Post-secular novels

Novels arise with secularism.  Citing Lukacs, Rowan William says that novels appear “when it is no longer possible to plot the significance of human lives against the unquestioned backdrop of what is agreed to be the one universal narrative,” which leads writers “to create ordered narratives for individual imagined lives.”

Dostoevsky radicalizes the secularity of the novel by dissolving “the tidy endings and the unitary personalities that were once the currencey of the novel.”  But Dostoevsky’s radical attack on tidy secular eschatology opens the possibility for a post-secular novel: ”the novel ought to be a stout defender of the independence of eschatology in its most robust sense – that is a defender of the apparently obvious but actually quite vulnerable conviction that the present does not possess the future.  Whether or not we say, as earlier believers in eschatology would have done, that God is in possession of the future, the one thing we can agree on is that we are not.  The open, ambiguous, unresolved narrative insists on this, which is why novels are never popular with ideologues and do not flourish in climates where eschatology is excessively realized.  You do not fund fundamentalist novelists.”