Revelation

It’s easy to Ms. (n) Turpin: Here's the reveal, no spoilage, stubborn southern lady laments to piggies after surreal episode; some see vision as her coming into the light, others see it for fraulein's fraudulent mind or still not there yet spirituality (for sure). It took me a while (revelation!), but here's the kicker: It's biblical but not so much Revelation as much as Gospels. Even while first reading, I knew it had to tie to casting the legions to the pigs (and I was so so hoping literally so). Well what we have here is a lady with multiple multiple demons (legions), a slightly confusing or confused exorcism: the ugly girl, but consider how many early christians considered Jesus ugly to ordinary at best and isn’t the truth as show more they say ugly, who cleverly cleverly refers to Ms. Turpins demonhood as warthog worthy, and now we're off to the races. Time warp, Ms. T can’t wait to unload her demons vis a vis her “clean” piggies (which she makes sure of first, supersoaker reassurance) in a ‘pigstye’. So this “vision” is actually the reality of her prejudices in their best Sunday suits riding off into the sunset. One could hardly expect such “vision” to be commendable, contrariwise, likely to be quite awful, but isn’t awfulness awfully well concealed in some so called holiness. Whether these internal “demons” will be permanently exorcised is doubtful, but not the concluding subject of her story. So in fact, the subject returns, materially unaffected, to her, similarly unaltered, southern landscape and culture. Pigs fed for a day. show less

7/10

I've struggled with O'Connor's work: while she is an exceptional story teller, she also strikes me as an unrepentant racist, which -- to say the very least -- makes me deeply, deeply uncomfortable. Within the last decade, papers and letters have come to light which allow that perhaps some of us were not so wrong in considering her a racist.

I've had the same struggle, most recently, in reading through Hemingway's stories: there I bristled at his unkindness; here, I've become a veritable porcupine, and I may have to reconsider her value as a writer. To be made uncomfortable is one thing; to feel that she held these as the strength of her convictions, is ugly to the extreme. (It would certainly bear further research into the primary show more documents, for those who have the time, and inclination.)

Something to keep in mind when reading O'Connor.

O’Connor is now as canonical as Faulkner and Welty. More than a great writer, she’s a cultural figure: a funny lady in a straw hat, puttering among peacocks, on crutches she likened to “flying buttresses.” The farmhouse is open for tours; her visage is on a stamp. A recent book of previously unpublished correspondence, “Good Things Out of Nazareth” (Convergent), and a documentary, “Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from Georgia,” suggest a completed arc, situating her at the literary center where she might have been all along.

The arc is not complete, however. Those letters and postcards she sent home from the North in 1943 were made available to scholars only in 2014, and they show O’Connor as a bigoted young woman. In Massachusetts, she was disturbed by the presence of an African-American student in her cousin’s class; in Manhattan, she sat between her two cousins on the subway lest she have to sit next to people of color. The sight of white students and black students at Columbia sitting side by side and using the same rest rooms repulsed her.

It’s not fair to judge a writer by her juvenilia. But, as she developed into a keenly self-aware writer, the habit of bigotry persisted in her letters—in jokes, asides, and a steady use of the word “nigger.” For half a century, the particulars have been held close by executors, smoothed over by editors, and justified by exegetes, as if to save O’Connor from herself. Unlike, say, the struggle over Philip Larkin, whose coarse, chauvinistic letters are at odds with his lapidary poetry, it’s not about protecting the work from the author; it’s about protecting an author who is now as beloved as her stories.

from

"How Racist Was Flannery O'Connor?" by Paul Elie, in The New Yorker, June 15, 2020.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/22/how-racist-was-flannery-oconnor show less