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Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 77; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00267929-3652702

1527-1943

Charles LaPorte,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Colin Jager is one of the finest critics now working on the relationship between secularization and literature in the nineteenth century. His first monograph, The Book of God, shows among other things how Romantic literature resists literary scholars’ assumptions about religion’s eclipse or demise at the hands of secular modernity. Jager’s second book, Unquiet Things, makes the same case for Romantic secularism, which it presents as the straitening and disciplining of religion by political power. These days, some such reassessment is de rigueur. Scholars of secularization no longer equate modernity with the obsolescence of religion, which, after all, has never disappeared from the world. Yet literary critics have been slow to grasp religion’s enduring relevance and still often write as if the arrival of modern secular individualism somehow marks its passing.For the generalist, then, Unquiet Things offers a searching critique of what Talal Asad (2007: 1) archly calls a “triumphalist history of the secular.” Jager follows Asad in outlining how secularizing reform wraps power in a language of neutrality: “I, too, argue that secularism is not primarily about religion but about the reform (or regulation, if you like) of what I call here ‘unquiet things’” (9). The quoted phrase (and title for this book) comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight: a touchstone for Jager because it captures the dance that takes place between religious and secular imaginations. Jager writes with real erudition and brings exceptional force to arguments of a now-familiar tenor. Beginning with Shakespeare’s Henry VIII (a story of secularization in the oldest sense of the term, the seizure of church property by the state), he weaves through chapters on Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, Jane Austen’s Emma, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, Walter Scott’s Waverley, and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner before closing with a constellation of poems by Lord Byron and Percy Shelley.Specialists will take pleasure in the novelty of Jager’s arguments about these texts, themselves a set of “unquiet things” that both register and resist secularism, moving like the ashes on Coleridge’s hearth. Admirers of The Book of God will find its subject approached from a fresh angle, since this new monograph takes the vantage of secularity, rather than that of religion. That prior work, for example, traces the politics of William Paley and David Hume in Mansfield Park and notes Austen’s nostalgia “for a world in which religion still saturates social space” (Jager 2006: 156). Unquiet Things swaps out Mansfield Park for Emma and interrogates the politics more than the nostalgia. Literary critics have generally been slow to give Austen’s religion much thought. “Remember that we are English, that we are Christians” (Austen 2002: 195), says Henry Tilney near the close of Northanger Abbey, in what now seems like a reprimand to careless scholars. Jager, too, reminds us how, in Austen’s world, these always come together in an uneasy relationship.Consider Emma’s Donwell Abbey, which, like Northanger Abbey, would have been appropriated by Henry VIII in the historical dissolution of the monasteries in the mid-sixteenth century. Jager reads Emma as a small domestic recapitulation of that “history of literal secularization and emotional straitening,” in which the disciplining of the unruly heroine stands under the sign of the book’s dedication, “To His Royal Highness the Prince Regent.” On occasion, Jager may follow his inner Michel Foucault too closely, may frame the power dynamic too exclusively. For instance, Austen’s readers invariably smirk at poor Harriet Smith’s treasure box containing “relics” of the unworthy Elton, but this episode cannot be reduced to a blanket condemnation of such comforts. When Emma inquires, “My poor dear Harriet! and have you actually found happiness in treasuring up these things?” (Austen 2000: 222), she evokes a whole realm of relics, shrines, and pilgrimages, banished in the Reformation, that might bring happiness or some other fulfillment in a less disciplined world. Purging the monasteries is a more straightforward business than purging feelings.Some parts of today’s literary discussions about secularization inevitably recapitulate the Karl Löwith–Hans Blumenberg debate of the 1950s and 1960s, in which Löwith (1957) looks at post-Enlightenment modernity and shrugs that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose and Blumenberg (1966) strives to demonstrate how modernity entails philosophically meaningful change all the same. Terry Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God, to take a recent example, recapitulates Löwith’s idea that modern culture remains thoroughly bound up in premodern religious paradigms. (Indeed, Eagleton [2014] sees a definitive break with theism made possible only by postmodernism’s dissolution of the self.) Early on, Unquiet Things inclines toward Blumenberg’s way of tracing change, despite Jager’s gloomier view of secularism “as a form of state-sponsored violence” (169). He seeks to show something real about the state church vis-à-vis minority religious cultures: the Roman Catholicism that haunted gothic literature of the period, the Scottish Presbyterian Covenanters who were slaughtered in the seventeenth century. As the book progresses, however, he moves back toward Löwith’s (and, subsequently, Eagleton’s) more skeptical attitude: Coleridge’s Kubla Khan becomes a proleptic critique of Jürgen Habermas’s (2006) “Religion in the Public Sphere”; Shelley’s Mont Blanc reframes the dilemmas of theism all over again. This seems to be Jager’s natural inclination; indeed, the Coleridge and Shelley chapters offer the strongest material of the book.So rich and powerful a set of reflections inevitably starts more intellectual hares than it can pursue, and some fields here get shorter shrift than others. Jager’s opening discussion of Frost at Midnight, for instance, seems to promise a more extensive discussion of the relationship between belief and folklore than this book provides. Coleridge’s poem makes much of the folkloric history of his fireside “stranger,” the ashy film dancing on his grate. It would be gratifying to hear Jager dilate on this folkloric tradition or on Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, which would intersect nicely with his discussions of Waverley or Old Mortality. Still, Jager’s monograph will do much to help shape the ongoing reconsideration of religion and secularization in this period and in the modern world.