Chapter Eight
Literary Secularism After 9/11: Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America and Orhan Pamuk’s Snow
No one who's even slightly westernized can breathe free in the country unless they have a secular army protecting them, and no one needs this protection more than intellectuals who think they're better than everyone else and look down on other people.
—Orhan Pamuk, Snow
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it was a commonplace in the United States to hear that “9/11 changes everything.” And indeed, in the political landscape of the U.S. at least, there was a pronounced rightward lurch, as many left-leaning critics stood behind the Bush Administration’s aggressive response to the attacks and supported the goals (and methods) of the “War on Terror.” More recently, the perceived exceptionalism of 9/11 as a historical event has come into question, and the mantra that “9/11 changes everything” no longer seems quite as clear, especially to critics of the British and American administrations’ apparent circumvention of international law in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But if the laws or the principles behind those laws have not in fact changed, it may be the case that there is something different in the status of secularism as a political idea in some Western contexts. Specifically, it appears that the Western liberal consensus regarding civil and human rights, the separation of powers, and the handling of intellectual dissent has been shaken up and realigned. In the United States in particular, the idea of separation of church and state, which had been to some extent judicially resolved since the 1940s, have reentered the public sphere, with intense controversies over the official display of the Ten Commandments, the teaching of Creationism in schools, and the language of the Pledge of Allegiance. The separation of Church and State is also an issue in both the abortion debate and gay rights debates, as the conservative stigma on practices such as abortion and gay marriage derives its righteous morality from the Christian framework. In the mass media, commentators such as Bill O’Reilly have demonized the “secularists” who reject Christian values as the basis for the American legal system.
These unprecedented frontal attacks on secularism in the United States, which has for decades had a seemingly rock-solid secular governmental framework in place in the Jeffersonian idea of “separation of Church and State,” have not yet been fully acknowledged by social theorists. In fact, the kind of direct critique of the longstanding secular consensus one sees in the arguments of popular commentators like Bill O’Reilly puts pressure on the emerging “post-secular” theories that have appeared in recent years. One of the most prominent critics of secularism in the Foucauldian vein is Talal Asad, whose Formations of the Secular aims to offer the definitive critique of the liberal theories on secularism and secularization articulated by Charles Taylor and Jose Casanova. For Asad, state secularism is not worth defending because it is inherently bound up in state coercion, even in liberal democracies. Asad objects to Taylor’s presumption of the individual access to institutions of liberal governance the unmediated “empty time” of the modern nation-state. As Asad puts it,
The distinctive feature of modern liberal governance, I would submit, is neither compulsion (force) nor negotiation (consent) but the statecraft that uses “self-discipline” and “participation,” “law” and “economy” as elements of political strategy. . . Taylor’s statement about participation is not, so one could argue, the way most individuals in modern state-administered populations justify governance. It is the way ideological spokespersons theorize “political legitimacy.”
For Asad, in every modern democratic system there are many layers of mediation in play, nullifying the direct access to real power that is so central to the idea of liberalism as articulated by liberal theorists like Charles Taylor. If the mass media and the corporate interests control the politicians, the liberal insistence on a separation of Church and State seems beside the point. But the ground has shifted as the stridency of the right has grown in the U.S. and elsewhere. In fact, as the old liberal secularist consensus is directly challenged by a new wave of religious conservatives, the Foucauldian approaches that deemphasize individual agency in light of the systematic structures of power seem to lose their efficacy and purpose. Liberal approaches to organizing society may be imperfect, and liberal democracy’s secularism may not be entirely free from state coercion, but that form of secularism still seems generally preferable to theocratic ones.
A healthy culture of political secularism need not be based on statist directives (indeed, as we will see in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, such an approach is riddled with problems), nor on lofty, quasi-metaphysical political concepts such as “liberty” and “democracy.” Indeed, the “overlapping consensus” between secular humanists and Evangelical Christians that was so important in the formation of the U.S. Constitution remains a quite viable concept today. As Taylor points out in his essay “Modes of Secularism,” the original idea of a “separation between Church and State” was implemented by Thomas Jefferson, first in Virginia and then nationally, as a pragmatic compromise designed to ensure a stronger union, not to assert secularist idealism. Of course, the historical example of the United States has limits, as it first emerged when the most “liberal” mainstream position was Theism; direct expressions of atheism or dramatically different eastern religions were not factors. For Taylor, the overlapping consensus concept is the absolute minimum rubric under which contemporary secularists and the religiously devout can hope to sustain a polity at the present moment:
The problem with the historical common ground is that it assumes that everyone shares some religious grounds for the norms regulating the public sphere, even if these are rather general: non-denominational Christianity, or only Biblical theism, or perhaps only some mode of post-Enlightenment Deism. But even this latter is asking too much of today’s diversified societies. The only thing we can hope to share is a purely political ethic.
To give a practical example of “overlapping consensus” in action, imagine a radical atheist and a highly conservative Muslim immigrant in England or the United States trying to define “secularism.” They may have close to no metaphysical or philosophical beliefs in common; fundamental ideas of individual liberty, the democratic process, or separation of spheres, may not lead to any kind of fruitful discussion on how to understand the role of religion in public life between the two. All that they will share will be what Taylor calls a “purely political ethic,” which is to say, they share the desire to be allowed to organize their lives in peace. A religiously devout member of a minority fears restrictions on his right to practice, while an atheist fears restrictions on her right not to practice. Insofar as the two goals overlap, secularism may be possible.
