Over at the Image blog, Greg Wolfe has a
post about the state of Catholic Letters. I like Greg Wolfe, and I have great regard for what he's done with Image Journal. So I thought it worth a response - my comments are in brackets.
In the conservative Catholic press—and blogosphere—there has been much harrumphing about the decline and fall of Catholic letters.
[This whole entry sounds rather more like a shot across the bow - "there they go again, those silly conservatives" - than an engaged argument, and that "harrumphing" is as good an approximation as any for the sound the shot makes as it leaves the cannon... But there's no reason why it can't
become an engaged argument, so: Mr. Wolfe, what means harrumphing?
This forum at
Inside Catholic? Heck, the folks there can barely even agree on what Catholic fiction
is. The front is not nearly united enough to constitute a proper target. It's not a harrumph of conservative Catholics (sort of like a gaggle of geese) so much as it's a bunch of confused souls trying to sort things out. Which is why a few of us got together on the same site to
discuss Ron Hansen's
Exiles in particular and Catholic fiction in general. We had a lovely time, and there's hardly a harrumph in the bunch, though I don't know how many of us would characterize ourselves as
conservative Catholics...maybe we should define our terms on that one. (Nota bene: one fellow tried to pull the old "Hansen's a liberal, therefore not worth reading" line, and was promptly shushed.)
Now, all that said, you may be reading other stuff, stuff that
does qualify as harrumphing. Lord knows, there are harrumphers out there in the Catholic blogosphere. But you need to show your work. I don't think the post from Amanda Shaw that you mention below qualifies as harrumphing. If you disagree, please make your case.]
Of course, the question of whether Catholic writing is alive, much less well, is really just another skirmish in the larger culture wars—perpetuated largely by those with ideological axes to grind.
[C'mon - if you're going to call folks out as ideological axe grinders - particularly in the literary realm, in which such a charge might call for laptops at ten paces at dawn - you need to give an example!]
I am not so naïve as to believe that I or anyone else can put an end to such posturing.
[How do you know it's posturing? Why can't it be distress at the disappearance of the religious sensibility - particularly, the Catholic religious sensibility, with all its incarnational character - from much of modern literature? Why can't it be sadness that the literary establishment was all agog, after the publication of
Gilead, at the notion of a religious character in literature who was good and intelligent and serious about his faith? People still believe in God, and even in the Catholic Church, so why doesn't literature, which begins in the observation of real people, reflect that? I think it's a fair question. Calling it posturing is pretty harsh.]
To be sure, on one level, the logical inconsistencies and blinkered vision behind this attitude call out for some response.
[Maybe even a response that doesn't accuse folks of blinkered vision?]
But in the end, what gets me so worked up is that this attitude ultimately trivializes and emasculates the Catholicism it seeks to vindicate.
[Well, that certainly seems worth getting worked up over. Lord knows the conservative Catholics I know lament the trivialization and emasculation of the Catholic faith, and I understand their lamentation. So, let's dig in.]
In a recent post at the First Things blog, Amanda Shaw quotes an admiring New Yorker review of a Graham Greene novel by George Orwell. In the review, Orwell writes: “A fairly large proportion of the distinguished novels of the last few decades have been written by Catholics and have even been describable as Catholic novels.”
Orwell is presumably referring to such writers as Evelyn Waugh, Georges Bernanos, and François Mauriac who, with Greene, were the major figures in the mid-century “Catholic literary revival.”
Ms. Shaw goes on to say:
“In the sixty years since George Orwell was reviewing Graham Greene’s novels, the phenomenon of the Catholic novel has shriveled into virtual nonexistence. I just returned to noisy New York after attending the third annual Southwell Institute creative writing workshop, and on the first evening Orwell’s observation was presented to a group of us young writers. “Who are the great Catholic novelists, poets, and playwrights of today?” we were challenged, and there was no quick response. As silence grew, the question was amended: If the human conflicts described by Orwell remain, and if art really can “hold a mirror up to nature”—showing us both good and evil, in all their power and glory—then why is “Catholic fiction” such a musty old phrase?”
The ignorance of that particular crowd really doesn’t prove much of anything—after all, it consisted of young writers.
[Gosh, I know I read more novels when I was young and free than I do now that I'm old and encumbered. I don't think you should necessarily hold their youth against them, especially since the question was, 'Who are the
great Catholic novelists...of today?" Presumably, even the youth would know about the great ones - the ones whose stature and significance were sufficient to merit that word. So while the charge is fair enough on one hand, it does come off a bit grumpy on the other.]
But the leaders of that workshop should know better.
[Why? Say more.]
As they say in the business world, it’s all a matter of “optics.” What are people seeing and what are they missing? Who is admitted into this particular canon? And what are their qualifications?
[Good questions!]
The conservatives’ myth goes like this: writers like Greene, Waugh, Bernanos, Mauriac, along with the Americans Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, were both famous authors in their time and “muscular Catholics.”
[Where have you seen this said? I don't know anyone who has ever characterized Greene as a muscular Catholic. (The man's struggles with questions of faith are pretty well known. By the end, it was all he could do to suppose that it might all be true - though it's worth noting that he carried with him a picture of Padre Pio.) If there is a myth, I would say it is this: that for all these authors, the Catholic faith was a vitally important thing, a thing not to be ignored, a thing that permeated all of existence, and lent drama to that existence. Have you really seen people treating these authors as defenders of the faith in the manner of Fulton Sheen or even Chesterton? Where?]
What’s crucial to this myth is that these writers were real Catholics and held a position of eminence (read: power) in the public square. The subsequent story is one of disenfranchisement and apostasy.
[Where is this myth written down? I've never seen the Catholic fiction of any era touted as having power in the public square. Trust me, conservatives know that novelists make lousy politicians.]
