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NCR
Books Catholic writers make literature, become conference
topics
By MICHAEL J. FARRELL
Nearly everyone scribbles -- our mene, tekel, peres on a
nearby wall, from prehistoric cave to inner city and finally to laptop. We
holler or whisper for attention, coaxing the horseman not to pass by.
Or, uppity, we wag our finger at the world and admonish it to beauty, truth and
goodness, in short to be more like us.
Most of our scribblings disappear when the tide comes in. Some
endure, by accident or design, significant either for their profundity or just
for their longevity. The best of what survives is eventually called literature
and becomes not only grist for English departments but the echo the rest of us
hear when we try to make sense of the world: authors brandishing well-worn
words from far away and telling us we dont need to reinvent everything
because they have been down this road before us and left footprints.
So we, for our part, go back to the authors, massaging them for
further insight or shooting holes in them until they confess everything. This
is what happens at literature conferences, which are popular in America.
Although there is an immense body of Catholic literature, there have been few
conferences to exploit it. Professor Russell Elliott Murphy, professor of
English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, aims to remedy that.
Yes, in Little Rock
First thing on a beautiful April morning, Michael Raiger of New
York University proposes that Gerard Manley Hopkins sonnet,
Spring, representing his nature sonnets, and
Carrion Comfort, representing his terrible sonnets,
can be seen to disclose the paradoxical operations of free will and grace
at work in the two spiritually opposed experiences of the presence and absence
of God.
At this stage the struggling reporter can only hope the reader is
still aboard. This could get serious. Furthermore, continues the unrelenting
Raiger, I locate this spiritual dynamic in the context of the biblical
tradition of the psalms, mediated by the Ignatian Spiritual
Exercises.
Raiger is a young man with pony tail, currently finishing his
dissertation. The attendance, which wobbled between 20 and 40 like the
speedometer of a broken-down Buick, was composed half of twentysomething grads
and half of more seasoned professionals too lumpy to fit in any category. This
was the fifth year of the St. Charles Borromeo Conference on Catholicism in
Literature and many were repeaters, old friends now, in touch betweentimes,
giving off the kind of energy that could blossom into a movement of some
kind.
Its not a movement yet. The papers were all over the place
-- but then, so is Catholicism, not to mention literature. The best a reporter
can do is limn some impressions of a unique gathering of people being Catholic
in a way that has implications for the long haul.
So back to Hopkins. British, though he did time in
Ireland. Hes very popular now, hopping around amid mysteries that Bill
Gates cant capture with all his software. Nothing is so beautiful
as spring, Spring begins, a rather unpromising start, but
watch him go:
What is all this juice and all this joy? A strain of the
earths sweet being in the beginning In Eden garden. -- Have, get,
before it cloy, Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy, Most, O maids child, thy
choice and worthy the winning.
Sean McDowell of Indiana University juxtaposes Hopkins with
another Jesuit, the 16th century Robert Southwell. While both poets share a
reworking of the familiar, McDowell argues, they treat the
workings of the poetic imagination and the emotions differently. Another
major difference was the fact that Southwell was hanged, drawn and quartered in
bad old anti-Catholic England, which had to be worse than Hopkins
banishment to Ireland.
McDowell points out how the scrupulous Southwell tried to cope
with a recurring pimple, or two, on the churchs tender psyche: the flesh
and the imagination, which could play havoc with one another. The devil,
Southwell wrote, has possessed ... most poets with his idle fansies. ...
For in lieu of solemne and devout matter, to which in duety they owe their
abilities, (poets) now busy themselves in expressing such passions as onely
serve for testimonies to how unwoorthy affections they have wedded their
wills.
And sex, too
One can only hope Southwell didnt die for the sole purpose
of keeping sex off the page. Certain concepts kept popping up at the Little
Rock conference -- such as eros, erotic imagination, relatedness -- to remind
us that the churchs best efforts to make Catholicism a construct of
intellectual beliefs high in our heads have failed to keep the body and its
emotional baggage at bay.
Suggested John Neary of St. Norbert College, De Pere, Wis.,
An important Catholic insight is that the personal story of concrete
feelings, things and people precedes abstract, theoretical, nonpersonal
truth. Neary then brings big guns such as David Tracy, Sallie McFague and
Andrew Greeley to bear on the Catholic or sacramental imagination.
Despite all the warnings in the confessional, this view holds, and despite all
the canon laws and catechisms, we cant -- and shouldnt -- leave our
bodies at the church door.
