The Pagan Writes Back: When World Religion Meets World Literature

By Zhange Ni

In the first book to consider the study of world religion and world literature in concert, Zhange Ni proposes a new reading strategy that she calls "pagan criticism," which she applies not only to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literary texts that engage the global resurgence of religion but also to the very concepts of religion and the secular. Focusing on two North American writers (the Jewish American Cynthia Ozick and the Canadian Margaret Atwood) and two East Asian writers (the Japanese Endō Shūsaku and the Chinese Gao Xingjian), Ni reads their fiction, drama, and prose to envision a "pagan (re)turn" in the study of world religion and world literature. In doing so, she highlights the historical complexities and contingencies in literary texts and challenges both Christian and secularist assumptions regarding aesthetics and hermeneutics.

In assessing the collision of religion and literature, Ni argues that the clash has been not so much between monotheistic orthodoxies and the sanctification of literature as between the modern Western model of religion and the secular and its non-Western others. When East and West converge under the rubric of paganism, she argues, the study of religion and literature develops into that of world religion and world literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: May 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9780813937694

Book preview

THE PAGAN WRITES BACK

WHEN WORLD RELIGION MEETS WORLD LITERATURE

ZHANGE NI

University of Virginia Press

CHARLOTTESVILLE AND LONDON

University of Virginia Press

©2015 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2015

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ni, Zhange, 1977–

The pagan writes back: when world religion meets world literature / Zhange Ni.

pages cm.—(Studies in religion and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3767-0 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8139-3768-7

(pbk.: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8139-3769-4 (e-book)

1. Religion and literature. 2. Paganism in literature. 3. Secularism in literature. 4. Neopaganism. I. Title.

PN49.N53 2015

809’.93382—dC23

2014035708

Cover art: Ex-Press, Ying Zhang, monotype print, 2014

STUDIES IN RELIGION AND CULTURE

John D. Barbour and Gary L. Ebersole, Editors

For

Anthony C. Yu

Priscilla Yu

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I. Proposing Pagan Criticism

1Historical Notes on the Varieties of Paganism

2From Secular Criticism to Pagan Criticism

Part II. Practicing Pagan Criticism

3Literary Paradise, Female Golem, and Cynthia Ozick’s Pagan Paradox

4Wonder Tale, Pagan Utopia, and Margaret Atwood’s Radical Hope

5The Aporia of Japan’s Orient and Endō Shūsaku’s Posthuman Pagan Theology

6The Pagan Problem in Modern China and Gao Xingjian’s Wild Man Series

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I offer here cannot properly convey my gratitude to all those who have contributed to this book in various ways. I always marvel at my luck to have studied religion and literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School under the guidance of Anthony C. Yu and Richard Rosengarten. I must express my deepest appreciation to them, whose erudition, eloquence, and insight provide a model of scholarship for me to emulate. When I was struggling with reading novels and conceptualizing issues, they offered encouragement, posed challenges, and helped me shape the initial contour of this project. My debts to Wendy Doniger, Amy Hollywood, Martin Riesebrodt, and Kathryn Tanner are no less immense. I cannot imagine my intellectual formation, or this book, without having studied with them.

Crucial to the development of this project was a postdoctoral fellowship from the Women’s Studies in Religion Program (WSRP) at Harvard Divinity School from 2010 to 2011. I depended on such support to continue my reading, thinking, and writing and benefited enormously from discussions with colleagues at the WSRP. In particular, I’d like to extend my gratitude to Ann Braude, Hauwa Ibrahim, Bethany Moreton, Yuksel Sezgin, Pamela Voekel, and the students in my graduate seminar The Cult of Literature and Its Feminist Dissidents.

Support from many quarters at Virginia Tech, my home institution, for collaborative intellectual work brought my ideas to fruition. I have the best colleagues I could wish for in and outside the Department of Religion and Culture. This book bears the traces of all those who have commented on drafts, offered insights, sent citations, and conversed with me at Brown Bag talks and corridor conferences. I am thankful for all the discussions with fellow faculty at Virginia Tech. This includes Ananda Abeysekara, Aaron Ansell, Brian Britt, Elizabeth C. Fine, Matthew Gabriele, Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, Madhavi Murty, Emily Satterwhite, Benjamin Sax, Peter Schmitthenner, Helen Schneider, Rachel Scott, and Janell Watson.

