Getting To Truth By Lying

Book Review by Suzanne Keen

From Commonweal, July 13, 2001

Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy (1991) remains one of my favorite American novels of the 1990s. In it Hansen presents a delicately balanced narrative of a teenaged postulant who receives the stigmata, to the consternation and even embarrassment of her religious community. Without tipping his hand to reveal "what really happened" in any crude sense, Hansen scrutinizes the reactions of the community with detachment and a lyrical economy that paradoxically heightens the reader's response to Mariette's experiences. It is a beautiful book about religious mystery that sustains both skeptical and mystical interpretations. Nothing about the presentation of that novel indicated that Hansen was Catholic, unlike his collection A Stay against Confusion, which arrives bedecked with blurbs comparing him to Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, Annie Dillard, and Andre Dubus. While I agree with novelist Valerie Sayers's assertion in Commonweal (May 4) that the duty of the Catholic novelist is to tell a good story, I also acknowledge the pressure applied by the label. What makes a writer who happens to be a Catholic into a Catholic writer? Hansen approaches this question directly.

Hansen has written six other works of fiction, including a book for children and six screenplays, and he has edited several books of American short fiction. Now the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University, he is a critically acclaimed writer in his own right. In his preface, Hansen tells two tales about the origins of his vocation. Both are sited firmly within Catholic worlds. In the first, the five-year-old Hansen recognizes in a suddenly familiar Gospel reading the power of repetition and the centrality of narrative. From the Mass he learned that "storytelling mattered," that to the faithful the return to "the same stunning stories" made the past live in the here and now and bound individuals into a sharing group. The purpose of storytelling in this version is clear; it encourages Christians to "continue the public ministry of Christ in this world." This model of vocation sets a standard so high that perhaps only Gerard Manley Hopkins himself could meet it, though it also allows us to observe that those original Catholic writers Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John sure told a good story, still fresh and functional after two millennia.

Fiction, however, springs from lying and thievery, as Hansen's second vocational anecdote acknowledges. Hearing from a fellow kindergartner a description of "a pressure-sensitive prie-dieu" in a European cathedral, which lit up a crucifix when people knelt upon it, Hansen swipes the idea and invents a hallway closet chapel, complete with miraculous special effects. The gratifying response of the kindergarten teacher encourages the child, just on the verge of reading, "to alter facts that seemed imposed and arbitrary, to intensify scenes and situations with additions and falsifications, and to ameliorate the dull and slack commodities of experience with the zest of the wildest imaginings." The very traits of fiction that dismayed Plato and provoked a dour response from evangelical Victorians become the offices of a vocation characterized by Hansen as "exalted and sacred."

Hansen makes two moves to justify this vision of authorship, one out of Sidney's Apology for Poetry and the other out of George Eliot. Sidney teaches us that the poet never lies because he never affirms; instead of telling falsehoods about the brazen world we live in, he creates an alternative golden world. In Hansen's words, fiction "holds up to the light, fathoms, simplifies, and refines those existential truths that, without such interpretation, seem all too secret, partial, and elusive." The artist as alchemist makes gold out of the impure materials of human life. As Hansen writes of his composition of Mariette in Ecstasy, "cribbing and stealing from hundreds of sources, I finally allowed my factual sources to be distorted and transmuted by figurative language, forgetfulness, or by the personalities of the fictional characters."

These made-up, swiped, or patchworked personalities become the vehicle for fiction's ethical work. George Eliot articulates the view that narrative fiction uses characters to cultivate the reader's sympathetic imagination. Thus fiction is an antidote to egoism and a device for encountering otherness. Hansen's version holds that "reading attentively, connecting our lives with those of fictional characters, choosing ethically and emotionally just as they do or in contradistinction to them, we enter the realm of the spirit where we simultaneously discover our likeness to others and our difference, our uniqueness." What makes Hansen's writerly vocation a Catholic one is the belief (Eliot would not have shared it) that reading fiction prepares an individual to recognize "a horizon beyond which abides the One who is the creator and context of our existence." Further, if writing fashions symbols properly, it offers readers an assurance of life's significance, and teaches the formula for happiness (first be; then love), it can, in Hansen's vision, become sacramental in itself.

It is perhaps inevitable that the essays following such an ambitious definition of vocation should fall short of the goal: interested readers should turn to Hansen's fiction. A Stay against Confusion collects occasional pieces (essays, talks, and meditations) in which Hansen discusses one aspect or another of his twinned topics, faith and fiction. The essays include personal reflections, a tribute to his mentor John Gardner, and workmanlike pieces on Ignatius of Loyola, Hopkins, a Tolstoy story, and the film Babette's Feast. These are joined by meditations on the Jesuit martyrs of El Salvador, the Eucharist, the prayer Anima Christi, and the stigmata. It is perhaps an inadvertent effect of the opening discussion of a writer's vocation that these nonfiction pieces at times invite a skeptical response. We know that as a novelist Hansen cribs, steals, distorts (as he should!), but what are we to make of the whiff of John Gardner's pipe tobacco, smelt by the author after learning of Gardner's death? Olfactory hallucination? Just the embellishment of an already quite touching tribute? Or does Hansen believe in ghosts? While I was moved by the results of Hansen's impulsive prayer to Gerard Manley Hopkins, the piece on the stigmata struck me as credulous, in contrast with the novel Hansen worked up from the same materials.

But these are small quibbles about a book whose satisfactions arise out of its variety. In an effort to unify the collection, Hansen provides a headnote to each of the pieces. These brief introductions provide background, often autobiographical, and I enjoyed them as much as anything in the book. Together with the meditations on Cain and Abel and the Eucharist, they sketched out the map of a memoir that would be worth reading. Literary editor and writer Paul Elie has written of our need for memoirs of Catholic adulthood, a rare item in a genre dominated by recollections of childhood. A frank account of a career spent writing "a faith-inspired fiction" would do more than A Stay against Confusion to illuminate the relationship between Catholic faith and American fiction.

Suzanne Keen, a frequent contributor to Commonweal, teaches English at Washington and Lee University.