Screeds, or Essays for the Near Future?
“For more than two centuries the popular spirit of each succeeding generation has tended more and more to the view that the mysteries of life will generally fall before the mind of man. Many modern novelists have been more concerned with the processes of consciousness than with the objective world outside the mind. In twentieth-century fiction it increasingly happens that a meaningless, absurd world impinges on the sacred consciousness of author or character; author and character seldom now go out to explore and penetrate a world in which the sacred is reflected.”
Greg Wolfe, in New York for the annual conference of Communion & Liberation – called the New York Encounter – is keeping up with our exchange of messages about literature and belief even so. “It’s an imperfect medium – in part, because my words essentially are captive to the way you frame the post – and, in essence, you always have the last word,” he says. So I'm going to give him the last word here.
He writes:
The history of criticism is littered with screeds bemoaning the decline and fall of contemporary literature or painting or what have you. How many times on reading a biography or attending a major art exhibition does one discover that the artist we lionize now was considered mediocre or worse in her own time?
Screeds? I guess he means my essay about literature and belief and Dana Gioia's about Catholic writing. But I am going to figure that he resorts to cliché and hyperbole because he is writing in haste.
On the substance, he's right: right that criticism -- especially criticism by those of us who write critically with our own books partly in mind – is often animated by a sense of decline, of absence and loss, stated in fairly general terms. Flannery O'Connor did criticism that way, as in in the passage from her essay “Novelist and Believer” quoted up top. So did Walker Percy. So did Thomas Merton, in dozens of essays about the dissipation of the habit of contemplation, the practice of silence, etc.
In the same way, the history of literature is "littered" with vanished journals along the lines of Image, which publish work for a time, often framed in terms of ideals and agendas, and then fold or disappear, only to be remembered, if at all, for a work or two or three published there.
That's how culture works. The fact that some critics will get some artists wrong, or that artistic tastes will change, is no reason to forswear criticism. The fact that a journal will eventually be out of date is no reason not to publish it. I was reminded of this latter point the other day. A friend working in a borrowed apartment pointed out a stack of old journals near the elevator. On top was an American Scholar – the issue that featured Marilynne Robinson's essay “Onward, Christian Liberals.” There it was: as extraordinary a piece of prose about Christianity in America as any published in the Bush years, set out for recycling.
Likewise these essays about the absences we writers feel. If you are a writer, especially a writer “with Christian preoccupations,” as O'Connor put it, you know that you can't write for all time; you have to begin with the time you live in. Say you feel an absence of work of a certain kind and quality. You consider this feeling, reflect on it. You watch and wait (ten years, in my own case, since the publication of The Life You Save May Be Your Own). Then you decide to act. You try to find words for the absence you feel. You present examples drawn from the work that does exist, and compare them to one another, making distinctions and drawing out shades of meaning. You allow for exceptions to the general point you are making. You look outside the usual categories (outside fiction, say, to nonfiction, or to work from abroad). You invite conversation and correction (as I am doing here). And yet you trust the sense of absence you feel, and in stating it and restating it you envision and evoke in words the kind of work you have in mind – both for yourself as a writer and for other writers in the near future, beginning with those who might read the essay you are writing.
That – presumptuously, but without apology – is what I sought to do it in my Times essay. Now over to Greg.
It’s clear that no matter how much evidence I cite, including a list of distinguished recent novels that fit your highly specific requirements (containing books you've confessed you haven't read) that you will insist that we have a "relative absence" of serious fiction grappling with big questions of religious belief.
No, it isn't clear. That's why I took up this conversation. But Greg keeps coming back to Charming Billy – and to some recent fiction that, to judge from how he puts it below, he too hasn't read, but that he adduces as evidence for his argument on the basis of the cover copy:
I had a good chuckle yesterday when browsing the new paperback table at the front of a Greenwich Village bookstore (missionary territory if there ever was one).
From that one table alone I made three purchases: Frances and Bernard, Carlene Bauer’s fictionalization of the relationship between Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell (believer and convert); Jamie Quatro’s highly-acclaimed story collection, I Want to Show You More, shot through with the biggest questions of belief (“like some franker, modernized Flannery O’Connor”); and Kyle Minor’s collection Praying Drunk (see Quatro above).
Also, a final point about Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy. That novel is quite clearly about the “main themes and the big claims made for religious belief.” The entire plot rests on the question of Billy’s simultaneous belief in his Catholic faith and the existence of true love—the classic literary-theological parallel of eros and agape. That he lives most of his life believing a lie only makes the point more forcefully. Is he a sad-sack or a holy fool? McDermott asks us to think about the nature of faith, including the question of faith’s meaning and value if it is merely believing a beautiful lie.
But as the Italians say: Basta. Enough.
