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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

“ [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

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 seem to 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. 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.” 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, 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

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period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.” Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt.Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become more irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

These vignettes, a quarter century apart, illustrate the Modernist rhetoric of Hemingway and Mailer. For both authors, they mark a beginning, a revelation, a new Genesis. One thing is clear: unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of traditional concepts of God, a sense of Providence, a rational universe. We have left the Garden. Many have written on religious themes in Hemingway and in Mailer: certainly, the themes exist and can be discussed. But I would like to examine the overall matrix of Modernity in which those themes are embedded, focusing on the disenchantment of the world.

Modernity and Disenchantment

Lewis says the modern novel is “doubly secular,” representing a world vacated by God. The representation is both thematic and formal. Much has been written about the changing status of religion in the era of Modernity—a period, shall we say, from roughly 1900 to the present day—and many

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concepts have been used, such as secularization, loss of faith, ironic cultures, cognitive minorities, the disenchantment of the world, the sacred and the profane, and modernist literature as religion substitute. As one might expect, the literature is considerable. After all, Modernity and the disenchantment of the world is a thing of complexity. But it cannot be undone.

For Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud onwards,“disenchanting” the world spelt the end of religion—the “death” of God—a process thought to be inevitable. The journey begins with Martin Luther in 1517, or earlier in Renaissance humanism. The rise of modern science, symbolized by On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres by Copernicus in 1543, is crucial: science advanced as it was able to provide mathematical explanations for phenomena attributed to God ormagic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to theWars of Religion, was also significant. No wonder Popkin says, “Luther had indeed opened a Pandora’s box."

During the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions attacked the Divine Right of Kings.While their respective revolutionary documents retain a “veneer of religion," this effectively begins the modern secular state. In 1843, Karl Marx, following Feuerbach in arguing that “Man makes religion," in memorable phrases described religion as “the heart of a heartless world” and“the opium of the people." After 1917, the Soviet Union mandated the “death” of God. A host of epistemological challenges—Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg—obviously contributed to this process we call modernity.

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