Conclusion: A Quick Look Around

Abstract

The one thing it would be impossible to conclude after this study is that there is anything like a ‘school’ of novelists at work in the post-Modern period and it has not been part of my purpose to try to show that any such school exists. Except for the possible pairing of the co-religionists Greene and Spark, between whom one can see some evidence of interaction, that writers I have focused on are very much unlike one another, and indeed the mere listing of their names would be unlikely to produce any immediate intimation of how they might be related. There is perhaps a strong element of Catholic, or at least Thomistic and Aristotelian philosophy common to all in that they all make use of a notion of mimesis derivable from Aristotle, and the notion of the self as agent occurs in Joyce who gets it from Aquinas, and it is expressed also by Hopkins. But the two Catholic writers included here are not typical of ‘Catholic novelists’ nor, one suspects, typical of Catholics. I have tried to pay scant attention to religious beliefs held by any author for which there is no adequate expression in the text of their novels. Where such dogmatic belief seems to interfere with the validity of the novel, as perhaps it does in the case of Isherwood, I have commented on the fact. So far as religion goes, the five novelists here considered might in fact have something in common: they are all religious writers in so far as they ask fundamental questions and are not content to define man by the position he can play in an ordered Society.