I've been meaning to write something about Flannery O'Connor for a while and yesterday gave me occasion to do just that. Part of what prevented me from writing on her sooner was that I felt overwhelmed by the volume and variety of issues that her writing helped to recast. I considered using O'Connor's work as a pointed critique of the misguided moral concern that seems to have befallen the conservative Mennonites of southern Manitoba; I also considered placing her in a larger tradition of theological aesthetics. Perhaps those projects will resurface at some other point in time. For now, here are some Easter-themed reflections on O'Connor's best known short story, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." I should also mention that this was largely initiated by reading O'Connor's posthumous collection of non-fiction writing, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. This was originally posted at A Catholic Commons.
In order to arrive at the joy and affirmation of Easter Sunday, we encounter the suffering and despair of Good Friday. It's not a pleasant thing to acknowledge, but grace and violence appear bound together at Easter.
Few writers are as astute at recognizing this relationship as Flannery O'Connor. Rather than a world of neutral surfaces, O'Connor's fiction presents us with a world that is irreducibly "grotesque." For her, the history of the South has made for an environment that is "hardly Christ-centered, [but] is most certainly Christ-haunted" (M&M 44). Her characters may not act like Christians, but theirs is a world which is divinely given, a world in which grace regularly emerges and disrupts. For this reason, O'Connor's fiction adopts what she has called, "prophetic vision," a way of seeing that paradoxically understands near things at a distance and far things up close. As she puts it, "The prophet is a realist of distances, and it is this kind of realism that you find in the best modern instances of the grotesque." This has everything to do with her view that art is incarnational. It is, in other words, ultimately about embodiment rather than abstraction, and its particular kind of embodiment is a deeply mysterious and troubling one.
I couldn't resist posting some of the highlights from my special Easter-themed radio show, which aired yesterday afternoon. If you've ever tuned in you won't be surprised that I've interpreted the Easter theme somewhat loosely, but, rest assured, there is some kind of logic at work here.
I started by pairing two songs about kingship. Together, I think, they produced an interesting tension. The first was a relatively straightforward folk-song from the Constantines' album 2009 album, Kensington Heights, called "New King." It's about the birth of a child (Webb wrote it about his friends having a kid), but the messianic tone of this song is pretty hard to miss.
Along with this, I played a track called "King Eternal" from TV on the Radio's debut album, Desperate Youth and Bloodthirsty Babes. Where the first track is about the promise of new beginnings, TVOTR's track is decidedly dark and apocalyptic.
Next up, the title track from Patti Smith's 1978 album Easter was too obvious to pass up. I was aware that it existed, but, before yesterday's show, I hadn't listened to it all the way through. It's a pretty stunning song, and I was quite impressed with the spoken word portion at the end.
After Smith's plodding Easter anthem, the tone picked up with an epic jam from 1989. From The Stone Roses' self-titled masterpiece, here's a track called "I am the Resurrection."
The last two highlights are more recent. The first, is from Blackout Beach, one of many projects for the brilliant Carey Mercer (best known for his work with Frog Eyes and Swan Lake). Released last year, his album's title (F*ck Death) might be a bit of a problem for some listeners, but I think it's a rather appropriate sentiment for Easter, and John Donne would probably agree.
Unfortunately I can't find a video for the last song I played. It was a discovered in the CJSR music library with the help of our trusty volunteer coordinator, and once I had the disc in my hands, I felt as though I'd been given a gift from above: something so strange, it would work perfectly with my show. Easterween is a concept record about Easter that was just released a few weeks ago. The project is a collaboration between two seasoned musicians, John Southworth and Andrew Downing. "Easterween," the album closer, is a hilarious mix of klezmer-folk and metaphsyical hoo-ha, making it perhaps the most fitting end to my show that I could have asked for.
If I actually had any listeners yesterday afternoon, I'm guessing they were pretty confused.
Milton is often chided for being squeamish when it comes to the subject of the body. Nowhere is this discomfort more evident than in the fact that his only poem devoted to Christ's Passion remains unfinished. Even Paradise Regain'd, his later work on the life of Christ, can only offer several vague gestures toward the Son's impending crucifixion. The Passion was begun at Christmas 1629, when Milton was 21. Later in his 1645 Poems Milton marks the unfinished poem's impasse with a statement of explanation:
"This subject the author finding it to be above the years he had when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished."
