For those who are just tuning in, a quick summary: About six weeks ago Jonathan McDonald wrote a call for clearer and stronger voices of moral responsibility in Catholic literary criticism (insofar as same exists), “What Has Rome to Do with Iowa City?” I responded here (let’s call that Part II), and he responded to my response (Part III). Let’s call this post Part IV, or “On Moral Fiction,” in which we continue to drill down into the specifics of what can be said to constitute same, and whose responsibility it is to see that it does so.
Of course I’m taking my title from John Gardner, who in his eponymous book argued that good art is good morality and vice versa. Art is moral on Gardner’s view if it “affirms life” — that is, acknowledges and honors the goodness of created things and of human existence — and takes seriously the reality that there are better and worse ways of living and acting as a human being. All of which, of course, we affirm as Catholics, although we go a bit further from there.
Gardner’s thought, though I don’t know if he knew it, has a lot of kinship with that of Maritain and Mauriac, although in a more secular vein. Gardner was not unfriendly to Christian moral and aesthetic thought but was once quoted as saying “Fiction is the only religion I have.” Fiction is not the only religion we have, obviously, “we” in this context being a community of Catholic writers. At the same time, it is a discipline whose inner laws we do well to respect if we plan to practice it, or set ourselves up to discuss it in a critical capacity.
I fiercely agree with Jonathan that Catholic writers are supposed to be on the side of both good aesthetics and good morals and that these ends aren’t essentially in competition with each other. But I can’t shake the sense that we disagree on other points, even if I’m not sure exactly where. So a certain moral responsibility devolves on Catholic writers and artists: agreed. In order not to burden consciences beyond what Christ through the Church asks and requires, then, we should seek great clarity about what this responsibility does, and does not, entail.
To do this we need to make use of a careful and thorough critical vocabulary. I submit that one distinction we will find especially helpful — and it’s going to be a fine line, and because human cognition is messy it can’t always be a bright line — between the explicit and the exploitative. I’m not talking specifically about the sexually explicit, which has its own inherent problems in avoiding exploitation just because of the way the human brain is wired.
I’ll also go out of the way to note that what is considered “explicit” at any given time is subject to cultural context and assumptions about standards in art that audiences are accustomed to encountering. These assumptions can lead artists into error — they are “in the air,” so to say, not unlike dioxins and progestins in the water — but for this reason, having been formed to take these assumptions for granted doesn’t necessarily mean we need to assume bad will on the part of the artist thus formed.
So the explicit, in itself, need not be sexual. It could be, as Jonathan lists, any detailed depiction of “potential moral error (e.g., glorifying crime, describing how to commit crimes, . . . cruelty and violence, mocking the sacred, blasphemy, racial ridicule, etc.).” There can be good and necessary reasons for including explicit content in art. Such almost always involve an attempt, hopefully without didacticism, to reveal the ugliness of the immoral and thus persuade people to turn their backs on what is wrong and seek the good. In fact, the explicit and shocking can often be far more effective than subtle or vague approaches when trying to express a moral in narrative.
To pick some low-hanging exemplary fruit, consider whether Crime and Punishment is a more or less effective novel without that very cold-blooded early chapter where Raskolnikov murders the landlady with an axe. Without the literal blow-by-blow, the entire development of R.’s nausea, denial, increasing anxiety and sorrow, and eventual repentance make next to no narrative sense.
Or consider those of Flannery O’Connor’s characters who speak the name of God or Jesus in an offhand, out-of-context way: O’Connor is recording the fact of their blasphemy in a way that reveals its absurdity and defends, against all cultural drift, the sense that there is a reality signified by these names worthy of far better treatment than it is receiving. You could multiply examples.
By contrast, when we talk about the exploitative in literature or art, this means the depiction of any meaningful human reality in a way that rips it out of its context of meaningfulness and human dignity and abuses it for some unworthy end. The exploitative crops up when the explicit in art is placed at the service of a lower value than art. It’s like the preachiness of evil.
For example: when violence is depicted in a spirit of exhibitionism or of unalloyed retributive anger, or when someone attempts to get cheap laughs from the unthinking destruction or defacement of something honorable or beautiful, or when a horrible event is detailed for the mere effect of forcing the reader’s attention (what we think of as “shock value”) without greater purposes in light of the total effect of the work.
But notice that the explicit relates to what is depicted; the exploitative relates to how and why something is depicted. The exploitative isn’t so much a question of content as a question of form.
The exploitative mode of depiction is often used to rub the noses of a certain class of readers into a fact the author, accurately or not, believes these readers ignore (in other words epater la bourgeoisie) or to gin up what would otherwise naturally be a lackluster readership, numbers-wise, through deliberate courting of controversy. To that end, the exploitative is often also manipulative. It’s taking unfair advantage not only of the character’s human experience, which deserves more respect than the exploitative mode gives it, but also of the reader’s baser instincts for attraction to the unsavory and for unhealthy curiosity.
The exploitative has little to do with authentic art. It’s definitionally in bad taste. Bad taste is quite often the point of the exploitative. Its presence can frequently serve as a sign that we are dealing not with high art but with some iteration of propaganda, fluff, twaddle, froth, or yes pornography. (Or in the case of Fifty Shades, which deserves exactly zero percent of our further attention, all of the above.)
The trouble is that you do occasionally get explicit and arguably exploitative passages in literary art that is otherwise worth engaging with and studying. Among these may be some of the passages Jonathan is referring to when he talks about bits “meant to incite the reader to lust” — although I would argue that whether they are meant to so incite and whether they do so incite are two separate things.
