| 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
               
 
 
 
 
 
 |