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DappledThings.org

A quarterly journal of ideas, art, and faith

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“What has Rome to do with Iowa City?”: appreciation and response

Katy Carl

I’m grateful to Jonathan McDonald for his recent post, in which he calls for Catholic writers to be aware of the possible effects of their work on others’ ongoing moral formation. Fair enough: charity asks us to be attentive to each other’s needs, spiritual as well as physical. Good art certainly seems to be a spiritual, or at least an intellectual and emotional, need of the human person. As Chesterton has it, “literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”

But what characteristics of fiction permit it to best serve this human need, and are there characteristics of fiction which especially qualify a piece for, or disqualify a piece from, the claim that it does serve this need in a spiritually healthy way? The discussion is worth having, although hard to pin down without delving into concrete examples and cases, individual reactions and readings: an intimate undertaking perhaps better suited for sitting around kitchen tables or bonfires rather than huddled before the not-so-warm glow of your laptop or phone screen. Still, let’s try to get started, if only to provide some groundwork for further conversation.

The external situation may have changed plenty since O’Connor’s day–not only is there no more Index, but pop culture is far more drastically depraved, mainstream Western society no longer even nominally Christian, in ways well enough documented elsewhere, just read your headlines, ho hum, let’s not waste any more time being shocked because we have life rafts to build, my friends. The intra-Church situation is also radically different from that of O’Connor’s day, also well documented and much hashed-out elsewhere, but not without analogues to now; “plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.”

It still sometimes seems that, for every one reader who can see through the less-than-ideal things literary characters do and say to the author’s underlying intention, there are ten given to jumping at shadows, raising red flags, pointing fingers: who, as O’Connor lamented, are not with confidence capable of identifying anything but obscenity in literature, because obscenity is all they have been trained to find. If all fiction has to descend to the level approved by this latter category of readers, if no one is allowed to write anything not suitable for a ten-year-old to read, we may as well all chuck it now.

(Never fear, though: that’s not the conclusion toward which I’m working, nor is it, I think, the conclusion implied by Jonathan’s post. I’m more trying to say that it’s all well and good to say that we need to be aware of our moral implications, but exactly what we mean and do not mean by that bears some spelling out.)

Part of the problem believing writers face today, as Joseph O’Brien pointed out in comments on the original post, is that “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, [censorship] would, at best, have little effect – or at worst, an adverse effect.”

The “adverse effects” may be many, and the worst would be casting discredit on the Catholic worldview by a more than zealous and less than prudent defense of it; but perhaps the most relevant to our purpose is this: if Catholic fiction writers, working at this challenging time and in this variously embattled place, spend all our time tearing our own work down, we will never develop any work worthy of becoming part of the canon we would wish to preserve for the intellectual formation and personal building-up of future generations — not to mention our own generation, already suffering the aftershock of what many don’t even realize has been a cataclysm, a tsunami, in which millions are being swept away from our spiritual homes, from even the bare possibility of living at peace within ourselves and with each other.

Let’s not waste time being shocked. We have life rafts to build.

If we leave the difficult topics in life to be treated by other writers — if we refuse to engage artistically with the sometimes scandalous realities of human behavior because an effective engagement with same involves not only acknowledging the general fact that people sin, but describing how our characters have done so, at length and in some degree of detail — we run the risk of quitting before we begin: silencing the very moral perception that we would have liked to bring to bear in creating art by a too exacting exercise of that perception.

Matthew Lickona articulates some relevant points to this in Swimming with Scapulars, I seem to recall, but I’ve handed my copy along to a neighbor. So I’ll enlist the help of Jacques Maritain, whose Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry contains principles on which Flannery O’Connor relied to develop her “purify the source” solution to the Catholic artist’s apparent dilemma.

Both Thomist and personalist, Maritain downplayed the conflict between acute moral perception and artistic production. Whatever action builds up the artist as a moral being builds the moral virtue to which that good action pertains — but not the virtue of art, which is primarily an intellectual rather than a moral virtue. Only the practice of art can build the virtue of art, a virtue of the practical intellect, “the very virtue of working reason.”

The virtue of art develops along a different pathway than the artist’s individual moral life; although because both are part of the unity of the human person they cannot be completely divorced from each other, they are indeed separate. Each product of art follows certain rules, specific and internal to itself although with some commonalities within groups of similar works: rules that are themselves defined by the artist’s vision of the work to be created. Maritain does not attempt to catalogue these rules, but he identifies their wellspring and precondition in the love of beauty. To love truth and beauty is to purify the source of art.

In this framework, there is a tacit recognition that representation is not endorsement. The love of beauty is not an interdict on the purposeful depiction of ugliness, any more than we should suppose that the good God’s love for the good world must forbid him to permit evil to exist in it. If an artist loves beauty, he or she will, with a clear and accurate vision, include ugliness in the work precisely to the degree required by truth. Only the love of beauty limits what artists depict or how and why they depict it: a deeply context-bound discussion in which, again, it is necessary to descend to specific examples in order to get anywhere.

