November 4, 2014 Leave a Comment

The Pull of Gravity

Today, and continuing throughout November, I am presenting a series of posts I’m calling The Happiness Plot, which will make up a very brief introduction to storytelling structure. A perfect way to stay in the groove for NaNoWriMo2014.

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To find the beginning of The Happiness Plot, click here or “The Happiness Plot” category listing to the right. 

Now, we continue with The Happiness Plot…

The Pull of Gravity

8.

When Dr. Ryan Stone, Sandra Bullock’s character in Alfonso Cuarón’s film, Gravity, becomes stranded in space after the destruction of her space shuttle, her objective becomes a simple one: stay alive. Although Jane Austen’s Emma considers the possibility of a life lived as an unmarried woman, eventually Mr. Knightley’s virtues win her heart. Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Black Mischief, explores the possibility that England may be just as barbarous as his imaginary African banana republic, Azania. And works as different as Oedipus Rex and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer show us protagonists whose lives are defined by the search for truth.

This collection of stories illustrate the four principal impulses of human nature; they show us that human beings always and everywhere desire (1) continued existence, (2) romantic attachments and family life, (3) friendships and just social and political communities beyond the family, and (4) truth. Our impulses for this collection of goods are the starting points of both our, and any fictional character’s, quest for happiness.

Which is to say that these natural inclinations are not aspects of ourselves that we choose. If our life is in danger, as Dr. Ryan Stone demonstrates, we don’t typically stand around debating whether or not we want to stay alive. Nature simply “takes over” and we do whatever is necessary to maintain ourselves in existence. The same goes for the other goods toward which we are naturally inclined. No one has to teach us to have romantic impulses, to want a family life of some sort, to want friends to whom we can confide our hearts, to prefer truth to falsity, illusion, and sham appearance. In fictional worlds, such goods comprise the “needs” that characters must learn to distinguish from their “wants.”

The goods to which our human nature inclines, in other words, make up the backbone of the happiness plot that every character, real or imagined, is destined to live.

 

* The images above are of “The Declaration House” in Philadelphia, a reconstruction of the house where Thomas Jefferson retired to write about the self-evident truths of our shared human nature.

Filed Under: The Happiness Plot 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: , , , , , , , , ,
August 11, 2014 Leave a Comment

Catholic Artists Must Appeal to the Secular World

Many thanks to Matt Emerson over at America for linking to my recent piece at The Catholic Thing: “A Catholic Moment in the Arts?”

In the article I try to put my finger on the reason why we Catholics still so often hark back to the great Catholic writers of the 20th century. I contend that there’s still something about that great collection of artists that needs recapturing today, namely–

a greater, more effective engagement with the secular world of the arts and entertainment. All of the writers listed above [Waugh, Greene, O'Connor, Percy, Spark, Powers, etc.] wrote fiction that can justly be described as Catholic, but they all also established large reputations with readers outside the Catholic fold. This was somewhat easier to do fifty or a hundred years ago. There is no question that Western culture has declined precipitously in recent decades, putting the Catholic imagination more and more out of sync with the prevailing secular culture. Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited was a Book of the Month Club selection for January 1946. It is difficult to imagine a novel about a Catholic conversion enjoying such popular approval today. And yet, in order to evangelize our culture Catholic artists must find ways to get their work in front of popular, secular audiences. It’s an enormous challenge, but one Catholic artists must take up without excuses. The culture desperately needs our vision.

Here’s the rest of the article. I’d love to hear what you think about it. In particular,

How do you think it is possible for Catholic writers (and other artists) to establish reputations outside the Catholic fold? Do you agree this is even an important endeavor? 

 

* The image above is a photograph I took of the model of Shakespeare’s Globe that can be found in the museum attached to the Globe Theatre in London.

Filed Under: Catholics and the Arts Tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,
June 20, 2014 Leave a Comment

What’s Your Anthropology?

Everyone has an anthropology. There is no not having one. If a man says he does not, all he is saying is that his anthropology is implicit, a set of assumptions which he has not thought to call into question.  –Walker Percy, “Rediscovering A Canticle for Leibowitz”

The reigning anthropology of our own day, argues Percy, “is something of a mishmash and does not necessarily make sense. It might be called the Western democratic-technological humanist view of man as a higher organism invested in certain traditional trappings of a more or less nominal Judaeo-Christianity.”

The traditional trappings by now are rapidly falling away. In any event, what Percy found interesting in Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz is the way in which it challenged the reigning anthropology with a very different one. That’s good work for a piece of dystopian sci-fi, and it’s something I also attempted in my new post-apocalyptic short story, “The Bureau of Myths.”

So as a writer or reader, what’s your anthropology?

“The Bureau of Myths” is available on Amazon for just 99 cents.

