Modern Fiction Studies 41.1 (1995) 141-163

Postmodern/Post-Secular: Contemporary Fiction and Spirituality

John A. McClure

And I'll bet that before this century is out men will turn once more to mystery, to wonderment; they will explore the vast reaches of space within instead of more measuring more "progress."

--PaPa LaBas, in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo

They are all the presences we are not supposed to be seeing--wind gods, hilltop gods, sunset gods--that we train ourselves away from to keep from looking further even though enough of us do . . .

--Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

[S]pirituality virtually by definition no longer exists: the definition in question is in fact that of postmodernism itself.

--Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism

An influential strand of contemporary cultural theory has tended to inscribe postmodernism within a secular history of secularization: to see the postmodern period and the cultural products identified with it [End Page 141] as thoroughly and satisfactorily secularized. This is how Fredric Jameson represents the moment, and how Jean-François Lyotard represents it, and how Brian McHale and many others represent it. Yet other students of contemporary culture, and of particular artists and novelists operating within that culture, tell a different story. 1Sociologists of religion describe the period from the 1960s to the present as one of a third "Great Awakening," yet another in the series of moments in American history when spiritual preoccupations intensify and new spiritualities flourish. 2 Poll-takers tell us that the vast majority of Americans still profess to hold significant religious beliefs. 3 But studies of contemporary spirituality also suggest that the nature of these beliefs, and the way in which they are held, are changing. They represent this period as one of spiritual exploration (Roof) and of what Jameson calls, in another context, "heterogeneity without a norm" (Postmodernism 17). "Mainstream" forms of Christianity survive in some sectors of the community, while in others Christianity takes on new and virulently dogmatic forms, and in still others it becomes identified with various movements of liberation. Judaism fragments along similar but by no means identical lines. At the same time, however, "many people appear to have become completely indifferent to religious and philosophical questions" (Taylor 4). And many others experiment with a flood of unorthodox spiritualities, some drawn from marginalized European traditions of magic and witchcraft, others from the non-European traditions of Africa, Native America, and the Orient. These new spiritualities, like the

more traditional forms, are often inflected with the rhetoric and values of consumer capitalism, but they tend, at the same time, to appeal to people dissatisfied with secular strategies of fulfillment, and to challenge what Cornel West calls market or consumer values. Thus the many-sided scandal of contemporary American spirituality: that it remains so vigorous, that it is so often politically engaged and so often entangled with consumerism and sensationalism, and that it is increasingly culturally eccentric in its inspiration and practices.

Some of the most celebrated contemporary American fiction captures and reflects this turbulent situation of spiritual engagement, uncertainty, and experimentation. Don DeLillo's work, for instance, repeatedly constructs contemporary Americans as a people driven by homeless spiritual impulses and mezmerized by new religious movements. And his work, while less formally and ontologically playful than [End Page 142] that of other postmoderns, insistently interrogates secular conceptions of the real, both by focusing the reader's attention on events that remain mysterious or even "miraculous," and by making all sorts of room for religious or spiritual discourses and styles of seeing. Thomas Pynchon's novels, frequently cited by students of postmodernism as exemplary texts, are a veritable index to the new spiritualities. Awash in paranormal events, they represent the world in ways that reflect the disparate ontologies of gnosticism, spiritualism, Native American and African religious traditions, the martial arts traditions of the East, and American transcendentalism. The world of Ishmael Reed's postmodern classic, Mumbo Jumbo, is similarly shaped in terms of marginalized sacred and occult ontologies, as is that of Leslie Silko's Almanac of the Dead. And sacred ontologies and discourses are powerfully represented in other artistic domains as well. Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" resonates with Jewish symbols and ideas. Quentin Tarentino's flamboyantly postmodern film, Pulp Fiction, features allusions to grace, election, and the miraculous, and ends with an extraordinary moment of conversion and biblical hermeneutics which cannot, I would argue, be either decisively affirmed or dismissed as an exercise in irony or pastiche. In order to understand what is going on in American postmodern culture, then, we need to think in terms of something like a religious revival: a resurgence (by no means unprecedented) of spiritual energies, discourses, and commitments. And in order to understand postmodern fiction, we need to attend to the ways in which it maintains and revises a modernist tradition of spiritually inflected resistance to conventionally secular constructions of reality.

In suggesting that many postmodern texts are shot through with and even shaped by spiritual concerns, I mean several things: that they make room in the worlds they project for magic, miracle, metaphysical systems of retribution and restoration; that they explore fundamental issues of conduct in ways that honor, interrogate, and revise religious categories and prescriptions; that their political analyses and prescriptions are intermittently but powerfully framed in terms of magical or religious conceptions of power. But I mean as well, that their assaults on realism, their ontological playfulness, and their experiments in the sublime represent a complex and variously inflected reaffirmation of premodern ontologies-constructions of reality that portray the quotidian world as but one dimension of a multidimensional cosmos, or as hosting a world of [End Page 143] spirits. I am arguing, then, that some of the very features of fiction which secular theorists have singled out as definitively postmodern must at least in some cases be understood in terms of a post-secular project of resacralization. But at the same time, I will argue, this process of resacralization can only be understood, in its historical specificity, with the help of the secular theorists who have ignored it.

