Journeys and Pilgrimages

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

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

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)

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

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’

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

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'

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

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

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'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”