Cancel Flannery O’Connor? Why Stop There?

ARC Digital ^ | 6 Aug 2020 | Justin Lee

[Rummyfan]

If you’re going to Mao up the canon, don’t half-ass it

On June 22, The New Yorker published the execrable essay “Just How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” by Paul Elie. The essay is pure race-bait meant only to stoke trouble and earn its author progressive plaudits for claiming the scalp of a revered figure in American letters. The hatchet job even abuses its primary source, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s recent study Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor—so much so that O’Donnell felt compelled to savage Elie in an article for Commonweal:

Elie mines the book for what he refers to as “nasty” passages, removes them from the historical and personal context necessary for understanding them, and presents them to the New Yorker readership with little explanation, all as evidence of O’Connor’s American sin of racism. The problems with his essay are many. It is confusing, it is irresponsible, and it is an attempt to make the erroneous claim that he is the only critic ever to deal frankly with O’Connor’s complex attitude toward race. Critics have been wrestling with this since the early 1970s. Readers of Elie’s essay are never informed of this. There is, in short, nothing new or notable in what he presents.

The essay had the desired effect: Twitter immediately lit up with rote denunciations of O’Connor. Certain professors of literature suggested her work no longer be taught. The spineless Jesuits of Loyola University Maryland even stripped her name from a dormitory. In short, a mob of woke white people mobilized to “cancel” a disabled Catholic woman famous for interrogating and denouncing through art the racism she observed in her culture and in herself.

[Rummyfan]

Quite a list...

If you’re going to Mao up the canon, don’t half-ass it. Really get in there. Don’t rest until every last one of your heroes who ever thought a single thought on the wrong side of history is not only dead—but forgotten. And don’t delay: time is short, justice is impatient, and you have a lot of reading to do.

Or you could, you know, get therapy.

[FreedomForce]

Flannery O’Connor is one of my favorite American authors. Cancelling her is more lunacy from the Left. Over the past 20 years or so, I’ve really grown to hate those SOB’s.

[ought-six]

She was a great writer. She suffered terribly from lupus, but still put out some brilliant prose. The “cancel culture” is an integral part of cultural Marxism and political correctness. My God, how I despise the left.

[proxy_user]

Ha! Just wait until they get to Wallace Stevens....

[Savage Beast]

This is way past ridiculous. It's downright stupid.

Flannery O'Connor was the opposite of racist.

[Savage Beast]

Yes, Flannery is one of the best.

These people are not just ignorant. They're stupid too.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

I can think of nowhere in her writings where she demeans black people. In fact, blacks in her writings always are treated with respect. It is white trash who she really criticizes.
 

[fhayek]

Cancel literature. What a Maoist thought.

[MrChips]

So idiotic! The short story Everything That Rises Must Converge, one of her most famous, is the OPPOSITE of racism! The real culprit in the story is not the black woman, nor even the white mother irritated by the black woman. No, it’s the pompous and hurtful yet ever-so-liberal college-educated son.

[foreverfree]

When I think of Savannah, I think not of Miss O'Connor but of

1) the old city's unusual street grid with little town squares

2) the Georgia RR Museum

3) the now departed MiLB team (the Sand Gnats) (I watched one of their games and went to the RR museum, and drove around a couple of those little squares on my visit to Savannah 10 years ago)

ff