RELIGION & THE MODERN NOVEL : What my Japanese students helped me see.

I have spent the last two summers teaching English literature to Japanese adults who come to the University of Chicago to finish their work for a master's degree the university offers in Japan. I had some broad goals as to what I wanted to do for my students, partly to justify the colossal expense (in hope as well as money) they had gone to in making their very long journey. I wanted to clarify certain organizing themes of the courses (religion and the novel one summer, gender relations in modern literature last summer). But I also wanted to teach them about certain aspects of American culture, and I wanted to help them improve their skills in reading literature and help them with their English. I thought the assigned texts, which included Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, and Joan Didion's Book of Common Prayer, would serve these goals in interesting ways.

I wanted some things for myself as well. I wanted to learn about my students by becoming involved with them as persons. This was possible because these were mature people, ranging in age from their late twenties to around fifty. I had a specifically literary way by which I thought I might arrive at a kind of anthropological knowledge. I asked them to be especially attentive to moments in the assigned texts when characters said or did things that surprised them, things quite different from what persons in Japan might have said or done in similar circumstances. I have found that, as a literary critic, illumination begins when you are flummoxed by something in a text. These are the moments when you stop finding only what you already know or have already read--when you cease gazing at your own image in the mirror. It's in unexpected and estranging moments that we have the chance to transcend ourselves and arrive at a new understanding. I imagined that the Japanese students would experience many such moments in reading the works I had assigned.

I was wrong. It was very hard for my students to report on their experience in this way. There are probably many reasons that my exercise in amateur anthropology was a bust. One is that Japanese culture confers great authority on the teacher. This means in practice that my students were waiting to see what I thought and were skeptical about the usefulness of their own impressions. There were other reasons having to do with Japanese attitudes but also with my students' lack of experience as readers. You have to be an advanced reader to feel confident about your experience of gaps in a text. The anxious novice reader will tend to minimize any anomalies that are encountered.

If my experiment in literary anthropology did not lead me into the heart of Japanese culture, it did force me to rethink where and how I might learn about my guests. In the process I discovered what Americans and other Westerners have often discovered in thinking about how to present European and American literature to Asian readers. I learned, willy-nilly, that my students were deeply acculturated to certain Western ideas and values--Mcdonald's and high tech make us kin--but tone-deaf on other wavelengths. As a consequence, I read and taught these books in a different way than I do when I teach American students. I found myself teaching self-consciously as an American and as a representative of Western civilization. Set down like that, my formulation looks pretentious to me. Put more simply, an American is not likely to learn much about foreigners and their culture by teaching British and American literature to people from other countries. What he is likely to learn concerns that literature itself and the culture (his own) in which it is embedded. And, because he too is embedded in that culture, he stands a chance of learning something of value about himself. (I use the masculine pronoun not because the learning is possible only for men but because I am talking about what happened to me.)

Let me explain in more detail. In the summer of 1998 I taught a section on religion and the modern novel. I enjoyed the experience but was often frustrated because I had only five students in the class. Anticipating that women students might be more interested in gender roles than in religion, last summer I changed my topic and wound up with twelve students. The surprising thing is that this course, supposed to be about gender roles, turned out to be about religion also. This was especially true for Muriel Spark's comic masterpiece, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Miss Brodie is an eccentric spinster and schoolteacher in 1930s Edinburgh. Initially, I was interested in her relationship to her "set," the ten-year-olds who idolize their wildly eccentric teacher in their otherwise constricted all-girls' school. My students handled those issues with relative ease but were often stymied by the way in which religion shapes Spark's story.

Spark was raised in Calvinist Edinburgh and in this novel she looks back at her own Scottish childhood. She looks back as one who has escaped from Edinburgh and converted to Catholicism. At one point she has a character say that Miss Brodie's moral obliquity in pushing one of her girls, now a teen-ager, to become the lover of the school's art teacher has its origin in Miss Brodie's mistaking herself for the God of Calvin. In Spark's view, Miss Brodie is no god but a self-deceived, self-intoxicated spinster who is using her girls to give order and emotional intensity to her life. Miss Brodie's idealization of Mussolini's Fascists only reveals the soft spots in her romantic aestheticism. Among the several virtues Miss Brodie lacks--being a Calvinist bluestocking is plainly responsible--are objectivity, impersonality, and a sense of the comic finiteness of human beings. Spark takes these to be virtues fostered by Catholicism.