Attempts to insist on secularism on principle have, in recent years, lost ground to religious conservatism in both the United States and India. Critics such as Noah Feldman have even suggested that it’s the very modernist intolerance of secularist principles that has provoked and inspired the new religious movements. A sense that “secularism has gone too far” has hardened and politicized the religious sensibilities of many people who, in the recent past, may have had only passive or latent ties to a sense of religious community. The change in tenor is not merely American. Indeed, the post-secular backlash now seems evident in a number of different national contexts, leading one to think that 9/11 may indeed be a marker (if an accidental one) of the globalization of the crisis in secularism. The Muslim community in the UK has grown increasingly strident in response to the joint American and British invasion of Iraq in 2003, to the extent that Parliament has passed laws for the first time forbidding the glorification of terrorism as well as “incitement of religious hatred.” And, as is widely known, France has moved to ban the wearing of religious scarves and turbans in schools, government jobs, and on identification cards. Subsequently, and mostly unrelatedly, France has faced widespread rioting in the heavily immigrant and Muslim suburbs of several major cities—suggesting that French concepts of national and secular identity are still in process. Moreover, in Turkey, the constitutionally mandated secularism created by Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s has also been challenged with the rise of a moderate Islamist party to political dominance in 2003. Islamicization is also for the first time becoming a major political plank in previously secular countries like Malaysia; and it is rampant in sub-Saharan Africa.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to respond to all of these (and other) crises in great detail. Writers have, of course, been responding to these various developments, some of them directly—one thinks of Salman Rushdie’s biting essays on the growing emphasis on teaching creationism in schools in the Midwestern U.S., though others have mainly focused on expressing their discontent in their literary works.
This essay will consider two illustrative cases of literary secularism in the current global conjuncture, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America and Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. My purpose is not to pose Roth and Pamuk as secularist authors in general comparison to one another; they are in fact so different from one another as authors that it’s not clear that general comparisons would be very fruitful. However, these two novels have certain commonalities that are worth exploring. Both novels can, for one thing, be characterized as “postmodern metafiction,” in the sense that they have self-conscious narrators who are (and are not) extensions of the real author behind the text. Orhan Pamuk’s novel has “Orhan,” who follows Ka’s path to the border town of Kars to try and unravel the mystery of his friend’s murder at the hand of Islamists some years after Ka had himself gone there, ostensibly to learn about a group of “headscarf girls” who had been committing suicide after being denied the right to wear the Hijab at school. Philip Roth’s novel, for its part, has “Philip Roth,” whose childhood experience in a heavily Jewish neighborhood in New Jersey resembles that of the real Philip Roth fairly closely.
The first-person narrators add a dimension of realism and narrative authenticity in both texts, which becomes all the more important given that both of these works contain counterfactual versions of recent history. Pamuk invents an incident of dramatic violence occurring at a theater in the (real) border town of Kars in eastern Turkey. In some sense the event, which will be described in greater detail below, is plausible, though it is tied to coincidences and doublings that are either highly implausible or completely metaphysical. Roth invents an alternate macro-history—a Charles Lindbergh victory in the Presidential election of 1940—in order to reflect on the myriad ways in which the American legacy of anti-Semitism is much deeper than many people think. But it also seems fruitful to read Roth’s novel, which was published in 2004, in light of the rampant violations of civil liberties in the U.S. system following 9/11. It may or may not be, strictly speaking, an “allegory,” but at the very least it provokes serious questions about the future of secularism in a United States dominated by fear of terrorism, xenophobia, and suspicion of the newer religious minorities.
Both novels are examples of literary secularism at the present moment. If read as I propose to read it, Roth’s novel is a powerful critique of the real danger of an American slide into authoritarianism. Pamuk, too is engaged with authoritarianism—really two authoritarianisms that seem to mirror one another. One is the Islamist and theocratic perspective that has emerged from the political underground in Turkey. The other is the authoritarian face of state secularism, which seems as restrictive of personal freedoms as the Islamic fundamentalist ideology it opposes. Neither novel offers an easy solution to the problems it poses, though both suggest that deconstruction of the dialectical contest between “enemy” and “friend” (and concomitantly, “religious orthodoxy” and “secularism”), must be an essential part of some future restoration of liberal humanism.
Orhan Pamuk’s Snow
As a way of introducing the metafictional critique at the heart of Snow, let us conduct a small thought experiment: imagine a “provocative” Broadway play about the U.S. use of torture in detention centers like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. In this imaginary play, a volunteer is requested from the audience, someone who preferably identifies himself as a “devout Muslim.” The volunteer is brought on stage and subjected to stage torture, as a way of shocking the audience, but also of using the horror produced by a direct representation of an unacceptable practice as a form of argument against that practice.
Further, let us add in a “Pamuk-esque” twist: imagine that the regular actors are all abducted one night and hidden away, and in their stead are American CIA agents who have become obsessed with this particular play, and seen it night after night, memorizing it entirely. When the agent-actors get their volunteer, the torture seen on stage is not a simulation, but actual torture. The audience sees blood, hears screams, and a look of utterly convincing terror on the man’s face. It’s disturbing, certainly, but few, if any audience members imagine that it could possibly be anything other than the most powerful realism. At the end, there is an overwhelming standing ovation; the audience is truly “moved,” and more angry at the government’s use of torture in interrogations than ever. But of course, as they watched the torture they were completely involved in the action, enjoying it utterly. The applause is for the quality and intensity of the performance, as much as it is for the ostensible politics of the play.
