Table Of ContentThe Gospel
According to
the Novelist
NEW DIRECTIONS IN RELIGION AND LITERATURE
This series aims to showcase new work at the forefront of religion
and literature through short studies written by leading and rising
scholars in the field. Books will pursue a variety of theoretical
approaches as they engage with writing from different religious and
literary traditions. Collectively, the series will offer a timely critical
intervention to the interdisciplinary crossover between religion and
literature, speaking to wider contemporary interests and mapping
out new directions for the field in the early twenty-first century.
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY:
Blake. Wordsworth. Religion, Jonathan Roberts
Dante and the Sense of Transgression, William Franke
Do the Gods Wear Capes? Ben Saunders
England’s Secular Scripture, Jo Carruthers
Forgiveness in Victorian Literature, Richard Hughes Gibson
Glyph and the Gramophone, Luke Ferretter
John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, Peter Jaeger
Late Walter Benjamin, John Schad
The New Atheist Novel, Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate
Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse,
Samantha Zacher
Victorian Parables, Susan E. Colón
FORTHCOMING:
Faithful Reading, Mark Knight and Emma Mason
The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace, Adam Miller
Jewish Feeling, Richa Dwor
Long Story Short, Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg and Peter S. Hawkins
Pentecostal Modernism, Stephen Shapiro and Philip Barnard
Romantic Enchantment, Gavin Hopps
Sufism in Western Literature, Art and Thought, Ziad Elmarsafy
The Willing Suspension of Disbelief, Michael Tomko
The Gospel
According to
the Novelist
Religious scripture and
contemporary fiction
MAGDALENA MąCzYńSkA
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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First published 2015
© Magdalena Ma˛czyn´ska, 2015
Magdalena Ma˛czyn´ska has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting
on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication
can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB : 978-1-7809-3623-9
ePDF: 978-1-7809-3578-2
ePub: 978-1-7809-3775-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India
Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Introduction 1
1 Sly evangelists: Historiographic meta-gospels 15
2 Other voices: Alternative point-of-view gospels 37
3 Other realities: Science fictional and
metamorphic gospels 61
4 Inquisitive scholars: Philological and
archaeological gospels 83
Conclusion 107
Notes 111
Works cited 131
Index 145
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without the generous help
of colleagues, friends, and family. My editors, Emma Mason
and Mark Knight, guided the development of my manuscript with
diligence and insight. A leave from Marymount Manhattan College
gave me the time to research and grow my ideas. Joseph Boone and
Michael Kaufmann offered much appreciated encouragement in the
early stages of the project. David Schoenbrun provided a summer’s
refuge and illuminating conversation. The companionship, physical
and virtual, of Lori Flores and Sejal Shah lightened the load of writing.
Tahneer Oksman’s enthusiastic feedback helped me get through the
final stretch.
I owe special thanks to my American family. Gladys Clark Farmer’s
extraordinary hospitality made possible the completion of the volume.
Jared Farmer supported my work in too many ways to mention. This
book, and its author, are forever in his debt.
Introduction
The novel is an omnivorous genre. It thrives by feeding on other
narratives—fictional, journalistic, legal, academic, religious. In a
cultural moment marked by the prefix post, novels take particular
pleasure in foraging established literary canons. Margaret Atwood’s
Penelopiad (2005) reinvents Homer’s Odyssey; J. M. Coetzee’s Foe
(1986) retells Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; Bharati Mukherjee’s
The Holder of the World (1993) reimagines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter. The list could run for many pages. One effect
of the novel’s prodigious appetite, as Mikhail Bakhtin taught us, is
the ability to hold multiple, often contradictory, voices in productive
tension. Novelistic rewritings of canonical stories use strategies
ranging from pastiche to satire to caricature in order to question the
ideological underpinnings of their source texts, all the while borrowing
their plots, themes, and styles. Rather than destroying literary icons,
contemporary iconoclasts appropriate and transform them.
Critics interested in the problem of canonicity have been
paying attention to recent fiction’s dialogic relationship with its
predecessors for several decades. Nevertheless, an important
type of writing remains curiously understudied: novels that rework
classics of religious traditions. Examples include the Bible in Jeanette
Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), the Qur’an in
Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), the Bardo Thodol
(Tibetan Book of the Dead) in Will Self’s How the Dead Live (2000),
the Kabbalah in Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man (2002), and so on.
