one in which the gods have not yet died and in which re-animation is still possible. The religious system on which Proust relies to describe such experiences is not totemism nor fetishism, but rather animism. According to theorists of animism, notably E. B. Tylor, the coiner of the term, the real origin of religious belief is belief in souls, and the ur-cult is the cult of the souls of the dead. When he imagines his memories as akin to the souls of the dead trapped in an inferior living being, Proust is drawing on animism. His

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references to animism allow him at once to maintain that certain objects connect us with memories of the dead and to recognize the psychological dimension of our tendency to view those objects as sacred. Durkheim relates Tylor’s theory that the idea of the soul originates in “the poorly understood spectacle of the double life that [man] normally leads, on the one hand while awake, on the other while asleep.”98 It is precisely this liminal territory between waking and sleep that Proust has staked out as one of his central areas of investigation; indeed, it is while describing the sensations of waking from sleep, on the novel’s first page, that he introduces the concept of metempsychosis. Over the course of the novel, Proust continually returns to the theme of the “transmigration of souls,” as for example when he recalls his deep but troubling sleep after a night of drinking and carousing as a young man: [I was] plunged into that deep slumber in which vistas are opened to us of a return to childhood, the recapture of past years, and forgotten feelings [“sentiments perdus”], of disincarnation, the transmigration of souls, the evoking of the dead, the illusions of madness, retrogression towards the most elementary of the natural kingdoms (for … we are ourselves animals [in our dreams]…), all those mysteries which we imagine ourselves not to know and into which we are in reality initiated almost every night, as into the other great mystery of extinction and resurrection.99

Here, as in the opening pages of the novel, sleep is the royal road to the most primitive states of existence for humans and animals alike, and also to the transcendence, through resurrection, of the limitations incumbent in bodily existence, trapped as the body is at a point in space and time. Proust’s theories of “disincarnation” never suggest that the soul can separate from the body without alteration; rather, during sleep the soul loses not only its connection to the body, but also that portion of its identity associated with civilized waking life, becoming something more animal. In his extension of this metaphor of sleep as metempsychosis, waking is the resurrection of the self. Similarly, the narrator describes falling out of love as like the death of an old self and the emergence of a new self, a form of continual extinction and rebirth. Proust also invokes a variety of other forms of metempsychosis, generally in order to speak of the influence of the dead on the minds of the living, as when the soul of his dead aunt Léonie seems to “transmigrate” into the narrator, who observes: “When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation.”100 Theories of

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reincarnation, and of the soul’s embodiment in objects, suggest for Proust the ways that our lives take on impressions from objects from the world of the past, as well as from those who are dead or no longer present to us. Significantly, when discussing these themes of resurrection Proust does not invoke the register of mythology and organized religion that he uses for salons and social rituals, but rather metaphors from primitive religion and especially magic. Such references are of course frequently ironic, as when the narrator comments near the end of the novel that Legrandin, though he resembles an Egyptian god, makes remarks “as trivial as those uttered by the spirits of the dead when we summon them to our presence.”101 Unlike such contemporaries as W. B. Yeats, Proust seems to have had little genuine belief in the powers of rituals, spells, and mediums. For Proust, the point of this magic is to represent the enchantment that the human mind casts over the world – an enchantment that human reason does not fully comprehend, but that provides profound indices to the workings of the inner self. Throughout the novel, Proust invokes magic and primitive religion to describe his own intimate relations and certain social spheres. These references differ from the references to organized religion, ritual, and cults in that they seldom conclude with the same kind of irony and disillusionment that wash through his descriptions of the Swann family and the salons of Verdurin and Guermantes.102 Proust tends to preserve magical analogies for those features of human experience that he truly does find mysterious and difficult to explain. To be sure, at one point he confesses that “the vagueness of such states” as involuntary memory may signify not “their profundity” but “our not having yet learned to analyse them.”103 Nevertheless, given the absence of any method of analysis that will demystify them, the only form of explanation that Proust can find for them is magical. It is as if, despite his talent as an anthropologist of social rites, when it comes to certain kinds of experiences involving magic and the dead, he prefers to side with the primitives. Durkheim quotes approvingly the remark of the anthropologist Andrew Lang to the effect that “for primitive minds, names and the things designated by these names are joined in a mystic and transcendental relationship.”104 In Proust’s presentation, the narrator shares this feature of the primitive mind, the inability to disentangle things or places from their names. If the cathedral (and through it, the Bible) provides one model for Proust’s work, another model is The Thousand and One Nights. When the narrator discovers the inspiration for his book after stumbling on some paving stones outside the Guermantes palace, he compares himself to a character such as Aladdin, who “unwittingly accomplishes the very rite

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which can cause to appear, visible to him alone, a docile genie ready to convey him to a great distance.”105 Echoing Balzac, the narrator later imagines his book as the Thousand and One Nights “of another age.”106 Genies and fairies seem to float through Proust’s novel, like the family genie that ensures that the Guermantes do nothing to break the social codes into which they are born, or like Mme. de Villeparisis, an aunt of the Guermantes, who seems to the narrator to be “the most powerful of fairies” because of her power to improve his social standing at Balbec.107 The introduction to an important new acquaintance feels like a “sacramental moment, as when in a fairy tale the magician commands a person suddenly to become someone else.”108 After giving some furniture inherited from his aunt to the madam of a brothel, he feels guilty about seeing the furniture in its new surroundings: “Had I caused a dead woman to be raped, I would not have suffered such remorse … [The furniture] seemed to me to be alive and to be appealing to me, like those apparently inanimate objects in a Persian fairy-tale, in which imprisoned human souls are undergoing martyrdom and pleading for deliverance.”109 Throughout the novel, objects seem endowed with subjectivity, like the clock in the narrator’s room at Balbec that seems to pass judgment upon him or the household objects after Albertine’s death: “Divided into a number of little household gods, she dwelt for a long time in the flame of the candle, the doorknob, the back of a chair.”110 Although these are divinities, they are more specifically household gods, more closely tied to primitive and folk religion than the Olympians who represent the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Even as a teenager, in a passage that strikingly prefigures the Recherche, Proust noted his own tendency to sacralize the profane: “Everyday things, like the countryside – I have consecrated them. I have clothed them with my soul and with private and splendid images.”111 In contrast with the elaborate social rituals and orthodoxies of the salons, Proust’s magical encounters are private, quotidian, familiar. Indeed, what distinguishes Proust’s use of magical imagery from his references to organized religion is precisely, as Durkheim might have predicted, the absence of a “church,” such as the faithful or the Guermantes set, to observe the magical rites. These rites belong to the narrator alone. Yet their concern with resurrecting the dead means these rites are not quite solitary either. Proust’s novel is full of death: its most moving passages include the deaths of his grandmother and the writer Bergotte, and the narrator’s discovery of his vocation takes important influences from the “off-stage” deaths of Swann, Albertine, Saniette, and the Princesse Sherbatoff. Even the lesson that his grandmother’s death teaches the narrator, “Each of us is indeed alone,”

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pushes him paradoxically towards connection through his vocation, for it is the attempt to overcome this loneliness through contact with the dead that gives rise to his writing.112 Many of Proust’s references to immortality, like the repeated comparisons of awakening to reincarnation, are strictly metaphorical. Yet the narrator also contemplates the immortality of the soul in literal terms. When his grandmother falls ill, he tells her, perhaps disingenuously, that “according to the latest scientific discoveries, the materialist position appeared to be crumbling, and what was again most likely was the immortality of souls and their future reunion.”113 Many of his further comments on the afterlife seem once again to return to the realm of metaphor, as when he writes that “the reality of other people survives their death for only a short time for us, and after a few years they are like those gods of obsolete religions whom one offends without fear because one has ceased to believe in their existence.”114 Here, as in other references to obsolete gods, Proust emphasizes the illusory nature of the power that the dead may seem to have over the living; still, much of the novel is invested in describing the ways that the power of the dead can be understood as real. Proust also refers frequently to the power of the living over the dead. The narrator’s conception of his own task as “deciphering” the “inner book of unknown signs” within him, a project that echoes the task of Mlle. Vinteuil’s lover to decipher Vinteuil’s last works, suggests that even as he penetrates his innermost self, part of what he seeks to uncover there are traces of the dead.115 Proust constantly represents the pursuit of art as a moral duty; this conception of art is present in the narrator’s most extensive comments in defense of an afterlife, which come after the death of Bergotte. Echoing the madeleine passage, he asks, regarding Bergotte, “Dead forever?” (“Mort à jamais?”). He dismisses the conventional reasons for believing in the afterlife, but mentions a few of his own reasons for belief: Certainly, experiments in spiritualism offer us no more proof than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as if we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be forever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer.116

The narrator then speculates that we must come to this world from an entirely different one, “a world based on kindness, scrupulousness,

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self-sacrifice” and that we may perhaps return to that other world after death: “So that the idea that Bergotte was not dead forever is by no means improbable.”117 Like Wordsworth in the Intimations ode, Proust echoes the Platonic myth that we arrive in this world bearing memories of another, a suggestion that has been present from the novel’s first page, where he imagines the “resurrection” from sleep in terms of reincarnation. This is one of those moments in the novel when Proust seems to abandon irony, except perhaps the gentlest kind of romantic irony, and to state, albeit in tentative terms, a hope for some rationale for immortality. It is a hope linked to art, but here art appears not as the means for achieving immortality or lasting fame, but as part of the moral universe that stretches mystical links between the living and the dead. We enter this world not in utter nakedness, nor yet trailing clouds of glory, but rather “carrying a burden of obligations.” These obligations to others, and to art, have little to do with fears of punishment or hopes for reward after death. Indeed, Proust justifies belief in an afterlife only (like Wordsworth) by reference to the sensation of a prior life. This is surely an image not only of the responsibilities we have to those in this world, but also of our obligations to the dead. The assertion of belief in immortality remains tentative, of course. It is a form of the “as if” (here, “comme si”) that appears in the brothers James: “everything is arranged in this life as if we entered it carrying a burden of obligations.” Like Kant, Proust hypothesizes the immortality of the soul as closely linked to the possibility of moral action; but Proust’s concern is with the soul’s relationship not to a possible future life but to the past. After the death of Albertine, the narrator returns to the problem of the immortality of the soul, this time in terms that echo Henry James more precisely: My imagination sought for her in the sky, at nightfall when we had been wont to gaze at it while still together; beyond that moonlight which she loved, I tried to raise up to her my tenderness so that it might be a consolation to her for being no longer alive, and this love for a being who was now so remote was like a religion; my thoughts rose towards her like prayers. Desire is powerful indeed; it engenders belief [“Le désir est bien fort, il engendre la croyance”]; I had believed that Albertine would not leave me because I desired that she should not do so. Because I desired it, I began to believe that she was not dead; I took to reading books about table-turning; I began to believe in the possibility of the immortality of the soul. But that did not suffice me. I required that, after my own death, I should find her again in her body, as though eternity were like life.118

Later, the narrator will repeat that “It is desire that engenders belief.”119 Although Proust had almost certainly not read Henry James’s “Is There a

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Life After Death?,” the passage echoes James’s thought that his belief in the afterlife “isn’t really a question of belief…it is on the other hand a question of desire,” and that “if one acts from desire quite as one would from belief, it signifies little what name one gives to one’s motives.”120 Both novelists note the role of desire in shaping belief, and they do so in the context of belief in an afterlife, finding evidence for the immortality of the soul in the strength of apparently bodily desires. In many respects, Proust seems to embody modernist solipsism. He insists, quite against the spirit of Henry James, that “we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.”121 His novel poses above all the problem of other minds, and he cannot find a resolution to it in anything like James’s shared fictions, which allow isolated minds to come together. Even in his claims about desire and belief, he suggests that the beliefs created by desire must be mistaken. Yet his solution does ultimately resemble that of Henry James. He finds evidence for the immortality of the soul and the reality of other minds – the seeds of a sacred community – not (like Durkheim) in social ritual, not even (like William James) in belief, but, like Henry James, in the magical power of desire, which binds us to others and to the dead regardless of whether we would choose it so.

chapter 5

Franz Kafka and the hermeneutics of suspicion

Near the beginning of The Castle (Das Schloß [written in 1922; published in 1926]), in a passage that, uncharacteristically for Kafka, might not seem out of place in Proust’s novel, the surveyor K. compares the church tower of his old hometown with a tower of the Castle in the village where he seeks work. His sympathies go emphatically to the church tower, which, “tapering decisively, without hesitation, straightaway toward the top, capped by a wide roof with red tiles, was an earthly building [“ein irdisches Gebäude”] – what else can we build? – but with a higher goal than the low jumble of houses and with a clearer expression than that of the dull workaday.” By comparison, the battlements of the Castle tower seem to him “irregular, broken, fumbling, as if designed by the trembling or careless hand of a child.”1 Here the problem of secularization is a question less concerning historical process than the development of the individual, where as adults we can never recover the sanctity that seemed to inhere naturally in the churches of our youth. K. idealizes the church of his own childhood, but finds the Castle tower, source of authority in the village, childish. Yet the very authority of the Castle relies on a mystery and inaccessibility that its employees present as the aura of the sacred; to the people of the village, the Castle is sacred, and K.’s attempts to question it in a secular vein are met with incomprehension. Shortly after this passage, K. pauses to remember the great triumph of his own childhood: “His homeland kept surfacing, filling him with memories. On its main square, too, was a church, partly surrounded by an old cemetery, and it, in turn, by a high wall.” K. recalls his friends’ efforts to climb this wall: “It wasn’t curiosity that drove them, the cemetery no longer held any secrets for them, they had often enough gone in through the small wrought-iron gate and had merely wanted to conquer the smooth high wall.” The taboo, then, lies not in entering the presence of the dead, but in doing so by unauthorized means. One morning K. succeeds in climbing the wall, carrying a small flag to mark his achievement. “Pebbles were still 111

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trickling down, but he was on top. He rammed in the flag, the wind filled out the cloth, he looked down, all around, even over his shoulder at the crosses sinking into the earth; there was nobody here, now, bigger than he.” Although the teacher shouts him down and he skins his knee on the dismount, the memory of this childhood accomplishment is able to give K. warmth and comfort even on a snowy night in the hostile village.2 This passage seems to be, in part, a parable of secularization. Unaided, and in that sense on his way to manhood, the child climbs to the top of the wall that divides the sacred from the secular, there planting that symbol of secular nationalism, a flag, high above the sinking crosses of the cemetery. Yet the passage also suggests the limits of secular reason. K. and his friends have no desire to knock down the wall, to pierce the boundary between the secular and the sacred, and their motives give little room to curiosity, that “desire to understand” that Aristotle considered the essence of the human mind.3 The flag rises while the crosses sink: if the symbolism of this seems initially straightforward, it is the schoolteacher, surely a representative of the training of secular reason, who chases K. down from the wall, and after the boy’s adventure the wall is still intact, holding in the sacred space inhabited by the dead and presumably holding out the secular space of the homeland (which, of course, the retrospective light of K.’s memories seems to have given its own sacred character). For Proust’s narrator, the line that divided the church of St.-Hilaire from the fuchsias that grew on its walls could never be crossed. K. manages to conquer a similar dividing line, but then he too fails to cross over, or rejects that crossing as a worthwhile goal. For the moment of his triumph, K. is the biggest person in town, perhaps a symbol of sovereign reason capable of transcending earthly limitations and even conquering death; but in the next moment the great dream of the individual’s triumph over the institution of the sacred turns out to be just another myth, the man of sovereign reason thinking he can take the place of God, but finding himself instead with only a skinned knee and the fantasy, rather than the reality, of omnipotence. Although the memory seems initially to promise a parable about the triumph of reason, instead it renders that triumph as merely an alternative form of myth. For Kafka, sacred and secular authority are always intertwined: although every community he imagines is thoroughly bureaucratized in its operation, it relies for its authority on the aura of the sacred, which Max Weber would call charisma. Kafka’s protagonists often imagine themselves to be voices of secular reason, capable of debunking myth, but typically they turn out to be only inadequate rival myth-makers. Franz Rosenzweig, who collaborated with Martin Buber on a modern German translation of the Torah, wrote the year after the publication of The

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Castle: “The people who wrote the Bible seem to have thought of God much the way Kafka did. I have never read a book that reminded me so much of the Bible as his novel The Castle, and that is why reading it certainly cannot be called a pleasure.”4 Given the absence of any discussion of or reference to God in the novel, Rosenzweig’s comment is somewhat surprising. Perhaps he was thinking about the distance and inscrutability of the Biblical God, which resembles the inscrutability of the Castle and its officials; probably he was also thinking about Kafka’s style. One source of debate in Kafka criticism has been whether to read The Castle as spiritual allegory or as a fundamentally secular work about modern bureaucracy.5 I shall argue that The Castle, like many of Kafka’s other works, largely concerns the border between the sacred and the secular. At key moments it leaves open the question of whether the authority of the Castle derives from sacred or from secular sources. This is a central example of a broader interpretive problem in the novel. From the novel’s first pages it is unclear, for example, whether K. arrives at the village deliberately or by mistake and whether or not he has in fact been summoned there.6 The novel places us in the position of K., forced to make interpretive judgments, but (also like K.) given insufficient information to make those judgments. The passage in which K. climbs the wall of the churchyard itself resists definitive interpretation. Yet it seems almost a parable of that movement in the history of interpretation itself that Paul Ricoeur would later analyze as the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Ricoeur described Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud as the three “masters of suspicion” who shaped the modern attitude toward interpretation. These three had in common, writes Ricoeur, “the decision to look upon the whole of consciousness primarily as ‘false’ consciousness.”7 Each of these masters of suspicion was also a famous antagonist of religion. Although Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud applied their hermeneutics of suspicion to various aspects of contemporary life, including ideology, morality, art, literature, sexuality, and power-relations, at the core of their projects lay the suspicion of religion as myth – whether understood as an opiate that prevents the masses from awakening to their condition, a systematic form of ressentiment that subjects the great individual to a herd morality, or a comforting illusion that allows civilized people to ignore their own repressed instincts. In rejecting the operations of such myth, however, each of the masters of suspicion created his own alternative mythology, risking the accusation of having slain the Minotaur only to become himself the monster at the center of the labyrinth. Like K. in the memory of the church wall, they manage to conquer the border between sacred and secular but then find that all they

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can do once they have conquered it is to establish a new form of sacred myth.8 Historically, hermeneutics, a term possibly derived from the name of the messenger god Hermes, concerned itself primarily with the interpretation or exegesis of Scripture. After the liberal Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher developed a systematic philosophical hermeneutics in the early nineteenth century, hermeneutics also played an important part in legal interpretation, and soon after in the developing field of literary criticism. Given the centrality of interpretation to the German philosophical tradition as well as the Jewish religious tradition, it is not surprising that all three masters of suspicion were German, two of them secular Jews. Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud all borrowed interpretive techniques developed in philosophical and literary hermeneutics and applied them to the culture as a whole, while at the same time making critical use of them against the very religious discourses from which hermeneutics had arisen. The modern problematic of interpretation seems closely bound up with the inheritance of monotheism. Hermeneutics developed in large part as an effort to understand Scripture as the word of God, whether in the Jewish tradition of the Talmud or the Christian tradition of typological and allegorical interpretation. The hermeneutics of suspicion seem to be an outgrowth of monotheistic thought, in which the apparent variety and heterogeneity of the world are understood to have a unified, underlying meaning, known only to God (or, in modern variants, to the skilled interpreter). Prominent aspects of Kafka’s style, such as the dreamlike quality of his works, or his persistent focus on acts of interpretation, (for instance, in the discussion of “Before the Law” [first published on its own in 1916] in The Trial [1925]), naturally suggest the theories of Freud, Kafka’s near contemporary. Particularly in its innumerable father–son conflicts and its tendency toward spiritual autobiography, Kafka’s writing presents obvious thematic material for Freudian analysis; it also demonstrates a fascination with the process of interpretation that has psychoanalytic as well as spiritual connotations. The analytical work of interpretation is at the center of the kind of reading that Freud made into a nascent science and critical aesthetic. Dreams, memories, jokes, slips of the tongue, religious beliefs: Freud subjects them all to interpretation and analysis in order to expose the unconscious underpinnings of mental life. “Psychoanalysis is justly suspicious,” wrote Freud, who made a point of taking nothing the patient said at face value. “One of its rules is that whatever interrupts the progress of analytic work is a resistance.”9 As Freud’s critics have pointed out, however, he used this principle to assert that anyone who disagreed with his interpretation of

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their dreams or symptoms was merely resisting the unconscious knowledge that Freud was right. While Freud claimed to have found empirical evidence of the unconscious in his clinical work, by its nature the unconscious (like Kant’s transcendental ideas) could be inferred only from indirect evidence that was highly susceptible to interpretation; Freud’s vaunted empiricism relied indeed on “evidence of things unseen.”10 If Freud was the supreme modern practitioner of a hermeneutics of suspicion, however, Kafka’s fiction demonstrates a consistent suspicion of hermeneutics. Kafka’s texts continually frustrate attempts at interpretation: they seem to welcome exegesis in the sense of an unfolding explanation while rebuffing attempts to assign a single meaning. As Harold Bloom has observed, “what most needs and demands interpretation in Kafka’s writing is its perversely deliberate evasion of interpretation.”11 In his stories and novels, disputes about meaning usually remain unresolved. He also seems to set traps for his interpreters. His recourse to multiple meanings challenges attempts to find a single latent truth but leaves open the (never confirmed) possibility of a higher revelation standing behind his texts. It is this quality that gives many of Kafka’s texts the air of Scriptural authority; it is most evident in his parable “Before the Law” and the debates over its meaning – clearly inspired by Talmudic commentary on the Hebrew Bible or Torah (“Law”) – that Josef K. has with the prison chaplain. Kafka scholars have continued the unending exegesis of this text very much in the spirit of the prison chaplain himself, who informs K. that “The commentators tell us: the correct understanding of a matter and misunderstanding the matter are not mutually exclusive.”12 Kafka’s friend and biographer, Max Brod, set the tone for early Kafka criticism by focusing on the theme of religious quest in Kafka. Willa and Edwin Muir followed this interpretation in their influential English translations, and Edwin Muir explicitly compared The Castle to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. This perspective has dominated much of the understanding of Kafka, whether in the relatively abstract terms of existentialism or more concretely in reference to Judaism.13 Post-structuralist critics have often verged on both types of religious interpretation in their emphasis on the undecidability of meaning in Kafka or the absence of a transcendental signifier.14 More recent scholars and readers, however, have rightly emphasized Kafka’s skepticism and his tendency to undercut apparent spiritual meanings of his work. The focus of recent critical studies has shifted to Kafka’s relations with the German, Jewish, and Czech communities, his interest in features of modern life such as photography and the cinema, the complexities of his sex life, and his attitudes to gender and race.15 As David

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Damrosch has noted, “portraits of the artist as a culture-transcending figure are giving way to portraits of the artist as a Prague Jew.”16 Valuable as these recent studies are, they tend to separate the local, political questions of Kafka’s day from the universal questions that certainly motivated his work. By comparing Kafka’s and Freud’s writings on religion and interpretation, we can see how closely their perspectives respond to their historical situation as first-generation assimilated, urban Jews in the Habsburg Empire. For both men, the act of interpretation turns out to be central to their conception of community. Both men present extremely bleak visions of community while at the same time expressing remorse or nostalgia about their own separation from the Jewish community. In response to this perceived lack, Freud creates his own interpretive community – the psychoanalytic movement – dedicated to a form of secular reason that claims to be capable of dispelling the mystique of the sacred, but that critics view as introducing its own alternative mystique.17 Kafka’s positive vision of community (admittedly seldom in evidence) relies on the function of the art work as a modern form of sacred text. In his later stories, art becomes not just a text but a form of sacred rite that holds together the community even as the community often disavows it. If the artists in these late stories of Kafka’s often resemble scapegoats, Freud’s vision of community in his final work is even darker than Kafka’s. Both men are responding to the plight of the secular Jew in the inhospitable environment of the Habsburg lands where the alternative of a universalistic faith in the nation-state, which presented itself to Durkheim and Proust, is unavailable. Out of this very local historical position, the two thinkers developed similar understandings of interpretation that shape our conception not only of modern literature, but also of modern culture more broadly. As W. H. Auden wrote, Freud became “a whole climate of opinion/under whom we conduct our different lives.”18 Kafka, too, created an enduring modern myth. Kafka’s attitude to the new forms of interpretation, however, differed radically from Freud’s. Whereas Freud trusts in the force of secular reason to arrive at a definitive interpretation of the mind and of culture, Kafka emphasizes, as in the episode in The Castle, the tenuous nature of that dividing line between the sacred and the secular where K. attempts to plant his flag. He doubts the ability of secular reason to dissipate the mystique of sacred authority, and he tries to appropriate this authority to art. Kafka thus lends his own texts an air of religious authority while resisting any particular religious interpretation; they are both bound to his particular culture as a Jew (and notably to the Hebrew Bible) and universal in their aspiration to the status of myth and their exclusion of almost all direct reference to

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Judaism and the Jewish people. The resulting frustration of the interpretive urge bespeaks a modern spiritual condition in which no religious authority can provide ultimate guidance, but in which the modern seeker continues to demand ultimate meaning; if his stories sometimes seem to present the material for interpretive communities, more often they imagine the interpreter as a community of just one individual, struggling to maintain a conception of the sacred in the face of a hostile and bureaucratic society that is anything but a community in the positive sense.19 kafka and freud, fathers and sons Despite a broadly shared sense of Kafka’s affinities with Freud, there have been relatively few comparative studies of the two figures.20 Intuitively, critics see similarities between the two, but they often subordinate Kafka to Freud by finding in Kafka’s writings demonstrations of Freud’s concepts. It is more fruitful, I think, to see the two as responding to similar circumstances in rather different ways. Freud generally embraced Jewish assimilation and especially secularization, and praised the role of secular reason in demystifying sacred texts; he saw the essence of Judaism as connected with monotheism and universal ethical values, which he embraced while yet trying to divorce these values from their religious roots. Kafka had a much more ambivalent attitude toward assimilation and secularization, and sought ways to maintain the sense of the sacred and what he identified as a religious ideal of community even in the context of a modern world that he recognized as hostile to both. For him, Judaism represented community and mystical experience, from both of which he felt himself exiled. Freud was born in 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia; his father, Jakob Freud, failed as a textile merchant, in part, perhaps, because of anti-Semitic boycotts. Kafka’s father, Hermann Kafka, himself the son of a kosher butcher, was born in Wossek, Bohemia, about two hundred miles west of Freiberg, in 1852. At the time, Freiberg and Wossek were small towns in the Habsburg Empire; today, they are known respectively as Příbor and Osek in the Czech Republic. It was the first decade after the accession of the Emperor Franz Josef, who, in the wake of the 1848 revolution, declared the emancipation of the Jews through a series of measures culminating in the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. The Freuds and the Kafkas both participated in the subsequent migration of Jews out of the countryside into the larger cities of the Empire, where they had excellent educational and career opportunities, but also confronted growing hostility from the gentile population. Before the middle of the century, both families seem

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to have spoken Yiddish at home and Czech in their dealings with gentile neighbors. Freud’s family moved to Vienna in 1860. After serving in the army, Hermann Kafka arrived in Prague in 1882, soon taking a wife from a relatively prosperous family; their son, Franz Kafka, was born in 1883. Both Hermann Kafka and Jakob Freud were wool merchants, the older Kafka a successful self-made man and the older Freud relatively unsuccessful. In their adoptive cities, both the Freuds and the Kafkas educated their children in German schools and became increasingly assimilated. Sigmund Freud and Franz Kafka grew up in the crowded Jewish centers of their respective ancient cities, in small apartments that contained large families. They never met, although they had some mutual acquaintances. As it happens, both men came under the treatment of the surgeon Marcus Hajek for the illnesses that would eventually kill them: Freud in 1923 for cancer of the jaw, Kafka just before his death in 1924 of tuberculosis.21 Kafka was raised in an essentially secular household, with only minimal religious education. Hermann Kafka attended synagogue about four times a year; his son later wrote to his fiancée, Felice Bauer: “I still remember how as a boy I almost suffocated from the boredom and pointlessness of the hours in the synagogue; these were the rehearsals staged by hell for my later office life.”22 Kafka underwent his bar mitzvah in the spirit of an oral exam. He later made acerbic observations about assimilation and secularization, commenting that most Jews attended synagogue only for weddings and funerals: “these two occasions have drawn grimly close to each other, and one can virtually see the reproachful glances of a withering faith.”23 Only in his late twenties, partly under the influence of Martin Buber, did he develop an interest in the Talmud, and in more mystical strands of Judaism, including the Kabbalah.24 The Freuds were non-observant Reform Jews. Sigmund Freud never refers to his own bar mitzvah; he probably did have one, but he attended synagogue very seldom indeed.25 In his youth, Freud’s family celebrated Purim and Passover; as an adult, Freud described himself as a “godless Jew,” and his family celebrated Christmas and Easter.26 Freud’s conception of Judaism, revolving around the Ten Commandments, was a form of the Jewish Enlightenment notion of “ethical monotheism.” His conception of religious experience was that it must resemble an “oceanic” feeling of unity between the self and the world, but he confessed, or rather boasted, “I cannot find this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself.”27 If he had some sympathy with Judaism as universalistic ethics, he had very little indeed for the oceanic feeling, which he saw as a vestige of childhood fantasy. Freud and Kafka

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both blamed their fathers for not having given them a more adequate Jewish education, and yet despite their interest in adulthood in various forms of mystical Jewish thought, neither man showed any interest in returning to traditional Jewish practice, nor, for that matter, any inclination to believe in God.28 Although both men grew up during the high tide of Austrian liberalism in the last few decades of the nineteenth century, their periods of major productivity corresponded with the rise of new anti-Semitic political movements.29 Still a teenager during the upswing of anti-Semitism in the 1890s, Kafka seems to have become conscious sooner than Freud of the tenuous position of the Jews, a topic that troubled him near the end of his life, when anti-Semitism revived throughout the former Habsburg lands. He wrote in 1920 of the hopelessness of the Jewish situation in Prague: “The heroism which consists of staying on in spite of it all is that of cockroaches which also can’t be exterminated from the bathroom.”30 Freud survived much longer than Kafka and had to leave Vienna suddenly in 1938, shortly after the Anschluss by which Hitler annexed Austria to Germany. Freud’s home had been raided and his daughter Anna held briefly by the Gestapo. Ultimately, four of Freud’s six sisters, and all three of Kafka’s, died in Nazi concentration camps. The difference in this respect of Freud’s and Kafka’s backgrounds from those of Durkheim and Proust is instructive. Despite the Dreyfus Affair, in general the pressure of anti-Semitism in late nineteenth-century France was much less intense than in the Habsburg lands, where the Jews had only recently achieved quite a precarious form of emancipation, and where antiSemitic riots broke out regularly. Freud’s and Kafka’s ambivalence (to use a Freudian term) about their Judaism seems much more marked than that of either Durkheim or Proust. For Proust, who was after all baptized Catholic, the Jewish inheritance belonged largely to the past, and he tends to project (another Freudian term) his own Jewish roots onto other characters in his novel. For Durkheim, assimilation was a conscious choice, the precondition and perhaps the inspiration for his sociological work. Both men were accepted in the highest circles of French society and academia. Kafka and Freud, on the other hand, only a generation away from the Czech countryside, ever conscious of the proximity to their own families of large masses of unassimilated Eastern European Jews, and estranged from the God of their Fathers, not by their own choice, but by that of their earthly fathers, looked at Judaism with a combination of nostalgia and disgust.31 They longed for contact with the Jewish people, either in their historical greatness (Freud) or in their persistent Hasidic spirituality (Kafka), but they also sought

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acceptance in the German-speaking mainstream. As we have seen, Durkheim wrote that we must choose between “God and society” as a guiding hypothesis, and by society he implied French society.32 Kafka and Freud, far more alienated from the Habsburg Empire, tended to associate community with Judaism, and certainly did not expect to be welcomed into a broader civil society as a result of rejecting God. Like Durkheim, Freud was the founder not only of a discipline, but of a movement. Durkheim’s colleague Georges Davy described Durkheim’s circle as “a little society sui generis, the clan of the Année Sociologique.”33 Analogies between psychoanalysis and religion were more pointed. The musicologist Max Graf, a participant in Freud’s Wednesday evening psychological society, founded in 1902, later wrote that “there was an atmosphere of the foundation of a religion in that room. Freud himself was its new prophet who made heretofore prevailing methods of psychological investigation appear superficial.”34 The predominantly Jewish make-up of the Viennese psychoanalytic group embarrassed Freud; this was one reason for his interest in gentile followers such as Carl Jung and Ernest Jones.35 If, as Philip Rieff has suggested, psychoanalysis was skeptical of all existing communities, Freud nonetheless eagerly promoted the psychoanalytic movement as an interpretive community of its own; the only way to become a psychoanalyst was first to undergo psychoanalysis by Freud, or by someone analyzed and trained by him – a sort of apostolic succession.36 Of all the figures studied in this book, Freud clearly had the broadest influence on the general culture; at the same time, his theories – particularly concerning religion – are held in lower regard by contemporary social scientists than those of William James, Durkheim, or Weber. While he continues to have a large following among literary critics and the increasingly fragmented psychoanalytic movement, Freud has seen his general reputation suffer greatly over the last generation as scholars have unearthed evidence of his medical malpractice, his exaggerated or fabricated accounts of his clinical success, his suppression of evidence that might challenge his theoretical claims, his indebtedness to his contemporaries for key concepts, and his manipulation of patients and colleagues within the psychoanalytic movement. Even during his lifetime, he was frequently regarded as a charlatan. Freud achieved his great fame and success, however, largely because of the satisfying mythology he crafted for modern selfunderstanding. His cultural writings on broad subjects of religion and society have tended to outlast his specific clinical insights, and Freud is now perhaps more often read as a social theorist than a scientist or medical expert.37

