Flannery O'Connor: limitations?

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the essay "Flannery's Kiss" by Mary Gordon (link here), which I initially found in searching for information about how Flannery lived out her celibacy, but stayed for that and other thought-provoking observations, which I recorded in my notepad. Here's one I found especially noteworthy:

O'Connor does not allow her characters to feel the pain of loss. They are denied the experience of grieving. I have often wondered if people are more comfortable with violence than with grief: violence is sharp, clear, bounded; grief can be eternal; it percolates and permutates. Its path is gradual and slow. It's the kind of thing that, as an artist, O'Connor can't do. She's no good at denouement, and she can't do the consequences of an act that follow onto a lived life. It is one of the failures of her craft; a failure unusual in so exigent a craftsman. Her stories, as she says, are romances, in the tradition of Hawthorne. She is interested in the climactic moment, not in the consequences of the climax. She is interested in redemption, but not in forgiveness. Consider the vast tonal difference in the two words: redemption and forgiveness. Consider the differences in temperature. Redemption is a fire that burns; forgiveness is a cooling poultice; it relieves. The sentence "I have been redeemed," is very different from "My sins have been forgiven." The first sentence speaks only of imposition; the second suggests agency. In Catholic sacramentology, sins can only be forgiven in the sacrament if the sinner asks forgiveness. As we all go on sinning, we must constantly be forgiven. Indeed re-forgiven. Redemption took place once in history; forgiveness must be relived. At the end of the sacrament of penance, the priest tells the penitent to "go in peace." This sentence is impossible to imagine in a story of Flannery O'Connor's.

I recommend the whole essay.

Edit: I find the essay more interesting in what it reveals about O'Connor; I disagree with some of the positions and opinions put forward by Gordon.

"Pious Trash" & Catholic Literature

I read the Flannery O'Connor essay "Catholic Novelists and Their Readers" from Mystery and Manners last night. I don't know if I'll ever be a Catholic novelist, but she sure makes me want to try. Check out this quote (emphasis mine):

For the Catholic novelist, the prophetic vision is not simply a matter of his personal imaginative gift; it is, also a matter of the Church's gift, which, unlike his own, is safeguarded and deals with greater matters. It is one of the functions of the Church to transmit the prophetic vision that is good for all time, and when the novelist has this as a part of his own vision, he has a powerful extension of sight. 

It is, unfortunately, a means of extension which we constantly abuse by thinking that we can close our own eyes and that the eyes of the Church will do the seeing. They will not. We forget that what is to us an extension of sight is to the rest of the world a peculiar and arrogant blindness, and that no one today is prepared to recognize the truth of what we show unless our purely individual vision is in full operation. When the Catholic novelist closes his own eyes and tries to see with the eyes of the Church, the result is another addition to that large body of pious trash for which we have so long been famous.

It would be foolish to say there is no conflict between these two sets of eyes. There is a conflict, and it is a conflict which we escape at our peril, one which cannot be settled beforehand by theory or fiat or faith. We think that faith entitles us to avoid it, when in fact, faith prompts us to begin it, and to continue it until, like Jacob, we are marked.

Another:

We Catholics are very much given to the Instant Answer. Fiction doesn't have any. It leaves us, like Job, with a renewed sense of mystery. St. Gregory wrote that every time the sacred text describes a fact, it reveals a mystery. This is what the fiction writer, on his lesser level, hopes to do. The danger for the writer who is spurred by the religious view of the world is that he will consider this to be two operations instead of one. He will try to enshrine the mystery without the fact, and there will follow a further set of separations which are inimical to art. Judgment will be separated from vision, nature from grace, and reason from imagination. 

These are separations which we see in our society and which exist in our writing. They are separations which faith tends to heal if we realize that faith is a "walking in darkness" and not a theological solution to mystery. The poet is traditionally a blind man, but the Christian poet, and storyteller as well, is like the blind man whom Christ touched, who looked then and saw men as if they were trees, but walking. This is the beginning of vision, and it is an invitation to deeper and stranger visions that we shall have to learn to accept if we want to realize a truly Christian literature.