Distrustful of grand narratives and wary of absolute textual authority,
novelists have found new, iconoclastic uses for traditional religious
writings. My study examines one type of literary engagement with
scriptural tradition—novels that borrow and transform canonical
stories while foregrounding these acts of transformation to explore
the parallels between literary and religious narrative-making.
2 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE NOVELIST
Like God in negative theology, my project is best defined by
what it is not. I am not interested in religion as a literary theme:
my study concerns neither novels featuring religious ideas
and characters, such as Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-
winning Gilead (2004); nor narratives that admit the possibility of
supernatural intervention (what some critics call spiritual realism);
nor recent postsecular fiction, defined by John McClure as writing
that promotes secular progressive values while disrupting “secular
constructions of the real” by tracing the return of secular-minded
characters to idiosyncratic engagements with religion (3). Neither
am I looking at scripture-based narratives that bring to life, rather
than problematize, the canonical stories on which they draw, either
by providing elaborate historical reconstructions or by recasting
canonical plots in contemporary settings (what Theodore Ziolkowski
calls fictional transfigurations). In short, while many of the novels
examined in this book feature religious characters, supernatural
ontologies and scriptural story lines, these elements alone did not
suffice for inclusion in my study.
Rather, I am interested in novels that not only draw on scriptural
tradition for their themes and stories but also draw attention to
the relationship between religious and literary discourses. How
are narratives—religious and literary—shaped by the processes
of transmission, translation, and interpretation? Is the distinction
between “scripture” and “literature” intrinsic to texts or constructed
by communities of readers? Do both kinds of writing rely on the
same set of narrative devices? If so, might they both be considered
a kind of literary text? Who has the power to endow certain writings
with “sacred” status, setting them apart from other human-made
stories? Such questions inform a body of recent fiction that combines
a general postmodernist interest in the narrative-making process
with a specific interest in religious textuality. As literary critic John
McClure observes, in contemporary novels, “scriptural traditions
tend either to be selectively cited, interrogated, and affirmed or to
be brought into vertiginous relation to one another, so that larger
claims for any one tradition’s universal reach, absolute accuracy, and
authority are denied” (5). This denial of authority strips scriptures of
their privileged status, yet also guarantees their continued cultural
resonance. No longer anchored in stable metaphysical systems,
INTRODUCTION 3
sacred texts enter alternative systems of circulation where they are
open to continuous creative revision.1
Although contemporary scriptural rewritings borrow from an
ecumenical library of texts, I have chosen to concentrate on novels
that use a single (albeit quadruple) source: the canonical gospels.
My choice reflects the fact that Christian gospels have inspired the
largest number of modern scriptural rewritings. I also take guidance
from Terry Eagleton’s claim in the preface to Reason, Faith, and
Revolution: “It is better to be provincial than presumptuous”
(2009: 3). If such an approach limits the scope of my discussion,
it improves my focus, allowing for better comparisons between
fictions grounded in the same ur-narrative. It also has the advantage
of placing contemporary novels within a well-documented tradition
of imaginative biographies of Jesus. Finally, while Western literature
has long been comfortable with using the myths of other cultures
outside of their original religious context, a similar relationship with
Christian mythology goes back a mere two centuries. What makes
recent gospel renditions particularly interesting is that they belong
to a (relatively) new and highly contentious conversation.
Contemporary fictional revisions of the gospels share a number
of strategies with postmodernist revisions of the literary canon:
retelling well-known stories from new points of view; placing familiar
characters in unexpected, unorthodox contexts; splicing traditional and
nontraditional material; leveling “high” and “low” subjects and styles;
experimenting with hybrid genres and alternate ontological structures;
and treating serious subject matter with irreverent, carnivalesque
humor. Most importantly, both types of rewritings simultaneously
deconstruct and reconstruct their canonical source texts. Frederic
Jameson famously argued that postmodernism “no longer produces
monumental works of the modernist type but ceaselessly reshuffles
the fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older
cultural and social production, in some new and heightened bricolage:
metabooks which cannibalize other books, metatexts which collate
bits of other texts” (96). Contemporary metascriptures participate in
Jameson’s textual play while also seeking a meaningful dialogue with
the texts they devour. The outcome is an ambivalent but productive
relationship between sacred originals, now wholly or partially emptied
of their traditional authority, and their novelistic correctives.
