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| ISBN-13: | 9780802829993 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company |
| Publication date: | 05/02/2005 |
| Pages: | 284 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.25(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.70(d) |
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Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South
By Ralph C. Wood Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Copyright © 2005 Ralph C. Wood
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780802829993
Chapter One
A Roman Catholic at Home in the Fundamentalist South
Speaking magisterially for her fellow Catholics in the American South, Flannery O'Connor offered a startling prophecy at the close of a 1959 book review: "It is an embarrassment to our fundamentalist neighbors," she wrote, "to realize that they are doctrinally nearer their traditional enemy, the Church of Rome, than they are to modern Protestantism. The day may come when Catholics will be the ones who maintain the spiritual traditions of the South." It has become commonplace to note O'Connor's affinity with her Southern backwoods prophets and preachers, though her early critics assumed, quite wrongly, that she was making literary sport of them. Yet no one has explored the real depth of this kinship. Robert Brinkmeyer has argued that, while O'Connor's narrators assume a fundamentalist tone, she herself maintains a serene Catholic stance above them. It is not difficult to understand Brinkmeyer's embarrassment, his unwillingness to admit that O'Connor's tough narrative voice is really hers.
Brinkmeyer is not alone in finding it difficult to grant cultural standing to fundamentalism. The liberal Protestant theologian H. Richard Niebuhr, in his 1929 analysis of AmericanChristianity, devoted only three pages to fundamentalists. In standard Weberian fashion, he attributed the primitive quality of their faith to their agrarian existence:
In recent times the conflict between urban and rural religion took on dramatic form in the theological battles of Modernism and Fundamentalism. ... [T]he religion of the primitive agriculturalist is inclined to magic, to the compulsive spell upon the powers of nature on which the rural worker is so dependent for his whole economic existence.... Hence the faith of the rural community centers more in the appropriation of the grace of God that men may live in harmony with Him, while urban religion is more concerned with the gain of that same grace that men may live at peace with one another.
George Marsden has shown that American fundamentalism is, in fact, an urban rather than a rural phenomenon, that its conflict with modernism arose in the North rather than the South, and that it was birthed by legitimate concerns over scientific and historical challenges to the main claims of Christian faith. This is not to deny that most revivalistic Methodists and Baptists and Pentecostals living in the rural South during the publishing years of O'Connor's life (1948-64) were also fundamentalists. They, too, held that the Bible is God's verbally inspired, inerrant, infallible book - not only in matters of faith and morals, but of history and science as well. Yet their biblical literalism was taken for granted rather than pitted against an alleged enemy. Marsden wittily notes, therefore, that to speak of most Southern Christians as fundamentalists was to indulge in redundancy. There was no need to give them the name, since the South remained largely immune to the angry battles that racked the Northern churches.
Once the warfare ended with an overwhelming modernist triumph, fundamentalism came to be regarded as the worst of abominations. In high academic and ecclesial places, whether Catholic or Protestant, its adherents have been dismissed as rigid and narrow, as mean-spirited and closed-minded folks who bludgeon their enemies with their Bible. Most scholars and critics see themselves, by contrast, as enlightened and compassionate, as inclusive and diversity-desiring people. We thus give thanks that we are not like the fundamentalists, the one group whom everyone can despise without guilt. Many liberal Protestants, by contrast, regard the Bible as a classic work of religious literature, one sacred text among other kindred books, the Western equivalent of the Muslim's Koran or the Hindu's Gita. Why, then, would O'Connor cast her allegiance with the old-line Southern fundamentalists rather than the up-to-date liberals?
The American Way of Life: Materialist Individualism
The answer lies, at least in part, in the 1950s cultural circumstance of O'Connor's work. Jon Lance Bacon has shown that O'Connor's faith and art were not solely fixed on transtemporal truths, but that she was deeply concerned about the homogenizing ethos of the Eisenhower era. It was a time rife with anti-Communism and pro-Americanism. "The American Way of Life" became the talismanic phrase for hailing all that was virtuous about our system of government and for damning all competing systems. It was the first American age to witness the triumph of the automobile and advertising, of consumerism and suburbanism. The chief demand of this new era was for individual conformity and "adjustment" to fit the demands of the emerging consensus in both politics and religion. O'Connor was openly allied with other critics of this consumer-centered call for conformity and homogeneity: C. Wright Mills and Marshall McLuhan, David Riesman and Vance Packard, William H. Whyte and Reinhold Niebuhr. They all saw that the rampant new commercialism and commodification of American life obliterated "the possibility of some other reality than the material."
