The Things Art Can Say

I recently read an article called ‘Art is for Seeing Evil’ by Agnes Callard, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.  She writes that in teaching her philosophy classes on subjects like death or identity, she finds she needs to include literature by such writers as Shakespeare, Tolstoy, James Joyce, Elena Ferrante in addition to philosophical texts in order to thoroughly teach on a subject. She writes:

“The situation is this: the topic of the course requires reference to something that doesn’t show up clearly outside the space of artistic fiction. My hand is forced, because without the novels my course omits something that I see as crucial to understanding death, or self-creation, or courage, or self-consciousness. I am talking about evil.”

She goes on to list all suffering as evil.

“I am using the word “evil” to encompass the whole range of negative human experience, from being wronged, to doing wrong, to sheer bad luck. “Evil” in this sense includes: hunger, fear, injury, pain, anxiety, injustice, loss, catastrophe, misunderstanding, failure, betrayal, cruelty, boredom, frustration, loneliness, despair, downfall, annihilation. This list of evils is also a list of the essential ingredients of narrative fiction.”

As a novelist and philosopher, I find on the one hand I want so much to agree with her, and to applaud her making the point that in order to talk completely about human experience, the materialist, relativist world view is incomplete, and we need to use ideas that are transcendent, such as evil. But her account is incomplete, as it emphatically discounts the good. She writes:

There is a certain noble lie that we tell students about art. I was told it, and I hear it retold often by those defending great books and humanistic education. The lie is that art is a vehicle for personal moral edification or social progress, that art aims at empathy and happiness and world peace and justice and democracy and the brotherhood of man. But those are the goods of friendship, or education, or politics, or religion—not of art. The point of art is not improved living; the point of art is precisely not to be boxed in by the sometimes exhausting and always blinkered project of leading a life. When art does transparently aim at moral guidance or social progress we dismiss it as dogmatic, pedantic and servile.

Post-modern, materialist philosophers don’t like references to the transcendent because references to the good create many problems. It points to a deity, it points to morality, it gives us too many ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’. But to say that any reference to the good in art is the equivalent of moral guidance doesn’t ring true. And it also ignores the fact that all evil indirectly makes reference to the good.

Augustine is first credited with the doctrine of privatio boni, that evil is a privation of a good, though Aquinas picked up the idea from him. He writes:

“For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? The flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils—that is, privations of the good which we call health—are accidents. Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good. And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else. 

Callard rightly determines we need transcendental realties to understand our experiences and to treat important questions, and saw she needed something that is still allowed to talk about metaphysics to examine them. Art and literature do just that. While I heartily agree with her claim that art reveals something important to us about evil and suffering, she still keeps one foot in the relativist world view by minimizing the role of the good. Rather than say, ‘art is for seeing the transcendent’ or ‘for seeing good and evil, beauty and horror’, she leaves out so much of the meaning and nuance of literature by minimizing the weight of the good.

Flannery O’Connor is one of the foremost modern writers to deal with the subject of evil. Her work relies on grotesque characters and violence. But for her, fiction wasn’t just for seeing evil, it was for seeing mystery. She writes in Mystery and Manners that the fundamental essence of literature is to express mystery. “The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.”

O’Connor cites Joseph Conrad, whose book Heart of Darkness could readily be viewed as a work of art for ‘seeing evil’ as Callard suggests. He writes that fiction should point us to invisible, metaphysical realities.

“Conrad said that his aim as a fiction writer was to render the highest possible justice to the visible universe…It means that he subjected himself at all times to the limitations that reality imposed, but that reality for him was not simply coextensive with the visible. He was interested in rendering justice to the visible universe because it suggested an invisible one, and he explained his own intentions as a novelist in this way: ‘It is the business of fiction to embody mystery through manners, and mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind. The mystery is our position on earth, and the manners are those conventions which, in the hands of the artist, reveal that central mystery.’”

It seems to me that Callard errors for not recognizing the whole of the mystery of the invisible reality that the visible reality of evil points to. As Pope John Paul II writes in Salvifici Dolores,

“Man suffers on account of evil, which is a certain lack, limitation or distortion of the good. We could say that man suffers because of a good in which he does not share, from which in a certain sense he is cut off, or of which he has deprived himself. He particularly suffers when he “ought” – in the normal order of things – to have a share in this good and does not have it. Thus, in the Christian view, the reality of suffering is explained through evil, which always, in some way, refers to the good.”

