Flannery O'Connor's Pilgrimage

IN1998, BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN allowed his substantial audience access to some of the ideas and events that have informed his singing voice, his composing mind. In Songs, he singled out a writer from the rural south who had died over three decades earlier—a New Jersey balladeer of working-class background wanted to pay his respects to a storyteller not exactly familiar to many of the millions who then knew his strong voice and sturdy presence so well: "At home before I was recording Nebraska, I was reading Flannery O'Connor. Her stories remind me of the unknowability of God and contained a dark spirituality that resonated with my own feelings at the time." A little further on, calling upon movies, he refers to "a world of moral ambiguity and violence." Indeed, the song, Nebraska, tells of "meanness in this world," even as the speaker (a killer on the run) acknowledges, "I can't say that I'm sorry for the things / that we done." Another song on the album, Mansion on the Hill, tells of "a town so silent and still," and of a father and son who "[p]ark on a back road along the highway side [in order to] / Look up at that mansion on the hill." Further along, industrial America is rendered: "Well they closed down the auto plant . . ." (Johnny 99). The speaker who carries us through Highway Patrolman, with its tale of lost, stray ones; and the speaker who addresses law and order in State Trooper asks that "somebody out there . . . deliver me from nowhere." Finally, there are those who hope for something better, the material transcendence a purchase can offer. In Used Cars, the speaker/singer vows, "Now mister, the day the lottery I win / I ain't ever gonna ride in no used car again"; and in Open All Night, the driver notes that, "This turnpike sure is spooky at night when you're all alone," and then addresses the yearning so many have for a loftier transcendence: "Radio's jammed up with gospel stations / Lost souls callin' long distance salvation / Hey Mr. Deejay, won'tcha hear my last prayer / Hey ho, rock and roll, deliver me from nowhere."

No wonder the poet who gives us, in vigorous American vernacular, those passing but ever so freighted moments in the lives of so many of us (our times of inwardness), turned toward Flannery O'Connor, her stories and her personal life: she who all along as a writer tried so hard to figure things out, the whys and wherefores of this life; and she whose musing and brooding spirituality started early in her life, as was also the case with The Boss. One can imagine her pinning with pleasure that title (its suggestion of a commanding presence) on one of her many characters who aren't shy calling upon others to do things, even giving them orders.

The Boss, whose summoning voice millions now attend, once was a youth eagerly, even urgently in pursuit of an understanding of this life's meaning—as was very much the case for the young Flannery O'Connor (whose grown-up writing voice would one day be noticed intently by a well-known singer). Indeed, a struggle for faith (or in the secular world, for a set direction or purpose) is often a struggle with oneself, with one's past interest in matters different than those now very much at hand—to the point that even with respect to the loftiness of faith, its arrival marks a concretely introspective turn in a person's life as well as a philosophical and ideological turn: a victory of seeing things in the immediate here and now over a longstanding manner of thinking felt to be comfortable, if not desirable. Yet, for some individuals reverential inclinations come early—to the surprise even of their church-going parents, who find themselves observing young spirituality firsthand.

Flannery...