P o stm o d ern B e lief: A m erican Literature an d R e lig io n since 1960

by Am y H ungerford
Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 2010. 224 pages

Steven Belletto

Am y H ungerford’s Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since

i9 6 0 m ounts an am bitious and im portant intervention into the study
o f postwar A m erican literature and culture. H ungerford draws together
two seem ingly unrelated strains, postm odernism and religious belief, to
show how a late-twentieth-century “ belief in m eaninglessness” becam e a
significant form o f religious belief in an increasingly secular, irrevocably
pluralistic world. As she explains in her introduction,

This b o ok will argue that a century and a half later [after E m er­
son], with religious critique so firm ly a part o f our secular con ­
dition, belief w ithout m eaning becom es both a way to maintain
religious b elief rather than critique its institutions and a way to
buttress the authority o f the literature that seeks to im agine such
belief. B e lief w ithout content becom es . . . a hedge against the
inescapable fact o f pluralism. (xiii)

Hungerford thereby sidesteps more familiar accounts o f literature as either

em bodying or condem ning religious belief in order to theorize how “ be­
lief in m eaninglessness” may tell a different story about postwar literature
and culture. Hungerford looks at numerous works o f literature and literary
and critical theory, and she ranges over D errida and de M an (both key
thinkers for her first book, A Holocaust of Texts) with the same confidence
she displays when recontextualizing the N ew Critics or noting a renewed
interest in the literariness o f the Bible in the 1970s and 1980s; she offers
similarly nuanced readings o f writers such as J. D. Salinger, Allen Ginsberg,
C orm ac M cCarthy, Toni M orrison , and M arilynne R obin so n , am ong
others. In each o f these cases, H ungerford’s m ethod is to place a w ork o f
literature or theory in new contexts, inventively reframing the work o f
individual writers in order to demonstrate the im portance o f belief in
meaninglessness as a frame for understanding postwar A m erican writing.
T hose com ing to the b o ok with backgrounds in critical theory may
be m ost interested in how the argum ent reconfigures the relationship

Twentieth-Century Literature 58.1 Spring 2012 159

Steven Belletto

between A m erican literary and cultural production, and the postm odern.
There was a time w hen postm odernism was seen as broadly apolitical,
as turning inward rather than radiating out. Foundational w ork by Ihab
Hassan, Brian M cH ale, and others em phasized postm odernism ’s formal
ingenuity and obsession with language, while later critics read it in eco­
nom ic (Jameson) or political (Hutcheon) lights. Postmodern Belief partici­
pates in the sort o f historicist recontextualization pursued by M arianne
D eK oven in Utopia Limited :The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern
(2004), which links the developm ent o f postm odernism to sixties radi­
calism. H ungerford investigates the underexplored resonances between
postm odern impulses and late-tw entieth-century religious belief, chal­
lenging our standard accounts o f postm odernism by dem onstrating how

sincerity overshadows irony as a literary m ode when the ambi­

guities o f language are im agined as being religiously empowered.
Writers in this m ode see fracture and materialism not as ends
in themselves but as the conditions for transcendence. Cultural
embeddedness— in the panoply o f American religious contexts—
comes to matter as much as transhistorical (or posthistorical) aes­
thetics even for the most formally ambitious o f writers. (xix-xx)

T h e varieties o f religious experience H ungerford has in m ind turn out

to have everything to do with language, for “ A m erican w riters turn to
religion to im agine the purely form al elements o f language in transcen­
dent term s” (xiii). Postmodern Belief exam ines various w riters and critical
theorists with two aims: “ to show how b elief in meaninglessness confers
religious authority upon the literary, and . . . to show how such belief,
and its literary vehicles, becom es im portant to the practice o f religion in
A m erica” (xv).
Chapter O ne, “ Believing in Literature,” begins with a great riff on
D w ight Eisenhower’s vague faith as epitom izing Am erican religious belief
in the 1950s, then turns to Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, w hich according
to H ungerford enacts the “ perform ance o f sacred hum an speech” (14)
in a religious vision that “ insists upon the specific content o f religious
w isdom but finds that content converging in a space o f n o-know ledge”
(12). From Salinger, H ungerford traces a fascinating line through N ew
C riticism to deconstruction to suggest how both invest literature with a
kind o f religious significance. “ For the N ew Critics,” she reminds us,