There are two friends to whom I owe special thanks: Zhang Ying and Chen Huaiyu. Ying’s pointed questions pushed me to refine my argument. Huaiyu shared with me his unpublished work and bibliographies on many subjects. Like many other colleagues and friends, they gave me confidence and inspired me with their intellectual rigor and generosity.

I have presented my work-in-progress at universities and conferences. My audiences have also contributed to a better understanding of my authors and texts. Thanks to those who invited me and engaged critically with my work at Arizona State University, Beijing Normal University, and the Institute of World Religions at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. I am also grateful to my audiences at the American Academy of Religion and Association for Asian Studies annual meetings. Their incisive questions and constructive comments are the very reason we present our works.

Turning a manuscript into a book is not always a smooth process. But again I have been extremely fortunate. I am grateful to Eric Ziolkowski for making the connection with the University of Virginia Press. I wish to express my appreciation for Cathie Brettschneider, Mark Mones, and Ellen Satrom, my dream editors, for having confidence in the project and meticulously overseeing the book’s production. I am also grateful to Terre Fisher and Susan Murray for carefully editing my manuscript and deftly clarifying my prose.

Earlier versions of sections of this book have been published. They are revised and used here with permission of Oxford University Press. Chapter 3 updates "Strange Paradise: Wrestling with the Golem and Double Idolatry in Cynthia Ozick’s Puttermesser Papers," Literature and Theology (2014), doi: 10.1093/litthe/fruo38. Chapter 5 is drawn from "Japan’s Orient and Animal Theology in Shūsaku Endō’s Deep River," Journal of American Academy of Religion 81, no. 3 (2013): 669–97.

Finally, I want to thank my parents for having cultivated in me a love for literature and habit of reading. During their brief visits in the United States, they indulged me with food and care, making my tedious writing process an enjoyed experience. I dedicate this book to my mentor, Anthony C. Yu, and his wife, Priscilla Yu, whose influence on me is no less enormous than that of my parents. Without their support a scholarly book of this nature would have never seen the light of day.

Introduction

RELIGION, NOT religious commitment or behavior per se, but the public visibility and awareness of the discursive realities of religion, has made a comeback in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, especially since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The topic of religion figures prominently in global politics, the media, and academia. Scholars across a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences are paying more attention to the changing contours and configuration of the religious field and the general rethinking of secularist discourses. At the same time, they cannot overlook the accelerating processes of globalization over the past few decades and the overarching transformations of the global political economy. Their investigations, identified as the postsecular turn, recognize religion and the secular as interdependent categories coemergent from the modern Western and Christian (more specifically, Protestant) context, and track the recent destabilization of these two categories in Western and non-Western societies.¹

The study of literature, which has been coming to terms with the impact of globalization, has just begun to take its own postsecular turn.² Rapid developments in the study of world literature have broadened the limited scope of national literatures and the mainly Euro-American-centered comparative literature.³ Even so, religion, which remains closely associated with absolute command and blind submission, is presented as a divisive and disruptive force that must be carefully contained to make space for literature and the arts. Edward Said’s development of secular criticism is a case in point.⁴ Fortunately, a number of scholars have begun to acknowledge the relevance of religion to their efforts to pluralize literature through problematizing old critical standards and aesthetic judgments. Still, for most, religion remains a frozen category or is simply coterminous with Christianity. Even in cases where literary and religious studies do intersect, such endeavors do not venture outside the terrain of Western literature narrowly conceived; they continue to adopt a Christian or secularist model of religion, a reductive lens that does no justice to traditions forced into the category of world religions.

As a result, the secularist understandings and Christian underpinnings of literature—whether Western literature or other modes of literary production and reception to which scholars of world literature are striving to pay tribute—stand largely unexamined and unchallenged. These strictures on thinking about literature truncate complexity and contingency to produce and naturalize stereotypes. Still, questions keep arising: How do we account for the deadly clash between the literary community and Muslim protesters unleashed by the Satanic Verses affair? Might there be ways of writing, reading, self-cultivation, and world-formation alternative to those inseparable from the Christian tradition that has given rise to religion and the secular? To what extent are our aesthetic priorities and hermeneutic practices shaped by the symbiosis of religion and the secular in the modern West, so that we turn a blind eye to certain aspects of even well-received and extensively studied texts? Why, despite the efforts of world literature scholars to be inclusive, do certain types of texts always elude the radar of the global market, literary prizes, and academic research, and so remain untranslatable?

