Brief and Sundry Thoughts on John Michael McDonagh’s “Calvary”
January 21, 2015 1 Comment

Brief and Sundry Thoughts on John Michael McDonagh’s “Calvary”

pzZvVdwHTuvOrvdcVj-WteA9dhpevhMcX-4h3xyf9Es (Note: I won’t sum up the plot. For that, and more, see Steven Greydanus’s and Lauren Ely‘s excellent reviews of the film.)

I saw Calvary in the same week that I saw When The Game Stands Tall. Which manifested the stark and depressing contrast between the genre of well-meaning, cloyingly inspirational faith-based movies and those rare films, often made by non-believers, that searchingly and artfully wrestle with the Cross at the center of the Christian mystery.

But Calvary is a very hard film to watch. It is not for all sensibilities and is certainly not for family viewing.

To paraphrase Walker Percy, before life can be affirmed in a work of art, death-in-life must first be named. Calvary vividly and relentlessly puts on display the grotesque death-in-life of the ordinary “wellness” of contemporary man.

Flannery O’Connor: “I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.” One might say the same about McDonagh’s subject in Calvary. In one scene in the confessional Father James wonders aloud to his penitent that perhaps the medieval belief in demons and demon possession was “closer to the mark” than modern psychological theories of evil. What Calvary shows us is pandaemonium, a parade of demons taunting the representative of Christ.

Brendan Gleeson is superb as Father James. And the character of Father James is one of the finest cinematic portrayals of a priest I can recall. Not that Father James is perfect, or that all of his counsel is sound (did I misunderstand the scene in which he advises the young man struggling with purity to go to a bigger city where there’s more women with loose morals? Was this an ironic joke?). But all in all he is virtuous and wise, and it is painful to watch his struggle faithfully to minister to those who can only taunt and abuse him. Calvary is a fine example of how virtue can be depicted without being saccharine.

There were some false notes. After a gripping opening I thought the second act sagged a bit, with too many stagey, talky scenes serving only for symbolic effect. I don’t think it did much for the narrative for Father James’s bishop to be so effete, but I suppose McDonagh wanted to contrast Father James’ integrity with the complacency of the institutional Church.

I don’t find the denoument ambiguous. I believe what McDonagh is trying to say in Calvary is that Father James is both the martyr-victim of those who seek to wound the Church in the wake of the clergy abuse scandal, and the very thing such people need the most. I thought the post-climax scenes of the townspeople going about their customary business was meant to show how lost they were without the grace that Father James attempted to bring them. The final scene in the prison between Fiona and Jack confirms the enduring gift of Father James’ final sacrifice.

In the end, Calvary argues that forgiveness is the only way past the pain of betrayal.

 

The image above is reproduced courtesy of Reprisal Films.

Filed Under: At the Movies, Writing in an Apocalyptic Time Tagged: , , , ,
December 18, 2014 Leave a Comment

Story Structure and the Meaning of Life

It’s been a productive week. Yesterday the third book in my children’s Kingdom of Patria series, a Christmas novella entitled The Chronicles of Oliver Stoop, Squire Second Class: The Quest for Clodnus’s Collectibles, went on sale at Amazon. I had to take the book off-sale today, however, after discovering a small glitch that needed correction (Amazon/CreateSpace takes books off the shelves if they need to be reviewed again). But the glitch has been corrected and the book should be back on sale by tomorrow at the latest, and I’m very happy about that. (If you’d like a signed copy of the book, just drop me a line and I’ll mail you a signed nameplate sticker that you can post inside the book.)

Meanwhile, I’ve been using Scrivener to put together the digital version of the book. I hope to upload that to Amazon sometime tomorrow.

Back in November, some of you may have been following my series of posts on storytelling structure, The Happiness Plot. My original intent was to write 40-some short posts (approximately 300 words each) during November and, after some revision/addition, publish the ebook in early December priced at 99 cents. The press of business prevented me from achieving that goal, though I have far from abandoned the idea for the book. In fact, I’m back at the manuscript, and I believe, in the end, I will be publishing a better product than it otherwise might have been.

