Justice Pits Belief Against Reason: We Disagree

We both really liked the Justice article—the ways in which it critiques how criticism operates, in particular—and we were therefore surprised when our discussion led us to a critique of an underlying assumption that Justice makes in his argument. In talking about the role of belief systems in our texts, we explored how, as Justice says, “doubting and investigating the miraculous begin almost simultaneously with believing it” (Justice 19). Justice encourages us to break out of an assumption that belief is separate from other modes of “cognitive experience,” by drawing upon Aquinas’ model of faith in which “the formulary of belief is not that which goes without saying, the plush carpet of presupposition, but that which has to be said, and then said again, because saying it provokes reactive intellectual energy” (Justice 13).

By applying this model of faith solely to the question of miracles (i.e. events that occur for supernatural rather than natural reasons), Justice might be selling Aquinas and Augustine’s reading of human perception short. We realized that Justice’s model assumes the givenness of a person who experiences the world as an Enlightenment subject of reason. Doubt must be a part of and simultaneous to belief because reason tells us that miracles are likely not believable. Justice penetrates the opacity of the medieval believing subject—whom criticism has frozen “into an idiot deadpan behind which either of two extreme possibilities might lie: they must speak either in a cynical and nearly sociopathic detachment from the truth-content of their words, or in a nearly delusional bondage to interests they do not even recognize as the source of those words” (Justice 11). But he does so by locating doubt within their belief system, implying that medieval subjects have trouble believing (as we ourselves do, or would) because of the self-evidence of natural law. We are not accusing Justice of anachronistically inserting an Enlightenment subjectivity into too early an era, which would fall directly into the trap Justice is warning us against: namely, assuming that medieval mindsets are inherently impenetrable to us. Rather, the protagonists in our texts reveal to us the belief systems under which we operate in the contemporary moment; these characters want to think and behave as rational, Enlightenment subjects, but they remain in the orbit of belief systems. It is not simply that belief is an act of will over an otherwise rational intellect. It seems, at least in our texts, that belief is as built-in as rationality; the mind struggles rather to distinguish between and reconcile the two.

Is it really the case that we (21st-century scholars) can’t identify with the perceptual account of belief? Answering that question is complicated by our own systems of belief and knowing, which adhere faithfully (at least in part) to a world characterizable by a scientific framework. Thus, when Sarah Boyle, protagonist of “Heat Death of the Universe,” begins to meditate upon the “second law of thermodynamics,” which “can be interpreted to mean that the ENTROPY of a closed system tends towards a maximum and that its available ENERGY tends towards a minimum,” the reader is free to interpret this as a factual clarification. Never mind that Boyle’s own perceptual experience provides her with little evidence that “a time must finally come when the Universe ‘unwinds’ itself, no energy being available for use,” nor that the imagery this brings to mind is far more reminiscent of the apocalyptics of medieval manuscripts than of anything that might correspond to our “reality”: “She thinks of the Heat Death of the Universe. A logarithmic of those late summer days, endless as the Irish serpent twisting through jewelled manuscripts forever, tail in mouth, the heat pressing, bloating, doing violence” (Zoline 3).

In fact, the more we discussed the role of knowledge systems reflected in “Heat Death,” the more we realized that Sarah Boyle is seeking the sense of security or certainty that a “factual” account of her life might supply, but in doing so she is really operating on religious and mythological registers as much as she is reflecting facts about the world. Drawing from her religious “texts,” namely “children's dictionaries, encyclopedias, ABCs and all reference books,” which leave her “transfixed and comforted at their simulacra of a complete listing and ordering,” Sarah writes notes to herself around the house.