Sex passages in contemporary fiction often have a sort of off-puttingly medical air due to all the clinical body-part language and are resultantly anything but exciting. Maybe this is a side effect of reading a lot of books about NFP and childbirth, which reading if you are living certain other aspects of Church teaching you may very well end up having occasion to do a fair bit of — but whatever the reason, the fact remains. Effects can range from humor to boredom to discomfort, pathos, even nausea: rarely are such passages enticing — any more in fiction than in NFP books — certainly not “pornographic” unless approached in the wrong way. You often have to ask yourself why they belong in the narrative at all. Sometimes it’s clear that they don’t so belong and are only present because some writer has no idea how to signal that this is supposed to be a Serious Contemporary Novel other than by including one or many sex scenes — which is fairly lame. On occasion, though, they tell us something important about a character’s inner life that couldn’t be explained in any other way.
You could make an argument that even for that strictly character-illustrative purpose, such passages are overused and often include excess detail: that in some cases they seek to fix our attention by furnishing details of characters’ experience and psychology that as general readers we honestly have no business probing into, thus crossing the line into exploitation. The problem isn’t that they necessarily incite to any particular wrong action but that they are invasive of privacy, in a way. They don’t violate chastity — only a reader’s intention can cause them to do that — but they do concern what takes place at or near the “intimate center” of personhood, so there can at times be an element of revealing-too-much about them. On the one hand, it’s good to keep in place mutually-acknowledged and -observed social boundaries about these types of revelations. (I could wish that our society still observed more stringent boundaries in news outlets, for example. Just in the course of reading news articles at times, I’ve been blindsided by the inclusion of lurid details I wouldn’t wish on anyone’s perception.) On the other, it’s hard to say that the experience of inner life isn’t the proper material for fiction or memoir — that is precisely what it is, and so it’s hard to say that details about that experience don’t belong there.
“Unflinching honesty” is (as a phrase, not as a thing) cliché, but in reality an unsparing account of difficult experiences can sometimes be a great gift to others, helping them come to terms with their own suffering. So I think we need to be extra, extra careful not to impute intention to incite to lust, or intention to degrade in other ways w/r/t depictions of violence, greed, cruelty, etc., when considering passages that deal with heavy themes in fiction. We’re well-advised to consider these depictions in light of the total effect of the work, without any attempt to engage in authorial mind-reading about intentionality.
I’d like to borrow Gioia’s metaphor from The Catholic Writer Today of the Catholic literary tradition as a rundown neighborhood of a big city ripe for rebuilding and renewal. I am not sure whether it fills me with dread or hope to imagine people running around the streets of our borough shouting at each other over bits of novels each other wrote: “This is obscene!” “No it’s not!” “Yes it is!” At least this low-comedy outcome would provide proof of intelligent life and thus be preferable to boarded-up windows. We need to exercise charity: to assume a good motive and refrain from imputing bad, except where evil motive is openly expressed as such in an indisputable way.
Jonathan acknowledges this in his post. But he also says, with regard to critics’ response: “We lack the moral subtlety required to discern . . . and so we tend towards blanket allowance or blanket condemnation.” Do we, though? Who’s this “we” that blanketly allows or condemns: Catholics in general, Catholics in serious Catholic circles? Catholics in comment boxes on blogs? Maybe I’m responsible for this straw man myself, with my remark about it sometimes seeming like there are still too many Catholic readers who “jump at shadows.” This seems like an unfair characterization to me now, on re-reading, although I know that authors are sometimes made to feel this way and that this feeling may constitute a significant drain on the unity and vitality of Catholic literary culture.
Who then? I don’t think this wet-blanket “we” applies to our magazine or its staff; at least I hope we’re among the more coherent articulations of a specifically Catholic literary voice currently at work, although we could do more to build our critical presence. I also don’t think anyone is disagreeing that it’s legitimate for writers’ groups to hash these issues out together or that editors can and should flag them for discussion and resolution.
Jonathan identifies an unwillingness (again on the part of I’m not sure whom) to object when a piece of fiction seems to encourage or give a free pass to wrong action:
“It does not do to give in to fear-mongering and extreme limitations of scope. . . . It does not do, either, to bend over backwards to excuse nearly anything as potentially acceptable, if only for the right age group and educational level. Sometimes a book crosses a line that no Catholic of good will should defend. Sometimes it crosses a more subtle line but is even more insidious for its deceptive approach, although even in that situation I think a baseline presumption of goodwill should be in place before the cross-examination begins.”
What specific books cross these lines? Where and how, except case by case, do we identify the line or lines that shouldn’t be crossed in fictional depiction? What cross-examination, by whom? Can we even be clear about where these obvious and/or subtle lines are without being too explicit, that is without crossing those very lines, in the effort?
I can understand the desire, in an increasingly blurry and overreaching world, for drawing hard and fast lines. Here’s one: I would argue that the exploitative is always to be avoided, on grounds of both art and morality. Lines — boundaries! — are good and necessary, even if we draw them in a squiggly, strange way because reality is squiggly and strange. But in order to figure out how best to draw them, it’s good to talk through specific examples.
So if the call is for further dialogue, let’s go. If the call is for a more robust Catholic critical presence, I’m all for that, too. The subtlety and careful thought Jonathan upholds will be indispensable to such an effort. If the desideratum is for individual Catholic writers to take a pledge in general favor of decency, such a pledge already exists. Those who take it promise to refrain “from writing or promoting works which are libelous or slanderous, which seek to foster hatred or conflict among individuals or groups, or which contain obscenity, pornography, or morbid depictions of violence.” I affirm the intention here, although for fiction writers in particular it seems somewhat beside the point, or even beneath the point in a bare-minimum sort of way. It seems to outline standards we should be able to take for granted, that should be implicitly contained in our baptismal pledge and in the demands of art itself.