The problem is that this is nearly all wrong. Some of these writers were politically and theological conservative, but others were anything but.
Take Greene himself. He was always a man of the Left and never an apologist for the Magisterium. The novels the conservatives most admire—The Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair, The Heart of the Matter—were roundly condemned by the conservative Catholics of the mid-twentieth century. The prevalence of adultery, substance abuse, and highly dubious moral dilemmas that characterized these novels was the subject of much mid-century harrumphing.
[As for the mid-century harrumphing - maybe so; you are no doubt more aware of these things than I am. As O'Connor - who
was rather an apologist for the Magisterium - noted, there are an awful lot of folks, Catholics included, who lack the fundamental equipment required to read a novel, who suppose that if they can read the phone book, they can properly engage literature. But don't tar the young with the harrumphs of their forbears. If they can see in Greene's work an appreciation and exploration of the force and mystery and power of religious belief - including religious belief that clings to peculiarly Catholic dogmas such as the Real Presence (I'm sure you've read Greene's short story
"The Hint of an Explanation") - and if they don't get their noses so bent of out shape about the adultery and other moral dilemmas that they lose sight of the traces of the transcendent, then isn't that a
good thing?]
Even as conservative a writer as Evelyn Waugh had to write a long, impassioned letter defending his satirical novels to the Archbishop of Westminster, after he had been attacked in the British Catholic magazine The Tablet. Poor Waugh had to do the worst thing possible for a satirist and comedian—he had to explain his jokes. (In his novel Black Mischief he had described a campaign by white colonialists to bring contraception to the native African population, with hilarious and unpredictable side effects—as a form of undermining anti-Catholic thinking.)
[But this is no argument that Waugh was not a public and even a "muscular" Catholic - merely that the Archbishop didn't know how to read a book. Conservative Catholics know well that being a "muscular" Catholic is not to be equated with being adored by the ecclesial authorities.]
Waugh’s irony, Greene’s venal protagonists, Mauriac’s thoroughly nasty cast of characters, O’Connor’s violence and grotesquerie—all these were subjected to ridicule by the predecessors of today’s conservative tut-tutters.
[Again, don't tar the "conservative" youth of today with the sins of their forbears. You'll miss their virtues if you do. The youth aren't saying that their tut-tutting predecessors had it right. They're saying that there's a problem, and a different sort of problem, today. And that's what you should be addressing.]
And while we’re on the subject of irony, it’s worth noting that every one of these writers hated being classified as a Catholic novelist. They wanted no adjective before that noun. Nor did they see themselves as a bloc, flexing their Catholic muscles in the public square. To do so would have reduced their work to propaganda.
[Maybe so, but in this case, it was Orwell doing the classifying, no? The Southwell question wasn't asking after a bloc, it was wondering about holding a mirror up to nature - a nature that includes a religious element.]
If these writers were muscular it was because the Catholic faith enabled them to write incarnationally, which is to say sacramentally. This entails a highly defined sense of paradox, since it is grounded in the mysterious yoking of heaven and earth, spirit and flesh. That’s why these writers employed irony and ambiguity: in order to convey a sense of how sin and sanctity can co-exist within the same person, how violence can model grace, how suffering and loss can lead to a sense of the lightness of being. There were edgy writers, unpredictable and dangerous, causing frequent flutters among the church’s hierarchy.
But to contemporary pronouncers of gloom, all that forgotten.
[What is your evidence for this forgetting? What is your evidence that the conservatives don't get incarnational, sacramental writing? Where have you seen these novelists held up as apologists - which seems to be your accusation? Where do you get the notion that conservatives don't think that sin and sanctity can co-exist in the same person, or that violence can model grace? The contemporary pronouncers of gloom, I suspect, would be grateful for an edgy, dangerous, identifiably Catholic novelist... What they lament is the dearth of Catholic fiction, not its edginess.]
Next time I’ll explain the cause of that amnesia.
[You also need to detail the emasculation you mentioned above. You haven't made your case yet. I know conservatives who value these authors precisely for their clear-eyed vision of the human condition and the reality of the world.]
...is a book by John Gardner. It includes this line: "Art begins in a wound, an imperfection -- a wound inherent in the nature of life itself - and is an attempt either to learn to live with the wound or to heal it. It is the pain of the wound which impels the artist to do his work, and itis the universality of woundedness in the human condition which makes the work of art significant as medicine or distraction."
This house, situated about two blocks from the one in which I grew up, is for sale. I noticed this during my last visit home. Once, my girlfriend lived there. Once, we made an agreement to rendezvous at 1 a.m. on her back porch. Naturally, I overslept. I woke at 3 a.m., cursed myself, and ran, in my pajamas, to her house. Naturally, she was not on her back porch. So I climbed onto the tiny roof over the front door of her house and leaned over to the leftmost of those second story windows - the one that opened on her room - and quietly called her name. (It was summer, so the window was open.) Her house fronts, on a diagonal, onto a rather busy street in my hometown, such that, even at 3 a.m., the occasional car would bathe me with its headlights. The comic quality of my predicament did not escape me. My girlfriend did not wake up. After about an hour of quietly calling her name, I walked home and went back to sleep.
What follows are the lyrics to Tom Waits' remarkable song Way Down in a Hole. The genius here, I think, is that he sings/talks with perfect sincerity, and yet, you suspect that may be, and probably is, entirely insincere. But only probably. Precisely the way to present religion in a post-Christian age? An even better version comes as the second song on this concert recording. Thanks to the Not-Ted for the heads up.
The very fine folks at Korrektiv (Quin Finnegan in particular) have posted a thought experiment that's as good as anything in Percy's great psychological exercise. Go, cogitate, contribute.
