Post by katycarl on Sept 3, 2008 11:53:36 GMT -5
Job, you raise another really good question there. I'm really curious about how Wolfe would answer it, but let's add to the list: do we in the West truly have a dying culture? I agree that we're more than a bit green around the gills, but I don't think we're looking at a terminal diagnosis yet. I think yes, Christendom as a political institution has been defunct quite a while; but culturally there are still quite lively pockets, not all of which seem to go totally unrecognized by secular culture. In fact, if you listen to some secularists, people of true Christian faith are still a Very Big Threat to Everything. How much of this is rhetoric and how much is actual fear on their part, I've never been quite clear. But anyway, the thought that we don't have any "healthy" culture anymore to nourish or to be the substratum of our work seems foreign to me. Maybe I'm overly optimistic on that point. I may also be overly optimistic about the possibilities still to be mined in the unhealthiness of other cultural pockets--possibilities not only for satire and humor, but possibilities for exploring serious themes, human evil and brokenness, human thirst for love and beauty, human desire for redemption.
This is the "Catholic" literary world Wolfe wants us to be more engaged with, I suppose: all those writers who are now producing quality fiction that resonates with the Catholic worldview, whether or not they actually happen to be Catholic. Or, simply, those who are creating great fiction, the classics of the future, that we should be familiar with. I think nothing is preventing us from this engagement but, perhaps, a frustration upon browsing the bookstore and finding so few examples ready to hand. We're open to discovery, but on the other hand, our reading time is valuable and we don't want to waste it. Where, we wonder, are the houses publishing literature that's great and suffused with truth--"marketable," perhaps, but with an eye to love of and betterment for the market itself, i.e., readers? Where are the teachers, agents, editors who would be sympathetic to helping us develop more of it? If Wolfe's thesis is that we don't know where to look, I readily admit it and eagerly wait to be instructed. If his thesis is that we don't care, I couldn't disagree more.
With regard to the writing side of it, you are right, Job: moving on from the giants is a challenge for imagination, and involves, perhaps, a willingness to roll up our sleeves and get messy in ways that would not have been possible or necessary to the Catholic writers of the past. It also, always, involves the challenge to "purify the source," as Mauriac puts it. And simultaneously not to feel obligated to write for fifteen-year-old girls of all ages and genders, as Flannery wryly adds. Now that is a pinch if I ever felt one.
"Writing with desperate blood": yes, that's it absolutely.
This is the "Catholic" literary world Wolfe wants us to be more engaged with, I suppose: all those writers who are now producing quality fiction that resonates with the Catholic worldview, whether or not they actually happen to be Catholic. Or, simply, those who are creating great fiction, the classics of the future, that we should be familiar with. I think nothing is preventing us from this engagement but, perhaps, a frustration upon browsing the bookstore and finding so few examples ready to hand. We're open to discovery, but on the other hand, our reading time is valuable and we don't want to waste it. Where, we wonder, are the houses publishing literature that's great and suffused with truth--"marketable," perhaps, but with an eye to love of and betterment for the market itself, i.e., readers? Where are the teachers, agents, editors who would be sympathetic to helping us develop more of it? If Wolfe's thesis is that we don't know where to look, I readily admit it and eagerly wait to be instructed. If his thesis is that we don't care, I couldn't disagree more.
With regard to the writing side of it, you are right, Job: moving on from the giants is a challenge for imagination, and involves, perhaps, a willingness to roll up our sleeves and get messy in ways that would not have been possible or necessary to the Catholic writers of the past. It also, always, involves the challenge to "purify the source," as Mauriac puts it. And simultaneously not to feel obligated to write for fifteen-year-old girls of all ages and genders, as Flannery wryly adds. Now that is a pinch if I ever felt one.
"Writing with desperate blood": yes, that's it absolutely.