Postmodernism as Achieved Secularization

In the conclusion to Postmodernism, Fredric Jameson presents the contemporary moment as one of historically unprecedented homogeneity. The postmodern, he writes, "must be characterized as a situation in which the survival, the residue, the holdover, the archaic, has finally been swept away without a trace" (309). "We no longer are encumbered," he continues, "with the embarrassment of non-simultaneities and non-synchronicities. Everything has reached the same hour on the great clock of development or rationalization" (310). This hour still has room for "new 'religious' formations," Jameson concedes, but these simulacral formations are utterly unrelated to "religious traditionalisms," which have "melted away without a trace," and they have nothing to do, either, with "the spiritual," which also has disappeared. The culture that remains is in Jameson's eyes "effortlessly secular": "spirituality by definition no longer exists: the definition in question is in fact that of postmodernism itself" (387).

Jameson's effort to produce an effortlessly secular and utterly desacralized present is unpersuasive but illuminating. Eager to wrest something from an age which otherwise offers marxism so little, Jameson ignores the persistence here in America and around the globe of all sorts of religious traditions, and disposes of those he cannot ignore by implying that they have nothing to do with a traditional "spirituality" he incongruously claims to take seriously. (Today's "religious revivals" can't be taken "at face value," [387], Jameson argues, implying that yesterday's somehow could be.) But Jameson's argument for achieved secularization is at least an argument. Elsewhere in the academic literature of postmodernity and postmodernism the secularity of the moment is frequently simply assumed, and evidence to the contrary is not so much denied as disappeared through subtle and reiterated acts of selective attentiveness. The postmodern condition, Lyotard, McHale, Jameson himself, [End Page 144] and others insist, is defined by a kind of shattering and schizophrenia: postmodern fiction sponsors or mimics these processes by its acts of ontological decentering, destabilization, and pluralization. It puts a whole range of worlds or discourses in play, but does not attempt, or make possible, any articulation, discrimination, or ranking of these worlds. Instead, it invites us to abandon such operations in favor of some sort of sophisticated play with and among the range of alternative spaces and constructions it opens up. By so doing it registers the collapse of the ultimately terroristic grand narratives of modernity and continues the modernist counter-offensive against realism (Lyotard), or breaks off the modernist quest for truth (McHale), or models the collapse of older forms of cultural coherence brought on by the global triumph of capitalism (Jameson).

This nearly consensual construction of postmodernism as a moment of anti-foundational, anti-totalizing, and anti-realist celebration of "heterogeneity without a norm" (Jameson,Postmodernism 17) enables critics to privilege a certain style of reading, one which attends to the pluralizing effects of postmodern artifacts and more or less suspends exploration of the relation between "worlds" put in play, the specificity and ultimate disposition of juxtaposed discourses, or any tentative re-collection of fragments from the grand narratives. It enables them, in other words, to narrate postmodernism as a flight from an oppressive singularity into a liberating (or differently oppressive) plurality, rather than as a rejection of realism in the name at once of polysemic playfulness or disorientation and of specific counter-constructions of the real. And it enables them to avoid examining the manifest power of various spiritual, occult, or supernaturalist discourses not only in American popular culture, where the "Great Awakening" of the last thirty years is finally being recognized even by the newsmagazines (see "The Search for the Sacred," Newsweek's cover story for November 28, 1994), but also in a whole range of highly

regarded postmodern texts.

The Postmodern Sublime

If the identification of postmodernism with radical pluralization serves to call attention away from the scandal of continued artistic engagement with non-secular constructions of reality, so does its identification, by these same critics, with a specific aesthetics of sublimity. To [End Page 145] speak of a postmodern sublime, as Lyotard and Jameson do, is to risk raising the spector of the sacred once again. Lyotard, for instance, insists that postmodernism is pervaded by "an aesthetic of the sublime" (77) and is preoccupied with presenting "the fact that the unpresentable exists" (78). This certainly seems accurate, but Lyotard's Kantian definition of the sublime so limits the meaning of the term as to secure it against any sacred, transcendental, or supernaturalist interpretation and thus to distract attention once again from such impulses in postmodernism. For Lyotard's sublime, like Kant's but unlike Edmund Burke's, is rigorously rationalistic: the pleasure offered by his postmodern text is "the pleasure that reason should exceed all presentation, the pain that imagination or sensibility should not be equal to the concept" (81). Jameson, having identified postmodernism with "depthlessness," also finds in it (rather incongruously) an aesthetic of sublimity. But his "postmodern or technological sublime" (Postmodernism 37), like Lyotard's, is strictly secular: the "something even deeper" (my emphasis) implied by its "representations of some immense comunicational and computer network" is "the whole world system of a present-day multinational capitalism" (37). In both cases, then, postmodern invocations of radical Otherness, invocations that might be read as protests against the regime of Reason itself, or at least against its contemporary formulations of the real, are instead first acknowledged and then emphatically recontained within discourses that celebrate reason and privilege it over mere imagination.