160
Review

one im portant fact about literary texts— and especially, about

poem s— was that they could not be paraphrased, that their form
carried with it som e unspecifiable, or unspeakably particular,
literary quality that transcended pedestrian content. T h e N ew
Critical poem qua poem is form w ithout content im agined as
transcendence. This bid for transcendence reproduces [Matthew]
A rn old’s effort to make literature a substitute for religion, and is
neatly encapsulated in Cleanth B ro oks’s notion o f the “ heresy o f
paraphrase.” (16)

T he elegant formulation “ heresy o f paraphrase” is useful for H ungerford’s

purposes because she wants to demonstrate not only how writers like
Salinger im agined literature as having a special religious capacity, but also
that critical theorists as different as Brooks and D errida explored this
idea in varying ways: “ Language in their [D errida’s and de M an ’s] hands
becom es im m anent in m uch the same way that the names o f G o d are
im agined to contain G o d ’s presence in H indu and in Jewish tradition and
in the way Christ is said, in the Gospel o f Joh n , to incarnate the divine
W ord” (19). For H ungerford, then, the heart o f the matter is that the
power o f language— and in some cases the very materiality o f the Word—
is its pow er to be mystical. As she shows in the rest o f the book, w riters
from Allen Ginsberg to C o rm ac M cC arthy view their w riting as related
in som e way to religious belief, as pervaded by what she som etim es calls
a “ num inous” quality (83, 84, 86, 138).
Ginsberg in fact provides H ungerford’s first object lesson, and she
devotes a w hole chapter, “ Supernatural Form alism in the Sixties,” to his
poetry and politics, especially as they developed after he returned from
India in 1963. In India Ginsberg engaged deeply with H indu and B u d ­
dhist meditative practices, and in a section called “ T h e Politics o f O m ,”
we learn how he appropriated the theory underlying H indu chanting,
which supposes that mantras themselves are im bued with mystical m ean­
ing that goes far beyond their semantic content, to develop a poetics that
invests words themselves with spiritual power (hence G insberg’s desire to
“ make M antra o f A m erican language now ” ). H ungerford first illustrates
this point through a masterful reading o f G insberg’s testimony and cross-
exam ination during the C hicago Seven Trial, in which Abbie H offm ann,
Jerry R u b in , Tom Hayden, and others were accused o f intending to in­
cite a riot at the 1968 D em ocratic N ational Convention. Ginsberg was
called to testify because the prosecuting attorney, T hom as Foran, viewed

161
Steven Belletto

him as “ kind o f the Y ippie religious leader” (quoted on 29), and wanted
to demonstrate that G insbergs frequent recourse to chanting was “ part
o f a repugnant and sexually perverted hippie religious practice” (30). As
Foran attempted to prove the perversions o f the O m chant, he connected
it to G insberg’s poetry; yet G insberg’s responses show, in contrast, that he
endeavored to write “ poem s that aim (in theory, at least) to evacuate the
kind o f referential content that proved so useful to Foran. In doing so,
G insberg uses the kinship between poetry and chant to advance an idea
o f poetry that moves beyond m eaning into . . . a fantasy o f supernatural
efficacy centered on the pow er o f soun d” (31).
T h e idea that “ a fantasy o f supernatural efficacy centered on the
power o f sound” had currency am ong the counter-culture o f the 1960s is
familiar to anyone w ho has listened to G eorge H arrison’s All Things Must
Pass (1970) or the recording o f the “ Hare Krishna M antra” he produced
the year before, but H ungerford takes this observation a few steps further.
H er larger point is not that Ginsberg ought to be read as a religious writer
(which others have done in m ore depth; the m ost thoroughgoing recent
exam ple is Tony T rigilio’s Allen Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics), but rather that
the way

G insberg im agined his poetry as spiritual, in the context o f the

trial and in the years leading up to it, reveals a set o f beliefs about
language and the supernatural that have remarkable affinities
with, and also raise a challenge to, understandings o f language
em anating from other sectors o f A m erican culture in the sixties.
...G insberg’s spiritual poetry intersects with beliefs about lan­
guage com m on to poststructuralism . . . and to a popular form
o f religious renewal that transform ed A m erican churches during
the sixties and seventies....His use o f a supernatural form alism
for political purposes . . . demonstrates, further, the social and
philosophical implications o f the conjunction between religious
b elief and language upon which his work relies. (28-29)

