Adult Protestant Irony vs. Childlike Catholic Hope:
Can We Go Home Again?
A Key to Critical Responses to Popular Fiction
by Ingrid Shafer
University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma
In this essay I intend to examine two largely unacknowledged obstacles to a fruitful dialogue of popular fiction and academic criticism: contemporary incarnations, sometimes in deep cover, of patriarchal misogynism and Calvinist puritanism. In addition, I shall point to a rich and largely neglected source of critical judgment: thoughtful non-academic readers who can provide an appropriate response precisely because they are not encumbered with the preconceived notions of university criticism.
High-culture dismissal of popular culture is a symptom of the tendency of Western prophets and philosophers to categorize, judge, impose rigid standards, exclude, and find fault. Western Academics are uncomfortable with ambiguity and generally think in terms of either/or rather than both-and. While this mind set affects popular literature by largely excluding it from the entire critical process as unworthy of consideration, it permeates all aspects of occidental scholarship. Michael Gallagher comments on this East-West divergence. In his introduction to Shusako Endo's The Sea and Poison he notes that "Japanese novelists are unfortunate, I think, in that there are too few critics of insight and integrity to ride herd upon them" (7). Gallagher operates from within a tradition which passes from the Old Testament prophets and gad fly Socrates through Augustine and Calvin and Descartes to Nietzsche's post-Enlightenment hermeneutics of suspicion and postmodern deconstruction. He takes it for granted that criticism means CRITICISM, not empathetic understanding but fault-finding, a call (religious or secular) to repentance. Within the context of discussing different approaches used by historians of religion, Wendy Doniger (at the time Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty) notes that Indian aesthetic theory distinguishes between two kinds of legitimate critics, the accomplished empathetic reader who "shares the heart of the person with whom he sympathizes" and the narrow-minded scholar who "wants to live entirely in the head and never in the heart" (12). A few pages later she points out that in the West, negative criticism is considered "more wissenschaftlich than praise in all academic disciplines, . . .. Since the Enlightenment, hatred . . . has been a more respectable scholarly emotion than love, . . .." (18). In fact, the West has a dual critical tradition as well, albeit one clearly weighted in favor of the adversarial, agonistic, tragic, cynical. Still, there exists a strong secondary non-adversarial paradigm which favors the empathetic, comic, romantic.
The Western intellectual tradition interweaves a Greco-Roman strand with a Judeo-Christian strand. The former stresses moderation, rationality, humanistic learning, objectivity, as well as the superiority of men over women and spirit over matter. The latter separated into two further branches, the dominant "right-handed" ascetic-spiritual-judgmental archetypally masculine branch of the Church Fathers and the subordinate "left-handed" humane-earthy-optimistic archetypally feminine branch of the people. The Fathers envisioned God as primarily Ruler/Judge, the material world as evil, and people as fallen creatures in need of harsh discipline and stern guidance. The people envisioned God as loving Parent, the material world as neutral and potentially sacramental, and themselves as fallible but also blessed and capable of doing good. They readily baptized and absorbed pagan elements, composed and enjoyed the songs of troubadours and bards, joined spiritual and erotic love, delighted in grail quest tales, and managed to sneak many of their beliefs into official teachings through the back door. In particular, they venerated the ancient Great Mother in her Christian incarnation as the Virgin who would protect them from Yahweh's wrath.1
In Western Europe the various branches remained braided in vibrant (if occasionally belligerent) tension under the single Catholic umbrella until the 16th century. After the Reformation they separated. Protestants (particularly Calvinists) tended to adopt the fault-finding mode which focuses on original sin and human depravity--emphasizing divine transcendence. Members of the Catholic hierarchy, popes and bishops, generally also identified with the authoritarian fault-finding mode. On the other hand, parish priests and most lay people continued to prefer the compassionate mode--emphasizing divine immanence. Elite ideas were primarily formed by combining the Greco-Roman strand with some aspects of the acerbic Judeo-Christian branch. Since the guardians of taste are generally members of the intellectual elite, our concepts of both "serious" literature and the "classics" are inextricably intertwined with Greco-Roman antiquity and the pessimistic branch of the Judeo-Christian tradition (including its heresy: Marxism). Hence, it is not surprising that stories are rarely considered first-rate or given the status of a classic unless they reflect a tragic or ironic vision which is at odds with popular Catholic hopefulness and its "comedies of grace," but oddly in tune with the contemporary high culture sense of cosmic absurdity.2
"Agon, as a cultural concept," notes self-proclaimed neo-Gnostic elitist Harold Bloom in Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism, "returns us via Freud, Nietzsche and Burckhardt, to the Greeks, and ultimately to Plato's contest with Homer" (51). Bloom interprets Western intellectual history in terms of an Oedipal conflict between generations of strong, isolated individuals, males without common vocabulary, establishing themselves through deliberate misreadings, parricides forever seeking to usurp their father's thrones. Bloom's poet or critic becomes most fully himself in the act of "falling out of love" rather than "falling in love, be it textual or sexual" (50; emphases mine).