Weekend Trips: Bibb County Glades, Andalusia, Trappists

I had a busy weekend. Birmingham, Flannery O'Connor's farm, a Trappist monastery. This could be a long post.

After work on Friday, I went to Birmingham for a Courage meeting and to reconnect with a friend. On the way, I stopped at Petals from the Past to buy some perennials to put around my mom's mailbox and to buy some American hollies for my dad (alas, they were sold out).

After Petals from the Past, I went to one of my favorite "secret" places in the world: the Bibb County Glades. Let me tell you about how you get there. The ordeal makes it obvious that, though it is public land, they really don't want just any schmoe going out there. First of all, you go to Bibb County in west-central Alabama, which just about no one has ever heard of (though it is pretty and has many horse and cattle farms and rolling, grassy hills). 

You turn on a county road and go a few miles. Once you cross a narrow bridge, there is an unmarked dirt road on the left amidst dense vegetation. You take the dirt road, which has mud puddles a foot deep and large rocks that you have to dodge. At the end of the dirt road you see a gate and the sign for the nature preserve. 

The "deception" doesn't end here. The trails in the nature preserve take you to relatively-boring (but pretty) areas along the Little Cahaba River. To find the Glades, you have to go off-trail. After going a ways through normal-looking Alabama forest, you begin to see strange plants you've never seen in the woods before. This prepares you for the sight ahead.

Before long, the trees disappear altogether except a few small cedars, and you find yourself in a rocky expanse of field  and slope, a sunlit oasis in the middle of the forest, aburst with blue, white, and yellow wildflowers you've never seen before in Alabama or anywhere else in the world. And that's why they make the place so inaccessible. It's a habitat for many rare plants and some endangered species.  

Bibb County glades. This is Amsonia ciliata var. tenuifolia, fringed bluestar.

The reason why trees don't grow here, and why so many rare plants do, is that the glades are outcrops of a kind of limestone called Ketona dolomite, which contains high amounts of magnesium, which most Alabama native plants can't tolerate. The plants you find in the glades have evolved to grow in this condition.

More fringed bluestar, Hypoxis hirsuta (common gold star, yellow), Minuartia patula (pitcher's stitchwort, white) 

The bluestar is the dominant species in bloom right now. The wildflowers I found are only the tip of the iceberg; the main bloom season has just begun.

On the edges of the glades, in the shade, you find an endangered species, found on only a few sites in Alabama, Tennessee, and Texas: the Alabama croton (Croton alabamensis).

Alabama croton, rare and endangered shrub, though now becoming more popular in cultivation. The leaves have silvery undersides and bright orange fall color. When crushed, the leaves smell like Granny Smith apples.

Alabama croton in the shade.

More of pitcher's stitchwort. I think these little carnation relatives look like baby's breath, popular in flower arrangements. They contrast well against the dark blue Ketona dolomite:

Pitcher's stitchwort

Check out that Ketona dolomite!

I couldn't resist one more photo of the bluestar. There were also many plants I just didn't have any idea about. I'll have to go out there with a guide sometime.

I got so carried away at the glades that I was sure I'd be late to the meeting in Birmingham. Traffic in Alabaster and Hoover was terrible also. Turns out the meeting started at 6:30 and not 6:00, so after I apologized for being late, the deacon looked confused and told me I was fifteen minutes early. Birmingham was lovely as ever.

***

A recent Catholic convert/new friend asked me to join him on a literary/religious pilgrimage on Saturday. We left bright and early, cutting across little towns in central Georgia with imposing courthouse squares and Greek revival plantation houses. We made it to Milledgeville, a former capital of Georgia, and home to Flannery O'Connor for the last years of her life, where she lived with her mother at a dairy farm, Andalusia, a few miles from town.

I had a serious attack of nostalgia at Andalusia. The house looked just as I imagined it, but the farm was much more hilly and forested than I imagined. A close look at the trees, and they only appeared to be 10-40 years old, meaning they probably weren't there when Flannery was alive. The nostalgia set in because of the way the house and land so resembled my great-grandmother's homeplace. The dirt driveway, the moss-covered brick paths, large oaks and the beds of old cemetery iris underneath. The house itself, though larger than Granny's, had the same feel, down to the doorknobs which looked exactly like Granny's.