The point of The Happiness Plot is to help working writers, and just plain lovers of fiction, think more deeply about the meaning of stories. It’s odd. We live in a world that has turned quite skeptical about truth and meaning, yet every day countless writers around the globe (just notice how often #amwriting trends on Twitter) shackle themselves to their writing desks in an attempt to communicate something meaningful to their readers. Is all of this effort just a waste of time if there is no objective truth “out there”? Or does the telling stories hint at a deeper reality to human existence than many are willing to admit? In the book I argue that there is an intriguing relationship between story structure and the happiness that provides meaning for human life.

Among the ingredients I’ve been throwing into the stew of my thinking on this topic are the following books:

  • Robert McKee’s Story
  • Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos
  • James Woods’ How Fiction Works
  • Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction
  • Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry
  • Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity
  • Seth Godin’s The Icarus Deception
  • Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

I’m now aiming for a Christmas Day (or thereabouts) release for The Happiness Plot. My hope is that this little book, while getting into some meaty theoretical subjects, will also prove to be of great practical value for writers. 

Filed Under: On Being a Writer, The Craft of Fiction, Writing in an Apocalyptic Time Tagged: , , , ,
October 22, 2014 Leave a Comment

How to Make Money as An Author

To be honest, making money as an author couldn’t be easier.

Take the case of Anna Todd, the 25 year-old debut novelist from Texas featured today in the New York Times. The clock on Ms. Todd’s 15 Minutes of Fame began ticking when the prodigious piece of erotic fan fiction she began publishing last spring on Wattpad garnered an enormous worldwide audience. Entitled After, Ms. Todd’s book features Harry Styles, the real-life star of the British boy band One Direction–or, rather, a boy band heartthrob with the same name, band, and features as Harry Styles–in a “steamy” (quoth the Times) relationship with a college freshman. The results? A six-figure multi-book deal with Simon & Schuster imprint Gallery Books plus a tidy sale of the film rights to Paramount. The paperback version of the book appears in stores today as a 584-page epic with added and extended sex scenes.

So there you go. The recipe could not be more straightforward:

  1. Take aim at that healthy portion of the global populace which maintains a robust fantasy life
  2. Pander to that audience by concocting a romance plot in which romance is defined as “lots of sex”
  3. Include as one of the romantic partners a beloved celebrity (or a character with the same name and attributes as a beloved celebrity)
  4. Publish free daily installments to that purveyor of fine culture, Wattpad
  5. Sit back and wait for New York and Hollywood to call

You don’t even need a laptop or good grades in English. Ms. Todd wrote most of After on her smartphone without paying much attention to punctuation.

If you can’t follow these easy directions to success, then I have to say, Dear Author Hoping to Cash In on Literary Fame, there isn’t much hope for you.

Or maybe you’re finding yourself reluctant to copy the recipe of Chez Todd, though you’re not quite sure why. You got into the writing game to attract an audience, but you never thought you’d have to write erotica for teens, twentysomethings (and beyond) to get your mug in the Times. Something about all this just doesn’t sit well with you.

Perhaps Walker Percy put his finger on the problem when he wrote the following about the presence of erotica in contemporary fiction:

“The real pathology is not so much a moral decline, which is a symptom, not a primary phenomenon, but rather an ontological impoverishment; that is, a severe limitation or crippling of the very life of twentieth-century man [Ed. note--things are looking even more impoverished here in the twenty-first, Mr. Percy]. If this is the case and if this crippling and impoverishment manifests itself often in sexual behavior, the latter becomes the proper domain of the serious novelist” (“Diagnosing the Modern Malaise”).

For Percy, it’s one thing to write about sex as a form of ontological impoverishment, quite another as a way of amusing oneself in the midst of one’s poverty.

But it’s strange. As the Times reports, Ms. Todd has a loving military husband who supported her literary endeavors by encouraging her to quit her day job so that she could write full-time. So: loving husband, six-figure book contract, a film deal, fame. Why would Ms. Todd be experiencing any sort of impoverishment? What could possibly be missing from her life?

What’s missing, if Percy is right, is that she and others–perhaps including ourselves?–don’t have the foggiest notion of who we are and what we’re doing on this planet. Fantasy sex, money, a feature in the Times–such things can distract us from the questions about ourselves we find it impossible to answer. But soon enough the malaise will creep back in and that person looking back in the mirror will demand to know what it’s all about.

To tell the story of that person, we authors will need a very different kind of guide. Instead of How to Make Money as An Author, we’ll need a “how-to” book with a title such as, How to Make Money as An Author Writing Books Which Manifest the Truth of the Human Predicament to a World Which Has Forgotten What That Predicament Is.

