Nick Ripatrazone, staff writer at The Millions, contributing editor to Marginalia Review of Books, and author of The Fine Delight: Postconciliar Catholic Literature, as well as several books of poetry and fiction, maintains a site also called The Fine Delight that is well worth adding to your bookmarks if you don’t know it already. The Fine Delight features substantive interviews with Catholic writers broadly construed, meaning, as Nick says, that “some writers are practicing Catholic, others have lapsed; some question more than they accept, others are Catholic by proxy, schooling, or influence.”
The most recent interview is with Joshua Hren, publisher and editor of Wiseblood Books and managing editor of Dappled Things. Nick talks to Joshua about the state of Catholic literature in the Anglophone world, his venture at Wiseblood Books, and the nature of belief in Hemingway, Dostoevsky, and David Foster Wallace.
Here’s an hors d’oeuvre:
What, in particular, gets in the way of contemporary fiction grappling with belief in a believable way? I think we can arrive at a partial answer to this question by turning to David Foster Wallace, a “post-modern” writer who was not afraid to reckon with the question and problem and subject of belief. As Timothy Jacobs argues in his study of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Wallace, who took his own life in 2008, confronted the “contemporary literary ironic nihilists” just as Dostoevsky’s “particular foes were the Nihilists” of the 19th century, those who openly rejected belief in anything at all, who openly rejected adherence to any moral principles. And yet, Wallace muses in an essay on Dostoevsky, “maybe it’s not true that we today are nihilists. At the very least we have devils we believe in. These include sentimentality, naiveté, archaism, fanaticism. Maybe it’d be better to call our art’s culture one congenial skepticism.” Wallace goes on to note that “in our own age and culture of enlightened atheism we are very much Nietzsche’s children, his ideological heirs”; the contemporary arts carry on as though God is dead, but not always consciously. In his novel Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace calls this “enlightened self-interest” and “unconsidered atheism” (267). Existing amidst this culture, Wallace proclaims the importance of fiction that does not shy away from belief: “believing in something bigger than you is not a choice. You either do or you’re a walking dead man, just going through the motions.” Sickened by a self-absorbed culture, he demands that we believe in something larger than ourselves, but doesn’t know quite what he himself believes. How, then, does he tackle that something bigger than oneself, how does he tackle that weary cynicism he finds so awful?
Find out by going to the full interview here.
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