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Articles

Volume 35, Number 2 (2010)

Catholic Integralism and Marian Receptivity in Wayne Johnston’s Newfoundland: Baltimore’s Mansion and the Catholic Imaginary

Submitted
January 31, 2011
Published
2010-06-01

Abstract

Wayne Johnston’s memoir is a political lament that cannot be understood unless readers engage with the family’s profound sense of religious loss. This literary act of mourning, voiced through Johnston’s family history, grieves the ruptured imaginary of Catholic integralism. To express the depth of this rift, Johnston constructs a philosophical impasse – a “grievous wound” – which operates as a symbolic locus of trauma originating from his father and son characters’ contending theological and political self-understandings. Arthur’s theo-political wound is inflicted by the deconstructive impact of the modern nation-state on cultures that maintain an intimate imaginative connection with the land. The land undergoes a topographical conversion from one set of imaginary correlates, Marian Newfoundland, to another, Canadian nationalism. Attending to the narrative structure, the critique of instrumental reason, and the overall “inculturation” of Catholicism in the Newfoundland imaginary helps demonstrate that theological themes pervade the entire texture of Johnston’s memoir.