Though modern philosophers have a disdain for the way ‘the good’ brings about too many ‘oughts’, I find as a tool for literary analysis, it is extremely illuminating. Take for example Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which Callard uses to show that evil gives far more weight to a story than the good, and offers as evidence the fact that you could take the happily married Kitty and Levin out of the story, but you could never take out Anna and Vronsky. But this analysis leaves out how the good is really operating in the story. It is not just the good of the happily married couple. The main way the book references the good is that Anna suffers precisely because she perceives herself deprived of a good – that of Vronsky’s love. At the end of the book, when they are just about to be together, she feels his love is cooling, and thinks that though he will be faithful to her he will end up just being kind to her out of duty, which is unbearable to her. Her story includes the complex mystery of the whole of reality – the fruit of sin and the way it makes us turn inwards, the freedom of the will, the psychological distress we can become entrenched in when we close ourselves off from virtue.  Her desire for the good of being loved by Vronsky, and her psychological suffering from that good being withheld from her, from not sharing in it in a way that she thinks she ‘ought’ directly motivates Anna’s choice to commit suicide. To not see the way evil comes about due to a lack of her participating in a good she thinks she ought to, or to not see the mystery of how our desires can become vices when they are unconstrained, and unmoored from their relation to the good, leaves out the heart of Tolstoy’s project.

Being able to see the whole of reality is, for O’Connor, something that children do naturally. Children tend to take in the whole ‘gestalt’ of someone, their whole shape, or their integrated reality. It is this type of reality the writer is interested in. O’Connor writes about A Good Man is Hard to Find:

“A good story is literal in the same sense that a child’s drawing is literal. When a child draws, he doesn’t intend to distort but to set down exactly what he sees, and as his gaze is direct, he sees the lines that create motion. Now the lines of motion that interest the writer are usually invisible. There are lines of spiritual motion. And in this story you should be on the lookout for such things as the action of grace in the Grandmother’s soul, and not for dead bodies.”

Here she explicitly tells us that the importance of her story is ultimately about the good, which is the movement of grace in the grandmother’s soul. The evil in the story is just a vehicle to reveal it. O’Connor sees violence and evil and suffering as ways that ultimate reality breaks into our souls. She writes, “In my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace.” One could see Callard putting O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find on her syllabi as an exaggerated portrait of evil in the violence and savagery of the mistfit, and thus would have, in O’Connor’s view, missed the essential point of her story.

Callard also misses the way C.S. Lewis’s points to this reality that children apprehend, one where suffering and evil point to the good, when she quotes Lewis’s commentary on Hamlet in her essay:

“I am trying to recall attention from the things an intellectual adult notices to the things a child or a peasant notices—night, ghosts, a castle, a lobby where a man can walk four hours together, a willow-fringed brook and a sad lady drowned, a graveyard and a terrible cliff above the sea, and amidst all these a pale man in black clothes (would that our producers would ever let him appear!) with his stockings coming down, a dishevelled man whose words make us at once think of loneliness and doubt and dread, of waste and dust and emptiness, and from whose hands, or from our own, we feel the richness of heaven and earth and the comfort of human affection slipping away.”

She uses this passage to support her thesis, and cites the ‘loneliness, doubt and dread’ as Lewis essentially saying that art is for seeing evil. But she doesn’t acknowledge Lewis’s reference to the good. When he writes ‘the richness of heaven and earth and the comfort of human affection slipping away’, we see he is much closer to John Paul the Great’s view that suffering is when we feel we ‘ought’ to participate in a good and we don’t.

Essentially, Callard makes the claim that “art—real art, true art, great art—is not designed for seeing good.”  But a casual survey of literature reveals the importance of it revealing both to us. The Lord of the Rings is for seeing the evil of Mordor, yes, but it is also for seeing the good of friendship in Sam Gamgee, and for mercy and compassion in Frodo’s response to Gollum, and for beauty in the Elves. And none of these are in the story as ‘moral edification’ or ‘improved living’, they are more accurately part of the mystery of reality. What moves us about the story of the fellowship is much closer to Lewis’s description of the feeling of ‘the richness of heaven and earth and the comfort of human affection slipping away’. What makes the character of Théoden, King of Rohan, being put under a spell by Grima stay with us so acutely is not just that we are seeing evil, but feeling the familiar loss and grief we feel when we know people who are a shadow of their former selves, who suffer from being cut off from the good of being wholly themselves.

