Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2018 The Dislocation of Man in the Modern Age: The Pilgrim Condition and Mid-Twentieth Century American Catholic Literature Thomas Bevilacqua Follow this and additional works at the DigiNole: FSU's Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES “THE DISLOCATION OF MAN IN THE MODERN AGE”: THE PILGRIM CONDITION AND MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN CATHOLIC LITERATURE By THOMAS BEVILACQUA A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2018 Thomas Bevilacqua defended this dissertation on April 16, 2018. The members of the supervisory committee were: Timothy Parrish Professor Co-Directing Dissertation S.E. Gontarski Professor Co-Directing Dissertation Martin Kavka University Representative Andrew Epstein Committee Member Christina Parker-Flynn Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the support of numerous people. First and foremost, I wish to thank my dissertation director, Timothy Parrish. One could not ask for a better dissertation director and I am forever grateful for his encouragement and guidance throughout this project. I would also like to thank S.E. Gontarski, not only being a thoughtful committee member but also for assuming dissertation co-director duties. I also wish to thank Andrew Epstein, Christina Parker-Flynn, and Martin Kavka for serving on my dissertation committee and providing helpful insights and assistance throughout this process. I am also thankful for the support of my friends from California to Texas to North Carolina to here in Tallahassee, Florida and all places in between. To acknowledge them all would take another dissertation unto itself so to all of them I say “thank you so much.” I do wish to say special thanks to some of my fellow graduate students—Adam McKee, Liz Polcha, Andrew Walker, Chris Jensen, Tom Tooley, and Sean Towey—for their friendship and academic counsel during my time at Florida State. I would be remiss if I did not say a special thanks to Don Quarello and everyone I’ve met at Waterworks for giving me a second home in Tallahassee and a place to relax when the stress of dissertation writing became too great. Finally, I wish to thank my family—my mother, my father, my stepfather, my stepmother, half-siblings and step-siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents for all their love. I do wish to say a special thanks my mother, Judith Boyette, for her unending support and encouragement throughout my entire graduate education, particularly as I wrote this dissertation. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Abbreviations .......................................................................................................................v Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... vi INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1: FLANNERY O’CONNOR .....................................................................................31 CHAPTER 2: WALKER PERCY .................................................................................................78 CHAPTER 3: JACK KEROUAC ................................................................................................115 CHAPTER 4: MARTIN SCORSESE ..........................................................................................151 EPILOGUE: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN .......................................................................................187 Endnotes .......................................................................................................................................192 Works Cited .................................................................................................................................195 Biographical Sketch .....................................................................................................................210 iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS CSS: O'Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. HB: O’Connor, Flannery. The Habit of Being. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999. MM: O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993. OTR: Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. Penguin, 2011. TM: Percy, Walker. The Moviegoer. Alfred A. Knopf, 1961. VOG: Kerouac, Jack. Visions of Gerard. Penguin, 1991. v ABSTRACT “The dislocation of man in the modern age”: The Pilgrim Condition and Mid-Twentieth Century American Catholic Literature highlights the ways in which the major Catholic voices in mid-twentieth century America—Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Jack Kerouac, Martin Scorsese—all shared a conception of man as a pilgrim (what philosopher Gabriel Marcel described as homo viator), one striving for something that transcended the physical and present world and yet fundamentally and necessarily of it and moving through it and that emphasis on the pilgrim is very in keeping with shifts occurring surround the Church at that time. I begin with a discussion of two earlier texts in which Catholicism plays a role—Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea— highlighting the ways in which the de facto American Catholic literature of the early twentieth century did not in fact address the concerns of the American Catholic, mirroring the Catholic Church before the Second Vatican Council that saw itself as a fortress against the modern world (of which America was closely associated). From there, I consider works such as O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Percy’s The Moviegoer, Kerouac’s On The Road and Visions of Gerard, and Scorsese’s Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. In that discussion, I note the recurring notion of man being necessarily in the world and yet longing for something outside of it, embodying the condition of the pilgrim making their way and paying penance while heading towards something more transcendent. The emphasis on this pilgrim condition in the work of these four authors mirrors the changes occurring within the Catholic Church at that time that led up to and resulted in the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, reforms that carried a profound resonance in America and emphasized the Catholic Church’s essential nature as a pilgrim church in the world. vi INTRODUCTION “We may find it out on the street tonight baby or we may walk until the daylight maybe.” Bruce Springsteen, “Incident on 57th Street” The mid-twentieth century in America gave rise to numerous literary and aesthetic movements, collections of writers and artists who would affect and shape the country’s cultural landscape. In poetry, there was the Beat Generation, the New York School, the Confessional School, and the Black Mountain School, all of which challenged the orthodoxies instilled by Modernism that manifested itself in academic and literary circles through the New Criticism. In fiction, the emergence of African-American, Jewish-American authors, and Southern authors, all drawing upon the traditions of the past while also taking new approaches that challenged some of those more established voices and methodologies, while the Beat Generation’s prose writers moved even further into the experimental realms of narrative. While these movements have dominated the discourse of post-war American literature, yielding numerous works of criticism situating these groups into the larger narrative of twentieth century literature and culture, another important though less remarked upon school of American fiction emerged at the same time. Authors like Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Jack Kerouac ushered in America’s first truly Catholic literary movement, crafting fiction that directly and pointedly draws upon their Catholicism and the experience of being Catholic in that particular time and place, with Martin Scorsese providing a comparable cinematic version of this at a roughly concurrent time. This claim may surprise readers who understand Kerouac as a writer who literary importance is only that as a writer of the Beat Generation, that Percy and O’Connor’s most lasting impact on American letters came through their writing about the South, and that Scorsese is merely a chronicler of the lives of criminals. But one might think to the ways in which O’Connor, as a Catholic in the predominantly Protestant south, saw this Southern world as in 1 part at odds with those beliefs she held to be most important and wished to avoid being “thought by the general reader to be writing about the South and […] judged by the fidelity your fiction has to typical Southern life” (MM 37-38), or Percy’s viewing of authors such as William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and the aforementioned Flannery O’Connor as being “more Southern in one sense than [him]” as he has “more of a distance” with “scenes [that] are middle-class, more urban or suburban, and therefore closer to American suburbia” (More Conversations With Walker Percy 21). One also recalls Kerouac’s claim in the preface to Lonesome Traveler that he was “not actually ‘Beat’ but strange