Seeing through a glass, darkly

...She would draw pictographs for a shopping list...

...And they have every right to make love...

...And I began to think about devotion in [terms of] images, and in fact this is one of the bases of my novel [Annunciation] I wanted to take an art historian who is a nonbehever, whose appreciation of art is basically historical—she sees things within the context of its age and aesthetic—and I wanted to take her and in the end have her kneel in front of a picture, a holy picture, and pray to it BAUMANN In a review of a Marguerite Duras novel (The North China Lover) you wrote about the ability of the novel to convey a sense of "immensity" [of what lies beyond or behind ordinary life] You wrote that for you the most satisfying reading experiences touch on that sense of immensity...

...Mine was nothing compared to theirs...

...He is perhaps best known for his Francoeur family tnlogy, about a large family of working-class French Canadians in Providence, Rhode Island Annunciation (reviewed on page 23), his latest novel, recently received an admiring notice in the New York Times Book Review "Mr Plante manages to keep even a skeptical reader with him on [this] physical and spiritual quest," wrote Bngitte Weeks "His hold on us comes from the economy of his prose, sometimes described as lyrical, which is in fact plain, taut, and uncompromising " Plante, fifty-four, grew up in a Franco-Amencan neighborhood in Providence, where he was taught in French at the local parochial school...

...In addition to his prolific novel writing—"Too many I shouldn't have been m such a panic," he winmngly admits—Plante also wntes profiles for the New Yorker I interviewed him in New York in May...

...There's no denying that You know, Catholics, especially wnters, turn against the church for having destroyed their lives, they think That often has to do with sex...

...I talk a lot about this with Mary Gordon...

...I come to darkness because, I think, I'm not a believer I don't believe, and yet I have all these longings And these longings are impossible longings because I can't believe they are realizable The very fact of the impossibility of them and yet the overwhelming presence of them makes me see God as darkness Darkness, as we know from Saint John of the Cross and other people, can be a very positive thing But it's not something you believe in, it's not an intellectual belief that you have, it's not a commitment It has absolutely nothing to do with dogma It has nothing to do with the teachings of the church insofar as the teaching has to do with telling us how to lead our lives but it's something fundamental and powerful and goes beyond one's conscious decision as to whether or not God exists . You write with what you have If as a Catholic you are brought up, inculcated with longings for eternal happiness with God, and this 21 is the greatest longing you have, and as you get older, you realize [it is the greatest longing you] will ever have, as a writer you think you must use these longings .. My Catholicism is my strength I'd be crazy to deny that I'd be denying my imagination...

...So the Catholic church is offering all the time images of impossiblity, of what is not possible that then becomes possible The Annunciation, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Assumption, the Ascension, the transubstantiation These are all miraculous things These images, the conception of these images, are in themselves miraculous, because they do not exist People do not rise from the dead The bread is not literally the body and blood of Christ . They become what it is impossible to become, and that's wonderful And for the Catholic church to lose all of that would be to lose the power of the greatness of its poetry In terms of images, I was in Jerusalem a while ago and went to a Greek Orthodox church I was looking at the icons, and appreciating them aesthetically In came three African women, all wrapped in white gauze, and they went up to the icons and ran their hands over the icons literally, and then ran their hands over their faces and bodies They were taking the power from the icons And I thought their appreciation of those images was much greater than mine...

...I come from total illiteracy so in a way English bePAUL BAUMANN is associate editor of Commonweal gins with me, and I have to invent it So if I write in this style, it has a lot to do with having to think it out baumann In Annunciation you use a very evocative image of a half-filled glass of water in a dark room I was wondering if you could talk a little about that The darkness, which yet is a presence, is how one of the characters thinks of God "That vast dark space behind the image of a sunlit glass of water is the way I can imagine God," he says To be crude, is that how you imagine God9 plante...

...They say, "Well, I want to make love...

...I believe that ultimately a writer doesn't write about himself The idea that a writer is fundamentally egocentric is false Writers ultimately write about something that is beyond themselves And if they don't do that, then they're not interesting to me as a reader I think there has to be something "other" in a book And I think this other has to be morally and spiritually inspiring...

...I don't believe it...

