d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn Reading the Supernatural in Contemporary American Ethnic and Christian Fiction Looking at the wider landscape of contemporary Euro-American fiction, it appears that themes of the supernatural are mostly confined to particular niches. Compared to the literary field of, for instance, the Romantic period, serious literature in Mark McGurl’s program era - from “institutionally subsidized high-art experimentalism” to “economically viable domains of serious middlebrow fiction” (29) - looks fairly disenchanted, in the Weberian sense of the term. There is no supernatural reality represented in that fiction. Even postmodernists such as Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, and Don DeLillo, who have been characterized by John McClure as post-secular for their interest in exploring “new forms of religiously inflected seeing and being” (ix), represent the supernatural mostly in a non-mimetic, fabulistic manner. If writers in the (neo-)realist vein choose to confront their characters with something like an experience of transcendence, these are imagined as immanent, often internal, psychological events. 1 Where religious beliefs are dealt with on the plot level, they usually do not come in supernatural forms that would openly violate a modern understanding of the natural order. There is a significant exception, however. What seems to be almost a taboo for Euro-American writers with ambitions to high-cultural prestige does not apply to those areas of contemporary American fiction usually demarcated as ethnic literatures. Among the practitioners of “high cultural pluralism,” a strong and often quite unironic interest in the supernatural and magical is, in fact, widespread. Remarkably, their often serious, even solemn approach to the supernatural does not keep these writers from gaining lots of academic attention and winning prestigious prizes. Nor does it keep them from attracting large and diverse readerships. Some of the most successful and critically acclaimed African-American, Native-American, and Asian- American authors writing today - who are simultaneously read in literature classrooms and endorsed by Oprah - have engaged with supernatural themes in ways that involve literal manifestations of various spirit beings or magical phenomena. When it comes to the treatment of the otherworldly or magical, these ethnic writings all share certain basic characteristics that distinguish them from the various types of genre fiction that typically feature the supernatural. In contrast to the alternative worlds created by genre fantasy, the supernatural in contemporary minority literatures seemingly emerges from a fictional reality represented as a model of “our” mundane world through recognizable 1 On religion in contemporary American fiction, see also Hungerford. 102 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn settings, objects, and psychologically-plausible characters. Also, in contrast to fantasy and most Gothic literature, the marvelous occurrences or entities in ethnic fictions of the supernatural assume forms that belong to, or are presented as belonging to, traditional religious beliefs. Typically, the entities are from the cultural heritage peculiar to the ethnic group into whose world the story introduces the reader. These fictions are further distinguished from horror or Gothic literature by the fact the supernatural is not primarily intended to thrill or frighten, nor is it a narrative means of, first and foremost, probing the dark side of the human soul. In the literature of high-cultural pluralism, these “dramatic disruptions of secular structures of reality” (McLure 3) are almost without exception linked to the religious quests of the fictional characters and tied into the larger spiritual concerns of the books. Interestingly enough, there is another large segment of contemporary American fiction that takes a markedly similar approach to the supernatural, but has not gained cultural authority as “serious literature” or slipped past the gatekeepers of the middle-brow: evangelical fiction. It exists in a distinct mass-market niche, similar to but separate from fantasy and horror. In many novels written for the evangelical fiction market, one also finds “dramatic disruptions of secular structures of reality” that link to religious quests and larger spiritual concerns, are presented as being part of traditional religious beliefs, and situated in recognizable, “mundane,” mimetic realities. These novels are never shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, though, nor are they regularly reviewed by middle-brow tastemakers. When they are published by mainstream houses, publishers sometimes have to hold their noses. 2 They have been largely ignored by academia, and are especially rare in literature classes. Like ethnic fiction, these novels have been quite popular, but in this case, commercial success is seen as incompatible with respectability. These novels violate the high-culture taboo against the supernatural in structurally similar ways to the often well-regarded ethnic fiction, but are treated quite differently by professional readers. This essay intends to shed some light on the question of why ethnic supernatural fiction and Christian supernatural fiction have fared so differently among professional readers. It seeks to delineate ethnic and Christian supernatural fictions as literary genres, offer some necessary differentiations, and more clearly shows the strategies by which these bodies of literature represent the supernatural. Moreover, it wants to examine the deep similarities in the way these fictions are read by “ordinary,” non-professional readers, and why they are read, and what they do for people. For this purpose, this essay will briefly consider the respective histories of the literatures, and one paradigmatic text for each type of supernatural literature will be discussed in a little more detail. As an example of ethnic supernatural fiction, Louise 2 As one New York editor put it as her publishing house prepared to enter the Christian fiction market, “whatever we all think about the Christian right, if we in New York only published to please ourselves, we’d all be out of business” (Kennedy). Reading the Supernatural 103 Erdrich’s 2005 novel The Painted Drum will be examined, while William Paul Young’s 2008 bestseller The Shack will serve to illustrate the treatment of the supernatural in evangelical fiction. *** Ethnic supernatural fiction came into its own in the wake of the post-1960 new ethnicity movements that led to the creation of African-American, and subsequently other ethnic minority studies programs. This also lead to the adaption of certain models of “ethnic writing” within proliferating MFA programs. At the same time, with the critical but also commercial success of post-colonial writers, “magical realism” emerged as a model for how to combine in “serious literature” the basic representational code of Western literary realism, certain experimental features of high modernism, and marvelous elements, often derived from non-Western belief systems. Authors such as Gabriel García Márquez and, later, Salman Rushdie produced works in this vein. These works were both best-selling and prize-winning. Consequently, magical realism became a category U.S. publishers, reviewers, and critics frequently used in framing the works that North American ethnic writers, most of them women, were beginning to produce in the late 1970s. This began with works such as Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) and Tar Baby (1981), Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977). The cachet of the category of magical realism and the interpretative possibilities for which it allowed proved crucial in gaining high establishment recognition for these authors. It also significantly helped their marketability. The term magical realism has been widely overused. This is especially true when discussing American minority writers who somehow conjoin the representational code of Western literary realism with marvelous elements. As Shannin Schroeder has argued, there is a “need to counteract the critical tendency to label anything and everything unreal or supernatural in literature as ‘magical realism’” (xii). This labeling leads to a blurring of important distinctions, both on the level of narrative representation and on the level of intended reader-response. 3 American ethnic fictions of the supernatural, in particular, require a more nuanced approach than the ones offered by existing studies. Although they do share certain general characteristics, and some authors have associated themselves with the label, these fictions are quite diverse in how exactly and to what effect the elements of the otherworldly are narrated. While the history of the term magical realism is complex and its definition contested, it is probably fair to say that most Anglo-American scholars working on the subject would follow Wendy B. Faris’s influential Ordinary Enchantments. In Faris’s view, the one indispensable requirement for magical realist works is that the narrated worlds mostly follow the code of realism, 3 A recent example for such an all-inclusive use of the category of magical realism is Uncertain Mirrors: Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures (2009) by Jesús Benito, Ana Ma Manzanas, and Begoña Simal. 