Getting people to read these days is tough.
Blame it on our age of social media, electronic games, infinite distractibility: if a text is more than a hundred words in length—beyond say what fills a smartphone screen—the gaze will likely flicker and flick away.
And as someone who writes both fiction and nonfiction, I will add this: even harder is finding folks to read the massive word-clumps known as novels. I am not alone in noting this. Recently, I visited Ignatius Press (which has been publishing my work) and chatted with president Mark Brumley. He said that he has noticed the same trend among the readership of the press’s Catholic titles. Readers, he says, go for everything nonfiction—theology, devotionals, biographies, polemics.
Fiction? That comes in dead last.
The problem isn’t new. Catholic storyteller Flannery O’Connor had something to say about this problem decades ago, in the 1950s. Mark asked me to elaborate my thoughts on this issue. Here goes!
Many Catholics today are dismayed by the world they see around them. For some, at least, the instinctive response is to take refuge in Catholic doctrine and adopt a defensive crouch. The result is a tendency to view with suspicion anything they cannot readily identify as orthodox and clearly Catholic.
This may help explain why some Catholics seem to view fiction with suspicion. Stories don’t always offer immediate clarity.
And why is this? Because stories take us on a journey. They ask us to accompany total strangers—fictional characters we don’t know—through experiences that may be uncomfortable or unfamiliar to a destination we cannot see clearly in the distance. Given this potential for intellectual discomfort, many people—including many Catholics—might just decide to stay home and never open to page one, never set foot outside the door of their intellectual household, and simply leave the story untouched.
Which would be too bad. Because when you think about what it means to lead a Catholic life, it’s good to recall what Christ tells his disciples. He does not say: Get comfortable, stay home, stay safe. Instead, he gives them a command, a job to do: He tells them to go forth; he encourages them to do what he did and engage with all kinds of people, accepting hospitality wherever they can find it.
And if we imitate Christ in going forth to engage with the world as we find it, we will discover the potential for a very productive exchange. We’ll have the chance to grow in our faith and learn from others, even as we bear witness to our life as Catholics in what we say and do. It’s a kind of dialogue, an extended conversation in which the participants can grow spiritually.
And something akin to this process happens when we read a novel. We rouse ourselves from the world we know and engage the world created by the storyteller. We make the acquaintance of new individuals—the characters in the story—and we watch them as they live their lives and tell their tale. As they do so, thoughtful Catholic readers might talk back to these characters, exclaiming: Hey, don’t do that, you’ll hurt yourself! Or: Hey, stop, you’re turning your life into a train-wreck; I know, because I did that once myself! Or: Hey, I never thought of that; this character is offering me a glimpse of wisdom.
Who knows? By the end of the book, you may feel you have just made a friend for life. I know for sure my own stagger-step lurching through the years (and that’s the best we can manage, isn’t it: Lurch forward, lurch on!) has been made easier by the companions I have met in great fiction. Don Quixote, Prince Myshkin, Lord Jim: they give me comfort, they make me feel I am not alone in what I go through.
They give me the sense, as Joseph Conrad wrote, that I have got company of the “kind we like to feel marching right and left of us in life.”
(Come to think of it, didn’t Christ himself do something like this with his parables? Prodigal son, good Samaritan, wise and foolish virgins: easy enough for us to find glimmers of our own behavior as we feel our hearts responding to what the divine Storyteller has to say.)
A cautionary note might be in order at this point. We shouldn’t expect that the novels we will read will offer us straightforward prescriptions on how to act and what to believe. The novel is not a catechism. Here it’s good to glance at what Flannery O’Connor stated in her meditations on what it means to be a Catholic novelist. “The main concern of the fiction writer,” she says, “is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.”
Note the pair of very Christian words she uses in this claim. ‘Incarnated’: the belief that the Second Person of the Trinity becomes man, and in so doing makes this whole messy fleshly existence of ours worthwhile—and worth contemplating.
The second word is ‘mystery.’ It comes from an ancient Greek term that means to have one’s eyes closed. ‘Eyes closed’; here it’s good to note something else O’Connor tells us: “Faith is a ‘walking in darkness’ and not a theological solution to mystery.”