If what we’re really concerned about, first and foremost, is standing in opposition to the torrent of exploitation of sexuality in our culture, I recommend joining the Angelic Warfare Confraternity and praying in solidarity with and for those harmed by said exploitation. That may be a better use of effort in that direction than trying to exact preemptive pledges from emerging artists with regard to art that doesn’t even yet exist.
Before concluding, I should — as Jonathan has thoughtfully done on his own account — add that my own thought here is mine and not necessarily representative of the DT editorial board’s as a whole. I should also add that I am not any kind of official Church spokesperson or trained theologian. My credentials are precisely those of believing and working fiction writer, moral-fomation-attuned homeschooling marm, and moderately well read but essentially undereducated blogger. Like Flannery herself, “I have what today passes for an education [in her case an MFA, in mine a college degree in English], but I am not fooled.” Add salt to taste.
Also, I’ll share a piece of advice given me by the very good and gentle old Jesuit priest — who, sadly for the rest of us, has now gone home to Christ: serious, solid, orthodox, yet pastoral — who heard my confessions in college. He gave me a way of thinking about this that stays with me today, a sort of corollary of double effect: if your true intention is that of studying literary texts in the spirit of your own intellectual growth in the service of the glory of God, if you are not studying them specifically because they contain explicit content for the sake of mere curiosity or worse, you bear no guilt. Even if the original storytellers had questionable intentions, you do not participate in those intentions when you approach the tales in the course of researching, for example, depictions of gender in literary history, or the thought of a particular author who used to be on the Index or would probably land there if such still existed, or what have you. I submit that the principle holds true for contemporary novels, or mythology, or medicine, or psychology, or whatever it is you go to study: whatever the intention of others, if you approach the necessary material as a student of truth with purity and humility, your own intention will do much as a safeguard against sin. Writer and reader alike are responsible for purifying the source. Writer’s failure to do same is not the fault of reader, nor vice versa.
In Jonathan’s original post, the quote from Flannery O’Connor discusses “saving the world” versus “saving the work.” Luckily, these aren’t opposed to each other. As writers, saving the world is not our responsibility — that task is already achieved through the superabundant merits of Christ. Saving the work is our responsibility; subcreation is our contribution to the work of salvation carried on by the Church. In my first response, I used the metaphor of novels as life rafts. If we believe that by using our talents — God’s gift to us — we can offer a lifesaving gift to others, then saving the work is a primary responsibility and not one we can shirk on the grounds of worrying about the repercussions of telling the whole truth.
Karen Ullo says
Katy, I can’t thank you and Johnathan enough for pursuing this discussion with such insight, perseverance, and grace. It’s like reading an infinitely better worded and more thoroughly researched version of my own internal battles. But – where are the concrete examples? What works ought we to drag out and dissect? As a last resort, I could put forward my own explicit (but I prayerfully hope, not exploitative) novel to be parsed, but I would gladly accept a reading list in hopes of helping the community of Catholic writers to delineate those very necessary boundaries. My appeal goes out to anyone reading this comment, not just Katy. What authors are out there who push the boundaries, who can help us all figure out just how elastic (or rigid) the lines might be?
Jonathan McDonald says
The request for concrete examples is a reasonable one. I was intentionally staying away from criticizing specific works and authors (aside from my repetitive “50 Shades” jokes) while trying to lay down some basic principles, but that may have been a mistake. I will give it some further thought and probably work on concrete examples in a future post.
Katy says
Yes, we should definitely go into concrete examples next. I have several in mind; here are a few. I’d even be into co-drafting a post if you would like that too, Jonathan.
* Joyce came up in the original comment thread. Two passages of Ulysses in particular come to mind: that in which Leopold Bloom is a creeper under a bridge looking up a young girl’s skirt, and of course Molly’s famous extended monologue at the end. Somehow Leopold’s passage seems gratuitous, Molly’s not, but I haven’t yet pinned down why.
* Farther down this comment thread, someone mentions Dubus (II, not III). He wrote a story about a young girl losing her virginity — interestingly enough, I think it is called “Molly” and I wonder whether it is supposed to echo Joyce; that just occurred to me — anyway, the narration follows her experiences quite closely and thus goes into a lot of detail which may very well be problematic for many readers, but it gets at some truths about what it all means to her (and what by a sort of via negativa is missing in what it means to her) that would be difficult to get at in other ways. That said, I wonder if all of it was thoroughly necessary or if a shade less detail would have worked just as well.
* By contrast, Fr. Uwem Akpan in “Say You’re One of Them” deals with some incredibly difficult subject matter by means of the deftest suggestion and the least possible amount of detail. I’m so surprised his work doesn’t come up in more discussions of effective Catholic fiction — maybe the acceptance of the book (it hit the mainstream in 2009) was so widespread that people didn’t realize he was a Jesuit priest?
* By contrast to *that*, right now I’m working through David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Or I was, until he lost me at one particular passage dealing with child abuse. (Matty Pemulis, if you’ve read it. I won’t say more if you haven’t.) I couldn’t go on at a certain point and just skipped it, but it was that bad. I’m not a passage-skipper, generally, but I just couldn’t go on. I’ve trusted Wallace a long way, and he achieves some incredible effects and gets across some powerful truths, but I just don’t know where he is going with this, and so my readerly trust in him is kind of broken right now.
* But then there’s Alice Thomas Ellis, whose The Summer House (a trilogy of novellas) deals with similar thematic matter but in a much more oblique and approachable way. Wallace’s writing is outraged at the violation; Ellis’ is no less angry at the fact of what happened but the anger is somehow buried, a fact that reflects the character’s buried anger perhaps, as well as revealing the society’s “buried” response to an event none of them really knows how to come to terms with.
