The Catholic English Teacher

Benedict meets Bakhtin: Towards a Catholic Theory of Literature

2012-01-26T21:55:00.000Z

In my last post, about Catholicism and the novel, I asked how we might approach the novel from a Catholic perspective. Pope Benedict hasn't, as far as I am aware, addressed this issue directly but he has, perhaps, given us some pointers to work with in his post-synodal exhortation, Verbum Domini.

Time and again he returns in this document to the theme of dialogue: "The novelty of biblical revelation," he writes, "consists in the fact that God becomes known through the dialogue which he desires to have with us."

Now that's a pretty remarkable statement but what's it got to do with the novel? Well, the most obvious link is with the great Russian theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, who saw the novel as essentially dialogic; it contains a multiplicity of voices competing with each other.

Bakhtin's dialogism and Benedict's may seem to be quite different beasts but the links are certainly worth exploring. For the pope, what matters fundamentally is that "our whole existence becomes a dialogue with the God who speaks and listens, who calls us and gives direction to our lives" whereas, for Bakhtin, it is the, necessarily limited, voices within the novel which matter.

However, Bakhtin does not argue that the text is a self-contained entity or that the author is dead. "Of course, this play with languages (and frequently the complete absence of a direct discourse of his own)," he writes, "in no sense degrades the general, deep-seated intentionality, the overarching ideological conceptualization of the work as a whole."

An Evelyn Waugh novel presents a fundamentally different view of the world from a Thomas Hardy novel; the "overarching ideological conceptualization" of their books differs enormously.

But we could go further. According to Bakhtin, it is not just the author but the reader who impinges upon the text. Indeed, it may be that, for Catholics, the true significance of the novel lies in the ways we read it, in what Bakhtin called the "ideological becoming" of the reader. Rather than get sucked into an argument with Orwell about how many Catholics have been good novelists, we can instead approach the novel from the opposite direction. It is what the novel does to us that matters.

There's much more to Bakhtin (and Benedict) than I have set out here but that's probably enough for one post.

Catholicism and the Novel

2012-01-24T21:38:00.001Z

In recent years Pope Benedict has had a lot to say about Catholicism and literature, focussing primarily on the way of beauty, the via pulchritudinis - see here, here, and, for a contextual discussion, here - and mentioning poetry more often than the novel.

And it is not just his speeches either: just before Christmas it was a poet, José Tolentino Mendonça, rather than a novelist who was appointed as a consultor to the Pontifical Council for Culture.

There are many possible reasons for this focus on poetry - perhaps, one might speculate, poetry is a more obvious vehicle for the Way of Beauty than the unruly novel - but it does leave the relationship between Catholicism and the novel somewhat unexplored.

Some writers and critics would have us believe that the novel is fundamentally uncatholic. George Orwell, for example, famously asked "how many Roman Catholics have been good novelists? Even the handful one could name have usually been bad Catholics. The novel is practically a Protestant form of art; it is a product of the free mind, of the autonomous individual.'' ('Inside the Whale')

And more recently Valentine Cunningham, Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, claimed that novels "have rights to that designation only insofar as they display their origins in and their debt to the Northern European Protestant matrix; they have, as it were, the matching DNA."

However, as Peter Marshall has pointed out in The Reformation: A Very Short Introduction, Orwell's claim "is difficult to endorse historically, partly because the Reformation was not noticeably in favour of free minds or autonomous individuals, and partly because some of the best early examples of what we now think of as novels - Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605) or Hans von Grimmelhausen's Simplicissimus (1688) - were the work of Catholic authors."

And the same is true in later centuries: it doesn't take long to find highly significant novels by Catholic authors - like Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed - even before the great Catholic literary revivals of the 20th Century.

Or we could go further back into literary history. Margaret Anne Doody challenges the views of critics like Ian Watts (and Valentine Cunnigham) by arguing, in The True History of the Novel, that the origins of the novel can be found not in post-Protestant England but in classical antiquity.

Nonetheless, it certainly is possible to see the novel as a secular or Protestant form that has been taken up and shaped on occasion by Catholics, to see it, in Georg Lukács's famous phrase, as "the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God." Unlike The Divine Comedy or the Arthurian legends, say, the novel tends to deal with the struggles of individuals in this very human world.

But does this matter? How are we to analyse the novel from a Catholic perspective? These are complicated issues which I shall attempt to explore in my next post.

The Guardian Style Guide

2012-01-19T17:25:00.000Z

The Guardian Style Guide is very useful but, as The Guardian would be the first to admit, it's not perfect. It has some very useful advice for budding journalists and, indeed, for all writers and is well worth using in the classroom but it also has one or two blindspots.

However, I did wonder what it had to say about the Catholic Church and this is what I found:

Catholic church

but if you mean Roman Catholic, say so

Which didn't seem very helpful. So I looked up Roman Catholic and this is what I found:

Roman Catholic

The archbishop of Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool, St Andrew's, Southwark and Westminster: it is not normally necessary to say Roman Catholic (as there is no Anglican equivalent).

The Roman Catholic bishop of Aberdeen, Argyll, Lancaster, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Shrewsbury (for all of which there are Anglican bishops).

Unless obviously Roman Catholic from the context, say the Roman Catholic bishop of Brentwood, Clifton, Dunkeld, Galloway, Hexham and Newcastle, Leeds, Menevia, Middlesbrough, Motherwell, Northampton, Nottingham, Paisley and Salford.

In a UK setting use Roman Catholic in describing Roman Catholic organisations and individuals and wherever an Anglican could argue ambiguity (eg "the Catholic church"). But Catholic is enough in most overseas contexts, eg Ireland, France, Italy, Latin America

But I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies. In 1928 neither "Catholic" nor "Roman Catholic" made it into the guide at all.

Tolkien and Chesterton

2012-01-17T21:29:00.000Z

There is a fascinating book by Alison Milbank, on Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians which is reviewed here. There is also an interview with the author here in which she makes the fascinating points like these:

"Tolkien says that Chestertonian fantasy shows you the actual world from a new angle but thoroughgoing fantasy is like opening a box that allows out new things and releases them from our ownership of them. This is a really philosophical statement. The Enlightenment philosopher Kant said we have no access to things in themselves, and all we have is our own perception of the world. This leads to an alienated form of knowledge. Tolkien, following Chesterton, is a realist in a philosophical sense, because he thinks that we can be aware of a world beyond our own perceptions. Paradoxically, fiction – creating your own fantasy world – is not a way of owning your own private reality but setting the things in that world free – like Tom Bombadil putting the contents of the barrow-wights’ hoard out on the hillside."

Reclaiming or Renaming the Middle Ages

2012-01-10T21:09:00.000Z

As I have mentioned before in another context, "medieval" and "the Middle Ages" are loaded terms. As C.S. Lewis puts it in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: "the very idea of the 'medieval' is a humanistic invention. (According to Lehmann it is in 1469 that the expression media tempestas first occurs.) And what can media imply except that a thousand years of theology, metaphysics, jurisprudence, courtesy, poetry, and architecture are to be regarded as a mere gap, or chasm, or entre-acte? Such a preposterous conception can be accepted only if you swallow the whole creed of humanism at the same time." (p.20)

Unfortunately it seems as though that creed really has been swallowed whole. The Middle Ages are now synonymous with obscurantism, cruelty and myopia. One of the Oxford English Dictionary's definitions of 'medieval' (which, incidentally, is first recorded as late as 1817) is: "Exhibiting the severity or illiberality ascribed to a former age; cruel, barbarous".

But this isn't the only problem. The OED also defines the Middle Ages as "The period in European history between ancient and modern times, now usually taken as extending from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West (c500) to the fall of Constantinople (1453) or the beginning of the Renaissance (14th cent.); the medieval period;esp. the later part of this period, after 1000." These are, of course, arbitrary dates. One of the problems of the term is that it is notoriously vague. When exactly were the Middle Ages? It depends who you ask.

Or it depends on what is being attacked. Let's look at the first three quotations the OED chooses in support of its definition:

[1570 J. Foxe Actes & Monumentes (rev. ed.) I. iii. 204/1 The primitiue tyme of the church,‥the middle age, and‥these our latter dayes of the church.]

1605 W. Camden Certaine Poems in Remaines of Greater Worke 2, I will onely giue you a taste of some of midle age, which was so ouercast with darke clouds, or rather thicke fogges of ignorance.

1624 H. Wotton Archit. sig. ¶4, After the reuiuing and repolishing of good Literature, (which the combustions and tumults of the middle Age had vnciuillized).

'The Middle Ages', in other words, is not a neutral description. It is not a mere description of an era. It is a convenient term of abuse, a term of abuse often reached for when describing the Church of Rome, which, supposedly, brought the "thicke fogges of ignorance" and, in so doing, "vnciuillized" literature.

I could go through example after example of great learning and great literature from c500 to 1453 but, even if I did so, the words "medieval" and "the Middle Ages" would remain. So we have a choice. Either we attempt to reclaim the Middle Ages from those who would see those wonderful, diverse centuries as "cruel" and "barbarous" - by using sites such as this one in our teaching - or we try to rename them. Or, perhaps, we just point out the ways in which we can be manipulated by the language. Either way we have a huge task in front of us.

Chinese Books of the Year

2012-01-09T17:01:00.001Z

OK, I realise I'm a year late but I don't read the People's Daily that often :)

This time last year the paper chose Canticle to the Land by Catholic novelist, Fan Wen, as one of its Top 5 novels of the year.

There are howls of anguish about the (supposed) demise of the Catholic novel in the English-speaking world so it's good to see that the situation isn't so bleak in the People's Republic.

To read more about Fan Wen's work click here or here. There are no plans for an English translation at the moment but, I hope, a French translation may be published later this year.

Golem, Gollum and Superman

2012-01-07T22:32:00.001Z

While teaching Frankenstein, I showed some of my students this video from the National Theatre about man-made creatures.

I was particularly struck by the section on the Golem, the automaton of Jewish legend, and wondered whether there could be a link with (the homophonic) Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. Others have suggested that there might indeed be a link but it's next to impossible to get hold of the relevant material.

Although Gollum's riddles are deeply rooted in Anglo-Saxon literature, Gollum (like the hobbits themselves) is not. It is perhaps not too fanciful, therefore, to seek his origins elsewhere, though it is also true that it is the Orcs who better fit the model of soulless automata created as hollow imitations of men.

I was also intrigued by Dr Nadia Valman's suggestion that the Golem legend evolved in the face of anti-semitic attacks, with the Golem coming to be seen as a super-heroic protector of the embattled Jewish community, and Superman himself being the creation of two Jewish cartoonists in the 1930s. It's amazing where English lessons can take you.

Waugh in Context

2012-01-05T16:50:00.004Z

There's an interesting article by Paul Johnson in the January/February edition of Standpoint on 'Novelists at arms'. It dwells slightly too much for my taste on the inspiration for Waugh's characters in The Sword of Honour trilogy, but it does at least put Evelyn Waugh's novels about World War II in some sort of literary context.

I'd want to take this contextual analysis further. Johnson doesn't mention Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse 5, for example, let alone the perspective of other nationalities. Mo Yan's Red Sorghum (and even J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun) gives a much needed Chinese perspective on the wars of the 1930s and 40s. But you can't have everything and what he gives us is well worth reading.

Evelyn Waugh and the Mass; OUP and the Catholic Tradition

2012-01-04T17:03:00.005Z

There have been some interesting reviews in the last two editions of The Catholic Herald. In the December edition, Joseph Pearce wrote a review article on the updated edition of A Bitter Trial, Evelyn Waugh's responses to the liturgical innovations of his last years. As I wrote last year, Waugh now seems remarkably prescient and this book sets out his views admirably.

And then, in the Christmas edition, Aidan Nichols favourably reviewed a new anthology of English Catholic writing, published by Oxford University Press and edited by John Morrill, John Saward and Michael Tomko: Firmly I Believe and Truly.

This looks like a great book and my only reservation is the start date: 1483. I understand the practical constraints - the anthology runs to over 700 pages as it is - but, nonetheless, many centuries of Catholic England and many great Catholic writers go unexplored in this, as in so many other, anthologies. But I mustn't be churlish: this looks as though it's a must-have anthology.

Belloc and the Nature of Belief

2012-01-03T19:38:00.000Z

Here is another of Belloc's purple passages from The Path to Rome on "the nature of Belief":

"Of its nature it breeds a reaction and an indifference. Those who believe nothing but only think and judge cannot understand this. Of its nature it struggles with us. And we, we, when our youth is full on us, invariably reject it and set out in the sunlight content with natural things. Then for a long time we are like men who follow down the cleft of a mountain and the peaks are hidden from us and forgotten. It takes years to reach the dry plain, and then we look back and see our home.

"What is it, do you think, that causes the return? I think it is the problem of living; for every day, every experience of evil, demands a solution. That solution is provided by the memory of the great scheme
which at last we remember. Our childhood pierces through again... But I will not attempt to explain it, for I have not the power; only I know that we who return suffer hard things; for there grows a gulf between us and many companions. We are perpetually thrust into minorities, and the world almost begins to talk a strange language; we are troubled by the human machinery of a perfect and superhuman revelation; we are over-anxious for its safety, alarmed, and in danger of violent decisions.

"And this is hard: that the Faith begins to make one abandon the old way of judging. Averages and movements and the rest grow uncertain. We see things from within and consider one mind or a little group as a salt or leaven. The very nature of social force seems changed to us. And this is hard when a man has loved common views and is happy only with his fellows.

"And this again is very hard, that we must once more take up that awful struggle to reconcile two truths and to keep civic freedom sacred in spite of the organization of religion, and not to deny what is certainly true. It is hard to accept mysteries, and to be humble. We are tost as the great schoolmen were tost, and we dare not neglect the duty of that wrestling.

"But the hardest thing of all is that it leads us away, as by a command, from all that banquet of the intellect than which there is no keener joy known to man.

"I went slowly up the village place in the dusk, thinking of this deplorable weakness in men that the Faith is too great for them, and accepting it as an inevitable burden. I continued to muse with my eyes upon the ground...

"There was to be no more of that studious content, that security in historic analysis, and that constant satisfaction of an appetite which never cloyed. A wisdom more imperative and more profound was to put a term to the comfortable wisdom of learning. All the balance of judgement, the easy, slow convictions, the broad grasp of things, the vision of their complexity, the pleasure in their innumerable life--all that had to be given up. Fanaticisms were no longer entirely to be despised, just appreciations and a strong grasp of reality no longer entirely to be admired.

