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The Literary Life Podcast
Episode 276: An Introduction to Flannery O’Connor
01:30:17
This week on The Literary Life podcast, Angelina and Thomas bring us the first of a two-part series on the oft-requested, oft-misunderstood author, Flannery O’Connor. They begin by sharing their commonplace quotes for this week, which leads into the...
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- [00:19]
Angelina Stanford
This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the science, skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The literary life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Hello and welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford, and here with me is the man who is mysterious.
- [01:36]
Thomas Banks
Not a misfit, though.
- [01:37]
Angelina Stanford
Not a mis. Oh, phew. That was close call. The mysterious Mr. Banks. Not the misfit Mr. Banks.
- [01:43]
Thomas Banks
No, no, heavens.
- [01:44]
Angelina Stanford
You'll get that joke if you tune in next week. Where we cover A good man is Hard to Find.
- [01:49]
Thomas Banks
No, no, my. My sociopathic tendencies are mostly exaggerated.
- [01:54]
Angelina Stanford
Mostly. As your wife, I can attest to that. That's good. Most. Mostly. As you might guess, we are starting a new series on Flannery o' Connor. Today we're going to do an introduction to her, the world that she's writing in, the other literary movements, and address some of the concerns that people have, or I should say, confusion people have when they approach her. So we've gotten a lot of requests over the years for us to do a Flannery o' Connor podcast. I haven't done it because I have a Flannery o' Connor mini class that I have taught and is for sale in our store. And I thought, well, I don't really want to do something on the podcast that I've already taught, but as time has gone by, I thought, well, maybe we could just do one story. We could do an introduction to her and then next week we do just one story. And that would give people a little taste and if they want to go deeper, they can purchase the class. So you'll hear me talk about the class here or there, but these, you know, these are standalone episodes and these, these should orient you to make sense of her work. But should any of you decide, okay, I'm in love, I'm smitten. This woman is it. Or I want to go deeper. I have a lot of resources. We'll mention some resources today. And then of course, the class, which I called the Redemptive vision of Flannery O' Connor.
- [03:10]
Thomas Banks
And that was what, five years ago you gave those lectures?
- [03:12]
Angelina Stanford
It was 2020.
- [03:14]
Thomas Banks
That's one of your greatest hits, I think it is. It seems like yesterday, honestly.
- [03:17]
Angelina Stanford
It does. I know. I pulled up the notes for it and everything. I was surprised to see how long ago it was. It was a very interesting experience teaching it the summer of 2020, because that was a particularly tense moment in our country with the George Floyd situation and.
- [03:35]
Thomas Banks
The riot when she was canceled as well.
- [03:36]
Angelina Stanford
She was canceled, but she's been brought.
- [03:38]
Thomas Banks
Back since then, probably by some of the same people who tried to cancel.
- [03:41]
Angelina Stanford
That's the way it goes, man. Time. The great judge has. Has smiled on her once again. So, yeah, so that's what's going on. And before we jump in. So as I said, you know, our business is the House of Humane Letters, Houseofhumane letters dot com. You can go there and you can find the Flannery OConnor class. But we've got some brand new live stuff coming up this summer. We have announced entire summer schedule and you can go on the website to see, like, the ridiculous, you know, embarrassment of riches that we have. Seriously, like, what a powerhouse. But I just wanted to focus on a couple of them today, which is the stuff that you and I are going to be doing. So we have. So first up, we have on June 3rd, another music webinar in our series with Karita Thompson. And I'm really excited about that. This one's called Nature, Myth and the Musical Imagination. You are not going to want to miss that. Uh, so you want to go to the website to get information about that. But mostly I wanted to focus on the two summer classes that Mr. Banks and I have going on through much demand. I am continuing with my series on Harry Potter with an all new class, this time on books four and five. So if you missed. Last summer, we did Harry Potter book one on the podcast. So that's available to you now. And it's basically a free class. It was very intense. Many people were like, this is like a graduate level class on Harry Potter. And indeed it was. And our thinking there was these books are. Well, I mean, it's the name of the course. It's the gateway to the literary tradition. And so I used those books as a way to open up the whole world of literature and to talk about how stories work as well as to bring out the many, many layers of meaning and the medieval framework that undergirds the whole thing. And then that was a really popular series. We're going to be rebroadcasting that this summer in conjunction with the class. So book one is free for you if you missed that. Then in the summer after the podcast, I taught books two and three. And that was a great success and I really enjoyed it. And so people kept begging me to keep going. And so I am. So this summer, the last two weeks of June, it's going to be a Monday, Wednesday, Friday class again. You can find all the information on our website, but I will be covering books four and five, the Goblet of Fire and the Order of Phoenix. And so I just as a little teaser, just as a little tease, I can tell you there's going to be a lot of King Arthur in this and we will continue to talk about literary alchemy and I will also be covering book four as a parody of literary alchemy. So we're going to learn all kinds of amazing stuff. And so, yeah, that's what I've got going on now. Mr. Banks, you've got a fantastic summer class and it is called Less Fun.
- [06:20]
Thomas Banks
Less Fun, probably less fun, but no. It's a combination of biography, social history, literature, revolutionary politics and a lot of other things. Five Victorian Lives. It's a study of five 19th century figures and the different aspects of the Victorian world which they themselves shaped and inhabited. So I'll be talking about the lives of the novelist and prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, the also novelist and scholar, George Eliot. Sorry, I'm thinking off the top of my head. Who are the other three? Karl Marx. Who needs no introduction. Yeah. So it's kind of weird to think of Karl Marx as a Victorian, but even though he was German born, he lived in England for the greater part of his adult life. And the medical reformer and philanthropist Florence Nightingale. And General Gordon of Khartoum.
- [07:21]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. So you are covering a politician, Disraeli, a novelist, George Eliot, a reformer, Florence Nightingale, an iconoclast, Karl Marx and a soldier, Garden of Khartoum. You know, I'm going to sing your praises because you want. You're amazing at biography. You, one person described it as you talk about these people like you're just sharing stories of your friends. And it really is like that's that natural. And you do such a good job. I feel like we're such interesting counterpoints because I always go big, big, big picture. Right. Like I go big to small, big picture.
- [07:58]
Thomas Banks
I have a more of a miniaturizing mind.
- [08:01]
Angelina Stanford
I think you start with the particulars and from that you, you bring out the Big picture. And so I think, I think that's fair. You're going to learn in this class about these individuals, but you're going to also learn about the 19th century. And that's going to help you to understand the history, the politics, the literature, all the big movements that are going on. So again, HouseOfHumaneLetters.com you can find out about both of those classes. And just one more because I got to give him a shout out. Dr. Baxter is back with us this summer as well with a brand new class. So I'm in June, Mr. Banks is at the beginning of July, and Dr. Baxter is going to be going every Monday in July in a brand new class called how to Read a poem like C.S. lewis and Fall in Love with Poetry. And so it's a class on lyric poetry, but it's going to be using as its lens the poems that have meant the most to CS Lewis. And we've had a lot of requests to, to understand lyric poetry better.
- [08:54]
Thomas Banks
Poetry is a very important part of his life, by the way. Yeah, when he, I think it's in Surprise by Joy. He's talking about the books that were on his parents bookshelves that.
- [09:05]
Angelina Stanford
The Prelude by Wordsworth.
- [09:06]
Thomas Banks
That's Wordsworth. You mentions Coleridge, Tennyson, a few others. But yeah, without, without poetry, C.S. lewis would have been a very, very much smaller literary presence.
- [09:16]
Angelina Stanford
I think a lot of our audience, I think, has been persuaded that poetry is important. They're just not really sure how to read it, what to think about. And I think this course is going to be very, very helpful in that. So. All right, that's what we've got going on there. Now let's get started with Flannery o' Connor by starting off officially with our commonplace quotes.
- [09:35]
Thomas Banks
Would you like to go first?
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Angelina Stanford
Mine's kind of long. You better go first.
- [09:38]
Thomas Banks
Okay. Well, I took.
- [09:40]
Angelina Stanford
Mine has a story, so.
- [09:41]
Thomas Banks
Oh, of course it does. Yes. Okay, so my commonplace is in Latin. I was reading this last year. I've been going back to some of Ovid's poems that he wrote in exile. Toward the end of his life, he got in trouble for, we'll just say, misconduct with a lady of the. Of the Augustus Caesar's family. We don't exactly know what it was, but there was a scandal anyway, so for his trouble, he was exiled to the coast of the Black Sea and told never to come back to Rome. Augustus Caesar evidently ensured that even after he died, Ovid would not be allowed to come back to Rome. So that's a Grudge right there.
- [10:17]
Angelina Stanford
The real.
- [10:18]
Thomas Banks
Anyway, so reflecting on the nature of suffering and human misery, Ovid writes, felix qui patitur quae numerare potest. Happy is the man who can number the evils he has endured. Ovid lost count of his son.
- [10:38]
Angelina Stanford
Man, that's. That seems like a play on Sophocles, the end of Oedipus Rex.
- [10:41]
Thomas Banks
Actually, it's a play on. There's a line in one of Virgil's Georgics, happy is he who knows the nature of things. Felix qui.
- [10:48]
Angelina Stanford
That's a great line.
- [10:50]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. I wish I could quote it off the top of my head in Latin, but I can't. Yeah. Felix qui rerum cognoscre causas. Yes.
- [11:00]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, you see, you did it. I know you did it. All right. Well, my quote has something to do with Flannery o' Connor and I thought I'm just going to jump in the deep end here. Flannery o' Connor is an author who can be controversial, I think, because she's misunderstood. She, she's writing in the south in 1950s and she sees, well, she sees a lot of things, but one of these things she sees, of course, is racism. And as a committed Christian, this is very upsetting to her. And so she's, she, most of her writing really, she's just calling out all of that stuff. But one of the challenges she has is that how do you portray characters being racist if you don't portray the characters being racist? Like, I mean, like, you could just come out and be like, well, here's Joe and he's racist, but I'm not going to show you any of that. Right. So she is, I mean, she's one of many writers writing during a very intensely realistic period. And she, their stories of her defending, even in, in her writing classes, you know, defending her use of realism with regard to the portrayal of racism. And you know, she, she basically said, this is how people talk, this is how people act. And you know, I can't call you out if I'm not portraying it. And she even said things like, you know, if you're offended when you run into this, like, that's exactly what I want you to feel. I want you to feel offended. Feel offended. The fact that people talk this way and act this way, you know, why aren't we all offended all the time? And so she's sort of an anti racist writer in that sense. But to somebody who doesn't really understand all of that, it can be a little bit jarring if you open up her works. And you know, there's racist language right there in the book. So I thought it would be interesting to give the perspective of a black writer to Flannery o' Connor. And so Alice Walker. This is such an interesting story. I don't know if you knew this, Mr. Banks. Alice Walker grew up in the same town as Flannery O' Connor.
