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On the Ethics of Sanctified Sacrifice: John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany

2006; Routledge; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10436920500468543

1545-5866

Paul Eisenstein,

Political Theology and Sovereignty

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Acts that fall under the category of terrorism or fundamentalism in the liberal democracies of the West usually have in common a certitude about the greater good secured in and through the commission of violence and a belief in some divine reward for one's actions. For a closer look at the ideas and images that motivate violent, terrorist acts—including interviews with the perpetrators of such violence—see Juergensmeyer and Stern. For a compelling case study in religious, fundamentalist violence in the United States, see Krakauer. 2. In both The Scapegoat and Job: The Victim of His People, Girard enjoins us to see the actual victim punished or killed in the name of knowledge whose status is never questioned—knowledge, he claims, that warrants the designation of myth. 3. This would be the question to pose to perpetrators of violence such as Yigal Amir, who claimed (according to a CNN report) that God was his accomplice in the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, or to Sheikh Ibrahim Madji, who contends that the Koran is “very clear” on the matter of Palestinians “voluntary detonating ourselves in their [the Jews and Polytheists] midst” (qtd. in Moghadam 71). 4. The larger context here is perhaps Heidegger's critique of onto-theology—his objection to philosophy's attempt to master the alterity of God by speaking and writing and ennobling Him. For Heidegger, every discursive invocation of God—no matter how reverential—is really part of human beings' desire to subjugate the real of being. So it is that Heidegger can claim that “[t]he ultimate blow against God and the suprasensory world consists in the fact that God, the first of beings, is degraded to the highest value” (105). For an explanation of this position—including an ingenious “parable of the sugar bowl” in which a minister's son, having been told at the dinner table that God is everywhere, quickly places the lid on the family's sugar bowl, declaring, “Got you, God!”—see Schwartz 209–16. 5. Such a critique is perhaps exemplified best by Freud's The Future of an Illusion, the basic thesis of which is that any subject who claims access to God's desires has, in fact, fallen prey, under the spell of desire and fantasy, to something illusory—something whose “truth” is in fact the product of “wish-fulfillment” meant to consolidate social and/or individual power. For Freud, the store of religious ideas are “born from man's need to make his helplessness tolerable” (23). In the face of Nature's disregard for the welfare of individuals and societies, the very idea of God—and dictates said to issue from Him—works in the service of a fundamental (and narcissistic) misrecognition at the heart of the ego. In light of this fact, whatever “Truth” espoused by adherents of this or that religion, for Freud, can never fully avoid the charge that “the appearance and utterance of their spirits are merely products of their own mental activity” (35). 6. Kierkegaard's claim that the essence of Christian belief is a passionate inwardness that soldiers on in the wake of objective uncertainty only lends intensity to Kant's attempt to theorize a faith uncoupled from certain knowledge and a code of moral conduct followed not for external rewards. Like Kant, Kierkegaard sees that “if passion is taken away, faith no longer exists, and certainty and passion do not hitch up as a team” (29). “The less objective reliability,” Kierkegaard writes, “the deeper the possible inwardness” (209). 7. Rather than see God as prior to the exercise of moral conduct, as Supreme Dictator of a pre-given Good who directly compels certain statutory actions, Kant's claim is that we never serve God directly. On the contrary, since our moral actions affect earthly beings alone, it is only by fulfilling our duties to other human beings (and ourselves) that we in fact please God. This constitutes the crux of Kant's critique of the dishonesty and presumptuousness that characterizes what he calls “dogmatic faith” (Religion 48), which in proclaiming itself a form of knowledge, reduces moral conduct to the idea of serving God in the compulsory performance of actions (e.g., prayer, worship). For Kant's discussion of the way that this dynamic turns religion into idolatry, see Religion 156–73. 8. For sympathetic readings of the novel that argue against Kazin's criticism and for the need to take seriously Owen's claim to divinity, see Haynes and Shostak. Haynes counters dismissive criticisms by explicating two of the novel's significant religious contexts: seventeenth-century New England's “antinomian controversy” and the twentieth-century writings of Frederick Buechner (whom Irving thanks in his acknowledgements and whom he uses for one of the novel's three epigraphs). Shostak, on the other hand, pays close attention to the novel's narrative repetitions and suggests that the charge that Irving's plot is contrived might in fact be a displacement of the Freudian uncanny. Kazin, for his part, sees Irving's novel as an expression of “astrology [that] denies the principle of free will” (30) and laments its absolute lack of irony. For a fascinating glimpse, in a completely different context, of Kazin's critical preference for literary works that testify to religious crises of faith, see Weissman 28–88. 