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Kafka certainly knew something about Freud’s theories, as we can see from his diary entry of September 23, 1912 about “The Judgment,” where he mentions “thoughts about Freud, of course.”38 The account, in that short story, of a son’s (only half-acknowledged) hatred and fear of his father, and the father’s eventual sentencing of the son to death by drowning, clearly calls forth Oedipal themes. Further psychoanalytic overtones accompany the son’s drowning, where thought almost immediately becomes deed. This magical quality of mind suggests the “omnipotence of thought” that Freud associated with dreams and childhood.39 Perhaps equally Freudian, however, is the story’s insistence on the the interpretation of its own dreamlike details, such as the content of the letters from Georg Bendemann’s friend in St. Petersburg and disturbing elements of the father’s appearance (his toothless mouth, his dirty underwear, the scar on his thigh). All these details, all this interpretation, emphasize the extent to which the story is self-conscious of being, in Freud’s phrase, “overdetermined,” that is, reflecting more than one meaning or cause. Kafka himself claimed to be unable to interpret the story, which is partly for that reason his first fully successful short work.40 Although there is no definitive evidence that Kafka had actually read Freud’s works, he did later, in 1917, befriend and read the works of one of Freud’s more distinguished disciples, Otto Gross, who himself was the victim of severe mental illness. Kafka also read other works that drew considerable influence from Freud, such as those of Hans Blüher.41 By the time he wrote the Letter to his Father in 1920, Kafka was clearly examining his own childhood through the lens of Freud’s Oedipus complex. This letter, along with the stories that Kafka wanted to collect as The Sons (“The Judgment,” “The Stoker” [1913], and The Metamorphosis), reflect not only Freudian theory, but also the social reality that produced Freud’s thought. Like Freud, Kafka belonged to the generation of assimilated Jews in the Habsburg Empire whose fathers left the countryside and strove to make their fortunes and support their families in an often hostile urban environment. Both Freud and Kafka looked on their fathers as materialistic and bourgeois, an aspect of the clash of generations that has become a familiar part of narratives of immigration and industrialization.42 Part of their disappointment with their fathers, undoubtedly, resulted from the fact that these seemingly all-powerful figures turned out to be relatively powerless in the context of the final years of Habsburg rule. In The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung [1899]), which Freud wrote during the first great wave of political anti-Semitism in Vienna, he recalled his father’s story of being out for a walk as a young man when a Christian knocked off his cap

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and shouted, “Jew! Get off the pavement.”43 When asked how he responded, Jakob Freud replied, “I went into the roadway and picked up my cap.” The young Sigmund was disappointed by what he thought was a lack of heroism on the part of his father, who otherwise appeared to him as a “big, strong man.” One of the central stories of nineteenth-century fiction, and of nineteenth-century society, concerns the son who leaves the provinces in search of his fortune in the city and who, if he succeeds, surpasses his modest roots. In a period of rapid industrialization and urbanization, many young men from the country did indeed come to the city, and the successful ones joined the middle classes. Alexander Welsh has suggested that this central story motivates much of “Freud’s wishful dream book,” The Interpretation of Dreams, a story about ambition fulfilled and the gap it opens between the generations – in other words, a sort of modernist variant on the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman.44 Carl Schorske has suggested that psychoanalysis derived in large part from a displacement of political concerns onto the psychic realm, whereby “politics could be reduced to an epiphenomenal manifestation of psychic forces,” thus allowing Freud to claim a power beyond the merely political and to overcome in fantasy his actual political helplessness.45 To the extent that recent social history did guide his thought, it is remarkable that Freud was able to fashion from the contingent circumstances of his times a mythology that seemed to many to achieve its claims of universality. In the cases of both Kafka and Freud, the social and intellectual gap that attended the sons’ university education only added to the vast cultural gap between the observant Jewish countryside and assimilated urban Jewish life. That this rift had initially been opened, in fact, not by the sons at all but by the family patriarchs – their decision to come to the city, their relative financial success, and their decision to send their sons to university – may only have increased the sense of difference between the generations. In the Letter to his Father, Kafka complained about having failed to receive a Jewish education from his father, analyzing the resulting gap between father and son as effectively as Freud ever did. In his analysis, Kafka proposed his own version of the psychoanalytic model, in which “the issue revolves not around the innocent father but around the father’s Jewishness. Most young Jews who began to write German wanted to leave Jewishness behind them, and their fathers approved of this… But with their posterior legs they were still glued to their father’s Jewishness and with their waving anterior legs they found no new ground. The ensuing despair became their inspiration.”46

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abraham and isaac Kafka’s understanding of the situation of the Jewish son finds expression in one of his few direct commentaries on the Bible. The story of Abraham and Isaac overshadows all Jewish and Christian accounts of the relations between fathers and sons. In one of Kafka’s favorite books, Fear and Trembling (1843), Søren Kierkegaard analyzes the story as an illustration of the situation of the “knight of faith,” who goes beyond the universalistic ethics of “the knight of infinite resignation,” and thus establishes his own private and particular relationship with God, one quite different from, and in some sense higher than, the universalistic demands of ethics.47 In the Biblical story, as Abraham prepares to carry out God’s command to sacrifice Isaac, taking in his hand the knife with which to slay his son, whom he has already bound and placed upon the altar, the angel of the Lord calls out and prevents him from finishing the deed. Instead, satisfied with Abraham’s faith, God provides a ram for the sacrifice in Isaac’s place. The passage (Gen. 22: 1–18), which radiates a terror and mystery of its own, was also perhaps the most iconic in the Bible for Christian typological readings, which interpreted the Hebrew Bible as prefiguring the events of the New Testament, since it was seen to prefigure God’s sacrifice of his only son. This emphasis also meant that the passage was closely associated with the broader insistence of the monotheistic tradition on interpretation. The Biblical story has inspired a plethora of modern responses, most of which touch on a central problem of ethical monotheism, namely the potential conflict between the demands made by God, whose desires may not always be what we understand as ethical, and the demands of a universalistic ethics. For those who would understand the essence of monotheism as consisting in a universally applicable ethics, notably liberal Protestants and Reform Jews, the story is especially problematic. Indeed, the great Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that Abraham should have “replied to this supposedly divine voice” that he was certain he should not kill his son but could not be certain that this apparition was really God; thus for Kant, ethics trumped monotheism.48 By contrast, for Kierkegaard, whose Fear and Trembling (subtitled “a dialectical lyric”) contains multiple competing voices, Abraham’s response to God’s command to sacrifice Isaac exemplifies the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” the operation by which faith can make demands higher than those of universal ethics (93). Kierkegaard suggests that the stakes of his critique of Kantian universalism concern themselves specifically with monotheism because, unlike the pagan Agamemnon who sacrifices his

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daughter Iphigenia, Abraham commits himself to a “private relationship with God” (88). Kierkegaard’s writings on Abraham and Isaac suggest that the demands that monotheism makes, while they generally ally themselves closely with universalistic ethics, can sometimes conflict with such ethics; he thus suggests more broadly that the mystery of faith is something greater than, and more personal than, universalistic ethics: it is more like the relationship of fathers and sons than that of free citizens to one another. God the father can demand sacrifices from his son Abraham that transcend the ethical, just as God the father will himself sacrifice his own son in order to transcend the Law. Kierkegaard’s analysis of Abraham arises, of course, out of a Protestant tradition and as a response to German Idealism (which itself is largely a Protestant phenomenon). The hermeneutic challenges of the story are perhaps even more pronounced for interpreters rooted in the Jewish Enlightenment, who must also concern themselves with another paradox of ethical monotheism: that the Jewish religion is understood at once as the particular expression of the Jews, God’s chosen people, and as the source of the universal values of the Enlightenment. The arbitrariness of God’s choice of the Jews as the chosen people underlies several modern commentaries on the story. The question, “Why are the Jews God’s chosen people?” implies the question, “Why was I born a Jew?,” which in turn has a correlate in the history of myth in the question “Why do I have these parents?” The arbitrariness of being born a Jew forms a more extreme version of the general arbitrariness of being born at all. Like Kierkegaard, the German-Jewish philologist Erich Auerbach draws on the distinction between pagan and monotheistic faiths in his analysis of the story of Abraham and Isaac, which he describes as typical of the intensive representation of psychically charged situations in the Hebrew Bible, where “it is unthinkable that an implement, a landscape through which the travelers passed, the serving-men, or the ass, should be described…they do not even admit an adjective.” Auerbach contrasts this narrative strategy with the “externalization” characteristic of Homer, who depicts a world where “men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible.” The Biblical style, as Auerbach nicely characterizes it, does not exactly refuse ocularity, but it does refuse to make clear the field of context and detail surrounding the characters and their actions in the way that Homer makes them clear: “certain parts brought into high relief, others left obscure, abruptness, suggestive influence of the unexpressed, ‘background’ quality, multiplicity of meanings and the need for interpretation, universal-historical claims, development of the concept of the historically

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becoming, and preoccupation with the problematic.” Apart perhaps from the emphasis on history, this could well be a description of Kafka’s work. Indeed, along with this fragmentary character, Kafka’s texts share with the Bible the sparse intensity that we have already seen Auerbach note. (In this respect, Kafka’s writing stands on the opposite end of the modernist spectrum from Joyce’s more expansive, Homeric style. Even Joyce’s portrayal of the stream of consciousness tends to externalize it and reveal all the depths of his characters’ minds rather than leave anything in shadow. Similarly, while Kafka and Joyce both write texts that encourage endless exegesis, Kafka’s works tend to make any interpretation seem inadequate, while Joyce’s seem to affirm the validity of multiple interpretations.)49 The story of Abraham and Isaac plays a brief, but important, role in Proust’s Recherche (and in Auerbach’s analysis of it), when, on the night of Swann’s most memorable visit to the narrator’s home, the narrator stays up past his bedtime in the hope of getting a kiss from his mother. The narrator compares his father, whom he expects to punish or even disown him, with “Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli which M. Swann had given me, telling Sarah that she must tear herself away from Isaac.”50 This image of the father-figure emphasizes the arbitrariness of paternal authority: “he paid no heed to ‘principles,’ and…for him there was no such thing as the ‘law of nations.’ ”51 As in the Bible, in Proust’s novel the son is also granted a last-minute reprieve, for the father decides to allow the mother to read to the narrator in his room. For Proust, this concession from on high marks the beginning of the narrator’s maturity, but it also represents a kind of defeat, since it entails the acknowledgment of the narrator’s “involuntary ailment,” his inability to exercise self-control, which will haunt him for the rest of the novel. For Proust, who sees the Biblical story from Isaac’s point of view, it seems to demonstrate the terrifying power of fathers and the essential lack of understanding between fathers and sons. The child’s moral life is shaped by an impulsive decision of the father’s, made out of neither a sense of justice nor of malice, but accidentally, more or less on a whim. It was from Abraham’s point of view that Kafka tended to see the story of Abraham and Isaac. In a letter that Kafka wrote in June 1921 shortly before beginning work on The Castle, he imagines alternative endings to the story (extending a technique of Kierkegaard’s from Fear and Trembling). In each of these alternatives, Kafka presents Abraham in modern terms and imagines the various ways that Abraham could misunderstand God’s call. He conjures a different sort of Abraham, willing enough to commit the sacrifice “with the promptness of a waiter,” but too busy to get around to doing it.52

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He proposes other Abrahams, without houses or sons, who could therefore not heed the angel’s call since they had no houses to put in order, no rafter in which to keep the sacrificial knife, no sons to sacrifice. The last Abraham he imagines, however, seems the most characteristic of Kafka’s imagination, “an Abraham who should come unsummoned” (“Ein Abraham, der ungerufen kommt”). He is willing to perform the sacrifice and would like to answer the summons; he has true faith in God, but fears that he, Abraham, is not the one God intended: “he is afraid that after starting out as Abraham with his son he would change on the way into Don Quixote [‘in Don Quichotte verwandeln’]” (“Abraham,” 43). In other words, he fears that he has not truly been called and that if he, the “ugly old man” tried to sacrifice his “dirty youngster” (“der schmutzige Junge”), everyone would simply laugh at him, thus “making him even older and uglier, his son even dirtier, even more unworthy of being really called” (45). Kafka goes on to compare this experience of Abraham’s to that of the worst student in class, who mistakenly thinks that his name has been called on prize day and rises from his seat only to hear “the whole class burst out laughing” (45). This passage exemplifies some of the ways that Kafka makes use of Biblical analogues and literary style in creating a distinctively modern style of his own. Kafka takes a well-known, multiply interpretable passage and imagines alternatives to it, each alternative slightly more ridiculous, but also more sinister, than the last. As Welsh has observed, “The representation of Abraham as quixotic informs Kafka’s two major posthumous novels [The Trial and The Castle].”53 The passage shows the Bible in the process of being converted into a novel, an aspect perhaps of the novelization of modern life itself. The act of imagining Abraham in various realistic circumstances – not having finished work on his house, or not having a son – proposes contingency as a ruling logic for the story, and contingency is the province of the novel. Kafka focuses on precisely the sort of details that the Bible leaves out. The similes he uses, comparing Abraham first to a waiter and then to a schoolchild, undermine the solemnity of the Biblical narrative by bringing it into contact with the far less dignified modern world. Abraham’s fear that he will turn into Don Quixote (which, as we have noted, parodies Kierkegaard’s discussion of the “knight of faith” in Fear and Trembling) wryly underlines this “novelization” of the Bible, for Don Quixote is the prototypical hero of the modern novel, the man who believes in a world of romance and transcendent values but must live in a world of realism and commerce. This exercise thus sketches a typical plot for a modern novel, in which a man with noble intentions, a man prepared to become a figure of valor or even

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tragedy, discovers (or fears to discover) that he has become a figure of mere comedy or farce. Yet ultimately, Kafka’s novels and stories, like Don Quixote itself, double this trajectory yet again into a reverse course: a typically comic set of misunderstandings (The Trial, The Castle) or a comic transformation (The Metamorphosis, “Report to an Academy”) comes to take on overtones of tragedy and nobility, as the hero’s inability to respond to the demands of the irrational modern world makes him symbolic of our own failure, not only to achieve heroism, but to have a heroic ideal that we can regard without irony. Another instance of the novelization of the Biblical arises in the final chapter of The Trial when, on the eve of his thirty-first birthday, Josef K. is seized by two executioners in frock coats and taken to a stone quarry on the edge of town. On the way to the sacrifice, a number of happenstance encounters – he sees Fraülein Burstner and several policemen – seem to offer him opportunities to evade his fate, but he fails to make any effort to escape. After positioning him awkwardly on a large stone, which may recall the altar in Genesis 22:9, the men take out a large butcher knife. While they pass the knife back and forth, K. contemplates what to do: “K. knew clearly now that it was his duty to seize the knife as it floated from hand to hand above him and plunge it into himself. But he didn’t do so …” If K. were to take the knife in his own hands, he would resemble Christ, who willingly accepts his crucifixion; but there is to be no redemption in Kafka’s story. Nor will there be a last-minute intervention by the angel of God, although the narrative lingers for a moment on that possibility. K. sees a window open in the distance and a human figure lean out and stretch out its arms. “Who was it?” he wonders. “A friend? A good person? Someone who cared? Someone who wanted to help? Was it just one person? Was it everyone? Was there still help? Were there objections that had been forgotten?… Where was the judge [Richter] he’d never seen? Where was the high court he’d never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers.” Despite the language of bureaucracy and political power on which the novel has insisted throughout, the absent judge in these final lines clearly suggests God; but God does not supply a ram to replace Josef K., and the person leaning out of the distant window, if indeed an angel or messenger of God, does not succeed in getting the message through. Instead, one of the men holds K.’s throat while the other turns the knife in his heart. The final words to flash through K.’s mind, “Like a dog,” offer a comparison between animal and human that differs pointedly from Biblical antecedents. Instead of a lamb of God or a ram of Abraham, K. is like a dog, an animal that is not typically sacrificial, which is to say one that does not traditionally

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mediate between the human and the divine, one whose death has no meaning except shame.54 Like his many images of people as animals, the version of the Abraham story that Kafka wrote in his letter resonates with his central concerns in other ways. Abraham’s doubts as to whether he and his son are worthy of divine summons, along with his dismissal of his son as “dirty,” suggests a parable about specifically Jewish fathers and sons. (By contrast, as Auerbach notes, the Bible leaves Abraham and Isaac as ciphers, offering no characterization of their feelings or motives.) Kafka may be thinking, as he so often does, of his father’s inadequacy as a potential patriarch, or of his own inadequacy in relation to his father’s ambitions for him; but more than that, the image of the whole world laughing at the “ugly” Abraham and “dirty” Isaac for thinking they have been chosen by God may reflect Kafka’s experience of anti-Semitism. More broadly, of course the story of Abraham and Isaac raises the question of the nature of any father’s love for his son. If, in the Christian account, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16), how much did Abraham love his own son if he was willing to sacrifice him without an explicit rationale, only on the deity’s word? the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity The question of paternal love is central to Freud’s only direct reference, in his published writings, to the story of Abraham and Isaac. In a passage of the Wolf Man case study, which Freud published in 1918 but wrote in 1914 as he began his research into the origins of religion, he records the following story about the patient, a Catholic who, as a boy, began having compulsions to think blasphemous thoughts, and who became obsessed with the notion that he himself was Christ: “The boy had some kind of inkling of the ambivalent feelings towards the father which are an underlying factor in all religions, and attacked his religion on account of the slackening which it implied in this relation between son and father. Naturally his opposition soon ceased to take the form of doubting the truth of the doctrine, and turned instead directly against the figure of God. God had treated his son harshly and cruelly, but he was no better towards men; he had sacrificed his own son and had ordered Abraham to do the same. He began to fear God.”55 In typical fashion, Freud relates the boy’s hostility to God to his repressed homosexual desire for his own father and his consequent inability to work through the Oedipus complex.

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Freud’s treatment of religion in this case study reflects the attitude that Kafka would criticize in one of his few explicit comments on psychoanalysis, in a letter to a friend written in November 1920: You say, Milena, you don’t understand it [Kafka’s mental condition]. Try to understand it by calling it a sickness. It’s one of the many manifestations of sickness which psychoanalysis claims to have discovered. I do not call it a sickness and consider the therapeutic part of psychoanalysis a helpless error. All these alleged sicknesses, sad as they may seem, are matters of faith, anchorings in some maternal ground for souls in distress. In the same way, psychoanalysis also maintains that religions have no other origin than the alleged origin of the “sicknesses” of the individual. Of course, today most of us don’t feel any sense of religious community; the sects are countless, even confined to individual persons, but perhaps it only seems that way from the biased perspective of the present time. On the other hand, those anchorings which are fixed in a real ground aren’t merely isolated, interchangeable possessions of men – they are formed in a man’s being and they continue to form and re-form his being (as well as his body) along the same lines. This they want to heal?56

Here, Kafka recognizes that psychoanalysis has diagnosed some form of spiritual malaise, but he disagrees with the psychoanalytic drive to root it out as a disease. It seems, rather, that this sickness (related perhaps to Kierkegaard’s sickness unto death) gives access to an existential truth, probably related to that of the Biblical fall. Kafka seems to have understood the fall symbolically, whereas Freud in his later writings sought rather literal-mindedly for the origins of guilt feelings in actual historical events. Kafka finds in religious attitudes a deeper understanding of the world than that of psychoanalysis, although he recognizes that the dissolution of religious communities has weakened traditional faith. Though the elements of religious experience often reside within souls in distress, Kafka suggests, they are perhaps less a disease than part of the immune system, a disturbance that can also be a source of renovation or insight. The theme of community or sect is a persistent one. During his initial phase of interest in Judaism, shortly after Yom Kippur, 1911, Kafka had written of the special character of the Yiddish theater, whose actors seemed “very close to the centre of the community’s life…people who are Jews in an especially pure form because they live only in the religion, but live in it without effort, understanding, or distress.”57 Kafka, who thought of himself very much as a Western European Jew, tended to romanticize the close-knit shtetls of Poland and Russia. He himself felt quite distant from the centre of any community and later wrote to Felice that he was an “asocial man… excluded from every great soul-sustaining community on account of his

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non-Zionist (I admire Zionism and am nauseated by it), nonpractising Judaism.”58 Yet while the actually existing communities in most of his stories and novels are infected by bureaucracy, Kafka continually holds out an ideal of a more organic community, which he will revisit in his stories of artists near the end of his life. Kafka correctly identifies Freud’s tendency to see religion as a disease, or more specifically as a neurosis, which is apparent in his most explicitly antireligious writing, The Future of an Illusion (1927). This work reflects the rather changeable tones of Freud’s approach to religion. On one hand, he displays an Enlightenment skepticism about the superstitions of religion, which he treats as appropriate for children and primitive people, and a consequent optimism about the possibility of overcoming it. Yet he combines these attitudes with a Victorian concern that the lower classes may need religion in order to behave morally, along with a related pessimism about the risks involved in depriving the masses of their illusions. The most positive of Freud’s formulations of religion treats it as simple wishfulfillment: religion is essentially a beautiful dream on the part of the whole human species. In keeping with Enlightenment notions of human development, Freud expects the species to outgrow this comforting but juvenile illusion, and he attacks Hans Vaihinger’s tract Philosophy of the As If (1911), a close cousin of William James’s work, for encouraging adults to believe in the “fairy tales of religion.”59 Freud’s writings on religion become more interesting, more ambivalent, and more outrageous when he moves beyond notions of simple wishfulfillment to the theory that Kafka refers to in his November 1920 letter, which treats religion as the result of a collective Oedipus complex, “the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity.”60 Freud had developed this theory in Totem and Taboo (1912–13). Responding in part to Durkheim’s work and using many of the same sources (notably Frazer), Freud also emphasizes the social element of totemism, although he concentrates on the importance of the social system in shaping the individual conscience. The Polynesians, he observes, “are after all not so remote from us as we are inclined to think at first.”61 Beginning with the problem of the origin of the incest taboo, Freud broadens his scope to include taboos of all kinds and argues that the obsessive character of taboos (against, for example, touching the totem animal) resembles the obsessions of neurotics. Freud conjectures that a single historical event in the history of the species must correspond to the Oedipus complex in the history of individuals. He even proposes what this event must have been: combining Darwin’s theory that the original form of society was the “primal horde,”

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ruled by a single male, with Robertson Smith’s account of the totem meal, Freud introduces what he calls a “hypothesis, which has such a monstrous air” that “one day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde” (Totem and Taboo, 176). From the ensuing compact among the brothers, which their shared sense of guilt cemented, arose the first social contract, along with the taboos against incest and murder. The totem meal, too, arose as a symbolic re-enactment of this original murder, and the sundry rituals that Frazer catalogued involving dead and reborn gods (including, of course, Easter) simply echoed and re-echoed this founding crime of civilization. This “just-so story” of Freud’s, as an early English reviewer called it, can be read in part as a psychoanalytic commentary on liberal political theory, combining Hobbes’s story of the war of all against all with Rousseau’s theory that political society originated in an act of theft.62 Indeed, Freud refers to the network of taboos associated with totemism as the origin of Kant’s “categorical imperative.”63 Written shortly before the end of the Austrian empire by a liberal who abhorred hereditary rank, Totem and Taboo can be seen as a political allegory: the primal father is the emperor or king, and the act of killing him the establishment of a liberal political order by a compact among equals. Many scholars have also interpreted the theory as a commentary on Freud’s own insecurity about his leadership of the psychoanalytic movement: here, the disciples who are eager to challenge or adapt the master’s theories are the parricidal band of brothers. More importantly for our purposes, the study can also help to account for Freud’s relationship with Judaism, not so much at the level of allegory as in terms of the scientific theory on which Freud relies. Totem and Taboo, after all, like the later Moses and Monotheism of 1939, depends on a Lamarckian account of evolution, according to which offspring can inherit acquired characteristics such as damaged limbs or learned behaviors. In Freud’s account (unlike Durkheim’s), later generations receive the feelings of guilt associated with the totem not simply through political institutions or social education, but through the biological inheritance of the Oedipus complex, a crime that, like something in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony (1919), had become inscribed in the body and passed down through the generations. As Freud put it, “I have supposed that the sense of guilt for an action has persisted for many thousands of years and has remained operative in generations which can have had no knowledge of that action” (Totem and Taboo, 195). This theory of inheritance was not the most straightforward or obvious result of any attempt to make the new science of psychology

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correspond with the latest evolutionary theories, since by Freud’s time, Lamarckian accounts of this kind had become fully outmoded. Although Darwin himself sometimes relied on Lamarckian notions, one of the great achievements of his evolutionary theory was to make them unnecessary.64 It would seem that Freud clung to Lamarckianism at least in part because it allowed him to retain a sense of having inherited, of physically embodying, the historical experiences of the Jewish people, without having to associate himself with either Jewish religious practice or Jewish institutions. As Peter Gay has shown, Freud’s remarks on his Jewishness are often laden with Lamarckian presuppositions.65 In his preface to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo, written in 1930, Freud describes himself as “ignorant of the language of holy writ,” “completely estranged from the religion of his fathers” and unable to “take a share in nationalist ideals,” but says nevertheless that he “feels that he is in his essential nature a Jew”: If the question were put to him: “Since you have abandoned all these common characteristics of your countrymen, what is there left to you that is Jewish?” he would reply: “A very great deal, and probably its very essence.” He could not now express that essence clearly in words; but some day, no doubt, it will become accessible to the scientific mind.66

As Peter Kramer has pointed out, it is also in Totem and Taboo that Freud develops one of his most lasting concepts, which he borrowed from the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler: ambivalence, a term that certainly characterizes Freud’s attitude to Judaism, as well as that of the primal society towards its patriarch.67 By his late work Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Freud would observe that “Whether one has killed one’s father or has abstained from doing so is not really the decisive thing. One is bound to feel guilty in either case…”68 This statement carries the air of common sense, but it undermines all of Freud’s historical claims in both Totem and Taboo and his final work, Moses and Monotheism. For Freud, monotheism is the fantasy of the all-powerful father: comforting insofar as it promises protection, but also conducive of guilt because of the universal desire (enacted or not) to kill that father. secular and sacred in the castle The starting point for the plots of Kafka’s three unfinished novels, Amerika or The Man Who Disappeared (Der Verschollene), The Trial, and The Castle, is the unwitting arrival of the main character in a complex social world where he is profoundly ignorant of the rules: America for Karl

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Rossmann, the law courts for Josef K., and the village and castle for K. As the landlady of the Inn tells K., “you’re dreadfully ignorant about the situation here, one’s head buzzes from listening to you and from comparing your opinions and ideas with the real situation.”69 Each of the three protagonists wanders around this unaccustomed world, stumbling through a series of adventures that fail to lead him to greater wisdom or understanding. The resulting structure of the novels is episodic, even picaresque; indeed, Kafka’s executor Max Brod had to make the final decision himself on the order of the chapters, since in the manuscripts their exact order is unclear. The protagonists all suffer from chronic sleepiness, and their frequent awakening into nightmarish scenarios re-enacts the opening scene of each novel. In all three cases, the protagonist is a symbol not just of modern anomie but more broadly of the human condition of natality, in which we all find ourselves confronted by a world created by others according to a logic we do not intuitively understand.70 What is unusual about Kafka’s characters is that by the age of seventeen (Karl Rossmann), thirty (Josef K.), or the mid-thirties (K.), all apparently symbolic of having reached maturity, none of them has achieved the least understanding of how the social world works. Nor will they achieve any such understanding or even make much progress towards one. The only ending that Kafka seems to have conceived for any of his novels was the unenlightened death of his protagonist.71 In The Castle, K. arrives in the village as an outsider, a land surveyor who fits into neither the occupational web of the village – small craftsmen, fire fighters, etc. – nor the hierarchy of the Castle. Although there is no specifically Jewish content in The Castle, K.’s status as middle-class professional “stranger” does suggest the social status of the Jews (33). He is not a villager, but, as he discovers when he tries to visit the Gentlemen’s Inn, neither is he by any means a gentleman. The landlady tells him, “You’re not from the Castle, you’re not from the village, you are nothing [‘Sie sind nichts’]. Unfortunately, though, you are something, a stranger [‘ein Fremder’], one who is superfluous and gets in the way everywhere…”72 Pavel Eisner, who reads The Castle as a reflection of the situation of the Jews in Prague, describes K. as “always on the edge, a marginal settler, burdened with an invisible leprosy: but at the same time almost sacer, in the ancient paradoxical sense of the word, which encompasses a range of meaning from ‘elect’ and ‘holy’ to ‘cursed’ and ‘damned.’ ”73 This state of being sacer, which Giorgio Agamben recently analyzed with reference to “Before the Law” and the works of Hannah Arendt, places K. precisely at the border between secular law and sacred authority.74 In the world of The Castle, these

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two realms are effectively undecidable. Ritchie Robertson has proposed that K. can be understood as a messiah figure, but if so he is clearly a failed or false messiah.75 K. himself is less obviously a scapegoat than the minor character Amalia, whose entire family becomes outcast after she refuses the sexual advances of the Castle official, Sortini, whose name suggests “fate” (Italian sorte) just as his colleague Sordini’s name suggests “deaf” (Italian sordo). The decrees of the Castle are those of a fate blind and deaf to human concerns.76 It is possible that Rosenzweig sees The Castle as resembling the Bible as much on stylistic grounds, and for the novel’s emphasis on interpretation, as on the basis of the plot. Rather than Biblical narrative, however, the style of The Castle often resembles allegory. The central plot is a sort of haphazard pilgrimage by which K. seeks access to the Castle and information about his position as a land surveyor. The characters have a faintly allegorical quality. K. is known only by his initial; some other characters are known only by their social functions; others are given names with apparent allegorical overtones. The settings – the Castle, the Inn, the Schoolhouse – are drawn in the most general terms and seem to have symbolic resonances. Most importantly, they are not given proper names; this absence of names establishes a generic landscape akin to parable and alien to realism, so that it comes as a shock when Kafka introduces realistic touches including brief mentions of the names of actual countries, such as France and Spain. Yet, from the first page, novelistic elements, and ones with a particularly modern aesthetic, intrude into this apparent allegory. The opening paragraph establishes the symbolic background, with the typically dreamlike atmosphere of the Castle and the village, surrounded by “fog and darkness.”77 (That virtually all information about the village and the Castle comes to the reader through K.’s perception, rendered in free indirect discourse, makes the novel visionary but not really visual, an ocular refusal or suspicion heightened by the author’s tendency to use rather abstract adjectives. The most striking images are those of obliterated outlines – snow and fog – rather than sharp visual detail.) By the second paragraph, however, K. is sleeping on a straw mattress in the taproom of an Inn where peasants are drinking beer. The straw mattress and the Inn seem to belong to allegory, echoing as they do Christ’s birth in the manger, but the peasants and the taproom are details that hint at realism. The effect is to leave the reader unbalanced, threatening constantly to slip from one register to another, feeling increasingly as though some stabilizing level is just out of grasp, as K. himself comes increasingly to feel. Like Abraham in Kafka’s parable, K. soon begins to resemble Don Quixote, or “an Abraham who

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should come unsummoned.”78 Yet whereas Don Quixote only thinks he is a knight, and the host at his Inn plays along with his delusion as a joke, K. really does seem to be a land surveyor, and the people he meets at the Inn do not realize that they are playing an elaborate joke on him, for the elaborate joke is their whole world. K.’s outsider position, along with his essentially secular attitude, encumbers him with the responsibility to bring secular reason to bear on the sacred mystique of the Castle. Like the bureaucracy of the court in The Trial, the officials of the Castle maintain their power in part through an elaborate hierarchy and in part through the mystique of secrecy. The figure closest to a monotheistic God in the novel, Klamm (whose name means “clammy,” with a hint of the uncanny) seems at times to be an alter ego for K., at other times to be a precursor of Samuel Beckett’s Godot. As Director of Bureau No. 10, Klamm sends K. the initial letter regarding the terms of his employment in the village. From then on, K. is obsessed with meeting Klamm. He becomes engaged to the bar-maid, Frieda, largely because she claims to have been Klamm’s mistress. K’s other girlfriend, Olga, allows him to see Klamm, “a medium-sized fat ponderous man,” through a peephole at the Gentlemen’s Inn, but K. never gets the opportunity to speak with him.79 When K. decides to try to approach Klamm directly, rather than through Klamm’s secretary, Momus (named after the Greek god of satire), the landlady insists, echoing “Before the Law,” that “the only path leading to Klamm passes through the secretary’s depositions. But I don’t wish to exaggerate, perhaps this path doesn’t lead to Klamm, perhaps it ends long before it reaches him; that decision is made by the secretary at his own discretion. Anyway, for you this is the only path that does at least lead in Klamm’s direction. And you want to give up the only path, for no reason other than contrariness?”80 She goes on to compare Klamm with an eagle (Adler), and K. decides that he sees the similarity in Klamm’s “remoteness, his impregnable abode, his muteness.”81 The comparison suggests Klamm’s godlike power and authority; but this is a god imagined as a senior bureaucrat who works not through intricate layers of cosmic hierarchy, but through his lower secretaries. Although K. later receives a further letter from Klamm, he never gets to meet him. Summoned to the Gentlemen’s Inn to meet another of Klamm’s secretaries, Erlanger (“achiever”), K. stumbles upon the bedroom of Erlanger’s own secretary, Bürgel (whose name suggests “citizen” or “guarantee” [Bürge]). Bürgel begins to explain the workings of the Castle to K. in some detail, but as he listens to these explanations K. keeps falling asleep. The source of the power of these officials, ultimately, is the accreted