In the movie Life is Beautiful, there is no doubt we are seeing the evil of the Nazi’s extermination of the Jewish people. But what moves us, what makes the heart of the story, is the breathtaking beauty of the father’s love for his son and his willingness to sacrifice his life for him. The audience is keenly aware of the good as it ought to be, that the two of them could live in a world of where their clear love and delight in each other could reign. The good in this story isn’t moral guidance or dogmatic preaching, as Cadwell holds the good always ends up being in art. The father’s death, the Nazi’s evil, would mean nothing if this larger reality of how things should be didn’t play on our hearts and minds. Similarly, Romeo and Juliet’s death would mean nothing if we weren’t so achingly aware of what it might look like if they could partake in the good of their love.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is listed as a book on Callard’s syllabus for her class on death, and indeed one could interpret the meaning of the book as ‘seeing the evil’ of a self-interested life, of upward mobility and power. But written just after Tolstoy’s conversion to Christianity, a more robust interpretation of the book’s aim is the reality that when suffering and the threat of death loom, something breaks into his reality and makes him change, and he turns from a meaningless life to an authentic life marked by compassion and sympathy instead of the artificial life of self-interest. In other words, he turns towards the good.

This move by Tolstoy seems to be much closer to O’Connor’s device to allow evil, or suffering, or violence, to break into our world, and bring us to a larger reality. It seems that Callard ignores this cathartic reality of so much of literature which is what makes us feel cleansed after we consume it. Whether the characters succumb to evil or rise towards the good, most of literature involves humans responding to whole mystery, the whole of reality of both, and not just simply evil. It is our own need and hunger to examine the mystery of life, and to consider how we would respond in such circumstances, and to remember ways that the reality of life felt just like that, that drives us to create art and literature and to consume it.

Callard rightly explains that our everyday intentionality often leads us to perceive only the good, towards that which is useful or leading us to our goals, and it tends to censor the bad. She writes “Art suspends our practical projects, releasing the prohibition against attending to the bad. Our ravenous consumption of badness in art reveals just how much we standardly deprive ourselves of it. We commonly praise some piece of art for its “realism”; we could fault life for its lack thereof.”

But I think a more satisfactory account of this can be found in the writings of Bernard Lonergan, S.J. In his major work, Insight: A Study in Human Understanding, Lonergan outlines his project for explaining how we come to understand or know anything. In it, consciousness moves from sense experience, to asking questions, to reflection, to arriving at an insight, which is the acquisition of real knowledge.

We can see clearly the basic outline of this movement of consciousness from sense experience to knowledge in the scientific method. But his explanation of how we arrive at an insight is perhaps most helpful because it reclaims philosophy’s access to metaphysical knowledge as well by giving us a framework for understanding transcendental insights. He writes that our experiences of art put us into contact with metaphysical realities. Because artists describe our sense world (and the better the art, the better job the artist does this), experiencing art actually puts us in the first stage of an insight – sense experience. “Art mirrors that organic functioning of sense and feeling, of intellect not as abstract formulation but as concrete insight, of judgment that is not just judgment, but that is moving into decision, free choice, responsible action.”

So while he shares Callard’s view that art suspends the practical projects of everyday life, for Lonergan it is not just because we tend to censor the bad in favor of the good in a phenomenological way, but because art takes us to that place outside of ourselves, and outside the place of thinking where biases and judgments are a barrier to understanding and knowledge. Art takes us into that pure state of sense experience that is prior to our formulations of opinions, prior to one that Lewis said was the thoughts of adult intellectuals, and in to the place of a child, drawing a picture, or seeing castles.

He echoes O’Connor’s view that the artist is trying to explain mystery through the manner in which we are in the world when he said:  “The artist establishes his insights, not by proof or verification, but by skillfully embodying them in colors and shapes, in sounds and movements, in the unfolding situations and actions of fiction. To the spontaneous joy of conscious living, there is added the spontaneous joy of free intellectual creation.”

Lonergan holds that the act of questioning puts us on the road to insight. Perhaps Callard’s questioning of why she needs literature on her syllabi to teach the whole reality of our experiences offered her the insight that we need transcendent realities to fully explain and understand our experiences. She is just held back by her rejection of the good, and thus of an integrated reality, or what O’Connor calls ‘the mystery that is the great embarrassment to the modern mind’. Even as she praises artists for trying to understand and communicate this mystery, she censors herself from the complete picture of it.

Writers don’t have that luxury. That mystery presses down on us, and drives us to write it, to explore it, and to set down exactly what we see, to draw the lines of spiritual motion that point to the invisible realities. Good art, good literature, it seems to me, is when a writer captures those realities accurately, when the essence of the good and the haunting effects of its absence are played out in their stories in ways that echo the realities of our world.

 

It’s been a month since my sister Maureen died at the young age of 41.