...You've said that Catholicism is a "deep and dark and strange religion" and the "space" in which you write your novels Yet there are many Amencan Catholics, I think, who would reject such a description of Catholicism Is that "strange" space still available in the modern world9 plante Look, virgins do not become pregnant The Catholic church offers us an image of something that is impossible So what is impossible becomes possible in terms of this image What was actually inconceivable, becomes conceivable in the Catholic church...

...In its ceremonies, in its prayers, in its appeals for love and compassion and expressions of grief toward suffenng, [the church] is absolutely wonderful...

...I went because of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, T S Eliot...

...There is in perhaps the greatest classical Amencan literature a darkness which is final and utter and from which there is no redemption It's in Hawthorne, it's m Melville, it's in William Faulkner, it's probably in Hemingway And I think that's not enough I want more baumann: Do you find that to be Protestant somehow9 plante The darkness9 Absolutely And more than the darkness there is something else about Amencan literature which I'm beginning to turn against I find myself using words like decadent, which are highly charged words...

...I think the way I'm most influenced by my Catholicism is that where Protestamsm is subjective—God is internal, subjective, you go in—for Catholics, God is objective He's out there He doesn't need me to exist...

...After graduating from Boston College, he went to Europe, "with all the Amencan myths of Europe intact...

...There is something about Amencan literature that I worry about, and I work against...

...And I don't know if I'd be able to defend my use of the word in the public arena, because it implies censorship, which I don't mean at all But I think someone like William Burroughs is a decadent wnter I think it is imagination that has gone into itself—it's gone into the cellar .I'm not going to accept that...

...He's out there, and you go out to God And all my impulses are to go out .. My instinct is to find some recourse outside myself And writing can do that If writing can be that kind of recourse, it's what I think makes writing and reading worthwhile baumann What do you mean [when you use the words] morality and spirituality91 ask this because you've wntten that if thinking means coming to conclusions about people, then you don't think writing has much to do with coming to conclusions Yet Catholic thinking about morality has a lot to do with coming to conclusions How do we bridge this gap9 PLANTE I think morality depends on loving one another and on compassion...

...He continues to live in London, and speaks with the elongated vowels and idiomatic expressions of his adopted country...

...AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID PLANTE Seeing through n glass, darkly PAUL BAUMANN David Plante, whose distinctive fiction and spare narrative style are often descnbed as "hypnotic" and "mystical," has written thirteen novels...

...baumann...

...But as a matter of fact when you read a paragraph which is very concrete by Hemingway, what you' re left with is a sense of something utterly and totally abstract which the concrete facts cannot account for baumann People have said as much about your writing plante That is partly due to the fact that English is really my second language, [my] having been brought up in this little parish in Providence, Rhode Island You know, my grandmother could not speak English...

...She was illiterate She was half Blackfoot Indian...

...It's so evocative I think of it in terms of space He creates space, and so much is suggested in those spaces In a way, I think of Hemingway as being a very abstract writer He's the most particular writer in the world, the most concrete...

...PAUL baumann How important an influence on your work is Hemingway9 david plante I once asked Raymond Carver what he thought of Hemingway, and he said "He's our grandfather" . The wonder of Hemingway is that he can descnbe something, a landscape, and he gives you a sense of something behind it...

...But the Catholic church won't allow that Well, you know, sex is a very minor issue, a very minor issue There are issues much more important than whether or not you are going to make love, and if you're going to reject the church on the basis that it is not allowing you to make love, I think there's something wrong in the church and there's also something wrong in the rejector for seeing the church only in those terms There has to be more My feeling is you get from the church what is most positive and what inspires you There are images of the body from the church that are so positive and so sensual and can add so much actually to an appreciation of another person's body Nothing—no poet ever has offered to the world—an image as powerful as the resurrected and glonfied body Which is physical' That's a physical body We're not talking about spmt As physical as one is at this moment That's a very powerful image offered to one And it's a very sensual image It is, in its way, a very sexy image So the church has its dogmas, but also in its blessed contradictions [or] paradoxes, offers these other things which it probably isn't even aware of So I think one doesn't reject the church entirely, but one sees in it what is universal and what is positive ? 22...