Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature

Fantastic Incarnations and the Deconstruction of Theology

Taylor Driggers

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350231757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

Fantasy literature inhabits the realms of the orthodox and heterodox, the divine and demonic simultaneously, making it uniquely positioned to imaginatively re-envision Christian theology from a position of difference. Having an affinity for the monstrous and the 'other', and a preoccupation with desires and forms of embodiment that subvert dominant understandings of reality, fantasy texts hold hitherto unexplored potential for articulating queer and feminist religious perspectives. Focusing primarily on fantastic literature of the mid- to late twentieth century, this book examines how Christian theology in the genre is dismantled, re-imagined and transformed from the margins of gender and sexuality. Aligning fantasy with Derrida's theories of deconstruction, Taylor Driggers explores how the genre can re-figure God as the 'other' excluded and erased from theology. Through careful readings of C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve, and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and the Earthsea novels, Driggers contends that fantasy can challenge cis-normative, heterosexual, and patriarchal theology. Also engaging with the theories of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Marcella Althaus-Reid, and Linn Marie Tonstad, this book demonstrates that whilst fantasy cannot save Christianity from itself, nor rehabilitate it for marginalised subjects, it confronts theology with its silenced others in a way that bypasses institutional debates on inclusion and leadership, asking how theology might be imagined otherwise.

1

Saving face?

Fantasy, ethical alterity and deconstruction

Any attempt to articulate a theology from the position of gendered and sexual marginality must consist of more than simply saving face on behalf of religious orthodoxy. On the contrary, its entire relationship to orthodoxy must be fundamentally different to the established norm. A queer, feminist approach to theology specifically necessitates a resistance to the claims of absolute truth and exclusive access to the divine as logos that generally characterize patriarchal religious systems. It needs, in Marcella Althaus-Reid’s words, ‘to replace hegemonic divine concepts by deviant (unnatural) styles of thinking, helping people to develop their own identities outside the closure and boundaries of theo/social systems’ (Althaus-Reid 2000: 175). Despite its common adoption as a tool for religious apologetics, which I outlined in the introduction, fantasy literature carries potential for disrupting representations of reality that religious orthodoxy both depends on and perpetuates with its claims to authority. The secondary worlds presented in fantasy texts can shake the foundations of the ‘primary’ world from which they necessarily draw influence – in other words, ‘reality’ as constructed within a fundamentally patriarchal, heterosexual and cisgender framework. This tendency, this chapter argues, is best understood in terms of the deconstructive philosophy put forth by Jacques Derrida. Likewise, many fantasy texts can be seen to dramatize deconstructive philosophy’s attempts to describe a movement which it names ‘deconstruction’, one that consists, as Derrida puts it, in ‘opening, uncloseting, destabilizing foreclusionary structures’ (Derrida [1987] 1992: 341).

This chapter examines the ways in which fantasy literature can be read as deconstructive in relation to patriarchal religious structures. I will demonstrate that not only is deconstruction always already at work within fantasy texts and the religious structures they uphold, but also that some fantasy texts, such as those I am examining in this book, are also alert to their own deconstructive power, whether or not the texts themselves or their authors define this power according to such terms. The argument of this chapter is twofold. First, fantasy texts and deconstruction have homologous structures; both situate themselves in terms of impossibility and alterity, and therefore share a radical potential for the disruption not only of normative constructs but also of normativity per se. Second, both of them have relationships to religion specifically that equip them to inhabit a critical space within theology that affirms theology’s language and concepts at the same time that it dismantles them. As discourses, fantasy and deconstructive philosophy are mutually illuminating; from one perspective, fantasy can give more concrete form to concepts and terms commonly associated with deconstruction, especially those related to religion, that may otherwise come across as esoteric. At the same time, reading fantasy’s relationship to theology as a deconstructive one allows for a more nuanced understanding of the theological work that fantasy texts do and safeguards fantasy against the appeals to sovereign authority that exclude women and queer people from theology.

I will begin this chapter with a brief overview of deconstruction as theorized by Derrida. The theological implications of deconstruction will be crucial to this discussion and therefore particular attention will be given to how Derrida’s discourse on theology relates to his interest in alterity. For this purpose, I trace a genealogy of influence between Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the other and Derrida’s work on deconstruction, particularly highlighting Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, ‘Psyche: Inventions of the Other’, The Gift of Death, Rogues and ‘Faith and Knowledge’. In these texts, Derrida foregrounds his project’s nature as an advent of the other, and in doing so develops and extends Levinas’s interest in the divine command towards ethical responsibility signified by the face of the other, who is utterly heterogeneous to the sovereign subject. While the definitions of ‘alterity’ and ‘the other’ will become complicated in later chapters of this book as queer and feminist theories and theologies draw from the language of psychoanalysis alongside deconstruction, for the purposes of this chapter these terms are to be understood in the theo/ethical sense that they are used by Levinas unless otherwise stated. In the second part of this chapter, I consider deconstruction alongside theories of fantasy elaborated by Tolkien, Le Guin and Attebery. I then turn to Till We Have Faces, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Passion of New Eve as case studies, conducting close readings that will demonstrate how each text not only uncovers sites of potential disruption by displacing theological structures into secondary worlds but also dramatizes the deconstructive power of fantastic storytelling in the process.

