In her famous essay “The Church and the Fiction Writer,” the good Miss O’Connor wrote a great deal about the need to enter into the mystery of existence and human experience. She wrote also about the danger of a creeping Manichaeism that can spiral out of sentimentalism, and thus she recommends writing as honestly as artistically possible, not regarding overmuch the consequences of potential scandal. As she says,
He [the writer] becomes aware, too, of sources that, relatively speaking, seem amply pure, but from which may come works that scandalize. He may feel that it is as sinful to scandalize the learned as the ignorant. In the end, he will either have to stop writing or limit himself to the concerns proper to what he is creating. It is the person who can follow neither of these courses who becomes the victim, not of the Church, but of a false conception of her demands.
So what duty, then, does the writer have towards the safety of weak souls who may read and be scandalized by some excess, perceived or otherwise?
The business of protecting souls from dangerous literature belongs properly to the Church. All fiction, even when it satisfies the requirements of art, will not turn out to be suitable for everyone’s consumption, and if in some instance, the Church sees fit to forbid the faithful to read a work without permission, the author, if he is a Catholic, will be thankful that the Church is willing to perform this service for him. It means that he can limit himself to the demands of art.
All well and good, one might think. The writer is given permission to work expertly within his own field, and if he inadvertently creates something that is generally unhealthy for souls, the Church will step in and make a judgment to that effect. Hypothetically, this creates a safety net for the writer which gives him the freedom to be creative without casting a constant, scrupulous eye on his own work.
There’s one glaring problem with this system: O’Connor wrote this essay in 1957, and the Index of Forbidden Books was not formally abolished by the Vatican until 1966.
Why is this a problem? Because this checks-and-balances system of creativity and censorship that O’Connor presupposes no longer exists. While no one ever expected Catholic novelists to acquire Nihil Obstats and Imprimaturs from the diocesan chancery (as was once expected of theologians and Catholics writing religious non-fiction), if they wrote a story that was considered obscene or sacrilegious (however inadvertently), the bishop could issue a formal warning to the laity of the diocese and even recommend placing the novel on the Index. Once the Index fell out of use, bishops quickly lost interest in even issuing such warnings.
Which leads to a new dilemma for the Catholic fiction writer: ought he to now take upon himself the “business of protecting souls from [his own] dangerous literature”? Must he review every work of his own scrupulously, trying to imagine what potentially ill effects it may have on all classes of readers, learned and unlearned, traditionalist and post-modernist, Catholic and non-Catholic? She even warns of what she thinks will happen next when writers become moral watchdogs:
[F]or many writers it is easier to assume universal responsibility for souls than it is to produce a work of art, and it is considered better to save the world than to save the work…. That [this view] is foisted on him by the general atmosphere of Catholic piety in this country is hard to deny, and even if this atmosphere cannot be held responsible for every talent killed along the way, it is at least general enough to give an air of credibility to [the] conception of what belief in Christian dogma does to the creative mind.
When artists assume the role of critic, O’Connor argues, the talent of the creative mind is likely to be killed.
I wonder, though, if this is actually true. Many great novelists and poets were also great literary critics, and even significant moral commentators. The ranks of those who pulled double or triple duty include Plato (originally a playwright), Horace, Augustine, Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Francesco Petrarch, Torquato Tasso, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, William Blake, John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, John Gardner, and yes, Flannery O’Connor.
If anything, the poetic mind seems inevitably drawn to the use of its critical faculties as a necessary respite from the difficult work of creativity, in addition to serving as the occasional reality check and reinvigoration of the artist’s mission. Engaging occasionally–rather than exclusively, as worried O’Connor–in literary and moral criticism of the poetic arts can serve as a refreshing and recreational Kanathosian Spring.
As Paul VI wrote in Apostolicam Actuositatem one year before abolishing the Index, “By the apostolate the spoken and written word, which is utterly necessary under certain circumstances, lay people announce Christ, explain and spread His teaching in accordance with one’s status and ability, and faithfully profess it…. The lay person engages himself wholly and actively in the reality of the temporal order and effectively assumes his role in conducting the affairs of this order.” The implication for the fiction writer seems to be clear: the clerical class has effectively removed itself from making judgments about whether certain poetical works should be modified, published, or censored. The moral burden is now on the lay writer to censor, when necessary, his own writing. We are not living in the 1950s of O’Connor’s America, and the business of protecting souls has been, as it were, distributed more freely.
