Sharp imagery,
authentic dialogue, running (as sport, culture, spiritual action), people
behaving badly in the shadow and sight of God, moments of grace, prose-poetic
lines, ideas that lift stories from the page: I was destined to love Jamie
Quatro’s fiction. In James Wood's generous review of I Want To Show You More in The
New Yorker, he notes that “Quatro’s female protagonists yearn and lust, and
the stories articulate that lustful yearning with an exciting literary freedom;
but these infidelities and imagined infidelities play out against the shadow of
Christian belief and Christian prohibition. This is unusual, not just in
contemporary fiction but perhaps in modern fiction generally.”
What is unusual is
not characters wrestling with faith and sexuality within a Christian
milieu--that appears in the work of Ron Hansen, Joy Williams, and Flannery
O’Connor--but that Quatro has arrived on that short list so quickly, so
absolutely. Her work demands consideration, not only as pieces of fiction, but as
documents of human imperfection. Readers of the Oxford American already know that Quatro’s critical thoughts arrive
with the same quality as her fiction: her ability to shift between those modes
with such ease and ability is rare.
It was a pleasure to
interview her for this site. For those who are familiar with Quatro’s work--and
I suspect that is a very large number--her responses offer an honest,
considered discussion that further elevates appreciation of her fiction. For
those new to her writing, this is a wonderful introduction, but the next step
is to find her book. To start with, say, “Demolition,” a story about a faith
community changed forever. This is fiction that unsettles, and then refocuses,
readers: really, the goal of faith. It is not for the faint of heart, perhaps,
but what soft hearts can handle the complexity of lived, absolute belief?
I’ll exit this
preface with some of Quatro’s beautiful prose in “Demolition”: the aftermath of
a discovery of “three fragments of broken stained glass on the aisle floor” of
a church, “the pieces belong[ing] to the sun in the window depicting Satan’s
temptation of Christ”:
“the missing stained glass was a gift. With only the lead outlines remaining, the familiar Bible stories were now articulated in three dimensions: yellow-greens of spring maple and silvered sprays of pine, fade-to-gray of cloud, blue sky beyond. Could it be, we said, that in this fusion of the ancient stories with present-day creation, God meant to reawaken our childhood sense of mystery? Hadn’t some of us noticed, lately, gilded horizon lines at the borders of things, a refracted spangling along the edges of sidewalks? Hadn’t others of us sworn we’d felt a finger brush the backs of our necks or calves while we stood loading our dishwashers, brushing our teeth? Perhaps, we said, God wanted gently to remind us of the world we’d forgotten about, the other Nature hovering just behind our own; and though we couldn’t see it--not yet--we grew increasingly certain it was there, just in front of us, waiting on the other side of a one-way mirror, breath fogging up the glass.”
***
1.
In an excellent interview with the Oxford American, you paraphrase Flannery
O’Connor as being “conscious of writing for a secular audience who thought her
Catholic belief in the Incarnation foolish and antiquated; on the other [hand],
she knew the majority of her Catholic audience thought her stories obscene . .
. in effect, she was misunderstood by both sides.”
I
agree. Not only was O’Connor misunderstood as a writer, her stories dramatized
moments of religious misunderstanding. Take Sarah Ruth’s exclamation of
“Idolatry!” in “Parker’s Back”: her literalist mindset causes her to mistake
the iconography of Parker’s tattoo of Christ for an attempt to replace God with
an image.
As
a writer who often imbues Christian imagery and themes into your work, have you
experienced any misunderstanding after the publication of your debut
collection, I
Want To Show You More?
In a larger sense, do you think writers of religiously themed fiction are
especially prone to experiencing such misreadings?
Before publication, I assumed any confusion or misreading
might come from the non-religious perspective—that secular readers might find
characters with orthodox (though troubled) beliefs foolish or antiquated, as
O’Connor’s detractors felt. But the opposite has proven true. Most
misunderstandings have come from Christians, predominantly evangelicals, who
find certain stories or scenes “blasphemous,” or at least difficult to
understand. I’m often asked: Why did you write this story? What did you intend
for it to say?