"The Catholic Church will have no philosophies. She will permit no comforts; the cry of the martyrs is in her far voice; her eyes that see beyond the world present us heaven and hell to the confusion of our human reconciliations, our happy blending of good and evil things.

"By the Lord! I begin to think this intimate religion as tragic as a great love. There came back into my mind a relic that I have in my house. It is a panel of the old door of my college, having carved on it my college arms. I remembered the Lion and the Shield, Haec fuit, Haec almae janua sacra domus. Yes, certainly religion is as tragic as first love, and drags us out into the void away from our dear homes.

"It is a good thing to have loved one woman from a child, and it is a good thing not to have to return to the Faith."

Belloc on the Mass

2012-01-02T19:01:00.000Z

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm reading Belloc's The Path to Rome, which is full of wonderful purple passages. Here, for example, is what he has to say about "a day one has opened by Mass ... [which is] a source of continual comfort to me".

"This comfort I ascribe to four causes ... and these causes are:

1. That for half-an-hour just at the opening of the day you are silent

and recollected, and have to put off cares, interests, and passions in

the repetition of a familiar action. This must certainly be a great

benefit to the body and give it tone.

2. That the Mass is a careful and rapid ritual. Now it is the function

of all ritual (as we see in games, social arrangements and so forth)

to relieve the mind by so much of responsibility and initiative and to

catch you up (as it were) into itself, leading your life for you

during the time it lasts. In this way you experience a singular

repose, after which fallowness I am sure one is fitter for action and

judgement.

3. That the surroundings incline you to good and reasonable thoughts,

and for the moment deaden the rasp and jar of that busy wickedness

which both working in one's self and received from others is the true

source of all human miseries. Thus the time spent at Mass is like a

short repose in a deep and well-built library, into which no sounds

come and where you feel yourself secure against the outer world.

4. And the most important cause of this feeling of satisfaction is

that you are doing what the human race has done for thousands upon

thousands upon thousands of years. This is a matter of such moment

that I am astonished people hear of it so little. Whatever is buried

right into our blood from immemorial habit that we must be certain to

do if we are to be fairly happy (of course no grown man or woman can

really be very happy for long--but I mean reasonably happy), and, what

is more important, decent and secure of our souls. Thus one should

from time to time hunt animals, or at the very least shoot at a mark;

one should always drink some kind of fermented liquor with one's

food--and especially deeply upon great feast-days; one should go on

the water from time to time; and one should dance on occasions; and

one should sing in chorus. For all these things man has done since God

put him into a garden and his eyes first became troubled with a soul.

Similarly some teacher or ranter or other, whose name I forget, said

lately one very wise thing at least, which was that every man should

do a little work with his hands.

Oh! what good philosophy this is, and how much better it would be if

rich people, instead of raining the influence of their rank and

spending their money on leagues for this or that exceptional thing,

were to spend it in converting the middle-class to ordinary living and

to the tradition of the race. Indeed, if I had power for some thirty

years I would see to it that people should be allowed to follow their

inbred instincts in these matters, and should hunt, drink, sing,

dance, sail, and dig; and those that would not should be compelled by

force.

Now in the morning Mass you do all that the race needs to do and has

done for all these ages where religion was concerned; there you have

the sacred and separate Enclosure, the Altar, the Priest in his

Vestments, the set ritual, the ancient and hierarchic tongue, and all

that your nature cries out for in the matter of worship."

Later on, he describes going to Mass on the feast of Corpus Christi and comments approvingly that "the Mass was low and short - they are a Christian people".

I don't want to draw any facile conclusions but it seems that, for Belloc, "the sacred and separate Enclosure, the Altar, the Priest in his Vestments, the set ritual, the ancient and hierarchic tongue" were not incompatible with the "low and short". For him the Mass could be both "careful" and "rapid".

But all this is to see Belloc with early 21st Century eyes. What really mattered then, as it matters now, was the Mass itself and its "continual comfort".

A New Year Message from Hilaire Belloc

2012-01-01T15:58:00.000Z

Since everybody else seems to be giving a New Year message, I thought I'd give Belloc a chance.

This is from his 1902 The Path to Rome, which I'm reading at the moment in the wonderful Penguin edition:

"Then I went on my way, praying God that all these rending quarrels might be appeased. For they would certainly be appeased if we once again had a united doctrine in Europe, since economics are but an expression of the mind and do not (as the poor blind slaves of the great cities think) mould the mind."

New Year

2011-12-31T15:20:00.000Z

Here's a great New Year poem from Denise Levertov.

You can also see and hear her reading some of her poems here.

José Tolentino Mendonça

2011-12-28T13:58:00.000Z

A couple of weeks ago the Pope appointed new members and consultors to the Pontifical Council for Culture.

What was interesting about these appointments was a) how wide-ranging the Vatican's definition of Culture is (among the consultors were professors of neurology, physics, and astrophysics) b) how high profile some of these appointments were (Arvo Pärt being the standout figure) and c) how poets rather than novelists represented the literary arts.

I will write shortly about Catholicism and the novel but, for now, let's look at the poet (and theologian) who was named as a consultor, Fr José Tolentino Mendonça. You can read about his work here and can read one of his poems (which is partly about Flannery O'Connor) here and another effective poem here.

If you ever need a lesson on how to not use the comma, Mendonça's the man.

Image Journal: Poems for the Season

2011-12-21T21:53:00.000Z

Image Journal is an interesting publication with an interesting blog. If you're looking for some festive poems they have some good recommendations here.

The Father Christmas Letters

2011-12-18T22:10:00.000Z

Tolkien's The Father Christmas Letters - also published in more detail as Letters from Father Christmas - are quite fun, though not in anything like the same league as The Lord of the Rings. The title is also slightly misleading. The letters are indeed from Father Christmas (to Tolkien's children) but Father Christmas is not quite as significant in most of the letters as the North Polar Bear, his accident-prone helper, though I suspect that it is Tolkien's pictures rather than his tales or his characters which are the chief attraction for many children.

I was intrigued by one minor detail though. Tolkien is very precise about the date of the last major Goblin attack - 1453 - which rather suggests a link with the Ottoman Turks who famously stormed Constantinople in that year. Now we have to be careful here: Tolkien claimed to hate allegory (though there is more than a whiff of it in stories like Farmer Giles of Ham and the wonderful Leaf by Niggle). The simple fact that the Goblins return to the North Pole during the dark days of World War II suggests that we cannot simply equate the Goblins with the Ottoman Turks. However, this simple fact also suggests that Tolkien's imagination was rather more allegorical than he sometimes claimed or would have liked.

One word of warning. You don't get all the letters in The Father Christmas Letters or even, I think, in some editions of Letters from Father Christmas, which can be rather frustrating.

Indeed, despite the enormous number of books published by and about Tolkien, there are still some gaps. I look forward to the day, for example, when we get a Collected Letters. What we have at the moment is only a selection with some significant lacunae. Take this example, for instance:

"Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament..... There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthy relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man's heart desires."(pp.53-54)

I'd love to know what comes at the end of that first sentence. But, even with the gaps, these letters are really wonderful.

Dickens, Chesterton & Christmas

2011-12-12T00:14:00.000Z

G. K. Chesterton wrote a series of brilliant introductions to Dickens' books, including his Christmas books, which are well worth reading at this time of year. You can find the relevant introductions here and here.

As you might guess, they are eminently quotable, so I have had to restrict myself to just a few of Chesterton's comments here.

What he appreciates is that "Dickens devoted his genius in a somewhat special sense to the description of happiness. No other literary man of his eminence has made this central human aim so specially his subject matter."

Which is why he was so attracted to Christmas, almost despite himself: "All Dickens's books," he writes, "are Christmas books."

So what is so special about Christmas?

"Everything is so arranged that the whole household may feel, if possible, as a household does when a child is actually being born in it. The thing is a vigil and a vigil with a definite limit. People sit up at night until they hear the bells ring. Or they try to sleep at night in order to see their presents the next morning. Everywhere there is a limitation, a restraint; at one moment the door is shut, at the moment after it is opened. The hour has come or it has not come; the parcels are undone or they are not undone; there is no evolution of Christmas presents."

And why does the season matter?

"All comfort must be based on discomfort. Man chooses when he wishes to be most joyful the very moment when the whole material universe is most sad."

As he wrote about Dickens: "He may almost be said to have only written a brilliant introduction to another man's book."

International Network for Catholic Education

2011-12-09T18:40:00.000Z

I have been sent information about a new network for Catholic educators which is due to start in 2012. It sounds like a good idea and so I have set out the relevant information below.

THE INTERNATIONAL NETWORK FOR CATHOLIC EDUCATION(INCE)

1. Mission Statement

To provide Catholic school leaders and teachers with ideas, inspirations, examples of good practice and research reports to improve the integrity and effectiveness of the various forms of educational work in which they are engaged. To help ensure that the mission integrity of Catholic education is maintained in contemporary conditions.

2. Aims

a. To help Catholic educators to improve their educational practice by providing access to staff development resources on various aspects of Catholic education.

b. To assist Catholic educators undertaking further academic and professional courses, by facilitating regular access to International Studies in Catholic Education (ISCE), as a study resource.

c. to realise the rich potential of international cross-cultural learning which is present in the Catholic educational mission worldwide

d. To provide a forum for discussion between Catholic teachers and Church leaders, policy-makers and educational researchers.

e. to facilitate networks for individual teachers who wish to organise exchange arrangements with Catholic schools in other cultures.

3. Subscriptions and Membership Benefits

For a subscription of £35 p.a. members will receive the following benefits:-

a. A complimentary copy of International Studies in Catholic Education(ISCE) each year.

b. Copies of CRDCE’s Professional Focus Series of texts for staff development, at discounted rates.

c. Regular notification of seminars, conferences and study groups on various issues in Catholic education, nationally and internationally.

d. Assistance with plans for academic projects (advanced degrees) or research applications.

e. Help with making contacts with Catholic schools internationally.

4. Applications

a. Please complete an application form (which you get by emailing Professor Grace at the address below) and send in with a cheque for £35 payable to :-

Institute of Education (CRDCE), to the address shown on the form

b. Please include both your postal address (home) and your e-mail.

Professor Gerald Grace

Director: CRDCE

Centre for Research and Development in Catholic Education,

University of London, Institute of Education

London WC1H 0AL email: crdce@ioe.ac.uk

How to Read

2011-12-08T20:03:00.002Z

I love this passage about reading from Steinbeck's East of Eden: "Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and grovelled between the covers, tunnelled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands."

This thought from the Sayings of Light and Love by St John of the Cross (who is quoting Guigo the Carthusian who is, in turn, reworking Luke 11: 9) is wonderful in a different way: "Seek in reading and you will find in meditation; knock in prayer and it will be opened to you in contemplation."

This fourfold approach is the basis of lectio divina but, it seems to me, it also has an application in the classroom. As English teachers we want our students to read but how they read is pretty important too.

Regina Derieva

2011-12-07T21:25:00.000Z

Regina Derieva is an interesting poet. She was born in what is now Ukraine in 1949 and lived for many years in what is now Kazakhstan before converting to Catholicism, emigrating to Israel and then finding herself in a stateless condition. She now lives in Sweden and continues to publish to critical acclaim.

I quite like some of these poems, which could well be used in the classroom.

Making the Most of Advent

2011-12-01T00:50:00.002Z

This time last year I recommended the poetry of St Robert Southwell (and here) and Alice Thomas Ellis's The Birds of the Air.

This year I have been slogging through her The Inn at the Edge of the World, a novel about a group of individuals who spend Christmas at a failing inn on a remote Scottish island in a vain attempt to escape the horrors of Christmas. As is typical of Thomas Ellis, there is more to the story than immediately meets the eye - selkie legends run through the story and a twist is coming - but I'm not enjoying it as much as I did The Birds of the Air simply because the characters are an eminently unlikeable lot.

So what else is available as we prepare for Christmas? I recommended a few books last November and a couple of children's books this year (here and here) but there's plenty more out there.

Denise Levertov's 'The Tide', for example, is presented as an Advent poem in one anthology of Catholic poetry. It's a good poem but I wonder if her poem about the Annunciation might not be a better bet at this time of year (as well as in March)? Levertov is a fantastic poet and not terribly well known, at least on this side of the pond.

Another option is Mauriac's 'A Christmas Tale', a story about Christmas, growing up and authorship, which is available in John B. Breslin's The Substance of Things Hoped For (along with some other great, and unusual, short stories.

Any other suggestions gratefully received.

Rowan Williams meets Dostoevsky: Towards a Catholic Theory of Literature

2011-11-27T22:49:00.001Z

In the introduction to his book about Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, writes about "Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene (at least in much of his earlier work) as Catholic novelists, and we mean by this not that they are novelists who happen to be Catholics by private conviction, but that their fiction could not be understood by a reader who had no knowledge at all of Catholicism and the particular obligations it entailed for its adherents. Quite a lot of this fiction deals with what it is that makes the life of a Catholic distinct from other sorts of lives lived in Britain and elsewhere in the modern age. ... Some of it is about how the teachings of the Catholic Church, difficult and apparently unreasonable as it seems, is obscurely vindicated as the hand of God works through chaotic human interactions."

That last sentence is enough to make the hackles rise but, even if we discount it, Williams' definition seems rather curious. These novelists are Catholic but not catholic. They are defined by their differences. Their vision is narrow.

But surely that is simply not the case. Both Greene and Waugh are read and enjoyed by many readers who have very little interest in, sympathy for, or knowledge of, Catholicism. As Catholics, their vision was wide enough to take in everything from gang warfare to relics, from politics to humour, from heaven to hell and everything in between.

This is precisely why Greene so disliked being labelled as a "Catholic novelist". But, if we are to reach towards a Catholic theory of literature, we have not only to be catholic in our own reading (as I suggested in my last post) but we have to allow Catholic novelists (and poets) to be catholic too. If Catholicism means anything at all it means everything.

To be fair to Williams, he does at least identify another type of Catholic novelist - represented by Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Muriel Spark, and Alice Thomas Ellis - whose books are less obviously Catholic but whose "work is about the possibility of any morally coherent life in a culture of banality and self-deceit." Williams feels more at home with this second group but, in using them as a way into Dostoevsky, he surely does a great disservice to Greene and Waugh.

