Stays Against Confusion

I am once again reading, for the heaven-knows how many-th time, Ron Hansen’s A Stay Against Confusion, in my opinion one of the best books ever written about writing fiction. Like many fiction writers I used to spend a lot of time wondering what the point of writing a certain story was. Which led to wondering what the point of writing at all was. Hansen finally helped me to understand that.

He is a wonderful writer. I read his novel Desperados years ago and absolutely loved it. It wasn’t the sort of fiction I usually read - about Emmett Dalton and the infamous Dalton Gang - but it is so richly written and full of color, texture and detail that I remember thinking if the author could make me love a book about that strange subject as much as I loved that book he must be a really good writer.

Over the years I read each Hansen book as it came out. His 1991 novel Mariette in Ecstasy is still one of my favorite books for its beauty of language and sensory lushness. Then, after I started writing fiction myself and had acquired shelves full of books on writing, I discovered A Stay Against Confusion: Fourteen Essays on Faith and Fiction. It was a joyous discovery.

Hansen, I learned, is the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. Professor in the Arts and Humanities at a Jesuit College. I should have known. Being a Catholic whose writing has been formed by the sensory intoxication, the honor given to the arts, and the continual awareness of the presence of God, the traditional Catholic Church gave us, I should have recognized a fellow.

Hansen took the title of his book from a preface written by Robert Frost in which he described poetry as being a momentary “stay against confusion”. He then goes on to develop the idea that fiction, like faith and like poetry, is such a stay. We live in a baffling world where people do unimaginable things and sometimes chaos seems like the only god. Faith, that beautiful gift that is so treasured by those who have it and so maligned by those who do not, is one way that a chaotic world begins to make sense. Fiction is another.

It is popular among some people to proudly proclaim, “Oh, I never read fiction!” The implication being that fiction, being “not true” is unworthy of their valuable attention. But what these people can’t grasp is that there is often far greater truth in fiction for one simple reason, it puts us in touch with universal truths that touch us all. That is something that non-fiction cannot do.

Good fiction makes order of chaotic ideas. Good fiction lets us remove ourselves from the immediate and contemplate the bigger picture. Good fiction is like faith - it pulls us out of our self-absorption and smugness and opens our minds and hearts to truths beyond our own limited world.

Faith, like fiction, gets a bad rap in a lot of areas these days. I’m fairly shocked by all the carrying-on about “faith-based” initiatives by some folks. What a misuse of language! As near as I can tell a lot of those people use the word “faith” as an inflexible, unyielding, dead concept that limits understanding. Faith is an active word requiring growth, expanding awareness, opening to new ideas and endless willingness to accept new realities to keep it alive. Faith never excludes but rather embraces.

Fiction writing, when done well, is a form of faith. It is a belief that together we - the writer and the reader - can understand realities beyond our own. Learning this changed the way I write. Now instead of thinking the premise of a story is too challenging, I think it is an opportunity to see something with new eyes. Hansen has done that for me again and again. May I be as skillful.

Thanks for reading.