104 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn but contain “irreducible elements of magic.” Magical realism signals readers to abstain from any attempts to rationalize away what are unambiguously supernatural phenomena, and to simply accept their matter-of-fact representation. Indeed, as Faris puts it, the elements of magic and the supernatural in magical realism are generally “well assimilated into the realistic textual environment, rarely causing any comment by narrators or characters, who model such an acceptance for their readers” (8). As a consequence, the conflicts or at least tensions between a naturalistic and a supernatural perspective on the world, which a modern educated audience (regardless of its ethnic, cultural or religious affiliation) would perceive outside of literature, tends to be eliminated within the fictional universe and, by implication, also in the experience of reading. Taking this admittedly very rough definition as a measuring stick, the use of the term magical realism seems quite appropriate when talking about a sizable portion of American ethnic fictions featuring the supernatural. But not all. The narrative naturalization of the supernatural can serve quite different functions, as far as the intended reader-response is concerned. Christopher Warnes pointed this out in his study of British postcolonial magical realist fiction. “The magic in the magical realist text may have, in postmodern fashion, the effect of unmasking the real, showing up its claims to truth to be provisional and contingent on consensus,” he writes. “Alternatively, the magical may seek to force its way into the company of the real, and thereby to share in the privileged claim the language of realism has to representing the world” (2005, 9). Here there is a helpful distinction between two paradigms of magical realistic fiction. One Warnes calls the irreverence paradigm, in which the supernatural primarily works as a metafictional device that enhances skepticism towards ontologies, epistemologies, and meta-narratives. The other he calls the faith paradigm. In the faith paradigm, the supernatural serves as a means to expand the secularized, naturalistic assumptions about the “real” underlying modern literary realism, often in the service of affirming “non-western world views and cultural modalities” (2005, 1). In the first case, the self-conscious suspension of disbelief in the reading process primarily works toward a heightened awareness of the make-believe nature of realist fiction and, indeed, of the cultural constructs of reality. In the second case, readers are encouraged to accept the veracity of what is narrated as a way of immersing themselves in an alternative world-view, “no matter how different this perspective may be to the reader’s non-reading opinions and judgments” (Bowers 4). Warnes’s paradigmatic examples for the irreverence paradigm are Rushdie’s novels, including Midnight’s Children (1981) and The Satanic Verses (1988). The faith paradigm is most clearly on display in The Famished Road (1981) by Nigerian Booker Prize winner Ben Okri. With U.S. ethnic writers, we can also find examples that clearly lean toward a religiously irreverent, highly ironic treatment of the supernatural. Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, Reading the Supernatural 105 Sherman Alexie, and Gerald Vizenor are all examples of this. 4 For the most part, though, ethnic supernatural fiction in the U.S. has tended toward the faith-paradigm. Even in early, otherwise fairly experimental works such as Song of Solomon or Ceremony, the supernatural is always also represented as reflecting authentic religious minority traditions, which are believable to characters and narrators, who model an attitude of serious attention for the reader. It is important to emphasize, therefore, that Warnes’s “irreverence” and “faith” paradigm are not be regarded as separate genres. They are rather two different sets of strategies, aimed specifically at structuring particular sorts of readings and eliciting certain reader responses. As such, they are not mutually exclusive but are frequently combined, even if one paradigm dominates. This is true not only for the above-named pioneers of magical realism in the US, but also for younger authors such as Gloria Naylor, Ana Castillo, or Cristina García. 5 A good number of ethnic supernatural fictions do not meet even the basic formal requirements for magical realist fiction, however. They encourage quite different responses from readers. Whereas magical realism naturalizes the supernatural, in these writings the characters’ encounters with the supernatural are ambiguated. They are presented as indeterminate in such a way as to forbid a seamless integration into the realistic narrative environment. In these texts, the same kind of phenomena that are usually admitted by the characters of magical realist novels without much ado and that are portrayed by the narrator in an unconcerned, casual style, are presented as irrevocably strange. They are represented as disconcerting disruptions of the initially established fictional world. 6 There are a few relatively early examples for this in American ethnic literature, notably Tony Hillerman’s Dance Hall of the Dead (1973) and Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983). Mostly however, this variety of ethnic supernatural fiction has been produced by younger writers who pushed into the market in the 1990s and early 2000s. This group includes novels by such acclaimed and successful authors as Louise Erdrich and Amy Tan, but also less well-known names like Randall Kenan, Nora Okja Keller, and Loida Maritza Pérez. 7 4 Compare, for instance, Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972); Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993); or Vizenor’s Hotline Healers: An Almost Browne Novel (1997). 5 Compare Naylor’s Mama Day (1988); Castillo’s So Far From God (1993) and García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992) and The Aguero Sisters (1997). 6 The best theoretical work that, drawing on examples from South American literature, offers a systematic narratological distinction between magical realism and the fantastic is still Amaryll Beatrice Chanady’s Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antinomy (1985). For a detailed definition of the ethnic fantastic, compare Stievermann, “Towards a Theory of the Ethnic Fantastic: A Comparison of Gloria Naylors Mama Day and Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow” (171-76). 7 On Erdrich, see below. Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses (1995) squarely falls into the category of the ethnic fantastic. So do Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits (1989), Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997) and Pérez’s Geographies of Home (1999). 106 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn In these novels, the experience of the supernatural comes as a problematic disturbance of the fictional world and hence is met by narrators and characters with surprise, awe and, frequently with hesitation or outright skepticism. Harking back to Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of fantastic literature, a better term for this sub-group of ethnic supernatural fiction is “the ethnic fantastic.” In common parlance (and often in scholarly writing, too) the fantastic and fantasy are still used interchangeably. However, as Tzvetan Todorov suggested in Introduction à la littérature fantastique (1970; transl. 1975), the term fantastic should be reserved for a very particular kind of literature that is characterized by an irresolvable hesitation of the reader over how to interpret the occurrence of seemingly supernatural phenomena in a narrative universe that otherwise seems to abide by the conventions of realism. Todorov’s defining exemplar of the literary fantastic was Henry James’s Turn of the Screw (1898). James’s work uses the techniques of psychological realism to create an interpretative impasse: characters and narrators struggle to account for the extraordinary events. Their disconcerted and skeptical response (their vacillation between naturalistic and supernatural explanations) mirrors the readers’ hermeneutic conflict about whether and how to adjust their understanding of the ground rules on which the fictional universe is based. Structurally, the ethnic fantastic works in a similar way even if its themes, contexts, and intended audiences are of course very different. Although there is a lot of overlap and some authors have experimented with both forms, the distinction between magical realism and the ethnic fantastic seems one well worth making. They constitute two closely related but distinct modes of combining the representational conventions of realism with elements of the marvelous that, each in their own way, have appeared significant to both professional academic critics and lay readers. Perhaps the popular and critical success of magical realist fictions in the U.S. has to do with the way in which the naturalization of the supernatural can be simultaneously read in a faith-oriented and an “irreverent,” selfreflexive, and subversive manner. Academic criticism of these novels, especially when sailing under the flag of minority studies, has not been averse to affirmative interpretations. In these interpretations, the unproblematic incorporation of the supernatural into a realist environment is understood as a way to expand rather than undermine the literary concept of realism and the dominant secular construals of reality. The protagonists’ encounters with the supernatural in such works as Song of Solomon or Ceremony are interpreted as a way of engaging readers in acts of recognition and self-recognition, respectively, of cultural difference and the value