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This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact. —Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast 230)

[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional. —Norman Mailer (Harlot’s Ghost 1287–8)

What is the rhetoric of modernism? Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God?” If so,why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?

This issue could be a problem in narrative theory, constructing modernity, contemporary religion, or all three. In any case, why does religion persist? Why is some God-language compatible with Modernity—and some not? I shall first discuss the rhetoric of Modernism, then Modernity and disenchantment, before moving on to my selection of God-language of Hemingway and Mailer. I briefly emphasize the sacred, indeterminacy, and grace.

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The Rhetoric of Modernism

The epigraphs speak of the role of fiction in our lives. For Mailer, paradoxically, good fiction nourishes “our sense of reality.” For Hemingway, fiction “may throw some light” on the facts. The strange relationship between fiction and fact seems linked with Modernism—and the problematic nature of “reality.” I call this the rhetoric of Modernism. But is that rhetoric—seen in the Modern novel—necessarily linked with secularization? Pericles Lewis suggests that it may be the following:

If the novel is indeed the art form of secularization, “the representative art-form of our age” in Lukács’s words, and if modernity is indeed a secular age, then we could expect the modern novel to be doubly secular. Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seemto represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of their characters expresses any concrete religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action.

But does the novel represents a world “abandoned by God”—or is this statement more hyperbole than argument? Either way, how do we explain these vestiges of God-language? Is this merely etymology—like using Wednesday without necessarily invoking the god Woden? I suggest that God language has more significance than that. But what is the rhetoric of Modernism? Here are two samples.

We start with Hemingway and In Our Time. (1925). At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation” (21). The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase scared sick looking stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun it, the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, In Our Time is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), published three years earlier. Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist” (12).

Works Cited

• Lucáks, George (1971). The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge: MIT Press.

• Lewis, Pericles. "Churchgoing in the Modern Novel". Modernism/modernity. 11.4 (2004): 669–694.

• Lucáks, George (1971). The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge: MIT Press.