9. For a reading that traces this feature of the novel, see Page. 10. In his bitter indictment of America as “a nation of moralists” and of Americans' preference for “boudoir morality” (275), Irving's novel (for this reader at least) is eerily prescient of the Clinton impeachment scandal. Indeed, one of the things that haunts Johnny (and Owen Meany, too) is the inability of political leaders to see matters of public policy in moral terms. Though Owen Meany does lament Kennedy's adulterous behavior, he also excoriates on moral grounds a matter of policy such as “Project 100,000” (330)—the 1966 program outlined by Robert McNamara that drafted America's poor and uneducated to fight in Vietnam. 11. Perhaps the better designation for “interpretation gone amok” is simply superstition. Indeed, for much of the novel, Irving pits materialist explanations over and against theological ones. The best example of this involves Owen's voice. Owen believes there is a reason he has the voice that he does—that his voice comes from God. Germaine, one of the maids in the Wheelwright house on Front Street, believes it comes from the Devil. It is Johnny's grandmother who provides the materialist explanation: “Nonsense to it coming from God—or from the Devil! It comes from granite, that's what it comes from. He breathed in all that dirt when he was a baby! It made his voice queer and it stunted his growth!” (175). 12. For a fuller articulation of this view, see Freud, “Dreams and Occultism.” On the one hand, Freud dismisses the notion that dreams are themselves telepathic or that they confirm “the objective reality of telepathy”(48). Indeed, for Freud, telepathy belongs not to the dream in itself but in “the interpretation of the dream, its psycho-analytic working over” (48). On the other hand, however, Freud does concede “a secret inclination toward the miraculous,” claiming that “[i]f one regards oneself as a skeptic, it is a good plan to have occasional doubts about one's skepticism too” (66). 13. The general tenor of Johnny's interpretation would seem to follow Freud's overarching maxim (in The Interpretation of Dreams) that “every dream is linked in its manifest content with recent experiences and in its latent content with the most ancient experiences” (252). Thus, Owen's longstanding conflict with Catholicism—tied, no doubt, to the Catholic Church's reaction to his parents' revelation concerning his birth (“they made us feel like we was blasphemin' the Bible, like we was tryin' to make up our own religion” [474])—is made to explain the image of the nun making the sign of the cross over Owen's dead body and stands as the latent dimension of the dream. As Johnny says to Owen, “given your sensitive feelings for Catholics, why wouldn't you dream that a nun was your own special Angel of Death?” (420). As for the manifest content: for Johnny, the very fact that Owen is in the Army and there is a war in Vietnam is enough to make the notion that Owen saves Vietnamese children unoriginal: “You're going in the Army, there's a war in Vietnam—do you think you'd have a dream about saving American children? And naturally, there would be palm trees—what would you expect? Igloos?” (421). 14. I have in mind here the Jesus Seminar's attempt to “distinguish Jesus from Christ” by seeing the Jesus of the Gospels as an “imaginative theological construct”—as a figure whose divine essence was not simply and objectively available to a select number of disciples but was forged, on the contrary, through fragmentary and often contradictory texts that belong to the province of historical scholarship. For a definitive expression of such an approach, see Funk. 15. Owen repeatedly insists on knowledge without recourse to its conditions. At one point, when Owen predicts the coming “angry” generation, and two more generations after that who “don't give a shit,” Johnny asks, “How do you know?” Owen replies, “I DON'T KNOW HOW I KNOW…I JUST KNOW THAT I KNOW” (322). In many ways, Owen is a character prior to cynicism and irony. Irving's own relationship to postmodernism—in particular, his allegiance to nineteenth-century novelistic priorities—strikes me as apposite here. For his implicit critique of postmodern methods and values, see his “In Defense of Sentimentality” and “The Narrative Voice.” 16. Whereas Haynes claims that Irving's novel “does not supply” answers to the “perennial religious questions” it raises—questions having to do with how we are to respond to the idea that “God speaks directly to individuals” and how we are to “distinguish confidently between God's voice and Satan's” (95)—I want to suggest that Irving's novel does in fact point us toward an answer by suggesting that God's voice (and the actions it might motivate) is a voice uttering commands that cannot be reconciled with notions of benevolence and meaning. In other words, we know God is speaking to us when the meaning and goodness of what God is saying is opaque. 