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Literary-Easter-Theory With Denise Levertov




I think it’s been since Kant that when we hear the word “mystery” we hear the wrong thing. “Faith” too. For us these words explain things that, in principle, can’t be known. They are important, perhaps essential for helping us get through our day. But they don’t explain things that happen.


When the Church talks about “the mystery of the resurrection,” it is therefore often misunderstood. People hear the phrase and think Catholics are talking about an “idea”, strictly speaking. Hence, to “believe” in the resurrection is to contemplate a concept, to initiate gnosis. It is to have an aesthetic experience which is mental—like guided meditation or Shaman coached psychedelic experiences.


The irony of this is that Catholics have always meant something opposite. What they mean is what writers have always found so compelling about it. Some are haunted by Catholicism, like Don DeLillo (the Bronx sequence in Underworld), and Cormac McCarthy (when he says “The only words I know are the Catholic ones” in Suttree, The Road, and Child of God); some are enticed by it like Hemingway (“Catholicism is a grand religion” from The Sun Also Rises), Denis Johnson, Toni Morrison (who converted for a time in her youth), and Willa Cather (Death Comes to The Archbishop); or many convert or maintain their faith (Flannery O’Conner, Thomas Merton, Dana Gaia, Tobias Wolfe, Denise Levertov).

What these writers find attractive in the Church is what makes for good writing; both Catholicism and fiction/ poetry lives or dies on what it thinks is real. The distinction between Catholicism and religions like Islam or Mormonism is precisely this point. Catholics don’t think they are right because of a book. It is not that God’s information has made its way into our minds. It is that God made his way into the world. Catholics think that when God wanted to communicate, he did so by action, by living and dying and rising again in full view; that his resurrection ensures his presence in the bread and wine of the eucharist, and that by baptism we participate in his resurrected body.


Of course, we take this to be true because of words, testimony. But, with Paul, we take these words to be potentially wrong. “If Christ has not been raised…we are to be pitied more than all men.” (1 Corinthians 15:12-19)


This is a distinction that all writers must make in their work. It’s what I think estranges them from dominant attitudes in literary theory. It’s what makes them disagree with Roland Barthe in “Death of The Author” when he rhetorically asks of Balzac in Sarrasine, “who is speaking thus…we shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice…[the] oblique space where our subject slips away.” (Barthes 142) Theory says the writer’s contact with the world, with reality, is not what is known by the reader. They say that the writer’s intention can’t be known in the text, that what is known is Barthes “tissue of the text,” the complex relation of symbols, built up through text itself. To read is to be cast within; to be lost in Borges infinite library.


The reason writers can’t believe this is because, for them, writing is always about things in the world, and not just about more writing. It describes, is at its best when relatable and true to life. Good writing is that which is vitally connected to people’s lives, makes sense of it, reminds them of their own experiences. The material this project only comes from the writers’ experiences, their pain, their loneliness, their observations, their sense of the world. To write like Barthes wants us to is to have no reason to write in the first place.

When the writer GK Chesterton converted he wrote his poem, “The Convert” where he says, “After one moment when I bowed my head/ And the whole world turned over and came upright…Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed/ Being not unlovable but strange and light; The sages have a hundred maps to give/ That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree/ They rattle reason out through many a sieve/ That stores the sand and lets the gold go free.”


Notice the reality of “autumn leaves” and the world come up right. The strangeness and lightness of experience post resurrection. This is contrasted by the sage’s maps of the crawling cosmos, the mental, aesthetic experience of symbols. It is this which rattles out reason like a sieve allowing the gold of reality to go free.


This notion is picked up by the convert Denise Levertov in her poem “On Belief in the Physical Resurrection of Jesus.” In it she explains this relationship of the real to symbol in terms of her Catholicism. Speaking of Easter, she says “Miracle is possible, / possible and essential.” Echoing Chesterton’s sages she wonders, “are some intricate minds/ nourished/ on concept…Can they subsist on the light/ on the half/ of metaphor that’s not grounded in dust, grit…Do signs contain and utter/ for them/ all the reality/ that they need?”

This theoretical position, that structures and signs are nourishing to metaphor, is then contrasted, not to some counter-theory, but to the bodily resurrection of Christ. For the sages, “resurrection…” is “an internal power, but not/ a matter of flesh…” It is precisely this theory which she rejects. For her, “miracles (ultimate need/ of life) are miracles just because/ people so tuned/ to the humdrum laws:/ gravity, morality—/ can’t open / to symbol’s power/ unless convinced of its ground.” Here, I think we can say, Levertov rejects Barthes theory in favor of something more old fashioned, like her religion. Metaphor and symbol are rooted in “bone and blood.”


For Levertov, it’s only when we “taste bread at Emmaus/ that warm hands/ broke and blessed” that language comes alive. This natural writerly sentiment, that by which all good writers must hang their hat, is at the heart of Catholic claims about Easter. And just as the truth of poetry rises or falls on the intentions and experiences of the poet, so the Catholic faith rises and falls on the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

Christus resurrexit.

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