DappledThings.org

A quarterly journal of ideas, art, and faith

Divining Divinity

Eleanor Bourg Donlon

Divining Divinity: A Book of Poems
by Joseph Pearce
with illustrations by Jef Murray
Kaufmann Publishing, 2008
43 pages, $10.95

Harold Bloom has written extensively about the “anxiety of influence” and its hindering effect on those poor souls tortured with poetic ambitions. The greatest poets must be readers of poetry and are therefore (or so Bloom reasons) doomed to produce only weak, derivative work until they cast off the burden of influence and make some extraordinary contribution—an act of genius unique enough to capture the attention of posterity. The fledgling poet, therefore, is prey to acute anxiety. His first poetic volume must either be a conflicted mess of agonized allusion or a prolonged display of ostentatious precocity. There can be no middle ground. [Read more…]

Faith at the Edge

Miguel Jiménez

Faith at the Edge: A New Generation of Catholic Writers Reflects on Life, Love, Sex, and Other Mysteries
Edited by Angelo Matera
Ave Maria Press, 2008
196 pages, $15.95

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.” So said Flannery O’Connor towards the middle of the twentieth century. Judging by the contents of Faith at the Edge, a new book of mostly short but striking personal essays, it appears a new generation of Catholic writers agrees. In their various essays—which touch on “Life, Love, Sex, and Other Mysteries,” as the book’s subtitle declares—these authors do not shy away from presenting the oddity of their Christian lives: the sign of contradiction they embody as followers of an ancient faith in a postmodern world. [Read more…]

The Misidentified Watchman

Jessica Hooten Wilson

The reviews of Harper Lee’s new old novel Go Set a Watchman have centered on the controversy about the hero of To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch. Fans have been disappointed by their idol’s fall from his pedestal. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus is a noble champion, the embodiment of all that is right. But in Go Set A Watchman, although still a Southern gentleman, Atticus is a racist and a staunch segregationist. Yet, that is not the purpose of the story. The sights are set only peripherally on Atticus; the focus is his daughter Jean Louise—called “Scout” in Mockingbird—who is now 26, returning from her life in New York, and trying to come to terms with a home that is no longer her home. While reviewers are having a field day with the racial issues of the novel and attacking the craftsmanship of the piece, they’re neglecting the pleasure of the story, the flashbacks of Southern life that are richer than buttermilk pie, and most significantly, the religious questions which undergird all of the racial problems.

I have a confession: I vaguely remember To Kill a Mockingbird. I read it in high school and watched the movie during class, so I have sparse memories of Boo Radley and racial injustice. Unlike the thousands of Americans who have been devoted Harper Lee fans for the last half-century, I picked up Go Set a Watchman because of its novelty. A novel with this interesting of a backstory begged to be read. Not only that, but I was working in Birmingham, Alabama, only a couple of hours from Lee’s hometown. A professor friend shared the details about the book and its controversy, and within minutes, I pre-ordered it on Kindle. The next day while visiting the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, I sat on the stone steps, facing the park where hundreds of children had marched during the 1963 crusade, and I read the book screen to screen. Sitting in the middle of a city saturated by a history of racial tension where the ghosts of children are immortalized in bronze statues all around me, I understood the gravity and reality of the racial concerns that Lee discusses in her novel. Although I agree with a number of critics who point out how prescient to our own time this new novel can be for its message about racial equality, I didn’t read it for its message. I read it because it made me laugh out loud. And, I read it because there were sentences of such beauty and stories of such goodness that I didn’t want to put it down. Granted, this second novel (first draft though it may be) is not deserving of the Pulitzer as its predecessor was, but I recommend it for the reasons I mentioned, but also with a caveat—there is even more at stake than the racial controversies or its aesthetic value.

The title Go Set a Watchman comes from Isaiah 21:6, a verse upon which the Maycomb pastor Mr. Stone preaches the first Sunday of Jean Louise’s visit: “For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.” Jean Louise becomes the watchman in the novel, seeing changes in her hometown that she wants to remain blind to, especially changes in her father, Atticus Finch, who has not really changed except in her eyes. All her life, Atticus has been Jean Louise’s watchman. Like those who question, “What would Jesus do?” Jean Louise admits that she has always asked herself, “What would
Atticus do?”

