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2. Writing and the Catholic Body: Mary Gordon’s Art So to be a Catholic, or even to have been one, is to feel a certain access to a world wider than the vision allowed by the lens of one’s own birth. —Mary Gordon, ‘‘Getting Here from There: A Writer’s Reflections on a Religious Past’’ Mary Gordon has said of that marvelous pre–Vatican II writer Flannery O’Connor that ‘‘For O’Connor, the habit of art . . . began with the habit of looking. It was,’’ Gordon insists, ‘‘the peculiar habit of her genius.’’ Several of Gordon’s own critics have used similar terminology to describe the role of ‘‘looking’’ in her art as well. Some have made their references to highlight strengths in Gordon’s prose. Kathryn Hughes, for example, praises Gordon for her ‘‘minute observation.’’1 Anita Gandolfo values Gordon’s art for its ‘‘prophetic vision’’ and its ability to bring Catholic issues into ‘‘sharper focus.’’2 Others have been less generous, noting that Gordon’s preoccupation with looking at the world produces narratives that rarely move beyond an interest in superficial qualities. According to James Wolcott, Gordon employs Catholic imagery ‘‘decoratively’’ and is far too satisfied with ‘‘ticky-tack symbolism.’’3 ‘‘If we accept the truism,’’ as Gordon suggests we should, ‘‘that all writers are voyeurs,’’ then the ‘‘peculiarity’’ of O’Connor’s genius relates less to the fact that she looked at the world and more to the way she chose to look. One could say it that it relates to the ‘‘lens’’ she used. According to Gordon, O’Connor’s line of sight was directed by her life as a ‘‘passionate, traditional ’’ Catholic who scrupulously practiced her faith within a specific institution , the preconciliar Church.4 ‘‘It must be remembered that O’Connor was a strict Catholic’’ in a pre–Vatican II world, writes Gordon, one ‘‘who believed all the dogma of the Church and obeyed all its rules, including the one that demanded she ask permission of a priest before she read a book on the Index.’’ According to Gordon, when O’Connor looked at the world of 41 42 Writing and the Catholic Body the 1950s and early ’60s, she saw the Church as ‘‘a visible symbol of order,’’ ‘‘invaluable to her, particularly in the context of modern disorder.’’5 Although she could never follow O’Connor’s strict Catholicism, Gordon nevertheless would refuse to disparage that path. Part of the reason is what she knows from reading O’Connor’s own words: that her preconciliar counterpart never accepted the Church uncritically. ‘‘It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it,’’ O’Connor once wrote, ‘‘but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.’’ Gordon likes the quote and uses it in her essay on O’Connor that appears in the collection entitled Good Boys and Dead Girls. To it she adds another from O’Connor: ‘‘nature is not prodigal of genius, and the Church makes do with what nature gives her.’’6 Although the words provide an interesting counterpart to O’Connor’s orthodoxy, Gordon still does not give them the final say. Her essay on the writer from Milledgeville, Georgia, avoids the image of the author as renegade . Rather, it celebrates O’Connor as a Catholic whose ‘‘cardinal virtue’’ is her ‘‘courage’’ to resist easy explanations and simple categories. Gordon’s O’Connor sees reality through lenses that admit, indeed insist upon, a world that is never just one thing. For Gordon, O’Connor is a fascinating collection of impulses and motives: ‘‘funny, relentless, deeply touching’’; her prose is full of ‘‘irony and formality’’ and her voice is both ‘‘a deep pleasure’’ and ‘‘harsh.’’ In Gordon’s description these disparate, even contradictory qualities do not remain at odds. We can name them, she insists, for together they comprise ‘‘an edification.’’7 This choice of words constitutes something that, as Gordon reminds us, ‘‘Catholics used to say.’’ She borrows the term from a preconciliar world that she knows is gone. Yet she allows it to be the last word of her essay on O’Connor, even though the choice says more about Gordon than it does O’Connor, for it is indicative of Gordon’s own contradictions and the struggles she undertakes to understand and live with the way faith...

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