of that difference. In other words, these novels have been seen as ethno-religious attempts at expanding the boundaries of Euro-American norms of artistic expression. The fiction asserts certain indigenous supernatural beliefs as distinguishing a minority group’s alternative - even superior - view of reality. Yet even during the heyday of multiculturalism, a kind of literature that demanded no more of its readers than a literal, realistic recuperation of characters and plots would have been seen as wanting in aesthetic complexity. A naive propagating of Reading the Supernatural 107 faith in spirits, conjuring or healing ceremonies would, likewise, have been something of an embarrassment. However, by virtue of the inherent ambiguity of magical realism, even of those works that primarily belong to Warnes’s faith-paradigm can at the same time be understood as philosophical metafiction. By inserting elements of myth and oral storytelling traditions containing elements of the supernatural into the representational code of realism, ethnic writers are taken to de-familiarize this code and challenge the empiricist epistemology and the ontology of the factual underlying the Western realist novel. Ethnic fiction in the magical realist vein is often read as simultaneously seeking to make its audience accept the “realness” and dignity of minority worldviews and as undermining normative construals of realism. In the case of the ethnic fantastic, the constitutive hermeneutic conflicts allow for both a more literal, identificatory reading and for a more self-reflexive, theory-driven interpretations. Some texts encourage readers to focus on the one, some texts on the other. Again, though, these are not mutually exclusive. For instance, Avey Johnson, the African-American protagonist of Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, struggles to make sense of her extraordinary spiritual experiences during a trip to the Caribbean (involving encounters with her dead aunt and husband as well as epiphanies during a dance ceremony). Avey’s conflict, on the one hand, lends itself to an identificatory, faith-oriented reading that focuses on her personal, cultural, and religious struggle, as she is trying to find some closure with her past and reconnect to her black heritage. At the same time, the novel has been interpreted by academic critics as reflecting a larger clash of cultural epistemologies, a clash written into the very narrative structure of the text. The text will not allow for a complete recuperation of Avey’s experiences, in accordance with the conventions of traditional Western realism, nor enable their full integration into an alternative type of realism. The ambiguity persists to the end. 8 Between the practitioners of “high cultural pluralism” and the burgeoning field of minority studies, there emerged strategies of writing and reading “higher,” theoretically validated, meanings into the different narrative modes of representing the supernatural in ethnic fiction. At the same time, strategies developed for endowing the supernatural entities and events on the plot level with the potential for “higher” symbolical or allegorical meaning, without, however, necessarily canceling out the possibility of a realist recuperation by the reader. In texts belonging to the irreverence paradigm, this claim might be more or less completely suspended. However, works belonging both to the faith-paradigm of magical realism and the ethnic fantastic depend on such a primary realist recuperation, although they also allow for secondary symbolical or allegorical interpretations. Significantly, these higher levels of meaning are usually derived from Western academic discourse such as psychoanalysis, theories of race, ethnicity, and gender, or post-colonial studies. Supernatural elements (say the appearance of ghosts) have been overlaid with such concepts as cultural 8 See Stievermann. 108 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn trauma or the invisibility of marginalized women. This allows for superordinate, secular interpretations of the novels’ otherworldly occurrences, turning them into allegories for various identity struggles. A striking example for this would be Kathleen Brogan’s concept of “Cultural Haunting.” In contrast to academic readings of the supernatural in Christian fiction, these superordinate interpretations are usually understood as having been intended by their authors (probably rightly so), even if that might raise questions about possible tensions between the authentic expression of indigenous or folk beliefs and their theory-driven employment on the secondary, symbolic level. In this way, the ghosts in Morrison’s Beloved or Marshall’s Praisesong for instance, appear to have been designed and interpreted in such a way that could make them simultaneously an authentic expression of black vernacular spirituality and a symbolic embodiment of black female traumatization or self-alienation. Similarly, the Indian witches who create the Europeans in Silko’s Ceremony lend themselves to a double reading, in which they are at once realistic narrativizations of an ancient Native American tradition and an allegory of a post-colonial counter-narrative of cultural history that reverses the priority of the white race. In addition to having a dimension of critical metafictionality, establishing such levels of symbolic complexity associated with recognized theories has been crucial to the institutional success and canonization as high-brow literature of many works of ethnic supernatural fiction by professional readers. *** Evangelical Christian fiction arose in the same historical moment as the ethnic fantastic, but in very different institutions and institution-supported interpretive communities. Starting in the mid-1950s, some white, upwardly mobile Christian fundamentalists began to push for re-engagement with the broader culture and increased interdenominational cooperation to that end. This was the so-called neo-evangelical movement, embodied by Billy Graham and also James Dobson. Neo-evangelicals maintained their theological conservatism, but adopted a more pragmatic, moderate sensibility. They were folksy rather than aggressively anti-intellectual. The style was suitable to the post-war expansion of the middle class, and sustained by a burgeoning network of institutions, including publishers, an evangelical booksellers association, and gatekeeping organs such as Christianity Today and Focus on the Family. 9 As the movement expanded with the influx of baby boomers “born again” in the 1970s, the institutions also nurtured new forms of cultural engagements, including evangelical fiction. 10 The literature was defined by this matrix of evangelical institutions and the movement, in turn, was shaped by the imaginative work of the literature. 9 See Stephen P. Miller, Eskridge, and Worthen. 10 There were, of course, novels written by evangelicals and with evangelical themes prior to the creation of an evangelical Christian fiction market. The market and its institutions have been such a powerful force in producing fiction and producing specific Reading the Supernatural 109 The paradigm for evangelical fiction is a combination of traditional Christian conversion narratives with popular fiction genres, reframing mass-market, “escapist” entertainment as para-scriptural devotional texts. The earliest examples of this among the neo-evangelicals were Christian romance novels. Janette Oke, the wife of an evangelical minister on the Canadian prairie, wrote a story where the standard romance narrative is layered with evangelical theology. The heroine finds love - both human and divine (Logan 207-216; Neal 26-30). Oke’s first novel, Love Comes Softly (1979), is generally considered the first work of contemporary evangelical Christian fiction. It was written, published, and sold through evangelical institutions and widely read by evangelical consumers, most of whom were white, middle-aged, and middle class women. The novel does not prominently feature supernatural elements. Though the protagonist does have a conversion experience she describes as an otherworldly “surge of joy” (208), the fictional world of the novel is strictly secular. Evangelical Christian fiction changed, in this regard, with the publication of Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness in 1986. Peretti adapted the popular genre of horror fiction. His story of secret occult forces controlling an idyllic American town is similar to Stephen King’s 1986 novel It, in which a malevolent power memorably takes the form of a clown. In the evangelical novel, the evil takes the form of a multi-national corporation run by a secretive New Age group that is controlled by demons. This Present Darkness is recognizably part of the tradition H.P. Lovecraft called the “spectrally macabre.” The supernatural elements serve - at least at first - to give readers a shiver of the numinous. The hideous demons are described in detail so that readers might “tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse” (Lovecraft 14). In Peretti’s adaptation of this genre, however, it is not the moonstruck who sense the cosmic horror, but the faithful. The spectral does not forever elude the grasp of sane minds, but rather becomes apparent to those open to a broader view of reality. The narrator presents the supernatural in a casual manner. Though characters often initially respond to the otherworldly entities as irrevocably strange, their sense of reality soon expands and demons and angels are accepted as part of the ontological furniture in this otherwise mimetic fictional model of “our” reality. Peretti’s protagonists are roused to recognize the evil lurking beneath the so-called culture wars. As they become aware of the “beating of black wings” and the “scratching of outside shapes” (Lovecraft 16), they turn to prayer and rally angels to spiritual warfare (Peretti 401-402). The novel’s narrative arc, then, can be thought of as moving characters from a world of supernatural horror to a world of magical realism. In this evangelical adaptation of the horror genre, the supernatural elements that disrupt mundane realism take traditional sorts of very defined fiction, however, that these novels need to be examined separately. For an early period of evangelical writing, see Brown. For more on the evangelical book market see Balmer 193-208, Hendershot, and Silliman. 