It is not necessary to ascend to the heights of Harold Bloom's enigmatic contemporary gnosis to find a stereotypically masculine rejection of popular modes. We need only turn to Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism. After chiding popular art for romantic escapism instead of "cynical spectatorship" (95) Lasch notes that "Emma Bovary, prototypical consumer of mass culture, still dreams" (95). In fact, Lasch's "cynical spectatorship" with its implied Freudian pessimism concerning human nature, its rejection of genuine human intimacy, and its yearning for patriarchal authoritarianism seems less a solution to the modern dilemma than a form of surrender or even part of the very problem it seeks to combat. Proponents of "cynical spectatorship" tend to forget that after legitimately exposing the inauthenticity of modern attempts to re-capture the primal innocence of Ricoeur's first naiveté (inter alia Symbolism 351), their stance has outlived its purpose, and the time has come for them to change lest they become the escapists. An empathetic study of the stories average readers buy and devour may in fact tell critics a great deal about contemporary society and may help bridge the chasm between popular and high culture. After all, Ricoeur's second naiveté (inter alia Symbolism 352-357) parallels Northrop Frye's vision of the present as a dawning of a new age, characterized by "return" to a form of metaphorical language of primitive communities (Code 16). Frye has faith in the intuitive wisdom of the people; he insists that the much-maligned romance is the fecund source for ever new variations of literary forms, particularly during transitional periods of instability when the possibilities of the elite conventions have been exhausted and new forms are about to be born (Scripture 29).
Bard McNulty agrees with Frye. After associating the current tendency to return to myth and romance with renewed faith that the universe manifests more order than chaos (178). To illustrate his argument, McNulty refers to John Gardner's Nickel Mountain, the tender pastoral tale of middle aged, grossly obese Henry Soames who is "reborn" through the love of sixteen year old Callie. "The explicit theme of rebirth is the reverse of ironic, it points, instead, toward the archetypes of conquest over death in myth and romance" (180). Gardner's novel, McNulty notes, "may be the product of an emerging nonironic mode developed out of the ironic tradition" (180). McNulty picked an intriguing prototype, since Nickel Mountain is the work of a critic-poet who deliberately sought to illustrate his iconoclastic literary theories in his poems and stories. Gardner sums up his own theory in a deceptively slim but powerful volume, Moral Fiction, his gauntlet thrown at the "naysayers." Gardner describes the true artist as "a passionate, easily tempted explorer who intends to get home again, like Odysseus" (204). He affects readers precisely because he cares about them and his characters (97), and his effect on them is going to be the greater "the more intensely the artist imagines his dream world, the more fully he surrenders to it, the more passionate his devotion to capturing it" (203).
Ironically, if we are to succeed in studying popular literature in a non-adversarial way then we must use fault-finding criticism against itself and challenge the entire Western critical tradition as too confrontational, agonistic, and cold. The time has come for critics to stop treating writers like Gallagher's above mentioned cows to be corralled with the verbal equivalents of lasso, whip, or cattle prod. There is no reason why critic and author should be friends in the best sense of the term, each seeking to help the other reach her or his potential. "Great art," according to Gardner, "celebrates life's potential, offering a vision unmistakably and unsentimentally rooted in love" (83). He goes on:
"Love" is of course another one of those embarrassing words, perhaps a word even more embarrassing than "morality," but it's a word no aesthetician ought carelessly to drop from his vocabulary. Misuses as it may be by pornographers and the makers of greeting-cards, it has, nonetheless, a firm, hard-headed sense that names the single quality without which true art cannot exist. . . . Without love we get the ice-cold intellectual style of most academics or the worst fiction in the New Yorker. (83-84)
Gardner neatly distinguished between lovers and cutters, the embrace and the scalpel, Desdemona and Iago, passion and frigidity. He also places himself firmly in the emotional, "soft," romantic tradition which has been consistently under attack by academic critics.
It is not coincidental that Gardner's polarities of warm unconditional acceptance and cold judgmental rejection parallel the two modes of religious imagination whose battle and interplay constitute the cultural matrix of the West, the Platonic-Augustinian-dialectical-Protestant (leading to such as Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth) and the Aristotelian-Thomistic-analogical-Catholic (leading to such as Teilhard de Chardin, Karl Rahner, and David Tracy).3 Applying the Protestant/Catholic paradigm we can classify people into those who tend to reject, criticize, and reform versus those who tend to adopt, adapt, and absorb; those who focus on divine transcendence versus those who focus on divine immanence; those who see the world fractured by original sin, versus those who see the world connected by original blessing; those for whom God is primarily a distant if righteous Father/King/Judge versus those for whom God is primarily a close and caring Father/Mother/Friend/Lover.4
In a fascinating little essay written almost seventy years ago, George Santayana makes the same point when he describes Catholics and Protestants leaving church through metaphoric space: "When Catholics leave the church," he writes, "they do so by the south door, into the glare of the market-place, where their eye is at once attracted by the wares displayed in the booths, by the flower-stalls with their bright awnings, by the fountain with its baroque Tritons blowing the spray into the air, and the children laughing and playing round it, by the concourse of townspeople and strangers, . . .." Protestants, on the other hand "leave the church by the north door, into the damp solitude of a green churchyard, amid yews and weeping willows and overgrown grounds and fallen illegible gravestones. They feel a terrible chill; the few weedy flowers that may struggle through that long grass do not console them; it was far brighter and warmer and more decent inside" (33).