O'Connor protested against the postwar attempt to baptize individualist self-sufficiency and materialist well-being in the name of sentimental uplift. In a 1957 essay she declared that "there is some ugly correlation between our unparalleled prosperity and the stridency of these demands for a literature that shows us the joys of life." She also asked whether "these screams for joy would be quite so piercing if joy were really more abundant in our prosperous society" (MM, 30). Raising her voice as a bullhorn against the trumpetings of middle-class contentedness, O'Connor insisted that "Catholicism is opposed to the bourgeois mind," while also praising her own favorite art form, the grotesque, as the "true anti-bourgeois style" (CW, 862). In her very first novel, Wise Blood (1952), her protagonist is a hayseed rather than a suburbanite, but he announces the new American gospel with consummate complacency: "Nobody with a good car," declares Hazel Motes, "needs to be justified" by Jesus (CW, 64). Motes's broken-down Essex is indeed his deity: he sleeps in it, preaches from it, and relies on it to escape from all obligations that are not of his own choosing.
Among O'Connor's many satiric portraits of the bitch-goddess - as D. H. Lawrence called the deity of bourgeois success - none is more acute than the figure of a copper flue salesman named Meeks in her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away. Meeks is an apostle of hard work, extolling it not as an intrinsic good but as the way to get ahead:
He said this was the law of life and it was no way to get around it because it was inscribed on the human heart like love thy neighbor. He said these two laws were the team that worked together to make the world go round and that any individual who wanted to be a success and win the pursuit of happiness, that was all he needed to know. (CW, 365)
Meeks has also mastered the art of salesmanship by way of feigned concern for his customers. In his cornpone espousal of the utilitarian creed, Meeks also reveals the nihilism lurking beneath it:
He said love was the only policy that worked 95% of the time. He said when he went to sell a man a flue, he asked first about that man's wife's health and how his children were. He said he had a book that he kept the names of his customers' families in and what was wrong with them. A man's wife had cancer, he put her name down in the book and wrote cancer after it and inquired about her every time he went to that man's hardware store until she died; then he scratched out the word cancer and wrote dead there. "And I say thank God when they're dead," the salesman said; "that's one less to remember." (CW, 362)
While O'Connor joined the 1950s liberal critique of American materialism, She was not deluded about the genuine threat posed by Communism. Yet she was hardly a McCarthyite, confessing that the death camps could have been constructed in her own native Georgia as readily as in far-off Poland. In her story "The Displaced Person," a Polish refugee is in fact slain by the same sort of "good country people" who operated Hitler's ovens. Yet O'Connor refused to sell her work to Czech and Polish publishers in 1956, vowing to keep it out of "Russian-occupied territory" for fear that it might be used for propaganda purposes, as had the fiction of Jack London. She was also a close friend of Granville Hicks, the anti-Communist editor of Saturday Review, and she joined with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick in seeking to oust an alleged Communist, Agnes Smedly, as director of the writer's retreat at Yaddo in upstate New York. More revealing still is O'Connor's high regard for Reinhold Niebuhr, the American theologian whose understanding of human evil made him a fierce critic of Communism. O'Connor joined Niebuhr, not only in his critique of American economic and intellectual smugness, but also in his denunciation of Stalin's desire to remake the whole of humanity into homo Sovieticus, a creature whose abject political conformities made bourgeois Americanism seem, by comparison, to be liberating indeed.
The American Way of Faith: Civil Religion
O'Connor's critical independence - her unwillingness to equate Christianity with any scheme or program - led her to reject another consensus that she regarded as far more noxious than bourgeois prosperity and anti-Communist hysteria: the newly emerging American civil religion. Its intentions were no doubt good. As the sociologist Will Herberg argued in his influential 1955 book Protestant-Catholic-Jew, various representatives from the nation's historic faiths joined in an effort to combat ethnic and racial discrimination. United in their opposition to bigotry in all its forms, they agreed to ignore their fundamental theological differences for the sake of a common need. The cause of social justice came to be defined, however, as a larger good than the historic traditions themselves. Thus was the old civil religion of Washington and Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers reshaped into a new Americanism that could suffice quite well without any confessional particularities at all.
