Introduction: Incarnations of Christ in Twentieth-Century Fiction

Abstract

The history of western literature’s intersection with Christianity is a long, often complicated, but strangely complementary one. The latter has provided the ideological basis for the former, either explicitly as a reassertion of the religion’s supremacy, or, more restrictively, as the ethical persuasion underlying literature, while western literature has often been used to clarify and expand, or question and challenge the theological premise of Christianity. This relationship is, of course, neither surprising nor inevitable: Christianity was (and still is) one of the western world’s most dominant and expansive metanarratives and has seeped into every aspect constituting human existence, be it personal values, community identity, or even state policies. As a discourse operating within and directed by the compass of this metanarrative, literature necessarily reflects, sometimes if only to satirize or parody, Christianity’s trajectory. This relationship is further reinforced by the fact that as a foundational discourse familiar throughout the West, the Bible has also provided writers with various narrative strategies and an astonishing range of symbols from which to draw, and which in turn either specifically or obliquely inform the ideological and aesthetical tenors of their literary work. However, while these two institutions may have complemented each other, they were never equals, and the relationship remained, for much of their shared histories, an uneasy one. The worth of literature was heavily dependent on aligning itself with the faith’s truth claims. In this regard, C. W. du Toit’s observation that the novel, being “free,” is therefore able to “pose critical and challenging questions invaluable to theology, uncomfortable to the God of dogmas and creeds,” is only partially accurate and largely specific to writings after the Second World War (818). Prior to this, there were limits as to how far literature could confront Christianity, thus circumscribing the kinds of “critical and challenging questions” literature could pose. Works that blatantly undermined or lampooned Christianity (or, more often, the church), such as Diderot’s The Nun, may at best be permitted as expressions of the corruption in the cultural and social imaginations that resulted from the abuse or abandonment of reli-