110 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn religious forms and end up linking to larger spiritual concerns, very much in the manner of the magical realism. This Present Darkness ultimately naturalizes the supernatural in a way that would be quite familiar to Warnes. It is structured according to his faith paradigm. As Warnes might phrase it, This Present Darkness puts the spectral in the company of the real, both finally sharing the privileged claim of mimetic representation (2005, 9). Peretti’s novel was quite well received among evangelicals. This Present Darkness sold 500,000 copies by 1989 and there were more than 200,000 preorders of the sequel, Piercing the Darkness (1989). It was a blockbuster by the standards of the evangelical book market, though it barely registered with the wider world (Bickle and Jantz 94; McDowell). Despite the critical tendency during this period to label any literature with supernatural elements expressed in naturalistic language as magical realism, scholars didn’t take note of this religious fiction that described spiritual warfare in the language of the newspaper. Among evangelical subculture, however, This Present Darkness had the notable effect of expanding the range of acceptable Christian literature. Though the Christian fiction market would continue to be dominated by genres of romance novels, a small but not insignificant portion of fiction experimented with supernatural elements. In the years immediately after Peretti’s success, T. Davis Bunn’s The Presence (1990), Larry Burkett’s Illuminati (1991), Pat Robertson’s The End of the Age (1991), and Bob Larson’s Dead Air (1991) all followed This Present Darkness in depicting occult forces in a recognizable, mimetic reality, using the code of realism to naturalize the supernatural. By the end of the decade, there were more representations of the supernatural in Christian fiction and they had gotten more diverse. Francine Rivers’ The Last Sin Eater (1999) makes use of traditions of Appalachian shamanism. Lynn Marzulli’s The Nephalim (1999) adapts New Age alien-deityabduction myths. Ted Dekker and Bill Bright’s Blessed Child (2000) imagines an African orphan with otherworldly powers. The most successful evangelical novel, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ Left Behind, came out in 1995. 11 Its narrative centers on a dramatic disruption of secular structures of reality, as true Christians all over the world are miraculously, supernaturally “raptured” by God. The fictional world they are raptured out of is presented mimetically. The novel treats the supernatural differently than This Present Darkness, however. In Left Behind, the supernatural is presented as fantastic, in Todorov’s sense. Its reality is ambiguous. The novel puts the reader into a position of hesitation that, if not irresolvable, is hesitation nonetheless. This is clear in a metafictional moment in the first half of the novel. A character notes that if the fictional narrative were a fiction in the fictional reality of the novel, it would be implausible. “If someone tried to sell a screenplay,” the protagonist thinks, “about millions of people disappearing, leaving everything but their bodies behind, it would be laughed off” (110). In the everyday reality of the reader, the novel can here be taken as plausible in how it is implausible, or the implausibility can be seen as implausible, 11 For an account of its commercial success, see Silliman. Reading the Supernatural 111 which would make it plausible. The problem is recursive. The characters do, as per the rules of Christian fiction, eventually have their conversion experience, which is here depicted as accepting the realism of the supernatural. This choice, however, does not simply resolve the problem of the disruption of the supernatural. As Amy Hungerford notes, the conversions happen as acts of submission (124-127). Belief is not portrayed as certain knowledge. Instead it is imagined as something that must be rehearsed and repeated, as “articulating the knowledge is part of the practice” of belief (Hungerford 112). The protagonists make extensive use of Christian apologetics, never getting to the point that such arguments are no longer necessary. The supernatural never achieves the status of taken-for-granted reality. The novel doesn’t give readers any reason to think the protagonists are wrong to choose to believe the realism of the supernatural, but the protagonists themselves doubt their knowledge and readers are never given more information than the protagonists. Left Behind is narrated from a close third person, so unlike This Present Darkness or some other works that fit into the faith paradigm of magic realism, the narrator never pulls back to show readers the true breadth of reality. Readers, like the protagonists, are rather asked to accept the plausibility of the supernatural, to believe in it, but only in the provisional sense of suspending disbelief. Professional readers have interpreted this representation of the supernatural according to the discourses of Western academic theory, specifically psychoanalysis. Left Behind is most frequently read symptomatically, the critic unmasking suppressed trauma and confused identity. “Clearly,” writes religious studies scholar Glenn W. Shuck in what is, to-date, the longest academic study of Left Behind, “beneath the bizarre, supernatural plots, something important is happening” (19). Shuck diagnoses the representation of the supernatural as resulting from the trauma of cultural changes. The texts serve to show that “prophecy believers already are, in a very real sense, the ones left behind by bewildering social, cultural, and economic changes” (18). Other critics see the “higher” meaning as sexual. Jason Bivins, for example, argues that the fiction teaches its audience to expect the culmination of human history but then that culmination is continually delayed, prolonging the believers’ (political) arousal (210-211). The text functions erotically. Hungerford also detects an “erotic charge” (123) between the two male protagonists, seeing Left Behind in part as being about illicit homosexual desire sublimated into practices of belief. There is, of course, ample textual evidence for psychoanalytical readings of Left Behind. This is an evangelical novel, after all, that opens with a penis joke (“Rayford Steele’s mind was on a woman he had never touched. With his fully loaded 747 on autopilot …” (1)). Nevertheless, the academics’ approach to this text is notably different than similar critical efforts to reveal the “higher” meaning in magical realist and ethnic fantastic fictions. Here, one cannot find affirmative interpretations that suggest the protagonists’ encounters with the supernatural serve to engage readers in recognition and self-recognition and thereby embrace the values of cultural difference. One does not find “critical” readings suggesting 112 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn the evangelical representations of the supernatural push against modernist Enlightenment norms and asserting a more expansive and holistic alternative or even superior understanding of reality. Even where evangelical and ethnic fictions’ representations of the supernatural are markedly similar, academic interpretations are not. Academic readings of the supernatural in evangelical fiction are most often framed with a certain aggression and hostility, as “counter,” and in some sense corrective. These readings are conceived as running against the presumed design of the text, the authorial intention. Where the theory-informed reading of the ethnic fantastic “reveals” a higher meaning, the same strategy applied to evangelical fiction “exposes” it. Professional readers have also rarely, if ever, allowed for a dimension of meta-fictionality to these Christian novels, even when the novels are very self-reflexive, ironic, ambiguous, and so on. There are standard explanations for the differences in how these respective representations of the supernatural have fared with professional readers. It’s commonly accepted that the cultural prestige awarded to the ethnic fantastic and denied evangelical fiction is a direct and objective reflection of quality. That could well be true. Yet, as James English has noted, there are also “these neglected agents and instruments of cultural exchange” that are always at work (14). The networks of institutions that produce and support these texts, and establish the interpretive communities that define them, seem more important in shaping the critical responses of academics than any actual textual features. In contrast to the divergent reactions of professional readers, both types of supernatural fictions, ethnic and Christian, seem to elicit similar responses on the “lay” level, even if readers