What does it mean to jot down experimentally — to provide “experimental fiction”? We often consider those that take daring risks with form, subject material, style, or structure. There’s Georges Perec’s 1969 novel A Void, as an example, written without using the letter e, or B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, which is available in a box that allow readers to shuffle the story around in alternative ways, or Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood, a novel written entirely in questions. Such texts are unmistakably, outlandishly experimental — we understand immediately that latest demands will likely be made on us as we read, and that together we’re exploring uncharted territory.

But there are also spiritually experimental novels, which push up against the boundaries of what we are able to know and experience of the transcendent dimensions of our lives. Frederick Buechner, who died a fortnight ago on the age of 96, wrote precisely this sort of fiction. Buechner worked across many genres (poetry, short stories, memoirs, essays, literary criticism, and so forth) and was held in high esteem by other writers, regardless that his work has up to now only found its approach to a small — though devoted — following of readers.

Annie Dillard, as an example, calls Buechner “considered one of our finest writers” in addition to being “my hero, my guide and inspiration.” His first novel, A Long Day’s Dying (1950), was championed by Malcolm Lowry and Christopher Isherwood, amongst other more widely known literary figures. He was a powerful influence on John Irving, and on the poet James Merrill, Buechner’s life-long friend. A finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and the recipient of nine honorary doctorates (including from Yale), Buechner’s legacy is long and sophisticated. However it is a specific dimension of his novels that I actually have been enthusiastic about most in the times following his death. Increasingly, this dimension strikes me as each beautiful and deeply strange, in addition to being virtually unprecedented inside, not only the tradition of American literature, however the novel form more broadly.

I’m considering of Buechner’s obsession — his infatuation, really — with saints. That is the nice preoccupation of Buechner’s literary profession, which may be summed up as a sustained, passionate exploration of the probabilities of sainthood. In novel after novel, he asked readers to wrestle with figures of true joy and divine vision, and to see of their lives something glorious. In reality, Buechner spent greater than fifty years asking his readers to assume themselves into the lives of great saints — to feel awe, provocation, and ultimately recognition of their strange ways of being on this planet. What was he as much as? What did he discover? What does it seem like to repurpose the novel as a vehicle for encountering the sacred, the transcendent?

I need to work out what these novels are doing, and why they feel like nothing else in contemporary fiction. And I intend to make sense of Buechner’s peculiar vision of what the novel form could make possible for each writers and readers.

The character of saints

Let me begin by declaring what Buechner’s novels are not, lest I give the incorrect impression right from the beginning. They will not be conventional hagiographies, wherein good deeds are held up for believers to mimic. They will not be didactic parables of virtue triumphing over evil, nor pious models of godliness. As Buechner himself said, these novels are “not Sunday School stories with detachable morals at the top” and contain no easy lessons. There are not any sanctimonious preachers scoring points against unbelievers in his fiction, or holier-than-thou types for whom real human concerns are only abstractions. His saints don’t moralise or proselytise. Buechner knew in addition to anyone that we’re rightly wary of didacticism, and of novels masquerading as sermons. (“When I actually have the sensation the someone is attempting to set me a very good example”, he once put it, “I start edging toward the door.”) His saints will not be plaster saints, they will not be particularly decorous or polite, and are only as likely as the remainder of us to fail themselves and others.

More surprising still, perhaps, is the indisputable fact that they provide little by the use of comfort or reassurance — as a substitute, they unsettle and provoke. The favored conception of saints, as meek-and-mild types with their heads within the clouds, detached from bizarre human experience, is nowhere to be found. Nor are these novels edifying tales of triumphant faith. In Buechner’s fiction, virtue is not at all at all times victorious. Though Buechner was himself an ordained Presbyterian minister (who studied at Union Theological Seminary under among the giants of twentieth-century theology, including Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and James Muilenburg), he went to great lengths to avoid using his novels as pulpits. “I lean over backwards not to evangelise or propagandize in my fiction”, he told one interviewer. “I don’t dream up plots and characters for example some homiletic message.” These novels don’t seek to offer fictional illustrations of Christian doctrine, nor to convert readers to the Christian faith.