These questions compel us to look beyond the literatures produced in the major European languages, the secularist model of religion based on Protestant Christianity, and existing approaches in the study of religion and literature. As they struggle against Euro-American hegemony in literary studies, scholars of world literature have much to learn from parallel projects in the field of religious studies—the study of comparative religion, religious pluralism, and world religions, especially the discursive analysis of the genealogies of religion and the secular across the world.⁵ I am particularly interested in tracking the symbiotic formation and transformation of religion and the secular (by no means restricted to the modern West), which has helped shape the discourse and institution of literatures around the world, as well as informing the thematic and formal configuration of particular texts.

On the flip side, scholars of religion and the secular have been primarily concerned with state formation, legal-constitutional frameworks, modes of governance, economic relations, and knowledge production, and have paid insufficient attention to literature, arts, and aesthetics. Literature (together with other arts) is not unlike religion in the sense of being irreducible to some privatized, isolated spiritual pursuit. The opening up of the dazzling diversity of literatures of the world can help us examine the discursive construction of religion in linked social spheres across national and civilizational boundaries and, more significantly, beyond the strictures of (Christian-based) secularism.

The agenda of this book is to radicalize the postsecular turn in the study of world literature—to extend the interdisciplinary study of religion and literature into the study of world religion and world literature. I do this by proposing what I call pagan criticism, a reading strategy that pays due credit to the context-specific formations of both religion and literature, tracing their related transmigration and transmutation in various parts of the world. It is no coincidence that world literature and world religion both originated in the Enlightenment theorization of the world and have responded to the same processes of globalization in recent years. Although both affirm difference and multiplicity, scholars of religion dwell on the untranslatability of the Christian/secularist model of religion, while scholars of literature celebrate the global utopianism of various vernacular literatures.⁶ To avoid simply reinscribing the myth of cosmopolitan literature versus divisive religion, pagan criticism reconciles untranslatability and utopianism. It resists the power of hegemonic discourse to impose universal categories and neutralize the distortions and destruction caused in that process. It pursues a utopian imagination from a pagan rather than a monotheist perspective.

IN POPULAR imagination and existing scholarship, paganism refers to non-Christian, nonmonotheist religions. It stands in contradistinction to the monotheism usually identified with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. As the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann has observed, monotheism is a regulative idea that establishes what is true worship by repudiating spiritual and civilizational falsehood; it is, in fact, an idea unsubstantiated and unsustainable by historical messiness and vicissitude.⁷ Even the three monotheist traditions are marked by ongoing cycles of monotheist and pagan tides, such as attempts to consolidate orthodoxy and various resurgent underground movements.

Nonmonotheist traditions, such as Confucianism and Buddhism in East Asia, also have their mechanisms for maintaining truth and managing falsehood. Thus, what I am calling paganism is extremely shadowy and slippery because it is everywhere repudiated into being, and the centers from which it is repudiated are multiple and historically contingent. The fluidity of paganism’s existence endows it with a certain critical potential.

In this book, paganism is considered both a historical term and a critical concept. Historical paganism refers to a whole range of false traditions identified at times of social and cultural change, and especially during boundary-crossing interactions. Examples include Mediterranean customs other than Judaism and Christianity in the era of early Christianity; beliefs and practices beyond the proper boundaries of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in and outside early modern Europe; contemporary neopagan revivals that undermine traditional delineations of religion and the secular; and spectral others such as superstition, which are born in the meeting of Western conceptions of the pagan and its non-Western counterparts.

Historical paganism is a countercategory because the varieties of pagan traditions are negatively constructed; that is, they are repudiated into being. Moreover, these counterformations occur in a network of multiple centers and shifting relations, so that the highly charged discursive history of paganism delineates no fixed identity for the pagan, since it is, to repeat, a countercategory. This countercategory has been widely stigmatized, but it is not my purpose here to simply replace its negative associations with positive ones. Rather than affirm the historical pagans and devalue monotheist traditions, I aim to dismantle the monotheist mechanism of establishing truth over falsity, or identity at the expense of the other, by unleashing the critical potential of the repudiated pagan.

