Flannery O'Connor, Hillbilly Thomist
Mclnerny, Ralph
Carlin "Filthy Words" monologue one mid-afternoon using language usually associated with the gutter (although at the time; in 1973, it also was finding its way onto some presidential tapes). A man...
...C • Stanley L. Jaki...
...This objection may involve a grievous misunderstanding of Christianity...
...486 pages...
...The point was to dc something well...
...a woman writer in Millidgeville, Georgia as just plain common sense...
...In this lies their fascination...
...Quite the contrary...
...It would be wholly wrong to imagine that she took it as the purpose of literature to be edifying in some obvious sort of way...
...Home is a good place to do that...
...It is here we find, I think, the sense of her remark that any good criticism reflects a Catholic point of view...
...Ca knM~~nt ; THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983...
...Edited by John J. Mulloy...
...Hardly...
...The deepest sense of life is religious...
...In one of the essays included in Mystery and Manners, having told the aspiring writers she is addressing that the kind of vision a writer needs is an anagogical one, Flannery O'Connor explains that this was one of the senses of Scripture the medieval exegete looked for, one "which had to do with the Divine Life and our participation in it...
...Aspiring to contribute to that literature, O'Connor was aware that there were some who thought-wrongly-that literature can flourish in the absence of the Christian outlook on human existence...
...M. E. Bradford...
...A fortiori, her conception of the vision 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983 Does she look condescendingly on her troubled believers, contrasting them with cool and cosmopolitan Catholics...
...When the artist succumbs to the view that agents are not the conscious responsible causes of their deeds, fiction will have died...
...Marion Montgomery...
...A s an old Thomist-as opposed to a Neothomist-I have often thought that one could do a sort of cheerleader piece on Flannery O'Connor beginning, say, with her description of herself as a hillbilly Thomist and going on to the use she made of the notion of art as a habit, gleaned from Maritain...
...345 pages Paper' $5 95...
...It is, I think, a great tribute to Thomism as a philosophy of perennial import that it should have struck Ralph Mclnerny is Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Notre Dame...
...It is the countless variety of human lives, in their fallen form and in their potential perfection, that strikes a writer like Flannery O'Connor.`" Catholic critics complained of her stories...
...hnstrantly &the lntellerfuals...
...How could Flannery O'Connor have thought otherwise...
...It may be thought that, whatever her intention, O'Connor would have had to see all lives in the same way, homogenizing them according to the tenets of her religious belief...
...This second reason the Supreme Court again affirmed recently in the "Kiddie-Porn" case...
...When he cites marginalia from O'Connor's copy of Maritain's Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, we know at once that he speaks with unusual authority...
...the space of a good read, you are caught up in her anagogical vision...
...Paper: $2.95...
...If all human persons have a common vocation, they are not called to be indistinguishable from one another...
...How can significant human action be portrayed if man's sinfulness is ignored...
...The lrnpatrence of .7nb...
...They are the categories without which Western literature is unintelligible...
...There is no place where it ii easy...
...Her reviews in the diocesan required of a serious writer did not get translated into a sectarian effort...
...Her quite Thomistic insistence, for example, on perception as cognitively primary for us...
...In upholding the Commission's disciplinary measure against the station, the Court held that in their context (context being all important) the offending words occupied the same place in the hierarchy of First Amendment values as did legal obscenity, i.e., their value is clearly outweighed "by the social interest in order and morality...
...We know what her characters are wearing and the look in their eye, we know the mud and dust of the roads, the aspect of a lake or an urban park...
...Paper: $.S.95...
...Intro...
...It is not enough to reply: because they are like ourselves...
...If that is true, Flannery O'Connor's submerged population could be said to be White *Sherwood Sugden & Company, $19.95...
...Why Flanery (1'l:onnor Stayed Ilomr (VoI...
...A Better (.'arde than Reason Studies in the American Revolution...
...Now the last thing in the world we expect from Flannery O'Connor is a pious remark...
...A superficial notion that art should edify produces stories from which sin is absent...
...The first duty of the artist is to produce an excellent artifact...
...What comes through is the conviction that individual human lives, the deeds of everyday, are fraught with an eternal significance...
...Noting that of all forms of communication it is broadcasting which has received the most limited First Amendment protection, the Court emphasized two reasons for this: (1) radio has-" established a uniquely pervasive presence" in American society, and (2) broadcasting is uniquely accessible to children of all ages...
...W'hy for Drank Legaur (Vol...
...stern of Rome: Refleaieris from the Life of a Roman (.atholu...
