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@joescarry
I embark today on a re-read of Flannery O'Connor's story, "A Temple of the Holy Ghost." It seems like an appropriate discourse to lift up at a moment when the country is confronting anti-trans and anti-drag hysteria.
(The first thing I noticed in my notes was a reference to Baby Ruth (TM) candy bars. Nothing is ever accidental in an FO story. The image above is from a '50s display ad in Colliers. What do you suppose she was driving at?)
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The first feature-length documentary with full access to the Flannery O’Connor trust, Flannery explores the life and legacy of the literary
This fascinating, NEW documentary about Flannery O’Connor premiered last night and can now be streamed at PBS. I think Flannery would approve of the production.
This is really really good. Got some good insights which I will post about in days to come ...
Emma Thompson in Angels in America
Threshold of revelation.
Taking a detour from Flannery O'Connor to drink in this amazing work by Tony Kushner.
Reminding me that the spiritual questions are not living in an isolated corner of American culture; they're prime time, baby!
I take very seriously Flannery O'Connor's suggestion, in “The River,” that there is a primal pull of water that tugs on our pre-intellectual minds. The scene in which the young boy, Harry/"Bevel", makes a beeline for the water is one that I personally replicated as a 6-year-old at a reunion picnic for our extended family in Pennsylvania around 1965.
I was fortunate to be whisked out of the water in time. The character in the O'Connor story, after bobbing briefly at the surface, surrounded by his plaid jacket like a great lily pad, was not so lucky.
WHY would someone who indisputably saw baptism into a life of faith as a good thing conflate that experience with drowning???
One possibility is that she wanted us to (once more) realize the enormous power involved. In a real way, O'Connor's entire oeuvre is a protest against the trivialization of religious experience in modern American life.
When I re-read Flannery O'Connor's story "The River" recently, I was struck by the way a tiny detail - a "half a package" of Lifesavers - was crystal clear in my memory. (Perhaps it was because of what it foreshadowed in the story ... )
The particular approach to salvation explored in this story -- baptism -- is one that can form the basis of a major chapter in any exploration of Flannery O'Connor's thought and works.
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Wise Blood (1979) dir. John Huston
Some preacher’s left his mark on you. Did you follow me for me to take it off or to give you another one?
The John Huston adaptation of Wise Blood was so great - watching it recently triggered a whole new deep dive into Flannery O'Connor's oeuvre.
Of the many great things about the film, the way it captured a certain kind of small city experience of contemporary Christianity really woke me up!
The Heshka image I shared yesterday put me in mind of this Roger Brown painting, If Christ Came to Chicago. That title is an allusion to the William T. Stead book of the same name published in the 1890s, centering on description of the Church that Stead envisioned in Chicago a hundred years hence. (I explored that in more detail in a 2014 blog post, written when I was living in Chicago and very active in church and social justice activities there. https://joescarry.blogspot.com/2014/10/let-the-church-out-of-the-closet.html )
The intersection (collision?) of the "city" and Church (and/or faith) turns up again and again in Flannery O'Connor's work.
I have come to appreciate her treatment of that more as I saw more and more US cities. I grew up in suburban New Jersey, and had occasional experiences of New York City; but there is an enormous range of flavors of city lying in-between those two poles, and I am only now grasping how perceptive O'Connor was about the nuances of all those places, especially when confronted by the pilgrim
Speaking of apocalyptic visions ...
This image (The Rapture by Ryan Heshka) graces the cover of the book by Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism.
It was in Sutton's book that I learned about the Scofield Bible - an edition of the Bible that popularized end times thinking (dispensationalism) in contemporary US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scofield_Reference_Bible
If I hadn't read Sutton's book and learned about the Scofield Bible, I would probably have blipped right over the name of Mrs. May's insurance-hawking son in Flannery O'Connor's "Greenleaf": Scofield.
The appearance of Scofield in "Greenleaf" tends to support the assertion of my high school English teacher, Mr. Foley, that one should never ignore the names bestowed on characters; they're always chosen for a reason! (And that's especially true in the works of Flannery O'Connor .... )
And while we're on the subject of “The Enduring Chill” ...
This is my sketch of the "death vision."
As I look back through my sketches and notes relating to various Flannery O'Connor stories, I'm struck by how many visions are in the stories, and how much more I get out of the story when I am able to devote time to the visions, and really visualize them.
Paying attention to divine visions is not something that was given much emphasis in my formation as a person of faith. Turning to it now provides good food for thought.
Ominous conclusion to “The Enduring Chill” …
( ... speaking of eerie visual phenomena in the works of Flannery O'Connor ... )
(This is the kind of detail I used to just "blip" over, until I forced myself to start paying attention to all the strange visual descriptions in FO's work, and even making a picture for myself if I was having trouble visualizing it.)
"A blinding red-gold sun moved serenely from under a purple cloud. Below it the treeline was black against the crimson sky. It formed a brittle wall, standing as if it were the frail defense he had set up in his mind to protect him from what was coming."
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Speaking of eerie imagery and the influence of ghost stories like those of Edgar Allan Poe ... how about the mark on the ceiling in Flannery O'Connor's story, “The Enduring Chill”?
It "had been there since his childhood" ... was it an omen of ill-fortune? or a grace-bestowing dove?