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tradition of their rule. This works rather like the rule of the noblemen in Kafka’s short sketch, “The Problem of our Laws,” in which the members of the community have no access to the laws themselves, but know them only through the interpretations or exegeses (Auslegungen) of the nobles. The legal realists, or perhaps pragmatists, in this community assert that “The Law is whatever the nobles do” (“Was der Adel tut, ist Gesetz”) – a claim that emphasizes the arbitrariness of their rule, but which ends up making the people even more disinclined to throw out the nobility, for fear that if they do so no law will remain.82 The idea that such traditions derive from sacred origins may be doubtful to K. or other outside observers, but the populace of the village takes it for granted. The uncertain nature of this authority, its sacredness or secularity, is most apparent in the long chapter in which K. debates with Olga over the nature of Klamm. Olga, whose brother Barnabas is the unofficial messenger who delivers Klamm’s first letter to K., explains that the image that villagers have of Klamm is highly variable, although “probably correct in its essential features.” He looks different in different conditions, and Even within the village there are some rather significant differences in the reports, differences in size, posture, corpulence, beard, and only concerning the coat do the reports happily agree, he always wears the same coat, a black morning coat with long tails. Now all these discrepancies did not of course come about by magic but are quite understandable, they are a product of the momentary mood, the degree of excitement, the countless gradations of hope or despair in which the observer, who in any case is at most allowed to see Klamm only briefly, happens to find himself. (Castle, 176; Schloß, 278)

Altogether, the story of Klamm represents a satire (rather more cheerful than those of The Trial or Waiting for Godot) of the monotheistic God, a God perhaps imagined in the Gnostic tradition as “alien and wholly transcendent.”83 Olga is not even sure whether the official that her brother identifies as Klamm (whose letters he receives for delivery not from the man himself, in any case, but from a copyist) really is Klamm. As she explains (concluding her disquisition), “one shouldn’t all of a sudden dispatch to the Castle an uninformed youth like Barnabas, who has never gone beyond the village surroundings, and then expect faithful reports from him and scrutinize his every word as though it were a word from Revelations [‘ein Offenbarungswort’] and make one’s own happiness in life depend on the interpretation [‘Deutung’].”84 Here, with one of Kafka’s few explicit references to the New Testament, comes perhaps the only practical wisdom that Kafka offers the existential sufferer, namely not to hope for a solution to the

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mystery of interpretation, nor to look for guidance from the Delphic utterances of the officials of the Castle. As with most of the practical advice from the women in the novel, K. ignores it. (All of the Castle’s employees are male and they have no suitable mates, which helps account for the fact that most of the women in the village are prostitutes or nearly so.) When K. finally does meet Erlanger, the only thing that is achieved is that Erlanger tells K. to have Frieda return to the taproom for Klamm’s comfort. As K.’s encounters with Klamm demonstrate, the problem of interpretation lies not only at the heart of allegory and of Biblical exegesis, but also at the heart of bureaucracy. As Robert Alter has written, “The Castle is the most striking instance of a world suffused with, and perhaps also corroded by, exegesis.”85 In the same way that Kafka’s readers attempt to interpret his seemingly symbolic language, K. spends a great deal of his time trying to interpret messages from the Castle – for instance, the initial letter from Klamm, which confuses him by addressing him on the one hand as “a free man” and on the other as “a lowly worker.” After two pages of interpretive effort, K. comes away with the impression, because the letter includes the three words “as you know,” that its writer must have “a troubled conscience – troubled, not bad.”86 (Later, after debating the meaning of the letter with the chairman of the village council, K. tells him, “you interpret [‘deuten’] the letter so well that all that’s finally left is a signature on a blank sheet of paper.”)87 K. also builds interpretations from the physical appearance of people he meets, thinking of Frieda’s hands, for example, that they “were indeed small and delicate, but they could also be called weak and expressionless.”88 Even K.’s own motives are subjected to long scenes of interpretation by himself and the other characters, such as his discussion with Olga about the scapegoating of Amalia, or his conversations elsewhere with Pepi and Frieda. (Despite his efforts in these scenes, he seems singularly unable to explain himself.) “Stop interpreting everything” (“Laß die Deutungen”), K. tells Olga, in the midst of her account of Amalia’s troubles.89 But in Kafka interpretation is interminable. animal stories and a historical novel Freud, too, wrote a novel that he nearly left unfinished at his death. He solved the problem of culminating the project, however, by converting his “historical novel” on Moses into a sort of historical treatise, Moses and Monotheism (1939). His English publisher, Virginia Woolf, recommended that he give the English title simply as Moses, since it would help sales, but Freud insisted on declaring monotheism as his major theme. Because the

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work claims that the Jews killed Moses, many of Freud’s friends asked him not to publish the work, fearing that it might inflame anti-Semitism and harm efforts to draw attention to the unfolding Holocaust. Freud allowed himself a similar flicker of unease when he wrote, “To deny a people the man whom it praises as the greatest of its sons is not a deed to be undertaken lightly – especially by one belonging to that people.”90 Yet he insisted on pushing forward with the (historically implausible) thesis perhaps in the effort, like Nietzsche’s madman before him, to murder God.91 In the first two sections of the book, which were first published in German in 1937, Freud advances the hypothesis (which the sociologist Max Weber had earlier suggested) that Moses was not a Jew but an Egyptian. Drawing on the rather speculative theories of contemporaries such as Ernst Sellin and Eduard Meyer, Freud argues that monotheism must have been originally an Egyptian sect, inspired by the powerful rule of the Egyptian pharaohs. In the book’s final section, completed in 1938 and published shortly before his death in 1939, Freud extends his anthropological analysis of the prehistoric primal horde to historical (or at least legendary) times, and sees in the killing of Moses the origin of monotheism. Extending the account of Totem and Taboo, Freud suggests that the murder of the primal father must have been repeated frequently, over the course of centuries. He asks, concerning the ancient Jews, “Whence…did this tiny and impotent nation derive the audacity to pass themselves off as the favourite child of the Sovereign Lord?” (Moses and Monotheism, 80). If the just-so story of Totem and Taboo implied a political allegory about the replacement of kings by liberal democracies, the political questions in Moses and Monotheism were perhaps more urgent. Instead of a social contract in a vaguely imagined deep human past, the murder of Moses pertains, albeit obliquely, to the great historical events through which Freud and his people were currently suffering. Freud did not refrain from treating the story of Christ’s resurrection as “an obviously tendentious distortion,” according to which a further murder of a father figure was transformed, by St. Paul, into the universal religion of humanity, which St. Paul achieved by giving up the idea of chosenness and circumcision and, through the idea of salvation in Christ, “lay[ing] the ghost of the feeling of guilt,” associated with the original parricide (112). (That Christianity had removed the sense of guilt would have been news to James Joyce). Freud seems to confirm the worst fears of his friends when he explains that the anti-Semitic claim “You killed our God” is “true, if rightly interpreted” (114–15). The Jews did kill their God (Moses), and so did the Christians; but only the Christians admit it. Yet, Freud is able, in a sense, to

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maintain the notion of the Jewish people as chosen because, as he puts it, “The great deed and misdeed of primal times, the murder of the father, was brought home to the Jews, for fate decreed that they should repeat it on the person of Moses, an eminent father substitute” (113). The Jews are rewarded for this fateful accident with a religion of “instinctual renunciation” which gave them a greater ability to delay gratification and to think abstractly for which they are still known in Freud’s day (152). Of Moses and Monotheism, Martin Buber remarked, “That a scholar of so much importance in his own field as Sigmund Freud could permit himself to issue so unscientific a work, based on groundless hypotheses, as his Moses and Monotheism is regrettable.”92 Freud’s final work can be understood as a product of his drive to interpret turned back against monotheism. Although Freud claims to find the origins of secular reason in the Jewish religion, he uses that secular reason to debunk the traditional myth of Jewish origins and replace it with a highly idiosyncratic myth of his own. Like Kafka, Freud turned to the question of the origin of community in some of his final writings. Freud had among his patients the Rat Man and the Wolf Man, named for animals associated with their dreams and neuroses. Kafka, too, had a stable of animal figures, from the vermin Gregor Samsa, through the dog in the posthumously published “Investigations of a Dog,” to the ape in “A Report to an Academy” (1917). Kafka’s own final portrayal of the history of a people is “Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse People” (“Josefine die Sängerin, oder das Volk der Mäuse” [1924]). Once again, this is a text about interpretation, and particularly the interpretation of the customs of a people. Whereas Kafka’s novels, as well as many of his stories, concern outsiders who try to understand the customs of a people from whom they are fundamentally alienated, Kafka also wrote, especially later in his life, a number of stories that give the perspective not of an outsider who fails to understand social rules, but of a group member who knows those rules all too well but who has lately taken to analyzing them and trying to understand them. The narrator begins by asserting that “Anyone who has not heard [Josephine] does not know the power of song,” but as he progresses to consider the nature of her singing, he confesses to being considered among her “opponents,” because he is a little skeptical of her powers. It seems that no one else in his culture sings – that the art of singing has died out – so that one must ask of Josephine’s art, “is it in fact singing at all?” The narrator wonders whether Josephine’s singing actually differs from the everyday piping of the mouse folk and whether she is “making a ceremonial performance out of doing the usual thing.” Josephine claims to protect the people

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from their enemies, indeed stages herself as “the savior [Retter] of our people,” but the narrator suspects that by bringing the people together to listen to her she in fact makes them easier targets for their enemies. Yet the people welcome Josephine’s concerts. The mouse people themselves, who, aside from apparently being tiny themselves, also seem to form a small and tightly knit community, are “not only childish, we are also in a sense prematurely old.” For this reason, perhaps, the early drying up of the juices, the mouse people, apart from their children, have little use for music. Yet, “Here in the brief intervals between their struggles our people dream, it is as if the limbs of each were loosened, as if the harried individual once in a while could relax and stretch himself at ease in the great, warm bed of the community [or people; ‘im großen, warmen Bett des Volkes’].” The narrator wonders, though, whether Josephine stands beyond the law, allowed, for example, to avoid daily work in order to concentrate on her voice. Josephine herself demands “public, unambiguous, permanent recognition of her art,” and threatens to withhold the grace notes in her performance (which the narrator, in any case, cannot detect). Suddenly, at the end of the story, as the mouse folk have rejected her demands, Josephine disappears: “Josephine has vanished, she will not sing; she will not even be cajoled into singing, this time she has deserted us entirely.”93 Josephine, like many of Kafka’s artists, is a performance artist, whose art exists only in the time of performance, unlike the published works of an author or the framed works of a painter. Her performance, like that of the Yiddish theater troupe Kafka admired, is close to the heart of the community, and yet by virtue of its being a performance it separates her from her community, puts her in some sense outside its customary laws. The performance has much of the character of a social or religious ritual, allowing the community its Sabbath. Like K. or Amalia, indeed like Freud’s Moses, Josephine the Singer is something of a scapegoat, devoting her life to an art that holds the community together but that the community does not recognize. (The title character of Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” [1922] offers a more extreme instance of this tendency.) Even the narrator, a community member who cannot identify what gives Josephine’s art its power, and who seems rather skeptical about her claim to a kind of priestly status, nevertheless acknowledges that, even if Josephine perhaps fails to realize the utopian dream of communal oneness, her art is what makes the dream possible. The narrator, who seems to speak for the author, represents secular reason not in strict antagonism to faith but in a dialectical relationship with it. Although Josephine’s singing can be analyzed as a cultural phenomenon (indeed, the story is its analysis), it does not

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lend itself to interpretation – it has no underlying meaning. It is merely a ritualized version of the everyday piping of the mouse folk. Kafka surely imagined his own writing to be something like Josephine’s singing, and he asked to have most of it destroyed so that the performance would not outlast him. Like Josephine, too, he always dreamed of a livelihood outside the insurance company where he was such a successful employee, but for most of his life he felt compelled to continue in the daily work of commerce. In Josephine the Singer, Kafka offers his most optimistic portrait of the role of art as a sacred force in the life of a community, albeit a community that does not recognize art’s sacredness and from which art itself is always on the point of disappearing. Freud’s and Kafka’s final works reflect their attitudes to interpretation: Freud’s an aggressive probing of appearances to find a hidden truth, Kafka’s a melancholy but inconclusive speculation. They also reflect their ideas of the central forces holding together community: for Freud, violent desires and repressed memories, for Kafka, a ritualized form of daily life that becomes sacred under the name of art.

chapter 6

Virginia Woolf and the disenchantment of the world

In February 1928, soon after T. S. Eliot had converted to AngloCatholicism, Virginia Woolf wrote to her sister Vanessa Bell: “Then I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was really shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.”1 These words were strong but not atypical, for Woolf expressed passionate hostility toward all forms of traditional Christianity.2 Woolf endows some of her characters with her horror of churchgoing and religious belief, which clearly relates to the problem of mortality. (Because he believes in immortality, Eliot is “dead to us,” less credible than “a corpse.”) Woolf directs her strongest sense of disgust, however, not at generalized religious feeling but at what she calls “this old savage,” God.3 In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf writes of the necessity for women writers to escape from “Milton’s bogey” – a phrase that explicitly refers to Milton himself (whom Woolf seems, incidentally, to have associated with her own father), but also conjures Milton’s portrait of God, the ultimate patriarch.4 Yet, if Woolf found the more dogmatic and intolerant aspects of religion to be repugnant, she also understood the uses of enchantment. Woolf does not, of course, embrace a return to traditional forms of religion, such as Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism. Neither, however, does she imitate her father’s militant attacks on belief. At the age of fifteen, she refused to kneel during her half-sister’s church wedding, but around the same time she was also “writing a long picturesque essay upon the Christian religion, I think; called Religio Laici, I believe, proving that man has need of a God; but the God was described in the process of change.”5 Although Woolf, who was not christened, never showed any interest in joining the church, a great deal of her work engages in a search for new models of sacred community and 142

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experience that could potentially accommodate the “process[es] of change” typical of modernity.6 In this chapter I shall explore in particular her efforts to describe “moments of being,” her term for a modern form of sublime experience that features prominently in many of her works, notably her masterpiece To the Lighthouse (1927).7 Scholars of Woolf’s work have generally taken her declarations of secularism at face value, ignoring her interest, despite her resistance to institutional religion, in alternative forms of the sacred.8 For instance, Woolf critics have often observed her “moments of being,” but usually they have done so from within a psychoanalytic framework, and seldom with much attention to the relevance of Woolf’s interest in religious experience.9 Taking their cue from Woolf’s animus towards God, some critics have sought to characterize her work as distinctively atheist: Michael Lackey, for instance, interprets Orlando (1928) and The Waves (1931) as proposing a “post-God” and “post-subject” discourse.10 Other, mainly feminist, interpretations have focused on the ways that Woolf, without rejecting all forms of religious experience, attempts to reformulate them by jettisoning the patriarchal God.11 Woolf’s position on God may seem like a simple outgrowth of her political rejection of patriarchy: what better representative of patriarchal authority than God the Father? Yet her putative atheism is complicated by her relation to a nearer father, Leslie Stephen, the most famous agnostic in Victorian England, against whom much of her work rebels. Although Woolf often expressed distaste for the dogmatism of religion, she also had her doubts about atheists, as she makes clear in her portraits of Fraser the atheist in Jacob’s Room (1922), Mr. Carslake in “A Simple Melody” (1925), and Mr. Ramsay and “the little atheist” Charles Tansley in To the Lighthouse.12 In her personal writing and her fiction alike, Woolf characteristically attacks those who claim to measure truth by a single standard – not only Christians like Eliot, but also atheists like Mr. Ramsay, whose atheism plays out as a perverse assertion of masculine authority: in the void left by God, Mr. Ramsay shall bestow the truth and the law. Woolf’s distinctive literary manner, her multiple, intertwining streams of consciousness, allows her to explore the multiple spiritual perspectives that contend in a disenchanted world where unitary models of truth have dissolved. Like other modernists, Woolf protests her incomprehension of religion, but like them too she seeks new forms of the sacred that will accommodate the pluralism of modern life. Having been raised essentially without religion, Woolf differs somewhat from the other figures considered in this study; her religious upbringing probably resembled that of Proust more

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closely than the upbringing of James, Kafka, or certainly Joyce. She never underwent a falling-away from religion, but her puzzlement at the manifestations of religion in modern life may have been all the greater for having been raised in an agnostic household. Her puzzlement is, however, tempered by a novelist’s drive for sympathy. Despite her obvious distaste at her flesh-and-blood friend Eliot’s conversion, Woolf in her fiction continually addresses herself to the challenge of understanding those whose religious views seem alien to hers. Woolf was receptive to mystical experience and even aspired to remake English fiction in a more “spiritual” vein. Woolf sought through her literary experiments to effect a re-enchantment of the world, a new form of spirituality independent of the Christian God and appropriate for the twentieth century. woolf, weber, and the disenchantment of the world In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924), an essay that many regard as her literary manifesto, Woolf famously remarks that “on or about December, 1910, human character changed.”13 The kind of event she means involves changes in culture so thoroughgoing that we experience them as changes in nature: “All human relations have shifted – those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature” (321). Much of the analysis of the shift in “human character” in Woolf’s essay has focused on conduct, politics, and literature; my focus here will naturally be on religion. In her most productive decade, the 1920s, Woolf returned to a problem she had explored in her adolescence: how to describe God “in the process of change.” Woolf’s pronouncements on modern fiction draw heavily on religious language. In another well-known manifesto, “Modern Novels,” she criticizes the Edwardian “materialists,” Galsworthy, Bennett, and Wells, for their preoccupation “not with the spirit but with the body,” and argues that “English fiction” might need to march away from them, even “into the desert, the better for its soul.”14 She also praises Joyce’s Ulysses as an attempt (albeit a failed one, she says) to find an appropriate modern form for spiritual feeling: “In contrast to those whom we have called materialists Mr. Joyce is spiritual” (34). Finally, she proposes as a model for English writers Russian fiction, with its “natural reverence for the human spirit” verging on “saintliness” (35–6).

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Woolf understood the fate of religious experience in modernity as a process strikingly similar to what Max Weber called “the disenchantment of the world.” Weber and Woolf had less in common with one another than did Durkheim and Proust or Freud and Kafka, but their comparison can nonetheless help to explain the attitudes of their period toward religious experience. Although they did not read each other’s work, they shared a broadly common cultural background, and their revolutionary achievements in their respective fields, sociology and the novel, rely on a common analysis of the rationalization or “disenchantment” of modern life. For Weber, the “disenchantment of the world” necessitates the “routinization of charisma” or “return of charisma to everyday life” (in German, die Veralltäglichung des Charismas).15 This process entails the investment of charismatic authority – an emotional power inhering in gifted individuals that is Weber’s closest equivalent to Durkheim’s “sacred” – into rational laws and practices that can sustain themselves without the presence of a charismatic leader. Woolf, who saw herself as a champion of the everyday, the “ordinary mind on an ordinary day,” expresses a similar interest in the problem of the relationship between everyday, routine experience and “moments of being,” the almost sacred moments in which experience enters the sublime, moments that transform and energize all the moments of nonbeing that surround them.16 The artist is, for Woolf, a charismatic figure capable of grasping these moments of being. The problem for the novelist and the social theorist alike is to determine how what Woolf calls vision and Weber calls charisma can be maintained in an era of rationalization, materialism, and bureaucracy. For Woolf, one task of modern fiction is to challenge modern civilization’s preoccupation with material affairs at the expense of other values. Her experiments with multiple perspectives provide an analogue for the clash of values characteristic of modern life, which Weber described as the renewed energy in modern society of the “eternal struggle” among competing “gods.”17 Like Weber, Woolf saw the universalistic ethos of Christian monotheism as outmoded and embraced instead a modern form of polytheism, in which competing value systems play the roles of the competing gods of pagan religion. She wrote, in relation to the First World War, of the “sadness at the back of life which they [the Greeks] do not attempt to mitigate”: “it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.”18 Her novels frequently envision a classical, pagan alternative to Christian monotheism. Woolf’s perspectivism allows her to demonstrate at once the irreducible conflict among value systems and the possibility of a

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harmonious reconciliation among them. Such reconciliation, however, must always be temporary. The essential challenge for the modern novelist is to produce such moments of reconciliation without imposing a false harmony on the world of brute fact. Both Weber and Woolf wished to preserve against modern rationality an intimate, imaginative sphere, a remnant of religious life and locus of mystical experience, which Woolf called “the wedge-shaped core of darkness” or “the privacy of the soul.”19 In his wartime lecture “Science as a Vocation,” Weber lamented that this private sphere is the only possible space for sublime values in modernity: Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental, nor is it accidental that today [in 1917] only within the smallest and intimate circles, in personal human situations, in pianissimo, that something is pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic pneuma [spirit], which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them together.20

These words seem particularly applicable to the modern novel as Woolf envisioned it. Modernism has long been understood as a “turning inward” of the novel, a heightened attention to the workings of the individual consciousness and to intimate experience. Indeed, for Woolf the “ultimate and most sublime values” seem to belong to “the smallest and intimate circles.” Like Weber, Woolf seeks to understand how spiritual values can survive in a civilization dominated by what they both refer to as “materialism.” Both see the First World War as a product of this materialism; Woolf wrote her major novels, and Weber his famous lectures on “Science as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation,” in direct response to the war. Neither writer, however, wishes modern civilization to return to Christianity or the institutional church. In fact, each sees the modern world as sharing some essential spiritual traits with the ancient world, especially the replacement of the Christian God with multiple, competing “gods,” the value systems to which rationality is subservient. Woolf understands the modern novel as a site where the charismatic artist can offer a vision of a broader form of sacred community. Although her conception of such a community in her literary works of the 1920s is not explicitly political, the literary experiments of this period do contribute to her later feminist critique of patriarchal society in such works as A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (1938). In the latter work, Woolf blames both the Great War and the impending Second World War on the materialism

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and aggressiveness of male-dominated “civilization.”21 She devotes much of her critique of the patriarchy to a sustained attack on St. Paul for institutionalizing gender divisions in the church, contrary to his own teaching that “There is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3.28, quoted in Three Guineas, 112). In place of moribund, hierarchical institutions like the church, she proposes an “anonymous and secret Society of Outsiders,” whose members refuse to participate in existing political and educational institutions and whose motto, echoing Milton, is “those also serve who remain outside” (Three Guineas, 100, 108). Woolf’s positive, if unworkable, political vision proposes a form of community that would transcend differences of sex, class, and race. In such a society of outsiders, writers would seem to have a special place. Woolf comments in particular on the role of many women as prophets in the early church: “Thus the profession of religion seems to have been originally much what the profession of literature is now. It was originally open to anyone who had received the gift of prophecy” (Three Guineas, 113). Any revival of the spiritual community of the early church will necessarily, under the conditions of modern civilization, take the form of a society of outsiders, and its prophets will apparently include the modern novelists. Writing near the end of the First World War, Weber offers his own, perhaps equally unworkable, solution to the spiritual dilemma brought about by the disenchantment of the world. Weber argues that in the modern secular world, where institutional Christianity no longer supplies the culture with its dominant moral understanding, competing value systems conflict with one another – the values of beauty, truth, holiness, and the good; French values, German values, and American values; the values of science and of politics. “We live as did the ancients when their world was not yet disenchanted of its gods and demons, only we live in a different sense … Today the routines of everyday life challenge religion. Many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They strive to gain power over our lives and again they resume their eternal struggle with one another” (“Science as a Vocation,” 148–9). Modern religious experience is, from Weber’s perspective, tragic, for the conflicting values or gods that we must serve are irreconcilable. Alluding to Nietzsche’s treatise Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Weber argues that “we realize again today that something can be sacred not only in spite of its not being beautiful, but rather because and in so far as it is not beautiful” (147–8). Weber was concerned about the possibilities for religious experience in this disenchanted world, in which no single God sets the standard for our values.

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For Weber, we are all sick souls, not so much because of personal disposition as because of the success of Calvinism and the effects of the resultant historical changes which make an integrated personality impossible in the modern era. Like the universe of William James, Weber’s universe is pluralistic: there is no single measure of the good. Yet whereas James finds in the plurality of human experience a source of strength, Weber sees the same situation tragically.22 His response to this situation bears comparison with Woolf’s. His stirring and controversial peroration to “Science as a Vocation” proposes a modern polytheistic ethos: “We shall set to work and meet the ‘demands of the day,’ in human relations as well as in our vocation. This, however, is plain and simple, if each finds and obeys the demon who holds the fibers of his very life.”23 This call to “obey one’s demon” transposes the Protestant ethical injunction to “follow one’s calling [or ‘vocation,’ Beruf ],” analyzed by Weber, into a polytheistic register. Just as in the days of radical Protestantism, one’s ethical duty is to follow one’s calling, but now this calling is seen not as a message from God, but as the urging of a personal demon – here meaning, of course, the attendant personal spirit (daimon) of classical mythology, but also inevitably suggesting the devils of Judaeo-Christian theology. It is only in the embrace of such personal demons, says Weber, that we can restore “sublime values” to the disenchanted modern world (“Science as a Vocation,” 155). This vision of each person “obey[ing] the demon” resembles a more individualistic form of Woolf’s “Society of Outsiders.” Like Durkheim and (later) Freud, Weber finds in pre-Christian religion, in this case paganism, a precursor of modern spiritual conditions.24 Woolf and Weber stood far apart on the political spectrum. Woolf was a radical, if skeptical, “stepdaughter of England,” Weber a liberal but fairly traditional German nationalist who nevertheless supported the founding of the Weimar Republic.25 Both writers, however, seemed instinctively wary of parties and crusades, preferring to take the long view of political developments. This similarity of perspective can be attributed in part to the fact that both Woolf and Weber descended from the Protestant ethic that Weber analyzed in his most famous study. He argued that the development of the capitalist economy was crucially affected by the flow of ascetic attitudes from monasteries into the world at large, a shift that was helped along by Calvin’s doctrine of predestination and Luther’s notion of the “calling.” Radical Protestantism emphasized the Biblical teaching that the faithful must, like Jesus, “work the works of Him who sent [them], while it is day. The night cometh, when no man can work.”26 The text, in Weber’s view a foundational one for the Protestant ethic, was a favorite of Virginia Woolf’s father.27

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That Weber’s scholarship contains an element of spiritual autobiography has been widely recognized.28 Max Weber, Sr., the father of the sociologist, came from a family hale with the spirit of capitalism, successful linen dealers in a growing industrial town. Weber Sr. was a successful National Liberal politician in the era of Bismarck. Though more conventional and less intellectual than Leslie Stephen, he seems, like Stephen, to have represented for his most famous child a certain “Victorian complacency.”29 Like Leslie Stephen, too, he was a demanding husband, and “little Max” resented the strain that his father placed on his mother Helene, who was eager to fulfill the Victorian ideal of the “Angel in the House.” Helene Weber had strong religious beliefs, but these made little impression on her husband or son. Max Weber found himself to be, like his father, “unmusical religiously,” though he continued to cite Protestant ethical teachings, especially the parables of Jesus, throughout his life. In a manner perhaps typical of Victorian children, and reminiscent of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Weber understood his own character as split between maternal and paternal sensibilities.30 Both the Protestant ethic of his mother’s family and the capitalist spirit of his father’s seemed to him to belong to a complex ethical and religious inheritance, whose interrelations he attempted to trace in his first major work on the sociology of religion, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5). Adeline Virginia Stephen’s parents were committed agnostics, but she too distinguished between two family inheritances, in her case between the depressive, Calvinist intensity of the Stephen family and the patrician creativity of her mother’s family, whose traits she traced to an aristocratic French ancestress, Adeline de l’Etang, whose first name she inherited.31 Woolf’s paternal grandparents and great-grandparents, leading members of the evangelical Clapham Sect, had worked tirelessly in the cause of social reform, in particular the abolition of slavery. Her grandfather, James Stephen, a descendant of Scottish Calvinists, was the author of Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography, which includes a famous account of the Clapham Sect that Woolf read as a teenager.32 Woolf’s aunt, Caroline Emelia Stephen, converted to Quakerism and wrote the mystical classic Quaker Strongholds (1890), which emphasizes the personal experience of an “Inner Light” and justifies the Quakers’ rejection of all forms of institutional rite.33 Leslie Stephen, after leaving the church, displayed a convert’s zeal for his new philosophy in such works as An Agnostic’s Apology. Woolf described her father as a “muscular agnostic” (Moments, 115). Woolf herself, like her father, inherited from her family tradition a sense of work as duty: “I am almost inclined to think that I inherited a streak of the puritan, of the Clapham Sect” (Moments, 68).