Perhaps that is a book I will have to write.

 

The image above of Harry Styles is reproduced courtesy of Fiona McKinley via Wikimedia Commons under the following license.

Filed Under: Art and Culture, On Being a Writer, Writing in an Apocalyptic Time Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
September 4, 2014 4 Comments

What Being a Catholic Writer Doesn’t Mean For Me (And Shouldn’t For You)

The phrase has become slippery.

“Catholic writer.”

What does it mean?

For some the phrase plays like a favorite old song, an evocation of the glory days of Greene, Waugh, Percy, O’Connor, et alia. Days long gone and sorely missed.

For others “Catholic writer” may spell an oxymoron, or at least refer to the kind of writer one would not like to meet at a Manhattan cocktail party.

Even for some Catholics the phrase increasingly tends to serve as a signal that some exceptionally maudlin fiction is quivering like a bad cheese on the horizon.

But even looking at the thing dispassionately, it’s not exactly clear what is being described when one uses the phrase “Catholic writer.” Does it refer to

[a] someone who writes stories set in a Catholic environment featuring (mainly) Catholic characters?

[b] someone interested in giving his or her audience what Flannery O’Connor called “instant uplift”?

[c] a writer whose religious affiliation happens to be Catholic?

Of the above options, I would argue that only [c] is a good answer to the question of what “Catholic writer” means. A Catholic writer need not write stories set in a Catholic environment featuring (mainly) Catholic characters (O’Connor almost never did, Waugh didn’t for the first half of his career, Greene only sometimes–and with dubious theology, Percy wrote some Catholic characters but never put them in a Catholic environment).

And a Catholic writer should not be interested in “instant uplift.” Our remit is not to conjure warm, comfortable feelings but to tell the truth in a beautiful (not necessarily “pretty”) way.

But I think we can say something more about what it means to be a Catholic writer. A Catholic writer is a writer who sees the world from the point of view of Catholic theology and, whether or not Catholics or Catholic things ever appear in his or her work, endeavors to tell the truth about the human condition from the point of view of that theology.

Such a broad charge can take a Catholic writer into some strange and unsettling territory, territory held largely by the devil, as O’Connor warned. If the Catholic writer is going to write stories about the times we live in, then he had better gird his loins and get ready to depict the devil’s territory in a convincing way. In light of that fact, this admonition by Barbara Nicolosi, “Why Good People Do Media Wrong,” is worth reflecting upon. Allow me also to recommend my essay, which includes some input from Barbara Nicolosi, “What Are The Limits to Depictions of Sin in the Arts?”

But the Catholic writer is certainly not obliged to take on the modern world mano a mano. In Kristin Lavransdatter Sigrid Undset took us to medieval (Catholic) Scandinavia. Tolkien took us to Middle Earth. Shusaku Endo took us to 17th-century Japan.

In fact, the choice of setting and characters–whether they are Catholic or not, contemporary or not, realistic or fantastic–is not the most important choice for the Catholic writer.

The most important choice is the commitment to excellence in the writer’s craft. That is what really makes a Catholic writer a Catholic writer. Sure, it would be great to change the world for Christ. But the first duty of the Catholic writer as writer is to create a masterful work of art. As Patrick Coffin argued recently in reference to cinema, that commitment to excellence is what is missing in so many artistic efforts by Catholics and other Christians.

I expand a bit more on this last theme in two other pieces:

“A Catholic Moment in the Arts?”

“Let’s Renovate the Catholic Literary Tradition”

Catholic and other writers, I’d be interested to hear what you think of these thoughts.

Filed Under: The Catholic Tradition of the Arts, Uncategorized, Writing in an Apocalyptic Time Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
July 25, 2014 Leave a Comment

3 Questions for Zach Braff

Or anyone else who might be interested.

In his recent interview with Elvis Mitchell on KCRW’s The Treatment, actor-writer-director Zach Braff (Scrubs, Garden State) talked about his new film, Wish I Was Here, which Braff described as a story of a man “searching for himself in a quirky, funny way….struggling to find his own spirituality.” Zach no longer professes the Jewish faith in which he was raised and claims not to believe in any “higher power.” Braff’s intriguing interview raises three questions:

1. Why should human beings feel a spiritual void if there is no higher power to begin with? Is this a mere residue of a religious upbringing (Cf. “Catholic guilt”), or do human beings possess some kind of natural desire for the spiritual?