come from different segments of the American middle class. There are good reasons to believe the majority of readers who consume ethnic fantastic and evangelical supernatural fiction tend to treat it as a spiritual variety of what Timothy Aubry has called therapeutic fiction. That is to say, the fiction is taken as a means to understand, confront and possibly manage one’s own desires, anxieties, losses, and hopes. Therapeutic reading hinges on identification with characters and their stories, and thus on readers’ realistic recuperation of the narrated world in analogy to their own. Lay readers engage with the supernatural elements in these novels using a faith paradigm, in which the supernatural serves as a means to expand the secularized, naturalistic assumptions about the “real,” and allows for an empathetic, imaginative experience of spiritual fullness. *** An important key to the success that many ethnic supernatural novels have had with popular audiences is how the characters’ struggles with their ethnoracial identities are linked with a religious quest. Most feature protagonists who have been born into a minority group or are of at least partially ethnic ancestry, but have adapted to mainstream, white American culture. They do not fully embrace what are represented as the traditional supernatural beliefs of their forebears. The search for what it means to be black or Native Reading the Supernatural 113 American is then presented as a search for faith and spiritual fullness. The individual’s struggle over racial or ethnic self-definition in the final analysis appears as a matter of faith. With those novels that can be classified as belonging to the ethnic fantastic, this struggle, by virtue of the texts’ in-built hermeneutical conflicts, appears as open-ended and without final closure. By making this link, the novels offer possibilities of identification for diverse audiences. Readers can identify with these characters regardless of race or ethnicity. In imaginatively participating in the protagonist’s experiences, their search for answers, explanations and identities, different readers are free to switch between foregrounding the spiritual or the ethno-racial dimensions. Whether these protagonists are middle-aged members of the black bourgeoisie estranged from a distinctly African spirituality, mixedrace Native Americans largely ignorant of their tribal heritage, or secondgeneration Chinese or Korean immigrants with a bicultural upbringing, the heroes and heroines of the ethnic fantastic all find themselves in a condition of liminality. The protagonists of the ethnic fantastic all make extraordinary, possibly supernatural encounters that are connected with a minority culture to which they are only tentatively connected. These encounters potentially constitute something akin to conversion experiences of spiritual self-discovery and regeneration, which also promise to establish new ties to the minority culture. However, due to the tenuous nature of these experiences and the characters’ abiding uncertainty how to interpret or integrate them into their lives, works of the ethnic fantastic typically stop short of allowing full personal closure or an actual spiritual-cultural re-birth to their protagonists. Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum serves as a case in point here. Supernatural or mythic elements almost always play into Erdrich’s novels, as they do into the works of many contemporary Native American authors. 12 Unlike some of the classics of the so-called Native American Renaissance, such as Silko’s Ceremony or N. Scott Momaday’s The Ancient Child (1989), however, Erdrich has frequently chosen to “hedge in” the magic so as to keep its ontological status within the fictional universe uncertain. This certainly applies to those of her novels that are set in the late twentieth century, such as Love Medicine (1984), The Bingo Palace (1994), The Painted Drum (2005), and The Round House (2012), for which she received the National Book Award. While Erdrich has also written texts that are more magical realist, all of the abovementioned works are better classified as ethnic fantastic fictions. Laid out for the reader in the style of traditional literary realism, the frame story of The Painted Drum takes place at the beginning of the new millennium in the rather mundane setting of a small New Hampshire town. The main protagonist and first-person narrator of the frame-story is Faye Travers. Faye knows that through her mother Elsie, with whom she lives in a rather strained symbiosis, she is partly of Ojibwe ancestry. She passes for white, though, and has never lived on the Northern tribal reservation, from where her maternal ancestors came. While she does have a certain interest in the 12 For helpful introductions to Edrich’s fictional universe, compare Stookey, Beidler, Jacobs, and Sarris. 114 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn traditional culture of the tribe, she does not identify as a Ojibwe, and neither she nor her mother are legally members of the tribe. Faye does not really believe in the religious views of her native ancestors, let alone practice their ways. And yet she reflects on how “we are more captive to our background than we admit” (32), and often wonders how she would look at things, “Were I a traditional Ojibwe” (33). Raised in an ordinary but troubled middle-class home, Faye is now a middle-aged estate agent and antique dealer specialized in indigenous art. She is suffering through an ongoing existential crisis linked to a childhood trauma, the death of her beloved sister and non-native father. That bereavement “prevents her from engaging fully with the events of her own life” (Wyatt 13). Called to appraise the estate of the Tatro family, whose grandfather was an agent on the Ojibwe reservation, she comes upon a ceremonial drum, which she then, on a sudden mysterious impulse, sneaks out of the house and takes home with her. When Faye discovers the drum it immediately and quite literally resonates with her in a scene clearly marked as a truly extraordinary event. Yet, due to the point-of-view technique so typical of the fantastic, the experience remains irreducibly ambiguous. I’m not a sentimental person and I don’t believe old things hold the life of people. How can I? I see the most intimate objects proceed to other hands, indifferent to the love once bestowed. Some people believe objects absorb something of their owner’s essence. I stay clear of that. And yet, when I step near the drum, I swear it sounds. One deep, low, resonant note. I stop dead still, staring at the drum. I hear it, I know I hear it, and yet Sarah Tatro does not. (39) A psychological as well as a supernatural account of the sensation seems possible. As Faye assures herself (and the reader): “I don’t just hear things, and I’m not subject to imaginative fits. There will be an explanation. Something’s shifting to strike the skin. A change in air pressure” (39). And yet, such naturalistic explanations fail to fully convince, especially given the mysterious power the drum seems to exert over Faye: “I set my hand on the drum and then I feel, pulled, through me like a nerve, a clear conviction. It is visceral. Not a thought but a gut instinct” (40). Soon it becomes clear that Faye’s “instinctual theft” (44) is driven by her need to come to terms with her traumatic past and her cultural-religious deracination. As her mother explains to Faye how in traditional Ojibwe culture ceremonial drums were venerated as living beings with magical, curative powers, she makes sure to add: “Of course, that is a traditional belief, not mine.” Faye finds herself nodding with relief, “for although I am surprised by my actions this afternoon, I do not believe of course that the drum itself possesses a power beyond its symbolism and antiquity” (43). And yet, Faye comes to admit to herself that the finding of the drum “signifies a matter so essential that it might be called survival” (44). With the drum rested beside her bed at night, Faye experiences something like a spiritual rebirth: “A greatness, a lightness. I grow heavier, then so inert my body seems without life. Between breaths, I loose feeling. And then my chest fills, a resurrection” (44-45). There are also unsettling but ultimately comforting visions of her sister, for whose accidental death she feels Reading the Supernatural 115 responsible. As with the initial drive to take the drum, Faye, a thoroughly modern woman, wavers in her explanations for these disturbing occurrences, and the feelings they stir up: Has she stolen the drum because she, with expert eyes, was struck by its beauty as an artifact and saw its great value? Or is the drum a magical thing, indeed a living spiritual being (as indigenous belief would have it), which has recognized her as an Ojibwe, and called her in order to revive its healing power? Are the night-visions of her sister supernatural visits from the spirit-world, which are miraculously caused by the powers of the drum as part of Faye’s healing process? Or were they nothing but dreams triggered by the accidental death of her lover’s daughter? Faye cannot decide. She nonetheless has the clear sense of a change in her life. Eventually, Faye decides to repatriate the drum to the reservation on the Northern plains. There she learns about the drum’s origin and multi-generational history from the mouth of Bernard Shawaano, the great-grandson of the builder. According to Bernard’s stories, which were told to him by his father and other members of the tribe, the drum was made by the devastated Shawaano at the bidding of his dead daughter after she sacrificed herself to attacking wolves in order to save her mother and sister. The drum contains the bones of the little girl. It is said to house her spirit, and to exert, if really believed in and treated right, a regenerative influence on the grief-stricken by reconciling them to their dead loved ones. Even though Faye becomes deeply fascinated by this myth and feels more and more connected with these oral traditions, she cannot shake off her Western education. She remains doubtful. The way Bernard’s stories are inserted into the realist framework of the novel and the tensions that arise from the co-existence of these two narrative forms invites metafictional interpretations. The structure of the narrative can be read as addressing the clash of cultural epistemologies. 