Continues Neary: The Catholic sacramental imagination tells
stories of connections. ... The vocation of the Catholic academy could be to
incarnate these stories and images of connection, community and eros by
adopting an erotic model of teaching and learning.
This urge to make the divine and human a better fit was also
reflected in the paper of Paul A.J. Beehler of the University of California at
Riverside. In Catholic Saints and Sexuality he drew on the lives of
several women saints to show that, increasing steadily from the 12th
century on, we find female erotic and sexual experience used to describe the
souls union with Christ.
You wont find that in your basic Sunday homily.
Murphys law
Young or old, they write and talk academese in varying degrees,
which should not be a surprise. What might surprise many is the extent of their
religious knowledge. And beyond the knowledge and the books and poems, various
degrees of commitment and aspiration revealed in private conversations as well
as public discussion. Being Catholic means something to them or they would not
be here. This was, after all, Little Rock.
Professor Murphy is the founder, organizer, director, godfather
and inspiration of the conference. He also drives the big van from hotel to
campus and later to big raucous communal dinners at nearby hostelries. He has
six children, two years old and up. He and his wife see what hes doing as
a ministry -- there is no other way they could survive it. Though born in Rhode
Island, all his teaching career has been at Little Rock. Murphy is your
favorite uncle, wearing heart and head on his sleeve.
Im old enough now to talk without apologizing,
he says by way of apology for that heart on his sleeve. At his age, he says,
theres not much time to waste. But there is time to spend: an
amateur palmist, after looking at the Murphy hand, said the headline and
heartline intersect perfectly. He comes from the working class, he says with
pride. I get bored easily, he goes on, still trying to explain
himself. He paints. One year he painted 150 canvases, but NCR has not
seen the pictures.
Murphy took a leave of absence, as it were, from the church for 16
years, missing the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. He came back a man
on a mission, almost a holy man, he says unselfconsciously.
Im Rip Van Winkle, he goes on. As a result, his Catholicism,
though quite conservative, seems to remain untarnished by the ideological wars
of the postconciliar era. Indeed, it would be virtually impossible to say,
using the lingo of our day, that the conference was conservative or
progressive, or who was which.
Not that Murphy is devoid of agenda. He tells with gusto the
events that first inspired the conference. He attended a 1993 convention at a
Midwestern university on Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh and was dismayed to find
the main speaker, brought over from Dublins Trinity College, was an
atheist. This, it seems, was designed to bring objectivity to the Kavanagh
case. Murphy, who is half Italian, thought this was baloney and decided to do
his own conference.
Back in Little Rock, happenstance stepped in again. Someone asked
him a chance question about St. Charles. This sent Murphy to Butlers
Lives of the Saints, where he found the biggest of them all was Charles
Borromeo, who, it turns out, used to hold symposia on literature at the Vatican
and would invite the secular community as well as the Catholic brass.
Thats how it became the St. Charles Borromeo Conference.
The people who come and give papers -- and nearly everyone who
comes gives a paper -- are the intelligentsia, in the European sense, says
Murphy. If we were a disease, how bad would the disease be? is one
way he poses the question of influence. He thinks the conference is infectious.
Nearly everyone who attends will be in touch with 50 to 100 students a year for
the rest of their careers, he figures, and they need never mention the Borromeo
conference in order to have Catholic impact.
On the third day of the conference, Murphy delivered his
welcoming remarks for the second time -- for the benefit of those
who missed them the first time: a call for an open and productive forum
on any and all issues, reflected in and through the medium of literature, that
touch on the Catholic faith. The Rip Van Winkle factor creeps in when he
talks about his faith in a way that it never does when literature, even
Catholic literature, is the subject.
Literary potpourri
The conference reflected the stronger voices of women, though
ultimately few would doubt that this was a mans church. Sr. Eileen
Quinlan of Chicagos Loyola University gave a paper on Spirituality
of the Feminine in Mary Gordons The Company of Women, in
which the stiff, cerebral Fr. Cyprian gets his comeuppance until he comes
to admit his need of the relationships with the women, the neighbors and the
farmland, embracing the feminine values he has disdained all along.
Dealing with The Convent as Colonist, Jeana DelRosso
of the University of Maryland describes how writers like Isabel Allende, Julia
Alvarez, Laura Esquivel and Rigoberta Menchú cope in their writings with
the conflicts between Catholicism and their individual cultures -- usually with
an ambivalence born of Catholicisms historic complicity in colonialism.
