A weak novelist?
The New Republic recently published an article that’s gotten a bit of popularity around the web. Novelist William Giraldi penned a 4000-word screed against Catholic novels and novelists ironically titled “Confessions of a Catholic Novelist.” Giraldi, himself an admitted heretic and apostate, wants to dismiss the idea that the Catholic has anything worthwhile to bring to the art of the novel, as a foundation to explain why he does not wish to be called a Catholic novelist:
The linguistic and narrative maneuvers of the Catholic novelist have at-hand explanations, ready-made motives, and so his characters tend to be denuded of complete and unique individual agency, of their own necessarily individual will. For the truly Catholic novel, there’s only one way to read it: the Catholic way. And any novel that can be read only one way isn’t a novel at all but an advertisement—or, worse, agitprop. If you want to know the aim of the avowedly Catholic novelist, the aim of his characters, of his storytelling sensibility, check in with the Gospels, the sacraments, the papacy, the Holy Ghost, the liturgy, the Mass. The Catholic novelist must, by definition, come to the novel with his epistemology embedded like a tick, his ontology fully explicable by deference to his faith…. Inside a Catholic novel, water, bread, and blood can never be just water, bread, and blood, and that’s a damning disadvantage for any writer.
Now, I have no other knowledge of Mr. Giraldi or his work. I had never heard of him before his article appeared in my blog reader feed. It might be that his novels are very well written and structured, that his imagery is rich and solid, dreamlike in the best possible way. But I cannot take seriously the intellectual meanderings of someone who pens something so ignorant as, “Sometime after my eighteenth birthday, I saw that Aquinas was no match for Nietzsche, and then Augustine lost by knockout to Hume.”
William Giraldi
Perhaps that’s beside the point–although if Mr. Giraldi can throw in a cheap shot, so can I–and the main point is ostensibly the aesthetic one: Can a Catholic write a novel in a Catholic spirit that succeeds as a work of art? But is that really what concerns him? “Here’s what I know with an almost religious surety: to be tagged a Catholic novelist is to be tagged a failed novelist,” he tellingly writes. He is worried about being thought a fool in the eyes of the world after Commonweal and First Things started praising his book. He knows that the wider critical apparatus of the world hates anything that even smells of portraying serious religious experience in a positive light. Catholicism is like a sinking ship that Giraldi does not even want to be close to on a life raft, lest he be sucked down with its whirlpool.
Is there anything worth salvaging in this short piece of anti-Catholic agitprop? Mr. Giraldi does actually say something rather interesting in response to a selection from a Walker Percy essay,
[M]ost erroneous is the assumption that a novelist requires a dogma such as the Incarnation as “a warrant” to probe the enigmas of human living. Why not just probe them? You don’t need a monotheistic guarantee of mystery: Your fellow humans will furnish it for you every day, don’t worry…. Referring to Flannery O’Connor in his essay “A Cranky Novelist Reflects on the Church,” Percy contends that “the truly Catholic writer knows” that “it is only through the particularities of place, time, and history … that the writer achieves his art.” Why it would take a “truly Catholic writer” to figure out what good writers have always known—E.B. White advised: “Don’t write about Man, write about a man”—is a tad baffling.
This, I think, is perfectly true. It is a natural truth that man–and a man–is a mystery full of interesting enigmas which the novelist can explore, and this belief needs no supernaturally-revealed warrant. The pagans of old knew that a man was interesting without the slightest bit of divine revelation (“Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide…”). Even when one ignores the existence of God and of the multitude of open doors between the spiritual and physical worlds, man himself is a mystery of preternatural heights and depths. Hamlet’s “Piece of Work” speech could be expressed by a materialist as easily as by a monk, because it is too self-evident to ignore.
After all, man is created in the image of God, and we could not say it were so if he did not share in some of his Creator’s mystery.
Indeed. He also forgets that the novelist, whatever his religious convictions, or lack thereof, finds it necessary to emulate God in going about his writing of a book, because no book that is truly “sound and fury, signifying nothing” ultimately succeed. All those particulars, in the end, must carry meaning, even if it is (as it ought to be) a multiplicity of meanings. Even fiction that sets out to upend this ultimately *depends* on other books to be able to achieve its effect, so even it can’t escape. John Gardner has some good thoughts on this in The Art of Fiction.