Counter-constructions of the Postmodern

Jameson's depiction of the postmodern moment in these texts is interestingly at odds with his earlier analysis of the same historical moment. In his discussion of "Magical Narratives" inThe Political Unconscious (1981), he argues that "in the context of the gradual reification of realism in late capitalism . . . romance once again comes to be felt as the place of narrative heterogeneity and of freedom from that reality principle to which a now oppressive realistic representation is the hostage." "Romance," he continues, "now again seems to offer the possibilitiy of sensing other historical rhythms, and of demonic or Utopian transformations of a real now unshakably set in place . . . a reconquest (but at what price?) of some feeling for a salvational future" (104-105). Here the multiplication of worlds or discourses discussed in Postmodernism constitutes [End Page 146] not a fall into pastiche and depthlessness but an assault on hegemonic discursive norms in the name of a sensibility once again tuned to forces ("the demonic") and futures ("salvational") identified, at least etymologically, with spirituality. Jameson's implicit point of reference in this discussion seems to be magical realism, but his analysis could also be pressed into service, I'd argue, to describe much of the contemporary anti-realist work he subsequently labels postmodernist.

Indeed, Jameson's definition of contemporary romance has important affinities, I want to suggest, with certain brief but suggestive counter-definitions of the postmodern, definitions that represent the postmodern project as one of reenchantment and of a post-colonial return of the repressed. Thus Zygmunt Bauman, in Intimations of Postmodernity, defines the postmodern moment as one

in which sacred and secular counter-discourses silenced by three centuries or more of Western secular rationalism (and rationalized religion) stage an exuberant comeback. "All in all," writes Bauman, "postmodernity can be seen as restoring to the world what modernity, presumptuously, had taken away; as a re-enchantment of the world that modernity tried hard to dis-enchant." At stake in this project of dis-enchantment, he continues, is "the right to pronounce on meanings, to construe narratives." In order to win "the war against mystery and magic . . . the world had to be de-spiritualized" (x). But the war was never fully won, and in contemporary culture "it is the modern artifice that has been dismantled; the modern conceit of meaning-legislating reason that has been exposed, condemned and put to shame" (x).

Bauman rehearses the history of dis-enchantment as a struggle of the modernizing West with its own past, but this battle has of course a second dimension, that of the imperial West's struggle with the Rest. More alert to this aspect of the struggle, non-westerners like Homi Bhabha and Ashis Nandy offer definitions of this historical moment that resonate with Bauman's but emphasize the role of non-western cultures and discourses in challenging the hegemony of "meaning-legislating reason" and of realism, its narrative manifestation. Bhabha argues that "if the interest in postmodernism is limited to a celebration of the fragmentation of the 'grand narratives' of postenlightenment rationalism, then, for all its intellectual excitement, it remains a profoundly parochial enterprise." This is so, he continues, because "the wider significance of the postmodern condition" has to do with the "presencing" of "a range [End Page 147] of other dissonant, even dissident histories and voices-women, the colonized, minority groups" brought suddenly close by "the new internationalism" (4-5). Among these voices, as the scholars of the subaltern studies school have often reminded us, are those of people who still speak the world in magical and religious terms, people, who, as Ashis Nandy puts it, reject the terms of "the modern knowledge systems" and even defy "the given formats of defiance" (273), yet "in their own way and with the help of their own categories, resist domination and theorize about it" (268).

To rethink the postmodern moment as one in which such voices challenge the hegemony of secular rational discourse with unprecedented power is to see it not simply as a moment of disintegration but also as one in which certain long-discredited (or residual) ways of seeing and saying-both Western and non-western-stage a complex kind of come-back. Such a perspective, I will argue, enables us to generate "thicker," more fully culturally contextualized, readings of canonical postmodern texts like Pynchon's, DeLillo's, and Ishmael Reed's. And it also enables us to see as postmodern a range of contemporary texts generally excluded from the category (and denied its prestige): the mostly Latin American works of "magical realism" and the novels of Afro-American and Native American novelists such as Toni Morrison, Michele Cliff, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich. 4 For what we find in the work of these writers, as in that of many canonical postmodernists, is the untidy resurgence of magical, sacred, pre-modern and non-western constructions of reality.

I don't mean to suggest, however, that we must choose between the two ways of seeing postmodernism that I have sketched out. Both seem to me to possess considerable descriptive utility, and neither does justice to all the texts that could arguably be designated postmodern. It only makes sense that the postmodern moment, like that of modernism, should produce a number of movements. Thus Norman Rush suggests, in a recent Nation essay, that at this moment the choice (in the arts) is increasingly between some kind of spiritual seriousness and some kind of decadence: "Things have been changing in the realm of the arts for some time," Rush writes, and one might "anticipate an intensification of tendencies like these: more and more implicit religious

advocacy in serious fiction, more pastiche, more decor for decor's sake . . . the pursuit of [End Page 148] 'liberation' through aesthetic explorations of sociopathy and brutality" (92).

But this is not to say there is a stark opposition between the impulse to spiritual advocacy and the impulse to play. The postmodern works that most interest me (Pynchon's, Reed's, Denis Potter's, Tarentino's) read, to borrow Italo Calvino's title, like "cosmic comics." Wild and defiantly unrealistic exercises in irreverent citation, genre-splicing, excess, caricature, and the grotesque, they run so against the grain of realistic or even modernist seriousness that it seems absurd, at first, to treat them as taking any issues seriously. And yet if they seem cosmically irreverent, they are also comically cosmic: they address sacred alternatives to secular constructions of reality in ways that invest these alternatives with a certain authority and invite us to reflection. If we accept this invitation, of course, the joke may be on us: there's always the suggestion, in these texts, that any kind of faith, secular or spiritual, is folly. But if we refuse the invitation, the case is the same: for the texts also suggest that secularism is a form of mystification and that those who accept its definition of possibility are victims of a world historical ruse.

