with David Mahan

Christina Bieber Lake is the Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College and author of the recently published “Beyond the Story: American Literary Fiction and the Limits of Materialism” (Notre Dame 2019).

Among the many issues that Christian scholars of literature consider in their work, an engagement with the dominant philosophical outlooks of the age presents a constant challenge. Because a wide range of outlooks inevitably find expression in our literary imagination, scholars rightly feel obligated to comment on these in their own critical responses―much the way that Dante scholars contemplate the impact of medieval theology on the poet’s vision or readers of Sartre and Camus consider how Existentialist sensibilities come to be expressed or embodied in their works.

In this issue of Among Winter Cranes we interview one literary scholar whose criticism seeks to engage some of the dominant outlooks of our present moment. Christina Bieber Lake, Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College, exemplifies efforts to generate conversations between literature, religion, and contemporary philosophy. Her book Prophets of the Posthuman: American Fiction, Biotechnology, and the Ethics of Personhood (Notre Dame 2014) asked how works of fiction confront the ethical dilemmas that emerge from new versions of the human, especially as these arise from rapid advances in biogenetic experimentation. In her more recent work, Beyond the Story: American Literary Fiction and the Limits of Materialism (Notre Dame 2019), Professor Lake extends this interest in human nature and the dignity of persons as these find expression in the works of some of the leading novelists of our time, offering a pointed critique of sociobiology as a dominant framework for these urgent questions. We asked her to share with us the inspiration for this work and how it directs our attention to the kinds of concerns Christian scholars of literature need to engage in their own critical practices.

DM: Thank you Christina for your willingness to do this interview at the end of what has been a challenging year for us all. I want to first ask you about the catalyst for this book. What spurred you to write about this particular framework of materialism through the lens of contemporary American fiction?

CBL: There’s a way in which all of my scholarly work has been animated by one central question: what difference does the Incarnation make to the way we should interpret what happens to us in our bodies and what we do with them? Gnosticism is woven into American culture in so many ways, and with it comes the discrediting both of one’s individual body and the body of the world as a reliable way to see God. Scientific naturalism is one outcropping of Gnosticism: the natural world is all there is, there is no God, so just make your own meaning out of your life. I believe instead that artists of all sorts discover God-given meaning in the body of the world—they don’t just make it up. So, I wanted to argue that fiction inherently defies materialism because it insists that the universe is personal and meaningful. How we live in it matters. If it were not so, we would not care. Fiction writers can be all kinds of things and have all kinds of goals, but what they cannot be is indifferent. Those who try to be the exception to that only prove the rule.

DM: There are numerous efforts to approach literary criticism with an eye to the philosophical outlooks and sensibilities found in our culture. I imagine a kind of triangular relationship between literature, science (and scientism), and religion (one of your abiding frameworks). Why do you feel it is important for literary scholarship to bring all of these elements together and in particular to include philosophical reflection in their work? Is there a risk of overwhelming the fiction with this look “beyond the story”?

CBL: Walker Percy was among the first Christian novelists to understand that scientism has become the view of the so-called “man on the street” in America. What this means is that even in the Church people look to technoscience first for solutions to their problems—a kind of practical atheism. Both he and Flannery O’Connor wanted readers to wake up and recognize that what we do with our bodies affects our souls. More importantly, both novelists understood that people tend not to recognize that scientism is the air they breathe, and that we often refuse to open to the possibility that we may not be actually listening to God’s voice when it comes to the question of how we should live here. Fiction, like all art, is really the best and most shocking way of asking readers to pay attention to what they might be ignoring: that there is something in the world that is important for you to see rightly and responsibly. You are not the center of the universe, but you matter to God. Like Pascal said: “It is dangerous to show man too clearly how much he resembles the beast, without at the same time showing him his greatness. It is also dangerous to allow him too clear a vision of his greatness without his baseness. It is even more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both.” I think fiction lives exactly in the space in between those dangers.

DM: Why did you decide upon these particular literary authors and thinkers as those well-suited for this study?

CBL: I chose these writers because I have been teaching them for years and I know their work well. I have always believed that close reading should be the center of what we do in literary studies, so I needed to narrow the field in some way. But my argument could have been made about almost any group of fiction writers at any time—except perhaps writers of mythology or fables. Some of the writers I chose precisely because they were known for the atheism—Philip Roth, for example. I wanted to make it clear that if I am correct about what motivates storytelling, the particular views of the artist don’t matter at all. Because of how fiction works, the artist pays attention to the world in its individual particularity in an act that is best described as an act of love. Thus fiction is best described theologically. The artist looks at creation and calls it good. Fallen, but good. Worthy of attention. And worthy, ultimately, of dying for. My epigraph is thus from Jacques Maritain: “The artist, whether he knows it or not, consults God in looking at things.”

DM: You have mentioned that you were surprised to find little critical interest in this book so far. Why do you think the reception has been less engaged than you expected?

CBL: Well, any book published at the end of 2019 ran into the pandemic and the problems it created. Anyone who may have been lined up to review it suddenly had a lot of other concerns. But I would be remiss not to mention that in the discipline of literary studies you can write from almost any other perspective except a theological one—especially if you actually believe in the God that you think literature inherently points to. I tried to publish with other university presses before I went back to UND press, hoping to gain a bigger audience. I quickly discovered that they would have taken the book if it were written for their theology collections, but they would not take it for their literary studies collections. I suspect it’s because they knew how most secular reviewers would respond.

DM: What are some of the hoped-for outcomes you imagine for this book, perhaps as a catalyst for further literary-critical projects or in terms of provoking changes in our perspective? Because our journal maintains an abiding interest in the shaping of a Christian poetics, as you know, what kinds of Christian literary-critical practices does this book model, which you find important to those broader ambitions?

CBL: I wrote this book so that Christian students of literature could recognize that the doctrines of the Incarnation, the Imago Dei, creation, and the Trinity all speak to what happens when we write and when we read fiction. All of these doctrines help us to see what is really going on when we tell stories. All of them help us to see why and how a work of art speaks to us, works in us, changes us. Jens Zimmerman uses the term “Incarnational Humanism” to describe how theology gives us a deep understanding that the goodness of the created world is bent toward revealing the image of God in persons. Artists discover that—or they try to fight against it, which is also important. I’m thinking about Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Snow Man” here. I’ve been thinking about that poem for thirty years. He can only write it in defiance of what we know, deep down, to be true: that there is something there in the landscape that did not simply come from my imagination. And that the something that is there points to a creator.

DM: Thank you again for taking the time to do this. I trust it will encourage more readers to check out this timely and fascinating study!

CBL: Truly my pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity.

Christina Bieber Lake

Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English, Wheaton College
christina.lake@wheaton.edu

David Mahan

Lecturer in Religion and Literature, Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Yale Divinity School
Co-Director, Rivendell Center for Theology and the Arts
david.mahan@yale.edu