I see no evidence of anything I'd call "grace" in a woman who churns out short stories wherein every character is so warped, damaged, and bent that when I read the story I think death would be a mercy for them all. I had to read some of her stuff in my undergrad years and just came away incredibly grateful that I wasn't raised Catholic. It obviously does long-lasting damage to twist a mind that hard for that long. Even as adults they have a Pavlovian response to anything that caresses the poison oak like itch coating their psyches from years of brainwashing.
"I see no evidence of anything I'd call "grace" in a woman who churns out short stories wherein every character is so warped, damaged, and bent that when I read the story I think death would be a mercy for them all. I had to read some of her stuff in my undergrad years and just came away incredibly grateful that I wasn't raised Catholic. It obviously does long-lasting damage to twist a mind that hard for that long. Even as adults they have a Pavlovian response to anything that caresses the poison oak like itch coating their psyches from years of brainwashing."
LOL I suppose the irony will escape you; but, your posts could have been lifted from the dialogue of one of the warped, damaged or bent characters in one of her novels that you so despised.
Sir, goodbye.
Dear Anamensis,
"a woman who churns out short stories wherein every character is so warped, damaged, and bent that when I read the story I think death would be a mercy for them all."
I understand your points about Miss O'Connor. When I first was forced-fed her work in college, it seemed abhorrent to me.
Of course, in paying attention only to the warped, damaged, and bent nature of the characters, one also misses the beauty and the response to grace of the same. In re-reading A Good Man is Hard to Find yesterday, I was (again) struck at how these "warped, damaged, and bent" characters were admixed with kindness, nostalgia, curiosity, joy, and other qualities.
Miss O'Connor certainly exaggerates the "warped, damaged, and bent nature" of characters, but perhaps she does so to hold up a mirror to the reader. Perhaps the revulsion we naturally feel is because we would prefer that we have only qualities like kindness, nostalgia, curiously, joy, and the others, and recoil in horror and indignity when the "warped, damaged, and bent nature" of our own souls is exposed to us.
However, it is the conceit of the current time to deny that we are warped, damaged, and bent.
sitetest
What I like most about Flannery is that she shows how mankind has lost its natural religious instinct to respect something greater than ourselves. And outlines how moderation or temperance have been thrown out also. She shows the continual drumbeat of western thought of divinizating man-- the religion of man as the new God. Everything is situational and pragmatic, and that Modern religion is de-mythologized, de-miraclized, de-divinized. God is not the Lord but the All, not transcendent but immanent, not super-natural but natural.
To me it outlines wishful thinking on behalf of the followers of modern atheists who champion "new morality," the subjectivity of Truth, the sexual revolution, and absurdity in thinking everything material.