Joy on Brad on Flannery
The lead review in this week’s New York Times Sunday Book Review is by the under-rated and under-read novelist and story writer Joy Williams.
It’s of the new biography of Flannery O’Connor, by Brad Gooch (a book I’ll be reviewing in the print edition of Commonweal).
Williams stresses O’Connor’s oddness — and indicates that Gooch errs by attempting to normalize his subject.
It’s a clever review: a series of statements, really, rather than an argument, allowing the reader to piece together his or her own opinion of Miss Flannery.
But when you string together that many statements, some inevitably succumb to their own brand of oddity.
Two I noticed:
1) “In her avid reading, she found Protestant theologians superior to Catholic ones, though she was pleased to discover Teilhard de Chardin.”
I’m not sure where that’s coming from. True, O’Connor appreciated the work of Tillich and Niebuhr and other Protestant theologians, and, sure, O’Connor was never shy about criticizing elements of the Catholic Church; there are always tart remarks to be found in her letters and essays.
But over and above Teilhard she had a serious and sustained engagement with Cathbolic theologians like Karl Adam, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, and Romano Guardini. (Of course, only Thomas Aquinas could grace her bedside table.)
2) “One should pretty much ignore her own pronouncements on her art, though in her last years she increasingly endeavored to explain her intentions.”
Really? The talks and essays collected in Mystery and Manners have been pretty well received over the years. I find the few “pronouncements on her art” either self-deprecatingly funny or…fairly insightful. Like the one where she defends the Misfit from being deemed evil incarnate.
“I don’t want to equate the Misfit with the devil. I prefer to think, however unlikely this may seem, the old lady’s gesture, like the mustard-seed, will grow to be a great crow-filled tree in the Misfit’s heart, and will be enough of a pain to him there to turn him into the prophet he was meant to become. But that’s another story.”
Not bad for such an odd lady.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has discerned this terrifying pattern in O’Connor’s [Flannery O'Connor] fiction. It pushes “toward the limits of what is thinkable and ‘acceptable,’ let alone edifying,” he explains. “She is always taking for granted,” he
adds, “that God is possible in the most grotesque and empty or cruel situations.” Her aim, Williams insists, is to make the natural supernatural, to create “a recognizable world that is also utterly unexpected,” a fictional milieu at once familiar and alien. Thus does she create “agents in fiction who embody excess of meaning and whose relations with each other and with the otherness of God are not limited by the visible, though inconceivable without the visible …[T]he infinite cannot be directly apprehended, so we must take appearance seriously… enough to read its concealments and stratagems” (Williams). Among its many hidden stratagems is the Cross. As an instrument for shameful death that has been transfigured into the true pattern of life, it makes havoc of ordinary life. Indeed, it discloses the terrible – the terror-striking – character of God himself. “A God who fails to generate desperate hunger and confused and uncompromising passion,” writes the archbishop, “is no
God at all.” O’Connor’s grotesque characters are who they are, he notes, because “God is as God is, not an agent within the universe, not a source of specialized religious consolation. If God is real, the person in touch with God is in danger, at any number of levels.”
To create such hunger and passion, Williams concludes, “is to risk creating in people a longing too painful to bear or a longing that will lead them to take such risks that it seems nakedly cruel to expose them to that hunger in the first place” (Williams).
~ Ralph C. Wood
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3777/is_200704/ai_n21100654/pg_5
Nice insights from O’Connor. Maybe it is obvious but I was not aware of this kind of depth in her. Even Elie’s book, which also centered on Merton and the other Catholic novelist, did not seek to explain this, though I cannot say for certain.
This adds more to her than I had appreciated up to this point.
Terry Teachout also has a perceptive review in the current Commentary. He has this nice quote from O’Connor:
“I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/believing-in-flannery-o-connor-15085
Martin McDonagh is a contemporary playwright whose work, though it’s set in rural Ireland, reminds me of O’Connor’s themes. He’s the author of Cripple of Inishman, Beauty Queen of Leenane and several others. Similar to the critical reaction to O’Connor Wikepedia reports that “audiences have been divided roughly into two camps; those who think he’s captured the black humour and zeitgeist of a postmodern rural Ireland, and those who see him as making a mockery of Ireland and the Irish by lampooning that caricature of old, the ‘stage-Irish’ fool.’”
So it’s interesting to find that McDonagh was an O’Connor fan at one time:
“McDonagh’s talent for spinning ‘once upon a time’ on its head was developed early on, the result of his Irish-Catholic roots; an avidity for writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Flannery O’Connor; an addiction to rock music, TV and films; and his own fevered imagination.”
