Beyond the Story

American Literary Fiction and the Limits of Materialism

Christina Bieber Lake

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780268106256
• eBook ISBN:
  9780268106270
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Beyond the Story: American Literary Fiction and the Limits of Materialism argues that theology is crucial to understanding the power of contemporary American stories. By drawing on the theories of M. M. Bakhtin, Christian personalism, and contemporary phenomenology, Lake argues that literary fiction activates an irreducibly personal intersubjectivity between author, reader, and characters. Stories depend on a dignity-granting valuation of the particular lives of ordinary people, which is best described as an act of love that mirrors the love of the divine. Through original readings of the fiction of Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, Toni Morrison, and others, Lake enters into a dialogue with postsecular theory and cognitive literary studies to reveal the limits of sociobiology's approach to culture. The result is a book that will remind readers how storytelling continually reaffirms the transcendent value of human beings in an inherently personal cosmos.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of theology and literary studies, as well as a broad audience of readers seeking to engage on a deeper level with contemporary literature.

NOTES

Introduction

1. D’Souza and Seiling, Being in the World, 26. Jens Zimmermann puts it this way: “Artistic expression, whether explicitly religious or secular, always constitutes a human interpretation of the world that beholds objects as participating in the mystery of being.” Zimmermann, Incarnational Humanism, 290.

2. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.

3. Degler, In Search of Human Nature, viii.

4. Wilson, Sociobiology, 4.

5. Dissanayake, What Is Art For?; Dutton, The Art Instinct; Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal. As Dissanayake puts it in a later book, “Whereas it is usual to think of human nature as being the product of gods, societies, and cultures, the species-centric position takes the reverse view: it holds that gods, societies, and cultures are the products, the answers, and embodiments of the species needs and potentials of an already existing human nature. Having recognized this truth, one can then go on, if one desires, to examine and understand cultural differences.” Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus, 5.

6. See Baker, Naturalism and the First-Person Perspective.

7. The issue of what animals can and cannot do is too complex to be treated fully here. For example, elephants appear to paint, but closer inquiry indicates that they have been trained to make the marks on the canvas; they did not generate the mimetic activity. See Morris, “Can Jumbo Elephants Really Paint?” Gorilla language acquisition, as I discuss in chapter 5, is a trickier question. But my argument in this book does not depend on a rigid animal vs. human binary. I agree with Robert Spaemann, who ended his most important treatment of the rights of persons with these lines: “The rights of persons are human rights. Yet if there exist within the universe other natural species of living beings possessing an inner life of sentience, whose adult members usually command rationality and self-awareness, we would have to acknowledge not only those instances but all instances of that species to be persons. All porpoises, for example.” Spaemann, Persons: The Difference between “Someone” and “Something,” 248; original emphasis. At the very least, we know enough about the possibility of gorilla self-awareness to merit them the dignity of being left alone.

8. Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 18.

9. Damasio deals with the problem of qualia in a chapter titled “Putting It Together.” He argues that the question of why our experiences in the world should feel like anything calls for evolutionary reasoning. “If perceptual maps of the body are to be effective in leading an organism toward avoidance of pain and seeking of pleasure, they should not only feel like something, they actually ought to feel like something. The neural construction of pain and pleasure states must have been arrived at early in evolution and must have played a critical role in its course.” Self Comes to Mind, 275. Of course, the ought does not necessitate the is. It would be just as easy to make the argument that any given species would be likely to have better survival rates if it never had the capacity to feel anything that would make them second guess their own actions. The best explanation for the kind of reasoning that eliminative materialism requires is from Thomas Nagel, who called it “Darwinism of the gaps.” Nagel, Mind and ­Cosmos.

10. In addition to Consciousness Explained, see Dennett’s TED talk, www
.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness.

11. Daniel Dennett argues, “Let me put the problem unequivocally: the ­traditional concept of the soul as an immaterial thinking thing, Descartes’s res cogitans, the internal locus in each human body of all suffering, and meaning, and decisions, both moral and immoral, has been utterly discredited. Science has banished the soul as firmly as it has banished mermaids, unicorns, and perpetual motion machines.” Dennett, “How to Protect Human Dignity from Science,” 44.

12. An interesting example of how this conflict operates can be seen in Jonathan Gottschall’s critique of Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. Wolf’s book is an exemplary expression of the cultural constructivist position; Gottschall collects and crunches data from stories around the world. The data reveal that stories told within every human culture favor characters that exhibit physical beauty, particularly in female characters. Since Wolf argues that female beauty is a Western construct, Gottschall believes he has disproven her argument. Responses to this argument followed, as would be expected, with most literary scholars still lining up on the constructivist side. Gottschall, Literature, Science, and a New Humanities, 127–56.