Arguably, this also places a burden on writer’s groups. When offering criticisms of other writers’ pre-published works, the Catholic must offer moral criticism where necessary, and should expect to receive it from fellow Catholics in their group. If the critiques never go beyond the aesthetic level into the moral, something must necessarily be lacking.
Written literary criticism must also consider morality and the effects of a work on individual readers, as well as on society in general. A work that is unavoidably scandalous must be repudiated. A work that is potentially scandalous should be explained so as to reduce the possibility of scandal. One need not be as quick to reduce the work of poets to ashes as St. Augustine, but one also need not bend over backwards to be “understanding.”
If Socrates was right that Beauty, Truth, and Goodness are all different manifestations of the same thing, then switching between aesthetic and moral criticism should not be difficult, especially for those educated in the tradition of Catholic morality. Sentimental and simplistic moralizing must be avoided, but surely this is not a greater danger than not considering the morality of art at all.
We are coming up on the 50th anniversary of the abolition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. It’s up to all Catholic writers to educate ourselves on the principles of morality that ought to govern our art, in addition to the aesthetic principles that every poetical artist needs. Is this an extra burden on the lay Catholic? No doubt it is, and no doubt many fiction writers will simply refuse any but the aesthetic burden.
But that is why the artistic occupation is also a Cross.
K. S. Wear says
Socrates is such a bizarre (if not subversive) example in this piece that I am inclined to take it as Straussian esoterica.
Jonathan McDonald says
Are you referring to his belief in the three Transcendentals?
Roseanne T. Sullivan says
This article is timely for me. And reinforcing. I recently was asked to review a novel by a Catholic friend of mine that described experiences of a 12 to 15 year old protagonist that horrified me. It had many parts that went far further than Ulysses, which as we all know occasioned an obscenity trial. The teen protagonist was said to be a church going Catholic but she didn’t seem to have any idea of Church teaching about chastity, custody of the eyes, obedience to parents, or many other aspects of Catholic doctrine, except that she prayed the Jesus prayer all the while as she was throwing herself heedlessly into harm’s way. At the age of 12, she became immersed in the objectionable music (and lyrics) of rockers like the Rolling Stones, and the Who, and she started obsessing about an androgynous appearing David-Bowie-like star. She put his poster above her bed, with her mother’s encouragement, and stopped caring about anything, stopped going to school even. The book began when at age of 15 she was pursuing her idol after a concert and kidnaps him. The author sees the novel as redemptive. Trying to decide what I could say about the excellently written novel made me think very hard about what makes a novel Catholic and what Catholics should write about. I would not want any young person to read that book, and even as an adult I found the scenes disturbing. I am encouraged by what you wrote in this to feel that I was providing a needed service to my friend. I hope that she applies her brilliant talents to some other worthy subject than a drugged bi-sexual rocker and routine committer of statutory rape who is pursued by the love of lust-possessed teenage girl who has lost her own moorings.
Jonathan McDonald says
Catholic writing does seem to have gotten a bit out of control since the abolition of the Index. That’s part of my impetus behind writing this post. Many writers have concluded that the lack of external censorship gives them more or less full license, and I think that is not so. If anything, it puts more of a burden on the Catholic writer.
Lickona says
Out of control? It barely exists! Who has been scandalized, and by what? Does “disturbing” equal “scandalous”? O’Connor was pretty clear about what Catholics should write about: the world they see around them.
I can’t shake the feeling that this is paralyzing hand-wringing. Why is 50 Shades even being mentioned here? It’s erotica. It never pretended to be anything else. It sure as heck isn’t Catholic.
Katy says
Isn’t it, though, precisely those who are most hurt and betrayed by the secular culture (like the protagonist of abovementioned novel) who need the most attention and compassion from us? Not to say that their (or our) actions have always been perfect, to wave away sin, for this would be a failure of compassion in itself: but to acknowledge their experience, bring it to the light, help unwind the threads of good and evil in it, and stand on the side of redemption: this seems a more than worthy project for a Catholic writer.