Catholic interpretive spectacles are tinted with archetypally feminine romantic hues; Protestant interpretive spectacles are tinted with archetypally masculine ironic hues. Hence it is not surprising that, at least in this country (with its puritanical roots), the denunciation of popular literature (and popular culture in general) corresponds to the persistent nativist myth of the intellectual inferiority of Catholics. In his much cited study, Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler develops precisely this paradigm when he traces the emergence of what he considers trashy best-sellers--largely manufactured for and by scribbling women (of either gender)--to the decline of harshly patriarchal Calvinism and the re-emergence of pagan Great Mother worship that, Fiedler argues, had cunningly survived in Catholicism masquerading as Christianity ever since ancient times.
Consequently, Catholic popular literature exhibits an especially high concentration of those characteristics (toxic, innocuous, or salubrious, depending on the interpreter's worldview) which we associate with all popular literature (and culture).5 A discussion of critical assessment of Catholic popular literature can, therefore, serve as a lens to bring into sharp focus and magnify both characteristics of and attitudes toward popular literature as such. Serendipitously, precisely such a study was published while I was researching this essay. It provides my test case. Since it is clearly an exercise in "Fiedlerian criticism" I shall deal with Fiedler first. Several colleagues with whom I discussed my thesis accused me of unjustly maligning a major figure in American literary theory. Hence, I'll let Fiedler speak for himself.
Fiedler laments the passing of the "traditional distinction of class" and describes the genesis of the novel, an inferior "hybrid form" (40) spawned by and for the new urban "mass public"--for whom the bible should have sufficed but didn't--(41), a group beyond the traditional "gentlemanly value system" (41), poorly educated, uncomfortable with "masculine wit," wishing to consume sentimental stories of love and marriage in the boudoir, in short a "predominantly female audience" (42). He objects to the modern assault on "aristocratic literature" by providing an "illusion of reading" leading to such further decline as magazines, comic books, movies, and television, "mass-produced commodities to be bought or rented in the market place like other goods" (43).
All of these debasements, according to Fiedler, are somehow traceable to "the secret religion of the bourgeoisie in which tears are considered a truer service of God than prayers, the Pure Young Girl replaces Christ as the savior, [and] marriage becomes the equivalent of bliss eternal" (45), in short, the "Sentimental Love Religion." He calls the conventions of that "religion" precursors to "our own latter-day romantic myths, which persist unexamined and only-half-recognized in ladies' magazines" (46) and "certain" books "which pretend to be novels but are in fact secret scriptures" (46). "Best-sellers," Fiedler tells us, "are by and large holy books, and the age of the best-seller is an age unable to confess its true religion except in terms of commodity fiction" (46). He goes on, "The belief in love between a man and a woman as the supreme happiness is neither a classical concept, nor a Christian one, . . . and one would have thought that the coming of Christianity (with its basic view of woman as temptress) would have discouraged rather than fostered such sentimental idolatry" (47).
Continuing his use of sexually charged language, Fiedler identifies the source of this false Sentimental Love Religion as the "inruption of the female principle into a patriarchal world, a revenge of the (officially rejected) Great Mother. Certainly in each, there is a symbolic installation of Woman . . . in positions of reverence and power quite out of accord with her actual status--or her theoretical place according to Christian orthodoxy" (47). In the grand tradition of such notorious woman haters as Fathers Ambrose, Chrysostom, and Jerome, Fiedler reminds us that in primitive Old Testament Judaism and Christianity the great Mother was considered abomination, persisting only "as the Bride of Darkness, the flesh of the sow, the whore of Babylon; and even Mother eve is conceived of as primarily the source through which evil entered the world" (48).
Fiedler thunders: "Between the elevation of the lady to a kind of Godhead and the Christian teaching that such an adulation is idolatry or worse there can be no compromise" (52), even if modern Christian apologists, such as Charles Williams, try illegitimately to "redeem in mystical terms the identification of love of woman and love of God" (53), seeking to equate amor and caritas. Fiedler cites (with approval) Capellanus' warning that "No man through any good deeds can please God so long as he serves in the service of love" (53) and calls it the "irreconcilable Christian answer" to the troubadour Bernard de Ventadour's "No man is worth anything without love" (53). Fiedler argument is internally consistent, and, given his definition of Christianity, his conclusion follows--Catholicism is not Christianity at all but a particularly abominable form of Mediterranean paganism in disguise:
In the Catholic south of Europe, the conflict of maternal and paternal, of lust and order, has never been resolved . . .. The nominal victory has been awarded God the father, but he remains invisible, while everywhere the Virgin with the Babe in her lap looks complacently down. The orthodox Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost has yielded in art and the popular imagination to the baroque trinity, derived ultimately from Venus, Vulcan, and Cupid, and still, despite the new names of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, what it always was: an archetypal representation of cuckold, mother, and son, the last degradation of fatherhood. (54)
In the name of historical accuracy, Fiedler cannot hold Catholics directly responsible for inventing the novel genre. But he does the next best thing; he traces the origin of the novel to the Northern European rejection of the Virgin and the "men [who] sought with special urgency to smuggle the mother principle back into their cultures . . . to satisfy the secret hunger of the puritanical bourgeoisie, which demanded bootlegged madonnas; it was the function of the early novel to supply them" (56). The sentimental popular novel could never have taken root if it had not been for the attack on the "old church" toward the end of the eighteenth century which destroyed "the father-centered, ascetic, intellectual faith upon which America had been founded," reducing it to "secularized feelings of guilt" (78).