I could go on. There’s a lot more. Others?
Karen Ullo says
Yay! A reading list! Thank you. I need a reading list badly right now – I’m laid up with a broken foot. Now if I can only figure out how to get to the library…
Josh Nadeau says
So happy that we’re getting into Ulysses – it deserves a whole series in and of itself, and analysis of that notorious “Nausicaa” section is kinda a must.
But how have we glossed over that the potentially most famous violent novel (and film adaptation) of the twentieth century was written by a man who, through his whole life, struggled with the legacy of his Catholic faith? I’m talking about Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange.”
I read the book (and watched the movie) last summer and am convinced that this is an interesting (and justified) fusion of exploitative and explicit, in the sense that while everything done by the character is for personal, exploitative purposes, the effect that reaches the audience is one of disgust. I don’t know a single person who describes Alex’s misdemeanours as something “fun” to read/watch.
It’s interesting because Burgess is almost trying to find exactly where this line is and how readers can relate to it in the sense of both being confronted with the monstrousity of what Alex does while shown Alex’s pure glee, which is what makes the thought experiment at the end of the book involving free will so poignant. The book (and it’s point) couldn’t exist without the ultraviolence. Even though the film is a little more risque in the sense that you see everything that Alex and his friends do, it isn’t meant for titilation (though I’m sure some do find it titilating, though not though the efforts of Kubrick, the director).
I think the more interesting question surrounding a book like “A Clockwork Orange” isn’t so much “was the violence/sex necessary to make this point” (I would say it is) as “was it necessary to make this point in the first place?” There’s a very rich question behind this, and I think that this could be fodder for a post all on its own. Some people find explorations of this particular shade of dark to be unneccesary, traumatizing and dangerous – this may be true, but can it also be just the right medicine for someone else?
Katy says
Karen, hope you are feeling better soon! I’m hijacking the reply button on your comment to respond to Josh, because for some reason the reply dialog under his comment is broken.
Josh, it sounds like you have a post to write! I haven’t read or watched A Clockwork Orange, precisely because I’d heard descriptions that made me suspect the distress and disequilibrium it inflicted might not be worth the insight gained. Your comment is the first evaluation I’ve heard to make me hope otherwise. And your concept of darkness in literature as strong medicine, the via negativa, etc., definitely seems worth exploring in more detail.
Karen Ullo says
I haven’t seen (or read) A Clockwork Orange, either. I tried to watch the movie once, and gave up almost immediately. But I also think there’s a great thought in the idea that what is completely gratuitous and off-putting to one person may be exactly the way to reach another. Please explore!
Rosemary says
Wonderful. Katy, would you mind if I shared this with students in a class I am teaching this summer?
Katy Carl says
Rosemary, feel free! Thanks for asking.
Walker says
Yes, another stellar step forward in the discussion; thank you Katy Carl.
I love the “exploitative”/ “explicit” terms. It seems to me gaffs into the exploitative are an almost inevitable venial sin of much serious modern art. In “The Passion of the Christ,” the addition of a crow to peck out the eyes of the bad thief seems to be more exploitative than doing anything to advance the story, let alone theology, of the movie (on the other hand, a whole discussion could address whether that buckets-of-blood movie is exploitation violence for a “holy cause”). But similar exploitations I’d point to in unnecessary orc decapitation in “LOTR” movie, “cool, funny kills” in “Saving Private Ryan,” etc. (I’m using all movies here; I’ll get to that in a second.)
I think a third “e” word, brought up in this article, deserves an equal place by the other two: “enticing.” This would apply pretty much just to sexuality but then I think sexual content is the majority (at least 51% or more, right?) of what we’re talking about when we talk about fiction that can cause moral harm.
There’s a biology at work—I can only speak from a man’s perspective, and only as one man who has talked with other men who feel the same way—in the sexual unique to any other type of content that breaks down the distance separating fiction from reality. When a woman in a fiction does something to lure a man, she is represented as sending out a biological invitation which reaches not only the man in the story but the man reading it. A cat, for instance, seeing a mouse come up on TV may do a double-take. Sorry for the humorous example, haha, but the analogy is that there’s a hard-wired God-given biological response that the sexual can trigger, and unlike the cat, it just happens that for a person, this response carries a tremendous moral burden with it.
I believe the “enticing” can fly under the exploitative and explicit radars but do some serious damage. It’s very subjective, of course, and even for me, for instance, I don’t feel comfortable reading the bawdy sections of “The Canterbury Tales,” and yet Rabelais, considered vastly more crass, somehow is just gut-bustingly funny and inexplicably spiritually moving to me. I can see someone arguing the opposite for themselves, and what could one say? I believe, with some good priests, that even certain sections of the Bible are not for unguarded reading. I don’t consider someone dirty-minded if they have a problem with certain things others are fine with. It’s a sensitive, personal area, and why I think there’s a lot of weight to Jonathan McDonald’s original article.
Karen points out a critical thing: that the discussion is coming up short on concrete examples. It seems that’s because Catholic fiction doesn’t (I don’t mean in an absolute sense, but relatively) exist. So this discussion is pouring an immense amount of insight upon a subgenre that currently produces fewer volumes than, say, stamp collecting.
So we are left culling from fiction that isn’t modern or maybe movies. One solution would be to discuss the fiction in “Dappled Things” itself. Like the recent “Ghost of a Chance.” It was skillfully written but left me wondering whether the editors put it in reluctantly or proudly.
I’ll get your book, Karen. I can’t promise to go all the way through if I encounter some material that, as I mentioned above, sets off my fickle self-monitor, but you have a good point that talk is cheap unless one is willing to take some chances for those actually taking the risk of writing Catholic fiction.
