Contrary to Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, Franco Moretti, and others who see the novel as marginalizing religion through Weberian rationalization, I argue that a religious legacy from the Catholic sacrament of penance (ritual confession) conditions the rise of the novel and produces precarious secularity in modern confessional novels—novels in the vein of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864). In what I call the legacy of cathartic self-narration, the narrator expects relief from oppressive memories by narrating them to a listener or reader. This expectation was ingrained in the Christian laity of medieval Europe through the sacrament of penance, and transposed into Protestant spiritual autobiographies following the Reformation. It migrated to fiction with the rise of the novel, and it survived the emergence of unique (and secular) individuality heralded by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s _Confessions_. Moreover, the frustration of this expectation for the secular narrator constitutes a trap that, as the non-ending in _Notes from Underground_ suggests (and as J. M. Coetzee has argued), produces endless confession. At MLA 2019, I considered J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1990) and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004) as two contrasting responses to Dostoevsky’s trap. Coetzee’s narrator engages in ascesis verging on self-destruction, while Robinson’s minister appeals to Christian grace.