As an alternative, Buechner saw saints as being concurrently flawed and majestic, with the facility to capture our imagination in a way that familiar religious language cannot. “In his holy flirtation with the world”, he wrote, in a characteristically startling and mystical image, “God occasionally drops a pocket handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.” Saints, for Buechner, “are essentially life-givers. To be with them is to turn out to be more alive.” Elsewhere, he expanded on this conception:

To be a saint is to live not with hands clenched to understand, to strike, to carry tight to a life that’s at all times slipping away the more tightly we hold it; however it is to live with the hands stretched out each to offer and receive with gladness. To be a saint is to work and weep for the broken and suffering of the world, but it’s also to be strangely light of heart within the knowledge that there’s something greater than the world that mends and renews. Perhaps greater than the rest, to be a saint is to know joy.

It was precisely these sorts of saints that Buechner spent most of his life writing about.

There are two key precedents in twentieth-century literature for such a project: Albert Camus’s The Plague, wherein Meursault famously poses the query of whether one can “be a saint without God” as “the one concrete query that I do know today”; and Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, wherein the whiskey priest, on his deathbed, sees how his life might have been so far more than it was, with nothing greater than just a little “courage” and “self-restraint”:

He was not for the time being afraid of damnation — even the fear of pain was within the background. He felt only an immense disappointment because he needed to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done in any respect. It appeared to him at that moment that it might have been quite easy to have been a saint. It will only have needed just a little self-restraint, and just a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now that at the top there was just one thing that counted — to be a saint.

Buechner wrote movingly on each these texts, however the second played a very vital role in shaping his own literary project. He said that The Power and the Glory was where he “learned that a saint isn’t what people normally consider — an ethical exemplar.” As an alternative, he realised, saints “may be just as seedy and hopeless because the whiskey priest.”

Buechner stumbled across his subject material unexpectedly, recognising that, like Greene, he had unwittingly produced a flawed and “seedy” and “hopeless” saint in a quartet of novels on Leo Bebb, a non secular charlatan who nonetheless lights up other people, giving them latest life. Buechner called him “a non secular crook” who can be “a bearer of grace.” The Bebb novels are populated with hucksters and con-men, and are filled with bawdy comedy, sexual exploits, exhibitionism, even infanticide. Yet somewhere within the writing of the novels’ central character, Buechner realised that he had unintentionally created a saint:

Once I first began, I believed of Bebb as an Elmer Gantry figure whom I’d expose within the strategy of writing about him. But I got here to love him increasingly and to see more clearly what was saintly about him.

From this point on, he resolved that he would only write about saints — that he could only write about saints: “Saints with feet of clay are the one subjects that interest me now.” For reasons mysterious even to him, Buechner believed that he was unable to bring some other sorts of characters to life.

“Nothing is harder to make real than holiness”

Consider, for a moment, the not possible task that Buechner set for himself. How on earth does a novelist make a saint come alive? If it is tough enough to make regular characters appear believable, realistic, how far more difficult it have to be for those whose goodness pushes them into the realm of the transcendent, and in whose lives may be perceived the outworking of divine grace. As he wrote: “Nothing is harder to make real than holiness.” Even when he had fluked it once with Leo Bebb, could or not it’s done again? Done consciously? Is there a madder literary aspiration than spending half a century writing novels about saints? Is there a more unlikely, more improbable subject material for the novel? (As Toni Morrison rightly reminded us, we’re much more comfortable with literary depictions of evil than of goodness. In contemporary fiction, “Evil has a blockbuster audience,” she wrote, while “Goodness lurks backstage.”) And isn’t it insanity to conceive of writing as novels as “my ministry”, as Buechner put it, and to see the work of the novelist as “a form of priestly craft that involves … sacrifice and discipline”?

