The Incarnational Art of Flannery O'Connor

good morning when professor Robin Jenson and doctoral student Dave Perkins and associate dean Mavis early met to plan an initiative to support the Flannery O'Connor Andalusia foundation and divided me to deliver the introductory lecture I believe I had won the lottery okay that's not a problem okay I was delighted to be given an opportunity to honor O'Connor for her contributions to the ballot ristic literary tradition and her contributions to my intellectual and spiritual formation but when I began composing this morning's introductory lecture I realized what a daunting task lay before me because I began to hear all the comments Flannery O'Connor had made regarding teachers and interpreters of her prose she once remarked that were it not for the grace of God in the generosity of the Ford Foundation she too might have become a teacher on another occasion she remarked English teachers come in good bad and indifferent but too frequently anyone who can speak English is allowed to teach it and when asked if she believed the strict academic requirements of a university were an impediment to creativity she responded everywhere I go I'm asked if I think universities stifle writers my opinion is they don't stifle enough of them there's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher and to a professor of English who had written to O'Connor to inquire about the symbolic significance of a character's name mrs. may in her short story titled Greenleaf O'Connor replied as from Mrs May I must have named her that because I knew some English teacher would write and ask me why I think you folks sometimes strain the soup too thin perhaps discharge of straining the soup too thinly is O'Connor's expression for reading beyond the boundary of what the textual evidence within the prose will allow one to argue logically or as you students at Vanderbilt Divinity School are encouraged from the first day you matriculate and begin your theological education to read in context in this morning's lecture at the risk of straining the soup too thinly I should like to introduce you or perhaps reacquaint you with this colorful literary theologian who was an artist endowed with a profoundly versatile intelligence and imagination one who read voraciously st. Augustine st. Thomas Aquinas the mystic st. John of the Cross O'Connor proclaimed herself a hillbilly Thomist who believed the created world is charged with God she had an uncompromising respect for mystery and an unrelenting aversion for sentimentality a disdain for the cliche and for facile interpretations she was endowed with a keen wit and sense of humor and one of the indices of her emotional and spiritual maturity was her ability to laugh at herself she maintained a carefully guarded reserve but had a deep capacity for friendship and she was one who had the courage to assume the posture of writer and to pursue a vocation in letters or as she would describe writing the Incarnation Allart recently I purchased online a used copy of O'Connor's first novel wise blood the story of hazel moats who in his struggle to flee the fundamentalist conception of God that he has inherited from his grandfather and mother endeavours to start a new church with the name but of Christ without Christ and the members of this church believed that the lame don't walk the blind don't see the dead stay that way and Jesus has been nothing more than a trick upon the blacks I purchased this addition as part of my study of the ways illustrators have interpreted and rendered images of this protagonist and instead of sending an electronic confirmation of my order the seller wrote me a letter and as I read his correspondence I realize the lines could have been written by hazel notes the succession of unencumbered declarative sentences the repetitive syntax resonated the intensity of Hazel's character and the PostScript to his letter echoes what scholars have confronted for five decades the gentleman wrote to me dear sir just a short note to let you know that I mailed off your book this morning I guess that it will take four or five days to get there please keep me informed of any problem whatsoever the book is brand new but keep in mind that any book can be returned for any reason for a full refund no questions asked thanks for the offer best wishes Steve Griffin PS she's certainly not easy to understand the correspondents PostScript reminded me of a story my late confessor told me when he was a Trappist monk at the monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers Georgia the sister monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemane in Kentucky the monks were among the readers of O'Connor's preliminary drafts of her stories she would come to the monastery gate and deliver her stories to the Porter when she would return to collect the manuscripts the monks under vowels of silence would look at her and register disturbed quizzical expressions on their countenances but she considered their reactions to be an indication that perhaps her narratives were approaching the anagogical level to which she aspired as a writer if the monks could have broken their vows of silence when returning the manuscripts perhaps they would have expressed