Notes from the Author: Ron Hansen on Exiles

by the InsideCatholic Staff and Friends - July 18, 2008

Reprinted with permission.

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What is "Catholic" fiction? Is it fiction written by a Catholic? Must it include Catholic characters and treat distinctly Catholic themes? Does it reflect a "Catholic sensibility"? Should the reader even bother with such questions?

To try to sort through some of these issues, Amy Welborn, Matthew Lickona, Bishop Daniel Flores, and Joseph O'Brien spent a week discussing them in relation to Ron Hansen's latest novel, Exiles.

The story, in brief: Gerard Manley Hopkins is a young seminarian in Wales when he reads of the wreck of the Deutschland, a ship bound for America whose passengers – and ultimate victims – include five religious sisters exiled from Bismarck's Germany. Unusually touched by the story, Hopkins sets about writing perhaps one of his most famous poems, "The Wreck of the Deutschland." Hansen weaves the story of Hopkins's struggle between his poetic gift and his priestly duty with that of the five sisters and their comrades in their final hours aboard the ship. Though separated by circumstance, Hansen explores the threads that bind them – exiles all in "this valley of tears."

Each day this week, three entries from our group's discussion will be posted. Though the members completed their conversation in advance (to keep the commentary running smoothly), they will regularly appear in the comments box to continue the discussion with you, the reader. We encourage everyone to respond, critique, ask questions, and post thoughts of your own in the comments section to add to our conversation, and help us move toward an answer to that initial question: Just what is Catholic fiction?

One final note: Reading the book is not a prerequisite for participating in the discussion. The conversation here goes far beyond the contents of Hansen's book. However, as this is a discussion and not a review, there will be spoilers in the commentary. Proceed with caution.
To jump directly to a particular entry, here are the direct links. Consider this your Table of Contents to the book discussion.
Matthew Lickona 1
Bishop Daniel Flores 1
Amy Welborn 1
Joseph O'Brien 1
Bishop Daniel Flores 2
Matthew Lickona 2
Joseph O'Brien 2
Amy Welborn 2
Bishop Daniel Flores 3
Joseph O'Brien 3
Amy Welborn 3
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Matthew Lickona writes:

Forgive me, author. . . I confess I went into Exiles weighted with the soft bigotry of literary expectations. The last time Ron Hansen wrote a novel involving nuns, we got Mariette in Ecstasy, a story boasting a facility and loveliness of language and imagery that bordered on poetry (here, the genuine poets in our midst may feel free to correct me):

Sister Anne and Sister Agnes heave heavy avalanches of wash onto a gray wool blanket and then go inside for more, and Mariette hangs sweet wet sheets on the clotheslines until she is curtained and roomed by them. Sister Agnes slinks through a gap in the whiteness with a straw basket of underthings that they silently pin up in the hidden world inside the tutting, luffing, campaigning sheets. . . . Sister Agnes aches from reaching. . . . She watches the postulant as the tilting sheets wrap around her and shape her. She watches the girl as she tenderly releases herself, as though tugging a ghost's hands away.

Mariette featured Christ speaking directly and audibly – to Mariette, at least. It told the story of a visionary, one who experienced ecstasies of passion in her communion with the divine. Hansen's image is perfect: Mariette the would-be nun, handling these intimate garments, garments that cover but also touch her sexual regions, regions she has at least spiritually given to Christ in becoming His bride. And as she does so, she is moving in a hidden world, obscured from ordinary sight, just as a cloistered nun's life is hidden from the world, where she is caressed as if by the hands by a ghost. And then there is the sound of it, the delight in sounding out those "sweet wet sheets," those "tutting, luffing, campaigning sheets." I read the book out loud to my wife, in part because she likes me to read to her, but in part because reading it aloud was such a pleasure, a supervening virtue to the prose that brought on my comparison to poetry.

Exiles is different. I confess to suspecting that Hansen, in writing a book that was, at least in part, about the writing of a poem – "The Wreck of the Deutschland" – had decided to veer his prose as far from poetry as possible. Here's his description of the poet Robert Bridges:

He was over six feet tall and wide-shouldered, a man's man who had played football and cricket and was the star oarsman of the Corpus Christi College rowing team; at Oxford he'd been considered so stunningly handsome that some classmates could not take their eyes off him. And if he was cold, secretive, aggressively intolerant, and given to petulant exhibitions of rudeness – or, put kindly, "delightfully grumpy" – he was also softhearted, considerate, and highly musical.

I read that, and I couldn't help but hear the voice of the guy who narrated Ken Burns's documentary The Civil War. I couldn't help but imagine such a description as words spoken over the visual of an old photograph – a sketch of a character, one that might provide a helpful dose of color as the documentary told its tale, but one that, in the context of a novel, ought to have been only a back-story, a tool to inform the author of how Bridges would appear, speak, and act. I had the same reaction to the stories of how the five nuns made their way into religious life.

