God in the Hands of a Realist Writer
Modernism has reduced the “real” to the material, even in fiction. It’s time we reclaim the full range of reality with our written words.
By David Priest
I was about 250 pages into writing my first novel when I realized I’d constructed a world without God. It wasn’t intentional: I’m a Christian and a professional writer—a journalist, mostly—trying my hand at longform fiction, and although I can draw on a couple of years studying in a fully funded MFA program, most of my education in creative writing came from reading books. Since I’m most interested in writing a realist novel, I read the work of realist novelists—ones as widely varied as Fredrik Backman, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Colson Whitehead, John Le Carre, and Jennifer Egan.
Yet in the throes of my attempt at the form, I realized that I was not imitating real life in my own writing, but the depictions of real life I’d read. And the range of contemporary realism, it seems, has become too narrow to include much of anything spiritual—perhaps because, by a sort of slow-moving consensus, the literary world has decided that “real” simply means “material” and nothing more.
And so we have the paradox of realism: it attempts to capture real life, and yet it does so through “unreal” means, through artifice.
God and “The Real”
Aesthetes have long defined the quality of art by its reflectiveness of nature, a notion made famous by Plato, and echoed through the ages by various writers. Camus: “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” George Eliot: “Art is the nearest thing to life.” Keats: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” et cetera.
In the last century, various critics have questioned the very nature of fiction and its “real”-ness. Roland Barthes, for instance, argued in his “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” that “‘What takes place’ in the narrative is, from the referential (reality) point of view literally nothing; ‘what happens’ is language alone.” Critic James Wood rightly called this line of thinking incoherent: “Just because artifice and convention are involved in a literary style does not mean that realism… is so artificial and conventional that it is incapable of referring to reality.”
And so we have the paradox of realism: it attempts to capture real life, and yet it does so through “unreal” means, through artifice. In many ways, this is the tension of all literature, of any search for truth or meaning using the implements of words.
Many writers have sensed this tension, and in pursuit of consistency, like Barthes, have sacrificed coherence. The self-described materialist poet Don Paterson, for instance, roundly rejects meaning altogether: “The idea that material objects, processes or events can somehow possess immaterial truths is, I suspect, a candidate for mankind’s greatest error—and the reason we cannot free ourselves from the iniquitous and inequitable laws we believe ourselves ruled by”—a bizarre claim not only in its self-evident inconsistency (absent immaterial truth, by what do we judge laws “iniquitous”?), but also in its context within a tome that spends pages deriding modernist poets who abandoned the “beauty” found in “the symmetry of form and organisation we find in the natural world.”
The explicit faith found in writers like Marilynne Robinson—or even the reckoning with moral mystery and meaning by irreligious writers like Cormac McCarthy—is the quickly vanishing exception to the rule of materialism.
What an odd circumstance the aspiring author finds himself in, then, in which it seems he must pursue truth and beauty, as did Keats, but not as such. If he achieves meaning, I suppose, it must be only by accident.
This so-called realism instructs readers, too. The result is a readership that no longer recognizes many undercurrents of story in eras past. Virtue and vice have been supplanted by trauma and pathology as the primary drivers of character behavior. Put another way, moral agency has been annulled in favor of behaviorism (which, to be certain, offers the author more easily articulated “motivations”).
Consider the recently released television show, The Rings of Power—a new story taking place in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. While the individual narrative threads generally follow those in Tolkien’s appendices, the show feels alien to the original written works: the protagonist, Galadriel, is driven primarily by the trauma of loss, as opposed to nearly all the heroes in Tolkien’s writings, who are driven by honor of various sorts; Galadriel’s brother advises her, early in the story, to “touch the darkness” in order to distinguish it from the light—a theme that emerges many times, despite being directly contrary to Tolkien’s own preoccupation with the corruptibility of the human heart given even the briefest exposure to evil; and Gandalf (or the wizard most viewers will assume to be Gandalf), rendered child-like, ultimately becomes good by repeating to himself, “I am good.”
It is a materialist impulse that says clearly distinguishable good and evil, virtue and vice, are less believable, less real, than trolls and elves. And it’s an impulse I’ve discovered in myself, the mimetic accumulation of more years than I care to count.
James Wood argues for a broader definition of realism in light of its inherent paradox, a definition that might include “Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Hamsun’s Hunger and Beckett’s Endgame”: “life on the page, life brought to other life by the highest artistry.” He calls this broader realism “lifeness.” Wood, who is not a Christian, understands the value of broadening the thematic grammar of our stories for the sake of capturing yet-uncaptured elements of human life.
In fact, he might have engaged with Christian authors, such as Marilynne Robinson, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, to name a few, who similarly wrestled with realism. O’Connor, for instance, wrote, “In the novelist’s case, prophecy is a matter of seeing near things with their extension of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up. The prophet is a realist of distances.” Dostoevsky said, “I am only a realist in the higher sense; that is, I portray all the depths of the human soul.”
Such realism—we may call it high realism, per Dostoevsky—throws off the constraints of materialism or low realism. It makes space for the enterprising author to retool the conventions of fiction for the purpose of describing a wider range of contemporary life: life with moral meaning, life with truth and beauty, life with God.
Connection, and more specifically its linguistic apparatus, metaphor, is irresistible to humans.