the same sentiment as did my bookseller you are certainly not easy to understand if I have the first slide please David before we travel imagine leaf further south to Georgia we go to Padua Italy to the scrovegni chapel where we examined the 14th century fresco painting depicting the Annunciation of the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary that she will conceive the Word of God and because it will become flesh I show you this image of the Annunciation because Jaco as a painter of frescoes and O'Connor as a painter in words employed the same technique in the translation of their creative urges before the fresco is paints in West's wet plaster the artist creates on paper with charcoal a full-scale drawing of the images to be transferred to the plaster this preliminary drawing is known as a cartoon a full-scale drawing of the fresco as a student in an experimental high school where pupils chose their own subjects aboard Flannery O'Connor spent time drawing cartoons in class interestingly she perceived herself primarily as a cartoonist and her interesting cartoons would complement and influence her riding her incarnation Allart I provided for you in the lecture outline three examples of her cartoons to illustrate her ability as one who could draw but also what I find most interesting are the captions that she wrote for each of these cartoons it's interesting to note that each of those captions will become a theme that she will treat later in her prose when one examines the characters in her Canon one discovers that O'Connor as does the cartoonist makes a serious statement through abstence oblique comic means her characters are large and startling figures haunted by a fundamentalist Christianity figures from a region that she described not as Christ centered but Christ haunted but her approach to these characters is not condescending her characters are not caricatures in them she portrays the mystery the complexity and the dignity of the human person all art she maintained is an agogic an interpretation that finds beyond the literal allegorical and moral senses a fourth and ultimate spiritual or mystical sense she argued that all fiction which is more than a mere diversion conveys the awesome battle between good and evil that is fought in every human soul her material was the rural South and this meant for her the most for the most part her characters are fundamentalist Protestants in their exaggerated religiosity they enable O'Connor to portray the drama of salvation as the drama unfolds in every human soul she had the grand fortune of being a southern American Roman Catholic surrounded by fundamentalist Protestants who provided for her a materia Poetica she was a modernist who examined characters who held distinctly traditional views anchored in the Bible and in rural life and like the cartoonist she uses exaggeration and emphasis to achieve a serious effect she delineate s' essential traits in sharp outlines and creates stark profiles as in the dual perspective of a cartoonist O'Connor blends the comic and the serious into a realistic view of life she once remarked the writer opera at a peculiar crossroads for time and place and eternity meet his problem is to find that location that intersection of the secular and the transcendent the interweaving of the profane with the secular Mary Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah Georgia on March the 25th 1925 her birth date on the liturgical calendar is the Feast of the Annunciation the Incarnation the commemoration of the in Fleshman of the word but for O'Connor the Incarnation was not only only a day on the liturgical calendar which also marked her deliverance in the human condition she described the Incarnation as and I quote the ultimate reality according to O'Connor one of the awful things about writing when you're a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the young carnation the present reality is the Incarnation and nobody believes in the Incarnation that is nobody in your audience my audiences are the people who think God is dead at least these are the people I am conscious I am writing for the human need for redemption is the central recurring theme in O'Connor's canon her characters are blinded by pride and have fallen from grace characters who are smug self congratulatory and convinced that Jesus has made them proper they are sophisticated in the softest understanding of virtue and become candidates for displacement O'Connor looked at the secularized in psychoanalyzed society of the mid 20th century and saw a world that had little need for God or grace a society that felt capable of being its own salvation and this perception serves as the foundation for the construction of her stories O'Connor described fiction as an incarnation Allart making the word flesh as she wrote in her essay the nature and the aim of fiction fiction is so very much an incarnation Allart fiction is about everything human and we are made of dust and if you scorn getting yourself dusty then you shouldn't try to write fiction it's not a grand enough job for you 50 years ago this semester O'Conner participated in a symposium at Vanderbilt and she succeeded ascribed her method of writing well I just kind of feel it