Flannery O'Connor's peacocks were gone, but they had two new peafowl in a cage out back. Here are some photos of the place.

The main house at Andalusia, where Flannery O'Connor lived.

A copy of the Flannery self-portait. We asked how many of the things were original to the house. Though friendly, they young, college-aged docents didn't seem to know a lot about the details of the place, only giving a vague sense that most of the furniture in the house was original.

Compare:

Flannery O'Connor's bedroom. I noted the books on the bedstand were a Latin breviary, a Bible, and two others I couldn't identify (we weren't allowed to enter the room). Also in the room were her crutches, a typewriter, and a record player.

The house where the tenant farmers lived, behind the main house and to the side.

Inside the tenant house.

One of the out-buildings, but not the large dairy barn. Man, these buildings look just like the ones at Granny's house. And the whole place makes Flannery's stories come alive in a fresh way.

Compare:

Main house, view from the pond below.

Me. The house was pretty big. I love the big porches and high ceilings in old houses.

Compare:

We also explored a little in Milledgeville. We stopped at Sacred Heart parish, where Flannery and her mother went to daily Mass. It was a little Southern church with an intact (though now separated from the wall) high altar and new marble communion rails. A deacon saw us go in the church and came inside to talk with us for a while and show us around. He also told us to go to Flannery's cousin's house, who lives behind the old governor's mansion. She was the first female Harvard Law graduate, he said, and is a tenacious Southern lady in her 90s, who might even speak to us. (She goes to Mass at Sacred Heart). We were on a tight schedule, though, so we didn't meet her, though we did go by the cemetery south of town to visit Flannery's grave.

***

Next we went to the Trappist Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia, about an hour north of Milledgeville, and on the southeast edge of the Atlanta metro area. I don't know why I always thought this monastery was in the middle of nowhere in south Georgia. If I knew it was so close to Atlanta I might have gone before now.

I didn't feel like taking photos of the place, though it was beautiful, and they must make a lot of money because extensive renovations and property improvements were in the works.

There was a lovely magnolia-lined avenue leading to the monastery. I couldn't help make comparisons between this place and the Benedictine monasteries I've been to. First of all, the monks behaved differently. They neither spoke to you or made eye contact, but they would speak to a person if approached. (Perhaps the Trappists have the silence still?) All of the monks I saw were doing manual or menial jobs. Apparently they built the church by themselves, carting wheelbarrows of concrete one at a time. It was hard to imagine how long and tedious that would have been.

The church itself was a beautiful and high Gothic ediface, though images and ornaments inside were at a bare minimum, reserved for the area immediately surrounding the tabernacle, as one might expect from the Cistercians. The walls and columns were bare white concrete, and a simple roof of wood. There were many windows allowing in a lot of light, of blue stained glass of abstract pattern.

We joined them for vespers, which was nearly identical to vespers with the Benedictines, although they did not allow visitors to sit in choir, and we were only able to listen to it without participating.

The front door of the church was a Holy Door for the year of mercy. We saw plumes of smoke from around the corner. I thought it was a charcoal grill, but it turned out to be some rough looking people smoking cigarettes, drinking, and listening to rap music. You can imagine the contrast between solemn vespers in the quiet church and this scene right outside. I'm thinking the Trappists may have been hosting a rehab program. These people looked really rough.

We stopped near Atlanta and ate low country food. It was good.

***

On Sunday I made more cornbread. This time I had a well-seasoned cast iron skillet. I used Alabama-grown stone-ground coarse white cornmeal, which I bought in Birmingham, and a little bit of barley flour for a boost of fiber. This time the loaf fell right out of the skillet, and the barley flour, though only a tiny amount, gave the cornbread a very smooth, almost creamy texture, that contrasted well with the grittiness of the cornmeal. And, I used real Irish butter and bacon grease. The flavor was amazing. I made it a meal.

Fell right out of the skillet.