5EACED28-6399-4482-8025-B08CAAF2FF25 AT gmail.com"
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The reader as much as the writer creates the vision in their
own mind
If the process of creation does not happen in the readers
mind is not reenacted
If the subterranean links and connections do not link
The work fails
For this reader Born a Jew Dr Percy wants us alert like one
of his hawks
His words give us a renewal and a resuscitation for our own
lives
Whitman too was religious ( okay a religion not made by a
mind) he helped us with our emotional evolution
Dr Percy adds to that self generating order
That creative struggle that all great authors ask of Their
readers
I read that article twice and I am sorry that he is wresting
so with his demons
catholic or otherwise.
Sent from my iPad
I so hope the world will take him at his word when Mr.
Giraldi denies being a Catholic. Otherwise, people might
mistake his interests and concerns for those of a real
Catholic novelist. As a secular novelist, Mr. Giraldi
seems most interested in how his life has prepared him to
be an artiste, his boyhood Catholicism being one
of those preparations: "An upbringing in the Church has, I
suspect and hope, outfitted me well as a storyteller." He
likes the instincts Catholicism gave him--but for the
purpose of storytelling and not for the purpose of
apprehending and conforming oneself to the truth. He even
likes there to be a quasi-religious vision to fiction, as
long as it is sufficiently amorphous: "A novel should
indeed be a groping after some form of the metaphysical, a
benediction to unseen powers, the upholding of the mysterium
tremendum, those insistent inklings of the
numinous."
But the Catholic novelist is most interested in objective
reality, and he sees his role as artist to be one of
rendering that reality as well as he can. Obviously some
novels (and novelists) are better than others, but the
vision of the Catholic novelist is neither narcissistic
nor subjective (Nor is it proselytizing, as Giraldi claims
with regard to Percy and Greene in particular.). No, the
Catholic novelist's vision is of something outside of
himself, corresponding to divine revelation. His
characters may be at any level of understanding (or
rejecting) that reality, but the (Catholic) novelist
himself has no such freedom. He knows what he knows, and
the world he creates, in which his characters live and
breathe, must bear a close resemblance to the real one.
But this includes immaterial as well as material reality.
Mr. Giraldi is fine with being exact about material
reality ("my books are flesh-obsessed"), but he wants to
keep the immaterial vague, subjective, fuzzy. That's why
he's not a Catholic ... and why he should therefore remain
silent about the concerns of Catholic writers.
Michael Larson
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In his reading of The Moviegoer, Mr. Giraldi completely ignores one
of its most important thematic threads, i.e. Binx's intuition of his
"Jewishness" as a "clue" to his deepest identity, and where that
clue leads him in the novel. Giraldi's simplified interpretation is
a serious misreading of the novel (for his own purposes, I suppose).