Fiction, and in particular the novel, is an agnostic enterprise. In the words of Georg Lukács, the novel is bereft of God:
The first great novel of world literature [Don Quixote] stands at the beginning of the time when the Christian God began to forsake the world; when man became lonely and could find meaning and substance only in his own soul, whose home was nowhere; when the world … was abandoned to its immanent meaninglessness.
How ironic it was, then, that when I myself felt most forsaken by God, that I craved not scripture but fiction—the genre of doubt par excellence. After my brain surgery, I had lost the ability to novelize life—to tell coherent stories about myself and others to the world, and to process and absorb them in turn.
Indeed, as Charles Taylor notes in his tome A Secular Age (2007), to deny the reality of faith foregrounded in the self—its whims, its longings, and (worst of all) its inconsistencies—is in essence to deny the character of belief in the modern era. William Egginton, in his study of Cervantes titled The Man Who Invented Fiction (2016), credits fiction with a foundational role in the pivot from the certainty of the medieval world to the “subjective truth” of the modern era:
Modern philosophy sought to determine the truth of that self’s perceptions; modern psychology sought to understand its desires; and modern political thought sought to grasp the relation of the abstract citizen to the body politic. But it was fiction that taught us to think of ourselves this way in the first place.
I imagine that other Christians—whether more devout or more prepared than I was to face illness at the relatively young age of 38—would have cited scripture, perhaps entirely from memory, to get them through the storm. I was in no position to do so before the surgery on my brain, and even less so afterwards.
In a way, I lived a dual life. A part of me was there, cognizant of my cognitive decline, but almost as if looking in from the outside upon a stranger. “This can’t be me,” I remember admitting to myself quietly, “I can’t even choose two sides and an entrée at meal time without losing track halfway through.” The other part of me was intimately aware of the body—the tubes and IVs, the catheter, the padded guard rails of my hospital bed meant to protect me and my fragile head from the momentum of my own body if a seizure struck unexpectedly.
“You should begin with stories you know,” my speech therapist, whom I met with daily, told me. It was through her reading tests and evaluations that I became aware of just how bad my cognitive decline had become. She would tell me a simple story and ask me to repeat basic facts from it back to her; I couldn’t. I’d begin to sob convulsively and read the look in her face. I can’t go down that road with you, her look seemed to say, if I broke down in tears too I could never get through the day. Her “self,” if you like, couldn’t bear the toll.
I tried watching television and I tried praying, but each of these seemed only to exacerbate my sense of powerlessness. I looked out the window of my hospital room at the world going on without me below in the courtyard. People were laughing, smiling, and flirting over coffee in the beautiful sunshine of a mild fall afternoon. Life was moving before my eyes, but my life wasn’t.
At first, I was in denial, and I tried to read new books or dense magazine articles in The New Yorker as if nothing had happened. But the futility of the effort became painfully clear, and quickly. So I asked my dad to pick up a title that I had already read from the local independent bookstore, which miraculously had survived, even in the age of Amazon. I took the book in my hands and immediately cracked the spine, making sure it was real—that it, like I, was a tangible being. The novel was Javier Marías’ Berta Isla. As soon as I read it, it was as if my mind had been cleared for takeoff after idling on the tarmac for hours at LaGuardia: I could see the protagonist as she waited idly in Madrid for her husband, whom she had slowly begun to suspect was working for MI6. I was standing there with her, on the balcony overlooking the plaza. The cigarette she nervously flicked was mine. I too waited by the phone for word from the British embassy of my husband’s whereabouts. I felt her longing and despair. I’d finally done what television and even scripture couldn’t do: I’d escaped my hospital bed; I’d entered into a terrain where the needles and IVs couldn’t go, because they weren’t welcome there.
In an article, now over a decade old, by Father Bishop Barron, titled simply “The Genesis Problem,” the erudite priest explains that:
One of the most important principles of Catholic Biblical interpretation is that the reader of Scriptural texts must be sensitive to the genre or literary type of the text with which he is dealing.
Reading that article as I approach a year since my brain surgery, I understand that the novel was a gift of God’s abundant grace—a genre meant to make men feel less alone in this vale of tears. And I remember that, as best as we can surmise, Cervantes died a faithful Catholic. Doubt, then, is as Catholic as the Pope, and part of the great mystery of faith. Despite its ostensibly secular nature, the novel had, in my hour of despair, brought me closer to God.