17. For examples of Johnny's use of quotation marks to signify skepticism, see the following sentences: “[H]e appeared to be sullenly embracing his ‘vision,’ like the typically doubtless prophet he so often seemed to be, to me. He had ‘seen’ his own name on his grave” (222); “It is a wonder to me that the changing of the year had so little effect on Owen Meany—when I consider that he thought he ‘knew,’ at the time, exactly how many years he had left” (319); “We still talk about what Owen ‘knew’ or thought he knew” (372); “What he meant was that he believed he ‘knew’ what would happen to him” (385); “You can't have a dream and believe that you ‘know’ what you're supposed to do” (418). 18. At times, Owen himself struggles with the authenticity of his vision. At Tabitha's grave, he (mis)perceives the Angel of Death speaking to him and shouts angrily, “WHAT DO YOU WANT? WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHAT DO YOU WANT OF ME?” (131). His cutting of Johnny's finger is also a clear attempt to prevent the prophecy from coming true (449). When he is not in Vietnam as the day approaches, Owen notes in his diary that perhaps the whole thing is “JUST A DREAM” (515). And at the Phoenix airport, as the departure of Johnny's flight to Boston is announced, Owen says that “THIS MAY BE THE HAPPIEST DAY OF MY LIFE!…MAYBE NOTHING'S GOING TO HAPPEN” (536). 19. The trap to be avoided here is the one that automatically designates this “something new” as Evil. Alain Badiou argues for the sophistry of this designation: “If our only agenda is an ethical engagement against an Evil we recognize a priori, how are we to envisage any transformation of the way things are? From what source will man draw the strength to be the immortal that he is? What shall be the destiny of thought, since we know very well that it must be affirmative invention or nothing at all? In reality, the price paid by ethics is a stodgy conservatism” (Ethics 13–14). Badiou's argument is that the effects of an “immortal” gesture are not given beforehand, that there is something radically incalculable about an act that aims to eclipse the consensual canons of moral conduct. For Badiou, the truth of an event is always linked to a kind of wager, to something undecidable and absolutely singular about it. And it is against the backdrop of these qualities that the subject of an event emerges. In his book on Paul, Badiou locates in the heart of Christianity—in Paul's fidelity to the Resurrection—such a subject, and many of the reasons for which Badiou praises Paul apply to Owen Meany. Paul is, for Badiou, “a poet-thinker of the event” (St. Paul 5) because for him, “the event has not come to prove something; it is pure beginning” (49). Like Owen, Paul does not “seek ‘confirmation’ for the event that appoints him in his own eyes as an apostle. He leaves this subjective upsurge outside every official seal” (St. Paul 18). 20. Irving's (via Johnny) critique of both the pro- and anti-war movements illuminate this point. On both sides, Irving sees an overweening sense of self-interest, a too-confident claim to have access to the good. This is why for Irving, the Vietnam war—on both sides—is entirely conservative, entirely dedicated to remaining within a corrupt moral system. On the Right, Irving shows us Rector Wiggin and his wife Barbara, who claim that God supports the US troops in Vietnam (415). And on the Left, he shows us anti-war protestors who claim that the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese are themselves morally superior to their adversaries (451). 21. This is one of the decisive differences between Johnny and Owen. Johnny thinks that it doesn't matter what one does because all is chance and luck—in his words, “What good does courage do—when what happens next is up for grabs?” (446). Owen cuts through this cynicism with reference to his job as deliverer of the bodies of war casualties: it is precisely because things are “up for grabs” that courage is so important. 22. As Owen makes clear—in his critique of Kennedy and what has become the Kennedy myth—morality belongs entirely to the realm of power and deception and exploitation. As Owen puts it, “THE COUNTRY WANTS A SAVIOR, THE COUNTRY IS A SUCKER FOR POWERFUL MEN WHO LOOK GOOD. WE THINK THEY'RE MORALISTS AND THEN THEY JUST USE US” (382). His words here are consistent with Irving's larger concern in the novel—to articulate a path of the ethical that refuses recourse to the discourse of morality for its articulation. This concern is at the heart of the prophetic critique he allows Owen to voice regarding the “oversimplification” of politics today—its usurpation by moralists. Writing in his diary in July 1968, Irving has Owen “predict” the AIDS epidemic and the religious interpretation of it as a symptom of unbridled sexual desire. Additional informationNotes on contributorsPaul EisensteinPaul Eisenstein, is associate professor in the Department of English at Otterbein College and the author of Traumatic Encounters: Holocaust Representation and the Hegelian Subject (State University of New York P, 2003).