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The intense productivity and full schedule of reading and writing characteristic of Woolf’s adult life find their fictional counterpart in To the Lighthouse, where not only Mr. Ramsay, but also Charles Tansley, William Bankes, and Lily Briscoe, look to their work as a source of meaning and justification. Their sense of commitment is fierce: Mr. Ramsay frets that, although “he has toiled honestly, given to the best of his power, and till he has no more left to give,” his books would have been better if he had never married (33, 60). Lily Briscoe, who admires Mr. Ramsay’s work as a philosopher without understanding it, sees herself as following a similar duty to truth in her work as a painter (72–3). Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner party, arguably the central event of the novel, earns the resentment of Charles Tansley and William Bankes because it takes them away from their work (73, 75–6). Regardless of whether Woolf’s thematic interest in the compulsion to work should be traced to her Protestant heritage, it is clear that for her, as for many of her characters, work is an expression, in Weber’s words, “of one’s duty in a calling” (Protestant Ethic, 54). Weber traced this sense of duty to Protestantism but thought that it had been perverted in modernity: “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of the monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order” (Protestant Ethic, 181). In Woolf’s case, it is clear that, while she is only one or two generations removed from Protestant doctrine proper, work has in the meantime become part of a generalized Victorian ethos, associated with “great men” like Carlyle, who wrote that “Properly speaking, all true Work is Religion.”34 Woolf could criticize such attitudes, but she made no great move to escape them. The emotional strain brought on by, or perhaps directed into, the sense of work as a moral duty, suggests, again in Weber’s words, how “the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs” (Protestant Ethic, 182). At the age of twenty-two, in 1904, shortly after the death of her father, Woolf suffered one of the most serious of her several mental breakdowns, which were often closely related to her work and its publication. Similarly, in 1897, at the age of thirty-three, Weber suffered a nervous breakdown after his father’s death. Weber then withdrew from his academic work for four years, spending time in a sanatorium and later a “clinic for nervous diseases.”35 For days at a time, he “sat by the window of his apartment in the Anlage [park area] and looked out at the tops of the budding chestnut trees. ‘What are you thinking about?’ [his wife asked him] – ‘Preferably nothing, if I can manage it.’ ”36 The mental illnesses of these two creative individuals – likely in both cases forms of manic depression or bipolar disorder – influenced their

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critiques of modern society. Some of Woolf’s greatest writing, such as Mrs. Dalloway, draws on her experience of mental illness; she once wrote that her mental illnesses had “done instead of religion” for her and that they were “partly mystical.”37 Weber’s analysis of the “iron cage” of capitalism surely owes something to his own breakdown; The Protestant Ethic was written within two years of his recovery. In terms that prefigure Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (a book that Woolf would later admire), Weber writes that the economic progress occasioned by the rise of capitalism has resulted in an economic system that “determine[s] the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force” (Protestant Ethic, 181).38 For Weber, the reformed churches, in their resistance to sacred relics and their elimination of the mediating function of the priest, contribute to the larger development that he describes as “the disenchantment of the world” (Protestant Ethic, 105).39 While Weber’s description of this process has sometimes been interpreted as an expression of triumphalism, he in fact regarded the development of Western rationality with ambivalence and even pessimism. The fundamental similarity of outlook between Woolf and Weber is most apparent in their shared concern with the relationship between value and fact. In Weber’s view, the sociologist, though he studies subjective values such as the beliefs of religious adherents, must never himself make value judgments about the materials he studies. The problem is how to study subjective values from the perspective of an objective science. This position of Weber’s, the neutrality of the social sciences with respect to the values of the people and societies that it studies, extends a central concern of liberal political thought into the social sciences. In liberalism, the state is neutral with respect to the substantive values its citizens pursue; each citizen can follow any definition of the good or the sacred that she chooses. The problem that Weber’s wartime lectures and methodological writings investigate is how to acknowledge the importance of values in general without specifically endorsing any particular value. This problem becomes acute for Weber and the social scientists of his generation precisely because of critiques like that of Nietzsche, who insists that no single standard of value can be assumed as shared for any given community, and because of the intensified awareness that, in Weber’s own words, science gives us no guidance about “ultimate meaning.”40 For Woolf, the challenge of modern fiction lies in combining the novelist’s responsibility to a world of fact with the artistic imperative to communicate “moments of vision.” She recognizes the task of modern fiction as the re-introduction of vision into a genre that

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has come, through the ossification of nineteenth-century realist techniques, to be dominated by the representation of fact.41 Weber’s concern with the failure of science to provide us with a sense of “ultimate meaning” resonates with Woolf’s insistent interrogations into “the meaning of life.” Woolf’s characters continually search for an answer to the meaning of existence and come up empty-handed. In his lucid moments, the war veteran Septimus Smith fears that “the world itself is without meaning,” but during his fits of madness he becomes convinced that he knows “the meaning of the world.” The insights that he takes to be profound truths, however, turn out to be platitudes of universal harmony: “first that trees are alive; next there is no crime; next love, universal love, he muttered, gasping, trembling, painfully drawing out these profound truths which needed, so deep were they, so difficult, an immense effort to speak out, but the world was entirely changed by them for ever.”42 In The Waves, the words with which Bernard begins his long final monologue seem to set him up for failure: “Now to sum up … now to explain to you the meaning of my life.”43 Perhaps sensing its futility, Lily Briscoe of To the Lighthouse retracts the question as soon as she asks it: “What is the meaning of life?” (138). She senses that her companions are working on the same problem: she overhears Mr. Ramsay mutter the words “Alone,” “Perish,” and feels that, “If only she could put [the words] together … write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things” (126). This moment is Woolf’s acknowledgment as a novelist that such a sentence, though we may seem to detect fragments at privileged moments, can never be written: the condition of our writing so many and various sentences is that we will never reach the one that consolidates the meaning of life, the truth of things.44 Instead, Woolf chooses to nurture the fragments: what Lily calls “daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.” Lily hopes, like Mrs. Ramsay, and indeed like Woolf herself, to “mak[e] of the moment something permanent” – a compact manifesto that she believes “was of the nature of a revelation” (138). The quest for meaning will find resolution not in a grand gesture that encompasses everything, but in minor daily miracles. This resolution, as far as Woolf is concerned, puts the quest for meaning in feminist terms: she parodies traditionally male obsessions with scholarships and academic reputations, while valorizing what is traditionally “women’s work” – the planning of parties, the knitting of stockings – which serves as a model for her own attempts to make of the moment something permanent. Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, Leopold Damrosch, and Charles Taylor have advanced variations on a Weberian thesis about the

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rise of the novel out of the inward orientation and searching of conscience typical of the Protestant ethic. Woolf’s focus on finding the key to ultimate meaning in “the ordinary mind on an ordinary day” suggests how influential the afterlife of Protestant ethical thought has been for literary modernism.45 moments of being Woolf developed her fictional technique in part, as Martha C. Nussbaum suggests in a fine essay, to address the “problem of other minds.”46 Her narrators and characters continually ponder the question of how it is possible to understand another person’s thoughts and values, and they understand this question not just in epistemological terms, but in ethical and social terms as well. For Woolf, no communion is possible with God or Christ, but she does seek some form of communion among selves. Such a communion can even seem to augur a form of immortality. For Woolf, it seems, the dead contribute to the problem of other minds, since belief in the immortality of the soul depends on the idea that other minds survive death, or, in a more secular variation, that one survives death only in the minds of others. Sublime moments of being temporarily allow the barriers between one mind and another to evaporate, the problem of other minds to be resolved; in this way, they form the basis for a sacred communion, an alternative to the communion of the Church of England. For Woolf, religious belief poses the most extreme form of the problem of other minds. An early experimental work, “An Unwritten Novel” (1920) raises the problem, to which her critical writing will continually return, of how to imagine another’s thought. The story takes place, like the central scene of the later essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in a railway carriage, where the narrator tries to figure out the story of a “poor, unfortunate woman” seated opposite her, whom she takes for a childless spinster.47 The Treaty of Versailles has just come into effect, and the narrator wonders why the woman (whom she gives the name Minnie Marsh) looks so unhappy. She attributes her desolation to some religious crisis: “Minnie Marsh prays to God… Oh, she committed some crime” (115). The narrator imagines Minnie’s God: but what God does she see? Who’s the God of Minnie Marsh, the God of the back streets of Eastbourne, the God of three o’clock in the afternoon? I, too, see roofs, I see sky; but oh, dear – this seeing of Gods! More like President Kruger than Prince Albert – that’s the best I can do for him; and I see him on a chair, in a black frockcoat, not so very high up either; I can manage a cloud or two for him to sit on; and

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then his hand trailing in the cloud holds a rod, a truncheon is it? – black, thick, thorned – a brutal old bully – Minnie’s God! (115)

Looking for a God attuned to the historical moment down to the smallest point of precision, “the God of three o’clock in the afternoon,” the narrator imagines Minnie praying to a brutal, warlike God, a bullying parody of the Old Testament Jehovah – the sort of God responsible for the war that has just ended, a God who resembles the leader of the Boers and also, coincidentally, the bureaucrat Klamm in Kafka’s The Castle. In the story the narrator tells herself, Minnie is an old-fashioned church mouse who constantly prays – “now the church door opens, the hard wooden pew receives her” – even as her God, in the new historical conditions opening up, fades from the scene. In the narrator’s reckoning, Minnie’s life is a lonely and increasingly desperate search for “meaning,” for a sign from “the old man with whiskers,” though no sign ever comes (116). When the train arrives at Eastbourne, the narrator, having invented for Minnie not only a crime, but also a failed romance and various humiliations, starts from her reverie as the other woman disembarks and greets her son. The entire “unwritten novel” falls apart, leaving the narrator once more with only questions about Minnie Marsh. This significant early story introduces Woolf’s preoccupation with the difficulty of knowing another person. “An Unwritten Novel” focuses this problem on the question of how others envisage God. The narrator’s efforts to comprehend the “mysterious figures” and “adorable world” around her form a kind of religious quest of her own, analogous to her character’s attempts to understand God (121). The narrator does not propose to take a God’s-eye-view of events, nor does she attempt to understand what God might actually be; rather, the task she sets herself is to understand that “ordinary mind on an ordinary day,” the sort of person one encounters on a railway carriage, and the limit-case, as it were, of understanding another mind is to understand its attempts to understand God. Religious belief often marks the limit of Woolf’s methods of sympathetically understanding her characters, just as Woolf greeted the news of Eliot’s conversion with bafflement. The least pleasant of her characters, like Doris Kilman in Mrs. Dalloway or Charles Tansley in To the Lighthouse, are people of humble origin who try to assert their authority to their social betters by aggressively broadcasting their beliefs in religious matters. (In Miss Kilman’s case, the belief is some kind of evangelical Christianity; for Tansley, it is atheism.) After the pious and pathetic Miss Kilman takes Mrs. Dalloway’s daughter to communion, Clarissa blames her for turning Elizabeth against her.

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The Ramsay children despise “the little atheist” Tansley, a response to him that Woolf gives us little reason to doubt; he is the antagonist of her heroine, Lily Briscoe, who broods bitterly on his taunting remark, “women can’t paint, women can’t write.”48 Tansley has made himself the acolyte of Mr. Ramsay, and his atheism seems less a well-considered philosophical position than a mixture of groveling imitation and belligerent self-assertion. Tansley and Miss Kilman mix their opinions on religious matters with profound class resentment. Miss Kilman proudly tells Elizabeth Dalloway that “My grandfather kept an oil and colour shop in Kensington” (Mrs. Dalloway, 98). Similarly, Tansley wants Mrs. Ramsay to know “that his grandfather was a fisherman; his father a chemist; that he had worked his way up entirely himself; that he was proud of it; that he was Charles Tansley” (Lighthouse, 78). Psychologically, their insistence upon their religious beliefs – by putting their beliefs in opposition, Woolf drives home the point that what matters is the dogmatism – signifies their poor breeding: they brandish the claim to absolute truth in order to reassure themselves of their status in the presence of the upper classes. Ironically, their insistence on a single measure of the sacred (God, not-God) makes them spiritually impoverished; for Woolf, the essential religious truth of modernity is the absence of any such single measure. In modernity, Woolf suggests, the only authentic religious or “spiritual” experience available can be found in intense moments of vision or ecstasy, which the techniques of art can preserve and transmit. In her autobiographical essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” which she wrote at the beginning of the Second World War, Woolf develops her idea of “moments of being” and contrasts them with moments of non-being. During moments of nonbeing, she says, one is “embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool” (Moments, 70). The specific moments of being that the essay recalls are all from childhood: the sudden desire not to fight with her brother; the recognition of the beauty of a flower-bed; the vision of an apple tree as somehow connected with the suicide of a family acquaintance. These moments are not as happy as the moments bienheureux that Proust’s involuntary memory reveals; indeed, the element of fear present suggests the influence of Wordsworth’s “spots of time.”49 M. H. Abrams has pointed out that Woolf’s emphasis on the visionary moment belongs to a tradition extending back through Proust and Wordsworth to St. Augustine.50 Though the moments she celebrates may contain a shock or a blow, they also promise “a revelation of some order,” Woolf writes: a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words… From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant

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idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we – I mean all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare; there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. (Moments, 72)

The unity of the world resembles that of a work of art, but it also seems that the work of art achieves its unity by representing that of the world. It is not just that “this vast mass” is like Hamlet, but that Hamlet is “the truth about this vast mass.” Woolf here echoes Mr. Ramsay’s statement that “there is no God,” but in a context that suggests a broader religious vision quite different from Mr. Ramsay’s and closer to that of his son James. Woolf remembers looking at a flower-bed and saying, “that is the whole,” but when Mr. Ramsay looks at a flower-bed he just thinks, “poor little world.” James, by contrast, sees a picture of a refrigerator in an illustrated catalogue as “fringed with joy.”51 There is a gentle irony here: the refrigerator itself has no intrinsic value; only James’s mood fringes it with joy. Woolf denies the existence of God, and she distinguishes God from the artist: behind the work of art that is the world there is no supreme artist. One of her constant concerns regarding novelistic form is the problem of how to create a work of art that reflects the underlying “pattern” of experience without imposing on it the views of an author-God. This concern recalls Flaubert’s famous dictum that the “artist in his work must be like God in creation – invisible and all-powerful; he must be everywhere felt but never seen”; yet Woolf’s idea involves a different conception of the author as one who forfeits his claim to God-like authority.52 This author is not an omnipotent judge who imposes meaning on her characters, but rather a finely-tuned receiver who picks up the varied and impersonal truths of the world and communicates them through characters who, because of their psychological complexity, seem to achieve a degree of independence of their creator. Her comments on Shakespeare reflect this ideal, but she seems to aim for a greater self-effacement even than Shakespeare’s. Woolf wrote that one of her first memories was of experiencing “the purest ecstasy I can conceive,” while lying as a child in her bedroom at St. Ives, Cornwall, and listening to the waves: “I am hardly aware of myself but only of the sensation. I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of rapture” (Moments 65, 67). Her conception of authorship involves a similar ecstasy, in which the author becomes a “container” for the impressions of her characters. Such moments of ecstasy, involving the erasure of the boundaries that typically separate one self from another, and resembling the “oceanic

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feeling” that so puzzled Freud, occur in Woolf’s fiction mainly in apparently private contexts. Often there is an intimation of lesbian eroticism. In “Moments of Being: ‘Slater’s Pins Have No Points’ ” (1928), which Woolf described to Vita Sackville-West as “a nice little story about Sapphism,” a student experiences a sudden and complete vision of her piano teacher’s past during the moment it takes the student to pin on a rose that has fallen from the teacher’s dress: “All seemed transparent for a moment to the gaze of Fanny Wilmot, as if looking through Miss Craye, she saw the very fountain of her being spurt up in pure, silver drops.”53 In this moment, the barrier between selves comes briefly down. Similar encounters mark emotional summits in Woolf’s novels. Mrs. Dalloway recalls “the most exquisite moment of her whole life” as when, in youth, a female friend kissed her: The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it – a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling! (Mrs. Dalloway, 28)

In To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe is frustrated in her desire for a similar moment of unity with Mrs. Ramsay. Imagining that the chambers of Mrs. Ramsay’s mind contain “tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out, would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly, never made public,” she wonders whether love would allow her to decipher these sacred tablets: Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s knee. (45–6)

In all three of these passages, Woolf uses the language of religious experience to suggest the possibility of overcoming the barriers separating one mind from another. Woolf’s moments of being participate in a renewed modernist interest in the sublime. Like other modernists, Woolf ironizes her use of the sublime, often retreating from direct statements of a sublime nature. She also reshapes it as a feminist aesthetic. Indeed, Woolf represents a central case of the “feminine” or “female sublime” that such theorists as Patricia Yeager, Rita Felski, and Barbara Claire Freeman have recently explored.54 When Woolf described “Moments of Being” as a “story about Sapphism,” for instance, she was of course referring to its lesbian content, but there is also a

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suggestion of the story’s use of an aesthetic of feminine rapture for which Sappho is the historical source. In “On the Sublime,” Longinus quotes Sappho’s “Ode to Anactoria” as demonstrating “a concourse of the passions”:55 Peer of gods he seemeth to me, the blissful Man who sits and gazes at thee before him, Close beside thee sits, and in silence hears thee Silverly speaking, Laughing love’s low laughter. Oh this, this only Stirs the troubled heart in my breast to tremble! For should I but see thee a little moment, Straight is my voice hushed; Yea, my tongue is broken, and through and through me ’Neath the flesh impalpable fire runs tingling; Nothing see mine eyes, and a noise of roaring Waves in my ear sounds; Sweat runs down in rivers, a tremor seizes All my limbs, and paler than grass in autumn, Caught by pains of menacing death, I falter, Lost in the love-trance.56

Woolf’s sublime erotic moments resemble Sappho’s in their interpersonal emphasis, in their illustration of the way that love transcends the boundaries of the self and that this transcendence closely resembles self-destruction. Other elements, such as the imagery of fire and water, the complaint about the difficulty of self-expression, and especially the sense of transformation (the world “turned upside down,” the “pains of menacing death”), also suggest continuities from Sappho’s sublime to Woolf’s.57 The sublime of course experienced many transformations in the centuries between Sappho and Woolf. The example of Wordsworth, for instance, was always prominent in Woolf’s consciousness; her father was a noted alpinist and Wordsworthian. The Wordsworthian sublime arises not simply from feelings of terror or admiration at the grandeur of nature, but also from the recognition, since nature, for all its grandeur, inevitably falls short of the infinite dimensions we can imagine, of the tremendous capacities of the human mind, “a sublime consciousness of the soul in her own mighty and almost divine powers.”58 Similarly, Kant, who connects aesthetic theories of the sublime to religious sentiment, relates an element typical of eighteenthcentury theories of the sublime, the initial moment of terror at the possibility of the self’s destruction, to a subsequent moment when the mind recognizes its own capacity for comprehending the idea of the infinite.

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Woolf’s “moments of being” encompass the three phases that Thomas Weiskel identifies as typical of the “sublime moment”: a state of normal perception, then a breakdown of such perception, and finally a recovery of balance in which “the very indeterminacy which erupted in phase two is taken as symbolizing the mind’s relation to a transcendent order.”59 In her use of the sublime, Woolf is very much the heir of the Romantics, although, as Weiskel notes, “to please us [moderns], the sublime must now be abridged, reduced, and parodied as the grotesque, somehow hedged with irony to assure us we are not imaginative adolescents. The infinite spaces are no longer astonishing; still less do they terrify… We live once again in a finite natural world whose limits are beginning to press against us and may well crush our children.”60 Woolf’s ironized sublime explores precisely this finitude, particularly as it presents itself in everyday life and as it relates to our own mortality. Nineteenth-century realism has little use for the sublime, although some variants of it survive in the nineteenth-century novel in the form of Gothic romance, and particularly in horror stories, from Frankenstein to Dracula. In her critical writings on Henry James, Woolf gave his ghost stories an interpretation consonant with the Wordsworthian sublime: “The horror of the story comes from the force with which it makes us realise the power that our minds possess for such excursions into the darkness; when certain lights sink or certain barriers are lowered, the ghosts of the mind, untracked desires, indistinct intimations, are seen to be a large company.”61 Again, the phrase “intimations” points to the Wordsworthian background of these ideas. Woolf’s family had a domestic tradition of reciting ghost stories, and her grandfather was said to have encountered ghosts. In her autobiographical writings, Woolf describes two apparitions that she may have experienced herself: one of “a horrible face” appearing over her shoulder in a mirror in her childhood summer home; and another of a man sitting on the edge of her mother’s deathbed.62 Both apparitions have a distinctly Jamesian quality, and they seem to find echoes in Woolf’s own mature fiction, where Septimus Smith sees the ghost of his old army comrade and Lily Briscoe thinks she may see Mrs. Ramsay’s ghost. In short, Woolf’s contribution to a modernist version of the sublime combines the Wordsworthian interest in the mind’s power to transform reality with the element of the uncanny drawn from the ghost story tradition. At the same time, it transfers the Romantic motif of the emptying-out and re-discovery of the self from the realm of nature into that of erotic love, fusing Wordsworth with Sappho. In this presentation, the erotic encounter has quasi-spiritual value as a type of communion, a sign of the “truth about this vast mass we call the world.”

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In Woolf’s modernism, the sublime relates not so much to grand or extraordinary things as to modest, everyday objects, things that have never been noticed but that turn out to open up unexpected worlds. The loss of the traditional sublime in the modernist era relates, no doubt, to the end of the age of exploration, but the dimension that makes itself more felt is a renewed interest in what transcends the limits of rational self-possession. One wellknown example of such a conception of the sublime is the echo in the Marabar caves in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, which, as Forster (a close friend of Woolf’s) wrote, is “either a man, or the supernatural, or an illusion.”63 Woolf, however, concerned as always with returning feminine dimensions of experience to the strategies of high aesthetics, shows interest in the possibilities of sublimity in the encounter, not just with natural or supernatural forces, but among people. We might think of this as a sublime of the quotidian, as when a character looks at a hat pin or remembers a kiss and the whole solid world seems to melt into air. In short, Woolf’s feminist, modernist sublime has for its archetype not a solitary man on a mountain pass, but a woman at a party; it addresses itself not so much to the universality of the human mind as to the interdependence of human experience. The question that each of these ecstatic episodes poses is whether the meeting of minds that the sublime moment offers can lead to sustained communion. For Woolf, the “moment of being” allows potentially for the re-enchantment of the world: it is a type of sacrament appropriate for a world in which no single measure of the sacred obtains, and in which community must result from the always temporary, ironic, and visionary merging of competing value systems.

to the lighthouse and the re-enchantment of the world Woolf’s To the Lighthouse undertakes to describe both the process of disenchantment of the modern world and also the possibilities for reenchantment. It poses, and then retracts, the question of the “meaning of life,” that question of “ultimate meaning” that Weber tells us science cannot answer for us. Criticism of this novel has focused largely on the problem of the self, along with Woolf’s critique of patriarchy and description of the impact of the First World War. I would like to suggest that the novel also poses the problem of how to find “ultimate meaning” in a world without God, and that it brings this question of ultimate meaning into focus through the use of explicitly religious images and plot elements.64 Woolf, who wrote her first published review on Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, surely intended the lighthouse as a polyvalent symbol, and,

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like the golden bowl, it has attracted many interpretations, some of them explicitly Christian. In the context of the theme of disenchantment, it seems to represent a modern, impersonal, disenchanted usurper of the sun, repeating incessantly its cycle of light and darkness and shining equally on the just and the unjust, and at the same time a longed-for but unattainable standard of judgment or truth that could reconcile the competing perspectives of the novel and unify them in a single vision – the modern equivalent of the vanishing point of Renaissance perspective. The barest plot of the novel can be seen in religious terms. It is the story of a man who damns his wife, her subsequent death and haunting of the family, and his expiatory trip to the Lighthouse. In the final section of the novel, Mrs. Ramsay’s ghost appears to the artist figure, Lily Briscoe; and although in these final moments Mr. Ramsay seems to declare that there is no God, a pagan spirit presides over the artistic vision of unity that closes the novel. The pagan element is significant: although Woolf, in trying to establish her own form of the sacred appropriate for modernity, makes use of elements of Christian typology, the most sacred, charismatic moments in the novel are not explicitly Christian. Rather, they belong to Woolf’s feminine sublime, and they suggest the survival in a post-Christian world of the possibility of sacred communion based not on union with God, but on the union of minds. The patriarch against whom the novel rebels is not a churchgoer, but the apparently atheist Mr. Ramsay. In the manuscript draft of To the Lighthouse, his son James recalls “dreary drives in the heart of winter to tabernacles in the city where his father, standing up very stiff & straight, proved conclusively (but James could never keep his attention fixed) that there is no God.”65 In the uncorrected proofs of the first edition, James gives a somewhat more extensive and hostile account of Mr. Ramsay’s insistence, after the deaths of his wife and two of his children, that “there is no God; one must be brave; for there is no God…” This is a caricature of Leslie Stephen’s attitude after the death of Virginia Woolf’s mother Julia, and Woolf deleted it before publication, perhaps in an effort to make Mr. Ramsay more sympathetic.66 James’s inability to fix his attention on his father’s arguments suggests not so much that God really does exist but that Mr. Ramsay is asking and answering the wrong question.67 Mr. Ramsay uses his own atheism as an occasion to claim for himself the authority that he denies God. Mr. Ramsay plays at being God: he “require[s] sacrifices” (18). This impulse to become like God trickles down to his children: in the first section of the novel, Nancy Ramsay plays with the minnows in a tidepool, “holding her hand against the sun, and so [bringing] darkness and

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desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures” (65). In the final section, her sister Cam thinks James “most godlike,” a “lawgiver, with the tablets of eternal wisdom laid open on his knee” (143–4). In both instances, the children are playing at being God the Father, dispenser of judgment, bringer of floods and darkness. The story of the “Fisherman and his Wife,” which Mrs. Ramsay reads to James, ends with the wife’s demand that the enchanted fish make her “like unto God” (182n.). Mr. Ramsay seems self-conscious about this tendency to play God: the continual images of being engulfed by water, “the sea eat[ing] away the ground we stand on,” and the hope that his children would “stem the flood a bit,” seem related to his anxiety about his atheism (40, 60). Leslie Stephen had left the church, as he explained to his children in his memoir, the Mausoleum Book, because he “became convinced that Noah’s Flood was a fiction … and that it was wrong for me to read the story as if it were a sacred truth.”68 Yet Mr. Ramsay fears water. It is as if Noah’s flood has entered his unconscious. Mr. Ramsay’s self-consciousness about his atheism is apparent in the way he dwells, throughout the first section of the novel, on the story “that Hume had stuck in a bog and an old woman rescued him on condition he said the Lord’s Prayer” (63). The story, which is related by Leslie Stephen in his entry on Hume in the Dictionary of National Biography, amuses Mr. Ramsay because it satirizes his own helplessness in practical matters and reliance on women to help him out of his slough of despond. On the other hand, the story doubtless amuses Mr. Ramsay because it describes the defeat of a philosopher of much greater stature than himself. In a well-known passage, Mr. Ramsay imagines intellectual achievement to be “like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet … ranged in twentysix letters all in order” (31). Mr. Ramsay’s “splendid mind” has made it to Q but seems stuck there, and he muses: “if he could reach R it would be something.” Hume, however, is no doubt that “one man in a generation” who reaches Z (32–3).69 The story about Hume and the old woman suggests the fairly typical Victorian (and modernist) assumption that women are the guardians of traditional religion. If Mr. Ramsay’s atheism is unappealing, one might hope for some spiritual understanding in his wife. Mrs. Ramsay, possibly like Woolf’s mother Julia a more recent convert to skepticism than her husband, does sometimes slip back into religious consolation. While contemplating her son James’s disillusionment at not being able to go to the lighthouse, she finds herself thinking, “We are in the hands of the Lord” (55). In one of Virginia Woolf’s typical rhetorical moves, however,

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Mrs. Ramsay immediately retracts the thought: “But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had said it? Not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean” (55). The beam of the lighthouse then seems to “purify… out of existence that lie, any lie,” and she goes on to wonder how any Lord could have made this world, in which “there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor” (56). While Mrs. Ramsay rejects what she evidently sees as the ideological consolations offered by religion, she does contemplate a different sort of quasi-religious ecstasy moments after retracting her thoughts about the Lord. She contemplates the beam of the lighthouse as she remembers: “she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness and [the beam] silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!” (57). Here (as elsewhere in Woolf’s work), both the water imagery and the color silver recall Sappho’s “Ode to Anactoria.” This moment of ecstasy prefigures two other such moments in the novel: Mrs. Ramsay’s sense of elation at the end of her dinner party and Lily’s moment of vision at the novel’s conclusion. The novel’s explicitly religious imagery develops around the plot of the postponed trip to the lighthouse. Mrs. Ramsay tells James, in the opening words of the book, that he may go to the lighthouse “if it’s fine tomorrow” (7). His father warns him, however, that “it won’t be fine” (8). Tansley gleefully rubs it in: “No going to the Lighthouse, James” (16). After the character sketch of Mr. Ramsay, as seen by Lily Briscoe and William Bankes, in chapter 4, the main theme returns. Mrs. Ramsay briefly challenges her husband: “How did he know” whether it would be fine tomorrow. He replies, “Damn you” (30). The portrait of the Ramsays’ marriage revolves around this remark which, though it clearly has no real magical power for Mr. Ramsay as far as his conscious philosophy is concerned, is in religious terms a powerful performative act, condemning Mrs. Ramsay to hell. Several chapters (but probably just a few moments of novelistic time) later, Mr. Ramsay approaches Mrs. Ramsay, who wonders whether he wants to apologize for saying “Damn you” (59). Instead, however, he complains that she looks unhappy. It is at this point that he begins musing on the story about Hume in the bog. That night, before bed, he wants to reconcile with his wife, and she realizes that he is thinking “Will you not tell me just now for once that you love me?” (104). If he is unable to apologize for his cursing her, she is unable, or perhaps unwilling, to tell him that she loves him,

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although, “he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him” (104). Yet, she does submit after a fashion, conceding that they will not be able to go to the lighthouse the next day. “And she looked at him smiling. For she had triumphed again. She had not said it: yet he knew” (104). Here, Mrs. Ramsay triumphs by submitting to her husband, but submitting in a slightly different way from the one he demands. After Mr. Ramsay damns his wife, the novel’s language becomes increasingly religious. If Mr. Ramsay seems to usurp the role of God the Father, he and the other men in the novel would like to cast Mrs. Ramsay as the Madonna. Mr. Ramsay thinks how the sight of his wife and son “consecrate[s]” his intellectual efforts (31), while the same sight causes William Bankes to feel emotional “rapture” (42). Mr. Bankes discusses with Lily whether in her painting she can reduce the subject of mother and child, “objects of universal veneration,” to “a purple shadow without irreverence” (47). Lily answers that “There were other senses too in which one might reverence them,” namely through the use of form and light (47). The conversation casts Mrs. Ramsay as the Madonna with Child, and indeed Woolf’s mother famously posed as the Virgin Mary for the Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones’s painting of the Annunciation.70 Woolf, however, gives Mrs. Ramsay a different role, associating her, like Septimus Smith of Mrs. Dalloway, with the figure of Christ. Like Christ, Mrs. Ramsay gives a last supper, which is the subject of the central scene and longest chapter of the entire novel. Here, her task, like Woolf’s or Lily Briscoe’s, is to form some kind of community from the separate selves at dinner: “Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole effort of the merging and flowing and creating rested on her” (72). The candles at the table are lit; “a yellow and purple dish of fruit” sits in the midst of the table. At the end of the dinner, as the candle flames burn brighter, Mrs. Ramsay imagines that she is in church: “the voices came to her very strangely, as if they were voices at a service in a cathedral, for she did not listen to the words. The sudden bursts of laughter and then one voice (Minta’s) speaking alone, reminded her of men and boys crying out the Latin words of a service in some Roman Catholic cathedral” (93). Mrs. Ramsay is, though she is only partly conscious of the fact, the center of this service. Her female communion challenges and competes with the all-male Catholic mass. Though the servants bring the food, it is Mrs. Ramsay who distributes the main course, Boeuf en Daube, in a scene that distantly echoes Christ’s distribution of the bread and wine at the Last Supper. The parallel with the Eucharist strengthens as Mr. Ramsay begins to chant a poem, “Luriana Lurilee,” and Mr. Carmichael rises, joining him,

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with his table napkin resembling a “long white robe” (a priest’s vestments). He turns and bows to Mrs. Ramsay “as if he did her homage” (93–4). Still, like the modernist churchgoers who fail to understand the words of the mass, Mrs. Ramsay is inattentive to the conversation. While the men chant, Mrs. Ramsay thinks, “She did not know what they meant, but, like music, the words seemed to be spoken by her own voice, outside her self, saying quite easily and naturally what had been in her mind the whole evening while she said different things” (94). The problem of other minds is momentarily solved. This appears to be one of those moments of being, in which it is revealed, as Woolf later wrote, that “the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art” (Moments, 72). It is Woolf’s equivalent of a sacrament. The ingestion of Mrs. Ramsay’s consecrated food forms the characters into a sacred community, as in the communion the members of the church become “one body.” The Biblical parallels that rule the first section of the novel uneasily cede their dominance, however, after Mrs. Ramsay dies. Mrs. Ramsay’s death bears resemblances to Christ’s: a “cock crows” just before her death is announced, like the cock that crows when Peter denies Jesus before the crucifixion; after her re-appearance to Lily in the final section of the novel, Lily says “It is finished,” repeating the last words of Christ according to John 19:30.71 Lily fears that her attempts to define her own emotions about Mrs. Ramsay amount to “a kind of blasphemy” (129). From the moment of Mrs. Ramsay’s death onward, however, the novel deals with the problem of the disenchantment of the world. The magic of Mrs. Ramsay’s presence no longer binds the family; the remainder of the novel takes up the thematic problem of how to unify a group whose central figure has died and the formal problem, which Woolf had already explored in Jacob’s Room, of how to write a novel in which the main character is absent. “Directly [Mrs. Ramsay] went, a sort of disintegration set in; they wavered about, went different ways,” writes Woolf (112). The “Time Passes” section describes the disintegration of the house during the family’s ten-year absence. A “flood” of darkness descends (107). “Divine goodness” seems at first to reveal the permanence of “the hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking… But alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his treasures in a drench of hail and so breaks them, so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth” (109). The war, the ravages of time, Prue’s death caused by “some illness connected with childbirth,” Mrs. Ramsay’s early

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and unexplained death: all contribute to this flood, whose source (the speaker remarks sarcastically) is “divine goodness” (113). The voice of the cleaning woman, Mrs. McNab – one of those stereotypical working women in Woolf’s writing who embody at once her desire and her inability to comprehend the minds of the lower classes – is “robbed of meaning” (111). “The mystic, the visionary,” walking along the beach and asking, “What am I,” “What is this?” (two of the first among many unanswerable questions in the novel), have “suddenly an answer vouchsafed them: (they could not say what it was)” (112). Meaning refuses language. Here, the mystic becomes the target of satire: the purely private, inexpressible meanings that appear to visionaries cannot form any real basis for communion. With bitter irony, Woolf writes that the intimations of war that haunt the seaside intrude on the “sublime reflections” that poetic types normally take from “the usual tokens of divine bounty,” such as the sunset, the dawn, and the moon (133–4). “Chaos” overtakes the house that has “stood all these years without a soul in it” (114). In a parody of the divine “Fiat” in Genesis, chapter 1, Woolf writes: “Let the wind blow; let the poppy seed itself and the carnation mate with the cabbage. Let the swallow build in the drawingroom, and the thistle thrust aside the tiles, and the butterfly sun itself on the faded chintz of the arm-chairs. Let the broken glass and the china lie out on the lawn and be tangled over with grass and wild berries” (118). The cyclical character of some of the changes described in “Time Passes,” including even arguably Prue’s death in childbirth, clashes with the violence of the war, which appears not as a cyclical phenomenon but as a bloody, “purplish stain upon the bland surface of the sea” – which ironically echoes the “Spirit of God” that “moves upon the face of the waters” in Genesis 1:2 (Lighthouse, 114). The section as a whole reverses the creation myth: the “flood” returns the house to “chaos.” The final section of the novel, “The Lighthouse,” describes the attempts of Lily Briscoe, Mr. Ramsay, and his children, Cam and James, to come to terms with Mrs. Ramsay’s death. Typologically, after Mrs. Ramsay’s death, Lily Briscoe and the surviving members of the Ramsay family are in something like the position of the first Christians awaiting the second coming. They inhabit the same post-messianic interlude that is the theme of the “Road to Emmaus” section of Eliot’s The Waste Land. F. L. Overcarsh has argued that the final section of the novel represents the Resurrection and Ascension; yet despite the imagery of trees, fish, and fishermen, which recalls the New Testament, the resurrection of Mrs. Ramsay in “The Lighthouse” differs importantly from the resurrection of Christ.72 Unlike in the Christian myth, no one claims that Mrs. Ramsay’s death has a

