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Causing Little Ones to Stumble: Paul Bailey and the Millstone of Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Robert Hardy
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Abstract

In Sugar Cane the novelist Paul Bailey describes what happens when someone is exposed at an impressionable age to religion in a brutally corrupt or merely stupid form and has to come to terms with that exposure: whether healing might be possible and what that healing might look like. Bailey suggests an alternative narrative, where, despite the suffering of his characters, the word ‘religion’ means more to him than it does to Irvin Yalom, who wrote of his belief after his own childhood exposure to the authoritarianism of his parents’ Jewish orthodoxy, that ‘faith, like so many other early irrational beliefs and fears, is a burden’.

Keywords

Paul BaileySugar Canehealingoppressive religionIrvin Yalom
Type
Original Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 98 , Issue 1076 , July 2017 , pp. 427 - 435
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 Irvin D. Yalom, ‘Religion and Psychiatry’, Acceptance speech delivered at his award of the Oscar Pfister prize, American Psychiatric Association annual meeting, May 2000. www.yalom.com/pfiser.html. Accessed 10 October 2005.

2 Bailey, Paul, Sugar Cane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994)Google Scholar, p.  148. All subsequent page references are to this edition.

3 Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), p.  228Google Scholar.

4 Also St Mark 9:42 and St Luke 17:2 (American Standard Version, 1901).

5 Murdoch, Iris, A Word Child (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1975), p.  122Google Scholar.

6 Hardy, Rob, ‘Doing Good and Winning Love: Social Work and Fictional Autobiographies by Charles Dickens and John Stroud’, The British Journal of Social Work 35 (2005) pp. 207–220CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Yalom, op.cit.

8 Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty‐Four (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1979), p.  134Google Scholar. Subsequent page references are to this edition.

9 Hawkins, Peter S., The Language of Grace: Flannery O’Connor, Walter Percy and Iris Murdoch. (USA: Cowley Publications, 1983), p.  117Google Scholar.

10 Hardy, Robert, Psychological and Religious Narratives in Iris Murdoch's Fiction (Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000, p. 35)Google Scholar.