The problem, of course, is the question. As soon as you
begin to talk about authorial “intent,”
the road swerves away from any kind of useful dialogue. Art doesn’t begin with
intent. At least, mine doesn’t. It begins with ache, yearning, some fragmentary
but insistent image. I sit down and sketch. Something begins to emerge. I watch
it happen. I am a servant to whatever unfolds. I don’t know what it “means” any
more than I knew, when I was six weeks pregnant, what gifts my children would
have, what fears and dreams (and
even those things are amorphous, always in flux). I write to discover what truths are inside me, or outside me, or beyond me; to
be surprised by the endlessly variegated ways in which they rear their heads.
Art is many things, but it is never the fleshing out of an a priori
intent. I come to the page with only faith, hope, and love: faith that
something worthy will emerge; hope that I will be up to the task (I always
wonder, when I finish a story: will I be able to do it again?); and love for
the process, for my characters, for the wide beating Universe that gives, and
gives. The more I let the work itself do what it wants to do, the more deeply I
understand that the subconscious mind—ignited by, breathed into by, God,
or Muse, or Universe—has a much better handle on Truth than I do.
And when a story is finished, I still can’t tell you what it
“means.” I’ve heard a dozen different interpretations of “Ladies and Gentlemen
of the Pavement.” Did I set out to write a story about the artist’s role in
society? Southern heritage and tyranny? Reliance upon grace versus attempt to
save oneself by works? The individual operating within and against the
communal? Sexual addiction and idolatry? Universal suffering and the
(misguided) attempt to elude its inevitability? No, I didn’t. And yes, I must
have, if that’s where a reader lands. Any establishment of “meaning” in a
literary work is, in a way, a sacramental act. Like the mystery of the Lord’s
Supper—that silent, Trinitarian moment in which God/Priest/Minister,
Christ/host, and Holy Spirit/communicant merge—reading becomes a form of
communion: author, text, and reader rapt in an intimate yet paradoxically
isolated collusion of spirits.
Misunderstandings among Christians also arise from the
assumption that fiction should present the world not as it is, but as it
“should be.” That literature should hold forth “gospel truth”—the story as tool
for evangelism. Hence the rise of the Christian publishing industry, which has
all but decimated any real theological dialogue between and among
denominations, and continues to further the etiolation of intellectual thought
and discussion among evangelicals in this country. What T.S. Eliot feared happening, in 1932, has happened:
"The last thing I would wish for would be the existence of two
literatures, one for Christian consumption and the other for the pagan world.”
I’m with Flannery: the role of the artist, even—no,
especially—the Christian artist, is to present the world as it is, in all its
complexity and ugliness. Sometimes, to make sin appear as such. If the
biblical narrative is concerned with anything, it’s with Redemption; and, as
O’Connor says, “Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the
actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in
our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.” The artist’s
responsibility, then, is to locate those “distortions which are repugnant to
him, and his problem [is] to make these appear as distortions to an audience
which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever
more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience.”
Also, I want to ask those Christians who find the images in
my stories obscene or unsettling: Have you read the Bible? Abram and Sarai used
Hagar, then rid themselves of her and the child they forced her to bear; Lot
was an alcoholic and had sex with his own daughters; Moses killed an Egyptian
and cowered behind his brother Aaron, who did all the talking for him; David
committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her husband, Uriah the Hittite,
murdered; Saul held Stephen’s garments while overseeing his stoning, then went
from church to church, dragging followers of “the Way” off to prison. These are
the heroes of the faith.
2.
The novelist and Catholic deacon Ron Hansen has bemoaned the tendency of
religiously themed fiction to be one-sided and devotional: stories that are
mere lectures. Your fiction would pass the Hansen test: you dramatize imperfect
people living imperfect lives, but there are moments of clear grace present.
Are there writers in the Christian tradition who dramatize faith in an
authentic way who
I grew up reading C.S. Lewis – the Narnia Chronicles, of
course, but also the space trilogy (Perelandra
haunted me), The
Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce. I read Madeline L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time
trilogy over and over in elementary school. I had no idea she was working from
a Christian tradition until I read Walking
on Water in graduate school. O’Connor, of course; T.S. Eliot, Graham
Greene, Walker Percy, Marilynne Robinson. John Newton’s Letters,
Thomas Merton. I just read Lady Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. And Christian
Wiman’s new book, My
Bright Abyss, which has unlocked the universe for me. My soul sang
alongside every word. It’s an instant classic, will be revered a hundred years
from now.
