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Introduction Avis Hewitt I The Trappist monk Thomas Merton once wrote that Flannery O’Connor does not belong in the company of Ernest Hemingway and Katherine Anne Porter but in the company of Sophocles because her work “serves to teach man his dishonor.” Our current cultural moment deals in clear ways with issues of dishonor , with issues of the place of the United States in the world community after the terrorist attack on New York City in 2001 and the nation’s response to it evolving into the Iraq War. If we look to our literature to explain our lives, then among American writers, Flannery O’Connor has shown herself one of the most adept at addressing our urgent yearning for literature to mirror lived experience—not only as an analogue to its particulars, but also to its principles. Never in recent times has O’Connor’s classic apology for the relentlessly recurring and seemingly arbitrary violence of her fiction—“To the hard of hearing you have to shout; for the almost blind you must draw large and startling figures” (MM 34)—been more readily acceptable or seemed more apt than as our nation stood stunned in the aftermath of 9/11. Few could miss, regardless of their level of religiosity, sensing that a great evil had been loosed on the world—again. And, of course, O’Connor assented to the notion of evil: her “subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil” (MM 118). Then, too, O’Connor’s era was itself a time of terror, spanning World War II, the Cold War, and the conflict in Korea. As several writers in this volume remind us, she wrote in her letters: “at night I dream of radiated bulls and peacocks and swans” (CW 1152). Yet she also asserted that grace is central to her vision, even though most of her characters and scenes stop short of providing illustrations of gracious living. Those few that do pray, “Jesus, stab me in the heart!” along with Mrs. Greenleaf, who in her corpulence lies upon the ground waving her arms and attempting to suffer empathetically with those whose troubles unfold in the newspaper clippings beneath her (CW 506). In fact, her prayer might be taken as a mantra for O’Connor’s project. To O’Connor, Avis Hewitt viii the fiction writer does not work with the goal of “uplift,” of demonstrating to a tired but eager populace how well they are doing, how “successful” they are. When Life magazine asked a group of promising young novelists in 1957, “Who speaks for America today?” she wrote that evidently it was the advertising agencies , a salty answer to Life’s complaint, woven between pages of commodity paradise, that the young Cold War writers in ascendance were not capturing “the joy of life itself” (MM 26). How true. For O’Connor, the joy of life could not be found in accelerated acquisitiveness. She makes plain—as plain as the winter and the winter-woman in Lucette Carmody’s sermon (CW 413)—her approach. She testifies in her essays that she “see[s] from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy . . . [with] the meaning of life centered in our Redemption in Christ” (MM 32)—a circumstance that renders problematic any paramount connections between the material acquisitiveness of the 1950s, the narcissism and hedonism of more recent decades, and “the joy of living.” For O’Connor, deepest joy lies in engagement with the Real. William Sessions explains the focus of O’Connor’s Catholic theology to be the Real Presence , which juxtaposes powerfully with the Lacanian notion of the Real as a terrifying exposure to nothingness—resulting perhaps in “no pleasure but meanness ” (CW 152). O’Connor dramatically supersedes Lacan’s limited thinking as she depicts our quotidian scrapes against ultimate reality. Her stories privilege the use of force and fearsome sundering as a means of moving characters—and readers—beyond mundane and stifling perceptions. Her truck is with New Testament paradox: we must be broken to be made whole. O’Connor famously confessed that nihilism is “the gas” we moderns “breathe” and that without the church, she would be the “stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw” (HB 97). But she did not stop with nihilism or positivism just because they were the most readily accessible informants for the self in modern culture. Her perceptions persisted depth upon depth into the Real until she struck upon “the...

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