Defining deconstruction, deconstructing definitions

Derrida’s fascination with God as a name for a disruptive ethical ‘other’ presents ample opportunity for troubling and transgressing normative religious doctrines and theological systems, particularly those situated within Western philosophical discourses, without disavowing theology altogether. Mentions of God pervade Derrida’s philosophical writing, but these almost never occur in a clear-cut fashion, and they tend to be impossible to pin down to a particular faith commitment or even a rejection thereof. The closest Derrida comes to making an explicit statement about belief in God is in an interview with John D. Caputo, Kevin Hart and Yvonne Sherwood, in which he states that

[i]f belief in God is not also a culture of atheism, if it does not go through a number of atheistic steps, one does not believe in God. There must be a critique of idolatry, of all sorts of images in prayer, especially prayer, there must be a critique of onto-theology – the reappropriation of God in metaphysics [ . . . ] In order to be authentic – this is a word I almost never use – the belief in God must be exposed to absolute doubt.

(Derrida et al. 2005: 46)

The paradoxes and contradictions contained within this brief quotation, chief among them that between faith and atheism, and that of faith as atheism and vice versa, are a summation of the profound ambivalence with which Derrida approaches the question of God in his work. Throughout his writings Derrida is harshly critical of the God of classical theology figured as absolute presence, ‘the absolute witness to the dialogue in which what one sets out to write has already been read, and what one sets out to say is already a response, the third party as the transparency of meaning[.] Simultaneously part of creation and the Father of Logos’ (Derrida [1967] 1979: 11). As we shall see, such a God as is described here, who serves as source and determiner of all meaning, is to Derrida both impossible and an oppressive function of Western logic. And yet, for Derrida this is not the final word on the question of God; the question remains, and must remain, open for deconstruction to be possible. Elsewhere, in The Gift of Death (1992), Derrida also offers the name of God as ‘the name of the absolute other as other and as unique’ (Derrida [1992] 1995: 68). That is, God is utterly heterogeneous to what could be articulated as proper by any speaking subject.

Derrida’s treatment of the name of God follows the premise that God is outside the realm of human understanding, a claim to which few theologians would object, but takes this in a far more radical direction than most theologians would. Derrida’s invocation of the name of God as a name for the other serves at once to point to the absoluteness of the other’s alterity and to unsettle the name of God. As Derrida elaborates in ‘Epoché and Faith’, ‘God is not some thing or some being to which I could refer by using the word “God”. The word “God” has an essential link to the possibility of being denied’ (Derrida et al. 2005: 37). The very name ‘God’ points to the impossibility of what it names, since to invoke God is to invoke what would be alien to articulation within a language, a theology or a faith tradition. To believe in God, for Derrida, is to be an atheist because belief in God requires refusing the finality of any ‘belief’ in ‘God’ that could be stated. While acknowledging this is not the same as rejecting theology, it does demand that theology give up its dreams of absolute authority. To quote Althaus-Reid, ‘theology has its own deconstructive forces, its own instabilities and imprecisions which always create tensions and open new ways of understanding’ (Althaus-Reid 2000: 148), but these cannot be rearticulations of divine authority as it has been understood. It is for this reason that deconstruction also enables theologians marginalized by hetero-patriarchal and cis-sexist religious structures to radically challenge the underlying assumptions of orthodoxy on the grounds that hegemonic orthodoxy is not a unified whole, and already contains within itself the potential for rupture and transgression from a position of difference.