She finds similar conflicts between Catholicism and ethnicity in the work of
Native American, Chinese American and Caribbean authors such as Louise Erdrich,
Gish Jen and Rosario Ferre.
DelRosso concentrates on the childhood narratives of these ethnic
female writers, tales in which the Catholic church stars as a liberating force.
But by the time the stories are fully told, the church is getting mixed reviews
from DelRosso: We cannot overlook Catholicisms complicity in
colonialism, a role that many women writers of the Americas are determined to
address in their novels, memoirs and theories.
Writers dead and alive
Whatever youre doing, come and tell us about it,
Murphys current conference credo, is a beguiling mandate to resurrect old
gray eminences or beat the bushes for new talent. The Catholic church is so
universal a mother nowadays that it leaves no writer untouched, including dead
writers.
Take Oscar Wilde. Patrick R. OMalley of Harvard University
takes on The Churchs Closet: Wilde, the Confessional and English
Anti-Catholicism. Not surprisingly, the Wilde version presents
Catholicism as exotic and erotic: The fuming censors, that the grave
boys, in their lace and scarlet, tossed into the air like great gilt flowers,
had their subtle fascination for him. As he passed out, he used to look with
wonder at the black confessionals, and long to sit in the dim shadow of one of
them and listen to men and women whispering through the worn grating the true
story of their lives.
British anti-Catholic sentiment of a century and more ago
connected the Roman church with perverted sexual escapades, and these in turn
with the confessional, adding up to a sinister scenario. In such a climate, and
Wilde being who he was, he didnt have to be a Catholic to be unable to
leave Catholicism alone.
But out of all the frolic and flippancy leaps occasionally a
startling insight. In a 1900 letter from Paris, Wilde told a friend of a
planned trip to Rome, and this time I really must become a Catholic,
though I fear that if I went before the Holy Father with a blossoming rod it
would turn at once into an umbrella or something dreadful of that kind. It is
absurd to say that the age of miracles is past. It has not yet begun.
Or take Ernest Hemingway. Joseph L. Liggera of Bridgewater State
College, Mass., told the conference how Hemingway claimed to have converted to
Catholicism as a young man in Italy. Although he didnt go on to be a
great Catholic saint, his view of the ideal life, whenever it came up, remained
primarily a Catholic vision.
Archetypal concerns about God and prayer surface
throughout, writes Liggera, and they are invariably a Catholic God and
Catholic prayers. And Catholic priests. And an occasional church a character
stops into, and perhaps lights a candle. And then, in A Farewell to
Arms, there is Frederic Henry, who, asked to visit the parents of a priest
in Abruzzi, instead visits a brothel -- not exactly the story of
Hemingways life but no help to sanctity either.
The Catholic religion was a grand religion, but he
couldnt muster the conviction to live up to it. I was a little
ashamed, and regretted that I was such a rotten Catholic, says Hemingway
alter ego Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises. Though unable to live up to
Catholicism, Hemingway admires it from a distance, as Liggera sums up: It
appears that Hemingway runs his own values parallel to a church he cheerily
accepts but does not believe in. It gives him a structure, something which
transcends everything else, most of which fails the test of being the great
reality.
Or take Jean Sulivan. Jean who? He was a French priest who began
life as plain Joseph Lemarchand. Joseph Cunneen, for 48 years editor of
Cross Currents, told how Sulivan was a university chaplain, ran a
monthly paper, a film club, and then became a writer in middle age and
published more than 30 books. He took the new name because he admired the
Hollywood movie Sullivans Travels.
A translation of Sulivans Eternity, My Love will soon
be published, Cunneen announced. It tells the story of a Paris priest who falls
between the cracks of church and state during the turmoil of World War II.
Asked why Eternity, My Love and other later novels seemed
so disjointed, Sulivan replied that this reflected the brokenness of the world,
and that it was up to the readers to put the pieces together. To write, he
explained, is to be on the lookout for fissures in this inhuman world, to
discover traces, to reveal love where it seems to be absent. God also speaks
when he is not present, through lips that happen to be there.
Sulivan died in 1980.
Mostly they were dead old writers under discussion. The naive
reporter wondered why living, breathing, still-scribbling workers in progress
were not getting the same attention as their dead colleagues. Now, when they
could use the critique, not to mention the fame and fortune.