But I find truth and spiritual meaning equally in the works
of those who aren’t necessarily writing out of a religious tradition.
Barthelme, for one. Kafka, Camus. And Beckett, his pulsing absent God(ot)
filling every inch of reality—the song of our experience of His absence (who
among us has not doubted?) just as true and necessary as the song of His
presence. I do think there are works of utter despair, that communicate a
nihilism. Though the chronicling of a loss of faith can also lift the gaze,
remind one of the gift of the imagination. O’Connor says that loss of faith is
precisely that: a failure, first, of the imagination.
3.
In that same Oxford
American
interview you mention an interest in writing criticism about “the intersection
of theology and literature.” I’d certainly be interested in reading such
critical thought from you: what subjects would you consider investigating? And
do you think creative writers spend sufficient time reading, and writing,
literary criticism?
I can’t speak for other writers. Not everyone can migrate
between the two types of discourse; not everyone wants to. I began as an English major,
then did graduate work in postcolonial theory and British Romanticism, so my
first “voice” was a critical one. Actually, that isn’t true. I started writing
stories as soon as I could hold a pencil, filled journal after journal with
terrible poetry in my teen years. In college and grad school I wrote stories in
secret. It was something I was ashamed of. Here I was, doing all this critical
work, but longing to create the kinds of texts I was writing about. How dare I
dream it! The idea felt prideful and bold and unrealistic. Part of me wishes
someone had known about the creative work, and said: You know, you could major
in this. And part of me knows that things happened exactly as they needed to—that
it was best to come to it later, after grad school, after children, all those
years of silence.
But I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute to
the critical body. I have a review coming out in the New York Times Book Review in a couple weeks. I’m writing a long
piece on Flannery O’Connor’s recently discovered prayer journal, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux is releasing in November. And to answer your
question about the intersection of theology and lit: I’m working on a collection
of stories about people waiting, or not waiting, for the biblical “rapture.”
Eschatology fascinates me, the various theological camps related to the end
times. There are vastly different takes. Some believe the earth is disposable;
that God’s first “do-over” was the flood, and his second will be fire. I'm
fascinated by how this affects social responsibility, environmental
stewardship—as I’ve said elsewhere, if you believe the planet is destined to
burn, why bother recycling?
4.
J.F. Powers and Erin McGraw are two great chroniclers of religious life at the
parish and community levels, and I’d add you to that list. Your fiction shows
the duality of religious life: the moments of ritual and grace, as well as the
times when belief
can feel rote and simplistic. What attracts you to the practical and tangible
elements of religious belief?
We need ritual, whether it feels imbued with grace or merely
rote, because it draws us back to the physical world--which seems, always, like
a distraction from the silence of pure communion. It’s a temptation, for me:
the longing to withdraw from action and other people and become a
contemplative. I could easily spend the rest
of my life reading, writing, thinking, with a little running thrown in. My
children are a gift in this regard; they pull me outside myself at every turn.
Wiman beautifully elucidates the complex interplay of action
and faith, silence and ritual; the need for isolation on the one hand, for
action and service on the other: “Silence is the language of faith. Action—be
it church or charity, politics or poetry—is the translation. As with any
translation, action is a mere echo of its original, inevitably faded and
distorted, especially as it moves farther from its source. There the comparison
ends, though, for while it is true that action degrades that original
silence…it is also true that without these constant translations into action,
that original, sustaining silence begins to be less powerful, and then less
accessible, and then finally impossible.” Thus the oft-quoted (and
oft-misapplied) Jamesian “Faith without works is dead”—not because works create faith,
or “earn” us salvation, but because if we inhabit the silence for too long
without translating it into something outward-oriented, that silence will, in
the end, be only an echo of the self, no longer the nourishing silence of
communion with God.
5.
In “The Anointing,” the titular action of the story feels like both ritual and
performance. Diane wants “God to extend a measured grace” to heal her husband
Mitch’s addiction to Vicodin, and this divine touch is expected to occur
through the very human hands of a pastor. Do you see Mass as a form of
performance or theater? Do the dramatized moments of faith in I Want To Show You
More
arise more from a Catholic or Protestant tradition?