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purpose. She dies in the middle of the night and in the middle of a parenthesis. The fact is stark and unexplained. It is neither a suicide nor a murder; she has not chosen to die in atonement for anyone else’s sins. As we will see, the resurrection that ensues follows less a Christian than a pagan pattern, and the redemption that it promises remains modest, if not illusory. No religious comfort seems available to Lily Briscoe at the beginning of “The Lighthouse.” The section begins with her asking “What does it mean then, what can it all mean?” (125). The phrase is her equivalent to Mrs. Ramsay’s “We are in the hands of the Lord.” Indeed, the final section of the novel presents a long series of unanswerable questions: “What does one send to the Lighthouse?” (125), “One said – what did one say?” (131), “Where to begin?” (135), “What does it mean? How do you explain it all?” (152), “What then came next? Where were they going?” (160). Lily quickly retracts her own question, “a catchword that was, caught up from some book, fitting her thought loosely,” yet she asks herself the question again: “What is the meaning of life? … The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.” With this insight, adopting Mrs. Ramsay as her example, Briscoe decides to try in her art “to make of the moment something permanent” (138). In To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay manages to be resurrected, not as Christ reborn, but simply as a ghost. Cam Ramsay accompanies her father on a belated trip to the lighthouse: “He had borne them down once more with his gloom and his authority, making them do his bidding, on this fine morning, come, because he wished it, carrying these parcels, to the Lighthouse; take part in these rites he went through for his own pleasure in memory of dead people, which they hated, so that they lagged after him, and all the pleasure of the day was spoilt” (141). Cam sees this journey as a rite, evidently an expiatory rite; Mr. Ramsay is trying to atone for his treatment of his wife during her lifetime, and especially for the moment he damned her, an event that James dimly remembers as the lighthouse nears. As the boat approaches their destination, Cam thinks that the people back on the shore are “free like smoke…free to come and go like ghosts. They have no suffering there, she thought” (145). Mrs. Ramsay seems beyond suffering. Cam envies the dead. By contrast, Lily observes, as she attempts a new painting that repeats her activity of the novel’s first section, that the dead “are at our mercy” (148). She thinks of Mrs. Ramsay as “Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely at any time of day or night”; but then she realizes that Mrs. Ramsay still has power over her

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(152). Meanwhile, the scene she is painting surrounds “a centre of complete emptiness,” now bereft even of the abstract maternal center of her earlier painting; what could fill this emptiness? (152) As though to summon that lost center or call back the dead, Lily cries out repeatedly, “Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!” (138, 153 twice). At last, after meditating on Mrs. Ramsay and art, Lily concludes that “she did not want Mrs. Ramsay now” – which is when a mysterious figure appears at the window, throwing “an odd-shaped triangular shadow” that echoes the “triangular purple shape” that represented Mrs. Ramsay and James in the earlier picture (170, 46). Lily receives an ecstatic vision in which Mrs. Ramsay reappears: One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy. The problem might be solved after all. Ah, but what had happened? Some wave of white went over the window pane. The air must have stirred some flounce in the room. Her heart leapt at her and seized her and tortured her. “Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!” she cried, feeling the old horror come back – to want and want and not to have. Could she inflict that still? And then, quietly, as if she refrained, that too became part of ordinary experience, was on a level with the chair, with the table. Mrs. Ramsay – it was part of her perfect goodness – sat there quite simply, in the chair, flicked her needles to and fro, knitted her reddish-brown stocking, cast her shadow on the step. There she sat. (170–1)

The closing line of this passage, “There she sat,” echoes the final line of Mrs. Dalloway: “For there she was.” It is a sacramental moment, comparable in its use of the deictic to Christ’s words, “This is my body.” The center of communion is a woman whose sympathy or imagination brings together the multiple visions of a community. This moment of vision is, however, gently ironized, like the waking dream at the end of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”; the echo of Kurtz’s last words in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (“The horror! The horror!”) suggests the limits of any ultimate vision. We can no more tell whether Mrs. Ramsay’s ghost really appears to Lily than we can say whether the ghosts in Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” are real. Yet the vision sustains Lily, and her brief, final conversation with Mr. Carmichael suggests at least the fragmentary beginnings of a new communion, such as seems to be denied Clarissa Dalloway. The resurrection of Mrs. Ramsay in Lily’s artistic vision seems to have a more pagan than Christian valence; and after Lily pronounces the words “It is finished,” and Mr. Ramsay appears to think, “There is no God,” the only religious force left in the novel is Mr. Carmichael, who resembles “an old pagan God, shaggy, with weeds in his hair and the trident (it was only a

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French novel) in his hand” (175–6). The figurative return to paganism is in fact a new phase in disenchantment, one in which the instrument of power that the gods once wielded is reduced (again in parentheses) from a trident to “a French novel.” The reference is, on the one hand, to a novel like Woolf’s, which presents itself as the basis for a new spiritual understanding; but this destination for the remnants of religious vision is also an ironic gesture, for novels do not really have supernatural power. It is far from certain that Lily’s painting, Mr. Carmichael’s poetry, or Woolf’s novel will, in Weber’s words, be that “something…pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic pneuma [spirit], which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them together.”73 In the disenchanted world of To the Lighthouse, rather, the hope for reenchantment takes the form of communion that only intense privacy can achieve. The private, apparently mystical experiences of Lily or Mrs. Ramsay form the basis for their attempts to create a new form of communion. The problem for the novelist, as for the hostess and the painter, is to bring the competing values, the many gods, of various individuals into some kind of harmony. This is the vision of the sacrament in Mrs. Ramsay’s last supper, but it is attempted in a more ironized, less full-blooded way in Lily’s final vision. The question of “ultimate meaning,” in Weber’s phrase, or “the meaning of life,” as Lily puts it, is not to be answered except in the fragmentary sense that each individual, and especially the artist, will follow her own vision.

chapter 7

The burial of the dead

Virginia Woolf first mentions Mrs. Ramsay’s death in brackets, in the most famous sentence of To the Lighthouse: “[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]”1 In her memoir, it is Woolf herself who stretches her arms out on the night her mother dies: “My father staggered out of the bedroom as we came. I stretched out my arms to stop him, but he brushed past me, crying out something I could not catch; distraught.”2 The passage recalls Odysseus’s encounter with the shade of his mother in Book 11 of The Odyssey.3 Woolf singled out the passage in Homer when she first read it at the age of fifteen, two years after her mother’s death. In Fitzgerald’s translation: “I bit my lip,/rising perplexed, with longing to embrace her,/and tried three times, putting my arms around her,/but she went sifting through my hands, impalpable/as shadows are, and wavering like a dream.”4 The corresponding scene in The Aeneid, Aeneas’s meeting with the ghost of his father, includes the word “arms” (bracchia) in the original Latin: “At this his tears brimmed over/And down his cheeks. And there he tried three times/ To throw his arms around his father’s neck,/Three times the shade untouched slipped through his hands,/Weightless as wind and fugitive as dream.”5 This classical image of the impossibility of recovering what we have lost appealed to Woolf probably because, as she put it in “On Not Knowing Greek,” it recognizes the “sadness” of this world, but without offering what she derided as the easy consolations of Christianity. Woolf regarded her major novels as elegies, but elegies without the consolation of immortality in another world.6 Facilis descensus Averni, Virgil’s Sybil tells Aeneas. The descent into the underworld seems easy for the modernists, too. Woolf was hardly alone among her colleagues in her fascination with pagan alternatives to Christianity. William Faulkner took the title of his novel about the burial of the dead, As I Lay Dying (1930), from a furious speech that Agamemnon 170

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gave, also in Book 11 of The Odyssey, denouncing his treacherous wife, Clytemnestra: “As I lay dying the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes for me as I descended into Hades.”7 The great popularity of The Odyssey among the modernists was doubtless due in part to the example of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922, but published serially from 1918); but more important, perhaps, was the contemporary relevance of a poem about re-pacifying the world after war, the longing to return home after an epic conflict, but also the dangers of that return, dangers that Agamemnon’s fate epitomized. It is to seek guidance on how to return to Ithaca from one of the shades, Tiresias, that Odysseus undertakes the descent to Hades (or katabasis). In the first of his Cantos (1917), Ezra Pound paraphrases the opening of Book 11 and, as T. S. Eliot wrote, Tiresias is “the most important personage” in The Waste Land (1922). The first section of The Waste Land, “The Burial of the Dead,” raises, in a tone of mockery concerning a failed resurrection, the question of what to do with the bodies and the memories of the war dead: “‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,/‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?’” The war poets Siegfried Sassoon, in “Rear Guard,” and Wilfred Owen, in “Strange Meeting,” both make ironic use of katabasis to describe the battlefield. The literature of the 1920s demonstrates a fascination with corpses that can certainly be traced in part to the trenches. J. M. Winter has discussed the renewed interest in spiritualism and attempts to contact the dead that swept both middle-brow and intellectual circles in the 1920s, as well as the connection of that revival with broader efforts to commemorate the war dead, which often drew on highly traditional forms of mourning.8 It is notable as well that in the 1920s the Church of England attempted for the first time since the seventeenth century to update the Book of Common Prayer, including the rite for the Burial of the Dead, a revision that aroused considerable debate. The House of Commons rejected the revised version twice, largely on the grounds that it was too Anglo-Catholic; notably in this respect the revised Book added to the traditional rites a new section of Prayers for the Dead, which Protestant Evangelicals regarded as superstitious and Romish.9 For Britons who did not belong to the church, these years also saw the publication of exotic alternative funeral rites including, for example, the Egyptian Book of the Dead (translated into English in the 1890s), which inspired many features of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), and the Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927), which was compiled by William Evans-Wentz, a traveler and spiritual seeker who had known both W. B. Yeats and William James.10 From the Victorian period onwards, partly under the influence of

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Hinduism and neo-paganism, cremation gained in popularity as an alternative to burial, with the foundation of the Cremation Society of England in 1874 and the passage of the Cremation Act in 1902. Beginning around 1907, bodies were cremated before having their ashes interred at Westminster Abbey, but the Catholic Church continued to oppose the practice (until the Second Vatican Council of 1962–5) because of traditional religious objections rooted in the problem of how the dead could be resurrected at judgment day if their bodies had been burnt. Although the war dead provided a powerful catalyst for such reconsideration of the proper rites for the disposal of dead bodies, such thinking was underway well before the war. After all, both James Joyce’s best short story, “The Dead” (1914), and Thomas Mann’s story “Death in Venice” (1913) predate the war, and both The Magic Mountain (1924) and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27) were begun before the conflict commenced, even though they were completed afterwards. The modernists’ concern with the burial of the dead, then, also arises from their broader search, which I have analyzed in this study, for alternative means of recognizing the sacred, which would replace the old rituals of the church. The modernists turn to classical, pagan models because they see these as offering a more adequate understanding of the afterlife than that provided by Christianity (or, for that matter, spiritualism and popular forms of Eastern religion). The pagan view seems more adequate to them not because they regard it as literally true but because of the felicity with which it symbolizes the relationship of the living to the dead – which is a primary concern perhaps of novels in general, drawing as they do on traditions from the deep past, speaking to an anonymous future, resurrecting from the author’s life the ghosts of his or her experience – but which seems especially so for the major novels of the modernist period. A central theme of these works is the constant use that the living make of the dead, for instance to tell themselves comforting stories or to symbolize their own unconscious desires. This is a major function of Henry James’s ghosts, for example, and it seems to be part of what James means when he discusses the afterlife as “a question of desire, but of desire so confirmed, so thoroughly established and nourished, as to leave belief a comparatively irrelevant affair.”11 In The Shadow-Line (1917), Joseph Conrad’s narrator argues with his first mate, who believes that the (late) previous captain is exercising malign influence from beyond the grave. “I imagine the dead feel no animosity against the living,” says the narrator in opposition. “They care nothing for them.”12 Yet the plot of the novel suggests that the dead captain does wield some kind of power over the ship. In D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love

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(1921), Birkin expresses the suspicion that dominates modernist fiction: “I don’t mind about the dead once they are dead. The worst of it is, they cling on to the living, and won’t let go.”13 In Birkin’s claim, the dead do not seem to be really dead until they have let go of the living – which means, of course, until the living have let go of them. As these acts of conflation suggest, we may be no more able to let go of the dead than to let go of our own desires and fears. What the modernists seem to find most appealing about classical versions of the afterlife is that they eliminate the comforting Christian superstitions that the dead are at peace (in one version of the liberal Protestant view) or that they watch over us and protect us (a more typically Catholic view). Not accidentally (since Dante had read Virgil who had read Homer), the souls in Book 11 of The Odyssey resemble the souls in Dante's Inferno, but in the classical underworld it is not just sinners who suffer, and there is no suggestion that their suffering is part of a providential plan, or that divine authority, wisdom, or love built Hades; justice is not part of the equation.14 Rather, the pagan dead are quite foreign to our living world, and they are bitter and unhappy. For the modernists, this seems to reflect more closely the truth of our relationship with the dead – we can never truly understand them or be happy concerning them, in part because they remind us of conflicts that never found resolution during their lives but more importantly because they remind us of our own mortality. The modernists not only experimented with the novel form as a way to explore the nature of religious experience in the modern world; they also saw the genre as having a particular ability to represent the process of mourning because of its powers of ironic distancing. Novelistic narration can represent both the public ritual of the funeral service and the private thoughts of the mourner, thoughts which may or may not accord with official sentiment. Yet the skeptical mourner cannot maintain quite the distance from the burial of the dead that he could from the Catholic mass. If the churchgoing scene represents a fading culture to which the modernist tourist responds as an outsider, the funeral scene reminds the mourner that eventually he too will be the central figure in this most inevitable of rites.15

katabasis Like many anthropologists of his time, Freud regards belief in the afterlife as an essential aspect of primitive religion. He explains the idea of the immortality of the soul as a product of the ambivalent emotions of the living, originating in “projections of hostile feelings harboured by the survivors

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against the dead.”16 Externalizing these hostile feelings, the living come to believe that the dead are haunting them. For Freud, as indeed for Proust, in this respect our encounters with the dead are just a more extreme case of the fate of all past experience, which tends to become preserved in the unconscious, like the souls of the dead in Hades. In a footnote in the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes: “If I may use a simile, [unconscious wishes] are only capable of annihilation in the same sense as the ghosts in the underworld of the Odyssey – ghosts which awoke to new life as soon as they tasted blood.”17 Unconscious wishes, like the memory of the dead, never disappear entirely but rather inhabit a sort of limbo. In the famous episode to which Freud refers, the dead vie to drink the blood of the sheep Odysseus has slaughtered and thus to take on more solid form: Now the souls gathered, stirring out of Erebos, brides and young men, and men grown old in pain, and tender girls whose hearts were new to grief; many were there, too, torn by brazen lanceheads, battle-slain, bearing still their bloody gear. From every side they came and sought the pit with rustling cries; and I grew sick with fear… Meanwhile I crouched with my drawn sword to keep the surging phantoms from the bloody pit (11.39–52, p.186) till I should know the presence of Teirêsias.

The dead appear here as they did in life, or more precisely at the moment of death; but while they retain this much of their humanity, in death they have become bestial, thirsting for raw blood. Moreover, they do not behave as strictly immaterial beings – after all, Odysseus can frighten them away with his sword. Proust, as well, alludes to the underworld scene of ghosts drinking blood. Even before he began his great novel, he wrote to a friend that “a hundred characters for novels, a thousand ideas ask me to give them substance, like those shades that keep asking Ulysses in the Odyssey to give them a bit of blood to drink and bring them to life, and that the hero pushes aside with his sword.”18 Here, the unwritten novel shoulders Proust with the demand that the dead place on Odysseus; so slow is the work of writing any novel, however, that Proust, like his antecedent, must at least initially refuse the bulk of them. Like Joyce, who imagines Leopold Bloom as a modern-day Ulysses, Proust imagines his narrator entering, perhaps even by way of “metempsychosis,” into the situation of Odysseus, here understood as a proto-Aeneas, a symbol of frustrated filial piety.19 It is in order to fulfill his duties to the dead that Proust’s narrator (and perhaps Proust) writes. Proust

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started the novel after his mother’s death, and the narrator’s grandmother’s persistent inquiries after his writing suggest the importance of duty in his sense of vocation. The Thousand and One Nights, to which Proust makes reference in his novel, tells the story of a storyteller who must keep inventing tales in order to stave off death. For Proust, who probably hastened his own death by writing, the novel as a work of art nevertheless represents a struggle against death’s power. Proust depicts a form of katabasis in his description of the narrator’s dream of his grandmother soon after her death.20 Although the narrator insists, rejecting literal belief in an afterlife, that “the dead exist only in us,” he describes falling asleep as crossing “an inward Lethe” and recalls a dream he once had in which he was late for an appointment in the underworld with his grandmother, but could not remember the address of the little room there to which she was confined. In the dream, he begs his father for the address and for assurance that the dead really do live on, but his father simply tells him not to make the visit. Proust is writing here from the perspective of the survivor. The dream is full of the narrator’s self-reproach at his failure to remember his grandmother (although he manages to displace some of this guilt onto his father). Even though the deaths of the narrator’s grandmother and of Albertine make him feel for a while like someone guilty of a “double murder,” he recognizes, and eventually comes to terms with, the inevitability of his forgetting them.21 One of Proust’s typical observations is how quickly the dead are forgotten. For example, Mme. Verdurin demands that the faithful agree to be buried next to her after death, but their own deaths merit nothing like the response she expects for her own: she “never thought of [other people] again for a single day as soon as, being dead, they could no longer come to her Wednesdays, or her Saturdays, or drop in for dinner.”22 Her husband insists that no member speak of the dead or dying, ostensibly because it would upset Mme. Verdurin too much, but in fact because it might lead to the cancellation of a dinner party; this practice leaves each member of the clan to wonder whether, on the day or his or her own death, “they would draw the blinds or give a party” at the home of the Verdurins.23 In the final episode of the novel, the model of Odysseus in the underworld becomes even more explicit. After the war, the narrator attends a reception at the home of the new Princesse de Guermantes, the former Mme. Verdurin, who has married the widowed Prince de Guermantes, thus uniting the bourgeois and aristocratic salons of the narrator’s youth. Here, among his aged friends, Odette Swann appears before the narrator, speaking with a voice that is “sad, almost suppliant, like the voice of the shades in the

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Odyssey.”24 The episode as a whole suggests the analogy that seeing one’s friends grown old is like seeing their ghosts in the underworld; Proust makes the comparison explicit in a passage about an anonymous friend of the narrator’s youth, now a politician full of “guile and dissimulation.”25 Here, it is only the man’s laugh, which remains the same underneath the changed features, that offers the narrator emotional proof that his old friend is the one before him; but once the man stops laughing, the narrator, “like Ulysses in the Odyssey when he rushes forward to embrace his dead mother,” is “obliged to give up the attempt” to recognize him.26 By this point in the novel, the attitude of the Verdurins and Guermantes of this world has diverged as far as possible from the narrator’s own piety. An elderly woman at the party feels that “every time someone of her own age ‘disappeared,’ she had gained a victory in a contest against formidable competitors. Their deaths were the only fashion in which she still for a moment became agreeably conscious of her own life.”27 Part of the interrogation of mourning in modernist fiction is the suspicion that the deaths of others can even be a source of pleasure for their survivors. Such a sentiment would be reflected in an uncharitable reading of Clarissa Dalloway’s communion with Septimus Smith in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. At the end of the novel, in the rapturous wake of experiencing something like a mystical bond with Septimus, the shell-shocked war veteran whom she has never met, Clarissa tells herself that Septimus’s suicide “made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun.”28 It is a line that puts Clarissa’s self-involvement in uncomfortably sharp terms; yet if Woolf sometimes suggests Clarissa’s shallowness with respect to death, she also seems to have sympathy with her protagonist’s views on immortality. The novel describes Clarissa’s spiritual views mainly through the recollections of her friend and former suitor, Peter Walsh. He remembers that, after her sister died in an accident, Clarissa initially blamed “the Gods” and argued that “the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a lady” (59). (The comment seems to echo Leslie Stephen’s remark that “I now believe in nothing, to put it shortly; but I do not the less believe in morality etc. etc. I mean to live and die like a gentleman if possible.”)29 Walsh remembers that in later years Clarissa “thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness” (59). With the chill of mortality in the air, owing to the war, to memories of her sister, and to preparations for a party of her own that evening, Clarissa spends a good part of the novel brooding on the problem of the “soul.” For

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her, as for Proust and James, this seems to mean primarily the problem of continuity and resurrection. Peter Walsh remembers a theory of Clarissa’s on the subject that seems to resemble theories of immortality proposed by Henry James and by Proust’s narrator: It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death…perhaps – perhaps. (114)

Clarissa introduces the same thoughts, more indirectly, early in the novel, when she asks herself whether, after death, “somehow, in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive of the trees at home…” (9). The idea echoes ancient images of the soul being captured in a tree, such as Proust also develops in his description of involuntary memory and Frazer catalogues in his Golden Bough.30 For Clarissa, the idea carries a particular pathos or irony, since her sister was killed by a falling tree. Clarissa, then, while atheistic in her official opinions about God, verges on pantheism in her reveries about the soul. In this light, it is important to recognize that it is not in reference to strict materialism, but rather to the rejection of traditional religious orthodoxies, that Peter Walsh describes Clarissa as “one of the most thorough-going sceptics he had ever met” (59).31 All of the novelists that this study considers might be described as skeptical of the existence of an omnipotent God; yet all of them, like Clarissa, seem to be searching for alternative accounts of religious experience, of “the soul” – forms of what Peter Walsh calls an “atheist’s religion.” the typological imagination If James, Proust, Kafka, and Woolf seem insufficiently thoroughgoing in their skepticism, James Joyce offers perhaps the best candidate for interpreting the modernist novel as essentially secular. After all, Leopold Bloom approaches the world from an unabashedly materialist point of view. To be sure, Bloom practices his own sort of piety, which has something to do with a vague consciousness of his Jewish heritage. It is notable that the Catholic Joyce creates a partly Jewish hero, whereas almost none of Kafka’s characters are Jewish and Proust assigns Judaism to the comic Bloch and the fatherfigure Swann. For Joyce, of course, Catholicism and Irish national identity

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are closely bound up, and this is one reason for the continual analogies he draws between the Irish and the Jewish people, whose religion is at the heart of their community. Making his central character a Jew allows Joyce to represent this community from the perspective of an outsider. Yet the main objects of Bloom’s piety are the memories of his dead father and his dead son, and in this sense Bloom perhaps most resembles the pious Aeneas rather than the many-minded Odysseus or, for that matter, the pilgrim Dante. Certainly, no Providence (other than that of the author) seems to preside over the events of the novel, unless it be that “dio boia, the hangman god,” whom Stephen Dedalus evokes in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode.32 Of all the figures that this book considers, Joyce was perhaps the most hostile toward organized religion but also the most shaped by his religious training. His pious adolescence really did resemble fairly closely the one he assigns to Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Joyce served as an altar boy, wrote a hymn to the Virgin Mary, and, after a sexual encounter with a prostitute at the age of fourteen, underwent an abrupt spiritual reformation occasioned by a sermon of Father James A. Cullen. By the time he was sixteen, when his director of studies asked him to consider whether he had a vocation for the priesthood, Joyce had fallen away from Catholicism and saw his future in art; but he always regarded art as a kind of alternative priesthood. Like Henry James and Franz Kafka, Joyce was highly conscious of the fact that one inherits one’s community of belief and does not necessarily choose what to believe. Asked in adulthood when he had left the Catholic Church, Joyce replied, “That’s for the Church to say.”33 Like Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, Joyce refused to feign religious belief as his mother lay dying. He denied her request to take Easter communion and would not kneel at her bedside on the day of her death (although she was already in a coma and could not have asked him to, contrary to Buck Mulligan’s more dramatic description of the corresponding event in Ulysses). “You have the cursed jesuit strain in you,” Buck complains to Stephen, in a passage in which Joyce was certainly describing himself, “only it’s injected the wrong way” (7). Around the same time as the incident with his mother, in his early twenties, Joyce first read Nietzsche, who inspired some of his fascination with the pagans and fueled his rejection of religion. Joyce signed one of his letters from this period “James Overman,” and Nietzsche’s ghost may have been lurking somewhere behind his decision to give the first draft of Portrait the title Stephen Hero. When Joyce revisits this phase of his life in Ulysses, however, he associates Nietzsche with the false

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artist, Buck Mulligan (who claims jokingly to be the Übermensch), hence somewhat discrediting the philosopher’s influence. Like Kafka and Proust, Joyce outgrew Nietzsche.34 In his adulthood, as Richard Ellmann reports, Joyce often attended mass during Holy Week, but stood in the back of the church “like a tourist of another persuasion.”35 In place of the mass, Joyce followed a sacramental conception of art. In “Sisters,” the first story of his first book, Dubliners (1914), a priest named James becomes ill and dies after breaking the chalice used in the mass. In Portrait, Stephen Dedalus sets himself up as a “priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.”36 Finnegans Wake features a hero named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (also known as Here Comes Everybody and Haveth Childers Everywhere), whose initials refer to the Latin words of the mass, “this is my body” (“hoc est corpus [meum]”). What most inspires Joyce is the power of the priest to transform the everyday into the eternal by performing the sacraments, rather than the power of God that lies behind those sacraments. The case of Ulysses shows the paradoxical character of the modern novel’s encounter with the sacred. In Arnoldian tones, T. S. Eliot interpreted Ulysses as struggling against the effects of secularization by establishing a “mythical method”: “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”37 Most critics, however, have rejected Eliot’s interpretation, and the predominant way of reading Ulysses has been to see it as a debunking or parody of myth. As George Orwell put it, “What Joyce is saying is ‘Here is life without God. Just look at it!’ ”38 Yet this eminently modern novel, presumably the secular product of a secular age, is peculiarly God-haunted. It is striking that the avowedly irreligious Joyce was the only modern writer whom T. S. Eliot exempted from his lament over the secularism of modern literature.39 In this choice, Eliot was certainly responding to the direct discussion of theological problems in so much of Joyce’s work but he also undoubtedly viewed Joyce’s work through the prism of what he identified as the “mythical method.” Franco Moretti has argued that Woolf’s and Proust’s concern with “meaning” differentiates them from the Joyce of Ulysses. Whereas Proust, Woolf, and even Joyce in Portrait all ask variations of “what did it mean?,” Leopold Bloom belongs not to the world of meaning, but to that of mimesis, metonymy, the cataloguing of external stimuli. On this claim, Moretti builds a case for a reading of “Ulysses without epiphanies,” asserting that the success of Joyce’s use of the stream of consciousness results from the

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author’s decision to use the technique consistently throughout most of the novel rather than frame it off within moments of lyricism, madness, or abandon. With its emphasis on mimetic technique over content, Moretti’s reading of Ulysses underestimates its efforts toward the discovery of meaning and seriously distorts modernism, not least by suggesting that only this “Ulysses without epiphanies” is genuinely modernist, whereas Proust and Woolf, in their quest for meaning, are incompletely so.40 The difference between Moretti’s assessment and that of Eliot has much to do with whether we understand the parallels between Ulysses and The Odyssey (and also the Bible, Hamlet, and other texts) as structures that give order and meaning to the otherwise apparently chaotic and anarchic events of June 16, 1904. Scholars who interpret Ulysses as a fundamentally Catholic or at least religious work (despite its author’s lapsed status) tend to take such parallels (especially Biblical ones) quite seriously, whereas literary theorists who work under the umbrella of post-structuralism or Western Marxism tend to dismiss them as mere scaffolding or what the Marxists call “superstructure.” It is true that Joyce himself jokingly said that the schema of parallels he sent to his translator Valéry Larbaud would serve to “help him confuse the audience a little more.”41 Yet the mythical method selfconsciously points to networks of deep connections among the ordering mythoi of the culture. Joyce surely did not think of these mythoi as divinely ordained. Yet, even as he subjects the Christianity of early twentieth-century Ireland to relentless criticism as false mythology, he draws on Biblical as well as Homeric sources to suggest that these myths nevertheless contain enduring human truths. In this endeavor, his model is not a contemporary social scientist but a medieval Catholic poet, Dante. (Later, he would find further inspiration for this approach in the work of the earliest of philosophical anthropologists, Giambattista Vico.) Dante undertook to transform the classical heritage, and in particular the epic convention of katabasis, by inserting it into a Christian theological framework. Joyce undertakes something similar: a transformation of both the classical and Christian conventions to meet the new spiritual situation of the twentieth century. If Dante took Virgil as his guide through the underworld, Joyce in a sense takes Dante as his own guide; his transposition of Dante’s techniques into the modern novel, like Dante’s transposition of Virgil six centuries earlier, involves not merely a rejection of the old theological framework but its reincorporation into a new system.42 In the Inferno, Dante rewrote the katabasis of classical antiquity in a Christian mode; in order to fit his Christian framework, he added journeys

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through purgatory and paradise. To do so, he had to re-interpret classical mythology as reflecting a Christian pattern, ruled over by divine Providence. Erich Auerbach’s now classic study, “Figura,” describes Dante’s poem as the culmination of a way of thinking about the relationship between Biblical history and everyday life: “the individual earthly event is not regarded as a definitive self-sufficient reality, nor as a link in a chain of development in which single events or combinations of events perpetually give rise to new events, but viewed primarily in immediate vertical connection with a divine order which encompasses it, which on some future day will itself be concrete reality; so that the earthly event is a prophecy or figura of a part of a wholly divine reality that will be enacted in the future.”43 Ulysses, with its emphasis on metempsychosis, makes the events of the plot function as such figurae, but as figurae without fulfillment. Stephen reenacts the mythical patterns of Hamlet (deliberately) and of Telemachus (without knowing it). Bloom re-enacts the adventures of Odysseus and the trials of the wandering Israelites. Joyce’s method, like Dante’s, is figural or typological, but where Dante shows all the events of human life as corresponding to the pattern set by the New Testament, and in particular the life of Christ, Joyce offers instead a variety of typological patterns, all potentially in conflict with one another, but all brought together by the authorial imagination. The figural vision originates in St. Paul’s readings of the Hebrew Bible, which he used to show that the coming of Christ fulfilled prophecies implicit in the Old Testament. Thus, in the Epistle to the Galatians, Paul interprets the birth of Ishmael to the enslaved Hagar as a type, or figure, of the old covenant and the law, and the birth of Isaac to the free Sara as a figure of the new covenant and the grace and freedom of the Christian dispensation (Gal. 4.21–31). Figural interpretation falls between allegory and symbol: both the figure (originally an Old Testament passage) and its fulfillment (in the New Testament) are real (unlike in allegory), but they are independent of one another, two separate historical events (unlike in symbolism). From this use of the Old Testament Paul’s heirs developed the tendency to read pagan sources, including Greek myth, as figures for Christian history, so that, for example, Zeus’s ravishing of Ganymede was seen as a type of the resurrection, in which God carries his son up to Heaven. The Church Fathers also developed a complex four-fold system for interpreting the Bible, which was to be the model for Dante’s allegory in the Divine Comedy. In the “Ithaca” episode of Ulysses, an episode that abounds with references to Dante and that concerns itself deeply with the appropriate methods

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for interpreting the events of Ulysses, Joyce has Stephen intone the 113th Psalm as he and Bloom leave the “house of bondage” (Bloom’s house [573]). The use of the 113th Psalm (114th in the King James Version) refers most obviously to the passage from hell to purgatory in the Divine Comedy, which is marked by a quotation of the Psalm’s opening line (In exitu Israel de Egypto).44 It refers as well to the famous letter to Dante’s patron Can Grande, in which Dante outlines his own literary method, which he calls allegorical, but which is closely linked to the figural vision. Dante distinguishes the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical levels of interpretation appropriate for reading the Divine Comedy. In his interpretation of the Psalm, Dante explains that the literal sense refers to the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt, the allegorical to “our redemption wrought by Christ,” the moral sense to “the conversion of the soul,” and the anagogical sense to “the departure of the holy soul from the slavery of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory.”45 Dante claims that his text, like the Bible, is “polysemous,” carrying many meanings. Joyce’s text is also polysemous, of course, but the critical question is how to interpret this polysemy. Few would expect to find four hierarchical levels of meaning in Ulysses, although Fredric Jameson does offer an updated model of Dante’s four levels for understanding modern fiction in his Political Unconscious, where he somewhat wishfully associates anagogical interpretation with political reading, concerned with the “collective ‘meaning’ of history.”46 Yet history, for Joyce, means neither the Christian history of Dante nor the Marxist history of Jameson. Rather, Stephen Dedalus plays off Marx when he famously describes it as “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (28). As the “Nestor” episode shows, Joyce’s history is neither the random assortment of facts that Stephen’s students memorize (“a tale like any other too often heard, their land a pawnshop”) nor one of the mighty patterns envisioned by Dante, Marx, and other theodicists (like Mr. Deasy: “All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God” [21, 28]). Rather, for Joyce history consists of the series of patterns that each human generation is forced to re-enact, and the great myths are the forms these patterns take in human narratives. Like other modernists, Joyce sought alternative models of community to replace the sacred community of the church that he had left behind. The story of the Exodus (to which the 113th Psalm refers) meant for him not only the Jews’ escape from Egypt but also the cause of Irish independence. At the same time, however, the homecoming of the Jewish people resembled the Nostos of the Greek heroes and Bloom’s coming home at the end of a sometimes humiliating day. If history is the story a people tells itself, the history that