- [13:02]
Thomas Banks
Middled.
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Angelina Stanford
Yeah.
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Thomas Banks
Okay. Wow.
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Angelina Stanford
It was an eight year age difference. So when Flannery O' Connor was 28, Alice Walker was eight.
- [13:10]
Thomas Banks
Okay.
- [13:12]
Angelina Stanford
And like, so Alice Walker literally grows up with like Flannery o' Connor looming over her. Right. And so Alice Walker wants to be a Southern writer. She's from the same town as Flannery o' Connor. And Alice Walker is, you know, she the author of the Color Purple and Other Things. But, you know, she. She is. Is she still alive? She may, she may be passed now.
- [13:33]
Thomas Banks
She must be very old if she is.
- [13:34]
Angelina Stanford
I should have looked that up. My. My apologies there.
- [13:38]
Thomas Banks
She's probably listening to this.
- [13:39]
Angelina Stanford
She's probably listening and saying, I'm alive. I'm right here. I'm sorry, I didn't know. But now I've lost my. Okay. So she goes to college to study literature. And Alice Walker, you know, she's coming up in the 60s and she's a progressive and she's a feminist. And, you know, she's obviously concerned about racial issues. Did you look it up?
- [14:00]
Thomas Banks
She is still alive.
- [14:01]
Angelina Stanford
She is still alive. My apologies. She is still with us. So anyway, she goes to college and she decides, I'm not reading any white Southern authors. Like, I have grown up in the white South. I'm not interested in hearing what white people have to say about the South. I'm only going to read black authors. And she very quickly comes to realize that's not satisfying to her. Like, she comes to realize that this is actually a disservice that she is doing to herself. And so she sort of finally gets to this point where she's like, I need to confront Flannery o' Connor. You know, like, and before I read you this quote, there's a. There's a really interesting story she tells of she and her mother going to visit Flannery Oconnors home, like after Flannery has passed and it's now like a museum kind of thing, and they're going to tour. And it's. It's such a fascinating moment because it's these two different generations, you know, confronting this. And. And Alice Walker is still in her kind of anti Flannery. Phase here, just. Just by virtue of the fact that she's a white writer and her mom's kind of apologetic as they're going through like, well, Alice, you know, that's just how people were back then and they didn't know any better. And she's like, of course, like, you know, this intense, you know, revolutionary college student. Well, they should have known better. That's not, you know, this kind of clash of cultures. But as she grows up and she starts to read Flannery o' Connor, she kind of has a moment and so she writes about this. This is actually a chapter in a book she wrote. So the book is beyond the Peacock, the Reconstruction of Flannery o' Connor. And if you have ever wondered why there's peacocks on everything, Flannery, it's because Flannery raised peacocks on their farm. Okay, so this is beyond the peacock. And the chapter I'm quoting from is the Alice Walker chapter. It's called Flannery o' Connor A South Without Myths. Now this is kind of a long quote, even though I've picked, and I'm kind of picking out different paragraphs. But I want to read you the whole thing because I just think it is so fantastic to hear Alice Walker talk about what does Flannery o' Connor mean? I discovered o' Connor when I was in college in the north and took a course in Southern Writers and the South. The perfection of her writing was so dazzling. I never noticed at the time that no black Southern writers were taught. The other writers we studied, Faulkner, McCullers, Welty, seemed obsessed with a racial past that would not let them go. They seemed to beg the question of their character's humanity on every page. Oconnors characters whose humanity, if not their sanity, is taken for granted and who are miserable, ugly, narrow minded, atheistic, and of intense racial smugness and arrogance, was not a graceful pretty one anywhere who is not at the same time a joke shocked and delighted me. It was for her description of Southern white women that I appreciated her work at first because when she set her pen to them, not a whiff of magnolia hovered in the air and the tree itself might never have been planted. And yes, I could say yes. These white folks without the magnolia who are indifferent to the tree's existence, and these black folks without melons and superior racial parents, patients, these are like Southerners that I know. She was, for me, the great modern writer from the south and was in any case the only one I had read who wrote such sly demysifying sentences about white women, as the woman would be more or less pretty, yellow hair, fat ankles, muddy colored eyes. Her white male characters do not fare any better, all of them. Misfits, thieves, deformed madmen, idiot children, illiterates and murderers. And her black characters, male and female, appear equally shallow, demented and absurd. That she retained a certain distance only, however, in her later mature work from the inner workings of her black characters seems to me all to her credit, since by deliberately limiting her treatment of them to cover their observable demeanor and actions, she leaves them free in the reader's imagination to inhabit another landscape, another life, than the one she creates for them. This is a kind of grace many writers do not have when dealing with representatives of an oppressed people within a story. And their insistence on knowing everything, on being God, in fact, has burdened us with more stereotypes than we can ever hope to shed. But essential o' Connor is not about race at all. Which is why it is so refreshing, coming as it does out of such a racial culture. If it can be said to be about anything, then it's about prophets and prophecy, about revelation and about the impact of supernatural grace on human beings who don't have a chance of spiritual growth without it. I remind myself of her courage and of how much in her art she has helped me to see. She destroyed the last vestiges of sentimentality in white southern writing. She caused white women to look ridiculous on pedestals. And she approached her black characters as a mature artist with unusual humility and restraint. She also cast spells and worked magic with the written word. The magic, the wit and the mystery of Flannery o' Connor I know I will always love.
- [19:25]
Thomas Banks
Well, that was all very well put.
- [19:27]
Angelina Stanford
I.
- [19:28]
Thomas Banks
There's one part of it I might take issue with since when a southern writing been notable for its sentimentalism. And I. I will admit that the greater body of southern literature is something I'm not deeply familiar with.
- [19:42]
Angelina Stanford
Well, not Faulkner, but maybe she's thinking Uncle Tom's Cabin.
- [19:47]
Thomas Banks
But that's not. Well, that's by a Northern, right? Well, yeah, maybe you could say that's kind of a honorary Southern book.
- [19:53]
Angelina Stanford
She might even be thinking of Gone with the Wind. I mean, she might be thinking of.
- [19:55]
Thomas Banks
No. Okay, I guess. Yeah. Actually, I wanted to bring up the history of the term Southern Gothic because I knew you will have some things to say about that.
- [20:06]
Angelina Stanford
Well, we'll get to that in just a second. I thought actually we might could start with what is our personal experience of like the first time we encountered Flannery o' Connor. What was your experience?
- [20:15]
Thomas Banks
College? I knew a bunch of people who went nuts over her all around the same time. And I picked up her collected short stories. At some point. I read. I didn't finish them. I. I think I read maybe half a dozen at most. And I remember thinking that was done with great skill. And that's also about the most horrible thing I've ever read. And I'm not going to come back to this for a long time. So I. Yeah, several years go by. I. Wise Blood, a friend of mine who knows her very, very well said Wise Blood is her masterpiece. And I read Wise Blood, and again, I liked it and thought, yes, this is.
- [20:54]
Angelina Stanford
I would take issue with that comment, but that's okay.
- [20:56]
Thomas Banks
It's a major work. It's a major work.
- [20:58]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah.
- [20:59]
Thomas Banks
And once again, I thought that, yes, this is a woman of frightening ability, and I just don't really enjoy reading her. And that's nothing. It's just. It's one of those. I think Flannery o' Connery is an example of a writer whom I admire. Admire, even if I don't. She's kind of outside the range of my readerly sympathies, maybe.
- [21:21]
Angelina Stanford
Okay, so, full disclosure, we did not talk about this ahead of time, so I did not know what he was gonna say, and this is the first time I'm hearing it.
- [21:28]
Thomas Banks
Let me qualify that. I really enjoy her letters. I enjoy her letters. I think she's an underrated nonfiction writer.
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Angelina Stanford
Oh, that? Totally.
- [21:37]
Thomas Banks
Actually, her letters are, I think, some of the best. And I really enjoy reading writer's correspondence. Actually, I enjoy Byron's letters almost as much as his poetry, so maybe it kind of figures. But, yeah, she's one of the great epistolary writers in American lit, I'd say.
- [21:56]
Angelina Stanford
But it's really interesting because I'm a Southerner, and you are not correct. And I often find that people who are not from the south really struggle with slander. Like, for example, one of the things we'll talk about is she considered her stories very, very funny. Like, laugh out loud hilarious. And a lot of people are shocked to find that out because they read it. And they're just horrified, Especially with the story we're going to do tomorrow. I mean, next week.
- [22:22]
Thomas Banks
Russians insist Dostoyevsky is funny.
- [22:24]
Angelina Stanford
Right. It's kind of like, yeah, like that. Like, you know, so many. So many people read and, like, this is just full of freaks and weirdos and, you know what's funny here? And then, like, Elizabeth Bishop, the. The Poet, you know, she said, I grew up, you know, going to Pentecostal tent revivals in Florida. I have personally met everybody in a Flannery OConnor story. Like, that's how I feel, too. Like, I live next to that person. I know exactly who these people are. And because, you know, the south is, in so many ways a different country, I'm hoping I can persuade you to. To the genius. I mean, you might. It might, like, be your thing. I mean, you. You and I tend to be drawn to slightly different things. It won't be a surprise to you that I like her because I clearly see the medieval tradition that she's working in and that she's trying to reintroduce in the modern age in her own way. I kind of put her in the same sphere as, like, Dorothy Sayers and the Inklings with, like, she sees the same sort of issues and is trying to jolt us out of that. She does it in a very American, Southern way, though. So my first experience was some of you might have listened last week to my literary Life Evangelina Stanford episode. And others of you might be. This might be the first time you've ever tuned in because you were looking for a podcast on Flannery o' Connor. But I told the story last time about the role that Dr. Marianne Wilson had in my life, in my education, and she taught a Flannery o' Connor class. So that was my first exposure to her, was in an entire class. And she had a tremendous impact on me. So for you, it was the letters. For me, it was reading her essays, Mystery and Manners. So I came up in high school in the 80s at a Christian school, and I've talked about this before that I think 80s Christianity is just awful. It's awful in the sense of, like, Christians just didn't know how to engage with the culture and had very deliberately sort of set up a subculture. So, I mean, I grew up where all the time I was told, well, you should like this album. I know it's a terrible album and the music is horrible, but it's Christian. Right? Or you should like, this movie, it's Christian, or this novel, it's Christian. And this very, like, well, it doesn't matter if it's good art, it's for Jesus. So, you know, if it's for Jesus, you can love this horrible art.