out like a hound dog I followed the scent quite frequently it's the wrong scent and you stop and go back to the last plausible point and start in some other direction you know the direction you're going in but you don't know how you'll get there O'Connor's role in the Incarnation Allart was not of a lowly handmaiden O'Connor believed that her vocation as a writer was not the domestic handmaiden of her age she argued that the artists role proper role is of a profit and David if I may have the next image please a prophet in the tradition of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible a person called to speak O Connor defined the Prophet as a realist of distance I've chosen this fresco of the prophet Daniel because he is the only one Michelangelo depicts in the posture of a writer she remarked the fiction writer is concerned with mystery that is lived he is concerned with ultimate mystery as we find it embodied in the concrete world of Sense experience O'Connor argued that the writer must not be characterized by a function but by a vision for O'Connor the literary artist has the prophetic obligation of recalling people to known but ignored truths the vision of writer like the vision of the Prophet involves observing events with their extensions of meaning their implications their ramifications of extending reality outward until the reality embraces a religious mystery the writers gaze as O'Connor argues has to extend beyond the surface and touch mystery to fulfill the role of prophet to be a realist of distance O'Connor did not believe the writer could descend into sentimentality and wave a handkerchief Mary Flannery O'Connor wielded a literary hatchet and her aim was clearly focused on carrot who worshiped the modern Idol autonomy and who must experience as O'Connor describes an essential displacement in order to see their grotesquerie their spiritual deformities in response to questions regarding the elements of violence in her fiction the means by which these characters will experience this displacement O'Connor remarked to the heart of hearing you shout and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures like the large outlines in a cartoon the violence in her fiction functions as an engine for liberating characters from a preoccupation with artificial values that are centered in the extrinsic and earthbound instead of the spiritual or the transcendent in response to the violence in O'Connor's first novel wise blood an elderly lady whom O'Connor referred to as her first fan wrote the author and declared I do not like your book it has left a bad taste in my mouth O'Conner replied to her first fans critique by stating you were not supposed to eat the book but read it she was born the only child of Regina Cline and Edward Francis O'Connor her parents were from families that were prominent in two of the major enclaves of Roman Catholic society within the fundamentalist environment of Georgia the O'Connor's were well known in Savannah the Kleins in Milledgeville the last Confederate capital of Georgia during the civil war in this slide O'Connor is shown at the age of two years with her mother Regina the most memorable event in her life prior to the publication of her first novel in 1952 occurred when O'Connor was 5 years old an aunt gave her as a curiosity a Bantam chicken that had the distinction of being able to walk either forward or backward the chickens fame spread throughout the press and paths a new scent a cameraman from New York to record this bizarre phenomenon and the film of little Mary Flannery and her versatile chicken was shown in movie houses throughout the country I tell you this story from her la because this pattern of movement forward and backward this uneven Kinetico pattern in motion describes the postures of a characters whom we meet in her fiction characters who are displaced and who lack this sustained linear progression in their development her characters move as indecisively as the figures in the stanza of our first modern poet TS Eliot her interest in fowl continued undiminished throughout her life of 39 years she once remarked that the reason she liked chickens was because they had never gone to college she had a special fondness for those varieties that were eccentric and despite having pheasants quail one of whom she named Amelia Earhart turkeys geese mallard ducks Japanese Banton's and the Polish crested she felt what she described as a lack in her collection show so she responded to an advertisement in the Florida market bulletin for P fowl and from your studies in Greek mythology you'll recall that the peacock is the bird that is the sacred attribute of Hera the wife of Zeus the front row Connors peafowl did not descend from Mount Olympus they arrived by train from Eustis Florida once when taking a required course in home economics O'Connor was given the assignment of making a garment suitable for a small child relative and on the day that the members of the class were to exhibit their achievements in children's fashion O'Connor confounded the teacher by bringing one of her chickens whom she had attired in a white pique coat and striped trousers she had sewn perhaps this was O'Connor's way of protesting requiring young women to take courses