American Catholic Arts and Fictions.

In an article in Commonweal in November 1991, Paul Giles described Donald Barthelme as "... a fascinating example of the Catholic literary sensibility at work," despite Barthelme's "avowed agnosticism.'' The writer participated in a Catholic cultural tradition, Giles maintained, through his implicit assumptions about the nature of man, society, and the world and through his choices of allusions and metaphors. Barthelme's Catholicism was not a philosophical system, but a "lurking irrational shadow" of "radical antihumanism."

This article appears, in a much-edited form, in Giles's massive new book on the Catholic tradition in American literature and art. While he had previously cited Bartheleme as an example of how a social context is expressed in the work of a single author, Giles now turns to an examination of the context itself by placing I a variety of Catholic writers, filmmakers, and artists in a community of culture that has formed a continual undercurrent to the dominant American ideology of Puritanism and romanticism. Giles offers a description of his subject that is both chronological and thematic- He moves gradually from nineteenth-century American stereotypes of Catholicism, and the appearance of Orestes Brownson as the first characteristically American Catholic writer, to contemporary novelists Mary Gordon and Robert Stone.

The concept of "analogy" is central to Giles's interpretation of the Catholic sensibility. In the Thomist doctrine of analogica entis, the universe is represented as a series of intercessionary links between heaven and earth, so that there are no unbridgeable chasms between spirit and matter, between the visible and the invisible. There is no "idealism" in this manner of thinking, since the analogical imagination finds the ideal in earthly substance, as in the mystery of transubstantiation. Since all physical things mirror the divine, analogy knits the world together into an interconnected whole and leads to an acceptance of imperfect, corrupt human nature.

By contrast, Giles argues, the dominant American, Puritan mode of thought is frequently "allegorical ."The Puritan separation of God from the world created two separate, closed realms of meaning. Mundane events can have only a figurative and arbitrary relation to divine truth. Because there are no intermediaries between the two realms, each individual is forced to take responsibility for his own spiritual state, replacing obedience to authority with extreme voluntarism. Because the mundane is closed off from the sacred, worldly success or failure can become absolute in its own sphere; in the "Protestant Ethic" wealth becomes the indisputable symbol of the elect. Social idealism becomes the faith of those faced with a conspicuous duality of good and evil, who have only to exercise their own wills to remake their society.

Giles argues that even Catholics and Protestants who have abandoned their faiths retain their characteristic sensibilities as matters of style and metaphor. Among Catholics, the principal stylistic division is between converts (such as Oresres Brownson, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, and Walker Percy) and "cradle Catholics." For the former, Catholicism is self-conscious and theoretical. For the latter, whether continuing believers or apostates, the influence of the church is usually more subtle and subliminal. Giles's chapter on John Berryman and the way in which a religious background can shape secular art in unconscious, unsystematic ways is particularly good. Ideas of guilt and divine grace run through all of Berryman's work and Giles finds elaborate parallels between St. Augustine's Cofessions and Berryman's intensely confessional Dream Songs.

The argument that the Catholic cultural legacy includes the arts of photography and cinema, as well as literature, is important for the author's principal thesis that a secularized version of theological style permeates much modern thought and expression. The iconographic arts of Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe reveal a Catholic origin in their rejection of romanticism, as well as in their frequent, although irreverent treatment of Catholic subjects. Similarly, the filmmakers John Ford and Robert Altman display an ironic ambivalence toward the cultural myths of Puritan America and a concern with community and ritual that stands in contrast to the idealistic individualism of the mainstream tradition.

The concepts of "analogy" and "allegory" provide Giles with an intriguing basis for constructing ideal types of the Protestant and Catholic mentalities. Nevertheless, while interpreting the work of individual artists as variations of an underlying, a priori typology may be an effective way of finding unity in diversity, it creates some problems. First, one occasionally feels that Giles is forcing particular traits into a predetermined theoretical mold. For example, Martin Scorsese's early obsession with being financially successful ( a goal one normally associates with the Weberian Protestant Ethic ) is taken as the outsider Catholic immigrant's desire for social acceptance and as evidence of an innately conservative belief in "playing by the rules." One wonders how Scorsese's lust for wealth and renown differs from that of Steven Spielberg, who is Jewish.

The fact that Catholicism became prevalent in the United States as a result of the "new immigration" between the Civil War and World War I poses a second problem. Daniel Moynihan has argued that the American system of social stratification along ethnic and religious lines is best understood as a result of the entry of different groups at different points in the nation's historical development. Thus, the "gloomy, stifling conformity" that Giles finds in the works of Dreiser and Farrell may result less from a peculiarly Catholic sense of a world linked by bonds of analogical similitude than from the experiences of a newly arrived industrial working class. It is not necessary to turn to secularized theology to explain why a child of the twentieth-century Chicago slums would have a different perspective from that of the cosseted sages of nineteenth- century New England.

Finally, the author's insistence on the fundamental conservatism and antihumanism implicit in the analogical imagination leads him to underestimate the energy for social reform that has played an important part in American Catholic intellectual life. As a social conservative, the minor writer George V. Higgins (The Friends of Eddie Coyle) is presented as an exemplar of Catholic values, while the leftist sympathies of Dreiser, Farrell, and others are glossed over. For all of these difficulties, American Catholic Arts and Fictions is an ambitious and insightful exploration of how Catholic culture in the United States has created a consistent, though complex, alternative to what Quentin Anderson called the American doctrine of "the imperial self." Readers who once imagined that all Americans are the direct intellectual descendants of Cotton Mather, Emerson, and Whitman will discover the new world of a diverse heritage.