P.S.: I’m pretty sure by “screen” you meant “screed.”
He has a point about not wanting to be pegged as a “Catholic” writer, and I didn’t find the whole article as bad as a “screed.” I think the problem with Percy is – while I enjoy his books very much – I’d never recommend him as a “great” novelist. Good to be sure, but I regard him as an acquired taste, but this has little to do with the religious content. Religion is just another way for characters to experience the world. Points to Giraldi for recognizing the unique character of the Catholic faith but methinks he doth protest too much in that one paragraph Mr. McDonald quotes.
Giraldi’s “Busy Monsters” was a delightful romp I’m glad I read. Usually whenever someone’s pens some rant against the Church its due to some personal problem or issue they have with an individual teaching or a person who has wronged them that they take as a representative of the whole. One can only pray for him.
As an aside, I wonder if he’s read “What Was Before” by Martin Mosebach, avowed Catholic Latin Mass aficianado. It was a novel about modern godless Germans, with little more than an insignificant religious hospital crucifix as an image of faith. I’d wager Mosebach’s restraint would probably meet with Giraldi’s approval.
Ah, perspective. I understand Giraldi’s irritation, being tagged a Catholic novelist, because I used to feel that way myself when I aspired to write Good If Not Great Fiction. But here’s the thing: All of us, whether we want to write or not–indeed, whether we are religious or not–are under obligation to be as honest as we can be, and that means we must first be honest with ourselves *about* ourselves. I don’t think Mr. Giraldi has quite accomplished that. Give him time. He’s very young. In fact, I’d suggest he write a novel about this very subject; it’s the best way to discover truth, writing is, and there is more opportunity for that discovery in fiction and poetry than ever there was in essay rants.
As an avid reader, I’ve heard of Walker Percy, and I’ve heard of Flannery O’Connor.
Who’s William Giraldi?
I just read Giraldi’s essay. The opening sentence of his closing paragraph reminds me of what some of the “New Atheists” have said in their angry rebuttals of bad atonement theory. As David Bentley Hart has observed, the New Atheists do a very good job of rejecting demiurges and deists–but not much else.
Giraldi himself falls victim to his own claims: he dismisses Percy’s “hodgepodge” and yet puts together a hodgepodge of his own in that sentence I just mentioned. Paul’s point above is wise: Giraldi’s got issues. Dena’s prescription is right on: let Giraldi write about them.
In the meantime, let him say yes if he means yes and no if he means no; we know where anything else comes from…
I don’t mind being called a Catholic novelist. I certainly wouldn’t mind being called a Canadian novelist, either. One of the proudest moments of my life was finding my novel in a Canadian library with a Canadian flag sticker glued to the spine.
As a Canadian novelist, I write in a distinctively Canadian way–automatically with Canadian spelling, which is a hybrid of American and British spellings. As a Catholic novelist, I automatically strive to recreate the universe made by God. The sins of my characters have their own built-in punishment, even if it is not immediately apparent, and Grace is not the result of virtue but a gift given freely by God. The essence of Catholic writing is not stuffing a work full of artificial symbols–an unconsecrated loaf of bread remains an unconsecrated loaf of bread, as all Catholics know, but we still give thanks for it, and pray to be given it daily–but expressing the truth about reality.
Well said. However, part of the problem with Catholic or Christian Faith based writing are the bloggers, the book reviewers, and those who profess to be a faithful Catholic and will not try a book of fiction, unless it is a testimonial, or someone says a prayer and boom the supernatural occurs. What was remarkable about writers like Graham Greene or Dostoevsky is that they wrestled with their faith and it showed like a red petticoat in the shadowy corners of their stories. Even in Greene’s nonCatholic novels, that world-view could be seen. Flannery O’Connor wrote about the dark side of humanity, and she certainly wouldn’t appeal to the shallow Faith hordes today. These are not stories desired to be read by someone who fails to see the value of such works in helping to form their conscience. I fear their faith is much too superficial, in a Calvanistic rigor mortis, that if you present the noir side they shun it out of fear, or inability to see its intrinsic value.
