Appreciation
Dubus was the dean of Catholic arts
culture
By VINCENT F. ROCCHIO
If there were such a thing as a
Catholic arts culture in this country, then its dean would surely be Andre
Dubus. Unfortunately, the increasing atomization and factionalism within the
American church has largely eliminated such a culture. To make matters worse,
Andre Dubus is no longer here to lead it, having succumbed at 62 to a heart
attack in his Massachusetts home Feb. 24.
For American Catholic culture the loss is of tragic proportions.
In both his writing and his personal life, Dubus provided a glimpse of what a
deeply devoted Catholicism transcending ideological rifts might look like. His
short fiction maintains a critical distance from contemporary American society
-- in it, but not of it. Dubus was unwilling to be seduced by the material
world and refused its claims that we should fear the turbulent, tragic forces
within and around us.
Dubus stories show how these forces carve out a space where
one can feel the materiality of grace. An ebullient man steeped in traditional
cultures, his works consistently and radically assert that grace, redemption
and transcendence are far more real than the empty shell of a world built on
top of creation.
Dubus style committed to the study of characters. He
explores their perceptions, feelings and sensations. His characters struggle,
stumble or strive to push through, to arrive at revelation, balance, peace. The
stories do not unfold in the tempo of action and accomplishment, but the pulse
of a patient observer waiting for a glimpse of grace manifested. It is a
measure of his craftsmanship that a two-page character study in Dancing
After Hours creates more heart-stopping momentum than any car chase ever
could -- the result of his fusing together the relentless inevitability of
narrative and of life.
Dubus characters have inner courage and sometimes downright
discipline. Many commentators ascribe this to the authors experience as a
Marine, and to his upbringing in the South. Certainly those factors come into
play, but Dubus was not raised just anywhere in the South. He grew up in
Catholic Louisiana, where, as his sister Kathryn observed, Catholicism
was the air that we breathed.
The depth of Dubus writing can be fathomed in that air --
where duty and discipline had a larger, transcendent purpose. His writing has
an almost childlike bewilderment at secular societys incomprehensibility
(and downright loathing) of picking up the cross daily, of the freedom that can
be achieved by dying unto oneself, of the joy that is to be found in
redemption.
Dubus found an aesthetic in the difficulty of facing the cross,
uncovering the promise hidden there. It was part of what lead him to his
practice of daily Eucharist. Dubus saw beyond the manner in which traditional
Catholic practices -- daily Communion, the rosary, devotions -- were being
co-opted to turn spirituality inward at the expense of a more activist church.
He was always on the side of the underdog, not so much for political reasons
but because of his faith that it was one of the core principles of
Christianity.
What he saw in traditional rites and ritual was something Thomas
Merton (and others who followed) point to: the potential for developing a duty
and discipline necessary to embrace the way of the cross.
Dubus found his own cross when, having stopped to give assistance
at the scene of an accident, he was struck by a car and left permanently
disabled. A man who had gone through life taking the bull by the horns suddenly
found himself using a wheelchair, unable to venture out without having to worry
if he would be able to relieve himself. The experience of being
crippled, as he described it, transformed Dubus. He had always been a
charming, difficult man: Eloquent and genuine, his ebullience could turn
boisterous and his clarity of purpose could become confrontational.
Like any encounter with the Way of the Cross, however, Dubus would
come face to face with the profoundly individual attachments that limit a
persons ability to accept how God can expand their potential to be loving
children of creation. For Dubus that meant confronting the issues of control
that had become such an integral part of his identity. In that struggle he
painfully acquired the humility he so admired in those he greatly respected:
Archbishop Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, Mohandas Gandhi, the martyrs of El
Salvador.
To think of Dubus struggle and anguish as only a story that
leads to his redemption is to somehow dishonor the suffering that those of us
who are whole bodies can never know. The depth of that redemption
has the power to save us, it spills over onto the pages of both Dancing
After Hours and Meditations from a Movable Chair, composed with an
even deeper human vision than he possessed before. A vision that understood
that to view human suffering as an abstraction, as a statement about how
plucky we all are, is to blow air through brass while the boys and girls march
in parade off to war.
Vincent F. Rocchio is a media scholar and independent
filmmaker. His forthcoming book, Cinema of Anxiety: A Psychoanalysis of
Italian Neorealism, is published by the University of Texas Press.
National Catholic Reporter, March 19,
1999
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