In a comment on the previous post, Victoria posed what I think are some central questions well:

. . . what will build up a soul and form it in beauty? What will knock it down or twist it into an unnatural shape? . . . [Q]uestions 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, temperance, 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’ll let her identification of the challenge stand as a springboard to further discussion.

I’ll also offer two — no, three — pieces of recommended reading: this Atlantic essay on emotional and moral engagement with literature, and this recent Aleteia piece on scrupulosity, laxity, mercy, and importantly perception, which seems all kinds of relevant to how we examine ourselves on these matters, but which I don’t have space to spell out here. Finally, here is this piece: “Read This, Not That,” in which it is taken as given that children’s moral formation requires good literature that is both aesthetically attractive and reflective of a world of moral justice that is, perhaps, a bit more (or more than a bit more) truly just and less apparently ambiguous than the moral universe that, as adults facing an imperfect world, we seem to encounter. I don’t disagree — when it comes to children’s fiction. But even so, I wonder whether some older children might not be — as, at about eleven or twelve, I was myself — upset and scandalized and led to challenge authority by the contrast between the way the world is presented to children in children’s literature and the way that, as we mature, we find many people actually behave.

At any rate, I submit that the mismatch between the immediately apparent, and the eternal or mysterious, effects of original sin and personal sin, is one of the mainsprings of much effective fiction written for adults from a perspective of faith. Fiction that takes this mystery as thematic will not be able to avoid recording potentially scandalous or shocking realities. On the contrary, it will often be centrally concerned with such realities. But, hopefully, it will be able to do so in a way that is not sensationalist or exploitative but that makes us more aware of our status and placement as moral beings and allows us to better understand, have compassion for, and thus be positioned to help — directly, indirectly, or both — those who suffer horrors and injustices, whether across the world or close to home.

You could say more. In fact, please do say more! Let’s continue the conversation. Again, I’m grateful to Jonathan for beginning it.

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Filed Under: Deep Down Things, General

Katy Carl

About Katy Carl

Katy Carl is Editor in Chief of Dappled Things.

Comments

  1. Katy CarlKaty Carl says

    April 25, 2016 at 2:33 pm

    Very related, if you are interested in these questions: do check out Josh Nadeau’s recent post here: https://dappledthings.org/9623/beyond-the-spotlight-part-ii-or-night-time. A teaser:

    “Yeah, art could be (fairly) compared to baby food on the experience-of-God scale when placed alongside the electrified, possessing nature of mystical experience, but the intimacy born of prayer, liturgy and unitive experience requires a discipline and understanding that’s not the easiest thing to come by. The intuitive, flash-in-the-pan connection that art can give (I quite literally got high once after hearing a poem at an otherwise-middling poetry reading) seems like an oasis in comparison. So it can be pretty understandable (even if we disagree) that a person, on encountering the back of God in a problematic piece of art, thinks that they’ve found the mystery at the center of the world.”

  2. AvatarCheryl Ruffing says

    April 26, 2016 at 11:21 pm

    This is an interesting conversation. I have to be up-front and say that I have not read McDonald’s post. I have read Nadeau’s first piece on “Spotlight,” but not the second. I’ve downloaded Maritain’s “Creative Intuition …” but got bogged down, then distracted before finishing it. I’m now reading O’Connor’s letters, as presented in “The Habit of Being,” and I’ve recently finished a few of her essays/presentations as recorded in “On Mystery and Manners.” My position on the questions presented are informed more by Sister Wendy Beckett’s wonderful interpretations of art, Daniel Siedell’s so-beautiful-I-want-to-cry guidance on, and interpretation of, modern/contemporary art, and most of all, Madeleine L’Engle’s insight into faith and art as shared in “Walking on Water.”

    All of that, mixed into my own experiences, observations, other reading, quests for meaning, and writing and artistic pursuits, leads to me to conclude, as L’Engle rather simply put it: the artist must serve the work. Anything more is propaganda. Think about it for a moment: if we, as writers and artists, are actively trying to craft a piece that will bring about in the viewer/reader a response we want them to have, we are engaging in manipulation, using the end to justify the means. As Christians, we need to be willing to relinquish control. We need to be open to letting the work tell us where it wants to go and what it means. Then we have to trust that it will find its way to those who need it.

  3. Josh NadeauJosh Nadeau says

    April 29, 2016 at 2:29 pm

    I’ve been toying around with writing my own response to the same post, but Katy brings up the same points here (and with much more grace). I think two extra points that I would add would be that:

    a) mandated censorship tends to address a problem that would be solved by a greater awareness of what it means to read. The old adage goes “don’t teach someone what to read, teach them how to read,” in the sense of teaching critical thinking skills and the ability to sort out wheat from chaff. This is necessary because a work that has a lot of chaff might have an essential grain of wheat that doesn’t happen to be anywhere else. Obviously in a culture with a low level of critical literacy something like censorship might be seen as a necessary evil, but it still would be more of a band-aid solution than an actual engaging with the real issues.

    and b) it’s very easy to mix up the purposes of proscriptive and descriptive art. There are definitely some upcoming posts on these two things, but it basically comes down to two very different things: art that shows how something *should* be vs art that shows how something *is,* and the lack of one or the other (as well as the framework to see how they fit in the world and in relationship with each other) causes a lot of crap to hit the wall.