in home economics in the next image we see her at the age of three intensely engaged with the book giving the text a close scrutiny I think somewhat a foreshadowing of the posture she would assume in her life's work as a writer the character that was forming in the young girl in Savannah was dominated by two traits which could be antagonistic to each other was at once highly sensitive and fiercely independent her childhood by her own account was unusually happy although she steadily refused to allow herself to be reared as a southern belle she recalled I was in my early days forced to take dancing to throw me into the company of other children and to make me graceful nothing I hated worse than the company of other children and I vowed I'd see them all in hell before I would make the first graceful move the attitude of resistance she manifested in her youth toward the social graces would recur in her adult years in 1959 after giving a reading here at the University she proclaimed whoever invented the cocktail party should be drawn and quartered another famous episode of O'Connor's interactions at a social gathering occurred in New York City the poet Robert Lowell and his wife Elizabeth Hardwick had introduced O'Connor to the successful writer Mary McCarthy Okara was particularly quiet feeling like the token Catholic and out of place among a group of high-powered intellectuals who O'Connor thought took themselves in their work and not much else too seriously in a 1955 letter to betty hester o'connor recounted this situation the people who took me to McCarthy's apartment were Robert Lowell and his now wife Elizabeth Hardwick having me there was like having a dog present who has been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them well toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist which I being metallic was obviously supposed to defend Mary McCarthy said that when she was a child and received the host she thought of it as the holy ghost he being the most portable person of the Trinity but now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one I then said in a very shaky voice well if it's a symbol to hell with it that was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it outside of a store except that it is the center of existence for me all the rest of life is expendable O'Connor's narrative about her exchange with McCarthy on the transubstantiation reveals not only the death and commitment of her faith but also what she perceived to be the absence of sacramental vision in the modern consciousness the dismissal of history by the modern mind the next images another one of her at the age of three as well and in the next one at the age of seven we see her on the occasion of her first communion she attended st. Vincent's Grammar School in Savannah while most of the children brought apples to their teachers Flannery O'Connor brought them Tomatoes her fierce independence extended even to her relations with the celestial powers the nuns at the parochial school she attended had informed her that every child has a guardian angel and from the time she was eight years old until she was 12 she practiced what she described as anti angel aggression she said I don't want to be an angel but my relations with them have improved over a period of time they weren't always even speakable I went to the sisters to school for the first six years at their hands I developed something Freudians have not named anti angel aggression call it from ages eight to twelve years it was my habit to seclude myself in a locked room ever so often and with a fierce and evil face whirl around in a circle with my fists knotted sucking the angel this was the guardian angel with which the sisters assured us we were all equipped he never left you my dislike of him was poisonous I'm sure I even kicked at him and landed on the floor you couldn't hurt an angel but I would have been happy to know I had dirtied his feathers I conceived of him in feathers anyway the Lord removed this fixation from me by his merciful kindness and I have not been troubled by its sense for O'Connor faith was a gift but a challenging one what people don't realize is how much religion costs she once remarked they think faith is a big electric blanket when of course it is the cross it is much harder to believe than not to believe and as she would say a faith in God don't expect faith to clear things up for you it's trust not certainty in the next image we see her at the age of 12 when she decided she would not get any older when I was 12 I made up my mind absolutely but I would not get any older I don't remember how I meant to stop it there was something about teen attached to anything that was repulsive to me I certainly didn't approve of what I saw of people that age I was a very ancient 12 year old my views at that age would have done credit to a Civil War veteran I am much younger now than I was at 12 or anyway less burdened the weight of centuries lies on children I am sure of it and in the ex next image we see O'Connor circa 1938 at the age of 13 at a neighbor's birthday party in Milledgeville interestingly she is the only girl not looking into the camera when she was 12 years old in 1938 her father Edward was discovered to