Learning to live by reading books
Review of Ethics for Apocalyptic Times: Theapoetics, Autotheory, and Mennonite Literature, Daniel Shank Cruz (Penn State University Press, 2024)
In their second Penn State Press monograph concerned with Mennonite writing and queer theory, bibliographer and bookworm Daniel Shank Cruz (they/multitudes) argues that literature can and should make “ethical arguments as art.” (9) Multitudes drafted the book swiftly, as an act of hopeful resistance during the pandemic, feeling overwhelmed by the impacts of climate change, Covid-19, and the rise of global fascism. Immediate urgencies compelled them to read mostly Mennonite novels, stories, and poems, and to write in the belief that literature has the potential to comfort and entertain, as well as to teach and transform. The project intends to be decolonial and queer, striving to foster better relationships between all humans, animals, and the environment. It is inspired by the expansive spirit of Walt Whitman, the poetics of Jeff Gundy and Di Brandt, and grounded in values Cruz associates with Mennonite beliefs: nonviolence, communal mutual aid, longing for a new society.
“Theapoetic” reading is related to, but different from, theopoetics, a field of inquiry and literary production that combines poetics, theology, and philosophy, and which has long been a wing of Mennonite writing. Theapoetics, so named to stress the feminine gender, values feminist, queer, oppressed, and other marginal experiences as sources of Divine revelation, Cruz explains, following theologian Molly Remer. The Divine can manifest as anything, sacred or secular, that has the potential to be an agent of transformation. Works of Mennonite literature “search for the Divine everywhere, not just within the faith community” (11), Cruz states, and revelation can come at any time. Secular literature can also be read through the lens of theapoetics. Cruz writes that “theapoetics queers theopoetics by doing secular theopetic work, which becomes theapoetic work” (12).
On the book jacket, the author identifies as a queer, disabled Boricua who grew up in New York City and Lancaster, Pa. Although they studied at Goshen (Ind.) College in preparation for the ministry, they are now a “secular Mennonite” as described by Maxwell Kennel: “a person for whom the cultures, values and identities of Mennonites are important in a way that cannot be captured by either straightforward acceptance or rejection of theological statements…and who “serve as a challenge to dualistic thinking of all kinds” (11). Cruz “still think(s) Mennonitism has lots to offer” – as ethical resource and cradle for literary production and community. At the same time, they believe that “institutional Mennonite theology has lots to answer for” (18) when it comes to sexism, racism, homophobia, colonialism, and other failures.
The author’s personal position matters because Cruz occasionally writes autotheoretically, narrating the specific ways books have provided them insight and taught them to live ethically. Sorrows, joys, and intimate personal revelations demonstrate the kind of open-hearted, transformational acts of reading that multitudes seeks. An autotheoretical approach raises the emotional stakes of this scholarly project as personal narrative demonstrates the study’s purpose and sparks reader interest. The approach, however, risks oversimplifying the complex issues, histories, and institutions Cruz seeks to engage.
Five of the six chapters discuss works of Mennonite writing in various combinations. Of those, my favorite is the chapter devoted entirely to Sara Stambaugh’s I Hear the Reaper’s Song, now only available in electronic form. Cruz’s reading of the 1984 historical novel published by Good Books is pleasurable and deep. In this chapter, multitudes discloses their own familial relation to one of the 19th-century Lancaster County Mennonite characters, and notes that the old Anabaptist settlement seems to be a neglected site on the Mennonite literary map. Interactions between the Hershey family and the railroad company exemplify a nonviolent and dialogic resolution of the conflicts around Barbie Hershey’s accidental death, Cruz finds, thereby naming a key ethical implication of the novel.
In the final chapter of Ethics for Apocalyptic Times, Cruz departs from a focus on Mennonite writing to consider The Mad Man, a 500-page, pornographic novel featuring several unhoused characters, written by the distinguished American novelist Samuel R. Delany. To demonstrate the inclusive possibility of theapoetic reading, Cruz “claim(s) Delany as a secular Anabaptist seeking beauty in the spirit of Gundy’s ‘Manifesto of Anabaptist Surrealist’” and their own spiritual teacher, despite Delany’s atheism (119). Moreover, the final chapter underscores a sexual ethic that Cruz develops through readings of several Mennonite texts earlier in the book: “any acts between consenting adults are permissible” (121).
No less provocatively, Cruz enters an opposition that has been observed for 30 years between Al Reimer’s individualist aesthetics (Mennonite Literary Voices: Past and Present, 1993) and John Ruth’s communitarian pragmatics (Mennonite Identity and Literary Art, 1978). As a mediating gesture, Cruz introduces “Revolution and Reverence,” a sermon that John Ruth preached in 1964 in defense of a Mennonite youth magazine that printed a poem written by Laurence Ferlinghetti. Cruz regards Ruth’s 60-year old claim for theological value in a secular text as precedent for their own argument for an inclusive theapoetic. Throughout the book, Cruz draws on their vast personal library of Mennonite literature to consider a range of genres and writers, some rarely discussed in recent years. Given the focus of the project, I was surprised that they chose not to consider work by the queer, Mennonite-background philosopher of religion Grace Janzen, whose ideas about justice, violence, and the Divine might have deepened the study. In any event, the book will be of use to scholars of Mennonite writing and individuals concerned with Mennonite cultures, identities, and theologies.
The study’s strength is also its weakness, bearing, as it does, the marks of many works created during the Covid lockdown – including my own 2023 collection of poems. Racked with grief, grievance, rage, and reckoning, and attuned to personal and collective identities, Cruz’s text can seem stylistically raw. My sense is that in their determination to use literary studies as a means of intervention in these times they deem “apocalyptic,” Cruz risks reducing theology to ethics, art to activism, argument to affirmations of identity, and reading to appropriation. Certainly, stories and poems have been put to social use since before the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, Matthew Arnold, and Mao Zedong. Yet, ethical instruction is not the main reason I read or write, and I resist the diminishment of creative writing to moralizing as reflected in the following reading Cruz offers of an early Miriam Toews novel: “Summer of my Amazing Luck urges readers to take note of this negative example of failing to serve the oppressed, and strive to do the opposite” (83). At times, Cruz’s instrumentalization of literary writing feels pointed in a way that may not be substantiated by the texts themselves, as in the reading of Sofia Samatar’s speculative fiction novella about a colony of Mennonites on a distant planet: “‘Fallow’ depicts four rebellious characters and how the community silences them as a metaphor for the hypocritical violence Mennonite institutions (especially Mennonite Church USA and Mennonite Church Canada, but other institutions – colleges, mission organizations, and so on – share culpability) inflict on those who are not straight white men because of these institutions’ focus on perpetuating their power rather than on adhering to nonviolent principles” (103).
I appreciate Cruz’s attention to Mennonite literature and their longing for community and human flourishing. As much as they lament the didacticism of the books published by Herald Press and penned by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien that shaped the literary imagination of their childhood, however, multitudes may finally fall to that charge themselves.