Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist

Richard Giannone

Description

2001 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

A compelling study of O'Connor's fiction as illuminated by the teaching of the desert monastics.

"Lord, I'm glad I'm a hermit novelist," Flannery O'Connor wrote to a friend in 1957. Sequestered by ill health, O'Connor spent the final thirteen years of her life on her isolated family farm in rural Georgia. During this productive time she developed a fascination with fourth-century Christians who retreated to the desert for spiritual replenishment and whose isolation, suffering, and faith mirrored her own. In Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist, Richard Giannone explores O'Connor's identification with these early Christian monastics and the ways in which she infused her fiction with their teachings. Surveying the influences of the desert fathers on O'Connor's protagonists, Giannone shows how her characters are moved toward a radical simplicity of ascetic discipline as a means of confronting both internal and worldly evils while being drawn closer to God. Artfully bridging literary analysis, O'Connor's biography, and monastic writings, Giannone's study explores O'Connor's advocacy of self-denial and self-scrutiny as vital spiritual weapons that might be brought to bear against the antagonistic forces she found rampant in modern American life.

Sujets

• Literary Figures
• Lettres et linguistique
• La letra escarlata
• Foe (novel)
• Superiority (short story)
• Biography
• Renunciation
• Christian burial
• Hester Prynne
• Self-love
• Misery (novel)
• Desperation
• Asceticism
• John Barth
• Autobiography
• Edward Gibbon
• Martyr

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 07 septembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611172270
• Langue: English

Extrait

FLANNERY O’CONNOR, HERMIT NOVELIST
Flannery O’Connor, Hermit Novelist
With a New Preface by the Author
Richard Giannone

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS
© 2000, 2010 University of South Carolina
Cloth edition published by the University of Illinois Press, 2000
Paperback edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2010 Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the paperback edition as follows:
Giannone, Richard.
Flannery O’Connor, hermit novelist : with a new preface by the author / Richard Giannone. 1st ed.
p. cm.
Revised ed. of: 2000. with a new preface by the author.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-57003-910-2 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. O’Connor, Flannery Religion. 2. Christianity and literature United States History 20th century. 3. Christian fiction, American History and criticism. 4. Monastic and religious life in literature. 5. Catholics United States Intellectual life. 6. Spiritual life in literature. 7. Asceticism in literature. 8. Solitude in literature. 9. Hermits in literature. 10. Deserts in literature.
11. Desert Fathers. I. Title.
PS3565.C57Z6794 2010
813’.54 dc22
2009042202
ISBN 9781-1-61117-227-0 (ebook)
To Frank D’Andrea and Joseph Sendry
The journey is long, and the way dry and barren, that must be traveled to attain the fount of water, the land of promise.
Statutes of the Carthusian Order 1.4.1
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

1. The Hermit Novelist
2. Hazel Motes and the Desert Tradition
3. Sporting with Demons
4. Entering a Strange Country
5. The Prophet and the Word in the Desert
6. Acedia and Penthos
7. Vision and Vice
8. The Power of Exile