Jean Louise reflects that Atticus stands apart from all other men, for “where most men had codes and tried to live up to them, Atticus lived his to the letter with no fuss, no fanfare, and no soul-searching. His private character was his public character. His code was simple New Testament ethic . . . ” Her description of the great man sounds so convincing, until you read it closely. Men choose “codes” to live by, and Atticus has “his” own code based on “New Testament ethic.” It reminds me of Dostoevsky’s warning about “Christian socialists,” those who used Jesus Christ as a teacher of ethics. Or to choose a Southern comparison, Atticus sounds like William Alexander Percy—Walker Percy’s uncle—who believed the New Testament was the best of books, a great guide to moral living. Yet, the elder Percy was also a segregationist. Such tidy Christian humanism is too weak to face the cultural mess
out there.

I hope it’s not a stretch, but I cannot help thinking of another story of a watchtower and its watchman written by Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome (sidenote: this novel too is often accused of lacking literary merit). Having posted himself in a tower to watch for fires, the lunatic priest Father Smith sees not literal signs of burning but spiritual warnings. He tells the protagonist Dr. Tom More to be wary of those who love mankind and have theories about mankind but who do not know Christ. What you end up with, he audaciously claims, is a Stalin or a Hitler. Percy stole this logic from Flannery O’Connor who writes, “In the absence of [Christian] faith, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror.” In other words, Smith says in echo of O’Connor, tenderness without Christ leads to the gas chambers.

No one wants to call Atticus Finch Hitler . . . except his daughter, who does just that in the novel. In her self-righteous speech at the conclusion of the book, Jean Louise denounces Atticus: “You are using frightful means to justify ends that you think are for the good of most people.” When she calls him Hitler, he responds with a smirk. After all, such name calling shows her slippery slope thinking; she’s being fallacious, ridiculous, and probably not thinking at all but having an emotional outburst, as the phrase goes. Yet her rage is on target. Her fury over injustice recognizes the problem with Atticus’s virtue; for all it’s worth, it is not enough. By living according to his own laws of right and wrong, Atticus allows for un-virtuous means to justify his noble ends. In this story, he suppresses the Negroes around him to vouchsafe the Southern way of life; he has convinced himself that he is protecting what is best in civilization. Like Jean Louise, many readers are going to find the two versions of Atticus inconsistent, but they align all too naturally.

As the grand conclusion of the novel, Jean Louise commits the same ideological error as her father. The story is supposed to be a coming-of-age tale in which a young woman, after being disenchanted of her hero worship of her father, discovers how to think for herself, to be her own watchman. As Jean Louise is floundering about wondering what is going on in her once peaceful hometown, she begs, “I need a watchman to lead me around and declare what he seeth every hour on the hour. I need a watchman to tell me this is what a man says but this is what he means, to draw a line down the middle and say here is this justice and there is that justice and make me understand the difference.” By the end of the book, her eccentric Uncle Jack explains that each person has a watchman; it is our own conscience. This is a rather anticlimactic conclusion. Isn’t Atticus failing to be virtuous because his conscience is misguided? Why is Jean Louise’s conscience any better? What she needs is a watchman who sees clearly, who always says what he means, and who not only knows that there are not two kinds of justice but also is justice himself.

While the novel misses the answer, it asks big questions, ultimate questions, and it does so in a way that is beautiful, humorous, and worth reading. To catch a glimpse of the joy of reading this book, I’d like to share an excerpt from when Jean Louise visits church in Maycomb:

“Any sense of isolation she may have had withered and died in the presence of some two hundred sinners earnestly requesting to be plunged beneath a red, redeeming flood. While offering to the Lord the results of Mr. Cowper’s hallucination, or declaring it was Love that lifted her, Jean Louise shared the warmness that prevails among diverse individuals who find themselves in the same boat for one hour each week.”

Harper Lee writes honestly about the strange sensation that occurs in church when different people somehow become one body. Although my favorite religious scene is when the young Scout and her brother Jem put on a fake revival in the backyard and get caught by the minister who has come over for dinner, this passage better captures the mysteries of the Christian faith.

While the Atticus Finch of Go Set a Watchman may be a letdown for devotees of To Kill a Mockingbird, Jean Louise is not. And, nor, for that matter, is Harper Lee. There is too much good in the book to be reduced to any lesson or artifact. Although I hope that Go Set a Watchman will become a book that is taught and studied, it also deserves to be read on a summer’s day in the park beneath the shade of a magnolia and thoroughly enjoyed for what it is, another great American novel.

 

Jessica Hooten Wilson is an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at John Brown University, where she also serves as Associate Director of the Honors program and Director of the Giving Voice Writers Festival. She has published articles on Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy and Dostoevsky and is a contributing reviewer to Books and Culture.

Book Review: Bleeder

Eleanor Bourg Donlon

Bleeder
By John Desjarlais
Sophia Institute Press, 2009
272 pp., $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-933184-56-2

“A miracle? Or bloody murder?”

