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Flannery O’Connor Canceled by Catholics?
Let me be bold and say that while there are others worthy of note, the greatest American short story writer is Flannery O’Connor. Her pen was inspired. Her soul is found on every page she ever published. Her commentary can be as biting as a serpent while remaining as beautiful as a piece of stained glass. I take great pride from the fact that she was from Georgia, as I am from Georgia. I take great pride in the fact that she was a Catholic, as I am a Catholic. I take great pride in the fact that she is part of the American canon, as she earned her place. Yet she has been canceled by Catholics at a Catholic university in Maryland that is removing her name from a dorm.
Apparently, when she was a young woman during the Jim Crow Era, Mary Flannery, as she was known as a child, wrote in private correspondence to family and friends some thoughts that “reflected a racist perspective.” It matters not that the president priest of Loyola who is removing her name from the dorm has recognized that O’Connor’s stories–the public art for which she is noted–uphold “the dignity of African American persons” while making “bigots the object of ridicule.” Her sins must be expunged as she is erased from the campus.
This is crazy and depresses me greatly. So instead of focusing solely on what I view as an injustice, I thought I would offer some words on my favorite O’Connor story and ask if anyone else finds her work worthwhile.
I have been thinking a lot lately about “The Enduring Chill,” a story which makes fun of the empty elitism of the main character Asbury who seems to feel his cosmopolitan experiences in New York City transformed him into a better person than his mother who runs a farm in the South. Incidentally, O’Connor shows two black workers on the farm are much smarter than the white Asbury, as no one can tell the young man anything. In his shows of moral superiority, he is full of arrogance, empty of wisdom. O’Connor brilliantly draws the portrait of an individual who would surely call himself “woke” in 2020, while cutting him down to size.
I wish there were writers like O’Connor currently working, though I’m not sure they’d get published in today’s “enlightened” world.
Published in General
Fair enough. I guess I made this argument later on in the thread as well when replying to @omegapaladin‘s thoughts on NPCs. You are right, @davidfoster. It’s so funny how the phrasing can make one’s mind turn in a new direction….
I would tell this person: Sticks and stones. That is a word. An ugly word, but still a word. How likely is it that this person is not at all bothered by words like MF, GD, F, etc, but this one word triggers so badly that just seeing it in print destroys the day. Context irrelevant.
If you let printed words cripple you, you only empower those words more. Let go of the obsession with one word, and look a little past it to understand the intent and meaning.
Of course you are right.
I was shocked many years ago–so this is not a “new” thing–when Mark Twain’s work was banned from a county in Georgia because this word, which completely fit into the mouths of the characters he crafted, offended parents.
As I recall a county hearing that was on the news, I listened to a woman talk about the “pain” the word caused her children, and I wondered if she had any idea what Huckleberry Finn was actually about… how she was asking to remove one of the greatest anti-racism novels ever written from the sight of students. This war on Mark Twain has been going on now for a very long time. It’s all so very ignorant.
“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead,” The Misfit continued, “and He shouldn’t have done it. He thown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can-by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,” he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.
–A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Cancel Culture and The Misfit go hand in glove.
I seem to recall that O’Connor once wrote (in one of her letters?) about a group of students discussing The Violent Bear it Away. For some of them, the voice in Tarwater’s head — referred to in the novel as Tarwater’s “friend” — was “the voice of reason,” and this alarmed her that they didn’t immediately understand it was the voice of the devil. Of the representations of the devil in the novel, she wrote “I want to be certain that the Devil gets identified as the Devil and not simply taken for this or that psychological tendency . . .”
Also, . . .
I never know how much of this is virtue signalling, or if the reader is really that oversensitive. I fear we have trained a couple generations now not to think but to react. That their reactions — their feelings — are what is most important. Not the message being imparted but the immediate reaction and sensation delivered by words taken in isolation.
There is no meaning. There is only feeling.
(Admittedly, I just received an e-mail where someone used the word “ask” as a noun, and I could not process the rest of the message because of that single grammatical sin, so I recognize the error in myself as well.)
My favorite part of this passage has always been the word “thown.”
As a result of this thread, the Library of America made a sale of a collection of Flannery’s novels. If anyone else is so moved, the volume is ten bucks cheaper on the LOA site than at Amazon.
My “ask” is this, @drewinwisconsin, are you purposefully trying to channel Flannery, or is it natural????
:)
I think children today are told the Devil doesn’t exist, so of course they don’t recognize his voice. They don’t even understand how he speaks directly to them. The only “evil” in the world is racism?
O’Connor was definitely an influence on my own forays into short fiction. Back when I took time for such things. I should probably do it again. Maybe I need to reread a bunch of O’Connor stories to jump-start the creative engine.
An NPC is not typically hostile in video games, true, but they can end your game even without attacking you directly.
It is about their predictability and their abandonment of agency & responsibility. He most certainly is hostile to the faith he supposedly serves.
In Sands of Iwo Jima, John Wayne’s character dies to a voiceless nameless extra.