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interested Joyce was that of the entire human species. The fascination with such patterns is one of the features Joyce shares with Yeats, but whereas Yeats finds them primarily at the level of world history (the gyres), Joyce found them at the level of the individual life as well. Joyce took from Dante the idea of including his contemporaries in his epic work, and of evening some scores along the way (“put us all into it,” says the editor Myles Crawford when he is trying to get Stephen to write for his newspaper [111]). Joyce’s Dublin resembles Dante’s hell in the sense that, as Bloom and Stephen push through the streets, they encounter many lost souls (the minor characters), each of whom they see only briefly before hurrying on. Through his technique of metempsychosis, Joyce undertakes something of what Dante did through allegory: he puts the sins and sufferings of his ordinary contemporaries on the same level as those of great historical and mythological figures. Like Dante, too, Joyce offers a deliberate interpretative challenge to his readers – the Linati and Gilbert schemata, in which Joyce outlined the Homeric parallels and other structural features of his text, are the equivalent of Dante’s letter to Can Grande – and this is part of what makes the two such exemplary candidates for scholarly exegesis. In particular, Dante frequently uses the technique of having each sinner explain his own sufferings before then allowing Virgil to tell Dante what the sinner is being punished for. The reader in the meantime has the opportunity to guess who the sufferer is. Joyce gives us no Virgil to explain the meaning of the events we read about and attempt to decipher, but guides and annotators from Stuart Gilbert to Don Gifford have stepped in to take Virgil’s place.47 Far from presenting straightforward mimesis, then, or a simple metonymic record of Bloom’s mind reacting to external stimuli, Joyce builds generous and comprehensive meanings through his use of continual analogies not only with the Odyssey, but also with Hamlet, Don Giovanni, the Bible, and many other texts, all incorporated into the broad mythical and symbolic pattern that is Ulysses itself. Joyce’s characters, though they remain concrete and historical like characters in any realist novel, cannot be fully understood without reference to the mythical patterns which they are reenacting, albeit for the most part unconsciously. Even with respect to himself as an author, Joyce thinks analogically, especially in terms of analogies between his own work and that of Dante, Shakespeare, and Homer, but more broadly in terms of analogies among disparate historical and mythical events. This logic has its roots in Catholicism.48 The effect of these mythical patterns is to elevate the characters into almost worldhistorical figures, but without draining them of their very concrete historical

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and fictional reality. Robert Alter has traced the ways in which Joyce makes use of the Hebrew Bible and of classical myth, demonstrating an “intricate coordination and complementarity between the Bible and the Odyssey,” and suggesting some of the links between Joyce’s readings of these texts and the typological tradition.49 As Alter notes, the hierarchical relationship that Dante assumes, according to which the real meaning or fulfillment of figural interpretation is always the Christ story, has disappeared for Joyce, and Biblical stories no longer have the ultimate authority that they did for Dante. Yet if we cannot say that Bloom’s life simply replays the life of Christ (although he sometimes imagines that it does, notably when he imagines himself proclaimed Messiah in the “Circe” episode), we can say that he contains aspects of Christ, Moses, Elijah, Odysseus and Hamlet’s father. The typological patterns in Joyce’s work, though they reinstate a religious language, cannot reduce the polysemy of the text to univocity or even to a four-fold system of interpretation. Rather, they open up the multiplicity of patterns through which we are all condemned to live our lives. Joyce was fascinated by the idea that every life re-enacts certain key patterns of experience. In December, 1918, at the age of thirty-six, Joyce wrote in French to Martha Fleischmann, a woman he admired, “As for me, I am old – and feel even older than I am. Perhaps I have lived too long. I am 35 years old. It is the age at which Shakespeare conceived his dolorous passion for the dark lady. It is the age at which Dante entered into the night of his being.”50 In the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus refers in a similar key to the opening lines of the Divine Comedy, by saying that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet soon after his father died, “with thirty-five years of life, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, with fifty of experience” (170). As a man in what Dante considered middle age, Joyce identified himself with both the Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet and the Dante who entered on the spiritual journey that the Comedy chronicled. Another comparison is probably at the back of Joyce’s mind, since Dante’s journey at middle age, beginning on Good Friday, 1300, demands to be understood as a re-enactment of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, who died at thirty-three. Yet if Joyce was more than usually self-confident in comparing himself with Shakespeare, Dante, and implicitly Christ, he did not limit his habits of pattern-making to himself, but drew such patterns everywhere. To be sure, this form of constructing meaning was present to some extent in the other modernists. Henry James borrowed scriptural texts for the titles of his major novels; Proust quietly portrayed his narrator as the New Testament fulfillment of the Old Testament Swann; Woolf drew on Christological

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parallels to create the holy family of To the Lighthouse; and Kafka compared Abraham with Don Quixote. Yet Joyce, more than any of these other novelists, saw his challenge as taking the pure mimesis of the stream of consciousness and finding in it the kind of underlying patterns or myths that Dante found in the lives of his contemporaries. It was in this conversion of mimesis into meaning, metonymy into myth, so clearly influenced by religion, that Joyce was most typically modernist. the resurrection and the life Despite her famously mixed feelings about Ulysses, Woolf selects the “Hades” episode for special praise in her essay “Modern Novels.”51 This episode, which appears immediately after the episode in which Bloom attends the Catholic mass, presents the most extended parallel with Book 11 of The Odyssey. Its comic treatment of Paddy Dignam’s death serves as a release or counterpoint for the seriousness with which other parts of Ulysses treat the problem of what we owe the dead – or, more accurately, of the demands they place on us: our need to come to terms with the importance the dead hold in our mental and spiritual lives. Bloomsday is the day of a funeral, and over its course Joyce shows in many ways the superficially competing, but really collaborating, processes of forgetting and mythologization with which the living try to come to terms with the dead. Bloom is still mourning his son Rudy, who died in infancy more than ten years earlier, and Stephen is in mourning for his mother, dead for almost a year. It is striking that of the novelists considered in this study, Joyce alone became a parent; Rudy’s death was inspired in part by a miscarriage suffered by Joyce’s wife, Nora.52 The death of Paddy Dignam (whose name suggests a form of the Latin dignus, “worthy”), and the increasingly fantastic memories of him that his friends describe, provide a comic foil to the central theme of mourning in the novel. Paddy Dignam and his son, Patsy, form one of the parent–child pairs against which Stephen and Bloom measure their own family relations, a comic counterpart to Hamlet and his father or to Odysseus and Telemachus. The novel gives the first hint that Bloom is going to attend a funeral in an aside in the fourth episode: “Be a warm day I fancy. Specially in these black clothes feel it more. Black conducts, reflects, (refracts is it?), the heat. But I couldn’t go in that light suit. Make a picnic of it” (46). At this point, the reader can infer that Bloom is planning to go to a funeral, and the theme of funeral as picnic, not only for the mourners but also for the rats and maggots, is one that will recur throughout the novel. In the next episode,

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the sentimental McCoy, noting that Bloom is dressed in mourning, insists on discussing “Poor Little Paddy Dignam,” praising the late Dignam senior as “one of the best,” while Bloom is busy trying to catch sight of the legs of a woman on the opposite side of the street (60). Later in the day, Bloom takes it upon himself to look into Dignam’s insurance policy, which is heavily mortgaged, and takes up a collection to support Dignam’s wife and five children. During the funeral, as Bloom listens to Father Coffey’s funeral service, the Latin prayers inspire thoughts similar to those in the “Lotus Eaters” episode: “Makes them feel more important to be prayed over in Latin.” (Throughout the day, Stephen Dedalus murmurs to himself the Latin prayer for the dead that he had refused to recite at the side of his mother’s deathbed: “Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet” [9].) As the Catholic service concludes, Bloom’s neighbor, Mr Kernan, comments to Bloom that the service of the Anglican Church of Ireland is “simpler, more impressive,” and then quotes the English service: “ – I am the resurrection and the life. That touches a man’s inmost heart,” says Mr. Kernan. Bloom politely agrees: “it does,” but then thinks to himself, “Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are” (87). The materialist explanation of the heart as pump appeals to Bloom’s practical nature and mechanical imagination. Bloom goes on to work up a vivid fantasy about the Last Judgment, with all the resurrected dead trying to find their internal organs: “every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps.” More practically, Bloom worries vaguely that Dignam might be alive inside his coffin, and also devises plans for using a gramophone to help remember the dead. “Besides how could you remember everybody? Eyes, walk, voice. Well, the voice, yes: gramophone. Have a gramophone in every grave or keep it in the house. After dinner on a Sunday. Put on poor old greatgrandfather. Karahraark! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullygladaseeagain hellohello amawf krpthsth.” (93). Technology offers an ersatz sort of immortality, but Bloom tends to concentrate on the fate of Dignam’s body, and he notices an obese rat toddling along the edge of a stone crypt. “Hades” contains references to three central episodes of Homer’s Book 11 that appealed to other modernists as well. As the funeral carriage approaches Prospect Cemetery, Bloom notices figures who resemble the shades begging for blood that Odysseus had to fight off before speaking to Tiresias:

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“Crowded on the spit of land silent shapes appeared, white, sorrowful, holding out calm hands, knelt in grief, pointing. Fragments of shapes, hewn. In white silence: appealing” (82). These are not in fact the shades of the dead but mortuary sculptures being carved by “Thos. H. Dennany, monumental builder and sculptor.” The urge to memorialize the dead here takes conventional form, but these forms echo the more metaphysical ones encountered by Odysseus. As Paddy Dignam’s body is lowered into the ground, Bloom vaguely echoes Odysseus’s encounter with his mother, thinking of the other plots in the cemetery: “Mine over there towards Finglas, the plot I bought. Mamma, poor mamma, and little Rudy” (91). Finally, Bloom’s encounter with the arrogant John Henry Menton recollects that of Odysseus with Ajax, who, still resentful about the awarding of Achilles’ armor to Odysseus, refused to recognize him in Hades. The “Hades” episode is also the most Virgilian episode of Ulysses, and in it Joyce is attempting what Virgil and Dante did before him: to rewrite earlier forms of the katabasis. Joyce signals the Virgilian presence when Stephen Dedalus’s father, Simon, refers to Buck Mulligan as his son’s fidus Achates (73). From Virgil, Joyce adapts a number of incidents, including the substantial role of the three-headed dog Cerberus, which in Joyce’s work finds a parallel figure in Father Coffey. When Bloom leaves the cemetery, Joyce refers to its glimmering gates (94), recalling the gate of ivory by which Aeneas leaves the underworld. Yet the central Virgilian theme of the episode is that of filial piety, as Bloom reflects on his father’s suicide. Dante, too, makes a brief appearance in the episode, as Bloom unconsciously echoes the Italian poet’s remark upon seeing the multitudes condemned to the AnteInferno, those who lived without either praise or blame: “How many! All these here once walked round Dublin. Faithful departed. As you are now so once were we.” (93). Eliot later borrowed the same allusion for a passage in “The Burial of the Dead”: “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/I had not thought death had undone so many.”53 Bloom’s trip to the underworld is just another weekday funeral, but at the same time it is Odysseus’s encounter with the shades, Aeneas’s confrontation with Cerberus, Dante’s spiritual journey, and even the gravedigger scene in Hamlet: both mimesis and meaning. As Bloom leaves the cemetery through the glimmering gates, he thinks to himself, “Let them sleep in their maggoty beds. They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds warm fullblooded life” (94). Thoughts of the funeral stay with him, however, and Paddy Dignam returns frequently in the course of the novel. The “Wandering Rocks” episode, episode 10, is in many ways central to the novel as a whole, and it is here that we move

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beyond Stephen’s and Bloom’s perspectives to learn for the first time of the thoughts of minor characters, including those of Paddy Dignam’s son and heir, “Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam,” who has been sent out of the house of mourning on an errand for porksteaks (192). The boy thinks mostly about boxing and his uncomfortable mourning clothes, but he stops for a moment to consider his father’s death when he sees some other children: “He met other schoolboys. Do they notice I’m in mourning? Uncle Barney said he’d get it into the paper tonight. Then they’ll all see it in the paper and read my name printed and pa’s name” (206). Then Patsy Dignam recalls his father’s death: “The last night pa was boosed he was standing on the landing there bawling out for his boots to go out to Tunney’s for to boose more and he looked butty and short in his shirt. Never see him again. Death, that is. Pa is dead. My father is dead. He told me to be a good son to ma. I couldn’t hear the other things he said but I saw his tongue and his teeth trying to say it better” (207). This is the most extensive detail that Joyce gives us about the circumstances of Dignam’s death; it appears that Dignam may have fallen down the stairs drunk (or at any rate, the stroke that kills him has been brought on, Bloom supposes, by alcoholism), in a parallel with Homer’s Elpenor, who falls off a ladder and breaks his neck after drinking too much at Circe’s house. The reader can hardly blame the little boy for his rather myopic concern with his clothes and what others will think of seeing his name in the newspaper, but we can see that this small moment of selfmythologizing resembles the larger manufacture of public myth that has transformed the drunken and improvident father into “one of the best,” in the words of Mr McCoy. Shortly afterwards, in the “Cyclops” episode, Alf Bergan drunkenly insists that he has just seen Paddy Dignam alive in Capel Street. The parodic voice that dominates this portion of the novel, which Joyce critics have called the Arranger, goes on to describe, in the language of theosophy, an imaginary séance in which Paddy Dignam communicates with the living in order to tell his son Patsy that he can find a missing boot behind the commode. Such is the wisdom that death confers on its initiates, the otherworldly secrets they can communicate to the living. In the meantime, the drunken patriots descend further into maudlin remembrance. Bob Doran rails against Christ as a “bloody ruffian” for taking Dignam before his time, although he gets Dignam’s first name mixed up: “The noblest, the truest, and he’s gone, poor little Willy, poor little Paddy Dignam” (247–9). In “Circe,” the nightmarish episode that takes place in Bella Cohen’s brothel, Paddy Dignam appears again, prefatory to the appearance of the ghosts of Bloom’s father and son and Stephen’s mother. Transformed from

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a beagle into a rather animal-like ghost, Dignam appears to Bloom quoting Hamlet’s father: “Bloom, I am Paddy Dignam’s spirit. List, list, O list!” before disappearing underground, followed by the obese rat that Bloom had noticed in the “Hades” episode, which seems to be running after a meal (385). This is more or less the last of Paddy Dignam, although Bloom does include him in the list of his dead acquaintances in the “Ithaca” episode (579). The mawkish memorials of Paddy Dignam, by elaborating mischievously on the theme of improper relations with the dead, prepare the reader for genuine pathos when the novel engages with the seriousness of death, in a scene that contains Joyce’s most moving echoes of Book 11 of The Odyssey. A drunken Stephen thinks he sees his mother’s ghost (with “a green rill of bile trickling from a side of her mouth”) at the end of the night in the brothel (474). He insists “They say I killed you, mother. He [Buck] offended your memory. Cancer did it, not I. Destiny.” As Bloom leads Stephen home, Stephen murmurs the words of Yeats’s “Who Goes with Fergus,” which he had sung in place of Catholic prayers for his mother as she lay dying; like Odysseus before him, he “stretches out his arms” (496). By this time, however, his mother’s ghost is long gone. As Bloom tries to make sense of Yeats’s poem, an eleven-year old fairy boy appears to him, and Bloom “(wonderstruck, calls inaudibly) Rudy!” But Rudy, like Stephen’s mother, cannot answer, and “gazes, unseeing, into Bloom’s eyes” (497). He goes on reading, from right to left, presumably in Hebrew, perhaps the words of the kaddish, the Jewish prayer said at the end of a burial service. The modernists frequently deny the consolations of immortality. In “Nestor,” Stephen has his students recite Milton’s “Lycidas,” a famous elegy, but Stephen himself has no faith in the power of “Him that walked the waves” (21). Many of the modernists were fascinated with the bodies of animals, like the dog that sniffs another dog’s carcass in the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses while Stephen watches, pondering the riddle about the fox who buried its grandmother. (The rat that follows Dignam’s ghost seems to continue this theme, closing the evocation of a possible spirit world with a fat little punctuation mark that reasserts the very corporeal fate of the dead.) Similar moments of attention to death as an animal process appear in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, where the youngest child, Vardaman, thinks, “My mother is a fish” (54), as well as at the close of Flush, Woolf’s biography of the dog of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, where the narrator observes, “He had been alive; he was now dead. That was all.”54 At the end of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the charwoman smiles as she explains that she has gotten rid of Gregor Samsa’s desiccated bug-body: “You don’t need to

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bother about how to get rid of the thing next door. It’s been seen to already.”55 In each case, the novelists derive an uncanny thrill from the fact that we treat animal corpses with such scant respect and the possibility that human corpses are no more worthy of our attention. Kafka suggests this thought in the famous letter to his father, where he complains that, when he attended synagogue in his youth, “when you stayed on in the synagogue for the prayers for the dead, I was sent away, which for a long time, obviously because of being sent away and lacking, as I did, any deeper interest, aroused in me the more or less unconscious feeling that what was about to take place was something indecent.”56 Yet, if they deny the promise of personal immortality or bodily resurrection, modernist novels do promise a different kind of immortality: the traditional immortality that literature confers, as well, perhaps, as a particular conception of survival in the memories of the living, which is a key feature in James, Proust, Woolf, and Joyce (if not in Kafka), and which is certainly one of the major reasons for their fascination with memory. In trying to imagine this kind of immortality, the modernists cast back before Christianity to a Homeric model, and their frequent invocations of Odysseus’s sojourn in Hades seem to mark for them the kind of immortality that is actually possible in a modern, post-Christian but not exactly secular world. Near the end of The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp attends a séance where the other residents of the Berghof Sanatorium try to communicate with his dead cousin Joachim Ziemssen. As in Ulysses, the idea of spiritual resurrection in the machine-run and modern world is ironized by the assistance of technology, here a gramophone that plays “light favorites” and an air from Gounod’s Faust. After a harrowing and hysterical scene in which the virginal Danish medium Elly Brand seems to be giving birth, the assembled inmates claim to see Ziemssen appear in the visitor’s chair of the doctor’s office where the séance takes place. Hans Castorp seems to see him as well, and Mann gives a lengthy description of Joachim’s appearance, in an old-fashioned military uniform: “Two deep creases were engraved on his brow between the eyes, which had sunk deep into their bony sockets, although that did not distract from the tenderness of the gaze that came from those beautiful, large, dark eyes, directed in friendly silence at Hans Castorp, at him alone.” Has the medium actually conjured the dead cousin to life? Is Hans the victim of a collective hallucination? Like Ajax in Book 11 of the Odyssey, Joachim does not speak. Hans tries to concentrate on the vision: “Bending forward and leaning out to see past the hands and head on his knees, he stared into red darkness at the visitor in the chair. For a

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moment he thought he would throw up. His throat contracted and cramped in four or five fervent sobs. ‘Forgive me!’ he whispered to himself, and then the tears came to his eyes and he saw nothing more.”57 Disobeying the psychoanalyst’s command to speak to the ghost, Hans stands up, turns on the electric light, and leaves the room. Hans Castorp is here rejecting the mystical attitude that Mann associates not only with spiritualism but also with psychoanalysis: the tendency to indulge unconscious desires and to believe in the magical power of collective identities. Yet he is also criticizing the way that the living put the dead to their own use. To do so seems to trivialize the dead by relegating them below our own (usually fairly petty) goals; it also falsifies the experience of death by allowing us to imagine that the afterlife is not ultimately so different from our own life. A few pages before Joachim’s ghostly apparition, Mann provides a strikingly cynical account of our attitude regarding the resurrection of the dead: “And yet, the return of those who have died – or better, the desirability of such a return – is always a complicated, ticklish matter. Ultimately, to put it plainly, it does not exist, this desirability. It is a miscalculation; by the light of cold day, it is as impossible as the thing itself, which would be immediately evident if nature rescinded that impossibility even once; and what we call mourning is perhaps not so much the pain of the impossibility of ever seeing the dead return to life, as the pain of not being able to wish it” (666). While James, Proust, and Woolf were able to imagine desire as the force that would guarantee our continuation after death, they all undoubtedly knew what Mann reveals here: the desire truly in question is that of the survivors. Henry James lived the longest of the novelists in this study. He died in 1916 at the age of seventy-two; his body was cremated in London and, although he had recently become a naturalized British subject, his remains were repatriated and interred in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Proust died in 1922, at the age of fifty-one of complications from pneumonia; he was buried in the family plot at Père-Lachaise cemetery, after a funeral service with military honors (owing to his knighthood in the Légion d’Honneur) which many major French authors, as well as James Joyce, attended. Kafka, too, died young, at the age of forty, of tuberculosis. Five hundred people attended his memorial service in Prague, where he was eulogized as the author of “the most important books in recent German literature.”58 His executor, Max Brod, ignored his instructions to burn all his unpublished manuscripts, including those of his three novels. After her suicide at the age of fifty-nine, in 1941, Woolf’s body was cremated, with only her husband, Leonard, present; he buried her ashes in their garden at Monk’s House in

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Rodmell, Sussex. Her exact contemporary, Joyce, had died a few months earlier, in Zurich, after an operation for a perforated ulcer. Someone suggested that a priest perform a Catholic service at his funeral, but his wife, Nora, said, “I couldn’t do that to him.”59 Sometimes, perhaps, the kindest way to remember the dead is to ignore the expected rituals of remembrance. That uneasy combination of fear and desire that we display towards the dead has driven many beliefs and rituals from the dawn of religion through the burial services of the great faiths to the séances of the twentieth century. The increasingly empty churches of Europe, which Nietzsche called “the tombs and sepulchers of God,” retain what power they have, according to Philip Larkin, because “so many dead lie round.” The building of churches continues apace in much of the world, and the burial of the dead will not soon cease. In the case of the writers this study examines, their extreme awareness of our uneasy and often forgetful relationship with those who have gone before us prompted them to make their own immense monuments to the dead and to life, their novels.

Notes

1 churchgoing 1. Philip Larkin, “Church Going,” in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1989), 97–8. 2. Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” in Prose of the Victorian Period, ed. William E. Buckler (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), 502. 3. Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach,” in The Poems (Oxford University Press, 1930), 401. 4. Wallace Stevens, letter to Hi Simons, quoted in Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 966. 5. Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (London: Routledge, 2001), 3–6, 161–2, 170–5. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 182. 7. T. E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism,” written 1913–14, published 1924, reprinted in Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 768. 8. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971). 9. W. H. Auden, Making, Knowing, and Judging: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on 11 June 1956(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 31. See Yeats’s four poems explicitly called “prayers,” published between 1917 and 1935, in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran, 2nd edn. (New York: Scribner, 1996), 162–3, 188–90, 212–13, 282–3; T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” (1939) in Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 1974), 215; and the final invocations in Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939) and “At the Grave of Henry James” (1941) in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1991), 247–9, 310–12. 10. Two recent studies of poetry, religion, and secularity have contributed to my understanding of the period: Siobhan Phillips, “The Poetics of Everyday Time in Frost, Stevens, Bishop, and Merrill” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University, 2007; a revised version is forthcoming from Columbia University Press) and Matthew Mutter, “Poetry Against Religion, Poetry As Religion: The Difficulty of Secularization in Literary Modernism” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University, 2009). 193

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11. For broad treatments of religion and literature that touch on modernism, see René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966); Eugene Webb, The Dark Dove: The Sacred and Secular in Modern Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975); Robert Alter, Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); and George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). A valuable recent study by Gregory Erickson, The Absence of God in Modernist Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), finds anticipations of postmodernist atheology or negative theology in the works of James, Proust, and Schoenberg. Another recent study, Robert Weldon Whalen’s Sacred Spring: God and the Birth of Modernism in Fin de Siècle Vienna (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2007), presents a similar thesis to my own with regard to one of the earliest manifestations of modernism. 12. On modernism and anthropology, see Marc Manganaro, ed., Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text (Princeton University Press, 1990) and Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (Oxford University Press, 1999). 13. Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in Collected Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), vol. ii, 107, 104. 14. Lionel Trilling, “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” in Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York: Viking, 1965), 9. 15. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor, 3 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), vol. iii, 1089; hereafter abbreviated as Remembrance. For the French original, see À la recherche du temps perdu, new Pléiade edition, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié et al., 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), vol. iv, 610; hereafter abbreviated as Recherche. 16. Henry James, Watch and Ward, in Novels, 1871–1880, ed. William T. Stafford (New York: Library of America, 1983), 88. 17. On Proust’s use of churches, see M. J. Jackson, “Proust’s Churches in À la Recherche du temps perdu,” Journal of Literature and Theology 5 (1991): 297–309. 18. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, 58–9. 19. André Aciman, “Proust’s Way,” New York Review of Books, December 1, 2005; Mark Harman, Translator’s Introduction, The Castle by Franz Kafka (New York: Schocken, 1998), xvi–xvii. 20. Henry James, The Ambassadors, New York Edition, vols. xxi and xxii of The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), vol. ii, 5. 21. Ian Watt, “The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors,” in Ruth Bernard Yeazell, ed., Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1994), 118–34; David Lodge, “Strether by the River,” in Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 189–213. 22. Remembrance, vol. i, 65; Recherche, vol. i, 60.

Notes to pages 10–17 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

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Recherche, vol. i, 60; Remembrance, vol. i, 66. Remembrance, vol. i, 164 ; Recherche, vol. i, 149. Remembrance, vol. i, 166; Recherche, vol. i, 150. Remembrance, vol. i, 171; Recherche, vol. i, 155. Malcolm Bowie discusses Proust’s “lively current of sympathetic fantasy” in Proust Among the Stars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 197. See also Leo Bersani, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (Oxford University Press, 1965), 56–63. 28. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe, and Claus Melchior (New York: Random House, 1986), 66. Subsequent page references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. 29. Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman, “Ulysses” Annotated, rev. edn. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 93; Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Hokey-pokey.” 30. Alter, Canon and Creativity, 151–83. 31. Ulysses, 66; Gifford and Seidman, “Ulysses” Annotated, 94. 32. Alter, Canon and Creativity, 162. 33. The Trial was of course unfinished at Kafka’s death, and Kafka did not number the chapters. Max Brod ordered the chapters according to internal evidence. See Brod’s postscripts to the first three editions in Franz Kafka, The Trial: Definitive Edition, trans. Willa Muir, Edwin Muir, and E. M. Butler (New York: Knopf, 1988), 264–74. 34. “Sie hetzen dich.” Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York, Schocken Books, 1998), 205; hereafter cited as Trial. Franz Kafka, Der Proceß, Critical Edition, ed. Malcolm Pasley, Fischer paperback reprint (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1994), 215; hereafter cited as Proceß (the novel was originally published with the standard German spelling Prozeß). 35. Trial, 206; Proceß, 215. 36. Trial, 201; Proceß, 210. 37. Trial, 204; Proceß, 214. 38. Trial, 207; Proceß, 217. 39. Trial, 208; Proceß, 218. 40. Trial, 211; Proceß, 221. 41. Proceß, 222–3; Trial, 212. 42. “Vor dem Gesetz.” Trial, 215–17; Proceß, 226–7. 43. Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law,” trans. Avital Ronell and Christine Roulston, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 181–220. 44. Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, ed. C. Ruth Miller and Lawrence Miller (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1995), 215. 45. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, ed. Morris Beja (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1996), 72. Subsequent pages numbers for this edition are given in parentheses in the text. 46. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (London: Penguin, 2007), 188.

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47. Among the many studies of Lawrence and religion, see the recent T. R. Wright, D. H. Lawrence and the Bible (Cambridge University Press, 2000). 48. Rita Felski has commented on the appeal of stories of the supernatural for the mass-market audience, and especially the importance of the “popular sublime” for women’s popular fiction, in The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 115–44. 49. On the French Catholic novelists of the interwar years, see Malcolm Scott, The Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel: French Catholic and Realist Novels, 1850–1970 (London: Macmillan, 1989), 179–269. 50. Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel (London: Peter Owen, 1971). 51. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 1948), 155. 52. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 34. 53. Auden, Making, Knowing, and Judging, 31. 54. Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” 106. For Taylor’s views, see chapter 2. 2 god’s afterlife 1. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 88. See also Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton University Press, 1953); Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959). 2. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 1948), 155. For the challenge to the secularization thesis over the last generation, see Steve Bruce, ed., Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). For an overview that comes down mostly on the side of the traditional secularization thesis, see Vincent Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2006). 3. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 93. 4. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 236–7; Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1968), 19–24, 127–52. 5. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), 101. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 167. 7. Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (London: Routledge, 2001), 30. 8. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 473–504.

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9. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 75. 10. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy in Prose of the Victorian Period, ed. William E. Buckler (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), 462. 11. Alan D. Gilbert, “Secularization and the Future,” in A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre-Roman Times to the Present, ed. Sheridan Gilley and W. J. Sheils (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 503–21. 12. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5), trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 1992), 78. 13. A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral: A Biography of Faith and Doubt in Western Civilization (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999); J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers [1963], new edn. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). 14. Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) is the classic statement of modernist contempt for Victorian earnestness. For a good general statement of the view of modernist literature as motivated in part by “skepticism,” see Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900–1916 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 1–4, 89–106. For Victorian earnestness, see Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 218–62. 15. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1980), vol. i, 3–7. 16. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, ed. and trans. Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1978), 281. 17. Hugh McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe, 1789–1989 (Oxford University Press, 1997), v. See also Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). On European exceptionalism, see Grace Davie, Europe: The Exceptional Case: Parameters of Faith in the Modern World (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2002). 18. For debate on the secularization thesis, see Peter Berger, “Globalization and Religion,” The Hedgehog Review 4, no. 2 (summer 2002): 7–20; Peter Berger, ed. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999); Robert N. Bellah and Phillip E. Hammond, Varieties of Civil Religion (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980); and José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 1994). 19. Taylor, A Secular Age, 516. For Taylor’s critique of existing secularization theory, see A Secular Age, 423–37. See also Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). I would note, however, that American politics still makes expressions of faith a prerequisite for the highest office.

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20. Taylor, A Secular Age, 19. 21. Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 112. Notably, Geertz borrows the phrase “aesthetic attitude” from Clive Bell, Art (1914). See also Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 49, n. 32. 22. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987); Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (Oxford University Press, 1999). 23. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 155. 24. Chadwick himself cautions against using the term secularization as “the lament of nostalgia” or as “propaganda” in his influential study The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1975), 266. 25. Frank M. Turner, “The Religious and the Secular in Victorian Britain,” in Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 35. 26. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2001), 73–95. 27. Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in Relation to his Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 45. 28. Letter of February 19, 1909, quoted in Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. and ed. Harry Zohn (New York: Wiley & Sons, 1975), 324. 29. James Joyce, letter to Nora Barnacle, August 29, 1904, in Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1975), 25. 30. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, 145–56; McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe, 15–16. 31. For Jewish history of the period, see Paula E. Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979) and The Jews of Modern France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998); Hillel J. Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870–1918 (Oxford University Press, 1988); and Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1989). 32. McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe, 20–1, 67–8. 33. Frank M. Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). 34. Gillian Beer, “What’s Not in Middlemarch,” in Middlemarch in the TwentyFirst Century, ed. Karen Chase (Oxford University Press, 2006), 26. 35. Flaubert, letter to Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie, March 18, 1857, in Selected Letters, trans. Francis Steegmuller (New York: Farrar Straus, 1953), 195. 36. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Paul de Man, Patricia K. de Man, and Eleanor Marx Aveling (New York: Norton, 1965), 166–77. 37. Émile Zola, “The Experimental Novel,” in “The Experimental Novel” and Other Essays, trans. Belle M. Sherman (New York: Haskell House, 1964), 26.

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38. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: Heinemann, 1899), 9–10. 39. Marcel Proust, Preface to Sesame and Lilies, trans. Jean Autret and William Burford, in On Reading Ruskin, 116. Karl Beckson, in The Religion of Art: A Modernist Theme in British Literature, 1885–1925 (New York: AMS Press, 2006), does not seem to recognize this change in attitude in the early twentieth century. 40. Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870– 1930 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931), 25. 41. Flaubert, Oeuvres complètes, vol. xv (Paris: Club de l’Honnête homme, 1975), 458, quoted in Geoffrey Wall, Flaubert: A Life (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 338. 42. Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (University of Chicago Press, 1961). See also Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 211–33. 43. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, 6. On the persistent fascination with Catholicism in the modernist generation, see Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 365–75. 44. Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1985); Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (University of Chicago Press, 2004). Among the major figures in this book, only William James was active in these matters; the rest of my chosen authors were a more skeptical lot. 45. Leonard Woolf, “Rationalism and Religion,” The Nation and Athenaeum 39.10 (June 12, 1926): 279. The figures below are tabulated from “The Questionnaire: Final Results,” The Nation and Athenaeum 40.2 (October 16, 1926), 75–6. The survey garnered responses from 1,849 readers, amounting to about one-sixth of its circulation. The mass-circulation Daily News, which also sent out the survey, had 15,168 responses, or about one-fortieth of its circulation. I am grateful to Elyse Graham for her research on this topic. 46. R. B. Braithwaite, The State of Religious Belief: An Inquiry Based on the Nation and Athenaeum Questionnaire (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), 55–6. 47. Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, 15. 48. Matthew Arnold, “Literature and Dogma” (1873), in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. vi, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 176, 189. 49. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America, quoted in Sidney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972), 784. 50. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 806. 51. Barth, Preface to the Second Edition, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford University Press, 1933), 10. 52. Introduction to Christian Ethics (1935), quoted in Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 942.

