There is the book, which I'm currently reading. Suddenly (page 93) I realized she was portraying the vacuity of southern masculinity. The negative example, the anti-hero. What not to be. And yet you recognize it more than you would care to admit. He's also an atheist in the Bible Belt. He talks about having a church of the no Christ. Then he becomes Humbert Humbert. But then he has O'Connor's sexuality and wafts away, avoiding intimacy, pushes away the teen who tries to crawl into his bed. There's a kind of lack of intimacy in every character, nobody is really wanted or powerful in any real way. Haze is schizoid. Isolation.
Wikipedia writes: "O'Connor states that the book is about freedom, free will, life and death, and the inevitability of belief. Themes of redemption, racism, sexism, and isolation also run through the novel."
There is a movie. It's for a fee on Amazon Prime. The cool thing now is that when you search a movie, they will tell you where it's available online. Free on Netflix is best. I have found amazing things temporarily available during the quarantine. Amazon Prime has a treasure trove of interesting documentaries on Joan of Arc, Napoleon, Harriet Tubman and all kinds of Shakespeare. These turbulent times have gotten me back to reading the classics.
I still think Trump Virus will typify these times, but soon the Republicans can criticize someone who is trying to do something instead of defending a donothing. Some of their memes are so lame. I was thinking about creating a bad meme website. It's like some oblivious school kid stuck two pictures together and wrote some text for a 4th grade alternative assignment.
I'm not sure what to think about some of the canceling going on about Flannery O'Connor. She has characters in the south, which was racist, sexist, and other nasty things we imagine we are past today. I never got the idea that she was putting some idea forward. I'll have to read her letters.
It seems that she is like Graham Green, there's an underlying Catholicism. Wise Blood is like the hero in Thus Spake Zarathustra, went into a southern town almost. It is like Portrait of an Artist except the author is a believer. I read nuns teach Portrait of an Artist to show that even if you repudiate Catholicism, it's etched into your soul. Not that O'Connor is on the level of those two, a great thinker or a great prose poem writer.
O'Connor was a believer, and you could probably assume she supported all the status quos of the south for the great generation. I had 2 grandparents who lived in the south. My grandpa Bell was from NYC, the son of a German immigrant who scrubbed floors. He was a military man and where he lived was just another post, though he was retired. In his boredom of being retired, he wanted to spend time with his grandson. The next door neighbor had a child the same age as me. Roger Rogingcamp. Not sure if I spelled the last name right. He was a preacher's son. I was the son of a logic professor who bunked his father's baptism. His father, Grandpa Parks, was a minister. My father is always talking about god, rejecting god, but always talking about god. I'm an atheist, and I find it a rather boring topic. I tried to read Karen Armstrong's A History of God, but I stalled in the mysticism chapter, it want into old theology I wasn't aware of and somehow didn't expect. It was pure gibberish.
Wikipedia says FO'C writes with a grotesque style of writing. "O'Connor said: "anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.""
"evolve around morally flawed characters, frequently interacting with people with disabilities or disabled themselves"
Another southern novel comes to mind, A Confederacy of Dunces, which I've tried to read 4 times and can't get out of the first chapter. I really need to commit, like I committed to Wise Blood. I have to throw it down and walk away, but I pick it up the next day.
Printing this early so it's a draft in progress, beware of updates.
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