Getting To Truth By Lying. - Review - book review

Commonweal, July 13, 2001 by Suzanne Keen

A Stay against
Confusion
Essays on Faith and Fiction
Ron Hansen
HarperCollins, $25, 288 pp.

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.