But I mustn't end on a negative. It is encouraging to English teachers everywhere that both the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury are prepared to spend time reading and writing. In fact Rowan Williams thought this one was so important that he took a sabbatical to write it.

If you want to read more about his book click here or here or here.

Benedict meets Basil: Towards a Catholic Theory of Literature

2011-11-21T22:15:00.000Z

Is it possible to have a Catholic theory of literature?

Over the next few weeks I shall try to explore a few different approaches, starting with one suggested by Pope Benedict in his General Audience on St Basil:

"Basil," he said, "was of course also concerned with that chosen portion of the People of God, the youth, society's future. He addressed a Discourse to them on how to benefit from the pagan culture of that time.

He recognized with great balance and openness that examples of virtue can be found in classical Greek and Latin literature. Such examples of upright living can be helpful to young Christians in search of the truth and the correct way of living (cf. Ad Adolescentes 3).

"Therefore, one must take from the texts by classical authors what is suitable and conforms with the truth: thus, with a critical and open approach - it is a question of true and proper "discernment"- young people grow in freedom.

"With the famous image of bees that gather from flowers only what they need to make honey, Basil recommends: "Just as bees can take nectar from flowers, unlike other animals which limit themselves to enjoying their scent and colour, so also from these writings... one can draw some benefit for the spirit. We must use these books, following in all things the example of bees. They do not visit every flower without distinction, nor seek to remove all the nectar from the flowers on which they alight, but only draw from them what they need to make honey, and leave the rest. And if we are wise, we will take from those writings what is appropriate for us, and conforms to the truth, ignoring the rest" (Ad Adolescentes 4).

"Basil recommended above all that young people grow in virtue, in the right way of living: "While the other goods... pass from one to the other as in playing dice, virtue alone is an inalienable good and endures throughout life and after death" (Ad Adolescentes 5).

"Dear brothers and sisters, I think one can say that this Father from long ago also speaks to us and tells us important things.

"In the first place, attentive, critical and creative participation in today's culture.

"Then, social responsibility: this is an age in which, in a globalized world, even people who are physically distant are really our neighbours; therefore, friendship with Christ, the God with the human face.

"And, lastly, knowledge and recognition of God the Creator, the Father of us all: only if we are open to this God, the common Father, can we build a more just and fraternal world."

To read the whole of St Basil's Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek [i.e. pagan] Literature click here.

Preparing for Advent: Frank McCourt

2011-11-11T00:25:00.000Z

Another good book for younger students in the run up to Christmas is Angela and the Baby Jesus by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Frank McCourt. McCourt's relationship with the Church was sometimes turbulent (as this interview makes clear) but Angela and the Baby Jesus is a delightful, true story straight from his good Irish Catholic mother. You can read a full review from the New York Times here and you can hear McCourt talking about the inspiration for the book in the following recording, though the sound quality, I'm afraid, is not great.

Mary Douglas

2011-11-09T00:04:00.000Z

I realise that it's rather off-topic but I want to write a few words (OK, quite a lot of words) about the great Catholic anthropologist, Mary Douglas, before suggesting a few literary links at the end.

When she died in 2007, Prospect Magazine had this to say about her: “Few thinkers have changed how we see the world; even fewer have changed how we think about how we see the world. Mary Douglas, who has died aged 86, is one of the rare exceptions. Her field was culture, but she was as unlike the stereotypical cultural studies academic as one could imagine. A devout Catholic, she spent the last few decades in an extraordinary flowering of inquiry that is now providing insights in fields as diverse as the study of the Old Testament and the politics of climate change.”

It was, in part, the immense range of her writings that made Mary Douglas such a profoundly important figure in British intellectual life in the second half of the Twentieth Century. She wrote books about Purity and Danger, Natural Symbols, Risk and Blame, How Institutions Think, and articles on everything from jokes to good taste, from drink to implicit meanings.

In a fascinating conversation with the historian and anthropologist, Professor Alan McFarlane, she spoke about the influence her convent education had had on her work: the nuns “were very interested in getting us married and they weren’t interested in us getting academic qualifications. But in order to get a grant they had to come up to certain educational standards and be certificated as a teaching school so in fact they were brilliant. Not just one, I had a series of really brilliant women teachers.”

In fact she goes so far as to describe three of her teachers as “quite outstanding intellectuals as well as teachers” and claimed that “to rise up to their standards was quite a challenge”. She also describes having a doctrine class every day which was so special that the students had to wear gloves: “We loved those lessons because the nun was so enthusiastic.”

Brown cotton gloves were also worn out of respect for the Blessed Sacrament whenever the girls went to chapel, while on Feast Days the pupils wore white clothes and white gloves. Some of the trenchant points she made about Friday abstinence in Natural Symbols were surely derived, on one basic level at least, from her experiences at the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Roehampton.

Indeed she became interested in social studies because all pupils were required to take a certificate in Catholic Social Teaching, based on the papal encyclicals. However, the nuns thought Sociology was anti-God and anti-religion so they wouldn’t send her to the LSE. She had to make do with PPE at Oxford instead!

So what has all this got to do with the Catholic English teacher? Three things, I think.

1. Mary Douglas wrote explicitly about literature in her last book, Thinking in Circles.

2. In her last years she also wrote about the Bible from a literary as well as an anthropological perspective: Leviticus as Literature, for example, is a fascinating book because of the multi-disciplinary approach Mary Douglas adopts.

3. Mary Douglas was educated at the same Sacred Heart school as Antonia White but the description she gives of her convent education is quite different from that given by White in Frost in May. I wouldn't wholly knock Frost in May, though I don't like the way it's been used to knock convent education across the board. However, while it's worth remembering that White later returned to her Catholic faith, as described in The Hound and the Falcon, it's also worth remembering that there were others, like Mary Douglas, whose experiences were much more positive from the start.

I'm not naive enough to think that very much of this will ever find its way into the English classroom but I do think that Mary Douglas is a great model of the committed Catholic intellectual and that her books are still very much worth reading. But don't worry: it's back to fiction for my next post.

Frank Cottrell Boyce on Newman

2011-11-07T21:37:00.000Z

Frank Cottrell Boyce, the author of Millions among many other great children's books, gave a lecture last week on Newman. As you might expect from Cottrell Boyce, it was both witty and thought-provoking. You can download a PDF of the lecture or listen online. Both are worth doing.

Preparing for Advent: Michael Morpurgo and Quentin Blake

2011-11-06T21:43:00.001Z

Michael Morpurgo and Quentin Blake are among Britain's most best-loved children's authors, so On Angel Wings, a retelling of the Christmas story by Morpurgo with illustrations by Blake, is a pretty surefire winner.

This short book tells the story of the shepherd boy who is left behind to watch over the sheep while the rest of the shepherds travel to Bethlehem to visit the infant Jesus. However, when Gabriel returns for him he becomes the first visitor at the stable and the first to give a gift. It's a charming and thought-provoking take on the original and one that I think I'll be reading to my Year 7s (11-year olds) in the last lesson before the Christmas holiday.

Blake's pictures, which will be familiar to anyone who has read Roald Dahl's books even if they haven't come across Blake's own wonderful books, complement the text as well as you would imagine and there's even a dramatised version coming up at the National Theatre on 21st December.

My only quibble, as with so many modern books that deal with angels, is that familiarity too easily replaces awe: "I'm sorry to drop in on you unexpectedly like this," are Gabriel's first words to the shepherds. But I'll try not to quibble too much. On Angel Wings is a welcome book for anyone looking for a good book for their children or their students for Christmas.

Lord of the Flies

2011-11-03T00:06:00.001Z

A little while back I set myself a literary challenge. I've now decided that a side of A4 is not enough but I have restricted myself to two sides. I'm currently working my way back through the 20th Century and here's my analysis of part of the final chapter of Lord of the Flies.

William Golding was the master of the unexpected ending. In many of his novels there is an unexpected change of perspective in the final chapter which makes the reader reconsider all that has gone before. In Pincher Martin, for example, it is only right at the very end of the novel that we realise that the sailor whom we believed to have been struggling for survival throughout the novel has been dead all along. And in The Inheritors, a novel in which we follow a wonderful group of Neanderthals, it is quite a shock when, in the last chapter, we see them through the eyes of homo sapiens, through our eyes in effect, as nothing more than “strange creature[s], smallish, and bowed.”

In his most famous novel, Lord of the Flies, the change of perspective comes shortly after the children have completed their descent into savagery. At the start of the novel their plane comes down during what is presumably World War III and they find themselves stranded without adults on a desert island. But gradually their bestial nature comes to the fore and two of the boys, including the one nicknamed Piggy, are killed. As the book draws to a close, a murderous hunt is underway for Ralph, the group’s former leader.

Just as he is about to be killed, the boys stumble across a British naval officer and, suddenly, we see them as they are: a bunch of unruly children. But they are no longer mere children. Like the adults who have been tearing each other apart in a nuclear war, they have discovered “the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart” - original sin if you like – and, in a wonderfully bathetic moment, they burst into tears.

The final irony, of course, is that the officers who discover them, men whose only response is to turn away “to give [the children] time to pull themselves together”, are no better than savages themselves. They may have neat uniforms instead of matted hair and unwiped noses, and machine-guns instead of spears, but, as Golding knew full well having served in the British Navy during World War II, they are as capable of following the Lord of the Flies as any schoolboy.

In some ways Lord of the Flies is very much a book of its time. As Golding himself put it: “Before the second world war I believed in the perfectability of social man; that a correct structure of society produced goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society. It is possible that I believe something of the same again; but after the war I did not because I was unable to. I had discovered what one man could do to another. I’m not talking of one man killing another with a gun, or dropping a bomb on him or blowing him up or torpedoing him. I am thinking of the vileness beyond all words that went on, year after year, in the totalitarian states. They were not done by the head hunters of New Guinea, or by some primitive tribe in the Amazon. They were done, skilfully, coldly, by educated men, doctors, lawyers, by men with a tradition of civilisation behind them, to beings of their own kind. I must say that anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.”

But Lord of the Flies is not merely a response to the horrors of Nazism: it is a book about the human condition written in beautifully poetic prose (a book written by a man whose first published work was a, now largely forgotten, book of poems). Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 because his novels transcended the times in which they were written and spoke to something deeper in his readers’ minds and hearts.

Of course there’s one other reason why I’m keen on Golding. Before he became a full-time writer, before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was an English teacher. There’s hope for us yet.

(P.S. See here for the Nobel Prize Lord of the Flies game)

Andrew Krivak - The Sojourn

2011-11-01T19:50:00.000Z

Last November I mentioned not only Siegfried Sassoon but also the former Augustinian friar, William Brodrick, whose novel, A Whispered Name, was a welcome addition to the ranks of First World War novels. This year it's the turn of a former Jesuit, Andrew Krivak, whose novel, The Sojourn, is a National Book Award finalist.

By writing about a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army fighting on the Italian front, Krivak gives us an insight into an aspect of the Great War which is too little known (nothwithstanding Hemingway's Farewell to Arms). But this is more than a war novel. The narrative is framed by two stories about children who are rescued, the narrator by his mother and another child (but I won't give too much away) by the narrator. This is a novel which is as much about families and migration as it is about the war.

Having said that, the sections which deal with the war are among the best in the book. The part of the novel where Krivak writes about the sharpshooters in action is, I think, particularly fine, although the final post-war sections are also both moving and harrowing.

However, I did have some reservations about the novel. In particular I found Krivak's prose style hard to cope with at times. To put it simply, I thought his sentences were sometimes just too long. Take this paragraph, for instance:

All this time, we spoke in English. The first day he hoisted me into that saddle and we led the herd away from Pastvina, the last he spoke of any Slavic language was to those same Rusyn peasants who greeted him as they took to the fields in Lent with "Slava isusu Khristu," to which he responded "Slava na viki," and then ceased to say a word comprehensible to me, until, by the end of the summer, I knew - and could respond to - the language that was to become our own there in the mountains, and which he insisted that I never speak when we went back to the village, where everyone spoke Slovak, or Rusyn, or Hungarian to outsiders.

I felt like I was being swept away by a flood of subordinate clauses. There were also moments when the language jarred. Take the penultimate sentence in this extract, for instance.

After a time, I asked, "What is left to be afraid of?"
And he said, "The possibility that a life itself may prove to be the most worthy struggle. Not the whole sweeping vale of tears that Rome and her priests want us to sacrifice ourselves to daily so that she lives in splendor, but one single moment in which we die so that someone else lives. That's it, and it is fearful because it cannot be seen, planned, or even known. It is simply lived. If there be purpose, it happens of a moment within us, and lasts a lifetime without us, like water opening and closing in a wake. Perhaps your brother Marian knows this."

Krivak reminds Sebastian Smee of The Boston Globe of Cormac McCarthy, among other writers, so let's compare Krivak's paragraph with one of McCarthy's.

When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

Of course it's invidious to quote authors out of context but I think the essential difference between the writers is clear even from these two passages.

Evelyn Waugh's Short Stories

2011-10-28T15:13:00.000+01:00

Evelyn Waugh's short stories are a little patchy in quality but they are still definitely worth owning and teaching. Some, like 'The Man Who Liked Dickens', are rightly regarded as masterpieces but others are less well-known.

'Love Among the Ruins: A Romance of the Near Future', for example, is not his best story but its subject matter is incredibly relevant in contemporary Britain and, as you would expect from Waugh, it has some great satirical moments.

The story follows Miles Mountjoy, an orphan brought up by the state and subjected to "Constructive Play" and psychonalysis every Friday, who becomes a pyromanaic. Fortunately for him, in "New Britain ... there are no criminals. There are only the victims of inadequate social services." He is therefore rehabilitated rather than punished, before being given a plum job with the Department of Euthanasia:

"Euthanasia had not been part of the original 1945 Health Service; it was a Tory measure designed to attract votes from the aged and mortally sick. Under the Bevan-Eden Coalition the service came into general use and won instant popularity. The Union of Teachers was pressing for its application to difficult children."

In the department he falls in love with Clara, an ex-ballet dancer whose sterilisation has had unexpected side-effects (she has grown a beard) and he slowly learns to become human:

"For Miles, child of the State, Sex had been part of the curriculum at every stage of his education; first in diagrams, then in demonstrations, then in application, he had mastered all the antics of procreation. Love was a word seldom used except by politicians and by them only in moments of pure fatuity. Nothing that he had been taught prepared him for Clara."