Flannery OConnors name kept popping up. Marie
OBrien of the University of Delaware had a paper on the role of Irish
Catholic women in America in the last century. John Staunton of Fordham
scrutinized works of Kate Chopin and Walker Percy in search of connections. All
dead. Some English departments didnt, at least until recently, allow
dissertations on any but the dead, Staunton said.
Its in the nature of the field, explained
Murphy. One is never quite able to determine the value of the
contemporary voice, and most of the literature thats meaningful is so
only because it had enough of a cultural history to survive, so that by logic
-- and without being a wise-ass -- those who produced it are no longer with us.
Its a given in the culture of academic endeavor.
Its all rather similar to the way the church deals with
saints.
Still, a few living upstarts did steal in under the tent. Mary
Gordon, as already mentioned. Jason Ambrosiano of the University of California
at Riverside read a paper on Blood in the Tracks: Catholic Postmodernism
in Cormac McCarthys The Crossing. And Robert P. Lewis of
Marist College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y., read one on short story writer Andre
Dubus.
Dubus Broken Vessels (1989) and Dancing After
Hours (1996), according to Lewis, make explicit, indeed luminous, his
understanding of the sacramental character of human intimacy and of the
artistic process itself. A rugged, tough-talking man in a wheelchair as a
result of injuries from a hit-and-run accident when he tried to help a
stranger, Dubus has a pervasive, one might say implacable, devotion to the
Eucharist. Writes Lewis, The Eucharist epitomizes for Dubus the human
condition: ineluctably fleshly, ineluctably spiritual, and always imperiled.
... The stories ... unfold Dubus familiar panorama of betrayal, violence,
pain and, even more characteristically, of fear in the face of the awful second
chance proffered by life after devastating youthful mistakes.
Equally living is Berry Morgan, now in her 80s, wheeled
triumphantly into the conference for a live session by her
biographers-to-be Robert Prescott of Bradley University and Fr. Gary Caster of
Notre Dame. One of Morgans distinctions is to have more stories published
in The New Yorker than any writer ever. She read one wry story for a
captivated audience. And Prescott explained: Throughout the body of her
work the most ordinary people and ordinary events are charged with the
mythical. Where others would see only what is plain or mundane, Morgan sees
that is splendid, what is graced. She celebrates the providential.
Theory or real thing?
The short, magic time spent with Morgan raised for the unlearned
journalist another thorny old issue: the propriety of all these papers and
scholars coming between the great writers and their potential readers. Rather
than reading -- or listening -- about Dubus, shouldnt one be
reading Dubus? One form modern minimalism has taken in the field of literature
is the deconstruction and kindred concepts espoused by one Jacques Derrida et
al. The rustic journalist has noticed that deconstruction never gets mentioned
without other rogue words such as postmodernism also creeping into the
conversation or paper.
My perception of many young grad students, said
University of California Riversides Paul Beehler reassuringly, is that
they seem to be very skeptical about theory, particularly about the
vocabulary used by the theorist, because it has created a movement away from
the primary literature (which) can be seen almost as a perversion of the
study.
A good example of such a lack of modesty is theorist Stanley Fish,
who opened a convention in Los Angeles some years ago by saying, in effect,
theres no need to read Shakespeare, you only need to read Fish on
Shakespeare.
This deconstruction, explained Beehler, creates a black hole in
the theorists view of reality: There is no center, there is no
faith, there is no core, and with that comes an emptiness that plays very
easily into nihilism.
Then one begins to realize that literature does matter. The theory
trickles down. It has permeated to popular culture, the sense that there
is no solid grasp of values or why they exist. If everything can be
deconstructed, then nothing has any ultimate value.
Beehler and Murphy agreed that the Little Rock conference is, by
most standards, as wholesome and free from the Fish follies as the study of
literature can get.
But then theres poet Patrick Kavanagh: Who killed James
Joyce? I, said the commentator, I killed James Joyce For my
graduation. What weapon was used To slay mighty Ulysses? The weapon
that was used Was a Harvard thesis. ...
That was Kavanagh, the Irish farmer scribbling. He, too, died and
went on to become an international superstar, even described as the best Irish
poet of the century, in the fullness of time the subject of other theses.
Kevin McEneaney, a poet himself, most recently the author of
Longing (Milestone Press, Little Rock, AR 72204), read a paper on Kavanagh.
His diction is simple but not plain, McEneaney writes, and
the voice of the earth, clay incarnated, is heard both yearning in an
impractical manner and singing on the other side of innocence. This wistful,
self-mocking voice of the earth spoke to all who stood behind the plow: mortal
in consciousness, immortal in ritual.