The critical term conceptual paganism consists of a set of philosophical ideas centered upon the formation of the world, the creation of a work of art, and the role of the critic. I retrieve pagan ideas, such as divine immanence, idolatry, and magic, to reconceptualize the world, the text, and the critic, all notions associated with Said’s secular criticism. To develop paganism into a working concept, I put Said’s secular criticism in dialogue with philosophers and their respective projects, such as Jean-Luc Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity and monotheism, Jean-Luc Marion’s distinction between the Christian icon and the pagan idol, the philosophy of immanence worked out by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Michel de Certeau’s heterologies.⁸ The immanent world, the idol-text, and the magician-critic (the latter two expressions are my own inventions) become the conceptual foundations for my project.

I define the icon-text and the idol-text as two modes of textual performance. In contradistinction to the icon-text, which elevates our gaze toward monotheist transcendence once and for all, the idol-text is created in a process involving multiple participants, since it engages a text made by the craftsperson/author, animated by the critic/priest(ess), and contested by idol-worshippers and iconoclasts. This process proceeds from a collective generative force that is singular and plural, divine and human, and ultimately identical with the pagan world of radical immanence and irreducible multiplicity. The magician-critic plays a crucial role in this process because she is responsible for highlighting pagan understandings of creativity (and authorship), dissolving the rigid boundary between the text and the world, and turning a closed book into a polyphonic conversation.

BOTH HISTORICAL and conceptual paganism are indispensable to my reading of world literature texts that inevitably engage world religions. I developed pagan criticism to push forward and critically examine the convergence of world religion and world literature from a genuinely postsecular perspective. Pagan criticism is postsecular for at least two reasons. First, it wrestles with the literary consequences of secularism and religion-making. More significantly, it illuminates the prehistory and ongoing transformation of religion and the secular, and the messy, heterogeneous, and largely unexplored gray area between them. Both thematically and formally, though to a varying degree in each case, literary texts inevitably bear traces of the several historical iterations of discourse on paganism that undergird the symbiotic formation of religion and the secular. These traces point to the pagan problem that can only be properly engaged by enacting the idol-text as proposed in conceptual paganism.

Second, pagan criticism overcomes the impasse of the religious-secular binary, bypassing theological and secularist approaches to literature. Postsecular investigations have revealed the polarity of religion and the secular as an ideology created by secularist epistemology, but this opposition continues to produce bifurcated theological and secularist readings. Literature has been treated either as mere form for the real substance of (the Christian) religion or as an instrument of iconoclasm against the unquestioned/unquestionable sacred in any society. Scholars read the text either to retrieve some theological ultimate concern, as under the influence of Paul Tillich and Nathan Scott, or to affirm secularist ideals such as Enlightenment humanism. In the former case, the secular is dismissed as a disguise for the theological. With regard to the latter, Said stresses that cultural criticism is by default secular, meaning attentive to human sociality and historicity, and it confronts the self-apotheosis of human collectivities and authorities. Religious criticism is an oxymoron.⁹

Even though postsecular thinking most often entails treating religion and the secular as intertwined open questions, some scholars have interpreted the postsecular as a pendulum moving away from the secular back toward the religious and, in some instances, even toward the orthodox side of certain religious traditions.¹⁰ Opposing established orthodoxy of any sort and rejecting the impulse in postsecularism to return to it, I travel an antinomian, esoteric, and heretical road to reach the idea of paganism. I will examine the apparent conflicts and deep-seated affinities of the theological, secularist, and postsecular (i.e., neo-orthodox) approaches and demonstrate that they all operate within the comfort zone of a Christian-centered monotheist framework. All pursue one ultimate reality and preclude other aesthetic configurations and interpretive modes. By contrast, pagan criticism breaks away from the unacknowledged—naturalized—monotheist legacy that simultaneously empowers and anesthetizes literature by valorizing certain assumptions at the expense of other possibilities.

