Flannery O'Connor by Jean Cash Return to Good and Evil by Henry T Edmondson III
Russello, Gerald J
SEER FROM MILLEDGEVILLE Flanncry O'Connor A Life Jean Cash University of Tennessee Press, $30,376 pp. Return to Good and Evil Flannery O'Connor's Response to Nihilism Henry T. Edmondson...
...She gives none of these books to Singleton...
...And her unique perspective that the mission of a Catholic writer was primarily to write for non-Christians changed the way Catholic authors practiced their art...
...There are important chapters on O'Connor's years at Iowa, which she attended from 1945 to 1948, and on the time O'Connor spent at the writers' colony at Yaddo and later with Sally and Robert Fitzgerald in rural Connecticut...
...It is a strange form of grace, featuring murder, sexual assault, and physical violence and generally unmitigated by happy endings...
...He also makes helpful connections between O'Connor's stories and her reading of Aquinas and contemporary Catholic intellectuals such as Maritain, Mauriac, and Bloy...
...After being diagnosed with lupus, the degenerative disease that had killed her father when she was fifteen, O'Connor returned to her mother's home in Georgia in 1951...
...For example, in "A Partridge Festival," a character carries a copy of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra as a present for Singleton, the criminal she is visiting...
...Because of her illness and short life, her literary output was small...
...Her isolation was both a blessing and a curse, as Georgia allowed her to concentrate in a way that a more superficially active literary life in a place like New York might not have allowed...
...Her success at the University of Iowa's famed graduate school in creative writing introduced her to cosmopolitan literary figures such as Caroline Gordon and Robert Lowell, and brought her briefly to New York...
...Even her likely intellectual allies were disquieted...
...T. S. Eliot, for example, although praising O'Connor's "uncanny talent," said his nerves were "not strong enough" to handle her writing...
...The moral skepticism of the modern world has deprived them of the means to distinguish good from evil, even as they try to create new moral worlds for themselves...
...Nietzsche sought to accelerate that loss by attacking Christianity and in developing a philosophy that would go "beyond good and evil," at least for the select few who could exercise the will to power over themselves and others...
...Her unrelenting depiction of temptation and the darkness of the human soul was a sharp contrast to the usually didactic and comforting Catholic fiction of her time...
...She lived in the town of Milledgeville, under the care of her mother, until she died at the age of thirty-nine...
...Edmondson's more important point, however, concerns O'Connor's ability to portray the consequences of the human search for goodness without a belief in God...
...While her fiction was not primarily an apologetic tool, O'Connor was adamant that fiction be infused with a moral vision that could open the reader to God...
...In contrast, Edmondson argues, O'Connor advocated a return to good and evil grounded in natural law and the Christian revelation...
...O'Connor's fiction reflects the Au-gustinian injunction that God can bring forth good even from evil, what the critic and essayist Russell Kirk called "the grotesque face of God...
...The moral problems she confronts remain with us in our "post-Christian" world as much as they did in hers...
...Her spare style and striking imagery-ice instead of fire for the Holy Spirit, Christ symbolized by a tree-line- departed from the expected tropes of religious fiction, which she called the "usual junk...
...Gerald J. Russello The action of grace in territory held largely by the devil" was how Flannery O'Connor described her fiction...
...Her efforts were often bewildering to sophisticated readers and to those she called the "hairdryer set," who perhaps expected something different from a soft-spoken unmarried Catholic woman from the South...
...Return to Good and Evil Flannery O'Connor's Response to Nihilism Henry T. Edmondson III Lexington Books, $24.95,224 pp...
...They remained her intellectual links to the world outside Milledgeville...
...Organized into chapters dealing with Wise Blood and a number of her most important stories, Edmondson examines both O'Connor's unique style, including her use of the "grotesque" as a narrative tool, and the themes of mystery, suffering, and redemption that suffuse her work...
...She was born Mary Flannery O'Connor in 1925, to a Savannah family...
...Jean Cash sets the spare events of O'Connor's life into a richer context in this well-researched study, the first full-length O'Connor biography...
...Perhaps it does, but it is worth noting that the character also carries a book of poetry and Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses...
...While true in a general way-as a philosophically informed Catholic, O'Connor would have no use for the Nietzschean "Overman"-specific instances of her refuting Nietzsche are sparse...
...We have only two novels (Wise Blood [1952] and The Violent Bear It Away [1960]), a clutch of highly polished short stories, a number of addresses and essays collected as Mystery and Manners, and The Habit of Being, a collection of letters...
...Equally valuable are Cash's discussions of O'Connor's education and her relationship with her mother...
...We also get a delightful window into a literary world now gone, in which O'Connor could publish stories in both Partisan Review and Mademoiselle...
...These experiences resulted in lifelong friendships with Lowell, Gordon, Brainerd and Frances Cheney, and her publisher, Robert Giroux...
...Nevertheless, O'Connor has become one of the most influential American Catholic authors of the last century...
...Characters in her fiction often believe themselves to be "beyond good and evil," but collapse when confronted by those who have affirmatively chosen evil...
...Both Nietzsche and O'Connor confronted a world losing its traditional faith...
...The O'Connor that emerges is remote but not isolated, brilliant, humorous, and, above all, driven to succeed despite physical and social obstacles, going so far as to drop her first name professionally to appear more distinctive...
...Gerald J. Russello lives in New York City...
...In Wise Blood, for example, the protagonist Hazel Motes seeks God through his "Church without Christ," but he is overpowered by the young, and truly evil, Sabbath Hawks...
...Edmondson writes that the story "teaches that the pursuit of nihilism will end in obscenity and that those who are drawn to its glamour will be outmatched...
...Similarly, the amateur atheist Hulga in "Good Country People" is mastered by the wandering Bible salesman, and her false sophistication falls away as easily as she removes her artificial leg, one of the story's powerful symbols...
...In Return to Good and Evil, Edmondson, a professor of government at Georgia College and State University (where O'Connor herself was a student) identifies O'Connor's opposition to nihilism, as represented by Friedrich Nietzsche, as an interpretive key...
...The evil characters use the moral agnosticism of others against them...
Vol. 129 • November 2002 • No. 20