Meaning and the Christian Author
For the Christian author—aspiring or established—plenty of implications of adopting high realism present themselves. Missing from most low realism of today are faithful Christian characters, serious discussion of the metaphysical ground (or lack thereof) underlying our assumptions about good and evil, depictions of purely self-giving behavior or cruelty that cannot be explained away.
But let me make one of many possible applications, examining how practitioners of high realism and low realism might think differently about a particular literary device—among the most important for the fiction writer: metaphor.
Connection, and more specifically its linguistic apparatus, metaphor, is irresistible to humans. Some cultural anthropologists argue metaphor offers the organizing principle of all human thought—that we can only understand anything by its likeness to other things. Indeed, the Bible makes extensive use of metaphor to reveal God’s mystery to humans: He is a father, a mother hen, a rock, a potter, a vine, a gardener.
Metaphor is a vital part of what makes literature what it is, yet there is something distinctly anti-materialist about the impulse to make of unrelated things a family. While we modern thinkers, brains bobbing along in our collective crania, tell ourselves the mark of acuity is the ability to parse, connections come to us unbidden. I recall walking with my then three-year-old son, pointing to objects and naming them: “path,” “grass,” “woodchips,” “swing.” And when I lifted him and began to push him on the swing, he pointed up at the orange and yellow canopy tossed by wind overhead and shouted, “fishies!”
Often it is these strange moments of connection, between leaves and fish, or anything else, that awaken in us some pleasurable discomfort, what Marilynne Robinson describes as “the feeling of an overplus of meaning in reality.”
For the high realist, metaphor uses this pleasurable discomfort to gesture toward mystery. I think here of plenty of authors, religious or not, whose words enlarge the reader’s view of meaning. From Wallace Stevens: “Remember how the crickets came/Out of their mother grass, like little kin,/In the pale nights, when your first imagery/Found inklings of your bond to all that dust.” Stevens strides confidently past the modest metaphor, with its single tenor and single vehicle, and opts instead for a whole language of metaphor, which gestures wildly beyond its frame. Who’s to say what is or isn’t bonded, who is or isn’t kin?
Was Stevens thinking of Adam, and his bond to the “ground”—in Hebrew, adama? Adam, which we take to be a name and which simply means groundling, became the very word for mankind: “So God created adam in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
Yet in this land of overwhelming complexity and wild connection, materialists and low realism offer metaphors to soothe rather than unsettle.
Writer Ira Glass once spoke on his radio show, This American Life, about his discomfort with the idea of God, a Being who demanded praise from His followers. This discomfort was generously assuaged by a retired Methodist pastor, during an hour-and-a-half-long car ride.
The pastor, said Glass, explained “God to be all the values and principles that he sees in scripture—the obligation to love each other, to be honest and decent in our dealings with each other, all of those things…. In other words, the literal words of the Bible, the literal words of the prayers aren’t as important as… [the] pledge to act a certain way in the world.”
Glass felt better after the conversation, because it is easy to abide a God who is different from us—whose face shines like the sun and who holds the keys of death—when he is not really there.
Even Christians feel this impulse, partly driven, it seems to me, by the straw man of “Biblical literalism” so often levied by an increasingly materialist culture. I recently attended a Bible study on the book of Revelation, about John the Revelator’s vision of the risen Christ, whose “eyes were like blazing fire [and whose] feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace and [whose] voice was like the sound of rushing waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and coming out of his mouth was a sharp, double-edged sword.”
At the end of reading all this, one exasperated attendant exclaimed, “But it’s all just symbolic!” In the materialist imagination (such as it is), concrete and abstract have amicably divorced: the material must abjure any symbolic potency, and the symbolic must deny any materiality. How much more palatable Christ appears within such a framework.
For the low realist, metaphor becomes mere abstraction, making smaller our understanding of moral meaning. God is not love; love—our love—is god. This abstraction raises a question: What utility does “god” as a concept offer, other than momentarily reviving emotions once associated with beliefs long abandoned? Or, to return to The Rings of Power, what utility do “light” or “dark” hold as concepts when Tolkien’s original conceptions of good and evil have been done away with? They are references without referents.
The Christian God and moral absolutes disturb hollow metaphor. Christ, after all, is metaphor enfleshed, the divine become human. We are invited into that metaphor, asked to become one with Him, to assume His sonship, His perfection, to accept His inheritance. We embody this metaphor each time we take communion, the flesh and blood of our Savior.
How else can we, aspiring high realists, share this literally real and symbolically potent Christ besides as He did—with metaphor?
This world in which we are rooted, from which we emerged, holds out to us the apparatus for apprehending the one true God, not as we might grasp a math equation, but as we might brush the fiery fur of a celosia in August bloom. Put another way, while low realists use metaphor as a gesture to the connectedness of things, high realists use metaphor as a gesture to all things’ connectedness to God.
We Christians are faced with this question, then: whether to adopt the conventions of low realism, of materialism, or to forge new conventions alongside generations of Christian authors striving for a higher realism. This is especially pressing, since we write to a readership whose natural spiritual intuitions, whose impulses toward meaning, have been so neglected by materialist writers.
For my part, I’m significantly revising my novel. I’ve decided I cannot believe in God with my heart and fail to confess him with my words, including those I write.
David Priest’s award-winning prose, focused on nature, technology, and ethics, has appeared in Religion & Ethics, Outside Magazine, Salon, The American Literary Review, and many other publications. He lives with his wife and two sons in Louisville, KY.
