The English novel’s religious narrative structures survive absorbed into its secular themes

Evidence

The challenge of producing a religious novel may appear, on the face of it, to be simply a matter of writing sympathetically about religious characters and perspectives. However, in the Western (and specifically English) novelistic and critical tradition—within which postcolonialism occupies an important but contested space—one must contend with what is often taken to be the three-hundred-year-old drift away from spirituality and faith toward a materialist working out of narrative plot and human choices. As many critics have shown, the English novel begins in large measure from the Puritan spiritual autobiography, with the work of John Bunyan being the most familiar example today. However, because of the clearly allegorical and other-worldly focus of a text such as The Pilgrim’s Progress, classical accounts of the rise of the novel, such as that by Ian Watt, tend to exclude this type of writing as not displaying enough of what Watt calls “formal realism”: a worldly particularity of place, time, and character, reflecting Cartesian and Lockeian ideas of reason and the self. In this account, the breakthrough text that combines spiritual and particularist tendencies in just the right measure to be “a novel” is Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe. Defoe’s shipwreck story famously begins by following the prodigal sin–repentance–redemption model of the spiritual autobiography but soon loses it in describing the physical travails and material rewards of its hero, Robinson, as he works hard and escapes the island, to find he is rich. … However, I would suggest that the structuring principles of the religious narrative do not actually disappear but are instead absorbed into the themes, idioms, and plot paradigms of the novel and continue to be evident to this day. For instance, the novel’s ongoing concern with appropriate ethical behavior has its origins in the religious roots of narrative. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 499

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘formal realism’ (Watt) as the worldly particularity said to mark the novel proper, then overturns the exclusion of spiritual autobiography.
• XREF: Connects to the standard Ian Watt ‘Rise of the Novel’ account and to Damrosch’s ‘exalts autonomy’ reading — the secularization thesis Morey contests feeds directly into how critics read religious characters in contemporary fiction.
• QUESTION: If religious narrative structures endure in secular form, what does that imply about how Hamid and Naqvi’s Muslim protagonists inherit story-shaped expectations of redemption or providence?