have developed disseminated lupus a disease in which the body forms antibodies which attacked the body's own tissues and effects the blood the joints and the internal organs that's magic etymology seasoning etymologically derived from the Latin lupus means wolfish savage ravenous predatory adjectives that describe the effects of the disease upon the body following her father's diagnosis the o'connor's moved to Milledgeville to the Klein house the mother's birth place that once served as the governor's residence in the center of the antebellum capital her father would die three years later in 1941 from the effects of lupus Edie as she called him her mother she addressed either by her first name Regina or the parent she enrolled at Peabody high school since there was no parochial school in the school yearbook she listed her hobby as collecting rejection slips this is she in 1942 the year she was graduated from Peabody High School in Milledgeville and the year that she matriculated at Georgia State College for women from her college years one sees that determined gaze after she was graduated from high school in 1942 she enrolled at Georgia State College for Women now Georgia College and State University in college she wrote fiction for the literary quarterly the Corinthian and she was also the art editor for the student newspaper the colonnade in the next image we see her reviewing the college literary magazine and you can see that on the cover one of her cartoons appears and in the next image this is she seated with the staff of the Corinthian during her tenure as editor from 1944 to 1945 in 1945 she was graduating with the baccalaureate in the social sciences an area of study that she will later ridicule in her fiction an English professor submitted her stories to the Writers Workshop of the University of Iowa and she was awarded a Reinhart fellowship for the workshop in 1947 she would receive the Master of Fine Arts degree in literature in the next image we see her during this is uh one taken of her in college during her graduate studies at the University of Iowa the time that she referred to her only time of going north and in the next image this is she in Iowa City on a walk when she left Milledgeville to go north it was to the school of four riders conducted by Paul Engle at the State University of Iowa her literary promise had been recognized in college this was an interesting and provocative time for her she read extensively and she learned about the craft of writing her first publication in accent magazine of her short story the geranium occurred in 1946 while she was still a student and in 1947 she won the Reinhardt Iowa fiction award for the first installment of her novel wise blood on these streets she was recommended for a place at Yaddo in Sarasota Springs New York a philanthropic foundation offering artists period of hospitality and freedom from financial obligations enabling them to concentrate on their work in December of 1950 when O'Connor was only 25 years old the first major attack of lupus occurred within her body the disease from which her father had died nine years earlier she was typing the manuscript of wise blood from the initial attack occurred in the 1950s half of the lupus patients died within four years of the diagnosis she and her mother Regina moved to the dairy farm near Milledgeville that her mother had inherited the farm was named Andalusia and this is the home that is supported today by the O'Connor Andalusia foundation of which this project is benefiting it's also the location for the filming of O'Connor's short story the displaced person this served as the setting in 1976 for that film version starring the late actress Irene Wirth and John Houseman through blood transfusions and injections of cortisone the disease was arrested but the massive doses of the medication weakened her bones there was a paradoxical effect from the medication eventually her hip bones could not bear her weight she used to cane at first but from 1955 on she used aluminum crutches with arm supports when she learned that she would have to use the crutches she proclaimed I will henceforth be a structure with flying buttresses on a trip to Atlanta after she had begun using her crutches she would be provided the title for one of her short stories the lame shall enter first she recounts the event that inspired the story's title an old lady got on an elevator behind me and as soon as I turned around she fixed me with a moist beaming eye and said in a loud voice bless you darling I felt exactly like the misfit and a good man is hard to find and I gave her a weakly lethal look whereupon greatly encouraged she grabbed my arm and whispered very loud in my ear remember what they said to John at the gate darling it was not my floor but I got off and I suppose the old lady was astonished at how quick I could get away on my crutches I have a one-legged friend and I asked her what they said to John at the gate she said they read she reckon they said the lame shall enter first this may be because the lame will be able to knock everybody else aside with their crutches of her illness O'Conner would say the disease is note is of no consequence to my riding since I used my head and not my feet this is