13 These are not forced upon readers, however, who can also choose to simply take them as embedded tales told by a character. While Faye shows signs that she might eventually be able to let go of her grief and allow herself to love once more, her existential troubles, like the identity conflict of which she has become aware through the drum, ultimately remain unresolved. She has undoubtedly undergone a change for the better but it is not clear that she will fully heal, nor whether the drum supernaturally initiated such a process. For Faye all proof of the spirit-world and the miraculous powers of the drum are “contained” within these second, or third hand, legendary stories, and hence rendered questionable. The reader gets one more startling glimpse of the drum’s alleged wonder-workings when another little girl from the reservation named Shawnee, who is seeking to save herself and her younger siblings from the deadly cold, hears mysterious beating sounds, leading her to Bernard’s house where his greatgrandfather’s legacy has found its rightful place. This additional first-hand account given by an anonymous, extradiegetic narrator works to increase the 13 On this clash as an overarching theme in Erdrich’s fiction, see Rainwater. 116 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn reader’s willingness to give more credit to the traditional stories about the drum. They support the reading of Faye’s experiences in supernatural terms. But by no means does it completely overturn the basic interpretative ambiguity which the novel is careful to sustain throughout. The supernatural in this novel appears less palpable and thick than it does in magical realist works. Hinted at rather than directly thrown in the readers’ faces, it cannot be called irreducible in Feris’s sense of the term. Everything possibly supernatural is explicitly marked as appearing to specific characters and does not get confirmed by anyone else. Faye consistently second-guesses her experiences. While supernatural explanations of the extraordinary occurrences might be presented as plausible all of the texts make a point of always offering an alternative explanation in naturalistic (e.g. psychological) categories. In this way, the supernatural or magical phenomena in a novel such as The Painted Drum are ultimately never fully integrated into a carefully established realist framework. The extra-ordinary experiences of the characters are marked as violations of the rules or assumptions that are inscribed into this framework and also go against the worldview held by the central character. Faye, like all main protagonists of ethnic fantastic novels, finds herself in an intractable explanatory conflict. In seeking to integrate her disturbing experiences into modern modes of thinking and being, she is torn between belief and disbelief. She is, as it were, caught between different construals of reality. Again, this hermeneutical conflict lends itself to academic interpretations under the auspices of diverse identity theories. 14 But it can also be read in more simple terms as struggle for personal belonging and spiritual fullness. Significantly, in the novels of the ethnic fantastic this struggle always remains unresolved. And so it is with Faye. As Wyatt points out, she certainly undergoes a transformation: “her perception of reality has shifted toward an Ojibwe worldview, she has a new vision of her relationship with the dead, and she is more open to the unfolding experiences of her life” (13). However, Faye’s new faith and sense of belonging remains tentative. This is forcefully expressed by her at the very end of the novel. “For to suddenly say, I believe, I am convinced, even saved, and to throw myself into Native traditions ... is not in my character,” Faye tells the reader. “Salvation seems a complicated process with many wobbling steps, and I am skeptical and slow to act” (269, original emphasis). If, as McClure has shown, the characters of much contemporary, postsecular fiction are rarely granted more than “partial conversions,” this is true in a special way for the protagonists of the ethnic fantastic. Their vacillation between belief and unbelief in rediscovering their ancestral traditions parallels their inability to either completely submerge themselves in the cultural mainstream, or to fully embrace the religious legacy and a faith in the supernatural that are represented as essential to the self-definition of this group. Through an active identification with the protagonists’ quest for a new sense 14 On the theme of Native American identity in The Painted Drum, see, for instance, the essay by Stokes. Reading the Supernatural 117 of self the reader can imaginatively participate in the conflicts surrounding their hyphenated identity. Arguably, though, the majority of non-ethnic, middle-class lay readers will identify with the character’s conflict more as a troubled, open-ended quest for faith, for a sense of belonging and spiritual fullness. *** Nearly identical fictional strategies are deployed in William Paul Young’s novel The Shack. Like The Painted Drum, The Shack starts with a frame narrative. A first-person narrator directly addresses the reader and the readers’ presumed skepticism. “Who wouldn’t be skeptical,” the opening line asks, “when a man claims to have spent an entire weekend with God, in a shack no less? ” (xi). It is soon revealed that the narrator is the neighbor of the man making this claim. He has been Mackenzie Allen Phillips’ friend and neighbor for more than 20 years. He knows him well enough to call him “Mack,” and well enough to trust him. Yet, he tells readers, even he struggled to accept Mack’s story about this supernatural experience. “It’s a little, well … no, it is a lot on the fantastic side,” the narrator says (xvii, emphasis original). He has, nonetheless, come to accept it. That is not, importantly, exactly the same as saying he thinks it is real. The ontological status of the supernatural is, for the narrator and the reader after him, unresolvable. He can’t be certain. He wants to believe it, but that only further heightens the uncertainty. “I confess to you,” the narrator says, “that I desperately want everything Mack has told me to be true. Most days I am right there with him, but on others - when the visible world of concrete and computers seems to be the real world - I lose touch and have my doubts” (xviii, emphasis original). The narrator thus models belief for the reader. That belief is not the resolution of the question of the reality of the supernatural, though, but rather an acceptance of a broader, more generous sense of how something can be “true.” While the narrator won’t vouch for the reality of the supernatural, he does testify to the effect that the events, whether they happened or not, have had. Despite the unresolvable hermeneutic conflict about how to interpret the seemingly supernatural, the events can be accepted on the basis of their transformative power. Mack is changed, readers are told. The narrator claims to have been changed too merely by the power of the story, dangling before the reader the possibility, via an identificationary reading, that reading this story could be a spiritually transformative act. If there were any question this novel will insist on certain insoluble ambiguities, the first-person foreword is signed “Willie.” Since this is a diminutive form of William, the signature could be taken by readers as identifying the narrator as the author, William Paul Young. Supporting that, the narrator identifies himself as the ghostwriter of Mack’s story, as Mack “is not comfortable with his writing skills” (xvii). In every English-language edition of The Shack, however, Young’s first name is abbreviated on the cover as “Wm.” In fact, the author, in his everyday life, goes by his middle name, Paul. Thus, just as the frame narrative works to alert the reader to the fact the narrator is not 118 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn the protagonist, the frame-narrative’s indication of the narrator’s identification with the author is presented to the reader as problematic. The narrator further warns readers that he appears in the narrative, but in the third person, described by the narrator from the protagonist’s perspective, possibly unreliably. The narrator is extradiegetic in part to warn the reader that he is also intradiegetic, and that there is an unstable relationship between the ways the narrator is inside and outside the story. While these strategies of destabilizing the identity of the author are familiar to readers of postmodern literature, they are remarkable in a work of evangelical fiction. These metafictional moves serve to send readers a strong signal from the start that this narrative will dwell in ambiguities, content to leave things