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And the Violent Bear It Away: O’Connor and the Menace of Apocalyptic Terrorism Anthony Di Renzo Mankind can’t endure the thought that the world was born by chance, by mistake, just because four brainless atoms bumped into one another on a slippery highway. So a cosmic plot has to be found—God, angels, devils. . . . People put bombs on trains because they’re looking for God. —Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum I “For [the fiction writer],” Flannery O’Connor said, “the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima affects life on the Oconee River, and there’s not anything he can do about it” (MM 77). A devout Catholic living in the Cold War, when Manichean politics brought the world to the brink of Armageddon, O’Connor often commented on the atomic bomb’s fallout on her imagination. Given her knowledge of the liturgical calendar and her eye for ghastly coincidence, she knew that 6 August, the date of the Hiroshima bombing, coincided with the Feast of the Transfiguration, the day Christ on Mount Tabor revealed his divine nature to his most intimate apostles in a flash of blinding light. At the Los Alamos test site, several Catholic physicists had compared the first atomic blast to Matthias Grünewald’s altar piece The Resurrection. Like her friend Thomas Merton, O’Connor considered the bomb a satanic parody of God’s power and a harbinger of a possible apocalypse. Today O’Connor scholars work under the shadow of another bomb. Ever since 9/11 revealed the murderous fury of apocalyptic terrorism, we have been forced to reexamine our assumptions about and approaches to her fiction. “Historical events have once again confirmed ‘what goes around comes around,’” Anthony Di Renzo 4 declares Michael Kreyling, who believes the War on Terror has returned us to “a Cold War culture of official dread, anxiety, and suspicion” (2). The fall of the Twin Towers marked the collapse of an old paradigm. Until then, we tended to see O’Connor’s work within its original context: a postwar America coming to terms with militant secularism, where the arrogance of science had marginalized orthodoxy, Christian charity had been replaced by welfare, and liberals pre-served evangelicals in formaldehyde. That context no longer exists. Instead, we live in a post-9/11 America of militant fundamentalism, where the arrogance of orthodoxy has marginalized science, the Gospel of Prosperity sancti fies a Darwinian economy, and evangelicals have placed liberals on the endangered species list. Flannery O’Connor’s fear that the Bible Belt would resemble the rest of the country was premature. If anything, as shown in a political cartoon popular after the 2000 presidential election, a map dividing North America into the United States of Canada and Jesus Land, the rest of the country has become the Bible Belt. Whether in the Ozarks or the Washington Beltway, a frightening number of Americans believe in the literal meaning of the Bible and consider the global war on terrorism a holy crusade, a cosmic battle that will end in the Second Coming. Once again, the world is in flames, and O’Connor scholars must have the courage to draw new circles in the fire. How do we interpret O’Connor’s disturbing and often violent work in these tragic times? What can her rabid preachers, berserk prophets, and eschatological visions teach us about religious fanaticism, political resentment, and apocalyptic terrorism? Too often we have treated O’Connor’s works as allegory or homily rather than fiction dealing with the problem of belief in the postmodern world. Neither a theologian nor an apologist, she was keenly aware how her grotesque characters are “afflicted in both mind and body” and possess “little—or at best a distorted—sense of spiritual purpose” (MM 32). “They seem to carry an invisible burden,” she admitted; “their fanaticism is a reproach, not merely an eccentricity” (MM 44). But a reproach against what? “Against the emptiness of secular humanism!” religious critics will reply. But O’Connor more often reproaches the pride, resentment, and vindictiveness passing for religion, the paranoia, xenophobia, and will-to-power fueling fundamentalism, here and abroad. We forget that fact at our peril if we insist her stories are hermeneutically sealed parables. As human remains continue to be removed from Ground Zero, we must go beyond even O’Connor’s advice to concentrate on “the actions of grace” in her fiction and ignore “the dead bodies” (MM 113). The...

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