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Post by katycarl on Aug 29, 2008 9:35:26 GMT -5
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Post by job on Aug 29, 2008 22:24:53 GMT -5
Good catch, Katycarl.
I find myself assenting and reacting to Wolfe's premises simultaneously.
But I think it's his second graf that gets at the heart of his OWN whetstone:
"Of course, the question of whether Catholic writing is alive, much less well, is really just another skirmish in the larger culture wars—perpetuated largely by those with ideological axes to grind."
Nonetheless, this isn't so much a question of left and right as it is smoke and mirrors. The smoke he throws in our eyes is that somehow we should be ashamed of engaging in a cultural war (which I suspect, for him, is really rather a political one); the mirrors, on the other hand, are what's at bottom and top - namely, the culture itself looking back at itself. That's the job of the writer, after all. Not politics. Not religion. Culture. Draw cutlasses, step lively and set your pikes and scaling ladders right, fellows. Yeah, I guess it is a war, at that.
But he's also right, and I couldn't agree more: the penchant among young writers is to place the cultural cart before the artistic horse. You don't write to the culture, you write to the art. The best we can hope is that some of us will push through and leave some indication among the palimpsests that ours was a generation that knew what it was about. Seutonius wrote a number of works which only surive in their titles - Lives of Famous Whores, Royal Biographies, Physical Defects of Mankind , Methods of Reckoning Times, Grammatical Problems, Critical Signs Used in Books - and yet all we have complete is his Lives of the Caesars.... Why? Who knows? But something of his shines through the centuries.
Well, actually, I think we do know - for the same reason that Aristotle's treatises survived and his dialogues didn't. For the same reason Plato's dialogues and his treastises didn't. For the same reason Shakespeare's plays survived and his haiku couldn't. For the same reason Donne's poems survive and his graphic novels couldn't.
This is the difference between carpentry and architecture; house painting and portraiture; Hallmark cards and literature; dinosaurs and cockroaches...
In the meantime, we use what we have - not politics, not race, not even religion - but culture. That's our canvas. That's our idee fixe.
I can think of duller things to sharpen one's axe on...
JOB
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Post by dhunt on Aug 30, 2008 8:55:42 GMT -5
The piece is on target. Those who so lament the dearth of "Catholic writers" wailing *why?* at the universe have, I think, another problem besides the one they cite. I don't mean this remark to be a criticism, but a way of trying to point out that the real problem does not lie in some elusive answer to that question but in the question itself. I repeat here what I said once before on a blog--Catholic Insight, I think it was--and give the same example. If one is Catholic, one's work will be "Catholic", even if one didn't especially want it to be; the example is Tolkien's paraphrased comment that The Lord of the Rings is Christian/Catholic because it's the product of a Catholic mind. There is no dearth of "Catholic fiction". I think, maybe, that many contemporary writers who identify themselves as Catholics are rather like many politicians who call themselves Catholic (and I have one very prominent writer in mind here and several politicians) but aren't. On the other hand, there may be many good Catholics who would be writers, but who aren't--yet. Nor will they ever be--until they give up this agenda, this "axe to grind" of which Wolfe speaks. Writing is not a mission.
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Post by dhunt on Aug 30, 2008 18:56:28 GMT -5
I can't tell whether I agreed with you or not. I think I did, but I'm not sure. A friend here says I did not.
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Post by job on Aug 30, 2008 23:47:36 GMT -5
Ms. Hunt,
I don't think we're disagreeing as such - I do think that, more than I would, you downplay the cultural tension which a writer works with, in and through.
Needless to say, no writer works in a vacuum; but more importantly, no writer works out of a simply artistic motive. Something of today, of the ephemeral, of the newsaper, must make its way into the art, howeverso ardent one is to write to that art. But the poet, the maker, takes the ephemeral and transforms it. The writer writes from the culture and to the art. The statue comes alive; the portrait's oils bristle; the poem runs off the page... But nothing a writer does, it seems, can find it's source other than in the world we live in. Richard Wilbur:
Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys, And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple As false dawn. Outside the open window The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses, Some are in smocks: but truly there they are. Now they are rising together in calm swells Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
Now they are flying in place, conveying The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving And staying like white water; and now of a sudden They swoon down into so rapt a quiet That nobody seems to be there. The soul shrinks
From all that is about to remember, From the punctual rape of every blessed day, And cries, ``Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry, Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.''
