Table Of ContentBREAKING THE FALL
STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND RELIGION
General Editor: David Jasper, Principal of St Chad's College, The
University of Durham
This series of volumes will provide an interdisciplinary
introduction to the study of literature and religion, concerned
with the fundamentally important issues of the imagination,
literary perceptions and an understanding of poetics for
theology and religious studies, and the underlying religious
implications in so much literature and literary criticism.
Robert Detweiler
BREAKING THE FALL: Religious Readings of Contemporary
Fiction
Max Harris
THEATRE AND INCARNATION
David Jasper
THE STUDY OF LITERATURE AND RELIGION: AN
INTRODUCTION
David Jasper and R. C. D. Jasper (editors)
LANGUAGE AND THE WORSHIP OF THE CHURCH
Ulrich Simon
PITY AND TERROR: Christianity and Tragedy
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Breaking the Fall
Religious Readings of Contemporary
Fiction
ROBERT DETWEILER
Professor of Comparative Literature
Emory University, Georgia
M
MACMILLAN
© Robert Detweiler 1989
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1989978-0-333-45808-2
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First published 1989
Published by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Harnpshire RG21 2XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Detweiler, Robert
Breaking the fall: religious readings of
contemporary fiction.-(Studies in literature and
religion).
1. Fiction in European languages, 1945-. Religious
aspects
I. Title 11. Series
809.3'04
ISBN 978-1-349-09993-1 ISBN 978-1-349-09991-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-09991-7
For Betty and Aaron, Richard and Mary Jane:
Religious Readers
Contents
Acknowledgements vüi
General Editor' s Preface ix
1 Playing for Real: Roles, Plots and
(Non-) Representations 1
2 What is Reading Religiously? 30
3 Braking the Fall: Walker Percy and the
Diagnostic Novel 67
4 John Updike's Sermons 91
5 Sacred Texts/Sacred Space 122
6 Scheherazade's Fellowship: Telling against the End 159
Select Bibliography 192
Index 195
vii
Acknowledgements
The author and publishers gratefully acknowledge permission to
use quotations from the following:
From The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Copyright ©
1985 by O. W. Toad Ud. Used by permission of the Canadian
publishers, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto; of the British
publishers, Jonathan Cape Ud, London; and of the United States
publishers, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.
From Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. Copyright © 1980 by
Russell Hoban. Used by permission of the British publishers,
Jonathan Cape Ud, London; and of the United States publishers,
Simon & Schuster, New York.
From The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
by Maxine Hong Kingston. Copyright © 1975 by Maxine Hong
Kingston. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York.
From The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur edited by Charles E. Reagan
and David Stewart. Copyright © 1978 by Charles E. Reagan and
David Stewart. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.
The author is also grateful for permission to use, as the basis
for the chapter on 'John Updike's Sermons', an earlier and shorter
version entitled 'Updike's Sermons' which appeared in Americana
Austriaca: Beiträge zur Amerikakunde, vol. 5, 1980, edited by Klaus
Lanzinger. Used by permission of Wilhelm Braumüller, Universi
täts-Verlagsbuchhandlung, Vienna.
viii
General Editor' s Preface
Robert Detweiler' s Breaking the Fall extends both our notion of
reading and the concept of a religiously reading community. As
our sense of textuality is expanded beyond the mere sense of
words on a page and conventional linguistic idiom, so also our
sense of the sacred is expanded. It may be that in our present
time we are being called to live out the apocalypse and vitally,
therefore, to seek the re situation of religious discourse. It may be
that, in Martin Buber's words, distintegration of the Word has
taken place, and that the familiar conventions of sermons and the
liturgy are reappearing in fictive conditions and with a disturbing
ambivalence. Such things are explored in this book.
Professor Detweiler is convinced of the importance of enter
taining the energetic discussions of contemporary literary theory in
the present debates in religious studies. The power of his writing
reminds us of the relative neglect of modern and post-modern
literature by most studies which are concerned with the relation
ship between literature and religion, and its sometimes disturbing
qualities may draw us beyond our comfortable, conventional
considerations to the point where we rediscover the inventiveness
and creativity which flourish only at moments of ambiguity and
recombination.
In our age we cannot afford to be timid in critical ventures.
If we wish to continue in a belief in the possibility of religious
interpretations of experience and literature, we must allow our
horizons to be expanded and our pre-formed perceptions to be
broken. Seeking new contexts and structures, our storytelling
against despair may indeed be painful even as it represents a
necessary and creative return to the semblance of faith and hope.
David Jasper
ix
Preface
... but as you go on, the writing - if you follow it - will take
you places you never intended to go and show you things you
would never otherwise have seen.!
Scholars of Bible and religion have been learning, in recent years
and with increasing finesse, to adapt the methods of the literary
critics to their interpretations of the sacred canons, while a number
of literary critics have tried their hand at what we could call secular
readings of the traditional sacred texts. Much of this crossing of
old boundaries has been inspired by the flourishing of post-New
Critical theory and practice that has also influenced theology and
philosophy and even, to a degree, the sodal sciences. Yet in the
midst of this stimulating inter-disdplinary activity, remarkably
little writing has been produced in the area that was, for a time,
the liveliest of the literature-and-religion nexus: the interpretation
of narrative fiction, poetry and drama from a religious perspective.
'The triumph of theory in literary studiesi, as J. Hillis Miller has
called it, seems to have caused a timidity among those of us
interested in writing religious interpretations of literature, as if we
feared that the theory had made, or would make, this interpretive
endeavour - already under fire for some decades - invalid.2
This reticence is surprising for two reasons. First is that some
of our prominent theorists, such as Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey
Hartman and Frank Kermode, have suggested the value of recent
theory for the religious interpretation of literary texts, causing one
to wonder why their lead has not been followed more enthusiasti
cally than it has. Second is that critics using other approaches
- those that the New Critics labelled 'extrinsic' - such as the
psychoanalytic, feminist and Marxist are busily appropriating the
newer theory (often while challenging aspects of it) in their reading
of literary texts, prompting one to inquire why the proponents of
the religious approach are, in contrast, so unenterprising.
xi
