More Thoughts on Catholicism and the Novel

As I mentioned in a previous post, Georg Lukács famously claimed that the novel was "the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God." But does this stand up to examination?

It's easy to assume that 19th Century Realist novels (and their 20th Century Modernist successors) define the genre. With their focus on the individual in this world alone, Eliot, Hardy, Woolf et al certainly seem to have written epics of a world abandoned by God.

However, it doesn't take long to find another way of looking at the novel. We have, for instance, just celebrated the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens, an author who (according to G.K. Chesterton) was heir to a different tradition that stretched back through Shakespeare to Chaucer and other great pre-Reformation authors.

As Flannery O'Connor once wisely noted in 'Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction': "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."

I would argue that some of the novelists of the 19th Century did a wonderful job of describing this world but only at the cost of restricting their vision of reality.

So where are the novelists to whom Flannery O'Connor's words apply? Muriel Spark, a Catholic convert, is a good example.

According to one critic: "[It] is as parables concerning the nature of reality that her novels must be read. In them reality exists simultaneously on several different planes. Most often and most easily observed is the naturalistic level, a term used here to refer to the ordinary or commonplace world characterized by unremarkable people who lead routine lives. The naturalistic level is presented with absolute clarity and reality. Less easily understood is the author's presentation of the supernatural level, which frequently interrupts and alters the naturalistic plane."

And later she adds: "Muriel Spark … emerges as a novelist whose themes are religious, even if they are not always couched in traditionally religious terms…. [The] author is acutely aware not only of the world of man, but also of the world of God and the incongruity between the two. The world of man is represented by the naturalistic surface of her novels which realistically depicts the commonplace lives of the characters. The world of God is represented by the extraordinary and inexplicable happenings which disrupt that surface. Both are quite real. They are complementary parts of a whole and rich reality…."

It is perhaps no surprise that Muriel Spark still does not receive the acclaim she deserves. Unless writing about The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, many commentators simply don't know what to make of her. She doesn't quite fit into the tradition of the novel as popularly conceived.

But, of course, she's not alone. There have been plenty of other novelists who wrote about what Evelyn Waugh called, in his 1959 preface to Brideshead Revisited, "the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters".

It's also worth pointing out that the world of the novel has changed out of all recognition since Lukács wrote The Theory of the Novel in 1920 (and even since Leavis wrote The Great Tradition in 1948) Both Magic Realism and Postmodernism in their different ways have disrupted the Realist tradition. Novelists now have to be open to wider possibilities, even the possibility of faith.

Catholicism and the Novel

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 True Story of the Novel'

Georg Lukács famously argued that "the novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God." 


Well, not according to Margaret Anne Doody. In The True Story of the Novel she argues not only that “the Novel has a religious well-spring" (p.172) but also that "a certain chauvinism leads English-speaking critics to treat the Novel as if it were somehow English, and as if the English were pioneers of novel-writing – ignoring, for instance, the very visible Spanish novels of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. A consideration of Spanish phenomena alone would lead to an admission that Catholicism and a pre-modern economic setting could also give rise to the Novel." (pp.1-2)


The novel need not be seen as a post-Protestant, secular genre. In fact she goes out of her way to point out that "in twentieth-century criticism the Novel is seen also as not only displacing but replacing myth, or religious narrative, or rather religion – customarily Christianity- itself. … We accept such a view as literal history (instead of as an image) only at the cost of ignoring the facts."(p.3)


Doody is no Catholic apologist and I wouldn't necessarily endorse all of her arguments but she does effectively demonstrate how narrow-minded English literary criticism has sometimes been. She also provides the groundwork for some interesting Catholic interpretations of the novel. She argues, for instance, that "what we term 'the Rise of the Novel,' meaning the advent of Prescriptive Realism, was Protestant enough to dismiss Mary out of hand" (p.453) and attempts to redress the balance by having a whole section of her book on Mary.