VARIETY
THE RELIGIOUS NOVEL
AND THE DETECTIVE STORY
The religious revival so often
bespoken by clergymen, indus–
trial psychologists, personnel man–
agers, jurists, educators, historians,
generals, statesmen, and politicians
has perhaps already .and unexpect–
edly overtaken us in literature.
And its epiphany is not the relig–
ious novel strictly so called, but
the detective story.
If
it be contended that the de–
tective story is a low form of litera–
ture, it does
n~t
follow that the
genre is unsuited to be the vehicle
of the "etherialization" that Ar–
nold
J.
Toynbee so lengthily in–
vokes. On the contrary. Whence
shall revival come if not from the
"internal proletariat" in the house
of fiction? This is not the first case
of an epiphany in a manger.
Our thesis will be clearer if we
look first at the religious novel in
its three typical forms: as the novel
of
salvation)
the novel of the
sanc–
tified person)
and the novel of the
savior.
These are technical terms,
and the things they mean are not
always what they seem. The sanc–
tified person may be either posi–
tive or negative to sanctity, that is,
may be either saint or sinner; the
savior may be visible or invisible;
839
but there is only one kind of sal–
vation, and that is from guilt.
Pil–
grim)s Progress
is the great and
beautiful paradigm of them all.
Today the novel of salvation
would be represented by
Pilgrim's
Progress'
most bastard child, Som–
erset Maugham's
The Razor)s
Edge).
the novel of negative sanc–
tity might be represented by Sin–
clair Lewis'
Elmer Garntry
and of
positive sanctity by Georges Ber–
nanos'
Joy;
the novel of the savior
visible by Robert Graves's
King
Jesus
and of the savior invisible
by Mann's
Joseph
series. Besides
these there are miscellaneous cat–
egories, such as The Travelogue of
the Textile Neurosis (Lloyd Doug–
las'
The Robe);
and, of the day
before yesterday, Tristram Shandy
Among the Essenes
(George
Moore's
The Brook Kerith)
;
but
these are only in a secondary (that
is, a promotional) sense religious
novels, and need not detain us.
Of religious novels some are good;
and some arehorrid; some have gone
to market and some have stayed in
Hollywood. But why have they all,
collectively and individually, failed
to bring about a religious revival?
The reason is to be sought in Pro–
fessor Toynbee's
field of "mimesis,"
where the varieties of religious ex–
perience, even the garden varieties,
commonly grow.
There has been a
failure of mimesis.
The sad fact
is that for some time now the hero
of the religious novel is a hero
