Flannery O'Connor in the Age of Terrorism: Essays on Violence and Grace (review)

It is almost embarrassing to admit, having now read the essays collected in Flannery O'Connor in the Age of Terrorism, that I failed in my previous estimations of O'Connor to acknowledge that she was very much a war-time author. She lived in an age that co-editor Avis Hewitt reminds us "was itself a time of terror, spanning World War II, the Cold War, and the conflict in Korea" (vii). I mentally relegated O'Connor to an idyllic Milledgeville farmhouse surrounded by peacocks and supposed her imaginative spectrum of concern to begin at some southern pulpit and to extend no further than the Mason-Dixon Line. But this collection reminds readers like me that she was a writer haunted by the Cold War specter of nuclear annihilation, a writer who confessed that "at night I dream of radiated bulls and peacocks and swans" (vii), and it offers ways of reading, connecting, and theorizing O'Connor's violence that resonate in our current haunted age.

Nearly all of the sixteen contributors seem to hold some degree of eminence in the field of O'Connor studies. In addition to co-editing the collection, Hewitt helped organize the conference "Flannery O'Connor in the Age of Terrorism" in 2006 and he edits Cheers! The Flannery O'Connor Newsletter. Other contributors include: editor of the Flannery O'Connor Review, Marshall Bruce Gentry; "friend, correspondent, and frequent visitor" (262) of O'Connor's, W.A. Sessions; and other authors of books and articles about O'Connor and her work. Co-editor Robert Donahoo, who is also President of the Flannery O'Connor Society, rounds out the collection with a survey of past approaches to O'Connor scholarship and a motion to move forward in an "attempt to stop reading O'Connor according to polite and expected patterns" (247). Flannery O'Connor in the Age of Terrorism certainly takes a step in this direction.

Anthony Di Renzo's "And the Violent Bear it Away: O'Connor and the Menace of Apocalyptic Terrorism" was the right essay with which to begin the book. Di Renzo argues that critics have too readily accepted "the violent fundamentalism at the heart of O'Connor's work" (5) by not questioning O'Connor's own anagogic interpretations of it, and this cannot continue if O'Connor studies wishes to remain vital and relevant in the current age. In short, critics must question O'Connor's claim that "[a] lot of people get killed in my stories, but nobody gets hurt" (42). To this end Di Renzo "confront[s] the shadow of orthodox Christianity and the potential madness in apocalyptic mysticism" by tracing the history of the Book of Revelation from the initial controversy surrounding its inclusion in the Bible through the rise "of violent millenarian sects, and their brutal repression" (5–6). He confronts these issues with a sprawling, yet swift, history that spans thousands of years and converges on The Violent Bear it Away and Francis Marion Tarwater, who, damned by his too-literal interpretation of the Bible and by his pride, "resorts to down-home terrorism" in what he considers "a holy war against the mundane" (19) that will end in his destruction. This is all to illustrate that Americans, as inheritors of an apocalyptic heritage, need to understand that we share in Tarwater's dilemma and to ask how "a secular democracy with a strong Christian tradition [can] define and defend itself without resorting to a self-destructive crusade" (21).

I initially thought John D. Sykes Jr.'s contribution, "How the Symbol Means: Deferral Vs. Confrontation in The Sound and the Fury and 'The Artificial Nigger,'" to be something of a square peg in a rounded collection. While Sykes's comparison of Faulkner's and O'Connor's use of symbols as an example of O'Connor's "peculiar position in regard...