The audience is roused, but what does it learn from watching this display? Possibly, nothing it wouldn’t have also known from watching an excellent fake version of the same thing. Or maybe it doesn’t matter: the real issue is the theory of theater that drove the diabolical CIA agents to do what they did. Their goal, of course, was not to discourage a practice by showing it directly (which may or may not work, because of the addictive quality of the spectacle of violence), but to actually use the theater to cause harm to someone they did not like. Their playing the roles of actors-who-are-not-acting proves that even “real” (non-simulated) violence may be seen as a performance (whether it is performed in an interrogation room or on a public stage). At the same time, the obliviousness of the audience in the presence of the Real Thing raises questions about desensitization.
These divergent commentaries on the act of violence, on the one hand, and its representation, are also active, albeit in the specifically Turkish context, in Pamuk’s Snow. In Pamuk’s novel, two mindbending works of “theater” are performed during the course of events that constitute the novel’s present. The first is described as a piece of moldy nationalist propaganda, “My Fatherland or my Headscarf,” in which religious fanatics plot a conspiracy and are gunned down by the noble protectors of Turkish state. Only, in the surreal version of it that is actually performed in the novel, when the police (who are real police, acting under orders from a mad actor who has become a state official) gun down the fanatics they do not go after the actors on the stage, but the audience itself. They specifically target boys from the local religious high school in the audience, who are enthusiastically voicing their disapproval of the secularist play. The police rifles are loaded; a small secularist massacre ensues, which comes to be known as the Coup throughout the second half of the book.
There are a number of different components to Pamuk’s approach to the performance of secularism in works of art. One line of thought has to do with literary medium and authority—as Pamuk’s novel defines poetry, theater, and fiction as modes of art that come with their own, medium-specific theories of power. The protagonist of the novel is a modernist, atheist poet named Ka, who visits the small town of Kars to investigate the recent spell of suicides by young Muslim girls, in protest of the state ban on headscarfs in public settings, such as public schools. After a dry spell of many years, Ka is suddenly overtaken by poetic inspiration at numerous moments in the novel. Poems come to him like spells of nausea—from something or somewhere outside of himself (something perhaps divine or daemonic). But the poems are nevertheless utterly private and personal, and are never cited or interpreted in the novel.
On the question of the protagonist’s atheism there are certain overlaps between Snow and books like James Wood’s The Book Against God (and also, a bit more obliquely with The Satanic Verses). For Ka is a dedicated, lifelong atheist poet who has lived outside of Turkey for many years. But he has also lost the thread of his writerly inspiration, only to find, with a shock, that he has it again—but only after he engages in serious discussions about religious faith with the religiously devout inhabitants of Kars. For instance, Shortly after arriving in Kars in the midst of a major snowstorm, Ka is asked about what he thinks about the snow by a Sheikh whom he visits: “'The snow reminded me of God,' said Ka. ‘The snow reminded me of the beauty and mystery of creation, of the essential joy that is life.'” (96) It comes over him as an almost involuntary reflex that he can’t control or stop—rather along the lines of the demonic inspiration responsible for Gibreel Farishta’s attempt to tempt Mahound in Rushdie’s novel, or the haunted and symptomatic “Book Against God” that Tom Bunting is writing in Wood’s Book Against God.
And indeed, the longer Ka stays in Kars, the more the line between his secularist convictions and the town’s religiosity come to be blurred. Some of his statements on the question of religious belief are in fact surprisingly ambiguous, suggesting that a kind of personal religious revelation may be in the offing for Ka:
'I grew up in Istanbul, in Nisantas, among society people. I wanted to be like the Europeans. I couldn't see how I could reconcile my becoming a European with a God who required women to wrap themselves in scarves, so I kept religion out of my life. But when I went to Europe, I realized there could be an Allah who was different from the Allah of the bearded provincial reactionaries.'
'Do they have a different God in Europe?' asked the Sheikh jokingly. He patted Ka's back.
'I want a God who doesn't ask me to take off my shoes in his presence and who doesn't make me fall to my knees to kiss people's hands. I want a God who understands my need for solitude.'
'There is only one God,' said the Sheikh. 'He sees everything and understands everyone—even your need for solitude. If you believed in him, if you knew he understood your need for solitude, you wouldn't feel so alone.'
'That's very true, Your Excellency,' said Ka, feeling as if he were really speaking to everyone in the room. 'It's because I'm solitary that I can't believe in God. And because I can't believe in God, I can't escape from solitude. What should I do?'
Note that Ka isn’t declaring his atheism as a matter of personal conviction. Rather, the emphasis seems to be aesthetic and somewhat idiosyncratic—he wants a God who “understands [his] need for solitude.” Oddly enough, the Sheikh accepts this approach to religion to some extent, though he either rejects or doesn’t understand Ka’s desire to be alone. And Ka adds to the confusion by suggesting that his attitude to religion and his desire for solitude are overdetermined, and therefore unresolvable. Ka’s concept of God is the exact negative of Emile Durkheim’s in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. For Durkheim, religion is an image of society, and society is formed in the image of religion. For Ka, it is solitude that produces atheism, and atheism is always presumed (even when he thinks of God), which, in an increasingly religious society, leads him to a life of perpetual solitude and/or exile.