To extract the pagan problem from the given text, I (the magician-critic) must first focus on how the text enacts historical paganism and then compare that enactment with the genealogy of this countercategory. I am not interested in locating well-defined and already fixed religious elements in literary texts—whether characters identified with particular traditions, expressions and rhetorics derived from certain scriptures, or some ultimate meaning reaching toward our existential depth—but am attracted to what paradoxically is and is not religion, that is, the repudiated religion. Recuperating the repudiated is key to transforming religion from a frozen category into a critical perspective, because the power structure that establishes truth by rejecting falsity is not only brought to light but also undermined from within. Keep in mind, too, that the instability of the repudiated pagan makes straightforward retrieval impossible. Thus I am committed to exploring the inadequacies, incongruities, and various fissures and failures of such an enactment rather than seeking to credit the author for his/her aesthetic and ethical concern for the pagan other.

Next, I reconfigure the artistic assemblage of a given text to reveal the idol-text in relation to the immanent world. Specifically, I prioritize nonhuman settings and peripheral characters, rearrange isolated episodes, problematize generic and stylistic conventions, and jump across the parallel universes of different texts. These are by no means wholly new practices, but used together they contribute to the transformation of a given text, the icon-text, into the idol-text. The opening up of the idol-text does not simply reject monotheist-based characterizations of how the human, the divine, and the object of art interact. The idol-text not only manifests the pagan as alternative to monotheist interpretive modes, but indeed presents the possibility of overturning the whole operation, of unhorsing the monotheist logic that establishes identity in and through repudiation of the other. The idol-text is an ongoing, open-ended, and polyvocal process of conversations and contestations, one in which authors and readers play with the myriad wonders of the immanent world.

IN THIS BOOK, I demonstrate the practice of pagan criticism by reading novels, essays, and plays by four contemporary writers, namely, Cynthia Ozick, Margaret Atwood, Endō Shūsaku, and Gao Xingjian—two writers from North America (the American Ozick and the Canadian Atwood) and two from East Asia (the Japanese Endō and the Chinese Gao). All the major texts under consideration here—as represented by Ozick’s Puttermesser Papers (1997), Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009), Endō’s Deep River (1993), and Gao’s Soul Mountain (1999)—were produced in the last two decades of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first.

North America and East Asia are new locations of power in the global political economy. Centers are peripheries at the same time, in the sense that I focus on Jewish American and Canadian literature produced by women writers and study how modern Japanese and Chinese literatures deal with pressures from the West. All together, my authors and texts belong to the emerging canon of world literature just as the postsecular turn is occurring in the academy and in the real world. Further, they touch upon, either conscientiously or unwittingly, the historical variety of paganism and share with conceptual paganism the ambition to pursue immanence, heterogeneity, and multiplicity.

Ozick wrestles with the biblical condemnation of pagan idolatry when navigating between the not infrequently conflicting claims of Jewish identity, feminist sensitivity, and commitment to literature. Atwood experiments with inventing a neopagan religion to cope with the countervailing yet not incompatible tides of New Atheism and fundamentalism. Endō, caught up in the clash between Western and Japanese mechanisms of defining and dominating the other, strives to paganize Christianity and resist Japanese nationalism at the same time. Gao reaches out to folk religions, ethnic minorities, and wild nature in China and directs our attention to the complexities of intertwined nationalist and cosmopolitan discourses, both of which are eager to appropriate the pagan.

Pagan criticism does not simply involve retrieving and celebrating the pagan projects of these authors and texts. Rather, the practicing magician-critic searches between the lines and across textual boundaries for unresolved tensions, thematic loose ends, and unarticulated agendas. The idol-text emerges from the process of tearing apart the available text-artifact and rearranging its fragments to invite further deconstruction and reconstruction. The purpose of pagan criticism is to shock the reader into abandoning entrenched presuppositions and taking departure from these points, or even freely inventing alternative points of departure.

The Significance of the Book

Given the range of authors and texts under consideration here, with due attention to original languages of the East Asian works (Japanese and Chinese), this book’s contribution is its exploration of areas of engagement between the parallel enterprises of world religion and world literature. In recent years, the study of religion and literature has moved away from its earlier focus on extracting theological relevance and significance from secular literature. Scholars have begun to assess the impact of secularization and religion-making on literature, which is simultaneously a discourse, an institution, and a body of texts. They have identified the indispensable role played by literature in the secularist remaking of religion as well. This book advances this line of inquiry by transgressing the monotheist boundaries of the Christian-secular West.

