Flannery O'connor's Art and the French
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University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Theses and Dissertations 2017 Flannery O’Connor’s Art And The rF ench Renouveau Catholique: A Comparative Exploration Of Contextual Resources For The Author’s Theological Aesthetics Of Sin and Grace Stephen Allen Baarendse University of South Carolina Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd Part of the Comparative Literature Commons Recommended Citation Baarendse, S. A.(2017). Flannery O’Connor’s Art And The French Renouveau Catholique: A Comparative Exploration Of Contextual Resources For The Author’s Theological Aesthetics Of Sin and Grace. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/4485 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you by Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S ART AND THE FRENCH RENOUVEAU CATHOLIQUE: A COMPARATIVE EXPLORATION OF CONTEXTUAL RESOURCES FOR THE AUTHOR’S THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OF SIN AND GRACE by Stephen Allen Baarendse Bachelor of Arts Taylor University, 1990 Master of Arts Indiana University, 1996 ______________________________________________________ Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature College of Arts and Sciences University of South Carolina 2017 Accepted by: Meili Steele, Major Professor Martin Donougho, Committee Member Robert Brinkmeyer, Jr., Committee Member Bradford Collins, Committee Member Cheryl L. Addy, Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School © Copyright by Stephen Allen Baarendse, 2017 All Rights Reserved. ii DEDICATION To Sara, my best friend and helpmeet An excellent wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Over the ten years it has taken to complete this dissertation, I have been keenly aware that no dissertation writer is an island, especially when that writer is attached to the mainland called a family. I would like to thank my wife Sara and our children Abigail, Jacob, David, and Esther, who celebrated with me on the days I wrote a thousand words and exhorted me not to lose heart when the well ran dry. At times they must have felt, as I did, that we were engaged in what Tolkien pictured as the noble but doomed struggle of “fighting the long defeat.” On many occasions I have been sorely tempted to cut losses and quit. My family has been my troop of thanes, the Master Samwise to the bearer of this heavy burden. Sara in particular has been my faithful refuge and support through the long slog. She and the children will be happy to find me around the house again on Saturdays, the oppressive constraint lifted. It seems like a dream now, but I look forward to returning to the simple pleasures of the Shire. I thank my mother and father, Elsbeth and Richard, for how they have supported me along this path for close to half a century. Mom has shown selfless loyalty in caring for her husband of fifty-two years, who for some time has been engaged in his own struggle with the gathering storm of dementia. In his prime, Dad was a leader of men in a foreign land. He is guileless, in the best sense of that word, with an unassuming radiance and a large vision of life. He has set before his children and grandchildren a compelling example of a purposeful and integrated life. As Augustine would say, his loves have been rightly ordered. His life has shown me better than any syllogism that Nietzsche was iv tragically mistaken to hold humility and mercy in contempt as weak. Dad’s meekness carries not a hint of the ressentiment Nietzsche so despised; it is his glory. In his confusion of mind he will not be able to read what I have written in these pages, but I could not have written any of them without the impact he made on my life from my earliest years. He has shown me, above any man I have known, what a man should be. I am honored to be his son, and I hope this work reflects something of the legacy his good fatherhood has left me. I am grateful for my brother Philip and my sister Christine Beasley and her family, as well as Sara’s parents Malcolm and Monica and her sister Alex. They have provided the family backing that has refreshed my spirits for years. I am indebted to the many friends who have encouraged me to press on along the way: for Martin Donougho who lent his generous support in the early years, and Meili Steele whose steady good cheer saw me through to completion. I am thankful for Ralph Wood’s encouragement to study Flannery O’Connor and to attend the Rome conference in 2009, the push of old brothers-in-arms Dan Cole, Andrew Dionne, and David Myers; the support of my faculty colleagues, especially John Crutchfield, Trevor Castor, and Mark Wenger; and the joy this past year of a growing friendship with Bill Tate in Chattanooga. I am grateful for another new friend, John Dunaway, professor emeritus of French and interdisciplinary studies at Mercer University, who knows O’Connor and the French subjects of this dissertation so well, and who so generously applied his keen editorial eye and the wisdom of his years to the chapters I sent him over the summer. I am thankful, too, for the many undergraduate students who have enriched my life since I began teaching English and humanities at Columbia International University v in 2001. Their refreshing contributions in and out of class can be felt in these pages. I have found writing to be like breathing: you have to give out as you take in. Classroom teaching has been my daily oxygen supply, a welcome reprieve from the enclosure of the office. Provost Jim Lanpher, Dean Bryan Beyer, and my supervisor and English colleague, Sandra Young, have assured me of their ongoing support over the course of this prolonged campaign. I am grateful for the reserves of their patience. Two years ago I tried to complete, but my committee sent me back to the drawing board. It was difficult at the time to accept the verdict, but now I know this dissertation is better for it. I am grateful for their honesty and exhortation to give it another try. This past week I taught Milton’s crisis sonnet “How Soon Hath Time.”1 The sonnet expresses the poet’s anguish at having passed the age of 23 without accomplishing the task for which he feels he has been prepared. I remember being moved by that sonnet when I read it at 23, during my early years as a graduate student at Indiana University. Mercifully, I could not know then that 26 years later I would still be a student. The consolation of the sestet has become more poignant to me now: Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow, It shall be still in strictest measure ev’n To that same lot, however mean or high, Toward which Time, leads me, and the will of Heav’n; All is, if I have grace to use it so, As ever in my great task-Master’s eye. 1 The sonnet begins: “How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, / Stol’n on his wing my three and twentieth year!/ My hasting days fly on with full career, / But my late spring no bud or blossom show’th.” vi ABSTRACT Flannery O’Connor described herself as “a Catholic peculiarly possessed of a modern consciousness” (HB 90). What makes her such a fascinating author is that she was almost uncannily sensitive to what Charles Taylor has analyzed in his large study A Secular Age as the fraught spiritual cross-currents of late modernity. Decades before Taylor described the modern secular social imaginary as a haunted space, O’Connor wrote in an essay that “if the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ- haunted” (MM 44). She interpreted the freak “as a figure of our essential displacement” (45). What Taylor works out about the late modern Zeitgeist in close to a thousand pages of dense analysis, O’Connor memorably puts before her reader in a few vivid strokes. She was a modern who, as a Christian believer, opposed the self-sufficient spirit of modernity. She held to original sin as fact, not mere symbol; and she believed that its only answer was redemption by a costly grace. Her fiction is her prophetic critique of the project of Enlightenment modernity. It is much more than that too, but it is that. This is a comparative study of some of the contexts that informed the author’s approach to her art. My argument is two-fold: first, O’Connor’s fictional poetics cannot be separated, as some critics seem intent on doing, from its theological rootedness in the Christian dramatics of sin and grace; second, O’Connor was profoundly nourished in working out her theology of art by the resources available to her in the twentieth century writers and artists of the French Catholic Revival. Her personal library testifies to her long and deep interaction with these contexts. I have singled out Jacques Maritain, vii Georges Rouault, François Mauriac, and Blaise Pascal, who enjoyed a revival in the context of existentialism. What unites these figures is that, like O’Connor, they are moderns who critique modernity from common Christian commitments. This results in interesting formal affinities of thought and aesthetics. O’Connor wrote her stories on a semi-secluded farm in Middle Georgia, but her bookcases and friendships opened her to contexts far afield.