Body, Soul, and Beyond: Mystical Experience in Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy and Mark Salzman's Lying Awake

Abstract

Body, Soul, and Beyond:Mystical Experience in Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy and Mark Salzman's Lying Awake Thomas A. Wendorf S.M. A good religious novel is hard to find, at least one that represents religious characters realistically and respectfully without falling into sentimentality, contrivance, or didacticism. For such a novel to find its way into the literary mainstream is even more notable. Literary critic Dennis Taylor addresses the underlying problem from the side of literary critics in his essay "The Need for a Religious Literary Criticism." Here he argues that critics wishing to address the religious and theological implications of a literary work face major challenges: "The subject of religious experience, and of course, religion itself, is a profoundly divisive and disturbing subject, and for that reason famously avoided in polite conversation."1 To speak to an audience wider than that of the religiously converted, Taylor argues, religious literary criticism needs to be attentive to the "competing voices in society," a notion that Mikhail Bakhtin notably treats in exploring the multiple perspectives woven into the works of the profoundly Christian Dostoevsky.2 We might expect similar challenges for contemporary fiction writers who choose to represent religious experience, and a similar [End Page 37] need to do justice to competing voices. American Catholic Flannery O'Connor certainly felt the challenge during the 1950s and '60s when she was writing her own strangely religious fiction. Her readers, she feared, would misunderstand her work because they would not share her religious convictions: "Today's audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental."3 This sense of her audience of course shaped the grotesqueness and dramatic extremes of her own powerful fiction. Two contemporary American writers, Ron Hansen and Mark Salzman, have both recently and coincidentally taken up the challenge with similar subjects. Departing from their earlier subject matter, both have written novels about women in Roman Catholic convents who have mystical experiences, and what is most surprising is that given the challenges that Taylor and O'Connor note, they have done it so well.4 In Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy, seventeen-year-old Mariette Baptiste manifests the stigmata—the wounds of Christ—and turns upside down the lives of the Sisters of the Crucifixion she has just joined. In Salzman's Lying Awake, Carmelite Sister John of the Cross has ecstatic visions that bear fruit in abundant inspirational writing but prove to be symptoms of a serious medical condition threatening her health and the peace of her convent. Principally set in enclosed convent worlds, both novels still reveal the clash and interplay of competing voices and conflicting interpretations, notably those of religion and medicine, but they also emphasize the conflicts within the realm of Christian belief itself. In revealing these conflicts of interpretation, both Hansen and Salzman do justice to the ambiguity of individual religious experience and the encounter between human understanding and mystery. Ron Hansen knew well the risks he faced in his subject matter, and he has frankly admitted, "I felt no tension as a Catholic writing Mariette in Ecstasy, because it's hardly unorthodox, but as a writer I worried that the book would be misunderstood by reviewers and that I would be ridiculed in academe. But if you predicate any writing [End Page 38] project on that basis, you might as well hang it up."5 His confidence in the power of good stories might account for his endurance. In his essay "Faith and Fiction," Hansen, speaking of the Gospels, notes the reconciliation that stories, and particularly myths, can provide for a world that relies on division and separation to deal with the inexplicable: "We have a tendency to separate heaven and earth, soul and body, mind and matter, the unseen and the seen. Myth unites them."6 Suggesting his theological vision as a storyteller himself, Hansen adds, "We seem to be far better off if we try to determine who the Creator is by considering creation, by finding parables of holiness and grace in the world around us."7 Hansen echoes the conviction of Flannery O'Connor, who likewise emphasized that to write good stories...