And yet, miraculously, they succeed. These novels overflow with life, abounding with the form of joyful exuberance and wild laughter that’s at all times characteristic of saints. There’s Godric of Finchale from Buechner’s 1980 novel, the medieval saint who experienced strange visions and spoke with animals. And Brendan the Navigator, the saintly scamp who sailed all over the world on high and holy capers, maybe even travelling so far as the Americas. There’s Isaac’s rascally son Jacob, from The Son of Laughter, who also emerges as a form of saint, and a number of characters from the Book of Tobit (of the Catholic and Orthodox Bible) who in On the Road with the Archangel do too. None of that is what one would expect upon picking up a novel in regards to the lifetime of a saint.

Equally unexpected is the uproarious comedy of Buechner’s novels. His work has a ribald, bawdy humour, and his saints laugh greater than anyone around them. (“Once I’m not carrying prayers, I often shake with laughter”, says Raphael, in On the Road with the Archangel, while Brendan’s follower Finn describes his laugh as “the sound of a person rolling stones in his cave.”) It seems significant that Buechner himself was converted to the Christian faith after hearing the preacher George Buttrick give a sermon on God’s grace, wherein he likened the coronation of Queen Elizabeth to the way in which that Christ is crowned within the hearts of his followers, with “confession”, in Buttrick’s telling, and “tears,” but in addition with “great laughter.” It was this final phrase that mysteriously undid Buechner, and it’s precisely this kind of wholly unexpected, joyful laughter that fill his novels.

As strange as these characters are, it isn’t unusual to want to come across high and lofty characters in fiction. We should always read only “what we have now to face on tiptoe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to”, writes Thoreau in Walden, and there are lots of common expressions utilized by bizarre readers that testify to such a call. We sometimes say that we’re reading up to a specific novel, or that it’s as a substitute beneath us. A certain novel “pushed me to latest heights of ethical perception and imagination”, a reader might say, or “I felt genuinely instructed, elevated” by one other. Even saying that we were “edified”, “enlarged” or “uplifted” by a specific text (versus being “diminished”, “insulted”, or “lowered” by it) gives voice to the intuition that literature can exert substantial influence over us. Perhaps saints just occupy the far reaches of a recurring desire amongst readers to search out in novels characters who’re truly value being attentive to. In any case, we read Buechner’s novels on tiptoe.

Encountering saints in fiction

What’s the experience of encountering such unlikely figures inside the pages of a novel? For one thing, the experience is unpredictable, pulling the rug out from beneath the standard expectations and pleasures of fiction. Buechner’s saints are dazzling of their intensity. The glory is upon them. They remind us that life has great depths of beauty and mystery that we overlook only at our peril. They call us back to the forgotten and neglected dimensions of our lives, which we have now missed through ignorance or complacency. His saints indict our habitual ways of being and seeing. (Godric, in any case, speaks with snakes, kisses lepers, and sees “heaven’s door” opening as a baby.) They may don’t have any truck with low-cost cynicism, and is not going to allow us to assume the worst. They’ve seen a vision, and remain loyal to it amid the oddest circumstances. Buechner’s saints rarely if ever preach in any straightforward way — their lives preach for them.

Here is Godric in his old age, reflecting on each the strange power that moves through him, and the pilgrims he attracts:

To the touch me and to feel my touch they arrive. To take at my hands whatever of Christ or comfort such hands have. Of their very own, my hands don’t have anything greater than any man’s and fewer now at this tottering, lame-wit age of mine when most of what I ever had is greater than mostly spent. However it’s as if my hands are gloves, and in them other hands than mine, and people those that folks appear with roods of straw to hunt. It’s holiness they hunger for, and if by some mad likelihood it’s mine to offer, if I’ve a holy hand inside my hand to the touch them with, I’ll touch them day and night. Sweet Christ, what other use are idle hermits for?

Their transparent holiness surprises us, but they startle in other ways too. For one thing, most of us are used to the thought of creating incremental moral and private progress, working slowly to turn out to be greater than we’re. But saints ask us to make giant leaps onward and upward. Not content with the standard markers of progress, their lives make a mockery of our polite, respectable attempts at self-improvement. Even our greatest actions seem just a little feeble of their light. (“The virtues of society”, wrote Emerson, “are the vices of the saint.”)