Coming across passages like the one about Miss Brodie mistaking herself for the God of Calvin, one of my students saw that religion was at least as important as gender issues in this novel. She e-mailed me: "I have little idea about Christianity. What does it mean to belong to schools such as Presbyterian, Episcopal, Calvinism, Catholic? And what is the meaning to be a Catholic nun?"

A crucial question, inasmuch as Sandy, Miss Brodie's favorite disciple and destined to become a nun, plays Judas by betraying her teacher. The result of Sandy's betrayal is that Miss Brodie loses her job, which is tantamount to losing her reason for existing. She dies soon after, and Sandy, consumed by guilt, enters a convent.

If Sandy is the Judas among Miss Brodie's schoolgirl disciples, that would seem to imply that Miss Brodie is a Christ figure. It would be more accurate, however, to say that Miss Brodie is a parody-Christ. Spark's consistently satiric view of human affairs doesn't allow for the easy inflation of characters into Christ figures, a sentimental weakness of other novelists who were writing in the same years. From the divine point of view, outside human space and time, all human activities have the quality of parody. But Spark's comic detachment is not melodramatic: Miss Brodie is a parody-Christ but not the Antichrist. On balance, as Sandy only belatedly comes to understand, Miss Brodie's part in the sentimental education of her girls is positive.

What, indeed, does it mean to belong to a "school" such as Catholic? I wondered what my students could make of Spark's deeply Catholic sensibility. As Commonweal readers perhaps know, the present near-moribund condition of Catholicism in Japan would have been a surprise to Catholics four centuries ago, when the Jesuit priest Francis Xavier brought Christianity to Japan. In the century that followed his arrival in 1549, as many as 300,000 Japanese may have converted to Christianity, and Jesuits became influential as advisers to powerful lords and even some of the country's rulers. Nagasaki is now famous in the West as the site of one of the devastating American atomic-bomb attacks, but it was famous in the seventeenth century as the Rome of the East.

Unfortunately for seventeenth-century Japanese Catholics, good times brought suspicion. Japan's feudal lords worried that Christianity would induce their vassals to transfer ultimate allegiance from them to God. So first, in 1614, Japan expelled all the priests and, twenty-five years later, all the remaining Europeans. For the next two centuries Japan remained a closed society. Even now, well over a century since Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to open to the West, Catholicism has not recovered anything like the prestige it enjoyed in its heyday. The corresponding lack of knowledge was clear not only in my students' reaction to Muriel Spark but also in their blank response to the Catholic material in Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.

McCarthy's memoir is notable for its attitude of disdain toward most forms of American Catholic life and American Catholics themselves. One of my students said that in Japan, where humility is a higher value than undiplomatic self-assertion, anyone as arrogant and self-willed as the young Mary would prove embarrassing to those close to her. I could only reply that there were probably fewer than six degrees of difference between that Japanese attitude and my own.

Still, there is some bravura writing in McCarthy's book. I wondered what my students would think about one chapter over which I myself have long puzzled. McCarthy's memoir was not written all at once. Originally the individual chapters appeared as self-contained sketches and stories in the New Yorker. Why, then, I have asked myself, did McCarthy elect to end this book about her Catholic girlhood with a long chapter, twice as many pages as any previous chapter, on her fascination with her maternal grandmother--who was a Jew.

Augusta ("Gussie") Morganstern Preston, the wife of Mary's maternal grandfather, seems at first an unlikely heroine. A recluse, she wore a veil in public to hide the scars from a disastrously unsuccessful facelift. But to the child Mary she was a deeply mysterious, romantic figure. What little we learn of Gussie's attitudes makes her sound as banal as any other adult character in Mary McCarthy's world. But the memoirist has special uses for her. McCarthy the adult memoirist is not explicit on this point, but as I read this chapter she conceives her grandmother as an old Christian stereotype of the Jew. Gussie is shown, even in her old age, as wholly carnal, occupied with paints, powders, and lotions to preserve her once-great beauty. Moreover, she is the only woman in the McCarthy and Preston families to be associated with the erotic. Overall, she is mysterious, a woman with a secret.