Yet, as the sun acknowledges With a warm look the world's hunks and colors, The soul descends once more in bitter love To accept the waking body, saying now In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
``Bring them down from their ruddy gallows; Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves; Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone, And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating Of dark habits, keeping their difficult balance.''
Artistic horse and cultural cart must go together; the way, I suppose, tradition and scripture go together; or tradition and the individual talent, to invoke the ghost of Eliot.
In these milieu, though, there must be some sort of ordering; I wonder by analogy if it's not something like the order of nature and the order of grace...
At any rate, the difficult balance...
JOB
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Post by dhunt on Aug 31, 2008 8:10:50 GMT -5
Dear Joseph, What a lovely post--and what a wonderful poem. Thank you. I see that my post did not disagree; it was simply irrelevant. On reflection, I do not think much about our contemporary culture--it's a decision made some time ago in my own self-defense, rather like the decision not to think about the destruction of creation. Such thought invites despair. And because it's so dangerous, I admire the warriors who do. I am a spiritual coward, perhaps, but I remember too well the days when I did take all such things directly to heart and spoke rather too long and too loudly about them, so that I was known in grad school as "the last of the great romantics" among those kindly disposed; among others, I was merely tedious or arrogant. But it took a lot to kill me--only the discovery that I was Wrong was sufficiently lethal. In the decades since then, I've learned that the only lasting and valid order is that which arises from chaos; any order imposed on chaos is false, ultimately very destructive and destined for failure, regardless of any motive behind it. In other words, I leave such matters to God and focus on my own small world and work. Maybe I am just old. Wilbur's poem put me directly in mind of Ron Hansen's imagery.
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Post by job on Sept 1, 2008 19:39:51 GMT -5
Ms. Hunt et al, Well at any rate, the battlements are being engaged with earnest here: www.matthewlickona.comDo your best, EVERYONE! JOB
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Post by job on Sept 1, 2008 22:27:03 GMT -5
All,
Alright, the Exiles thing didn't exactly froat your bloat, but now you're being challenged by the premiere Christian journal in the country.
Gregory Wolfe throws down the gaunlet, slaps you in the face with the glove, calls you out to find a shrubbery:
4) Furthermore, I could turn the complaint back on you. Part of what I’m criticizing is absence—and not presence; what isn’t happening as opposed to what is. So: name five serious essays or reviews celebrating the achievement of a contemporary Catholic writer in the past year in First Things, The St. Austin Review, Crisis/Inside Catholic, Dappled Things, or any other conservative Catholic publication.
Matthew Lickona's goodly response:
[But I'm not arguing about the absence. I'm arguing about your characterization of conservative Catholic beliefs about mid-twentieth-century Catholic authors. About the absence, we're in agreement.]
To arms! To arms! to...
What will be.
JOB
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Post by katycarl on Sept 2, 2008 10:02:42 GMT -5
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Post by Bernardo on Sept 2, 2008 10:58:37 GMT -5
Oh, dear! It does seem like I'm being pushed into an argument! What can I say in my own defence?
Perhaps the first thing I could point out is precisely that I do feel rather pressed into a defensive position more than engaged in a conversation. Mr. Wolfe certainly says a lot of good things, but however much he claims to disdain the idea of a culture war, no doubt he is fighting one himself. He is fighting against an idea he has formed of the "conservative Catholic" subculture. I am unconvinced that it is a useful idea.
To begin with, even though Mr. Wolfe inserts DT into his group of allegedgly "blinkered" conservative Catholic publications, I seriously doubt that most of the people who participate in this forum would see in his post an accurate -- if critical -- reflection of themselves and their own thinking. Mr. Wolfe trades too much in labels and generalizations, and I think that gets the conversation -- if there is to be one -- started on the wrong foot.