Furthermore, saints perceive reality itself as sacramental, dissolving the standard distinctions between the sacred and the profane. They’re pilgrims, questing for something that the remainder of us cannot quite see — or a minimum of that we persuade ourselves that we cannot see. They do things that simply don’t compute. Following promptings that nobody else hears, they’re moved to great works. Some inner voice pushes them on, past the familiar obstacles (pain, doubt, frustration, and so forth) that exhaust the remainder of us. (Brendan wins kings and queens for the brand new faith, and Jacob, after all, leads what he calls “a lucky individuals who would someday bring luck to the entire world.”)

Paradoxically, saints appear to feel pain more deeply, while also taking life itself more flippantly. They’re apt to laugh or to weep on the drop of a hat. Saints seem without delay childlike and invulnerable, now not prey to the identical fears that haunt the remainder of us. Attuned to the high stakes of on a regular basis actions, they respond in kind, with fierce seriousness. Such that reading about saints’ lives — a minimum of, in the way in which that Buechner presents them — may end up in a form of cosmic slap. Dazed and bewildered, we glance about us with latest eyes, awake to mysteries we couldn’t perceive before.

Saints also ended up serving as life-giving figures for Buechner himself to spend time with. He wrote of how Godric had ministered to him, and of how the saint’s final words (“What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all of the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup”) gave healing and “fearsome blessing” during a very dark period of his life. Godric may be Buechner’s central masterpiece, a book that he claimed to have been given “roughly on the home”, with no real effort on his part. He insisted that saints are actually the proper subjects for literature, since they exceed all the novelist’s preconceptions and refuse to be contained inside familiar storytelling structures. “There’s a lot life in them,” Buechner said. “They’re so in contact with, so transparent to, the mystery of things that you simply never know what to anticipate from them. Anything is feasible for a saint. They won’t stay put or be led around by the nose, irrespective of how you are trying.” Life-givers themselves, additionally they have an awfully life and vitality on the page that. “What other novelist’s worlds do SOULS inhabit?” Annie Dillard wonders, noting the remarkable indisputable fact that “souls live” in Buechner’s fiction. “What other author” she asks, “gives respiration room to SOULS?”

The image that involves mind when reading Buechner’s novels, particularly Godric and Brendan, is of looking right into a funhouse mirror of the soul. The postmodern novelist and short-story author John Barth used the carnival funhouse as a metaphor for experimental fiction, for the ways wherein writers guide readers through a bizarre series of virtuosic tricks and amusements wherein they see strange, grotesque, and distorted reflections of themselves and the world. For his part, Buechner holds up a cracked and startling mirror too, but one which performs one other function altogether. As an alternative of unveiling distortion and grotesquery — seeing our reflections with gigantic limbs, say, or bent right into a series of horrifying shapes — we see faint glimmers of our own latent, undeveloped saintliness. We catch a glimpse of what it may be prefer to possess the identical virtues that illuminate the saints. In any case, we too are humans, and our lives have the identical potential to expand to the scale of those we see on the page. His novels bring this potential into view, making our own souls appear more lovely, no more distorted. Ultimately, what confronts us most forcefully as we read of those saints’ outlandish lives is the undeniable implication that we’re also able to such life-giving and joyful feats, of lighting up those around us. We may be saints too — with just just a little more courage, just a little more self-restraint.

Don’t we frequently tire, as readers, of tales of depravity and evil? Tragedy, wickedness, and corruption now not have the facility to surprise us, but merely confirm our worst suspicions of what life is admittedly like. We’re rarely shaken to the core by novels that give attention to such things, which might seem strangely inevitable, given the form of world we inhabit. True goodness, however, startles us, and we’re at all times longing — even when we cannot admit it — to come across those that manifest truly latest and glorious possibilities. Whose lives are radical experiments. Buechner’s insight was that while we’re apt to squirm at words like holiness and sanctity, we’re utterly unable to look away when presented with characters whose lives embody them. Perhaps the culture isn’t merely “Christ-haunted”, as Flannery O’Connor suggested, but saint-haunted. Perhaps what we long for are examples of true holiness, in whose lives we see glimpses — nonetheless faint — of God.

