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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 (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

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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 or magic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to the Wars 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.

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his Syllabus of Errors (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in The Fundamentals (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, A Rumor of Angels. My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality. However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the

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predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority." This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a rejection of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as complementary to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope. In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It"

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of In Our Time came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord” (1928 31). In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home” or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette. Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling." The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it," could be seen as a signifier of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror” from Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale." A quarter century later, Hemingway’s In Our Time offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In The Sun Also Rises, two themes are balanced. One epigraph,“You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth

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abideth for ever." This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.” but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”}}10 Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero debacle. Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God." Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me." The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;" we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?"

A Farewell to Arms marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.” It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a synecdoche of a larger human defeat. This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation But what of the priest in A Farewell to Arms: is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, butHenry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.” Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate—renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.

There is a foreshadowing of Catherine’s death, but the words have more resonance as a statement on human destiny. Yes, there may be a rumor of grace in the phrase, “many are strong at the broken places,” but the pervasive tone

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is bleak. There seems an absence of God-language, providence, any orderly universe. So, have we not left the Garden for the wasteland?

Indeed we have. But this diction is still theological language. Mankind’s estrangement from the Garden may be part of Modernism, but it is at the heart of the biblical story—and another element in disenchantment. In Genesis, we read that “the LORD God drove [Adam] out of the garden of Eden," that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence," becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth." Here is alienation—being a stranger, a fugitive. Linked with Hegel and early Marx, alienation has deep biblical roots. In God-language, all are sons of Adam and brothers to Cain. Here, the rhetoric of modernism and Genesis intersect: Garden and wasteland belong both to a biblical vocabulary and also to the vocabulary of modernity.

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s nada experience. In his own, each character faces his nada or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period. The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God. The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant synecdoche for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Yet, the waiter demythologizes the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism. Surely, this representation is the absence of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced grace—and every other theologically significant word—with nada, nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

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