- [24:38]
Thomas Banks
The intention matters more than the construction.
- [24:40]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, I just could not deal with that. I couldn't deal with the whole, like, cheapness of it. I couldn't deal with the fact That I was in high school and people would wear T shirts with a giant Coke can on it that instead of Coca Cola, it said Jesus Christ, the real thing. And like this. Yeah, I, I, I thought that that.
- [24:57]
Thomas Banks
Was, like, genuinely horrifying.
- [24:58]
Angelina Stanford
And, and I just, I didn't understand it. And I liked Lewis and Tolkien. I liked that they wrote books and were published by regular publishers and weren't, like, a subculture of Christian publishing labs. Like, here's my book. It's good, or it's not good, and, you know, my intentions are irrelevant. It's either good art or bad art. Um, so I was really wrestling with that at a young age. So I get to college and I take this Flannery o' Connor class, and we start reading these, these essays that she's writing. And this was literally the first time in my life I had encountered a brilliant mind who is a Christian, who is wrestling with the question of what does it mean to be a Christian artist? And I just loved her, Loved her. I thought, this is, this is a woman whose mind I can respect. I appreciate how much she's thinking through this. So, yeah, she was a tremendous influence on me. It was very similar to what would happen later when I read Dorothy Sayers, the Mind of the Maker. Again, I see somebody wrestling with what does it mean to be a Christian artist? And both very clearly saying, you know, your personal piety or devotion or, you know, religious intention is not enough to make something valuable. Like, it has to be a good piece of art. Yeah, I, I, I, I just adore her. But you know what it brings us. Well, actually, let me, let me tell this story first. So before I talk about the different ways you can enter her work for the first time. So we took a trip a few years ago to Savannah.
- [26:27]
Thomas Banks
Oh, yes.
- [26:28]
Angelina Stanford
And we took a pilgrimage to the childhood home of Flannery o' Connor. And that was. Oh, that was such a treat and a highlight.
- [26:35]
Thomas Banks
And it was not my first time in her childhood home, but it was yours. But you knew everything already. And it was kind of amazing because you sort of took over the tour as I, as I remember I did.
- [26:48]
Angelina Stanford
And it makes me sound terrible, but.
- [26:50]
Thomas Banks
Oh, no, you were very winsome.
- [26:51]
Angelina Stanford
And we had a private tour, so it was just us and I. And I. So I felt that I felt the liberty to, you know, finish the sentences of the tour guide in my.
- [27:00]
Thomas Banks
Some monstrous, like, horrible crib. It was her baby crib that, yeah, it looked like it was designed to, it was like a miniature prison almost. It was kind of Like a chicken coop.
- [27:11]
Angelina Stanford
So exciting, because there I was literally looking with my own own eyes at all of the things that I had read about. You know, I. I got so. I didn't even need the tour. As soon as we walked into her bathroom, I was just losing my mind, like, because that's what happened. That's why I kept running ahead of the tour guide. Again, this was a private tour. I promise I'm not that obnoxious. But, like, when I saw the bathroom, I was like, that's where she sat with the Grimm's Fairy Tales. That's the bathtub where she read Grim and that she would. She would read the Grimm's fairy Tales to the neighborhood children who would then go home and tell their parents and the. Then they would call her mother and be like, your kid is terrorizing us. And we went into her bedroom and saw her collection, her and her child. I just love her so much in her childhood bedroom. Her books were Grimm's Fairy Tales and Edgar Allan Poe.
- [27:54]
Thomas Banks
Yeah.
- [27:55]
Angelina Stanford
And again, if you know me, I'm a great defender of Grimms. I'm going to be giving an Edgar Allan Poe webinar in. In September, the name of which is Edgar Allan Poe, American defender of the medieval imagination. Right. So she's. She's been being, you know, again, things are. That are misunderstood. We think Grimm's and Poe are just like, you know, weird and scary for the sake of being weird and scary. That is a horrible misreading. Like, there's something else going on and you can just see her, you know, being crafted like that is. Even as a small child. But the other thing that really, really just knocked my socks off. So I knew from studying her. I knew from all that I had read about her, of course, that she is a devout Catholic and that the Catholic Church and. And what it means to be a Catholic and the FAI of those things, I knew that that loomed large in her imagination. But when we stood in her mother's bedroom and looked out the window and literally saw the church, Cathedral of St John the Baptist, which we went into.
- [28:52]
Thomas Banks
And which is, by the way, if you're ever in Savannah, Savannah's. And Savannah is one of the most beautiful things in the American.
- [28:58]
Angelina Stanford
Shout out to Savannah.
- [28:59]
Thomas Banks
It's my favorite American city. Yeah. If you're in Savannah, just step inside the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. Wonderful church.
- [29:09]
Angelina Stanford
It's gorgeous and it's huge. It's a cathedral. And so her house is on the square with the church.
- [29:14]
Thomas Banks
Lafayette Square. Yeah.
- [29:15]
Angelina Stanford
And you look out the window and there's this huge church and it's literally like, just fills. I had such. I don't even know how if I can describe it. I had such a moment when I stood in that window. Because the way that the church just filled up everything and was over her, I thought, this is it. This is everything about her story that she sits under her faith. It is the biggest, largest thing in her imagination all the time. And some of you might be saying, I tried to read Flannery. Ok, what are you talking about? Her faith is in the story. Well, I'm. I'm going to hope to give you the keys to unlock that partially today and then when we go through the story. But that was just a huge, huge treat to go visit her. I have next to me my bun. I bought all kinds of things. I bought Flannery o Conor. They saw me coming. We bought books. I bought magnets, pins, a bumper sticker, which I don't have in my car because I don't actually put bumper stickers on my car. Instead, I have it in my office, but it's a bunch of peacocks. And here you have good narrator voice. Read this bumper sticker.
- [30:12]
Thomas Banks
I'd rather be reading Flannery o' Connor.
- [30:16]
Angelina Stanford
I love that.
- [30:17]
Thomas Banks
So one time, there's all sorts of. Yeah, Winsome bling one can buy there.
- [30:21]
Angelina Stanford
Okay. I got really excited when I saw this, and of course I had to buy it because I had once seen it on a car. I was once walking out of the store or restaurant or something, and I was getting into my car and I saw another car that had this bumper sticker on it, and I started yelling, this person is my new best friend. And I was like, I. My kids were so embarrassed. That's why I didn't do it. They were like, mom. I was like. I said, look, I was just gonna wander through the parking lot yelling, who's got the Flannery o' Connor bumper sticker? We're besties now.
- [30:49]
Thomas Banks
They're like, mom, Mom.
- [30:50]
Angelina Stanford
Don't know. So I didn't. That was a. That was a missed opportunity. But I was so happy when I saw the bumper stickers. Like, now I have one. Now I have one.
- [31:00]
Thomas Banks
So did this person think that you were, like, pursuing them madly, like, intending.
- [31:05]
Angelina Stanford
To actually meet the person?
- [31:08]
Thomas Banks
No, I'm just wondering what they would have been thinking. There's this mad woman behind me.
- [31:12]
Angelina Stanford
I've actually been in the car and I'm just, like, banging on it, you know, going full, like, you know, Fatal Attraction kind of.
- [31:20]
Thomas Banks
Ah, you know, I. I will admit I've actually done. This is something probably my version of my version of that story. This is one of those things I did which probably come across as just really, really weird. I was at this concert when I was, like, 18, and it wasn't anyone famous or anything like that. It was just a, you know, college band at a bar. And the guitarist for this band, it was. He was on a break, and he was, you know, holding his guitar, and he was, you know, drinking bottled water, and I was trying to make out what kind of guitar it was he was playing. So I walk up, you know, through the smoke in the bar, and instead of just asking him, like a normal person would, I just took his guitar away from him and, like, was, like, looking at it for a second. And, like, the weird thing is, like, I think he was so surprised that he just kind of stares at me for a minute. And then he's. After a second, he's like, hey, man, can I have that back? I have to go and play another set. But it was. Yeah, I just. No, it was just like, you know, one of those technical points of interest for me that I wanted to see. You know, I wanted to see. What type of neck is Les Paul had?
- [32:28]
Angelina Stanford
We're not going to talk about all, you know, the obvious, you know, list of restraining orders on both of us all over the country.
- [32:34]
Thomas Banks
Probably there's more than a few on me. Yeah.
- [32:39]
Angelina Stanford
All right. So a lot of people, they hear that Flannery o' Connor is an important author. They maybe even hear that she's a Christian. They open up the book, they start reading, and they are horrified. Like, worst case scenario, they're horrified, they're repulsed. They're like, this is not a Christian. I don't know what this is. This is disgusting. I never want this again. Other times, people are like, I'm not. I don't know what it means. I don't hate it, but I don't really know what it means.
- [33:05]
Thomas Banks
Didn't she write about nicer things?
- [33:06]
Angelina Stanford
That's what her mother said. That's a cool mother.
- [33:08]
Thomas Banks
That's really.
- [33:09]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, that's kind of.
- [33:10]
Thomas Banks
Oh, I didn't know that.
- [33:10]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, it is, it is. That's. That's coming up in my notes. Can't you write around about nice people sometimes, Flannery? And we're going to talk about, you know, her upbringing and kind of her life story here in a very short and tragic life, tragically cut short. But, you know, she made the most of the time that she was given, but we'll get to that in a second. But I have a lot of conversations with a lot of different people and try to figure out like, you know, what, what was kind of in their doorway for me. So I took this class and we read the stories, but we also read her essays alongside them. It was a very well put together class. And in the class that I teach, each story that we read, I have the essays to go with it and also a selection of her letters. So you actually get a taste of all of that and you really do get to know her personality and her sense of humor in particular in her letters. But so for me, it was the essays, you know, like, reading her talk about being an artist and what she's trying to accomplish, like, that really oriented me and that, that helped me to just really kind of fall in love with her and, and put in the effort to understand the stories. But other people have other experiences. So both Cindy Rollins and our dear friend, the late Lynn Bruce, for them it was the letters. Like, like you. For it was reading her collection of letters, the Habit of Being. Well, that's one of her collection of letters. There's more have been published since then. But you get a sense of her sense of humor. Lynn Bruce used to say that everybody should have Flannery oconnors letter on their nightstand. And that, like, her advice for, like, you know, the guide to Christian living is every night you should read one Flann Connor letter.