Events start to spiral out of control at Santa-Claus-tide (because Christmas, of course, has been abolished) but I won't spoil the ending here.

Evelyn Waugh is sometimes characterised as a conservative throwback, a man who was out of touch, but, in fact, as this story shows, he was not just remarkably acute but also remarkably prescient.

Another story which now now seems more visionary than it would have done in the years immediately after Waugh's death is 'Out of Depth', which was written shortly after his conversion. Drawing upon the tradition of H G Wells and Conan Doyle and, more directly, on John Gray's Park, it tells the story of two men who, after a drunken night out, are sent back and forward in time to "recover the garnered wisdom which the ages of reason have wasted."

The story follows Rip Van Winkle, the man who travels into the future, to a London which has returned to primitivism. Londoners now live in mud huts, travel by canoe, and move "with the loping gait of savages." However, in a twist familiar to readers of Park (then) and Noughts and Crosses (now), these white savages are ruled by a noble black race. Rip gradually gets to learn about their way of life before coming across that garnered wisdom:

"And then later - how much later he could not tell -something that was new and yet ageless. The word 'Mission' painted on a board; a black man dressed as a Dominican friar... and a growing clearness. Rip knew that out of strangeness, there had come into being something familiar; a shape in chaos. Something was being done. Something was being done that Rip knew; something that twenty-five centuries had not altered. [...] The priest turned towards them his bland, black face.
"Ite, missa est."

It may have been difficult to appreciate Waugh's understanding of the hermeneutic of continuity in the years following his death in 1966 but now his insights are coming back into their own. Perhaps his short stories, as well as his wonderful novels, could also put in more of an appearance in the classroom too.

The Arab Spring

2011-10-22T20:31:00.000+01:00

One way of making sense of what has been going on in North Africa and the Middle East over the last year is to look at literature and film. Of Gods and Men, which won the Grand Prize at Cannes, for example, clearly struck a chord with a great many people and is well worth watching. (The press kit also provides some useful information which could easily be used in the classroom.)

However, great a movie as it is, it doesn't provide the last word on North African politics. Clearly there is plenty more to the Arab Spring than what is going on in Algeria. There have been some wonderful books written in Egypt, for instance, which help shed light on the difficulties faced by Coptic Christians in recent weeks and months (to pick just one important topic among many). A novel I particularly enjoyed was Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery by Bahaa' Taher (some of which can be read here).

As the translator, Barbara Romaine, points out in her interesting introduction: "just as it is no accident that [Taher's] novel - about a remarkable alliance between a Muslim village in Upper Egypt and the inhabitants of a nearby Coptic monastery - emerges precisely when it does [in 1996], it is no coincidence that the novel has not just one chief heroic figure, but two: the one a Muslim and the other a Copt."

She further points out that "it is arguably not primarily the issue of religious identity that has historically given rise to conflict between Muslim and Coptic communities. In fact, the most serious trouble between Coptic and Muslim groups has occurred at times when external or internal political forces have disrupted Egypt's social fabric to such a degree that its citizens
have found themselves in a struggle to assert their identity as Egyptians."

Which is why this book is so important in the contemporary climate. Taher doesn't give us the sort of novel we might want because he doesn't play on our western prejudices. What he gives us instead is something much more profound and, ultimately, something much more hopeful:

"[T]he Western reader...," he wrote in an interview with Egypt Today, "wants to read about the exotic East, and about the discrimination against women. They want to hear that the regimes are dictatorial, and that there are fierce problems between minorities. Khalti Safeyya said that things are not that bad, and this is something they do not want to hear. The BBC interviewed me about it, and the anchor kept interjecting, ‘Surely things are not really as you describe them.’ At the end I told her it is your testimony against mine. Go back to what Lucy Duff Gordon wrote, and she was a visitor to the area I write about. If I write a novel about [discrimination], it will become a best-seller tomorrow."

However, I'm not recommending this book because it's timely or because it offers a hopeful picture of life in Egypt but because it's a great piece of literature. It's short - a mere 124 pages - and yet the plot, the characterisation and the sense of place are all vividly realised. There is, admittedly, little sense of what the Coptic monks actually do in the monastery - Of Gods and Men is much better at giving us a sense of the liturgy - but we are given a wonderful portrait of ordinary village life among ordinary Muslims and their relationship with at least some of their Christian neighbours.

A few thoughts about 'Jamrach's Menagerie'

2011-10-18T21:51:00.000+01:00

Jamrach's Menagerie, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is a fascinating book. The subject matter is, at times, grim indeed but it's worth reading for the prose style alone. I have used the section about the capture of the Ora (page 162), for example, to show my students how to make use of the senses, and especially smell, in their own writing.

The book also raises some interesting questions for the Catholic English teacher. To explain further I need to mention some key moments in the plot so please look away now if you don't want to know what happens.

When the sailors are shipwrecked they cling at first to the vestiges of their humanity: they bury their dead at sea and pray. But as their plight and their actions become more desperate the novel's language also becomes more explicitly religious. The decision to turn cannibal creeps up on the characters and soon they are drinking blood and eating flesh:

"Drink of this," said Dan when it was his turn, raising the cup as if it was a chalice, "for this is my blood, shed for thee..."

It is the body and blood of ordinary human beings which sustain the sailors because, as one of the characters explains, "enough praying had gone on in that boat to sanctify all the holy places of the earth and it had long since become plain that God didn't answer. Not so's the average idiot could understand anyway."

However, religious questions remain to the fore as the plot begins to revolve around the notions of love and sacrifice. The last three sailors draw lots to decide who shall be shot and eaten and Jaffy, the young narrator, finds that he has agreed to kill his best friend, Tim. In a powerful but terrible inversion, Tim assures his friend that he's "got the worst of it":

"No blame, Jaf," he says. "I'd do the same for you. You're my best friend."

The novel ends not with Tim's death or with Jaf's rescue but with his return to London. Unable to face up to what he has done, he shuts himself away from everyone in the close-knit community, including Tim's mother and sister, the girl he has always loved. And yet his shame is all apparently self-imposed. When he emerges from his shell the people of Bermondsey do not reproach him for killing and eating one of their own. Even Tim's mother's verdict is: "I know it's not your fault, Jaffy ... I know it really, but it's just a very hard thing."

He lights candles for the dead in the seamen's bethel and gradually time and the understanding of those around him bring a kind of peace. But, however hard he tries to forget it, the essential question still remains: "My heart hurt, and at night I'd look up at the sky and remember the stars at sea and ask: am I forgiven?"

The answer, as far as there is an answer in the novel, seems to be yes. Tim's sister, the sister of the friend he has killed and eaten, moves in with him, in what is perhaps the book's most implausible moment, and life goes on.

One could say that this is a book in which the goodness of God is replaced by the goodness of people, a goodness so wide it can encompass even those who have resorted to cannibalism. As Carol Birch explains: "Partly what moved me to write this novel was how much love there was in the accounts of the people who survived for the people who hadn't."

Jaffy's world is ultimately godless and, ultimately, godless worlds do not work in the same way as God-filled ones so, although Jamrach's Menagerie is a beautiful and challenging novel, it is not one, I think, whose moral questioning can go unchallenged.

‘Be dumb,  or speak but of forgotten things to far-off times to come.’

2011-10-17T22:18:00.000+01:00

'Vesica Piscis' by Coventry Patmore

In strenuous hope I wrought, 

And hope seem’d still betray’d; 

Lastly I said, 

‘I have labour’d through the Night, nor yet 

Have taken aught; 

But at Thy word I will again cast forth the net!’ 

And, lo, I caught 

(Oh, quite unlike and quite beyond my thought,) 

Not the quick, shining harvest of the Sea, 

For food, my wish, 

But Thee! 

Then, hiding even in me, 

As hid was Simon’s coin within the fish, 

Thou sigh’d’st, with joy, ‘Be dumb, 

Or speak but of forgotten things to far-off times to come.’

From The Unknown Eros

A poem for Catholic bloggers?

The National Book Awards

2011-10-13T21:39:00.000+01:00

The National Book Award finalists have just been announced and there are a number of books on the list which immediately grabbed my attention. One of them is The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak, a former Jesuit.

Some of what he calls, in this interesting conversation, his genealogy of faith has found its way into his first novel:

Did I, in the first-person narrative voice of the memoir, have a story to tell? That question remains open for anyone who may want to read what became A Long Retreat. Excised, however, from the middle of that spiritual memoir are facts that I would eventually weave into the fiction of The Sojourn. In my work of nonfiction, I talked a great deal about the genealogy of faith that my grandparents had passed along, and my opportunity as a Jesuit to travel to and live in Eastern Europe, so that I could taste and see the reality of the lives that populated the mythological “old country” I had heard about as a youth. But when those chapters hit the nonfiction cutting room floor, I thought, “Okay, maybe not here, but they belong somewhere, and maybe my next project ought to find out where.”

The Pen and the Cross

2011-10-13T00:04:00.000+01:00

Some of the most interesting work about Catholicism and English Literature in the last few years has come from French specialists. I shall write about Brian Sudlow's Catholic Literature and Secularisation in France and England, 1880-1914 another time but today I want to mention The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature 1850-2000 by the recently retired Professor of French at King's College London, Richard Griffiths.

Griffiths is an interesting man. He is now an Anglican Priest and has written, among other things, a book about Poetry and Prayer for Lent. The best moments in The Pen and the Cross come when his sympathy for Catholicism, his French expertise and his knowledge of English Catholic Literature come together, as when he writes about Graham Greene and French Catholic writers.

There are also some wonderful surveys in this book. I particularly enjoyed the chapter about Gerard Manley Hopkins which would be a great introduction to the poet's work for 6th Formers.

However, I have to take issue with some of his judgements about Catholicism and the 20th Century novel. Griffiths is clearly more comfortable with what he calls "the heady atmosphere of the build-up to Vatican Two" than he is with the hermeneutic of continuity and so he aligns himself with those authors who, like "Greene and Lodge have shown that a new, vital, more literary Catholic novel can be created on the basis of dialogue and uncertainty".

Evelyn Waugh, therefore, has a "very rigid view of Catholic faith and doctrine" and "his work is essentially a dead-end" while Greene "stands as a rock at the centre of the Catholic literature of his time". And, like Waugh, a number of other writers "entrenched themselves in a last-ditch defence of traditional values".

So Alice Thomas Ellis gets relatively short shrift, in part because of her "predictable sideswipes against the modern Church", and Muriel Spark is a flawed genius partly her Catholicism is "of a traditional type, untouched by the modern tendencies that we have seen in so many other Catholic writers of the period."

I would argue instead that it is precisely writers like Waugh, Spark and Alice Thomas Ellis who provide the basis for a Catholic literary revival. In the years since Waugh's death, Britain may not have produced its own Martin Mosebach, a literary heavyweight and champion of orthodoxy, but it is surely only a matter of time.

I am not writing off writers like Lodge and Greene, whom Griffiths rates so highly, but I would want very strongly to challenge the suggestion that "traditional values" are dead. The accession of Pope Benedict XVI suggests very strongly that the theological tide, and with it (ultimately) the Catholic literary tide, has turned.

But I don't want to end with criticism of The Pen and the Cross. Despite a few puzzling omissions (like Rumer Godden), Richard Griffiths has given us a fascinating book which has left me wanting to follow up a great number of novels, poems and writers. Catholic English teachers and Catholic schools will certainly want to have a copy on their shelves.

Teen Magazines

2011-10-11T01:57:00.000+01:00

Teen magazines are really not my thing but, as these things go, t! magazine is much better than most. As well as all the usual articles about fashion, make-up and Tom Daley, there is also an article in the current edition about World Youth Day and another about Mary's Meals. Perhaps as important is what is not there. The editors are keen to leave parenting to parents.

The magazine also runs journalism courses for students. These run at various points during the year and have to be paid for but they sound as if they could be interesting.

The Translation of the Bones

2011-10-07T19:48:00.001+01:00

There is an interesting article in today's Catholic Herald about the Orange Prize-winning novelist, Francesca Kay. Kay, who speaks positively about her convent education in the interview, has recently published The Translation of the Bones, "a novel about faith and motherhood" which I will review properly at a later date.

The Nobel Prize for Literature: Tomas Tranströmer

2011-10-06T20:32:00.000+01:00

"I believe in God but only when I am writing poetry." So wrote the new Nobel Laureate, Tomas Tranströmer. However, according to Bill Coyle, "Tranströmer is a Christian poet, though not a churchgoing one".

Whatever the precise nature of his beliefs, it is clear that the new Nobel Laureate, at the very least, has a strong interest in the divine. One article which explores this further can be found in the Logos Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture.

You can read some of Tranströmer's poetry here and here. If anyone has any particular recommendations I'd be delighted to hear them.

Sea to the West

2011-10-05T20:20:00.000+01:00

A greatly under-rated writer, I think, was the Anglican poet Norman Nicholson. Nicholson lived all his life in the industrial (and then post-industrial) town of Millom on the Cumberland Coast. He was therefore largely ignored by the metropolitan elite with the happy exception of T.S. Eliot who recognised his potential and signed him up for Faber & Faber.

My personal favourite among his books is his final poetry collection, Sea to the West, which is now sadly out of print. However, you can read (and hear) some of his poems here and here. He also wrote some wonderful prose works about the Lake District which are well worth seeking out.

Nicholson was a devout Anglican - and an editor of Pelican's wartime Anthology of Religious Verse - and there is no better example of his faith than the title poem of his final collection: 'Sea to the West'.

With one crucial change this poem provided the words for his own gravestone. He was buried with his wife and so the inscription reads:

Let our eyes at the last be blinded
Not by the dark
But by dazzle.

Tolkien and Catholicity

2011-10-04T01:46:00.001+01:00

To return briefly to the subject of my last post ...

While there is room for a legitimate debate about Tolkien's style (though Tom Shippey and others have mounted a pretty robust defence on his behalf) there can surely be no doubt that Tolkien, almost uniquely among modern writers, realised the need for catholicity in fiction and so refused to be limited by the constraints of the all-conquering novel genre in writing The Lord of the Rings.

See Tom Shippey's The Road to Middle-Earth for a much more detailed discussion.