Postmodern Advocacy

How, then, do the texts of what might be called high postmodernism-texts such as Gravity's Rainbow or Vineland-engineer this strange combination of cosmic irreverence and comic advocacy? How do they manage at once to mock advocacy and practice it? The secular theories of postmodernist rhetoric I want to complicate have quite understandably been preoccupied with postmodern novelists' ontological playfulness, their refusal to abide by the rules of realism, their inclination to juxtapose disparate worlds. These are indeed the distinguishing features of a whole range of postmodern texts. But ontological juxtaposition can produce a number of effects besides that of vertiginously undermining any stable notion of the real. It can also be used, for instance, to deprivilege a reigning ontological paradigm and substitute an alternative, or to produce a richly polyontological cosmology, or to locate us in a liminal space between worlds. And ontological juxtaposition is only the most dramatically new of the many meaning-making strategies in postmodern [End Page 149] texts, which also continue to employ a whole range of traditional devices (comic, satirical, and realistic) for testing and dismissing, or testing and advocating, particular styles of being and constructions of reality.

The ontologically plural and undecidable world of Gravity's Rainbow might for instance be seen, paradoxically, as both the "foundation" for and the product of a specifically postmodern quest for something like truth. That is, in any event, how it is described in one passage from the text itself. "Those like Slothrop," the passage goes, "with the greatest interest in discovering the truth, were thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity" (582). Here the stabilizing concept "ground" is invested oxymoronically with the destabilizing attributes of contradiction and absurdity, but the concept survives, and far from putting an end to epistemological explorations, its redefinition simply dictates a rejection of more systematic, rational-empirical modes of exploration (which, Pynchon suggests here, have been rendered futile by the power and covert machinations of a global elite) in favor of a range of alternative, visionary epistemologies identified with occultism, divination, and paranormal phenomena. The utility of these (and hence the limitations of more secular rational approaches) is affirmed again and again in the text, as characters achieve through divination and dream new insights into the structure of the natural cosmos (Kekulé's dream of the Great Serpent with its tail in its mouth), the social order, and their own destinies, and as the

narrator turns to the Tarot itself to explore his characters' futures.

This privileging of non-secular practices and constructions of the real is achieved as well through the text's ontological exuberance: surely it is significant that so many of the alternative worlds canvassed by Pynchon make room for what must be described, from the perspective of secular rationalism, as "supernatural" sites and forces. As we traverse the text, we slip, along with its characters, into zones of pre-modern animism (the Herero, the Indians of Slothrop's colonial Massachusetts), European witchcraft (Geli Tripping), spiritualism ("All talk of cause and effect," says Herr Rathenau through his medium Sasha, "is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic" [167]), oriental mysticism (88), Christianity, gnosticism, and ecospirituality. If Pynchon effects an ontological destabilization and pluralization, then, he does so by the [End Page 150] introduction of a range of alternative ontologies that insist on the existence of broadly "spiritual" spaces and forces, readmit, as something more than equals, a whole range of supernaturalist ontologies suppressed or silenced by the West. At the same time, Pynchon uses the traditional rhetorical devices of characterization, dialogue, and action to mount a fierce polemic against the deadly consequences of technological rationality and to affirm-as Tom LeClair has noticed-an ecospiritual alternative, in which the earth exists as a "living critter" (590) that must be respected by humanity, if humanity is to survive.

This predeliction for ecospiritual constructions of reality is even more apparent in Vineland. According to Brian McHale, "the space of Vineland is a multiple-world space, a heterotopia or 'zone'" (137) characterized by "extreme ontological incongruity and disjuncture" (136). Perhaps, but it could also be argued that the space of Vineland more closely resembles a postmodern version of the complexly mapped and many-leveled worlds of pre-modern myth, religion, and fairytale. The distinction is not trivial, for McHale's description of the novel's space emphasizes the novelty and playfulness of its ontological ordering, while mine emphasizes the way in which this ordering recapitulates and implicitly reinstates earlier modelings of a sacred or at least enchanted universe. I would not want to promote one reading to the exclusion of the other however. After all, if Pynchon's universe does resemble the universes of pre-modern systems in its multi-tiered and magical features, it is a decidedly postmodern sacred universe that is here projected, one produced by the frequently hilarious juxtaposition of incongruous discourses and composed of elements taken not only from Native American spirituality (the Yurok underworld), Emersonian transcendentalism ("divine justice"), and animism (the talking trees), but also from Japanese and American horror movies (the Chipco monster and the Thanatoids). The various esoteric domains and "paranormal" phenomena projected in these very different discourses are all present in the comically inclusive cosmos of Vineland, so that it offers an exuberantly polyglot, hybridized, and comic/serious version of the older spiritual ontologies. But like them, it arguably asserts not so much a discontinuous plurality of worlds as a single quotidian world shot through with mysterious forces and presences, and opening onto esoteric domains above and below. Thus while McHale's representation of the ontology of postmodern [End Page 151] texts may work well in many cases, it does not do full justice, I'd argue, to a range of postmodern texts whose ontological affinities are also with pre-modern, or marginalized modern sacred discourses.