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53. Thomas Bokenkotter, A Concise History of the Catholic Church (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977), 325–35; Hans Küng, The Catholic Church: A Short History, trans. John Bowden (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 171–6; Alec R. Vidler, The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church: Its Origins and Outcome (Cambridge University Press, 1934); Claude Tresmontant, La crise moderniste (Paris: Seuil, 1979). 54. Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry, 105ff. 55. Quoted in Norbert M. Samuelson, An Introduction to Modern Jewish Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 203 and Mark Lilla, “A Battle for Religion,” New York Review of Books, December 5, 2002. 56. Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind, 5–9. 57. Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, trans. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1999), vol. ii, 2. 58. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 66. 59. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 2. 60. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930, rev. edn. (New York: Random House, 1977). 61. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). 62. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 52. 63. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 171; Durkheim, “The Dualism of Human Nature and Its Social Conditions,” in On Morality and Society, ed. Robert N. Bellah (University of Chicago Press, 1973), 149–63; Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989); Weber, Protestant Ethic, 180–3. 64. William James, Pragmatism (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1991), 18. 65. Ralph Barton Perry, Thought and Character of William James (New York: Braziller, 1954), 204–7; Henry Samuel Levinson, The Religious Investigations of William James (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 71–94; Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 257–64. 66. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 782–3. 67. Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 420–3; Weber, Protestant Ethic, 232–3, n. 66; Hughes, Consciousness and Society, 284–5, 321. 68. James, Pragmatism, 131. 69. Sociologie et philosophie, quoted in Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, vol. ii, 107. 70. Max Weber, Ancient Judaism, trans. Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale (New York: Free Press, 1952), 122, quoted in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 5. 71. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Random House, 1967), 166. 72. Freud, letter to Arnold Zweig, September 30, 1934, quoted in Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, 16; Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, 55.

Notes to pages 49–57

201

73. Letter of February 19, 1909, quoted in Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, 324. Emphasis in original. 74. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 92. 75. Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of “As if”: A System of the Theoretical, Practical, and Religious Fictions of Mankind, trans. C. K. Ogden, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1935). 76. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 53. 77. See Pericles Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–51. 3 henry james and the varieties of religious experience 1. Henry James, The Ambassadors, vols. xxi and xxii of The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), vol. i, 41. 2. Henry James, The American in Novels, 1871–1880, ed. William T. Stafford (New York: Library of America, 1983), 790. 3. “The Aspern Papers” in Complete Stories, vol. iii, ed. Edward Said (New York: Library of America, 1999), 228. 4. Pericles Lewis, “Christopher Newman’s Haircloth Shirt: Worldly Asceticism, Conversion, and Auto-machia in The American,” Studies in the Novel 37 (2005): 308–28; Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Edwin S. Fussell, The Catholic Side of Henry James (Cambridge University Press, 1993). See also James Duban, The Nature of True Virtue: Theology, Psychology, and Politics in the Writings of Henry James, Sr., Henry James, Jr., and William James (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001); Andrew Taylor, Henry James and the Father Question (Cambridge University Press, 2002). For the most ambitious attempt to read Henry James’s novels in terms of Henry James, Sr.’s theology, see Quentin Anderson, The American Henry James (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1957). 5. Henry James, The Golden Bowl, vols. xxiii and xxiv of The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), vol. i, 31. Subsequent page references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. 6. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Martin E. Marty (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 133; hereafter abbreviated as Varieties. 7. James’s more immediate source may be William Blake: “Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?/Or Love in a golden bowl?” James’s father had edited a volume of the work of Blake, who like him drew inspiration from the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. 8. Robert B. Pippin, Henry James and Modern Moral Life (Cambridge University Press, 2000). 9. Graham Greene, “Henry James: The Private Universe,” Collected Essays (London: The Bodley Head, 1969), 23.

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Notes to pages 58–62

10. Leon Edel, Henry James, (New York: Avon Books, 1978), vol. v, 93, 115, 140; Henry James, letter to Mr. and Mrs. William James, July 4, 1902, quoted in F. O. Matthiessen, The James Family (New York: Knopf, 1948), 338. See also Paul J. Lindholdt, “Pragmatism and ‘The Beast in the Jungle,’” Studies in Short Fiction 25 (1988): 275–84. 11. Ross Posnock, The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 1991); Pippin, Henry James and Modern Moral Life. 12. F. O. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Phase (Oxford University Press, 1944), 131. 13. R. P. Blackmur, Studies in Henry James, ed. Veronica A. Makowsky (New York: New Directions, 1983), 101. 14. William James, letter of June 17, 1905 to Robert Underwood Johnson, quoted in Leon Edel, Henry James, vol. v, 298. 15. Pericles Lewis, “The Reality of the Unseen: Shared Fictions and Religious Experience in the Ghost Stories of Henry James,” Arizona Quarterly 61.2 (Summer 2005): 33–66. 16. Varieties, 53–77. 17. Henry James, letter to William James, October 17, 1907, in Letters, ed. Leon Edel, vol. iv (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984), 466. 18. William James, Pragmatism (1907) (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1991), 23. 19. Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of “As if”: A System of the Theoretical, Practical, and Religious Fictions of Mankind, trans. C. K. Ogden, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1935). 20. William James compares the Pragmatist criterion to Jonathan Edwards’s interpretation of the Biblical passage “By their fruits shall ye know them” (discussed in Varieties, 20). This passage suggests the continuity between Pragmatism and Protestant ethical thought. 21. William James, Diary, April 30, 1870, quoted in Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2001), 219. See also the fine biography by Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). 22. Henry James, “The Turn of the Screw,” in Complete Stories, vol. iv, ed. David Bromwich and John Hollander (New York: Library of America, 1996), 727; Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle,” in Complete Stories, vol. v, ed. Denis Donoghue (New York: Library of America, 1996), 505. 23. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, New York Edition, vols. xix and xx of The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), vol. ii, 242. 24. The Ambassadors, vol. ii, 299. 25. Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge University Press, 1962); Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 153–97; Robert Weisbuch, “Henry James and the Idea of Evil,” The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, ed. Jonathan Freedman (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1990).

Notes to pages 62–81

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26. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (University of Chicago Press, 1955), 154. 27. Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 154. 28. Henry James, “Charles Baudelaire,” in European Writers and Prefaces to the New York Edition, vol. ii of Literary Criticism, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Library of America, 1984), 155, quoted in Taylor, Henry James and the Father Question 129; on Hawthorne, see Richard Ruland, “Beyond Harsh Inquiry: The Hawthorne of Henry James,” ESQ 25 (1979): 95–117; Richard Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne (Oxford University Press, 1986). 29. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Norton, 1990), 7. 30. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 478–98. 31. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, “Podsnappery, Sexuality, and the English Novel,” Critical Inquiry 9 (1982): 339–57; Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (University of Chicago Press, 1991); Alexander Welsh, Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 250. 32. Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Stephen M. Parrish, Norton Critical Edition, 2nd edn. (New York: Norton, 1993), 55. 33. Margery Sabin, “Henry James’s American Dream in The Golden Bowl,” The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, ed. Jonathan Freedman (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 204–23. 34. Gregory Erickson, The Absence of God in Modernist Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 57–92. 35. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James (University of Chicago Press, 1976), 52. 36. Pippin, Henry James and Modern Moral Life, 81. 37. Henry James, Preface, The American, vol. ii of The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York: Scribner’s, 1907), xvi. 38. Mark Seltzer, Henry James and the Art of Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 62. 39. Richard A. Hocks, Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974), 217–25. 40. Henry James, “Is There a Life After Death?,” in In After Days: Thoughts on the Future Life, by W. D. Howells, Henry James, et al. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910), 231–2. The text is readily available in F. O. Matthiessen, The James Family, 602–14. See also the discussion of this text in relation to The Wings of the Dove in Sharon Cameron, Thinking in Henry James (University of Chicago Press, 1989), 155–8. 4 marcel proust and the elementary forms of religious life 1. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. i, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 47. This edition is

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Notes to pages 81–5

cited hereafter as Remembrance. I have sometimes silently modified the translations of Scott Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (who translated Time Regained in the same edition). À la recherche du temps perdu, new Pléiade edition, vol. i, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 43. This edition is cited hereafter as Recherche. 2. Remembrance, vol. i, 47; Recherche, vol. i, 43–4. 3. Remembrance, vol. i, 3, 878; Recherche, vol. i, 3; vol. ii, 176. 4. Remembrance, vol. i, 51; Recherche, vol. i, 47. See also Roger Shattuck, Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to “In Search of Lost Time” (New York: Norton, 2000), 124–36. 5. René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 80–2; Barbara Bucknall, The Religion of Art in Proust (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969), 155–7. 6. Remembrance, vol. i, 48; Recherche, vol. i, 44. 7. Remembrance, vol. i, 14; Recherche, vol. i, 13. 8. Remembrance, vol. ii, 2; Recherche, vol. ii, 520. 9. Sarah Raff, “Erotics of Instruction: Jane Austen and the Generalizing Novel,” Yale University Ph.D. Dissertation, 2004. 10. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), 80–3; Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (Oxford University Press, 1966), 444. See also William C. Carter, “Proust, Einstein, et le sentiment religieux cosmique,” Bulletin de la société des amis de Marcel Proust 37 (1987): 52–62. 11. Pericles Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 153–75; Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 72–113; Erin Carlston, “Secret Dossiers: Sexuality, Race and Treason in Proust and the Dreyfus Affair,” Modern Fiction Studies 48 (2002): 937–68; Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust, trans. Euan Cameron (New York: Penguin, 2001), 299–306; George D. Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 208–40. 12. Tadié, Marcel Proust, 584. 13. Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1945) in The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 3–62. See also Georges Poulet, Proustian Space, trans. Elliott Coleman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). Proust continually complained that critics saw his novel as formless, when in fact he thought it had the structure of a cathedral. 14. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. David Magarshack (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 691. 15. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 69. 16. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 111.

Notes to pages 85–9

205

17. See John B. Vickery, The Literary Impact of “The Golden Bough” (Princeton University Press, 1973). 18. R. H. Codrington, The Melanesians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), 118, n. 1, quoted in Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 196–7. 19. Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 217. 20. Remembrance, vol. i, 205; Recherche, vol. i, 184. 21. For a comparison of Durkheim and Bergson, see Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, vol. ii, trans. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1999), 60. 22. Tadié, Marcel Proust, 205; Remembrance, vol. ii, 962; Recherche, vol. iii, 322. 23. Proust’s references to Kant emphasize how the “rigorous…determinism” of Kant depends on “a supreme act of free will,” an interpretation not entirely at odds with that of William James, discussed in the previous chapter. Recherche, vol. i, 497; vol. ii, 768. For Proust’s other uses of Kant, see also Joshua Landy, Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford University Press, 2004), 51–84. 24. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 14. On Darlu, see H. Bonnet, Alphonse Darlu: Maître de philosophie de Marcel Proust (Paris: Nizet, 1961), 34–7. 25. Tadié, Marcel Proust, 204. 26. For the rather bizarre debate about Proust’s alleged anti-Semitism, see Albert Sonnenfeld, “Marcel Proust Antisémite?” The French Review 62 (1988): 25–40, 275–82; Naomi Diamant, “Judaism, Homosexuality, and Other Sign Systems in A la recherche du temps perdu,” Romanic Review 82 (1991): 179–92; Juliette Hassine, Marranisme et hébraïsme dans l’oeuvre de Proust (Paris: Minard, 1994); and Marion A. Schmid, “The Jewish Question in A la recherche du temps perdu in the Light of Nineteenth-Century Discourses on Race,” Neophilologus 83 (1999): 33–49. 27. Tadié, Marcel Proust 27–8, 37, 247. A brief reference in his first, unfinished novel Jean Santeuil, indicates that in that novel, the mother is Jewish. Proust seems, according to a passing reference in Jean Santeuil, to have had some sort of belief in God in his high-school days. Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil, précédé de Les Plaisirs et les jours, ed. Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 479. 28. Sociologie et philosophie, quoted in Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, vol. ii, 107. 29. Deborah Dash Moore, “David Emile Durkheim and the Jewish Response to Modernity,” Modern Judaism 6 (1986): 287–300; Ivan Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France (University of Chicago Press, 1997). 30. Paula E. Hyman, The Jews of Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Paula E. Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). 31. Quoted in Hyman, The Jews of Modern France, 27. 32. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (Oxford, 1956), 313, quoted in Steven Lukes, Émile Durkheim: His Life and Work, A Historical and Critical Study (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 35. See also Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, vol. ii, 45.

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Notes to pages 89–94

33. Remembrance, vol. i, 793; Recherche, vol. ii, 97–8. Translation slightly modified. For Durkheim’s attitude to Eastern European immigration, and for the question of immigrant Jews generally, see Paula Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, 115–52. 34. Remembrance, vol. ii, 223; Recherche, vol. ii, 514. 35. Letter to Paul Souday, December 17, 1919, in Correspondance, ed. Philip Kolb (Paris: Plon, 1970–93), vol. xviii, 535–6. See also Painter, Marcel Proust, 210. 36. Letter to Célestin Bouglé, March 28, 1898, quoted in Lukes, Émile Durkheim, 348. 37. Robert Tombs, France 1814–1914 (London: Longman, 1996), 462–72; Maurice Agulhon, The French Republic, trans. Antonia Nevill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 82–112. 38. Durkheim, “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” trans. S. and J. Lukes, in Durkheim on Religion: A Selection of Readings with Bibliographies, ed. W. S. F. Pickering (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 62. 39. Elementary Forms, 175; “Individualism and the intellectuals,” 61, 62. 40. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 216. 41. Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel, 126–74. 42. Remembrance, vol. i, 20; Recherche, vol. i, 18–19; Malcolm Bowie, Proust Among the Stars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 1–29. 43. Remembrance, vol. i, 1; Recherche, vol. i, 3. 44. Remembrance, vol. i, 1; Recherche, vol. i, 3. 45. Theodor W. Adorno, “Theses Upon Art and Religion Today,” Notes to Literature, trans. Sherry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), vol. ii, 297–8. 46. Remembrance, vol. i, 5–6; Recherche, vol. i, 5. 47. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe, and Claus Melchior (New York: Random House, 1986), 236 and passim. 48. M. H. Abrams, in Natural Supernaturalism, 80–3, attributes the similarities between Proust and Wordsworth despite their different traditions to the model of Augustine. While this is the original source, there are more proximate causes of their similarity: both read Rousseau attentively, and, as Abrams notes, Proust read George Eliot and Ruskin, who were deeply influenced by Wordsworth. With the help of Marie Nordlinger, Proust translated Wordsworth’s “Three Years She Grew,” which is quoted in Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies. 49. Remembrance, vol. i, 858; Recherche, vol. ii, 158. 50. Remembrance, vol. i, 205, 858, 119; Recherche, vol. i, 184, vol. ii, 158, vol. i, 109. 51. For early comparisons of the two, see Leigh Hodson, ed., Marcel Proust: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1989), 89, 181–2, 187–90, 268–70. See also Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Re-Reading Novels,” published July 20, 1922, just months before Proust’s death, in which Woolf represents Proust as an heir of James. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie, vol. iii (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 336–46. 52. Erich Auerbach argued that Proust’s novel could not be subsumed under the category of “unipersonal subjectivism” because “Proust aims at objectivity, he wants to bring out the essence of events.” Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton University Press, 1953), 542.

Notes to pages 94–103

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53. Remembrance, vol. iii, 51; Recherche, vol. iii, 566. 54. On Proust and Dostoyevsky, see Levin, “The Dostoevsky Side,” in The Gates of Horn, 408–21. 55. Remembrance, vol. i, 67; Recherche, vol. i, 62. 56. Remembrance, vol. i, 67; Recherche, vol. i, 62. 57. Remembrance, vol. i, 205; Recherche, vol. i, 184. 58. Remembrance, vol. iii, 246, 253; Recherche, vol. iii, 749, 756. 59. Remembrance, vol. i, 205; Recherche, vol. i, 184. 60. Remembrance, vol. ii, 965; Recherche, vol. iii, 325. 61. Remembrance, vol. i, 273; Recherche, vol. i, 246. 62. Remembrance, vol. i, 283–4; Recherche, vol. i, 255. 63. Remembrance, vol. i, 315; Recherche, vol. i, 284. 64. Remembrance, vol. ii, 906; Recherche, vol. iii, 270. 65. Remembrance, vol. ii, 981; Recherche, vol. iii, 340. 66. Remembrance, vol. ii, 11; Recherche, vol. ii, 317. 67. Remembrance, vol. ii, 11; Recherche, vol. ii, 317. 68. Remembrance, vol. i, 31; Recherche, vol. i, 29. 69. Remembrance, vol. iii, 112; Recherche, vol. iii, 623. 70. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (Princeton University Press, 2008), 162–94. 71. Remembrance, vol. i, 440–1; Recherche, vol. i, 399. 72. Remembrance, vol. i, 548; Recherche, vol. i, 499–500. 73. Remembrance, vol. i, 567, 685; Recherche, vol. i, 517, 626. 74. Remembrance, vol. i, 569; Recherche, vol. i, 519. 75. Margaret Topping, Proust’s Gods: Christian and Mythological Figures of Speech in the Works of Marcel Proust (Oxford University Press, 2000), 82–94. 76. Remembrance, vol. i, 714; Recherche, vol. ii, 24. 77. Remembrance, vol. i, 853; Recherche, vol. ii, 153. 78. Remembrance, vol. iii, 33, ii 281; Recherche, vol. iii, 550, ii 568. 79. Remembrance, vol. ii, 26; Recherche, vol. ii, 331. 80. Remembrance, vol. ii, 532; Recherche, vol. ii, 802. 81. Remembrance, vol. ii, 564; Recherche, vol. ii, 832. 82. Remembrance, vol. i, 119; Recherche, vol. i, 109. 83. Remembrance, vol. i, 179 ; Recherche, vol. i, 162. 84. Remembrance, vol. ii, 1041, 939; Recherche, vol. iii, 397, 300. 85. Elementary Forms, 44. H. Stuart Hughes notes the broad similarities in Durkheim’s and James’s approaches in Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930, rev. edn. (New York: Random House, 1977), 284–5. 86. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, abridged edition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 56. For a history of secular magical entertainments, see Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). 87. Remembrance, vol. i, 174; Recherche, vol. i, 158. 88. Remembrance, vol. i, 177; Recherche, vol. i, 160.

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Notes to pages 103–11

89. Remembrance, vol. i, 177, 178; Recherche, vol. i, 160, 161. 90. Remembrance, vol. i, 179; Recherche, vol. i, 162. 91. Remembrance, vol. i, 178; Recherche, vol. i, 161. 92. Remembrance, vol. iii, 263; Recherche, vol. iii, 766. 93. Remembrance, vol. iii, 263; Recherche, vol. iii, 765. 94. Remembrance, vol. iii, 263; Recherche, vol. iii, 765–6. 95. Remembrance, vol. iii, 263; Recherche, vol. iii, 766. 96. Remembrance, vol. i, 460; Recherche, vol. i, 417. 97. Samuel Beckett, Proust (1931; New York: Grove Press, 1970), 23. 98. Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 47. 99. Remembrance, vol. i, 878; Recherche, vol. ii, 176–7. 100. Remembrance, vol. iii, 73; Recherche, vol. iii, 587. 101. Remembrance, vol. iii, 976–7; Recherche, vol. iv, 514. 102. Malcolm Bowie, Proust Among the Stars, 273. 103. Remembrance, vol. iii, 388; Recherche, vol. iii, 883. 104. Elementary Forms, 187. 105. Remembrance, vol. iii, 901; Recherche, vol. iv, 447. 106. Remembrance, vol. iii, 1102; Recherche, vol. iv, 621. See Recherche, vol. iv, 1316, n. 1. 107. Remembrance, vol. i, 736; Recherche, vol. ii, 45. 108. Remembrance, vol. i, 932; Recherche, vol. ii, 227. 109. Remembrance, vol. i, 622; Recherche, vol. i, 568. 110. Remembrance, vol. iii, 533; Recherche, vol. iv, 104. 111. Marcel Proust, “Pour la Revue Lilas,” Écrits de jeunesse, 1887–1895, ed. Anne Borrel et al. (Combray: Institut Marcel Proust International, 1991), 124. 112. Remembrance, vol. ii, 328; Recherche, vol. ii, 614. 113. Remembrance, vol. i, 782; Recherche, vol. ii, 87. 114. Remembrance, vol. iii, 616; Recherche, vol. iv, 182. Translation modified. 115. Remembrance, vol. iii, 913; Recherche, vol. iv, 458. See Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 94–102. 116. Remembrance, vol. iii, 186; Recherche, vol. iii, 693. 117. Remembrance, vol. iii, 186; Recherche, vol. iii, 693. 118. Recherche, vol. iv, 93; Remembrance, vol. iii, 522. 119. Remembrance, vol. iii, 623; Recherche, vol. iv, 189. 120. Henry James, “Is There a Life After Death?” in In After Days: Thoughts on the Future Life, by W. D. Howells, Henry James, et al. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910), 231–2. 121. Remembrance, vol. iii, 459; Recherche, vol. iv, 34. 5 franz kafka and the hermeneutics of suspicion 1. Franz Kafka The Castle, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken, 1998), 8; Franz Kafka, Das Schloß, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1982), 17–18. I

Notes to pages 112–16

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

209

follow my regular practice of giving the initial date of publication even though there was in Kafka’s case frequently a considerable delay between composition and publication. For a related interpretation, see Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 242. Castle, 28–9; Schloß, 49–50. Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Franz Rosenzweig, letter to Gertrud Oppenheim, May 25, 1927, in Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, ed. and trans. Nahum M. Glatzer (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 160. Robertson, Kafka, 268–72. Walter H. Sokel, Franz Kafka (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966). Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 33. Neither Freud nor Kafka had any particular interest in Marx, but both had read Nietzsche as young men. Freud quotes Nietzsche on the transvaluation of values in Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon, 1965), 365. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 555. Ricoeur ultimately finds aspects of an opposite conception of hermeneutics, as revelation of the sacred, in Freud’s work on religion. See Freud and Philosophy, 531–51. Harold Bloom, The Strong Light of the Canonical: Freud, Kafka, and Scholem as Revisionists of Jewish Culture and Thought (New York: City College, 1987), 7. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 25–9. Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken 1998), 219. Franz Kafka, Der Proceß, Critical Edition, ed. Malcolm Pasley, Fischer paperback reprint (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1994), 228. Sokel, Franz Kafka (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966); Karl-Erich Grözinger, Kafka and Kabbalah, trans. Susan Hecker Ray (New York: Continuum, 1994). Henry Sussmann, Franz Kafka: Geometrician of Metaphor (Madison, Wisc.: Coda, 1979); Stanley Corngold, Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988). Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient (New York: Routledge, 1995); Elizabeth Boa, Kafka: Gender, Class, and Race (Oxford University Press, 1996); Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); John Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Hanns Zischler, Kafka Goes to the Movies, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (University of Chicago Press, 2003); Iris Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007); Carolin Duttlinger, Kafka and Photography (Oxford University Press, 2007). David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton University Press, 2003), 188. For the cultural history of Prague, see Peter Demetz, Prague in

210

Notes to pages 116–17

Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997). 17. For the concept of interpretive communities (in a more secular context), see Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). 18. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1991), 273. 19. For the opposition between community (Gemeinschaft) and society (Gesellschaft), see Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, trans. Jose Harris and Margaret Hollis (Cambridge University Press, 2001). 20. For the direct comparison most relevant to my argument, see Bloom, The Strong Light of the Canonical. An important brief treatment is Walter H. Sokel, “Freud and the Magic of Kafka’s Writing,” in The Myth of Power and the Self: Essays on Kafka (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 152–65. There is of course much discussion of Freud in the many biographies and critical studies of Kafka, but often Freud is treated as the unexamined framework for understanding Kafka, rather than as a contemporary exploring the same issues through a different method. Oddly enough, in the last decade, there seems to have been one direct comparative study of the two authors in each major European language. Philippe Réfabert imagines the man from the country undergoing psychoanalysis in order to criticize Freud’s scientistic tendencies in De Freud à Kafka (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2001). Franco Rella emphasizes the open-endedness of interpretation in Freud and Kafka, focusing on the way they both think through images, in Pensare per Figure: Freud, Platone, Kafka, il postumano (Rome: Fazi, 2004). Neither of these studies deals with the historical context of the two authors. The late, distinguished French translator and biographer of Kafka, Marthe Robert, collected six of her essays on the two men in a volume that appears, ironically, to be available only in Spanish translation, Acerca de Kafka, Acerca de Freud (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1994). This volume includes an important essay on symbolism in The Castle but does not include much direct comparison of Freud and Kafka. Robert has, however, explored many of the issues of Jewish history that I discuss in this chapter, largely in a Freudian vein. See Marthe Robert, As Lonely as Franz Kafka, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1982) and Marthe Robert, From Oedipus to Moses: Freud’s Jewish Identity, trans. Ralph Manheim (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1976). Rudolf Kreis explores both Freud and Kafka, without really comparing the two, in relation to the history of anti-Semitism and the Catholic Church in Antisemitismus und Kirche: In den Gedächtnislücken deutscher Geschichte mit Heine, Freud, Kafka und Goldhagen (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1999). Rainer J. Kaus compares the interpretive techniques of psychoanalysis and literary criticism in Literaturpsychologie und literarische Hermeneutik: Sigmund Freud und Franz Kafka (New York: P. Lang, 2004). Although Kaus emphasizes the interpretive openness of hermeneutic approaches to literature, he often falls into the prevalent tendency of psychoanalyzing Kafka and thus applying Freud to Kafka, for example in inquiring

Notes to pages 118–19

21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

211

into Kafka’s supposed latent homosexuality. Kaus emphasizes the theme of guilt in his shorter study, Kafka und Freud: Schuld in den Augen des Dichters und des Analytikers (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2000). Both Réfabert and Kaus are practicing psychoanalysts. Mark Edmundson, The Death of Sigmund Freud (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), 174. Franz Kafka: Letters to Felice, ed. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born, trans. James Stern and Elizabeth Duckworth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), quoted in Nicholas Murray, Kafka: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 246. Letters to Felice, quoted in Murray, Kafka, 155. Frederick Karl, Franz Kafka, Representative Man: Prague, Germans, Jews, and the Crisis of Modernism (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1991), 421–6. For a detailed account of Kafka’s Jewish background, see Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, Literature. For a discussion of Kafka and theology, see Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death” and “Some Reflections on Kafka,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 111–14;. and Gershom Scholem, ed., The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932–1940, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 220–6. For commentary, see Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 18–23. The main source for Jakob Freud’s views is the Hebrew inscription he wrote in a Bible that he gave his son on his fifty-third birthday. See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 57–79. Freud to Oskar Pfister, October 9, 1918, quoted in Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), 602. See also Gay, Freud, 6, 600; and Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents , trans. and ed. James Strachey, with an introduction by Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 11. Eric L. Santner has argued for a conception of Freud as developing, like his contemporary the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, Jewish ethics concerned with “my answerability to my neighbor-with-an-unconscious.” See Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (University of Chicago Press, 2001), 9, 43. Franz Kafka, “Letter to his Father,” in Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken, 1954), 171–6; Freud, letter to J. Dwossis, December 15, 1930, quoted in Gay, Freud, 600. Gay, Freud, 14–21. Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena, trans. Philip Boehm (New York: Schocken, 1990), 213, quoted in Murray, Kafka, 313.

212

Notes to pages 119–22

31. Ernst Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 384–5. 32. Sociologie et philosophie, quoted in Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, trans. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1999), vol. ii, 107. 33. Georges Davy, “Émile Durkheim: L’Homme,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 26 (1919): 195, quoted in Dominick Lacapra, Émile Durkheim: Sociologist and Philosopher (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972), 35. 34. Quoted in Peter D. Kramer, Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 111. 35. Gay, Freud, 204–5. 36. Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 33. 37. One of the earliest works in this reassessment was Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (New York: Basic Books, 1979). For an anthology of the most critical accounts of Freud’s career, see Frederick C. Crews, ed., Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend (New York: Viking, 1998). For a more tempered but equally devastating assessment of Freud’s life, see Peter D. Kramer’s Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind. In this study I have also drawn extensively on Peter Gay’s magisterial Freud: A Life for our Time. 38. Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910–1923, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh and Martin Greenberg with the cooperation of Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1976), 213. Kafka also referred to a conversation with a young Gymnasium (high school) professor about Freud in July, 1912; see Diaries, 478. 39. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. and ed. James Strachey, with an introduction by Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 107. 40. For discussion of “The Judgment,” see Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason, 272. 41. Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason, 120–1; Gilman, Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient, 158–62. 42. Zadie Smith, “F. Kafka, Everyman,” New York Review of Books, July 17, 2008. 43. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 230. 44. Alexander Welsh, Freud’s Wishful Dream Book (Princeton University Press, 1994), 71–8. See also Peter Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot,” in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 90–112. 45. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 183. See also David Joravsky, “Between Science and Art: Freud versus Schnitzler, Kafka, and Musil,” in The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940, ed. Mark S. Micale (Stanford University Press, 2004), 292; and John Brenkman, “Freud the Modernist,” in The Mind of Modernism, 172–96. 46. Franz Kafka: Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (1978), 289, quoted in Murray, Kafka, 326.

Notes to pages 123–32

213

47. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay, in The Kierkegaard Reader, ed. Jane Chamberlain and Jonathan Rée (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 80–3. See also David J. Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 108–21. 48. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, quoted in The Kierkegaard Reader, 77. 49. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton University Press, 1953), 3–23. See also Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11–76. For the relevance to Kafka, see Alexander Welsh, Reflections on the Hero as Quixote (Princeton University Press, 1981), 220. For the comparison of Joyce and Kafka, see Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 174–5. 50. Remembrance, vol. i, 39; Recherche, vol. i, 36. 51. Remembrance, vol. i, 38; Recherche, vol. i, 35. 52. Franz Kafka, “Abraham,” trans. Clement Greenberg, in Parables and Paradoxes: Bilingual Edition (New York: Schocken, 1961), 41. 53. Welsh, Reflections on the Hero as Quixote, 192. See also Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971); David Quint, Cervantes’s Novel of Modern Times: A New Reading of Don Quijote (Princeton University Press, 2005). 54. The Trial, 230–1; Der Proceß, 240–1. 55. Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 224. 56. Kafka, Letters to Milena, 216; translation modified. See also the discussion in Joravsky, “Between Science and Art.” 57. Diaries, 64, quoted in Murray, Kafka, 95. 58. Letters to Felice, 423, quoted in Murray, Kafka, 208. 59. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. and ed. James Strachey, with an introduction by Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 37. 60. The Future of an Illusion, 55. 61. Totem and Taboo, 29. 62. Gay, Freud, 327. I am grateful to David Quint for the suggestion concerning regicide; Freud named his son Oliver after Cromwell. 63. Totem and Taboo, xviii, 29. See also Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989), 31. Around the same time, the philosopher of Jewish Enlightenment, Hermann Cohen, teacher of both Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, was arguing that Kantian universality derived from Jewish monotheism. See Norbert M. Samuelson, An Introduction to Modern Jewish Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 164. 64. Kramer, Freud, 144–7. 65. Gay, Freud, 333–4, 601–2. 66. Totem and Taboo, xxxi. 67. Kramer, Freud, 147; Totem and Taboo, 194, 19.

214

Notes to pages 132–9

68. Civilization and its Discontents, 95. 69. Castle, 55; Schloß, 90. 70. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1958), 8–9, 177–8. 71. This is one of the faults noted in Edmund Wilson, “A Dissenting Opinion on Kafka,” in Kafka: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ronald Gray (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 91–8. Brod relates a happy ending Kafka promised for Amerika, but Kafka’s recent translator convincingly argues that a grimmer fate was more likely in Franz Kafka, Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: New Directions, 2004), xii. Kafka told Brod that The Castle would have ended with the death of K, followed by the arrival of a message finally granting him permission to stay in the village; see Murray, Kafka, 349. 72. Castle, 48; Schloß, 80. 73. Pavel Eisner, Franz Kafka and Prague, trans. Lowry Nelson and René Wellek (New York: Golden Griffin Books, 1950), 8–9. 74. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press, 1998), 49–58, 126–34. 75. Robertson, Kafka, 218–35. 76. The Castle, 207–21; Schloß, 326–47. 77. Castle, 1; Schloß, 7. 78. Welsh, Reflections on the Hero as Quixote, 194. 79. Castle, 36; Schloß, 60. 80. Castle, 112; Schloß, 177. 81. Castle, 115; Schloß, 183. 82. “The Problem of Our Laws,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir in Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken, 1971), 437–8; “Zur Frage der Gesetze,” in Franz Kafka, “Zur Frage der Gesetze” und andere Schriften aus dem Nachlaß, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1994), 106–8. 83. Bloom, The Strong Light of the Canonical, 2. 84. Castle, 183; Schloß, 288. 85. Alter, Necessary Angels, 76. 86. Castle, 23–4; Schloß, 40–3. 87. Castle, 71; Schloß, 114. 88. Castle, 37; Schloß, 62. 89. Castle, 205; Schloß, 324. 90. Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Random House, 1967), 3. Subsequent page references to this work are given in parentheses in the text. 91. Edmundson, The Death of Sigmund Freud treats the historical context of Freud’s claims but does not subject them to much critical scrutiny; Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses offers a much more searching account, but ends with a somewhat speculative account of the psychological origins of Freud’s theories in his relation to his father’s Judaism. 92. Quoted in Kramer, Freud, 196.