We learn that secret only when Gussie's sister, Rose, dies and Gussie expresses her grief in terrible, almost inhuman howling. McCarthy makes the point that Gussie had not grieved so openly when here own husband had died or when her daughter Tess, Mary's mother, had perished while still a young woman, leaving behind four small children. The secret, it's clear, is that the Prestons have never been as real to Gussie as her own sister, blood of her own Jewish blood. In her quiet, reclusive way, Gussie had all those years been in exile among Seattle's genteel Christians.

If we ask how this may bear on Mary McCarthy's self-narrative of rebellion against her Catholic past, the answer, I think, is that little Mary is implicitly being depicted as identifying with her grandmother, the exotic outsider. Of course, the child can hardly have been fully aware of the basis of her grandmother's appeal for her. But the adult memoirist, perhaps recalling Joyce's Stephen Dedalus and his invocation of "silence, exile, and cunning," sees in the figure of the Jew a foreshadowing of her own literary role as the rebel who risks being marginalized as a pariah. Gussie, whose primary activity is looking after her body and making her daily tour of Seattle's upscale fashion stores, might seem too vacuous to use in making any large point. But, as I read this concluding chapter, McCarthy is suggesting, in the portrait of Gussie, how the little girl Mary will grow into a woman quite contrary, far more aggressively so than the self-isolated Jewish grandmother. Here, in the identification with the scarred outsider, are the beginnings of the adult McCarthy as a radical social critic. The grown-up McCarthy will become a scourge of bourgeois respectability, including its religious versions. She will devote a career to making up for the shame and abuse heaped on her during her Minneapolis years by her mother's Catholic relatives in the terrible aftermath of her parents' sudden death when she was six.

I might offer a similarly religiously oriented interpretation of Joan Didion's A Book of Common Prayer. The title evokes that of the Church of England's ordering of the liturgy for Sunday worship. Yet Didion's novel does not seem, on the face of it, to have any religious content. Set in the years of the descent of the anti-Vietnam War movement into the mindless violence of the Radical Left, it is a story about a vacuous, well-to-do California matron who sees her empty life transformed by her daughter's involvement in terrorism and disappearance into the underground to avoid arrest. The mother becomes a drifter, finally offering her life in a revolutionary cataclysm that takes place in a banana republic wholly given over to violence and nihilism. And yet, I would argue, there are religious inklings, fragments, or seedlings of redemption, amidst this wasteland.

But I won't argue the point here. Rather, I mention my intuitions about the McCarthy and Didion texts because I would not have been led to them had I been teaching in a familiar American context. My Japanese students were very astute about the gender relationships. But I have alluded to their tone-deafness at certain levels. It was the religious dimension in these stories that they were missing. And I might have continued missing it, too, if I had not sensed a large gap in their response, a gap I needed to close up if I were to serve them as they deserved.

I continue to be interested in those moments when we or our students show ourselves to have tin ears. For Americans those moments often occur in the reading of literary texts containing explicit religious ideas and hard-to-detect religious residues. If, as with the Japanese students, you have little knowledge of the historical relationship between Christianity and Judaism, Christians and Jews, you lose much of the force of Mary McCarthy's characterization of Gussie Morganstern. If, in the case of Didion, you don't know that the liturgy unifies the disparate members of the Anglican congregation in communion by way of public prayer, hymns, ritual, and ceremony, you will miss the force of her novel's depiction of a total breakdown of order and community. How, then, did I spend my summer? Well, I think I learned a little about religious reading. As for learning about Japan's culture, I hope to go there some time soon to find out what difference it may make to teach familiar British and American texts on my students' home turf.

Mark Krupnick teaches English literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism.