Flannery O'Connor's South
Wimsatt, Margaret
kids with inflated egos. The kids from Milwaukee who made Airplane: may find that they have a tough time resisting a Blues Brothers budget on their next project, even if they want to. The entire...
...This had begun in England, in English, with the Emancipation Act, which within a generation made it possible for Newman and yon H//gel to be heard, and allowed the work in England and Ireland of the Ward family...
...I said in my last column that there was a messa~gefor Hollywood in the relative performances of Airplane...
...in New York City, she thought, it might work...
...Alphonsus Liguori...
...The tension between the world view of the Southern girl raised in Savannah, living in a country village, and the Harvard psychiatrist is never quite resolved...
...she had an ear...
...I must ask, simply as a matter of terminology, whether the distinction between faith and belief is valid and illuminating...
...I understanding of theology IIII CATBOLICISN Richard P. McBrien Winston, (2 vols., xcii & ixxx & 1186 pp...
...Katherine Anne Porter, EudoraII FLANNEllY 0"C0NNOR'SSOUTH Robert Coles Iamislana State, $14.95, 166 pp...
...WESTERBECK,JR...
...Each treatment is concluded by a summary and a synthesis of these materials in contemporary language...
...It is an interesting phenomenon, be-cause it embodies two opposing views of the South at that period, and of all Southern history and values...
...Most Catholics, he believes, sit unhappily amid the turmoil...
...I find some ambiguity in defining "the powers at work in the world which are hostile to god...
...She allowed that Martin Luther King was doing what he had to do, what had to be done...
...Under these conditions films such as The Blues Brothers are, like the legendary oogle-oogle bird, in danger of flying up their own rear ends and disappearing...
...I notice them most quickly in his treatment of the Bible...
...She refused to meet James Baldwin in Georgia...
...O'Connor has to the unknowing appeared a bigot...
...And these are really all the nits I have to pick...
...The entire industry is run on the Peter Principle...
...But in Mystery and Manners Fish...
...Around the turn of the decade, as the Civil Rights movement burgeoned, Robert Coles and his wife went South, the psychiatric social scientist, the teacher of English, to Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia...
...Flannery O'Connor was interested in the country people around her, in their pride, in their sinfulness, in their less-than heroic virtues, and in themselves always as possible vessels of grace...
...But I have to mention that the family name of St...
...G. K. Chesterton embraced the faith with gusto...
...They worked along different lines, their paths crossed briefly...
...Readers of this review would be surprised if I did not embrace this approach...
...I have to ask whether the very brief treatment of angels should not ha~/e adverted to some more recent interpretations of the reality of angels...
...How nice...
...after the school of Ernest Jones, and the industrious analyzers of Hamlet and Sylvia Plath...
...But the consequence is that a film has a very brief life in first-run...
...is consistently misspelled Ligouri...
...This means that while the amount of money that has to be recouped on a blockbuster gets larger and larger, the amount of time each one has to do it in becomes smaller and smaller...
...her unexplained objection must have been based on the misinterpretations such a meeting would almost call for...
...They lived for a while in Cobb County, Georgia, north of Atlanta, and there found themselves taming frequently for illumination on the people among whom they worked to the stories and two short novels of Flannery O'Connor...
...The normal treatment of each topic comprises a review of the material from the Bible, theological development from the Fathers through the Middle Ages and the Reformation to contemporary theologians, including Protestants, and the official statements of the church...
...I know that the generalities which every reviewer has in his clich6 box are unfair to a work of this magnitude...
...I am sure that those who write compendia of theology, like those who write dictionaries of the Bible, hope they' are producing something which has not been produced before...
...The Coleses were deeply involved in the Civil Rights movement...
...In our century Maritain, Mauriac, Bloy, Eric Gill with his Thomistic aesthetic, were considered seriously by the establishment...
...Uncle Tom's Cabin and Tobacco Road were displaced as authentic pictures of life below the Mason-Dixon Line...
...they would, I think, be just as surprised if those who resist theological development did not resist this approach as well...
...Hollywood itself could disappear with them.COLINL...
...MargaretWimsatt Welty, even Carson McCullers, were read and esteemed far beyond their parish boundaries...
...It is they, and not his fellow-theologians, whom he addresses...
...Readers will say, rightly: Here is a psychiatrist who can read complicated fiction without Freudianizing the author, and who can admit development in his own point of view...
...The reviewer is tempted--at least I am--to compare McBrien's compendium with some of its predecessors...
...A film has to play everywhere at once in order to take sufficient advantage of its promotion...
...I have done this too often to repudiate it...
...Books: COMPLEXITIES& IRONIES F LANNERYO'CONNOR ( 1925-1964) lived, flourished, matured, and died toward the end of the Catholic miniRenaissance that was already fading by the time of the Second Vatican Council...
...There are certain limits to reconciliation imposed by what is or what is thought to be a demand for unconditional surrender...
...now to the clich6 box...
...Her late, successful years also overlapped the period of new and intelligent Northern interest in the South...