Susan Altstatt says
By way of introduction: my name is Susan Altstatt, I freely admit to being the author whose novel “Belshangles” was excoriated in Roseanne Sullivan’s March 16, 2016 at 5:53 PM comment to Jonathan McDonald’s “What has Rome to do with Iowa City?”
The background on this? Recently I was shown the article by Dana Gioia, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, titled “The Catholic Writer,” which appeared in “First Things,” and also in “Santa Clara Magazine.” I was most impressed, and thought I fit his profile of the new Catholic fiction writer pretty well. I addressed myself by email to Mr. Gioia, asking if would read my book. His answer, “No, I will not read your book: my desk is already littered with the unread novels of my friends.” I then made the same request off the local literary pundit who, with glowing excitement, had pointed me at the Gioia article in the first place. She said she had no time; all her time goes into blogging. This conversation was repeated down the line. So how can the people whose opinions are the most educated be too absorbed writing and blogging about the former glories of Catholic literature to read anything new? Flannery O’Connor isn’t with us anymore.
I finally addressed my request to ms. Sullivan (Who describes herself as a “Would-Be Catholic Pundit,”) because I have known her for years, and knowing her, trusted her to be scandalized and come out swinging. She did not disappoint. But how could I possibly have guessed she would compare “Belshangles”—not to “Fifty Shades of Gray,” or other such trending sensationalist fare, but to James Joyce?? That’s the kind of public critique for which most authors would pay good money. Many thanks!
(Though I’m frankly curious which passages in Belshangles she thinks “go beyond Ulysses…”)
I still maintain “Belshangles” is modern fairy tale about the power of inalienable love, not obsessive lust. It is available on line from Amazon: Daniel & Daniel Publishers (October 12, 2015) ISBN-10:1564745783 in case anyone wants to find out what all the to-do is about, and join the conversation.
I intend to further address Rosanne’s criticisms at some length in my blogs about “Belshangles” ongoing both on Facebook and Goodreads: however since this is the start of Holy Week, and in addition to my Mass and choir obligations, I have a rental home to clean out for an incoming tenant, it may take me a while to marshal my thoughts.
Roseanne T. Sullivan says
“Written literary criticism must also consider morality and the effects of a work on individual readers, as well as on society in general.”- Jonathan McDonald
I didn’t think I was excoriating the novel. We are all trying to think these thing through here. I wrote about Belshangles here without identifying it because Jonathan McDonald’s post encouraged me to hope that I was performing a laudable and useful function for Susan Altstatt, even though I risked being hated and mocked for not approving it.
For example of mockery there is Susan’s inaccurate ad hominem statement about my describing myself as a “Would-Be Catholic Pundit.” In a page on my catholicpunditwannabe.blogspot.com blog titled “Why Would Anyone Want to be a Catholic Pundit?” I nominated myself tongue in cheek as a Catholic pundit because it seemed reasonable to me that if anyone is consulted by the media as a Catholic pundit that person should love the Church and her teachings.
I was tired of reading anti-Church quotes from other so-called “Catholic pundits” who don’t love the Catholic Church or believe in her teachings, such as Angela’s Ashes author Frank McCord or homosexual activist pundit Andrew Sullivan, who are always consulted by the media and are given a chance to air their ideas about how a loosening of Catholic doctrine and practice in the areas of sexual morality would cure any of the Church’s ills.
I’m sorry Susan either doesn’t get or like my little joke. (As a matter of fact, Susan Altstatt is the one who once asked me that very question “Why Would Anyone Want to be a Catholic Pundit?” when I told her about my blog. I wasn’t serious, and not to worry, nobody has taken me up on my offer.)