Dante and Catholic Literature

2011-10-01T21:45:00.001+01:00

What constitutes Catholic Literature is a question I have steered clear of on this blog, partly because of its complexity but partly because it seems to me that it's not a live issue for most Catholic English teachers. The reality, in the UK at least, is that we spend the overwhelming majority of our time teaching books that have little or no connection with Catholicism, even if we teach in Catholic schools. What I have tried to do on this blog, therefore, is suggest just a few Catholic authors whose books we might drop into our teaching.

Nevertheless, the question cannot be wholly ignored, which is why Paul Claudel's essay about Dante is so interesting.

According to Claudel, "Dante is one of five poets who, I believe, deserves the adjective sovereign or catholic". (He doesn't say who the other four are.) Dante's work has three key traits: inspiration, intelligence, and catholicity. And what Claudel means by catholicity "is that these outstanding poets have received from God such vast things to express that only the entire universe will suffice for their work."

Such a vision does not force authors away from the real. On the contrary, "a true poet hasn't the least need for grander stars or more beautiful roses. What exists already is enough, and the poet understands that his own life is too short for the lesson it gives and the respect it deserves."

It is this catholicity, this breadth of vision, which makes Dante's work truly great. It is also this breadth of vision which makes his work truly Catholic.

The natural corollary of Claudel's argument, however, is that because they are limited to the merely human most novels (and a great many poems) do not deserve the same adjective. Now this is controversial and so I want to examine the idea in greater depth in a later post.

The crisis of the 19th Century, for Claudel, was not an intellectual crisis of faith but "the drama of a starved imagination." Part of Dante's genius was to create an image of Paradise that we could imagine, for, in the words of an English author quoted by Claudel, "if we are unable to form for ourselves a real conception of the thing desired, we are inclined to let our spirit stray and place it outside the field of actual interest." If we can't imagine it we can't believe in it.

Claudel's essay ends with some wonderful comments about Beatrice, Paradise and love but I wonder if this idea of "the starved imagination" isn't the idea which might be of more practical interest to Catholic English teachers. Maybe, just maybe, it's a problem we can do something about.

American Born Chinese

2011-09-26T21:16:00.000+01:00

I briefly mentioned Catholic Manga a little while back (click here to see the book they produced for World Youth Day) so it's now time to mention a Graphic Novel which has set new standards, Gene Yang's American Born Chinese, which was the first Graphic Novel to be shortlisted for the National Book Award.

The book deals with questions of American Chinese identity by bringing three apparently unrelated tales together with an unexpected twist. One of these tales is a fascinating reworking of the story of the Monkey King from the Chinese classic, Journey to the West.

Yang reimagines this Buddhist classic as a Christian tale because, as he explains in this fascinating interview, "there is an idea within Christianity of intention behind your identity, that there is this outside agency that actually intended you to be who you are. Asian Americans tend to be caught in a place where we don’t fit into our culture of origin and we don’t fit into the culture we find ourselves in. Thus, this idea of intention is very powerful and that was what I wanted to explore."

"[T]he two biggest pieces of my identity," he explains, "are my ethnicity and my religion [Yang is a Catholic]" but that doesn't mean that he produces Catholic propaganda. Far from it. As he has explained elsewhere his philosophy is to "live your faith and then write your life."

Yang has also published The Rosary Comic Book but American Born Chinese is his masterpiece (so far). You can see and hear him speaking briefly about it here.

So how might we incorporate this book into our lessons? I can suggest two ways. Colin Teevan's knockabout version of Journey to the West is sometimes performed in schools so American Born Chinese would fit in well here.

At another level, I was speaking the other day to some 6th Formers who are looking at the issue of identity in novels such as Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger and Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Yang's novel would, at the very least, provide some interesting contextual material for anyone looking at this whole question of identity.

And finally, while we're loosely on the topic, it's worth remembering that Yang isn't simply introducing a western religious concept into Chinese literature. Christianity, like Buddhism, may be a foreign import into China but, like Buddhism, its been around for a very long time. If you want to explore the topic further I'd recommend Jean Charbonnier's Christians in China: AD 600 to 2000, Liam Brockey's Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724 and Jonathan Chaves' book about the Catholic priest, artist and poet, Wu Li.

Catholic Radio for Schools

2011-09-25T18:04:00.000+01:00

This looks like it might be interesting. Here's a list of UK schools already involved.

Half Blood Blues

2011-09-23T18:26:00.000+01:00

I have written before about the via pulchritudinis, the way of beauty, which Pope Benedict has made so much of during his pontificate.

It was Paul VI who first referred to artists as people "who are taken up with beauty and work for it". John Paul II called them "ingenious creators of beauty" and Benedict XVI, in 2009, "the custodians of beauty".

I was reminded of these comments when I came across this passage in the Booker-shortlisted novel, Half Blood Blues. One of the Jazz musicians who suffered under Hitler is trying to explain the importance of his art towards the end of the book:

"I tell you what I know. The world's damn beautiful. But it's an accidental beauty. What we do, it's deliberate. It's the one damn consolation you can offer not just your own life, but other lives you ain't even met."

There is much here that Catholics can agree with - the beauty of the world; the importance of art; the life lived for others - even if we wouldn't accept that it's "an accidental beauty". There are some interesting discussions to be had about the philosophies of life espoused in the novel but I don't think it's too outrageous to suggest that John Paul II's words from his Letter to Artists might provide us with one interpretative tool:

"In so far as it seeks the beautiful, fruit of an imagination which rises above the everyday, art is by its nature a kind of appeal to the mystery. Even when they explore the darkest depths of the soul or the most unsettling aspects of evil, artists give voice in a way to the universal desire for redemption."

Writing Advice from Hemingway

2011-09-22T21:34:00.000+01:00

Ernest Hemingway on Writing is an extremely useful and interesting book. I wouldn't encourage my students to accept Hemingway's advice uncritically but I would certainly want them to read it.

There are problems with taking passages out of context but, nonetheless, Larry Phillips has done us a service by publishing many of Hemingway's comments about the business of writing in one volume. Take these words, for example:

"Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similies [sic] (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time)."

That should set the cat among the pigeons.

And what about these thoughts?

"I can write it like Tolstoi and make the book seem larger, wiser, and all the rest of it. But then I remember that was what I always skipped in Tolstoi... I don't like to write like God."

There was a humility about Hemingway which is sometimes forgotten. By not telling the reader everything - by not playing God - he made a virtue of our human limitations and through those very limitations created writing that was not simply spare and vigorous but, often, very beautiful too.

Paul Claudel

2011-09-15T22:24:00.000+01:00

I briefly mentioned Paul Claudel the other day but could have said more. (To see a lot more download an interesting Communio article here.)

Claudel has not always been well served by translators but it is just about possible to track down some of his poems in English translation. They sound better in French of course. Here is a reading of the lovely 'La Vierge à Midi'. And here's another with the words.

Fortunately one or two of his prose writings are still available, including this wonderful essay which I shall write about separately another time.

And if you're looking for a slightly longer school play than usual - as analysed here by Hans Urs von Balthasar - The Satin Slipper comes in at just under eleven hours :)

Literature and Prayer

2011-09-12T22:54:00.000+01:00

Pope Benedict recently returned to a topic which appears to be close to his heart: the role of artists in the Church.

In his weekly audience he spoke of the ways in which art "resembles a door open on to the infinite, on to a beauty and a truth that go beyond the daily routine" and specifically mentioned Paul Claudel, the great Catholic poet and dramatist.

What I really like about the pope's comments was the way in which he started his talk: "In this period I have recalled several times the need for every Christian, in the midst of the many occupations that fill our days, to find time for God and for prayer." Easier said than done? Well, it depends, at least in part, on our conception of prayer.

According to the Pope, "The Lord himself gives us many opportunities to remember him. Today I would like to reflect briefly on one of these channels that can lead to God and can also be of help in the encounter with him. It is the way of artistic expression, part of that “via pulchritudinis” — the “way of beauty”, of which I have spoken several times and whose deepest meaning must be recovered by men and women today."

Pope Benedict has spoken of the Way of Beauty before but this is, I think, the first time he has explicitly linked Art and prayer: "some artistic expressions are real highways to God, the supreme Beauty; indeed, they help us to grow in our relationship with him, in prayer. These are works that were born from faith and express faith. We can see an example of this when we visit a Gothic cathedral: we are enraptured by the vertical lines that soar skywards and uplift our gaze and our spirit, while at the same time we feel small yet long for fullness...."

"Dear friends, I ask you to rediscover the importance of this path also for prayer, for our living relationship with God. Towns and villages throughout the world contain treasures of art that express faith and beckon to us to return to our relationship with God. May the visits to places filled with art, then, not only be opportunities for cultural enrichment — that too — but may they become above all moments of grace, incentives to strengthen our bond and our dialogue with the Lord so that — in switching from simple external reality to the more profound reality it expresses — we may pause to contemplate the ray of beauty that strikes us to the quick, that almost “wounds” us, and that invites us to rise toward God."

It puts a different gloss on what we're doing as English teachers.

The Cross

2011-09-10T16:09:00.000+01:00

Next Wednesday 14th September is the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. The day is being marked in one Catholic Church in London by a performance of The Dream of the Rood, the great Old English poem in which the cross on which Jesus was killed tells its own story. You can find the text (and translation) here or here. And you can hear it being read (in the original Old English) here.

The name of the poem itself is perhaps a little misleading because, as Mitchell and Robinson point out in their Guide to Old English, the poem has no title in its original manuscript: "It has also been called A Vision of the Cross," they explain, "which is perhaps more suitable."

Whatever you call it, it is a remarkable poem and has an amazing immediacy:

I remember the morning a long time ago
that I was felled at the edge of the forest
and severed from my roots. Strong enemies seized me
on their shoulders and set me on a hill.
Many enemies fastened me there. I saw the Lord of Mankind
hasten with such courage to climb upon me.
I dared not bow or break there
against my Lord's wish, when I saw the surface
of the earth tremble. I could have felled
all my foes, yet I stood firm.
Then the young warrior, God Almighty,
stripped Himself, firm and unflinching. He climbed
upon the cross, brave before many, to redeem mankind.

Mitchell and Robinson point out that the personification of the cross could have been suggested by old English verse riddles such as Riddle 30 on this page and Riddle 53 on this page, both of which may have been riddles about the cross. These riddles (and many others like them) are wonderful resources for the English Teacher.

But what about the obvious objection that all this is just too obscure for the classroom? I would argue that Old English can be fun. Students enjoy hearing and attempting to decipher what is of course their own language. And as for the subject matter: we cross ourselves with great frequency. We have crucifixes on our walls (and maybe even round our necks) so why not bite the bullet and have a poem about this central Christian image too?

More Dickens. More Chesterton.

2011-09-03T22:19:00.000+01:00

The fact that Chesterton is so quotable means that he has not always been taken as seriously as he should have been. Here are a couple more of his comments from his wonderful book about Dickens:

"Dickens had all his life the faults of the little boy who is kept up too late at night. The boy in such a case exhibits a psychological paradox; he is a little too irritable because he is a little too happy."

"[Certain Moderns] permit any writer to emphasise doubts ... for doubts are their religion, but they permit no man to emphasise dogmas. If a man be the mildest Christian, they smell 'cant'; but he can be a raving windmill of pessimism and they call it 'temperament'."

Catholicising the Curriculum - Part 2

2011-09-03T22:13:00.000+01:00

The second part of my article on Catholicising the English Curriculum is now available online. The first part is available from the link posted here. I hope some of the ideas might prove interesting.

You can download the whole magazine here.

Faith in Fiction - James Wood in Oxford

2011-08-27T14:52:00.001+01:00

There' an interesting article in today's Guardian, a version of James Wood's Weidenfeld lecture at St Anne's College, Oxford.

It is encouraging to see, in the secular press, the argument that "a more nuanced examination of religious belief [than that found in the works of the New Atheists] can be found in modern fiction." However, there are problems too. For a start, Wood takes a long time to get going. Because it is the New Atheists who are deemed to have set the agenda, it takes Wood over 500 words to get to the point where he can write that, "Rather than simply declaring all religious belief to be non-propositional, which is manifestly untrue, it would be more interesting to examine what might be called the practice of propositional beliefs."

Another problem with the article is that it accepts many of the New Atheistic assumptions it criticises. For example, Wood claims that "one good place ... to see religious belief seriously represented and seriously examined, is the modern novel from, say, Melville and Flaubert in the 1850s to the present day. Melville, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Tolstoy, Virgina Woolf, Beckett, Camus - and in our own time José Saramago, Marilynne Robinson and JM Coetzee have all shown sustained interest in questions of belief and unbelief".

All of which is true but look at the lacunae: Georges Bernanos, Rumer Godden, Graham Greene, François Mauriac, Martin Mosebach, Flannery O'Connor, Muriel Spark, Sigrid Undset, Evelyn Waugh, to name but a few. With the exception of Dostoevsky and Tolstory, who lie safely outside the safe Anglo-American Protestant world, the only orthodox Christian on Wood's list is Marilynne Robinson. And practising Catholics don't get a look in.

The same is true, by the way, of the Weidenfeld lectures themselves, which feature Melville, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf and Beckett.

There is an interesting critique of the original lecture in The Oxonian Review in which Tom Cutterham points out, among other things, that, according to Wood, "narrative is both an “ally and a secret enemy” of faith. He connected the rise of the novel with that of a demythologising Christological scholarship in the early 19th century; that is, an interest in a more realistic, historical Jesus, consonant with the conventions of 19th century fiction." But, as I pointed out in my last post, G K Chesterton made a very similar point in 1906, though he drew rather different conclusions. (He also had a lot more to say on the topic than I was able to include in my brief post.) There is more to literature than the modern novel.

Cutterham summarises nicely: "Wood’s central point is not that our secular fiction gets rid of God, and can have no place for him, but that it is precisely in fiction that we can best examine the hold he still has on our consciousness." Exactly. So if we're going to be intellectually open and honest, let's ensure at the very least that we consider what believing novelists have to say about the fluctuations of belief and unbelief too.

Charles Dickens, G.K. Chesterton and Catholicism

2011-08-26T09:45:00.000+01:00

In his preface to Barnaby Rudge, Dickens wrote: "However imperfectly those disturbances [the 1780 No Popery riots] are set forth in the following pages, they are impartially painted by one who has no sympathy with the Romish Church, though he acknowledges as most men do, some esteemed friends among the followers of its creed."

