Storytelling and the Catholic Imagination

I have become aware in my travels as an “author”—as opposed to my travels as a writer, which all take place at my desk—that many readers are more interested in acquiring a lesson from a serious novel than they are in participating in the “magic” of it, the magic of art. I suspect this is the reason that novelists are more often invited to “give talks” rather than to read from their work. I also suspect this is why the most frequent questions we hear are variations of “what were you trying to say…“ or “…is that what you intended?”…

I have nothing against hidden meaning, or any kind of meaning. I have been known, in fact, to quote T.S. Eliot’s lament to both my students and to my children, “We had the experience but missed the meaning.” But I would argue that the experience, the experience of the conjured world, how a novel happens, is primary.…

So what then of the idea of the sacramental imagination, or better yet, as the phrase seems to imply, what of the sacramental imagination of the Catholic writer? Doesn’t the very notion of a story told by an author with a sacramental imagination imply that the author begins with a conviction, a motive—in this case, that God reveals himself through the physical world—and then attempts to create just such a world by telling a story that upholds, or illustrates, this conviction?

If the sacramental imagination is something that exists prior to the storytelling, if it is part of some conviction, some belief, then doesn’t the motive for the story constitute its reason for being? Isn’t the novel’s world merely secondary, a cartoon that runs beside the editorial, a picture meant to convey an idea?

In the early days of my writing career, I allowed myself one motive, one goal, for the fiction I would write. I would, as Joseph Conrad put it, seek “to render the highest possible justice to the visible universe.”…It is the motive I continue to serve, 30 years on.

Of course, I am not unique in this. I daresay Conrad’s injunction operates to some degree in all of us who write. Flannery O’Connor agreed with it, but then added, with all the conviction of her great faith: “For me the visible universe is a reflection of the invisible universe…The artist penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality.”

Personally, I am…a born and bred Catholic, even a somewhat public Catholic, a “practicing Catholic”—if “practicing” means still working at it, still not doing it very well, certainly not yet ready to take the stage. I approach my faith with none of O’Connor’s breathtaking certainty.

But what I am certain of, through long experience, is the validity of the conjured world, of a universe made visible by the magic of art.

And if in the course of delineating this fictional world, of making you see, I should discover, even as my narrator discovers, as my reader discovers, something absolutely astonishing: that love is redemptive, for instance, that love is a mystery that outruns time, physical change, mortality—much as our Christian faith tells us it does—well, I’m as surprised at this as you are. This is not a message or a meaning I set out to discover, or to illustrate, or to confirm. It’s simply what happened—what happens—when, through the magic of art, through the grace of that holy trinity of writer/narrator/reader a world is conjured via the written word, a world where the concrete shimmers with the light of the unseen, where life conquers death, where love redeems us.

“Is that what you meant to say?” the chattering classes well may ask. “As a practicing Catholic, do you think this is true? Is that what you were trying to prove?”

I repeat my disclaimer. I set out to prove nothing. I know nothing about the real world. I cannot speak with certainty about what the creator does or does not do in it.

But as one part of that holy trio that constitutes the necessary and silent confluence of minds that transforms marks on a page into a world, I can point to what we see together, in all its vividness and clarity, and say, as astonished as narrator and reader alike, by love, by grace, by God in all things, “Look, it is there.”