It’s interesting, your use of the words “performance” and
“theater” side by side. We do use them interchangeably, when in fact
“performance” invokes actor, “theater” audience. Which makes me wonder: in the
act of worship, am I player or audience, watcher or watched? Maybe the answer
–like most answers to profound questions – is both. Worship is
call-and-response, a dialogue between God and myself. God watches me; I watch
Him back. In a liturgical service, God initiates the conversation in the Call
to Worship, concludes with the Benediction.
Performance, ritual: why do we think of these terms as
pejorative? Performance is a part of nearly everything we do. Are we ever not
performing, to some degree? Maybe when we’re asleep, or involved in a
self-actualizing activity (for me, when I’m drafting or on a long run;
sometimes in yoga). There’s a sense in which we need ritual. We crave it at a
physical level; we inhabit a universe that operates according to ritual: sun
up, sun down; work, rest, play, work; summer, fall, winter, spring. There is
joy in the rehearsal of the known, the familiar. Raising children is a great
reminder of this: they thrive on routine, love tradition. And without ritual,
there can be no mystery—how can the unexpected enter into a life that is devoid
of expectation? Ritual opens the door for revelation. We move through ritual
and performance to access the Divine. Yoga teaches this: when we know the
poses—when they become habit, motor-memory—we can more quickly access the state
of heightened awareness that is beyond the physical. The ecstasy. I find the
same to be true with liturgy. The more I practice it—when it becomes part of
the fabric of my being—the more quickly and completely I can move through it to
approach the Divine.
6.
In “A Plain Kiss,” the narrator quotes Saint Augustine and C. S. Lewis before
admitting a longing of a more sexual nature. Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy examines the intersection
between the sensual, the sexual, and the religious, and I think his novel shows
that the language and experience of those ecstatic worlds are not very
different. How do you view the presentation of these themes in your fiction,
and do you perceive them in the lived reality of the faith?
What a rich word, ecstasy. Ekstasis – ek, out; stasis, a
stand, or standoff between two parties. In philosophical terms, to stand
outside oneself
This is why I don’t believe that heaven will be some kind of
floating, disembodied joyride among mansions of glory; nor the “mere” extension
of the individual consciousness into eternity; nor, as Eastern religions posit,
an absorption into a kind of universal consciousness involving the gradual
detachment from, and eventual
Mystery utterly inhabiting reality, the retention of the
physical senses—this is why Christians insist upon the resurrected, glorified
body of Christ. He was somehow, in resurrected form, still a body, still
recognizable as a man, bearing scars in his literal, touchable skin, but also
able to transcend physical laws as we know them (it seems he could move through
walls, appear and disappear at will). The Consummation, then, might be
precisely that: completion, fulfillment of a promise we sense even now, if
we’re awake to it, humming faintly beneath the material surface of our lives,
every now and then flaring out in a created universe that is groaning for redemption.
This is also why I find Catholicism and Pentecostalism the
most compelling forms of lived faith, though I practice neither myself. They
both embrace the mystery of the physical body—Catholicism in the doctrine that
the church is, in some tangible way, Christ's literal body; and Pentecostals in
the raw nerves of the human body, in allowing the inexplicable and emotional to
play a part in the ritual of worship: speaking in tongues, getting “slain in
the spirit.” In the end, both feel closer to what we’re meant to understand
about the Divine than the weak-eyed, Christ-less deity most liberal Protestant
theologies are selling nowadays.
And the coexistence of the erotic and spiritual, the sexual
and sacred—there’s something deeply true there. It’s why lovers often talk in
such exalted terms, say things like they want to eat one another, to be one
another. An artist must probe into these moments. She cannot look away. In the
act of creation, she must ask herself—require herself—to suspend all judgment.
She must beg the same from her readers.
***
Jamie Quatro’s debut story collection, I Want To Show You More (Grove 2013), is a New York Times Editors’ Choice, NAIBA Bestseller, Indie
Next, and O, The Oprah Magazine pick
for summer 2013. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The O.Henry Prize Stories, The Kenyon
Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, McSweeney’s, and
elsewhere. A finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and
the winner of the 2011 American Short Fiction contest, she is the recipient of
fellowships from Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, Sewanee, and Bread Loaf. Quatro
holds graduate degrees from the College of William and Mary and the Bennington
College Writing Seminars, and is a Contributing Editor at Oxford American. She lives with her husband and children in Lookout
Mountain, Georgia.
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