- [34:47]
Thomas Banks
I've never heard that before, but okay, that's.
- [34:50]
Angelina Stanford
It's such a l thing to say. So, you know, if you're somebody who has struggled, I, that's what I would suggest. And that's why in the class that I put together, I, I give letters and I, you know, I, I match everything up, the letters and the essays to go with the stories. And it really helps to give that larger context for, for understanding what, what she's, what she's about. Now we'll have a bunch of resources I can recommend toward the end of the podcast here, you know, if you're interested in things like biography and stuff. But before that, let's just jump in. So she's born in Georgia. Her name is actually Mary o' Connor, which, I mean, that makes me laugh. Like, what is there?
- [35:26]
Thomas Banks
Mary Flannery.
- [35:27]
Angelina Stanford
Okay, she's named after an aunt. The middle name Flannery is after her aunt. So she's Mary Flannery o' Connor. Which Mary o' Connor? Like, could you be a bigger Catholic? That is like the Catholic name she Goes by that name actually, till she gets to college and she decides she, she doesn't want to just be another Irish Catholic. And so she, she, she takes her middle name to kind of give her a little bit of individuality.
- [35:49]
Thomas Banks
I wanted to ask because I don't actually know, though I have read a biography about her. Did she start publishing under Flannery, since that's. It could be a man's name as well. Kind of like was there like George Eliot or, you know, one of those, you want to be taken seriously?
- [36:03]
Angelina Stanford
That's what was going.
- [36:04]
Thomas Banks
Okay.
- [36:05]
Angelina Stanford
It's. I mean, I've never read that. I mean, most of her stuff she was writing, she was reading out loud and presenting in person. So I don't know, it wasn't as.
- [36:13]
Thomas Banks
Though like her was a.
- [36:14]
Angelina Stanford
My years, you know, like, I think people knew who she was. So she's raised. She's a, A Catholic. She goes to a Catholic school. Her dad gets diagnosed in his 30s with lupus, which ultimately kills him, which will later ultimately kill her. And after that he sort of, you know, has to stop working. And that's when they leave their family home, their townhouse in Savannah, and they move out to the farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. And then he, he dies there. At that point, she has to go to a public school. Her sense of humor is so hilarious. So she talks about how she went to this. It was a very progressive school that let you quote, unquote, like, choose what you want to learn. And she said, heaven help us. I know, right? And I just love her so much. Saucy teenage Flannery. And she said, fortunately, I have a terrible memory, so I can't remember anything of the nothing I learned there. She also said, they would rather give us arsenic than teach us Greek.
- [37:13]
Thomas Banks
Wow.
- [37:14]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. So she grows up this tremendous mind. She grows up feeling very much like she's an uneducated country bumpkin. Like she's a hick.
- [37:25]
Thomas Banks
She went to like Georgia women's college.
- [37:27]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah.
- [37:28]
Thomas Banks
So she's not an elite.
- [37:30]
Angelina Stanford
She goes to college and feels very fish out of the water. Feels like she's the country. There's so many country bumpkins in her stories. But, you know, what people don't understand is like, that's how she thought of herself. Like she's.
- [37:41]
Thomas Banks
And was she, was she actually gauche or socially awkward or is that just what she perceived in herself?
- [37:46]
Angelina Stanford
It's so hard to say. One of the biographies I read made that exact point. Like she, she's so self deprecating to.
- [37:53]
Thomas Banks
Have had A lot of friends she does. She seems to have been well liked wherever she went.
- [37:56]
Angelina Stanford
But she portrays herself as being socially awkward. But again, she's got that self deprecating sense of humor.
- [38:03]
Thomas Banks
Yeah.
- [38:05]
Angelina Stanford
So she goes to graduate school, she ends up in Iowa and she's in journalism, actually, not in creative writing. So she's in journal journalism in, in Iowa and is trying to shake off the country bumpkin image. And she's writing short stories at the time. And a few people encourage her, like, you know, well, Iowa's got its whole famous Writers workshop thing, master's program. Like why don't you switch from journalism to that? So she goes to. In person, she goes to the head of the program in this story. I don't think it's John Ransom Crow. Later on it's John Ransom Crow, but John Crow.
- [38:45]
Thomas Banks
Ransom.
- [38:45]
Angelina Stanford
John Crow. Ransom. Thank you. Anyway, so she has like a poor thing, right? She's already like so self conscious of being this backwoods hick. She's got this very, very thick Georgia accent. There are recordings of it, by the way. There's actually a recording on YouTube you can find of her reading. A Good man is hard to find if you want to hear her kind of sense of humor and her playfulness when she reads it. So she tells him, I'm in the journalism department, but I'm not really a journalist, I'm a writer and I think I should be into the program. And he looks at her and he says, he just in shock. And he said, I don't understand the language you're speaking.
- [39:19]
Thomas Banks
Oh, wow.
- [39:20]
Angelina Stanford
So such a thing, George. And he says, can you write down for me what you're saying? So she takes on a piece of paper and she writes, I am not a journalist. I want to be in this. Okay?
- [39:33]
Thomas Banks
Like, wow.
- [39:34]
Angelina Stanford
The whole scene is like something out of one of her stories. Just this fish out of water, backwards person. Anyway, she gets in and she's accepted and everyone can see she is a rising star. She. She gets along with everybody.
- [39:49]
Thomas Banks
Do you know when she publishes her first works?
- [39:51]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, I should have looked that up. I don't recall.
- [39:53]
Thomas Banks
Young though. I mean, she's in her 20s.
- [39:54]
Angelina Stanford
The first collection is this one right here in my hand. A Good man is hard to find. Well, she doesn't live very long, so. Yes, yes, it's in her 20s. So as one would expect, a writer's program is pretty bohemian, let's put it that way. Children are listening. It's very bohemian. And she is a devout Catholic and she is not interested in that at all. But she does enjoy for the first time being with intellectuals, having intellectual conversation. She likes that a lot. So she graduates from there and she moves to New York and she gets involved in a writing community there and is very much like, this is me now. I'm a big city girl. I'm never going back to the backwoods. I am a bumpkin who has escaped. I'm a city girl now. That's that. She. New York City was either that was even more bohemian. It was even more bohemian. So she's really uncomfortable with that. But she's making friends. And she's also meeting Catholic converts like the Fitzgerald, Sally and Robert Fitzgerald.
- [40:54]
Thomas Banks
Robert Fitzgerald, by the way, was one of the leading American modernist poets. And actually he's probably better known as a translator. Yeah, translated some of the Greek and Roman classics.
- [41:05]
Angelina Stanford
You might have his translation of the Aeneid or, you know, the Odyssey. And you'll see Sally and Robert Fitzgerald's name a lot. If you get, you know, he purchased.
- [41:15]
Thomas Banks
Flames and into theirs or something like that.
- [41:17]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, she kind of lived in their guest house and she, she was kind of like a godmother to their kids. She was also involved in a lot of conversions to Catholicism with the friends that she met. So like she. She is always pious. And Ms. Flannery O' Connor, like Robert Lowell called her Saint Flannery. And she hated that. She hated that that would be annoying.
- [41:37]
Thomas Banks
She just.
- [41:38]
Angelina Stanford
To be a normal person. So she is just living her best life. You know, she's going to start writing. The Fitzgeralds are huge, huge supporters and fans of what she's doing. So she's this young woman on the rise. She has no intention of going home. But fate has other plans. She goes home for Christmas one year for a two week trip. She doesn't even like pack her stuff. She leaves everything in New York because she's coming back. This girl is not going home to live in Georgia. She goes to visit her mom. She gets very, very sick and she gets diagnosed with lupus. And so for a long time she keeps up the fiction of, when I recover, I'm gonna go back to New York. And it quickly becomes apparent that's never gonna happen.
- [42:20]
Thomas Banks
Little bit of trivia, by the way. The film version of Wise Blood, directed by John Houston. Yeah, Very strange movie. Don't.
- [42:29]
Angelina Stanford
Don't watch it before to be justified.
- [42:31]
Thomas Banks
Yes, indeed. Famous line. The screenplay for that movie was written by Benedict Fitzgerald, who's the son of Robert and Sally.
- [42:39]
Angelina Stanford
So one of her God children.
- [42:40]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, yeah. Who also wrote the screenplay for the Passion of the Christ.
- [42:44]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, how interesting.
- [42:45]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, I think he just died, like, a year ago, but there you go.
- [42:48]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, that's very interesting. So now Flannery o' Connor is unceremoniously ripped from her writer's life in New York City and is back on the farm, living with her mother, who is her caretaker. But she continues to write. She continues to write, and it's physically.
- [43:10]
Thomas Banks
Arduous because, I mean, she lives in more or less constant pain and.
- [43:13]
Angelina Stanford
Yep.
- [43:13]
Thomas Banks
I mean, I think she said that she could only really stand to sit and type for about three hours a day or something like that before it wore her out.
- [43:22]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, I mean, she had lupus. She was also on steroids for that. It really changed her looks. It gave her that steroid.
- [43:28]
Thomas Banks
Oh, yeah. If you look at pictures of her before and after, she looks like a different person.
- [43:32]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah.
- [43:32]
Thomas Banks
And also prematurely old. Yeah, she.
- [43:35]
Angelina Stanford
And she's walking with, like, the crutches and everything. It's just, you know, it's just. It's. It's the life of a chronic illness. But she. You know, it's so interesting to look at lives like that because she had a short life. It was intensely painful, but somehow she turned that into just like a remarkably intense creative period. You know, like, I know it was people like Jane Austen and her. I'm always tempted to think, oh, if they had lived longer. But, you know, maybe Jane Austen, also chronically ill, but, you know, maybe it was the fact that they weren't going to live long that had them produced so much in the time that they did. Maybe if they had lived to be 80 years old, they still would have only produced that much amount of work. You know, life. Life is a mystery like that. So a few. Just a few things about that. Let's talk a little bit about just the south, because this is going to. This is going to loom very, very large in all of her stories. And the thing about the south, it's been called the Christ Haunted south, and that is because the south is very saturated with Christianity. Now, that doesn't mean everybody in the south is personally, you know, a believer or anything like that. It just means Christianity is everywhere. And so I'm going to use you, dear, as my counterpoint here. Not his face. Like, are you about to say, I'm not a Christian? But no. When we got married and you moved here to the south, you went through some culture shocks.
- [45:04]
Thomas Banks
Oh, yeah, yes, absolutely.
- [45:06]
Angelina Stanford
About the South. And you loved it. You loved it. But it was. It was very strange. And one of the things that was so strange to you was how Christianity was everywhere. Like, you would come home and say, I was at the coffee shop and there were three different Bible studies going on. And you'd say to me, you'd never.