Thus, despite its failure, Milton still chose to include the poem in his first collection of published verse. Indeed, one does not have to look hard for poetry that fully invests itself in the suffering of Christ (Donne and Herbert are not far off); in Milton's own life and work, however, this failure to recount Christ's death shows that some of the best theological points are made in their absence.
The Passion
I
Ere-while of Musick, and Ethereal mirth, Wherwith the stage of Ayr and Earth did ring, And joyous news of heav'nly Infants birth, My muse with Angels did divide to sing; But headlong joy is ever on the wing, In Wintry solstice like the shortn'd light Soon swallow'd up in dark and long out-living night. II For now to sorrow must I tune my song, And set my Harpe to notes of saddest wo, Which on our dearest Lord did sease er'e long, Dangers, and snares, and wrongs, and worse then so, Which he for us did freely undergo. Most perfect Heroe, try'd in heaviest plight Of labours huge and hard, too hard for human wight. III He sov'ran Priest stooping his regall head That dropt with odorous oil down his fair eyes, Poor fleshly Tabernacle entered, His starry front low-rooft beneath the skies; O what a Mask was there, what a disguise! Yet more; the stroke of death he must abide, Then lies him meekly down fast by his Brethrens side. IV These latter scenes confine my roving vers, To this Horizon is my Phoebus bound, His Godlike acts, and his temptations fierce, And former sufferings other where are found; Loud o're the rest Cremona's Trump doth sound; Me softer airs befit, and softer strings Of Lute, or Viol still, more apt for mournful things. V Befriend me night best Patroness of grief, Over the Pole thy thickest mantle throw, And work my flatter'd fancy to belief, That Heav'n and Earth are colour'd with my wo; My sorrows are too dark for day to know: The leaves should all be black whereon I write, And letters where my tears have washt a wannish white. VI See see the Chariot, and those rushing wheels, That whirl'd the Prophet up at Chebar flood, My spirit som transporting Cherub feels, To bear me where the Towers of Salem stood, Once glorious Towers, now sunk in guiltles blood; There doth my soul in holy vision sit In pensive trance, and anguish, and ecstatick fit. VII Mine eye hath found that sad Sepulchral rock That was the Casket of Heav'ns richest store, And here though grief my feeble hands up-lock, Yet on the softned Quarry would I score My plaining vers as lively as before; For sure so well instructed are my tears, That they would fitly fall in order'd Characters. VIII Or should I thence hurried on viewles wing, Take up a weeping on the Mountains wilde, The gentle neighbourhood of grove and spring Would soon unboosom all their Echoes milde, And I (for grief is easily beguild) Might think th' infection of my sorrows loud, Had got a race of mourners on som pregnant cloud. This Subject the Author finding to be above the yeers he had, whenhe wrote it, and nothing satisfi'd with what was begun, left itunfinisht.
“Theologies” of Easter only do their job, perhaps by their very theoretical untidiness, by their capacity to point back towards the disorienting “He is not here” of the very first Easter witness; back to the confusing narratives and the frustrating impossibility of pinning down and defining “the” Easter experience. . . .
The cross ceases to be an ideological weapon when it is recognized not only as mine but as a stranger’s; and it is the stranger whom we meet on Easter morning. To stop with Good Friday is to see the crucified simply reflecting back to me my own condition and even to remember the crucified, in the superficial sense, can merely leave us with a martyr for our cause. The women come on Easter morning to look for the corpse of a martyr and the find a void. If we come in search of the “God of our condition” at Easter, we shall not find him. . . . Holy Week may invite us to a certain identification with the crucified, Easter firmly takes away the familiar “fellow sufferer.” It does not even allow him to be a consoling memory, a past hero; he is not here because he is risen, because his life continues and is not to be sealed off with a “martyr’s” death. There is at Easter no Christ who simply seals our righteousness and innocence, no guarantor of our status, and so no ideological cross.
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