T he “ popular form o f religious renewal” that Hungerford describes is the

Charismatic movement, which interests her because o f its ability to inten­
sify religious belief while still being open to a variety o f specific doctrinal
content. This is relevant for understanding Ginsberg— and H ungerford’s
reading o f 1960s religious culture— because it reflects the belief, as she
says in reference to Alan Watts’s ideas, that “ propositional content was the

162
Review

enemy o f true religious experien ce” (44). In other words, for G insberg
as for the Charism atics, the religious experience was the linguistic ex­
perience o f either chanting or speaking in tongues, an experience that
is remarkably accom m odating to A m erica’s entrenched pluralism— and
which in turn makes it possible to read political critique in G insberg’s
w ork in this strain. For exam ple, discussing a poem that wishes M erry
Christm as to an apparently indiscriminate list o f political, cultural, and
religious figures, H ungerford argues that “ the p o et’s hail o f cosm ic good
will” evinces a political “ critique o f a peculiar kind, in keeping with the
version o f pluralism on display in the Charism atic m ovem ent. It is cri­
tique that allows opposing voices to continue speaking and that does not
argue against, seek to unite, or seek even to interpret, opposing points o f
view ” (50-51).
After leaving Ginsberg behind, H ungerford provides a chapter-length
study o f D o n D eLillo, “ T h e Latin Mass o f Language.” This chapter is
especially interesting— and, to my m ind, correct— because it suggests
that for too long D eL illo’s w ork has been conflated with the textbook
postm odernism o f White Noise (1985).W hile White Noise is no doubt an
achievement, and handy for A m erican novel surveys or postm odernism
courses, H ungerford rightly suggests that it is atypical o f D eL illo’s larger
career. For the m ost part, she argues, his w ork is invested in literature’s
“ im m anent transcendence” in ways that do not exactly m irror Ginsberg’s,
but that make D eLillo look quite different from a cartoon postm odernist
that blanches at any shred o f foundationalism . W hereas she reads Gins­
berg through his interest in H induism , H ungerford points to D eL illo’s
Catholic background, which she invokes not to cast him as a religious
w riter on the order o f Flannery O ’C on n or or Walker Percy, but rather to
help explain how he “ ultimately transfers a version o f mysticism from the
Catholic context into the literary on e” (53). D eL illo’s novels, she claims,
“ translate religious structures into literary ones w ithout an intervening
secularism,” a thing they can do “ because they im agine language in a way
that preserves a specifically Catholic understanding o f transcendent expe­
rience while drifting far from Catholic traditions and themes.” In order to
elaborate what she means by a “ Catholic understanding o f transcendent
experience,” H ungerford reads D eL illo ’s novels within the context o f
1960s controversies about whether mass should be held in Latin or the
vernacular. In H ungerford’s account, one argument against the vernacular
mass was that the Catholic religious experience was centered not on the

163
Steven Belletto

between Am erican literary and cultural production, and the postm odern.
There was a time w hen postm odernism was seen as broadly apolitical,
as turning inward rather than radiating out. Foundational w ork by Ihab
Hassan, Brian M cH ale, and others em phasized postm odernism ’s formal
ingenuity and obsession with language, while later critics read it in eco­
nom ic (Jameson) or political (Hutcheon) lights. Postmodern Belief partici­
pates in the sort o f historicist recontextualization pursued by M arianne
D eK oven in Utopia Limited:The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern
(2004), which links the developm ent o f postm odernism to sixties radi­
calism. H ungerford investigates the underexplored resonances between
postm odern impulses and late-tw entieth-century religious belief, chal­
lenging our standard accounts o f postm odernism by dem onstrating how

sincerity overshadows irony as a literary m ode when the ambi­

guities o f language are imagined as being religiously empowered.
Writers in this m ode see fracture and materialism not as ends
in themselves but as the conditions for transcendence. Cultural
embeddedness— in the panoply o f American religious contexts—
comes to matter as much as transhistorical (or posthistorical) aes­
thetics even for the most formally ambitious o f writers. (xix-xx)