Karen Ullo says
Walker, thank you. I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts.
Katy says
Walker, thanks for your kind words. You’re right, “enticing” is another good category to consider — there’s sort of a venn diagram of the three “e” categories we’re looking at, then, yes? which makes sense, and there are probably other categories we haven’t identified.
Concrete examples are next! Do see the comment above. I’m cooking up a whole subsequent post, and it sounds like Jonathan is too.
Victoria Seed says
Katy,
Thanks for another installment in a fascinating and insighful discussion. Having been buried in my own fiction writing I had tuned out, but have now caught up on all four gripping episodes.
Continuing with some of the same themes of my ling-winded comment on Jonathan’s original essay, I wonder if it is at all helpful (or true) to point out that whatever censorship does or doesn’t happen, whatever formations authors do or don’t have, controversies will abound about what is good and what is bad — both morally and artistically — what harms and what educates, and what risks are acceptable when it comes to the tender soul of the reader. And I think there is one over-riding reason for this: all good novels have as their topic and impetus sin & brokenness. In the world of fiction good is reliant on evil for its very being: without dragons, what need have we of knights? Modern fiction is an envelope-pushing exercise, too. Already in a tense relationship with the theologians thanks to our good-evil inversion of priority, we mix the categories even further: our knights are a bit scaly and dragonish in places; our dragons have chivalrous depths in the deepest crevices of their souls. And these chimeras are meant to teach our readers about knightly virtue. But what if gentle reader takes a scaly bit of our knight to be a bona fide mark of true-blue chivalry? Or what if he thinks (or thinks we think) that the scaly bits are buffed smooth by their proximity to the shiny armour? And what of the dragon? Does a whispy vestige of whimisical chilvary in a twisted beast redeem it? Does pointing it out make it look like we think it is redemptive?
This is where art comes into it. A good novelist is more like a good optometrist than a journalist. We aren’t aiming for /no/ interpretive lens; we are aiming for the /right/ lens. This perscription is one through which the reader can see the whole of the story, when viewed from vantage point of the final word, with a moral clarity. The good and shiny appears good and shiny, and the bad, twisted and blurry is not over-corrected to shininess. Ideally, if the optometrist is a good one, the glasses should be comfortable to wear, but side effects can occur: some dizziness, and even nausea, is quite normal when one is adjusting to a new perscription. Would-be censors will often criticise how sharp the knights appear through the new lenses, whether they are shiny enough, whether their scaley, dragonish bits are overcorrected, whether the dragons still look twisted, whether a tender reader, putting on this new and novel perscription can cope with the dizziness, or whether it will so disorient them they will walk unawares right into the jaws of a dragon.
If you have born with me through these attenuated and hopelessly mixed metaphors, let me reward you with some plain speaking: only a very great prude would claim that novels, or even Catholic novels, ought not to depict sin. The real worries come from /how/ it is depicted, but that holds true for virtue as well. A graphic description of lovemaking between married persons, no matter how tender, is likely to be nearly as objectionable as unapologetic erotica, for it can hardly help presenting the scene as an object of titillation, or else as the conjugal equivalent of furniture assembly, both of which miss capturing the nature of married love. But it is possible to write about sex, both licit and illicit, without requiring the reader to view it through a steamy, moist or anatomical lens.
Determining, and grinding out, the right lens is a challenge, but one central to the vocation of the novelist. Good formation amongst authors is obviously crucial, but so too is wider discussion. We writers are often terribly sensitive people, and the temptation is huge, when questioned or pushed on some finer point of our craft or the impression our writing creates, to reply as Pilate did “What I have written, I have written.” But this will not do. However profound we believe our aritstic revalations to be, if they are misunderstood by our well-formed interlocutors — by which I do not just mean great literary scholars, but also those of “ordinary” virtue — then we must take that seriously. If your next door neighbour, sainted grandmother, or parish priest think that your lens makes the dragons look like knights, well, even if you can very clearly see the difference, you must accept that you’ve written a bad perscription. No optometrist can be reckoned any good who leaves his patients blind. Perhaps the literaty utopia we should dream of is not the one with wise and prudent censors, but the one with humble artists and robust, lively discussion of the moral dimension of the arts.
Katy says
Victoria, thanks for stopping in — you are insightful as always. Your extended metaphor makes me wonder if you’ve read A Landscape with Dragons, & if so, what you thought?
Victoria Seed says
Katy, I haven’t read A Landscape with Dragons. I promise to do so at some point…but will not make rash promises to do so soon unless you can provide me with a very good reason to jump it up the very long queue. I think I’m a bit fixated with dragons generally, as my own current literary project has a recurrent dragon/serpent theme, but what was in the back of my mind was the following Chesterton quotation. (In truth if I had any humility I would have just shared this and spared you my over-interpolation!)
“Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.” -GKC, Tremendous Trifles
Josh Nadeau says
I feel like Michael O’Brien (both his novels and Landscape with Dragons) could get a treatment here on Dappled Things as an example of popular Catholic criticism (especially among homeschooler communities), but there’s a lot in Dragons (and I’ve talked to the author about this) that doesn’t sit well with me and errs a little too much to one side of caution.
Again, fodder for another post.
Katy says
Josh, thank you! I’d be interested to hear more. O’Brien’s work is in a lot of ways fascinating, and it’s pretty incredible what he’s been able to achieve with apparently little or no artistic community either among Catholics or among secular writers (of which latter category he seems pretty dismissive, with exceptions). I ricochet between admiration and frustration when I read him, and it sounds like I’m not alone in that. I’m not able to embrace it wholeheartedly and I’m not able to dismiss it altogether, and I’m probably not alone in that either. A more thorough exploration would be helpful.
