The End of our Affair with Mannerists

Anyone else out there bored by the "Catholic writing" commentators who talk in endless circles about Graham Greene, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy? Are you interested in creating original work that will not be seen as a manneristic footnote on penumbras emanating from Percy's lousy, hackneyed wreck of a book, "The Thanatos Syndrome"? [Thanatos, in Freudian writing, was the death urge. Catholics cannot afford to wallow anymore in the culture of death. Read Joyce Kilmer, below, on self-destruction. The only logical response to self-destructive behavior is Kilmer's flip question, "And don't you think you were an ass?"] Anyone else wondering why we need to suffer through two hundred pages of shock reading to get to a not-so-bright point about morality?

An inordinate amount of Catholic "literary commentary" focuses on modern works that focus on ugliness. I'm sick of ugly books about sin. I'm at a loss to explain why conservative intellectuals who recommend books about sin [i.e., about breaking the sixth commandment] also trumpet family values and point fingers at politicians or other public figures who might need to go to confession every now and then. I suspect they're playing a game of Hegelian dialectic on us--- with the prudery of their public positions playing off against the license of their artistic voyeurism [please, someone explain to me the difference between Percy's verbal pornography and Paris Hilton's films. Will certain intellectuals finally completely flip their lid and discover that Paris Hilton is creating "art films" that illustrate the plight of modern sinners? Give me a break!]. So, with prudery on one hand, and literary voyeurism on the other, the commentators are set up as the pathfinders who can show us exactly what narrow path to walk so that we can be naughty and nice in just the right measure. [Jesus, by the way, wasn't into "naughty and nice"... goodness and redemption and true enjoyment instead. He also said to call no man father, that is, to elevate no one to a godlike status-- which would imply that we should be cautious about letting critics of any kind tell us what to read.]

I submit that the way out of this dialectical fraud is for Catholic writers to stop reacting to the Catholic critics. We can, of course, read what we want to, but must read critically. At some point, we must question why they keep recommending the same five or six authors. [I hope they have read other books....] Therefore, while the philosophes bore one another extolling the ugly books, I would like to recommend something transcendant. Fordham University's website features an Internet Medieval Sourcebook. As we readers and writers redicover the real canon, the modern literature of the grotesque can shrink to its rightful stature.

Note well that no Western Catholic writer of the twentieth century wrote a traditional epic. You can't spin an epic out of ugliness.

Enjoy the Fordham University Medieval Sourcebook:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook.html

And, if you don't want to read it, you don't have to. There's freedom to think for yourself on this website.

EMR