An obvious question for any Catholic English teacher, therefore, is which side of Dickens won out: the 19th Century Protestant who had "no sympathy with the Romish Church" or the sympathetic friend who was perfectly capable of seeing Catholics as people like any others? I'll come back to Barnaby Rudge in a later post but for now I'd like to look at what G.K. Chesterton had to say on the matter.

In one of his books, he commented that, "When [Dickens] found a thing in Europe which he did not understand, such as the Roman Catholic Church, he simply called it an old-world superstition, and sat looking at it like a moonlit ruin."

More damningly still, in his introduction to Barnaby Rudge he argued that, "Undoubtedly [Dickens] knew no history; and he may or may not have been conscious of the fact. But the consciousness did not prevent him from writing a History of England. Nor did it prevent him from interlarding all or any of his works with tales of the pictorial past, such as the tale of the broken swords in Master Humphrey's Clock, or the indefensibly delightful nightmare of the lady in the stage-coach, which helps to soften the amiable end of Pickwick. Neither, worst of all, did it prevent him from dogmatising anywhere and everywhere about the past, of which he knew nothing; it did not prevent him from telling the bells to tell Trotty Veck that the Middle Ages were a failure, nor from solemnly declaring that the best thing that the mediæval monks ever did was to create the mean and snobbish quietude of a modern cathedral city. No, it was not historical reverence that held him back from dealing with the remote past; but rather something much better -- a living interest in the living century in which he was born. He would have thought himself quite intellectually capable of writing a novel about the Council of Trent or the First Crusade. He would have thought himself quite equal to analysing the psychology of Abelard or giving a bright, satiric sketch of St. Augustine. It must frankly be confessed that it was not a sense of his own unworthiness that held him back; I fear it was rather a sense of St. Augustine's unworthiness."

In other words, Chesterton was not blind to Dickens' self-confessed anti-Catholic prejudices but that did not stop him writing, in what Ian Ker calls "probably [his] greatest work", an appreciation of Dickens as a novelist which has been scarcely equalled since.

One of Chesterton's great strengths was that he was able to see Dickens' novels in their broad historical context. In one of those marvellous, free-flowing passages of his, he argued that "for a few years our corner of Western Europe has had a fancy for this thing we call fiction; that is, for writing down our own lives or similar lives in order to look at them. But though we call it fiction, it differs from older literatures chiefly in being less fictitious."

According to Chesterton, Dickens stood outside this tradition because he retained a link with the literature that came before the Realist revolution: "Dickens was a mythologist rather than a novelist; he was the last of the mythologists, and perhaps the greatest."

Dickens stood in a line of descent, through Shakespeare, with Chaucer and other great Catholic writers and so, Chesterton argued, whatever his own personal prejudices, his art drew upon all that was best in the pre-Reformation world: "He could only see all that was bad in mediaevalism. But he fought for all that was good in it."

As we approach the bicentenary of Dickens' birth next year, we do not need to be overly concerned by Dickens' lack of "sympathy with the Romish Church". As GKC puts it in his final paragraph: "The hour of absinthe is over. We shall not be much further troubled with the little artists who found Dickens too sane for their sorrows and too clean for their delights. But we have a long way to travel before we get back to what Dickens meant, and the passage is along a rambling English road, a twisting road such as Mr Pickwick travelled. But this at least is part of what he meant: that comradeship and serious joy are not interludes in comradeship and joy, which through God shall endure for ever. The inn does not point to the road; the road points to the inn. And all roads point at last to an ultimate inn, where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters; and when we drink again it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world."

Or if that's not punchy enough, we could look at the sign that hangs at the entrance to all Dickens' novels, according to Chesterton, the sign that could equally well hang at the entrance to Chesterton's own book: "Abandon hopelessness, all ye who enter here."

St John of Avila and St John of the Cross

2011-08-25T20:14:00.003+01:00

At the end of one of his homilies at World Youth Day, Pope Benedict told the pilgrims that he would "shortly declare Saint John of Avila a Doctor of the universal Church." St John will therefore join his compatriot and namesake, St John of the Cross (and our own St Bede for that matter), as a Doctor of the Church.

Is there any chance of either writer appearing on the school curriculum? Well, maybe. As I wrote before, St John of the Cross does appear on a list of recommended reading drawn up by the English Faculty at University College, London. And his poems have been translated by the excellent (Catholic) poet, Roy Campbell. One I'll be using is 'Other songs concerning Christ and the soul' ('Otras canciones a lo divino (del mismo autor) de Cristo y el alma') [p.43] which has a wonderful twist (for a modern reader). If we teach Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert et al, surely there's room for at least one poem by this great poet and teacher.

It's going to be trickier with St John of Avila but let's hope there are more editions of his works on the way now that he is about to be recognised as a Doctor of the Church. His Audi, Filia is said to be the book to read but it is rather expensive.

A little summer reading

2011-08-19T20:13:00.000+01:00

I sometimes include the Bible, or particular books of the Bible, on my recommended reading lists; my students usually respond with expressions of complete incredulity. But I'm glad to see I'm not alone. Here are the Pope's suggestions for vacation reading:

When we have a break from our activities, especially in the holidays, we often take up a book we want to read. It is on this very aspect that I would first like to reflect today.

Each one of us needs time and space for recollection, meditation and calmness.... Thanks be to God that this is so! In fact, this need tells us that we are not made for work alone, but also to think, to reflect or even simply to follow with our minds and our hearts a tale, a story in which to immerse ourselves, in a certain sense “to lose ourselves” to find ourselves subsequently enriched.

Of course, many of these books to read, which we take in our hands during our vacation are at best an escape, and this is normal. Yet various people, particularly if they have more time in which to take a break and to relax, devote themselves to something more demanding.

I would therefore like to make a suggestion: why not discover some of the books of the Bible which are not commonly well known? Or those from which we heard certain passages in the liturgy but which we never read in their entirety? Indeed, many Christians never read the Bible and have a very limited and superficial knowledge of it. The Bible, as the name says, is a collection of books, a small “library” that came into being in the course of a millennium.

Some of these “small books” of which it is composed are almost unknown to the majority, even people who are good Christians.

Some are very short, such as the Book of Tobit, a tale that contains a lofty sense of family and marriage; or the Book of Esther, in which the Jewish Queen saves her people from extermination with her faith and prayer; or the Book of Ruth, a stranger who meets God and experiences his providence, which is even shorter. These little books can be read in an hour. More demanding and true masterpieces are the Book of Job, which faces the great problem of innocent suffering; Ecclesiastes is striking because of the disconcerting modernity with which it calls into question the meaning of life and of the world; and the Song of Songs, a wonderful symbolic poem of human love. As you see, these are all books of the Old Testament. And what about the New? The New Testament is of course better known and its literary genres are less diversified. Yet the beauty of reading a Gospel at one sitting must be discovered, just as I also recommend the Acts of the Apostles, or one of the Letters.

'Understanding Media' - Marshall McLuhan's Catholicism

2011-08-16T20:38:00.001+01:00

There was an interesting article on Marshall McLuhan's Catholicism in the Catholic Herald on 22nd July which I suspect is still available for website subscribers. (It's now available here. With thanks to Benjamin Robertson for letting me know.)

The authors, William Baker and Evan Leatherwood, point out that McLuhan was "a devout Catholic, who taught almost exclusively at Catholic universities and attended Mass nearly every day of his adult life."

They also point out that his Catholicism "underlay his thinking", though it is true that the impact of his faith on his work is highly complex. However, what is clear is that he was not averse to quoting Catholic authors approvingly in some of his most famous books.

Take Understanding Media, for instance. McLuhan was nothing if not eclectic and so a staggeringly wide range of authorities are referred to, including the Psalmist, Blessed John Henry Newman and, perhaps surprisingly for today's secular culture, Pope Pius XII, who said in 1950 that:

"It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of modern society and the stability of its inner life depend in large part on the maintenance of an equilibrium between the strength of the techniques of communication and the capacity of the individual's own reaction."

The conclusion that McLuhan draws from this is that "Pope Pius XII was deeply concerned that there be serious study of the media today."

Now this raises all sorts of questions which can't be dealt with in a short blog post but I do wonder if Catholics in education - and I include myself - need to do a little more thinking about the much-maligned Media Studies. Here's an interesting article which might provide a good starting point from the excellent Holy Spirit Study Centre in Hong Kong.

G. K. Chesterton

2011-07-20T14:38:00.000+01:00

I'm without an internet connection at the moment and am set to be without one for the next month so apologies if all goes quiet on this blog temporarily.

However, all has not gone quiet on the G.K. Chesterton front. In fact there has been a flurry of activity just recently with a new biography and a book on The Holiness of G.K. Chesterton to name but two. (See this review for further details).

I've argued before that there is a place for Chesterton's fiction in schools but perhaps we might now also see increasing attention being paid to his wonderful non-fiction. Internet connection permitting, I shall return with some practical suggestions later this summer.

Journeys and Pilgrimages

2011-06-29T20:50:00.000+01:00

One A Level coursework option currently on offer is 'Journeys and Pilgrimages'. Teachers and students are given a free choice of texts so I have been wondering which books might be worth studying. It's hard to think of much literature that doesn't contain a journey of some kind, so what makes this option intriguing is the reference to pilgrimages.

There are some fairly obvious choices, like The Canterbury Tales, but there are other pilgrimages which don't stand out so readily. H.R. Stoneback, for example, has pointed out that:

"Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway's religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs. Pilgrimage variations in his work range from individualized quests to places that are sacralized by the achieved journey, to traditional pilgrimages long held sacred by centuries of pilgrims. Most notable in the latter category of pilgrimage is Hemingway's longstanding devotion to the specifically Catholic Pilgrimage of Santiago de Compostela."

And while we're on the topic of Santiago de Compostela, I have to mention Neil Curry's sadly out-of-print Walking to Santiago. The good news, though, is that his Other Rooms: new and selected poems does contain a good selection of the Santiago poems.

Another recent book which addresses similar territory is Christopher Howse's A Pilgrim in Spain while a recent movie is Emilio Estevez's The Way.

The focus of much recent literature about Journeys and Pilgrimages - like Cormac McCarthy's The Road - is the journey itself. However, an exhibition that has just opened in London reminds us that the destination was also pretty important, even if that destination then pointed the way to a far greater destination.

The British Museum's Treasures of Heaven certainly looks as though it will be worth a visit. Some interesting events have been organised by the curators and the associated book looks wonderful. There are some interesting books now available on the topic of relics - such as Holy Bones, Holy Dust - but Evelyn Waugh's Helena remains one of the most fascinating.

That's probably enough to be getting on with but I'm sure there are plenty more texts out there which would fit beautifully into this unit of work. Any thoughts?

Poem

2011-06-27T19:31:00.001+01:00

A line from one of the weekly readings caught my eye the other day: Ephesians 2: 10.

"We are God’s work of art, created in Christ Jesus to live the good life as from the beginning he had meant us to live it." (Jerusalem Bible)

Now what do we make of "God's work of art"? Here's the passage in the original Greek:

αὐτοῦ γάρ ἐσμεν ποίημα, κτισθέντες ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ ἐπὶ ἔργοις ἀγαθοῖς οἷς προητοίμασεν ὁ θεὸς ἵνα ἐν αὐτοῖς περιπατήσωμεν

The key word is ποίημα which, according to my Liddell & Scott dictionary means "anything made or done; a work, piece of workmanship; a poetical work, poem; an act or deed."

Most biblical translations render it as "workmanship" but I rather like the idea that we are God's poem.

In fact my classroom's Word of the Week is now "poem". And if you want the etymology here's a shortened version of what the OED has to say:

"Middle French poeme (French poème) ... and its etymon classical Latin poēma ... ancient Greek πόημα(4th cent. b.c.), early variant of ποίημα, thing made or created, work, poetical work, also applied to prose of poetic quality < ποιεῖν (early variant ποεῖν) to make ... + -μα."

Manga Hero

2011-06-20T22:35:00.000+01:00

OK, time for a change of tone: Catholic Manga!

Manga Hero is producing a book about the pope for World Youth Day 2011. The company also has some other intriguing books available now and more in the pipeline.

The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel, 1785-1829 by Maria Purves (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 2009)

2011-06-16T19:22:00.000+01:00

I recently came across a fascinating book which turns on its head an argument expressed on this blog among many other places: that Gothic fiction is rooted in anti-Catholic sentiment. Maria Purves argues that literary critics have missed or ignored many novels which complicate this reading of the Gothic. “At the heart of this study,” she writes, “is a collection of Catholic novels written in the period 1790-1816. These novels complicate the orthodox reading of Gothic as a vehicle for anti-Catholic, anticlerical sentiment. They make Catholic monastic characters heroic and use them to define and demonstrate the value and superiority of Christian piety in a world of unruly emotion and unchecked sensibility.”

Purves sees the Catholic relief Acts of 1791 and 1793 as symptomatic of a wider sympathy for Catholicism in the wake of the French Revolution, a revolution which not only produced a steady stream of émigré priests and religious but which also revealed, to at least some British readers and thinkers, the dangers of fashionable anticlericalism and anti-Christian sentiment.

The key text for Purves is (the Catholic) Alexander Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, a poem which provided the model or inspiration for a range of novels and poems which presented religious in a favourable light. In fact, what is perhaps most valuable about her study is the literary archaeology she carries out: a long list of Catholic (or pro-Catholic) novels are unearthed, including Regina Maria Roche’s “major best-seller”, The Children of the Abbey (1794), Eleanor Sleath’s The Orphan of the Rhine (1798),The Monk of the Grotto (Anon, 1800), Catherine Selden’s The English Nun (1797) and Agnes Lancaster’s The Abbess of Valtiera (1816). What is significant about these novels, according to Purves, is that they “all posit spirituality as a means of female fulfilment.” In fact she goes so far as to argue that “the Gothic novel became a vehicle for [the] promotion of Christian devotion.”

Novels such as these “offer a new type of Gothic heroine who challenges our picture of Gothic further. Convents in these novels are not symbols of the superstition, oppression and corruption of the Catholic Church. They are not anachronistic institutions from which enlightened democratic Protestant England is thankfully far removed. Rather, convents are presented as feminine havens where strength and dignity can be restored, or schools in and from which may be learned the value and power of a Christian moral foundation in a cruel world."

