Postsecularism and a Prophetic Sensibility

Recent fiction signals a shift in orientation with regard to the religious. Many contemporary novels depict the performance of a "turning" in the lives of characters or the introduction of moments of mystery and religious possibility, such as those found in the works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. In other novels, characters who already espouse some religious belief take up secular challenges to religion by reconsidering religious assumptions, toying with the practice of faith, attempting to rebuild religion afresh, or placing an existing tradition alongside other faith systems in a syncretistic articulation of belief. Yann Martel, E. L. Doctorow, Cynthia Ozick, Marilynne Robinson, and Toni Morrison are among the authors engaged in these kinds of activity. John McClure has dubbed this manifestation of the turn to the religious, "the postsecular." Ina 1995 article in Modern Fiction Studies, McClure described the period of "resacralization" in contemporary fiction and theory as a movement toward religious ways of knowing. McClure complicates accounts of the postmodern, like Frederic Jameson's and Jean-Francois Lyotard's, contesting their claim that the postmodern is already secular, and even post-religious. (1) McClure notes, as Linda Hutcheon's account of postmodernity suggests, that the secular strand of the postmodern is rivaled by a different strand, which allows for a different kind of reading than the one privileged by critics who assume secular constructions of the postmodern. He points to the "presencing" (using Homi Bhaba's term) of religious discourses in some postmodern fiction, including Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. (2) The postsecular shift has only intensified in the years since McClure first published on the subject. (3) Currently, postsecularism in literature describes a marked increase in the production of novels involving "journeys of the soul" (Ford S6-S7). In December of 2007, McClure published Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison, the first full-length book devoted to the subject of contemporary postsecular fiction. In the preface, he defines postsecularism as "a mode of being and seeing that is at once critical of secular constructions of reality and of dogmatic religiosity" (ix). Postsecular narratives, he writes, suggest the need for a "religiously inflected disruption of secular constructions of the real," yet they refuse, for the most part, to endorse any single religious discourse (3). Postsecular thinkers, for McClure, neither reject the religious a priori nor do they accept existing interpretations of the religious a priori. I argue that the postsecular can be characterized as a "prophetic" turn, as the notion is elucidated in Martin Buber's writings. Martin Buber, who wrote in the first half of the twentieth century, called for a renewal of the religious to counter the prevalent secularism of his age. (4) In works such as I and Thou and On the Bible, Buber urged not a return to existing models of the religious but a turn toward unmediated relation with the divine. Buber's renewalism, and in particular his interest in the prophetic, can help us to think out the shift of orientation through which we seem to be moving, and especially the literary writing now characterized as postsecular. In his article, "The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible," Buber articulates a definition of prophetic reading. Buber states that man must read the Jewish Bible as though it were something entirely unfamiliar, as though it had not been set before him ready-made, as though he has not been confronted all his life with sham concepts and sham statements that cited the Bible as their authority. He must face the Book with a new attitude as something new. (5) Buber posits a practice of reading scripture in the context of one's "historical hour" and undertakes to move biblical reading from a tripartite relation (which is arbitrated by convention) to a bipartite relation (which involves unmediated contact with the divine) ("Prophecy"). …