T he varieties o f religious experience H ungerford has in m ind turn out

to have everything to do with language, for “ A m erican w riters turn to
religion to im agine the purely form al elements o f language in transcen­
dent term s” (xiii). Postmodern Belief exam ines various w riters and critical
theorists with two aims: “ to show how belief in meaninglessness confers
religious authority upon the literary, and . . . to show how such belief,
and its literary vehicles, becom es im portant to the practice o f religion in
A m erica” (xv).
Chapter O ne, “ Believing in Literature,” begins with a great riff on
D w ight Eisenhower’s vague faith as epitomizing Am erican religious belief
in the 1950s, then turns to Salinger’s Franny and Zooey; which according
to H ungerford enacts the “ perform ance o f sacred hum an speech” (14)
in a religious vision that “ insists upon the specific content o f religious
w isdom but finds that content converging in a space o f n o-know ledge”
(12). From Salinger, H ungerford traces a fascinating line through N ew
Criticism to deconstruction to suggest how both invest literature with a
kind o f religious significance. “ For the N ew Critics,” she reminds us,

160
Review

one im portant fact about literary texts— and especially, about

poem s— was that they could not be paraphrased, that their form
carried with it som e unspecifiable, or unspeakably particular,
literary quality that transcended pedestrian content. T h e N ew
Critical poem qua poem is form w ithout content im agined as
transcendence. This bid for transcendence reproduces [Matthew]
A rn old’s effort to make literature a substitute for religion, and is
neatly encapsulated in Cleanth B ro ok s’s notion o f the “ heresy o f
paraphrase.” (16)

T h e elegant formulation “ heresy o f paraphrase” is useful for H ungerford’s

purposes because she wants to demonstrate not only how w riters like
Salinger im agined literature as having a special religious capacity, but also
that critical theorists as different as Brooks and D errida explored this
idea in varying ways: “ Language in their [D errida’s and de M an ’s] hands
becom es im m anent in m uch the same way that the names o f G o d are
im agined to contain G o d ’s presence in H indu and in Jew ish tradition and
in the way Christ is said, in the Gospel o f Joh n , to incarnate the divine
W ord” (19). For H ungerford, then, the heart o f the matter is that the
power o f language— and in som e cases the very materiality o f the Word—
is its pow er to be mystical. As she shows in the rest o f the book, writers
from Allen Ginsberg to C o rm ac M cC arthy view their w riting as related
in som e way to religious belief, as pervaded by what she som etim es calls
a “ num inous” quality (83, 84, 8 6 ,1 3 8 ).
Ginsberg in fact provides H ungerford’s first object lesson, and she
devotes a w hole chapter, “ Supernatural Form alism in the Sixties,” to his
poetry and politics, especially as they developed after he returned from
India in 1963. In India Ginsberg engaged deeply with H indu and B u d ­
dhist meditative practices, and in a section called “ T h e Politics o f O m ,”
we learn how he appropriated the theory underlying H indu chanting,
which supposes that mantras themselves are im bued with mystical m ean­
ing that goes far beyond their semantic content, to develop a poetics that
invests words themselves with spiritual power (hence G insberg’s desire to
“ make M antra o f A m erican language now ” ). H ungerford first illustrates
this point through a masterful reading o f G insberg’s testimony and cross-
exam ination during the C hicago Seven Trial, in which Abbie H offm ann,
Jerry R u b in , Tom Hayden, and others were accused o f intending to in­
cite a riot at the 1968 D em ocratic N ational Convention. G insberg was
called to testify because the prosecuting attorney, T hom as Foran, viewed

161
Steven Belletto

him as “ kind o f the Y ippie religious leader” (quoted on 29), and wanted
to demonstrate that G insberg’s frequent recourse to chanting was “ part
o f a repugnant and sexually perverted hippie religious practice” (30). As
Foran attempted to prove the perversions o f the O m chant, he connected
it to G insberg’s poetry; yet G insberg’s responses show, in contrast, that he
endeavored to write “ poem s that aim (in theory, at least) to evacuate the
kind o f referential content that proved so useful to Foran. In doing so,
Ginsberg uses the kinship between poetry and chant to advance an idea
o f poetry that moves beyond m eaning into . . . a fantasy o f supernatural
efficacy centered on the pow er o f soun d” (31).
T h e idea that “ a fantasy o f supernatural efficacy centered on the
power o f sound” had currency am ong the counter-culture o f the 1960s is
familiar to anyone w ho has listened to G eorge H arrison’s All Things Must
Pass (1970) or the recording o f the “ Hare Krishna M antra” he produced
the year before, but Hungerford takes this observation a few steps further.
H er larger point is not that Ginsberg ought to be read as a religious writer
(which others have done in m ore depth; the m ost thoroughgoing recent
exam ple is Tony T rigilio’s Allen Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics), but rather that
the way

