Fiction and Propaganda

The University News, the student newspaper of my alma mater, the University of Dallas, has a wandering but thoughtful article by Zach Czaia titled "The Black, the White, and the Gray: Tom Wolfe and the borderline between Art & Propaganda" (I suppose someone has been reading some lit crit lately). Although it begins by pondering the merits of Tom Wolfe (an author I've never read) as a novelist, it is more interested in the state of the Catholic novel. A few quotes:

Rather, [history department chair Thomas] Jodziewicz said, a true work of art ought to look at those "obvious" things-life, meaning and suffering-and make them seem new and fresh. He offered the Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor as an instance of a recent author with this gift of making the obvious new. Dr. Theresa Kenney, associate English professor, agreed with Jodziewicz's assessment of O'Connor's artistic merit, though she said she had difficulty reconciling O'Connor's representation of violence with that author's Catholic vision.

"I think you, as a Catholic reader, have to bring to your reading the Catholic understanding of grace and the sacraments in order to understand the action of her stories in that way...I don't think a non-Catholic or non-Christian would understand the action in that manner," she said. This is not to point out a weakness in O'Connor's representation, Kenney said, it is only to say that conversion to a creed or set of beliefs is not an express purpose of her art. But Kenney maintained that, from a Christian perspective, all artistic expressions are necessarily moral expressions as well.

"If you are a moral being-and if you are a Christian, you believe that all human beings are essentially moral beings-then your work, whatever it is, is going to have a moral element to it," she said.
This inescapable moral element can be conveyed to the reader in an artful or in a baldly didactic manner, and it is in the manner of the conveying, Kenney said, that we judge the artist.

"Take the Da Vinci Code, for instance," she said. "It has a moral component. It, in fact, is propagandistic; it appeals to popular anti-Catholic viewpoints and attempts to convince the reader of the validity of those viewpoints." But the book's anti-Catholicism was not why it was such a chore for her to read the book (at the recommendation of one of her graduate students). No. Her primary objections were aesthetic ("It is just so badly written! The thought is so puerile...and the English is so bad!").

It's a relief that Dr. Kenney acknowledges the puerile, bigoted nature of The Da Vinci Code, not only because she is a professor of English, but because she once worked for Ignatius Press:

Kenney herself worked at one of the largest Catholic publishing houses in the U.S., Ignatius Press, as a freelance copy-editor and proofreader. During her five years there, Kenney said she did not see Catholic fiction of any artistic quality being produced, a condition she said has not improved very much to this day.

In fairness to Ignatius Press, fiction is not a major, or even (I think) a secondary focus. There are a handful of exceptions, but the only novelist that IP has put serious weight behind in recent years is Michael O'Brien. Overall, however, it is hard to disagree with Kenney's somber assessment of the state of Catholic fiction in the U.S.

Comments

[Francis DS]

A writer who has not read Tom Wolfe....unbelievable!

He and Carl Sagan are for me the two most enjoyable reads, prose-style wise)

[Carl Olson]

Francis,

I'm too busy reading Tim LaHaye, Dan Brown, and other literary giants. ;-) I have read some of Wolfe's essays, but none of his novels. Favorite novelists include Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Chaim Potok, Kenneth Roberts, etc.

Carl

[Carl Olson]

Francis,

I'm too busy reading Tim LaHaye, Dan Brown, and other literary giants. ;-) I have read some of Wolfe's essays, but none of his novels. Favorite novelists include Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Chaim Potok, Kenneth Roberts, etc.

Carl