[percy-l] Confessions of a Catholic Novelist
Henry Mills
wppdirector at gmail.com
Tue Jun 23 06:27:11 EDT 2015
/Note: the following 6/22 post is a re-post of a message that appeared
at the bottom of a long section of text for those who missed its
commentary. Further comments on Giraldi's essay or otherwise on Percy
are invited.//
//Henry Mills, Percy-L Administrator/
--
On 6/22/15 5:41 PM, desmond wrote:
In his reading of The Moviegoer, Mr. Giraldi completely ignores one of
its most important thematic threads, i.e. Binx's intuition of his
"Jewishness" as a "clue" to his deepest identity, and where that clue
leads him in the novel. Giraldi's simplified interpretation is a
serious misreading of the novel (for his own purposes, I suppose).
John Desmond
> On 6/22/2015 11:37 AM, Lauren Stacy Berdy wrote:
>> The reader as much as the writer creates the vision in their own mind
>> If the process of creation does not happen in the readers mind is not
>> reenacted
>> If the subterranean links and connections do not link
>> The work fails
>> For this reader Born a Jew Dr Percy wants us alert like one of his hawks
>> His words give us a renewal and a resuscitation for our own lives
>> Whitman too was religious ( okay a religion not made by a mind) he
>> helped us with our emotional evolution
>> Dr Percy adds to that self generating order
>> That creative struggle that all great authors ask of Their readers
>>
>> I read that article twice and I am sorry that he is wresting so with
>> his demons
>> catholic or otherwise.
>>
>>
>> On Jun 22, 2015, at 12:14 PM, Michael Larson <larsonovic at gmail.com
>> <mailto:larsonovic at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>> I so hope the world will take him at his word when Mr. Giraldi
>>> denies being a Catholic. Otherwise, people might mistake his
>>> interests and concerns for those of a real Catholic novelist. As a
>>> secular novelist, Mr. Giraldi seems most interested in how his life
>>> has prepared him to be an /artiste/, his boyhood Catholicism being
>>> one of those preparations: "An upbringing in the Church has, I
>>> suspect and hope, outfitted me well as a storyteller." He likes the
>>> instincts Catholicism gave him--but for the purpose of storytelling
>>> and not for the purpose of apprehending and conforming oneself to
>>> the truth. He even likes there to be a quasi-religious vision to
>>> fiction, as long as it is sufficiently amorphous: "A novel should
>>> indeed be a groping after some form of the metaphysical, a
>>> benediction to unseen powers, the upholding of the /mysterium
>>> tremendum/, those insistent inklings of the numinous."
>>>
>>> But the Catholic novelist is most interested in objective reality,
>>> and he sees his role as artist to be one of rendering that reality
>>> as well as he can. Obviously some novels (and novelists) are better
>>> than others, but the vision of the Catholic novelist is neither
>>> narcissistic nor subjective (Nor is it proselytizing, as Giraldi
>>> claims with regard to Percy and Greene in particular.). No, the
>>> Catholic novelist's vision is of something outside of himself,
>>> corresponding to divine revelation. His characters may be at any
>>> level of understanding (or rejecting) that reality, but the
>>> (Catholic) novelist himself has no such freedom. He knows what he
>>> knows, and the world he creates, in which his characters live and
>>> breathe, must bear a close resemblance to the real one. But this
>>> includes immaterial as well as material reality. Mr. Giraldi is fine
>>> with being exact about material reality ("my books are
>>> flesh-obsessed"), but he wants to keep the immaterial vague,
>>> subjective, fuzzy. That's why he's not a Catholic ... and why he
>>> should therefore remain silent about the concerns of Catholic writers.
>>>
>>> Michael Larson
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>
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