I was actually upset by Belshangles because I was sincerely trying to understand in what sense it could be a Catholic novel, and I could not stop reacting in my heart with shock and horror and pity to the life lived by the young protagonists. I used to live in a milieu quite like the one being described and I feel grateful that I escaped, although my time was the 60s and my idols were the Beatles and Bob Dylan. When I wrote to Susan my thoughts after about two weeks of reading and re-reading and drafting and re-drafting and then I stopped trying to write a review, I felt as though I had emerged from a poisonous swamp that felt much like the poisonous swamp I used to be in before I came back to the Catholic Church.
I sincerely wanted to be able to write something sophisticated about how a Catholic novel can describe sordid things such as evil rock and roll lifestyles, but I couldn’t find a way to do that for the life of me. It’s a novel about a teen’s obsession for a decadent bi-sexual indiscriminately rocker who promiscuously takes underage boys and girls to bed. Nowadays they call men like that child rapers, even though the sex is consensual, because the children are under the legal age of consent, and so the rapes are statutory. Maybe there is a valid comparison between this book and Lolita, both excellent works of fiction about deplorable obsessions?
I don’t want to put in any more spoilers, but even though the male protagonist seems to have gained some potential for reform at the end, I can’t figure out how his potential (but partial) redemption makes the book acceptable, even though the girl prays a lot. For example, he tells this 15 year old wannabe mother of his children that any woman he loved would have to accept his love for his male partner in the band too, and it’s clear that if she was given the option, she’d be fine with that.
I don’t have the book any more, so I can’t quote passages to compare to Ulysses. The juiciest bit of Ulysses I remember (and I didn’t read the whole of that) is the scene at the end where Molly Bloom remembers her seduction and says, “He asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and … his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
Note that in that passage nothing is clearly stated, what is being asked or what is being felt. And that and other non-explicit passages were considered scandalous because of what they were describing. But nothing is supposed to scandalize us nowadays.
What I meant by the Ulysses reference is that we have become immune to scenes that would have been cause for cries of obscenity in past years. Since the Belshangles novel recounts the sensual writhings of a rock star and his lover on stage in the midst of a Bachanalian scene of 50,000 screaming and crying fans, and tells about a young girl being encouraged by her mother to put a poster of her idol over her bed–followed by the girl basically dropping out of normal life-and about a 15 year old girl gazing lustfully on the naked object of her desire standing on a rock in a stream bed, I am shocked because I personally don’t want to have those kinds of images in my mind, and I wouldn’t wish them on anyone else, no matter how skillfully done. The author told me matter of factly she would have been happy to have her book listed under the teen fiction category, and that appalls me too.
I keep thinking about John Updike’s work when I think about Belshangles, because Susan is a fine writer too. I read Updike’s achingly beautiful story Pigeon Feathers a long time ago and loved it, even though I deplored its conclusions about the existence of God. But I was always very sad that Updike wasted his immense talent writing tedious stories about adultery between unlikable undistinguished people. (Updike said in an interview that other have often told him the same thing too.) I would hope for greater topics for Susan too.
Susan Altstatt says
Roseanne, I never told you, matter-of-factly or otherwise, that I would be happy to have Belshangles listed with teen
fiction. The contrary is true. Similarly, although it is a love story, I would never want it listed as romance.
Susan
Roseanne T. Sullivan says
I apologize if I misunderstood. You seemed to me to be thinking out loud about what categories your book might be listed under, and you mentioned young fiction. I thought the only reason you would mind would be because your book is a work of literary fiction, and shouldn’t be pigeon-holed in a category like teen fiction or romance.
Jeffrey M Minick says
Dear Ms. Altstatt and Ms. Sullivan,
I have not read the book in question here nor any of your other columns. But given today’s crass back and forth exchanges, I wanted to compliment both of you for your civil exchange of notes. I came across your notes by accident, but was impressed by your politeness and by your attempts to understand the other.
Best,
Jeff Minick
Susan Altstatt says
To Jeff Minick:
Thank you kindly, sir. I do prize civility, and I don’t get along too well with hate speech. I wish you’d take the time to read my book. As i said, it’s called “Belshangles,” (which is the name of a band,) and is readily available on Amazon. Yours is an opinion I’d like to have.
Cordially,
Susan Altstatt
Joseph O'Brien says
Mr. McDonald is commended for raising a point which I first confronted in John Gardiner’s “On Moral Fiction” – a book which offers an interesting alternative to the “piety” which O’Connor bemoans.