The provocative phrase jumped out at us from the bookcover starkly displayed on the Catholic Writers Guild table. My cousin drew in her breath, and I muttered (rather inadequately, but with great expression): “Golly.” [Read more…]

Review: The Violent and the Fallen

Helen Pinkerton Trimpi

The Violent and the Fallen
by James Matthew Wilson
Finishing Line Press, 2013

James Matthew Wilson’s new collection of poems, The Violent and the Fallen, demonstrates his command of major themes of modern experience in a style that is unusually complex, but always exact, profound and deeply insightful. His intensity of thought draws the reader into an absorbing confrontation with the nitty-gritty of the contemporary urban world and its many kinds of people, young and old. Often, he seeks out stark urban scenes and events which are difficult to depict, and succeeds brilliantly.

In an interview at Hillsdale College, September 19, 2013, when Wilson was asked about the meaning of his phrase “the violent and the fallen,” he replied that his poetry “tends to explore the fallenness of things and the way in which a slow, patient investigation of our lives actually reins in that flailing will and makes it possible to reason, to figure out how the world is structured, how the soul should be conformed to that structure.” His book is “about awakening to a world where we’re often violent and lustful beings, trying to find the permanent truth that can give us purpose, order, and discipline.” This is a large order for any poet to satisfy, but Wilson, in the majority of the poems in this collection, has filled it.

While Wilson most often explores the thoughts and feelings of others, he is also self-explorative, although not self-exploitative, as so much of contemporary poetry is in its spectacular confessional modes. He is not interested so much in exhibiting his own “fallenness,” as anxious to get beyond it. An example of this is “At the Public Pool,” where during the moment of rescuing his daughter from drowning in a pool, he becomes conscious of the attraction of the “soft dark” of the female lifeguard’s “tanned, bikinied” thigh. He compares the near drowning to “another kind of fatality”: “I clutched my daughter, but my eyes searched her, / And dreaded what, a moment, I could wish.”

To deal with the urban world and his relationship to it, he has developed a structure that appears to me to be very effective: description, conscious involvement, and deliberate withdrawal for commentary. Through accurate description, his intensity of feeling draws the reader into an absorbing confrontation with the complexities of modernity as he travels the United States, Ireland, and France. Many of his best and most effective poems exhibit this technique. In a very short poem he can depict the consciousness of a person clearly and movingly, and then relate that consciousness specifically to his own, thus giving his observations a remarkable objectivity and power.

For example in “The Mishawaka Cruisers,” he describes the activity of a crowd of young men driving cars on a certain street in Mishawaka, Indiana, cruising up and down the street with loud mufflers, “waiting, talking, searching through the dark.” Each detail he notes is clear and sharp:

Their midnight-blue mesh jerseys are the fields
On which blank luminous 15s appear
In answer to the strokes of passing headlights.
A line of weekend cruisers, mufflers loose

And loud with bragging, makes its measured circuit
Along three blocks of neon fast-food chains,
The darkened panes of auto dealerships,
The Checks-Cashed, and the boarded Dollar Store.

The description continues with visual exactitude—no blurring of the fine details. Then, the poet places himself in the scene:

Three boys follow my car as it gets trapped
Within the caravan, eyes settling for
My mute impatience in lieu of the hope
Of spying an unknown batch of girls with beer.

Above them “the sky opens into sweeping plains / That neither field nor parking lot, nor lights / Studded along the row of burning signs / Could penetrate or prettify. The sky / Is just an empty clearing for the heat.” Then, the poet identifies their world with his own, even while he remains the observer:

And though these boys’ hearts pound with want and weakness,
And though cars fill the street with chrome and order,
I catch the vacant boredom just beneath.

He feels as they feel, and describes their feeling: empathizing with what they lack and want:

Just then, a gap forms as two girls hop out
From a green pickup’s cab to join the crowd,
And I escape, turn right off the main drag.
Their eyes pursue my fenders, then turn back

In search of something worth the endless waiting.

However, he can distinguish himself from them, even while he nearly becomes the same as they are, because,

I have a place to go, someone to meet,
But in their restless still-becoming rests
My own dread of the bare, the incomplete.

Wilson repeats this technique of close identification, followed by distancing, in several other poems set in bewildering urban settings that American poets have tried to deal with effectively since the early twentieth century. Wilson, however, sees the cold bare inhumanity of urban traffic, the restlessness typical of modern city life, as reflective of his own “still-becoming” transient suffering, and is able to turn to  “a place to go, someone to meet.” He will not drift aimlessly, if he can avoid it.

