(Download) "Carnival in the "Temple": Flannery O'connor's Dialogic Parable of Artistic Vocation." by Christianity and Literature * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Carnival in the "Temple": Flannery O'connor's Dialogic Parable of Artistic Vocation.
- Author : Christianity and Literature
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 215 KB
Description
Faced with a dreaded pilgrimage to Lourdes in 1958, Flannery O'Connor consoled herself by gleefully anticipating the conversations of her fellow pilgrims. They could not fail to be, as she put it, "professionally rewarding" (The Habit of Being 264). She considered her comedic art to be her vocation, and she tamed neither her tongue nor her wild imagination in pursuing it. She dismissed edifying fiction like Cardinal Spellman's The Foundling for "tidy[ing] up reality" (HB 177). Self-consciously religious fiction she called a "smoothing-down" (Collected Works 830) that distorted reality and violated the demands of art. "Stories of pious children tend to be false" she wrote in her preface to "A Memoir of Mary Ann" (CW 822), and she peopled her fiction with impudent, even vicious, brats typically locked in mortal combat with domineering elders. O'Connor intended for her outrageous art to shock, perhaps even to scandalize her readers, but she repeatedly defended the comic mode as a fitting vehicle for prophetic vision. She went so far as to claim that she looked for the "will of God through the laws and limitations" of her own art (CW 812). What God seems to have willed for O'Connor was an acid-tongued species of comic-prophetic writing that operates by unveiling human malice in unlikely characters, especially children. Readers familiar with O'Connor's letters know the pleasure she took in portraying herself as a socially challenged curmudgeon known for her vernacular reductions of academic cant and her delight in the ludicrous aspects of her fellow humans. Her sole function at her mother's social gatherings, she said, was to cover the stain on the couch. In her letters she spoofed her significant theological learning by calling herself a "hillbilly Thomist" (HB 81), and she memorialized her social awkwardness among the artsy set at Mary McCarthy's sophisticated New York dinner party by telling the story of how gracelessly she blurted out her belief in transubstantiation: "Well, if it [the Eucharist]'s a symbol, to hell with it" (HB 125). The staunchly Catholic persona of the letters is nowhere to be found in her fiction, of course, but in the 1954 story, "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" O'Connor makes a rare departure from custom. In the unnamed adolescent protagonist she traces, not very obliquely, the lineaments of the O'Connor of the letters. The story can be read, in fact, as a wry (if cartoon-like) portrait of the artist.