I will wait to address the broader argument until I've had the opportunity to read the rest of his posts, but for the moment let me respond to what he says about Dappled Things. I agree: we have not published much in the way of essays or reviews celebrating the achievement of a contemporary Catholic writer. The thing is, neither have we been churning out essays on *older* Catholic writers, yearning for the "good old days" and such. The reason is that so far we have been much more devoted to publishing primary literature and art *by* contemporary writers and artists, rather than *about* them. Before our last issue, we had never even had a reviews section, and this is still only an experiment. Rather than "harrumphing" and longing for the olden days, our main concern is bringing to light new works of art that take advantage of the richness the Catholic tradition has to offer. We think the Catholic vision of reality, and our tradition's understanding of the beautiful, has much to give to our culture -- but, even more importantly, the *human beings* in that culture -- because beauty is a human *need*.
I am thus tempted to turn Mr. Wolfe's criticism of DT on its head: perhaps his real concern is that the absence of cheering and booing in our pages for one side or the other means that we are not engaged enough in a culture (or subculture) war. No doubt this is not how Mr. Wolfe himself would put it, but my point is merely that the suggestion that DT's interest in art is driven by some axe we have to grind is mistaken, and that, if anything, our approach to engaging culture -- whether contemporary or otherwise -- is precisely the kind that is more concerned about the art itself than about furthering some sort of ideology.
Certainly we are interested in "changing things," but rather than bother ourselves with who said what about whom in the latest literary periodical, or be overly concerned with furthering or opposing current trends, we are trying to create and publish art that grows out of a complex and coherent tradition and *therefore* is able to speak to human beings living in the modern world. We may or may not have achieved this goal yet, but we do our work trusting that the Catholic vision of reality is inevitably timeless and timely, and we have faith that the art we publish will eventually communicate this truth by itself. No doubt the culture at large has developed an unhealthy obsession with the immediate present, the here and now, the current news cycle, and in this sense it has much to gain from writing and art that has been informed by the faith. I've always been fond of Chesterton's maxim that the Catholic Church saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age. But not being a child of one's age does not mean that one is irrelevant or necessarily hostile to it, simply that one is not determined by it. This, I think, is a more accurate characterization of what we're about.
But I've gotta get going. I look forward to reading more of your thoughts on this matter.
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Post by Bernardo on Sept 2, 2008 12:31:48 GMT -5
OK, I wanted to add that I do think there are good reasons to engage works of art through essays and reviews. An obvious one is that such commentary can serve as a catalyst for further thought and conversation about the primary literature. This is why we're experimenting with such a section now -- but my main point in the previous post was that this is not, and has not been, our focus. We can hardly be blamed for not doing what we didn't set out to do.
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Post by katycarl on Sept 2, 2008 16:01:01 GMT -5
Berni: yes and yes. By "accept the challenge" I meant mainly that I think it's good for DT to be engaged in conversation about, as well as in primary production and publication of, fresh and high-quality literature informed by the Catholic worldview. Also that I personally want to be more aware of such literature where it already exists in the mainstream and secular markets, which really seems to be what Wolfe is really encouraging us to do. The broad generalizations about the views and awareness levels of all emerging Catholic writers seem to be more of a "hey, look over here!" tactic to get us listening. Instead, they got us riled, because they got us wrong. (To begin with, I doubt very much that everyone here is "conservative"--again, what *does* that word mean when it comes to literature?--and know for a fact that not everyone here is "young," at least by the calendar. And we like it that way.) Leaving that discussion aside, then, my reaction to Wolfe's basic premise--be aware of great fiction currently happening in the secular press, don't limit your reading to Catholic circles or to the past--is "Sheesh! If you wanted me to listen, that's all you had to say in the first place. Yes, please! Tell me where!"
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Post by Bernardo on Sept 2, 2008 18:34:46 GMT -5
This is very positive indeed. I agree this is the heart of what Wolfe is about, and, like you, I welcome the challenge.
On the other hand, I also agree many of us would not characterize ourselves as "conservatives" -- I never have, for one. Certainly I am committed to Catholic orthodoxy, but I do not bother myself with labels or the positions they are supposed to entail. I think Wolfe makes a mistake when he attempts to pigeonhole us into certain roles. He'd get a much more sympathetic hearing if he stuck to the positive part of his message, I think. In any case, I am quite glad to hear all he has to say about writers we ought to explore in greater depth. I look forward to part III.
