ABSTRACT Reading As an Imitatio Christi: Flannery O'connor and the Hermeneutics of Cruci-Form Beauty Daniel Mark Train, Ph
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ABSTRACT Reading as an Imitatio Christi: Flannery O’Connor and the Hermeneutics of Cruci‐Form Beauty Daniel Mark Train, Ph.D. Mentor: Ralph C. Wood, Ph.D. At its simplest, this dissertation proposes two, possibly counterintuitive but mutually dependent, claims: 1) that O’Connor’s fiction can be, even must be, considered “beautiful,” and 2) that O’Connor writes the way she does to make her audience better readers. Given the dark, shocking, grotesque, even carnivalesque character that pervades all her fiction, this first claim is likely to give the greatest offense or at least engender the most skepticism. But, as I argue throughout this work, it is essential that we be able to first conceive of her work as beautiful in order to also preempt one of the main objections to my second claim, a claim that O’Connor herself would be wary of endorsing in so far that it suggests and then elevates the didactic or pedagogical function of her art. To say she hopes to make better readers out of us would seem to suggest that her real contribution is as a schoolmarm rather than as an artist. Even worse, it would seem to place O’Connor squarely in that category of writing that she so abhorred: sentimental, pietistic moralizing in the guise of “fiction.” And yet, if we can entertain the possibility of O’Connorʹs work as exemplifying beauty, I argue that we can also: 1) avoid suggesting as so many have that O’Connorʹs work perpetrates a fundamental violence on her characters and/or readers (thereby further ratifying modern assumptions regarding the essential inevitability of violence); and 2) entertain the possibility that a non‐ violent, non‐manipulative apprehension of the beautiful is in fact the ability to see or more clearly, or as in this case, to read more clearly. Indeed, as David Hart shows, only by restoring “the beautiful” as a proper dimension of not just aesthetic, but philosophical, theological, ecclesiological and ethical reflection, can we even conceive of a speech‐act that is not ultimately just another expression of one violence over another in an interminable, self‐extinguishing cycle. Copyright © 2013 by Daniel Mark Train All rights reserved TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE ........................................................................................................................ vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .............................................................................................. xii DEDICATION ............................................................................................................... xiv CHAPTER ONE: Introduction ........................................................................................1 CHAPTER TWO: A Christ-Haunted Hermeneutic: Reconsidering ‚Readerly Violence‛ in O’Connor as a Rhetoric of Peace ................................................20 Towards an Aesthetic Whose Persuasion Is the Form of Peace: The Hermeneutical Implications of Beauty in David B. Hart ..................35 CHAPTER THREE: The Eucharist, Cruciform Beauty and Christ the Form of Infinite Gifting: Towards a Theological Aesthetics of Sacrament, Sacrifice, and Suffering.......................................................................................64 Building on Girardian Readings of Sacrifice, Sacrament, and Suffering ...................................................................................................68 Beyond Girardian Readings ..............................................................................83 Sharing Stories and a Rhetoric of Gift-Giving: Christ the Form of Trinitarian Beauty ...................................................................................91 CHAPTER FOUR: The ‚Difference Ingrained Theology Makes in the Sensibility:‛ O’Connor as Hillbilly Exegete ..................................................106 Two Competing Grammars and The Reasonableness of Abraham: Radical Orthodoxy’s Response to a Radical Hermeneutics ............124 CHAPTER FIVE: ‚The Accurate Naming of the Things of God:‛ John Hawkes’ Second Skin, ‚Parker’s Back‛ and the Ontological Basis of Poetry ..................................................................................................................161 ‚Naming Names:‛ A Portrait of the Artist and the Violence of Interpretation in Second Skin ..............................................................166 v ‚Parker’s Back:‛ Art, Naming Accurately, and Iconic Beauty ...................191 CHAPTER SIX: ‚Intrud*ing+ on the Timeless‛: Violence, Vision and the Reader’s Vocation in The Violent Bear It Away ...........................................213 Mason Tarwater’s ‚Violent, Impossible Vision of a