- [45:19]
Thomas Banks
See the end times or something.
- [45:22]
Angelina Stanford
See that in Montana. You would never just see all this public Christianity. Or how about like when you moved here, everybody you met invited you to their church.
- [45:29]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, that also happens.
- [45:30]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. And again, you were like, that never happened in Montana. And so I looked it up. It was so fascinating because you had told me that where you came from, Bozeman, Montana was the least churched city in the United States.
- [45:42]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. Like there was this one, this one poll that was taken and yeah, back in, I think it was like 2010, Bozeman was atop the list of the least, like, church membership, you know, per capita.
- [45:55]
Angelina Stanford
I don't know how. What was so interesting is you had moved. We were, at the time, we were living right outside of Winston Salem, N.C. and I had looked it up and Winston Salem, North Carolina was the, the most churched place in the United States. There, there's. You can't even fathom, there's churches next door to each other and across the street. It's like, you know, did they just buy one parking lot and all the churches share it? It's just everywhere. I remember one time, you know, after church on a Sunday, you had gone to the grocery store and you came home and you just had this look on your face. And I was like, what? And you said, it was so weird. You said, the cashier said, and how was your church service today? How was church? Like, just, just, just the assumption in the culture that it's Sunday, everybody went to church. Right. It's just the, the. I remember driving to Charleston from North Carolina for our honeymoon. Just, you were so. I don't know if tickled is the right word, but you were struck by, remember all the signs on the side of the road with Bible verses and repent. Now the end is nigh. Like, you know, like, like you're like, are we in the movie Deliverance? But that's, that's the south, right? It's just, it's just everywhere. So that presented a unique set of both opportunities and challenges for her. And one of the challenges for her was, how do you convince people in a Christ saturated culture that they need the gospel? Right? Because everybody's like, what are you talking about? I have Jesus, I go to church. And, and her whole thing was just because you go to church and Just because you have this outward veneer of Christianity doesn't really mean you're a Christian. Right. And that's part of what's going on in her stories is that she's, she's trying to like take you by the lapels and shake you, you know, kind of shake you out of this fog that you're in of, of believing that because, well, everything's got this Christian surface, then, then it must be Christian. And we've talked a little bit about the sense of humor. She has a very, very self deprecating sense of humor. Like she once described herself as a combination of St. Fulton Sheen and Gorgeous George.
- [48:00]
Thomas Banks
Who's Gorgeous George?
- [48:01]
Angelina Stanford
Okay, so I was just about to explain to our listeners. Gorgeous George was a professional wrestlers like Hulk Hogan. So she's like, I'm a combination of a saint and a professional wrestler. A clown and a clown. A performer. Yeah, yeah. She was so funny.
- [48:13]
Thomas Banks
Oh, by the way, we should probably see who Fulton Sheen was because people. Yeah, unless you're like 60 years old, you probably don't know. Fulton Sheen was actually the first televangelist. That makes him sound. Actually, no, he had, he had a TV program. Well, the first. He was a. Oh, I want to say he was Bishop of Rochester, New York or something like that. Anyway, so he was a Catholic bishop and he was kind of the first American celebrity priest, I suppose. And the other thing was he was trained as a philosopher and was a, like a real, you know, and substantive public intellectual. But he had a very successful radio broadcast and television broadcast after that. That. Anyway, so, so. And he would have been kind of at the height of his fame in the 1950s.
- [48:59]
Angelina Stanford
She, she's very self deprecating, she's very humble. She. At one, I can't remember now off the top of my head which short story it was, but they wanted to make a TV show out of one of her short stories, right? I'm like, this is every writer's dream, right? Sell the movie rights. This is the big money. She was horrified because they were going to play it on a Saturday morning and she kept saying, all these kids are going to tune in expecting to be super, see Superman and they're going to see like sideshow freaks. Like, well, you know, what is this? Before I forget, let me mention, because she did only live for a short time what her canon of work is before I start putting her into the larger context of the writers of the time. So Mystery and Manners is a collection of essays she wrote of a whole bunch of different places in Addition, there's a collection of book reviews that she wrote over her life.
- [49:46]
Thomas Banks
That one's called the Presence of Grace.
- [49:48]
Angelina Stanford
The Presence of Grace. You bought that one for me? We have her letters in the Habit of Being. We also have a newer collection of letters that came out with. It's basically her letters with Caroline Gordon, which we'll talk about. Caroline Gordon, because she plays a very important role in Flannery o' Connor, both her life and her. And her work. And we have a prayer journal of hers that has come out only the.
- [50:14]
Thomas Banks
Last 10 years or so.
- [50:15]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, that's.
- [50:16]
Thomas Banks
That's a new one.
- [50:16]
Angelina Stanford
On our last tour of her own.
- [50:19]
Thomas Banks
Something I've noticed. I think there's kind of become grown up in the last 20 years, say, an industry we can talk about the Flannery industry. I mean, when you see new editions of her books every five years, you know, major biographies. I think two or three in the last 20 years.
- [50:35]
Angelina Stanford
The.
- [50:35]
Thomas Banks
The movie.
- [50:36]
Angelina Stanford
The. Yeah, the Ethan Hawke.
- [50:37]
Thomas Banks
Ethan Hawke movie. So she's. Yeah, she's. She's one of those authors that, I guess you could say, maybe cynically, is there. There's money there.
- [50:47]
Angelina Stanford
Well, it's interesting, too, because after 2020, when people were just looking to cancel everyone, and she was definitely high on the hit list, I feel like a lot of big names came out in support of her. Ethan Hawke would be one of those that was like, you know, I'm going to defend her. But there was. There was a few others as well. So in terms of her fiction. So she's. She's writing and her stuff is getting published in various magazines, but the first collection of her short story comes out. I probably should have looked up the year there. 1954. 1955, the book. But the first story came out in 1948. All right, okay. And that's the collection. A Good man is Hard to Find. And it's got quite a few short stories in it. Let's see.
- [51:28]
Thomas Banks
And that's really the form which she would want to be known for. Yes. Ten short stories, wouldn't you say?
- [51:33]
Angelina Stanford
Yes. So we'll talk about that in a second. Her second collection of short stories comes out posthumously. Everything that Rises Must Converge. And then also she's got two collections of short stories, but she's also got two novels, so Wise Blood and the Violent Buried Away. Now, I've read. I've read all of those. The consensus seems. That's why it's really funny. Strange to me that your friend said that the consensus seems to be that. That her Milieu is the short story. She's a brilliant short story writer. The novels are not as good, but, you know, I think there are some people in the lit life group who feel very strongly that they love her novels. And I've read them. I like the short stories more, but I, I didn't, I didn't necessarily dislike, dislike the stories either. The novels, I mean, so, so that's her work. So let's try to put her in the context because I think that's going to really, really help us to understand what she's doing. Because no writer writes in a vacuum, right? They're, they're writing in a particular context and it's not our context unless they're writing right now. Even in her own time, she was profoundly misunderstood and interestingly enough, even the people who really, really loved her seemed to love her for the wrong reasons. So she's writing in the mid 20th century, the age of nihilism, existentialism, absurdism, and they think she's one of us. So she gets called a hillbilly nihilist. And they meant this as an, as a compliment. And she comes back and says, no, you've completely misunderstand me. What I am is a hillbilly Thomist.
- [53:01]
Thomas Banks
Can you put that on a tax return or a business card? I wonder why.
- [53:06]
Angelina Stanford
You tell us.
- [53:10]
Thomas Banks
Thomism is a school of philosophy mainly, but not exclusively, Thomas Klein. Yeah.
- [53:16]
Angelina Stanford
So.
- [53:16]
Thomas Banks
And it's a school of Christian philosophy which largely adopts Aristotelian categories of inquiry and classification. And yes, it's, you know, most perfect expression is the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas, which he, she wrote in the.
- [53:36]
Angelina Stanford
13Th century A.D. so we'll come to that in just a few minutes, explaining more like basically how being a Thomas means she's the opposite of a nihilist. So in a, in a world where, of nihilism, where everyone's writing these nihilistic works, she's, she's, she's trying to push back against that. So she uses a lot of the same techniques of those guys, but she's doing it for drastically different, different purposes. And she gets lumped in with a lot of them. She gets lumped in with Kafka, Truman Capote because of the violence. You know, she gets, she gets lumped in with a bunch of people. We'll get to that in a second. So that's one way she's misunderstood people who loved her because they thought, oh, she's one of us, she's a nihilist. On the other side, she gets Misunderstood by, we'll call them the respectable Southerners. Her mother, for example, was horrified. Okay, so imagine this, right? This is. This is so funny. So Flannery's living at home with her mother, and her mother is like, my daughter's a published author, right? Who wouldn't be proud of that? Her first short story collection is coming up. Her mother plans, like, this formal Georgia tea for, like, all the church ladies to come over. I know your face. Oh, they all come over, right? To celebrate this book coming out, but none of them have read it.
- [54:54]
Thomas Banks
It.
- [54:54]
Angelina Stanford
Okay, so they're at the tea, and now it's come out, and they've read it, and they're just horrified. They're so awkward. One of the funniest things was one of the ladies at the tea says to Fl. Like, they're all just sipping tea, and Flannery's all uncomfortable and everything. And she says, does your priest know you read these stories? Like, they're just so horrified. They're thinking, these are not Christian. One lady, before she read it, it. Okay, this is gonna make you laugh. So it comes out. She buys it. She doesn't read it. And she sends it to her priest with a letter. This is for a girl from our hometown, our own parish. We're so proud of her. And so she sends it to him. Then she reads it. She sends a second letter. I apologize for sending you this.
- [55:39]
Thomas Banks
This horrible and degrading worth of totally.
- [55:43]
Angelina Stanford
Getting it from both sides. Evelyn Waugh. You'll appreciate this. So even wa Writes a review. He likes it.
- [55:48]
Thomas Banks
It.
- [55:48]
Angelina Stanford
So he likes a good man. It's hard to. And he writes this in the review.
- [55:50]
Thomas Banks
Evelyn Wall liked her.
- [55:51]
Angelina Stanford
Evelyn Wall liked her. I thought you'd find this interesting.
- [55:54]
Thomas Banks
He didn't like anything about America. Well, he liked New Orleans. He liked the city of New Orleans, but everything, I think America bothered him.