The interest in the secular and religious properties of poetry in Snow overlap with the novel’s reflexive concern with the nature and efficacy of fiction. In addition to the protagonist Ka, there is also a first-person narrator in Pamuk’s novel, named “Orhan,” who is following the trail of Ka’s experiences in the town of Kars some years later, and writing about it. Through Orhan, there is some discussion in the novel about the form of the novel. In contrast to both drama and poetry, novels are given both historical and anthropological authority—they have the power to describe the totality of a people or an event. Even if fictional, a novel is, in some sense, the most straightforwardly and widely “true” of the three literary forms. One of Ka’s interlocutors, a young man named Fazil, seems all too aware of this when he asks “Orhan” to insert a disclaimer in the novel he knows the latter is writing:
‘I did think of something, but you may not like it. . . If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I’d like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away.’
‘But no one believes in that way what he read in a novel,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, they do,’ he cried. ‘If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would put in what I’ve just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds.’
On the one hand, it is a mark of Fazil’s provincial simplicity—his stupidity—not to be able to comprehend the basic function of representation in art. He is a young man who was, earlier in the book at least, associated with the Islamists in the town, and perhaps his naiveté about the truth-value of “fiction” is tied to the trouble the very religious have with accepting any “representation” that deviates from the sacred, or that derives from any individual’s self-ascribed authority. On the other hand, with that naiveté comes an unmistakable respect for the work of art as a powerful linguistic agent.
The secularists in this novel are harried people, losing the battle against Islam in the countryside. The fantasy of a secularist play that becomes Absolute, and of a literary work that becomes Real, is in some sense a fantasy that the naïve view of Art (i.e., that Art is never fictional) might in fact be true after all. It is a way of thinking about representation where modern literature (which is by James Wood’s definition secular) embraces a kind of representationalist fundamentalism as the only effective way of communicating in a society in which representation is forbidden. The problem of efficacy not just a problem for artists living in environments consumed by religious fundamentalism. Indeed, it might just be a quintessentially modern/modernist problem, depending on how it’s framed.
With his depiction of the theater, Pamuk puts us in the domain of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, only with the secularists as Apollonian idealists and the Islamic fundamentalists as Dionysian realists whose “intoxication” comes from the destruction of all institutions of pleasure. Nietzsche isn’t mentioned in Pamuk’s novel, though there are some references to the “play to end all plays” that are reminiscent of Nietzsche’s concept of Dionysian excess. Pamuk refrains from offering any straightforward theory of theater or aesthetics in the discourse of the novel itself, though there is an intriguing reference to Hegel:
“It was Hegel who first noticed that history and theater are made of the same materials,’ said Sunay. ‘Remember: just as in the theater, history chooses those who play the leading roles. And just as actors put their courage to the test onstage, so too do the chosen few on the stage of history.’
Sunay, the speaker here, is the mad actor/state official who orders the actors in “My Fatherland or my headscarf” to be replaced by real police, carrying loaded weapons, who shoot down the religious fundamentalists in the audience. The play is, therefore, a public spectacle that doubles as a public act. It is an artistic representation of secularism that also enables to impose it by force, and “for real,” on the residents of the town.
A second play is performed by the same theatrical group, which decides to puts on a second play the following day, a Turkish adaptation of The Spanish Tragedy that Sunay Zaim calls The Tragedy in Kars. Here again, the line between reality and art are blurred. In the climactic scene of this play, Kadife, the “leader of the headscarf girls” in Kars bares her head and suggests she'll commit suicide, in exchange for the opportunity to kill Sunay Zaim, who planned the secularist massacre from the previous day’s performance. Kadife does in fact bare her head, but when she shoots Zaim with a revolver that has a clearly empty clip, he does in fact die:
As I have referred several times to the inspecting colonel sent by Ankara after things had returned to normal, my readers will have already deduced my indebtedness to this man and his detailed report on the stage coup; his own analysis of the gun scene confirms it was less a case of sleight of hand than actual magic. . . . There were, of course, many stories suggesting that Kadife did knowingly and willfully kill Sunay Zaim, and without his real permission; to refute these allegations, the inspecting colonel showed it would have been impossible for the young woman to have switched guns or to have replaced the empty clip with a loaded one so quickly. And so, despite the amazement Sunay's face registered with every shot, the fact remains that searches carried out by the armed forces, the inventory of Kadife's personal effects at the time of her arrest, and even the video recording of the performance all confirm that she was in possession of only one gun and one clip. . . . Kadife's last words ('I guess I killed him!') turned her into something of an urban legend; the inspecting colonel saw them as proof that this was not a case of premeditated murder. Perhaps out of consideration for the prosecutor who would open the trial, the colonel's report digressed to give a full discussion of premeditation, wrongdoing with intent, and other related legal and philosophical concepts; still, he wound up alleging that the true mastermind—the one who had helped Kadife memorize her lines and taught her the various maneuvers she would deftly perform—was none other than the deceased himself.
In effect, though there’s every indication that Kadife murders Sunay Zaim after baring her head (on his orders), there’s no physical evidence to support it. The only possible conclusion is that Sunay Zaim planned this second play as a kind of elaborate self-sacrifice (a secularist “shahid”!), which fits the doublings and reversals that blur the line between the religious and secular in the novel as a whole. The depiction on stage is intended to show the headscarf girl’s revenge against the imposition of a particular interpretation of state secularism, reflecting what the audience might see as Kadife’s true desires if not her true intention. The act that is actually performed has the effect of partially vindicating Sunay Zaim’s earlier sacrificial violence, but its seemingly Islamic encoding (i.e., as martyrdom) suggests the impossibility—and ideologically, the futility—of either absolute secularism or an absolutist interpretation of Islam in the Turkish context.