The demands of Buechner’s novels

At the identical time, nonetheless, it could actually be truly terrifying to read accounts of such saintly lives. While Buechner’s saints make manifest latest and joyful possibilities, additionally they make us painfully, unavoidably aware of our own inadequacies. They convey home our countless frailties, together with the terrible compromises we have now made with the world. But when it takes courage simply to read about saints, how far more courage it must take to jot down about them? To dwell day after day with their luminous, unthinkably capacious souls, to try to inhabit and convey to life their mind-boggling feats, their blinding virtues.

Buechner’s novels make real demands on us. His saints are joyful and life-affirming, but in addition filled with revelation and insight. To perceive them as saints is to recognise the claim they make on us — we’re forced to think about the likelihood that the mysterious, divine light that seems to flow through them may be as real as anything we are able to see or touch. Saints have a bigger, more expansive picture of ourselves than we do, they usually invite us to live up to those expectations. Not content to take us as they find us, they invite us to maneuver up and right into a richer, higher life, wherein we turn out to be greater than we knew. Such an invite is each alluring and terrifying. We’re also confronted by the undeniable sense that Buechner’s saints know us higher than we all know ourselves. They comprehend our deep human need for forgiveness, love, and style. They read us as much as we read them.

Clearly, Buechner felt unable to jot down about the rest — to accept less. (Value noting, too, is that his early fiction from the Nineteen Fifties and 60s can be often concerned with saints, if not quite as explicitly as his later fiction, and that within the last a long time of his life he was writing a novel on Mary Magdalene.) Yet probably the most moving passages in his long body of labor, particularly within the wake of his death, is the poignant admission he fabricated from his own regrets within the afterword to Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought To Say): Reflections on Faith and Literature. Written in 2001, at what now seems the relatively tender age of 76, Buechner laid bare what he himself most yearned for:

There’s sadness … in considering how far more I might need done with my life than simply writing, especially considering that I used to be ordained not only to evangelise excellent news to the poor, but to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and the imprisoned, and lift the dead. If I make it so far as St. Peter’s gate, probably the most I’ll have the ability to plead is my thirty-two books, and if that isn’t enough, I’m lost. My faith has never been threatened as agonizingly as [G.K.] Chesterton’s or [Gerard Manley] Hopkins’, or just abandoned like Mark Twain’s, or held in such perilous tension with unfaith as Shakespeare’s. I actually have never looked into the abyss, for which I’m thankful. But I wish such faith as I actually have had been brighter and gladder. I wish I had done more with it. I wish I had been braver and bolder. I wish I had been a saint.

What did the ultimate 21 years of his life seem like after writing these words? How does one go on, after reaching the identical insight as Greene’s whiskey priest? One in all Buechner’s convictions was that what our culture needs greater than anything are true saints. All of us, he thought, are drawn to the sorts of figures who populate his novels, since “even should you don’t imagine within the God who made them that way, you think in them.”

After all, Buechner’s theological commitments may be a bridge too far for a lot of readers. He was, in any case, an ordained minister, which he sometimes rued as “profession suicide” for the way in which that it immediately cost him a wider audience. A Recent Yorker review of an early novel referred to his work as “high-flown nonsense”, while a later critic characterised the very novels I actually have been praising here as “agenda fiction, temple rhetoric from an ordained minister.” But for those willing to wrestle with the demanding and eccentric figures Buechner was drawn to, his fiction accommodates infinite riches.

Identical to the more recognisably experimental writers I discussed earlier, Frederick Buechner’s vision of the novel challenges lots of our expectations and assumptions. His work is impossibly strange, eccentric, filled with surprises. Within the history of the novel, he was a real outsider artist, with a deeply idiosyncratic vision of what fiction is, and the way it would work on readers. Buechner took us into unchartered territory too.

Lucas Thompson is an Academic Fellow in English on the University of Sydney, and the creator of Global Wallace: David Foster Wallace and World Literature.