Put bluntly and not at all kindly, when I read bits like this, I thought to myself, "These are not parts of a novel; these are the notes for a novel." In the "Author's Note," Hansen writes, "The characters finally represent my own interpretation of people who actually lived more than a century ago." After my first read-through, I found myself wondering, "What interpretation? This is barely removed from journalism. The novelist's imperative is 'Show, don't tell.' This book features great swaths of telling. It even lets us know that Hopkins, the son of the man who wrote A Manual of Marine Insurance, 'grew up in a world wet with marine accidents and was especially attentive to them.' Couldn't he have gotten this across more artfully? What happened to the man who gave us Mariette?"

But of course, Mariette isn't Exiles, and it's not fair to criticize something just because it isn't something else. I resolved, on my second read-through, to try harder to take the novel on its own terms. I sought to be more docile to the text, to assume that Hansen knew what he was about. As Joseph O'Brien noted to me in an e-mail before this conversation began, it wasn't that Hansen had lost his fastball when it came to building a sentence. It was just that most of the poetry seemed to be lavished on the storm and the cold and the weather. ("Along the dock the snow was gliding over the tarred planks in white wisps that between trailing and flying shifted and wimpled like so many silvery worms." Perfect.)

The question then became: What was Hansen up to? Was it just that he was bucking expectations, writing unpoetically about the story behind a great poem? If not, then what?

Please permit me another look back at Mariette in Ecstasy: "You're my sister," says Mariette's biological sister (and a nun herself), "but I don't understand you. You aren't understandable. . . . You may be a saint. Saints are like that, I think. Elusive. Other. Upsetting." Because of her visions, Mariette is Other even in comparison to those who have withdrawn from the world and into religious life. In this, she's a little like Hopkins, who describes himself when he describes Duns Scotus:

Scotus saw too far, he knew too much; his subtlety overshot his own interests. A kind of feud arose between his genius and his talent, and those who could not understand him voted that there was nothing important to understand . . . .

"The pestering originality of [Hopkins's] intellect" proves to be Hopkins's ruin within the Jesuit order; he is Other even among those who are already Other themselves – English Catholics, priests, Jesuits. But unlike Mariette, his Otherness isn't supernatural; it's intellectual and artistic – something altogether more ordinary.

The five nuns are also Other, but even more prosaically so – they are Catholics in anti-Catholic Germany who have chosen to live "this odd, hard life of denial."

It's that very prosaic Otherness that turns them into exiles and gets them on board the doomed Deutschland – and, ultimately, joins them to Christ. (As Sister Aurea notes, "Christ was an exile, too." In Mariette, union with Christ was a matter of uniting with Him in spiritual ecstasy, and possibly even sharing His wounds. Here, it's a matter of humble, even humdrum imitation: "If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before you.") Suddenly, a less exalted prose style seems more fitting.

And again – Mariette actually heard Christ telling her that He loved her even as He allowed her to suffer. Here, our nuns have only Scripture for comfort, and it's a cold sort of comfort, too: the story of Christ stilling the waters of the storm, even as the storm outside the Deutschland threatens to destroy them. Theirs is a much more "normal" sort of spirituality, one shaped by their own decidedly human stories (and this is a fertile topic for later, I think). When Hopkins is reading about the wreck, he learns that "the chief sister" was "calling out loud and often, 'O Christ, come quickly!' till the end came." The soul calls for the unseen Christ, and it is death who answers. This is surely a more common account of faith than that of Mariette, and so, it might be argued, justly receives a more common style in its recounting. Christ isn't talking here, and I can recall only one moment where God is treated as a real and certain and active thing: when Hopkins goes before the Blessed Sacrament and "grace as soft as a dove's wing floated over him, calming him . . . ." (Why here? Anyone?)

So yes, I would have preferred that Hansen find a more "show, don't tell" way of letting us know that Poet Laureate Bridges "could not have foreseen how interest in his own poetry would languish just as interest in Gerard Manley Hopkins's grew." I wish he had felt free to go further in making "dramatic what is otherwise contained in Hopkins's letters and journals." But I think maybe I can see part of the point: Besides the journalistic vibe brought on by his "duty to their memories," Hansen is fitting his prose to the character of the story.

Well, I think I've made enough mischief for one opening comment. Final thought, regarding the whole "show, don't tell" criticism. On second perusal, I've started thinking that maybe Hansen is playing a bit – that he's telling, yes, but that he's telling to show;he intends what's told to point to something further. When the pilot of the Deutschland decides to anchor for the night, saying "I have only my eyes to go by, after all," that's a lovely bit of show – an intimation of the story's treatment of faith.

Later, Hansen gives a detailed account of the way a ship figured its location under stormy skies. He concludes this bit of telling-heavy description by writing, "With the skies clouded, the trigonometry of sextant and chronometer was impossible. Voyages in 1875 sometimes involved a ship simply blundering from one place to another." Ah. Another intimation of the experience of faith. Telling to show. It doesn't quite account for a description like "[Hopkins] was a gregarious loner, an entertaining observer, a weather watcher, etymologist, cartoonist, and nature artist," but it's something.

Anyone?