The misogynist diatribe continues: "The American had finally denied too many fathers to survive except as the fatherless man. The fatherland abandoned, the Pope rejected, the bishops denied, the king overthrown--only the mother remained as symbol of an authority that was one with love" (78). Apparently Fiedler's contempt of women and admiration for masculine modes of monarchy exceeds his disdain for Catholicism--and he objects to the American tendency of challenging the hierarchy. No wonder America became "the only country in which a major religious denomination was founded [horror of horrors!] by a woman" (79)! In this country, according to Fiedler, "the novel is both beneficiary and cause of this symbolic shift of allegiance. Its salvationist myths meet head-on the older Pauline notions of the female as tempter [sic] and marriage as a necessary evil" (79). With obvious approval Fiedler adds that "In the strongholds of Calvinism it was taught that copulation of the husband and wife on the Lord's day is especially sinful, which is to say that the rite of marriage does not transform the sexual act into a sacramental one" (79).
Using the game plan of a simplified cartoon Calvinist Puritanism, supplemented by elements of Freudian psychology and Nietzschean philosophy, Fiedler constructs a selfcontained dualistic paradigm of reality as either/or battle between reason and emotion, man and woman, nobility and commoners, law and love. According to this standard, the Sentimental Love Religion is blasphemous precisely because it is grounded in what he considers the feminine principle of love and "challenges the fundamental Calvinist belief in natural depravity; for it teaches that women, woman in general and some women in particular, are absolutely pure; and there merely human purity can do Christ's work in the world: redeem corrupted souls from sin" (80). Fiedler continues:
One has only to imagine the incredulity of St. Paul or Augustine, Calvin or Cotton Mather before such a statement to realize how revolutionary it is in its implications. Any cynical phrase taken at random out of Rabelais is far closer to orthodox opinion on the subject: When I say womankind, I speak of a sex so frail, so variable, so changeable, so futile, inconstant and imperfect, that in my opinion, Nature . . . did in a manner . . . stray exceedingly from the excellence of providential judgment by which she had created and formed all other things, when she built, framed and made up the woman." (80)
Thus it is not surprising that Fiedler blames 19th century women authors for degrading literature with their novels: "Neither inwardness nor character, however, interested the scribbling ladies at all. They sought, however unconsciously, the mythical beneath the psychological--and rendered the myth in sub-literary or pre-literary form, degraded it to the stereotype" (84), allowed to pursue their offensive scribblings because the "harsh, Puritan God" had been deposed in favor of the "eyes of a benevolent maker" (87).
The final effect of the kidnaping of the sentimental form and fable by women writers in a relatively classless society was to define in America from the very beginning an anti-literature: bourgeois, timid, not quite literate--and to identify this ersatz- art with the values and aspirations of women. . . . Against this audience and in competition with the writing which satisfied it, our best fictionists from Charles Brockden Brown to Edgar Allan Poe to Hawthorne and Melville have felt it necessary to struggle for their integrity and their livelihoods. . . . For better or for worse, the best-seller was invented in America (the flagrantly bad best-seller) before the serious successful novel. (92-93)
The first edition of Fiedler's study was published in 1959. In his preface to the second edition (1966) Fiedler notes with obvious self-satisfaction: ". . . I still believe what it says. . . . Like others, I have now grown so used to what was new and daring in its theses once, that I am sometimes annoyed at how hard it presses or how pleased it seems with its own insights. 'But we all accept these contentions,' I am tempted to cry. 'This is where we now begin'"(7). While the "all" is obviously hyperbole, the very fact that the Fiedler volume went through two editions and numerous printings indicates its ubiquitous presence in academic libraries and in the brains of professors of literature. In addition, it has just established its continued potency by siring offspring.
Earlier this year (1992) a scholar called Love and Death a landmark study (Gandolfo 60), and devoted an entire new book to perpetuating its assumptions, applying the Fiedler paradigm to (of all things!) the "New Catholic Fiction in America." Even more ironically, this scholar is not only a woman but did her research in the community of a major center of Catholic learning, the University of Notre Dame. In Testing the Faith, Anita Gandolfo repackages Fiedler's "Sentimental Love Religion" as "Sentimental Love Ethic" and links it with what she considers a post-Vatican Two decline of institutional Catholicism (just as Fiedler had considered his category a symptom of the decline of Puritanism [79]). She appears to consider this decline as negative at least part of the time (when she does not call for a total rejection of the Church as altogether meaningless). Fiedler's (strangle)hold is so durable that critics buy into his denouncement of popular culture without taking note of his assault on women, marriage, heterosexuality, democracy, and Catholicism. I suspect that Fiedler's continued appeal is a function of the extent to which his work reflects and reinforces the tacit master myth of American elite culture.
