God in Secret: Elizabeth Strout’s Postsecular Fiction

ABSTRACT

In this article, I address the religious significance of American writer Elizabeth Strout’s work, arguing that she manifests many of the characteristics of postsecular fiction. Drawing on a close analysis of several of her stories, I argue that in her imagining of a barely there God she comes into a close proximity with negative theology.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Malina Załużna-Łuczkiewicz’s work (Secrets and Silences; Spectacle realism revisited), and Michael Tager. Delphine La Tort has also written about the HBO adaptation of Olive Kitteridge (2015).

2. The conclusion of My Name is Lucy Barton would seem to fit clearly into this reverence for life, with the final page reflecting on the wonder of the natural, “as though the soul can be quiet for those moments. All life amazes me” (191).

3. One could write a whole paper on the significance of Jews for Strout as an Other, from Christopher’s first wife Suzanne in Olive Kitteridge to the unnamed doctor in My Name is Lucy Barton. Like Bernie in Olive, Again, this doctor is the child of survivors of the Holoucaust. Another Holocaust survivor is mentioned in Abide With Me – this time an acquaintance who survives the camps only to commit suicide (75).

4. Tager’s article “Divided America” primarily foregrounds racial rather than religious difference in this novel, despite the plot in which a pig’s head is rolled into a Somali mosque.

5. The mainline Protestant minister Tyler Caskey in Abide With Me sarcastically notes that he ”can’t say I’ve been to many Southern revivals lately” (78).

6. Though there is some argument between scholars over whether Derrida’s late writing was religious (John D Caputo) or atheist (Martin Hagglund), here I will split the difference and use Derrida in what Kearney, Anatheism calls an anatheist way, a fragile theology of doubt and skepticism that may (or may not) return us to God in the end.

7. Notable writers of negative theology include Nicholas of Cusa, Pseudo-Dionysius and Angelus Silesius, who Derrida discusses in On The Name.

8. Derrida underlines what he calls the an-economic nature of the gift, the suspension of economy. As Derrida describes it, “the gift is precisely what must not present itself” (34), for the very condition of a gift is that it does not accrue obligation in the circle of obligation and debt. It exceeds calculation, to be a gift it must not appear as a gift, lest it be taken into a broader economy of debt and repayment. Instead, the gift when it comes must be impossible – as surely the knowledge of God is.

9. Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling talks about the ethical temptation that Abraham faced in Genesis 22, the desire to not take his son Isaac’s life. Instead, there is a suspension of calculation that Kierkegaard calls the religious, in which Abraham believes on the strength of the absurd. Derrida makes much of this in The Gift of Death, arguing that that the unconditional requires a pact of silence as in Abraham’s pact with God in this story.

10. I take this idea of a weak God from the work of John D Caputo, who in; The Weakness of God argues that God needs to be understood as a weak force, one without the metaphysical grandeur of the Christian theological tradition. Where theologians like Aquinas argued that God should be considered to be Being in itself, Caputo suggests that a post-metaphysical God without being is a more plausible God for our age. God insists, while we exist” as Caputo puts it elsewhere (13).

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Emily McAvan

Emily McAvan is an Australian literary critic whose work investigates the intersection between religion and culture. She is the author of Jeanette Winterson and Religion (Bloomsbury 2020) and The Postmodern Sacred (McFarland 2012) as well as numerous articles in journals including Literature and Theology, Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Bible and Critical Theory.