Flannery O'Connor (1925 - 1964) is a southern gothic writer.
Alice Walker grew up on the farm next to her. She went to Iowa Writers Workshop and spent time at Yaddo, but retired to the family farm rural Milledgeville Georgia when she found out she had Lupus. She grew up in Savanna, spent some time in Atlanta, even lived in NYC for spell. She lost her father when she was 12.
Wise Blood is a novel about weirdos and misfits, and the skulking presence of Christianity. I need to see the John Huston movie based on it. They picked him to make it because he was an atheist. He's quoted as saying after it was done, wistfully, it was about Christianity.
American Masters has a wonderful 120 minute documentary on Flannery. We're on a first name basis. These things are available in ephemeral ways, and go behind firewalls unexpectedly, so watch it if you like the history of American writers or are interested in well crafted art that somehow transcends. They want you to buy the DVD for $25, so they're priming the pump to get some reviews going. I'm not really an early adopter, and I don't like the idea of a taste influencer, because it's a quack job derived from modern society's alienation from oneself, but I say snatch this up! It's an opportunity. Access expires 04/21/21.
To cancel her for her racism, caught in her opinions in letters, is to miss her accurate portrayal. I'm a Buddhist who has a love/hate relationship with the south, but I absolutely love her crazy writing. In her writing she portrays the fantasy of white power.
Alice Walker says that nobody should be chained to the ideologies they were born into and don't even understand are part of them. In a way southern writers write about racism, and that mean that they're documenting it, and perhaps believe differently, if they could even examine their ideas. That's what's insidious about racism--it's an unexamined attitude.
Connecting the gothicism of Flannery and Emily Dickinson: I imagine them both with secret skeleton tattoos in very private places, and the thrill of unexpected horrors, the specter of death.
I learned about the letters to Erik Langkjaer. He romanced her and kissed her, but she was too shocked to kiss back.
She wrote a story about a girl who freaked out when a guy touched her fake leg. That sort of implies that when langkjaer kiss her and she was a dead fish, that she was shocked and inhibited, maybe she could of overcome it, but he took it as a rejection.
O'Connor corresponded with Betty Hester, who was discharged from the military for being a lesbian and went back to Georgia and worked in a shitty job and didn't express her sexuality because it wasn't safe, and wrote letters to people. Flannery accepted her. I want to read her letters now. A guy is quoted in the documentary asking himself, "where is this going," and being on edge, reading her letters.
More recent articles on O'Connor:
8/3/2023: Flannery O’Connor and the Devil’s Territory (source).
"...many readers have trouble detecting the Catholic underpinnings of her stories, since the plots feature drunkards, prostitutes, swindlers and cold-blooded killers. There are also horrifying moments, when people are shot to death, gored by bulls and run over by tractors. A man blinds himself, and a little boy hangs himself. Often, these upsetting and violent events happen at the very end of the story, which means there is no neat, sunny resolution. "
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