The assumption underlying the view shared by most Americans, at least at moments when they think in "non-sectarian" terms, is not so much that the three religious communities possess an underlying theological unity, which of course they do, but rather that they are three diverse representations of the same "spiritual values," the "spiritual values" American democracy is presumed to stand for (the fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man, the dignity of the individual human being, etc.). That is, at bottom, why no one is expected to change his religion as he becomes American; since each of the religions is equally and authentically American, the American is expected to express his religious affirmation in that form which has come to him with his family and ethnic heritage. Particular denominational affiliations and loyalties within each of the communities ... are not necessarily denied, or even depreciated, but they are held to be distinctly secondary.
"Each of the religions is equally and authentically American" - there could hardly be a clearer articulation of American civil religion: we are first of all Americans, and only secondarily are we Jews or Muslims, Protestants or Catholics or Orthodox. O'Connor discerned that something deadly had occurred when national identity had been made to trump religious faith. She proved to be recalcitrantly unpluralistic, therefore, at a gathering of eminent scholars, theologians, and writers at Sweet Briar College in 1963, which included Franz Boas, Stanley Romaine Hopper, and John Ciardi. "The Devil had his day" at this conference, O'Connor lamented, because the participants all sought to reduce specific religious doctrines to general human possibilities. "I waded in," O'Connor wrote to Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, "and gave them a nasty dose of orthodoxy.... I told them that when Emerson decided in 1832 that he could no longer celebrate the Lord's supper unless the bread and wine were removed that an important step in the vaporization of religion in America had taken place" (CW, 1180).
O'Connor's objection to a blithe indifferentism concerning truth and error, to an all-tolerant notion that one church or synagogue or mosque is as good as another, to a reduction of doctrinal and communal faith to uncritical moral earnestness, was also voiced by the Jesuit Gustave Weigel in a debate with the liberal Protestant Robert McAfee Brown: "The average Protestant seems to think it makes little difference what you believe so long as you are decent and virtuous. About the only faith he seems to demand is the one implied in the sincere effort to do the right thing." Whenever the choice lay between vaporized liberalism and hidebound fundamentalism, O'Connor chose fundamentalism, as we shall see. She heartily agreed with the Presbyterian theologian Hugh T. Kerr, who once said that it is easier to cool down zealots than to warm up corpses.
Not only did the civil religion of the 1950s melt particularized historic faiths into a thin religious gruel; it also made even the most secular Americans into allegedly religious people. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower once declared, "Our government makes no sense ... unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith - and I don't care what it is." Once the substance of "faith" no longer needs to be specified, as long as it is "deeply felt," then the public atheist has no more function and virtually vanishes from the American scene. In 1954, the phrase "under God" was added to the pledge of allegiance to the American flag, making atheists such as Robert Ingersoll and Clarence Darrow and H. L. Mencken seem like irrelevant figures from the remote past. Flannery O'Connor was not alone in sensing that something had gone profoundly wrong; so did her fellow Catholic and fellow novelist Walker Percy. Writing amidst the mushrooming American religiosity of the 1950s, Percy has his narrator and protagonist Binx Bolling confess his vexation that his own groping quest for God is out of kilter with the boosterish religiosity animating the great preponderance of Americans:
As everyone knows [declares Bolling], the polls report that 98% of Americans believe in God and the remaining 2% are atheists and agnostics - which leaves not a single percentage point for a seeker....
Continues...
Excerpted from Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South by Ralph C. Wood Copyright © 2005 by Ralph C. Wood. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
| Preface | vii | |
| Introduction | 1 | |
| 1. | A Roman Catholic at Home in the Fundamentalist South | 13 |
| 2. | The Burden of Southern History and the Presence of Eternity within Time | 51 |
| 3. | The Problem of the Color Line: Race and Religion in Flannery O'Connor's South | 93 |
| 4. | The South as a Mannered and Mysteriously Redemptive Region | 121 |
| 5. | Preaching as the Southern Protestant Sacrament | 155 |
| 6. | Demonic Nihilism: The Chief Moral Temptation of Modernity | 179 |
| 7. | Vocation: The Divine Summons to Drastic Witness | 217 |
| 8. | Climbing into the Starry Field and Shouting Hallelujah: Flannery O'Connor's Vision of the World to Come | 251 |
| Index of Names and Subjects | 267 | |
| Index of Scripture References | 271 |