Walker says
While I’m waiting for Karen’s book to arrive, her request for concrete examples is the third one from various people for the same thing. The first author who comes to mind for me in modern Catholic fiction is Andre Dubus (Andre Dubus “II,” not his son Andre Dubus III who wrote “House of Sand and Fog”). Andre Dubus’s “Selected Stories” contains “A Father’s Story,” also anthologized in Sheed & Ward’s 2007 “Best American Catholic Short Stories.” I found much to like and some I didn’t like in that story and others of his, but he seems like he’d be an excellent center of debate re: moral fiction. Also Ron Hansen comes to mind simply by reputation, though my library doesn’t have any of his books and so, neither do I. :j Has anyone read him?
Also, I’m not sure whether this question goes with this or not, but because Flannery is in a lot of places on DT, I suppose anywhere is a good place to ask. Does anyone here enjoy reading O’Connor–find her pleasurable reading? Her fiction. I’ve read her two novels and probably half of her short stories, and I just don’t really enjoy it. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” I find just kind of horrible; it’s skillfully written, it’s powerful, but sort of like Samuel Johnson’s reaction to Cordelia’s death, I wouldn’t want to read it again.
Dostoevsky is my favorite author, and if someone said (and they frequently do) that they don’t like reading him because such horrible stuff happens, I could respect that. I would answer probably that for me, yes, there’s horrible stuff (the horse-beating scene in C&P I sometimes simply skip over) but that I find Dostoevsky–his writing style and dialogues (from what I can pick up in translation), characters and themes–enjoyable. Enjoyable firstly and then edifying.
I’m versed in some of the O’Connor contra (that shock is the point, the means, breaking through the modern malaise, coating the pill, etc.), but I just wondered if anyone here would say, “Yes, I especially like her style, plots, characters, etc. and frequently re-read some of my favorites from her stories/novels.”
Karen Ullo says
Walker, I put a hold on a library book that has “A Father’s Story.” Hopefully I can get it soon. Dostoevsky has been a huge influence for me (Jennifer the Damned is actually inspired by C&P), and I certainly have no objections to the gorier scenes. I don’t see how one can possibly probe the mind of a murderer without exploring the actual murder(s).
The first thing I ever read by Flannery O’Connor was “Mystery and Manners,” and I thought, “This is a very wise woman, and a kindred spirit.” Then I read Wise Blood and several of her stories – and I had pretty much the same reaction you did. She’s clearly talented, but I find her characters so unlikable and almost inhuman that I really can’t stomach them for long. I can appreciate her writing, but I cannot enjoy it.
Katy says
Re: Hansen, Mariette in Ecstasy is just wonderful. Highly recommended. I haven’t read much else by him (except his book of essays A Stay Against Confusion) but am always meaning to.
Re: O’Connor, maybe it reveals a twisted mind, but I enjoy her work deeply, especially the later stories — “Parker’s Back,” “Revelation,” “The Enduring Chill” — they just do not get old. Going back a bit, “Good Country People” is perhaps her most darkly hilarious. The only one I can’t re-read now that I have children is “The Lame Shall Enter First” — it’s just a little too worst-nightmare-scenario.
Walker says
Thanks, Katy. I seem to have a problem with certain authors based on fans of theirs. It took me a long time to like Tolkien because I couldn’t stand Tolkienites, but I finally got over it. Couldn’t stand Chesterton for the Chestertonians but outgrew that. O’Connor, in my mind, has a reputation as an author who only an illuminati of professors and such can understand, and I can foresee a time when I’ll like her.
Victoria Seed says
I completely understand that, Walker. I have that sort of relationship with Dostoyevsky. (No offense intended.) I am still trying to like Tolkein, oddly, because I like so many of his devotees. And I genuinely appreciate his stories, though I struggle to care about the finer details of the myth, but I just cannot get on with his storytelling. I simply don’t find his prose enjoyable. (Feel free to think me a literary neanderthal!)
We’ve all been thinking about the moral obligations of the author, but the fact is, even a very worthy book won’t appeal to everyone. It strikes me as true that there must be many right ways to write fiction. “Catholic fiction” must truly be a broad church, aesthetically speaking.
Walker says
Pride has kept me from appreciating some remarkable writers and personalities. I was introduced to Dostoevsky by a teenage sweetheart, and when I lost her, I lost optimism and found consolation in the grayness of D. Without reading them carefully, I came to disdain TLC, as I called them—Tolkien, Lewis, and Chesterton—for what I considered their simple-minded fiction. When I mentioned not liking their fans, I meant overly-visible extremists: adults dressed as hobbits or Chestertonians defending smoking and drinking as though temperance were a threat to Christianity.
Tolkien I thought was too black and white, Lewis’s allegories intelligence-insulting, and Chesterton too pompously self-assured. None of them had a thing I dearly valued in Dostoevsky (and later in the prose of Cardinal Ratzinger): the ability to inhabit an oppositional viewpoint, humanize one’s enemies, make them sympathetic. In short, a kind of intellectual empathy. Tolkien’s Boromir I found that author’s most sympathetic “baddie,” and that character’s story disappointingly truncated. Lewis’s Eustace and Devine were cardboard; Chesterton haughty in his construction of strawmen who were only ever vain and stupid.
Currently, I think my problem with them was primarily spiritual. I was made uncomfortable by their joy. Joy is too vulnerable. It was easier to hide in the alleyways of Dostoevsky and the one night cheap hotels of Eliot. Really I was out of touch with the spirituality of all these authors.
To Victoria’s point, it’s a broad church. I now try to respect a variety of authors. My sympathy today, which is less and less begrudging, is to TLC—as though they’ve discovered the only new thing in literature in the last hundred years: joy. Joy is almost a yoke to try to carry in the millennial generation: an oddity and a burden. It’s not natural or easy for me to attempt.
