Fictions of Home - Narratives of Alienation and Belonging, 1850-2000

The Metaphysics of Home: Religion, the Canon, and Existential Trauma

As we have seen, home is a spatiotemporal imaginary, and as such it is concerned with our place in the world, both in the sense of our geographical location and of our position within the larger scheme of things. Accordingly, an inquiry into the nature of belonging may quickly lead us beyond questions of daily existence, toward the realm of metaphysical speculation. More specifically, inquiries into the nature of home are likely to spark questions of a religious nature because religions tend to hold forth the promise of a final, transcendental home. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, for instance, humanity appears as tragically fallen: expulsed from Eden, and exiled in the desert of earthly existence (an idea powerfully expressed, for instance, in John Milton’s Paradise Lost). As John Durham Peters observes, there is thus at least one similarity between Judeo-Christian and poststructuralist thought, for in both these traditions human identity is seen as inherently incomplete and discontinuous with itself (“Exile, Nomadism, and Diaspora” 22).13 According to Peters, Christian discourse in particular has come to be suffused with nomadic imagery, with St. Paul’s ideas being particularly influential: “The human body for him is a temporary, mobile dwelling in which mortals sojourn on earth” (27–28). In this view, humans are wanderers on the face of the earth, and only in death, when we have finally left our nomadic bodies behind, is it possible for us to recover our transcendental home in God, with whom we will forever rest in peace.

Steven Spielberg’s E.T. explicitly draws on this religious narrative of alienation and belonging in order to enhance the significance of little Elliott’s quest. As already noted briefly, Elliott’s own father is absent from the home; he has left the mother and moved to Mexico with his new partner. Elliott longs for the absent father, and E. T. assumes the role of a Messiah who will guide the boy towards a new sense of belonging. Indeed, as Thomas Sebeok has noted, E.T.’s emotional power depends to a large extent on its “subliminal religious infrastructure” (662). Spielberg’s film tells the story of an otherworldly being who, we will find, has the power to heal little Elliott’s wound when the boy cuts himself on a sawblade; a being who dies, is resurrected, and who, in the final scene, ascends once again to his heavenly home (Alexander 25; Tomasulo 275). The film’s religious subtext is also apparent visually, as when E. T.’s glowing heart alludes to the iconographic tradition of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (FIGURE 2).14 In fact, even the film’s advertising campaign has incorporated this religious dimension, with official posters pointing to Michelangelo’s depiction of the creation of man in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel (FIGURE 3). In E.T. – as in many texts about home – a protagonist’s attempt to find a place in the world thus assumes a profoundly metaphysical dimension, and it is arguably for this very reason that the eponymous heroine of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) includes home in her list of the “great words” (the others being love, joy, happiness, mother, father, and husband; 62; ch. 6).15 At the same time, to say that Elliott’s quest gains in metaphysical depth, as well as emotional resonance, through the film’s use of religious imagery is not to argue that E.T. is in fact a religious film; the point is, rather, that intertextual references affect our reactions to the film. More generally, references to religious and other texts that are widely familiar can enhance the spectator’s sense of belonging, as they place the individual work of art within a larger system of meaning.

Historically, it was the literary canon – or in Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase, “the best that has been said and thought in the world” (Culture and Anarchy 5) – that was to provide men and women with a sense of belonging to a higher order that was not, strictly speaking, transcendental, but that at least transcended the spatiotemporal limits of these individuals. Indeed, the term canon – which originally referred to the list of biblical books “accepted by the Christian Church as genuine and inspired” (OED) – itself bears witness to the quasi-religious function envisioned by Arnold for the monuments of high culture. In fact, Arnold and other Victorian thinkers (e.g. Thomas Carlyle) had quite explicitly conceived of ‘high culture’ as a means both to cultivate the soul and to ensure social cohesion in the absence of religious certainties (Philip Davis 133–134; Eagleton, Literary Theory 21). Agnes Heller has captured well the utopian hope embodied in this high-cultural home that, ideally, would form the basis for universal belonging:

Heller herself notes, however, that the canon, as envisioned by Arnold and others, can only fulfill this function of creating a sense of universal belonging if it remains limited and exclusive; as soon as too many works are included, the canon’s ability to serve as a discursive home begins to crack and, ultimately, collapses (10). The Arnoldian ideal of the canon as home is thus in one sense inherently contradictory, for it can only serve as a discursive medium of universal inclusion if it simultaneously remains thoroughly exclusive in terms of the works it incorporates. Many will, in other words, not be directly represented in this assembly of high culture, and will therefore simply have to trust that those who are included will speak on their behalf. The logic of canonization thus resembles closely Victorian arguments for a limited franchise – a parallel that is arguably not accidental.

At any rate, those who happen to be unfamiliar with the canonical texts that, supposedly, form part of “a common cognitive background” (Heller 10) may find that intertextual references can also have a profoundly alienating effect. Comedies, for instance, are a highly allusive type of genre – and therefore they travel rather less well across cultural borders than other types of texts, for as Franco Moretti has observed, “laughter arises out of the unspoken assumptions that are buried very deep in a culture’s history: and if these are not...