A paper by Olga M. Ouchakova, presently at the University of
Nebraska at Omaha, was about the renaissance of religion in English literature
earlier this century. Even more interesting is that Ouchakova is Russian, over
on a Fulbright scholarship, her presence a reminder of the bigger world story
that neither politicians nor economists nor artists have yet managed fully to
grasp.
The search for meaning
We are all, East and West and up and down, trying to scribble the
story, all trying to make sense. We seem to be at a moment in human history
when our story can be seen only through that famous glass darkly, if indeed
there is still a story at all. Amid this uncertainty there is a hankering for
absolute answers and surefire truth. But no one knows better than creative
writers that the best most humans can do is dance around in a ring and
suppose.
In his fine book, Quantum Theology (Crossroad, 1997), Fr.
Diarmuid OMurchu writes: Finally, we humans tried to control the
Godhead itself, that divine, mysterious force that fascinates, puzzles and
frightens us. And how did we decide to do it? By inventing religion! ...
Religion is the greatest idolatry of all time.
The reason for our current alienation, OMurchu goes on, is
because that scenario has been played out. It no longer satisfies. So people
have abandoned traditional religion, leaving a vacuum.
The keynote speaker at the Little Rock conference was Desmond
Egan, a poet whose stature, some say, rivals that of Seamus Heaney. Egan read
his poems in an understated, moving way, poems about the agony of Northern
Ireland, about the laughter and love of life.
But before the poetry, Egan, who reads his poetry throughout the
world, talked about that cultural vacuum and our puzzled waiting on a
Beckett-style scorched landscape for something to happen.
He talked of a Russian poet who in the bad old Communist days
would attract as many as 14,000 to a poetry reading, and whose books would sell
a million copies. Now the Wall has come down and Russia returned to the family
of nations -- and no one wants to hear or read the poet. Whatever made people
hang on the words before, desperation or hope or something else -- whatever it
was is gone. A Latvian poet had a similar story -- and these are not people
Egan read about, theyre his friends. He mentions someone in
Czechoslovakia -- ironic ... dont quote me. A
Romanian, ditto, a Hungarian -- full of irony and misgivings and unease
and uncertainty ... not yet ready to write of the archetypes. Egan finds
things no better in France or Japan or England or even his own Ireland. An
attitude of dont include me, minimalism throughout, they
never quite get round to confronting reality.
Maybe, finally, says Egan, the whole country, any country,
has to grow up again for the poets to grow up again.
It does matter. History seems to say so. Artists as a rule
dont run countries or put the final shape on societies. But they smell
change in the air. They smell something odd that might be truth or
authenticity. And grab it by the scruff of the neck. And scribble it down. A
Dublin monument to Charles Stewart Parnell carries the inscription: Let
others write a nations laws if I could write its songs. The word is
in the beginning.
We are between stories, OMurchu writes. We need a new one to
explain our destiny to ourselves. The literati havent sniffed it out yet.
To judge by Egans experience, theyre afraid to grab any reality by
the scruff of the neck.
Perhaps the life of imagination is easier in hard times. In his
1971 Nobel lecture, Alexander Solzhenitsyn recalled those he left behind on the
archipelago of Gulag, the well-known names and the nameless. And
virtually no one managed to return. A whole national literature remained there,
cast into oblivion not only without a grave but without even underclothes,
naked, with a number tagged onto its toe.
But before they went into oblivion, Solzhenitsyn went on, when the
camps allowed the opportunity, there would well up inside us the words
that we should like to cry out to the whole world, if the whole world could
hear one of us. Then it seemed so clear. ...
That was then and this is now and almost nothing seems that
clear.
Perhaps because we have it all too easy. Were treading water
and the water is lovely. Even if it is shallow, no one would want to make
waves.
As we were driven back to the hotel in Murphys big van, the
talk turned to the relatively small crowd that had turned out to hear Egan the
sage or Egan the poet. We had no trouble understanding this. At the end of a
busy day of work or play, people didnt want to get up and go out again,
except maybe to the bar or the ball game, that was different. But this Egan --
who had heard of him? A poet? Who needs it?
Few are likely to remember what was on television that night, but
we in Murphys van agreed that if they had turned out to hear Egan they
would remember for the rest of their lives.
Michael Farrell is editor of NCR.
National Catholic Reporter, May 22,
1998
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