- [56:00]
Angelina Stanford
Well, there you go. He liked her. So he said, if it's true that this is. That a young lady wrote this, then that's very impressive. Okay, so Flanner o' Connor is very like, yes. Right. Okay. So she's like, wow. Evelyn Waugh is so impressed. She shows it to her mother. And her mother just keeps going. What does he mean, a lady didn't want. How are you not a lady? What is he saying is her mother's, like, offended and horrified, and so Flannery o' Connor is, like, trapped between these two worlds of misunderstanding. And she's just like, I I.
- [56:34]
Thomas Banks
She can't win.
- [56:35]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, exactly. I I. Even without the lupus Even without the lupus. Yeah, exactly. And her situation with her mother is very interesting. And no, we don't, you know, we don't have the biographical fallacy here. She's not like writing about her mom and all the stories. But you will notice a consistent kind of tension in the stories.
- [56:56]
Thomas Banks
Women of a certain age often don't come off well.
- [56:59]
Angelina Stanford
Well, no, it's more like there's. Well, I mean, there is that, but it's more like a lot of the stories are about adult intellectual children trapped at home with a parent.
- [57:10]
Thomas Banks
Oh, yes, that.
- [57:11]
Angelina Stanford
Okay. And, but, and this is classic Flannery, okay? She turns it on its head because the stories will be about how annoyed this adult child is with their mother and how much he judges her or she judges him. And the flip will be that it's the, it's the younger person who's the real problem. And, and, and that really reflects her own struggle. Like, maybe I'm just being self righteous. For me, I don't understand my own mother. Maybe I don't love her enough. Enough. You see that? But we'll talk about that kind of Slannery reversal in just a few minutes.
- [57:44]
Thomas Banks
I, I coined a phrase. You can tell me if it's pretentious or trash to describe sort of the mechanism of some of her stories, at least the ones I'm familiar with. It seems very often it's almost actually kind of, kind of Sophoclean, you know.
- [57:59]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, I'm getting to that. I have a quote about that, but go ahead. Oh, well, you're getting ahead of me.
- [58:04]
Thomas Banks
All right. But, but in which frequently someone comes to self knowledge in a situation which ruins them, destroys them, or humiliates them in some very abject kind of way. So it's, it's almost like the, the annihilating epiphany.
- [58:24]
Angelina Stanford
That's well said.
- [58:25]
Thomas Banks
Is that well said? That's not just trash. I wasn't following a false. Very good. I don't actually haven't read pages of.
- [58:32]
Angelina Stanford
My notes from that. We'll come back to that.
- [58:33]
Thomas Banks
Okay.
- [58:34]
Angelina Stanford
Okay, so first let's. That's put. Very well done, honey.
- [58:37]
Thomas Banks
She pats me on the head.
- [58:38]
Angelina Stanford
I did. I did. Okay, let's put her into the context of other writers at the time.
- [58:43]
Thomas Banks
Yes.
- [58:44]
Angelina Stanford
This is going to help us to understand how she's resisting them. Okay, so at the time, there's a lot of writers writing with violence, exaggeration and grotesqueness. Okay. But she's doing it for very, very different.
- [59:00]
Thomas Banks
I was thinking what, what you were describing about the violence. The kind of danger is never far away. And the people in her books have always something kind of savage about them. Might Tennessee Williams be a point of comparison?
- [59:17]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, perhaps. Yeah.
- [59:19]
Thomas Banks
You can imagine the characters from A Streetcar Named Desire growing up in one of her stories. All the men are kind of savages and who beat their wives. And the women are all kind of.
- [59:28]
Angelina Stanford
They compared a lot to Kafka, about to go insane. Hemingway, Katherine Ann Porter, like all those guys.
- [59:36]
Thomas Banks
Okay, most of those. Maybe not Hemingway, but a lot of those make sense.
- [59:39]
Angelina Stanford
Anyway, so let's talk a little bit about the Southern Gothic. You wanted to talk about that, so let's bring that up, because she has an essay about this.
- [59:49]
Thomas Banks
So I was looking up the origins of that term, and it's originally used as a term of abuse, a term of negative criticism to describe Southern writers. Kind of hacky, sensationalistic Southern writers of not the first rank. And I was thinking. And then I was making a list, compiling a mental list of writers I've seen described as Southern Gothic. And, you know, of course, Faulkner is kind of the quintessential Southern Gothic writer. You know, old family whose ancestors were on the losing side in the Civil War and have been living in a dilapidated mansion on the, you know, plantation where no crops are grown or something like that. Kind of a cliche situation.
- [60:31]
Angelina Stanford
Rose for Emily.
- [60:32]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, Rose for Emily, sure. So Faulkner. But I've also seen Margaret Mitchell. I know. I've also seen. Okay, you mentioned Truman Capote and Flannery o' Connor. I think I've even seen the term applied to Poe. I don't know if that's like a really. It's so baggy a term that it's maybe not as helpful as we might like it to be.
- [60:53]
Angelina Stanford
Okay, so she actually has an essay about this on the Southern grotesque. We read it in the Flannery o' Connor class that I teach. And I'm going to. I'm going to address some of those things. What's happening is they're just looking at the surface level, okay? Truman Capote writes about a bunch of freaks, and there's violence. She writes a bunch of. A bunch of freaks and there's violence. See, they're. They're all doing the same thing, but she's actually pushing back against this. So. All right, hear me out here. As a devout Catholic and Thomas Flannery starts with original sin, okay? So she starts off with, the world is fallen and broken. People are fallen and broken. That immediately puts her in a very different category from a Nihilist, right? So a nihilist. There is no God. There's no meaning. Maybe there are some psychological reasons why we are what we are, but they're completely unconcerned with any kind of spiritual matters. And that is profoundly what she is interested in. Right? This is the heart of the matter.
- [61:50]
Thomas Banks
Okay?
- [61:50]
Angelina Stanford
She is interested in spiritual things. Those guys deny the spiritual things even exist. Now. She's writing at a time when Freud is very, very popular, not only in psychoanalysis, but in psychoanalytic approaches to literature. This is probably like the heyday of the Freudian readings of literature. And I love her so much because she hated those because she's trying to write these medieval stories and to show this. This spiritual, transcendent reality that we live in. Like, even in the modern world, if you don't know it, it's still there. And people are doing all the Freudian things. So she wrote a story, it's called the Comforts of Home. And she even says in a letter somewhere, like, I dare the Freudians to read this Freudian. Okay? And she just. It's so fantastic. She really messes with him. It's about a guy. I'll only say this part. It's about a guy, and he's got a gun, and he accidentally shoots his mom. You can see how the Freudians would go that, right? But then she flips it all on its head. It's just. It's just fantastic. And then, yet there are people who read this story and go, no, no, I know she said, it's not Freudian, but it's totally Freudian. And they do it anyway. And I'm just like, ah. I was actually on a podcast once where we read that story, and I was making. Think I was trying to make the case that Flannery wrote this story to make fun of Freudian literary criticism. And the people I read it with were like, yeah, but I think it's really Freudian. I mean, come on. The guy's got a gun and he shot his mom. Like, hey, hello. And I. I was like, you're part of the problem. You are part of the problem. So she hates all of that. So what? She. So in the other stories, okay, so Truman Capot, for example, the grotesque, it's just there for its own purpose. It's just something weird. It's just ambiance. What she's doing is something different. You may have heard me talk about this on the podcast before. So that this old medieval tradition that characters in a story are visible souls, their insides are on the outsides. That's a phrase from C.S. lewis. Both visible souls and insides are on the outside. If you take it, my favorite characters.
- [63:44]
Thomas Banks
Are tattooed on them.
- [63:46]
Angelina Stanford
And she has a story where somebody's.
- [63:48]
Thomas Banks
Tattooed that was a softball.
- [63:49]
Angelina Stanford
Oh yeah, Parker's back. That's a great one. Where the guy tattoos the icon of Christ on himself. If you read them, understanding their insides are on the outsides, you're going to understand like that's a totally medieval thing she's doing and it's genius, right? So for her, if you meet a grotesque store, a character in a story, it's because she's trying to show we human beings are deformed because of original sin. Okay? This is, this is our original fallen nature. Original sin, fallen nature that's being projected on the outside and, and in her typical kind of flip it all on its head, you know, kind of way that she does things, a lot of times she'll have a character who's deformed and another character who's like a very self respecting, you know, middle class, respectable person. And they'll just be disgusted by this freak and maybe they're even like, oh, look at that, look at that freak, that's horrible. And she'll flip it around to where the person comes to an understanding that oh no, I'm the freak. I'm the freak. I'm just as deformed in spite of.
- [64:48]
Thomas Banks
My good manners and pearls and all that kind of.
- [64:50]
Angelina Stanford
Precisely, precisely. You know, despite my middle class respectability, again, that surface Christianity, I'm a fallen creature too. I'm deformed and I am just in much in need of healing, you know, as a person with an actual birth defect. So, you know, you'll see a lot of things like one armed people, one legged people, you know, birth defects, misfits in the next story. That's their insides are on the outside. That's, that's what she's going for there. So Caroline Gordon, who we spoke about just moments ago, she was. So she was a Catholic convert.
- [65:26]
Thomas Banks
She's also a novelist of some standing.
- [65:28]
Angelina Stanford
Yes. And a short story writer herself. She's married to Alan Tate. So she's involved in the southern agrarians. And as a Catholic convert, she's got a lot of zeal. And she discovers Flannery o' Connor is like, oh my gosh, this woman is everything. I get her, I understand her. This is, this is everything. And she writes to Flannery ocon oconnor, this huge fan letter, right? And Flannery o' Connor reads It and thinks, somebody finally gets me. This woman gets me. So Caroline Gordon becomes a super close friend. She's not officially, like, the executor of Flannery's work or her. Officially her editor, but unofficially, basically, Flannery o' Connor never writes a word that doesn't get passed by Caroline Gordon. And Caroline Gordon has a lot of influence over her. If Caroline Gordon's like, this isn't very good, Flannery would change it. She. She was a very, very intense editor of her own work and really worked very hard and was very humble and open to criticism. Caroline Gordon, who I should say the first time I heard of her was in graduate school. My best friend in grad school did her dissertation on Caroline Gordon. Okay, so anyway, here's a great quote from Caroline Gordon, who, according to Flannery o' Connor, like, she gets me. She understands it. And so here's what she says about Flannery with regard to, like, being lumped in with all these other authors. She says it's fashionable to write about freaks like Truman Capote. But you. She's saying this to Flander o' Connor, but you are giving us a terrifying picture of the modern world. Your book is full of freaks, but what sets you apart is the possibility that your lame will walk again, your maimed will be made whole. Isn't that good?