she in 1952 and in the next image at the publication party for her first novel wise blood and in the next image the following year this is she in 1953 you can see the difference that one year is made in the effects of the lupus upon her health and in the next image this is she with her self-portrait and defect which we now see as a color image I think one can draw a correlation between the characteristics of her self-portrait and an icon done in the Byzantine tradition of iconography the frontal view the stylized representation of the person the intense penetrating eyes and the presence of her attribute a pheasant this is she in 1957 the year that she would receive a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and I don't have the date for this next image it was from an article that was published in Notre Dame's alumni magazine she never considered herself photogenic she said that in most photographs taken of her she looked as if she had just bitten her grandmother and the next image we see her with the writer Brainard's Chaney his wife Frances Chaney was a professor of library science at George Peabody College for teachers and when O'Connor would come to Nashville she visited the Chaney family I will never forget in 1979 I interviewed mrs. Cheney about her experiences with O'Connor and before I could ask the first question mrs. Cheney's first remark to me was well she was no beaut and in the next image 1960 you see her seated underneath her portrait and now we see her on the grounds at Andalusia this next image is one that is used for the cover of the 75th birthday celebration different riders contributing on O'Connor this is she's sitting on the porch swing in a letter to a friend she jokingly remarked as for me I don't read anything but the newspaper in the Bible if everybody else did it would be a better world and now we see her in the celebrated image of her with her peacock yet Andalusian another one of her attributes she said a peacock that they were nothing more than chickens that had grown up to have exceptionally good looks but the bird figures very prominently as a Christian symbol in in her work especially in her short story the displaced person which I've always interpreted as an allegory in the anatomy of evil you measure the people's reaction to the peacock in an effort to understand at what level they are thinking spiritually in her essay king of the birds it's the first essay in her book mystery and manners she describes the behavior of the pea fowl and the reaction of different people to the male strutting she recounts on one occasion an african-american woman who saw the bird in all of his glory and all she could say was repeatedly amen amen but on another occasion a truck driver who was trying to negotiate a load of hay down the road came to a halt because one of her peacocks would not move he simply decided to demonstrate all of his glory right in the middle of the road and the farmers response was somewhat less inspirational than that of the african-american woman he merely said we'll get a load of that bastard and here we in the next image of on the roof of Andalusia and this is she in the next image wearing a hat with peacock feathers and and her portrait painted by her friend Robert hood a friend of mine who knew O'Connor would often go and collect peacock feathers from the yard at Andalusia and as she would leave O'Connor would always say now don't take them into the house because it's dead bad luck and you can see in this image particularly the effects of the eggs in 1964 O'Connor had surgery to remove an abdominal tumor which was causing severe anemia the lupus consequently became reactivated and her kidneys were affected she died after midnight on August the 3rd 1964 which on the liturgical calendar is the Feast of the finding of the body of Saint Stephen who is recognized as the proto martyr she was buried beside her father in memory Hill Cemetery after a low Requiem Mass at the Sacred Heart Church in Milledgeville on the occasion of her death at the age of 39 one of the most premature deaths in the Bella trysting literary tradition her contemporary and fellow southerner and Vanderbilt alumnus Robert Penn Warren remarked in what I believed to be one of the most elegant tributes to O'Connor's genius he wrote Flannery O'Connor had a subtle and beautifully equilibrated intelligence and an eyes that missed noting the twist of a mouth the light on a leaf her imagination often saw actuality as exploding into or bleeding into the fantastic and the McCobb but that imagination was so strongly geared to the inner logic of experience that her fantasy comes to us in the form of truth she is original she is sometimes spoken of as a writ a member of the southern school whatever that is but she is clearly and authoritative Lee herself and she will no doubt speak in her special tone to many people for a very long time to come she will give them their own kind of pleasure glittering painful redemptive in other words she is that rare person an artist the Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton remarked upon her death that the name of Flannery O'Connor should be inscribed with the name of the Greek tragedy on Sophocles throughout her vocation O'Conner