A number of brilliant works have been written on Christianity, secularization, and English literature.¹¹ When it comes to the reading of modern and contemporary literary texts in particular, critical reflections on the categories of religion and the secular have duly informed recent publications.¹² However, having acknowledged that religion is premised upon but not reducible to the Christian tradition, these works have made no attempt to problematize the implicitly Christian framework of their investigation and analysis. In this regard, the literary scholar Gauri Viswanathan argues that secularism, in defining itself against religion, has contributed to homogenizing religion’s variegated history, which nonetheless continues to exert influence in subtle, oblique ways that escape the secular understanding. In a similar light, the anthropologist of religion Saba Mahmood critiques the secularist mode of reading for its blurring of the differences between diverse cosmological imaginations and their correlative interpretive categories.¹³ The key task of this book is to go beyond the binary of naturalized religion and secularism, the production of which has been and continues to be conditioned by mainstream Christianity.

As I shift attention to the pagan other in contradistinction to the conceptual strictures of monotheism, I look at not only the pagan undercurrents in the Judeo-Christian West but also the complexities in non-Western cultures defined as pagan from the Western perspective. Although I am interested in how pagan trends irrupt in mainstream realist literature, this book is not intended to be a study of esotericism, occultism, and popular culture.¹⁴ I am not content with seeing indigenous spiritualities themselves as a challenge to the West; instead, I will explore encounters of the local and Western pagan-producing mechanisms and demonstrate the impossibility of retrieving the pagan from a single and fixed perspective.

East Asia has remained largely untrodden territory for Western scholars of religion and literature, despite some interest in its traditional religions and classical literatures.¹⁵ Likewise, religion as a discursive practice remains a blind spot in most (East Asian and Western) scholarship on modern and contemporary literature and culture in East Asia. In this book, I endeavor to bridge this unfortunate gap. Happily, in the field of religious studies, some very recent publications have inquired into the invention of religion and secularization projects in China and Japan.¹⁶ Therefore, by introducing these developments into the realm of literature and the arts, I can contribute to ongoing discussions.

Given the scope and diversity of the authors, texts, and languages under discussion, this book is necessarily a study of world religion and world literature. I will demonstrate how the discourse of world religion has been critiqued for preserving European universalism in the language of pluralism and the difficulty of accounting for the global resurgence of new religious constellations. Likewise, I am cognizant of the confusion around the plethora of definitions of world literature, as well as the colonial, imperial, and secularist versions of this parallel enterprise. I am even more acutely aware that these two areas have not yet been considered in concert. I developed and practice pagan criticism in order to study their confluence and conflict.

Pagan criticism does not limit its intervention to reading a given text. I propose and practice pagan criticism as an attempt at intervention in critical theory and cultural criticism. Its critical impact is immediately manifest for the fields of literature, philosophy, and religion, but it is also relevant to history, cultural anthropology, and the humanities in general. It addresses such problems as how to read a text, how to imagine the world, and how to study the self-other relation.

Literary and cultural criticism often perpetuates the myth of aesthetic autonomy and the sacralization of literature and the arts; or it may reduce literature to ethnographic and social-scientific purposes or mere service to abstract philosophical conceptualizations. Pagan criticism opens up literature, which is neither sanctified nor secularized but heterological (to borrow a term from Michel de Certeau). Pagan criticism treats this heterological enterprise as a meeting and mediating place where historical vicissitude grounds theoretical insights, and conceptual experiments shed light on the unrepresentable Real in the empirical realm.

Pagan criticism complements the critical reading practiced in gender studies, postcolonial studies, and animal studies. However, it goes beyond simply adding religion (or paganism) to the existing categories of gender, race, class, and species in the analytical toolkits of literary critics, or merely providing them with resources from pagan traditions. What buttresses the invention of pagan criticism is a quest for immanence that represents a new way of doing performative thinking—invoking difference not just as another fashionable philosophical concept but as a different