Brian Sudlow, author of a new book examining the rise of the so-called “Catholic literary revival” in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, has given an interview to Emily Stimpson in which he discusses the circumstances that launched an entire generation of authors on both sides of the English Channel, from Gerard Manley Hopkins, G. K. Chesterton, and Robert Hugh Benson to Paul Claudel and Charles Péguy. In Sudlow’s words:
The Catholicism of many writers was inflected by the attempt to counter secular trends. In a period when the divinity of Christ was increasingly questioned in secular circles, the doctrine of the Incarnation was central to the thinking of Charles Péguy and indeed Chesterton. Writers like novelist J. K. Huysmans and Robert Hugh Benson wrote eloquently about the miracles that took place at Lourdes, which were a living sign of the possibility of divine communion in a world turning in on itself.
The doctrine of vicarious suffering — by which our own suffering can help earn graces for others — deserves special mention. It inspired both French and English Catholic writers (again Huysmans and Benson in particular) and emerges as arguably the definitive rebuttal of secularism, which replaces salvation with attempts simply to build a better world. Ideologies of progress implicitly deny the Christian value of suffering; vicarious suffering affirms not only that good can come from evil but that we are all responsible for each other.
A question which naturally arises when reading something like this is, of course, whether the experiment can be repeated–or, more pointedly, “where are today’s great Catholic authors?” While the interview ends with a scowl at changes in the liturgy (and since cultus is the basis of culture, it is no use denying the element of truth here, particularly given the proliferation of clerics who don’t follow the reformed rubrics so much as their own personal style). But a significant part of the explanation must also lay at the foot of history and the occasional confluence of trends that gifts certain eras with not one or two but entire bunches of geniuses. In the case of Catholic literature, the highly unique “cultural climate in both countries,” which Sudlow goes on to characterize as “one of decadence”–a period that saw the long, painful demise of the old order and eventually exploded in 1914–was also an atmosphere whose urgency was harder to replicate in the decades of bourgeois prosperity that followed the Second World War.
Another, perhaps related explanation should be sought in the fact that many of the authors mentioned (particularly British Catholics) had a minority experience, and so their writing is infused with a simultaneous longing to indict the majority and move into it. Even in France, it is worth noting, the Church was facing serious internal and external threats. By that standard, then, perhaps we are closer to a new birth of Catholic literary talent than many would imagine.
March 29th, 2012 | 3:11 pm
That all seems likely, but I think it’s also worth saying that publishing and consumption is different today. There may be great Catholic authors out there right now, but they’ll never get published, and if they were to be published no one would buy their books.
Compare that to the growing and grudgingly complied with market in Christian fiction — there has been a mass literary resurgence in response to modern misery, but it’s been a Protestant one, and a populist one. I’m not sure this has been a good thing for Reformed thinking, since being accepted by big centralized publishers means you have to get in bed with them, and that’s not necessarily going to be good in the long run.
March 29th, 2012 | 5:15 pm
Forget about Catholic writers. Where are the great writers (of imaginative prose) anymore? I’d say the last two books of fiction in English that were really remarkable feats of imagination and writing were Nabokov’s Ada (’69) and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (’73). In French, Georges Perec’s great Life, A User’s Manual (La vie mode d’emploi) dates from the same period. Looking at the Modern Library list of 100 20th-Century books in English (which is rather conservative, omitting Beckett and Pynchon) I count maybe 3 or 4 published after 1970, and they aren’t very distinguished IMHO. I fear the novel may now really be a dead art form, like opera, for Catholics and others alike.
March 29th, 2012 | 8:35 pm
Carlos Eire’s memoir “Waiting for Snow in Havana” won the 2003 National Book Award. It’s a beautiful and thoroughly Catholic book. Check it out.
March 30th, 2012 | 9:58 am
That all seems likely, but I think it’s also worth saying that publishing and consumption is different today. There may be great Catholic authors out there right now, but they’ll never get published, and if they were to be published no one would buy their books.
Marie,
If you check Amazon, Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories is still in the top 100 in its category (#51 in Short Stories). I really find it difficult to imagine there are great but unpublished Catholic writers out there. Even if publishers would not publish them (which I find impossible to believe), there is always self-publishing. If there are any great Catholic novels out there waiting to be published, I urge their authors to contact me and I will see to it that their work makes it into print one way or another.
I think HT is partly correct. Who are the great “classifiable” (but non-Catholic) authors of today? For example, is there a Southern writer who compares with Faulkner?
I think one issue is not that Catholics are an oppressed minority whose great novels must be kept out of print, but rather that Catholics are almost totally assimilated. I don’t know how to find any statistics, but I would bet that there are many successful novelists writing today who happen to be Catholic. But I doubt that they want to write “Catholic novels.”
March 31st, 2012 | 7:00 pm
[...] Where Are Today’s Great Catholic Authors? – Matthew Cantirino, First Thngs/Frst Thghts [...]
March 31st, 2012 | 8:30 pm
I’m working on it. I hope you’ll all buy my novel when I’m done! :D
March 31st, 2012 | 11:13 pm
Consider the state of the liturgy in the 19th and 20th centuries. Compare that grandeur and reverence to the dead and dull masses we have now, and a hierarchy that wants more to belong to the world than present the truth. There is no real symbolism or austerity in the mass anymore. No proper respect for mystery or the cosmic implications of worship. Catholicism is no longer a mystery, it’s an accessory.
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