But while I am interested in arguing that Pynchon uses ontological juxtaposition and other, more traditional, rhetorical devices to advocate a non-secular view of things, I do not want to suggest that his project is in any way reducable to the definitive elaboration of some "new paradigm" of the sacred. He invites us, in Gravity's Rainbow, to imagine his work rather as a form of reaching. "I don't know," sighs a character asked to state more precisely how the world works if not in

terms of cause and effect; "She didn't know," confirms the narrator, "all she was trying to do was reach" (159). Don DeLillo's work is also full of characters who, dissatisfied with conventional ontologies, reach in language towards more adequate articulations: "There is still the element of shared culture," muses an American character in The Names who is trying to understand his profound reaction to Greece. "Something beyond this is familiar as well," he continues, "some mystery. Often I feel I'm on the edge of knowing what it is. It's just beyond reach. . . . I can't quite get it and hold it" (26).

DeLillo's fictional reaching, unlike Pynchon's, is a reaching out from within the ontological and narrative horizons of realism, but these horizons are experienced, as they are in Virginia Woolf's work for instance, or E. M. Forster's, as impossibly confining, and they are relentlessly questioned and subtlely violated. The questioning is handled by the many characters who speak some form of non-secular discourse and by DeLillo's narrators, who almost always speak a creolized idiolect that promiscuously blends secular and sacred terms. The violations entail both subtle departures from realism's conventions and the eruption, within the worlds of the novels, of uncanny or miraculous events. Thus one character in Players (McKechnie) turns up both in the novel's "real" world and as the protagonist of a television drama watched by another character; and The Names draws the reader up into the domain of language (its sounds, its history, the mysteries of representation and self-referentiality) so emphatically that the text loses the transparency essential to realism, begins to produce effects of unworlding on its readers. Meanwhile, back in the story-worlds themselves, DeLillo's characters dematerialize, or survive deadly bicycle rides across crowded highways, or participate in "coincidences" so farfetched as to seem fated. These events [End Page 152] constitute effects of ontological destabilization and resacralization more tentative and less comic than Pynchon's, but equally urgent.

Yet it is inaccurate, I think, to cast Pynchon's fictions (or DeLillo's) as conventional accounts of unfinished religious reachings or spiritual quests. For both novelists seem determined simultaneously to reach and to resist grasping. In work after work, they sympathetically explore certain non-secular constructions of reality while repudiating others as forms of repression and control and insisting on the inevitable partiality of all. Pynchon is particularly insistent on the necessarily and even redemptively unfinished nature of any ontological mapping, the ever-present danger of confusing a particular representation of reality for being itself, which must always exceed any formulation. His work seems designed, in other words, both to promote specific forms of resacralization and to remind us that all formulation is rhetorical-a matter of probabilites and partialities. Hence his splendidly comic (and chilling) deconstructions of secular/spiritual binaries, his refusal, after all, to choose between "our stories, all false, about who we are" (Gravity's Rainbow 135), his enactment of a creative exuberance that reminds us of Harold Bloom's definition of "blessing" as "more life" (44) and that always outpaces the impulse to containment. Pynchon returns us to the domain of sacred experiences and doctrines, then, but not to set us down in some safe zone of putative certainty. This is why he remains, for me, the most exciting religious novelist of our time.

Postmodern Spiritualities

To argue that Pynchon introduces his reader to a vertiginously decentered space of juxtaposed non-secular discourses (or discursive fragments) is to argue that his spirituality is in one familiar sense of the word "postmodern"-that it participates in that larger experience of discursive and ontological decentering and fragmentation identified by Lyotard, Jameson, McHale, and others as

characteristically postmodern. And it is to suggest, as well, that it might be useful, having established the role of the sacred in postmodernism, to look more closely at the postmodern reinflection of sacred codes. Theologians and sociologists of religion of various persuasions are addressing this issue, and some of their insights are reflected here. But I am more interested, for the purposes of this essay, in establishing the importance of postmodern critical theory to [End Page 153] any discussion of contemporary literary treatments of the spiritual. If Lyotard's construction of the discursive terrain as a cloud of fragmented "language elements" (xxiv) is useful in this regard, so are Bauman's, Bhabha's, and Nandy's suggestions that this "cloud" consists not only of the debris of disintegrated metropolitan traditions, but also of fragments of once marginalized traditions that have survived within or migrated to the old imperial centers, carried sometimes by orientalists, sometimes by romantic travelers, sometimes by colonial missionaries to the metropolis, and sometimes by colonial populations in motion. Hindu and Buddhist ideas arrived, of course, in the nineteenth century, and have been important features of the American literary imagination ever since. Other traditions well-represented today-Native American shamanism, Haitian voudon, various animisms-have become influential more recently, as have the various traditions of pre-Christian or heretical Europe: witchcraft, various systems of divination, the mysteries, and goddess cults. Novelists like Reed, Silko, Erdrich, and Alice Walker write directly about the religious wars of modernity and postmodernity: the suppression, survival, and resurgence of traditions marginalized by European conquest. And they also invite us to reflect on the implications of the increasing popularity of these traditions among Euro-Americans, including Euro-American novelists like Pynchon, DeLillo, Robert Stone, Russell Banks, and Margaret Atwood. Do Westerners' appropriations of non-Western traditions represent a salutory victory for the marginalized, or are they simply one more instance of European misapprehension and expropriation? Native Americans in particular are debating the implications of Euro-American interest in their faith traditions. 5

