Page 9, 30th April 2010

30th April 2010

Page 9

Page 9, 30th April 2010 — Move over Greene, Waugh and Belloc
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Move over Greene, Waugh and Belloc

Roy Peachey says it is time to expand the canon of great Catholic writers to include those born outside the western world
CS Lewis once wrote: “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristics of our own period. And that means the old books.” Useful as Lewis’s advice undoubtedly is, his assumption that, “all contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook” takes us only so far. Even in the age of the global village, authors from different cultures and continents simply do not think or write in the same way as each other. They may share something of the same outlook but the differences are often more interesting.
We must therefore extend C S Lewis’s argument. Since we all need books to correct the characteristics of our own period, we should read not just old books but books from around the world. We might like to think that, as Catholics, we are particularly aware of the need for catholicity but, in truth, we are as likely as anyone else to become parochial the moment we step inside a bookshop.
Most English language studies of the Catholic novel – and, I would guess, most readers – tend to focus on a very small group of western writers. More often than not that group is based around either Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene or G K Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and J R R Tolkien.
Some critics and readers, it is true, are more daring in considering Bernanos, Mauriac and Undset – after all, it’s hard to ignore two Nobel prize winners entirely – while others read Flannery O’Connor and Rumer Godden. More recent writers like Michael O’Brien, J F Powers and Piers Paul Read may even get a look in.
But very rarely will you see any mention of writers from outside Europe or North America. The only exception is Shusaku Endo, and one suspects that this was largely because he received Graham Greene’s imprimatur. It is perhaps churlish to pick on any one publication as an example of this parochialism but the CTS booklet on 100 Books You Really Should Read is both widely available and fairly representative in this regard. Divided into separate sections on biography, fiction, history, spiritual reading, and theology, teaching and faith, it makes many valuable recommendations and is certainly worth dipping into.
Its lack of geographical range is quite striking. Reading this booklet, it would be easy to believe that the Catholic Church did not extend beyond the confines of Europe or North America. To put it another way, it would be easy to think that the Catholic Church were not catholic at all.
Of the 25 recommended works of fiction, for example, only two (by the Australian novelist Morris West) break the North American and European stranglehold. Not one novel from Asia, Africa, South or Central America is recommended.
Nor do the other sections remedy the booklet’s imbalance: most of the world simply doesn’t feature in the list of recommendations. And yet Catholic authors from all around the globe have produced a wonderful array of writings which may help us to escape what C S Lewis calls the “great mass of common assumptions” that we share with most writers from the Anglophone world.
To do justice to the Catholic Truth Society, whose booklets usually set a very high standard, their authors faced a number of practical difficulties in drawing up their list of recommendations.
A lack of translations into English was perhaps the main problem. Many excellent Catholic novelists, like the Argentinian Manuel Gálvez for instance, still remain to be translated, often, in part, because of their Catholicism. As one critic has pointed out, Gálvez was condemned as “a literary, ideological, conservative, religious dinosaur” at the time of his death in 1962 and only now is his literary reputation being reevaluated.
Other authors have not even got as far as a re-evaluation. The great Chinese writer and critic Su Xuelin found herself effectively marginalised as a woman, an anti-Communist and a Catholic after the Communist victory in 1949. After working for CTS in Hong Kong she moved into exile in Taiwan where she built up a reputation as a formidable scholar.
But, even today her novels – like Ji Xin, a semi-autobiographical account of a young Chinese woman’s conversion to Catholicism – remain out of print and untranslated.
Even when authors do manage to find translators, their more explicitly Catholic works are often neglected. Japan’s leading Catholic novelist, Sono Ayako, has had two of her novels translated into English but her non-fiction work about Maximilian Kolbe can still be read only in Japanese, despite its being described as a “minor classic” by the renowned critic and translator Philip Gabriel.
And so we could go on. Catholics from around the world languish in untranslated neglect because they are neither fashionable enough nor heretical enough to break into the publishing mainstream. But this is not the whole story: a lack of translations does not entirely explain the CTS booklet’s blindspots. There are plenty of Catholic writers from Japan to Trinidad, from Indonesia to Nigeria, whose books have either been translated or were written in English in the first place.
One of the glories of the Catholic Church is its catholicity and we can only benefit from reading widely among our coreligionists, if only because, as C S Lewis put it in that same essay with which we started: “Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.”




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