Ginsberg im agined his poetry as spiritual, in the context o f the

trial and in the years leading up to it, reveals a set o f beliefs about
language and the supernatural that have remarkable affinities
with, and also raise a challenge to, understandings o f language
em anating from other sectors o f A m erican culture in the sixties.
...G insberg’s spiritual poetry intersects with beliefs about lan­
guage com m on to poststructuralism . . . and to a popular form
o f religious renewal that transform ed A m erican churches during
the sixties and seventies. ...His use o f a supernatural form alism
for political purposes . . . demonstrates, further, the social and
philosophical im plications o f the conjunction between religious
belief and language upon which his w ork relies. (28-29)

T he “ popular form o f religious renewal” that Hungerford describes is the

Charismatic movement, which interests her because o f its ability to inten­
sify religious belief while still being open to a variety o f specific doctrinal
content. This is relevant for understanding Ginsberg— and H ungerford’s
reading o f 1960s religious culture— because it reflects the belief, as she
says in reference to Alan Watts’s ideas, that “ propositional content was the

162
Review

enemy o f true religious experien ce” (44). In other words, for Ginsberg
as for the Charism atics, the religious experience was the linguistic ex­
perience o f either chanting or speaking in tongues, an experience that
is remarkably accom m odating to A m erica’s entrenched pluralism— and
which in turn makes it possible to read political critique in G insberg’s
w ork in this strain. For exam ple, discussing a poem that wishes M erry
Christm as to an apparently indiscriminate list o f political, cultural, and
religious figures, H ungerford argues that “ the p o et’s hail o f cosm ic good
will” evinces a political “ critique o f a peculiar kind, in keeping with the
version o f pluralism on display in the Charism atic m ovem ent. It is cri­
tique that allows opposing voices to continue speaking and that does not
argue against, seek to unite, or seek even to interpret, opposing points o f
view ” (50-51).
After leaving Ginsberg behind, H ungerford provides a chapter-length
study o f D o n D eLillo, “ T h e Latin Mass o f Language.” This chapter is
especially interesting— and, to my m ind, correct— because it suggests
that for too long D eL illo ’s work has been conflated with the textbook
postm odernism o f White Noise (1985).W hile White Noise is no doubt an
achievement, and handy for A m erican novel surveys or postm odernism
courses, H ungerford rightly suggests that it is atypical o f D eL illo’s larger
career. For the m ost part, she argues, his w ork is invested in literature’s
“ im m anent transcendence” in ways that do not exactly m irror Ginsberg’s,
but that make D eLillo look quite different from a cartoon postm odernist
that blanches at any shred o f foundationalism . W hereas she reads Gins­
berg through his interest in H induism , H ungerford points to D eL illo’s
Catholic background, w hich she invokes not to cast him as a religious
w riter on the order o f Flannery O ’C o n n or or Walker Percy, but rather to
help explain how he “ ultimately transfers a version o f mysticism from the
Catholic context into the literary on e” (53). D eL illo’s novels, she claims,
“ translate religious structures into literary ones w ithout an intervening
secularism,” a thing they can do “ because they im agine language in a way
that preserves a specifically Catholic understanding o f transcendent expe­
rience while drifting far from Catholic traditions and themes.” In order to
elaborate what she means by a “ Catholic understanding o f transcendent
experience,” H ungerford reads D eL illo’s novels within the context o f
1960s controversies about w hether mass should be held in Latin or the
vernacular. In H ungerford’s account, one argument against the vernacular
mass was that the Catholic religious experience was centered not on the

163
Steven Belletto

content o f the mass— knowing what the words mean— but on the sounds
and experience o f the mass: “ For those w ho opposed the use o f Latin, lack
o f com prehension was simply that and necessarily bad . . . [but] for those
in favor o f the Latin, the barrier to understanding facilitated a mystical
relation to the language, a relation that reinforced the transubstantial,
incarnational logic o f other elements o f the m ass” (57). Lest readers find
such debates “ literally parochial,” H ungerford connects them to som e m a­
jo r currents in 1960s thought, notably M arshall M cLuh an ’s oft-repeated
dictum “ the m edium is the m essage” — after all, his idea was that the

m odern m edia have their effects on A m erican culture not be­

cause o f what they say, but because o f how they say i t . ...M cL u­
hans analysis o f m edia and, secondarily, o f religion and liturgy,
locates a mystical reality both within the m edia o f hum an co m ­
m unication and also, importantly, beyond m edia’s com m unicative
functions. (58)