Althaus-Reid, Caputo, Walton and many others have extensively identified and made ample use of the opportunity for radical rethinking and re-visioning that deconstruction enables, even demands, for theology. Scholars of fantasy, however, have been more reluctant to take on Derrida’s project. It has often been presumed that a deconstructive approach to fantasy would be inimical to theological or otherwise mystical readings of the genre. Insofar as common ground is identified, fantasy is positioned over and against Derrida’s work to correct perceived flaws and shortcomings. Most famously, C. S. Lewis scholar Kath Filmer has dismissed deconstructive writing as a ‘philosophical cloud-cuckoo-land’ (Filmer 1989: 55) that consists of ‘the disruption and denial of textual meaning’ (Filmer 1989: 56). To Filmer, such a discipline ‘depends on the absence of an objective reality; since there is nothing to be perceived, there can be no perception’ (Filmer 1989: 57). As an alternative or antidote to such apparent nihilistic madness, Filmer presents mythopoetic fantasy as ‘a kind of deconstructive activity which is every bit as radical as Derrida’s, with the considerable advantage that the mythopoetic mode makes good sense’ (Filmer 1989: 60). For her, the tangible forms of fantasy are far better equipped to challenge received notions of reality than the horrifying, alienating void that deconstruction apparently signifies.

Though not as strident in his position as Filmer, Marek Oziewicz has similarly grouped deconstruction together with a handful of potential approaches to fantasy he identifies as ‘reductionist’ (Oziewicz 2008: 4). Oziewicz categorizes ‘reductionism’ and ‘holism’ as two opposing approaches to fantasy, claiming that

[w]hereas the former was interested in fantasy as a cultural practice which reveals political, historical, economic, gender and other entanglements that characterize human activities, the latter approached fantasy as a cultural practice whose meaning encompasses yet extends beyond those entanglements and aims to create a platform for imaginative representation of transcultural concepts and values. Whereas the former adopted as its allies relativism, biological determinism, naturalism, behaviourism, Freudianism and secularism and used them to examine fantasy, the latter aligned itself with the school of sophia perennis, antireductionism, essentialism, and Jungian, religious and spiritual perspectives.

(Oziewicz 2008: 4–5)

Oziewicz’s lists of values here are odd, given that they group together wildly divergent and often incompatible strands of thought on opposing poles of a culture war with little effort made to elaborate on them or to justify their alliances. The important point for Oziewicz’s argument is, apparently, that approaches he deems ‘reductionist’ are inappropriate for fantasy in that

[t]hey are anti-essentialist, relativistic, and politicized, besides asserting that reality is a linguistic construct, that all meanings are provisional, and that the concept of human nature, along with any talk about values or meanings in literature, must be distrusted as Euro- and andro-centric.

(Oziewicz 2008: 29)

By contrast, ‘holistic’ approaches to fantasy, of which theological readings are one example,

[see] fantasy literature – with its tendency for depicting unquestionably supernatural events and building stories on the protagonists’ reactions to a reality suddenly flooded with the supernatural – as one of the ways modern humans express their yearning for mystery and continue to reflect on the meaning of life.

(Oziewicz 2008: 5)

Even leaving aside the question of how allegedly ‘reductionist’ philosophies can be at once too relativistic and too staunchly political, Oziewicz’s binary framing fails to consider how the supernaturally suffused realities presented in fantasy are blatant linguistic constructs; how ‘the meaning of life’ and any concept of divinity, transcendence and the human subject are always mediated through cultural, philosophical and linguistic presuppositions; and, most crucially, how the worlds presented in fantasy can unsettle such assumptions. In the following section, I map out some key points of Derrida’s deconstruction in relation to questions of God and religion. This discussion will show that far from being reductionist, deconstruction opens onto a richer, more thorough engagement with religious themes, and with religious impulses in fantasy, than is possible within the narrow ‘holism’ that Filmer and Oziewicz advocate.

Vive la différance

Defining deconstruction is made difficult by the fact that ‘deconstruction’ refers both to a philosophical discourse and to what that discourse attempts to describe. This is partially because, especially in English, the word ‘deconstruction’ is easily misconstrued when used to describe the movement with which Derrida’s writing concerns itself. As he states, ‘[the] word, at least on its own, has never appeared satisfactory to me (but what word is), and must always be girded by an entire discourse’ (Derrida [1983] 1988: 3). Furthermore, Maria-Daniella Dick and Julian Wolfreys note that deconstruction’s concern with disrupting and unravelling structures from within means that ‘[t]here can be no definition of deconstruction as a concept [ . . . ] to do so would be to traduce its movement, which would anyway already be at work within “itself”’ (Dick and Wolfreys 2013: 55). In other words, any possible definition or even utterance of ‘deconstruction’ is open to the same disruptive movement which it describes. Deconstruction, as a movement within structures, does not supervene upon them from the outside; it is not a theory or a critical tool that can be applied because, according to Derrida, ‘[d]econstruction takes place, it is an event that does not await the deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a subject, or even of modernity’ (Derrida [1983] 1988: 4).

One of the principal concerns of deconstruction as a philosophical discourse is the disruption of logocentrism, t...