O'Connor and Spencer in the Shadow of 9/11

Abstract

O'Connor and Spencer in the Shadow of 9/11 Andrew Silver (bio) Flannery O'Connor in the Age of Terrorism: Essays on Violence and Grace. Ed. Avis Hewitt and Robert Donahoo. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2010. xvii + 217 pp. $45.00 cloth. Elizabeth Spencer's Complicated Cartographies: Reimagining Home, the South, and Southern Literary Production. By Catherine Seltzer. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Ix + 207 pp. $85.00 cloth. Avis Hewitt and Robert Donahoo begin their diverse new collection of essays, Flannery O'Connor in the Age of Terrorism: Essays on Violence and Grace, with the urgent hope that a contemporary meditation on O'Connor's violent aesthetics might help lead us from tragedy to grace after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. "Never in recent times," Avis Hewitt writes in his introduction, has O'Connor's violent artistry "seemed more apt than as our nation stood stunned in the aftermath of 9/11." Anthony Di Renzo promptly offers an unorthodox challenge to this hopeful project in the first chapter, arguing in his fine essay on apocalyptic violence that O'Connor's aesthetic might in fact share something in common with the fundamentalism of the 9/11 bombers. If the field of O'Connor studies "is to remain vital, relevant, and honest," he argues, "it must rethink fundamental questions about the violent fundamentalism at the heart of O'Connor's work. To do so, we must confront the shadow of orthodox Christianity and the potential madness in [End Page 147] apocalyptic mysticism—two things we have denied or explained away for the past forty years." Di Renzo's provocative plea that O'Connor scholars not "remain blind to or blasé about the horrific underside of O'Connor's traditional Christian symbolism" is, unfortunately, not taken up by the theologically oriented essays in the first (and strongest) third of the book. There's a generosity about these essays that comes from a deep, undisguised, and entirely refreshing love of O'Connor's craft, often wedded to a thoughtful and capacious spirituality. But this abiding love sometimes stiffens into apologia in the wake of 9/11: disturbing questions are occasionally acknowledged, unearthed, and promptly side-stepped in the interest of salvaging and defending the power of O'Connor's stories and the saving grace of her violence. Ralph C. Wood, for instance, in an otherwise compelling reading of O'Connor's work, dismisses unspecified criticism of its extreme violence by favorably comparing her work to that of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, where a little girl is "made to spend a subzero night in an outdoor privy, weeping and pleading for mercy from 'dear kind God.'" O'Connor's fiction is more humane by comparison, Wood improbably argues, because "almost no one in her work goes to death unwillingly." Unlike the open and unanswerable theological wounds of the despairing Ivan in Dostoevsky's "Rebellion," violence here is cleansing, metaphorical, and, as Di Renzo notes, packed with holy meaning. "A lot of people get killed in my stories," O'Connor famously wrote, "but nobody gets hurt." J. Ramsay Michaels similarly argues that "violence in O'Connor—and in the Bible—is a problem for some, not because it is gratuitous but because it is not. It has a definite purpose." The purpose of O'Connor's violence, of course, is to bring her characters to the mystery of grace—each tragedy a winnowing, a passion, a "covert rescue operation," as John D. Sykes Jr. puts it. The implications here for 9/11 and the "age of terrorism" are a little unnerving. The attack on New York's World Trade Center, Hewitt suggests, is the "large and startling figure" reminding us "that we are never safe." We would have been a better country, this logic suggests, if there had been somebody to bomb us every day of our nation's life. The defense of violence in this first section tends to ref lect O'Connor's own quarrel with her culture: we need to be knocked into grace because, as Christina Bieber suggests, "contemporary Western culture has devalued human life." Michaels argues that secularists flinch at O'Connor's violence "because of...