...Paper: $5.95 • Aather Traee...
...On the other hand, O'Connor speaks with acerb wit of those who employ Catholicism as a sort of procrustean bed on which to measure the events of their stories...
...The point is that the religious is not something added on to an otherwise already satisfying conception of human action...
...We are all grotesque...
...Not only does Montgomery know the published canon...
...This is the most provocative suggestion: art without religion is impossible...
...Who are the nice people she is ignoring...
...An artist to the tips of her toes, she showed little interest in the literary life, the Manhattan hothouse, the campus critics...
...loth '$19.95...
...But if recognition of sin is artistically required, art demands that grace too be acknowledged...
...A writer must seek a vision of human life which sees the deeds of -creatures in relation to God...
...On the one hand, in the essays collected in Mystery and Manners, O'Connor often speaks of the importance her religious faith has for her writing, providing her with an outlook, a scale of values which form a hierarchy at once ontological and imaginative...
...Escape from Seep- T trarm Liberal E'dwattnn as if Truth Alsttrred...
...Although this was a method applied to biblical exegesis, it was also an attitude toward all creation, and a way of reading nature which included many possibilities, and I think it is this enlarged view of the human scene that the fiction writer has to cultivate if he is ever going to write stories that have any chance of becoming a permanent part of our literature...
...Objectivity is the truth of art...
...This is not a sectarian remark...
...Faith permeates life, gives it shape and meaning, confers an awful importance on the choices of human persons...
...1H~ r, .,.,dor ifrrrii pr.eo Odd 11 prat...
...As to the first, the Court stated that in the case of patently offensive, indecent material being broadcast in the privacy of the home, the "individual's right to be left alone plainly outweighs the First Amendment rights of an intruder...
...Why should we be interested in narratives about agents like ourselves, the rise and fall of their fortunes, their struggles to achieve their ends, their failures...
...woman from Millidgeville, Georgia stayed home...
...The Founding Fathers, while roundly applauding Slaton and Pacifica, would probably have wondered why the Supreme Court had to decide them...
...Powers is a writer O'Connor particularly admired...
...After all, did the Fathers not state the obvious: the liberty which the Constitution so boldly sought to safeguard could exist only in an ordered and moral society...
...Paper: $4.50...
...To produce excellent artifacts...
...This absence is a literary inadequacy...
...Nonetheless, the question of the relation of Flannery O'Connor's work to the fact that she was a Catholic has been raised, even if somewhat peripherally, by Marion Montgomery in Why Flannery O'Connor Stayed Home, Volume 1 of a trilogy on American writers.* This dense, learned, and ebullient book is one that every fan of Flannery O'Connor will want to own...
...Edited by John J. ' fulloy...
...Updike said of Salinger that not even God loves his creatures as much as Salinger does his...
...It leads philosophers to invent a Problem of Evil and blame God because we abuse our freedom...
...Sin and grace and salvation are not the odd tenets of rednecks...
...Ars est recta ratio factibilium...
...weekly often touched, it seems, on bad or inadequate ways of seeing the relevance of belief for art...
...Trash, or people very near that category...
...Paler: $4 95 • M. E. Bradford, (:nlrratvons of the Faithful Ifrart (1n the l.ttrwrarr of the .South...
...The recurrent charge was that she wrote only of grotesques...
...Dynamos of W'nrld llish,rV...
...Frederick D. Wilheimsen...
...Imagine all the ways she could have gone as a writer, believing as she did...
...Why should we regard our own lives as in some sense a story...
...Of particular interest is her opposition to the "assumption that there is a brand of criticism special to Catholics rather than that any good criticism will reflect a Catholic view of reality...
...442 pages...
...The free creature can damn himself and it is sentimental to want to rewrite the rules afterward so that everyone is really a winner...
...they are most interesting when, as in the novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, they are obsessed with religion...
...I of the trilogy, The linplxtl, Prxt & the .SpsnI of the Age...
...It can be argued that Western literature has been reared on the outlook Flannery O'Connor insists upon...
...To the Founders, the question would not be why the reasoning of Pacifica should not apply with equal force to cable and other subscription TV but why the process of reasoning from legal precedent should be necessary to censor material like the visual counterpart of Carlin's seven dirty words...
...The world of O'Connor's stories could not be more concrete...
...that is why the Catholic vision, the anagogical vision, is intrinsic to her art...
...Make them products of their environment, playthings of their genes, anything else than centers of freedom, and they could no longer interest us...