World Transfigured‛ vs. Rayber’s Micro-scope ...........................................221 Francis Tarwater’s Quest: A Stranger in that Violent Country ..................237 The Visible Universe as a Reflection of the Invisible Universe: The Violence of a Single-Minded Respect for Truth and the Spirit Which Makes it Itself ............................................................................252 WORKS CITED..............................................................................................................265 vi PREFACE In the midst of writing this dissertation I received an email from my church announcing the baptism of a young, pre-teen girl. The email arrived on a Friday and announced that the baptism would take place the next day, a Saturday. In the note, the pastor acknowledged that the timing was ‚unusual,‛ but suggested this would be ‚best‛ given the family’s ‚difficult circumstances.‛ The difficulty, we all knew, was that the young girl’s mother had just been brought home for Hospice care after her doctors announced that the cancer treatments were not working and that they had exhausted all options. Less than six months before, the mother, a young professor in the Honors College of my university, seemed to be a picture of human flourishing. Now, they said, it was only a matter of time. The baptism took place precisely at noon, on a very hot, sunny Texas Saturday. Several members of the congregation held cameras to record the event for the girl’s mother who was obviously too ill to attend—someone had even set up a laptop on a stepladder so the mother could be present via Skype (if ever there was an argument for the possibility of technology as a sacrament, this would be it). As could be expected, the baptism was a somber occasion; the pastor as well as the community of observers did their best to proclaim the joy of vii the occasion and affirm the Apostle’s creed in the midst of cracking voices and tears rolling down from behind their sunglasses. When the girl came up out of the water (not altogether coincidentally, the church has repurposed an old cow trough to be used as a baptismal), there were some smiles and more tears, but none of the usual clapping or laughing that so often accompanies such an occasion. Certainly, there was much about this ‚celebration‛ that was unusual, perhaps even unnatural and grotesque. I had arrived a few minutes late to the baptism, having rushed off from my carrel in the University library. I had just been reading William Cavanaugh’s work on Torture and the Eucharist and, as I too stumbled and cracked my way through our creedal affirmation, I couldn’t help but consider its implications for the setting of this baptism. Cavanaugh argues that the church’s truest response to torture—to a tyrannous dictatorship whose greatest weapon is to dissolve any communal bonds by ‚disappearing‛ and dismembering its own citizens—is, in fact, the celebration of the Eucharist. In the same way that celebration of the Eucharist in Chile re-membered and renamed the faithful gathered there as they literally ingested and became united in the Body of Christ, here we were in the face of unthinkable grief and loss, the inevitability of which nearly left us all speechless, celebrating one of our own member’s decision to be buried with Christ. In the face of tremendous suffering and the certainty of impending death, viii here we were collectively, communally celebrating yet another—in this case, even voluntary—death. And yet, even as I write these words, words I have heard and have repeated throughout my life, reading them makes me uneasy. Not altogether unreasonably, such language tends to make us wary; perhaps especially so after 9/11, it seems ‚unnatural,‛ morbid and too prone to distortion, abuse, and ‚extremism.‛ But it seems to me that something very much like this tension—this unusual Saturdayness of being doubly caught between the ‚goodness‛ of Friday's crucifixion and the judgment of Sunday’s resurrection—animates much of our attempt to make sense of Flannery O’Connor work. Most, if not all, of her characters are ugly, mean-spirited, narrow-minded, or arrogant in their assiduously backward ways, and so many of them, perhaps especially the ones we find most tolerable as human beings, those we might be able to consider our neighbors, lose either limb or life before the story ends. Hers is clearly a fiction of the cross, rather than of a cheery, eastery Sunday morning—a realization which is only made worse by the fact that the more we read O’Connor, the more she seems to accomplish her intentions. The violence we read about in her stories is a violence we eventually tend "to feel in our bones, if no where else" (MM 162). ix And yet, mercifully, most of us also sense, even if we can't articulate it or explain why, that ‚something is going on here that counts.‛ Since her death in 1964, a not insignificant