Maybe I’m afraid O’Connor will make seeing that joy murkier, which is why I asked about enjoyment and so heartily appreciate Katy Carl’s answer.
Josh Nadeau says
This is something that I think we really need to delve into further: what consolation can darkness bring people who live in a fallen world? And who are those who might need this consolation, as compared to those who might feel themselves scandalized by it? It seems like a fruitful vein to track.
Karen Ullo says
Walker, as promised, I got “A Father’s Story” from the library. (Still waiting to get Katy’s suggestions in from other branches.) I can certainly see why you brought it up. I thought it handled the scenes one tends to think of as potentially scandalous – i.e. the scenes about sex, violence, death – very deftly, without ignoring the realities but also without shoving the reader’s nose in them unnecessarily. It’s the ending – the exploration of this Catholic sinner’s relationship with God – that made me slightly uncomfortable. After all, it’s a portrayal of heresy: this man deliberately chooses not to confess a mortal sin, yet continues to receive the Eucharist. But the fact that I felt slightly uncomfortable means Dubus did his job as an author: he forced me to look at the world through the eyes of a very sinful yet very relatable man, and to consider that God loves him – and he loves God – even in the midst of his willful heresy. I don’t know anything about Dubus’s faith, but it doesn’t really matter. I think everyone in this discussion has agreed that the dramatic portrayal of sin is a necessary part of fiction, so I don’t see how portraying heresy is any worse than portraying sins of the flesh, etc. I don’t find anything exploitative in the story. But I’ll propose another e-word for our consideration: endorse. Does “A Father’s Story” endorse heresy? One could possibly make that case. However, it’s open-ended enough that I cannot answer, “Yes” – which, to my mind, is enough to say, “No.” After all, a first-person narrator can’t be expected to impeach himself, and I certainly don’t leave with the impression that Dubus wants us to accept this man as a model for our own behavior. It’s a difficult story that wrestles with difficult issues in the context of one man’s relationship to God through the Church, but I don’t find anything scandalous in it. If anything, I think most of us could use a jolt now and then, to remind us that even heretics still love and want to be loved by God.
What are your thoughts?
Jonathan McDonald says
It will be a little while before I can write a longer, fuller response. Let me simply post a few quotes from smarter thinkers than me, for now. Perhaps they will serve as food for thought, perhaps not. I am unsure yet what I think about drawing the moral line between being explicit and being exploitive, although I do not deny that the former can be morally acceptable.
“The traditional view is that true art is moral: it seeks to improve life, not debase it. It seeks to hold off, at least for a while, the twilight of the gods and us…. That art which tends toward destruction, the art of nihilists, cynics, and merdistes, is not properly art at all. Art is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy.” —John Gardner, “On Moral Fiction”
“We will suppose that he [who has learned dance and song] knows the good to be good, and the bad to be bad, and makes use of them accordingly: which now is the better trained in dancing and music—he who is able to move his body and to use his voice in what is understood to be the right manner, but has no delight in good or hatred of evil; or he who is incorrect in gesture and voice, but is right in his sense of pleasure and pain, and welcomes what is good, and is offended at what is evil?” —Plato, “The Laws”
“Thus, there are five sources from which critical objections [of dramas] are drawn. Things are censured either as impossible, or irrational, or morally hurtful, or contradictory, or contrary to artistic correctness.” —Aristotle, “The Poetics”
Katy says
Jonathan, thanks, and I look forward to seeing what more you have to say! This has been a helpful conversation for me, and I hope for you too — it is all in a friendly spirit of seeking the truth in common, and I hope taken as such.
I do wonder what is implied in the second of the three quotes above — surely Plato isn’t saying that, both being people who act according to right reason in the moral sphere, the “better” of two artists as artists is the one who has the right feeling but the wrong technique, rather than the one who is technically excellent — that is, capable of evoking the right feeling in the one appreciating the art — but himself lacking in emotion? The one who experiences right feeling might be better as a human, but the one who evokes right feeling is better as an artist, I’d venture. Good old Maritain again.
Of course, all three are full of good things to unpack. As I say, I’m looking forward to seeing where you go with them. 🙂
Jonathan McDonald says
Plato had very strong ideas about the moral end of the arts, not in the sense that the arts ought to be didactic, but that they should be used to order the passions according to a correct way of life. I think he would say that the first singer-dancer in his example is deft at his art, but can (and probably will) use it in a way that encourages the *disordering* of the passions; and that the second singer-dancer knows how the passions ought to be ordered, but lacks the talent to effect any passionate change in his audience. So, the first would be either dangerous to society or outright evil, and the second useless towards the purpose of furthering the Good.
Anyway, I’m not saying I quite agree with Mr. Plato, although I think that’s what he’s getting at. I haven’t read “The Laws” in full, but hopefully some day I will.
Victoria Seed says
Jonathan, in my opinion, the place to go for Plato on the morality of/in literature is the Phaedrus. I think he is explicitly setting out the relationship between the moral educator and the pupil, and whether and how this relationship is mediated through writing. Unfortunately, as I wandered away from philosophy before finishing my PhD explaining the unity of the dialogue (most people think its two parts dealing with love on one hand and gramar on the other are essentially disunified. Some would even say it’s a failed dialogue), so I have no literature to point you to. Just a passing thought or recommendation, or something. I won’t try your patience with a summary of his argument here.
PeterJM says
I simply want to say thank you to both Katy and Jonathan for a superbly important and incisive debate. Each writer/thinker represents a particular tendency in my own mind/heart, and it has been wonderfully revelatory to read each installment.
Katy says
Peter, thanks for your kind words. I’m glad you have found this discussion helpful!
