[sitetest]

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

[Anamensis]

Perhaps it was the conceit of Miss O'Conner to hold up these pitiful characters and say they are a mirror of all humanity. They are a mirror of the religious view of humanity, which likes its victims full of self-loathing. For after all, people don't need "salvation" if they feel good and straight and whole already. Religion must tear down self-esteem, remove confidence and pride, and inject self-hatred and fear into the psyche to tenderize the meat enough in advance that when "salvation" is offered, the tortured victim is ready to confess to anything in order to make it stop. That morsels of kindness can be found in these wreck-heaps is akin to finding kernels of undigested corn in feces. Sure, you can, but wouldn't you rather just have a nice, fresh ear of corn? I would.