insisted that a writer's commitment to an established set of beliefs serves as a source of freedom not restraint rather than passively contemplating a crucifix O'Connor's characters actively experienced the demands of religion she wrote I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the rider but I myself have found nothing further from the truth actually it frees the storyteller to observe Christian dogma is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world a belief in fixed dogma cannot fix what goes on in life or blind believer to it Christian dogma effects his writing primarily by guaranteeing a respect for mystery but novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and look if what he sees is not highly edifying he is still required to look and to reproduce with words what he sees by reading from her Canon by exploring her Incarnation Allart we discovered that her themes are ecumenical rather than parochial because her concern is with the timeless issues of sin and salvation the pervasive apathy and pride which can affect the human spirit and the transcendent visions which repair one for the transition from moral sloth to active belief but she was insistent that she was primarily a storyteller and not a Catholic apologist she was uncomfortable with pious interpretations of her work and with the expectation that her work should be edifying or uplifting in her writing she takes deliberate deadly aim at the foibles of the human heart and no person nor any behavior is granted a dispensation from her observations and her pen as an artist she is Catholic also with a lowercase C as in the Greek meaning of the adjective katha Luo Universal her vision transcends geographical boundaries and the miliar of the modern South the themes from the human condition that Flannery O'Connor incarnate sin language transcend any miliar and trespass any geographical boundary the themes she investigates are universal and liberated from temporality her essays letters short stories and novels become mirrors in which we in our humaneness see our reflections we meet characters who are flesh and spirit we see them in their humaneness their strengths their limitations their flaws and their spiritual transformations we are invited to observe and to attempt to understand the interior scape of a character to examine the spiritual deformities which result in one becoming grotesque her insistence upon challenging conventional wisdom is a commitment any student of theology will appreciate and careful readings of her canon repeatedly yield a blessing in helping us to struggle with maintaining our postures as simple believers I do not use the adjective simple disparagingly or in the pejorative but as in the shaker hem just a gift to be simple a simplicity that can help to deliver us this and every day from Pride O'Connor accomplishes in language what the misfit in a good man is hard to find says about Jesus Jesus threw everything off balance O'Connor intentionally throws everything off balance O'Connor throws off balance while humans construct in the name of God and try to maintain in codified manners readers including her mother were confused that she wrote about such seemingly odd and grotesque spiritually deformed displaced characters her response to such criticism was won only a deeply religious writer could have spoken she said and I quote we are all grotesque her characters have been described as American gargoyles a gargoyle provides drainage for a cathedral literally a water spout rain water spews from the mouth of a gargoyle as he Pierce down from the cathedrals these architectural decorations are not represent not representative of Satan and the devil's of Hell but are representations of the pagan deities who remained important to people when the church was unable to eradicate the pagan influences and were therefore allowed to exist side by side with the objects of Orthodox Christianity O'Connor uses the same strategy in her fiction her gargoyles are the spiritually grotesque sanctimonious characters from whose mouths pew distorted views of religion but who muster the courage to respond to the intervention of grace and experience a revelation of truth as a literary theologian o'connor reminds us of all that we may say of grace that grace may come to anyone at any time and at any place and whereas one's participation in grace may be described and recounted the experience can never be elucidated I continue to be amazed at the influences of O Connor upon contemporary artists Bruce Springsteen has credited O Connor with influencing his songwriting at the 1988 Grammy Awards the Irish musician and social activist bono of u2 pay tribute to O'Connor the musical artist Sufjan Stevens has recorded one of his compositions titled a good man is hard to find based on the O'Connor story the film director and actor John Huston translated O'Connor's first novel wise blood to the movie screen in 1979 the American actor Tommy Lee Jones who wrote his harvard thesis on o'connor made his directorial debut two years ago with his film the three burials of Melquiades Estrada and the critics responded by drawing analogies to O'Connor's canon in his journey into the soulful sacred and profane heart of the south