Filed Under: Short Stories by Daniel McInerny, The Craft of Fiction Tagged: , , , , , , ,
June 19, 2014 Leave a Comment

Disrupting Dystopian Fiction

The y coordinate in A Canticle for Leibowtiz is the Jewish-Christian understanding of what human beings are and our place in the cosmos. This understanding of the human person cuts across the time line of the x coordinate, thus disrupting the usual approach to dystopian fiction.

What would I say is the y coordinate in my new dystopian short story, “The Bureau of Myths”?

It is that same Jewish-Christian understanding of who we are, represented by the fact that my protagonist, Potomac VII.15, an official in the Regime’s Bureau of Myths, finds a copy of the Acts manuscript in the monastery of St. Dwayne of the Painted Desert. This manuscript, itself incomplete, is the only surviving fragment of Christian scripture and serves as the basis not only of the monastery’s but also of the village’s culture.

But more specifically, the y coordinate is embodied in the kind of community that Potomac VII.15 finds in the Coombe Verde settlement. Coombe Verde is a village like one would find in Jane Austen (Meryton or Highbury), or Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford stories: a small, self-sustaining community ordered to the common good (as opposed to a collective of individual interests) in which an older tradition of the virtues (Aristotelian as enhanced by Augustine and Aquinas) constitutes human flourishing. The inhabitants of Coombe Verde have been inspired to form this kind of community by certain “myths,” not all of which are Christian, which have made such a life attractive.

Coombe Verde is not a perfect community, but what goodness it has achieved cuts across the arid landscape of “The Bureau of Myths” like a summer rainstorm.

“The Bureau of Myths” is available on Amazon for just 99 cents.

 

The image above is reproduced courtesy of Tomas Castelazo at Wikimedia Commons.

Filed Under: Short Stories by Daniel McInerny, The Craft of Fiction Tagged: , , , , , , , ,
June 18, 2014 1 Comment

Sci-Fi Fiction, Walker Percy, and the Y Coordinate

A chief inspiration for my new post-apocalyptic short story, “The Bureau of Myths,” is Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. But I am particularly indebted to Walker Percy’s essay on Miller’s novel, “Rediscovering A Canticle for Leibowitz.” In the essay Percy tries to put his finger on why exactly Miller’s novel gave him “agreeable-eerie neck pricklings,” and he attributes it to the fact that Miller’s tale, unlike all other sci-fi fiction, plots both an x and a y axis. What does Percy mean?

Typically, sci-fi fiction plots along a single x coordinate, the time line. “When a starship lands on a strange planet and intelligent beings are encountered, one’s questions have to do with the other’s location on the time line. Have you split the atom yet? Can you dematerialize? What is the stage of evolution of your political system?”

But what makes A Canticle for Leibowitz so special, argues Percy, is that the time line, the x coordinate, is crossed by a y coordinate. “What is the y axis? It is Something That Happened or Something That Will Happen on the time line of such a nature that all points on the time line are read with reference to the happening, as before or after, minus or plus.”

The y coordinate of Canticle is what Percy calls the Jewish or Jewish-Christian coordinate. It is the imposition of something beyond time into the world of time. To apply Jewish-Christian coordinates is a contradiction in terms, says Percy. “It is like turning on a TV soap opera and finding that the chief character is Abraham.”

“The Bureau of Myths” is available on Amazon for just .99 cents.

Filed Under: The Craft of Fiction Tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,
May 23, 2014 Leave a Comment

The Comic Mind

“I found that the novel enabled me to express the comic side of my mind and at the same time work out some serious theme.” –Muriel Spark, “How I Became a Novelist,” in The Informed Air: Essays.

This observation captures what it is I admire in the writing of Muriel Spark: the mixture of comedy and, if not tragedy, at least some serious theme. I am reminded of what Socrates argues at the end of Plato’s Symposium, that the best writer is able to write both tragedy and comedy. Is it possible to do both at the same time?

I am reminded also of what Walker Percy says in one of his essays. He is talking about the predicament of the contemporary Catholic novelist in the American South, but what he says here I believe is applicable more broadly:

“So what should he [the novelist] do? His natural mission in this place and in these times is, if not search and destroy, then probe and challenge. His greatest service is to attack, that is to say, satirize. Don’t forget that satire is not primarily destructive. It attacks one thing in order to affirm another. It assaults the fake and and the phony in the name of truth. It ridicules the inhuman in order to affirm the human. Satire is always launched in the mode of hope” (“How to Be an American Novelist in Spite of Being Southern and Catholic” in Signposts in a Strange Land).

Such hope and affirmation are fruits of the comic mind: the mind that knows that, despite all the fakery and phoniness and destructive inhumaneness, there is an unexpected and loving resolution at the end of all things.

Filed Under: Art and Culture Tagged: , , , , ,