The lack of clerical – or for that matter, ecclesiastical – interest in good art, which Mr. McDonald speaks of, raises an interesting chicken-and-the-egg question: Did the culture lose its aesthetic/moral bearings when the Church began to withdraw from cultural concerns, as the suppression of the Index indicates, or did the Church begin to withdraw from cultural concerns when culture lost its aesthetic/moral bearings?
After successfully imposing a Catholic moral standard on film making in the US for several decades, the Legion of Decency has been renamed by the USCCB and now does little more than provide a ratings system for the faithful. Nonetheless, this Catholic institution’s declining influence is a good case study of the relationship between morals and art from a specifically Catholic standpoint. Was it wrong for the Church to impose itself in the way it did? Or was it permitted to do so by the culture that perhaps even welcomed the Bride of Christ’s two-cents in such matters?
Perhaps central to this discussion is the role censorship plays in art. As democrats (small “d”) we are uncomfortable with this idea – the Bill of Rights has enshrined freedom of speech, after all. Yet in a healthy culture censorship is necessary and even welcomed. In an unhealthy culture it becomes merely a nuisance and, for those who must have their desires fulfilled (I think that’s how Plato defines the democratic soul) it becomes a cause for celebrity outrage. For instance, we’d all agree that it would be useless and even a bit mad for the proprietor of a brothel to prohibit pornography on the premises, yes?
On the other hand, without a healthy culture, censorship becomes a blunt hammer which sees everything as nails. The urge to “legislate” aesthetics/morality (either canonically or civilly) rises from the admirable desire of countermanding a culture’s coarseness; yet, in such a culture, it would, at best, have little effect – or at worst, an adverse effect. By the way, for this same reason, abortion and capital punishment and same-sex marriage et al will never be “cured” by what our folks in Washington decide. All mores, at least according to De Tocqueville, must come from the culture (and primarily the family) first and then the laws will follow suit.
As to the question of self-censorship, Mr. McDonald makes an interesting proposal. O’Connor’s now famous dictum that artists in a deaf culture sometimes have to shout sounds reasonable enough. (It echoes, by way of response, Henry Adams’ equally famous dictum that a chaotic age calls for a chaotic art). The question Mr. McDonald seems to be raising is – Does that shout sometimes risk inciting a riot, in the soul if not in the public weal? This concern is real and ought not be downplayed by bohemian rhapsodies about the artist’s freedom of expression, etc. De Sade would agree. Otherwise, pornography, where is thy sting?
Yes, as Catholics who are called to live every day as an act of love, the rightness of human action (real or imitated) remains the central altar of our concern here. Mr. McDonald writes: “Written literary criticism must also consider morality and the effects of a work on individual readers, as well as on society in general. A work that is unavoidably scandalous must be repudiated. A work that is potentially scandalous should be explained so as to reduce the possibility of scandal. One need not be as quick to reduce the work of poets to ashes as St. Augustine, but one also need not bend over backwards to be ‘understanding.'”
Paradoxcially, O’Connor was b ending over backwards to avoid being reduced to ashes, paradoxically when in one of her essays she exhorted her readers to not read her work before they’ve mastered the Tradition – that is, the literary canon from which she has drawn her own material, forms, inspiration, etc. Yet there are plenty of works in that same canon – from Herodotus to Horace to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Melville – which pose real or potential occasions for scandal. All the same, it was precisely because the public understood these works to be more than the sum of their scandalous parts that, culturally, they remain a vital part of our Western literary patrimony. How is it, then, that the bumpkins of the past could take on these works and survive their baser influences while we, the sophisticated moderns, cannot take so much reality with our own fiction?
Perhaps I’ve oversimplified the case with my question, but if nothing else it points up the state of culture today. We fear scandal because it is so prevalent or perhaps because its very prevalence makes it less scandalous and therefore more dangerous…. For those Catholics attempting to carry their cross – as artists or as readers – we may simply be wary of the world in a way that even the Vandal gazing upon Rome did not have to be; or we may simply be splintered and wounded in a way that even the groundlings at the Globe could not comprehend.