The technique I have described appears in a very different setting in “The Gypsies: On the Margins of Tours.” Here, Wilson suggests through an epigraph from Philippe Jaccottet, the Swiss francophone poet, that his complex feeling of identification and estrangement can occur in any environment: “Comme je suis un étranger dans notre vie.” In a woods near Tours, France, where he has been sleeping, he encounters a group of gypsies. Awakened at midnight by their fire and their “madrigals tongued in the light of gypsies, /Their curious foreign sounds,” he sees them “sway before the fire, as if /A brood of curious drunks who’ve staggered in sight / Of some town’s decorous dances.” He senses their alienation from the town and identifies with it. Then, as he walks

Back toward town, my words, not theirs, seem as those
On whom all decorous shrugging doors have closed.

Like the gypsies, he feels excluded from more “decorous” people.

In a very different kind of poem, an elegy, Wilson is equally effective. “At Father Mac’s Wake,” is a moving recollection of his relationship to a parish priest, whose wake he was obliged reluctantly to attend as a boy of ten years. Returning in memory, he recalls that he had used his bike key to record his anger and his envy of his friends, who were playing outside, by defacing with repeated stabs the pew in which he sat. He sees now that these stabs were signs “of a last attack before defeat”—his boyish battle with Christian belief.

In the later poems in his book, the poet turns definitively away from the perspective of the Baudelairean  “flaneur” of many of his earlier poems to a new world of welcoming human love. He signals this change effectively in “The New Life,” with its suggestive title, and its dedication: “For Hilary.” In a traditional formal love sonnet he brings to a close the old vagrant life depicted so movingly in the earlier poems. He admits his habitual detached but still explorative attitude:

Though neither young nor old, nor full of wine,
Nor blind, exactly, though my sight was poor,
I crouched, a beggar waiting for a sign
So obvious the dead could not ignore.

All the time he had really been looking for more than just sympathetic identification and withdrawal:

A flaneur so much as is possible
In a despoiled city such as this,
Amid the listless crowd, I casually strolled,
Searching for a stare not quite purposeless.

He found one, for, he concludes, “Then you came—sign, stare, cure, and word—and brought / A new life where none was but one was sought.” The flaneur has, at last, found a resting place.

Answering the Call for Dialogue: A Review of Pope Francis and the Caring Society

Pope Francis and the Caring Society, edited by Robert M. Whaples
Independent Institute, 2017
Review by Lindsay Myers

For some, Pope Francis might function as this year’s controversial figure who mustn’t be mentioned over Christmas dinner, lest Uncle Fred leaves before the pie is served. His approach, often so rhetorically different than his predecessors, has brought the hands of many together—some in applause, some in prayer, and some wringing with anxiety. The document that rests at the center of the controversy is, of course, Laudato Si’, Francis’ 2015 encyclical wherein he takes a heavy swing at the economic system many in the United States hold dear and makes several declarative statements on the environmental status of “our common home.” In an effort to take seriously Francis’ invitation for “all people” to enter into a dialogue with him on these issues, Robert M. Whaples has compiled a collection of interrelated essays called Pope Francis and the Caring Society. Whaples, along with ten other Catholic voices active in economic and environmental affairs, examines the various economic, environmental, familial, and historical claims made by Francis in Laudato Si’ and throughout the rest of his papacy. Fortunately, the collection strikes just the right balance between charitable and critical. Each contributor approaches the Holy Father with the respect due to his office and with a genuine eye toward charitable interpretation, despite concerns that Francis’ claims are underdeveloped, misinformed, or hyperbolic. The collection is an excellent tool for those seeking an introduction to Francis’ economic and environmental policies. It grounds both in his wider pastoral approach and the long history of Catholic Social Teaching articulated by his predecessors. Though the volume is not without its own flaws—including some unhelpful graphs—it is on the whole thorough, well researched, and devoid of the inflammatory rhetoric that has caused so much anxiety during the Holy Father’s papacy.

One of the most interesting arguments raised by the collection is that the free market system has the most potential for economic, social, and environmental good because it—perhaps unintentionally—works within the limitations of human nature. A.M.C. Waterman’s essay, “Pope Francis on the Environmental Crisis,” roots the theological premises of such an argument in Augustine and later in John Paul II’s Centesimus annus. Philip Booth bolsters Waterman’s arguments with passages from Aquinas in his essay, “Property Rights and Conservation.” The basic tenets of the argument are as follows: Man was wounded by original sin and thus relies on certain sociopolitical systems to counteract his fallen state. Because the free market system does not necessarily place self interest in opposition to the common good, it produces “unintended consequences that are socially benign” (148). Thus, regardless of whether economists will ever acknowledge Pope Benedict XVI and Francis’ premise that purchasing is “always a moral—and not simply an economic—act,” the residual benefits of the free market system can (and do) support the common good.