    • Josh NadeauJosh Nadeau says

      April 29, 2016 at 2:30 pm

      Sorry – that should read “prescriptive” art, not “proscriptive.”

    • Katy CarlKaty Carl says

      April 30, 2016 at 1:03 pm

      Josh, this is insightful! Thank you. I would like to say more, but my kids are making immense noise. I am writing a follow-up and will possibly quote you: hope that’s okay.

  4. Josh NadeauJosh Nadeau says

    April 29, 2016 at 2:31 pm

    By the way, Katy, this isn’t marked under “Deep Down Things” so it’s not actually showing up on the main page. I only discovered your post by a fluke and am sad that it’s not more accessible.

    • Katy CarlKaty Carl says

      April 30, 2016 at 1:02 pm

      Thank you! Fixed it. 🙂

  5. AvatarWalker says

    May 5, 2016 at 1:29 pm

    Great thoughts, Katy Carl.

    I think the more common scandal for us Catholics is not that impure Catholics are creating impure art, but that impure sources are continually creating great art. I think the Catholic artist more often feels like Salieri in “Amadeus”: with a far purer life and intentions than his peers and, yet far inferior artistic results. Like Pharisees (who are far too maligned; they’re so wonderfully like us), we’re seeing the prostitutes and tax collectors enter the kingdom of art before us.

    (I’m not calling anyone here, far less the inspirer of this fine debate, a Pharisee. It’s wonderful, these discussions: exactly what young Catholic intellectuals should do. I’m just playing my part rhetorically.)

    Perhaps, like Pharisees, we’re tying burdens too heavy to lift. After all, as another commenter said, the question isn’t where is Catholic fiction going wrong, but where is it? I feel as Cheryl does: it seems to be because Catholic artists are too hung-up generally: trying to control themselves and others in a field that requires malleability. Such a Catholic trying to be an artist is rigid like the dancer who’s crippled by not wanting to make a mistake. He can’t loosen up long enough to actually dance.

    Also, to second another commenter, respectfully can we drop “Fifty Shades of Grey” in these discussions? That’s like bringing “Debby Does Dallas” into a discussion about serious cinema. Like Catholics’ overreliance in political discussions on pointing to Auschwitz, we’re perhaps fairly written off in society by always going immediately to the most extreme example.

    Since there’s not a great deal of modern Catholic literature to talk about presently, I’d like to see more talk about other sophisticated modern literature, Pulitzer Prize winners or contenders like “All the Light We Cannot See,” “The Snow Child,” “Olive Kitteridge,” and so forth. A great deal of modern fiction like this does what we’re hoping for here: avoids impurity while dealing seriously with sin and redemption.

    Or more to the point, I’d like to see a discussion on this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner, The Sympathizer. I don’t know that I liked this book profoundly, but to the question at hand, I was surprised how it was able to talk about the sexual without being sensual, or even impure really (with the singular exception, perhaps, of a somewhat crude anecdote on self-abuse).

    A lot’s going right in modern literature right now.

    • Josh NadeauJosh Nadeau says

      May 6, 2016 at 9:42 am

      Walker,

      It’s fantastic that you’re mentioning examples of these concepts at work in modern fiction – there can be a bit of a fixation in these parts on “Catholic Art” and, in particular, the wonderful stuff that was produced up to fifty years ago. Keeping current with relevant (and sometimes fantastic) work that’s being done in our time helps us to step out of the bubble we can tend to weave around ourselves.

    • Katy CarlKaty Carl says

      May 10, 2016 at 9:31 pm

      Walker, thank you for your kind words and insight.

      Two things, quickly: (1) I agree we need to involve ourselves in more discussion & appreciation of good work that is currently being done in literature and (2) yes, I am Salieri, and trying not to be, perpetually, and I know I’m not alone in this. I have the feeling that if we (Catholic fiction writers) could keep our eyes on our own work a bit more, “purify the source” as Jonathan goes on to say in the next post in the series, and get off our own backs about whether our characters were giving scandal, that would go a long way toward nurturing more Mozarts, so to speak.

  6. AvatarSusan Scott says

    May 17, 2016 at 8:33 am

    Wow! I’m so glad to have stumbled upon this article on this blog today. With so much edifying discourse by the commentators, I have much to ponder as I go about my day. Thank you so much you beautiful artist people.

Mary, Queen of Angels 2020

Purchase Featuring nonfiction from Joshua Hren, fiction from Jennifer Marie Donahue and Rob Davidson and the winners and honorees of the Bakhita Prize in Visual Arts.

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