Four Theses on Modernism’s Secular Imaginary

IN THIS CHAPTER, I suggest some ways to approach modernism’s secular imaginary, primarily through themes of time and posthumous personhood. If the so-called secularisation thesis – that religion is steadily subtracted in modernity from reasonable and differentiated societies – has been pronounced dead, dissected and laid to rest, the secular nevertheless remains a problem for literary history and theory. Secularisation is inextricable from the multifarious, ever-shifting phenomena designated ‘religion’, but is in its own right as complex and strange a character in stories of modern cultures. We should consider the possibility that the secular is as arduous to inhabit, as complex to construct, and as challenging to conceptualise as faith, the sacred, divinity, prophecy, conversion, revelation, grace, the eternal soul, divine judgement, covenant and so on, and that one of modern literature’s great struggles has been to imagine secular worlds. If this is the case – that the secular is not the passive remainder of other cultural practices (‘religions’) but an audacious cultural project that dreams itself in literature – we have many questions to answer. In what follows, I approach the idea of a secular world as one committed to human survival; the ambiguity of what human survival means in modernity, and ambivalence about its worth, are what so dynamically engage (and viciously trouble) modernism’s imaginative capacities.

The four propositions below are incremental steps for gaining further traction in thinking about modernism and the secular. My goal is to clarify methodological issues and test a normative claim about the secular, as a commitment to human survival and specific stance toward human remains. I intend for this thematic and conceptual approach to complement Suzanne Hobson’s rich historicist scholarship on interwar organised secularism. Comparatively, what follows are speculative propositions which explore the secular as a historically situated metaphysical stance, an approach which also contrasts with political interpretations of secularism as an expression of biopolitics and governmentality, in a discursive and administrative play of colonial domination. In this existential and ethical approach to the secular, I suggest that other political interpretations may be possible.