[On the] lid of the diaper bin she has written in Blushing Pink Nitetime lipstick a phrase to ward off fumey ammoniac despair. "The nitrogen cycle is the vital round of organic and inorganic exchange on earth. The sweet breath of the Universe." On the wall by the washing machine are Yin and Yang signs, mandalas, and the words, "Many young wives feel trapped. It is a contemporary sociological phenomenon which may be explained in part by a gap between changing living patterns and the accommodation of social services to these patterns." (Zoline 3)

This passage’s blending of magico-religious (“to ward off … she has written” or the use of buddhist iconography) and the factual/authoritative is symptomatic of the story as a whole. By seeking to participate in the “factual” world by gleaning meaning from it or considering herself a part of it, Sarah cannot help but slip between the banal and the miraculous, the workings of her own perceptual world and the workings of a world which exceeds her and which must be taken upon faith or authority.

A glance at the world of Sarah Boyle shows how this blending of belief and fact operates within the framework of Enlightenment reason, but in By the Sea, this picture is complicated. The protagonists of the novel must negotiate a Western standard of rationality alongside a  postcolonial heritage that seems to function similarly to medieval culture as seen by Western critics: that is, Western colonizers relate colonized subjects to mysticism and an immature historic past.

Toward the end of By the Sea, Latif comes to Saleh’s apartment to hear about Saleh’s backstory. Their pasts and their family histories are deeply interconnected—most importantly, Saleh took possession of Latif’s family’s house, and now he has come to Britain using Latif’s father’s name and passport. The novel gives the two protagonists’ competing, but not mutually exclusive, accounts of what happened in their pasts. The characters seem to privilege the truth that can be imparted by rational knowledge over their culture’s traditional mode of Islamic storytelling. Latif in particular, who is an English professor in London, introduced by Rachel to Saleh as “an expert on your area” (Gurnah 65), makes the association of Zanzibari religious and folkloric traditions with a historic past that is inaccessible, or at least incomprehensible, to the rational Western subject. The following comments that Latif makes to Saleh imply that he perhaps looks at his “nativity,” his childhood, as being “native” in that other sense:

“I think I imagined you as a kind of relic, a metaphor of my nativity, and that I would come and examine you while you sat still and dissembling, fuming ineffectually like a jinn raised from infernal depths. Do you mind me talking to you like this?”
“If you have to,” I said. “Which jinn do you have in mind? Which jinn sitting still and dissembling, fuming ineffectually?”
“Do you mean which story?” he asked, smiling, frowning, trying to tease out a memory. “I can’t remember. I have an image.”
“Horned? Does the jinn in the image have a horn? One horn in the middle of a huge forehead? … ‘Qamar Zaman,’” I said, “That story has the stillest, shiftiest jinn in the whole A Thousand and One Nights. With a horn in the middle of his forehead. My favourite jinn, an utter grotesque, which is how you imagined me.”
“No, no, definitely not ‘Qamar Zaman,’” he said. “I know that story very well.”
“Well, which, then? You’re the expert.” (Gurnah 169–170)

In this game of chicken, Latif realizes that he doesn’t want the jinn he was thinking of to be a particular jinn, because that demonstrates that he has been thinking on the level of mythology. By denying the specificity of “Qamar Zaman” and saying “I know that story very well,” he calls upon his status as literary scholar, as if his knowledge of English literature means he has rationally studied and critiqued the stories of his childhood. But he has already admitted that he had an image of the jinn he’d pictured Saleh as, and Saleh’s ironic appropriation of Rachel’s term for Latif as an “expert” calls into question Latif’s distance from this folklore. He wants to think of himself as a rational subject, trying to find the truth of what happened, but he finds himself operating within the traditional belief system of storytelling and jinns.

In conclusion, we recall the moment in Justice’s article where Christina of Markyate has a vision that the abbot wore the wrong color the day before—this is so extraordinarily miraculous that her supporters realize they hadn’t actually believed in miracles before then. The abbot discovers that “what he has used as a convenient heuristic premise is actually the rudest fact: it is not as if she can see him; she just can see him. He thereby learns to believe what he believes” (Justice 17). In addition to this being a truly delightful moment, it seems clear that the medieval believers Justice describes are not merely Enlightenment doubters overcoming their rationality with the force of will. Rather, it seems that they can’t necessarily tell the difference between believing and knowing, or faith and reasoning. We think our characters (and humans in general) have this problem too.