In Snow, the chief terrorist (“Blue”) isn’t especially violent, whereas the most passionate secularist creates elaborate justifications for acts of terrorism. Reflecting the reality of the Turkish countryside, in this town secularists are a shrinking minority, tyrannized by the religious-minded majority. For a secularist to be killed by a “headscarf girl” turns the Islamists’ pursuit of martyrdom on its head. As Sunay tells Ka earlier in the novel, justifying his mad action in the massacre of the first play:
Those religious high school boys you saw in the cells today have your face permanently etched in their memories. They'll throw bombs at anyone and anything; they don't care as long as they are heard. And furthermore, since you read a poem during the performance, they'll assume you were in on the plot. No one who's even slightly westernized can breathe free in the country unless they have a secular army protecting them, and no one needs this protection more than intellectuals who think they're better than everyone else and look down on other people. If it weren't for the army, the fanatics would be turning their rusty knives on the lot of them and their painted women and chopping them all into little pieces. But what do these upstarts do in return? They cling to their little European ways and turn up their affected little noses at the very soldiers who guarantee their freedom.'
In effect, the secularists are desperate—and are increasingly forced to use anti-democratic means to support their agenda. But even a madman like Sunay Zaim probably has a point when he talks about the reign of violence and intolerance that will ensue once the Islamists take full control. But this kind of justification can only be practiced for so long before it becomes absurd.
Pamuk doesn’t offer a compromise pattern or a theory of secularism that might bridge the two positions. Instead, the pattern of doubling and the destruction of the self comes to a rather dark conclusion, which is to say, suicide—Sunay Zaim’s, Kedife’s, and Ka’s. Suicide is, in Pamuk’s novel, an act of power and assertion. And it may be gendered, based on the conversation that immediately precedes the shooting of Sunay Zaim:
'May I again insist that you explain to me why you wish to kill yourself?' said Sunay.
'It's not a question anyone can really answer,' said Kadife.
'What do you mean?'
'If a person knew exactly why she was committing suicide and could state her reasons openly, she wouldn't have to kill herself,' said Kadife.
'No! It's not like that at all,' said Sunay. 'Some people kill themselves for love; others kill because they can't bear their husbands' beatings any longer or because poverty is piercing them to the bone, like a knife.'
'You have a very simple way of looking at life,' said Kadife. 'A woman who wants to kill herself for love still knows that if she waits a little her love will fade. Poverty's not a real reason for suicide either. And a woman doesn't have to commit suicide to escape her husband; all she has to do is steal some of his money and leave him.'
'Very well, then, what is the real reason?'
'The main reason women commit suicide is to save their pride. At least that's what most women kill themselves for.'
'You mean they've been humiliated by love?'
'You don't understand a thing!' said Kadife. 'A woman doesn't commit suicide because she's lost her pride, she does it to show her pride. . . . Women kill themselves because they hope to gain something . . . Men kill themselves because they've lost hope of gaining something.'
This passage brings us back to the concerns of the previous chapter, specifically the question of women’s rights in the face of patriarchal repression. Here, however, the oppressor isn’t the male-dominated religious hierarchy, but the male-dominated secularist state, which refuses to allow Kedife to wear her Hijab publicly. She’s announced her suicidal intentions (which she knows full well go against the ideals of the Islam to which she is committed), and then, in the passage above, defends her decision to commit suicide with a feminist reference to women’s pride. As with many other debates in Pamuk’s novel, this one is mired in paradoxes about performativity and negation. It seems Kedife wants to commit suicide not simply to negate her life because others have restricted her self-expression, but to insist (positively) on her ability to express herself even if that self-expression has been forbidden. The act is still a performance, still theatrical, and as such is, in Pamuk’s ledger, a kind of positive assertion.
Philip Roth’s Plot Against America
Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America contains some of the same logical puzzles and interpretive traps as Snow, though it is on the whole somewhat more transparent. One is Roth’s creation of a counterfactual history, in which the anti-Semitic celebrity Charles Lindbergh succeeds in winning the Presidency in 1940, riding a surge of anti-war sentiment and latent American anti-Semitism. Roth’s nightmare vision stands on its own, and is given support by the Appendix to the novel, composed of true historical documents pertaining to Lindbergh. But it also pointedly resembles the Presidency of George W. Bush. There are, to begin with, entertaining parallels in the personalities of the real President Bush and the imagined President Lindbergh (both are almost comically taciturn), but it’s the serious parallels that are salient for our purposes. Lindbergh’s anti-Jewish directives lead to a state of fear and division within the Jewish community, which is also a consequence (in the real world) of the crackdown on Muslim immigrants taking place in the U.S. today under the Patriot Act. Roth’s book also mirrors some of the aspects of Jewish recognition and identity that can be seen in a long tradition of representation of Jews in Anglo-American contexts, including George Eliot’s 1876 novel Daniel Deronda. The phenomenon I refer to as “Jewish recognition” is a way of identifying (and stigmatizing) a religious minority, but it also, I find, operates within the community through a specifically Jewish version of W.E.B. DuBois’ “double consciousness.”
