What Naturalisms Leave Out (?) 2/2

or, a plea for real transcendence

[Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Northern Landscape, Spring, c. 1825. Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Image is in the public domain under Creative Commons 1.0 license.]

After last week’s essay on Undset’s The Wild Orchid, friend and reader Seth Wieck—fellow MFA student, fiction writer, and author of a forthcoming novel you should really stop everything right now to put on your 2025 TBR list—shared this excellent passage which delves into a different kind of naturalism. This naturalism we might also want to call a painterly attention to nature as it is accessible to the senses, with an eye to what meaning, if any, such deep attention might reveal. This type of attention is also a key feature of Undset’s work, which we’ve been discussing, as well as of contemplative realist writing. (And I promise that a more compressed accounting of contemplative realist style is part of what I’m working toward.)

There’s also a meaning of “naturalism” that just intends “close attention to nature.” This close attention is all to the good for artists (I hope that’s too obvious to need stating). It relates to the kind of natural contemplation without which, as Maritain reminds us, no kind of human art is possible. It’s also in this sense that the first scientists were called “naturalists.” They also took up natural contemplation when they studied natural operations, natural phenomena, the living and unliving creation of matter. Then there are those visual and literary artists who gained from the quality of that close attention and put it to their purposes. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thoreau, Tolkien, Willa Cather, Annie Dillard—and Sigrid Undset, who we’ve been discussing—are all naturalists in this wider sense. We could multiply examples.

Yet none of that is more than indirectly related to the kind of naturalisms I’ve been resistant to here. So my title for this miniseries might after all need an asterisk, or some other sort of academic dodge: “What [Some] Naturalisms Leave Out,” or “What Naturalisms Leave Out (?)”. (See above for dodge, duly applied.)

The naturalisms I want to critique, instead, track directly to what Joshua Hren in Contemplative Realism calls “materialist realisms.” We might call these ways of seeing classical literary naturalisms. These kinds of naturalisms double down on determinism and fatalism. They narrow their scope to close in on the pain and waste in nature. They whittle human intellect and will down to mere functions of material or, at most, social conditions.

So to Seth’s line of thought on whether a writer could reasonably be a “contemplative naturalist,” I want to say yes, as long as we preserve or restore this original meaning of “naturalist” as giving a patient account of nature that stays open to polysemous and multivalent meaning. Nature, also an important concept for contemplative realism, yields far more than surface appearances, without losing the vitality or beauty or integrity of those appearances—or their frailty or ugliness or fragmentation, if that is indeed what we find in them.

We need not labor under the illusion that nature is always “rich, wise, and merciful,” as the protagonist of Henrik Pontoppidan’s Lucky Per finds it. Rather, as poet Benjamin Myers reminds us, “seeing Christ in nature” we can “see Him crucified.” The natural world is full of pain and waste that appear senseless to the human intellect—senseless, because we are better at seeing parts than at seeing the whole.

Even human nature, good as it is, cannot muster enough goodness to balance out the world’s evils. Human value only seems beneficent. Yet in this highly complicated moment of the world’s development we are far enough removed from the Hobbesian “state of nature” that tender compassion, tolerance, and mutual encouragement seem to us like they must be natural. They are not. They are gifts of grace. When we lose the grace, we lose the gifts—if not immediately or obviously, still sooner or later, and disastrously. We end up in the war of all against all.

Thoughts of war and grace bring us back to Sigrid Undset’s Paul Selmer. His story continues in the sequel to The Wild Orchid, The Burning Bush, where he faces public and personal losses after World War I. Large-scale destruction has rendered the thought of building for permanence absurd to many. So Paul’s stonework business is declining in value. He entertains doubts about the worthiness of the human products his work turns out. By contrast, the undisturbed natural world—which he used to study as a scientist—gains value in his estimation.

Meanwhile, his romantic life is in a tangle. His wife has left him for another man, while other women begin to pursue him, leaving him conflicted both against himself and against his newfound religious convictions that, however, continue to clarify and complete his previous agnostic’s observations about human life. In his own social circles, meanwhile, no one would blame Paul for opening up a new chapter. They find it strange that Paul and Bjorg do not separate, and still stranger as events snowball toward a surprising resolution of his first love with Lucy.

The Wild Orchid also continues to develop Paul’s self-dialogue between doubt and faith, while it raises to a crescendo his dialogue with God. This dialogue, which is made more direct by means of quoted dialogues of prayer in The Burning Bush, develops the idea that this dialogue is also what is most real in Paul’s life. These conversations bring to mind, in a way, the dialogues of Catherine of Genoa or Julian of Norwich: Paul is addressing a God he believes to be the most real being he has ever encountered. He does not receive the kinds of direct, verbal answers the medieval mystics did, but his mode of address surmises that such answers are possible and that, if they were ever given, they would arrive from a place outside the monologic self.

When reading fiction, we always need to be attuned to the narrator’s hidden or unspoken perspective and motive—as reader Oso Guardiola puts it accurately, “the consciousness’s reason for telling.” Paul Selmer’s reason for telling is his growing awareness that the nature he has always loved is created by and has reference to something beyond nature. More, Paul believes that that “something beyond” is personal, that it consists of Three Persons each of whom has a name, wants a relationship with him, loves him, means him better than he can intend toward himself, forgives his inevitable mistakes and flounderings, looks more favorably on those who try to do right than on those who intend others harm, and offers help and strength when doing right is difficult. These are already controversial propositions, but Paul stacks another one on top of them when he comes to believe in a church as an expression of this inner life of the Trinity: a shelter against harm, a home where new spiritual life can be born and nurtured.