Jonathan McDonald says
Thank you for your thoughts, Mr. O’Brien. There’s a lot here to consider. I may followup with another post in a little while.
Katy says
Job, I am glad you mentioned Gardner’s On Moral Fiction! I was going to bring that up too.
Karen Ullo says
As an author who struggles with this dilemma *a lot,* I’ve found a few principles to guide me. One is that I cannot shoulder the burden of vetting my work alone. If the Church is no longer in the business of officially policing fiction, then it is incumbent on authors not only to police themselves, but to seek guidance from other Catholics, be they clergy, friends, editors, publishers, or all of the above. Another is to pray throughout the entire process of creation. (Many a day has my prayer consisted of, “Please don’t strike me with a lightning bolt for writing this. It’s going somewhere redemptive, I promise!”) And a third is to be as honest as possible – with myself, with my characters, and with anyone who encounters the story. Sin is real and cannot be swept under the rug if fiction is going to hold any grain of moral truth. Sin is also glamorous – no one would be fooled by the Prince of Lies if he were not convincing. There is no way to portray the true power of Christ’s redemptive love without also portraying the truth of human slavery to sin. If there are souls whom that portrayal might scandalize… what can an author do except pray for them?
Lickona says
What would be an example of a novel that is both aesthetically good and also “unavoidably scandalous”? How could there be such a thing? The Catholic Encyclopedia gives us this: “Hence scandal is in itself an evil act, at least in appearance, and as such it exercises on the will of another an influence more or less great which induces to sin.” But can there be a novel which is both aesthetically excellent and “in itself an evil act, at least in appearance”? I’m not being flip here: aesthetic excellence in fiction seems to me to require a fidelity to What Is that precludes its being evil in itself (even if it does, as it must, depict evil). Further, a novel’s ability to influence the will of the reader will vary from reader to reader. What is scandalous to one may be far from scandalous to another. Given this, who is to say what is “unavoidably scandalous”? Finally, is there much evidence that this is really a problem today? The Da Vinci Code told lies that lead people astray. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. When a Catholic writer sets out to grapple with life through writing, I’m pretty sure that nothing he or she is going to produce is going to be evil in itself that induces another to sin.
Jonathan McDonald says
I don’t think I argued that there are likely to be many, if any, novels that are both unavoidably scandalous and aesthetically excellent. Beauty and Goodness are too closely linked for that to happen. A novel like “Fifty Shades of Grey” is immoral any way you look at it, but also (according to all accounts) an aesthetic failure. And then “Ulysses” is immoral, but perhaps only conditionally scandalous even in spite of the smutty parts, and arguably possessing of many aesthetic merits.
Lickona says
But if Beauty and Goodness are so closely linked, why must the novelist worry about switching between aesthetic and moral criticism, which you mention? And why must the writer consider censoring him/herself over and above making excellent art?
Jonathan McDonald says
The two kinds of criticism are closely linked, but not identical. (Presumably, Beauty and Goodness are entirely identical only within the Godhead.) Because they are closely linked, trying to divorce one from the other must result in a poor work. If the moral aspect is insisted upon at the expense of the aesthetic, the result will be simplistic propaganda; if the focus is on the aesthetic at the expense of the moral, the result will be a heartless and amoral work of cold beauty.
JOB says
cf. most of Philip Freneau for the former and most of Swinburne for the latter?
Katy says
When it comes to work that is “unavoidably scandalous” vs. only “potentially scandalous,” I think we need to be cautious not to condemn our own or others’ work too quickly or even to appear to do so. Elsewhere, O’Connor speaks of the responsibility of the morally mature person not to be too easily scandalized. And even in the passages quoted here, she points out (as you note, Jonathan) — although not in so many words — that there are those who will be just as scandalized by an apparent refusal to consider certain topics or recognize certain realities as others will be by depicting or emphasizing them in the wrong way. Put shortly, we have a responsibility to both types of souls. Neither can be ignored. Not to mention the artist’s soul, standing there as we see it, in the breach.
