The Rising of the “Body, Glorified”

Christianity and Literature Vol. 60, No.1 (Autumn 2010) REVIEW ESSAY The Rising of the "Body, Glorified" J. Robert Baker John D. Sykes, Jr. Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and the Aesthetic of Revelation. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007. ISBN 78-9-82621757 -8. xi + 208 pages. $37.50. DonaldE. Hardy. TheBodyin Flannery O'Connor'sFiction: Computational Technique and Linguistic Voice. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1-57003-698-9. xii + 187 pages. $39.95. Lorraine V, Murray. The Abbess of Andalusia: Flannery O'Connor's Spiritual Journey. Charlotte: Saint Benedict Press, 2009. ISBN 1-93530216 -7. xxxiii + 233 pages. $16.95. Just when it seems that everything that can be said about the theological preoccupations and convictions of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy has been said, a new book appears that deepens our understanding with a new radiance-for example, Richard Giannone's look at Flannery O'Connor's debt to the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and Paul Elie's juxtaposition of O'Connor and Percy, along with Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day, in the intellectual milieu of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. Now John D. Sykes, [r., and Donald E. Hardy have increased our understanding of the theology of O'Connor and Percy with new vertices by which to see their convictions, while Lorainee V. Murray offers an homage to O'Connor about whom she is enthused and clearly wants her readers to be inspired. In Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and the Aesthetic of Revelation, Sykes takes up Lewis Simpson's idea that O'Connor and Percy replaced the aesthetic of memory, developed by Faulkner and others in the generation of writers before them, with an aesthetic of revelation.' Putting O'Connor and Percy into the context of the South that nurtured them and of the literary 129 130 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE modernism on which they cut their teeth, Sykes helps us to understand the spiritual grounding that they proposed as a means of restoring meaning, community, and resonance in contemporary life. Sykes reads O'Connor and Percy as deliberately departing from the characteristic themes and concerns that dominated the literature of the Southern Renaissance. Their stories and novels lack the pervasive melancholia, the unremitting despair, the generational sweep, and the Faulknerian degeneracy that typify so much literature from that period. Sykes sets out "to specify the nature of [their] new aesthetic, which has implication not only for the fiction of a particular region, but also for the entire modernist project" (1). He identifies two causes for the shift in O'Connor and Percy away from the tropes of Southern literature: the loss of spiritual grounding and a flattening of modern life. As the South moved out of the peonage in which it had been kept since the end of the Civil War, traditional religious beliefs and communal ties began to weaken. With growing economic prosperity, the region became more and more like the rest of the country, suffering the torpor of consumerism and the mindnumbing and soul-coarsening effects ofthe triumph of the commercial over the personal. For O'Connor and Percy, these effects were privative, that is, evil. In light of their religious faith, O'Connor and Percy, saw fiction as an instrument for knowing the true state of things; it was, for them, a mode of prophecy. Sykes says, "For both, the Gospel is the truth that was already there, obscured by the human penchant for indifference and self-deception. Fiction, for them, is one means whereby this veil can be lifted. And this pursuit of revelation as a subject naturally changes the role of the writer" (2-3). In Sykes'sview, O'Connor took art as a declaration ofthe immanence of God even in face ofthe arrogance and delusion of self-sufficiency. Percy, too, found a moral purpose in writing novels, especially as fiction tends to create a bond with readers and to set them, like his characters, on a quest for the Good. Drawing on the neo-Thomism of Jacques Maritain and other thinkers of the Catholic Renaissance, O'Connor and Percy saw art as a testimony of God's generous gifts of freedom and creativity...