For example, if someone asks me what is your favorite religious film made within the last thirty years, I wouldn’t say The Passion of Christ. I would say Flatliners. As beautiful and terrifying and moving as The Passion of Christ is, Flatliners discussed sin and its brutal results. It hits you where you live, how you live, that even a minor infraction can add up to something huge. As a writer of noir thrillers and Gothic, all my stories carry the Catholic view of the world. But when two of my books were reviewed by a Catholic blogger, she recognized the Catholicity of the one about abortion because it was overtly a faith political issue. My second story was much more Catholic to me because I wrote about marriage and divorce and grief, how it can keep us locked up so we do not love and live, and the differences between two loving parents raising a child, and two who are more interested in themselves. She only recognized that my protagonists were Catholic, and failed to see how they applied their faith in their work, and in their personal life away from the Church. Her myopic view of literature is typical, and not the exception.
This is what we’re up against. If Catholics would stop only reading books by some priest, theologian, or nun, and branch out into the world of genre and literary novels, all us Catholic writers might have a chance.
Too true about “Flatliners”! Brilliant and scared the living daylights out of me.
I think the way forward is just to write the truth. We can (and probably should) write about Catholics, but we have to tell the truth about Catholics. The Catholic girl who is a sexual sinner is a sexual sinner in part because she’s a friendly, likable girl boys notice, and she’s just rather conventional, following the non-Catholic majority in its courtship practices. Instead of coming to a bad end, she often just gets married to her live-in boyfriend. The girl who isn’t a sexual sinner might just not have had the opportunity to be one, and if she falls into sin, she can fall with one heck of a clunk. Too many freshmen at the big name “Catholic colleges” drink their brains out among strangers to lose their inhibitions, and only a tiny minority go to Adoration (Christendom, Steubie, Ave Maria, and St. Thomas Aquinas notwithstanding). The cool priest who breaks all the rules and has pyjama parties for the altar servers is a lot more likely to be an abuser than Father Earnest and Boring. Et cetera. And you know, at the end of the day, only 30% of Catholics in Canada (for example) go to weekly Sunday Mass; what about the other 70%? Are we to expel them from our writing?
Hey guys,
I think that, despite any and all percieved cheap-shots, he’s just trying to point out something that we talk about on here all the time: the fact that there’s a huge pull for religious writers with a solid sense of their worldview (or, for that matter, anyone with a hefty opinion of how the world works) to have their work be a mouthpiece for what they believe the human mystery to be, rather than be an honest exploration of the human mystery itself.
Lots of bad novels written by devout Christians tend to share the flaw of not earning their revelations, or of having two-dimensional characters go through a low-stakes plot with a clean ending that has nothing to do whatsover with the life that most of us live every day. Our ideas about life too-often hijack the characters rather than the characters hijacking the novel, which is one directive he beautifully states.
Sure, he’s got his problems with the church but the main point of what he’s saying is solid – let’s not be too quick to jump on the ad hominem train when we all have a common opponent: the Instant Answer.
From the beginning, through the middle, ‘until the end,’ this article is typical hype. I say ‘until the end,’ because, there, Giraldi negates all he said before. The last sentence: (the Catholic faith) “gives a writer the dramatic itch for sin, for judgment and damnation, for the rottenness of the world, and for the holy in us all.” Everything a literary writer needs for good fiction—unless you are a writer who ‘ignores’ the holy in us all.
The holiness of the human person is the startling difference between a secular writer and a Catholic writer. When Giraldi asserts that a Catholic writer is a failed writer, I ask by whose standards? And are they standards Catholic writers want to adhere to anyway?
So what’s the point of the article—that it is better to propagandize rather than proselytize? Or is this article only a piece of puff, and an effort to play to the secular crowd?
It is NOT necessary for a ‘Catholic novel’ to contain a Catholic dogma.
All that is necessary is to have a good Catholic as the main character and hero of the story, and the reader will get the point.
This is what I did in “Empress Theresa”. An alien from space who read the book would have no idea what a Catholic was,
but would get the impression that a Catholic can be a successful, useful member of society.