The modern and contemporary Catholic novel (4)

Theodore P. Fraser writes, in The Modern Catholic Novel In Europe, that:
"Heinrich Böll was born of a Catholic family of craftsmen whose ancestors had left England to settle in the Rhineland during the reign of Henry VIII. The Catholic identity of the family was strong, and Böll was brought up in close-knit, supportive Catholic environment of working class people living in tenements ... Böll's early works, which use the war as living metaphor of universal evil, also have deep religious themes of guilt and the need for repentance - for both individual and collective sins of aggression and cruelty ... Böll's later novels are much broader in scope and more morally explicit and engaged in regard to social, political, and religious problems ... Böll became increasingly outspoken in his criticism of the Catholic Church in Germany in the 1960s ... Despite his sharp attack against the German Church, Böll never denied being spiritually Catholic and insisted that he should receive a Church burial at his death. Like Péguy, whom he much admired, Böll was always careful to distinguish between the mystical body of the Church extending above and beyond the human institution and the essentially worldly and political corporation for the wealthy social classes that he judged the Church in West Germany to be."
Gene Kellogg, writing in 1970 in The Vital Tradition, commends the development of Japanese and Indian Catholic literary movements:
"Natsume Soseki's Kokoro (1914) compares favorably with the work of most Japanese writers working today. Similarly, in India the best work of M. R. Anand can be read quite comfortably even in such company as R. K. Narayan's masterpiece, The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1962), particularly if one turns to Anand's zestful and humane short stories such as "The Barbers' Trade Union" (1936)."

Doug Cummings, in his essay accompanying the film Silence, writes that, during the period that the Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo studied at the University of Lyon, "Catholic thought in postwar France was in the midst of intellectual revival and reform" - "Philosophers like Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier grappled with theology and modernity" while Endo "focused on writers he called the "grande écrivaines of French literature" ... François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and Julien Green ... Catholic novelists who specialized in vivid descriptions of personal struggles, religious doubts, and dark nights of the soul. (Their novels were later direct influences on Graham Greene and Flannery O'Connor.)"

Endo was born in Tokyo in 1923. After his parents divorced, he and his mother converted to Roman Catholicism. Following study at Keio University and in Lyons, his novels established him the leading writer of his day in Japan. He has been called the Japanese Graham Greene because he is a Catholic novelist whose writings depict both the anguish of faith and the mercy of God. A central theme of his writings has been the clash between Japanese culture and a very Western mode of religion. Novels like Silence and The Samurai suggest that Christianity must adapt itself radically if it is to take root in the “swamp” of Japan. Cummings notes a "deep bifurcation within Endo that would remain a part of him and his writing throughout his life: the Western-Christian side and the Eastern-Japanese side, both psychological hemispheres yearning for solidarity but refusing cohesion." As a result, the reigning motifs in his work become "philosophical rifts, religious fervour and weakness, suffering innocents, martyrs and apostates, and the clash of cultures."

Steve Scott notes, in Crying for a Vision and Other Essays, that:

"Endo's characters, both eastern and western, are haunted by a specific Christ - a paternal, Judicial figure in the West and a maternal, forgiving figure in the East. In this haunting they bear some resemblance to the "fundamentalists" of Flannery O'Connor's fiction. Endo has repeatedly registered his conviction that a gospel centered on the forgiving, nurturing Christ is far more appropriate for his homeland than the stern, judgemental model imported from the West."
Endo writes in his Preface to the American Edition of A Life of Christ that the "religious mentality of the Japanese ... has little tolerance for any kind of transcendent being who judges humans harshly, then punishes them ... the Japanese tend to seek in their gods and buddhas a warm-hearted mother rather than a stern father." In Endo's classic novel Silence, for example, as Adrian Pinnington notes in his interesting paper on Endo, "Rodrigues, the priest who finally betrays the Church and apostasizes, actually first learns true humility through this action." It is only, Pinnington notes, "after he has abandoned the false absolutes of European culture that he can recognize the action of Christ in his own life, and begin to hear the voice of Christ."
Other novelists considered within the critical literature on the Modern Catholic novel include: Mary Gordon, Carmen Laforet, Elisabeth Langgässer, Gertrude von Lefort, Giovani Papini, and Sigrid Undset. The popular novels of Morris West can also be considered in this context.

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Tōru Takemitsu ~ Itinerant.

Humility, humanity and shame culture

I've been reading Edmund de Waal's The Hare With Amber Eyes and Shusaku Endo's A Life of Jesus, as well as watching Masahiro Shinoda's film of Endo's Silence, over the Christmas period.
De Waal is critical of Ruth Benedict's famous thesis, made in The Chrysanthmum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, "that the Japanese had a culture of shame rather than a culture of guilt." De Waal's criticisms - the simplicity of this polarity and Benedict's own lack of direct experience of Japan - are fairly standard current critiques of Benedict's thesis. What is interesting though is the continuing popularity of the book and it's influence on a Japanese writer like Endo.

Endo writes in his Preface to the American Edition of A Life of Christ that the "religious mentality of the Japanese ... has little tolerance for any kind of transcendent being who judges humans harshly, then punishes them ... the Japanese tend to seek in their gods and buddhas a warm-hearted mother rather than a stern father." He then suggests that if his American readers "keep this point of view in mind as they move through A Life of Jesus, they will ... gain deeper insight into just where the religious psychology of the Japanese and other Orientals coincides with their own, and they will better appreciate those points at which the two psychologies perhaps diverge."

As Adrian Pinnington notes in his interesting paper on the issue Endo clearly accepts the shame culture versus guilt culture thesis and it may be that this reflects the influence of Western Catholicism on his thinking and writing. Doug Cummings, in his essay accompanying the film Silence, writes that "Catholic thought in postwar France was in the midst of intellectual revival and reform" during the period that Endo studied at the University of Lyon - "Philosophers like Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier grappled with theology and modernity" while Endo "focused on writers he called the "grande écrivaines of French literature" ... François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and Julien Green ... Catholic novelists who specialized in vivid descriptions of personal struggles, religious doubts, and dark nights of the soul."

Cummings notes a "deep bifurcation within Endo that would remain a part of him and his writing throughout his life: the Western-Christian side and the Eastern-Japanese side, both psychological hemispheres yearning for solidarity but refusing cohesion." As a result, the reigning motifs in his work become "philosophical rifts, religious fervour and weakness, suffering innocents, martyrs and apostates, and the clash of cultures."

Pinnington, however, argues that Endo's "initially negative picture of Japanese culture grows more positive" with "the lack of a strong self" coming to be seen as a "precious asset." This change in Endo mirrors the Japanese response to Benedict's thesis which was "initially accepted in a spirit of contrition after the war, but was later reversed into evidence for the greater humanity of Japanese society." Once this is understood, Pinnington suggests, Endo's early work can also be seen as less negative towards Japanese culture than has often been assumed. In Silence, for example, "Rodrigues, the priest who finally betrays the Church and apostasizes, actually first learns true humility through this action." It is only, Pinnington notes, "after he has abandoned the false absolutes of European culture that he can recognize the action of Christ in his own life, and begin to hear the voice of Christ."

On this basis, it would seem that, while Benedict's thesis cannot simply be accepted per se, its reception in Japan and the use made of it by Endo suggest that her thesis has much that can critique Western culture when understood through Japanese eyes.

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 Toru Takemitsu - Rain Spell.