Like a Poe story that builds inexorably toward its singular climax, this story concludes, "the Holy Ghost, emblazoned in ice instead of fire, continued, implacable, to descend."
(Jump-scare warning)
Animated short inspired by Stephen Gammell's artwork in 'Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.'
Not adapted from any of the stories, but an exploration of the style.
While we're on the subject of terrifying stories, Poe, and graphic depictions thereof, and their relation to the works of Flannery O'Connor: the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series is much beloved in our family.
My daughter and I used to sit together in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago and read these stories. She was about 8 at the time, and we took this project very seriously. We would begin by giving each story a prospective "scariness" rating - two actually: one based on the story title, and one based on the graphic. Then we would read the story, and add a third rating - how scary was the story actually turn out to be? Much discussion ensued of how the elements of the story worked together. (We're talking real scary story connoisseurship.)
One key finding: the images alone were worth the price of the book.
Maybe Stephen Gammell is "the one" we need to do the graphic version of the Flannery O'Connor oeuvre - at least part of it?
‘The Tell Tale Heart’
by Andrew Mar
“Ha! would a madman have been so wise as this, And then, when my head was well in the room, I undid the lantern cautiously-oh, so cautiously –cautiously (for the hinges creaked) –I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye”
Edgar Allan Poe, 1843
I spent a long time trying to find the anthology of illustrated mystery stories I read as a boy in the 1960s - an anthology that included "The Tell-Tale Heart." This illustration comes the closest to capturing the feeling of the TTH illustration I remember (though that one was a rough pen and ink version). Along the way I discovered the massive body of illustration that has been done on the basis of this one story.
I'm stuck on Poe because I discovered one reference to Poe in Flannery O'Connor's letters (The Habit Of Being). In the course of summarizing her youth reading experiences, she refers to a collection of Poe stories -- which she characterizes as "Slop with a capital S." Well ... that would seem to call into question my sense that her story "Wildcat" is an homage to Poe. It also echoes my own feeling, as I emerged from adolescence and began to seek out more and more "sophisticated" literature, that the only appropriate posture was to look back on those Poe (and other) mystery stories that I had read as primitive at best.
It's been a long journey for me, re-orienting myself to EAP.
“My dreams were of the most terrific description. Every species of calamity and horror befell me. Among other miseries I was smothered to death between huge pillows, by demons of the most ghastly and ferocious aspect. Immense serpents held me in their embrace, and looked earnestly in my face with their fearfully shining eyes. Then deserts, limitless, and of the most forlorn and awe-inspiring character, spread themselves out before me. Immensely tall trunks of trees, gray and leafless, rose up in endless succession as far as the eye could reach. Their roots were concealed in wide-spreading morasses, whose dreary water lay intensely black, still, and altogether terrible, beneath. And the strange trees seemed endowed with a human vitality, and waving to and fro their skeleton arms, were crying to the silent waters for mercy, in the shrill and piercing accents of the most acute agony and despair.”
—Edgar Allan Poe
So ... I went back to my notes on "Wildcat" by Flannery O'Connor, and I found this notation: "Oh! This is certainly an homage to Poe!" (Which is a safe guess just about any time one is looking at a short story by a modern American author.)
I'm grateful for this citation, which sums up the sense of dread that I remember being conveyed in so many Poe stories (Masque of the Red Death, Tell-tale Heart, Black Cat, Fall of the House of Usher).
A quick re-reading of "The Black Cat" led me to notice that Poe's dread lived in a very circumscribed, humanistic, civil conception of our circumstances. Flannery O'Connor takes a leap into the great unknown with "Wildcat" - it's a great big stick-in-the-eye to the whole arena of eschatology!
"Wildcat": What's It About?
I'm intrigued by the new film project about Flannery O'Connor, Wildcat. Yes, of course we need an FO film! But why, out of all the works by O'Connor, focus on this perplexing story?
Having given it another read, I'm now wondering if FO wasn't announcing something about her program as a writer, in effect letting it be known that she intended to take on the most elusive aspect of the human experience - the dimension of faith and spirituality?
The fact that the wildcat is terrifying may seem to disqualify it as a symbol of faith ... until one becomes familiar with the rest of O'Connor's oeuvre.
By the way: it occurred to me to wonder, "What kind of 'wildcats' do they have in Georgia, anyway?" I was fascinated by this report from a few months ago that suggests that, even today, the question of "is it out there?" is a live debate in the milieu in which Flannery O'Connor lived and worked!
It’s a topic that gets people in our area talking: apparent big cat sightings, like panthers and mountain lions, in rural Georgia.
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Maya Hawke protagonizará 'Wildcat' película dirigida por Ethan Hawke
Maya Hawke interpretará a Flannery O'Connor en 'Wildcat', una biopic dirigida por Ethan Hawke.
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How convenient for people like me who are located at the Venn diagram intersection of "fans of Maya Hawke," "fans of Ethan Hawke," and "fans of Flannery O'Connor"!!! [art to follow ... ]
Elijah is taken to heaven in a chariot of fire, to his disciple Elisha (II Kings, II 0.9-12), 1956, Marc Chagall
Medium: etching,paper
Yesterday I noticed a mention in Flannery O'Connor's letters of how much she loved the work of Chagall. (But of course!)
I grow even more convinced that O'Connor's oeuvre requires a graphic treatment!
