Death, sex, love, and guilty deeds and thought: these four are private, death because it is the rarest event, occurring only once to each of us, and normally in seclusion; sex because we seek privacy to avoid embarrassment and foster intimacy; love because it exists in internal feeling, sensation, and imagination the individual desires to share with only one other; and guilty deeds and thoughts because they spontaneously seek secrecy in order to avoid humiliation, degradation, exclusion, and loss of opportunity.
Religion traditionally seeks control of these four experiences. Religion encourages us to regard our own retention of these four in privacy as intrinsically injurious because we cut ourselves off from the commonality of experience-ignoring the implications of the fact that others cut us off from sharing their own tightly held experience. It would have us believe that we cannot prosper as individuals because our consciousness is too meager to support us cut off from intimacy with others in their own private experiences of death, sex, love, and guilt. The goal of both religion and literature is to help us acquire or regain unimpeded access to the totality of experience freed of the restrictions and blindness created by concealment of our own and others’ death, sex, love, and guilt, but religion and literature face different obstacles in this effort.
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Literature, as the art form that shares an individual’s private experience across space and time with other individuals, is uniquely appropriate to supplement the deficiencies of individual experience that religion addresses without the controls religion places on individuals.
Literature improves on religion in a second way: it offers readers access to the privacy of others while religion shunts others’ experience away from us into the social dead end of confession. The primary defect of literature in this task of replacing religion is its lack of reciprocity: the author normally does not read the reader’s response nor the reader’s own expression of private experience. But reciprocal and mutual sharing, the ideal of religion, has rarely existed in religion anyway in recent times: a Catholic may share private experience with a priest, but the priest, rather than reciprocating, just symbolically readmits one to the realm of common experience (communion) on the premise that relieving oneself of one’s isolation from the priest, and thus supposedly from the deity, can supplant the need to share experience with the rest of the congregation, or humanity. The cleric is an interloper in the process of reconciliation: instead of having the community bond directly, he offers some relief from the pain of isolation as a pretext for creating dependency on the church.
Literature seeks to eliminate the mediation of the cleric and church by letting the reader know at least one person shares something of his or her private experience without demanding the price of conformity and obedience.
One cannot immediately fill the void of literature’s lack of reciprocity and mutuality. But the sustained habit of writing and exchanging writing and responses with friends can begin to remedy this deficiency. For writers who know and share with other writers, some communion develops within the group that can, to some extent, will itself to remain open to others. If that reciprocity and mutuality could remain open, for the members the desired functions of religion could be served.
Richard Duffee
December 28, 2011