...More than ever before, Hollywood's motto is THINKBIG...
...I hope this description of the book makes it clear that a detailed criticism is impossible within 900 words...
...Advertising and distributing a film have become so expensive that they can be justified only bysaturation bookings...
...He has read and pondered her fiction...
...But that kind of thinking has a Catch-22 built into it now...
...Catholics and their works and ideas had had the ear of much of the Western world's secular press, partly because of the temper of the times, partly because of the number of talented Catholics working then...
...McKenzie RICHARD P. McBRIEN has without doubt produced his magnum opus, and I do not thereby mean to imply that he has produced his last major work...
...Others will notice them in other areas...
...They met her briefly in the hospital where she was playing out the next to last act of her struggle with lupus erythematosus...
...Under these headings the elder theologian can discern the tractatus dogmatici of his youth, with some philosophical prolegomena and a discussion of the basic principles of Christian morality...
...Who that has read it can forget the imbecilities of the pseudo-Confederate General Sash in "A Late Encounter with the Enemy," or the fatuous efforts of his granddaughter to make the old fraud into a hero for Commonweal:532 the benefit of the Daughters of the Confederacy, and her own pride...
...But a two-volume compendium of Roman Catholic theology of nearly 1400 pages is major enough to permit him to rest on his laurels or on his oars, whichever way one prefers to think ofy.it.I do not think he is likely to do either...
...He presents a tidy small list of references to books about her and her work that he has profited from...
...Roman Catholic theology has long been dominated by the bitter quarrel between those who accept theological development and those who resist it...
...and considering the bias that Robert Coles might have been expected to bear with him on his journey south, he has written a kindly book...
...Flannery was not a racist...
...She is not interested in the pitiably swaggering remains of the antebellum South...
...It is a risky operation always open to criticism from one's colleagues who will have each his own opinion on some 26 September1980:533...
...His reasons would serve as a model for much theological writing and deserve to be set forth...
...Well, this is it...
...nery O'Connor could still say plaintively: "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...
...It tells us more about Coles than about HistoricalO'Connor...
...that is all...
...McBrienbelieves that an effort at healing and reconciliation can be made and should be made...
...Considering the complexities of O'Connor's work, and the peculiarities of the world she presents to a reader (what world could be more foreign to most of mankind...
...It is inevitable that McBrien's method will have some shallow spots...
...Lengthy appendices quote various ecclesiastical documents and some theological writings, the use ofwhich is not always apparent...
...Nor was she writing about blacks...
...If the Lord didn't get around to gifting Robert Coles with a sense of humor, or any comprehension of irony, Flannery O'Connor would be the first to understand...
...The key to his approach, as he states in the accompanying quotation, is the historical understanding of theology...
...I reject this temptation...
...Coles is not a doctrinaire social-worker-do-gooder...
...she understood and respected the elegance and variety of their defenses against overwhelming racism, but in her work they appear as a chorus at the most, more often as parts of the stage set...
...Nearly twenty years and many volumes later, Robert Coles was asked by Louisiana State University to give the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History, and this book is the result...
...He tries to show them that the pre-Vatican I church and the postVatican II church have a fundamental unity far deeper than the causes of division...
...and The Blues Brothers...
...Robert Coles worked with a tape recorder (in this book are recorded passages by a black nurse and a white itinerant preacher), a tool that Flannery's art never needed...
...I am compelled to suppose that only the hazards of publishing deadlines is responsible for the omission in the treatment of the virginal conception of Jesus of the best treatment of the question in English (and possibly in any language), the article by Joseph Fitzmyer in Theological Studies in 1978...
...It was a period of battles and crusades and a fair share of victories...
...The work is divided into thirty-one chapters u~ader five headings: human existence, God, Jesus Christ, the church, and Christian existence: ethical and spiritual dimensions...
...For his purpose he omits the conventional apparatus of erudition and limits himself to suggested readings from theological sources and theological writers...
...The Agrarians took their (various) stands...
...His insights are serious and thoughtful...
...I do not suggest that there is no room for a sketchy treatment of some topics which cannot be omitted entirely when the general public is addressed...
...Sisters wrote theses on the art and faith of Graham Greene and we all loved Ronnie Knox...And, as they say, so much more.., some of it initiated, all of it chronicled in much of the Catholic press, and in particular, in Commonweal...
...Malcolm Cowley's Portable Faulkner made a selection of his works easily available...
...O'Connor had the problems of any alert Catholic of her period, but she had also courage, a sense of humor, the gift of irony--and talent...
...29.95 JohnL...
...the book to which he has added a significant chapter will never be closed...
...But this was not her province...
...There is indeed a "mystery of iniquity," but this mystery is not rendered tolerable by the dualism implicit in a belief in personal demonic beings, a dualism from which McBrien has not clearly extricated himself...
...McBrien does answer one of the'reviewer's questions at the beginning of the book: why this book...
Vol. 107 • September 1980 • No. 17