In her dependence on Fiedler, Anita Gandolfo leaves herself open to a charge of duplicity and inconsistency. Unlike Fiedler who clearly announces his hypothesis that cultural decline is rooted in the softening of Protestant rigor and erosion of aristocratic masculine values by middle-class feminine sentimentality, Gandolfo introduces herself as a woman with at least some feminist sensitivity who claims to be genuinely concerned with the present state of the American Catholic church as reflected in popular fiction. Yet she uses as her standard a set of assumptions specifically developed to belittle women, disparage marriage, dismiss popular literature, and attack the Catholic imagination. Gandolfo does not tell us whether her viewpoint is existentially Catholic or ex-Catholic; her name, topic, and approach, however, indicate personal affiliation and unresolved conflicts with Catholic culture.
While Gandolfo does not explicitly identify herself as such, her ideological stance--except for her reliance on Fiedler--is clearly feminist. She discusses a total of 118 works. Twenty-six are by women; 92 are by men. She argues that 92% (24 of 26) of the women-works portray exemplary values for the Church in contrast to only 27% (25 of 92) of the books written by men. In addition ALL the books she considers worst are written by men (primarily Andrew Greeley, guilty of "Passionate Intensity" and the "Sentimental Love Ethic," followed by William Kienzle and Ralph McInenry) and all but one the best books are written by women (Mary Gordon, Valerie Sayers, Jeanne Schinto and so forth). Her favorite male author in the study is William Flythe with his tales of "unhealthy relationships nurtured in the soil of religion" (199). Gandolfo also makes several gratuitous comments about Greeley's supposed distaste for feminists (cf. 60, 63)--without uttering the tiniest objection to Fiedler's glaring misogynism. Hence, she obviously uses Fiedler selectively, pulling his patriarchal criticism from its context and using it against male authors, an approach for which Fiedler himself prepared the ground by a comment concerning the "sentimental, quasi-literate, female audience (female in sensibility whatever the nominal sex of the readers who composed it)" of popular novels (93).
Fiedler and Gandolfo get entangled in vicious circles of begging the question; they presuppose that which they wish to establish. In addition, they disregard evidence which might discredit their premisses. In their tightly structured analogical cosmos it is morally good for adults to be mature and morally wrong for them to be immature. Hence they pounce on instances of works pandering to or fostering immaturity among readers. Genuine literature is written for and by adults. Gandolfo cites Mary Daly to warn us to shed the no longer possible stance of uncritical childishness--kin to Paul Ricoeur's first or "primitive naiveté" (Symbolism 351). Daly defines "'prophetic knowing'" as "a Fall from false innocence into a new kind of adulthood. Unlike the old adulthood that requires the arresting of growth, this demands a growing that is continuing, never completed" (Beyond God 3). While Daly's prophetic knowing sounds much like Ricoeur's "second naiveté" (inter alia Symbolism 352-357) it lacks Ricoeur's allusion to child-like purity and innocence which is inextricably woven into the connotation of the term "naiveté." Gandolfo fails to differentiate between the immaturity of "childish" and the authenticity of "child-like." In the process Gandolfo, Fiedler, and most contemporary academic critics simply deny the very possibility of shucking ponderous adult cynicism and returning (on a higher level!) to the love, trust, and wonder of childhood, of going home.
This is what John Gardner means when he writes: "We all as children feel we are a certain kind of person, and it's a good person . . .. We get a very clear sense in childhood of who that person is. Then, in the process of life, we betray that person, over and over, until we begin to believe that we are not that person--although we are. . . . And I think that fiction and religion and education ought to be in the business of keeping the kid alive, keeping that noble self alive . . . " ("Literary" 36). Acceptance versus rejection of the child within is one of the points of difference between critics empathetic to romantic modes of literature and critics hostile to romantic modes of literature.
Interestingly, the invitation to become young again is implied in Roland Barthes's objections to canon-bound "university criticism" coupled with his call for the kind of spontaneity which seeks primarily the opportunities a text offers to writers and audience to create new meanings and hence new possibilities for their interdependent growth. Wayne Booth also sees a connection between an obsession with the "adult" reader and "serious" (non-moral) criticism in general. In the context of remarks concerning the moral effects of reading being more readily discernible in work that "unlike Ulysses show heroes and heroines facing clear dilemmas and making admirable or lamentable choices" he adds, in parentheses: "Occasionally, if I ask the question of a professional critic or scholar, the answer is that fictions don't change people's lives, at least not if they are adult readers" (278).
In her above mentioned analysis of recent Catholic fiction, Anita Gandolfo presents herself as John Gardner's antipode. She uses Jeanne Schinto's short story, "Before Sewing One Must Cut," as a metaphorical frame for her study. Schinto's tale concerns a nameless 1960s teenager who has to deal with her father's death an disillusionment with the church. The young woman finds a letter fragment which belongs to one of the priests in the rectory where she works as receptionist. Toward the end of her book, Gandolfo cites the following passage: "'I pray you will trust your instincts and lean into this. That you will permit it to cut you, heal you, and cut you again. That you will stare at it into its own center. And that you will accept the faith that you will find there'(55)" (166). Gandolfo explains:
Growth involves pain, Schinto's narrator learns. In this story of the inevitability of loss in the process of life development, disillusionment with the Church becomes a component in the large human experience of loss of innocence. As the narrator lost a parent, she also loses the model of Church-as-parent, a loss that, Schinto indicates, is not hers alone. (166)
This frigid emphasis on the salutary nature of cynicism becomes especially important in light of Gandolfo's extreme animosity toward what she calls "Fiction of Passionate Intensity" and "Sentimental Love Ethic," two ideological cardinal sins which she interprets as subversive of literature, offenses both against the Church and real life's dark center. She introduces what she considers those errors in a discussion of William Michefelder's pre-conciliar Be Not Angry, severely censuring what she calls the author's "romanticized anti-intellectualism that sees life in terms of absolutes" (49). Paradoxically, what she calls absolutes is embodied in the deathbed comments of Monsignor Murchie to a clerical legalist concerning his decision to give his blessing to the marriage of one of his priests, ". . . Creed, Father, is not compassion. Nor is canon the same thing as charity" (Gandolfo 49).