- [67:03]
Thomas Banks
Oh, that is very good.
- [67:05]
Angelina Stanford
So remember, you know, we're all deformed because of original sin. And so Flannery o' Connor is trying to use physical details to show us a spiritual reality. So that will really help you. Right. The deformed people are. They're just wearing their fallen nature on the outside, and other people are blinded to the fact that they are just as deformed.
- [67:23]
Thomas Banks
I don't know which of his books this occurs in, but there's a line from Oscar Wilde where he says, all of us are lying in the gutter, but some of us are staring at the stars. His middle name was also Flannery, by the way. Just coincidentally.
- [67:37]
Angelina Stanford
That's cool. Okay, okay. So in her story, she's always kind of like, pulling back the veil, right? Like, here's how things look on the surface, but here's what's really going on underneath. That's part of why it's horrifying, because there's something kind of horrifying under our nice veneer of respectability. We're actually fallen creatures.
- [67:55]
Thomas Banks
Ah. Sorry. Wow.
- [67:57]
Angelina Stanford
You looked.
- [67:58]
Thomas Banks
I just looked it up. It's Flaherty. Wow. Never mind. Gosh, that was. I felt Like I was making a connection, even if it was a trivial one. Never mind. Okay.
- [68:08]
Angelina Stanford
She also gets thrown in with writers like Kafka and Kierkegaard. So here's Flannery's response to that. She says, my philosophical notions don't derive from Kierkegaard, but St. Thomas Aquinas. And I don't intend the tone of the book to be pessimistic. It is, after all, a story about redemption. And if you admit redemption, you are no pessimist. So, okay, that's a big thing to understand with her. All of her stories are about redemption. All of them. All of them, yeah.
- [68:41]
Thomas Banks
I think I could see why someone would make the mistake, the connection to Kafka and. Because horrible things happen in both their stories. All of them have weird. Yeah. But Kafka's stories seem to be.
- [68:57]
Angelina Stanford
An.
- [68:58]
Thomas Banks
Almost systematic enumeration of all the ways that a meaningless universe can bludgeon its inhabitants to death after humiliating and degrading them. Yeah, Yeah. I think Kafka is kind of the great artist of the. Of, yeah. Absurdist nothingness kind of. And I enjoy Kafka, but, you know, in small doses. But, yeah, I don't. I don't think that aside from superficially, the superficial kind of. Of horrors of both their works, there's a whole lot in common there.
- [69:27]
Angelina Stanford
I'm so excited, by the way, to read A Good Man. It's hard to find with an actual Catholic.
- [69:31]
Thomas Banks
Oh, okay.
- [69:32]
Angelina Stanford
So I hope you can open some things up for me. So critics, remember we said at the beginning, even the people who loved her misunderstood her. They thought, oh, she's one of these great nihilist writers. And what happened was, is they made the mistake of filtering her fiction through their understanding of the Southern Gothic. And in the. In the, like, traditional kind of Southern Gothic, you have freaks. But they're just there to demonstrate the utter debasement of realism, our lurid voyeurism. You know, we're just enjoying looking at freaks. But what she is trying to show is that the most damaged sinners long for transcendence whether they know it or not. And she's also trying to show in these stories that that transcendent, it will make its presence known at long last. Now, interestingly, if you're thinking. But yeah, not every story, like, has somebody with a physical disability. Well, you can appreciate this. She also thought over education was another kind of disability.
- [70:30]
Thomas Banks
Oh, here, here. I'm. Yes, you're preaching to the chorus there.
- [70:33]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. Right. Like. Like, you know, we all know the type they go to college and they come back with a lot of high.
- [70:37]
Thomas Banks
The sort of person whose academic experience serves to cloister them from larger human experiences and more generally, you know, she.
- [70:46]
Angelina Stanford
Also thought that being over educated could lead you to self righteousness. And in all of Flannery's work, you will see that the greatest sin of all is the self righteousness. Yeah. So some of the freaks in her stories actually just might be over educated people. So again, it's. It's visible souls, right? So if your problem is that you're self righteous and you think you're better than everybody because, you know you have an education, that's still going to be a kind of deformity.
- [71:12]
Thomas Banks
That's actually another point of contact between her and Dostoevsky, I think, because Dostoevsky, a lot of his antiheroes and villains and unsympathetic characters are highly intellectual villains and anti heroes. He's someone who has a theory in which they sit on some sort of pinnacle far removed above the mere mass of humanity and look down on them. I'm thinking Russ Kolnikov.
- [71:38]
Angelina Stanford
Right?
- [71:38]
Thomas Banks
Right, like that.
- [71:39]
Angelina Stanford
But in this, she's also pointing the finger at herself. We should understand that. She, she worried she had gone to New York City, right, and become this educated gown, came back, and now I can't love my mother and I hate the small town I'm in. Like, she, you know, she, she wrestled with that a lot, you'll notice in her stories. A lot of times sometimes people read them and they're like, oh, I hate her. I get mad. And, and it's because. It's because they have sort of fallen for the Flannery twist there. And what I mean by that is you'll be reading her books and you'll think, oh, yeah, this character's a freak. They're messed up. Okay, Visible soul. I see it, that kid, that, that character needs Jesus, right? And the whole time you're like, that person needs Jesus. Okay, Flannery, I'm tracking with you. You and me, we're the same, okay? And then you get to the end and the whole twist is it's you who have been blinded by your own self righteousness. You're worse than this sinner in this book because self righteousness is worse. And so she twists it. At the end, she points the finger at herself. She points the finger at her reader. And a lot of times that can be very jarring and you feel like she's just turned the whole world upside down, which of course she has, because Pointing the finger at other people and judging them and feeling like I'm good, but they need to get right with Jesus. You know, that that's its own sort of damning sin. And she thought that living in the Christ haunted South with that veneer of Christianity, that we were particularly susceptible to that kind of sin. I don't. What do I need? I go to church on Sunday. I tithe.
- [73:07]
Thomas Banks
I, you know, I thank you that I am not like this fairy. No. Not like this tax collector.
- [73:12]
Angelina Stanford
Right, right. You know, like I. I go to the church garage sale where my kids are involved in the youth group. Like, you know, why are you looking at me? I don't need Jesus. We have Jesus. And she's constantly saying. Saying, actually, you know, you do. You do. So let me give you kind of the context of, like, where we are with the culture when she's writing. So. And this is where I see in her doing something very, very similar to, like, what the Inklings are doing, but in a particularly American Southern way. After World War II, you begin to see a rebellion against basic beliefs and values in traditional culture and literature. This tradition had included the assumptions that human beings are fairly rational creatures who live in an at least partially intelligible universe. Here you hear how we're talking about this as a medieval perspective. Right. The world makes sense and we can understand it. Humans are part of an ordered social structure, and they may even be capable of heroism or dignity, even in defeat. This changes after World War II. Now people are no longer thought of as made in the image of God, as part of an ordained universe with meaningful lives. Instead, we see ourselves as isolated human beings who've been cast into an alien and hostile universe. The human world has no inherent truth, value or meaning. And literature begins to represent human life as a fruitless search for purpose and significance. How's this for depressing? As it moves from the nothingness from which it came to the nothingness which it must end. This is the world that Flannery is riding in the belief that we live in a random, hostile universe. And if you've ever studied, I'm sure you have a 20th century literature, then you know that the big themes of 20th century literature, of what we put all these other authors in, is alienation, isolation, fragmentation, metaphysical pointlessness. Point. And despair. Yeah, a lot of despair.
- [75:12]
Thomas Banks
Okay. For me, the sentence that best encapsulates this almost, you know, the opening of the Stranger by Albert Camus.
- [75:26]
Angelina Stanford
No, go ahead. Oh, I'm standing on the beach with a gun in my hand.
- [75:29]
Thomas Banks
No. Okay. You're thinking of. Oh, the one the Cure song was based on. Sorry.
- [75:35]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, it's on the Stranger.
- [75:36]
Thomas Banks
Okay. It's. Maybe it's in the stranger, but it begins with, mother died yesterday. Or maybe it was today. I can't really remember.
- [75:45]
Angelina Stanford
Yes, yes. Which. That echoes. But that echoes Macbeth.
- [75:48]
Thomas Banks
That's like a nihilistic nihilism for me right there.
- [75:51]
Angelina Stanford
Soliloquy about Lady Macbeth. When he finds out she died, he says, she would have died sometime.
- [75:55]
Thomas Banks
Oh, yes. She should have died afterward. There would have been a time for such. Yeah. Yep, yep.
- [75:59]
Angelina Stanford
Okay. Yes, yes. Mother died. Okay. It's like nothing means anything. Okay. All right. This, by the way, is why modern literature is so depressing. When people like, I tried. I took a class on modern Liter. It's so depressing. That's why. Because that is the universe they're living in. Okay? If you understand that, you're gonna see Flannery o' Connor's genius, right? What she's pushing against. So she takes this whole, hey, we're just a bunch of weird exiles and a meaningless life. And she shows that it's not true that actually human beings have souls that long for meaning. And her souls are filled with even the most unsuspecting people discovering that they have souls that are longing for God and that what they are longing for will break through in unexpected ways. And it's going to shock you because you have pretended that there is no transcendent realm. There were a lot of writers at the time talking about things like, we just need to make peace with our despair. And Flannery wrote at one point. I know, right? Like, well, thanks.
- [76:59]
Thomas Banks
That's great.
- [77:00]
Angelina Stanford
Now we just want to give you a pill to make peace with your despair. But she said, I don't want you to make peace with your despair. Your despair is an indication that you're longing for something more. Don't make peace with your despair. Right. I hope you're getting the sense that Flannery is like. She's like an alarm. That's why her books are so shocking. Like, she said, in a deaf world, you have to scream. And that is what is going on, Right? She is trying to snap us out and don't make peace with your despair. So Thomas Merton, who was her very good friend, the. The Monk Thomas Merton.
- [77:31]
Thomas Banks
No, I never knew that.
- [77:33]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, no, they were pen pals. They were really, really good friends. He said upon her death that he could not compare her with Hemingway or Catherine Ann Porter or Jean Paul Sartre. He said, I compare her to Someone like Sophocles. So you see, you answered for the win.
- [77:50]
Thomas Banks
For the win. Okay. I feel redeemed after that stupid Oscar Wilde comment.