She was 18 months younger than me, the seventh in our family of eight children so I can’t remember life without her. Even though we knew her death was coming it still feels like a shock. She had been hospitalized many times in the last few years for kidney infections, and she had been septic eight or nine times. It was clear over the past few years that her body was breaking down, but she so often rebounded and came home. She finally had an infection that antibiotics couldn’t beat, and she passed peacefully in her sleep on November 27.

I thought leading up to it that I knew something about grief. I lost my dad to an asthma attack/heart attack when I was 19 and my brother to MS/heart attack when I was 35. But each grief is as unique as the person you lost. So I have to learn again how to walk this road.

Part of what makes it hard this time around is that Maureen’s story is complex. She was one of five people in the world with a disease where her body didn’t respond to the hormone produced by the pseudohypoparathyroid gland, affecting her whole endocrine system. Doctors at Mass General said she was a subset case of Albright’s Syndrome.

When she was born it manifested in having short fingers and toes because her body had a hard time calcifying bones. Other than some extra hospital stays and doctor appointments, Maureen’s differences were hardly noticed in the bustle of our large family, and in the brightness of her big personality. She was fun and funny, happy, smart, and had a savant-like quality of remembering everything that anyone ever said to her, dates and addresses, and the family tree of everyone we knew. She was a lot like her Down syndrome friends in Special Olympics when it came to having an outgoing personality, sense of humor, and exuberant joy. She in so many ways prepared me to be Ronan’s mom, to be a mother to a child with Down syndrome.

Her differences were noticed by her grade school friends. Her metabolism was slow and she tended to carry extra weight, and other kids would make fun of it. We got her a Garfield t-shirt that said ‘I’m not fat, I’m totally awesome.’  She learned to repeat the line with enormous confidence. It paid off. When we were in high school, I would look across campus and seeing her bounding with joy across the lawn, stopping to talk to everyone, smiling always. “You’re Maureen’s sister?” people would ask me, always chasing the question with, “she is so awesome”. “She really is,” I would always reply.

She loved school, and when she graduated, we were worried. What could she do now that would make her feel valued, give her purpose, let her engage with others? She worked at a day care for a while until her ability to stand all day grew weaker, and then she attended a day program with other adults with special needs, who became her best friends, her other family.

When I saw how wonderful my husband was with Maureen, how he made her laugh and how much she loved him, I knew he was a keeper.

When I got engaged, she got sicker. Her bones in her spine were collapsing on her spinal cord. She writhed in pain the first Thanksgiving my husband spent at our house, and we were all so worried until she finally had spinal surgery at Mass General.  She wore the brace she needed as she healed to my wedding shower. She was much better by the time of our wedding, and walked with a walker as a bridesmaid down the aisle.

When I started having a family, she started having hip and knee pain. While I had three children, she had three hip replacements. After our third was born, she was in a wheel chair because the last hip replacement didn’t work. Her knobby knees started to lock at hard angles, though her face was soft and round and rosy, and her love for her nieces and nephews abounded.

By the time our fourth child was born six years ago, Maureen was losing the ability to use her arms and hands, was bound to an electric wheel chair and required a hoyer lift to be moved, powered by my mother who took such wonderful care of her even through her own hip replacement, heart issues, and breast cancer. If Maureen was tough, she was modeling what she knew from our mother.

As much as we desired to bring her into our life, it was harder and harder for my mom to take her out, and she started to have spasms and stomach aches that made it hard for her to get out of bed. We needed to come to her. Looking back, we can see that as her body was breaking down on the outside it was breaking down on the inside too. Her kidneys kept backing up and getting infected, and she was hospitalized often with UTIs and kidney infections. Her colon kept getting backed up and distended because it just wasn’t working anymore. She would say a Memorae every time she was uncomfortable or in pain.

Through all this, Maureen rarely complained. It didn’t even occur to her to feel sorry for herself. In the end she required a lot of care from my mom to help her stay comfortable, to readjust her in bed, to help her sit up. But she was always happy to see us, and when my mom brought her to Thanksgiving or Easter she tried hard to be part of the festivities, even though she would probably rather have been in bed.

Maureen’s adult life is exactly what doctors have in mind when they say children with special needs might be a burden. They might suffer. But if you ask her and my mom, they didn’t see it that way at all. We were all so thankful for every day of her life.

Maureen’s faith was like a child, and in many ways, she helped all of us keep a childlike faith. She touched everyone she met.  Not by preaching words, not by any achievements. Not by anything she did, but just by who she was, and loving others well. She exemplified 1 Corinthians 13:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails.

