Since reading the wonderful novel “Theo of Golden,” I feel as though I am rediscovering the power of literature. This has moved me to reread sections of Flannery O’Connor’s “Mystery and Manners.” Flannery had wonderful insight into the art of literature. She wrote the following:
“St. Thomas called art ‘reason in making.’ This is a very cold and very beautiful definition, and if it is unpopular today, this is because reason has lost ground among us. As grace and nature have been separated, so imagination and reason have been separated, and this always means an end to art. The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees. For him, to be reasonable is to find, in the object, in the situation, in the sequence, the spirit which makes it itself. This is not an easy or simple thing to do. It is to intrude upon the timeless, and that is only done by the violence of a single-minded respect for the truth. … If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader” (pp. 82-83).
I find Flannery’s view fascinating that the author will experience a greater surprise than the reader.
I am trying to recall an anecdote I heard about the great film director, Fritz Lang, who was being interviewed.
Asked by the interviewer why he used a particular camera angle at one point in one of his films, Lang confessed that he found it impossible to explain why he chose that angle at that moment. He just knew, as he was creating the film, that the camera angle should be used at that moment. Even great artists cannot explain completely the process of creating art.
Writing this column about literature has led me to stroll down memory lane. I am greatly in debt to novelists whose work I have read. I can date exactly when I became interested in reading novels, especially what I eventually came to call “Catholic novels,” an interest that has lasted more than 75 years. In my senior year at Xavier High School in Manhattan, Father Vincent Taylor, SJ, the English teacher, had the entire class read Graham Greene’s “Brighton Rock.” I had never heard of the novel or its author, but reading it eventually led me to read all the “Catholic novels” I could find. I read all of Greene’s novels, some several times, and also the novels of Evelyn Waugh, George Bernanos, Francois Mauriac, Edwin O’Connor, Ron Hansen, Myles Connolly, Muriel Spark, Morris West, Shisaku Endo, William Peter Blatty, Ralph McInerny, A.J.Cronin, Piers Paul Read, Mark Salzman, Alice McDermott, Flannery O’Connor, J.F. Powers and Walker Percy about whom I eventually wrote a book. My interest in “Catholic novels” led me to give a seminar on it at St. John’s University a few years ago. My impression was that before taking the seminar, even the seminarians had never heard the term “Catholic novel,” which I found unfortunate. I also have 50 lectures on Catholic novels on YouTube; search for “Fr Robert Lauder” to find my landing page.
Why would someone write a novel? I think the novelist wants to influence the way readers live. I have never even tried to write a novel, but I think a novelist thinks they see something important about human beings and tries to create a story about that insight. I have come to believe not only that novels can influence us deeply, but also that the novelist hopes to influence the reader. Great novels tell us something important about the mystery of the human person, and they do that not in the way a textbook in philosophy might do it. Novelists try to influence through a story. In one of her essays, O’Connor comments on author Joseph Conrad’s view of writing fiction. She points out that Conrad’s aim as a fiction writer was to render the highest possible justice to the visible universe. Pointing out that for Conrad reality was not coextensive with the visible, she then quotes the following words of Conrad about being a novelist:
“My ask, which I am trying to achieve, is by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel, it is, before all, to make you see. That, and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there, according to your desires, encouragement, consolation, fear, charm, all you demand and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask” (p. 80).
What a beautiful view of the vocation of the novelist.
The next time I celebrate a Eucharist, I am going to offer it for all those novelists who have been such a wonderful gift in my life.
Father Lauder is a philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica. His new book, “The Cosmic Love Story: God and Us,” is available on Amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.