To an objective observer it seems clear that in this encounter it is the legalist who can't let go of the absolutes while the compassionate monsignor has progressed beyond rigid legal proscription to an understanding of the Father's unconditional love Jesus came to share in such parables as the story of the runaway son and the crazy vineyard owner. This, however, is not the way Gandolfo interprets the passage. She even castigates reviewers of Be Not Angry for their comments that the book "earnestly pleads that human love is a work of God as surely as the priestly vocation" (Times) and "was passionately committed to belief in a power greater than the disciplines of a church or the practices of a faith" (Saturday Review) (Gandolfo 50). For Gandolfo, Schinto's dark image of human orphans in a meaningless cosmos is somehow linked to the proper way of creating Catholic fiction of literary merit. In a cosmic void the monsignor's simple act of love turns into sentimental fluff.
I do not disagree with the significance of Schinto's vision. The "dark night of the soul" is every bit as valid as the via positiva. I object to having it presented as the only, or at the very least, the more fully Catholic alternative. In addition, to strip Christianity of compassion, empathy, and love is to tear out its living heart. Nothing remains but the brittle institutional shell, the ossified exoskeleton.
Gandolfo's reading of Greeley seems largely projection, rooted in her tacit assumptions, the kind David Bleich sees in all readers. She contrasts what she calls Greeley's phony, sentimental novels of passionate intensity and sentimental love ethic with the literary works about genuine pilgrims, those engaged in the "Spiritual Quest." She notes:
Especially pertinent to this study of fiction is Gilligan's methodology, an empirical observation of women's voices, their narratives of personal experience. For, as Gilligan point out, "the way people talk about their lives is of significance, . . . the language they use and the connections they make reveal the world that they see and in which they act"(8). (Gandolfo 163)
Gandolfo follows Gilligan in distinguishing male and female perspectives in terms of the masculine emphasis on morality of rights, emphasizing separation, and a feminine morality of responsibility which stresses relationship. Since she cannot fault Greeley for presenting heroic loners, she does the next best thing: she simply asserts without proof that Susan Cayhill's Earth Angels and Margaret Wander Bonnano's Ember Days depict criticism of the hierarchical Church in a far more nuanced manner than the fiction of passionate intensity (184), adding (with obvious approval) that women writers such as Kathleen Lawrence and Caryl Rivers consider "their Catholic past as irrevocably 'gone' and of little interest to the contemporary woman" (164). Apparently, women have a right to be critical of the hierarchy but priests don't.
According to Gandolfo important writers are those who have the courage to confront the limitations of American Catholicism by depicting their characters "in the process of personal growth encountering a contemporary Church bereft of meaning" (190). For Gandolfo, evidently, personal growth is simply irreconcilable with discovering meaning in the Church, just as most academic critics assess the literary quality of a given work in terms of its nihilistic cynicism, or at least existential despair.
By dismissing the very possibility of not finding the contemporary Church (or life as a whole) bereft of meaning, Gandolfo denies people the right to transcend the stage of loss of meaning to discover that they can, after all, come home (a point eloquently made by T.S. Eliot). To respond to Gandolfo and offer an example of the way actual readers creatively interact with popular fiction I am going cite extensively from a woman who wrote to Andrew Greeley, and whose life story represents a powerful instance of both "Spiritual Quest" and concern with the Church "As We are Now," Gandolfo's final two chapter headings. If we accept Gilligan's argument that "the way people talk about their lives is of significance," we must allow this woman to speak. If we are genuinely interested in the way REAL readers respond to popular, we should listen.
In forewords and afterwords, on Good Morning America and Larry King Live, in articles and books, Andrew Greeley has insisted that he writes theological "comedies of grace" intended to help people discover God in the world, especially in and through their communities--families, spouses and lovers. After citing D.H. Lawrence's admonition to trust the tale rather than the teller, Gandolfo proceeds to read Greeley through Fiedler's glasses, and obviously finds no evidence that the books are in fact what their author claims. Instead, she argues, "Greeley's sexual preoccupations owe less to the Christian tradition than to the Marquis de Sade. For, like de Sade, Greeley's theology of sex is simply a reversal of traditional proscriptions, a reaction to a repressive past through the creation of a world in which 'whatever has been suspect, outcast, and denied is postulated as the source of good.' There are indeed theological ramifications to Greeley's fiction, but not the ones he blithely proposes" (60). She accuses Greeley of allying religion with the baser human instincts, adding "For inspite of the theological purposes that Greeley projects into his fiction, the actual sexual images in these novels reflect a consistent objectification of the female, a practice characteristic of pornography" (60). (Ironically, Gandolfo doesn't bother to point out that Fiedler laments the absence of obscenity in the American tradition, the fact that we have no Marquis de Sade or Monk Lewis! [Fiedler 29]).