It is within this context that H ungerford analyzes D eL illo ’s novels—

principally Libra, Mao II, The Names, and Underworld— to explore how a
“ mystical understanding o f language” (59) operates in them.
For H ungerford, D eLillo shares with G insberg an interest in the
“ materiality o f language” (60), so that Mao II recuperates “ an analogy
between the Latin mass and the novel” that is accom plished “ by virtue o f
the linguistic freedom D eLillo im agines can arise out o f the form ulae o f
cult speech once fanatical beliefs have been replaced by the sheer capac­
ity for b e lie f” (66). Likewise Underworld, w hose ending features not the
atheist nuns o f White Noise but a nun whose “ embrace o f a mystical vision
. . . is rewarded with a very C atholic-lookin g afterlife on the Internet”
(xx), exemplifies D eL illo’s broad question regarding the religious power
o f lan guage:“ how religion that is abandoned in m ost respects can persist
in a literary fo rm ” (74).
Follow ing her close analysis o f the works o f G insberg and DeLillo,
H ungerford’s fourth chapter, “ T he Bible and Illiterature,” first explores
how debates about teaching the Bible in public schools foregrounded
the idea that it could be variously interpretable. From there she notes the
renewal o f interest in the Bible by m ajor literary critics in the 1970s and
1980s, and then offers readings o f C orm ac M cCarthy and Toni M orrison
that demonstrate how they appropriate Biblical language to confer that
“ num inous” sense so hard to articulate in conventional terms. As she
writes:

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Review

In their dealings with the Bible, literary critics and novelists in

this period w ork out the relationship between literature and the
sacred in ways that make literature akin to scripture. To im agine
literature as scripture is not the same as im agining it as supernat-
urally powerful on the m odel o f the H indu chant, as G insberg
does, or as transcendent on the m odel o f the Latin mass, as D eL -
illo does, though all these impulses share a recognizable desire to
connect the religious to the literary. (76)

In w orking through these connections, H ungerford offers numerous

m om ents o f insight, one o f the most compelling o f which concerns Frank
K erm ode’s The Genesis of Secrecy (1979). As H ungerford writes, K erm ode
“ postulates a herm eneutic practice revolving around the ‘secrecy’ o f texts,
a practice that always privileges latent over apparent m eaning” (82). She
connects this idea to Postmodern Beliefs larger claims about how the sa­
cred is m ade manifest in literature: “ For K erm ode, secrecy is what makes
literature literary” (83), an idea that links him to D eLillo because both
find “ spiritual mystery at the heart o f the literary enterprise.” Ultimately,
then,

The Genesis of Secrecy connects the Bible with m odern fiction

through an interpretive m ode that is m ore num inous than ratio­
nal, that equates the “ business” o f w riting m odern fiction with
that o f w riting scripture, and that is driven by a late-twentieth-
century interest in opacity and latent m eaning. (84)

Such m om ents stand am ong the surprising pleasures o f Postmodern Belief

because they offer alternative explanations for the undeniably strident
interest in “ opacity and latent m eaning” we find in a range o f critical and
literary texts o f the late twentieth century.
This diversion through postwar literary criticism sets up the analyses
o f M cC arthy and M orrison later in the chapter. After a brilliant reading
o f a scene in M cC arth y’s Child of God in which a blacksmith tells in detail
how to form an axe-blade (“ We have been shown,” H ungerford writes,
“ how to make som ething out o f words, how to forge som ething from
the stubborn material o f language, from the obscure words, archaisms, and
vocabularies o f technique that M cC arthy excavates here and throughout
his w riting” [88]), H ungerford moves on to Blood Meridian, the novel
w hich secured M cC arth y’s place in the postwar A m erican canon. Taking
up the challenge o f those critics w ho see in the novel’s style “ som ething

