Part 1

[Irene]

Looking forward to reading what you have learned,
Frances, from your essays by Hansen. I think it will really enrich my experience of this book.

[Frances]

I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear about Ron Hansen. Yes, he is an ordained deacon. In regard to his twin brother, here is what Hansen says in A Slant Against Confusion: “I have spent more than a third of my life in Jesuit schools as either a student or teacher, and my brother was a member of the Wisconsin Province of the Society of Jesus for nine years . . . (page 73)

On Mariette in Ecstasy: “I hoped to present in Mariette’s life a faith that gives an intellectual assent to Catholic orthodoxy, but doesn’t forget that the origin of religious feeling is the graced revelation of the Holy Being to us in nature, in the flesh, and in all our faculties. (page 9)

“In Religion and Literature, John Updike noted that the English Victorians generally wrote with the presumption of a religious sensibility on the part of their readers, but that the modernists, responding to the wreckage of conviction wrought by Darwin, Freud, and Marx, sought to make art itself their religion. And so the twentieth century became, for many, an age of disbelief. (page 15)

“The job of fiction writers is to give their readers the feeling that life has great significance, that something is going on here that matters. Writing will be a sacrament when it offers in its own way the formula for happiness of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Which is: First, be. Second, love. Finally, worship. We may find it’s possible that if we do just one of those things completely we may have done all three.” (page 13)

If there are any questions that members of our group have, please ask, and if Ron Hansen addresses them in A Slant Against Confusion, I’ll post his remarks.

[Manny]

I think I'm on the right track with my reasons for Hansen setting the novel in 1906. Besides the internal to the novel tension, the reader of today has to read it with a modernist world view, only to find out that he was wrong. I hope that doesn't spoil it for some people. I imagine everyone has reached the end at this point.

[Irene]

Thank you Frances. Does Hansen say anything about sexual themes in the novel or the figure of Mariette's father?

[Frances]

In answer to the question about sexual themes, I'm going to cite several places in the essays, Irene. Please bear with me, I don't want to confuse anyone.

Just after he read The Story of a Soul, Hansen happened to read a collection of love letters between two eighteenth century figures, lines of which which "stunned and excited" him. He wanted emotions like that at the heart of his novel. (Mariette) "I pretended that the nun I'd modeled after Therese of Lisieux would have a kind of love affair with Jesus, with all of a romance's grand exaltations and disappointments, and its physical manifestation would be Christ's wounds from the crucifixion." (page 8)

"I was trying to stake claim, as Pico Iyer put it, to 'a world as close and equivocal as Emily Dickinson's, alive with the age-old American concerns of community and wildness, of sexual and spiritual immensities, of transcendence and its discontents.' "
(page 9, A Stay Against Confusion)

Ron Hansen tells the reader his opinion about Mariette's stigmata, but I won't type that until we're sure that everyone has finished reading.

Hansen says, "in a society that seems increasingly secular and post-biblical it is now writers and artists of faith who may feel exiled or silenced . . . " I think that is exactly what Mariette's father did to her. He was -- as person and symbol -- secular, postmodern man, as Manny has pointed out.

[Frances]

I apologize: Kerstin did, too, in message 20.

[Irene]

Thank you for these passages, Frances.

[Frances]

You’re very welcome, Irene. Ron Hansen has a stunning essay on the prayer “Anima Christ” in A Stay Against Confusion, and a beautiful essay on the Eucharist. In an essay dedicated to Gerard Manley Hopkins, he wrote some lines that gave this reader a thrill: Hansen explains, “Other poets have been important to me — Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman — but Hopkins has remained my favorite because, like T.S. Eliot, he is not so easily solved. Any interpretation insists on further interpretation. An infinite number of layers . . . “

Here he explains how he came to Santa Clara University, and this is the thrilling part I referred to:
“At lunch with a Jesuit friend a few years ago, I was approached by the president of Santa Clara University who said, ‘I have an offer you can’t refuse.’ He described a professorship in creative writing that would be funded with an endowed chair. An attractive offer, but I was gainfully employed elsewhere and wasn’t sure I ought to change jobs. So I secretly prayed to Gerard Manley Hopkins about whether I ought to take it or not. The next night I got a call from the president of Santa Clara, asking for my decision, and then adding, ‘We’ll call it the Gerard Manley Hopkins chair. Does that mean anything to you?’ It did. And I imagined Gerard in heaven, smiling.”

[Irene]

Frances, It looks like I can borrow this book. I will have to give it a try. Your comments have sparked my interest.

[Frances]

Thanks for telling me that, Irene. I think you'd like the essays, especially one titled "What Stories Are and Why We Read Them." Here's an excerpt from it as an example: ""stories give us access to otherwise hidden, censored, unsayable thoughts and feelings disclosed in the guise of plot and character. . . The hungers of our spirits are fed by sharing in the glimpsed interiority of others." (page 39)

[Celia]

I am now done with the book, Dear Friends. I am now reading all of these wonderful comments and learning so much. I did know that a few have experienced the stigmata and in most cases have been doubted and ostracized. Despite that knowledge, I was upset that Mariette was doubted. I was especially upset that Mariette's father doubted her too. (I guess I am easily upset about these things; I tend to wear rose colored glasses).

On another subject from Part I, I gained clarification about something that I have been confused about until now. I have always had a love for The Feast of the Assumption because I was baptized on that date in 1948. I know that the Assumption became dogma in 1950, so erroneously thought that the FEAST was added to the church calendar in 1950. When I read that Mariette was brought into the convent on Aug 15, 1906, I knew that I had been mistaken about the Feast's origins. I then did a little research and learned that the Feast has been observed since the Fifth Century. So I WAS baptized on the Feast of the Assumption, a fact that brings me joy, even more than my birthday.

[Celia]

One more note: I am ecstatic (pun intended) to have been introduced to Hansen's A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction. I bought the Kindle version and hope to read it in Sept.

[Manny]

Celia wrote: "I am now done with the book, Dear Friends. I am now reading all of these wonderful comments and learning so much. I did know that a few have experienced the stigmata and in most cases have been dou..."

Celia, our book club may be small compared to some of the others out there but I think a very strong group. We really dig into the details and I think makes for a better reading experience. For me it's not a book club if everyone reads completely isolated from each other and just posts a review at the end. I aim for building a community here. I've quipped that this is our little monastery away from the world. Some people may not like reading other's comments as they're reading and some do. I try to balance it. I try to have a week of reading a section without comments followed by opening it up to comments while we read the next section. Fast readers usually zip through but this way we give everyone a chance to keep up and participate. I hope you'll participate in the future. Plus, we're not done with discussing Part 3 here.

Also if you set your defaults to receive email notifications when a comment is posted, you won't ever miss a comment.

[Celia]

Manny wrote: "Celia wrote: "I am now done with the book, Dear Friends. I am now reading all of these wonderful comments and learning so much. I did know that a few have experienced the stigmata and in most cases..."

Thank you, Manny, for your comments. I'll be more of a participator in the future on the books that I am reading for Catholic Thought.