Jonathan McDonald says
Certainly, we don’t want to be too quick to condemn. The artistic temperament is a sensitive one, and it should not be subject to battery by way of harsh criticism when unwarranted. Yet, I don’t see how the artist can avoid the responsibility of judging his work and the work of others on moral standards.
However, I don’t think that our problem today is that we are too quick to judge, but that we are too slow. The milieu is such that we are most likely to bend over backwards making excuses for morally degrading art, and because of this our powers of moral judgment have somewhat atrophied.
It is the duty of mature people not to be easily scandalized, but that is no excuse for publishing outright smut (e.g., “Fifty Shades of Grey”) or works intentionally meant to degrade customs and morals (e.g., “The Monk”). I would defend other novels that have so-called questionable content (including many postmodern novels) if the author’s intention is not to promote immorality as such, but simply to depict it and its effects. The latter type is where readers are unreasonably scandalized, but they are reasonably scandalized by smut and intentional degradation.
Karen Ullo says
I agree that both moral and aesthetic judgments are important, and I agree with Katy that we need to exercise caution when employing them. But I don’t think it’s true that “we” have become too slow to judge. I certainly agree that there are people who bend over backwards to accommodate the immoral, but this is less a result of “slow” judgment than a quick one that judges everything to be acceptable simply because the artist wants it to be so. It judges expression to be a good of itself, regardless of what is expressed. Likewise, there are just as many people who instantly cry foul the moment a work of art strays from warm-fuzzy, sin-free kitsch. “Slow” judgments have fallen woefully out of fashion – which is why the need for essays like yours and discussions like all of the comments here has become so great.
On another point: if the scandalous/ not scandalous nature of art is to be judged by the “author’s intention,” we will end up in a hopeless mess of attempted mind-reading. The question should be, does the work itself promote immorality as such, or does it merely depict immorality for the sake of exploring its evil effects? It’s a minor quibble but an important one.
Katy says
“… there are people who bend over backwards to accommodate the immoral, but this is less a result of “slow” judgment than a quick one that judges everything to be acceptable simply because the artist wants it to be so. It judges expression to be a good of itself, regardless of what is expressed. Likewise, there are just as many people who instantly cry foul the moment a work of art strays from warm-fuzzy, sin-free kitsch. “Slow” judgments have fallen woefully out of fashion …”
Yes. All of this. However, I think we’re in better shape than we were in O’Connor’s time (“we” here being a subset of Catholic laity who are both trained to resolve this tension from an artistic perspective and interested in doing so from a perspective that treats Catholic teaching as an aid rather than an obstacle to perceiving truth; in her own day and milieu she would seem to have been, not quite a one-woman show, but certainly rather isolated).
That said, I want to inspect this notion of “morally degrading” art a bit more closely. Taking for granted that representation is not endorsement, it seems to me that we have to look at how the moral universe as a whole is represented in art, rather than lining up isolated actions or states of moral character and judging a piece based on their presence or absence. As a writer, holding up a character’s evil actions for the explicit purpose of picking them apart is just as pernicious to the soul as real-life gossip, as well as being destructive to art. I would go farther, saying we shouldn’t even set out purposely to show the ill effects of x, y, or z in fiction. If we truly believe x, y, or z action or state of being is morally harmful, and we care both enough (quantitatively) and in the right way (qualitatively) about the person or persons on whom it has ill effects, and we set out to tell the story of characters in a way that respects their lived experience as persons, it seems to me we cannot do otherwise than turn out deeply moral fiction. If we really believe we have hold of deep moral truth as Catholics, a wellspring of truth flowing from the person of Christ to which secular culture has lost easy access by turning away from the Church, then we don’t have to create or evaluate fiction from a place of moral defensiveness. We can rely on our perception, strengthened rather than weakened by the encounter with moral truth in the person of Christ known in and through the Church. This doesn’t absolve us from any responsibilities, but it puts those responsibilities in a primary context of love and discernment.
Karen Ullo says
Amen to all of this. Thanks. Katy.
Victoria says
Apologies for coming late to the party, and for any rambling below.