Since they do not share her interpretation, Gandolfo simply dismisses the opinions of Greeley's readers who do report, in thousands of letters from all over the world, that Greeley's novels have sparked profound, positive changes in their lives. Limited space does not permit me to cite from the hundreds such letters I have personally examined. Instead, I am responding to Gandolfo by citing only one of those letters--actually more of a journal-- written over a nine month period. The letter is exceptionally long and unusually detailed, but precisely for that reason it speaks for all the other letter-writing readers who do not have that woman's capacity for expression but whose letters tell of similar experiences of renewed hope and faith as a result of Greeley's reinterpretation of the Christian message. If we combine the overall congruence of reader reports with Bleich's insistence on reader projection of pre-existing attitudes we can arrive at only one conclusion: Greeley's public is indeed his parish; his readers allow his stories into their lives, precisely because there is something in his texts which not only responds to a need common to vast numbers of people, but allows those people to become conscious of entirely unexpected horizons in their own lives.
The Reader introduces herself as a psychotherapist in her forties, of American Irish ancestry. She attended Catholic grammar and secondary schools, graduated from a Jesuit college, and went to South America with the Peace Corps, filled with enthusiasm and dreams of making the world a better place. Then came the birth control encyclical. She writes:
I was devastated. . . . My hope that we could bring about change was ruined. I was full of righteous indignation, as only 21 year olds in the 6O's could be righteously indignant. Looking back, I don't know if I would have lost my faith if I had been in United States at that time. But the woman next door had 15 children and most of them were hungry . . .. You asked people how many children they had, they always said the number living and the number dead. Usually the numbers were almost equal. I knew that . . . people would take the Pope's word as law and the suffering . . . would continue.
And so she left the Church and went to graduate school at the University of Chicago. Eventually, in the early eighties she and her husband, another lapsed Catholic, joined the United Church of Christ. A few years later she read Lord of the Dance. She was deeply touched, "For the first time in many years I began to feel a pull towards Catholicism, a beginning of a thaw in the icy wall I had built around my heart against the Catholic Church, I wanted to write to you then, but chickened out."
She wasn't ready. She describes tentatively going to mass a few times and finding herself attracted by the beauty of the liturgy and repulsed by anti-abortion rhetoric. She started reading How to Save the Catholic Church by Greeley and his sister Mary Durkin, but left the book unfinished, annoyed at herself for beginning to care again about the Church.
She continued to search. In 1991, in addition to Greeley's autobiography, Confessions of a Parish Priest, she read several of his novels: Love Story (three tines), Patience of a Saint, Rite of Spring, Saint Valentine's Night, Virgin and Martyr, and Cardinal Virtues. Those books, and the "image of God as passionate, non-abandoning lover" helped her reestablish a Catholic identity. She began to see that she had a tendency to approached non-Christian religions with an open mind, focusing on positive aspects. Why shouldn't she give the same break to the Catholic faith? Realizing that she was never going to be a Native American or a Buddhist, she noted, "Why can't I reach back into my own cultural heritage and reconnect with the positive, beautiful parts of Catholicism? You seem to be able to do that."
She asks, "Does the Church you describe in yours books really exist?" She began to take a Mexican highschool exchange student to church, and after a few months, she received communion for the first time in over twenty years. A few months later she attended a conference in Washington, DC. After the conference she visited the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception--and made peace with her roots, herself, her church, her God:
I wound up spending most of a day there. Talk about Goddess! It felt like a pilgrimage, as I went from altar to altar, sometimes praying, sometimes meditating, my favorite place in the whole church was the one I came upon last--the little alcove with Our Lady of Ireland. She has a laughing baby on her knee and a slight smile on her face, It seemed to embody an image of God that I find so nurturing, that of a maternal, joyful, sensual God. I realize that this image of God came from my Catholic background.
We have come full circle. The Madonna, so reviled by Leslie Fiedler, the cunning "Virgin with the Babe in her lap look[ing] complacently down" everywhere in southern Europe, having defeated the "orthodox Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost" has crossed the Atlantic and settled in our national capital to complete a conversion-renewal process begun for this woman by Greeley's bestsellers years before. And we can go even further back. The Mary Myth: On the Femininity of God is Greeley's first extended and deliberate engagement with romantic themes, and his challenge to a universal sell-out to cosmic futility. In the first chapter, by way of introduction, Greeley takes issue with the kind of cultural pessimism represented by scholars such as Robert Heilbroner and proposes to counter Heilbroner's masculine symbol of nobly stoic resignation, the Greek mythological Atlas, "resolutely bearing his burden"(Mary Myth 7) with Henry Adams' smiling Virgin of Chartres.
The Reader concludes "I still have a lot of unanswered questions, and I'm sure that there will be many things about the institutional Church that I will violently disagree with. But it does seem like I've come home."
She thinks she came home! But did she? According to critics such as Gandolfo the homecoming is a lie, a flight into childish dependence, a refusal to lean into the cutting blade and stare into the void.