- [77:55]
Angelina Stanford
He said, I write her name with honor for all the truths and all the craft with which she shows man's fall and his dishonor. And honestly, this needed to be said when she was writing. Right. We needed to be said. The reason you have despair and you feel alienated and isolated is because you're fallen. But you can be made whole. You can be saved, you can be redeemed. Right? And you don't want to make. Don't. Don't make peace with that despair. That despair is pushing you towards something else. So when Thomas Merton describes her esophagealism, she actually has an essay where she talks about that as well, where she sees herself as a kind of Sophocles. She writes very Aristotelian. And you made that. You made that point very well earlier and very well. I see. You want to say something?
- [78:41]
Thomas Banks
No, I was just. I was just saying. I mean, we mentioned Fulton Sheen earlier. It was kind of odd that. That particular moment in American religious history where you have, like, the celebrity. It seemed the celebrity clergyman in, like, kind of large numbers. Not. I mean, not just Catholics. I mean, there was, you know, Norman Vincent Peale and guys like that as well. But, yeah, like Thomas. And Thomas Merton was a Trappist. Trappist are supposed to be the quiet monks who don't say anything. But he became. Became kind of a public intellectual in his own right. And he's.
- [79:16]
Angelina Stanford
This is also the age of, like, Billy Graham.
- [79:17]
Thomas Banks
Billy Graham, yeah. He would be. He would be. Yeah. Quite a young man at this point. And. Yeah. Anyway, just something that occurred to me.
- [79:25]
Angelina Stanford
No, you're right. So saying that she writes like, Sophocles. You know, Aristotle talks about Sophocles, and one of the points he makes is that Sophocles drama works on the idea of reversal and recognition. So you'll have this moment where you're going in one direction and it gets flipped around and you go the other. Like with Oedipus Rex, where he's like, I will find the killer reversal. I am the killer. Right. Okay. So all of Flannery o' Connor stories have that reversal in it. You've heard me talk about it already. I've hinted at it already. Right. You think, oh, that guy's the freak. I'm good. Only to have it flipped around. I'm actually. Actually the freak who's in need of salvation. It's it's me. It's. It's not the freak. I'm the freak. That kind of thing. Now going with that is the idea of recognition. So Aristotle talks about in that moment of reversal. That's also when your eyes are open and you see. So. Right. So Oedipus has the reversal, but also the sight. I'm. I'm the problem. Right. I hope you can see how she's very Sophoclean. I'm gonna fix somebody else's problem only at the end to find out I'm the problem. So all of these stories that she writes are moving the characters toward an epiphany. And the characters either accept or reject the grace that is offered. But again, she's going to flip it. It's often not who you expect. It's often the finger pointing back at us.
- [80:50]
Thomas Banks
Doesn't one of her stories turn on a literal overture of grace where there actually is a Christ appearance? Maybe I'm confusing her with another writer. But doesn't Jesus Christ actually appear in one of her stories?
- [81:05]
Angelina Stanford
Not that I can recall. I mean, it's been a while. I haven't read them all since I taught the class.
- [81:09]
Thomas Banks
Oh, never mind. Wow.
- [81:12]
Angelina Stanford
Okay.
- [81:12]
Thomas Banks
Yeah.
- [81:14]
Angelina Stanford
I mean, he comes in. Well, I mean, he comes in the form of a bull. He comes in all kinds of moments.
- [81:19]
Thomas Banks
Yeah.
- [81:20]
Angelina Stanford
Now the thing. And you got to understand this again, right? So like, like somebody like Truman Capote in Cold Blood, he's. There's going to be violence, but it's not violence towards some kind of spiritual encounter. It's just violence as we live in a meaningless violence world. Here's a family, they got killed, Dan. You know, stuff happens. For her, the violence is usually what precipitates the grace. I've got this quote by Joyce Carol Oates where she says it's never violence in itself. It's violence in the Greek sense. Right. So it's. It's always.
- [81:53]
Thomas Banks
I think that's a useful distinction.
- [81:54]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. Yeah. So it, it's. The violence has meaning when you get to the. That. I think that's why some people are just like, well, this was gross. Because they're making the mistake of thinking it's violence for violence sake. It's freak for freak's sake. No, no, no visible souls. And the violence is that, that grace breaking thing. I mean, look, think about the gospel. You have to die to live. That's violent. Right. You have to stop being who you are. Put that to death. Be crucified with Christ. Right. These are not just platitudes she's trying to show us this is real. If you're gonna. If you're gonna be redeemed and born again from the fallen nature to some, you know, some other version of yourself, a redeemed version of yourself, then something's gotta die. The old man's gotta die.
- [82:35]
Thomas Banks
It's gonna be all my body and make it my slave.
- [82:38]
Angelina Stanford
You got it? It's Paul being struck down on the road to Damascus. Okay. Like that's a Flannery o' Connor story. You're going in one direction. I'm gonna go persecute these people. That grace tears through him like lightning. He's blinded and he has his reversal and his recognition because in his blindness is when he can finally see. Okay, that, that is the Flannery o' Connor, like, in a nutshell. That's the structure right there. But the grace she offers. This will be my last point. The grace she offers, however, is not Pollyanna. Right? It's not sweetness and light. It's not Dale Carnegie. It's not Vincent.
- [83:16]
Thomas Banks
And then they fixed their life and they were happy again.
- [83:17]
Angelina Stanford
That's right. And they went back to being respectable middle class Christians. That's. That's not what this is about. This is. Okay, this is about a life changing, violent moment where you learn to die and be born again. It's not. You mentioned Vincent Norman Peel. Like she's writing in the time of. Well, just with positive thinking.
- [83:36]
Thomas Banks
The power of positive thinking.
- [83:37]
Angelina Stanford
Positive thinking. Somebody. Somebody gave me that as a high school graduation gift.
- [83:40]
Thomas Banks
No.
- [83:41]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. Wow.
- [83:42]
Thomas Banks
It's amazing that's still in print.
- [83:43]
Angelina Stanford
My dad was horrified. Well, that's a lot.
- [83:44]
Thomas Banks
There's a lot of positive thinking out there that needs to be crushed, I guess.
- [83:48]
Angelina Stanford
So it's not going to be that. Don't expect that. It's going to be Paul on the road to Damascus. It's a grace that's going to rip through you like lightning and it is going to unmake you in order to remake you. But again, not everyone's going to accept that grace. Everyone in the story is going to be unmade. Some people will be remake and some people are just going to be on me.
- [84:10]
Thomas Banks
No, I can't wait.
- [84:12]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. So I hope that that kind of, you know, gets us started and we'll walk through this whole process with a good man is hard to find. And you're going to see how she brings it to life. I really, really hope that this redeems her for you. So before we say goodbye, I do want to just in case you're out there, like, how can I learn more about Flannery o' Connor? So in addition to everything I mentioned, I've got a few other resources for you. Kind of the standard biography of her is Flannery A Life of Flannery o' Connor by Brad Gooch. Now, the thing to keep in mind about this one is that he makes the mistake that so many people make of trying to understand Flannery o' Connor outside of her faith. See, you know, so many people who are not of a faith themselves kind of see faith as an add on, a kind of a side thing. Like, you know, so here's Flannery o' Connor, and also, she went to church. No, like, like stand in her bedroom window, the church loomed over her. You know, she is atomist. And he doesn't get that. All right, so there's going to be a lot of good things about her life. But just understand he's not going to fundamentally misunderstand her because he doesn't understand her faith. Now, a book that I think is a really good corrective to that is, you know, our friend Jonathan Rogers, his book the Terrible Speed of Mercy, which is short and accessible and really, really good. He does approach her as a person of faith, right? As a devout Catholic and Christian, and does see her through that lens. That's a really, really good book. If you're struggling to understand Flannery, but you want to that, that's a great place to start that book right there. We really should have him on the podcast one of these days to talk about that book. And then I've got two books, both by Ralph Wood, retired professor at Baylor. Who have I met? You'll see my books are autographed. One is Flannery o' Connor and the Christ Haunted South. So that goes through the various stories and talks about, you know, that Christ hauntedness coming through the stories. That's a good one. And the other one is Ralph C. Wood, the Comedy of Redemption. Okay, if you've listened to the podcast, you know, the comedy we're talking about is that U shaped redemptive narrative. We'll talk about that next week. The subtitle is Christian Faith and Comic Vision in four American American Novelists. And so he goes through the table of contents here. He goes through Flannery o' Connor, Walker Percy, John Updike, and then he's got a few other, like, you know, philosopher kind of guys. But he puts her into the context of, like, other Christians who are writing at the same time who are also trying to offer redemption. I hope this has been helpful. Like, if you listen to the podcast a lot, I hope one of the things that you're learning at is like, all of these authors, you know, they're speaking to their time. Yes. Artist, transcendent and art is universal. Right. But they are addressing the issues of their time, and they're not exactly the issues of our time. And so it can be difficult. In the case of Flannery, even people in her own time misunderstood her. But I think if you keep in mind a few things, characters are visible souls. The violence and grotesqueness is always with a purpose. That she is trying to say that we live in a meaningful, transcendent world and that she sees her stories as comic stories of redemption. I think if you keep that in the back of your mind, it's going to help you a whole lot.
- [87:28]
Thomas Banks
Hear, hear.
- [87:29]
Angelina Stanford
All right, Well, I look forward. I really do look forward to reading this with you, so.
- [87:32]
Thomas Banks
Oh, yes. I'll just, you know, have to, you know, sit at your feet.
- [87:35]
Angelina Stanford
So we'll read a good man. It's hard to find next week. So I'll see you guys. Then again, you can go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to pick up my Flannery O' Connor class and to register for any of our summer classes, Karita's webinar, my Harry Potter class, The Victorian class, Dr. Baxter's poetry class, and then the second half of the summer, the August and September, that schedule will open up partway through the summer. All right, well, thanks for joining us. Stick around to the end. Mr. Banks will have a special hillbilly Thomas poem. I'm joking. It's not actually gonna be Walt Whitman. Actually, well, not. Not a hillbilly or atomist. There you go. Until next time, keep crafting your literary life because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find and Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with Cindy@morningtimeformoms.com Join the Conversation at our member only Patreon forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our series sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.
- [89:11]
Thomas Banks
From Song of the Open Road by Walt Whitman. You, road I enter upon and look around. I believe you are not all that is here. I believe that much unseen is also here. Here the profound lesson of reception, nor preference, nor denial. The black with his woolly head, the felon, the diseased, the illiterate person are not denied the birth, the hasting after, the physician, the beggar's tramp, the drunkard's stagger, the laughing party of mechanics, the escaped youth, the rich person's carriage, the fop, the eloping couple, the early market man, the hearse, the moving of furniture into the town, the return back from the town, they pass, I also pass. Anything passes. None can be interdicted, none but are accepted, none but shall be dear to me.