In other words, when we read a story, we are in the dark; we don’t know what’s ahead. But the storyteller takes us by the hand and guides us as we feel our way through dim corridors and vast caverns out into strange worlds and unfamiliar situations.
Be warned here: We will not receive clear-cut resolutions to our existential questions. As O’Connor says, “We Catholics are very much given to the Instant Answer. Fiction doesn’t have any. It leaves us, like Job, with a renewed sense of mystery.”
But if novelists do their job, at a minimum, we should be left with a greater sense of awe and gratitude to God for this mysterious gift we call life.
Now some Catholics might say, Whoa, fella, hold it right there. There are plenty of books that are simply bad; they glorify sin and self-indulgence and godless materialism.
True—all too true. But this is where Ignatius Press steps in.
Because the staff members at Ignatius Press believe in publishing novels that can help us explore and strengthen our Catholic faith. They’ve selected a library full of novels that are written from a faith perspective.
They’ve assembled an array of stories that help strengthen our Catholic faith, even as the tales entertain us and hold out the hope that we can make two new and distinctive sets of friends: the characters in the story in whose struggles we become involved; and the fellow readers with whom we can discuss the story we’ve just read.
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Recommended reading – anything by Michael O’Brien, especially ‘The Lighthouse’
I quit reading most all novels years ago. I’ll now look onto Ignasus Press. Very good to hear such worthy words.
Pinault’s novel Providence Blue was quite marvelous. I read novels along with theology. Because stories! We love stories! And if you’re in the mood for a wonderful two part series about the maturing of a young Norwegian man, who goes through temptation and comes to Catholicism and learns about the cross, I recommend Sigrid Unset’s The Wild Orchid, followed by the Burning Bush.
All of Undset’s novels are marvelous.
We read “The novel is not a catechism.” Indeed, sometimes far removed…
The effort of the Church to deal with the running ink of the printing press came in the form of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, established in 1557 under the Council of Trent. Over the years, the list included some 3,000 authors and 5,000 works, including such novels as “Gone with the Wind,” and the “Hunchback of Notre Dame” (removed only in 1959). The Index began under Pope Paul IV and the other bookend, when it was formally abolished, under Pope Paul VI in 1966.
A backroom curiosity for a long time, but a case study on the difficulty of trying to turn back the ink-tide of error, fantasy, or even theological dialogue with natural science–with the stroke of an ecclesial pen. Yesterday the novelty of the printing press; today fake news on the airwaves, theological doublespeak and signaling, and the threshold leap of electron-soaked and likely misused AI.
How to at least recall the human person to the inborn natural law, and conscience which precedes all words, novel or otherwise? A Reflection on the non-fiction interior life:
“The first so-called ontological level of the phenomenon of conscience consists in the fact that something like an original memory of the good and the true (they are identical) has been implanted in us [!], that there is an inner ontological tendency within man [!], who is created in the image and likeness of God, toward the divine…the anamnesis of the origin, which results from the god-like constitution of our being, is not a conceptually articulated [!] knowing, a store of retrievable contents. It is…an inner sense [!], a capacity to recall [!], so that the one whom it addresses, if he is not turned in on himself, hears its echo from within. The possibility for and right to mission rest on this anamnesis of the Creator, which is identical to the ground of existence. The gospel…must be proclaimed to the pagans, because they themselves are yearning for it in the hidden recesses of their souls” (Ratzinger, reprinted in “On Conscience: Two Essays by Joseph Ratzinger, Ignatius/National Catholic Bioethics Center, 2007, pp. 11-41).
This, instead of the hijacking of constructive and vulnerable engagement with the world under Vatican II (ressourcement and aggiornamento), and more recently a fictional dual magisterium (yes?) replacing the Catechism and Veritatis Splendor (1993).
Novels. A primary source of deepening our humanness, our comprehension of the human condition. The novelist addresses our spirit, the sentiments and reasoning that form our ethics, things that beyond the surface exchanges reveal what really matters. Pinault offers a guide. But it is the reader who captains his expedition into the enchanting forest.