The contemporary reader is invited to find Paul’s reasons suspect. Undset does not seem especially to be worried about whether we suspect them. She is interested, instead, in creating a narrative space in which Paul can investigate his own rational nature and his relationship to Divine Reason to the fullest. At the same time, she lets the mundane happenings of Paul’s life sometimes support but more often challenge his ideas of what is reasonable and what is good. All this is done not in the detached, ambient narrative voice Undset uses for her epics but in a voice that is allied closely to, and often conflated with, Paul’s own consciousness.

Undset seems to choose Paul’s consciousness as a point of view to work through because it is close enough to, yet fruitfully different from, her own. We can say accurately that Paul’s consciousness represents the organizing consciousness of both novels. As such, the narration hews closely to details that are filtered through his senses, by which his experience is rendered porous to the reader. Particularly, moments of high emotion are often rendered not in third person but in Paul’s own voice. It is not despite his individuality, but through it, that he is able to speak to perspectives wider than his own—even to the divine perspective, as he experiences it.

So how does that relate to contemplative realism? To me the connection looks direct: Undset is doing something very like what a contemplative realist writer might want to do, as she presences Paul’s raptures with, and subsequent struggles against, a source and locus of cosmic truth Whom he both loves and fears. She avoids a too autocratic insistence on the overwhelming force of that cosmic truth—an insistence that might sweep us up into a kind of illusory pseudo-omniscience which deals in bad faith with point of view’s necessary limitations, by pretending they do not matter or that there are circumstances where they do not obtain. Undset, in her duology here, claims no such omniscience and makes no such pretense. Instead, Undset’s dealings in and through Paul’s character make clear that if a human being is going to have any access to a cosmic truth, it can only be because that truth makes some entrance, establishes some relation, as a Person, within the individual consciousness—and in a mode unique to that individual consciousness, to which only that consciousness can render full justice, though other fair accounts might well also be possible.

That is a sweeping claim, so I’ll let us sit with it while we turn (slightly) aside to consider questions of point of view writ large. These questions directly call up the mysteries, not only of what we depict and how we depict it, but also of how we don’t depict what we, inevitably, don’t depict within the closed horizon of an artwork, and why we don’t depict it, and what effect all this has on narratorial trust. This too is directly related to questions of organizing consciousness. When we choose a point of view in fiction, we are always limiting ourselves to the types of perceptions that that point of view could plausibly access. We will have to leave some things in heaven and earth out of account. So, do we leave them out in such a way as to suggest, evoke, or ask the reader/viewer to do work to complete what is missing? Do we leave them out in ways that foreclose on the possibility of their existence—or their significance? Do we leave some things out because of our own ignorance? (Inevitably, yes, but this is a regrettable necessity of human limitation, not a desideratum. Authors of good will do what they can to work against their own ignorance.)

Do we leave things out so as to indicate a posture of skepticism or nonjudgment? Does our choice of omission efface known truth, or does it heighten a sense of mystery? Are surfaces being shown in a way that reduces them to mere surfaces? Or are they being shown in a way that reveals or at least suggests their depths?

There’s a certain approach to character interiority that works more by suggestion and evocation, that calls on the reader in a constructive way to supply what is implied yet left in shadow. Undset’s approach is more directly expository and brings to light much that might never be seen otherwise. I don’t mean to suggest that either of these approaches is exclusive to the contemplative realist aesthetic. Either could be used to invite deeper reflection on the mystery of human character. Either could also be used—depending on the plot and on characters’ intentions—to prescind from that reflection. And really, we are not limited to an “either this or that” situation, here, at all.

In the present case, Undset uses her close-third and endophasic perspectives on Paul, with all the inherent limits and inherent virtues of these postures, to tell Paul’s own story in ways that extend his significance beyond the closed horizon of his individual life. In this way these passages of her novel meet two contemplative realist desiderata at once: “refusing to strain certain facts or sensory impressions by forcing a supernatural significance upon them,” while also “presencing the work of Spirit” so as to show “that such is the richest reality” (CR, 52).

None of the above means to say that Undset’s work should be read wholly under the label “contemplative realist”—not only was this not a live category when she wrote, it is for the individual author to claim or disclaim such descriptors, and she is not in a position to do so now. Nor are these works flawless. Elsewhere these two novels we’ve been discussing also commit common faults of religious fiction that (maybe just this contemplative realist) would tend to critique, and that are not present either in her early contemporary novels or in the great works of her historical epics.

Nor do I mean to argue that classical literary naturalisms are necessarily always inadequate to their purposes. It’s just that their purposes often leave me restless. I find dissatisfying the materialist ideas in which some forms of naturalism (like Dreiser’s, Crane’s, Gissing’s, Frank Norris’s, sometimes Steinbeck’s) seem to be rooted. Philosophical materialism seems to me to lead by a direct road to what Jonathan Franzen calls “depressive realism” (“You are, after all, just protoplasm, and one day you’ll be dead”). The richest dramatic actions, by contrast, suggest rich interiority, singularity of character. They illustrate core realities of the human condition as, at the same time, they reach conclusions that feel unpredictably inevitable.

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Apropos of this week’s conversation, poet Sally Read has this to say about the perennial human need for authentic, meaningful transcendence and for its expression in art—which is, I believe, the core of what closed-system naturalisms and materialist realisms leave out:

Perhaps our inspirations and conclusions have for too long been shackled by our belief that there is nothing more than ourselves. If we contain within ourselves both the question and the answer (and within a poem there is always, in some manner, a query and a response) then the poem will suffocate.

If you have never felt, as I know I have, this sense that your own interiority is stifling, I can only say that you are likely to be farther along the way than I am. Or perhaps, in Read’s terms, the roof of your house has already been lifted off. Or—you are in one of hundreds and thousands of other situations I have not adequately imagined here, and which you alone can narrate as it merits.