I've never read anything by her, but I thought that some MOJ readers might be interested in this:
Sightings 4/16/09
Destiny’s Child
– Thomas Zebrowski
In her recently-released spiritual
memoir, Anne Rice, the bestselling author of Interview with the Vampire,
writes that the mass appeal of her fantasy books may be due partially to the way
she has draped their otherworldly trappings over a conventional three-act
frame. Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession is
itself no exception. Yet the personal story she fits into this
familiar dramatic pattern is not so much the prodigal daughter’s, as the one
C.S. Lewis called “the pilgrim’s regress.” The accent is less on
sin and redemption than the loss and recovery of childhood faith.
The importance of origins to the
tale Rice has to tell is demonstrated by the convincing detail with which she
recreates and defends the pervasively Catholic culture of 1940s New Orleans,
underlined by the manifest stability in her lifelong conception of God and his
Church. According to Rice, her preliterate openness to a world of
sense experience in which “there was a profound connection between narrative,
art, music and faith” is at the root of her abiding religious “interests and
tendencies,” not to mention her knack for writing popular fiction about
supernaturally haunted lives. At the center of this incipient
world was the icon of Jesus Christ who, present in the Holy Sacrament and in his
Church, was able to call her back to Catholic faith after decades of hopeless
wandering in a professed atheism one feels she never fully inhabited.
And as anyone knows who is familiar with the first two volumes of the
novelized autobiography of Jesus upon which Rice has audaciously embarked,
Christ remains for her the person proclaimed in the Church’s creeds and the
canonical New Testament, presented with literary embellishments yet without
significant concession to the skeptical conclusions of modern biblical
scholarship.
It thus comes as an amusing surprise
to discover that this deeply traditional and even nostalgic Catholic makes no
apologies for some of the most colorful sins of her waywardness – neither the
pseudonymously authored pornographic novels, still less the more pedestrian
eroticism and gender play in which she has drenched her mainstream fare.
Just to make the point that she is not simply the anti-modern Christian
her old-fashioned catechesis set her up to be, in fact, Rice quietly reminds the
reader about her “transgressive” sexuality. Though her tone, to be
sure, is one of openness to correction rather than outright dissent, she devotes
a portion of the book’s closing chapter to discussing the reasons why she
remains unpersuaded by the Catholic Church’s teachings on women’s ordination and
sexual morality.
The long shadow cast by Rice’s early
impressions might help us to make sense of these apparent incongruities as
well. There is more than a hint here that the relaxed sexual
attitude Rice adopted contemporaneously with her college departure from
Catholicism came quite naturally to the same person whose “oversensuous mind”
had made her so open to the rich physicality of pre-conciliar Catholic
piety. And haven’t the more puritan strains of Christianity
always suspected a certain connection between carnal permissiveness and lavish
sensuality in worship? Of course, these tendencies were kept apart
and an elevated aesthetic maintained by an overarching awareness of original
sin, and a concomitant mistrust of the untutored passions, in the ordered world
in which Rice grew up. But there is some evidence that Rice
herself may have developed a weaker view of human corruption – an Augustine or a
Pascal could have some fun with her innocent-sounding notion that because her
fall from faith was “sincere” it must have been morally blameless.
Rice’s personal misgivings about
some traditional Christian mores are far from being the focus of her lovely
memoir, even less central to it than a related belief about herself as a
“genderless” person, which she also traces to childhood. Yet they
fit in with our picture of her as a bracingly straightforward and unironic
person who has learned from experience to trust her intuitions.
Indeed, the “tragedy of mind and heart” she memorializes in Called Out
of Darkness is partly about the consequences of her mistake to abandon
Catholicism, the first love and only meaning of her life, just because she
wasn’t intellectually prepared to reconcile her deep religious convictions with
what appealed to her in the secular world in which she came of age.
Here, the prescient words of a youthful Paulist priest who tried
(counterproductively) to counsel her as her teenage faith wavered go straight to
the point: “For a Catholic like you,” he melodramatically
cautioned, “there is no life outside the Catholic Church.” From
the Gothic tales that brought her fame to the devotional literature she’s now
turning out, Anne Rice’s body of work bears consistent witness to this
fact.
References
Anne Rice, Called Out of Darkness
(Knopf, 2008).
For an excellent appreciation of
Rice’s writings on Jesus see, “In Defense of Anne Rice” by Patricia Snow, which
appeared in First Things: http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1297.
Thomas Zebrowski is a Ph.D.
Candidate in Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and a former
junior fellow in the Martin Marty Center.