Yet, something odd happens in Gandolfo's conclusion, a glimmer of doubt, the ghost of a childish/childlike wish that she might be part of Greeley's community. It seems that despite her obvious prejudice against Greeley, she, too was somewhat changed by the experience of reading. She writes that "Greeley's novels offer an inspiring--if unrealistic--image of the Church of the emergent culture" (211). Of course, she immediately retracts, citing Fiedler's comment that bestsellers confuse wishes and facts, adding that "Greeley recreates the 'old neighborhood' of the Immigrant Church for his readers, a classic wish-fulfillment fantasy. His mythic Ryan clan and their family priest, Blackie, are an interesting mixture of the residual culture of Catholicism with American individualism--Catholicism 'going my way,' with an emphasis on the personal possessive pronoun" (211). Still, she concludes her consideration of Greeley with the even more ambivalent passage:
The acute sociologist in novelist Greeley has identified the Church that Catholics in the United States would embrace--a strong and loving local community headed by wise and compassionate leaders who respect individuality, . . .. This would be, in effect, an extension of the table fellowship inaugurated by Jesus. (Gandolfo 211)
But, of course, it's a lie! Or is it? Greeley's readers don't think so. And neither does David Mayer who discusses Greeley's stories in two books on the neighborhood novel. "For Greeley," Mayer notes,
the neighborhoods are magic, sacred places where loving attraction and union can help people heal their wounds and live positive, creative lives. Greeley the sociologist has stated the facts of neighborhood survival and its benefits. Greeley the novelist shows with great feeling how these neighborhoods continue to function in the lives of the people and grow as the people grow. (119)
In addition to Greeley's novels, Mayer sympathetically explores the tales of such ethnic story-tellers as James Farrell, Mario Puzo, James Baldwin, John Edgar Wideman, Toshio Mori, Monica Soni, and Chaim Potok. In the afterword to his first book, Mayer asks that critics "consider writers and their individual works as the case requires" (141). In the conclusion to Door Stoops and Window Sills, he makes a similar plea for humane sensitivity to other people's stories (144). In Mayer's two slim volumes the various strands of this eight thousand word essay coalesce. He is an American scholar who lives and teaches at a Catholic university in Japan; thus he combines Catholic and non-Western perspectives. He obviously finds no reason to ride herd on unsuspecting novelists. He represents the academic edition of the paradigmatic reader. Instead of judging stories against some artificial standard, he approaches them on their own terms. He obviously cares for his writers and their imaginative worlds and people. He believes that love is possible, and that it is perfectly alright to like one's home and want to go there. He refuses to consider indifference or hatred or cynicism the only legitimate scholarly stances. Instead he quietly affirms and puts into practice the non-adversarial critical paradigm which favors the empathetic, comic, romantic. Paradoxically, he and others who take popular works seriously or discuss complex theories in popularly accessible terms are not only chipping away at the barricades which sever high and low culture, they are simultaneously reaching beyond the walls of the academy, preparing for the university of the future which can educate students for universal pluralism in countless not-yet-envisioned ways. Unknowingly, they are healing a fracture in the collective Western mindset which has caused such chronic agony since Plato expelled Hesiod from his politeia and Aristotle insisted that the great-souled man must have proper disdain for the common people.
10In May of 1992 I saw an interesting late medieval example of this sort of imaginative, popular harmonizing. A 15th century fresco in the tiny 8th century church of St. Prokulus at Naturns in the Vinschgau region of Northern Italy shows an angry Yahweh shoot arrows at sinful humanity. The people below are huddled under the cloaks of Mary and Jesus; they are safe because the arrow-proof mantles deflect the missiles back toward heaven!
20For a wide-ranging and popularly accessible discussion of this issue, see Andrew Greeley's The Catholic Myth (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990).
30See David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (1981. New York: Crossroad, 1986), esp. 405-449, where Father Tracy distinguishes between dialectical theologians of the word with their radical negative dialectic (415), and analogical theologians of the imagination who articulate similarity in difference (408). It should be noted, however, that Tracy's definition of "dialectical" is Barthian rather then Hegelian. Several years ago I published a more extensive discussion of the two types of Christian imagination in "Non-Adversarial Criticism, Cross-Cultural Conversation and Popular Literature," Proteus 6.1 (Spring 1989), 6-15. Also see my introduction to a theme issue, "The Catholic Imagination in Popular Film and Television," Journal of Popular Film and Television 19.2 (Summer 1991), 50-57.
40For extensive discussion of these categories and they way the were used in actual survey research, see Andrew Greeley's work, especially the Religious Imagination (New York: Sadlier, 1981), Religion a Secular Theory (New York: The Free Press, 1982), God in Popular Culture (Chicago, Thomas More 1988), Religious Change in America (Harvard University Press, 1989), and the above mentioned Catholic Myth.
50In numerous articles, and several books, such as the above mentioned God in Popular Culture and The Catholic Myth, Andrew Greeley has argued convincingly that there is an essential congruence of popular culture and the Catholic incarnational vision of reality. While he does not share Fiedler's negative valuation of that association (or Fiedler's assumption that Catholicism is not a Christian religion) he and Fiedler are in essential agreement concerning Catholic and Protestant ways of apprehending reality.
References
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7 January 1993
Revised 6 November 1993
8256 words
Posted on the Web 6 January 2002
Copyright © 2002 by Ingrid Shafer