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Steven Belletto

close to nonsense,” H ungerford argues that “ the meaninglessness o f its

metaphysical and philosophical discourses . . . reveal [s] the counterintuitive
way the novel aspires to the authoritative status o f scripture” (90). A c­
cording to H ungerford,“ Blood Meridian is designed to make us feel, above
all, like G o d is speaking___ This is Bible as style, as a tone o f authority as
opposed to authoritative argument or history or supernatural claim ” (95).
Blood Meridian has always been a head scratcher for m e personally, but
Postmodern Belief has given me a new way o f understanding that book, if
not a new appreciation for it— som ething that is one o f the best things
one can hope for from literary criticism.
H ungerford’s argum ent also helps explain why the supernatural has
proven a recurring elem ent in M o rriso n ’s w riting. W orking through
novels such as The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, H ungerford
argues that

the notion o f supernatural reading effaces the w ork o f the au­

thor, [while] at the same time the resulting mystification o f the
author suggests an otherworldly expertise or access to the spiri­
tual....M orrison seeks to replace white possession o f the Bible,
and its cultural and spiritual authority, with an authority based
in the illiterate’s possession o f that sacred book, in the process
m aintaining— and, m ore importantly, deploying— the ultimate
privilege accorded to the Bible in W estern culture. (96)

For readers w ho have w ondered how M o rriso n ’s ghosts and mystical

happenings jib e with a postm odern sensibility, this argum ent turns her
novels into another powerful exam ple o f H ungerford’s general re-reading
o f postm odernism .
H er final chapter, “ T h e Literary Practice o f Belief,” looks at writers
“ invested in particular b elief” (121).To this end, she examines M arilynne
R o b in so n ’s Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home to show “ how discourses o f
belief becom e religious practices, and how literature— both the novel as
a narrative form and various poetic structures [R obinson] uses within
narrative— com es to catalyze this com m union between approaches to
religion currently held apart in scholarly w ork on religion.” H ungerford
holds R o b in so n ’s novels up against another, m ore popular way “ the lit­
erary” has “ reimagine[d] b elief as practice,” the best-selling Left Behind
novels written by evangelical Christians T im LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins,

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which explicitly describe a post-R apture w orld with the ultimate aim
o f w inning converts. B rin gin g together readings o f R obin so n and the
Left Behind books offers a necessary com plication to H ungerford’s argu­
m ent because it helps bring into focus how “ the Christian practitioner
in A m erica . . . cannot live religiously w ithout on occasion trying to
articulate that knowledge,” insofar as “ articulating the know ledge is part
o f the practice” (112).
In her b rie f conclusion, H ungerford reflects on what it means that
her chosen w riters “ aim to ‘reenchant’ the literary world, urging it away
from rationality and realism even w hen w orking in realist m odes, insist­
ing on a species o f m eaning that is not reducible to historical context
and cannot be fully perceived even by the m ost sublimely literate reader”
(132-33). This understanding o f literature w ould help us not only rethink
the postm odern, but also question m ore generally how we value and
evaluate literature as we w ork through the legacies o f postm odernism .
“ Poststructuralism,” H ungerford writes,

questioned the literary artifact as such, the pow er o f the author,

the metaphysical capacities o f literature, the grand narrative,
and the possibility o f m eaning; the culture wars questioned the
aesthetic and ideological assumptions assumed to underlie the
traditional literary canon; the reading public, even that segm ent
educated to appreciate m odernist literature, began to fall away
from reading— from reading books, at least. T h e writers I have
considered here, both novelists and critics, seek a version o f liter­
ary authority closely allied to the ambitions o f m odernism — to
reveal in art the large-scale structures o f the world as well as the
very texture o f consciousness, to make literature a secular reli­
gion and critics its priestly caste. (136)

This account does the double duty o f reinvesting both literature and
criticism with a signal im portance that is hard to describe— a lingering
difficulty that is part o f the point. In the course o f rethinking postm od­
ernism, proposing fresh readings o f key postwar writers, and arguing for a
new conceptualization o f late-twentieth-century religious belief, Postmod­
ern Belief also tackles one o f the trickiest projects o f all, theorizing— and
then defending— those slippery “ som ethings” that make literature literary.

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Steven Belletto

Works cited
DeKoven, Marianne. Utopia Limited:The Sixties and the Emergence of the
Postmodern. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.
Hassan, Ihab. Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times. Urbana: U o f Illinois
P, 1975.
Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism, 2nd Edition. New York:
Routledge, 2002.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: or; The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987.
Trigilio,Tony. Allen Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
UP, 2007.

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