Notes to pages 140–3

215

93. Franz Kafka, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” in The Complete Stories, 361–76; Franz Kafka, “Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse,” in Erzählungen (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1983), 200–18. For discussion, see Robertson, Kafka, 279–84. 6 virginia woolf and the disenchantment of the world 1. Letter to Vanessa Bell, February 11, 1928, no. 1858, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975–80), vol. iii, 457–8. This edition is cited hereafter as Letters. 2. See Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (New York: Vintage, 1999), 222–3. 3. Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, ed. C. Ruth Miller and Lawrence Miller (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1995), 215. For a reading of The Voyage Out in relation to secularization, see Vincent Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2006), 173–88. 4. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), 171. 5. Diary entry, December 8, 1929, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979–84), vol. iii, 271. This edition is cited hereafter as Diary. 6. Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf (London: Grafton, 1987), vol. ii, 136. 7. See Woolf’s autobiographical writings, collected in Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd edn. (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985). This edition is cited hereafter as Moments. 8. For relevant discussions, see Alice Van Buren Kelley, The Novels of Virginia Woolf: Fact and Vision (University of Chicago Press, 1973); Maria DiBattista, Virginia Woolf’s Major Novels: The Fables of Anon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 64–9, 149–55; Mark Hussey, The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986), 96–106; Patricia Ondek Laurence, The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition (Stanford University Press, 1991), 52–5, 98; James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 105–18; Lisa Ruddick, The Seen and the Unseen: Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977). 9. Hussey, The Singing of the Real World, 136–40; Christine Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 226–34. 10. Michael Lackey, “The Gender of Atheism in Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Simple Melody,’ ” Studies in Short Fiction 35 (1998): 49–63; “Atheism and Sadism: Nietzsche and Woolf on Post-God Discourse,” Philosophy and Literature 24 (2000): 346–63; and “Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot: An Atheist’s Commentary on the Epistemology of Belief,” Woolf Studies Annual 8 (2002): 63–90. 11. Elizabeth J. Gualitieri-Reed, “Mrs. Dalloway: Revising Religion,” The Centennial Review 43 (1999): 205–25.

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Notes to pages 143–8

12. Jacob’s Room, ed. Edward L. Bishop (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 2004), 87; To the Lighthouse, ed. Susan Dick (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1992), 9. This edition is cited hereafter as Lighthouse. For an important discussion of Woolf’s views of her father’s agnosticism in To the Lighthouse, see Mark Gaipa, “An Agnostic’s Daughter’s Apology: Materialism, Spiritualism, and Ancestry in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse,” Journal of Modern Literature 26.2 (Winter, 2003): 1–41. 13. Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Collected Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), vol. i, 320. This edition is cited hereafter as Collected Essays. 14. “Modern Novels,” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986– ), vol. iii, 32. This edition is cited hereafter as Essays. 15. The phrase is translated influentially but somewhat misleadingly as “The Routinization of Charisma,” in The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, ed. Talcott Parsons (New York: Free Press, 1964), 363–85. The alternative translation is given in Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, trans. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1999), vol. ii, 389. 16. “Modern Fiction,” revised version of “Modern Novels,” in Collected Essays, vol. ii, 106. 17. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 1948), 148–9. 18. “On Not Knowing Greek,” Collected Essays, vol. i, 13. 19. Lighthouse, 54; Mrs. Dalloway, ed. Morris Beja (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1996), 95. Subsequent page references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. 20. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 155. 21. Three Guineas, ed. Naomi Black (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 2001), 63. See also Francis Watson, Agape, Eros, Gender (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 6–39. 22. For Weber’s views of James, see H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930, rev. edn. (New York: Random House, 1977), 321; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 1992), 232–3, n. 66.; and Max Weber, “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism,” in From Max Weber, 308. 23. From Max Weber, 156. 24. John Milbank criticizes Weber’s assumption that multiple gods implied pluralistic values in Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 93. 25. Three Guineas, 13. On Weber’s politics, see Fritz Ringer, Max Weber: An Intellectual Biography (University of Chicago Press, 2004), 41–75. 26. John 9.3, quoted in Protestant Ethic, 157. 27. For Stephen’s use of the Biblical phrase, see Lee, Virginia Woolf, 94.

Notes to pages 149–53

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28. Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. and ed. Harry Zohn (New York: Wiley & Sons, 1975); Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960); Ringer, Max Weber. 29. Bendix, Max Weber, 27. 30. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 84–5. 31. Lee, Virginia Woolf, 56, 88. 32. Lee, Virginia Woolf, 56; Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian (New York: Random House, 1984), 160–2; Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism, 161–73. 33. Caroline Emelia Stephen, Quaker Strongholds, 3rd edn. (London: 1891). 34. Past and Present, Book iii, chapter 12, quoted in Annan, Leslie Stephen, 94. See also Frank M. Turner, “Victorian Scientific Naturalism and Thomas Carlyle,” in Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 131–50. 35. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 242. 36. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 238. 37. Letter to E. M. Forster, January 21, 1922, no. 1210, Letters, vol. ii, 499; Diary entry, February 16, 1930, Diary, vol. iii, 287; Lee, Virginia Woolf, 187–8. 38. On Woolf’s late reading of Freud, see DiBattista, Virginia Woolf’s Major Novels, 219–28; Lee, Virginia Woolf, 710–14; and Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (University of Chicago Press, 1989), 14–20. 39. I have modified Parsons’s translation. He gives “elimination of magic from the world” for “Entzauberung der Welt.” On the limitations of his translation (and the more recent ones), see Lutz Kaelber, “Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic in the Twenty-first Century,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 16.1 (2002): 133–46. 40. “Science as a Vocation,” 143. 41. Diary entry, April 25, 1933, in Diary, vol. iv, 151–2. 42. Mrs. Dalloway, 67, 51, 110, 72. 43. The Waves, ed. James M. Haule and Philip H. Smith, Jr. (Oxford: Shakespeare Head, 1993), 155. 44. See Rachel Bowlby, “Getting to Q: Sexual Lines in To the Lighthouse,” in Feminist Destinations and Other Essays on Virginia Woolf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 54–68. 45. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1959); Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Leopold Damrosch, Jr., God’s Plot and Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (University of Chicago Press, 1985); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). Weber’s work dovetails with that of Erich Auerbach in this respect, and Watt cites both of them as sources at Rise of the Novel 79, 63, 64n. More recently, Weber, Auerbach, and Watt are sources for Charles Taylor’s account of the “affirmation of ordinary life” in Sources of the Self, 222, 225, 286–9.

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Notes to pages 153–9

46. Martha C. Nussbaum, “The Window: Knowledge of Other Minds in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse,” in Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein, ed. Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 55–76. 47. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick, 2nd edn. (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 112, cited hereafter as Complete Shorter Fiction. 48. Lighthouse, 9, 43, 136. 49. Woolf refers quite frequently to Wordsworth, and may have taken the working title of Mrs. Dalloway, “The Hours,” from a passage in the Prelude that relates to his conception of “spots of time.” See Prelude 7.458–66; Virginia Woolf, Diary entry of August 22, 1929, Diary, vol. iii, 247; the passage also appears in Woolf’s notebooks for Mrs. Dalloway. 50. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), 418–27. 51. Moments, 71; Lighthouse, 62, 7. 52. Flaubert, letter to Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie, March 18, 1857, in Selected Letters, trans. Francis Steegmuller (New York: Farrar Straus, 1953), 195. 53. Complete Shorter Fiction, 220; letter of July 8, 1927 to Vita Sackville-West, no. 1781, Letters, vol. iii, 397. 54. Patricia Yeager, “Toward a Female Sublime,” in Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 191–212; Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 115–44; Barbara Claire Freeman, The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995). See also Laura Doyle, “Sublime Barbarians in the Narrative of Empire; or, Longinus at Sea in The Waves,” Modern Fiction Studies 42 (1996): 323–47; and Kari Elise Lokke, “Orlando and Incandescence: Virginia Woolf’s Comic Sublime,” Modern Fiction Studies 38 (1992) 235–52. 55. Longinus, “On the Sublime,” section 10, trans. W. R. Roberts, in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 83. 56. This is Symonds’s translation, which was undoubtedly known to Woolf, who was in love with Symonds’s daughter Madge, one of the models of Sally Seton. 57. On Sappho as a model for the feminine sublime, see Freeman, The Feminine Sublime, 13–26. 58. Wordsworth, “Preface to Poems (1815),” quoted in Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 62. 59. Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, 24. 60. Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, 6. 61. “Across the Border” (1918), in Essays, vol. ii, 219. 62. Moments, 69, 92. In both cases, she casts doubt on the reality of the apparitions (the first by saying it may have been a dream, the second by saying that she cannot remember whether she made up the story for attention).

Notes to pages 160–72

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63. Letter to G. Lowes Dickinson, June 26, 1924, quoted in Peter Childs, A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on E. M. Forster’s “A Passage to India” (London: Routledge, 2002), 22. 64. Martin Corner, “Mysticism and Atheism in To the Lighthouse,” Studies in the Novel 13 (1981): 408–23. 65. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft, ed. Susan Dick (University of Toronto Press, 1982), 315. 66. Stephen’s own writings on agnosticism are less dogmatic than this, conceding that there may be a God, but arguing that we cannot have any knowledge of him. 67. Woolf’s brother Thoby presented her with a volume by James Thomson inscribed with the words “There is no God.” Lee, Virginia Woolf, 217. 68. Leslie Stephen, The Mausoleum Book (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 6. 69. See Gillian Beer, “Hume, Stephen, and Elegy in To the Lighthouse,” in Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 29–47. 70. Annan, Leslie Stephen, 76. 71. Lighthouse, 109, 175; see also 189n. 72. F. L. Overcarsh, “The Lighthouse, Face to Face,” Accent 10 (1950): 107–23. 73. Science as a Vocation, 155. 7 the burial of the dead 1. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1927), 194. 2. Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd edn. (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 91. 3. Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 163. 4. The Odyssey 11.206, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1990), 191. 5. The Aeneid 6.699–702, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1990), 184. 6. “On Not Knowing Greek,” Collected Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), vol. i, 13; Virginia Woolf, diary entry of June 27, 1925, Diary, vol. iii, 34. 7. William Faulkner, Novels: 1930–1935, ed. Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk (New York: Library of America, 1985), 1028n. 8. J. M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1995). 9. Bryan Spinks, “The Prayer Book ‘Crisis’ in England,” in The Oxford Guide to The Book of Common Prayer: A Worldwide Survey, ed. Charles Hefling and Cynthia Shattuck (Oxford University Press, 2006), 239–43. 10. Donald Lopez, ed., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Oxford University Press, 2000). 11. Henry James, “Is There a Life After Death?,” in In After Days: Thoughts on the Future Life, by W. D. Howells, Henry James, et al. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910), 231–2. 12. Joseph Conrad, The Shadow-Line (Oxford University Press, 2004), 82.

220

Notes to pages 173–9

13. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007), 185. 14. Inferno 3.4–6. 15. On modern views of death, see Phillipe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Sandra M. Gilbert, Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve (New York: Norton, 2006); Robert Pogue Harrison, Dominion of the Dead (University of Chicago Press, 2003). 16. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. and ed. James Strachey, with an introduction by Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 78. 17. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon, 1965), 591–92. 18. Letter to Antoine Bibesco, December 20, 1902, Correspondance, ed. Philip Kolb (Paris: Plon, 1970–93), vol. iii, 196. See also Roger Shattuck, Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to “In Search of Lost Time” (New York: Norton, 2000), 13. 19. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. i, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 3. This edition is cited hereafter as Remembrance. À la recherche du temps perdu, new Pléiade edition, vol. i, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 3. This edition is cited hereafter as Recherche. 20. Remembrance, vol. ii, 786; Recherche, vol. iii, 156. 21. Remembrance, vol. iii, 506; Recherche, vol. iv, 78. 22. Remembrance, vol. ii, 925; Recherche, vol. iii, 288. 23. Remembrance, vol. iii, 241; Recherche, vol. iii, 745. 24. Remembrance, vol. iii, 993; Recherche, vol. iv, 528. 25. Remembrance, vol. iii, 985; Recherche, vol. iv, 523. 26. Remembrance, vol. iii, 986; Recherche, vol. iv, 523. 27. Remembrance, vol. iii, 1026; Recherche, vol. iv, 556. 28. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, ed. Morris Beja (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1996), 138. See also Edward Mendelson, The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), 160–203. 29. F. W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (1906), 144–5, quoted in Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian (New York: Random House, 1984), 2. 30. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, abridged edition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 126–56. 31. On Woolf’s representation of death, see Garrett Stewart, Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 253–312. 32. Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe, and Claus Melchior (New York: Random House, 1986), 175. 33. Details in this paragraph are drawn from Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, new and rev. edn. (Oxford University Press, 1983), 30, 47–50, 65, 310. 34. Ellmann, James Joyce, 129, 136, 142, 162, 172.

Notes to pages 179–85

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35. Richard Ellmann, “Joyce’s Religion and Politics,” Aligarh Journal of English Studies 7.2 (1982): 102. 36. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, corrected by Chester G. Anderson and ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1964), 221. 37. T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace, 1975), 178, 177. 38. George Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” Collected Essays (London: Secker and Warburg, 1961), 136. 39. T. S. Eliot, “Religion and Literature,” Selected Prose, 100. 40. Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Verso, 1996), 153–5. 41. Ellmann, James Joyce, 519. For works on Joyce’s Catholic background, see J. Mitchell Morse, The Sympathetic Alien: James Joyce and Catholicism (New York University Press, 1959); Robert Boyle, S.J., James Joyce’s Pauline Vision: A Catholic Exposition (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1978); Frederick K. Lang, Ulysses and the Irish God (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1993); Mary Lowe-Evans, Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2008). For a more nuanced view, see Roy Gottfried, Joyce’s Misbelief (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2008). For the historical context, see Emer Nolan, Catholic Emancipations: Irish Fiction from Thomas Moore to James Joyce (Syracuse University Press, 2007). 42. For a detailed study of Joyce’s use of Dante, see Mary Reynolds, Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). 43. Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 72. 44. Purgatorio 2.46. See also Robert Alter, Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 175–6; Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman, “Ulysses” Annotated, rev. edn. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 581; Reynolds, Joyce and Dante, 119–32; Beryl Schlossman, Joyce’s Catholic Comedy of Language (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 60–6. 45. Dante Alighieri, letter to Can Grande della Scala, in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 122. See also Reynolds, Joyce and Dante, 64–6. 46. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 31. 47. Many of the specific references to Homer, Virgil, and Dante that I mention in this chapter are noted in Gifford and Seidman, “Ulysses” Annotated. 48. Auerbach, “Figura,” 62. 49. Alter, Canon and Creativity, 159. 50. Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 234. 51. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986– ), vol. iii, 30–7.

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Notes to pages 185–92

52. Kafka may have fathered a child but, if so, he apparently remained unaware of the fact and never met the child. I have called Nora Barnacle Joyce’s “wife,” but they lived together for twenty-seven years without marrying; when they did eventually marry, it was a civil ceremony. 53. Pound noted the borrowing from Joyce (“JJ”) in his marginal comments on Eliot’s manuscript of the poem. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 1971), 9. 54. Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography (London: Hogarth Press, 1933), 161. 55. “The Metamorphosis,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir in Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken, 1971), 138. 56. Franz Kafka, “Letter to his Father,” in Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken, 1954), 173. 57. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Vintage, 1996), 671–2. 58. Nicholas Murray, Kafka: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 387–9. 59. Ellmann, James Joyce, 742.

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Wood, James. The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief. New York: Modern Library, 2000 Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays. London: Hogarth Press, 1967 The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989 The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell, and Andrew McNeillie. San Diego, Calif: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979–84 The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. San Diego, Calif: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986– Jacob’s Room. Ed. Edward L. Bishop. Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 2004 The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975–80 Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. 2nd edn. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985 Mrs. Dalloway. Ed. Morris Beja. Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1996 A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth Press, 1929 Three Guineas. Ed. Naomi Black. Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 2001 To the Lighthouse. Ed. Susan Dick. Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1992 The Voyage Out. Ed. Ruth C. Miller, and Lawrence Miller. Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1995 The Waves. Ed. James M. Haule and Philip H. Smith. Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1993 Yeager, Patricia. “Toward a Female Sublime.” Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. 191–212 Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel. University of Chicago Press, 1991 Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James. University of Chicago Press, 1976 “Podsnappery, Sexuality, and the English Novel.” Critical Inquiry 9 (1982): 339–57 Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, ed. Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1994 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991

Index

Blüher, Hans, 121 Boutroux, Émile, 87 Breton, André, 18 Brod, Max, 115, 133, 191 Brown, Callum, 3, 6, 16, 24, 40 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 189 Buber, Martin, 42, 112, 118, 139 Bunyan, John, 115 Burne-Jones, Edward, 164 Butts, Mary, 18

Abrams, M. H., 83, 155 Adorno, Theodor, 92 agnosticism, 5, 20, 31, 38, 43, 49, 50, 143, 149 allegory, 37, 113, 114, 131, 134, 137, 181–3 Alter, Robert, 14, 137, 184 Anglicanism, 3, 15, 16, 31–4, 38, 63, 142, 153, 171, 186 animism, 84, 95, 104 anti-clericalism, 32, 33, 39, 90 anti-Semitism, 34, 89, 117, 119, 121, 128, 137–9 Aragon, Louis, 18 Aristotle, 112 Arnold, Matthew, 1, 3, 26, 36, 40, 179 Aron, Raymond, 44 atheism, 25, 31–4, 37, 38, 44, 108, 142–3, 154, 161–3, 176 Auden, W. H., 4, 21, 116 Auerbach, Erich, 23, 37, 124–5, 128, 181 Austen, Jane, 66 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 23 Balzac, Honoré de, 77, 94, 107 Barth, Karl, 40, 41, 46 Bataille, Georges, 18 Baudelaire, Charles, 63 Beckett, Samuel, 104 Waiting for Godot, 135, 136 Bennett, Arnold, 144 Bergson, Henri, 87 Bernanos, Georges, 18 Bersani, Leo, 62 Bible interpretation of, 32, 41, 134, 137, 165, 180, 216; see also interpretation, typological New Testament, 46, 123, 136, 148, 165, 166, 184 Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), 9, 13, 16, 54, 74, 88, 112, 115, 116, 123–9, 134, 154, 184, 185 Blackmur, R. P., 58 Bleuler, Eugen, 132 Bloom, Harold, 115

Calvinism, 31, 54, 148, 149 Carlyle, Thomas, 150 Cather, Willa, 18 Catholicism, 6, 7, 12–14, 18, 24, 31–4, 38, 41, 51, 52–4, 62–5, 68–9, 72, 82–3, 88, 90, 92, 95, 98, 100, 119, 128, 164, 172, 173, 177–9, 180, 183, 185–6, 189, 192 Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote, 126–7 Chadwick, Owen, 31, 39 Christ, see Jesus Church of England, see Anglicanism Clapham Sect, 32, 149 Clermont-Tonnerre, Stanislas de, 88 Codrington, R. H., 85 Cohen, Hermann, 42 Colenso, John, 33 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 4 Common Prayer, Book of, 72, 171 Comte, Auguste, 90 Conrad, Joseph, 61, 84, 168, 172 Corelli, Marie, 18 Damrosch, David, 115 Damrosch, Leopold, 152 Dante Alighieri, 20, 37, 51, 83, 100, 178, 180–5, 187 Darlu, Alphonse, 87 Darwin, Charles, 33, 39, 92, 130; see also evolution Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 42–3, 84, 94 Dreyfus Affair, 10, 34, 83, 88, 89–91, 119

232

Index Durkheim, Émile, 10, 19–20, 28, 32, 33, 35, 43–51, 60, 65, 72, 78, 83, 93, 97–8, 101–8, 110, 116, 119–20, 130–1, 145, 148 Elementary Forms of Religious Life, The, 47, 84–6, 87, 95, 101 Eliot, George, 31, 33, 35–7, 77, 92, 94 Eliot, T. S., 4, 18, 38, 142–4, 154 “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” 179–80 Waste Land, The, 16, 166, 171, 187 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 94 Engels, Friedrich, 33 Enlightenment, 123, 130 Jewish, 42, 51, 118, 124 Erickson, Gregory, 69 evangelicism, 6, 16, 39–40, 51, 149, 154, 171 Evans, Mary Ann, see Eliot, George Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 89 Evans-Wentz, William, 171 evolution, 39, 40, 131–2; see also Darwin, Charles Faulkner, William, 170, 189 Felski, Rita, 157 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 32–3 Flaubert, Gustave, 35–7, 77, 94, 156 Forster, E. M., 19, 160 Foucault, Michel, 26–8 France, Anatole, 89 Franklin, Benjamin, 50 Frazer, J. G., 30, 33, 85, 102, 130–1, 177 Frederic, Harold, 53 Freeman, Barbara Claire, 157 Freud, Anna, 119 Freud, Jakob, 117–19 Freud, Sigmund, 15, 19–20, 27, 32, 42, 43–51, 83, 85, 104, 113–22, 128–32, 145, 148, 157, 174; see also psychoanalysis Civilization and its Discontents, 46, 132, 151 Future of an Illusion, The, 48, 130 Interpretation of Dreams, The, 121, 122, 174 Moses and Monotheism, 48, 137–41 Totem and Taboo, 47, 48, 130–2 fundamentalism, 21, 27, 39–40, 43 Galsworthy, John, 144 Geertz, Clifford, 30 Gifford, Don, 183 Gilbert, Stuart, 183 Girard, René, 86 Graf, Max, 120 Greene, Graham, 18, 57 Gross, Otto, 121 Habsburg Empire, 20, 34, 42, 115–22 Hajek, Marcus, 118

233

Hall, Radclyffe, 18 Hardy, Thomas, 17–18, 26 Hasidism, 42, 119 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 53, 63, 77 Hegel, G. W. F., 5, 32 Hennell, Charles, 33 hermeneutics, 6, 114 of suspicion, 45, 48, 86, 113–15, 134 Hitler, Adolf, 119 Hocks, Richard, 78 Homer, 124, 170–1, 173–8, 180, 181, 183, 184, 185–91 Hugo, Victor, 8 Hulme, T. E., 4 Hume, David, 162 Huxley, Aldous, 38 idealism, philosophical, 34, 39, 48, 59, 60, 87, 124 interpretation; see also hermeneutics typological, 8, 10, 13, 20, 114, 123, 161, 180–3, 184 James, Henry, 4–5, 7, 20, 31, 51, 52–62, 81, 93–5, 144, 159, 172, 177–9, 184, 189–92 “Aspern Papers, The,” 53 “Beast in the Jungle, The,” 57, 59, 60 “Ghostly Rental, The,” 59 “Is There a Life After Death?,” 78–80, 109–10, 177 “Turn of the Screw, The,” 59, 60, 168 Ambassadors, The, 7–9, 11–15, 17, 19, 52, 53, 61, 67 American, The, 52, 53, 54, 69, 77 Europeans, The, 53 Golden Bowl, The, 37, 53–8, 61–77, 160 Portrait of a Lady, The, 54, 69 Princess Casamassima, The, 53 Roderick Hudson, 53 Wings of the Dove, The, 53–8, 61, 63, 76 James, Henry, Sr., 31, 58 James, William, 8, 19–20, 31, 38, 43–51, 57–62, 64, 78–80, 87, 93, 102, 109–10, 120, 130, 148, 171 Pragmatism, 47, 59; see also pragmatism Varieties of Religious Experience, The, 46, 54–5, 57–60, 62, 63, 85 Will to Believe, The, 79 James, William of Albany (grandfather of William and Henry James), 31, 63 Jameson, Fredric, 23, 77, 182 Janet, Paul, 87 Janet, Pierre, 87 Jesus, 13, 33, 40, 41, 82, 92, 97, 101, 127, 128, 134, 138, 147, 149, 153, 164–5, 166, 168, 180–5, 188

234

Index

Jewish people, the, 67, 131–4, 137–41, 182; see also Judaism Jones, David, 18 Joyce, James, 4–5, 7, 20, 30, 32, 34–7, 42, 51, 83, 125, 138, 144, 174, 177–9, 189–92 Dubliners, 36, 172, 179 Finnegans Wake, 171, 179 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A, 177–9, 182 Stephen Hero, 178 Ulysses, 5, 11–15, 36, 93, 144, 171, 174, 177–91 Joyce, Nora, 185, 192 Judaism, 6, 10, 11, 14, 31–4, 42–3, 48–50, 51, 70, 75, 83, 87–90, 95, 114, 115–24, 128, 177, 189; see also Jewish people, the Kabbalah, 118 Kafka, Franz, 4–5, 6, 15, 20, 32, 42, 46, 51, 114–30, 144, 145, 154, 177–9, 185, 189–92 “Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse People” (“Josephine die Sängerin, oder das Volk der Mäuse”), 139–41 “Judgment, The” (“Das Urteil”), 121 Castle, The (Das Schloß), 37, 111–13, 115, 116, 126, 127, 132–7 Metamorphosis, The (Die Verwandlung), 121, 127, 139, 189 Trial, The (Der Prozeß), 14–15, 17, 114, 115, 126, 127, 135, 136 Kafka, Hermann, 117–19 Kant, Immanuel, 46, 59–62, 87, 90, 109, 114, 115, 123, 131, 158 Kaye Smith, Sheila, 18 Keynes, John Maynard, 38 Kierkegaard, Søren, 40, 44, 123–5, 126, 129 Kramer, Peter, 132 Lamarck, J.-B., 131 Lang, Andrew, 106 Larbaud, Valéry, 180 Larkin, Philip “Church Going,” 1–6, 11, 19, 21–2, 29, 192 Lawrence, D. H., 17–18, 19, 31, 172 Leo XIII, 41 Levin, Harry, 83 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 65 Lewis, R. W. B., 62 liberalism political, 28, 30, 34, 87, 89, 90, 119, 131, 138, 148, 151 theological, 32, 38–44, 46–51, 57, 90, 91, 114, 123, 173 Locke, John, 30 Loisy, Alfred, 41

Longinus, 158 Luckmann, Thomas, 26 Lukács, Georg, 23 Luther, Martin, 148 Lyell, Charles, 32 magic, 12, 21, 30, 38, 65, 84, 86, 101–8 Mâle, Émile, 9 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 36, 83 Mann, Thomas, 172 Magic Mountain, The (Der Zauberberg), 172, 190–1 Maritain, Jacques, 42 Marx, Karl, 33, 75, 104, 113–14, 182; see also Marxism Marxism, 180 materialism, 5, 21, 30, 43, 145–7, 177 Matthiessen, F. O., 58 Mauriac, François, 18 Mauss, Marcel, 65, 72 McKeon, Michael, 152 Menand, Louis, 60 Mendelssohn, Moses, 42 Meyer, Eduard, 138 Milbank, John, 25, 44, 45, 50 Miller, J. Hillis, 26 Milton, John, 142, 147, 189 modernist movement in Catholic theology, 41 monotheism, 42, 48, 51, 114, 117–19, 123, 124, 132, 137–9, 145 Moretti, Franco, 23, 179–80 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 183 Muir, Edwin, 7, 115 Muir, Willa, 7, 115 Nation and Athenaeum, 38 naturalism, 35–7 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 41 Niebuhr, Richard, 40, 41 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 24, 27, 42–3, 46, 113–14, 138, 147, 151, 178, 192 Nussbaum, Martha, 153 occultism, 4, 25, 34, 46, 75 Orwell, George, 179 Overcarsh, F. L., 166 Owen, Wilfred, 171 Pater, Walter, 36 Pippin, Robert, 76 Pius IX, 41 Pius X, 41 Plato, 92, 109 positivism, 19, 44, 48, 58, 60, 87 Pound, Ezra, 171

Index Powys, John Cowper, 18 pragmatism, 21, 47, 48, 58–60, 78–9, 87, 136 Protestantism, 6, 20, 32, 39, 46–51, 63, 68, 98, 100, 114, 124, 148–53, 171, 173 Proust, Marcel, 4–5, 6–7, 13, 14, 20, 30, 32, 36, 37, 42, 46, 51, 83–92, 111, 112, 116, 119, 143, 145, 155, 172, 184, 189–92 Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu), 5, 9–12, 81–4, 92–110, 125, 172–80 psychoanalysis, 48, 50, 114, 120–2, 128–9, 131, 143, 191; see also Freud, Sigmund Puritanism, 149 Quakerism, 149 realism, 18, 23, 25, 35–7, 77, 126, 134–5, 152, 159, 183 Renan, Ernest, 31, 33 Renouvier, Charles, 48, 60, 87 republicanism, 32, 34, 42, 90, 95 Ricoeur, Paul, 114 Robertson Smith, W., 85, 131 romanticism, 4, 29, 30, 78, 109 Rosenzweig, Franz, 42, 112, 113, 134 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 90, 131 Ruskin, John, 9, 31, 33, 36 Sappho, 156–8, 163 Sassoon, Siegfried, 171 scapegoat, 55–7, 91, 96, 116, 134, 140 Schiller, Friedrich, 23 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 39, 114 Scott Moncrieff, C. K., 7 secularism, 3, 29, 32, 39, 88, 90, 143 secularization, 3, 5, 7, 19, 23–51, 111–12, 117, 118, 179 Sellin, Ernst, 138 Shakespeare, William, 156, 180, 183–5 Shelley, Mary, 159 spiritualism, 21, 27, 38, 42, 87, 108, 171, 172, 188, 190; see also occultism St. Augustine, 155 St. Paul, 46, 138, 147, 181 St. Teresa of Avila, 46 Stephen, Caroline Emelia, 149 Stephen, James, 149 Stephen, Julia, 161, 162, 164 Stephen, Leslie, 31, 32, 37, 143, 149–50, 161–2, 176 Stevens, Wallace, 1 Stoker, Bram, 159 Strachey, Lytton, 26 Strauss, David Friedrich, 32–3 Stravinsky, Igor, 83 surrealism, 18, 37 Svevo, Italo, 84 Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 32, 58

235

symbolism, 25, 35, 65, 69, 72–3, 83, 92, 112, 133, 160, 174, 181 Symons, Arthur, 36 Tadié, Jean-Yves, 87 Talmud, 114, 115, 118 Taylor, Andrew, 63 Taylor, Charles, 4, 22, 24–5, 29–30, 38, 152 Thousand and One Nights, The, 106, 175 Tolstoy, Leo, 92 totemism, 47–8, 72, 84–6, 91, 95, 98, 101, 104, 130–2 Townsend Warner, Sylvia, 18 Trilling, Lionel, 5 Troeltsch, Ernst, 39 Turner, Frank M., 31 Tylor, E. B., 85, 104 Tyrrell, George, 41 Vaihinger, Hans, 50, 59, 62, 130 Veblen, Thorstein, 26 Venn, John (great-grandfather of Virginia Woolf), 32 Vico, Giambattista, 180 Virgil, 170, 180, 183, 187 Watt, Ian, 23, 152 Waugh, Evelyn, 18 Weber, Helene, 149 Weber, Max, 17, 19–20, 23, 26, 28, 31, 32, 39, 42, 43–51, 60, 83, 112, 120, 138, 145, 148–53, 169 “Science as a Vocation,” 144–8 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The, 46, 49, 149–51 Weber, Max, Sr., 149–50 Weiskel, Thomas, 159 Wells, H. G., 144 Welsh, Alexander, 122, 126 Wesley, John, 46 Weston, Jessie, 30 Wilson, A. N., 26 Wilson, Edmund, 36, 77 Winter, J. M., 171 Woolf, Leonard, 38, 191 Woolf, Virginia, 4–5, 7, 16, 20, 22, 32, 33, 37, 38, 46, 51, 84, 137, 142–53, 179, 185, 189–92 “Moments of Being,” 156–8 “Sketch of the Past, A,” 155–6 “Unwritten Novel, An,” 153–4 Flush, 189 Mrs. Dalloway, 16–17, 151, 152, 154, 157, 159, 164, 168, 176–7 Room of One’s Own, A, 142 Three Guineas, 146

236

Index

Woolf, Virginia, (cont.) To the Lighthouse, 24, 37, 143, 150, 156–7, 159, 170, 184 Voyage Out, The, 15 Waves, The, 143, 152 Wordsworth, William, 4, 109, 155, 158–9

Yeager, Patricia, 157 Yeats, W. B., 4, 38, 106, 171, 183, 189 Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, 73 Zinzendorf, Nicolaus, 50 Zola, Émile, 35, 89