2. How is it possible that a human being would have to go in “search of the self”? What is the self that it is something that can be lost? And how does the search for the self relate to the struggle to find a spirituality? Is it the same struggle?

In the interview Mr. Braff states: “When you don’t believe in a higher power per se, what my spirituality is is finding some way of dealing with the, I don’t want to say ‘curse,’ but the mind-f@!# of living on a spinning rock in the middle of infinity. What my spirituality is is the science of it all, the earth, the elements, the fact that we’re evolved from cells and looking into nature. You know, I see God in little things, I mean I feel cheesy saying this but it’s the truth, in an orchid…I see that as my higher power…or you go online and see some bizarre-looking animal that lives a zillion miles under the sea and I see some higher power in that….”

3. The poet William Blake talked about the ability “To see a World in a grain of sand,/And Heaven in a wildflower….” Is that what you find, too, Mr. Braff, in the zygote and the orchid and the bizarre sea creature? If so, then this is an interesting kind of spirituality or transcendence, a transcendence based upon “the science of it all” in which you stand in what the novelist Walker Percy called “a posture of objectivity over against the world, a world which he [the scientist] sees as a series of specimens or exemplars, and interactions, energy exchanges, secondary causes….” From this godlike vantage point, the world indeed looks pretty spectacular, but also ultimately reducible to material actions and reactions of finite duration. Question: how is it possible to sustain transcendence or spiritual uplift when the object of one’s privileged vision, beautiful as it is, is also as prone to decay as you and I are?

Filed Under: Art and Culture, Writing in an Apocalyptic Time Tagged: , , , , , , , ,
July 24, 2014 Leave a Comment

The Jane Austen Racket

The Jane Austen Racket is a hard temptation for the writer to resist. It is only the iron-willed craftsman who has not lain awake into the small hours mentally tinkering with a plot that would bring the now middle-aged Knightleys, Darcys, and Captain Wentworths together for a house party at Pemberley, during which the Darcy’s daughter Imogen falls madly in love with Freddie Poots, the rascally ward of Captain Wentworth. I mean, if the formidable P.D. James cannot resist writing a murder mystery sequel to Pride and Prejudice, where does that leave the rest of us weak-willed types?

What is it exactly, that is so tempting to the writer in the Jane Austen Racket? Is it the allure of romance? But a romance writer can easily pursue 50 shades (and more!) of steamy romance by using a contemporary setting. I suppose to us workaholic westerners the leisureliness of a day that begins with a long healthy walk before a hearty breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast and marmalade is also an attraction. But does the thought of writing English breakfast passages provide sufficient fuel to get a writer through 80,000+ words?

I would like to suggest another reason for the attraction of the Jane Austen Racket. Perhaps it is only my way of justifying my weakness, but I believe we writers like to return to the world of Jane Austen because we believe there is something in that world that we are desperately missing in our own. Romance is part of it to be sure, but not just any notion of romance. Leisure and opulence are part of it, too, but not just wealth for the sake of further wealth. Walker Percy once wrote that when “people already know who they are, their literature celebrates and affirms the already existing relationships and hierarchies of society.” This is what Austen’s own books do. And in desiring to revisit and re-imagine her world–even to the point, as I did in my short story, “The Bureau of Myths,” of transplanting her world, or something very much like it, to the arid desert of a post-American dystopia–I believe we are, whether we are quite conscious of it or not, attempting to rediscover who we are. Romance in the context of courtship and aimed at marriage, the fairy tale ending by which a new family enters into the community whose task is to nourish it–these are the deeper elements in Austen that we cannot resist because we instinctively know they are integral to who we are as human beings.

That, at any rate, is why I am happy to succumb to the Jane Austen Racket.

“The Bureau of Myths” is available for just 99 cents at Amazon and barnesandnoble.com until the last reel is danced. (Sign up for my free monthly newsletter and receive a free digital copy of “The Bureau of Myths” for Kindle, Nook or iPad. See the email signup form on the homepage of danielmcinerny.com.)

 

The image above is reproduced courtesy of the BBC. 

Filed Under: Writing in an Apocalyptic Time Tagged: , , , , , , ,