Fascinating as this argument is, there are limits to her revisionism. She argues that “a spectrum of opinions, rather than an absolute anti-Catholicism, coloured the years when the Gothic novel flourished". In other words, there was still plenty of anti-Catholicism in this period, an anti-Catholicism which deeply influenced mainstream English literature. However, anti-Catholicism wasn't the only ideology on offer.

In her book Purves offers a closely argued and well-researched reappraisal of the Gothic novel in its early years. The corresponding weakness of the book is that it only covers the early years. What she does not explain is the continuing strength of the anti-Catholic tradition in canonical texts such as Dracula. That was not, she might argue, what she was setting out to do but any discussion of the Gothic which omits, say, Frankenstein, Dracula and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde can only be a partial discussion.

However, that is to quibble. There is much that is refreshing about Purves’s book, including her awareness of contemporary critical blindspots: “Because Christianity is no longer a dominant aspect of our culture today, scholars habitually underestimate its resonance in the eighteenth century... ," she writes. "There is a tendency to over-represent the status of secularity in eighteenth-century society and assume that a thinking individual, a person of letters, must have disencumbered him or herself of religious belief and its customs... It is essential then that scholarship does not make light of or abbreviate Christian themes, inferring tokenism or satire, when they pervade a literary work or genre of this period. This often happens simply because such themes are more assimilable as irony to the postmodern reader and critic.”

It is a book which deserves to be widely read.

Evelyn Waugh interview

2011-06-15T19:42:00.000+01:00

There's a great interview with Evelyn Waugh here. It's not exactly breaking news, I realise, but it's still a great interview.

A few thoughts on the Gothic in Evelyn Waugh’s ‘A Handful of Dust’

2011-06-14T19:19:00.000+01:00

I was surprised to discover Evelyn Waugh’s ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’ in The Penguin Book of Horror Stories the other day. Waugh is not by any stretch of the imagination a horror writer, though it is true that he transformed his masterly short story into a novel which is, in many ways, dominated by the idea of the Gothic.

The Gothic of A Handful of Dust seems to be, at first glance, a merely architectural feature with three of the novel’s seven chapters being entitled ‘English Gothic’. However, there is more to it than that: Gothic pretensions are constantly undercut (or covered over) in this novel.

“Between the villages of Hetton and Compton Last lies the extensive park of Hetton Abbey,” the county Guide Book tells us. “This, formerly one of the notable houses of the county was entirely rebuilt in 1864 in the Gothic style and is now devoid of interest.”

In fact parts of Hetton Abbey suffer the ultimate indignity of being clad with white chromium plating in the course of the book. And yet the Gothic remains for Tony Last an ideal. When he discovers the extent of his wife’s treachery, his mind became “clearer on many points that had puzzled him. A whole Gothic world had come to grief ... there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled...” The Gothic is more than an architectural style: it is an ideal, a moral guide, a symbol of a golden age.

This is why he does not abandon his ideal, even after the Gothic world “had come to grief”. Rather he pursues it across the globe. When he sets sail for Brazil, his mind is “occupied with the City, the Shining, the Many Watered, the Bright Feathered, the Aromatic Jam. [You have to read the novel to get the joke.] He had a clear picture of it in his mind. It was Gothic in character, all vanes and pinnacles, gargoyles, battlements, groining and tracery, pavilions and terraces, a transfigured Hetton, pennons and banners floating on the sweet breeze, everything luminous and translucent; a coral citadel crowning a green hill-top sown with daisies, among groves and streams; a tapestry landscape filled with heraldic and fabulous animals and symmetrical, disproportionate blossom. / The ship tossed and tunnelled through the dark waters towards this radiant sanctuary.”

It is, of course, an illusion, a handful of dust, for Waugh was no Gothic novelist. Perhaps, instead, we should see A Handful of Dust as a wry commentary on the Gothic pretensions of Horace Walpole et al. Frank Kermode has written about the way in which great houses become “by an easy transition types of the Catholic City, and in this book the threatened City is Hetton.” More convincing is Douglas Lane Patey’s argument that in A Handful of Dust Waugh actually offers us a critique of Hetton as a great house and, by extension, of the Gothic as an ideal.

George Orwell: A Very Christian Atheist

2011-06-13T20:00:00.000+01:00

There is a very interesting article in this week's Spectator about George Orwell's attitudes towards Catholicism:

"No one will be amazed that George Orwell disliked Roman Catholicism," it begins; "it is odd, though, that he seemed unable to leave the subject alone."

It reminds me of the argument of Alan Sandison's George Orwell: After 1984 which argued that Orwell was very much a post-Protestant. It's years since I read it but, at the time, its analysis of 1984 seemed to make perfect sense. I'm sure it's worth revisiting.

Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road'

2011-06-10T23:06:00.002+01:00

We can be fairly certain that Joseph Ratzinger was not thinking of Cormac McCarthy when he wrote in 2002 that, in the face of the evil seen in the modern world, "a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough. It cannot stand up to the confrontation with the gravity of the questioning about God, truth and beauty." Nonetheless, that stark concept of beauty is precisely what we find in what is arguably McCarthy's greatest and most explicitly religious novel, The Road.

The book is in many ways utterly bleak - an unnamed father and son wander through a dead America in which "the frailty of everything [is] revealed at last", where cannibalism is rife and children are roasted on spits - but it is also shot through with what McCarthy calls in The Sunset Limited "the lingerin scent of divinity".

God seems at first to be utterly absent from this post-apocalyptic world - the father asks, "Are you there? ... Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God ... Oh God" - and yet His scent lingers on in the love the father has for his son and in the son himself.

The boy is in many ways the novel's central character. It is the son who retains his humanity when his father struggles to hold onto it. It is the son who compels his father to feed an old man they pass on the road, and the son who insists on returning clothes to the thief they had robbed in turn. As his father puts it, "If he is not the word of God God never spoke."

Despite the horrors he experiences the boy still "glow[s] in that waste like a tabernacle". The child is not deified - he remains a child who desperately craves reassurance and love - but he does retain a childlike religious sense. When the father stumbles across a stache of food, for example, the boy insists on thanking the (long-dead) owners for it: "Dear people, thank you for all this food and stuff. We know that you saved it for yourself and if you were here we wouldnt eat it no matter how hungry we were and we're sorry that you didn't get to eat it and we hope that you're safe in heaven with God."

The father learns many lessons from his son and the importance of prayer is just one of them. Shortly before he dies he tells his son: "If I'm not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I'll talk to you. You'll see." This may not seem much like prayer as traditionally understood but it is the best he can manage in the post-Christian world they inhabit.

It is surely significant then that, at the very end of the book, when the boy finds refuge with another family, "He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time."

This is a terribly bleak novel but it is also one which carries a redemptive message about hope and love. It is a novel of great narrative power, a book in which the stark of beauty of the prose style carries as much meaning as the journey itself.

In one of his very rare interviews, Cormac McCarthy disingenuously said that: "it is more important to be good than it is to be smart. That is all I can offer you." He was wrong: in The Road he offered so much more.

Evelyn Waugh and Universae Ecclesiae

2011-05-14T21:27:00.000+01:00

It is, in my view, time for a re-evaluation of Evelyn Waugh. He has been too often derided as a conservative and yet, in one respect at least, his time has now come.

At a time when Universae Ecclesiae has just been promulgated it may be worth recalling the comments Waugh made both in his diaries and in a letter to the Catholic Herald (which can be found in A Little Order, a selection of his journalism to which I shall return in a few days):

"When I first came into the Church," he wrote in his diary during Easter 1964, "I was drawn, not by splendid ceremonies but by the spectacle of the priest as a craftsman. He had an important job to do which none but he was qualified for. He and his apprentice stumped up to the altar with their tools and set to work without a glance to those behind them, still less with any intention to make a personal impression on them.

"'Participate' - the cant word - does not mean to make a row as the Germans suppose. One participates in a work of art when one studies it with reverence and understanding."

In the letter to the Catholic Herald on 7th August 1964 he argued that: "'Participation' in the Mass does not mean hearing our own voices. It means God hearing our voices. Only He knows who is 'participating' at Mass. I believe, to compare small things with great, that I 'participate' in a work of art when I study it and love it silently. No need to shout."

He finishes the letter by again adapting, and significantly adding to, the words of his earlier diary entry: "I am now old but I was young when I was received into the Church. I was not at all attracted by the splendour of her great ceremonies - which the Protestants could well counterfeit. Of the extraneous attractions of the Church which most drew me was the spectacle of the priest and his server at low Mass, stumping up to the altar without a glance to discover how many or how few he had in his congregation; a craftsman and his apprentice; a man with a job which he alone was qualified to do.

"That is the Mass I have grown to know and love. By all means let the rowdy have their 'dialogues', but let us who value silence not be completely forgotten."

These views may have seemed curiously old-fashioned in 1964 but, during the current pontificate, they seem prescient. It might well be time to return to Waugh's words now that the Roman tide has turned.

UCL, St John of the Cross and Flannery O'Connor

2011-05-11T20:07:00.001+01:00

I was somewhat surprised, but rather pleased, to discover that UCL has The Dark Night of the Soul by St John of the Cross on its recommended reading list for 16 year olds thinking of reading English at university.

I can't believe that The Dark Night of the Soul features on many school reading lists but what should? Flannery O'Connor has a characteristically forthright answer in her essay, 'Fiction is a Subject with a History - It Should Be Taught That Way' in which she argues, among other things, that "In our fractured culture, we cannot even agree that moral matters should come before literary ones when there is a conflict between them. All this is another reason why the high-schools would do well to return to their proper business of preparing foundations." She goes on to argue that "The high school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present."

Carol Ann Duffy - 'Rapture'

2011-04-28T00:45:00.007+01:00

One of the most striking features of Carol Ann Duffy's Rapture is the sheer amount of religious language it contains, which is perhaps not surprising when we recall that Duffy was brought up and educated as a Catholic:

"shy of a prayer" in 'River' (5)
"like something from heaven on earth, from paradise" in 'Swing' (8)
"baptised my head" in 'Rain' (9)
"my steps to the river are text to a prayer' (10)
"Lazarus" in 'If I Was Dead' (13)
"the prayer of rain" in 'Rapture' (16)
"I see your soul in your eyes" in 'Tea' (20)
"a broken rosary" in 'Bridgewater Hall' (23)
"The evening sky / worships the ground" in 'Love' (27)
"like a sacrament" in 'Finding the Words' (31)
"simple as faith" in 'December' (32)
"grace" and "the heron priest" in 'Grace' (33)
"they pray at us" in 'New Year' (34)
"The Latin names of plants blur like belief" in 'Wintering' (36)
"forgiveness", "rain's mantra", "a kind of grace", "an absolution" in 'Spring' (38)
"as I drowned in belief" and "the dark church of the wood" in 'Write' (43)
"as though / in prayer" in 'Whatever' (45)
"grace" and "souls" in 'Midsummer Night' (47)
'Epiphany' (57)
"known by heart like a prayer" (59)
"a church" in 'Unloving' (61)
"without spell or prayer" and "this Christmas dawn" in 'Over' (62)

Now, these images all clearly need to be analysed in context but what is striking about them, with the exception of the "rain's mantra", is that they are all Christian and, in some cases, explicitly Catholic.

Time and time again, Duffy turns to religious language (and to myth) to supply the words and significance she seeks in the relationship described in Rapture. As with Samuel Beckett, Duffy believes that "all poetry is prayer". Or, as she puts it elsewhere: "Poetry and prayer are very similar. I write quite a lot of sonnets and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite."

So what does this mean in practice? The hermeneutic key to this particular set of references can be found in 'Over', the last poem in the collection, in which the abandoned lover asks, "What do I have / to help me, without spell or prayer, / endure this hour, endless, heartless, anonymous, / the death of love?" The immediate answer is memories and the implicit answer is poetry. But without myth ("spell") or prayer neither memory nor even poetry itself seems strong enough to fill the gap. For those who still believe, the "Christmas dawn" that ends Duffy's poetic journey has a significance that maybe even the poet herself cannot see.

A Farewell to Arms

2011-04-26T19:44:00.000+01:00

The impact of Hemingway's Catholicism can be seen in A Farewell to Arms but not, in my view, in the obvious places: neither in his sympathetic portrayal of the priest nor in the description of the narrator's near-death experience on the Italian front line but in the journey the protagonist undergoes during the course of the novel.

This is particularly clear if we examine two of the parallel episodes in the plot. One of these - and, in some ways, one of the most shocking episodes in the book - is when Frederic Henry shoots one of his comrades in the back as he runs away and then shows no remorse whatsoever. It is a scene which is thrown into sharp relief later in the novel when Henry himself is shot at by his own side for apparently abandoning his company.

What we make of these parallel episodes is very much left up to us. As Hemingway put it elsewhere, "I don't like to write like God." His narrative technique - the starkness of the style, the absence of all extraneous details, the refusal of the detached first-person narrator to pass judgments - forces us to plunge into the morally murky world he describes.

However, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Henry himself comes to believe that to do as you are done by is an inescapable law of life. The bare narrative continues throughout the novel but the narrator does not remain entirely detached to the end. In fact, it is the journey he goes on - "pilgrimage" would perhaps be too strong a word - which brings us closest to the author's incipient Catholicism.

As an ambulanceman at the front line, Henry had to allow his senses to become dulled; he was unable to respond emotionally to the deaths of so many of his comrades in arms. However, he also slowly found himself being overtaken by love. Emotional detachment was therefore no longer possible when, at the end of the novel, he was confronted by the possibility of death, the death of his "wife".

The passages which describe his inner turmoil as he waits in a Swiss hospital are among the finest in this wonderful novel. But bleak as they are, they do not plunge us into an abyss of hopelessness for Henry himself has changed, not wholly but enough to suggest that, as someone else once wrote, the great fisherman "let him wander to the ends of the world [and still brought] him back with a twitch upon the thread."

Initial Thoughts on Hemingway's Catholicism

2011-04-21T15:33:00.000+01:00

I was rather surprised to discover that, for much of his adult life, Ernest Hemingway was a Catholic. The image Hemingway projected to the world doesn't exactly suggest pious devotion but, according to one distinguished critic, we need to take his Catholicism seriously if we are to understand some of his greatest books:

"Beginning with his wounding and near-death experience on an Italian battlefield in 1918, and continuing with increasing intensity through the early and mid-1920s, Hemingway's personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest, in his life and his work, by profound engagement with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of Toreo, or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage).

