Between Human and Divine: The Catholic Vision in Contemporary Literature

11. The Contemporary Catholic Bildungsroman: Passionate Conviction in Shūsaku Endō’s The Samurai and Mary Gordon’s Men and Angels

189 Chapter 11 The Contemporary Catholic Bildungsroman Passionate Conviction in Shūsaku Endō’s The Samurai and Mary Gordon’s Men and Angels Nancy Ann Watanabe “Our every good act is a response to grace.” —Edward William Clark, Five Great Catholic Ideas My aim in this chapter is to use a traditional genre approach to shed light on aspects of two novels published during the same decade, the 1980s, by Catholic authors who are separated by geographical, national, and linguistic boundaries. Born in Tokyo in 1923, the Japanese author Shūsaku Endō was baptized into the Catholic faith as a boy by his mother, who had converted to Roman Catholicism. He was given the Christian name Paul in honor of St. Paul, the apostle whose name was changed from Saul to Paul when he converted to Christianity. American Mary Gordon was raised in an Irish Catholic family and is a New Yorker. Both of these authors portray character in ways that illuminate important Catholic themes that emerge as an underlying cultural and spiritual motif common to both novels. This motif, or unifying idea, is the role of the Christian man and the Christian woman in a non-Christian society. Endō’s historical masterpiece The Samurai (1982; Samurai, 1980) joins his critically acclaimed Silence (1972; Chimmoku, 1969) as an exploration of the triumph of faith in an era of anti-Christian sentiment in Asia. Gordon’s award-winning feminist novel Men and Angels (1985) radically moves to a poeticized role the sacramental, the scriptural, and the ritual of Catholicism, which played a more central role in her earlier works, Final Payments (1978) and The Company of Women (1980). Critic Don Brophy , who wrote The Story of Catholics in America and served for many years as an editor at Paulist Press, bestows recognition upon Endō’s Silence and 190 Nancy Ann Watanabe Gordon’s Final Payments in his One Hundred Great Catholic Books: From the Early Centuries to the Present.1 Both The Samurai and Men and Angels are much more than mere sequels. Endō and Gordon in these novels of their maturity demonstrate an even greater craftsmanship in coping artistically with the complexities and complications connected with contemporary life in a worldly culture. In The Samurai and Men and Angels, artistic compressions of the fundamentals of the Christian faith give rise to remarkably similar types of psychological symbolism that appear to render problematic the spiritual integrity of the protagonists. Vividly, Endō and Gordon depict the struggles of a religious individual within a social and political milieu that is predominantly nonreligious, resulting in a revolutionary sort of universalism that parallels the ecumenical movement in the Roman Catholic Church. In the quest to assert selfhood through attempting to vanquish opposition, the Christian individual acquires greater understanding of self and society. While the Christian individual moves from ignorance of the truth to knowledge of the truth, the success of this interior learning process is undermined by anti-Christian forces of adversity in the exterior world of reality. Endō’s The Samurai portrays Catholic themes directly by entering the minds of characters whose faith deepens. Gordon’s Men and Angels renders the minds of characters whose divided selves and alienation from one another underscore the importance of true Christian love in a utilitarian society. As contemporary Catholic novelists, Endō and Gordon confer new meaning upon the Bildungsroman literary genre. Their works perpetuate the traditional novel of education, a genre that rose to prominence during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With craftsmanship and intellectual verve, Endō and Gordon elevate the Bildungsroman from a straightforward depiction of manners, mores, and cultural milieus to a more subtle and sophisticated probing of the religious fabric of modern society as an outgrowth of Renaissance globalization, commercialism, and secularization. By virtue of the pervasive limning of interior consciousness with respect to matters of religious belief and moral responsibility, the contemporary Catholic Bildungsroman as written by these artists may be viewed as belonging to the theological novel genre. Literary theorists often equate the Bildungsroman with a related genre, the Erziehungsroman, which portrays a central character who is acquiring familiarity with a social and cultural milieu through 1. Don Brophy, One Hundred Great Catholic Books: From the Early Centuries to the Present (New York: Blue Bridge, 2007). 191 Shūsaku Endō’s The Samurai and Mary Gordon’s Men and Angels personal experience. The Bildungsroman places emphasis on certain episodes or...