Another postmodern theory that speaks usefully to the fiction I am discussing is James Clifford's influential recasting of cultural history in terms of inevitable "pollution," "creolization," and "reinvention." The novels record and, for the most part, celebrate these processes, and in so doing they challenge the culturally reactionary equation of spiritual regeneration with purification and return. Native American novelists like Silko and Erdrich, for instance, are manifestly committed to the reinvention of Native American spirituality: "after the white people came," explains the shaman Betonie in Silko's Ceremony, "it became necessary to create new ceremonies . . . only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong" (126). They see these ceremonies as a means of empowering Native Americans, but also represent them as culturally mixed and open [End Page 154] practices rather than as the exclusive property of a single people. Thus while their works are not as ontologically playful as Pynchon's, they are ontologically destabilizing and innovative, and in this respect belong to the broader tradition of postmodernism I am trying to construct.

New ceremonies are under construction in Euro-American fiction as well: one thinks of DeLillo's consecration of the Acropolis as pilgrimage site in The Names, or Pynchon's counter-culture feast at the end of Vineland, where an aging Wobblie reads a passage of Emerson from his copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience. DeLillo's Acropolis looks to me dangerously like a Western rallying point, the anxiously constructed and agonistic alternative to his Mecca, a place where Muslims are seen to exchange sober individuality for intoxicating fanaticism. But it is the other as well to the Western fundamentalisms and materialisms more weakly traced in the text. Pynchon's sylvan feast, on the other hand, celebrates a range of American counter-spiritualities productively

entangled with oppositional politics and with the quotidian impurities of consumer capitalism.

If contemporary fiction is seamed with references to pre-modern spiritual traditions, it is seamed, as well, with fascinated portraits of the what might be called, after Robert Venturi, "the commercial vernaculars" of contemporary spirituality. DeLillo's analysis of the master narratives of tabloid spirituality in White Noise is a little masterpiece of cultural studies, but his assessment of it and of other vernacular spiritualities tends to the sour. Pynchon, on the other hand, clearly enjoys the vigor and impurity of the vernacular imagination: Vineland reads like a tabloid tour of commercialized spiritual discourses. Nor is Pynchon fascinated merely with the impure exuberance of the various New Age orientalisms-the whole industry of Esalen-like retreats, healing hustles, and martial arts studios. He has been satirizing the New Age since its dawning in the California of The Crying of Lot 49, but he also invites us to respect certain aspects of the new spiritualites. In Vineland, for instance, D. L. Chastain, a rootless army brat without resources or education, is saved by the ideas and discipline she acquires in a disreputable storefront dojo:

She was finally acknowledging her mother's soul, one more side benefit of life in the martial arts. The discipline had steered her early enough away from the powerlessness and [End Page 155] the sooner or later self-poisoning hatred that had been waiting for her. Somewhere further along, she'd been given to understand, she would discover that all souls, human and otherwise, were different disguises of the same greater being- God at play. (121)

Pynchon offers us, here, a class-specific map of the religious landscape of our culture and a profoundly pragmatic argument for the value of a form of preterite spirituality that more often gets celebrated in low-budget films and popular TV shows. (When the petty criminal Jules is born again at the end of Pulp Fiction, he declares his intention to become Kane, the hero of "Kung-Fu.") The passage epitomizes several aspects of Pynchon's spiritual imagination that may reflect broader tendencies in the spiritual counter-culture with which he can be identified. There's the fascination with forms of spiritual "discipline," for instance, and its complicating articulation with the vision of a "God at play." There's the representation of spirituality as an enabling practice that precedes and may or may not result in some coherent vision of things. And there's the dream of social reconciliation, a healing of the breech that separates the children from the parents, the counter-culture from the mainstream (D. L.'s mom is a born-again Christian).

Postmodern and postcolonial theory thus usefully illuminate significant features of contemporary post-secular fiction. But to recognize and explore other aspects of these texts, one must turn to less academically accredited sources. For the articulation of new spiritualities, the elaboration of new sacred discourses, is taking place at some distance from the most academically fashionable sites of cultural production, in the mostly marginalized work of feminist and ecospiritual theologians, for instance, and Native American spiritual teachers, and the heretical proponents of creation theology. It is in works like Carol Christ's Diving Deep and Surfacing, Charlene Spretnak's States of Grace, Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon, and Rosemary Reuther's Gaia and God, as well as in Native American works like Vine DeLoria's God is Red and theological treatises like Matthew Fox's Original Blessing, that one finds this new spiritual discourse, or family of discourses being elaborated and disseminated. These writers, working from different traditions and reaching, one would guess, a mostly middle class, Euro-American audience, all challenge not only the possessive individualism and commodity fetishism [End Page 156] of consumer capitalism, but also reigning religious celebrations of a transcendental divinity and home, a future free from death, and an ascetic, "earth-fleeing"