Maureen’s life strengthened all of our faith. From a very young age, we had a constant counterpoint to our culture’s message that worth comes from success, advancement, achievement, beauty, wealth or power. She was one of the gang, cherished and loved for just being who she was. Her unique qualities: her belly laugh, her love of the silly, her razor-sharp wit, and her ability to navigate to a person’s heart, to what matters and always reveal so clearly what does not, made her one of the most inspiring people I will ever know. The really remarkable thing about her was that she was just always her essential self. She had none of the things that trip most of us up – ego, doubt, fear – just peace and love.

The thing that’s so hard about losing Maureen, even though I am so happy she is out of pain, and I know she is a saint, is that we’re going to miss her example. Her reminder to just be who God made you to be.

But as I hear Ronan on the monitor, waking up with giggles, I am so thankful God sent us another reminder. He knew we would need it.

 

It’s my birthday this Saturday, and we’re celebrating by having pretty much my dream day: my husband and kids and I will take a ferry to an island off of Portland, ME, where my best friend is renting a big house with her new husband and baby. We’ll sit and watch the ocean from rocking chairs or hammocks, get lobsters for dinner from a lobsterman on the island (if you’ve read my novel the Wideness of the Sea you’ll know how close all these things are to my heart), drink wine, play games with the kids, and drift off to sleep with the sound of a clinking harbor bell off in the distance, the salty breeze of the ocean drifting in.

Like I said, a perfect day.

I tend to get reflective around my birthday, and it occurred to me that right now, in this very spot in life, as I roll into my 43rd year and roll out of another year of school for the kids, will be one of those times that I’ll look back on and wonder how did I do all that? Six kids, TWO nineteen month old boys, a marriage I try hard to make strong and a husband who I love spending time with, a dog and a cat, a writing life full of deadlines for short projects and bigger projects that whisper to me all the time, stacks of books I want to read, and dinner every night.

And then it hits me: is this a great life or what?

I know from the number of people who say to me ‘Oh my gosh, six kids! Better you than me’ that its not a life many people would choose. It sounds hard. It sounds like too much responsibility. Too much life to give up.

But I owe it to anyone out there who is wondering if they could do big family life to tell them that the world has it so wrong. Laying down your life for other people sets you free. 

Definitely not in the day to day, hour by hour, is-it-almost-bedtime-yet sense of being free. On this level, it’s super hard, and there is a lot of work that needs to get done everyday and a lot to manage. I’m in a season where I rarely get to do what I want (and I tend to compensate by staying up too late one night a week and walk around tired the next day because I just need that one chunk of time alone.) There is effort. There is self-sacrifice. There are always piles of dishes and laundry. And I am v v grateful that my husband does all these things with me.

But when I wonder about how to bring goodness into the world and what I could do with my life that has the most meaning, there is this intense peace about caring for all these beautiful souls. And they will leave and have families and hopefully bring love and joy to the world. Each one of my kids could be a life’s work that I was proud of, and I get to multiply that feeling by six.

And here’s the thing: in filling up my plate so full, everything unnecessary has had to get removed from my life, so that only what’s necessary remains. It’s simple, its pure, and while it’s not easy, it is a very light burden. Because all that remains is to love and be loved. And somewhere deep in our hearts that is what we are wired for. That’s what we were created to do. And I get to do it every day.

I often think it’s a bit like breathing, like inhaling and exhaling. I feed people, I go for a run, feed people, run kids to sports, make dinner, do the power hour with the babies where we do baths, diapers, jammies, bottle and bed. I read a book with my six year old, and I chat with my big kids about their lives. And then I fall in to bed, exhausted, knowing that the babies will be up early and we’ll do it all over again. But in between all these activities, there are these moments. A hug, a kiss, a smile, a giggle, a laugh, a discovery, a song, a dance party, a tickle session. And I know that these are the moments I will treasure in my heart forever, like on-my-death-bed montage playing in my head of these memories and I’ll think, I’d do it all again. Just like that. It was perfect. 

And I know from spending a nanosecond in the media that this life sounds horrible to many people. But one book read, one meal, one interaction with my kids, means more to me than any accolade. Sure they are shiny and they catch my attention. Sure I would love to have more time to work. But this loving and being loved business? Man. Nothing is quite like it.

I think we’re at a very interesting point in history where women can do whatever they want. And that is as it should be. Women are such a gift to the world. Men are too. I just hope that women and men who are coming down the pike know that of all the things they could do, one of the choices available to them is to fall crazy madly in love with people, and live together with them in chaos and noise and clutter and messes and joy. Lots and lots of joy. And that this choice isn’t crazy. It shouldn’t be laid down too casually or rejected too easily. It actually might be the best thing they could ever have done with their lives. Sure you might be broke at the end, but only if you measure what’s not important. If you measure what’s important, you’re cup runneth over.