13. Taylor, A Secular Age, 59.

14. Kearney, On Stories, 3.

15. Michael Ruse argues that Darwinian evolution has always positioned itself as an alternative to Christianity: “Christianity and Darwinism are rivals, different reflections of the same reality.” Literary fiction is one of the key battlegrounds for these competing metanarratives. “Making the crucial distinctions between pseudoscience and popular science, and popular science and professional science, it was at the popular science level that Darwinism struck hardest and had the greatest effect. And seen in this light, there was something we can properly speak of not just as a revolution in science but as a religious revolution, whether you want to speak without qualification of Darwinism as a religion or more cautiously of Darwinism as offering a new, secular religious perspective.” Ruse, Darwinism as Religion, 194, 281.

16. Taliaferro, The Golden Cord, 68. Taliaferro’s book was one of the early inspirations for this project.

17. As Jens Zimmermann has argued, when the incarnation has its rightful place in Christian theology, it teaches a participatory logic regarding the relationship between human beings and reality. Human beings were made to see Jesus at the center of creation. Zimmermann, Incarnational Humanism, 52–113.

18. This astonishment is one I share with Marilynne Robinson. Robinson, Absence of Mind, 32–33. In a later essay “Humanism,” Robinson singles out the discipline of neuroscience for its unwillingness to recognize how its starting assumptions dictate its conclusions: “The gist of neuroscience is that the adverbs ‘simply’ and ‘merely’ can exorcise the mystifications that have always surrounded the operations of the mind/brain, exposing the machinery that in fact produces emotion, behavior, and all the rest.” Robinson, The Givenness of Things, 6.

19. Kearney, On Stories, 5; original emphasis.

20. Hart, The Experience of God.

21. I use the word love because, unfortunately, there is no better word in English to describe what I mean. As many writers have noted, in the English language the word has serious limitations. Robert Spaemann argues that “there is no word—except maybe ‘freedom’—that has such a wide-ranging and often contradictory conglomerate of meanings as the word ‘love.’” Spaemann, Love and the Dignity of Human Life, 2. Along with Spaemann, I define love not as a feeling but as a habit, a way of thinking and acting toward another person. I also prefer the definition provided by St. Thomas Aquinas: “an act of love always tends towards two things; to the good that one wills, and to the person for whom one wills it: since to love a person is to wish that person good.” Aquinas, Summa Theologica 1.20.1.

22. As far as we know right now this robust first-person consciousness is uniquely human, but my argument does not de facto preclude the possibility that other species could be discovered to possess it. If they did possess it, they would, too, be storytelling animals.

23. This idea reveals the influence, especially in the West, of the Judeo-­Christian idea of the person. See Taylor, Sources of the Self.

24. By “incarnational,” I mean that the artist starts with the physical world that he or she believes to be good and, thereby, revelatory of the creator. This does not mean that everything in the world is sacred.

25. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly argue that the “whooshing up” experience is premodern, necessarily temporary, and pretty much all we have of the sacred in today’s society. “What there really is, for Homer, is whooshing up: the whooshing up of shining Achilles in the midst of battle, or of an overwhelming eroticism in the presence of a radiant stranger like Paris; the whooshing up of a rock in the turbulent sea that calls forth Odysseus’s hand to grab it. These were the shining moments of reality in Homer’s world. And whooshing up is what happens in the context of the great moment in contemporary sport as well. When something whooshes up it focuses and organizes everything around it.” Dreyfus and Kelly, All Things Shining, 200–201. Amy Hungerford argues that contemporary American literature operates much the same way; it provides a religious feeling of belief as a substitute for any meaningful object of belief. Hungerford, Postmodern Belief.

26. As we shall see, Hans Urs von Balthasar insisted that there can be no art for art’s sake. Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord. Similarly, Hart argues that beauty is “the startling reminder, even for persons sunk in the superstitions of materialism, that those who see reality in purely mechanistic terms do not see the real world at all, but only its sha...

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Beyond Darwin
• ONE Beyond the Author: The Storytelling Consciousness and Hemingway’s Baby Shoes
• TWO Beyond the Self: Escaping Narcissism in Philip Roth’s Everyman
• THREE Beyond the Brain: Your Brain on Lydia Davis
• FOUR Beyond Evolution: Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood and the Language Animal
• FIVE Beyond the Postsecular: The Theological Grotesque in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
• SIX Beyond Beauty: Theology on The Road
• SEVEN Beyond the Visible: Loving Witness in Daniel Clowes’s Wilson and Richard McGuire’s Here
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index