"Hemingway's rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper. Before his twenty-eighth birthday (in 1927), he has accepted the tradition, the authority, and the discipline of Rome and formalized his conversion. Far from being a "nominal" or "bogus" Catholic as some biographers would have it, Hemingway is a devout practicing Catholic for much of his life. He believed that "the only way he could run his life decently was to accept the discipline of the Church," and he could not imagine taking any other religion seriously (Baker, Life Story 333)."

These ideas are developed more fully here and, even more fully, in "In the Nominal Country of the Bogus: Hemingway's Catholicism and the Biographies." Hemingway: Essays of Reassessment, ed. Frank Scafella. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. 105-40.

I'll post a few thoughts on A Farewell to Arms and Hemingway's Catholicism after Easter.

Graham Greene

2011-04-20T15:29:00.000+01:00

I've just come across an interesting article about Greene. I don't agree with everything the author says about the modern reader or about Greene himself but he certainly raises some interesting questions.

Flannery O'Connor: Assaulting the Imagination

2011-04-14T20:15:00.000+01:00

There is an interesting article in last week's English-language version of L'Osservatore Romano (6th April) on Flannery O'Connor. The article, entitled ''Assaulting the Imagination", is adapted by Michael Paul Gallagher S.J. from his recent book, Faith Maps. There's not a great deal that's new in it but it does provide a useful overview of O'Connor's theological approach from a Professor of Fundamental Theology.

All Quiet on the Western Front

2011-04-12T21:58:00.000+01:00

I recently returned from a trip with my students to the cemeteries and battlefields around Ypres and the Somme and while I was there I read Erich Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, one of the greatest pieces of literature to have emerged from the Great War.

Remarque was baptised and raised a Catholic. He was educated in Catholic schools and attended a Catholic teachers' seminary until he was called up in 1916 and then injured at Passchendaele. So it seems reasonable to ask what impact Catholicism had on his most famous book.

It is something of a cliché that religious belief was one of the casualties of the war and, at first glance, All Quiet on the Western Front seems to bear the cliché out. While meeting the bereaved mother of one of his fellow soldiers, Paul Bäumer, the narrator (or, at least, the first of the novel's two narrators) says, "God, is there anything I hold sacred? You soon change your views on that sort of thing where we are."

However, as Brian Murdoch points out in the Afterword to his translation of the novel, "All Quiet on the Western Front is not a memoir." It is a work of fiction and we have to see this narratorial comment in the context of the whole novel, a novel in which, to quote Brian Murdoch again, "the motif of the inextinguishable spark of life in man" cannot be ignored.

Murdoch does not explicitly link this spark of life with Catholicism but there is surely some link: when, later in the book, the narrator finds himself in a Catholic infirmary he declares that "this is a piece of good luck, because the Catholic hospitals are known for good treatment and good food."

The place clearly has its faults - the nuns are criticized for praying loudly in the corridor with the doors open - but it is still a place where utter cynicism cannot survive: "There is no one who wouldn't do anything in the world for Sister Tina, a wonderful nurse, who cheers up the whole wing, even when we can only see her from a distance," Bäumer tells us.

And when we are tempted to see her as an isolated good egg, he reminds us that "there are a few more like her. We'd go through hell and high water for them."

Of course, there's a great deal more to the novel than these hospital scenes. There is much that is harrowing (as well as much that is funny) in its pages. And, given what we know already about Bäumer's ability to lie about the circumstances of his friend's death, it's impossible to draw much consolation from the way his own death is presented at the end of the novel.

And yet, despite the horrors it describes, this is not a book without hope, nor a book that is entirely free of the consolations of religion. Remarque went on to write plenty more novels after this one: I shall now be making a conscious effort to seek them out.

Bringing Catholic Culture Back Into the English Curriculum

2011-04-04T21:23:00.000+01:00

I have just had an article published in Faith Magazine on 'Bringing Catholic Culture Back into the English Curriculum'. This is the fullest statement of my ideas to have appeared in print so far and I hope it helps provoke a debate. Any thoughts gratefully received.

The Man Booker International Prize and John Henry Newman

2011-03-30T20:45:00.002+01:00

Looking through the list of finalists for this year's Man Book International Prize which was announced today, I was reminded of something Newman wrote in The Idea of a University:

"First, then, it is to be considered that, whether we look to countries Christian or heathen, we find the state of literature there as little satisfactory as it is in these islands; so that, whatever are our difficulties here, they are not worse than those of Catholics all over the world. I would not indeed say a word to extenuate the calamity, under which we lie, of having a literature formed in Protestantism; still, other literatures have disadvantages of their own; and, though in such matters comparisons are impossible, I doubt whether we should be better pleased if our English Classics were tainted with licentiousness, or defaced by infidelity or scepticism. I conceive we should not much mend matters if we were to exchange literatures with the French, Italians, or Germans."

I don't agree with everything Newman wrote in this particular essay but I do recognise the temptation to look for greener grass in the literature of other countries. So what do we find when we examine the list of finalists? Amin Maalouf, who explores his own complex identity in Origins and In the Name of Identity, is a Catholic but the writers from Catholic Spain and Italy (Juan Goytisolo and Dacia Maraini) are less than enthusiastic about the Church. The Australian, David Malouf, though baptised a Catholic, seems to have stopped going to mass as a teenager. Marilynne Robinson is a Calvinist and Philip Pullman we all know about.

Does this mean that these writers are not worth reading? Of course not: they are all fine writers. But it does mean that we are going to be frustrated if we look to other countries for something we can't find in our own. To return to Newman: "One literature may be better than another, but bad will be the best, when weighed in the balance of truth and morality. It cannot be otherwise; human nature is in all ages and all countries the same; and its literature, therefore, will ever and everywhere be one and the same also. Man's work will savour of man; in his elements and powers excellent and admirable, but prone to disorder and excess, to error and to sin. Such too will be his literature; it will have the beauty and the fierceness, the sweetness and the rankness, of the natural man, and, with all its richness and greatness, will necessarily offend the senses of those who, in the Apostle's words, are really "exercised to discern between good and evil.""

A Literary Challenge

2011-03-24T21:56:00.000Z

How about this for a literary challenge? Let's say there are roughly 33 weeks in a school year - and, yes, I am embarrassed to type that - then could we (or our students) create a History of English Literature in 33 texts? Or, if we give ourselves three years and one text a week, a History of English Literature in 99 texts? It's the literary equivalent of A History of the World in 100 Objects.

I'm quite looking forward to constructing a History of English Literature ... in Reverse, starting with the 21st Century and working my way backwards. Each text and accompanying comments about interesting literary features must fit onto an A4 sheet of paper.

I'm also going to give the task to some of my students. It will be good for some of the older ones to think about how literary canons are formed. It will raise all sorts of questions: which authors, which genres, which genders, which religious affiliations, which countries, which languages, which dates?

Any suggestions gratefully received.

When Historical Memory Fails

2011-03-21T22:14:00.001Z

There is a slightly bizarre quotation from Stephen Layton in today's Telegraph: "when it comes to choral singing," he claims, "we are the best in the world, with a tradition stretching back to the Reformation". Is he really claiming that there was no decent choral singing in England before the Reformation?

It seems hard to believe but we see much the same with literature. As far as many schools and exam boards are concerned we have a great tradition stretching back to the Reformation. But before that English Literature wasn't worth bothering with. And anyway it's too difficult to read. And we weren't taught it ourselves at university.

Fortunately, there are some good resources out there to help us cope with this failure of historical memory.

The Bells of Nagasaki

2011-03-15T19:56:00.000Z

We should be careful not to make crass comparisons but I can't help but be reminded of Takashi Nagai's wonderful The Bells of Nagasaki at the moment. Nagai was a Catholic radiologist who survived the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan's most Catholic city, and described his experiences before, during and after the bombing in a wonderfully restrained manner. He did not shirk the hard questions (indeed, he came up with some arresting answers) but his book focuses more on human stories than on hard political or theological issues.

You can also read about Nagai in this book from Ignatius Press but I'd definitely start with The Bells of Nagasaki.

Words of the Week

2011-03-09T22:16:00.000Z

As well as a Poem of the Week, I also have a Word of the Week in my classroom. Next week's word is going to be Lent, which is a shortened form of the now obsolete lenten, which in Old English simply meant spring. In fact, as the OED explains, "The ecclesiastical sense of the word is peculiar to English; in the other Germanic languages the only sense is ‘spring’."

In a few weeks, I shall choose Easter. Again the OED makes some interesting points. Not only does it explain the derivation - "from Eostre (Northumbrian spelling of Éastre), the name of a goddess whose festival was celebrated at the vernal equinox; her name (:—Old Germanic *austrôn- cogn. w. Sanskrit usrā dawn; see east v.) shows that she was originally the dawn-goddess" - but it also points out that the festival corresponds "to the Jewish passover, the name of which it bears in most of the European langs. (Greek πασχά, < Hebrew pésaḥ, Latin pascha, French Pâques, Italian Pasqua, Spanish Pascua, Dutch pask)."

Alexander Pope: Part 1

2011-03-05T21:08:00.000Z

There is an interesting article by Brian Young on ‘Pope and ideology’ in The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope. “This essay,” he says in the opening sentence, “will unpack the simple statement that Alexander Pope was born to Catholic parents in 1688, and that he died in 1744, still a Catholic.”

Young reminds us that, in Pope’s day, Catholics were legally unable to inherit or purchase land, were forbidden from sending their children abroad to be educated as Catholics, and, bizarrely, were not allowed to keep a horse worth more than ten pounds. Alexander Pope was, therefore, very profoundly shaped by the discrimination his family faced because of their religion.

The result was, according to Young, that he became “very profoundly a poet of opposition … Far from being the laureate of Augustan England, Pope was a firm witness to the perceived shortcomings of the Whig alliance between Church and State.” This doesn’t mean that he was an orthodox Catholic: in fact he had “a problematic relationship with religion” and distanced himself “from much of the religious debate that engulfed a lifetime deeply marked and shadowed by the politics of religion”.

It is perhaps no surprise then that An Essay on Man, which is the poem most likely still to be studied in schools, “contains both Catholic theology and elements of freethinking”. We might argue about the balance of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in the poem but what is clear is that the poem certainly doesn’t contain “anything like a consistently or straightforwardly Christian exercise in apologetics.”

So what do we get in Pope’s poetry? Young quotes two particularly significant passages. The first is from one of his Imitations of Horace:

My Head and Heart thus flowing thro’ my Quill,

Verse-man or Prose-man, term me what you will,

Papist or Protestant, or both between,

Like good Erasmus in an honest Mean,

In Moderation placing all my Glory,

While Tories call me Whig, and Whigs a Tory.

To a certain extent, in other words, Pope was a mere Christian, but a typically moderate Augustan one. However, there is another passage which suggests that Pope wasn’t simply a moderate:

Hopes after Hopes of pious Papists fail’d,

While mighty WILLIAM’s thundering Arm prevail’d.

For Right Hereditary tax’d and fin’d,

He [Pope’s father] stuck to Poverty with Peace of Mind;

And me, the Muses help’d to undergo it;

Convict a Papist He, and I a Poet.

Young identifies “a secularizing drift from religion to poetry as a means of ideological resistance” in Pope's work. As has been suggested many times before, this same secularizing drift from religion to literature is commonly met in 20th Century literary texts. Pope is rarely taught in schools these days but in many ways he is a very familiar modern figure.

However, we can perhaps overdo this emphasis on Pope's secularizing drift. Young also recognises that “Pope’s use of satire in disguising his own commitments … makes it occasionally difficult to disentangle the religious elements of his thinking”. Indeed, he professes himself unable to explain why Pope remained a Catholic: “Why Pope, whose religious character remains obscure, chose to remain a Roman Catholic when conversion to Anglicanism would have procured him an altogether easier and more comfortable political identity,” he writes, “is a genuine enigma.”

There is one obvious answer, though it’s not an answer one normally finds in academic textbooks. Just possibly, as G.K. Chesterton once suggested in another context, the great fisherman “caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”

Learning from the French (and a couple of Americans)

2011-02-28T22:10:00.001Z

I recently picked up a battered secondhand copy of French Literature and its Background: the Twentieth Century, which contains, among many other interesting chapters, an essay on 'The Novel and Christian Belief' by the book's editor, John Cruickshank.

Cruickshank, who was Professor of French at the University of Sussex, argued that François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and Julien Green "all managed to command a wide readership while producing a considerable body of work in which they have written consciously as Catholics." Even if they hadn't influenced various English writers (Graham Greene most notably) they would still be of considerable interest in their own right.

The "avoidance of naive religious didacticism, notable in Mauriac' best work as well as in the novels of Bernanos and Green, goes some way towards explaining the considerable appeal of all three to a largely secular-minded public. They are not concerned to illustrate religious dogmas but to respond to their faith in imaginative and human terms," according to Cruickshank.

So which novels are particularly worth reading? I'll post some reviews another time but here are the ones Cruickshank recommends.

Among Mauriac's "more orthodox, charitable, and explicitly Christian novels of his 'second period'", he praises The Knot of Vipers and The Woman of the Pharisees. (I'm giving the English titles though he gives the original French ones.)

"In some ways, Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette is Bernanos's most satisfactory artistic achievement with its deeply compassionate account of an unloved, and superficially unlovable, child. The religious significance is implied rather than stated positively, yet implied with both delicacy and boldness, as the suffering of a fourteen-year-old girl points to Christ's passion," according to Cruickshank. However, he also recommends The Diary of a Country Priest and Monsieur Ouine.

As for Julien Green: "The main novels written by Green the believer are Moïra (1950) and Chaque homme dans sa nuit (1960)."

So we can learn from the French but what about the Americans? Well, Cruickshank's comments about Bernanos's use of 'Realism' to mean "responsiveness to the life of the spirit as well as of the flesh", a responsiveness which "must encompass both the seen and unseen worlds" reminds me of Flannery O'Connor's claim that, “All novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality.” ('The Grotesque in Southern Fiction')

And the other American? Julien Green himself. One of the greatest writers in French in the Twentieth Century was actually an American citizen.