singer/songwriter Jim white acknowledges the influence of O'Connor when creating his film searching for the wrong eye Jesus David Sedaris published the anthology children playing before a statue of Hercules to support a non-profit tutoring center in Brooklyn to help students develop their writing skills the anthology includes O'Connor short story titled revelation when Sedaris was asked why he anthologized an O'Connor story he responded that he read O'Connor so that he would stop and remember that he should not judge people and try to be a better person african-american choreographer and dancer built he Jones created a modern ballet based upon O'Connor's short story titled the artificial in which he explores the subject of racial bigotry ironically in the year 2000 a Catholic bishop in Louisiana banned O'Connor's cannon from diocesan schools because he regarded her works as racially insensitive the irony lies not only in O'Connor being a devout Roman Catholic but because she Lampoon's bigots in her fiction in O'Connor's defense contemporary writer Alice Walker contends that Alice that O'Connor's stories are not about race at all according to Walker they are about prophets and prophecy about revelation about the impact of supernatural grace on human beings who don't have a chance of spiritual growth without it her stories when reading context become documents in anti-racism she developed a view of people all of whom are suffering all of whom have the propensity for becoming corrupt all of whom are subject to being misunderstood and all of whom who can become recipients of grace her stories are set in the Jim Crow South and to pick white bigots as protagonists and O'Connor exposes and condemns the hellish pride that leaves these characters to be so dismissive of african-americans so whether in literature classes in the halls of divinity schools and seminaries on the screen and the dance theater or on the concert stage Flannery O'Connor through her inclination in-car national art continues to throw us off balance in conclusion and as a tribute to O'Conner I should like to read a poem by the 1973 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize Maxine kumin who incarnated in language her experience of visiting O'Connor's grave in 1988 I am hopeful you will appreciate the significance of the imagery in the last line on visiting Flannery O'Connor's grave Milledgeville Georgia 1988 blindingly triped this calling on the dead hath obeisance half an appeasing there go I we were born in the same year her birthday the same day as my favorite brothers he too died young of a rare crippling disease these self-inflating notions nag me as I Drive through primordial red clay country past Brer rabbits pawn shop and flea market past Uncle Remus real estate and Museum for I am stuck forever to the tar baby who sticks to the next and the next a circuit that will carry me by day's end to memory Hill but first an historic detour just this side of what the local intelligentsia in Fond self-deprecation called Mudville to take the cart track up to Andalusia the family seat a serene removed from town as in a good Victorian novel here from the first floor bedroom window even on those last dark days she could see her beloved peacocks pecking and Fanning the tribe of Philo Pro genitive donkeys ambling down to the farm pond in the meadow a grove of ancient pecan trees bending to be picked not Antebellum grand but commodious Andalusia with real Gardens Harold every spring with real manure so that its touching but not surprising that when Mary McCarthy remarked years before she had come to think of the Eucharist as a symbol O'Connor considerably put out by lapsed Catholic rhetoric flared well if it's a symbol to hell with it they're hanging in the Swale Machinery clatters woods been cut and stacked I could walk up to the empty manse and peer in passed a shudder the last descendants of O'Connor's critters one unkempt little donkey and a Henny the casual offspring of a female Genet and a Shetland stallion canter across the turf they won't come up for carrots keep the distance they feel safe in fair enough in town I passed the college all mannerly red grip held fast as in a spell the last begotten donkeys mournful Bray trails me past dogwood Holly silver Belle what can an outsider know except the shell of things the ancestral home wants painting surrounding it the handsome latticework brick wall has major gaps at the end of the trampled road memory Hill stands on a rise so slight I want to say to hell with it below the cemetery mild traffic punctuate scroll call not as I pictured her enthroned on high fiercely Promethean with eagles say or lions on the headstone but the square unscathed family plot sands even a drooping willow seems right aligned with her father three great aunts opposite space for the mother who outlives her yet Flannery lies unadorned except by name who breathed in fire and fed us on the flame with hope that I've not strained the soup too thinly I'm very grateful for your attention thank you

Channel: Vanderbilt University

Views: 12,839

Keywords: vanderbilt, university, religion, theology, literature

Id: TTp-Ohh9hqg

Length: 50min 55sec (3055 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 05 2009