There are two issues related to this post subject that give me heartburn. First, when a Christian is known to have repented and left old things behind, why would other professed Christians think they should engage in judgement and punishment. Even if the state of grace of the person being so judged is unknown, it is still wrong. President Trump has faced this with regard to his character since he has been in office. The second issue would apply perhaps more to the ‘woke’. Why are some ethnic references to groups of people considered insulting and others, very similar in nature, merely descriptive, think a word for those Mexicans who cross the Rio Grande to enter the United States versus a word for southern white farmers working long hours out in the sun.
I found this reflection today comparing the writing of two Catholic authors: Hemingway and O’Connor. I am not an expert on either writer, but I think the essayist provides those without any prior exposure to O’Connor (or Hemingway for that matter) a taste of her writing style and more importantly her creative influences (spoiler alert: her Catholic faith).
https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/ernest-hemingways-dark-night-of-the-soul/
I love Hemingway’s letter to the priest. It is why I don’t put a Jesus sticker on my car, though, of course, his desire to not wave a faith flag was much more significant per his work. ;)
Thanks for sharing the article.
Even prater can’t cure stupid. Although I don’t know if much of that goes on at Loyola.
Prater = prayer, right?
We can pray for Loyola.
I was wondering if anyone in the English Dept.–someone who presumably knew something about O’Connor–might have spoken on her behalf, so I checked out the curriculum for starters. This seemed most applicable.
The only thing that I could find out about Dr. Guttman is that she is a “Visiting Affiliate Assistant Professor,” which, for some reason, reminded me of The Rolling Stones’ song “Under Assistant West Coast Promo Man.” But, since O’Connor is not among the 14 authors mentioned, perhaps she would not have had a champion in Guttman. Considering the number of major writers that are not mentioned, perhaps the selection is somewhat quirky.
Note also that Loyola College has a “core diversity requirement.”
If you substitute out the word “bigotry” for the term “racism” and if bigotry is then seen as being “hatred of the other” then bigotry is exactly the greatest evil.
All of the genocidal activities in history came about through bigotry. These involve the “go to” genocides, like the 20th Century and its Third Reich’s Holocaust against Jews, and the earlier Turkish people against the Armenians. But it also would include the great 100 or more years of persecution of the Protestants against the Catholics and vice versa in the 1600’s in France.
And of course the bigotry of the rich against the poor and the poor against the rich.
It is interesting to note that prior to around 1615 or so, one out of every four people who stepped off a ship from the Old World and began a life in the New World ended up living with the Native Peoples. Sometimes this was voluntary and some times it was through being captured.
This caused a great deal of disturbance among those who were trying to set up churches of any kind in the New England areas. What sort of preacher would spend time in England cultivating a congregation only to have 25% among the congregants leave once over in their new land? So the idea that the Native People were savage heathens came about, so that by the time people made their way overseas, they would be fearing them, and avoiding them, rather than living among them.
We have to be carefully taught to hate.
interesting!
Flannery should have a class for herself, but it’s hard to see everything going on in a classroom from a syllabus…. This class alone should fill the “diversity” requirement per different sorts of voices over the decades. It probably doesn’t count though.
Me too. Where did that come from? It is awful. :-)
Same place as people using disconnect and connect as nouns.
I’ve heard disconnect as a noun a lot in geek culture / internet slang, and I think it migrated from there. Typically, the internet slang is DC. “Sorry about the DC. Cat hit my router.” I pretty rarely hear disconnection used compared to disconnect or connection, and I have never heard connect used as a noun.
I’m usually careful, but I do use ‘reveal’ as in President Trump’s reveal of the ‘deep state’ and the ‘swamp creatures’.
I used to say that, but then I caught it out in the wild with a caller to a radio show. Kids these days. I’ll give them a disconnection.
Honestly, the only place I hear “disconnection” is in $cientology, where it refers to their vile practice of shunning people who are disapproved by the church, often including family members or for trivial reasons.
D/C or DC is common, disconnection is used much less than loss / end / termination of connection
disconnect tends to be used for a misunderstanding mixed with different paradigms or different ideals. It does not actually imply an existing connection was broken.
Since you guys have gone into a gerund-y conversation about grammar, which, I suppose, is still connected to a post about a writer, let me ask a question. It’s the American standard to put the period to the left of quotation marks at the end of a sentence. A comma would go to the left as well if preceding a tag-line. However, should the comma go to the left in ALL circumstances?
She liked “gobble gook,” but not “flibber gibbets.”
Or
She liked “gobble gook”, but not “flibber gibbets.”
And then there are lists!
She liked “gobble gook,” “flibber gibbets,” and “flabber wooze-its.”
OR
She liked “gobble gook”, “flibber gibbets”, and “flabber wooze-its.”
I really don’t know the “correct” way to do this.
I don’t either. But I’ll keep the comma “inside” the quotation marks in all circumstances–even if it’s wrong.
Yes, and the correct way is:
She liked “gobbledygook,” “flibbertigibbets,” and “(I have no idea what this one should be).”
😉
It’s still wrong. Not that I’m compulsive about it.