As an erstwhile moral philosopher and aspiring novelist (by which description I only mean I used to be paid to do moral philosophy and am not yet paid to write novels) the issue of an artist’s responsibility to his audience is a question I have considered at some length, and very often in a cold sweat at three in the morning. One of the reasons it is so thorny an issue is that it is primarily a question of moral formation: what will build up a soul and form it in beauty? What will knock it down or twist it into an unnatural shape? But questions of moral formation are not ones that can be answered in a manner that is both universal and detailed. You can give a general account of good moral formation: that which models virtue, requires its consistent practice, and teaches justice temperence, fortitude and prudence, etc, and even set out a pretty detailed outline of a program of ideal moral education. However, how the struggles of individuals are or ought to be addressed is less amenable to a single account simply because we are broken in so many different ways. Addressing all of those in one story is practically impossible. I think Miss O’Connor is right that assuming a universal responsibility for souls will smother the artist and his talent, for what an you right at that point but saccharine platitudes?, but this does not mean that the artist has no moral responsibility, or that a Catholic novelist ceded responsibility to the Church, but was forced to take it back with the abolition of the Index.
I had the good fortune today of managing to find entertainment for my young children for long enough to allow me to reread TS Eliot’s 1934 essay ‘Religion and Literature.’ (I could quote almost the whole thing here quite happily, as Eliot really gets too grips with just this issue, though from a different angle.) He discusses censorship at one point, and although he refers to state censorship of certain novels, rather than the Church’s Index, he makes an interesting point about the consequences of such lists. Of course it can be argued that sometimes the wrong works are censored, but more to the point, Eliot thinks that lists of banned books can give the impression that any title not on the list is harmless. How true; and how alarming. Any book that expresses untruth enticingly, or badly muddles its expression of truth can be potentially scandalous. And I don’t just mean contemporary pulp fiction, or even Ulysses or Lady Chatterly. I mean ‘nice’ romantic classics. Jane Eyre, for example, in its denouement, completely divorces repentance or growth in virtue from happiness. (I could go on about the faults of the sisters Bronte, and indeed have done on my own blog. I don’t know if this blog accepts links in the comments, but if you searched for ‘Adventures, Considered,’ which is the name of the blog, and ‘The Effects of Fresh Air on Literary Criticism,’ which is the post title, you’d find it. You know, if you wanted to. And if a bunch of traffic just happened I might feel inspired to get back to blogging…)
In essence, all novels are works of moral philosophy, whether they intend to be or not: they show us what is good, often by making it beautiful so that even the most twisted soul can, theoretically, be drawn to it. This is why truth is so important: beauty is enticing, so some may just as easily be drawn to a glittering falsehood as a sublimely attractive truth. So, to minimise the potential of his creation to cause scandal it strikes me that the moral obligations of the Catholic artist are two-fold. First, he must be very attentive to his own moral formation, and to the state of his own soul. This is his lens, and he wants it to give clear magnification to the right things. It is not that all art is self-expression, but as Eliot writes in the above-mentioned essay:
“When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behaviour by his attitude towards the result of the behaviour arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.”
Second the author ought to attend to his craft. The better his writing, the more clearly he speaks, and the better he can ‘protect’ his weaker readers from himself. I love what GK Chesterton has to say about art and communication in ‘The Glass Walking Stick’:
“The artist is a person who communicates something. The artist does ultimately exhibit himself as being intelligent by being intelligible….I do not say by being easy to understand, but certainly by being understood.”
The novel is, really, one of the best media through which to explore the moral consequences of sin, and the difficulties of the life of virtue in a post-lapserian world. Where traditional moral philosophy can wind up sterile, and often requires us to take an artificially neutral, or ironically amoral, stance in our considerations, novels address us as sinners and don’t shy away from messiness, ambiguity, imperfect knowledge, unforeseen consequences, the futility of virtue in the face of evil, or any other number of tragedies that typify the life of a fallen human being. Remember when Jesus was pressed on moral questions he didn’t usually give a syllogistic response: He told stories and spoke in images. We are not Christ, but if we are prayerful and diligent, we can hope to imitate Him. That, I think, is the aspiration with which the Catholic artist is saddled.