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:iXKUWabiNv0J:articles.latimes.com/2005/may/22/entertainment/ca-pillowman22+%22martin+mcdonagh%22+%22flannery+o%27connor%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=19&gl=us&client=safari
And here’s another surprising fan: Bruce Springsteen, as told to Will Percy (nephew of Walker Percy) recalled that:
“The really important reading that I did began in my late twenties, with authors like Flannery O’Connor. There was something in those stories of hers that I felt captured a certain part of the American character that I was interested in writing about. They were a big, big revelation. She got to the heart of some part of meanness that she never spelled out, because if she spelled it out you wouldn’t be getting it. It was always at the core of every one of her stories — the way that she’d left that hole there, that hole that’s inside of everybody. There was some dark thing — a component of spirituality — that I sensed in her stories, and that set me off exploring characters of my own. She knew original sin — knew how to give it the flesh of a story. She had talent and she had ideas, and the one served the other.”
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/01/walker-percy-an.html
I would like to mention the writer Philip K. Dick. Dick is the type of science fiction writer who is
read by people who don’t like science fiction. I don’t particularly care for science fiction yet I have read most of what Dick wrote. I get a special delight with his stories because of where they often take place. Dick grew up in Berkeley, California and also lived for long stretches at a time in Marin County, California. He knew San Francisco very well. He often talks about neighborhoods and places in San Francisco that I am very familiar with. He actually once wrote about a hotel room in an old seedy hotel that sounded like a room I had been in.
Fr. John Garvey wrote a very interesting piece about Dick in Commonweal.
http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=1924&var_recherche=valis
Patrick — that’s an interesting comparison! I didn’t know McDonagh was an O’Connor fan, but he certainly does share her talent for the grotesque. I love McDonagh’s plays, but I think he’s unlike O’Connor in that he doesn’t have much of a moral vision underlying his work. It’s bleak all the way down. There’s a good production of The Cripple of Inishmaan in NYC now (at the Atlantic Theatre Company), and I left with the impression McDonagh was having fun toying with his audience — defying our expectations of a happy or redemptive ending.
Patrick Molloy –
Interesting that Springsteen finds O”Connor to be a “revelation”. One of her greatest stories (one of the greatest stories ever, I think) is called “Revelation”. It’s about a Pharisee of a woman who is so judgmental she challenges God Himself. Springsteebn also sees the theme of meanness that runs through her work. I wonder if meanness and being judgmental were a problem for O’Connor herself. In the flesh her wit could be devastating, but ever the truth-teller it didn’t stop her telling what she saw.
Michael M. –
Another fan of Dick is the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. You’re in good company :-)
Mollie – I agree that McDonagh doesn’t seem to have much of a moral vision. I don’t know if he’s bleak all the way down; he may have a view of art (or imagination or wicked humor) as finally redemptive. Not religion or theology or a moral vision, but something.
Any interview with him that I’ve seen shows him as somewhat shallow. One doesn’t imagine him taking Maritain or Teilhard to heart as O’Connor did. But he’s still young and perhaps the O’Connor influence will tell in the end. Certainly he’s immensely gifted.
Of course, how could Cripple of Inishman not succeed when the actress Dearbhla Molloy (no relation) is part of the cast?
The only Martin McDonagh work I am familiar with is “In Bruges,” his first feature film.
I’d say that film was not bleak all the way down — it’s a dark comedy, to be sure, but it’s also obsessed with the need for forgiveness and redemption.
Perhaps his plays are bleaker than his film?
I wonder if Gooch discusses O’Connor’s father at all. He has a pretty shadowy presence in “The Habit of Being”. O’Conner herself mentions that he had writerly impulses. Whereas her mother was the explicit pattern for many of the characters in her stories, I wonder if her father’s character may have implicitely shaped her narrative voice.
Incidentally, John Huston’s film adaptation of “Wide Blood”, which was co-written by Benedict and Michael Fitzgerald (sons of Sally and Robert), seemed quite faithful to the story (as one would expect under the circumstances, I guess).
“Wide Blood” indeed! “Wise Blood”, please.
I’ve heard interesting stories about the making of “Wise Blood.” Apparently John Huston was constantly worried that religious elements were going to make it into the film, something he didn’t want to see. So the Fitzgerald brothers thought up a host of ways of assuring Huston that such was not the case, all the while knowing it was.
The Fitzgerald brothers thought up a host of ways of assuring Huston that such was not the case, all the while knowing it was.
Interesting. “The Dead”, Huston’s last film and one of his best, was recently shown on one of the cable movie channels. After seeing it again, I wonder if he was as oblivious to religious symbolism as all that. I’d like to think not, but that’s my hero worship showing.