The modern and contemporary Catholic novel (3)

Gene Kellogg notes, in The Vital Tradition, that:
"... in the United States, the tendency of American Catholics to adopt the secular community's values of social meliorism without spiritual reservations gave rise rise to Flannery O'Connor's brilliant satires, in which social meliorists were depicted as blind victims of illusion, who did not understand that without spiritual dedication social meliorism was powerless to reach even those it sought to help. J. F. Powers had already exposed the spiritual bankruptcy of the "golfing priests" and the "regular fellows," who had abandoned spiritual values to go over to secularism on secularism's most superficial terms."

Kellogg also suggests that:

"Flannery O'Connor and J. F. Powers ... represented the two tendencies we had seen in the work of the European Catholic novelists, criticism of the secular environment and criticism of "religious" people, but in criticism of the environment the approach was milder than the European. When Powers or Flannery O'Connor criticized non-Catholics, or nonreligious people, the criticism had nothing to non-Catholicism or anti-Catholicism. Powers tended to attack some general characteristic inhumanity as in "The Old Bird" or racial prejudice as in "The Trouble." Flannery O'Connor tended to attack broadly prevalent patterns of human behaviour, such as meliorism (Rayber in The Violent Bear It Away) or the need to dominate (Mr Head in "The Artificial Nigger")."

O'Connor and Walker Percy introduced ideas on ways of communicating Christianity in popular culture. O’Connor wrote that:

“When you can assume your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of taking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

The problem as O’Connor saw it is that non-Christians do not recognise as sin those things that Christians view as sin. The whole concept of sin itself may be anathema to those who are not Christians and they may accept as completely normal things that Christians view as sinful. So she wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” In order to make things which seem normal to many appear as sinful to your audience you need to use the shock tactics of distortion and exaggeration, crisis and catastrophe.

Percy wrote about there being two stages in non-Christian audiences becoming aware of grace. First, there is an experience of awakening in which a character in a novel (and through that character, the audience) sees the inadequacy of the life that he or she has been leading. This is a moment of epiphany or revelation about themselves; a moment in which they either realise their depravity or their potential for grace. This is what O’Connor was talking about when she said that the job of the Christian novelist is to help the audience see activity that they regard as normal as a distortion. Such an experience may then lead on to the second stage of hearing and responding to the grace of God in Christ. What O’Connor and Percy both seemed to suggest is that their characters and their audience cannot see the grace of God without the first stage of becoming aware of the inadequacy of the current lives.

Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Children of God deliver a central Catholic priest who is wonderfully himself despite the extremities of situation and suffering into which he is placed. They are a brilliant demonstration of the difficulties of communicating the Gospel in another culture and, as such, are on a par with Endo's Silence and The Samurai. Emilio Sanchez, its Jesuit central character, is an engaging central character who is honest about the deficiencies and the inspirations of his faith. The split narrative works well before meshing at the conclusion to bring together the events of the central crisis and the response to it. This central crisis is genuinely shocking although its resolution is probably a little too easy and dealt with too briefly but the novel, as a whole, provides an engaging and challenging exploration of God's presence and guidance in human exploration and suffering.

Ann Rice was brought up a cradle Catholic but exchanged her belief in God for the belief that there is no God while at University in response to her imperative need to read authors that were banned by the Roman Catholic Church. She married a convinced atheist and became famous as the author of popular Vampire novels. Her novels, however, reflected her search for meaning within a personal life touched by tragedy. The combination of her personal search and the research for her novels returned her to the history of Rome and beyond this to the mystery of the survival of the Jews. In 1998 she returned to the Catholic Church. Eventually this led to her own search for the historical Jesus as she read extensively on the subject with the result being the first two novels in her Christ the Lord trilogy.

The first of these, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, is written in simple, sparse prose with the story told in the first person. The storyline incorporates some of the miracles found in the apocryphal infancy gospels but these are mainly restricted to the period in Egypt. The remainder is an imaginative fleshing out of the minimal Gospel stories of Jesus' childhood. Very little happens in terms of action but Rice's dramatisation of Jesus' growing understanding of who he is and what he has to do is effective and moving. In Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, Rice creates a pre-history for Christ which seems consistent both with the Gospel narratives and with the character and personality of Christ which emerges from those narratives. The fictional pre-history of The Road to Cana is also dramatic and engaging; which is itself a considerable achievement. Rice is clearly a novelist who is well read in Biblical Criticism with a real understanding of the Gospel narratives.

"The American Catholic Ron Hansen ... has effectively transposed the story of the Prodigal Son to our own day in Atticus," writes Crowe. His novel, Mariette in Ecstasy, is the senstively told story of a young postulant given the stigmata and the varied reactions to her from her convent. Elmore Leonard's Bandits and Pagan Babies both have a focus on issues of Catholicism and organized religion with more invested in their questions of doctrine and faith. Touch provides a wry take on fame and the miraculous when Juvenal, a former brother of a Catholic order in Brazil who now helps alcoholics in a Detroit rehabilitation centre, performs a miracle cure on a woman who has been beaten by her husband. The story contrasts the love Juvenal finds with the business and church zealots who seek to exploit his gift.
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M Ward - Epistemology.

Happy 20th birthday to 'Image'

Image issue 60 is a bumper edition in honour of the journal's twentieth anniversary and featuring extra pages and special visual art features.

There is new work from twelve of their favorite artists who have appeared in Image in the past, including Mary McCleary, Tim Hawkinson, Joel Sheesley, Alfonse Borysewicz, Lynn Aldrich, and others, and an essay by Ted Prescott on the variety of art represented in Image. There's also a quartet of short essays from four very different contemporary painters - Cathy Prescott, Tim Rollins, Alfonse Borysewicz, and Wayne Adams -reflecting on the state of their medium.

A special symposium on art and the religious sense, "Fully Human," collects nine statements on the connection between art and a full expression of our humanity. Contributors range from theologian Stanley Hauerwas to poet Robert Cording, whose essay about the importance of "craving reality" can be read online. The symposium also includes contributions from Ena Heller of the Museum of Biblical Art, Ron Austin on film, Valerie Sayers, Mako Fujimura, and more.

Issue 60 also includes fiction by Ron Hansen, poems by Scott Cairns and Franz Wright, an interview with singer-songwriter Sam Phillips, an essay by Poetry magazine editor Christian Wiman, and more.

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Sam Phillips - Reflecting Light.