unresolved. At the same time, unlike magical realism, the text does not signal to the reader that characters will and readers should treat these disruptions as obvious and unproblematic. As the narrator is problematized, so too the text will call into question what is real in the reality of the fictional world of The Shack. The narrative centers on Mack’s weekend visit to the titular shack, where his young daughter was violently murdered some years before. Mack has been overwhelmed by depression in the intervening years, overcome by what he refers to as “The Great Sadness.” During a snowstorm, while his family is away, Mack receives a note in his mailbox summoning him to return to the shack, “the icon of his deepest pain” (62). The note is signed by God. He’s quite skeptical that God put a note in his mailbox. He decides, however, to act as if this is a supernatural message, despite his doubts. “I guess part of me would like to believe that God would care enough to send a note,” he says, though at the same time acknowledging his confusion (69). As he approaches the shack, a startling, magical transformation occurs. Winter becomes spring. A pristine lake is suddenly visible. The dilapidated shack becomes a larger, cleaner, and beautiful log cabin. “Little, if anything, was the same” (80), and then, there, in that transformed space, Mack meets God. God is a large black woman called “Papa,” a Middle Eastern-looking Jesus, and an Asian woman called “Sarayu.” When Mack asks which one and if one of them is God, they answer in unison, “I am” (87). As with the ethnic fantastic, The Shack persistently leaves open the possibility that these apparently supernatural disruptions of reality can be accounted for naturally. The divine figures appear only to Mack, their reality confirmed neither by another character nor by the narrator. Mack himself considers a variety of natural explanations: he’s lost his sanity, he’s imagining all this, he’s dreaming, he’s suffered an accident and is in a coma, or he’s dead. The realism of the realistic narrative unsettled, the bulk of the novel amounts to an account of a spiritual retreat. Mack spends the weekend having long conversations with the respective persons of the Trinity on topics such as the problem of evil and the nature of God’s grace. He engages in various planned activities, such as gardening with the Holy Spirit and walking on the water of the lake with the Son of God. Though Mack never picks a single natural explanation for this experience, he continues to question its reality. God acknowledges the confusion. Rather than settling the question, Reading the Supernatural 119 though, or naturalizing the supernatural, God makes the argument that this uncertainly is part of the spiritual lesson Mack is to learn. “I understand how disorienting all this must be for you, Mack” says God the Father, who confounds Mack quite a bit by appearing in an unexpected race and gender. “I am what I am. I’m not trying to fit anyone’s bill …. I’m not asking you to believe anything, but I will tell you that you’re going to find this day a lot easier if you simply accept what is, instead of trying to fit it into your preconceived notions” (124). To accept “what is,” in the novel, is to accept doubt and uncertainty. It is to make peace with unresolvable ambiguity, even the ambiguity of a genderqueer God. Mack is shown to heal from his trauma through the adoption of this expanded perspective on reality. At the same time, the supernatural elements of the novel are never fully integrated into the mimetic, mundane reality of the fictional world, thus giving readers a chance at the denouement to embrace this same healing acceptance of uncertainty. Mack’s weekend ends, for example, when he wakes up in the shack. The shack is again the shack. The world has reverted to winter. “He was back in the real world,” the narrator says. “Then he smiled to himself. It was more likely he was back in the unreal world” (261). That might seem like a resolution into naturalistic realism, but then the novel vacillates in the final pages, the realism resolving and unresolving again. Mack leaves the shack, but gets in an accident on the way home. He regains consciousness slowly, emerging from a black sleep in a hospital with only a tenuous grasp on what happened. “He vaguely remembered the drive to the shack, but things got sketchy beyond that,” readers are told. Fragments of the weekend come back to him, “but he wasn’t sure if they were real or hallucinations conjured up by collisions between some damaged or otherwise wayward neurons and the drugs coursing through his veins” (265). He then remembers and, for a moment, the supernatural experiences are presented as part of the real world of the novel. Their status is then immediately thrown into doubt again when Mack is informed that he has been in the hospital the whole weekend. Mack decides this question of chronology is ultimately irrelevant, as God is not bound by time. His human conception of time, like his human conception of God, and his human conception of reality, is too limited. Mack tells his wife of the supernatural experience he had on his weekend with God and “there was life in what he was telling her, and she quickly understood that whatever had happened had greatly impacted and changed her husband” (268). Like Willie, Mack’s wife is persuaded to accept the supernatural even as it remains unassimilated into reality. This is the evangelical novel’s version of the “wobbling” conversion of Faye Travers. Though not identical to the “partial conversions” of other sorts of fiction, this is a partial conversion nonetheless. Characters achieve a spiritual fullness by pushing back on the boundaries of rationality, accepting and rising above their own persistent uncertainty. 120 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn The Shack has not, thus far, attracted much critical attention from professional readers. 15 It has been quite popular, though, both with evangelical audiences and non-evangelical audiences alike. By 2015, The Shack sold more than 10 million copies in the United States and another 9 million internationally. It is being adapted to film by a major studio - early rumors suggesting Oprah might play the character of God the Father (Sneider; Meeks). All the evidence suggests that a wide range of lay readers identify with the character’s troubled, open-ended quest for a sense of spiritual fullness. The Shack lends itself to this sort of therapeutic, identificationary reading. Evangelical fiction generally is very amenable to that sort of “devotional” reading, as the network of institutions that create the market also define what this fiction is and frame it, most frequently, as para-scriptural texts serving a spiritual purpose. There are a number of major ethnographic studies of evangelical readers of evangelical fiction, all of which have found this mode of reading to predominate. In evangelical reading groups, the book under discussion serves “more as an aperture than a focal point” (Weaver-Zercher 108). The focus is on personal responses to the text by means of transference, and the formal elements of the novel are relevant “only inasmuch as they illuminate readers’ own lives and connect them with the experiences of others” (Weaver-Zercher 109). Amy Frykholm, in her study of readers of Left Behind, notes that this hermeneutic is also the one evangelicals use in reading the Bible. She calls it the life-application method: “Readers of both the Bible and Left Behind constantly ask, ‘How does this apply to my life? ’” (111). The text of The Shack encourages this approach. In the afterwards, the reader is again addressed directly by Willie. He offers his own life-application, suggesting that the best way to understand the preceding narrative is to talk about “how it has affected me” (273). He models a book discussion. “Do I think it’s true? ” Willie asks. “I want all of it to be true. Perhaps if some of it is not actually true in one sense, it is still true nonetheless - if you know what I mean” (273). This is a recuperative reading, emphasizing reader-character identification through the creation of analogies. The readers do not regularly claim to have undergone similar supernatural experiences themselves, but find ways to meaningfully identify and imaginatively, temporarily try on the experiences of those who have. Via that identification, readers can feel they come to confront their own desires, anxieties, losses, and hopes. *** Given the predominance of these reading strategies, it seems likely that the popular appeal of ethnic and evangelical supernatural fiction should be seen as part of a broader cultural trend since the 1960s, described by Robert Wuthnow and others as a movement toward a “spirituality of seeking.” Wuthnow convincingly argues that one striking manifestation of seeker-oriented spirituality is the burgeoning interest in spirits, miracles, and “special appearances, such as near-death experience and angels” (8). In his opinion, 15 The financial success of The Shack has received more attention than its literary merits. See Grossman, Lisa Miller, Rich, Rosenfeld, and Streib. Reading the Supernatural 121 this is symptomatic both of a general uncertainty of belief, and an uncertainty about what exactly to believe. In this situation in which many people feel an irresistible fascination for supernatural experiences and a demand for “a vicarious sense of spiritual authenticity” (140), the (imaginary) traditions of ethnic religions have become an important resource for religious selfsearch and self-expression, alongside older Euro-American forms of alternative spiritualities. 