The Politics of Fear
Up until it’s reversed at the surprise ending of the novel, one of the most intriguing elements of The Plot Against America is the ominous change in American society that doesn’t quite amount to fascism. Roth’s two political inventions—government programs created by the fictitious Lindbergh presidency—are the “Office of American Absorption” and a new “Homestead Act of 1942.” Both are voluntary programs, designed to assimilate specifically Jewish immigrants into mainstream American society. Both have the whiff of Nazism, without its ugly sting. The word “absorption” is particularly terrifying, as it suggests deracination by force.
But as I mentioned, the two programs instituted by the Lindbergh Presidency are voluntary ones, and the Jewish community in Roth’s novel is divided internally about whether to support them. Many do, and they find good reasons for doing so (aren’t the perils of ghettoization real, after all? isn’t the difference between “assimilation” and “absorption” trivial?). Others—like “Philip’s” father—don’t support the measures, and find themselves constantly waiting for the other shoe to fall. They seem paranoid, and the expectation is that they are right to be so.
However, in Roth’s novel, the excesses conjured by the specter of a Nazi sympathizer as an American President never quite materialize. Anti-democratic practices, such as the routine use of torture (or something approximating it) against detainees, have been naturalized. Also naturalized is the government policy of aggressive deportation against Muslim immigrants in the U.S., which subjects large segments of the immigrant population in the U.S. to life in a state of fear.
As with Roth’s novel, there is nothing illegal about what the government has done with these deportations. In every case, there has been shown to be something amiss with the deportee’s immigration status—an overstayed student visa being the most common culprit. But take the case of two teenage girls in New York who were detained in April of 2005. The FBI held them for six weeks in detention while questioning them, based on an essay one of the girls had written for a school assignment, as well as statements one of the girls had made in an Islamic internet chatroom. After six weeks in a holding cell and intensive interrogation, it was finally decided that, chatroom Jihad notwithstanding, the girls weren’t terrorists. Nevertheless, the Bangladeshi girl (Tashnuba) and her family were all deported in June. They had been in the U.S. for thirteen years (thirteen out of Tashnuba’s sixteen years), but they were illegal, and the deportation was fully legal.
As I said, the deportation of this family cannot be construed as “wrong,” but the conditions in which it occurred raise the question of whether the deportation is itself a form of punishment for Tashnuba’s strong views on Islam. Either way, the FBI’s extremely aggressive tactics produce a climate of fear in the immigrant community; people have to watch what they say, or run the risk of detainment and/or deportation. The fear of violating unspecified laws (or, following the Patriot Act, a litany of new laws), and the constant sense of having done something wrong merely by virtue of being different, do seem quite similar to the paranoid vision of America in Roth’s novel.
Jewish Recognition
Roth’s novel brings us full circle—that is, it brings us back to the questions of Jewish recognition and identity that were at issue in Chapter 2. For the debate within the Jewish community over assimilation is as important in the late Victorian world of George Eliot’s novel as it is in the counterfactual 1940s New Jersey of Roth’s Plot Against America. Deronda’s anxious reaction to being called out as a Jew before he has fully recognized it in himself is particularly relevant here: the sense of embarrassment at being recognized as a member of a stigmatized group, the fear and humiliation that defines the dominant religious community in the eyes of the minority. Eliot’s novel is a critique of the failure of true secularism in England, and to a great extent Roth’s book is a corollary in the American context.
There are scenes of Jewish recognition in The Plot Against America as well, especially in the “Loudmouth Jew” chapter early in the novel. In one particularly disturbing scene, the Roths are away from their predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, on a trip to the nation’s capital. Everywhere they go, they are seemingly recognized as Jews by mainstream (Christian) Americans, and it’s often unclear what is behind it. Perhaps it’s partly the name “Roth,” though if so one wonders why the hotel that eventually turns them out ever booked them to begin with. It might also be in their appearance; one of the most painful passages early in the book is the nine-year old Philip’s recognition that both he and his mother definitely “look Jewish”:
I began to pretend that I was following somebody on our bus who didn’t look Jewish. It was then that I realized . . . that my mother looked Jewish. Her hair, her nose, her eyes--my mother looked unmistakably Jewish. But then so must I, who so strongly resembled her. I hadn’t known.
Philip has learned to see himself the way non-Jews see him. With that realization, however, comes pain, as implicit in the capacity for Jewish recognition is the assumption that the difference that is suddenly unmistakable to Philip is something to be ashamed of.
This brings us back to the scene where the Roth family visits the Washington Monument, and get into an argument with a stranger who admires President Lindbergh:
The stranger took a long, gaping look at my father, then my mother, then Sandy, then me. And what did he see? A trim, neatly muscled, broad-chested man five feet nine inches tall, handsome in a minor key, with soft grayish-green eyes and thinning brown hair clipped close at the temples and presenting his two ears to the world a little more comically than was necessary. The woman was slender but strong and she was tidily dressed, with a lock of her wavy dark hair over one eyebrow and roundish cheeks a little rouged and a prominent nose and chunky arms and shapely legs and slim hips and the lively eyes of a girl half her age. In both adults a surfeit of prudence and a surfeit of energy, and with the couple two boys still pretty much all soft surfaces, young children of youthful parents, keenly attentive and in good health and incorrigible only in their optimism.
