Confessions of a “Catholic” Novelist

A weak novelist?

The New Republic recently published an article that's gotten a bit of popularity around the web. Novelist William Giraldi penned a 4000-word screed against Catholic novels and novelists ironically titled "Confessions of a Catholic Novelist." Giraldi, himself an admitted heretic and apostate, wants to dismiss the idea that the Catholic has anything worthwhile to bring to the art of the novel, as a foundation to explain why he does not wish to be called a Catholic novelist:

The linguistic and narrative maneuvers of the Catholic novelist have at-hand explanations, ready-made motives, and so his characters tend to be denuded of complete and unique individual agency, of their own necessarily individual will. For the truly Catholic novel, there’s only one way to read it: the Catholic way. And any novel that can be read only one way isn’t a novel at all but an advertisement—or, worse, agitprop. If you want to know the aim of the avowedly Catholic novelist, the aim of his characters, of his storytelling sensibility, check in with the Gospels, the sacraments, the papacy, the Holy Ghost, the liturgy, the Mass. The Catholic novelist must, by definition, come to the novel with his epistemology embedded like a tick, his ontology fully explicable by deference to his faith.... Inside a Catholic novel, water, bread, and blood can never be just water, bread, and blood, and that’s a damning disadvantage for any writer.

Now, I have no other knowledge of Mr. Giraldi or his work. I had never heard of him before his article appeared in my blog reader feed. It might be that his novels are very well written and structured, that his imagery is rich and solid, dreamlike in the best possible way. But I cannot take seriously the intellectual meanderings of someone who pens something so ignorant as, "Sometime after my eighteenth birthday, I saw that Aquinas was no match for Nietzsche, and then Augustine lost by knockout to Hume."

Perhaps that's beside the point--although if Mr. Giraldi can throw in a cheap shot, so can I--and the main point is ostensibly the aesthetic one: Can a Catholic write a novel in a Catholic spirit that succeeds as a work of art? But is that really what concerns him? "Here’s what I know with an almost religious surety: to be tagged a Catholic novelist is to be tagged a failed novelist," he tellingly writes. He is worried about being thought a fool in the eyes of the world after Commonweal and First Things started praising his book. He knows that the wider critical apparatus of the world hates anything that even smells of portraying serious religious experience in a positive light. Catholicism is like a sinking ship that Giraldi does not even want to be close to on a life raft, lest he be sucked down with its whirlpool.

Is there anything worth salvaging in this short piece of anti-Catholic agitprop? Mr. Giraldi does actually say something rather interesting in response to a selection from a Walker Percy essay,

[M]ost erroneous is the assumption that a novelist requires a dogma such as the Incarnation as “a warrant” to probe the enigmas of human living. Why not just probe them? You don’t need a monotheistic guarantee of mystery: Your fellow humans will furnish it for you every day, don’t worry.... Referring to Flannery O’Connor in his essay “A Cranky Novelist Reflects on the Church,” Percy contends that “the truly Catholic writer knows” that “it is only through the particularities of place, time, and history ... that the writer achieves his art.” Why it would take a “truly Catholic writer” to figure out what good writers have always known—E.B. White advised: “Don’t write about Man, write about a man”—is a tad baffling.

This, I think, is perfectly true. It is a natural truth that man--and a man--is a mystery full of interesting enigmas which the novelist can explore, and this belief needs no supernaturally-revealed warrant. The pagans of old knew that a man was interesting without the slightest bit of divine revelation ("Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide..."). Even when one ignores the existence of God and of the multitude of open doors between the spiritual and physical worlds, man himself is a mystery of preternatural heights and depths. Hamlet's "Piece of Work" speech could be expressed by a materialist as easily as by a monk, because it is too self-evident to ignore.

After all, man is created in the image of God, and we could not say it were so if he did not share in some of his Creator's mystery.