(Ruether 139) ethic. The key words of the spirituality they promote are immanence (the spirit in the world, not over it), interconnectedness, and finitude. "I believe," writes Christ, "that women's spiritual quest and feminist theology are drawing all of us, women and men, to accept finitude and change, to live in and through it, [to] give up the quest to ally ourselves with a transcendent source or power which is beyond change" (xiv). Enabling nonmaterial energies and sources of insight are thus to be found, as they are in animism, pantheism, and panentheisim, but only intermittently in Judaism and Christianity, within the world itself, rather than over it. And redemption consists not in a program of escape and individual immortality, but in one of compassionate identification with a creaturely community that suffers, enjoys, and endures. Thus DeLillo's privileged protagonists-Pammy in Players, James Axton in The Names, even J. A. K. Gladney in White Noise-make their ways down out of isolation, crippling anxiety, and illusion into concrete, communal spaces that are simultaneously carnal, incomplete, and profoundly, if obscurely, consoling, while Pynchon's-Slothrop in Gravity's Rainbow, Zoyd and other post-sixties refugees in Vineland-find their ways back into spiritually charged relationships with the natural cosmos, community, and time that simultaneously sustain them and reconcile them to their mortality. The spirituality of these and other contemporary texts represents itself, then, not as an alternative to worldliness but as a life-affirming and profoundly worldly alternative to the psychologically alienating and ecologically destructive pseudo-worldliness of secular rationality. This emerging counter-spirituality, which shapes the political imagination and practice of many people in contemporary communities of opposition, has received little attention in literary and cultural studies, but versions of it are being articulated everywhere in contemporary fiction, sometimes quite starkly, sometimes in ways that reflect a characteristically postmodern suspicion of any totalizing narrative, any celebration of a center.

But to limit discussion of these texts to accounts of their postmodern and ecospiritual elements would be obscure much of what is difficult and disturbing about them and the cultural movement of which they are a part. Criticism needs to explore, for instance, the relation of contemporary literary spirituality to the spiritualites of literary modernism, [End Page 157] but also to reflect on its relation to the exhaustion of modernism and existentialism in the early sixties. Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, which traces the movement of Mucho and Oedipa Mas out of existentialist dead ends (Oedipa lives in an "exitless" world of privilege, Mucho works under a sign that reads "N.A.D.A.") into realms of "miracle," suggests that the new spiritualities represent a refusal of modernist-existentialist pessimism. (Mircea Eliade has made a similar argument in an important essay on the popularity of Teilhard de Chardin in the early sixties.) To write the intellectual history of the last forty years in this way is of course to call attention to a glaring division of interest between writers and readers of fiction on the one hand and academic critics on the other: the one community turns away from existentialism to the new spiritualities, the other to poststructuralism. But perhaps this split, if it occurred, is not as sharp as I have just suggested. One could also write a more dialogic narrative of intellectual life in the last third of the century, one in which the new spiritualities and poststructuralism would be seen as addressing some similar issues and producing-in the work of some of our best writers-new and less dogmatic forms of spirituality.

This is not to suggest, however, that all of the experiments in resacralization underway in contemporary fiction can be comfortably accommodated under the signs of ecological sensitivity or poststructural respect for difference. It is important to recognize that it is possible "to resist domination and theorize about it" (Nandy 268) in the language of the new spiritualities. But it is equally important to assess the risks and costs of the project. I am unpersuaded and deeply

troubled, for instance, by the discursive shift, most dramatically effected by Reed, Silko, and Pynchon, that reconstrues all power as a form of "magic." Cultural theorists like George Bataille and Michael Taussig have of course done fascinating work on this very terrain, attempting to blur the distinction between magic and economic, magic and science. But the privileging of magic as a master term for forms of power still strikes me as profoundly problematic. To represent Europe at mid-century as a culture "in the last weary stages of its perversion of magic" (277), as Pynchon does fairly consistently throughout Gravity's Rainbow, opens the way in that text for demonizing dismissals, apocalyptic thinking, and programs of magical empowerment that reject any movements for change that operate within the space of traditional politics and modes of persuasion. [End Page 158] Thus Gravity's Rainbow ends, if I read the final episodes correctly, with a terrifying representation of global nuclear war as a cleansing operation that will destroy the perversely magical "order of Analysis and Death" (722) and make room for a wholesomely magical reanimation of the world: "a face on ev'ry mountainside,/And a Soul in ev'ry stone" (760). Pynchon is too critically reflective to let such a naive romance stand uncontested; but he is sufficiently taken with it to invoke it in the crucial closing passage of his novel.

I find myself similarly unpersuaded by Silko's version of history (in Ceremony) as a struggle between "the witchery"-which may have created the white race as its vehicle-and their benign adversaries. And Reed's depiction of history in Mumbo Jumbo as a centuries long war between the "Atonist conspiracy" and its earthier, more anarchistic adversaries is as sharply polarizing as Pynchon's, which it may well have influenced. One is free, of course, to take all these magical modelings as metaphorical and strategically perverse: as ways to frame the struggle between modernizing Europe and its adversaries in a manner that does not assume the veracity of Europe's secular knowledge system. But the modeling exerts its own power, whether strategically deployed or not, and the power it exerts returns us to ways of thinking that have been plausibly challenged by secularism.

I am drawn up short, as well, when I find Don DeLillo arguing that the forces behind Kennedy's assassination may have originated beyond politics and history. Talking with an interviewer about the historical events he treats in Libra, DeLillo asserts that Oswald's attempt to kill General Walker was "a strictly political act." But, he continues, "Oswald's attempt on Kennedy was more complicated. I think it was based on elements outside politics and, as someone in the novel says, outside history-things like dreams and coincidences and even the movement or the configuration of the stars, which is one reason the book is called Libra" (289 SAQ).