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Post by katycarl on Sept 3, 2008 9:39:49 GMT -5
It's up already; three cheers for the Image team: imagejournal.org/page/blog/the-state-of-catholic-letters-part-iii-the-whiskey-priest-meets-charming-billyThere's going to be a Part IV, too, which will include The List of People We Should Be Reading. Bring it on, says I. I'm gratified that Wolfe's dialing back the "conservative/traditional/orthodox" language. Indeed, in this installment he's identified it himself as mainly an attention-getting play. I think he still overestimates the scope and depth of the embrace of the "myth of decline," which seems a rather separate thing. I don't know what others' experience has been--and this would be a fruitful topic of discussion in itself--but embracing the the myth of decline seems like a possible danger for us rather than a permanent error we've made. Personally, I did go through a phase where I was reading The Catholic Authors like mad and practically nothing else, and the myth of decline seemed tempting then. Even at that time, though, I think I knew it was a phase: that I needed that reading for the sake of educating and locating myself within a tradition, giving myself a framework for engaging more contemporary literature and eventually for producing my own. At this point, I feel that the only way I could embrace the myth of decline would be by giving up entirely 0n everything I am trying to do both as a writer and as an editor of Dappled Things. I trust and pray that day is far off yet. What about y'all? What have your experiences been with the discovery of "Catholic literature" (slippery as that term is) -- whether contemporary, medieval, modern or what have you -- and how have they affected your own development as a reader and/or writer? Do you embrace the myth of decline, i.e., the thought that there either is no good "Catholic" literature being produced or that it ain't what it used to be? Why or why not?
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Post by job on Sept 3, 2008 10:42:42 GMT -5
Katycarl, et al,
If we're going to discuss Wolfe's "myth of decline," I would return to what I'd first said about writers - Catholic or otherwise. While not a product of our culture, our writing certianly springs from the culture. Ms. Hunt pointed out her retirement (I hope that's the right word!) from culture; and we can all express our disgust for the culture as it now stands. But the plain fact remains, that culture is still the "stuff," the substratum, the primary substance, to be Aristotlean, of writing. But if culture itself is in decline, how can we expect anything great to come out of it (the exceptions are notable: papal writings, which are looking more to the grand skein of things...)?
Also, I would note that the previous generation, O'Connor, Percy, Powers, etc. They weren't restricting their reading to the great "Catholic" authors of their time; they were influenced by, among others, Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, and Dostoevsky. I think more often than not, they were readers for ideas and style, but not because there was anything strictly Catholic about these writers. They simply knew how to tell a story and told it well. This rubbed off, I would contend, on O'Connor et al.
We have the benefit of having a Catholic generation of fictionists among us to draw on. And sometimes one rises unambiguously to the top - i.e. Ron Hansen (although, there again, Hansen was mentored by John Irving. Nothing against Irving, but I doubt he wouldn't make it anyone's "Catholic list" - as a great stylist, on the other hand, Irving has had an influence: Hansen's works WORK because of his own attention to style.)
Hansen is the exception, though. For the most part, we'd agree, we've seen little movement in the "Catholic" literary world. (And lets face it, by movment, we mean onto and up the NYTimes bestseller's list or some other secular gauge). Could it be that the benefits of having O'Connor and Powers looking over our should are also hindrances? Henry James' saw De Maupassant as a "lion in the path" which he needed to slay before he could get on to his own writing in earnest. Similiarly, I would submit that while we must acknoweldge our debt to the wonderful deposit of tradition among the previous generation of Catholic writers, we also must write with desperate blood - that is, write until we discover oursleves out from beneath their shadow. I think it was Percy who said that it was next to impossible for a Southerner to write after Faulkner. He was only half serious (obviously). But the point is well taken. The same is true today. Writers must find that style and, as Ms. Hunt noted earlier, the Catholic "stuff" will come with it.
So compared to the days of O'Connor and Percy, today the stakes are doubled for writers - and the challenges are too:
We have a dying culture (exponentially more so since even Percy last spilt ink) and we have these giants to contend with, giants we must work with but also navigate around. The writer should feel pinched between these two opposing forces - and probably does. The challenge here, though, is to turn that pressure into a constructive aid toward composition.
The challenge is not purely cultural for the writer, but also a matter of imagination. Is there a way for a writer to both embrace the tradition and, yes, trotting out Thomas Stearns again here, his own individual talent?
JOB
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