And the conclusion the stranger drew from his observations he demonstrated with a mocking movement of the head. Then, hissing noisily so as to mislead no one about his assessment of us, he returned to the elderly lady and their sightseeing party, walking slowly off with a rolling gait that seemed, along with the silhouette of his broad back, intended to register a warning. It was from there that we heard him refer to my father as a “loudmouth Jew,” followed a moment later by the elderly lady declaring, “I’d give anything to slap his face.”
As is often the case with Eliot, the moment of recognition in Roth’s novel is an embodied one—though Roth’s narrator disregards what the stranger probably sees, and looks at the family, for the moment, with tenderness and sympathy rather then prejudice. However, when he throws down the slur, he doesn’t single out the differences in their appearance, but the “loudmouth” voice, which I think is central to the logic of Jewish recognition, and indeed, of anti-Semitism more broadly. It’s the voice that annoys him most; he doesn’t quite know how to shut it up.
The broad cultural history of Muslims in the west is quite different from the Jewish diaspora story, and it would be dangerous to make too much of what is at best a historically arguable parallel. And yet some parallels to the contemporary Muslim experience are evident in the embodied nature of the contest over Islamic identity especially following 9/11. While traveling, many Muslims report being especially careful about what they say and the voice in which it is said, often taking extra care to enunciate in American English so as to address the fears fellow passengers. As with Roth’s example, it is the incidental characteristics such as the voice, the complexion, or the physical demeanor that are read and evaluated by others. And it is in response to those types of attributes especially that the hostility to what many perceive as a dangerously foreign religious community is provoked.
Conclusion: A Renewed “Secular Criticism”
In both Daniel Deronda and The Plot Against America religious identity (and in this case, specifically Jewish identity) is marked on the body in ways that are mysterious but unavoidable. They are part of a pattern that can be seen in the various literary texts in Literary Secularism of religion entering into the lives of modern characters through involuntary allegiances and unconscious associations. These dynamics are the interpretive core of Literary Secularism; they show that modern fiction can be an ideal medium in which to explore the intimate experience of religious belonging. Just as importantly, fiction is also a powerful medium by which to express resistance to the control of religious orthodoxy. James Wood is right to see an association between fiction and secularism, though as I discussed in the Introduction, his sense of modern fiction as the “destroyer of religions” overstates the case. Modern fiction is secular, and capacious enough (or dialogical enough) to accommodate the myriad psychic and social experiences of religious life that continue to permeate modernity and contribute to its richness. To a great extent literary secularism is a colonial and postcolonial problem, because it is particularly critical for writers in national contexts that are new, or in the process of being articulated, to mark their distance from religious orthodoxy. But as the works of writers from contemporary England, the U.S., and Turkey show, the idea of literary secularism is also vital—even necessary—in the broader global context.
What I have been calling “literary secularism” is to a great extent merely a literary appropriation of Edward Said’s famous concept of “secular criticism,” originally articulated in The World, The Text, and The Critic more than twenty years ago. In that essay, Said defined the role of the critic as a practice of detachment and rigorous intellectual dissidence:
On the one hand, the individual mind registers and is very much aware of the collective whole, context, or situation in which it finds itself. On the other hand, precisely because of this awareness—a worldly, self-situating, a sensitive response to the dominant culture—that the individual consciousness is not naturally and easily a mere child of the culture, but a historical and social actor. And because of that perspective, which introduces circumstance and distinction where there had only been conformity and belonging, there is distance, or what we might call criticism.
For Said, to be “secular” is essentially equivalent to being “worldly,” which is to say, to possess a sensibility that is freethinking, cosmopolitan, and humanist. The concept has little to do directly with religion, though over the course of the essay important questions about religious experience and literature arise that have bearing on the present argument. A secular critic is a dissident at a distance both from a naturalized concept of culture (“the individual consciousness is not . . . a mere child of the culture”) and from rigidly bound modern political ideologies (Marxism) or academic methodologies (Foucauldianism) that seem to discount the role of individual as “historical and social actors.”
Said’s use of the word “secular” in the phrase “secular criticism” is in fact a kind of word-play, but it is word-play with important philosophical implications. For as the textual examples in this book indicate, the modern contest between “religious” and “secular” points of view is not a symmetrical one. Secularism, both literary and otherwise, has the potential to scramble the concepts and framework of religious thinking so as to make the latter permanently unstable. And yet, even as secularism seems to have the rhetorical and epistemological equivalent of the “upper hand,” secular writers and critics are also often haunted by the very religious discourse they aim to “privatize.” William David Hart, in Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, describes how this duality operates in Said’s work:
Religion is an issue for [Said], unlike those who are indifferent, whom we mistakenly call secular. Secularism, in this respect, is a particular kind of relationship with religion. It is a skeptical, wary, or hostile interest. Secular thinkers are preoccupied with boundary-drawing and boundary-maintenance, with where secularism ends and religion begins. Secularism is the desire to separate and keep apart things that do not go together well such as church and state and the public and the private. It is also the desire to confound what religion holds apart. Thus secularists revel in contaminating what religionists hold as pure; they ridicule the fetish for purity, but often in the name of a different kind of purity.
The conflicted attitude towards religion is in some sense evident in Said’s very use of the word “secular,” which he holds to be self-identical with intelligent, modern, and humane perspective (while “religious” describes—somewhat circularly—all manner of hidebound, chauvinistic, or pre-modern thought). To conflate “secular” with “modern” or (following Rushdie) “hybrid” social identities is to confound the religious with an epistemology that seems to make the very idea of religious devotion in the modern world seem impossible. It is only one conceptual step away from the “daemonic” secularism of Rushdie’s novel.