In 1988, when the interview occurred, a Gallup poll of Americans' religious beliefs found that only 12% of adults, but 58% of teenagers, believed in astrology; this was also the year when the role of astrology in the Reagan White House was revealed (Gallup 32-34). I shuddered then at the thought of an administration run by horoscope, and I balk today at the thought of an historical imagination that locates inexorable order and agency at such a distance. If the religious imagination of one of [End Page 159] our finest novelists is taking such turns, we may all live to regret what Richard Falk calls "the resurgence of religion as a political force" (83).

Falk, a highly respected Princeton political scientist, explores this resurgence in a recent essay. He argues that secular modernism, its appeal eroded by modern warfare, the nuclear threat, ecological depredations, and the perceived deterioration of the social fabric, is "losing its hold over the cultural imagination." In reaction to its weakening, he writes, "a dynamic of cross-penetration is underway between politics and religion, producing a series of developments that

can be either constructive (liberationist) or destructive (fundamentalist)." Through this cross-penetration, "politics is being reinfused with religious symbols and claims, [and] religion is being summoned to the trenches of popular struggle" (98).

If Falk's analysis is correct, and I think it is, then politically engaged cultural and literary critics in particular need to be paying closer attention to the spiritual projects of postmodern fiction, recognizing them as manifestations of powerful discursive shifts in the broader culture, a culture increasingly committed to understanding human experience in religious ways and deeply divided about how to do so. Some critics, I suspect, will turn their attention to these matters only to urge, once again, the abolition of all forms of "superstition." But others, surely, will be ready to acknowledge the stubborn endurance of the spiritual imagination and to engage the new discourses more sympathetically.

I don't want to end this essay, however, with an argument from political obligation. For if the texts I have been discussing are preoccupied with spirituality, if the questions they explore, the discourses they deploy and remake (and in which they invest their hopes) are frequently spiritual or religious, then attending to these preoccupations, investments, and discursive urgencies will make the experience of reading them richer and more productively troubling. And it will vitalize the work of criticism, too: for the resurgence of spirituality offers criticism yet another opportunity to think again, to recognize and respond to developments it did not for the most part anticipate, and cannot, as yet, perhaps ever, discuss with precision or confidence. "I have no language for what I am beginning to see," exclaimed a colleague exploring these developments and unready to resort to the old master discourses, secular or sacred, to explain them. And this is precisely the case. For we [End Page 160] find ourselves, like the writers we study, caught up in a reaching; and we are-as postmoderns-wary of grasping.

JOHN A. MCCLURE is author of Kipling and Conrad: the Colonial Fiction (1981) and Late Imperial Romance (1994). He is Professor of English at Rutgers University and is currently working on a study of contemporary literary and popular spir itualities.

Notes

1. Pynchon criticism is rich in studies of the spiritual dimension of his work. See for instance Mendelson, Hite, Weisenburger, Eddins, LeClair, and Porush. LeClair and Porush, particulalry, recognize that Pynchon's engagement with spirituality is inflected by postmodern styles of thought; other critics either ignore this aspect of his thought or try (Eddins) to capture Pynchon for modernism.

2. Among the many scholars who mark, trace, and attempt to understand the religious resurgence of the past thirty years are Robert Bellah, Harvey Cox, Robert J. Ellwood, Martin Green, Erling Jorstad, and Wade Clark Roof. William F. McLoughlin draws the connection between the sixities period and earlier periods of "awakening," as does Ellwood in his more recentThe Sixties Spiritual Awakening. Cox studies the "oriental religious revival" (11) of the period in Turning East. Roof, focusing on religious trends in the eighties, sees the continuation of earlier developments: "Religious and spiritual themes," he writes, continue to "surface in a rich variety of ways-in Eastern religions, in evangelical and fundamentalist teachings, in mysticism and New Age movements, in Goddess worship and other ancient religious rituals, in the mainline churches and

synagogues" (4-5). Like the others, he sees growing interest both in fundamentalism and in exploratory styles of spirituality that emphasize practice over doctrine, creative reinvention and hybridity over traditionalism and purity.

3. Gallup polls taken in 1988 indicate that 94% of Americans believe in God or a universal spirit (4), while some 80% believe in miracles (10). Almost 70% of the respondents to Wade Roof's survey, also conducted in 1988, expressed a belief in "psychic powers" (85). Yet the Gallup poll found no rise in the percentage of religiously preoccupied Americans between 1960 and 1988; the resurgence of spirituality noted by many seems by this reckoning to be more a matter of growing spiritual intensity and visibility than of growing numbers. Thus aNewsweek poll conducted in November of 1994 found that "a majority of Americans (58%) say they feel the need to experience spiritual growth" (54).

4. Native American scholars have recognized the similarities between Native American narrative practices, traditional and contemporary, and certain postmodern practices. See Vizenor and Gunn Allen.

5. See for instance Paula Gunn Allen's essay, "Special Problems in Teaching Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony" and Ward Churchill's Fantasies of the Master Race.

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---. Players. 1977. New York: Vintage, 1989.

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