Cheryl Ruffing says
There has been a lot of ink spilled on this discussion here at Dappled Things, but the forest of words is apparently hiding the one tree with the answer, which is this: no writer can control how a reader responds, so she needs to just write and let her story tell her where it wants to go.
It seems to me that if, before you’ve even gotten any words down, you’re worrying about leading some mythical soul astray with a story that may never even see the light of day, you’ve already lost the battle to create art.
Walker says
As Catholics, we believe that just because we can’t control another’s actions doesn’t mean we have no responsibility. That’s the whole concept of scandal:
“Anyone who uses the power at his disposal in such a way that it leads others to do wrong becomes guilty of scandal and responsible for the evil that he has directly or indirectly encouraged.” (CCC #2288)
That “power at his disposal” surely includes a talented writer’s words. Remember, Christ referenced woe and millstones to those who caused scandal, so it’s not a little matter we’re dialoging about. The Catechism calls avoiding scandal “respect for the souls of others” which is a beautiful thing that I don’t believe could stunt one’s art.
I actually began from a similar standpoint, Cheryl, and there’s a comment of mine somewhere in the last few days about how budding Catholic writers are like inhibited dancers. But it’s been through this exchange of ideas that I’ve had change of heart.
I value what DT does to foster these sorts of discussions because these comment boxes may be the closest we are likely to come to the coffeehouses or parlor rooms where historically artists and those concerned about art debated what art should or shouldn’t do.
Cheryl Ruffing says
Walker, thank you for again acknowledging my comment. Thus far, you are the only one to do so with either of them. You were also the one, on Katy’s original post, to bring up Salieri in the movie “Amadeus.” If you recall, Salieri was an upstanding Christian who wanted to create music that would glorify God, but in the end, he tried to kill Mozart. Isn’t it interesting that Mozart created music glorifying God, but its effects on Salieri were so sinful?
I will once again bring up Madeleine L’Engle’s insights on faith and art. I know that she is not “St. Flannery,” but her wisdom and humility are formidable (as, indeed, were Flannery’s, who might well find much of this discussion tosh). In “Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art,” L’Engle quotes an Eastern Orthodox theologian, Timothy Kallistos Ware, who wrote: “an abstract composition by Kandinsky or Van Gogh’s landscape of the cornfield with birds … is a real instance of divine transfiguration, in which we see matter rendered spiritual and entering into the ‘glorious liberty of the children of God.’ This remains true, even when the artist does not personally believe in God. Provided he is an artist of integrity, he is a genuine servant of the glory which he does not recognize, and unknown to himself there is ‘something divine’ about his work. We may rest confident that at the last judgment the angels will produce his works of art as testimony on his behalf.”
“Provided he is an artist of integrity”: I would hope that all of us here, having this conversation, are people of integrity.
L’Engle goes on to write: “We may not like that, but we call the work of such artists un-Christian or non-Christian at our own peril. Christ has always worked in ways which have seemed peculiar to many men, even his closest followers. Frequently the disciples failed to understand him. So we need not feel that we have to understand how he works through artists who do not consciously recognize him. Neither should our lack of understanding cause us to assume that he cannot be present in their work.
“A sad fact that needs to be faced is that a deeply committed Christian who wants to write stories or paint pictures or compose music to the glory of God simply may not have been given the talent, the gift, which a non-Christian, or even an atheist, may have in abundance. God is no respecter of persons, and this is something we are reluctant to face. …
“We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions, and we become smug like the Pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues, and thanked God that he was not like other men.
“Unamuno might be describing the artist as well as the Christian as he writes, ‘Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.”
Free will comes with a great deal of responsibility, doesn’t it? Life would be so much easier if everything came with labels that tell us what is safe and what is not.
I’ve spent much of my life wringing my hands, worrying about “giving scandal,” and trying to create art that glorifies God. I have little worth showing for it.
Within the past year, I finally figured out that relinquishing my need for control, looking beyond the labels and imprimaturs, and trusting the process are the only ways in which I can ever hope to create something with even the tiniest sliver of the transcendence contained in a painting by Caravaggio (who was excommunicated, by the way).
No, I’d rather stare at a blank wall than create a painting that looks like it could have been done by Thomas Kinkade.
Katy says
Cheryl, I’m sorry to have missed your comment; like other DT writers, I am a volunteer doing my best to contribute at a reasonably high level while maintaining balance with other areas of life. I dropped the ball this time, and I apologize — especially since I basically agree with you that writers and artists should feel free to create according to the demands of art and that applying language like “must repudiate,” “must ensure,” etc., doesn’t tend to nurture this endeavor. So, if I somehow didn’t manage to communicate that my entire effort here has been to push back to some degree against assigning a responsibility to the writer that essentially belongs to others, that of determining the total moral effect of a work and discerning who if anyone should read it — then I missed the mark. This is not to say that a writer can totally ignore the total effect, but as you and O’Connor and L’Engle and Maritain all point out, a “person of integrity” is already going to be creating in a way that harmonizes with his or her moral vision. Which is why, to some, much of this is going to feel like Episode 175 of the Catholic Artist Captain Obvious States the Obvious Show. But for others of us, it’s helpful to try to spell it all out in detail.
Josh Nadeau says
I’m adding the “Catholic Artist Captain Obvious States the Obvious Show” to my Netflix playlist.
Jonathan McDonald says
I think it’s important not to encourage scrupulosity during the creative process. An artist should generally feel free to create as the Muse leads him, and only engage his critical faculties with his own work afterwards. Sometimes a painter may decide to toss out a painting because it is too racy or easily misunderstood, but that should not prevent him from painting it in the first place. He cannot know that he will or must reject it until he has created it.