16 What makes these traditions so attractive to so many Americans is that they perceive them to be a residuum of more authentic and holistic forms of spirituality rooted in an uncomplicated, unwavering faith in the transcendent, a faith which Western culture had irretrievably lost. Indeed, many white Americans also pick and choose elements from these traditions (or what is represented to them as such) and seek to incorporate them in their highly individualistic and syncretic religious identities. However, rather than just offering readers explications of beliefs or devotional spirits in the fashion of spiritual advice literature, the ethnic fantastic and some evangelical fiction represent the supernatural in a way that engages audiences in a basic hermeneutic conflict that is rooted in the tension between the (nostalgic) yearning for a pre-modern form of religiosity that does not yet recognize the distinction of natural/ supernatural, matter/ spirit so fundamental to modernity and the conditions of faith in the secular age. These novels give readers the opportunity to imaginatively immerse themselves into an essentially pre-modern spiritual worldview. They are allowed to experience the existence of another reality in which the opposition between the natural and the supernatural doesn’t exist and “belief” is a kind of instinctual certainty. In the simulated space of the novel, readers can have vicarious encounters of the sacred in a manner that, outside of art, has become fundamentally problematic, if not altogether unavailable to the modern mind under the condition of secularity: The sacred is encountered in an immediate and often tangible manner that leaves no doubt as to its reality, and this within the recognizable framework of their readers’ own mundane world. These fictions - the ethnic fantastic and the evangelical - thus respond to the religious yearnings for a re-enchanted, spiritually inhabited universe. The ethnic fantastic and evangelical fictions do problematize (at least for readers willing to engage in such problematizations) the possibility of a supernatural reality that can be taken for granted. With the emphasis on the disturbing quality of supernatural phenomena and the built-in structure of interpretative hesitation, the fictions reflect the basic epistemological uncertainty of modernity and confront readers with the seemingly irresolvable conflict between a life in the condition of secularity and the naïve or unbroken faith ascribed to pre-modern spiritualities. Due to their literary nature, however, these representations of the supernatural do not confront the reader with a direct, unreserved truth claim in the manner of non-fictional 16 On Native American traditions in particular, see Jenkins. 122 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn writings. After all, readers always know that they are “just” reading a novel, which might possess verisimilitude but does not purport to be a mirror of the real world. Even in willingly suspending skepticism, readers will keep a self-conscious distance from what Western modernity has irreversibly problematized. The ethnic fantastic, in particular, calls attention to this distance by frequently telling the stories of characters who never complete their journey from alienation and doubt to fullness and certainty of faith. They merely undergo what McClure has called “partial conversions.” The protagonists always struggle with the question of what to believe, how to explain or interpret disturbing experiences and how to come to terms with their implications. In the ethnic fantastic, traditional religiosity is represented as something that the protagonists might have been in touch with through older members of their family, but which is no longer available to them. For them, to believe in the reality of supernatural beings and magical causalities is not an instinctual, quasi-natural way of life. On the contrary, they have come to regard this kind of worldview as something that is irreconcilable with science, rationality and modern life at large. If the protagonists of these novels in the end open up to a new respect for their ethno-relgious tradition, they clearly stop short of converting to the faith of their ancestors. The inherited faith will at best be to them, to borrow a phrase from Charles Taylor, “an embattled option” (3), which the characters tentatively embrace, highly self-conscious of surrounding alternatives. The worldview of their ancestors can never become an unchallenged, unproblematic reality, but stands as one construal of reality competing with other such construals in the plural environment of (post)modern America. Hence, in the literature of the ethnic fantastic the unresolvable self-reflexivity and hesitancy of faith−which Taylor has described as a hallmark of religion in the secular age−is made to mirror the abiding uncertainties and ambiguities of the characters’ hyphenated state between communities and cultures. And maybe the ultimate therapeutic function of these novels is to help readers reconcile themselves to this and, like the protagonist, accept partial conversions and a permanent state of in-between. In these characters and their attempts to find a way back to the belief of their ancestors, readers confront an awareness of their own impossibility to return, by any conscious effort, to a naïve, lived faith in an enchanted universe. In this manner, the ethnic fantastic makes its readers face one of the great paradoxes that haunt the contemporary spirituality of seeking: The same forces of modernity that create the wide-spread desire for extraordinary, authentic experiences will always render these experiences uncertain, just as they inevitably problematize the notion of authenticity. Individuals might choose to hold certain supernatural beliefs, but these can never be more than self-conscious convictions, however strongly they are felt. Under the conditions of modernity, direct manifestation of spiritual forces in the natural world demand experiential confirmation. But such experiences, even if people personally have them (or think they do), can never be had without Reading the Supernatural 123 hesitation, that is without being aware of other explanations, including the explanation that the experiences were just a projection of their own religious imaginary. The “spirituality of seeking” is not only something that happens beyond the bounds of traditional Christianity, however. There are also American Christian traditions that have adapted or emerged in response to this new situation of secularity, where emotional apprehensions of the sacred seem fleeting, if not radically elusive. These churches assume believers struggle with belief and feelings of spiritual emptiness and yet yearn for a (nostalgic, pre-modern, authentic) religious experience. It is in these faith communities that one finds “practices [that] share a good deal with psychotherapy,” as T.M. Luhrmann has shown (101). These practices are central to the religious life of these believers and, notably, are quite similar to the popular strategies for reading the supernatural. People valorize their own emotional responses (xxi), exercise the imagination (84), suspend disbelief, and “pretend in order to make the pretense into a reality” (73). They learn to commit themselves to the “play that occurs in the boundary between the mind and the world” (87), and thus expand their experience of reality (133). The goal of these religiotherapeutic practices, Luhrmann notes, is to develop a “state of mind ... a lot like being engrossed in good magical fiction” (83). That is to say, the exercises of re-enchantment are effectively similar to the “faith paradigm” by which readers of ethnic and evangelical supernatural fictions achieve the experience, at least temporarily, of fuller, deeper realities. Both evangelical and ethnic fiction are thus commonly read as spiritual varieties of therapeutic fiction involving (partial) conversion narratives, stories of, at least, partial regeneration from alienation and unbelief to a new, more authentic self. These fictions engage the reader with the problems and uncertainties of religious experience under the conditions of secularity but, due to their literary nature, do not confront the reader with a direct, unreserved truth claim in the manner of non-fictional writings, whether of Christian theology or alternative spirituality. It is their bracketed truth claims that make the spiritual content of these literary works especially palatable for a college-educated, middle-class audience. By allowing readers to recuperate in a realistic fashion encounters of the supernatural, these fictions suggest to the reader the possibility of such experiences in the extra-literary world, while not making any direct calls for commitments. In these particular niches in the wider landscape of contemporary Euro-American fiction, the fictional worlds are partially and problematically enchanted. Works Cited Aubry, Timothy. Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2011. Balmer, Randall. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. 124 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn Beidler, Peter G., ed. A Reader’s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich. Revised and Expanded Ed. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2006. . Benito, Jesús, Ana Ma Manzanas, and Begoña Simal. Uncertain Mirrors: Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures. Amsterdam/ New York: Rodopi, 2009. 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