But Said’s own invocation of T.S. Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in “Secular Criticism” suggests that the applicability of “secular criticism” may not be as transparent as one might expect. For despite Eliot’s insistence on his hostility to what he calls “secularism,” Said reads Eliot’s conversion as itself motivated by a secular concept of religion in early modern England. It is a religion not of organic “filiation,” but of ideological and intellectual “affiliation”:
His model is now Lancelot Andrewes, a man whose prose and devotional style seem to Eliot to have transcended the personal manner of even so fervent and effective a Christian preacher as Donne. In the shift from Donne to Andrewes, which I believe underlies the shift in Eliot’s sensibility from the world-view of Prufrock, Gerontion, and The Waste Land to the conversion poetry of Ash Wednesday and the Ariel Poems, we have Eliot saying something like the following: the aridity, wastefulness, and sterility of modern life make filiation an unreasonable alternative at least, an unattainable one at most. . . . If the English church is not in a direct line of filiation stemming from the Roman church, it is nevertheless something more than a mere local heresy, more than a mere protesting orphan. Why? Because Andrewes and others like him to whose antecedent authority Eliot has now subscribed were able to harness the old paternal authority to an insurgent Protestant and national culture, thereby creating a new institution based not on direct genealogical descent but on what we may call, barbarously, horizontal affiliation.
For Said, Eliot’s religious conversion is not a rejection of modernity, but an example of the alienating effects of modernity in action. Rather than remain with the religious community of his birth, Eliot radically reimagines himself along “affiliative” lines, and appropriates a religious community that is itself defined by its “insurgent Protestant and national culture.” Even if Eliot might believe himself to be withdrawing from the vertiginous philosophical aporia of The Waste Land, Said argues that even Eliot’s conversion is nothing other than a symptom of his modernism.
Said is far from the only critic to note the potential power of conversion to reorient social identities. Michael Ragussis’ important book Figures of Conversion was cited in an earlier chapter; and Gauri Viswanathan’s book Outside the Fold: Religion, Modernity, and Belief uses examples such as John Henry Newman, B.R. Ambedkar, and Pandita Ramabai to argue that religious conversion is one of the key features of secularism in the cultural sphere. There are of course limits to such arguments—it seems hard to escape the fact that both Newman and Eliot were motivated to convert by their sense that their originary religious communities (Anglicanism and Unitarianism, respectively) were not in fact authoritarian enough. But it is nevertheless the case that the challenges posed by Newman’s and Eliot’s respective conversions forced their peers to reconsider the meaning of religious boundaries. The voluntary act of conversion seems to be a way in which even the religiously devout can, as Hart puts it, “ridicule the fetish for purity, but often in the name of a different kind of purity.” For Viswanathan, the challenge posed by conversion is a sign that secularization itself has perhaps been a flawed process, for reasons outlined by Matthew Arnold:
The system of cultural authority that Said challenges as bearing religious overtones, even in a secular society, is a legacy of the historical moment of secularization, when the structures of official religion no longer supported the bases of political, social, and cultural power and the authority of the state gained ascendancy over civil apparatuses such as law and education. But it is not merely a question of one form of authority displacing another. If culture shares the guild features of the ecclesiastical order, this is largely because, as Matthew Arnold so persuasively argued over a century ago, culture takes over the moral purposes of religion in a civil society, and education becomes the instrument by which the moral mission of a culture is propagated. (46)
Viswanathan accepts Matthew Arnold’s famous dictum about culture as a modern version of religion as being literally true. For Viswanathan, the concept of “culture” and the coercive institutions of the state have taken over from religious institutions the role of disciplining modern subjects. We are still always in some way “inside the fold” of a limiting ideological framework of state apparatus even if we consider ourselves to be secular.
But this perspective—which is closely echoed in Talal Asad’s recent arguments on secularism—is not really what Said has in mind in “Secular Criticism.” For Said, the goal isn’t to show that freedom is impossible because of coercion or mediation, but that individual intellectuals have both the capacity and the ethical obligation to distance themselves to a sufficient degree from coercive social and political institutions. Moreover, it’s important not to minimize the degree to which secularization has occurred and continues to occur in considering literary texts and other cultural artifacts. “Culture” may still have the ability to be coercive in the way that Matthew Arnold approvingly described, but even if the gatekeeper institutions of “culture” (universities, publishing, and so on) are viewed as dogmatic, they simply do not function in the same way as religious orthodoxies. To say so is to understate the degree to which the real fact of secularization allows individuals to extricate their patterns of thought from the given. The position that culture is the new religion is also of no help in responding to the distinctly modern phenomenon of the new religious fundamentalisms around the world, since it removes the hope of a viable alternative to “desecularization.” Certainly, in light of the severe challenges to political secularism that have arisen in recent years, it is more important than ever to be clear about how these terms work. While the “literary secularism” I have explored in this book frequently leads writers to aporetic moments in which religious and secular frameworks are confused, there is rarely a doubt that the goal is nevertheless to effect a form of secular representation—of the world, and for the world. There are aspects of literary texts that resist direct categorization or critical evaluation, but it is nevertheless quite clear that the secularism one sees in so much modern fiction does instantiate the “secular criticism” Said so eloquently articulated.