Works Cited
Index
Preface INTO GREAT SILENCE
Ours is certainly a time for solitaries and for hermits.
Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert
WE CAN NOW SAY with full assurance that Flannery O’Connor numbers among the commanding writers of the twentieth century. Her name evokes the dogged courage of firebrands wrestling with God. Some blaspheme him; others rant about soul-hungry Jesus; all take the path of most resistance. They slash their way with fist and tongue through the towns and backwoods of Georgia and Tennessee. Burdened by a consciousness of evil, these torchbearers entreat, assault, drive onward. O’Connor’s reputation rests secure on her novels and stories, which with stylistic excellence and miraculous economy capture a hinge moment in American life.
The consequential passage is World War II and its aftermath. O’Connor finds that victory for the United States does not bring peace. Hot war causes cold war. The total disregard for decency and law that killed more than sixty million people on battlefields and in prison camps has frozen the human heart. Warfare has crossed the Atlantic and Pacific. Hatred has leached far into the soul. Death is a very American way of life, everywhere. A child’s body swings from an attic beam; the bones of an innocent foreigner crackle under a tractor set in motion by patriotic farmhands; and extinction skulks along rain-washed roads where good country people live their mundane lives. The anguish lies within earshot of O’Connor’s porch in middle Georgia.
O’Connor’s Collected Works begins in full cry. First comes “Jesus hep me” ( CW 115) from a wheezing man savagely run down by an avenger’s car. His howl resounds in the staccato screams of a family shot one by one by spree killers on the lam. Shrieks, some partially muted, and deep timbre bellows, one muffled by murderous drowning, rise and fall through her fiction. The final story of O’Connor’s posthumous volume repeats the desperate original plea. “Hep me up, Preacher” ( CW 694), wails a dying old man. A neighbor has bound the geezer’s head and arms in the spokes of a banister. Life hangs in a hallway. The world is on the cross. Joined by cruelty, victim and victimizer grieve with sorrowing intimacy. Our ears ring with the silence in which carnage leaves us.
There is still more to O’Connor’s canonical story. Within the accounts of rage, deprivation, and butchery, there stirs a search for meaning and the source of life. This yearning gathers momentum as the very source of life, God, intervenes as an external reality and inner presence to assert sovereignty. The characters neither expect nor desire to meet the Almighty. As Bible Belt citizens know better than most, God’s presence can be bitter. It can stop the heart, can turn events on a dime. In O’Connor’s world, divine favor upends the dramatic action. God sees into the human heart. Rough justice yields to providential embrace, and readers face their assumptions about good and evil. We trust that God is on the side of victims only to see in O’Connor’s theology he is concerned for aggressors too. The Lord is near them and lives in them. All share in a new transfigured life.
O’Connor’s belief that life rises from devastation may in part explain her growing importance in the twenty-first century. Her fiction is still sending jolts to readers. More than that of any other writer who emerged following World War II, O’Connor’s work speaks to our postmodern sensibility. It is difficult to account for her appeal. Various reasons will come to light as evolving cultural needs for making sense press themselves on her fiction. A few possible explanations do come to mind. O’Connor’s craft alone recommends her work to readers. Rereading O’Connor taps immeasurable richness. Knowing what happens in the story frees one to savor the life in her language. She aims to enflesh words. Also her moral toughness suits our hard times. Violence bears away the dominion of nations and the kingdom of God. She understands loneliness. Her grasp of jeopardy and personal dislocation in the collapsing order of the old South resonates to those forming social networks through Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
For all the cultural significance connecting her art to how we live now, O’Connor’s Christianity would seem to be a stumbling block for our secular age. Understood in abstract doctrinal rigidity when exercised to gain institutional power, Christianity would be an obstacle. Christianity has had a propensity to control people to save their souls. Moralistic smugness invites rejection and is precisely what O’Connor deplores. She writes from, not to or about, her faith. Presenting belief through experience that centers on conflict and uncertainty makes all the difference. Far from putting stumbling stones in the path, O’Connor’s dramatized faith clears away obstacles of simplistic believing so that readers can recognize their personal searches and doubts in her art. Her treatment of the post–World War II predicament embraces with great sympathy the unbelief that nihilism has given rise to. O’Connor honors those who follow the truth with all the sincerity of their conscience. She is the friend and sister of those searchers everywhere, in particular those who cannot believe and who gather in exile.
If circumstances and moral positions change, the human search does not. O’Connor’s villains and do-gooders alike, we see, are looking for something more than living out their evil or proclaiming their virtue. Unbelievers who feel that something is missing in their life converge with believers who seek transcendence. The path is one. The desire for the fullness of life is the search for God. God, O’Connor holds, does not change. The God of the Babylonian captivity and the Crucifixion is the God of the Holocaust, the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur, and 9/11. Always one to yield to the darkly luminous mystery of it all, O’Connor admits that one cannot grasp with reason or art the horror of what humans do to humans any more than she can know the ways of God. And yet, buried beneath words, noise, bodies, and especially religious platitudes that deceive us, O’Connor’s laserlike vision discerns an underlying reality. No wonder our unbelieving era, as it copes with cyberwarfare and domestic terrorism to the beat of swirling drones and stinger missiles, is turning to O’Connor. She puts her hope in the unfailing source beyond politics, dogma, and ritual and beyond being itself. Her fiction concerns death and the remainder of life.
In these opening years of the twenty-first century, critical acclaim for O’Connor continues to flourish. By 2000, the year Flannery O’Connor, Hermit Novelist first appeared, three lines of interest were gaining prominence. True to form, a provocative writer with a modest oeuvre who died at thirty-nine and thrived amid physical and cultural adversity would arouse interest in her personal life. Sally Fitzgerald’s editing of O’Connor’s letters in The Habit of Being (1979) and organizing the chronology in the Collected Works (1988) laid the foundation for three recent biographies. Through careful spadework, Jean Cash’s Flannery O’Connor: A Life (2002) unearths abundant dates and details about people and places to show how O’Connor’s writing evolved while depending on the locale in which she worked. Cash limns a clear picture of O’Connor. Except for her father’s death in February 1941, just before O’Connor tur