“Why should Catholics bother to read novels?” That’s really kind of a silly question, but let me take a shot at an answer – because it’s fun.
C S Lewis’s ‘That Hidden Strength’ and his ‘The Abolition of Man’ are fine examples of good interesting fiction in the former and philosophy in the other.
One book complements the other in studies of the natural law.
Excellent article Mr. Pinault i read all Kind of genres but the genre that i must enjoy is the catholic fiction. I must confess that i am a catholic collector all persons that you are interested in catholic literature i recommend the Goodreads’s group Catholic Book Club moderated by my friends John Seymour and the novelist Manuel Alfonseca. I am an admirer of Ignatius Press i have bought but i have a big problem i am not american i am from Spain and i suffer a lot to bring the books to Spain. The books are not expensive but the customs and the taxes are terribly expensive “A thing of Darkness” by my friend Fiorella de Maria was really expensive for this reason i do not buy more american books i have sworn not buying more books and it is something that i would like to do it. Indeed “Providence blue” i would like to buy it for the topic but i can not spend 100 euros in a book. I cheer up to read them. The bride the Magdebourg by Gertrud von Le Fort i have read into spanish language. Yours sincerely Fonch PS. Pearce is with Juan Manuel de Prada, G.K. Chesterton and Manuel Alfonseca my favorite writer and i bought “The faith of our fathers”. PD. I will speak about this article in my youtube channel the problem is into spanish.
“Yer a wizard, Harry!”
Dostoevsky, through Prince Myshkin, expressed his view that the Catholic Church was the antiChrist because it held up dogmas (standard Socialism was also bad for Dostoevsky for the same reason – it held up dogmas). The novel Don Quixote, on the other hand, is a tribute to Christian belief and doctrine from beginning to end, and a condemnation of scepticism and myth, ending with the conversion of Don Quijote. Night and day.
Gone with the Wind was never on the Index. I don’t know of any American work of fiction that was and if memory serves, the only condemned English novel was Pamela.(I pulled my copy of the Index off the shelf to double-check.) But all the famous 19th C French writers drew censorious wrath: Hugo, Balzac, Sand, Zola, both Dumas, et al. Aside from naughty French writers, the Index showed very little interest in fiction, although Alberto Moravia was condemed in the last years of its existence.
Furthermore, allow me to confess that I tried to read another French novel on the Index, Flaubert’s Salammbo, when I was nine years old. Speaks reams, doesn’t it?
Indeed, reams. I recall in Flannery’s Habit of Being she mentioned asking a priest for permission to read books that were on the Index.
I read salammbo for me it was a very positive thanks to this novel i understood as evil it could be a pagan society im which Jesus Christ has not arrived to the world. The same idea had Gene Wolfe with the Latro’s trilogy although in his case with the greek civilization. The scene of the children sacrifice is cruel. It is inspired in a rebellion slave before the second punic war which was very close to destroy Carthage. It is said that Rome could be involved at last Amilkar save Carthage for a piece of time.
The novel banned was the Temptation ofSaint Anthony by Flaubert i do not know the reason 🤔.
Why was *Pamela* on the Index, @Sandra Miesel?
I’m surprised you didn’t mention Pope Francis’s letter that came out last year on the value of reading literature in formation. He covers some of the points you make here. If you’re not familiar with, I think you should look it up.
I try to do some balanced reading myself. Some good suggestions in the comments here, thanks to all who made them.
I am an avid reader of books on our Catholic faith. I find that the more I read, the more I learn, but it’s a double-edged sword – I also realize how much I DON’T know or completely understand about our Catholic faith. I want to learn.
On the other hand, I do like complete escape sometimes, & for that I look to my favorite authors of fiction – Bradbury, Asimov, Donaldson, Poe, Doyle, Drury, etc. I wanted to name a few with whom almost everyone is familiar, but there are many others as well. Nothing says we can’t temporarily escape from the busy-ness of our everyday lives by reading decent fiction. God gave these authors their talents to entertain us, after all. But let’s not forget to learn all we can about our faith while enjoying our temporary escapes.