by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Electro-literary Shock Therapy
Some wit on the staff of the New Yorker – that, or the news cycle – set David Remnick’s profile of the least anxious man in Washington just adjacent to Luke Menand’s essay about the most anxious one: Scott Stossel, editor of The Atlantic and author of My Age of Anxiety.
It all points back the running conversation we are having about literature and belief. Because Stossel is one of my first readers when I submit a piece to the magazine, his daring account of his roiling inner life – with emotional, psychological, phobic, and pharmaceutical aspects – is a reminder that there is no such thing as the “average reader.” Every reader is singular; no two are wholly alike. And Menand’s essay about the recent career of the idea of anxiety – including a mid-century arranged marriage between Kierkegaard’s “concept of anxiety” and Freud’s “`riddle’ of anxiety” – is a reminder that our sense of the present age is generally overdetermined: we see our age as more distinctive, more cut off from prior ages, than it turns out to be.
A note from Matthew Sitman folllows on this. Sitman is the literary editor of the Dish, Andrew Sullivan’s website – and an ardent and discerning reader of literature that deals with religious belief. Says he:
I’m not immersed enough in contemporary fiction to know if Wolfe is hearing whispers that aren’t really there (or there with the frequency he claims). My point is that even if you grant him that point, the thrust of your argument still holds – scores of whispers don’t add up to a single Percy or an O'Connor. I take you to be looking for a certain kind of faith-informed writing, and even if examples of that were small in number, you wouldn’t have written the piece you did just over a year ago, or at least not have written it in the same way. When you described the presence of Christian belief in our fiction as “something between a dead language and a hangover,” I took you to be making a qualitative, not merely quantitative, distinction between our own day and the past. After all, when we talk about Percy and O'Connor and others, we’re really talking about only a handful of writers, and what makes them so remarkable is not that they were exactly `representative’ of some broader cohort of Christian novelists, but that the work they produced was so arresting, and treated matters of belief with such extraordinary force.
Which means, he goes on, that writers don’t have to whisper, even if many do:
If we did have to whisper, how do you explain the continued attachment to Percy and company? I’m 32 years old. I’m fully formed by the circumstances Wolfe claims demand we whisper. And yet, a decade ago when I first read Percy, it hit me with all the force of an electric shock. If we had to whisper, I don’t think these books would resonate the way they still do – they’d seem clunky or too earnest or otherwise heavy-handed. Instead, they are points of reference, even intellectual benchmarks, for Christians my age. And that’s largely due to a near total lack of alternatives.
Some of you will have noticed that at this point both Greg Wolfe and I seem to be making arguments for the continuity of the present with the past. Greg maintains that there is ample literature dealing head-on with religious faith in the present, as in the past. I see a relative absence of such work, as Sitman describes above, and yet insist that such work is no less possible – or called for – in the present than it was in the past.
That’s Walker Percy in the photograph, before his hairline began to recede.