...By and large her characters are religious in a fundamentalist, Baptist sort of way...
...A man who heard the broadcast while driving with his young son complained to the FCC...
...he has also made good use of the novelist's papers and personal library...
...But praise was not the point...
...That the thought of Thomas Aquinas, gotten first-hand as well as through such intermediaries as Jacques Maritain, had a tremendous influence on Flannery O'Connor no sensitive reader could doubt...
...by Jeffrey Hart...
...it is difficult to think of a Powers story that does not have priests for its subject...
...Christopher Derrick...
...Literature, in some way, is identified with this sense of the religious at the heart of human existence...
...hnstrane(l IF...
...11 of the trilogy, The liophetvr Yet & the Spirit of the Age...
...Her reply...
...The believer who sets aside his creed and finds no daily pertinence of it will not for long remain a believer...
...Christopher Dawson...
...Frank O'Connor described Powers's usual subjects as constituting a submerged population and he argued, in The Mirror and the Roadway, that this is what any successful short-story writer must find...
...She did not spurn praise she felt she had earned b3 what she had written...
...Paler $4...
...Montgomery puts us in touch with the reviews Flannery O'Connor wrote for The Bulletin, the Catholic diocesan paper of Georgia...
...ay Without n (,cost: Stlatrd Essay...
...Christopher Derrick...
...that "the explanation for any good writer is first that he knows how to write and that writing is his vocation...
...Such a piece could be written, but this is not it...
...The Founders no doubt would agree with the unassailable argument that cable TV should be subject to the same content restrictions as the FCC imposes on commercial TV (and commercial radio as in Pacifica...
...This is what writing truly means...
...Angels...
...Clearly she is a writer for whom being a Catholic is central to her conception of the writing vocation...
...That is, we are all fallen, sinners, in need of grace...
...O'Connor's faith bore on the way things are, here and hereafter...
...Surely this is one of the most remarkable statements by a twentiethcentury author one could possibly imagine...
...In Flannery O'Connor's stories, people are on their way to heaven or hell, doubtless via purgatory...
...tprr, & Men...
...O...
...Paper $4.95...
...George W. Ruder...
...This basic Christian belief is our author's as well and, if only for...
...No human person is superfluous because each human person is a peculiar and unique possibility...
...But after a stay in the North, she returned gladly to Georgia...
...509 pages Paper...
...Surely the affirmation in that remark is more striking than her opposition...
...224 pages...
...Still, we should direct our attention to the truths shared and the way they cast light on O'Connor the writer rather than to their pedigree or to the vagaries of transmission...
...That would trivialize life, make it unserious...
...And there would be other things...
...The question of the importance of O'Connor's Catholicism for her fiction must take into account several factors which do not, at first blush, seem facets of the same diamond...
...Marion Montgomery...
...A third fact is that Flannery O'Connor almost never wrote about Catholics...
...Ralph Mclnerny FLANNERY O' CONNOR, HILLBILLY THOMIST Why the...
...This Thomistic conception freed O'Connor from the notion that art is self-expression, a wishing of her own subjectivity onto her readers...
...He quotes her insistence...
...Sherwood Suiden & Company 1117 Eighth Street, La Salle, IL 61301 I errkx...
...Perhaps particularly, her allusion to such things as the anagogical sense of Scripture, a notion she must have picked up from reading the Summa theologiae, something she said she did a bit of every...
...East & 1I'rif...
...One marvels at the sureness and compassion with which she handles her characters, yet she is never sentimental...
...19.95...
...248 pages...
...J.F...
...Montgomery's title mocks the critic who assumed that Flannery O'Connor wanted to escape the South she wrote of...
...The argument the Founders would feel more compelling is the more fundamental one that "the social interest in order and morality" outweighs any value found in much of what today invades the lives, assaults the "sensibilities of unwilling recipients," and helps form the values of adults and children alike...
...Yet her stories are otherworldly: the stakes are heaven or hell...
...7 91, • Christopher Dawson...
...Paper: $4.95...
...As to the second, the Court reaffirmed its earlier recognition of "the government's interest in the 'well-being of its youth' and in supporting 'parents' ' claim to authority in their households...
...Cloth...
...Like Conrad, she wants above all to make us see, and see the way things are...
...It brushed aside the fact that before the Carlin program there had been an advisory caution...
...I_- - _l or m'k,,h-ked, M...
...Flannery O'Connor was a Catholic all week long and she could not have seen the world differently than she did...
Vol. 16 • July 1983 • No. 7
