The Modern Catholic Novel in Europe

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 8, 1995 by Joseph Cunneen

Theodore Fraser begins his penetrating study by conceding that "the Catholic novel is in many ways a literary phenomenon belonging to the past," but the final effect of his book is to suggest that the category still has vitality. The author, a specialist in French literature, teaches a course on the modern religious novel at Holy Cross College. I hope his study becomes required reading for a host of new courses on the subject in schools that now neglect it.

Fraser provides us with a reliable survey of the European Catholic novel from its 19th century French origins to post-Vatican II experiments by Heinrich Boll, Muriel Spark, Jean Sulivan and David Lodge - there isn't room in this review for everyone he includes. A purist could complain that the Europe of the title is limited to France, England, Germany, and Scandinavia - why is Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed not mentioned? - but the book covers an enormous amount of material in limited space.

Don't skip the prologue, which quickly raises the question of whether the Catholic novel is only "an impressive artistic achievement of a vanished age." Fraser answers critics who complain that Catholic writers draw on elements of doctrine: "All novelists imbue their works with a moral vision from which we can discern some value statements on the human condition." Next he cites Lodge's summary of the ingredients of the Catholic novel: "the idea of the sinner 'being at the heart of Christianity' (a phrase that comes from Charles Peguy), the idea of 'mystical substitution,' the implied criticism of materialism, and the tireless pursuit of the erring soul by God."

Fraser emphasizes the domination of positivist ideas in mid-19th century France, while the Catholic novelist who emerged as defenders of the spiritual were unreconciled to the French Revolution - and often blatantly anti-Semitic. Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's Une vieille maitresse (1851) presents a universe of moral absolutes, sexual passion as a matter of salvation or damnation, and the idea of the innocent doing expiation for sinners, themes that would recur in later Catholic fiction. Despite Barbey's talent, his work is marked by melodramatic excess and implicit misogyny; the object of the hero's passion is demonized.

Barbey's influence on Leon Bloy is evident. Bloy stresses Christianity identification with the poor, but his criticism of capitalism has no connection with practical social reform and his diatribes against the rich often become a call for vengeance. Nevertheless, Bloy was a minor prophet, and the famous last line of The Woman Who Was Poor - "There is only one tragedy, not to be one of the saints" - is echoed at the end of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory.

Joris-Karl Huysmans began his novelistic career as a naturalist, but Against the Grain (1874) dramatizes "the restless striving of the decadent spirit." Its aristocratic hero, after pursuing an endless quest for new experiences, ends by praying to the God in whom he does not yet believe. Down There (1891) deals extensively with Satanism as the narrator researches the life of the 14th century Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais, yet shows an increasing fascination with Catholic art and liturgy. Later novels mark Huysmans return to the church and become a celebration of the aesthetics of Catholicism.

Fraser gives attention to Peguy, even though he was not a novelist, because of hid widespread influence as a witness of how "the republican and religious traditions of France.... could merge in harmonious justice and charity." Unlike the anti-Semitic Catholics of the time, he supported Alfred Dreyfus. An independent socialist, Peguy could not receive the sacraments after he returned to the church because his wife refused to convert with him. This separation from the institution gives extra force to his lines on the complementarity of sinner and saint, used as an epigraph in Greene's The Heart of the Matter.

Fraser also has new insights on such well-known novelists as George Bernanos, Francois Mauriac, Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Sigrid Undset. Bernanos' strong sense of vocation as a writer has a close connection with his childhood vision of the world; Fraser considers the priest-hero of Diary of a Country Priest (1936) "an unsurpassed portrait of a modern saint." Mauriac, another victim of Jansenistic upbringing, was accused of collusion with evil because of the recurring pull of "the cross of flesh" in his early novels. Even though such criticism is excessive, it is hardly accidental that his most enduring success, Viper's Tangle, concentrates on the vice of acquisitiveness rather than lust. Waugh is praised as a satirist whose novels are "suffused... with religious symbolism," giving them unusual depth. Although Fraser's close reading of Brideshead Revisited is also perspective, I remain unconvinced by the spiritual evolution of its narrator or the deathbed conversion of Lord Marchmain. Greene seems more successful in communicating the dramatic tension in which "characters yearn for the consolation of faith while weighed down by sin in an unjust world." The novels of what is called Greene's "Catholic period" (Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair) employ a cinematic eye to convince us of the sordid reality of a fallen world while conveying a consistent sense of the mercy of a hidden God. Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter transcends French Catholic novelistic formulas in its exhaustive recording of medieval life. As Fraser notes, though the Norwegian writer treats her characters realistically, we sense "the timeless drama of...creatures of God called to an eternal destiny."