Note: the following 6/22 post is a re-post of a message that
appeared at the bottom of a long section of text for those who
missed its commentary. Further comments on Giraldi's essay or
otherwise on Percy are invited.
Henry Mills, Percy-L Administrator
--
On 6/22/15 5:41 PM, desmond wrote:
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).
John Desmond
55888105.3000402 AT whitman.edu" type="cite">
On 6/22/2015 11:37 AM, Lauren Stacy
Berdy wrote:
5EACED28-6399-4482-8025-B08CAAF2FF25 AT gmail.com"
type="cite">
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.
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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