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Post by Bernardo on Mar 13, 2009 9:01:17 GMT -5
In case you missed it, check out Eleanor's essay, "The Abortion Story," in the National Catholic Register. She describes a phenomenon we see much at Dappled Things. I imagine more than one of you has tried his hand at such a story. I know I did... |
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Post by katycarl on Mar 13, 2009 11:52:03 GMT -5
Too, too true what El says. And says excellently, to boot. (My own Abortion Story, "Battleground State," was given the rejection it richly deserved by this very magazine back in 2006. Berni claims not to remember this, which amnesia suits me just fine. I wish I could forget I ever wrote the thing.  ) |
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Post by firefolk on Mar 13, 2009 17:11:11 GMT -5
Yeah. I remember seeing Schindler's List with my folks in the theater, and my ol' pappy commenting afterwards that it was sadly easier to make such a movie than to make a movie about the victims of abortion. Not easier, of course, in a moral sense, but merely as a storyteller--because, by definition, these victims can have no dialogue (as Eleanor perfectly points out in the Anne Frank comparison). I fear it will fall to our generation and our children's to figure out some way to overcome this difficulty. (Everyone's read GK's "By the Babe Unborn," right?) I'll keep everyone posted if I come up with any good ideas, if you all do the same. And hey, Katy--don't ever regret having written something that didn't work. That's precisely how we grow. What happens to a Saiyan when he loses a battle?
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Post by dhunt on Mar 16, 2009 8:05:08 GMT -5
Excellent article, Eleanor, and still more excellent advice. The divisiveness of legal abortion is often compared to the divisivenss of the Civil War, most notably perhaps by Fr Neuhaus. In fact, that comparison may be what prompted his sojourn into the history of the War, at the conclusion of which he said that although the South was indeed doing what it claimed (defending States' Rights), ultimately the War was about slavery.
And this conclusion made me think that perhaps Principle will always fall to Reality. The rather beautiful Principle of creating a "master race" fell to the Reality of the Holocaust. The economic Principle of equal distribution of wealth fell to the tyrannical Reality that was communism. The legitimate Principle of States' Rights fell to the hideous Reality of slavery. Just so will the Principle of abortion rights fall to the Reality of what abortion actually is.
What will achieve this is not fiction: Uncle Tom's Cabin affected deeply only those who were already abolitionists. Southerners declined to read it. Those who read "abortion stories" are already pro-lifers. Pro-choicers don't read them. There is a time for words and there is a time for pictures. In the recurring war between Principle and Reality, a picture is indeed worth a thousand words. Burned forever in my memory are the photographs of the death camps after their liberation. The weapon of choice now is not an "abortion story" but a sonogram.
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Post by Bernardo on Mar 16, 2009 8:39:44 GMT -5
Dena, what you say is true, yet abortion is a subject that looms so large in the Catholic mind today that it would be an error, I think, to ignore it in our writing. You certainly did not in Pear Trees. The fact that so many of the stories are of very poor quality does not mean they need to be, as Eleanor points out and you demonstrate with your own contribution. Happy Hills is not a bad example either. As for my own contribution, I was recently reading over it and was rather ashamed of it from an aesthetic point of view. However, while I would reject it as an artist, I can't just throw it into the trash bin if only for what we might call a "utilitarian" consideration: a friend who had long been on the fence over abortion issues read it and was deeply affected. Somehow the story pushed her just a bit more over to our side of the fence. It's funny that you mention it, though, because she read the story shortly after being show one of those very realistic 3-D sonograms. It seems the two things together over the course of a week packed a strong punch...
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Post by dhunt on Mar 17, 2009 8:53:58 GMT -5
I don't know about you, Bernardo, but I revise (to literal death, sometimes) everything I write. In the original conclusion of Pear Trees, the "blood clot" made a re-appearance. I removed it because the story was not about abortion, per se, but about the obfuscation of the character's vision, which is what made her abortion possible. (I believe that in Natural Law women are horrified by abortion. It's only in the un-natural current law that they are confused.)
But, after all, good fiction does not "tell" a character but rather "shows" a character--and we're back to a preference for "picture," at least metaphorically. In my own fiction, whether good or bad, story follows character. I could never write a story about abortion, but I can try to show a character who has had one.
Fence-sitters who aren't convinced by a sonogram wouldn't be convinced by a story either, I suspect. But the two together, thank God, saved your friend.
It's not for nothing the pro-choice crowd seeks to outlaw showing sonograms to women considering abortion. What can be discerned by our senses (in this case, our sight) trumps what can be discerned via legal "rights" disputations. God saves the Innocents, but who will save the women? That's what "looms so large in [this] Catholic mind." If it is to be science/sonogram and not art/fiction, so be it. Whatever works.
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Post by firefolk on Mar 17, 2009 11:45:33 GMT -5
Just reading Kreeft's "C.S. Lewis for the Third Millenium." The point it makes the most strongly for me, is simply the unashamed audacious blatancy with which the Enemy lies to us. What POSSIBLE justification could the pro-deathers have for trying to ban sonograms, except the simple, inexorably obvious fact that they show Truth? What I really wonder about, is the extent to which these people have allowed themselves to be deceived, versus the extent to which they are knowingly serving the cause of hatred and murder. But of course that's not really my place to know, still less to judge. God save us all. I think you and Berni have a good point though, about the convergence of different types of media all pointing to the same truth. Like my man GK says, "a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy from four books, than from one book, one battle, one landscape, and one old friend. The very fact that the things are of different kinds increases the importance of the fact that they all point to one conclusion." We can't be landscapes, I suppose, but we can write books and fight battles and most certainly be old friends.
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Post by meredith on Apr 29, 2009 19:48:54 GMT -5
Great article, Eleanor!
I've never written an Abortion Story, but I have written an Abortion Poem.
This is something I like about DT: we are getting the Abortion Story as it could hardly appear elsewhere. We get to publish the best of it. I'm thinking especially of Eve Tushnet's work.
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