Alternately entitled: “You want examples? I got examples.”

I’ll explain: This post is related to a recent series of posts, a conversation between myself and Jonathan McDonald, about the moral voice in literature and literary criticism. It is a sort of beginning of a response to the unanimously voiced call for specific discussion of how these questions play out in particular works.

What it is not, unfortunately, is a proper close reading or any kind of serious review of the novel in question. I’d like to do a close reading, but I don’t have my hands on a copy of the novel right now. This short essay has been brewing for the past seven months or so, as I read a library copy just weeks before giving birth and have been thinking about it ever since. Now the time seems right.

So if you’re still with me, I most likely don’t have to tell you who Jonathan Franzen is or why he is relevant to a discussion of contemporary literary culture. But if I do, hang in there! Many of us have been steered awry by a phenomenon Franzen himself often discusses, the compartmentalization of literary writing from almost all of the rest of American culture. In case you’re the latter, go get caught up. I’ll wait. Ready? Good.

Franzen’s most recent novel, Purity, is relevant for our discussion of the “four ‘e’s” — explicit, exploitative, enticing, endorsing — or some venn-diagram of the above, because it takes for one of its themes the psychosexual development of its protagonists, particularly Anabel, Tom, Andreas, and the eponymous Purity (known throughout as “Pip,” in a nod at Dickens). In service of this end the novel is — how would you like me to put it? — thorough.

The character of Andreas stands in for ideological “purity,” the novel’s central concept, which Franzen’s narration reveals as often the product of youthful idealism which needs to mature into a deeper commitment to honesty and faithfulness to reality as we find it. This is a characteristically novelistic perception, and there’s a lot more I would like to say about how it plays out in the text. For now, though, I’ll limit myself to a couple of things: 1. the confluence of the unlikeable with the explicit in the character of Andreas and how it helps shape the reader’s attitudes to receive the story as Franzen tells it, and 2. the relationship of “purity” to truth on Franzen’s exploration of the concepts and how the novel’s view of purity essentially differs from, but is fascinating for, that of Catholic thought about what purity is and is good for. I’ll focus on point 1 in this post, point 2 in the next.

So: Andreas, one of the novel’s four major protagonists, is a creeper. Even Franzen describes Andreas, in an FSG interview about the novel, as an “icky guy.” Franzen is not writing about Andreas’s tendency to, for example, skulk around church youth groups seducing teenage girls, in order to make us like or sympathize with Andreas. I’ve written before about being careful not to impute intention to an author, but here it almost seems Franzen wants us to see for ourselves that this is, objectively, an “icky” behavior; he seems to want us not only not to give Andreas a free moral pass, but to stop just this side of losing all patience with Andreas.

The fact that creeperdom is one of the first things we learn about Andreas is one of the mechanisms by which Franzen taps into the reader’s own moral insight and gets us to question Andreas’s character right away, hardly even giving us a chance to see Andreas as Andreas sees himself or would like to be seen before we start dissecting his every move and doubting his motives. In short, Franzen does not narratively endorse Andreas’ behavior. What he does do is give us an intimately detailed description of this behavior, which is important for understanding what happens next, and yet which is not flattering to the character.

At the same time, Franzen as narrator obviously has deep compassion for Andreas and wants to try to understand what formed him, what drives him, what makes him who he is. As the truth about Andreas’s past and motives is slowly eked out through Andreas’s introspection, his interpersonal relations, and the impact of plot events, it’s impossible for an attentive reader not to have pity for Andreas and to feel deep sorrow over his eventual fate (no spoilers, but it isn’t pretty). This is despite, or in some ways maybe this is because of, some quite explicit passages–some violent and gruesome (there’s a murder involved), others what might be considered “enticing,” still others that I at least found really queasy-making. The pages turn at an astonishing rate and in a way that at times made me feel the characters’ agony was being exploited for effect, so driving was the pace, and yet only in a handful of instances providing truly excess detail, and at the same time avoiding the kind of disgust or revulsion that would make you put the book down altogether. Franzen is brilliant at holding the reader’s attention and trust through the most difficult of passages.

Still, since it seems that the content warning is the wave of the future anyway, I won’t be shy about red-flagging the novel for anyone who might be (a) a survivor of abuse or trauma, (b) a very young person or someone otherwise in a state of formation, and/or most especially ( c) anyone who feels their own effort to live the Church’s teachings about honoring the dignity of the human person and refraining from abuse, revenge, anger, deception, and utilitarian sexuality is likely to be derailed or sabotaged by encountering literary portrayals of abuse, revenge, anger, deception, and utilitarian sexuality. If you find yourself in any or all of these categories, be aware that Purity may not be the book for you.

This is unfortunate, though, exactly because some of the novel’s greatest strengths are so tied up with the reasons some readers will be missing out. It is so hard to want to discuss a novel like this and at the same time have to feel that you must hold back from wholeheartedly recommending it and getting right down to work on many of the larger truths the novel recalls. Theoretically, the ground Purity covers should be open to the Catholic writer and reader, but the way in which it covers it may possibly turn some devout readers away, despite (or again because of?) the novel’s deep insightfulness about the way that two specific passions — desire for revenge, and sexuality twisted away from self-gift — can warp the human heart.

*

If any writer ever “makes it,” Franzen has made it. He doesn’t need praise from a two-bit unpublished novelist like yours truly. Yet why not, let’s be generous and say it anyway: what Franzen has achieved as a novelist, journalist, essayist, and general influence on literary culture is admirable and worthy of study and emulation. Intentionally or otherwise, he has opened a path for novelists who want to “instantiate single-entendre principles.” These are the words of David Foster Wallace (with whom Franzen was friends) in his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram” — a miniature manifesto I often think of in connection with our mission here at Dappled Things:

“The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels.”

Next time: off to the library, then to dive deeper into concepts of “purity” differently understood and explored. Until then, there’s this — not really relevant to the novel itself, but look, there’s Stephen Colbert too!:

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.