Whaples and Watermen are skeptical about whether Francis will ever allow the free market a place in his economic vision. Whaples says that Francis “turns the logic of the world on its head,” and that his call for a lifestyle of extreme humility and simplicity is incompatible with any socio-political system man can devise. Waterman similarly argues that virtue is “necessary [but] not sufficient” to bring about the change in human behavior for which Francis calls. Rather, the market must incentivize that change by working within man’s desire for possessions and financial security. Many of the contributors cite Francis’ hyperbolic rhetoric and seeming blanket distrust of capitalism as antithetical to his call for dialogue. Andrew M. Yuengert’s essay, “Pope Francis, His Predecessors, and the Market” and Samuel Gregg’s “Understanding Pope Francis: Argentina, Economic Failure, and the Teologia del Pueblo” ground the Holy Father’s vision within the framework of his predecessors and the historical and cultural circumstances of Francis’ life in Argentina. Both essays help soften some of Francis’ bolder claims by demonstrating that they are either consistent with Church teaching or colored by the devastation Francis witnessed under Argentinian Peronism.

The biggest disappointment of Pope Francis and the Caring Society is that it lacks an essay in true support of Francis’ economic and environmental claims. In the spirit of true dialogue, one might expect at least one voice who earnestly considers what Francis’ vision might look like in practice and offers plausible means of implementation at the micro and macro level. Philip Booth’s essay on private property rights comes as close to engaging with Francis’ calls for reform as any of the other contributors. He proposes that the work of 2009 Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom might lay the foundation for a real-world solution to the problem of overconsumption. Her thesis is simple: communities and individuals would benefit from property held and managed in common by those who have interest in it. Her theory can be understood within the context of the principle of subsidiarity and deserves further exploration by Francis and the economic community as a whole.

For those looking for an introductory exploration of Francis’ economic and environmental claims, Pope Francis and the Caring Society is the perfect starting place. The essays can be read in or out of sequence and generally provide focused and well researched considerations of the strengths and weaknesses of Francis’ vision. More importantly, they allow the reader himself to participate in Francis’ call for dialogue by providing him with several informed perspectives to consider within the context of Francis’ own.

Lindsay Myers is a wife, mother, avid reader, and freelance writer living outside of Washington, DC. She is finishing a master’s degree in English literature at the Catholic University of America and expecting the birth of her second baby sometime in January. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life

Reviewed by Meredith Wise

Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life
By Paul Mariani
Viking, 2008
496 pages, $34.95

“To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life”: in this line, Hopkins could have been speaking of the treatment he has received from his biographers. Two full-length lives have already been published, and both, while impeccably researched, fail to credit the reality of Hopkins’ spiritual life. [Read more…]

Book Review: In the Custody of Words: Poems

Billy Middleton

In the Custody of Words: Poems
by Philip C. Kolin
Franciscan University Press, 2013.

Philip C. Kolin’s new chapbook In the Custody of Words begins with a Latin epigraph of the opening lines from the Last Gospel: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” The importance of words and language as a fundamental element of creation informs this collection. God, as creator, is the divine wielder of words. [Read more…]

Book Review: Amor de Lohn

Katy Carl

Gabriel Olearnik, Amor de Lohn
Andromache Books, 2009

Readers of Dappled Things are already aware of the brilliance of British poet Gabriel Olearnik. A few of the poems in his new collection–notably the Pushcart Prize-nominated ‘The Builders,’ ‘Languedoc,’ ‘An English Apocalypse,’ and ‘Three Hours After the Miscarriage in Thailand’ have previously appeared in this journal. Most, however, are new. Alternately lyrical and epic, their free verse ranges over localities of Greek and Norse myth, history, geography, architecture, art, and the contemporary experience of Western alienation. The result is a volume that is cultured in the best sense, comprehending a multitude of narratives, ideas, and visions in a way cohesive enough to afford glimpses at Truth. Therefore, though the volume is dedicated “to the love of those far away,” it could also be read as dedicated to the love of that which is far away–Heaven–and yet not so far, after all. [Read more…]

Book Review: Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age

Joseph O’Brien

Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age
by Gregory Wolfe
ISI Books, 2011
278 pp., $29.95 (hardcover)
ISBN: 1933859881

One look at any art museum and the numberless portraits of the Madonna and Child, or depictions of the Nativity, the Crucifixion or the Last Supper that invariably hang there will demonstrate exactly how successful the relationship between the Church and the artist has been in the history of Western civilization. [Read more…]

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